Netsuke

by Rikki Ducornet

  I found Akiko asleep by the phone with her head on the kitchen table. She looked so vulnerable, so lost, that I felt overwhelmed with shame. Or perhaps it was anxiety.

  I covered Akiko’s shoulders with a blanket and went upstairs to shower. I can never get enough hot water. So much filth and always the desire to scald it off. I thought I would stay under the water until the years spilled into the sewers of the city and I was new again. But the knowledge that I had to find a way to safely break with the Cutter had me crouching in a spasm of pain. It was an old pain, the pain of a prisoner who has been tightly bound with wire and abandoned in his cell.

  As the burning water thundered down, I continued to crouch, wondering about the lethal necessity of sex, that murderous, that inescapable … and then I imagined that I was an insignificant thing spinning about in the vast sea of first things, irresistibly driven into splitting in two. I imagined that act as inescapable as the impulse to orgasm. I thought I had discovered the first instant of orgasm, there at the heart of things, at the world’s beginning.

  But Akiko was rapping on the shower door, peering into the steam and down at me. “My love!” she cried out in fear and wonderment, “My love!” the glass door open but a crack, her face floating above mine pale as the moon, “What are you doing? Are you O.K.? What are you doing?”

  Akiko was hazed in steam, dripping with moisture.

  “I’m worried about you,” she said, and pulling her fingers through her hair: “I’m worried about us.” I turned off the water and, grabbing a towel, laughed.

  “I’m all right! I’m just all knots—I can’t believe I spent the night at the hospital—what time is it? I’ll be late—”

  She said: “You haven’t slept.”

  Seeing her so lost, so despondent, I gave her a quick squeeze—

  “We’re all right,” I said. “Akiko. We are all right.”

  I dashed about scowling, drying myself with ferocity, dressing in haste as she looked on, wide-eyed, her arms crossed over her chest as if to hide her heart.

  “Let’s meet downtown for dinner. I’ll call you from the office—” I pecked her cheek—as she once joked: a poor excuse for what she craved.

  In the car I wondered at the brevity of things, recalling how Akiko had once consumed me utterly, how I had trusted her vivacious intelligence, a certain quality, a luminosity I revered. There was a time I thought her superior to other women. I told her she was the one who had uncorked my bottle. And in response to her confusion explained:

  “I was once a little child who was turned into an imp so nasty he was made very small and put into a bottle, a sealed bottle, without any food or air inside; the bottle was a perfect fit.”

  13

  THIS MORNING, FOR THE FIRST TIME, I drove to work in the car. A prehistoric Studebaker, it really should be scrapped, and yet I can’t seem to part with it. The car is so much like me: once remarkable and now less so. The car is defective, it needs constant attention, it is calcified, cranky. But despite its defects, it is the only one of its kind out and about, and so I suppose in this way remains remarkable, somehow exceptional. If I took him in for a paint job he’d look a whole lot better. He guzzles gas. Akiko has suggested I replace him with a hybrid. A reasonable suggestion, yet I prefer not to be overdetermined by the current trends. My Studebaker is not easily classifiable. Like my clients, he is unstable. I feel a certain ambivalence about him. He appeals to me. He keeps me vigilant. He manages to call attention to himself. The Cutter thinks he is wildly attractive, touching: “I mean he needs a paint job, a little new chrome, and then, wow!” She, unlike my other clients, has seen him; I’m so often at her place when Akiko is away. I feel this knowledge of him adds a touch of coziness to an otherwise often tumultuous and even downright scary affair. He is a reminder that I am “safe,” old enough to be her father, established, accountable, a professional, trustworthy, her doctor. Today, she will see him parked out in front of the new office.

  When I bought the Studebaker, it was a major step toward the construction of an operative persona. He was remarkable but not showy. Subtly sexy. Not precious, nor flamboyant.

  A Studebaker is not a car chosen by a fetishist or a gambler. It suggests a healthy and productive life. It is not the car of a survivor, or of someone overly meticulous. It is not the car of a voyeur. My Studebaker taught me how to dress. He was my mirror and perhaps he still is.

  Except that I do need to take him to the shop for an overhaul, long overdue!

  14

  THE NEW CABINET.

  I wait for the Cutter.

  As I wait I wonder about the world beyond my immoderate interstices. I mean the so-called “real” world, the world of everyday. The world of novelties and embalmers, anesthesiologists and escalators. The world of paper, paste, and cocktail hours. Public attention. Akiko’s world.

  I wonder what it would be to be unsevered from the instant, undiminished, as is she, intact. To live in Eden, before the smack, the disorder to which one is eternally espoused. (And even this before the father muscled his way into … but I will not go there!)

  As when an adolescent, one entered into a moment of grace, riding a rented horse across the city beaches in the raging sun of summer, brown as a savage man, proud of the body I had suddenly grown into. Salt on my tongue, the wind thick in my hair—I felt the bounty of the world. And I knew that I was of that bounty.

  Later, the university years, those distant evenings when I sat talking with friends over coffee—a thing I am less and less able to do; I wonder why? I have of late, grown increasingly impatient with language and all the rest. I suffer a general irritation with Akiko’s damned thingness. I think: how dare she inhabit time as though she were the apple of its eye? Ah. I am tired of marriage. A house full of carpets and books. Instead I long for my clients, those

  CREATURES OF DARKNESS!

  They drift in the city air like pages from a charred book. They cannot live out their lives. They die young of famishment; they suicide; they are gnawed to the marrow of their bones by AIDS. (The risk! The risk of keeping such close company!) So unfathomable when one is used to the world as it was, and not so long ago. A spread table. The endless feast.

  Once, in a European museum, Akiko pointed out a series of anamorphoses and their cylindrical mirrors. Painted on paper, they were incomprehensible, an ugly spill of color. But when one looked at their reflections on the curved surfaces of the mirrors, they became fully visible. And they were erotic. Shamelessly so. They were beautiful and they were obscene.

  I am like these. My tribe is like this.

  15

  THE CUTTER IS LONG AND LANKY; she’s like a hungry bone. She wants more from the world than she will ever get. She is striking, but in that she is not alone. She has a temper hot enough to fry an egg.

  I can see at once that the new cabinet threatens her. For one thing, it further establishes me in my life. It is the demonstration that I intend to see more clients. That I do not intend to cut back my hours. It is likely we will spend less time together.

  She is impressed but also outraged at the expense. Yes, I am certain that is so. I have not been particularly generous with her. She begins to resent this. They always do. Sooner or later the interstices are too small for everyone.

  She is standing in the middle of the room. As I am seated, she towers above me in very high-heeled sandals and a silk dress the color of bruised plums. Her auburn hair, sparked with red, sets her face on fire. She says:

  “I can’t remember a thing. Was I awful?”

  “You were very drunk.”

  “I was awful.”

  “Why were you drunk? That’s the question you need to ask yourself. Why now? You’ve been doing so much better.”

  “So you say.”

  “So you’ve told me.”

  “So why do you believe me?”

  “You’re right. I could be deluding myself.”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to do that.”

&n
bsp; “I’m not. Kat. Sit down.” She settles down at once, her feet curled beneath her and I know her heels will leave their mark in the new leather.

  “I want more from you.”

  “I want more for you, too.” I say. “But not in the way you mean. You know that is impossible. As much as I adore you, Kat.” She glares at me. I continue.

  “I think you are wanting more from everything, not just me. You are better. You need more room. It’s a good sign, this wanting of yours.”

  She snorts. “A good sign!”

  “These reversals are inevitable. You know this. Recovery isn’t a linear process.”

  Kat bites her lip and begins to cry. “I want to die. I’m … I want to die,” she repeats.

  “Sweetheart,” I say, rising, going to her, pulling her to me so that she collapses, shuddering in my arms.

  “You talk about … about ideals, universal ideals …” she weeps noisily, extravagantly, “you talk about my … my autonomy … my … my self-determination. You taught me those words! But you don’t mean—”

  “Of course I do. It’s all true, Kat. Our work together, our extraordinary love affair, they are all about your coming to terms with your past, your fear of love! Please, Sweetheart! Don’t forget everything we’ve talked about, all the—”

  “I’m fucking goddamned guys in bars!” she shouts. “I’m fucking all the wrong guys! I’m more fucked up than ever!” Tearing herself from my embrace she screams so that someone in the dental office upstairs hammers on the ceiling. I should never receive the Cutter during regular business hours.

  “You twist everything into … into … any shape you want. And now! And now you want to get rid of me!”

  “Have I said that? Have I ever said—Kat! You must stop this!” I point to the ceiling where the hammering persists.

  “Look at you!” she glares at me. “Look at you! Clenching your teeth!” Grabbing her bag she stands up, having come to some horrendous understanding. Facing me, she says a thing that in another world would have turned me into a block of ice or salt or granite:

  “I am not! I am not going to die to get you off the hook!”

  “What are you talking about?” I whisper. “Where is this coming from? Who is talking about dying here? I—” I struggle for breath. I fear that the Cutter is threatening the entire edifice: Drear, Spells, the New Spells, the park, the house, the marriage, my reputation. All of it.

  “Kat,” I implore her quietly. “Sit down. We must talk. We must trust one another. You came to me for a reason. You were on the verge of self-destruction. But now—and yes! I know your tendencies to self destruct are still haunting us both. Becoming is a fearsome thing! But you are better. And this because of the courageous, the exemplary work we have undertaken together!”

  Now she is perched on the edge of the psychoanalytic couch that has served us both so well in so many unexpected ways. In a seemingly infinite—I think: how infinite the choreography of erotic encounter! I can tell she is thinking along the same lines.

  “Yeah. Well. O.K.,” she says at last. Looking into my face she smiles. Kat’s smile is winning. Sensuous and slightly askew. “It’s true,” she decides. “I’m not empty the way I was. I’d be O.K., maybe, if I could stop drinking. You know?”

  16

  YOU FILL A HOUSE with precious things; they break. You fill a heart with precious things; it breaks. In the end it all breaks. All night long I hear bones snapping. My nights are my star chamber. In my dreams the elusive sweetness of the world is just around the corner: up a tree, waiting in the silver tower, at the top of the mountain, in a box secreted at the bottom of the sea, in the flame of Aladdin’s lamp. And always between these legs or maybe those: the divine secret of sweetness.

  Is it, I wonder, the same sweetness that seizes the fish when it spills its sperm. And the tigers when they fuck? The serpents as they coil and uncoil, thrashing in the mud together? Could it be that this elusive sweetness is at the heart of everything? Coupling, striving for delight. As once in Tahiti, Samoa, such places—

  17

  LATE IN THE DAY I received a call from a man named David Swancourt, a young man most likely, with an unusually engaging voice, disquieting, restless, intimate. Intrigued, I played his inquiry over a number of times before returning his call. I managed to reach him at once and we made an appointment for the following Friday in the new office.

  Then: a shower (the downtown Spells has both a private shower and a restroom for clients, a luxurious restroom like a picture gallery), a nap, and a call to Akiko to discuss where we would meet.

  One thing I am compelled to do, because it promotes coherence, is to take Akiko to a restaurant where I have eaten with a lover. Or in a risky part of town where I have engaged, if briefly, with marginalia. To be healthy one needs to bring the disparate parts of one’s puzzle together and in this way defuse prevailing habits, promiscuity’s fevers. At the same time it provides proof for myself and my wife—who labors beneath the weight of the clues I have inadvertently left in her path—that our life, hers and mine, is singular, is the real one, the one that actually matters, so that the clues are disarmed and whatever pain she feels anesthetized. Or so I intend.

  I was wanting the Red Dragon, a funky place she dislikes. I like its shadows, its intimacy; I like its dragons; above all I like the fact that I had been there with the Cutter a number of times. I liked the risk of this. She lives nearby and came often; I knew I was pushing things. I said to Akiko,

  “I wonder if you would be up for the Red Dragon?”

  “O, god!” she said. “You know I never am.”

  “Last time you said the dumplings were O.K.—”

  “We could go to the Vietnamese,” she countered. “We both like the Vietnamese.” I thought it over. The waitresses there were wonderfully attractive. There was a time when I had been involved with one. I could never decide if it was sex she wanted, or a father, or a green card. She did want money. A beauty with expensive tastes. I recalled a pair of boots she asked me to buy for her. Over a thousand—

  “Are you still there?”

  “I’m thinking,” I said. “The Dragon’s spareribs are in the Dragon’s favor. They have that soup you like.”

  “You are impossible,” Akiko said. But she was laughing.

  We pulled into the parking lot at almost the same moment. Akiko looked great; she was wearing silk jeans the color of pewter and silver sandals with what must have been a four-inch heel. She was wearing a white silk sweater. I could see at once that she was a little nervous. She’s no longer the person she was. She’s watchful. She notices now when I look at women. For that matter, she notices pretty women often even before I do. She has developed a flair. It used to be she was secure in her own beauty. I dislike this insecurity of hers; it has made her less lovely. She enters the restaurant looking fretful. Lovely, surely, but fretful. Yet she used to like pretty women. She was one of their tribe. Now she resents them.

  The Cutter is very pretty. As we enter the Red Dragon, the Cutter, who has been sitting in the shadows in the back, sees us at once. It’s uncanny. It’s as if she has been waiting there. She walks toward us and she calls out: Doctor! And being the bitch she is, she ignores Akiko and gives me a hug. I can feel Akiko wired, thrumming with anger and fear. When I introduce them, Kat barely glances at her. She knows she holds the heat. The moment lasts ten seconds but it seers Akiko just as if the door of a furnace had suddenly blown open. When we sit down I shake my head and say,

  “A client.”

  “Now I’ve seen it.” Akiko looks totally lost.

  “It’s a long process,” I tell her. “And as much as I’d like to, I can’t control every aspect of this. She’s a rude person. Not a good person. Pretty impossible, in fact. She had no right … I’m sorry,” I say. “This has upset you. Me too. But Akiko. It doesn’t mean anything. The meaning is here. Between us.” I take her hands in mine and put them to my lips. I kiss her hands, her fingers, and then I put them to my
forehead. When I feel her little hands against my forehead I think that if I knew how to weep I might have wept at that moment. The oddest thing.

  Yet this reassures her. Perhaps this is the thing that keeps us going; Akiko is so easily reassured. So eager to trust me. It doesn’t make any sense. But she relaxes; I feel the tension in her hands melt away. In a moment she is caressing my face. When I open my eyes her own face is open. Her eyes are tired, but their expression has softened.

  “You once told me,” she says with real sweetness, real heat, “that I stung your face and hands.”

  “And tongue.”

  “I want … I want to sting you again.”

  “And you shall, my love,” I promise, “once this difficult passage is over.”

  When our food arrives, I notice the delicacy with which she lifts her dumplings, one by one, with her chopsticks. The delicacy of her perfect teeth, her mouth; the delicacy of her face. Why does the sight of my wife eating dumplings enrage me?

  When the very air within one’s marriage grows thin and dim, there is nothing to do but set out to find a richer, brighter air. When the glass is fractured, a new glass must be procured. These days my wife does not know what to do with her tenderness.

  If I were Akiko, I’d be out fucking men.

  18

  HOURS PASS IN DREAR. I attempt to extricate a client from a life lived leaping from one frying pan into another. After she leaves I suffer the professor who is exhausted by absolutely everything. All that civilization has to offer: markets, dumpsters, embalmers, highway patrols. I recall something Akiko said the night before: