Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  At the end of the party he told me that he would be in Paris for a few more days and that, if I was interested, he wouldn’t mind spending some more time with me. The beautiful Priscilla had fled to her homeland with a young Italian, heir to a textile mill, and he would be by himself drifting from museum to café.

  “We should hang out,” he said. “You probably know Paris much better than I do.”

  “I have a lot of work,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  I was conflicted about men in those days. Outwardly I liked to appear as though I didn’t care about them at all. At the same time, I secretly thought of their attention as something important to gain. Women, those herdlike creatures, were so easy to win over. Just be thoughtlessly nice like my childhood friend Tomoko and women loved you. Men were much harder to please. Men were always seeking a woman who was smart and engaging and capable. What greater reward than to be seen as interesting in their eyes? To be interesting, I believed, was a quality women could not understand.

  “It isn’t healthy to work all the time.” Timothy shook his head with concern. “Even you have to alternate work with play. It’s better for the imagination.”

  I conceded that I would be happy to show Timothy the parts of Paris that I knew. Then, because I didn’t want to seem too eager, I told him he could find me in the 14th arrondissement. I practiced in the morning, had class until three, then generally did my homework with Theo at La Coupole. If Timothy wanted to, he could find me there.

  I was tense for the next few days, like the shortest, tightest string on a piano. Sitting in the window of the café, I often strained my gaze past the immediate stream of pedestrians to see who else might soon glide past the large glass windows. Theo noticed. “You’re already in love with him.”

  “With who?” I took a puff of my cigarette.

  Three days later, he appeared, sidling in through the doors and grinning almost apologetically as if he’d meant to arrive two days earlier. Theo eyed him up and down. I tried to appear disinterested. “Oh. Hello.”

  “Sorry. I’ve been a little tied up.”

  “Priscilla?” Theo asked.

  “From Italy?” I said.

  “She’s back there now,” Timothy said. “Never to return. Until her honeymoon, anyway.” He sat down.

  Theo turned to me and began to talk again about our homework. “You ought to at least try to understand why Debussy sounds so different to you, Satomi. He was one of many composers working on avoiding a cycle of fifths as a way to build a score.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You need to be able to look at this and see where Debussy was moving chords around for color or for an actual key change.”

  Timothy leaned in close to my face. “Can you help me get a cup of coffee? They won’t understand my accent.” Warmth passed from his body to mine and though I had been slightly chilled sitting so close to the window, I felt a fever in my stomach.

  “American?”

  He blinked. “No. The French kind. But with milk.”

  “Garçon,” I called. “Un café au lait.”

  “Olé!” Timothy smiled.

  Theo groaned audibly.

  “So, you two meet here every day and do homework like this,” Timothy said.

  “She needs the help,” Theo explained.

  “It’s true. I do.”

  “What about … Paris? Bateau mouche? The Seine?”

  “No time,” I said.

  “You have your life all planned out.”

  “I have always had a plan.”

  His mouth, that elastic arch of a line, stretched into a broad smile of glee. “And did your plans include me?”

  It wasn’t long before I stopped going to class, to my café sessions with Theo, and to the apartment to practice, though I still met with Professor Montmartin. Time was better spent with Timothy, who didn’t laugh at my English and who spoke even less French than I did. He was also grateful that I could act as interpreter, even with my handicapped r’s and l’s. “Comment? Comment?” the French asked me when I stumbled over their words.

  “Try saying it again. Slower,” Timothy suggested.

  Timothy’s encouragement and attention made me feel stronger. I was reminded of that time in my life when I had lived just with my mother, and her love for me had been enough to convince me that the moon people actually existed and that I belonged in their kingdom. When Professor Montmartin gave me my weekly lesson and criticized me, I stood up and stalked out of the apartment. I could see how stunned he was when I did this, and the next time we met, he checked his temper.

  “See, you need me,” Timothy said when I reported on Professor Montmartin’s change in behavior.

  It was true. It was not enough for me to want to express something. I needed Timothy, as I had once needed my mother, to help me unleash all that I felt I could do.

  One night, not a week after we’d met, we walked along the Right Bank of the Seine, willows sweeping the waves, the moon high and bright and the boats churning through the water. Timothy leaned over and kissed me.

  It was my first kiss. Masayoshi and I hadn’t so much as held hands. Kissing was something people in Paris did all the time, whether they were married or not. Certainly I’d learned to endure the cheek kissing that accompanied a greeting. But this was my first real kiss.

  When it ended, I could feel Timothy studying me, waiting, with typical concern, to see how I would react to this new experience. I wasn’t too sure what to do. So he kissed me again, and gradually it became easier for me to kiss him back. Little by little, I found that I enjoyed it.

  “I’d like to go back to your place tonight, if that’s okay,” he whispered while he held my hand tightly.

  “My apartment?”

  “Nothing has to happen.” He smiled reassuringly. “I’ll just miss you tomorrow morning, unless I wake up next to you.”

  I liked the idea of waking up with him, of finally not feeling quite so alone in Paris.

  “Anyway,” he murmured, “I’m falling in love with you. So you don’t have to worry about that.”

  At the time, I didn’t completely understand what he meant—why would I be worrying? I wasn’t worried. I was a little startled, but mostly I was pleased. I liked the changes in my life that Timothy had brought. It felt completely natural when, a few days later, he moved out of the small pension where he’d been staying and came to live with me. We kept his presence secret from the Montmartins. He used the community toilet and shower on the sixth floor. At night we climbed up the staircase from the lobby and soon I eschewed going into the Montmartin apartment altogether, except for lessons.

  Timothy had a philosophy of life. I’d never met anyone outside of Masayoshi who had a theory of how the whole world worked, as though it were something you could study, know, and master.

  “We can go anywhere. Do you know how hard it was for all those Victorians to get to Japan from England? We’re so lucky. I think we were meant to take advantage of the jet age. We’re free, Satomi. Freer than our parents, even. We can see the world.”

  “It isn’t always better to travel. The French are a very rude people. Maybe it was better when I was home, believing that this was a beautiful place with beautiful people.”

  “You’re going about it all wrong, Satomi. You can’t travel and expect to find nirvana out there. You go and you find the best things about a country and you make that part of yourself. Then you move on. My guess? This is the first generation of humans that will actually attain enlightenment because we will be exposed to the greatest number of things.”

  “You want to be a Buddha?” I was teasing him, but he took me seriously.

  “It’s the only religion that really tells people how to be holy. Christianity just makes you feel bad all the time. The Buddhists are life affirming.”

  I thought about Masayoshi. “I don’t know,” I said. “We are very Buddhist in Japan. Plenty of Buddhists are unhappy.”

  He ignored me. “I wasn’t ready
to understand the Buddha back in Japan,” he said. “I still need to travel more before I can go back and really hear what people there have to tell me.” He smiled. “Maybe you’ll help. I mean, you already have.”

  “Me?”

  “Sure.” He continued to grin. “You’re a very calm person, Satomi.”

  I told him that I didn’t feel calm. Certainly no one in my family would describe me as calm. I was considered rather terrible. Temperamental, in fact.

  “This is why it’s important to travel. If your family saw more of the world, they’d see how self-possessed you are in contrast to most of the human population.”

  “What do your parents say about your travels?”

  “They think it’s a phase.”

  “A what?”

  “You know. A phase.”

  I looked up this term in my small Kodansha dictionary. The word phase in Japanese had several translations, mostly to do with the stages of the moon, or with the development of the mind from child to adult. By Timothy’s age, though, had he been Japanese, he would have been expected to be an adult. What kind of a phase was he in?

  “What do you do all day, when I’m in class?” I asked.

  “I read. I sleep. I dream.”

  “Don’t you get bored?”

  “The imagination is never boring.”

  “But,” I insisted, “you cannot just dream for the rest of your life.”

  I was hurt when he laughed at me, and he tried to explain it away, something about how serious I was all the time. Then he said that he would show me one of his hobbies the next time I had a free day and wasn’t playing the piano for the professor.

  The next Saturday we went to a small museum known as the Musée Guimet, which housed a number of important Japanese and Chinese antiques. He spent a lot of time looking at the porcelain in particular. He said he was studying. When I asked him what he meant by that, he took me next to the Louvre and asked me to look at a number of Dutch still lifes and portraits from the sixteenth century.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  I pointed out the usual European fascination with dead animals and skulls and fanciful clothing.

  “What else?”

  The closer I looked, the more I began to see something quite odd in all the portraits. Something very, very strange.

  “All these rich men,” I said. “They all have … Chinese bowls.”

  “Bingo!” Timothy grinned.

  The Netherlands had been an economic powerhouse in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and had actively traded with China during its powerful Ming dynasty. Well-to-do Dutchmen had been very likely to own a Ming porcelain collection and to pose for their formal portraits displaying these blue-and-white wonders as evidence of their wealth. Time and again, amid the plump wives cushioned by lace and the fat pheasant dinners in the background, were these Chinese dishes.

  “Know anything about porcelain?” Timothy asked me.

  I told him about my mother’s love of Arita and our small pieces at home in Hachinohe.

  He held my hands. “I’m thinking of going to Amsterdam in a couple of days. Lots of flea markets.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  He nodded. “This guy in San Francisco—he’s hard to get to unless you have an ‘in.’ Theoretically, I’m just a courier. But I tried to make it sound like I knew what I was doing. The collector said he’d buy anything from me that I found. Of course, it has to be the real thing and not some nineteenth-century copy.”

  “That sounds really interesting,” I said. This was a loose translation of the Japanese phrase omoshiroi desune, which means roughly the same thing. It was a handy phrase at home, something to say to fill up empty space in a conversation, and I couldn’t break the habit of using it in the West. Timothy was still holding my hands and I turned my face to the side, not wanting to show him how upset I was that he would be leaving.

  “I’ll bet,” he said slowly, “that you know more than I do.”

  “Of course I know about antiques in Japan. It’s my culture.”

  “Can you tell the difference between Korean and Chinese?”

  “Can’t you?” I turned back and smiled at him.

  He grinned. “I could pick you out of a crowd.” When I didn’t say anything, he continued in a soft voice. “Look, I’m telling you that I wouldn’t mind more of your company, if you’ll come along.”

  I left a note for the Montmartins that I had been called back to Japan on a family emergency. Home was so far away and the language barrier such a problem, I doubted the professor would ever think to call to make sure that I was actually in Hachinohe. I could just imagine what would happen if he were to actually pick up the phone and hear my mother’s polite, purely Japanese voice on the other end of the line. If he didn’t hang up out of frustration, I knew she would hang up out of embarrassment.

  I had thought we would be taking the train, which was what most of the other students did in Paris when they went somewhere. But Timothy had a small car, a Peugeot, which he said he’d bought some months earlier and driven all over Europe and planned to drive until it died.

  Amsterdam surprised me by how much it was and was not like Paris. The coffee was different, each cup coming with a small side of sweetened milk. The breakfasts were larger and included ham and cheese. There was also a very welcome surprise: rijsttafel, an Indonesian specialty. While the spices in the rijsttafel weren’t at all what I had grown up with in Japan, it was a relief to eat a meal with rice instead of bread.

  Over the years, I’ve followed the antiques news enough to know that the world of collecting has become increasingly difficult. There are now entire factories devoted to churning out false paintings and statues, with increasingly complicated techniques used to make sure that glazes look real and that the fake ladies of the T’ang dynasty bend in just the appropriate manner and that their makeup is in place, but not so perfect as to raise suspicion among connoisseurs.

  What I mean to say is that I don’t know if I would be of any use to someone like Timothy today. But back then, in the late sixties, all I had to do was to look at a piece of porcelain and tell him if I thought it was old or if it was new. If a plate resembled something my mother might have used to serve food, we shouldn’t buy it. If it looked like something she would have kept in a wooden box and covered in silk, or like something I’d seen in the Tokyo National Museum, then we should purchase it immediately.

  Timothy and I developed a code, like baseball players. A cough meant we should move on. If I put my hand over my mouth and smiled, it meant that there was something in the stall for us to look at. One finger meant early Ming. Two meant the middle period. And so on. It was fun, this game playing. And the traveling was fun too.

  I sometimes had to remind myself that the Dutch were not on display for me to watch and enjoy. Amsterdam was a real city, as real as Tokyo. But everything was so different, and so interesting, it was difficult not to feel as though I had fallen into a storybook and was watching characters come to life. This is the difference between traveling to a foreign country and trying to live in one, as I was doing in Paris. Countries, like people, are at their most beautiful when you visit them briefly and allow them to enchant you over a short period of time.

  Timothy was always offering to buy me something: a vintage pin, a used scarf, an old hat. I demurred out of politeness and, frankly, my Japanese sense of not wanting to buy something that was once worn by a smelly European. One afternoon, however, I could not resist a little leather jacket we found for sale on the street. It was soft and brown, with a fringe on the sleeves and across the back like something an American Indian might wear. I felt at home in it, not because I thought of myself as a Native American, but because the jacket made me feel conspicuously from another country. It emphasized and made no excuses for my foreign face.

  Timothy bought me a one-way train ticket back to Paris with a promise to be in touch soon. He had “business” to do alone. He said he was worried le
aving me by myself in Paris, but I calmly explained that I would be fine on my own. In a way, I was relieved to see him go. With Masayoshi, I had always had to worry what my mother or stepsisters would say. Timothy and I were complete strangers with no expectations on our relationship and I feared I was becoming a bit too accustomed to this kind of independence. Once or twice, I even said something to Timothy about my feelings.

  “We can’t just travel like this forever.”

  “Says who?” He stroked my hair. “All those rules you have in your head. Illusions.”

  But I kept hearing the voice of my mother telling me that what I was doing was not what she had dreamed of for me. I should go back to Paris and resume my studies.

  How surprised was I then when a yawning, sick emptiness flared open inside my stomach as the train pulled away from Amsterdam. Without Timothy in Paris, I would have to think seriously about my future. Was I really going to graduate from the École Normale as previously planned? Should I go back to Japan a failure? The questions were so serious and so large. Why was I having them now? It was true that I had been away from home for a long time now, and perhaps this had left me open to influence. But I’d been on my own before and not wavered from trying to be a musician. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to play music—not exactly. I still had that longing to do something important with my life, to feel the world embrace me with all its love. But I had discovered there were ways to capture this feeling that didn’t involve pianos and teachers and audiences. I was hungry to know more of the world.

  I wanted Timothy to come back.

  When I returned to my Paris room, I found a wad of mail shoved under the door. Most were postcards from my mother. She had a cold. Nothing to worry about. Mineko’s children were growing. Buried in a comment about changing autumn colors was the fact that Masayoshi’s son had celebrated his third birthday. I thought that any feelings I might have had for him had long since changed with the seasons. You can’t imagine what I’ve been doing, I replied, mentally, to all the postcards.