Picking Bones from Ash (28 page)

His eyes twinkled. “I’ll give you 10 percent. After all, the check was made out to me. You want any more, you’ll have to work for it.”

“We should share.”

“Sure we should. But then you’ll tear out of here on the first plane you can catch and I’ll never see you again and that would make me sad. On a practical note, I have a business to get started and I need your help. You can quit smelling like vegetables, get cleaned up, and assist me for a while. Once we’ve earned a little more money, we’ll talk percentages that are more partnership-like.” He grinned.

I seethed. Did he have any idea what it had been like for me to be working in that vegetable shop while he wandered around San Francisco, doing who knew what and pretending to have an important job? I’d debased myself more than he knew. My mother, had she been alive, would never have allowed me to work in such a filthy place, and now he was adding insult to injury and refusing to pay me money that he damned well knew I deserved.

He listened, patiently, and occasionally made little comments like: “But the thing is, Satomi, we have no contract. You have no legal basis to get any money from me.” And then there was: “How will Timothy feel once he learns you left him in Japan and went off to make the money on your own?” And even: “You know you’re not even legal in this country.” As I cried and cried, unleashing all the emotion I had stored since my mother’s death, François remained almost impassive, countering each of my pleas like this, refusing over and over again to give me any more cash.

Eventually I grew exhausted from my outpouring of emotion and sat
down, too tired to cry and thinking over the events of the past year. Would I have taken the money and run away as François predicted? I might have. But it also wasn’t as though I had any place that I really wanted to go. I didn’t want to go back to Japan, and what would I do in Europe now that I had abandoned my music career?

I heard François moving around nearby. “Look at this.” He pulled a large photograph out of an envelope. “I’m thinking I could fix the damage.”

I turned around to see a photograph of a six-panel screen. Though my eyes were swollen by now, I still strained to see the photograph. It was an amusing scene in which beaky-nosed foreigners with big hats sat in ships hoping to trade with Japanese standing on a gilded shore. Gold-colored clouds blossomed around both parties, a shape mirrored in the swelling water cradling the boats. In a corner, where one screen panel ended and another started, there was a large tear.

“I think I could paint what’s missing,” he said, pulling out a few pieces of loose paper from the same envelope. “Have a look.”

They were sketches, proposed repairs for the missing corner of the screen. I looked back and forth from the painting to François’ work. At the time, it seemed like a daring thing to do: copying the hand of a master, for the undamaged part of the screen was most certainly beautiful.

“This looks like it is from the eighteenth century,” I sniffed.

“Early seventeenth,” François replied quickly. “The
shoguns
had thrown foreigners out by 1639.”

I snuck a look at him. His expression was quite serious and I thought to myself that if he were always this sincere and knowledgeable, I might have been able to like him from the very start.

“Maybe it is a copy,” I suggested, more to test him than anything else.

“A copy? By the eighteenth century, no one could do faces quite like the ones you see here. No, this is a very good seventeenth-century screen and I think that we could sell it for a good profit if I could just fix the missing corner.”

I took a pencil off the little table we used for eating and for work and drew in a few lines on François’ drawing. “It would be better,” I said, “if the water had a curve like this.” I added a few more lines. “And you are right that there should be a plume here where the water hits the rock. But not so fancy. You don’t want to draw attention to the missing corner. What I have done is more what you would call ‘stylized.’ ”

He took the piece of paper from me and grinned. “The most difficult
part will be matching colors. Finding the right paint. I’ll have to befriend a museum curator next.”

“I think,” I said slowly, “that you will be able to do this.”

He glanced at me sideways. “So you have finally developed some faith in me.”

I didn’t say anything right away. I just stood up and began to look through our tiny refrigerator for some ingredients to make dinner. François, for once, did not press me, though I could feel him beaming even when my back was turned to him. It was only after we had eaten—grilled fish, rice,
miso
soup—that I said to him, “I could help you.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “You could. Maybe you’ll even start to like it here. Maybe you’ll even like me as much as I like you.”

So I stayed. I have no one to blame but myself. No one forced me. Certainly not François. I could have left even without the money, but again—where could I go? I occasionally saw young women my age from Japan and Korea on the streets of San Francisco, and they had a bruised look about them, like one of those vegetables I’d learned to pick out and throw away for having been handled one too many times at the market where I had worked as a cashier. I was aware that I could be like them, that I did have even further to fall. Would that happen to me? Might leaving be even worse?

“You promise to pay me?” I asked François.

“Of course.” He smiled. “But we must be fair.”

Not too long after that we received our first letter from Timothy. I’d been writing regularly, but each letter had been returned to me unopened. I had initially kept my letter writing a secret from François, but he’d come home one day when I hadn’t expected him and had intercepted the mail. In a patient voice, he said, “It will be awhile before he is out of prison, Satomi.”

“I still want to try to write to him.”

“Of course.”

Then a month went by and my most recent letter hadn’t come back to me. Once again I held out hope that Timothy would be able to read the letter himself, and I was rewarded one day when a thin aerogramme came to our new address in the Marina District of San Francisco, postmarked from
Japan. Finally, the elaborate Japanese legal system had allowed my last letter to reach its intended reader, and Timothy, recently awarded rights to pen and paper, had written back.

Mostly he wrote of his experiences in prison during his first year. In the beginning he had been forced to stand in a room with no chair and not quite enough room to lie down. On the few occasions that he’d tried to sit on the floor, a guard had come in and hoisted him to his feet. When he wanted to urinate, he was given a plastic cup. After ten days he was transferred outside of Tokyo to Chiba, a nearby village, and given a room with a small cot. At night the light was left on in his cell and when he tried to cover his eyes to sleep, a guard would scream at him until he removed his arm from his eyes.

He told me that he became friendly with the other prisoners in cells near his and that they prayed together. One man was from the Philippines and had come to Japan to work as a gardener but had overstayed his visa. Another man, a Korean, was accused of raping his neighbor’s daughter. Timothy taught them the fragments of the Lord’s Prayer that he remembered, and they taught him to chant Buddhist
sutras
. Through the bars of his cell, Timothy mimicked the lotus position that the Korean showed him, and learned how to meditate.

I wrote back, asking if he was eating enough and telling him that I had come to America with “luggage” and that I hoped he didn’t mind that I had sold his “clothes” at a garage sale. He told me about the powers he was commanding, how he was able to remain calm when the guards beat him for failing, again, to sign his confession, and how much weight he was losing on his prison diet. “The Korean,” he wrote, “tells me that Buddhist priests in training eat practically the same thing. I’m basically doing the whole Buddhist boot camp, and if I can just focus on that, I’ll quit thinking of this as a level of hell and more like an experience.” I wrote to tell him of life in San Francisco, how the city turned pink in the morning and evening, unlike any other place I’d ever seen in my life. I asked if there was some place I should visit that he could imagine, some place we could both be, where we could pretend to be together.

He told me how if he concentrated hard enough on his prison walls, he could see a
mandala
emerge from the cracks in the concrete.

For one brief, wry moment I allowed myself to see the humor in having loved two men who’d turned to Buddhism. Then I was just annoyed by the
self-righteous tone he’d adopted. He asked no questions of me in any of his letters. He didn’t want to know how I liked living in America, he didn’t express any regret that my mother had died, and he didn’t even comment about the sale of his “clothes.” All his letters were simply about himself.

François found Timothy’s letters amusing. “It is true,” he said, “that this description of prison is an awful lot like the monastery.” François told me how he himself had arrived in Japan determined to become the first Western man ever to survive the Buddhist training at the famed monastery of Eiheiji temple as part of his fieldwork. He wouldn’t be like the last applicant, an American, who’d been carried out on a stretcher, emaciated. He was going to become a full-fledged priest. He’d stood outside the temple gates, all six foot three of him, and begged for entrance alongside other hopeful initiates. Though the priests inside had ignored him even longer than they’d ignored the other waiting men outside, they’d eventually let him in, giving him a bowl of
miso
soup to drink and a bowl of rice to eat. Then he’d begun his days trying to sit
zazen
, or meditation, and cringing each time he’d been hit on the back with a bamboo stick.

He’d left the temple after two months because a visiting priest named Yamagata-roshi had come by for a visit and, in broken English, had said, “There must be another way to experience religion.”

And then, he said so sincerely that I almost believed him, he’d gone to Muryojuji temple and seen a girl so unusual, he’d fallen in love with her in an instant. Love, he said, was a much better way to be close to any of the many gods roaming the planet. It was a shame that Timothy had never learned this, or if he had, that he’d been able to forget the lesson so quickly.

Timothy’s letters continued to come to us, though they were always filled with philosophy and I learned to skim their contents. I suppose I never completely gave up hope that he would show some curiosity about my situation, but mostly I accepted that he had changed in some fundamental way and that he was no longer as interested in me as he had been. Then they came at increasingly wider intervals until they stopped coming at all. It was only much, much later when I’d returned to Japan that I thought over those letters again and wondered if he had worded them so strangely because he was in prison and was subject to extreme censorship.

We drifted along, François and I, growing the business and delighting when we made a sale.

“Congratulations, Satomi,” he said, holding out a fistful of cash. “I’ll tell you what. If you let me kiss you, I’ll give you an extra 10 percent.”

“No.”

“One kiss.”

“No,” I said. “Just work. We just work.”

Work we did. I kept track of all the pieces, drawing little sketches in notebooks and leaving the descriptions for François to write in by hand. I was responsible for reading signatures and seals, though he was studying
kanji
characters and making some progress with his language abilities. Even now I must admit that he was a very good connoisseur. I was frankly a little bit surprised that a Westerner could know so much about Asian art, know more than I did, in fact.

I was able to enjoy the work. My favorite thing of all was when we found a slightly damaged piece that needed our collective imaginations in order to be repaired. It felt like a game to me. Each wounded sculpture, each defaced painting required a different solution, and it was fun to sit together sketching out solutions on paper.

But the thing I enjoyed the most, the thing that made me happiest, was to see my pile of money grow.

I kept my cash in two places. Since I was, as François had pointed out, an illegal immigrant, I could not open a bank account. I kept most of my money on the dresser in a box. François knew about this stash and he used some of it when we moved from a rented apartment to a house. These were all in François’ name because I had yet to apply for a green card, as he did, or citizenship. Every now and then François would propose that we get married so I would not have any legal problems, but I always demurred. I could not see the point of marrying someone I did not love.

I had a second pile of cash—much smaller, but always growing—that I squirreled away in a paper bag I kept at the bottom of my supply of sanitary napkins. François did not know where I hid the cash and, if he was inclined to go looking for it, he would most likely not think to look there. It was on this pile of money that all my hopes rested. If I were ever to leave America, it would be because I’d finally earned enough in my little brown bag.

Eventually, François and I became intimate. At the time it seemed an abrupt transition in our relationship, but I see now how naturally it developed, an outgrowth of the way we celebrated our successes together, how really we had no one to turn to but each other when we made a particularly good sale. Plus, I was lonely in San Francisco and made few friends. Men often wanted to talk to me, but I rarely wanted to talk to them, and it frustrated me that I could not go out for a cup of coffee or a smoke without some teenager sidling up beside me and attempting to start a conversation. It was much easier to go out in the evening if François was present and people naturally assumed we were a couple. Drunk on wine one night, I let him kiss me and he gave me an extra hundred dollars. Things progressed from there. From time to time I even enjoyed myself. Certainly I became accustomed enough to it not to mind.

I became pregnant. I found out the usual way. I felt a sensation vaguely akin to cramping in my abdomen and told myself that my period was on its way, just a little bit delayed. A week later I started to feel nauseous and weak, and when I threw up three mornings in a row, François insisted on taking me to the doctor. François’ reaction, when he learned of my condition, confused me.