Netsuke

by Rikki Ducornet

  “I wonder why it is the animals, the birds and fish, manage to live so much more gracefully than we do. And now we are killing them all off. And soon there will be just people like you and me, and all that simple grace will be gone from our lives.”

  And I said this terrible thing. I said: “No one will miss it.”

  But now I can see her point, because I have no choice but to suffer the professor’s fearful and sinister stories, fearful and sinister because they recall the acute, the suffocating misery of my infancy. As of late, I enter Drear with a dire sense of foreboding. I have come to dread the professor, whose visits are as chilling as a visit to the morgue.

  Beyond the French doors, off in the distance, I see Akiko gazing into her beloved carp pond. And I envy her.

  Then there are the hours in Spells, the elastic days, days rich in event, ripe with diversions. Days of figs and thorns. Yet Mr. Horner, as he must, returns home in time to sup. The wife across from him, a galaxy away, is hopeful, inquisitive, rich in beauty, promise, yet … I try her patience. I try her capacity to trust. I am her snake, she is my grass. She is vulnerable; when she breaks, all the king’s horses and all his men will be unable to fix her. Should I smile, I would give myself away. Therefore I come to table scowling like a pirate. In this way the evenings pass.

  “Why?” she mocks, “the dark look?”

  “I don’t like what I do.” I think: You have failed to lick me clean of bile and brimstone and tar. You have failed to release the Minotaur from his nightmare. I cannot forgive you.

  “What are you thinking? I feel like you are on the moons of Mars, or worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “Another galaxy entirely.”

  “I am impossible to live with.”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “I am,” I insisted. “Even I can’t stand it.”

  The dinners follow one another; it’s like being on an infernal carousel. She has grilled salmon; the fish has a crust of nuts; gilded like the helmet of a king.

  “How do you do this?” I ask.

  “I like to cook for you.” Then, quietly: “When I looked in the mirror today, I saw that I am fading. I suppose this is why you are no longer eager to be my lover.”

  I was startled and knocked off balance by this bravery of hers. I had seen it before, but it had always taken me by surprise. I am not used to bravery. Not from men. Not from women.

  “We can end this,” she said simply. I took my time considering how to respond.

  “I am troubled,” I said hesitantly, searching for the right words, the right modulation, “in my Practice, it is the Practice, Akiko. Not you. Never you. You are exactly what I have always longed for.” If I said this from need, love or from perversity, I do not know. “I am troubled in my Practice,” I told her, Friday nipping at my heels, “and exhausted.”

  Yet there are many evenings when I relish the quiet, when Akiko takes on a pearly glow like a fantastic creature born of the sea. In these hours the mystery at the heart of things exists exactly where we embrace, or read to one another, or walk together among the fallen leaves to the lake … and I suppose these are the hours that allow her to continue to give me the benefit of the doubt.

  But is this any different, I ask myself, from what it was sometimes like with the Cutter not so long ago, when it seemed we were the children we had never been, she and I, on the verge of a great adventure. In those moments I could see what she saw: a vast, nebulous world just beyond the city’s rim, a vaporous promise dazzling in the heat of my lust for her like a sumptuous mirage. But it was, after all, only a thing of shimmering heat, only an illusion briefly entertained, that under the impact of the day and its demands, her anger and her appetite, is dissolving now, at the speed of light.

  19

  DAVID SWANCOURT WAS SCHEDULED for the afternoon; already I had broken my rule for Friday, which was to keep the afternoon open for affairs of the heart. Over the years these varied from vivid to mundane.

  Until recently, the Cutter had taken up the entire afternoon. We would go off together, to the coast or up in the hills outside of town. When Akiko was away, our Fridays extended into long, luxurious weekends.

  Kat could be tender. She liked it when we could stroll together hand in hand like any regular couple. “What if?” she said on one of these marvelous interludes we shared in the interstices of our lives. “What if I am the one to domesticate Bluebeard?”

  “Bluebeard!” I said, astonished that she could think such a thing of me, let alone say it with such spontaneity, even gaiety. “Whatever makes you think I am anything like that?”

  “Oh, come on!” She stopped walking, and dropping my hand, turned to face me. “You love that filthy shit.”

  I was lost. I considered. I thought she meant anal sex. I said:

  “You love it, too.”

  “Not as much as you.”

  “I thought you were crazy for it!”

  “Are we talking about the same thing?” Kat asked, gnawing a cuticle, spangled in the sun.

  “Maybe not.”

  “I’m talking about the videos, baby, the sick shit.”

  “Oh, god. That.” I felt at once as if my skull was being compressed. Even now, recalling this, the terrible pressure returns. It persists.

  Before the Cutter I had never actually seen a snuff film. But early on in our sessions together she had insisted, for reasons still unclear to me, that I watch one with her. In fact, the first time I spent a night with her in her place, we had seen one, the first of many. The films had colored our affair and had, I can see it now, seeped into the hours and minutes of my life. Yes, such things can change the nature of time. Because the films were the unspooling of my most private nightmares. This is what the Cutter gave me. Free access to my own abyss.

  In a session, one has access to the invisible. The visible presents itself in costume, with attitude. The client arrives dressed for the occasion, self-protective, guarded, hopeful, prepared to be seductive, wanting to be impressive, for her story to matter, to be unique; wanting her pain to be perceived as exemplary, important, meaningful.

  Most often, a woman will arrive perfumed. Even if her heart has been torn from her chest, she will step into the office with freshly washed hair. Even if she is on the verge of suicide, she will present herself in her best shoes. She may question whether or not she should paint her face because she knows that if she weeps, she’ll make a mess of it.

  A guy will wear a clean shirt, a suit or tie; he may press his jeans. The first time the Cutter showed up she was wearing five-inch heels and jeans so tight I could see the swell of her mons pubis. In other words, she presented as a woman who was fuckable, and that her fuckability mattered to her more than anything else.

  20

  DAVID SWANCOURT BURNS into the cabinet like a flame, and when he leaves I will look down at the carpet and imagine it has been scorched.

  Thirty-five. Tall, slender, a full mouth, an intense expression about the eyes. When he looks at me it’s like having my genitals grabbed. A good, straight nose, good bones, soft brown hair cut at the shoulders; overall: a feral ease. A man who sighs. A man who paces, who steals across the room as though on skates. A man I cannot help but watch with a certain fascination. A man fully aware of his beauty. A man I find beautiful.

  Unlike the Cutter, David Swancourt is enigmatic. Perhaps a chimera. There is a heat to him, a heat that matches my own. He reminds me of my youth, except for this difference: he knows about this heat of his, whereas I did not know, did not understand its implications, its possibility, until later. It took me two marriages to understand and acknowledge it; a third to follow its imperatives. I wish I had known sooner; I would not have wasted so much time. I would have been a smoother player from the start.

  Yet, despite all this, I also see his insecurities. These, too, are like my own. I know he will tell me about chaotic sex, that like me he is driven to sex, that he is deeply humiliated by the imperiousness of this need, it
s rabid character; a need that bites and seethes and will not settle.

  I know that he prides himself in his endless exploits, the fact of all the smoke and sulphur he has shared with so many, those countless others, each so different and yet, when push comes to shove, the same.

  A body opens like a flower, like a wound beneath the assassin’s knife, a street hit by a grenade.

  This is how it was, even before the rest was revealed. I began at once to read him, to devour him with my eyes as he paced, this man so like myself, so fearless, so afraid, so famished, so incapable of nourishing himself. Above his left eye there was a scar that dove into his eyebrow; beneath it that eye of his tore into the room. It was an angry eye, a timid eye, an eye sucked nearly dry with fear. Unlike his other eye, the right one, the eye that showed how smart he was, how funny he could be, how playful, how inventive. His right eye was brown and brimming with humor. And then I saw that rarity: his left eye was blue. I marveled that I did not notice this at once. A cold eye, a hot eye. Here was one curious fish!

  He had been pacing for ten, fifteen minutes. At last he dropped down into the other Eames. He said, “I have never been in a room like this before.”

  “How so?” He smelled of leather and citrus; he smelled of earth. I noticed his boots, a bit the worse for wear, caked with dry mud. And his fingernails needed attention.

  “It’s a beautiful room.” He shook his head and, frowning, stood up. How he roamed about! How he wheeled and soared! Rose and fell! One minute a kestrel, the next a carp!

  “Swancourt,” I said, “is an unusual name. It seems …” As I searched for the right word, he returned from his wanderings and once again sat down. “Unprecedented.”

  He laughed disdainfully. His gaze continued to drift. Each and every thing in the room caught his attention, but only briefly. And then he’d rip into me with those schizophrenic eyes.

  He turned to the netsuke cabinet, and there he lingered. His profile caught me by the throat. There are faces that have the attraction of stars. Studded with star eyes, eyes that have a gravitational field. These are the eyes of those who are not only close to the edge, but who have already gone over the edge, perhaps cyclically, a chronic habit with them. And yet they have managed to return. The soles of their feet are scarred by fire; they have eaten glass; they have bedded down with snakes; they will do anything, anything at all to stop a certain kind of pain, which is the pain that comes to a person whose spirit has been so sullied and downtrodden the best it can do is shine forth fitfully, like a firefly caught within a fist, in the throes of a kind of final frenzy, and in the face of death.

  These are the people who make for thrilling lovers. Invariably, their attraction is compromising. The risk is immense. But one is like them. One is willing to risk everything if only to burn brightly for a moment. The world is full of people such as this. People raging with hunger who may at any instant implode. Our planet is studded with such black holes. I have considered developing a cosmology of this ruinous eroticism.

  David Swancourt was looking directly into my face.

  “I think this room is too beautiful for someone like me.”

  “Perhaps not beautiful enough,” I said. He pointed to his boots.

  “I walked here from the bus station. I’ve left mud all over your carpet.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “But you must be very thirsty.” I stood up. “How about a Perrier—”

  “A Perrier!” he laughed. Was he mocking me? I brought it to him nonetheless and watched as he polished it off thirstily. When the bottle was empty he set it down and, standing, said: “So. This is how it begins.”

  “It has already begun.”

  “Yeah,” said David Swancourt, “I guess so. I’d say it has.” For the briefest of moments he lashed at me with his yes with such unbridled ferocity I thought: watch out!

  21

  I RECALL, IN FACT I WILL NEVER FORGET, a brief event that took place many, many years ago when I was a boy of thirteen or so, watching my father get dressed for an evening out with Mother. His closet door was open wide and I could see his many pairs of carefully shined shoes, his numberless suits hanging on expensive wooden hangers, his ties suspended from some fancy sort of frame, everything clean, pressed, seemingly new, fussily cared for. I teased him and said, “Dad, you’re some dandy!” (It was rare for me to tease; our family life was low on fun.)

  “Dressing well is sexy, son,” he said, “and do you know why?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Because when you step out of your clothes you’re really naked.”

  This, I now know, was an emblematic moment. At the time it made me anxious, it made me blush, and even angry. Any mention of sex on my father’s part always made me unaccountably angry. But then as I grew older, I found myself turning into a fussy dresser too, a man who wore expensive hats, silk suits and ties, tie-up shoes. And I discovered, indeed, how sexy this was, what a turn-on for certain kinds of women. And that it was, along with the fact of being an MD, considered both sexy and an indication of safety.

  22

  I BEGAN TO PREPARE for the momentous eventuality: David Swancourt’s next visit. I prepare for a possible affair. I prepare for a possible affair as I always do. I buy clothes. I ask Akiko to come along because she has a good eye. And because it reassures her. It’s domestic, the very thing loving couples do together. We do so little together. Me taken up with the Practice. My wife with her career.

  Akiko makes no bones about what she thinks. “You look like a banker in that suit,” she’ll say. “I hate it!” Or: “You look like a public accountant.” “For godsakes! You look like a serial rapist!” Inspired, she convinces me to buy a brown linen suit on sale; Armani. It’s gorgeous, and perfect for early fall weather. The color of stale chocolate, it makes me look good.

  “You look fantastic!” Akiko says. “I want you to keep it on and take me out for tapas right now!”

  In this way I break it in. In this way I am prepared for David Swancourt’s second visit.

  I live in something like a heightened state. And yet also in a fog. While gardening, Akiko picks up a splinter. It is large and painful, but despite its size I am unable to remove it, my hands are shaking so. Instead I manage to stab her with the needle. It is almost as if the needle leaps of its own volition in order to wound her. For godsakes! she cries, what is the matter with you? I apologize and complain about my nerves; I promise to be very careful. When I stab at her again she is furious with me and perhaps, without realizing it, fearful. She no longer looks like the Akiko I remember courting so assiduously. She spends the next hour alone in the kitchen soaking her hand in hot, salty water, easing the splinter out bit by bit. I do not ask if I can help her. I go running instead. There is a full moon, and the trails are clearly visible. I like to feel my muscles move; I like to feel my body ache with movement. There is an eros to running. After all, one is running toward the future, the next encounter.

  The encounter materializes as if cut out of the air. But this is ridiculous; after all, I had scheduled David Swancourt in. But there are people, you will have noticed, who astonish us, whose presence in the world seems miraculous. And David Swancourt is a creature of dream, or even a creature of dreamtime. What I mean is this: he entered the downtown cabinet as if conjured by a magic letter. As if he were the materialization of desire. As if he had been summoned by my fascination.

  So: here he was again. Boyish, lithe, as edgy as a caged cougar, all of it. I thought: when David Swancourt enters a room, reason dissolves. The world begins to dream. I thought: this one is a woman. A woman coiled within a man the way a cock coils upon itself within a pair of silk panties. A beautiful woman—of this I was certain—about to surge from her shell. And then, as if he were able to read the progress of my thoughts, as if he had been reading my thoughts all along—and he had! He had been reading my mind—David Swancourt closed his eyes, almost as though he were keeping back tears, and in a whisper said:

  “Ah. Shall I. Show he
r to you.”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “You will not betray us.”

  “No.”

  “Ah …” He sighed again, as if in a fever of his own. He said: “Watch this.” So I did. I watched him rise up from the couch and stand before me. I watched in a joyous panic, although I did nothing to reveal my joy, nor my panic, but sat very professionally in my linen suit, forefingers pressed to my lips as is my habit when I am considering something very seriously.

  “Look at me,” he insisted, although I was. I said: “I am.”

  “You are …” he waited.

  “I am looking at you,” I said.

  And then almost imperceptibly, instant by instant, atom by atom, flame after flame, I saw him changing. It seemed every particle of light in the universe was careening toward him, this shimmering youth who was in the process of shedding his skin like a garment that fell to the floor only to pool among the shadows before dissolving altogether. Yet the room was free of shadows, but for the shadows he evoked and the darkness, like a heavy weather that rose up within me, or I was sinking into; I was sinking into a passion once again, except …

  Except that when she stood before me now, naked but for a teal-colored string, her diminutive breasts studded with tiny sprays of silver stars that trembled as she breathed, falling like tears or foam so unexpectedly against her skin, I was overcome as I had never been before, of this I am certain, and gasped for breath, but only once. Which elicited a light laughter. She said:

  “Don’t move.” She crossed over to where I sat and, leaning over, with her thumb caressed my cock strangling in my pants like a snake on a noose, and then, wheeling away: “Ah. But my time is up.” And bending over, so that her ass was for an instant suspended within reach, took up her disguises and eclipsed out the door that leads to the back hall, the restroom, the street.