“Maybe it is a copy,” I suggested, more to test him than anything else.
“A copy? By the eighteenth century, no one could do faces quite like the ones you see here. No, this is a very good seventeenth-century screen and I think that we could sell it for a good profit if I could just fix the missing corner.”
I took a pencil off the little table we used for eating and for work and drew in a few lines on François’ drawing. “It would be better,” I said, “if the water had a curve like this.” I added a few more lines. “And you are right that there should be a plume here where the water hits the rock. But not so fancy. You don’t want to draw attention to the missing corner. What I have done is more what you would call ‘stylized.’ ”
He took the piece of paper from me and grinned. “The most difficult part will be matching colors. Finding the right paint. I’ll have to befriend a museum curator next.”
“I think,” I said slowly, “that you will be able to do this.”
He glanced at me sideways. “So you have finally developed some faith in me.”
I didn’t say anything right away. I just stood up and began to look through our tiny refrigerator for some ingredients to make dinner. François, for once, did not press me, though I could feel him beaming even when my back was turned to him. It was only after we had eaten—grilled fish, rice, miso soup—that I said to him, “I could help you.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “You could. Maybe you’ll even start to like it here. Maybe you’ll even like me as much as I like you.”
So I stayed. I have no one to blame but myself. No one forced me. Certainly not François. I could have left even without the money, but again—where could I go? I occasionally saw young women my age from Japan and Korea on the streets of San Francisco, and they had a bruised look about them, like one of those vegetables I’d learned to pick out and throw away for having been handled one too many times at the market where I had worked as a cashier. I was aware that I could be like them, that I did have even further to fall. Would that happen to me? Might leaving be even worse?
“You promise to pay me?” I asked François.
“Of course.” He smiled. “But we must be fair.”
Not too long after that we received our first letter from Timothy. I’d been writing regularly, but each letter had been returned to me unopened. I had initially kept my letter writing a secret from François, but he’d come home one day when I hadn’t expected him and had intercepted the mail. In a patient voice, he said, “It will be awhile before he is out of prison, Satomi.”
“I still want to try to write to him.”
“Of course.”
Then a month went by and my most recent letter hadn’t come back to me. Once again I held out hope that Timothy would be able to read the letter himself, and I was rewarded one day when a thin aerogramme came to our new address in the Marina District of San Francisco, postmarked from Japan. Finally, the elaborate Japanese legal system had allowed my last letter to reach its intended reader, and Timothy, recently awarded rights to pen and paper, had written back.
Mostly he wrote of his experiences in prison during his first year. In the beginning he had been forced to stand in a room with no chair and not quite enough room to lie down. On the few occasions that he’d tried to sit on the floor, a guard had come in and hoisted him to his feet. When he wanted to urinate, he was given a plastic cup. After ten days he was transferred outside of Tokyo to Chiba, a nearby village, and given a room with a small cot. At night the light was left on in his cell and when he tried to cover his eyes to sleep, a guard would scream at him until he removed his arm from his eyes.
He told me that he became friendly with the other prisoners in cells near his and that they prayed together. One man was from the Philippines and had come to Japan to work as a gardener but had overstayed his visa. Another man, a Korean, was accused of raping his neighbor’s daughter. Timothy taught them the fragments of the Lord’s Prayer that he remembered, and they taught him to chant Buddhist sutras. Through the bars of his cell, Timothy mimicked the lotus position that the Korean showed him, and learned how to meditate.
I wrote back, asking if he was eating enough and telling him that I had come to America with “luggage” and that I hoped he didn’t mind that I had sold his “clothes” at a garage sale. He told me about the powers he was commanding, how he was able to remain calm when the guards beat him for failing, again, to sign his confession, and how much weight he was losing on his prison diet. “The Korean,” he wrote, “tells me that Buddhist priests in training eat practically the same thing. I’m basically doing the whole Buddhist boot camp, and if I can just focus on that, I’ll quit thinking of this as a level of hell and more like an experience.” I wrote to tell him of life in San Francisco, how the city turned pink in the morning and evening, unlike any other place I’d ever seen in my life. I asked if there was some place I should visit that he could imagine, some place we could both be, where we could pretend to be together.
He told me how if he concentrated hard enough on his prison walls, he could see a mandala emerge from the cracks in the concrete.
For one brief, wry moment I allowed myself to see the humor in having loved two men who’d turned to Buddhism. Then I was just annoyed by the self-righteous tone he’d adopted. He asked no questions of me in any of his letters. He didn’t want to know how I liked living in America, he didn’t express any regret that my mother had died, and he didn’t even comment about the sale of his “clothes.” All his letters were simply about himself.
François found Timothy’s letters amusing. “It is true,” he said, “that this description of prison is an awful lot like the monastery.” François told me how he himself had arrived in Japan determined to become the first Western man ever to survive the Buddhist training at the famed monastery of Eiheiji temple as part of his fieldwork. He wouldn’t be like the last applicant, an American, who’d been carried out on a stretcher, emaciated. He was going to become a full-fledged priest. He’d stood outside the temple gates, all six foot three of him, and begged for entrance alongside other hopeful initiates. Though the priests inside had ignored him even longer than they’d ignored the other waiting men outside, they’d eventually let him in, giving him a bowl of miso soup to drink and a bowl of rice to eat. Then he’d begun his days trying to sit zazen, or meditation, and cringing each time he’d been hit on the back with a bamboo stick.
He’d left the temple after two months because a visiting priest named Yamagata-roshi had come by for a visit and, in broken English, had said, “There must be another way to experience religion.”
And then, he said so sincerely that I almost believed him, he’d gone to Muryojuji temple and seen a girl so unusual, he’d fallen in love with her in an instant. Love, he said, was a much better way to be close to any of the many gods roaming the planet. It was a shame that Timothy had never learned this, or if he had, that he’d been able to forget the lesson so quickly.
Timothy’s letters continued to come to us, though they were always filled with philosophy and I learned to skim their contents. I suppose I never completely gave up hope that he would show some curiosity about my situation, but mostly I accepted that he had changed in some fundamental way and that he was no longer as interested in me as he had been. Then they came at increasingly wider intervals until they stopped coming at all. It was only much, much later when I’d returned to Japan that I thought over those letters again and wondered if he had worded them so strangely because he was in prison and was subject to extreme censorship.
We drifted along, François and I, growing the business and delighting when we made a sale.
“Congratulations, Satomi,” he said, holding out a fistful of cash. “I’ll tell you what. If you let me kiss you, I’ll give you an extra 10 percent.”
“No.”
“One kiss.”
“No,” I said. “Just work. We just work.”
Work we did. I kept track of all the pieces, draw
ing little sketches in notebooks and leaving the descriptions for François to write in by hand. I was responsible for reading signatures and seals, though he was studying kanji characters and making some progress with his language abilities. Even now I must admit that he was a very good connoisseur. I was frankly a little bit surprised that a Westerner could know so much about Asian art, know more than I did, in fact.
I was able to enjoy the work. My favorite thing of all was when we found a slightly damaged piece that needed our collective imaginations in order to be repaired. It felt like a game to me. Each wounded sculpture, each defaced painting required a different solution, and it was fun to sit together sketching out solutions on paper.
But the thing I enjoyed the most, the thing that made me happiest, was to see my pile of money grow.
I kept my cash in two places. Since I was, as François had pointed out, an illegal immigrant, I could not open a bank account. I kept most of my money on the dresser in a box. François knew about this stash and he used some of it when we moved from a rented apartment to a house. These were all in François’ name because I had yet to apply for a green card, as he did, or citizenship. Every now and then François would propose that we get married so I would not have any legal problems, but I always demurred. I could not see the point of marrying someone I did not love.
I had a second pile of cash—much smaller, but always growing—that I squirreled away in a paper bag I kept at the bottom of my supply of sanitary napkins. François did not know where I hid the cash and, if he was inclined to go looking for it, he would most likely not think to look there. It was on this pile of money that all my hopes rested. If I were ever to leave America, it would be because I’d finally earned enough in my little brown bag.
Eventually, François and I became intimate. At the time it seemed an abrupt transition in our relationship, but I see now how naturally it developed, an outgrowth of the way we celebrated our successes together, how really we had no one to turn to but each other when we made a particularly good sale. Plus, I was lonely in San Francisco and made few friends. Men often wanted to talk to me, but I rarely wanted to talk to them, and it frustrated me that I could not go out for a cup of coffee or a smoke without some teenager sidling up beside me and attempting to start a conversation. It was much easier to go out in the evening if François was present and people naturally assumed we were a couple. Drunk on wine one night, I let him kiss me and he gave me an extra hundred dollars. Things progressed from there. From time to time I even enjoyed myself. Certainly I became accustomed enough to it not to mind.
I became pregnant. I found out the usual way. I felt a sensation vaguely akin to cramping in my abdomen and told myself that my period was on its way, just a little bit delayed. A week later I started to feel nauseous and weak, and when I threw up three mornings in a row, François insisted on taking me to the doctor. François’ reaction, when he learned of my condition, confused me.
“Why, that’s wonderful.” He grasped both my hands and the doctor, a man, beamed at us.
François threw himself into impending fatherhood, signing us up for Lamaze classes and dictating my diet. He told our few acquaintances that he knew (knew!) that Lamaze would keep me from feeling any pain during childbirth. He bragged about my stoic nature. Sometimes I caught him saying things to someone on the phone, some mysterious person he spoke to at odd hours of the night. “Well,” I once heard him say, “if it’s a girl, then I’ll be raising two women. I rather like that idea.” When he brought up marriage again, I used a line I’d once heard a hippie say: “Why do you have to define everything?” And he’d laughed and beamed and hugged me and declared that I was a very modern girl, and not at all the kind of stereotypical Asian people were always accusing me of being. “If only people knew,” he laughed.
The baby grew. I know that for many women this is an exciting thing. They cannot wait to make contact with the life growing inside them. Certainly the baby was trying to make contact with me. I would dream about her—I knew very quickly that I was going to have a girl. I could feel her thoughts intertwining with mine and I would wake up angry. My dreams, my thoughts, my fantasies did not need the interjection of this other voice. Though it was just a very small baby in the beginning, already its personality was quite clear. She wasn’t at all like me, but more like my mother. She would be the kind of child who observed the world with a calculating brain. One day, after observing the bipedal monsters around her, she would simply stand up and walk. She would grow up looking into my heart and knowing that I wasn’t sure if I loved her or not. She would know that I had fallen into the life I was leading now and that I had not deliberately chosen it.
Pregnancy can make women emotional and I was no exception. All the things that had seemed so foreign about America now frustrated me. I wanted my rice and miso soup every night, not just once a week as François had agreed to when we’d first decided what to eat and how to eat it. I wanted elderly people to stand up and give me a seat on the bus. I wanted to hear children’s songs in Japanese and not the kind of rock and roll that filled up the lessons on Sesame Street, where puppets with large noses lived in trash cans and fought with each other until the humans intervened. I wanted to know where I would take my child on her third, fifth, and seventh birthdays. Home. I wanted home. Desperately. When I mentioned this to François, he suggested I go to a Japanese American Buddhist temple to look for guidance.
I was unprepared for my reaction when I met with my countrymen, for the sound of so many Japanese voices immediately caused me to burst into tears. Once upon a time I had lived in a country where I had effortlessly understood the language, regardless of dialect or class. Then sentences had washed past my ears like river currents supporting a water bird in her natural habitat. I had grown accustomed to living in America, where absolutely everything was an effort due to its strangeness. I had almost forgotten that there was once a place where I might have been unhappy or frustrated, but where I had always felt at ease.
For a time, I liked visiting the Japanese immigrants and hearing them talk. They were full of advice for the coming baby, what to feed her, what to teach her. Eventually, though, I grew frustrated with them. Most were peasant class, uneducated fishermen and gardeners who knew nothing of antiques or classical music.
What I really wanted was my mother.
I wondered if she had become pregnant with me in a similar fashion, if she had been just as terrified. If so, I understood even less why she had been so willing to escape into the domesticity of the Horie household, why she’d been all too happy to pick up golfing and lunches as though she’d always been destined to be a housewife with three daughters to raise. If it had just been the two of us, we would have managed. She could have come to Paris with me, or moved to Tokyo while I’d been in school. There would have been no neglected afternoon cold that evolved into pneumonia, no large house in Hachinohe filled with debts no doubt accumulated by overeager adopted daughters who had deluded themselves into thinking that their family deserved a better lifestyle than they could afford.
I do not like to remember the birth of the baby, whom we named Rumi, or of the days that followed. Fortunately I have been able to put much of it out of my mind. I do remember that I was physically the most uncomfortable that I have ever been. My skin had been stretched, the weight I had gained from pregnancy did not disappear, and I felt as bloated and heavy as the umi bozu, or sea monster, with its fat body and bald head that I now like to draw to frighten small children. What would they say if I told them that my scariest monsters are inspired by what I saw when I looked in a mirror during those terrifying days?
I was dutiful about feeding Rumi. She was always hungry, and I began to wonder how my life had been reduced to being nothing more than a food dispenser. I waited for the moment when everything in my world would feel right and I would be happy to be here with François, when I would be happy to be a mother and to have this little baby, to be in this story that was my life. The moment ref
used to come. I waited for it. Prayed for it. I sat in a chair by the window and watched the sky turn dark, then watched the sun rise again. I cried and I slept. It was more frightening to me to hold the baby than it was to hold a ten-thousand-dollar piece of porcelain. I might drop her. I might accidentally snap that soft neck. I wouldn’t mean to drop her, but it could happen. I would never be forgiven.
All of the melancholy I had felt while I was pregnant now coalesced into one unbearable burden: the baby. I could not give her back, could not set her down for a day or two while I collected my thoughts and decided whether or not I wanted to be a mother. Well, that was just it. I had to be a mother. I didn’t like not having a choice. So I’d put her down and go for a walk, and François would find her unattended and he’d scold me.
From the moment the baby was born, François adored her. Almost instantly after her birth, his face took on a different cast that is difficult to describe. He looked … satisfied. I did not understand how someone could change so suddenly, and become so contented. It was eerie. Watching him, I knew that he could never understand my frustration, my longing to go home. We’d come such a long way, he declared, and now we were a family. Things were as they were supposed to be. Couldn’t I feel just how right it was to have Rumi in our lives? He knew how hard it had been to adjust to living in San Francisco, but why was I having so much trouble now?
“Don’t you realize,” he declared, “how much I love you?”
I didn’t realize. At the time, I couldn’t even believe him. I searched for a way to respond, but all I ever managed to relay was that I was deeply tired. At this he would relent for a while before growing angry again when I neglected the baby once more.
These were my lowest days. How had I come to this? A girl from Japan full of talent—of passion, Sanada-sensei had said—now living an unremarkable life in America. Worst of all, I couldn’t muster the energy to change my circumstances. I was like one of our neighbor’s cars that coughed and gurgled in the driveway, but whose engine never managed to catch fire. I wondered if all the rest of my days were going to be the same. So aimless.
Picking Bones from Ash Page 22