The Nicholas Linnear Novels (173 page)

He could see the outline of her nipples, but he did not know their color or texture. He could see beneath the spandex the shadow of the vertical crease he ached for, but he did not know its true shape. There was so much to learn, and so little time before the fragrant petals dropped to the earth.

She stared at him in much the same way a man will drink in the sight of a naked female form. Branding had never before seen a woman do this. He felt excited by it, and wondered how some women could be so offended by being considered sex objects. He found the experience ego-expanding.

Shisei stared into his eyes, compelling his attention. She was very close to him; he thought he could feel her heat, remembered the press of her mount against him as they had danced, and got hard. Then he felt her fingers on him, enclosing him. Her fingers did not stroke him. They squeezed him; he got bigger and bigger.

“You’re ready,” Shisei said. “So fast.” She said it in a way that made Branding’s mouth water.

She shrugged off the cover-up, stepped out of her bikini, and Branding drank her in as she had, moments before, done to him.

“Turn around,” he said thickly.

But Shisei shook her head, advancing on him. Now he felt her against him without any intervening material. She lowered her head, sucked on a nipple, and he gave out a little gasp as a line of pleasure traced itself from chest to groin. Then she climbed upon him, entwining herself about him as if she were worshiping a giant phallus. Branding groaned.

They made love to music by Grace Jones, an album that Branding’s daughter had left behind one summer. He had never listened to it, but Shisei found it in among the George Shearing and the Bobby Short records and put it on. The singer’s voice was by turns as soft as the inside of a fruit, as hard and shiny as chrome on a sports car.

Branding had never made love to music; Mary had needed undisturbed quiet in order to relax sufficiently for sex. He found the music at once exhilarating and disturbing, almost as if he were making love to two women at once—or, more accurately, as if they were making love to him, one with her mouth and her sex, the other with her voice.

Then, sweat-sheened, Shisei sank all the way down on him, and he forgot about everything else.

Afterward, he said with an ironic smile, “I wonder what would have happened if you’d found a David Bowie album instead of this one by Grace Jones.” He was exhausted; she was amazingly dexterous, extraordinarily powerful. He felt as if he had just spent two hours working out at a gym. It was, he thought, a delicious kind of exhaustion.

“I masturbate to David Bowie,” Shisei said. “Do you masturbate, Cook?”

“That’s an odd question.” He was astonished by her power to shock him.

“Do you think so?” she said. “Why? It is merely a parameter of what makes you you—one of many.”

He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, determined to break the mood. He was uncomfortable when she spoke like this, with the cutting directness of a child. But she was not a child. “Here in America,” he said, “it is not something easily spoken of.”

“Not even among man and wife?”

“We are not man and wife, Shisei. We are strangers.” And then, because her penetrating gaze compelled him, he added, “Sometimes not even among man and wife.”

“That is senseless,” she said. “It is natural, like the naked body. Like sex. And yet Americans are ashamed.”

“From what I understand, there are many subjects not openly talked about in Japan.”

“Shall we speak about all of them now?”

Branding did not believe her. “What about
kata
?”

Shisei moved on the bed, taking between her calves the printed top sheet, flicking it onto the stained wood floor. “I have been taught that if something is beneath the ice, if you sense it but cannot see it, it is still there, moving, disturbing the currents.” She opened her thighs, redirecting Branding’s gaze. She arched her back. “Come here, Cook. I do not think that I have finished with you—nor you with me.”

When Justine stormed out of Nicholas’s workout room, she went into the kitchen. It had been close to dinnertime, but she had realized that she could not remember what it was she was going to prepare. Besides, she had not been hungry, and as for Nicholas, she had thought, if he’s hungry, let him get his own dinner.

Having come to that conclusion, she found that she was no longer comfortable anywhere in the house. She went outside, down the
engawa
steps, past the huge cryptomeria. In the last of the light she wandered the grounds, until she found herself at the stone basin where, more than three years before, Nicholas had taken her on their way to this house.

I’m thirsty,
she had said then, and she was thirsty now. She stopped, took up the handmade bamboo ladle, drank from it. She stared down into the bottom of the basin, made out the Japanese character for
michi.
A path; also a journey.

Was her destiny here, in Japan? Was that the only direction in which her path lay, the sole destination of her life’s journey? Could such a thing be possible? She had always thought that life’s journey had many paths, a multitude of destinations. Well, then? But she tried to imagine her life without Nicholas, and all she felt was a terrible loneliness that she knew she could not bear. Living somewhere apart from him would be torture, she knew, because her mind and her heart would always be wherever he was. She did not want to live the rest of her life as an emotional cripple.

But on the other hand, she knew she could not continue the relationship as it was. She had relied on Nicholas. He was her anchor, her safe haven, especially here in Japan where she knew no one and, moreover, was increasingly coming to feel that she was unwanted. In the beginning everyone was friendly—no, she corrected herself,
polite
was the right word. Every person Nicholas or Nangi introduced her to was so damn polite Justine couldn’t stand it. No one could consistently be that polite, she suspected, and really mean it. And yet Nicholas had repeatedly told her that the virtue of sincerity was extremely important to the Japanese.

What, then, was she missing? Was she crazy in her belief that she would never be allowed into the inner social circles of even Nicholas’s closest Japanese acquaintances? She did not think so.

Again she felt as if she were missing something vital, some kind of Rosetta stone which, once deciphered, would explain the unexplainable Japanese to her.

And now Justine understood that she needed Nicholas’s help more than ever. She could not allow him to push her away. She had to persevere. She knew in her heart that whatever difficulties both of them might encounter, they could survive them only if they stuck together and did not tolerate this eerie estrangement in their relationship.

Justine allowed herself one brief moment to feel the fear that her estrangement from Nicholas engendered in her. Then she did her best to clamp it off. She listened, instead, to the sounds of summer all around her.

In a moment she had drunk her fill. She replaced the ladle on the stone basin, and immediately the carved
michi
disappeared. Justine turned and went through the twilight, taking a different route back to the house.

Inside, she heard Nicholas in the workout room. She could hear his deep exhalations as he hit the padded pole over and over again with knuckles as hard as steel.

She exhaled deeply, as if she had been holding her breath for a long time, felt how much tension she had been holding in her upper body. For months she had ached with worry for Nicholas. She passed by the workout room now and thought, Everything will soon be all right. He’s starting to get back to his old self.

Nothing could have been further from the truth, however. Nicholas knew it the moment he threw the first of the aikido
atemi.
It was clumsy, out of skew, the result not only of being rusty, but of something more pervasive, something sinister.

The unthinkable had occurred. Nicholas had suspected it months ago. Now he was sure.

In the first few weeks after the operation, there had been a great deal of pain. Out of reflex Nicholas had sought to dissipate it though his martial arts training. There was a way to open, internally, the endorphin channels in order to clamp down on the brief, immediate pain one experiences in hand-to-hand combat. For more lasting pain, such as he had, there was another way.

Getsumei no michi.
The Moonlit Path. Akutagawa-san, one of Nicholas’s
sensei,
had said:
In
Getsumei no michi
you will experience two immediate insights. One, all sensation will gain in weight and significance. You will, in effect, simultaneously see the skin and what is beneath it. Two, there will be an awareness of light even when there is none.

What Akutagawa-san had meant, Nicholas had learned, was that
Getsumei no michi
allowed him to combine intuition with insight. He could hear lies spun in the air; he could make his way through the most labyrinthine enclosure blindfolded.
Getsumei no michi
was a return to man in his most elemental state, long before the layers of civilization accreted, stifling his primitive power.

But
Getsumei no michi
was much more. It was, in effect, a haven, the source of Nicholas’s inner strength and resolve. In
Getsumei no michi
all things were made clear to him. Without it he was far worse than deaf, dumb, and blind. He was defenseless.

When, in pain in the hospital, he had sought surcease in
Getsumei no michi,
he had found none. His connection with that mystical state was not only severed, but his knowledge of the state itself was gone altogether. It was not a question simply of memory. Nicholas could remember what
Getsumei no michi
was, could even conjure up what it had felt like to be there, and that proved the most painful realization of all. A person born blind looks upon life differently than one who has had his sight taken from him. Cruelly, Nicholas was aware of what he was missing, and the knowledge ate at him like acid.

Still, because he had been so weak after the operation, he could not know for certain if the damage were irreparable until he returned home and began his twice-daily workouts. Physical proof was required that he had been reduced to the status of mere mortal. Which accounted for his moods, his anxiety and his sleepless nights. Quite simply, he was terrified to confront the truth. As long as there was a shred of hope that he was wrong and in time
Getsumei no michi
would be returned to him, there was something to hold on to. But after the first
atemi
was struck, when he would know absolutely whether or not he had been abandoned, he knew that there would no longer be room for hope, only reality.

Now it had happened; his worst nightmare come true. He was like a man naked beneath a blinding sun with no protection, nowhere to run.

He had never been aware of how he relied on his godlike state until it had been stripped from him. How dull and uninteresting real life seemed with its reliance on the five underdeveloped senses.

Who knew how long Nicholas would have continued to sit on his
engawa
contemplating light and shadow, refusing to come to terms with his fate, had not Lew Croaker’s letter arrived, had he not asked Justine to read it, and she not been curious about Croaker’s new hand.

That had cut it. In the face of what his friend had gone through, and was still dealing with, Nicholas felt abject and foolish for putting off what he knew was inevitable.

He had gone into his workout room and, staring hard at the padded pole, had begun his preliminary breathing exercises, had, without thinking, assumed the ready position, and had struck out.

The first
atemi,
the basic percussive blow of aikido, was struck. And it was as if he were a rank beginner. The form remained, ingrained in his musculature, but there was nothing behind it: no conviction, no mind-set, no purity of purpose. Instead Nicholas’s mind was a chaos of conflicting thoughts and images deflecting and reflecting off one another in wild concatenation.

Nicholas, mechanically striking the padded pole over and over, was in shock. He could not quite believe it was happening.
Getsumei no michi
gone. His mind no longer part of the benevolent Void, emptied in order to absorb fully each clear thought, but rather, a babble of mutually antagonistic currents, each seeking its own independent end.

And that was how Justine found him, collapsed onto the tatami mats, his chin lolling on his sweat-streaked chest.

He heard her enter, heard her little gasp of horror, and lifting his head, he saw the look of pity in her eyes and could not bear it.

“Get out!” he shouted. And, because he had unconsciously used
kiai,
the samurai’s war shout, Justine felt as if she had been physically assaulted. She recoiled, reeling in bewilderment. “Get the hell away from me!”

When Tomi Yazawa shut the door to Commander Omukae’s office behind her, she was trembling. She stood still for one long moment, composing herself. The realization that she had revealed, to a man she did not know well, more than she had revealed to anyone else in the world, shocked her. More, it shamed her. No matter that Senjin Omukae had given her permission to speak; she should have kept her mouth shut. Why, then, had she spoken? And why had she spoken the truth instead of a well-crafted, face-saving lie?

Tomi did not know, but she suspected that her weakness of resolve had had something to do with Commander Omukae’s beautiful face. She shuddered as she recalled the moment when he had stood up, moving into her line of sight. She knew then that he had trapped her as surely as if he were a hunter with a snare. She had had no recourse but to look directly into his face for the whole of the interview.

The experience had been terrifying. She had felt somehow naked—obscenely, glowingly naked—beneath his penetrating gaze. And although she had fully meant to create some kind of fabrication to answer his questions, she found as she was about to speak that she could not. It was as if Commander Omukae possessed an invisible hand that had entered her mind, drawing out from her against her will that which he wanted to know.