“Yes, she does,” Lara agreed.
“Weird, huh? How someone just drops into your life like that. I mean, there we were, minding our own business.... What did we do to deserve her?”
Lara shook her head and smiled. “I don’t know. But nothing really bad’s come of it so far, right?”
She crossed the room to the kitchen table and stood behind Dyann, putting her hands on her lover’s shoulders.
“I think Akiko’s story is touching,” she said, pulling Dyann gently to her stomach. “You should write about her. I mean, this woman has guts. Escaping from a husband who beat her, coming all the way here to America, to Northampton, Massachusetts, to have her baby, all because of us. No, because of you! What was it she wrote? ‘I feel such sadness for my lying life. So I now wish to ask you where can I go to live my happy life like her?’ That’s you, darling, your happy life she’s talking about. Makes me proud....”
Dyann caught Lara’s hand and kissed her palm. “Okay. You win. It is my happy life, truly it is.”
JANE
“Domo arigatoo gozaimashita,” said Suzuki, bowing slightly. Oh did the same.
They were sitting on the floor of my apartment. We had just had dinner, then watched the tape. The boys were silent, and then when it was over, Oh shuddered and Suzuki turned to me.
“Thank you very much. I feel like I’ve filmed something very important. I am proud.”
“What are you going to do with it?” asked Oh.
“I don’t know....”
“You’ll never get it on TV, not in Japan, anyway. It’s much too... real.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s no different here.”
“It’s too bad. People ought to see this.”
“Yeah.”
We went down to Houston Street, to the Parkside Bar, an anachronistic tribute to a stretch of green long since tarred over. I told the boys I’d buy them drinks because I owed them for lying about the master tapes and saving them and risking getting fired. But they objected, saying they owed me for making a documentary they could feel proud of—and for really getting fired in doing so. And because I was dead broke, I gave in.
“I’m warning you guys,” I told them. “I’m not pregnant anymore. I’m serious about drinking tonight....”
We ordered a round of double shots of Jack and pints of Brooklyn Lager.
“Jane-chan wa mada wakai ... ,” Suzuki said, toasting me decisively. “You’re still young. You can get pregnant again.”
Oh raised his glass, supporting this notion.
“I’m not so sure about that. I can’t do it on my own, you know.” Suzuki gave me a puzzled look. I laughed. “What, you thought it just happened? Like immaculate conception? I broke up with the guy I was seeing, the baby’s father.”
Suzuki puffed out his chest and leaned in close. “Ja, boku wa?” he said in a manly tone of voice. “Can I help?”
“Boku mo!” said Oh, shoving Suzuki off his barstool and out of the way. “Me too!” he said eagerly. “You don’t need the Commissioner. We can do the job.”
“Baka!” I laughed and threw a handful of soggy pretzels at them. Then I realized what Oh had said.
“You knew about the Commissioner?”
“Do you really think we are stupid?” Suzuki asked. “How could we not notice an identical very tall man showing up week after week, in Nebraska, Texas, Oregon ... ? Please, give us some credit.”
“How come you never said anything?”
Suzuki looked at me, affronted. “You didn’t want us to know. We were being polite.”
“Oh,” I said.
“What happened, anyway?” Suzuki asked. “How come you broke up?”
“I think it was the miscarriage,” I said, tipping my head back and polishing off the shot. “But I don’t know for sure, because he’s dropped out of sight. I have no idea where he is. Won’t return my calls. Nothing.” I held the glass in the air.
“Oh.”
The bartender filled our shot glasses, and the three of us drank them off, then had another. When we left the bar, we were leaning on each other for support. We went up to Saint Mark’s Place for a bowl of ramen noodles, and then they walked me home. It was a weekend night and the streets were restless. People were on the prowl, humming with an edgy, inconsolable desire.
“It’s none of my business,” Suzuki said as we crossed Avenue A, “but the Sloan Rankin Band was playing at the Mercury Lounge last weekend.”
I stopped short. “How did you know that?”
“I read it in the Village Voi—”
“No. The Commissioner. How did you know he was Sloan Rankin?”
“Oh, really, Takagi,” he said, disgusted. “You have got to give us more credit. Sloan Rankin is a very popular indies star in Japan. He’s in the Suntory Dry Beer commercial. Playing his sax.”
The next day I called the Mercury Lounge. After a bit of a fight, the bartender put me through to the owner, who did the bookings. Rankin, he told me, was on tour with his band.
“They don’t usually tour like this, at this time of year,” he said.
“Do you know where they were headed?”
“Yeah, that was weird too. They were doing a Southern circuit. Smaller gigs. I was surprised.”
“Do you know where I can find them this weekend? Like tomorrow?”
“Yeah. I think he said they were heading down to Memphis.”
AKIKO
The first evening she was alone in her new apartment, she walked from room to room, perching for a moment on a windowsill, leaning against a bare wall, or crouching in a corner to gain a new perspective. Not that it was a big place. There was a kitchen with space enough for a table, a tiny bedroom, and a living room with a big, deep window seat that looked out onto the tree-lined street called Pleasant. Akiko liked that. In her old neighborhood in Japan, the streets were generally called by numbers.
Dyann and Lara had been wonderful. Lara had helped her find the apartment, and Dyann had introduced her to a woman doctor, who would help her have the baby. They had lent her pots and pans and a chair, and then taken her shopping for the futon mattress on a frame that folded into a couch, which was clever and very American. As she tiptoed from room to room, Akiko decided that, all in all, this certainly felt like the beginning of a happy life.
The window seat was her favorite spot. She’d bought a thick pillow to sit on and another one to lean against, intending to spend the next seven months perched right there, curled and ripening. It was a place where one could watch the first snow dust the skeletal branches of the maple out front, then deepen as the winter grew deep. Then, when the weather warmed, the snow would grow heavy and slide from the neighbor’s slate roof and splatter wetly to the ground, where it would melt, baring patches of dark, raw earth. Quickened by the fury of early spring, red spikes would spear the earth from underneath (as dark and sharp as anger or as loss), and one could watch that too, until finally the days grew long and mild and the tiny leaves unfurled into a dense green canopy. Just when the breezes blew warm through the window, it would be time to hoist oneself to one’s feet and trundle off to the bedroom to pack a bag, to go to the hospital, to have a baby.
She tested the window seat now, jumping up from time to time to fetch something that would make it even better: a blanket, a cup of tea, Shōnagon, and her own pillow book too, and finally a pen and some writing paper that she’d bought at the stationery store earlier that day. She leaned back and looked out the window into the darkness, then picked up her pen.
“Dear John,” she wrote. “I am writing to tell you that I am fine. I have left you and I am never coming back.” She took a sip of her tea. She had changed her mind about telling him. She had to write, otherwise it would never end.
So you pack your bags
Without a word of good-bye,
And you don’t care if he never even knows
The reason why ...
Not that John would ever write a song about her, but it was
an example of how not saying something made it hang around in the air, like a refrain that just keeps coming back at you, again and again. Akiko had plenty of very good reasons for leaving, and she wanted him to know each one. Only then could she be done with him, once and for all.
JANE
On Beale Street, a greasy rain smeared the neon as it fell, then scooped up its light in asphalt puddles. Beale Street. The name is full of blues and magic, conjuring up a time and place, gritty with lost authenticity, that embarrasses the sham of here and now. Now Disney is the model for magic, and conjuring has turned America’s more colorful streetfronts, like Beale and Bourbon and Broadway, into self-referential shadows of their former, bad-ass selves. On warm sunny days, sporting emblazoned T-shirts, the tourists are sheepish as they graze Beale Street in search of the real thing, but in the night, this night, the few seekers who were out and bent against the rain bled seamlessly into the sax-filled air.
It was Sloan’s sax. I could hear the thread of it blocks away, so I slowed, then stood there on the corner, wavering. The notes fractured the night, absolute in their dissonance, irreconcilable. I thought about turning around, returning to the ducky comfort of the Peabody, but instead I walked on, stomping through puddles like a Japanese monster, to give me courage. At the doorway I fingered Ma’s nickel, pushed in.
Sloan commanded the stage and the place was rapt. He was deep into the middle of a long, slow riff. Rope thin, his rangy body curled around his instrument, then magnificently unfurled as he rode its crescendo. No one could let loose like Rankin. I stood at the back, watching him through a thick blue haze, across a pebbly expanse of backs and heads that I knew I would have to cross to get to him, and it suddenly was very clear to me: I wanted that proximity again. I wanted that muscled mouth against my mouth, and the sure pads of those fingertips stroking my bones. So when the last set was over and Sloan wiped the sweat off his forehead and turned his back to the crowd, I stomped over all of them to get to him first. But when I got close, I stopped.
There were girls. Already there. Shadowy girls, tall like me, better dressed, like the ones we met in SoHo boutiques or the garden cafés in L.A., whose talent was simply to belong, no matter where they found themselves. One, in particular, belonged to Sloan. Gamine, tainted with the pallor of youth, she made an art out of gawky. I stood there and watched as she suffered a kiss to her cheek, then languidly she turned and draped her slim arms around his neck, pushed back his sweaty cowlick, and blew on his forehead. He closed his eyes, tilted his head, moved it slowly from side to side to direct her breath across it.
So maybe I didn’t believe it. Maybe I didn’t believe that she was real, or that he was, or maybe it was Ma’s nickel, but when he opened his eyes again, I was standing behind her, more or less over her shoulder, directly in his line of vision. I didn’t have a plan or anything. I mean, there I was, sodden, gaunt, deflated. No competition..If I’d been talking to the girl, that’s what I’d have said, and given her arm a reassuring pat or two. All I really wanted to do was watch them. And understand. And then get the fuck out. But as soon as he saw me, he released her, walked right through her.
I put out my hand. The waif was watching us with bruised eyes. “Sloan Rankin?” I said in a voice meant to carry. “Pleased to meet you. Jane Little, Tennessee Commissioner of Jazz. It’s a pleasure to welcome you and your band of outstanding musicians—”
He grabbed my outstretched hand by the wrist, twisted it up behind my back, turning me, then moving his body in behind mine. “Walk,” he ordered roughly in my ear. I struggled, but he lifted my pinned arm up between my shoulder blades, and it hurt. He marched me across the emptying room, through the door, and out into the rain. Then he released me against the side of the building. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he asked.
I stood there, rubbing my elbow. I didn’t really have an answer prepared. I shrugged. “Here on a job. Heard you were in town.”
“Bullshit.” “Yeah.”
We stood there, facing each other. It was raining harder now, and the big, fat drops were running down my face, and his too, as he loomed over me.
“Just say it.” His voice was tight and his teeth were clenched and I could see the muscle in his jaw working.
“What?” I lifted my shoulders, cocked my elbows, raised my palms to the weeping sky. “What do you want me to say?” Trying hard for insouciance.
“You’re sorry. Just say you’re sorry.”
“Sloan, it’s too late for apologies—”
“Fuck you!” He slammed his fist into the brick wall next to my head. “Fuck apologies. I don’t want apologies. I just want to hear it. I want to hear once that you are sorry, like you really mean it. No fucking excuses. No explanations. Just once, that you are as sorry as I am ...” He was crying, I think. I was too. I sank back against the wet brick and covered my face with my hands, then slid down the wall, like a body shot through the heart.
“I’m sorry,” I sobbed. “You don’t know how sorry—”
And then suddenly he was all around me, gathering me up and crushing me against the wet brick, kissing the rain. And I realized I’d never been gathered up before, never been so broken apart or so recovered, and it was shocking, but before I could think about it, we were walking really fast through streets that flowed like a river, to arrive, dripping, at the stolid Peabody. Up the brass elevator, across the densely carpeted hall, to the door where I fumbled for the key (remembering the last time I stood at a door at the Peabody, fumbling for a key), but before I could think about it, the door swung open and Sloan backed me through, across the room, and onto the big, redeeming bed.
It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t like we made love and it was this enormous flood that washed away all our sins and insufficiencies, although from time to time that was how it felt. Rather, we had to negotiate a way through layers of nakedness and conjunction, stopping and starting, asking questions, filling in gaps and testing the waters. But we did it. Dove, then rose again to reach a plateau where we could rest, breathing deep and easy. Until another accusation surfaced. A doubt insisted on address. And so we would start again, and so we continued, off and on, all night, until morning.
I made him get up. It was Sunday, and I made him get out of bed and shower and get dressed, and it was a good thing that he always wore a suit and tie onstage, because by eight o’clock he looked presentable. We grabbed coffees, stumbled into my rented car and I drove across the border into Mississippi, and an hour later, at a little before nine, we were parked in the dirt lot of the Harmony Baptist Church, watching Mr. Purcell and Miss Helen and the kids unload from their car and greet their neighbors. When Miss Helen looked up and caught my eye and recognized me, I saw her confusion, so I walked over to her and stretched out my hand.
She held it, and shook it, but said nothing.
“I came back to say I’m sorry.”
It took her a while, but finally she spoke.
“You said you’d come back,” she said, nodding, “and you did.” She patted my hand.
“I don’t know how to explain what happened,” I told her. “I didn’t agree—”
She pulled me toward church, tucking my hand under her arm. “You come back to the house afterwards.” She caught sight of Sloan. “Is that your friend? Bring him too.” She stopped, and we waited for Sloan to catch up, and I introduced them.
“You didn’t tell me we were going to church,” Sloan whispered as Miss Helen turned to greet a friend on the front steps.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t know....”
“Takagi, I don’t do church....”
“Neither do I. Usually.”
We climbed the steps. At the top the buxom usher in the white nurse’s uniform greeted us and we followed her through the doors and into Harmony.
“I get it,” Sloan continued, whispering as we walked down the aisle. “This is a trick, and when we get to the altar there’ll be a guy with a shotgun....”
I glared at him. “Don’t fla
tter yourself.” Miss Helen was still holding my arm, and pointing out people I’d met on the previous visit, who waved and called out to us.
“Takagi, we’ll get married, that’s fine. A nice civil ceremony... but just not in a church, please!”
And just at that moment, the Yamaha organ launched a triumphant chord, and the Harmony Five burst into a rousing rendition of “It Remains to Be Seen What He Can Do for Me.”
“Relax, Sloan,” I said, patting his hand as we took our seats next to Miss Helen. “Just sit back and enjoy the music.”
Epilogue:
January
SHŌNAGON
It Is Getting So Dark
It is getting so dark that I can scarcely go on writing; and my brush is all worn out. Yet I should like to add a few things before I end.
I wrote these notes at home, when I had a good deal of time to myself and thought no one would notice what I was doing. Everything that I have seen and felt is included. Since much of it might appear malicious and even harmful to other people, I was careful to keep my book hidden. But now it has become public, which is the last thing I expected....
Whatever people may think of my book, I still regret that it ever came to light.
JANE
Hah!
As a fellow documentarian, I can say this with authority: Shōnagon’s covering her ass. It’s false modesty, so don’t believe a word of it. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The rest of my story is a matter of history. Sloan and I parted in Memphis knowing that we would try once again to forge our respective uncertainties into something that resembled a family and a future. We talked a little about adopting kids. I called Grace Beaudroux, and she promised to take the family to hear him play in New Orleans at the end of his tour, then I flew back to New York to find a job.
My Year of Meats Page 33