Please Enjoy Your Happiness (29 page)

‘Teachers in general tend to be Communists or homosexuals,’ he told me in Hong Kong after our visit to the orphanage.
‘Teachers everywhere are do-gooders and do-gooders tend to be un-American and homosexuals, unless they are Christian teachers. Do-gooders are definitely not Baptists. Baptists are reapers and sowers.’

‘But aren’t there Christians who are do-gooders?’ I asked. ‘And if a homosexual does good, what’s wrong with that, sir? . . . And if Communists are do-gooders, why is Communism bad?’

He started muttering. ‘You need to go to college, Rogers,’ he said.

‘And college teachers?’ I asked. My thoughts were racing ahead. ‘Also, who are the do-badders?’

He did not reply. That was the way it always was with Chaplain Peeples. Everything was emphatic, doctrinal, black and white. There was no room for and/or, or for the colour grey.

Mr Ito was seated behind the big mechanical cash register, a pre-war relic, no doubt. His fingers were racing up and down an abacus, the little ivory circles clicking away as he did rapid calculations almost without looking. But he did look up with a smile as I came through the door.

‘Are you meeting someone?’ he asked teasingly.

‘I am not sure, Mr Ito,’ I said. ‘I am looking for Miss Kaji.’

‘Ohhh,’ he said. ‘She
will
be pleased!’ He began fussing – straightening his bow tie and sucking in his belly – in a way that astonished me.

‘Have you seen her today?’

‘Oh, no. Not today. But yesterday, yes.’ He straightened his bow tie again. His face went scarlet when the schoolgirls, entering in single file, began addressing him in babyish French.

‘Well, maybe I should have coffee and wait for her.’

‘Yes. That is a good idea. Do you know that today is Debussy day?’

‘I saw your sign.’

‘Good. Well,’ he began excitedly, ‘let me tell you, Mr Anthony Perkins. Kaji-san told me this would be the most perfect happy day to play Debussy. So now, with pleasure, I present for you Debussy’s
Nocturnes
.’ He clutched at his heart theatrically.

I laughed. The schoolgirls squeaked. Claude Debussy appeared to be smiling down at us from his portrait on the wall. Mr Ito had ringed the portrait with pink paper cherry blossoms because, he said, Debussy had used the Japanese print-master Hokusai’s picture
The Wave
on the cover for the sheet music of
La Mer
when it was first published in Paris in 1905.

‘Do you like Debussy?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes . . . I am homosexual.’

I blinked and started sipping the espresso brought to me on a chrome tray by a shy young waitress who looked as if she were afraid I was going to bite her. I asked for cream. She looked alarmed. She bowed her head. ‘I am so sorry,’ she said in apology, backing away with a shuffle, as if I were some kind of potentate and not someone probably her own age.

‘Do you know about homosexuals?’ Mr Ito asked.

‘Well, as a matter of fact, my ship’s chaplain, the priest – no, he is a minister – told me recently that homosexuals are Communists who are probably do-gooders.’

Mr Ito rubbed his crewcut rapidly with his hand in astonishment.

‘I am sorry,’ he said in his halting English. ‘You mean, this . . . he . . . is a holy man?’

‘Holy? You know, Mr Ito, I never thought of Chaplain Peeples as “holy”. I am not sure how to describe him.’

Mr Ito was still looking at me with amazement. I wished at that moment that Chaplain Peeples and maybe even Commander Crockett were there, seated at the table with me, so they could enlighten Mr Ito and vice versa. But, of course, that was impossible. Officers never, ever socialized with enlisted men, although some officers made it clear to me they would like to socialize with college girls.

I did not know much about homosexuals when I was twenty. They were do-gooders. They were Communists. They liked Debussy, apparently. Like Debussy and Mr Ito, they wore bow ties. They made delicious espresso. The espresso made them extraordinarily fastidious. They had a unique and memorable way of writing signs in English, and they also seemed to be polite and very interested in the subject of happiness.

I also knew that if someone aboard the
Shangri-La
was rumoured to be a homosexual, the rumour expanded overnight by leaps and bounds to excruciating heights. One of my friends developed a serious stutter after the rumours began. Some of the rumour-mongers asked me about him. I told them that as far as I was concerned, his girlfriend was – next to Kojima Akiko – the most beautiful woman in the world, and as for my friend being a homosexual, what did I know?

‘Take a look at the photos his girlfriend sent,’ I told them. ‘What do you think? Can you match that?’

I was confused, Yuki. Mr Ito was confused. The waitress, who now appeared with a little white ceramic pitcher of cream, also looked confused. She held the pitcher out in front of her, walked slowly to my table, gave a quick bow, and said again in a voice like a child’s, ‘I am so sorry.’ This is a charming expression
frequently used in Japan and is said politely by people intruding into another person’s presence.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I told her in a careful and kindly manner. ‘It is not important. What is your name?’

‘I am so sorry,’ she said. ‘Just I know, “I am so sorry”.’

Debussy’s
Nocturnes
was playing, but I could clearly hear the sound of high heels clattering across the concrete floor towards me. Mr Ito was laughing out loud and straightening his bow tie again as if he was about to stand inspection. It was you, Yukiko, wearing a dark red beret to go with your lipstick. You had buttoned your trench coat to your neck, as was your custom. The belt was cinched tightly round your waist. ‘Oooh, oooh, oooh,’ you were saying, and, ‘Ooh la la!’ As you moved your body, it had a slight sway to it. You did not often wear high heels and you had explained to me that when you walked you had to move your body as if you were some kind of goddess of love, to help you balance.

‘My marching shoes,’ you called your high heels. ‘If only I could dance tango.’

You were coming closer. I could see that you had not forgotten to enjoy your happiness. I remembered in that Debussy moment how one day when we were walking, and you were swaying in your heels so that your hip touched my hip again and again, you told me you had a record of ‘Tango Uno’ from the 1940s that you said ‘inflames the beating hearts of women’. You played it for me a couple of times, but the lyrics were in Spanish so I could only imagine what they meant. Only recently have I translated it. It is from Buenos Aires, Argentina, world capital of high heels, elaborate lingerie, highly evolved despair, and manic melancholy. A Brazilian woman poet
languishing in a Buenos Aires apartment with mouldy plaster falling off the walls once told me (in Portuguese): ‘
Num deserto de almas também desertas, uma alma especial reconhece de imediato a outra
’ [‘In the desert of souls also deserted, a special soul immediately recognizes another’].

You sat down. You moved your chair closer to my chair and leaned in my direction. You had been walking quickly – I knew because I could feel your heat. When I finally breathed in, I could smell your Ancient China perfume which you daubed behind each ear before you uttered a little cry of joy. You straightened my necktie and then brushed my forehead with the palm of your hand so that I closed my eyes.

‘Don’t open your eyes, sailor boy, until I tell you,’ you said. ‘I am going to look at you now.’

Two or three minutes went by. I had not moved. You had not moved. But then I heard you inching your chair even closer to mine. I felt your hip touch my hip. Your breath was hot and was flavoured with pomegranates. You held my hand. You said something to Mr Ito and he turned up the volume to
Nocturnes
. You told me to open my eyes, and when I did I saw that your face was only inches from mine and that you were still staring at me. Your eyes were slightly crossed. What did you call being cross-eyed?
Ron-pari.
London-Paris. Yes, you were sometimes
ron-pari
because, you explained, it was as if one of your eyes saw London and the other saw Paris at the same time.
Ron-pari
was one of your qualities that I have never forgotten.

I am still fascinated by women who get cross-eyed when they look at a man. It is as if, without knowing it, they are making magic that cannot be resisted.

You put your finger on my lips to silence me. You rolled your head back a little like you did when you were listening to Ludwig van Beethoven. Sunlight coming through the window made it look as if the beret you were wearing was a halo, but a blood red one, not a golden one. No, gold would not do, I thought. Gold is for angels, for ethereal creatures not of this world. Blood red is for a woman like you, with a heart beating fast and a passion for life and love she is not able to share.

I squeezed your hand, and you did the same to mine. And then we listened to the three passages, each about eight minutes long, while Mr Ito brought us scoops of vanilla ice cream and sugary wafers whose taste reminded me of the wafer popped into my mouth during Holy Communion in those days long
ago in England when my mother imagined herself to be a Catholic.

We said nothing. I hardly dared to breathe.

Every now and then, Mr Ito looked at us as if what he saw was impossible.

The waitress looked at Mr Ito, and she looked at us like a dragonfly not knowing whether it should alight or pass on by.

After the last portion of
Nocturnes
, the
Sirènes
, had ended, and the chorus of their voices without words had melted away, you finally said something. ‘This is the moment I waited for so long. This is my happy time. When you leave me I will have this to remember. Thank you.’

You looked so astonishingly sincere.

Then we started talking. We were still seated very close together. I had never seen a Japanese woman sit that closely to a man in a public place.

Grown women and the high-school girls scattered around the coffee shop could not take their eyes off us. They did not say anything. They watched us talking. They watched the way you were still looking at me.

You were studying my face, as if I had just told you ‘I love you’ and you believed me.

They watched me too. It was as if you had kissed me for the first time because I had said ‘I love you’.

22

What Men Find Beautiful

The next afternoon I started walking the familiar route to your house. I made a mental note of every landmark, every small store selling mysterious candies and saucy girlie magazines, every shrimp-fried-rice place pumping the smell of cooking out onto the street, every one of the small sake bars competing with every other with colourfully designed signs that clamoured for attention in a language I could not read. I knew the visit would probably be the last I could make to your retreat on the hill. Sometimes you called it ‘my fortress against vicissitudes’. The world could change around it, you said, but as long as you were the tenant, the serenity it provided would remain exactly the
same. There would always be your guardian, the paulownia, scattering its blue petals on you when you sat outside to write me letters. There would always be the array of cawing crows standing witness, malevolent, reminding you that you were ‘doomed’, you so often said. There would always be the 101 steps to Heaven. ‘This is the end of the road for me,’ you sometimes said. But you never explained what you meant, although you did tell me on the trip to Kamakura that you would like your ashes to be scattered on the hill because no one would grieve for an ‘ugly woman with no family to call her own’.

One day, as you were peering intently into the mirror at your house, I had asked you why you insisted on calling yourself ‘ugly’.

‘When I was a young woman,’ you said, as I watched you apply lipstick, ‘I was told my skin was as pure as the finest porcelain laid in a bed of snow. My breasts are not large because in my childhood I was encouraged to bind them tight with cloth so I would be able to offer myself with modesty. I was told frequently that big breasts are the curse of a loose woman. I was encouraged to glide graciously like a passing shadow. I discovered that when I read books late in the day, and the light is fading and my face has strong character, men are drawn to me. This encouraged me at an early age to read the most complex of the ancient classics.’ You knew by heart, you said, the key passages about lost love in the
Kagero Nikki
journals [
The Gossamer Years
], written by an unknown woman of the tenth century. You knew the best commentaries written by a woman about men in Lady Murasaki’s diaries. You turned to your notebook, always so close at hand. ‘For example,’ you said, ‘here is a very small poem from the
Gosenshu
[
The Six Collections
,
AD
951].’

‘I can recite, like that, in a pleasant voice that will fascinate an intelligent man,’ you said, after you had put me in a trance. ‘Or, at intimate moments, I will speak as if all I can do is whisper, so that men have to listen closely to every word, knowing that if they fail to understand me they will not know if I am willing to submit.’