Netsuke

by Rikki Ducornet

  That evening my wife taxes me with strange questions apropos of nothing: she wonders why I call my patients clients and not patients.

  “Because ‘clients’ is more democratic.”

  “Since when is ‘doctor’ and ‘patient’ classist?”

  “Elitist, then.”

  “It makes no sense,” she says. “I mean, the relationship between doctor and patient is exemplary. Almost sacred. For one thing—”

  “The sacred has nothing to do with it. After all, my clients are paying for a service.”

  “So.” Akiko speaks with a new bitterness. I perk up my ears. “In that way you are like a grocer. Grocers have clients. As do whores.”

  “More a whore than a grocer.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Love, after all, is involved.”

  “Yes. I suppose that is so. Everything but kissing?”

  “You hate me, then?”

  “Do I have reason to?” She feigns indifference.

  “You think I am a monster.”

  “It never occurred to me,” she laughs. “Some monster! With only a single horn.”

  Suddenly I am overcome with weariness.

  “I’m exhausted,” I say, and standing with unexpected difficulty, make my way to the couch. Crossing the living room is like crossing the Sahara without water. The living room is dark, uncluttered, spotless; it is as if no one lived anywhere near it. As soon as I lie down I feel dizzy and heavy. I fall into sleep like a corpse into mud, wondering: What happens when a doctor sleeps with a patient? And the patient keeps paying the doctor for the other things they do together, the journey into pain and loss and mysterious crimes too terrible to recollect. Is the doctor, then, the patient’s whore?

  23

  I KEEP SHUDDERING. Something momentous has happened. Akiko points out that all the crows in the city have vanished. She has become watchful, strange. She finds a fish, one of her favorites, floating belly up in the pond. She brings up the shell again. The one she found broken, after I brought home that crazed shopgirl, Lucy. From an old collection, she tells me, and precious, because taken live from the sea a century ago. A thing now illegal because the species is nearing extinction. A perfect thing, until … Somehow the tips of its delicate prongs have been snapped off. As if, but this is impossible, someone deliberately snapped them off. But this is impossible.

  “I was keeping it safe,” she says. “A perfect thing. I mean a thing of perfect beauty. Beauty vanishes …” I feared she was about to use that terrible word: betrayed. And then it seemed to me that perhaps I had seen Lucy lift the thing from its box and before my eyes snap … Yes. I believe I recall seeing her look deeply into my eyes before pocketing—

  “—the prongs,” Akiko is explaining, “that keep the shell from being tossed about by the currents of the sea. The prongs that root the creature to the sand.”

  So that it may sleep as we all wish to sleep, undisturbed.

  Had she really said that? Is this what I heard?

  It is one thing to cover up one’s own clues and another to remember to cover up someone else’s clues, someone as erratic, as crazy, really, as Lucy.

  “Let’s go out!” I suggest to Akiko, to break the fog roiling into every nook and cranny of the house, “and shake off this dark mood. If we make a run for it, we could get to the theater in time. I have tickets; I actually have tickets—” I rifle through my wallet. “You know I sometimes get these little gifts—”

  I have a need, such a need, to bring it all together, to ease the moment’s terrible dis-ease. When Akiko agrees, I am greatly relieved. Yet the tickets had come from an old client of Spells; how these things haunt one’s life! Yet there it is: things get solved but never really satisfactorily.

  24

  THE LITTLE THEATER on Third Street is not far from the Crucible, so called, where all the night butterflies poison the air with their breathing and beating of wings. Going into the Crucible is like stepping into a pool of boiling milk, and as we drive through I see one, a chimera, surge into our lights before vanishing. Perhaps this is also David Swancourt’s world; it is too soon to know. And I realize that, in fact, there is so much about him that I do not know.

  The play is intimate, so intimate, and our seats so close to the stage, that it comes across as being performed in our laps. Akiko watches my ex-mistress avidly; I can feel the static dancing on her skin. And the ex-mistress, having seared us both with one greedy glance, plays her part with an uncalled-for ragefulness. But at last it is over and we escape into the night air. Thankfully, the sky overhead seems particularly expansive.

  Akiko says:

  “Who is the actress? Do you know her? It seemed like she was aware of us the entire time. I actually picked up a great deal of animosity!” Curiously, at that moment my anxiety vanishes and I feel whole again.

  “Well, yes. You’re right. I wasn’t sure at first, but I do know her. Or did. She was once a client. I didn’t realize she was still acting. Gosh—she must be close to sixty. A very neurotic woman.”

  I know I should stop there, but something compels me to go on.

  “A fascinating woman, talented, beautiful—although she looked haggard, I thought, tonight. I suppose that had to do with the role. Or her ongoing difficulties; I imagine she is still as unhappy as she ever was. A fascinating and unhappy woman.”

  I repeat the word “woman” purposefully. The word itself turns me on; I am stirred. I can grow hard just saying the word “woman” aloud. When I was a boy I was able to bring myself in the shower just by saying the word over and over. When I say “woman” around Akiko, I feel thrilled by the risk. “Woman” is another clue she hasn’t yet fathomed.

  That night after the play, after talking about the actress, I felt entire. I felt warm and secure and of a piece so that once we were in the car, I seized hold of Akiko and kissed her passionately; I would have fucked her then and there in the car in front of the theater if she had allowed me to. But she did not. The moment was lost and so it goes; this is one of the many ways a shared life begins to unravel, because then, when we had returned to the house and in the midnight driveway Akiko reached out to claim what was offered just minutes earlier, I pushed her away, oblivious to her rising anger and dismay, cognizant only of the mane of death, the stench of flesh roasting over coals … I stumbled forth alone into the house to fumble with the day’s mail in its basket from Pakistan or who-knows-where, as if it mattered to me in the least.

  1

  AKIKO IS WEARY. She is losing her luster. The force of his gravity is bearing down on her. These days she picks up splinters as easily as a cook picks up spoons; she bumps into things and trips on the stairs. The last time he looked at her he noticed the bruises on her legs and thighs. As young as she is, she begins to scowl; he catches her scowling unawares. He thinks it seriously impedes her beauty. Somehow it never occurred to him that one day she too would scowl, would join the scowling ranks he has left in his wake.

  2

  THE WORLD THEY SHARE is seriously shrinking. Perhaps this explains why he notices objects he had not noticed before. The room in which they eat is spare, but there is a statue of some kind on a stand in a corner and it casts a shadow that, when he looks its way, actually causes him physical discomfort. Which is ridiculous. Yet when he looks again, the malaise returns. To be precise, this shadow makes the skin on his scalp grow painfully tight, as though it were shrinking.

  Akiko sits across from him. He notices how her lashes also project shadows; they scamper across her cheeks each time she blinks. The sight unnerves him. Her lashes seem longer, as does her face, the lines at each side of her mouth. And the shadows in the room. They, too, are longer.

  Without a word, he rises and goes to the corner to investigate whatever it is that looms there. He finds an unfamiliar statue of oiled wood: a dancer of some kind with far too many arms. Hindu. She appears to be scowling, showing her teeth.

  And her tongue! The length and breadth of his thumbnail
, it seems to be thrusted at him aggressively. He says,

  “Have I seen this before?” He picks up the statue and examines it closely, as though it were an artifact from another world.

  “Yes,” she says, rising, and, sensing his difficulty, approaches him quietly. With real gentleness—where does this fund of tenderness come from?—she puts her arm around him. “Remember, we saw her together a while back in town and you said how much you liked her, so I went back and bought her and put her here. I wondered if you’d ever noticed! It amuses me,” she smiles into his chest, rubbing her face against him, “how long it takes for you to notice these things. These changes I make in the house. Why is that?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, full of wonder, somewhat stunned by this revelation. “I don’t know if that is really true. Is it true?” he asks her now, almost as though he were a child, she thinks, needing her guidance. “I don’t know why I once liked her so much!” he says, pulling away. “She’s on the rampage.” Akiko is bewildered. Hurt.

  They stand together in the early darkness. They discover that they do not recognize one another. Frightened, she takes his hand and says:

  “Come sit down. I’ve made something delicious for dinner.” But she thinks: So it has come to this. We have been reduced to this. But why?

  They eat in silence. She does what she can to keep back her tears. She has lost him, but she no longer knows whom she has lost. She believes she loves him, yet he is not the man she fell in love with. All the shadows in the room have now conspired to take him from her. She forgets to serve the salad. He neglects to pour the wine. As Kali dances in the corner, they sit alone together in a boneyard. Again she wonders why?

  3

  AFTER DINNER, Akiko puts on a heavy sweater and takes a walk. For some reason she remembers the first time they took a trip together. Oaxaca. Now that she thinks of it, his behavior had been incongruous, somehow immodest. They had only just arrived and there was so much to see, the city in the grip of life. And yet he must find a pen shop. Feverishly he began approaching strangers. Streets were named, directions given, and off they ran. He hurried on ahead of her, oblivious to the many things that caught her eye. In new sandals she trailed behind, the streets fraught and fractured, rubble at each step, as he sped on like a large cat, his own sandals as snug on his feet as those sturdy pads lions wear. Yet everything caught her attention, the town was a living hive! Why wouldn’t he slow down and let her see it?

  When they reached the shop, the display of pens was clearly unsatisfactory. He hovered above the sweaty glass case and asked to see them all. He fingered them, returning to an old one, stubby and thick, of indecipherable color. She and the shopkeeper looked on as her husband stroked it. A unique item, its pump unusually conceived. Its fat body held a lot of ink.

  A glass bottle was now set out upon the counter, its label faded and flaking, its facets dulled with dust. She was losing patience; already so many precious instants had passed! Outside the hour was white, someone was singing in the air above them, and then: the sudden ringing of a vendor’s bicycle bell. When she caught a whiff of coffee she remembered she was hungry; they had left the hotel without eating breakfast. Yet there her husband stood, unreasonably transfixed. She decided to complain, to insist that they move on for godsakes—an impulse thwarted by the uncanny intensity with which he continued to examine the pen. And although it was absurd, impossible in fact, what she saw in his eyes was sexual ardor.

  Her husband was trying the pen’s pump mechanism. Dizzy with bewilderment, she watched as the ink fountained down into the bottle and then as it was sucked up again. When he dabbed the pen’s tip with a small square of blotting paper, she saw that the gesture was exactly the one he used after taking a piss, holding his cock in one hand and soaking up the last drop of urine with a folded tissue.

  Tonight, as she wanders the woods in the moonlight, it occurs to Akiko that the pen shop had provided a public stage upon which her husband had sexually performed. That what had happened in the pen shop was a disclosure. An admission of betrayal. In the pen shop in Oaxaca, he had betrayed her before her very eyes.

  Is it possible? Is the world as strange as this? No, she decides. It cannot be as strange as this.

  4

  IN THE MORNING he stands in the shower until something shifts, the dark weather that has begun to plague him dissolves; he rises like Neptune from the cleansing waters and feels beautiful; he touches the muscles of his calves and arms; he caresses his stomach and chest; he feels the comforting weight of his sex—and as he steps out into the sunny room and tiles to stand before a window facing east, he feels expansive; he thinks his home is like the palace of an Assyrian king; he relishes the comforts it provides. Even the towels, he notes with satisfaction, are luxuriously sized and of a rich, indeterminate color, like a warm sand of nacreous shells.

  He has the dressing room of a prince, with a large three-way mirror that allows him to fully see himself. By the time he sets out for the new cabinet, he is his own man. He has once again set up the day so that by three he can receive David Swancourt without any fear of disruption.

  He has rearranged the room. And opened windows. The distant roar of city traffic delights him. He is an urban prince at the height of his powers. A king of a kind. He is wonderfully strong, his flesh burnished like bronze. He is wearing a silk tie the color of burned oranges. He ranges through the room, delighting. Everything is renewed. Everywhere new buildings rising, old neighborhoods torn down, the dingy houses and their sorry little orchards replaced by mansions. There is talk of a new city park. The theater and library, the art museum, have all been recently transformed into temples, palaces! He thinks he lives in Babylon! He is the king of Babylon! Everything about his life is remarkable. There is a boundlessness to the day, to these rooms, this city, his own life, his own erotic hunger, this capacity of his to awaken erotic hunger. Spells is ready to receive his new lover in whatever form he/she decides to take. Perhaps David Swancourt’s forms are limitless. He’d like to think so. This time he has found a lover as protean as the weather. As protean as he is himself.

  This is what is delicious: a professional man, a trustworthy, mild-mannered, thoughtful man who measures his words; a beautifully groomed man of impeccable taste who moves with ease; a graceful man, a man whose mind is occupied by many obscure complexities, whose life is both comfortable, expansive, and above all mysterious …

  5

  … AND ALL OF THIS on the line. Reassuring, deeply desired. Because when it is set on fire, it blazes with such intensity! When such a man stands fully clothed but for his bounding cock, which she takes with such delicacy, such tender ferocity, into her mouth, well! Then the entire castle of cards so carefully set out upon the table tumbles to the floor with unprecedented abandon! And when the man and his life have all burned down to a small heap of ashes, well then, she’ll dance upon those ashes, she will be Kali in a necklace of bone.

  This is what drives David Swancourt: the burning of a world, the setting of a man on fire, a distinguished man, the man she can never be, not ever, because that chance was stolen from her during her own secret prehistory. He is the man she would have become, or so she thinks. Because she does not, cannot know, the bitter truths that rule him; she does not know, cannot know, that he, too, is in drag.

  She does not, cannot possibly imagine, that her doctor is her biggest risk. Because she has come to him in deep trouble. Because a month earlier she went off with three men she picked up in a bar and was raped. Because like Kat, she drinks too much. Like Kat, she is drawn to those who will hurt her. Because she had come on to the men who had raped her. Because in some elusive country deep in her mind, she wants to be fucked into oblivion. Lovely Anna Morphosis! She wants to be fucked to death. Except it’s not that simple. She has come to see him because she wants to live.

  That week he had called her to ask her her name. Jello, said David Swancourt. She’s over her head, Doctor. She’s in a bad way. And her doctor.
What did he say? He said: Together we will make her O.K.

  6

  JELLO CANNOT IMAGINE what a real childhood would be like. The glimpses she has had are so stunning, so sumptuous, so utterly desirous, she dares not engage them for fear of dying of unrequited longing. But sometimes she cannot help herself. Because these memories ground her. They remind her what it was like to be awestruck, to be giddy, to be joyously giddy with the world’s promise.

  There dwells within her a certain fragrant weather, a certain bright knowledge, a safe place where she can, at odd moments, be devout—worshipful in other words—of the mysterious process of living among others. When such a moment seizes her, she needs to share it; she needs to talk about it. And now, at thirty-five, she fears that if she does not talk about all of it with someone she can trust, it will turn to dust; she’ll never be able to access it again.

  A brass watch belonging to her father, her fascination as a little boy with watches, with small machines of all kinds. Before she became Jello, he was a mechanic. He liked to roll under cars and smell their hot, greasy underbellies. Because he was clever. Because he liked the way it felt to be close to the ground. Because when you are on the ground, flat on your back, there is no place to fall. Because when he showered down after work and dressed in pressed jeans and a clean shirt, he felt good. He spent hours wandering the mall, days even, hunting down the right shirt.

  One day it wasn’t a shirt he bought, but a dress. The salesgirl liked him; maybe she was teasing him, or maybe she had a hunch. Or it was simply the fact of his beauty and she was curious; she wondered what this beautiful boy would look like in a beautiful dress.