My Year of Meats (22 page)

Again, I felt the warm smugness that comes over me when I know that there is another heart-wrenching documentary moment at hand, being exquisitely recorded.

Truth lies in layers, each of them thin and barely opaque, like skin, resisting the tug to be told. As a documentarian, I think about this a lot. In the edit, timing is everything. There is a time to peel back.

I was not always so cavalier with my wives as I sometimes sound. To some extent that pretense was necessary in order to keep up with our production schedule and get the programs out. But the fact is, I did care, and at the same time I couldn’t afford to care, and these two contrary states lived side by side like twins, wrapped in a numbing cocoon that enabled me to get the work done. Psychiatrists call this “doubling.”

Here’s another example; I wanted to make programs with documentary integrity, and at first I believed in a truth that existed—singular, empirical, absolute. But slowly, as my skills improved and I learned about editing and camera angles and the effect that music can have on meaning, I realized that truth was like race and could be measured only in ever-diminishing approximations. Still, as a documentarian, you must strive for the truth and believe in it wholeheartedly.

Halved as I am, I was born doubled. By the time I wrote the pitch for
My American Wife!
my talent for speaking out of both sides of my mouth was already honed. On one hand I really did believe that you could use wives to sell meat in the service of a greater Truth. On the other hand, I was broke after my divorce and desperate for a job.

Suzie Flowers. Miss Helen Dawes. Certain women stuck to me, flickering around the edges of thought. In the dim, inchoate hours of the morning, when I woke up to pee, they’d insinuate themselves like tapered ghosts into my sleep-addled brain. Once there, they worked like ammonia, delivering a jolt of clearheaded dread. My skin prickled, my pores leached sweat. In Japan, ghosts have no legs. Often they are wronged women who are not even dead yet, whose extremity of suffering forces the spirit from the body to torment their oppressors. Living ghosts. Neither here nor there. They are well documented in the works of Heian women, but they had exorcists to deal with them.

I can defend myself; that’s not the problem. Miss Helen was not my fault. As things go, she barely counts as a casualty at all. But the fact is that I forced my way into her life, overcame her reservations, and I will never forget her wistful acquiescence when I called to cancel the shoot. And it wasn’t my fault, either, that Suzie Flowers’ pipe-fitting husband was bonking the cocktail waitress. It was her life and I had no part in its making. Still, the worn fabric of her life tore like tissue under the harsh exposure of my camera; I watched it happen, took aim, exposed her, then shot her in the heart.

A crack in consciousness is a dangerous thing. The slightest tremor can turn it into a gaping abyss. There was something else lurking in the darkened corners, some fact trying to come to light, and when it did, I was in the editing room, finishing the Lesbian Show, cleaning up Dyann’s sound. The program was uplifting, a powerful affirmation of difference, of race and gender and the many faces of motherhood, and I was filled with a moral certitude that would sustain me through the fight I knew would ensue when Ueno found out that I’d gone and shot a biracial vegetarian lesbian couple. Then suddenly it occurred to me—I never got around to telling Lara and Dyann about the program sponsor. I never told them about BEEF-EX.

Lara and Dyann were vegetarians for political reasons. I didn’t know this at first, but I’d suspected as much, then I’d learned it for sure during the cooking scene.

“Are there a lot of vegetarians in Japan?” Lara had asked, as she washed the parsley.

Suzuki was filming Dyann chopping garlic on the other side of the kitchen, so I answered in a whisper. “No, not so many, really. The traditional Japanese diet has more fish than meat.” But Dyann heard and joined in.

“Yeah, well, that’s a good thing,” she said. “You know, we’re vegetarians by default. I mean, we like meat, like the taste of it, but we would just never eat it the way it’s produced here in America. It’s unhealthy. Not to mention corrupt, inhumane, and out of control, you know?”

“Uh, Dyann, Suzuki’s filming you and we need you just to chop, you know, and not talk, just for now....”

“Oh, sorry.”

But Lara continued. “When we were trying to get pregnant, it was amazing what we found out. Do you know that sperm counts have dropped by about fifty percent in the past fifty years? That’s just one report, but a lot of scientists think there’s something to it. They think it’s related to the increase of hormones used in industry, especially in meat production. So we just figure, with the babies, you know, why risk it? I mean, you are what you eat, right?”

Dyann couldn’t resist. She looked straight into the camera and, using a nearby parsnip as a mike, smiled like a TV announcer. “Recent studies show that today the average man produces fewer morphologically normal sperm than your average hamster.”

“Uh, Suzuki, could you cut, please....”

 

 

It was an insignificant exchange, suppressed in the chaos of the moment and easily edited out. But recalling it in the editing room, I knew for certain that they would never consent to their image being used to advertise meat.

There was nothing I could do. No possible way to shoot another program in time to meet the broadcast deadline. I’d pushed the schedule to the very limits because I didn’t want Ueno to have a choice about airing this one. I wanted to force his hand.

If I told them, they would probably refuse to let it air, and I wouldn’t have a show to deliver to the network and would lose my job. I would probably lose my job in any case, for broadcasting vegetarian lesbians. I couldn’t imagine Ueno letting this go unpunished.

Why hadn’t I realized? If I’d just dealt with it earlier, I could have talked them into agreeing, as a subversive political statement or something. But it was too late now.

Too late ...

My heart sank.

My ghosts.

My baby.

Sloan still didn’t know.

I hadn’t dealt with this at all.

But then again, why bother? Why make a big deal about it when the problem would surely go away by itself? Although the ultrasound had been fine, and so were the tissue tests, my uterus and my life were obviously too unstable to support a child. The fetus would realize that its mooring was defective and just quietly slip away. A little nut, like a cashew, with translucent, threadlike limbs. Smaller than my thumb. No color yet, really. I’d never thought it would last this long. Nine weeks? Ten? Sloan didn’t need to know. It was just a matter of time.

Dyann and Lara had signed the releases. I could send them a “white mother” copy of the show, before the titles or commercials were inserted, and they would never need to know anything about BEEF-EX.

The program was a good one, really solid, moving, the best I’d made. It could even effect social change.

And so I continued, taking out the stutters and catches from the women’s voices, creating a seamless flow in a reality that was no longer theirs and not quite so real anymore.

The black woman sits on the couch, watching the white woman next to her. The white woman is nuzzling and calming the two coffee-colored little girls, fixing the bright ribbons in their soft brown ringlets, tucking their striped jerseys back into their denim overalls. The little girls squirm and dance. Pensively, the black woman starts to speak.

“Even when I was very, very small I knew I never wanted to be with a man, you know?”

Slowly, slowly, as she speaks, the camera moves toward her face. Her voice is tentative and thick.

“Never wanted a man, never wanted to get married to a man or have his children. I knew it when I was as little as these babies are here.”

The little girls glance up, eyes bright from the tussle, breath rapid with the possibility of more. The white woman smiles at them and shakes her head.

“And there was something else I knew for certain.”

The camera holds steady on the black woman’s face. She falters, her voice cracks, and she frowns with concentration to control it.

“The one thing I wanted,
ever
wanted, was to have a woman to love and to make a family with. Even
I
thought that was crazy, let me tell you—impossible, loco ... but look.” The tears well up in her eyes.

“I got it all. Here they are....”

Wonder underscores her words, belies her ferocity. She scowls through filmy tears at the white woman, who reaches over and gently touches her cheek. The two little girls throw their arms around her, kiss her, and she gives in to it all and starts to laugh. The
My American Wife!
theme song swells, a wave of sound that washes over them, confirming their joy with closure and sealing it with a commercial break.

Akiko stared at the television screen as a thick red streak hit a griddle with a splat, followed by a deafening sizzle.

She was kneeling on a cushion, hugging herself, rocking slowly back and forth. She stopped and saw that her hands were shaking, so she put them on the edge of the
kotatsu
to steady them. Then she noticed that she was crying. She was not sure why. Possibly it was fear of John’s mood when he came home. It would not be good, she was afraid. From what she knew of his tastes in programming, she sensed that it might be wise to throw away the recipe for Pasta Primavera right away and perhaps serve a Beefy Burrito instead.

But it was not just fear of his anger or even of getting hit. As she watched the sun set on the vast American landscape—“Beefland!” the logo proclaimed—she realized that her tears had nothing whatsoever to do with John. These were tears of admiration for the strong women so determined to have their family against all odds. And tears of pity for herself, for the trepidation she felt in place of desire and for the pale, wan sentiment that she let pass for love.

Akiko buttoned her coat in the
genkan
and let herself out. The hollow metal door echoed behind her. Yes, and there was something else as well. Something that the black woman had said, which resonated in her. Something about impossibility and desire, or lack of it. It was a new thought, slow in coming, but by the time Akiko had walked down twelve flights of stairs to the playground, passing the mothers on her way, it hung in front of her, tentative but with its parts fully formed: She wanted a child; she’d never wanted John; once she became pregnant, she wouldn’t need him ever again.

At the neighborhood butcher’s shop, she splurged and bought two fat sirloin steaks, some potatoes instead of rice, to bake with butter, some tender tips of asparagus. For dessert she chose a muskmelon, bursting with sweet juice and seeds. Or so she hoped. That was the problem with melons, she thought. You never knew what they were like inside.