by S. J. Parks
Chapter 63
The music was low and moody. Hana was still trying to excavate pretzel paste from the furthest reaches of her incisors and concluded she was in the way while Jess seemed to entertain some thought of staying; working with the inebriated tide of a belated overture from Roddy.
Standing in the open-plan kitchen, the city blinking like an unreliable landing strip she picked at the cheese board until the taxi buzzed up to the apartment. Roddy stumbled to meet her goodbye and she drifted off to join the departing Japanese girls. Ed caught the move and stopped her …
‘Can you stay? I wanted to ask. Could you?’
It triggered Jess’s bid to make the taxi.
‘Talk to you about it tomorrow,’ she called back as she made for the lift.
‘I’ll come with you?’
‘No, no you stay.’ Jess was reassuring. ‘There’s some washing-up here,’ she added laconically.
As Ed manned a position at the lift shaft, countering the universal aversion to goodbyes, she found the coffee. While it brewed, she lingered in front of the ugliest piece of art she had ever seen, with a perplexing sense of contentment, wondering how long she should stay.
Chapter 64
The teahouse grounds, 1989
They had become lovers. Mochizuki lay across the tatami smoking a cigarette, a flight of ducks animating the expanse of the pond behind him. In the afternoons they would leave the world behind and make love in the teahouse gardens by the lake or in the tatami rooms of the Yoritsuke beside the outer garden. No one disturbed them and they never saw the abbot anymore. In the period of what felt like a deconsecration of the teahouse, they had made it a sanctuary for their love.
As they lay with her head on his chest, he told her of his passions.
‘I would like you to see the Minka farmhouse out in the hills. Surrounded by bamboo forest. I love it there and you should see it.’
‘We should go.’
‘You can get away for a weekend?’ he asked.
She longed to go but this, she knew, would be impossible. What excuse could she make to Josh?
On the days when she did go into the offices her colleagues were cold and treated her as a stranger. Though she might understand why, she chose to put it down to the lack of time she spent with them and their inability to communicate.
A week later Josh arrived on an early morning flight. She heard him root around the bedroom softly in an attempt not to wake her before leaving for his Saturday gym session with Sam. After a long flight he always needed to exercise or he left too pent up. She slept late, always content to have the house to herself. She wasn’t expecting him back until lunchtime. They had tickets for a concert in Harajuku that night, and they had made plans to drive out to a hot spring on Sunday. It was easier for her when they all went out together because it diluted the burden of untruth. It was as if by not telling any of them it rested on each one of them equally, but when she was alone with Josh his ignorance about it was sharper and more accusative.
She held her head under the shower and closed her eyes. She would hide the truth for as long as she could. The strength of the deluge of water was a comfort. She felt for a shower gel nearest to hand and rubbed at her naked stomach without shame or guilt but her movements were slow and satisfying and she recalled a shared an erotic pleasure. But the Acqua di Bravo smelt of Josh, and interfered with the memory of Mochizuki.
When the doorbell rang in an electronic sing-song, she remembered Mr Kami, the property manager, who was due to take a look at the air-con.
Hanging on the back of the bathroom door she found Josh’s large, white, cotton shirt, and wrapping a towel around her head she flew to the front door, cursing herself for forgetting.
Preparing a flood of apologies she double-jumped the stairs and opened the door with a ‘sorry’, only to find the architect standing on the porch. He smiled approvingly at what greeted him.
She stood back as if they were strangers, searching for an explanation of why, now, he chose to violate the space she shared with Josh.
Wrong-footed by her reception and her distance, by way of explanation for his unannounced appearance he offered her a package.
‘Why did you come?’ she asked. Why had he risked a confrontation with Josh?
‘I brought you something.’
‘Yes, but …’ Had she encouraged the opportunist in him?
He read the alarm in her eyes. ‘I was in Aoyama. I saw Sam; he was headed to the gym with Josh. I wanted to see you, chocho,’ he said, using his pet name – butterfly – for her.
She could not ask him in.
He handed her a small box wrapped in a furoshiki cloth.
They stood opposite one another on different thresholds of the same house. Her house.
‘You gonna open it?’
She stepped back and sat down on the long step that ran the length of the entrance hall. Josh’s shirt rode up her tanned knees and the tail of the towel turban fell across her shoulder.
‘Shall I stay out here?’
Knowing that Josh was at the gym played like a mantra, reassurance. Mochizuki had walked in to the entrance hall before she made answer.
The wrapped cloth was difficult to untie when a nervous energy demanded her strength and, resting it on her knee, she fumbled at the knot. How long would Josh take at the gym? How could she explain away the visit? She wanted him to leave as much as she wanted him to stay.
He stood over her waiting for a reaction to the gift that might have delighted her at another time or – now, he understood – any another place. Not until she looked him in the eye did he bring himself to sit beside her on the step. If Josh should return to find them sitting there as easy as an idiom, she would find it hard to explain away. The wrapping cloth fell away. It was a black, lacquered inro, the size of a cigarette box, with an ivory netsuke of pine cones tied at its base, decorated with scenes in gold leaf. An expensive gift. Beneath long dream-like Eastern clouds was a small refuge among fields. He took the box from its lining and turned it over.
‘See here,’ he said excitedly.
In a long boat there was a solitary fisherman and perched on the bow was a bird.
‘See,’ he said again delightedly.
The cormorant fisher.
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘And pine cones …’
The exquisite gesture was lost in discomfort.
‘It’s beautiful. Thank you, but I think you should go. Josh will be back soon.’
She rehearsed the two men meeting at the end of the road.
‘Leave me a file or something. I could tell him you dropped it off.’
Silenced, he got up to retrieve a folder. His long fingers walked calmly through the case of files until they found an item that he felt comfortable leaving. He dropped a folder on the step.
‘Naomi-san—’ he bowed exaggeratedly ‘—as you send me away. I have to go.’
She rose on her toes to take him by the back of the neck and pressed a kiss hard on his mouth.
He turned, shrugged, and on leaving said, ‘You give me so little.’
She stood chastised. As if she had not risked enough. Just then, over his shoulder she saw Mr Kami swinging his motorcycle helmet in his hand, slowing up mid-flight on the wide-hewn steps under the pine tree in her garden. Perhaps he had stopped for the shade.
‘You have to go,’ she hissed, and pushed him roughly.
What Kami might have seen, and how long he had been studying his approach, were questions that remained as useless as trying to rewind the past. She was cutting herself loose to drift on a small raft that she could barely keep afloat and his attempts to join her here would sink them both. She felt as hopeless as if there were now no alternative.
The men passed one another with a restrained good morning.
She showed the property maintenance man cum agent into the sitting room and apologized that she would have to leave him for a moment. Kami refused a drink and studied th
e ceiling where one of the offending units hung, humming and clucking irrationally.
When she returned dressed properly, he proposed to check each of the systems around the house and report back to the Chinese landlady: ‘Without fear or favour.’
She liked him no better than she had when he first found them the house but tried to communicate otherwise.
He acted as if he had seen nothing
‘I tell her,’ he said again, referring to the landlady, Mrs Fukamora. ‘About …’ And he paused for effect, to torture her, referring possibly to what he might have seen. Then he said, with over-obvious candour, ‘The air-con.’
His nerve was best ignored, she decided, as a reaction would suggest it was important enough to be any of his business. It had taken him so long to turn up she would have to leave him to it. She could not send him away when the system was in such great need of attention.
She sat in the window seat with a Japanese primer laced with black kanji and left Kami to his preliminaries. He was always so keen to save the landlady money that she wondered if he was related to her.
Josh yelled on arrival, as was his redundant habit, though the heavy door always marked his entrance anyway. He dropped his kit and paused momentarily to pick up the file Mochizuki had dropped on the bottom step. The cover page showed nothing but dense Kanji and he lost interest, guessing, since he had seen a familiar motorcycle on the road – he recognized the symbols for air-con – that it was Kami’s. He blew in, with the endorphins that a run and a morning on the rowing machine brought, to ionize the room. Crossing to the bay window he ran his hand along her shoulder affectionately and greeted Kami, who was tinkering with the switching over in the open-plan dining room.
‘Mr Kami, your file. You dropped it?’
‘No. No, not mine, but the friend of Ms Naomi,’ he replied, mischievously
Josh looked at it again and looked for her to shed some light.
‘Mochizuki dropped it off,’ she blustered casually. One glance enough to see Kami was enjoying his position.
‘He dropped it off?’ Josh repeated. ‘Work?’
‘Hmm.’
‘Your Japanese is getting good … an instruction manual?’
Kami came up to peruse over the file. ‘Very good Japanese, but conversation always best way to learn languages, ne Naomi-san?’ Laced with irony, he sought her agreement.
How far would he take this? She was furious with him and beholden to him at once. She couldn’t wait to get the little man out of the house.
‘Have you finished? she asked as she rose, getting ready to dismiss him. ‘And when? When do we get the system fully functioning?’
Chapter 65
‘Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity’
−Renzo Piano
Naomi sat back against the antimacassar on the cracked leatherette seats of the taxi. They headed home after a meal in Roppongi with Josh’s American boss. This part of Tokyo was a tourist playground and an architectural tart; at night the neon signs pulsed with so many demands for attention that they cried wolf and become wallpaper.
‘You okay? You were very quiet tonight.’
‘I think you made up for that,’ she said, her tired objection diluted to the point where he wouldn’t have detected her disenchantment.
‘I want to meet your boss. We hear so much of the illustrious Mr Architect. When do we get to invite them over for dinner, hon?’
‘When are you next in the country?’
He ignored the charged line. ‘This weekend. We are here this weekend.’
‘That is far too short notice to get the Mochizukis to come over.’ The plural made them a set of strangers to her.
The prospect of sitting opposite Mochizuki and eating politely in the company of his wife and Josh, pretending she didn’t know what it was like to lie beside him and watch his pulse return to the steady pace that called them to sleep. She could not do it. Josh would talk of raising money, when it was not a commodity Mochizuki chose for conversation. Stopped at the red light Josh’s face was caught in the neon lights, which played over his profile, flashing blue and red and turning him into a ghoul.
‘No, it won’t work. I don’t want to offer them some culinary disaster from my short repertoire.’
‘Well, we’ll take them out.’
‘They don’t really like to dine out.’
‘Well, we can try them, surely? I tell you what. Just ask them to brunch at Spiral in Aoyama.’ Spiral was a relatively new piece of award-winning architecture completed just a few years before. Josh was being thoughtful, which only added to her discomfort.
She was torn between resistance, over which he would question her, and a need to avoid the situation at all costs. While this invitation played on her mind it was for him a simple notion of little substance. It was another of the common contests of wills that blew through the house with the predictability of a weather system. She would find herself unaccountably and stubbornly opposed to him, and on the margins of these opposing fronts, the arguments would ensue. She waited for him to loosen his hold on the idea but with Josh it was so often like trying to close an umbrella in the wind and the wind would take it until it was turned inside out. In some instances when he forced an issue she would find herself exposed and left to cry. A light frost would ensue between them; this gradual desiccation had worked away at their foundations and she had begun, now, to find it easier to lie.
Three days later they sat at the dinner table beneath a pendant light illuminating the pale porcelain plates. Her chicken recipe failed to rouse any enthusiasm; a light supper between heavy hearts.
Josh asked her about the teahouse, which had long become the excuse for her to escape in the afternoons with Mochizuki and was coupled in her mind with the illicit affair. It was uncomfortable to hear mention of it, though she knew Josh was merely trying to understand her day.
‘Minamioka is the carpenter. Comes from a family who have worked on the temple for generations. Can you believe that? Generations.’
‘Yes, you told me,’ he said, relinquishing the subject after the first failed attempt at kindling any interest between them. Then, mid-mouthful, he threw his arm to his neck slapping himself in surprise. ‘Let’s hope the goddam mosquito season is nearly over,’ he said aggressively. ‘If you get the agent over for this air-con there won’t be so many.’
He leapt up to fill the vaporizer, which was plugged to the wall, with another mosquito mat. As he squatted he removed the tablet from its foil. His back towards her, he asked her, ‘Have you invited the Mochizukis over for dinner yet?’
After searching for it, Naomi pulled a vaguely disinterested voice from somewhere, thankful she did not have to face him. ‘You know, I don’t think she’s in town.’
Josh walked back to the table and he would have it his way. He often dealt decisively with what he called her fey artistic ways and gave instruction when he judged she was incapable of making a decision herself. He had done as much after he asked her to come to Japan.
‘We can go to Spiral.’ He was firmly decided. ‘Weekend after next.’
A mood like a weather system came over them and looked set for some time.
Chapter 66
Minka farmhouse, mountains outside Kyoto, 1989
Hour upon hour upon hour with two couples in the confines of log-jammed weekend traffic was never going to make their journey easy.
The car finally drew up on the cinder drive. A forest of bamboo covered the gentle sides of the hill, surrounding the tall, thatched Minka farmhouse, protecting it from the wind, casting a pale-green light filtered by lowering skies.
Naomi knew it to be a place that Mochizuki loved and curiously here she was with Josh. Sam and Miho were mercifully also there to distribute the attention loads. She couldn’t quite work out how it had happened this way but she took each day at a time right now. It was nearing three in the afternoon and while they hoped to arrive before lunch,
after several hours crawling the expressway, they were now starving.
Miho opened the car door for Naomi. ‘You feel a little better?’
The nausea had passed but sour breath left her throat like cardboard. She couldn’t predict when it would return.
‘Motion sickness’s tough.’ Sam began to unload the car.
She wondered whether it was. She had never had it before. No one else in the car had suffered.
‘We were on the road too long. You’ll feel better when you eat.’ Miho took the French loaves from the parcel shelf and Naomi found the smell of bread was a new assault.
‘Come on.’ Miho tugged at her sleeve. ‘Let’s get the food going.’ Naomi stayed in car while they unpacked: the inertia of having travelled for so long. She would remain in her seat and drive the same number of hours straight back if it meant she did not have to go through with spending the weekend up here in the very countryside that Josh hated. He would behave badly. For him the absence of anything to do touched him like an insult.
‘Porter.’ Josh handed Sam a bag.
Mochizuki had wanted her to see the structure. The reeded roof was aged black with curious quiffs to the ridge ends, which hung over the roofline like a porch.
Josh leaned in to the car subserviently. ‘Anything else we can do, m’lady?’ he asked, turning cockney chauffeur, his hand ready on the cloth bag filled with Naomi’s sketchpad and chalks.
She stopped him. ‘I’ll bring it,’ she said quietly.
‘We have come all this way to the backside of Japan for you to study the architectural merits of a barn. Weren’t there any textbooks on the subject that could have saved us the trouble?’ Josh joked.
It hadn’t exactly been sold to him as a study trip. It was a generous offer of a weekend from Mochizuki in exceptional countryside. She believed he so wanted her to see the little masterpiece of traditional architecture that was the farmhouse even though he could not take her himself.
‘What is that?’ Josh called as he passed a large tin drum on a brick platform.