The Tattoo (18 page)

When we were lying together in bed one night, Claude spoke over the hum of the air conditioner. “These women from Korea and Vietnam, these women who my mother employs as hostesses, masseuses, and strippers, they need the money and will get it any way possible, even whore themselves. My mother knows the lifestyle sucks, and yet she perpetuates it for her own profit. I don’t get it.”

“Hey,” I said, “another thing I don’t get is why is it that it’s mostly Koreans and Vietnamese who are in these businesses?”

“You don’t know? What were the last two major wars the U.S. fought in?”

“Korea and Vietnam?”

“The natives were trained. These were the businesses they ran for the soldiers during the war. So some of them, when they came here afterwards, knew it was a money-maker and just continued doing it.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “I guess Koreans get a bad rap for it. You know, peddling sin and all.”

“I know, it pisses me off. Koreans get a bad rap for a bunch of stuff. You notice every bad driver in Hawai‘i is a Korean lady? Every little grocery store, the ones that sell pornos behind the counter, is owned by a Korean.A bar on Keeaumoku or Kapiolani isn’t called a ‘bar,’ it’s called a ‘Korean bar.’ All of us aren’t bad-driving bar and grocery store owners. But people like my mother perpetuate it.”

I sighed. “But like you said, maybe it’s all she knows.”

“I totally respect my mother and I understand why she is how she is, but sometimes I hate her for trying to push her obsessions on me. For her, life is all status. Mercedes and Gucci. Shit, I was almost named Mercedes. She wanted me to go to a ‘name’ school, get a ‘name’ job, and marry a ‘name’ kind of guy. When I was a kid, she was an absolute tyrant. Watched over me, like a hawk or something, making sure I was doing all my homework. Sending me to Punahou with the rich kids. Didn’t let me go out on weekends. She saw no present for me, she just wanted me to see the future. What is the future, anyway? It’s just something that’s going to happen no matter what we do.”

I looked at her and smiled. “It must be hard, though. To do what she doesn’t want you to do considering she’s done so much for you.”

She pulled the covers closer to her neck. “That’s the worst part about it. Sometimes when she’s on me about something I can practically see the love and hope pouring out of her. She loves me so much sometimes I hate her for it. It makes me feel guilty and ungrateful.”

I touched her face. “So what do you do?”

“I used to fold all the time. When she was unhappy with something I was doing, I’d correct it, no questions asked. But then after a while I got worn down. I used to look in the mirror and not see much, you know. I’d see me, but I couldn’t see anything inside. I felt like this non-person, destined to be a doctor and to marry one, destined to have kids, destined to die a grandma. My future lacked imagination, it lacked substance. That’s when I found the ocean. I started to surf. I told her I was going to college here at U.H. It was a horrible scene. I told her the day she got my acceptance letter from Stanford. That’s another thing about her, she always used to open my mail. Sometimes I wanted to report her to the feds.”

“What happened?”

“She threw a fit. She even threatened to disown me, can you imagine that? But she calmed down after giving me the silent treatment for a few days. For me, for her too maybe, those were the most horrible few days. I felt so guilty. I’d lie up at night just imagining my mother working in that brothel in Korea, fucking G.I.’s left and right. About her crammed in some boat being shipped illegally to Hawai‘i. Can you imagine? She didn’t even come here by boat. Her uncle sent her money for a ticket, and she flew over. But there I was, imagining her pregnant in some barge, stuffed in a room with a hundred other Koreans, standing in puddles of piss, shit and vomit. When she finally talked to me, I think she asked if I was hungry or something, I just burst into tears. She hugged me and called me a silly girl. She’s still pissed that I didn’t go to Stanford, but she accepted that I stayed.”

“So what about when you told her you were majoring in art history?”

She laughed. “That one wasn’t as bad. She just called me ‘pabo,’ you know, stupid in Korean, and it kind of blew over. I think someone told her I could become a professor in the field and it cheered her up. It’s like she figured there was a chance for me to become a doctor yet. She told me intellectuals are greatly respected in South Korea and it would be just fine with her if I got my doctorate and became a professor. Can you imagine? A PhD was like the last thing on my mind.”

“Pabo, ah. She was calling me stupid all these years and I didn’t even know it.”

We laughed together.“So what about it?” I asked her. “Are you going for a PhD?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I’d have to go to the mainland for it, though. I mean, if I wanted to teach here. U.H. doesn’t hire U.H. students.”

Suddenly the discussion was dropped. She pulled the covers over both our heads, climbed on top of me, and began kissing me. I gladly gave up the conversation. I think we both knew that we were getting into a discussion about the future. Like she said, the future was going to happen no matter what we were going to do. But I think both of us wish now that we’d had that conversation. It might have opened our eyes, and we might have been able to see what was coming next.

About eight months after we met, Claudia got pregnant. It was inevitable, really, we kind of always let safe sex stand waywardly on the side of the road while we raced past it. Maybe we both knew it was going to happen, but we just didn’t want to bring it up. But there she was one day, sitting on my leather sofa, waiting for me to return. I opened the door and as soon as I looked at her she told me. She wore this kind of blank look, not sad, not happy, maybe just waiting to see how I’d react. I tried to confront her with the same poker face while my mind raced.

I thought about how I was when I was a teenager, how I was just a year before, how this would have never happened. I thought about how stupid I had become, how this love thing wasn’t so good after all. It was something that seemed to make your mind not work logically, it was charged with RPM’s, made you run hot, made you blow your engine.

I looked at her and somehow knew she had ideas of keeping the baby. I felt the future hit me and it felt like I was jumping into an ocean of freezing water at night without a light. I started to shiver. Once again, I didn’t know what to say in her presence in a tough moment. I felt it would be imprudent to reveal my truest thoughts.

Suddenly the words, “fuck it,” flashed into my mind in big, bright neon, Vegas-style letters. Those two wonderful words that many of us cling to. It’s like your mind, it can conjure up all sorts of rationalizations, arguments, and the debate can go on and on, but when you say,“fuck it,” it’s like the ace in the hole because there’s no real argument that can stand against it.“Fuck it” can mean you made a decision or you let life make the decision for you while you were totally uninterested in it anyway. “Fuck it” is absolute, it covers all bases. When I was a kid, I could say it on a whim and make my problems instantly evaporate. But as I got older it became a harder thing to say, and with Claude around it was almost impossible to say, but in my mind, for an instant, I said it anyway. I didn’t mean it, though. I couldn’t mean it. I looked at her and she looked like she needed cheering up. So I said, “Is it mine?”

For an instant her face looked shocked. But she caught on, she always did, and she said in a quiet, over-dramatic voice,“Well, it’s between you and this other asshole I’ve been dating, this Japanese asshole who always seems to want to make jokes in serious situations.”

“You slept with an asshole like that? Seems like you get what you deserve.”

I sat next to her on the sofa. I put my hand on her leg and she put her hand on mine. My mind began racing again in the silence. I looked around my living room and saw no evidence indicating that this was a room created by a father. I looked at the big screen television, the Bose stereo. I saw all the wires sticking out from the back. I looked at the glass table and it made me feel nervous. I looked at the lamp on the side of the sofa and thought how easy it would be for someone small to touch it and burn themself. I looked at my bookcases and thought about how much inked paper there was there to eat. My eyes finally fell on the framed Otsuka print, on the eyes of Miyamoto Musashi, and I trembled. I didn’t want to look at it, but I did. I saw his angry slanty eyes stare at me. His swords were sheathed, but he was attacking with two wooden sticks. His purple and yellow kimono was decorated with Kabuki-like faces. The faces wore looks of sorrow, pride, and rage. No, I wasn’t made to be a father, just as my father wasn’t made to be a father, but it seemed I was going to be a father, anyway. I was going to be a father with no war to run to.

I looked at Claudia and noticed that she was looking at Musashi, too. “Jeez,” she said, “you gotta get rid of that thing, it’s kind of creepy.”

“You crazy? Musashi’s my boy. He’s my friend.”

“No,” she said, “he’s your idol.”

“Well, we’re a package deal.”

She laughed. “Well, so are we.”

I thought for a second. Then I said, “Fair enough.”

So for the first time, we began to plan our future. I told her I wasn’t really anxious to marry, not because I didn’t love her, but because none of the Mrs. Hideyoshis in my family ever faired too well, and I wanted to keep her around for a long time. She agreed to this. “Well maybe we should give the baby my last name then.”

“That sounds like a great idea to me. In fact, if we ever do get married, I’d like to take your name too.”

We laughed and lifted the boulder of the future together. It didn’t feel as heavy as we thought it would. But then, people didn’t start climbing on while we walked with it yet.

Claudia’s mother did
not take the news well and I lost my job. Claudia lost her apartment. Claude was pissed at Mama-san and decided that she would never speak to her again. I figure this pissed Mama-san off even more. But she didn’t blame Claude, the blame fell directly on me. I’m pretty sure she got the idea in her head that I had crossed the line, that I’d finally done something that had ruined her daughter’s life. And I finally got it through my thick skull that me being Japanese probably didn’t help much either. Well, in Hawai‘i, Koreans are known for their tempers. Mama-san took this to another level. She snapped so loud I should’ve heard it coming. Suddenly Honolulu wasn’t big enough for the both of us.

After three weeks of not speaking with her mother, Claudia finally broke down and decided that she would meet Mama-san for lunch. The silent treatment was hard on her, too, I mean, she and her mother were really close despite their differences. I remember after about four days of not talking to her mother, Claude told me, “This is the longest I’ve gone without talking to my mother.”

So I was kind of glad that she was going to have lunch with Mama-san. I guess at the time I had this notion that family mattered. Even I, who fucking hated my father, called him once in a while to see what was going on. So I encouraged the lunch and told her I would stay home and sit on my sorry, unemployed ass.

Like so many times in my life, I found myself waiting. But for the first time in my life I was waiting for something good. Waiting for something that meant the world to me, something that belonged to me, something that I belonged to. I wasn’t waiting for death, I was waiting for life. But it wasn’t coming. I was cruising on my sofa, reading an issue of
Time
. After a few hours, the clock began ticking really slow, slower than it had when I was taking shitty community college classes. I began telling myself they must’ve made up and decided to do something that night. I stood up after several hours and looked out my window. I looked down at cars stuck in traffic on Kapiolani Boulevard, some of them had their headlights on. They were waiting for the light to change. The sun was setting, but I faced the north so I couldn’t see it. I turned around and shut off the T.V. I decided that I’d work out to kill time.

I returned home after about an hour and a half, flipped on the light switch and checked our bedroom. She wasn’t home. I looked at the clock and saw that it was a little before eight. I went to the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator. I wasn’t really looking, though, it was like I was just zoning out, enjoying the cool air that shot out on my face.“What can Mama-san do? She can’t do shit,” I told myself. I thought about the fact that Claude was Mama-san’s daughter, and I knew that Mama-san wouldn’t hurt her own daughter. I relaxed a little and closed the fridge. I walked to the bathroom and decided to take a shower. I was starting to feel stupid, overly concerned, uncool. While feeling the hot water wet my weary body, I told myself I was worrying like an old lady. Claude was fine, hell, if anyone can change a person’s mind about something, it was Claude.