Netsuke

by Rikki Ducornet

  There is a daughter, from a second marriage, he is not allowed to see. He begins to think about her. And then he thinks about other things.

  8

  THE MODERNIST AESTHETIC PERSISTS; it never loses its power to charm. The new cabinet will be spare, furnished in Eames, black or buff leathers, a Noguchi glass table floating above a large tribal rug, paper lamps that appear to float down from the ceiling and up from the floor.

  Akiko is good at transforming neutral rooms into something astonishing. She calls this subversion. Shopping together we look happy. Perhaps we are, acquiring beautiful things. Once the tribal rug—startling in indigo and madder—is rolled up and tagged with our name, we go off to Mr. Taka’s shop to acquire a few more netsuke. And a cabinet to keep them, along with the others she has bought me over the years. I approve the extravagance. Netsuke go up in value all the time, and the curiosity cabinet will warm up the room’s cool weather.

  For now the netsuke are housed in Drear. I tell Akiko how useful they have been in the Practice, stories she has heard before and always likes to hear again. An anorexic client once held up a devil with a protruding belly and said she saw herself. A librarian, the victim of a supernatural tormentor, recognized her dilemma in an ivory clam about to be torn apart by a crab. We traced the crab back to a school principal who liked to paddle unruly girls. As if the paddle were not enough, this monster had a wayward middle finger.

  At Mr. Taka’s, we are taken by a small series in the style of Yoshimura Shuzan, who was, Taka tells us, the greatest carver of all time. But the forgeries are excellent and as Mr. Taka passes them to us, Akiko cries out.

  “Look how they appear to shriek and howl and even buzz!” You will notice a tendency in her to overstate, but Taka agreed; the Shuzans and the best done in his manner are the most expressive in the world.

  “I once saw an authentic Shuzan,” he tells us. “Although it was displayed along with a number of other exceptional pieces, it called attention to itself, just as you say. It did buzz—that’s it exactly! Like a hornet in a rage. What is extraordinary,” he persists, looking through his books to find us a picture of the piece, “is the amount of manic energy Shuzan can pack into a thing so small and of such humble materials. Here! Look!” Mr. Taka strokes the photograph almost tenderly. “Look at the sensuality of the colors. The reds above all. The passage of time has imparted such luminosity! In another hundred years, in a thousand years, the colors will be even more wonderful!” We watch as this diminutive man, a severely elegant man, slides the book back into its case.

  “When lacquer adheres this well to wood,” he continues excitedly, “the two cleave together. It is a passionate embrace.” He laughs.

  I find myself taken by the little things. I realized that I had not paid them enough attention. I liked Mr. Taka, too, this intelligent man who understands passion as well as I. I will repeat what I have heard to the pretty clients who take an interest in my cabinet. Perhaps I will tell a white lie and let them imagine they are very likely fondling a Shuzan and not a counterfeit. See that blue there, I’ll say. Shuzan’s blues have a tendency to grow colder, to veer toward violet, while the red veers to orange: it heats up!

  And then I will tell them how Shuzan’s lacquer—its recipe lost for centuries—cleaves to the soft cedar wood, transforming it into something else, perhaps immortal, cell by cell.

  On the way home, we stopped for an early dinner at a new restaurant Taka had raved about, Pearl Soup, its Japanese country cuisine as good as any in Japan. The food was great, as was the sake, and I found myself, who knows why?—the sake, the happy mood we shared, my feeling of deep affection for my wife—needlessly, shamelessly, dropping a clue.

  “Akiko,” I said, “I must tell you, in fact I wonder how I could have forgotten, but recently, a client—” Akiko shuddered, if imperceptibly. I was thinking of the Cutter, of course. “Lifted her knees—it was sudden!—and revealed a pussy trimmed in the Brazilian fashion.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Akiko squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head as if to shake the moment off. “What is this?” she said. “An epidemic? I mean isn’t there some movie—”

  “I don’t know. Is there a movie?”

  “Well, yeah. Come on! It’s notorious! For godsakes. So—” I watched as my wife looked around the room, despairingly. “Did you fuck her? Because. If you did. Well. I’d like to know.”

  “Of course not! Do you think I—no! No!” I moaned in utter despondency although the affair singed the inside of my skull like a shovel full of hot coals. “I told her to recover herself—yes. Those—so absurd, really, were the words that came to mind. And then”—and here I dropped another clue, all the while wondering, why? Why was I doing this to a woman I cared for, I admired, a beautiful, talented woman, an exemplary woman?—“I held her. So like a child, really! As she sobbed.”

  “You held her?”

  “As she sobbed, yes, you see—”

  “You held her.”

  “Yes. She was feeling so humiliated! I—”

  “You hold your patients?”

  “Clients. Yes. Only rarely. Come on, Akiko!”

  “Rarely. You’ve done this before.”

  There was no way around it but to lose my temper. “Don’t persecute me!” I warned her. “I know what I am doing. I’m good at what I do. I know the risks. She was on the verge of suicide. The week before she had slashed her wrists. Her boyfriend found her, most likely just in time.”

  “I think you need to know,” Akiko said, “how hard this is for me. And I will think of you now, in the new office, holding someone …”

  “Ah. Akiko—no! Don’t do this!” I sighed and thought: I am a total fool. I really must do something about this weird—it is weird—compulsion of mine. “The thing is,” I continued, “you are right. I should not talk about this with you. It is unfair. But who else can I talk to? I mean—you are so smart. Akiko, you understand how people are; you are my dearest friend.”

  “Am I?”

  “I have never trusted anyone as I trust you. And I guess if I brought this up it is because this woman, this really crazy woman, is the one I worry about above all. I think when she is stabilized, I’ll be able to leave the practice for a week or two.”

  “You know how much I’d like that.”

  “Me too.”

  “I know how loving you can be,” Akiko said, “how deeply you feel for your patients—”

  “Clients. Yes. I do.”

  “Yes. I appreciate how important you are to all these people—”

  “Peculiar people!” I blurted out with a sudden, overwhelming feeling of terror and disgust. “Sometimes I fear I am pissing my life away with peculiar people.”

  “Jesus,” said Akiko. “For godsakes—”

  9

  I SCRIBBLE THESE NOTES between clients; I have fifteen minutes or so each hour except for the occasional trip to the can and lunch on the fly; I often write during the brief break I take for lunch.

  What is curious about writing all this down is the fact that I find myself tossed into the memories of things I had completely forgotten, from infancy. These memories are like little theaters of the vanished self, sometimes frozen in time as beneath ice. Today I recalled a recurrent dream I had in early childhood. I had heard the phrase, “the land of milk and honey;” it was a joke as I recall; my mother and her sister had just come back from shopping at some favorite store that my aunt referred to in this way. These words of hers caused tremendous excitement. I begged to go there. I pleaded as my mother brayed with laughter and slapping me on the knee cried: you damned fool! Her sister, Loll, of kinder disposition, said, Oh darling, darling, it’s just a joke, it’s not like that at all—at least not for little boys! Why not? I wept, why can’t I go there? Loll, who was a good sort, said O.K. We’ll take you today. Right after your nap.

  I couldn’t sleep. I was wild with excitement. What would the place be like? I understood it was no land, but a shop, but meant for women, no
t for children or men. A woman’s sweet shop! A teahouse, maybe. My daydream began this way: imagining a palace of a kind packed with glass-fronted cabinets full of ices and milkshake fountains—the ridiculous dream of a little boy who longed for sweetness, poor, miserable wretch that he was!

  At last I was allowed to leap out of bed. My face was washed and my hands, my hair brutally combed, Loll (I have no idea what her real name was) benignly beaming. (As I recall, Loll was not very smart. The odious would make her beam. She laughed at my mother’s jokes. Her gifts were always disappointing. Neglected as soon as they were unwrapped.)

  The thrilling rotating doors. Their highly polished brass. And everywhere the smell of women. A rich perfume almost overwhelming. I may have sneezed. The smell of powder so rare these days and the perfumes rosier than now. Far sweeter, far too redolent of mothers and their sisters and friends and yet intoxicating—as was Loll’s indivisible bosom, weighty as a watermelon.

  There we were. It was a palace devoted to women’s clothing. Not a cookie in sight. Only the infinite air, a female ocean. My mother brayed: Look at his stupid face!—her laughter bouncing off the countertops like spheres of glass. It was a lesson, one of many. In this way I was trained to despise all my dreams.

  I was bred to anger, born and bred to rage. I eat away at the ripe flesh of things like a wasp eats away at the body of a fig, leaving it to rot. The longing for, the hatred for all the lands of milk and honey—those recurrent vipers rising up to sting me on the neck. Every endeavor taken, every optimistic gesture deflated and compressed by my mother’s teasing: Off he goes again! To the Land of Milk and Honey!

  This is what I learned: I was not intended for delight. Delight was made to elude me.

  This is what the parent does: he yokes the child’s lion to a chariot and sends all his elephants trumpeting off to war.

  The child is born speaking the languages of birds; the child has horns and scales and wings; it has a beak; it has a cloven hoof. He is the sum of all creatures: the ones that swim, the ones that soar, the ones that leap, the ones that maze the earth with burrows.

  If I have chosen to take my war directly back to the womb, can you blame me?

  I am the spirit of negation. My aspects are twinned. I am attraction and repulsion. In this way I turn inexorable. I am a wheel. As I rise, Sweetheart, I carry you along with me, a heady, dizzying spin toward the sweet oceans of eternity. On wings of flames we sink into the sea of love. May we burn forever like bees in honey. Who does not wish for that delirium to last forever?

  When we fuck my darling, my kitchen, my cherry, it always seems the endless chain of causality has blossomed into bliss.

  Why? She always wants to know, why can’t we stay like this forever? We have found the One Real Thing! Is it not the Highest Good? When I turn this way and that, when I wrap my legs around you, have we not received the Most Perfect Knowledge? Is this not deliverance? Is this not Eternally Existing? Is this not the Nature of Happiness?

  10

  BUT ALWAYS THE CLOCK STRIKES. The knife falls. In love I am only blind. There is no knowledge there. No purifying fire. A moment’s bliss and then: the mule brays.

  In the shadow of the wheel, nothing can persist. The shadow of the wheel is named Calamity. It is named: Contagion. There, nothing has significance. Nothing is real. Nothing visible; there is nothing to express. Beneath the wheel rage has rendered everything perfectly flat.

  In the end I am like Death Himself with a scythe of ice. Yes, that’s it: my blade is like the ones Eskimos were said to make of ice in the polar regions. There is the story of the Eskimo who makes himself a knife out of his own excrement because it is all he has. And it is as sharp as steel.

  I think I am like that Eskimo. I live in a wasteland and yet I survive because I own a knife of shit.

  11

  THE WOMEN I SEE come to be seen. I offer the chance, perhaps the last chance, to be visible.

  One sees one’s self through the eyes of the other, and if the parent sees their own monstrous infancy, their own collapse, in their child, well then, that child is lost.

  So when my beautiful client the Cutter, striped and spotted like a feral creature—she both loathed and worshipped that sweet body of hers—revealed herself to me (who knows? Perhaps she saw the movie, perhaps not—no matter. I have not thought to see it myself), she wanted to be fully visible and could imagine no other way, no better way. I only gazed at her that first time; I drank her in. She asked:

  “Why are you so quiet?” I said:

  “I am eating you with my eyes. And they are dumbfounded.” She laughed at this.

  “Why only with your eyes?”

  “Because the pleasure of looking has turned me to stone.”

  “You’re hard!” she said, still laughing. “And that is the point I wished to make.”

  “Hush.”

  I suppose you could suggest the Cutter was the beginning of my downfall. Until that moment I was always the one in charge. No longer. I cannot explain why this was so. Perhaps I had fallen in love. Whatever it was, I had fallen. Her sex was like a beacon at the end of a tunnel—or so I imagined. In fact, her sex was the tunnel I had always dreaded, always fled. If my mind was already treacherously mazed, she confounded the problem. She squared the maze and then she squared it again. I was now in an inescapable place although at the time I did not know it. When one is snapped up in the beak of desire, one knows nothing but fire. I hung suspended from that beak for days, weeks, months. Never have I been so taken by a creature. She was, I see this now, deranged, shrill, mundane. She was also stunning, quick, agile as an acrobat, shameless, and smart enough. And because she was always on the verge of self-destruction, she kept me on my toes. My habit, until then, calculated in its risk taking, became perilous, an addiction. I was needing to disrupt the Practice, to leave the house at odd hours because of my imperious need for her and because of her incessant breakdowns, hospitalizations, tearful calls from dangerous bars; once she was so drunk she could not stand; once she called to say she had cut herself so badly she came close to passing out, and awakened us in the middle of the night. Akiko was the one to pick up the phone. She passed it at once to me.

  “A patient,” she said. “She sounds really … drunk?” Angry, fearful, this and more, I feigned impatience, disgust. But I was in grave danger. The Cutter was shouting and I feared she could be heard. Shouting and sobbing uncontrollably.

  “This is an emergency,” I whispered to Akiko. And of course it was. I told the Cutter I was on my way. I dressed in slacks, a linen sweater; until then the Cutter had seen me only in suits. I sensed this would change the direction our affair was to take: the drama, my sandaled feet, the escalated risk, my wife’s stark and troubled look.

  “Might she be violent?” she asked, pacing the room. “What if she tries to hurt you?” But I knew that whatever the circumstance, the Cutter could be soothed by extravagant fucking. It was my habit to toss her about with a practical and tender ferocity; we were like two demons, droll and terrible together. I knew that in the early hours of the morning I would soothe her, bandage her, bathe her. Silently, in slow motion, in a sepia dawn, we would cleave together like Shuzan’s lacquer to the soft cypress body. That when we came together, we would be healed of all the wounds inflicted upon us, the father’s monstrous dick, the mother’s ingenious tortures, all the theaters of horror that tormented us both, lost, hungry souls that we were, my client and I, mirror images of one another, raging like feral wolves beneath the bitter moon, the all-devouring mother moon, her horns up both our asses.

  The sun would rise, she would be soothed, I would be soothed. She would cease to sob, weep silently at times, then cease her weeping altogether; I would feel her loosen up; I would feel her let go. I would feel her throat between my fingers pulsing with the orgasm, and she would sigh and sleep like a little child nestled in my arms.

  I, too, would sleep, if only for an hour; I would shower; I would dry my hair; I would return ho
me briefly to reassure Akiko, Akiko who had spent the night waiting for my call; I would have to make up a good story about the hospital, the dreadfulness of it all, the difficulty of leaving my client, if only for a moment. All that…

  12

  NAKED, THE CUTTER APPEARED to be sleeping on the floor. I could see at once that she had not hurt herself, but she was very drunk. There were marks all over her body, and as always the sight of them stunned me. She looked like a kid sprawled as she was, a shameless, crazy kid. A kid up for adoption. A kid up for sale.

  I had the distinct impression that she was only pretending to be asleep and that she knew I was standing there looking at her. I think she knew the sight of her naked body ate into me; the Cutter leeched me. There is no better way to say it.

  It was beyond the middle of the night. I slipped out of my clothes and tenderly roused her with my tongue, my teeth. Ah, Kat, I breathed. My own Kat, your blue latex, your violet moss, your bitter lime … She laughed her dizzying laugh; she said:

  “So … it’s you.”

  It began slowly, a novelty for us. I knew what I was doing was disgraceful and relished that knowledge. Each time I kissed Kat’s scars I knew I was wounding Akiko. Unspeakable, I thought, and it was thrilling. The Cutter in love is enigmatic. This is because she is imagining violent acts, staggering, terrible things.

  And now she begins to complain, to enter into battle. I feel her nails tigering my neck and shoulders.

  “Go easy,” I whisper. “I’m a married man.”

  This simple fact enrages her. I have forgotten my promise to her, that I will stop sleeping with Akiko. When she tears herself away, cursing me, I say:

  “You know I can’t totally stop fucking her. I live with her! It’s not easy for me, Sweetheart.” And then she does something that frightens me. She slaps my cock; she slaps it hard. And then she slaps my face.