“Aren’t they beautiful,” she said.
“Yes.” Not wishing to frighten her, he did not add that they had not been there before.
He gazed at a particularly large one among them. A red drop oozed from one of the petals.
Old Eguchi awoke with a groan. He shook his head, but he was still in a daze. He was facing the dark girl. Her body was cold. He started up. She was not breathing. He felt her breast. There was no pulse. He leaped up. He staggered and fell. Trembling violently, he went into the next room. The call button was in the alcove. He heard footsteps below.
“Did I strangle her in my sleep?” He went, almost crawled, back to the other room and looked at the girl.
“Is something wrong?” The woman of the house came in.
“She’s dead.” His teeth were chattering.
The woman rubbed her eyes and looked calmly down at the girl. “Dead? There’s no reason that she should be.”
“She’s dead. She’s not breathing and there’s no pulse.”
Her expression changing, the woman knelt beside the dark girl.
“Dead, isn’t she?”
The woman rolled back the bedding and inspected the girl. “Did you do anything to her?”
“Not a thing.”
“She’s not dead,” she said with forced coolness. “You needn’t worry.”
“She’s dead. Call a doctor.”
The woman did not answer.
“What did you give her? Maybe she was allergic.”
“Don’t be alarmed. We won’t cause you any trouble. We won’t tell your name.”
“She’s dead.”
“I think not.”
“What time is it?”
“After four.”
She staggered as she lifted the dark, naked body.
“Let me help you.”
“Don’t bother. There’s a man downstairs.”
“She’s heavy.”
“Please. You needn’t bother. Go on back to sleep. There is the other girl.”
There was another girl—no remark had ever struck him more sharply. There was of course the fair-skinned girl still asleep in the next room.
“Do you expect me to sleep after this?” His voice was angry, but there was also fear in it. “I’m going home.”
“Please don’t. It wouldn’t do to be noticed at this hour.”
“I can’t possibly go back to sleep.”
“I’ll bring you more medicine.”
He heard her dragging the dark girl downstairs. Standing in his night kimono, he for the first time felt the cold press upon him. The woman came back with two white tablets.
“Here you are. Sleep late tomorrow.”
“Oh?” He opened the door to the next room. The covers were as they had been, thrown back in confusion, and the naked form of the fair girl lay in shining beauty.
He gazed at her.
He heard an automobile pulling away, probably with the dark girl’s body. Was she being taken to the dubious inn to which old Fukura had been taken?
One Arm
“I can let you have one of my arms for the night,” said the girl. She took off her right arm at the shoulder and, with her left hand, laid it on my knee.
“Thank you.” I looked at my knee. The warmth of the arm came through.
“I’ll put the ring on. To remind you that it’s mine.” She smiled and raised her left arm to my chest. “Please.” With but one arm, it was difficult for her to take the ring off.
“An engagement ring?”
“No. A keepsake. From my mother.”
It was silver, set with small diamonds.
“Perhaps it does look like an engagement ring, but I don’t mind. I wear it, and then when I take it off it’s as if I were leaving my mother.”
Raising the arm on my knee, I removed the ring and slipped it on the ring finger.
“Is this the one?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “It will seem artificial unless the elbow and fingers bend. You won’t like that. Let me make them bend for you.”
She took her right arm from my knee and pressed her lips gently to it. Then she pressed them to the finger joints.
“Now they’ll move.”
“Thank you.” I took the arm back. “Do you suppose it will speak? Will it speak to me?”
“It only does what an arm does. If it talks I’ll be afraid to have it back. But try anyway. It should at least listen to what you say, if you’re good to it.”
“I’ll be good to it.”
“I’ll see you again,” she said, touching the right arm with her left hand, as if to infuse it with a spirit of its own. “You’re his, but just for the night.”
As she looked at me she seemed to be fighting back tears.
“I don’t suppose you’ll try to change it for your own arm,” she said. “But it will be all right. Go ahead, do.”
“Thank you.”
I put her arm in my raincoat and went out into the foggy streets. I feared I might be thought odd if I took a taxi or a streetcar. There would be a scene if the arm, now separated from the girl’s body, were to cry out, or to weep.
I held it against my chest, toward the side, my right hand on the roundness at the shoulder joint. It was concealed by the raincoat, and I had to touch the coat from time to time with my left hand to be sure that the arm was still there. Probably I was making sure not of the arm’s presence but of my own happiness.
She had taken off the arm at the point I liked. It was plump and round—was it at the top of the arm or the beginning of the shoulder? The roundness was that of a beautiful Occidental girl, rare in a Japanese. It was in the girl herself, a clean, elegant roundness, like a sphere glowing with a faint, fresh light. When the girl was no longer clean that gentle roundness would fade, grow flabby. Something that lasted for a brief moment in the life of a beautiful girl, the roundness of the arm made me feel the roundness of her body. Her breasts would not be large. Shy, only large enough to cup in the hands, they would have a clinging softness and strength. And in the roundness of the arm I could feel her legs as she walked along. She would carry them lightly, like a small bird, or a butterfly moving from flower to flower. There would be the same subtle melody in the tip of her tongue when she kissed.
It was the season for changing to sleeveless dresses. The girl’s shoulder, newly bared, had the color of skin not used to the raw touch of the air. It had the glow of a bud moistened in the shelter of spring and not yet ravaged by summer. I had that morning bought a magnolia bud and put it in a glass vase; and the roundness of the girl’s arm was like the great, white bud. Her dress was cut back more radically than most sleeveless dresses. The joint at the shoulder was exposed, and the shoulder itself. The dress, of dark green silk, almost black, had a soft sheen. The girl was in the rounded slope of the shoulders, which drew a gentle wave with the swelling of the back. Seen obliquely from behind, the flesh from the round shoulders to the long, slender neck came to an abrupt halt at the base of the upswept hair, and the black hair seemed to cast a glowing shadow over the roundness of the shoulders.
She had sensed that I thought her beautiful, and so she lent me her right arm for the roundness there at the shoulder.
Carefully hidden under my raincoat, the girl’s arm was colder than my hand. I was giddy from the racing of my heart, and I knew that my hand would be hot. I wanted the warmth to stay as it was, the warmth of the girl herself. And the slight coolness in my hand passed on to me the pleasure of the arm. It was like her breasts, not yet touched by a man.
The fog yet thicker, the night threatened rain, and wet my uncovered hair. I could hear a radio speaking from the back room of a closed pharmacy. It announced that three planes unable to land in the fog had been circling the airport for a half hour. It went on to draw the attention of listeners to the fact that on damp nights clocks were likely to go wrong, and that on such nights the springs had a tendency to break if wound too tight. I looked for the lights of the circling planes,
but could not see them. There was no sky. The pressing dampness invaded my ears, to give a wet sound like the wriggling of myriads of distant earthworms. I stood before the pharmacy awaiting further admonitions. I learned that on such nights the fierce beasts in the zoo, the lions and tigers and leopards and the rest, roared their resentment at the dampness, and that we were now to hear it. There was a roaring like the roaring of the earth. I then learned that pregnant women and despondent persons should go to bed early on such nights, and that women who applied perfume directly to their skins would find it difficult to remove afterwards.
At the roaring of the beasts, I moved off, and the warning about perfume followed me. That angry roaring had unsettled me, and I moved on lest my uneasiness be transmitted to the girl’s arm. The girl was neither pregnant nor despondent, but it seemed to me that tonight, with only one arm, she should take the advice of the radio and go quietly to bed. I hoped that she would sleep peacefully.
As I started across the street I pressed my left hand against my raincoat. A horn sounded. Something brushed my side, and I twisted away. Perhaps the arm had been frightened by the horn. The fingers were clenched.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It was a long way off. It couldn’t see. That’s why it honked.”
Because I was holding something important to me, I had looked in both directions. The sound of the horn had been so far away that I had thought it must be meant for someone else. I looked in the direction from which it came, but could see no one. I could see only the headlights. They widened into a blur of faint purple. A strange color for headlights. I stood on the curb when I had crossed and watched it pass. A young woman in vermilion was driving. It seemed to me that she turned toward me and bowed. I wanted to run off, fearing that the girl had come for her arm. Then I remembered that she would hardly be able to drive with only one. But had not the woman in the car seen what I was carrying? Had she not sensed it with a woman’s intuition? I would have to take care not to encounter another of the sex before I reached my apartment. The rear lights were also a faint purple. I still did not see the car. In the ashen fog a lavender blur floated up and moved away.
“She is driving for no reason, for no reason at all except to be driving. And while she drives she will simply disappear,” I muttered to myself. “And what was that sitting in the back seat?”
Nothing, apparently. Was it because I went around carrying girls’ arms that I felt so unnerved by emptiness? The car she drove carried the clammy night fog. And something about her had turned it faintly purple in the headlights. If not from her own body, whence had come that purplish light? Could the arm I concealed have so clothed in emptiness a woman driving alone on such a night? Had she nodded at the girl’s arm from her car? Perhaps on such a night there were angels and ghosts abroad protecting women. Perhaps she had ridden not in a car but in a purple light. Her drive had not been empty. She had spied out my secret.
I made my way back to my apartment without further encounters. I stood listening outside the door. The light of a firefly skimmed over my head and disappeared. It was too large and too strong for a firefly. I recoiled backwards. Several more lights like fireflies skimmed past. They disappeared even before the heavy fog could suck them in. Had a will-o’-the-wisp, a death-fire of some sort, run on ahead of me, to await my return? But then I saw that it was a swarm of small moths. Catching the light at the door, the wings of the moths glowed like fireflies. Too large to be fireflies, and yet, for moths, so small as to invite the mistake.
Avoiding the automatic elevator, I made my way stealthily up the narrow stairs to the third floor. Not being left-handed, I had difficulty unlocking the door. The harder I tried the more my hand trembled—as if in terror after a crime. Something would be waiting for me inside the room, a room where I lived in solitude; and was not the solitude a presence? With the girl’s arm I was no longer alone. And so perhaps my own solitude waited there to intimidate me.
“Go on ahead,” I said, taking out the girl’s arm when at length I had opened the door. “Welcome to my room. I’ll turn on the light.”
“Are you afraid of something?” the arm seemed to say. “Is something here?”
“You think there might be?”
“I smell something.”
“Smell? It must be me that you smell. Don’t you see traces of my shadow, up there in the darkness? Look carefully. Maybe my shadow was waiting for me to come back.”
“It’s a sweet smell.”
“Ah—the magnolia,” I answered brightly. I was glad it was not the moldy smell of my loneliness. A magnolia bud befitted my winsome guest. I was getting used to the dark. Even in pitch blackness I knew where everything was.
“Let me turn on the light.” Coming from the arm, a strange remark. “I haven’t been in your room before.”
“Thank you. I’ll be very pleased. No one but me has ever turned on the lights here before.”
I held the arm to the switch by the door. All five lights went on at once: at the ceiling, on the table, by the bed, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. I had not thought they could be so bright.
The magnolia was in enormous bloom. That morning it had been in bud. It could have only just bloomed, and yet there were stamens on the table. Curious, I looked more closely at the stamens than at the white flower. As I picked up one or two and gazed at them, the girl’s arm, laid on the table, began to move, the fingers like spanworms, and gathered the stamens in its hand. I went to throw them in the wastebasket.
“What a strong smell. It sinks right into my skin. Help me.”
“You must be tired. It wasn’t an easy trip. Suppose you rest awhile.”
I laid the arm on the bed and sat down beside it. I stroked it gently.
“How pretty. I like it.” The arm would be speaking of the bed cover. Flowers were printed in three colors on an azure ground, somewhat lively for a man who lived alone. “So this is where we spend the night. I’ll be very quiet.”
“Oh?”
“I’ll be beside you and not beside you.”
The hand took mine gently. The nails, carefully polished, were a faint pink. The tips extended well beyond the fingers.
Against my own short, thick nails, hers possessed a strange beauty, as if they belonged to no human creature. With such fingertips, a woman perhaps transcended mere humanity. Or did she pursue womanhood itself? A shell luminous from the pattern inside it, a petal bathed in dew—I thought of the obvious likenesses. Yet I could think of no shell or petal whose color and shape resembled them. They were the nails on the girl’s fingers, comparable to nothing else. More translucent than a delicate shell, than a thin petal, they seemed to hold a dew of tragedy. Every day and every night her energies were poured into the polishing of this tragic beauty. It penetrated my solitude. Perhaps my yearning, my solitude, transformed them into dew.
I rested her little finger on the index finger of my free hand, gazing at the long, narrow nail as I rubbed it with my thumb. My finger touched the tip of hers, sheltered by the nail. The finger bent, and the elbow too.
“Does it tickle?” I asked. “It must.”
I had spoken carelessly. I knew that the tips of a woman’s fingers were sensitive when the nails were long. And so I had told the girl’s arm that I had known other women.
From one who was not a great deal older than the girl who had lent me the arm but far more mature in her experience of men, I had heard that fingertips thus hidden by nails were often acutely sensitive. One became used to touching things not with the fingertips but with the nails, and the fingertips therefore tickled when something came against them.
I had shown astonishment at this discovery, and she had gone on: “You’re, say, cooking—or eating—and something touches your fingers, and you find yourself hunching your shoulders, it seems so dirty.”
Was it the food that seemed unclean, or the tip of the nail? Whatever touched her fingers made her writhe with its uncleanness. Her own cleanness would leave behind a drop of tragic
dew, there under the long shadow of the nail. One could not assume that for each of the ten fingers there would be a separate drop of dew.
It was natural that I should want all the more to touch those fingertips, but I held myself back. My solitude held me back. She was a woman on whose body few tender spots could be expected to remain.
And on the body of the girl who had lent me the arm they would be beyond counting. Perhaps, toying with the fingertips of such a girl, I would feel not guilt but affection. But she had not lent me the arm for such mischief. I must not make a comedy of her gesture.
“The window.” I noticed not that the window itself was open but that the curtain was undrawn.
“Will anything look in?” asked the girl’s arm.
“Some man or woman. Nothing else.”
“Nothing human would see me. If anything it would be a self. Yours.”
“Self? What is that? Where is it?”
“Far away,” said the arm, as if singing in consolation. “People walk around looking for selves, far away.”
“And do they come upon them?”
“Far away,” said the arm once more.
It seemed to me that the arm and the girl herself were an infinity apart. Would the arm be able to return to the girl, so far away? Would I be able to take it back, so far away? The arm lay peacefully trusting me; and would the girl be sleeping in the same peaceful confidence? Would there not be harshness, a nightmare? Had she not seemed to be fighting back tears when she parted with it? The arm was now in my room, which the girl herself had not visited.
The dampness clouded the window, like a toad’s belly stretched over it. The fog seemed to withhold rain in mid-air, and the night outside the window lost distance, even while it was wrapped in limitless distance. There were no roofs to be seen, no horns to be heard.
“I’ll close the window,” I said, reaching for the curtain. It too was damp. My face loomed up in the window, younger than my thirty-three years. I did not hesitate to pull the curtain, however. My face disappeared.
House of the Sleeping Beauties Page 9