Netsuke

by Rikki Ducornet

  The changing room was hospitable. Large enough for the two of them. It was an ark infinite with possibilities. In an instant they both vanished within its mirrors.

  She undressed him. She showed him how a woman undresses a man. She fondled his nipples and she wouldn’t let him kiss her. She said: Just let me play! She was droll, spunky, radiant. He was down to his briefs. She cupped his erection in her hand and said: You have to behave yourself because you are about to become a lady! When he laughed she hushed him with a kiss. He was riveted to the spot. The dress spilled over his body. After, he’d think about how they had found this little nest for themselves.

  Because he was in a dress he felt he could be soft. He whispered: Now am I your lover or your sister? When she burst out laughing she was fired on the spot. The two of them were banished from Foley’s. The months they spent together were the happiest of his life. They became bandits, stealing dresses for themselves, shoes, perfume, makeup. He would flirt with the salesgirls as she, in the midst of superabundance, would uncover and lift the rarity.

  Understand that they were not ruled by greed, but by the need to be transformed. And of course, the need to risk the freedom they had just claimed for themselves. Nevertheless, they were overturning the chaos that had from the start been an infliction. They transformed his tiny apartment into a clandestine backstage dressing room. They bought an outsized vanity from the 1950s, its mirror intact, and filled the drawers with makeup. They experimented with wigs. They might have gone on this way forever except that he fell in love with a man. For a few days they wept in one another’s arms. Then it was over, and David Swancourt was on his own.

  Jello changes her colors often. She shimmers. She does not want to be recognized, seized upon, locked up, and shut down. Her colors are lime, lemon, strawberry, blueberry, black cherry. She does not want to be harmed. She wants to flicker like the Aurora Borealis. She wants to be harmed. She wants to bleed like a severed aorta. She wants to be safe. She wants to be safe. She never wants to bleed again.

  She goes to him because he is known to like trannies. He’s seen scoping out the Crucible. He’s intrigued more than he realizes. He once talked a he/she out of a sex change. He said: The knife is just another way to flee pleasure.

  Ever since the rape she feels as though a grenade is about to go off in her head. She’s badly boxed in. And what she recognizes about the doctor at once is that he is himself boxed in. Maybe she forgets why she is there. She decides to unbox him. He will be her jack-in-the-box. She will find the mechanism that will release him.

  7

  THE THIRD FRIDAY wheels into his life. It seems miraculous when Jello appears. She burns her way into the downtown Spells like an arsonist. When she enters the room, he rises, stunned by the extravagance, the totality of David Swancourt’s transformation. Jello is absolutely gorgeous. He thinks that if chaos spins at the heart of things, David in his dress really puts a finger on it.

  His astonishment is so evident, so transparent, Jello laughs, the illusion simultaneously shattered and intensified by the fact of David Swancourt’s laughter. It’s like the world’s most fascinating shell game.

  David Swancourt’s laughter releases his own. He discovers there is nothing funnier than an extravagantly eroticized woman laughing like a man. Under the impact of this laughter, the world turns upside down and convulses.

  She takes a step toward him. He meets her halfway between worlds. When they embrace a season passes, then another. Another season, another cataclysm. Neither of them expected this. They sleep, then awaken. The new Spells is deep in shadow. She grabs her things, she turns, says: Hey. And is gone. An act of devastating magic has taken place, and it is too damned late to do anything about it.

  He is dizzy with a kind of murderous fury in the face of his own banality, the impossibility of the task ahead: to return home for dinner. He reeks of perfume, sperm, sweat; he showers like a maniac and changes clothes.

  He likes what he sees in the mirror. He can pull this off.

  He has this brutality in him that cannot always be masked. But it can never be measured, also, because it is mutable, in constant flux. Now seemingly playful, tender. Now an infection, dismay. His brutality is a source of joy and confusion, provocative, always. It resides in his marrow. When he is merely mischievous, well, it is a blessing.

  His brutality is both fearlessly naked, triumphantly so, and at the same time deeply ashamed of this nakedness.

  He calls Akiko to say he’ll be at least twenty minutes late. She has invited friends for dinner, and this is far more than he is capable of. He offers to pick up some wine to buy himself some extra time.

  “A Mascara would be great, actually,” she says. “I’m making a tagine.”

  8

  ON THE DRIVE HOME he decides that Akiko’s ordered life is anomalous. He thinks: I carry the tower within me. An old story. An ancient story. A story inscribed in the Book of Nature from the start. The world was born in confusion, in confusion it proceeds, in confusion it will fall.

  At dinner he is mostly silent. His wife’s friends are artists—a photographer and a painter. The painter is clearly irritated by her lover’s drinking, yet the drinker’s insolence is amusing, and he is grateful he takes up so much room.

  “This will lead to oblivion, if not a row,” the painter warns.

  Akiko laughs: “I hope he intends both for later.”

  “All heroes have their weaknesses,” the drinker grins at his host and winks.

  “What do you know of weakness?” he asks him. It is his first unsolicited sentence of the evening.

  “Everything!” the drinker brags. “I collect vices as others do stamps.”

  “Such as?” The mood is changing. He can tell he is bringing an unexpected edge into all of this.

  “Wine,” he says, lifting his glass toward Akiko, who fills it. “Women.” He nods first at Akiko and then at his mistress. “Song. But … I do not intend to sing.”

  “A blessing,” says his mistress.

  “I’d like to hear the man sing,” he says with an implied belligerence he knows Akiko dislikes.

  “Then I will sing!” the drinker declares, “in my host’s honor!” He stands, knocking over his chair, struggling to set it on its feet again before belting out a piece of obscenity from Carmina Burana. When it is over, he bows and turning his back on them, makes his way unsteadily to the bathroom.

  “Don’t get lost!” his mistress calls cheerily after, retrieving crumbs of chocolate cake from her dish with her finger. He thinks: Heavens be praised. The repast will soon be over.

  “It has been said,” the drunk intones as he returns to the table, his fly unzipped, “that Dionysius manages better in the meadows and the woods than the living room.”

  “He is going to fall,” his mistress decides.

  “As the broads all fall for him,” the drunk declares. “Or so he likes to think.”

  “Ah,” the wayward doctor says, for he cannot resist: “A man after my own heart.”

  “Or cock,” Akiko mutters, to the surprise of everyone. “A little joke,” she whispers. She turns to him. “A little joke, my love. On me.”

  It is an entreaty. Or perhaps a warning. He wonders: just what does she know?

  9

  SATURDAY MORNING he feels such a tender longing for Jello, such an ache in every bone, that he calls her, breaking all his rules.

  Sleepy, surprised by his call, he can hear a growing excitement in David’s voice. He asks if he can speak with Jello. David tells him Jello is not there, but he expects her back later in the day. He suggests they meet downtown at four.

  Until now, he has always been a cautious seducer. Now this caution seems precious, adolescent, absurd. He prepares himself for the day ahead, relieved that by the time he is out of the shower, Akiko is already at work, the studio lights blazing in what is a misty fall morning, overcast, mysterious.

  He thinks: I am the Prince of Saturn, on a holiday on Earth. He leaves a
brief note on the kitchen table, something vague about getting the car serviced. The old Studebaker justifies many absences. What’s more, such banalities have a way of dispersing the stench of smoke. The next thing he knows, he is out and about, a leopard on the prowl. The world unfolds and time dissolves. It is ten o’clock in the morning.

  He sees a cigar store where he has flirted, heavily flirted, with a woman like Lucy, not much older than a child. Impatient with fate, her dreams much bigger than her means, she has a way of revealing not only what her naked body looks like, but what she is like in bed. He cannot look at her without imagining plowing into her.

  He sees her right away behind the counter. As soon as she sees him, she gives him one of her best hot looks. A customer leaves; he suggests they have lunch together, asks when she takes off for lunch. She is wide-eyed, exhilarated by this sudden outspoken interest. Eleven, she says. Perfect. Only an hour away. He imagines her co-worker watches this come together with envy.

  He kills time with what Akiko ironically calls “domestic bliss”: the bank, the drugstore, where he buys a carton of Kleenex in handsome bronze-colored boxes for the new Spells. When he returns for her, she is already waiting on the curb. He asks her what she’s in the mood for.

  She’s a fantastic little tart; she simply reaches over and squeezes his crotch. He says: I know just the place. She says: So do I. As they approach the arboretum, she unzips his fly. There is a dirt road parallel to a new public road that circles far back into the woods and ends behind an abandoned gravel pit. They fuck like high school kids in a kind of frenzy. She smells of oyster mushrooms and won’t stay still. She’s showing off, eager to impress him. At some point he goes crazy with it and forces her ass. Things are out of control now; she is crying, fearful. This all goads him on. He tells her she’s incredibly sexy, not to be afraid, but he’s almost impossible to understand. He’s thinking of Jello, of David Swancourt, both of them, the mad edge to fucking a guy. This kid, he thinks, is small, her body sweet and compact, except for her breasts, which are on the verge of unmanageable. And although he fully appreciates the ripe fruit of her, he is thinking of the length and sinew of Jello’s thighs, and David’s ass, so that somehow he is fucking David, Jello, and the kid at the same time and comes, howling, and she, the little imp, pretends to come too, hoping to save the day and with it herself.

  10

  SOMETHING IS ACCELERATING. His life is speeding up. This is an old feeling and yet there is something new going on, unfamiliar. The new room, too, is unfamiliar, and the netsuke all so strange, buzzing behind the glass in a new Spells all their own.

  He takes out the erotic ones. They nest in the hand like a breast, the smooth heal of a woman’s foot, a delicate ear or elbow, the head of a cock, its root, the testicles, that delicacy, that weight. He can understand why people collect these, why they are so rare, so coveted. And then he notices that all the netsuke, not just the erotic ones, have this quality—even the frog crouching on the body of the persimmon, the twinned gourd, its cut stem erect as a nipple, a wasp feeding on the cleft of a plum. He is like a voyeur, turning these over and over, examining their little dimples, secret moles, and discolorations. In his hands the netsuke begin to sweat. He thinks that the more they are fondled, the more they will be his.

  An illicit Saturday like so many others. A Saturday unlike any other. He looks out the window at the weight of the sky accumulating just beyond the city limits. In the distance, the mountains are already obliterated by rain. The traffic hums; the river slides past in silence as it does always.

  Four o’clock, and already it is evening.

  He is seized by uncertainty. The seconds pass with a terrible slowness. It is like swallowing nails. Perhaps she will not come. Three minutes past the hour. His wife will wonder why he has spent the entire afternoon at the garage. Soon it will be winter. His wife will be without her garden. When she is not in her studio, the house will ring out with his absence. She will brood upon the clues he has dropped in her path like luminous stones. She will take greater note of his moods. She will taste another woman on his tongue.

  The phone rings. He leaps on it. He says: Yes!

  “It’s me,” Akiko says. “Don’t I get to see you today? I thought you were going to the garage. They said—”

  “I came here instead to read some notes. And fell asleep on the couch. What time is it?”

  “Almost four-thirty. Don’t forget, we’re having dinner guests—”

  “Again?”

  “I don’t see people all week. Not even my own husband.”

  “Am I being scolded?”

  “I’m sorry. No! I’m not sorry.” At which point Jello walks in. Incandescent.

  “I have to finish up here,” he says. “I won’t be late. I’ll pick up some wine. Some champagne.” He looks on as Jello bends to the table and touches the netsuke he has left out.

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “Life,” he offers.

  “Yours?” she asks. “Or mine?”

  “Jesus!” he laughs. “I am in trouble!” His laughter reassures her, or so he hopes.

  “O.K.,” she says. “No later than six. I need you to husk oysters.”

  Outside the rain begins and in a moment slams into Spell’s high windows. Jello is nervously threading her hair with her long lacquered nails. They cannot kiss without moaning. He tears her blouse open. She is too excited, too triumphant to complain, although she is unsure how she will replace it. Or when. When the phone rings the room is darker, as if by necromancy, and the windows silvered with rain. Akiko wonders where he is. It is only just after six, but still … He puts down the receiver. Shit, he says.

  “O.K., buddy. Time to close up shop, eh?” says David Swancourt.

  “You make me crazy,” he says. “You make me forget everything.”

  “You make me crazy, baby,” Jello says, and the acute banality of this phrase, uttered first by him and now by her, terrifies him. He says:

  “We have to get out of here a.s.a.p.”

  With a kind of tragic dignity, Jello stands, and carrying her panties and shredded blouse, all the rest, walks to the hall. In silence, they shower together, put on their clothes, walk out into the rain.

  11

  HE HAS CHANGED HIS CLOTHES for the third time that day. He is feeling unaccountably safe and renewed. He is an acrobat who has successfully walked a high wire in a gale. In the kitchen he kisses his wife behind the neck and at the table thinks he has never been more spontaneous, more brilliant. He talks about his Practice; he cannot let it go. No matter that the conversation rushes off in other directions. He always brings it back to the thing that matters: his good work with people, the way his clients flourish, the ways in which madness makes fools of the best of us, how fools become kings and assassins reclaim their innocence. The lives that split apart at the seams, the seas that bleed, the sons buggered by their fathers, the client who sees his thwarted life in every red light; how the world breaks apart only to reawaken, and demons cling for their lives to every star. Carelessness, exhaustion. What it is like to be marooned on an island of the mind. The car wrecks, the calls for help, the ones who drown, the ones who drink up an ocean before sitting down to dinner.

  When much later he falls heavily to sleep, his wife notices that his heart is beating uncommonly fast.

  12

  AKIKO LIES AWAKE next to the man who was once her lover. He sleeps as if nailed to the bed, his face so knotted with pain it is almost unrecognizable. How is it possible? His youth and beauty have dissolved. She looks at his face in the moonlight unbelieving, and faults herself for this indiscretion. She thinks that despite the stories he has told her, or perhaps because of them, always the same stories and always told in the same way, she does not really know him. Akiko is at a loss; she is in way over her head.

  Sleep finally begins to claim her. Halfway there she wonders: What is that taste of another’s pleasure on your tongue? A voice from her ascending dream answers:
Only death, brushing your lips with her wing. What is that sound? she wonders, sinking into sleep. Only the lid of the sky, only Death’s eye, snapping shut. Why is it I do not know these things? she wonders, dreaming now, beside him. She hears his voice, the beloved’s voice answer: Because I wanted to keep you safe. In her dream she marvels: Safe?

  When Akiko awakens, her heart is hammering. She awakens stunned to the quick by a dream. In her dream she goes to the new office alone and opens the netsuke cabinet. They are gone; instead there is a vast collection of porcelain dolls, each only a few inches high, female, male, their genitals distinct. If their sex and the color of their eyes and hair varies, they are all otherwise identical.

  That is to say except for one. Like Akiko’s, her hair and eyes are black. But what makes her unlike the others is the gaping hole that pierces her belly where her navel should be.

  It is close to four in the morning. Akiko rises cautiously and makes her way in the dark into the hallway; in the dark she wanders the rooms of their house unable to quiet her heart, considering her dream. Entering the living room she sees the phone light blinking. A message left while they were sleeping, a brief message for him. A woman wanting him to call. A woman who called in the middle of the night. She recognizes the voice of the framer’s assistant. The one who spilled coffee on her portfolio months ago.

  Perhaps it is true that catastrophes like to accumulate. Because Akiko now wanders in the chill air like a lost person, a homeless person, into the garden. When she reaches the carp pond, she sits down at the edge. In the distance at the world’s end the sky begins to whiten, and she sees that all the fish are dead or dying. She wonders how lethal this contagion actually is, how far it reaches. She knows how far it reaches.