Raw Silk (9781480463318) (32 page)

I encountered this knowledge, finally, with the numb calm that greets momentous and terrible news. I folded the sketch into the wastebasket, picked up my bag, walked between the rows of desks to the elevator, and entered it on the mellifluous
bong
of the loudspeaker for eleven-thirty tea break.

T
HERE ARE NO LAUGHS
in this part.

I kneel on the floor of my room at the Palace Side Hotel in Kyoto, Japan, which is eight feet by twelve, painted eggshell, containing a chest of drawers, a single bed, a nightstand and a thermos jug of iced water. It is not a prison because there are no metaphors. It is the thing it was intended to be, a room without an identity, imposing the gift of identity on its occupant. There are four eggshell walls and a thermos jug, a bath tiled in cream tiles, a stopper in the basin, a closet with four hangers on which hang my four suitcase-creased dresses. I am wearing a blue-flowered
kimono
provided by the hotel. My watch is on the nightstand, my sketch pad and a bottle of Extra Dry Sure deodorant on the bureau. These represent my occupancy; these, and the audible, soundly regular beating of my heart. Hear the monotony of living in full cognizance of the sound of a heart, so many beats a minute, so many minutes an hour, hours a day, so many days and so on. This is not a metaphor. No laughs, no anecdotes, no metaphors. Eggshell walls, a bedspread ribbed at intervals of three-eighth inch; you may count them from the pillow to the foot at one heartbeat per rib and when you are done it is not yet dawn. These phrases misrepresent because they are too interesting.

My daughter and the friends of my youth are two thousand miles to my left beyond the basin stopper. My husband and the friends of my adulthood are four thousand miles to my right behind the thermostat. I know one person in this hemisphere; he is a walrus-moustached acquaintance with an acquired subpassion for industrial advance and a tendency (not talent) for anecdotal putdown. I know no one else, no one. I am less organic than the telephone that plugs its electric identity into the eggshell wall, a conduit at least for others. To be a conduit is, at least, to be organic. One may be insignificant, used, indistinguishable from thousands of others; one may even be black, as my telephone is, and by conducting other wills aggregate a will, partake of will. No; there are no metaphors. There are walls to the left and right, a telephone, a stopper, a drain, a can of Sure.

I descend to the television set to watch the wrestlers sweat. I ascend to read but cannot read. The words are identical to other words and cause no pattern. I perceive that not only the printed words and painted walls but the
kimono,
etc., belonging to the hotel are manifestations of an endless impersonal reproduction; but so are
my
watch,
my
Sure,
my
dresses bought in Cambridge and in London, etc. No element is my own but only the pattern my ownership represents, and there are no patterns. There are only the brute realities of individual physical manifestation. Objects. Wall, telephone, etc.; stopper, etc.; Sure. Everything. Is. Separate.

No, there is one pattern. I take my sketchbook up. I have copied, with alterations so minute that I myself cannot perceive them, in distortions dictated by my Californian poor trade unionist inclinations, conditioned by my British rich right-wing acquired style, an
amigoromo,
a botanical scroll, a screen fan of a see-no-evil monkey. I have reproduced, with imperfections and modifications ordained by genetic and environmental bigotries in the muscles of my drawing hand so minute that I cannot perceive them, a torn, a surf-swirled border, an arabesque of branch. These lines bespeak me. In the sinuous curve of the cherry spray (who chopped down the cherry tree?) is my dishonesty embedded. In the thrust of the wave my anger, in the pale-washed diamonds my rigidity. What I copy I distort, what I touch I mangle. Here I am as surely as I can be found, an unintentional parodist of the centuries in Alpha Eagle No. 2 graphite, a cartoonist in pastel. Knickknack, gimcrack, bric-a-brac; here is my Japan. Here is my heartbeat. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. No metaphors. Sure. I listen to the boredom of my heart.

No one had noticed my absence from the Design Center, but they would, and I had to get out of the hotel. I did not want to explain to Tyler Peer that I was counting the ribs of the bedspread. I didn’t want to do anything, but among the things I didn’t want to do this one seemed particularly pressing. Tyler had said that I must not miss the village of Takayama in the mountains north of Nagoya. An undiscovered colony of the arts, he said: a place that would be a tourist trap if it were on the tourist route, but made unattractive by the third-class train that was the only means of getting there. Tyler told me that I must go there. Must is a command. I can follow a command. I packed the smallest of my bags and paid my hotel room for two weeks in advance, noticing with a certain panic that my travelers’ checks were finite.

“The signature does not match,” the hotel clerk informed me irritatedly, and sure enough when I looked at the check, I had misspelled my married name.

I don’t believe in alchemy, astrology or psychiatry, but I do believe in radio, television and telepathy, and I have been forced to observe that people emanate expectations that they will be treated in a certain way. Dillis, for instance, sent out short-wave invitations to be kissed and rubbed during her affair with Jake Tremain, and most everybody kissed or rubbed her once a day. When I was pregnant but before I showed, mothers of small children used to stop me on the street to ask my advice, and once a dozen schoolchildren on a nun-guided outing filled my lap with marguerites in a public park. In Tokyo I had been deferred to as a woman of the world. Now I started putting out a fluorescent halo of victimization. Kick me, I said, and situations presented themselves accordingly.

Nothing really terrible happened to me. The business with the travelers’ check was a fairly crude example. Between trains in Nagoya I knelt to admire a street vendor’s monkey, who endearingly cocked his gray head, climbed my bags and took hold of my index finger in damply dirty palms. Then he bent my finger back with a vicious leer while the vendor grinned mockingly and passersby made disapproving clucks. A horror took hold of me that did not have to do with the bones of my finger, but with grins and leers and clucks. I don’t know how I got free.

The first seat I chose in the Nagoya station was smeared with vomit, which my coat hem brushed before I saw it, and when I went to the restroom to wash it off, a black spider sat in insolent guard over the basin. Black, widow, spider, my brain said, counting ribs of the bedspread. Widow, window, black window spied her. I did not want my brain to work in this way. I rubbed at my hem with a paper towel, went back to the waiting room and sat, incredibly, in the same pile of vomit. Slapstick but no laughs. Frightened—of what, exactly?—I rolled my raincoat backward off my shoulders, resolutely sloughed it into a trash can and went to stand on the platform until the train arrived. I knew I would need the coat but I perceived that to have a coat was less important than to have done something with resolve.

Ahead of me in the platform queue was a woman with her baby in one of the crisscrossed backpack systems that I can’t figure out, which looks like a papoose facing the wrong direction. The baby is asleep, head thrown back from its mother’s neck, mouth open, legs dangling. I am carrying Masuji Ibuse’s
Black Rain,
in which the mothers of Hiroshima lug their dead babies out of the atom bomb rubble, and this Navajo arrangement, which is wholly irrelevant to Hiroshima, seems to me pitiful and wrong. This domestic efficiency is full of latent horror: Biafra in Frances’s hospital room, donated by the Migglesly Mothers’ Corps. The woman catches my look because she leaves; she moves with a bland expression of dislike to another line, leaving me behind the most creaseless and shining of the creaseless and shining Japanese I have seen.

He is a man of a certain age, but I do not know how this is communicated to me because there are no lines in his face, neither in his forehead nor about his mouth nor at his hooded eyes. His suit is thrown from a mold, his hair is black rubber. He has no eyebrows, only a shelf above his eyes as glistening as a scar. The light paints a line where his eyebrows should be.

“Excuse me, I wish to know is it polite to speak to foreign lady?”

I nod, panicky—at what? “Will you kindly tell me if my English is understandable to you?” Square, square, reassuringly square. But when he follows me into the austere train compartment and sits beside me his thigh crawls against mine … I think. “My—sixty-five years!” he boasts, beating his breast. He discreetly pokes me, hands me his calling card and points out that he is manager of the Grand Hotel in Gifu. I show him a picture of Jill, say that my husband is meeting me in Takayama, and pull out Ibuse, politely making to read by asking if he knows this excellent Japanese novelist. He responds by pulling out his reading matter, a magazine elusively called
Cock,
which he opens onto a triple centerfold of very Occidental breasts and buttocks, cheerfully shouting, “I want! I want!”

I shrink angrily into my book, trembling. With the fear of what? That he will drop me a karate chop? The train is crowded. He taps me on the wrist. His bald face is a mask of doggy anxiety; obsequiously his mouth parts and he begs, “Do you put out?”

I shoot from my seat to another across the aisle. The woman I have offended by staring at her baby now stares at me. The man follows me and bends over my seat, ginger root on his breath.

“Do not put out,” he pleads against my face. “I do not mean to put you out.”

“No, no,” I murmur, stared at, six feet tall and fetus-pink, an irrational Amazon in a compartment full of wary pygmies. Are you put out, do you put out, I put him out, he put me up, he put it off, you are put off; put ’er there, he put in, he put it in, he put it to me; put ’em up. I wonder that anybody learns English, including the English.

“No, no,” I murmur. “I just want to read.”

Please cease your irrelevant amusement. Anecdote is anguish recollected in tranquility. Recollection is emotion rationally rationed. Causes can be assigned to such terror as I might have experienced in the Nagoya-Gifu-Takayama stopping train on August 21, 1972: in the 1940s that were my formative years Japan was the very image of the mysterious East, where at any moment a knife might enter your back through a bead-curtained doorway. Such images stick, even if with my conscious and ironic mind I know that in 1972 I am safer in Japan on a rural train at night than I would be at two in the afternoon on Wilshire Boulevard.

But I am not afraid of images buried from my childhood. I am not afraid of a knife in my back, which would be as much a relief to me as was the loss of my virginity: is
that
all? I am not afraid of rape, or violence, or foreigners, all of which I have survived. I am afraid of the glazed woven rush stuff on the back of the seat ahead of me. Anybody who has experienced pure, that is, irrational, terror will understand this and anybody who has not cannot be made to understand it. The glazed baskety fabric shines; there are finger smudges on it, some encrustation that might be the squashed body of a bug, dust in the crevices. The shine is sickly and I cannot take my eyes from it. I take my eyes from it and am afraid of the smeared window. I am afraid of the conical trees beside the mounting track, afraid of their sinister shape and sinister color. I can say that they are shaped like butcher knives and that their color is poisonous, but these are metaphors and I am not afraid of knives or poison. I am afraid of trees and green. Things do not connect, you see? No, you don’t see. I am afraid of gum wrappers in the aisle. I am terrified that such fears should shake me. I have nothing to fear but fear itself, but what he did not say, what FDR failed to acknowledge among the warriors and the folks at home, is that the fear of fear is the real fear, the most debilitating of all, more deadly than the fear of bombs or bayonets or blood, all of which have the reassurance of the reasonable. I am afraid of the fear of the smell of cooking fat. It is called anxiety, and there are drugs for it.

Ginger, cedar, turpentine, bonita broth and bean paste were the smells of Takayama. They freshened out of open shopfronts and settled from the windows above, from houses shingled to the texture of kindling wood. It was evening when I arrived but the shops stood open. They stood as if metaphysically open so insubstantial did they seem; children poking sticks between the slatted boardwalks, a wood carver seated leaning against a bending bamboo porch support. As if you could huff and puff and blow their houses down. A huff of bean paste from a woman with a bowl at an upstairs window, a puff of cedar sawdust from the furniture maker below; huff turpentine, the lacquerware artist flicked a minute design on a chopstick handle; puff bonita, the waiter ladled soup into lacquer bowls. Each of the smells was delicious and exotic in its way, spiced and foreign, holding no associations for me. They blew my manor down. The desolate thing about being identified by marriage to the same man for fourteen years, and then not being, is that there is nothing in the universe that is not connected to him. Fish, paint, wood, grass itself between the slattings of the boardwalk—these bound me to a shared experience, and if I say that things did not connect, which is what I centrally suffered, I leave out the fact that every sight, sound, texture, smell was connected to my adulthood and that all of it had been spent with Oliver.

I remember, very clearly, a time when I did not know what an identity crisis was. When I was in New York at twenty, people were talking about identity crisis so earnestly that I had to suppose such a thing existed, only I did not know what it was. Of course I knew who
I
was. How could you not know who you were? I could no more imagine it than being blind. I saw what it meant now. Children in sandals. Trees. Spoons, tablecloths, roads, rocks, mushrooms, the moon and nightfall; it means having no relation to these things except by association that you repudiate.