Please Enjoy Your Happiness (11 page)

‘Uh . . . Um . . . Well, sir,’ I said, ‘I am not actually a “young American”. I am actually a young Englishman. There is an important difference.’

‘I know that, goddamn it,’ Davy Crockett exploded. ‘I
know
that you are a goddamn foreigner. But you are in the goddamn United States Navy, God love it! You are a goddamn Englishman, and we can’t give you a security clearance even if we wanted to because you are an alien – an alien! – and that means we can’t trust you, and that means if you end up in the arms of a Japanese floozy and she is a Russian agent then you have no loyalties to the United States. Nothing!
Nada
, goddamn it! . . . Oh, jeez. Jeez Louise! I need a moment. I need to catch my breath . . . I mean, what I am trying to say is that you can write and you can spell and you can go far if you are not eaten up by one of those goddamn Japanese spiders. In other words, we goddamn need you, you bastard!’ He paused for a breath. His face was red. His khaki shirt had been dry and starched when I entered his cabin. Now there were dark circles of sweat under his armpits. ‘Look,’ he said. His voice dropped several octaves, and there was a tone
to it that sounded unexpectedly kind. ‘What are you trying to do, kid? There is a girl involved. I know. There has to be a girl! A goddamn bar girl, and you have lost your mind because she has sweet-talked you like no other woman can. Not even your mother can do that, goddamn it!’

I shook my head, respectfully. ‘Sir . . . There
is
a girl. She is a
woman
. She works in a bar. But she knows a lot about literature and classical music and history. I have not had sex with her. She is a very nice person.’

‘Sex! Sex!’ the commander roared. His voice sounded like a saw biting into a very dry log. ‘Good God Almighty, Rogers! That is the worst kind of woman. A real devil! A man-eater! Goddamn! A true spider, I am sure. And you . . . and you . . .’ He looked me up and down, paternally and with pity. ‘You don’t have any idea. Any clue. And she has you wrapped around her little finger, and all of her fingers have very long red fingernails. She’s got ya. Ohhhhh, jeez. Oh, Jesus! Oh, my God! Goddamn! God in Heaven!’

I gulped. I quaked. But I remembered at that moment the tall-masted schooner,
The Torment
, manoeuvring, escaping a great thundering hunk of steel.

‘Now, look,’ Davy Crockett said, after taking yet another deep breath. ‘You wrote a real nice story. No one else could have written a story like that.’ He was referring to a long piece set to appear in the October edition of the ship’s newspaper, after we sailed away from Japan forever in late September to return to the United States. I knew the senior officers on the ship had read the piece carefully. It was not the typical dull military story full of boring technical terms. No. This story glowed with emotion. The headline had already been written: ‘
Shang
Bids Sayonara to Japan.’ The layout for the page included
a drawing of a Japanese woman in a kimono holding a parasol over her right shoulder and looking out at the ocean from the side of a hill. I had found a magazine illustration of a geisha looking out to sea and had told the seaman who was the ship’s artist to adapt it for the article. He depicted the mighty
Shangri-La
as nothing but a tiny silhouette disappearing over the horizon. The ship was no larger than a flea. The woman was a hundred times its size, and she had an intelligent profile and a sensual twist to her body as she watched the Shitty Shang sail away.

Our leader, the ensign, was terrified about how all this would be received by his superiors. ‘I just don’t think this is appropriate,’ he whimpered. ‘It creates the wrong impression. We should have an illustration of an American wife waving from the shoreline of the United States, or at least from a beach in Hawaii. And your story: it makes all the men on this ship feel as if they had a love affair in Japan. We print this story, and every man sailing back home is going to feel guilty.’

Guilt? Maybe. Love affairs? Unlikely.

Nonetheless, I had been told that Commander Crockett liked that drawing, and the story, and that he had also approved another piece I had written for the same issue about the marriage in Japan of Lieutenant Junior Grade Pat Bauschka to a beautiful graduate of the University of Hiroshima, Niishi Mieko. I told you that I treated this story in exactly the same way I would have written it if he had married a girl from Texas. Bauschka, a radar controller on AD-5W Skyraider aircraft, was a tall young officer from rural Wisconsin, completely without guile, who fell in love with Miss Niishi on a previous
Shangri-La
cruise to the western Pacific. There was a lot of grumbling on the ship about this union. Chaplain Peeples strongly opposed the
marriage on the grounds that Niishi Mieko was not American and not Christian and also not worthy of being a wife and mother loved by an American commissioned officer.

I interviewed Bauschka for the story, and I could tell his heart was in it. He was truly in love. He became one of my heroes, in fact. During the brief weeks I knew him, he urged me many times to go to college. He also urged me not to reenlist in the navy. ‘You are not quite the right fit,’ he told me. Bauschka went on in life to command several ships. He has passed away. But Mieko, his wife, still lives. I wish so much that I could tell you this in person, Yukiko. You knew all about their marriage. When I told you about it you said ‘Really?’ many times as if this was a reality that would never be yours. You would have loved to know the couple had children.

Recently I exchanged emails with the Bauschkas’ son, Chris, who is an electrical engineer. You would have enjoyed knowing this too. When I asked Chris whether he thought I could interview Mieko about her life with Pat, he replied:

You would probably recognize, Yukiko, the regret in this email – the regret of a child of a military man who did his duty for the naval service but who was, as a result, seldom home. Regret over a mystery that can never be put right, or understood, at least until old age makes acceptance and comprehension possible. Then there will be peace. At death, this father and son will be reunited. I am sure you would agree.

Commander Crockett? Oh, yes, Yukiko. His talk with me ended, and he waved me away, but not before he attempted to plant horror in my soul. I saluted.

‘Don’t salute me, son,’ he said. ‘You will do well. But keep your nose clean. Stay sharp. Don’t drink too much. Don’t smoke. Don’t kiss strange women. Do kiss your wife if you ever marry. Of course, kiss your mother. Make goddamn sure you always use a rubber. When you get all hot and bothered, remember the training films about your health that we showed you back in boot camp! Be truly scared of
non-specific urethritis.
You don’t want someone shoving a glass rod up your dick! And be especially scared of
chancroids.
You don’t want your balls turning black with rot! No more fighting, son. No more contact with the police.’

‘Police?’ I asked, trembling. ‘Police?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The goddamn cops. I had a few words today with a smart-ass detective, who told our liaison that a kid sailor had been involved in two incidents ashore, including one in which a woman almost died.’

Almost died. Yes, you almost died. I could not hold back the tears.

‘Now, now, son,’ Crockett said. ‘Be a man. I know you tried to help her. I know that. You did the right thing. But can you imagine if that got into the local newspapers? I would have the
God Almighty US ambassador in a three-piece suit on my neck. The mayor of Yokosuka. The foreign minister of Japan. Maybe even the emperor of Japan. Oh, my God! . . . But . . . Oh, my God! God help us if the captain, and the goddamn admiral, and the chief of naval operations heard about this. God help you, son! God help me if you get into trouble again. Stay away from Japanese women, if you can. Love them and leave them. That’s the navy way.’

‘So,’ you said, Yukiko. ‘Everything is all right, then?’

‘What?’ I exclaimed. ‘What? No! . . . Everything is
abunai
!
Abunai!
You understand
abunai
?’

‘Oh,’ you said. ‘I am sorry . . . so sorry, Paul. I did not know how much trouble I caused.’ You reached out and took my hand, and you would not let go when I pulled away a little, not sure if you were a spider or the woman I hardly knew.

‘Please, let me say “I love this hand”,’ you said. ‘Just this hand. You will let me love just your hand. I can’t say “I love you”, because that is impossible. It is impossible for one hundred reasons, most of which you do not know. It is better if you do not know. You are going to leave me. You will go down the hill and back to the ship and you will never come to the White Rose again.’

You started weeping.

Like a man, I did not know what to say.

‘I am only going to go when the ship sails away in September,’ I said. ‘It is still only July. I am going to have a birthday soon. There is lots of time.’

You shook your head slowly. You looked up at me. ‘There are just a few days left,’ you said. ‘There is not enough time to make everything perfect. There is not enough time for you to know me so that you will never ever forget me.’ The tears came again.

I blurted out, ‘They did not order me to stay away from you. They just told me you are like a spider.’

‘What?’ you said, jumping up. ‘How dare they! How dare they! What an insult that is to a poor Japanese woman. How unkind! How ignorant! How rude! How
American
! What do they know about anything? What do they know about me? They know nothing!

‘No. No,’ you said, releasing my hand, your face clouded, furious, dangerous. ‘No. No. Take your stupid English and go back down the hill and find some stupid girl you can talk to like a stupid boy. That is what you should do. You don’t want to be with an ugly woman like me, so old, so evil . . . A spider!’

It took me some moments to realize I still knew almost nothing about your past.

8

Nice Simple Boy

I did not retreat down the hill. I stood on the topmost of the 101 steps that led to your house. The city, the ship, and the train station were all laid out neatly below me in the haze as if they were toys. One lesson I had learned that summer, even in the face of countless sights and sounds I did not understand, was to stand my ground. I would do that in Vietnam and in Cambodia, in Buenos Aires and Caracas – any place there were barricades and rocks, tear gas and bullets. Defiance became my style after we met. You taught me well, Yukiko. I gripped my left wrist with my right hand, leaned slightly to the left, and stood right in front of you – and waited calmly and resolutely
for your rage to subside. It was a way of looking and asking a question without words.

I had climbed the hill thinking that I would tell you that during 1945 when the
Shangri-La
was brand new, its aircraft bombed Yokosuka and other places, deep in the heart of Japan, seven days a week, until the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year. Japanese air defences were so shattered at that point that there was nothing people could do except watch their neighbourhoods go up in flames. The ship became known as the ‘Tokyo Express’ for its regular deliveries of destruction and death. I was going to tell you that I had noticed that major military powers often delight in sugar-coating their instruments of war, as if this would enable their citizens to sleep at night instead of picturing in their mind’s eye – as I did aboard ship – that moment when the bombs detonated in the sky, killing 225,000 of the 590,000 people in the two cities. I wondered whether Heaven had the capacity to receive all those souls at once, or if those shrieking spirits still flew around, unable to respond to the grand chorus of loved ones in Heaven awaiting them. And now that I mention Heaven, I give thanks to whoever it was who restrained me from telling you about the
Shangri-La
’s role in the ruination of Japan.

We looked at each other uneasily for two or three minutes. The expression on your face was slowly changing. I could sense that you had accepted the fact that I was not leaving. There was a flicker of approval in your eyes, as if I had passed a test. I had the feeling that you had never come to this point in your life before – the moment of revelation. Your history was hidden. It was left behind. It was forgotten, locked up, buried, not even real any more. I was not sure what I should do if you started talking. Should I just listen? If there were tears, should I cry?
Would you need comforting? Should I put my arm round you? There was a part of me that knew the answers to those questions. There was a part of me that still did not understand what it was to love unconditionally, even when there was no hope of a happy outcome.

You took a deep breath. ‘Please wait here,’ you said in a very small voice. You turned and went inside your room. I could hear the rustle of the blue dress you were shedding, and the sound of satisfaction you made when you pulled the obi sash tight round the waist of your yukata – the long, simple cotton kimono the Japanese wear at home in the sultry summer months. You were humming a light-hearted melody popular in the shambles of post-war Japan, ‘Ginza kan-kan musume’ [‘Ginza Street Girl’].