Netsuke

by Rikki Ducornet

  He sleeps unusually late. As he sleeps, she gets on with her life. She makes tea. She calls the gardener. When he comes they discuss what needs to be done. He is an old friend by now and sets to work at once. The fish must be buried, the pond emptied, its pumps and rockery, everything, disinfected.

  She pushes herself through her paces. And there is that other funny American expression she likes: keep on truckin’! In fact she is fighting for her life. When she looks back, all the clues he has left over the years blink on and off like the eyes of wolves in the dark of night. She decides to finish the triptych. An act of will and an act of faith in her capacity to live in a world that is collapsing.

  The triptych is nearly complete. Paradise. Hell to the right, Limbo to the left. In the center, Eve, perfectly human, is receiving a hand grenade from a Minotaur who is clearly her own mazed husband. Her Paradise is a take on the Paradise of Islam, packed with nubile virgins, but also fantastical streetwalkers, temple whores, little girls, the gods and goddesses of love, copulating creatures of all kinds, lascivious boys, devastatingly gorgeous drag queens. If these figures are all distinct up close, from a distance they vanish, become a jungle of blossoms and extravagantly blossoming bushes and trees.

  So, Adam, a Minotaur, dwells in a boundless harem. If Eden matters to him, it is only because it is sexed. Her Minotaur’s sex is scandalously large, gorged with blood, striking Eve’s thigh. His balls, dark as plums, quiver beneath. If Eve is aroused, creamy, her sex is folded into itself, hidden. Only the cleft, like the mark on a plum, is visible. And if Eve is eager to accept Adam’s gift, it is only because she is blindfolded.

  When she returns to the house, he is gone and the girl’s message deleted. On the dining room table, she finds a note. The car. The garage. So: the world has shrunk down to this. This all-encompassing banality.

  Later, much later when he returns, the Studebaker washed and waxed as a proof of a kind, of what? His fidelity? She tells him about the pond, the lost fish.

  He is feeling generous, expansive, on top of the world. To his own astonishment he recalls that she had bought the fish in San Francisco. We’ve been talking about a break, he says. Why not go to San Francisco? A long weekend. You could choose the fish you like.

  “You know what I think?” Akiko says.

  “No, Sweetheart, I don’t.”

  “I think you are patronizing me. Sweetheart.” He hates her for this, and if he wonders what she knows, he does not ask. As for Akiko, there is so much she wants to say, but does not. So much she could ask, but will not. She has received her dream as a revelation. She knows that his lies are boundless, that he lies as he breathes, by necessity.

  That night she roasts quail. Over dinner they circle the abyss like cautious lions. He tears his birds apart in his hands like a hunter from another century.

  13

  AFTER DINNER she takes her car, vanishes, tries to make sense of the city, tries to relearn how to think. He stays behind in the house and for a time stands looking out at the trees, at the beauty of the trees stirring mysteriously in the moonlight. He decides to write Akiko a letter. He is not convinced he wants to lose her. He is not relieved by her anger but forlorn. He dislikes the feeling.

  He writes:

  I have to acknowledge a certain disorder within my erotic life. Or I should say sexual life, as the erotic impulse seems sorely compromised at this time. That is to say I am driven to sexual encounters, but joylessly, without élan, without delight. (But how true is this? he wonders. No matter; he persists.)

  Akiko, my love, I cannot bear to be touched by you, to touch you, for a number of reasons. For one, I fear if we touch you will know how compromised I have become. How filthy. I believe my body’s texture has changed and I am certainly colder. There are times when I feel cold and senseless like a dead clay, and surely you would be horrified by this if we embraced. (But is it true? How can he be writing all these things having spent the afternoon as he had, in a fever with Lucy? A fever heightened by the One he currently adores more than life itself, David Swancourt’s Jello! Yet … does he adore Jello? No. That is not the word. What is the word? Fascinated. Yes. This is better. He is, in a word, Fascinated. And the name of the galaxy he shares with her is: transgression. And a marriage, even with a woman like Akiko, always up for heat, for adventure, simply cannot provide what he craves. Yet the idea of losing her, another divorce, the horror of all this around him collapsing is frightful. Then again: what is the exact nature of ‘this’? It eludes him. He looks at the trees, the books in their shelves, Kali so silent in her corner, and sees no meaning there.

  Although … he has the good sense, after all—does he not?—to know, rationally, that it does somehow matter. Only—it has been shunted aside for so long it is almost impossible, it is impossible, for him to know why.

  He writes:

  For some reason, perhaps it will become clear to me as I write to you, Akiko, I recall being a small boy, my father having just punished me and leaving the room, locking the door behind him. I was in tremendous pain, an unnamable pain, that pulsed through my entire body, and yet I felt numb, immobilized. I thought: now I am like a soldier made of lead. I remembered the men my father once described, who died in trenches of clay only to become clay themselves over time. Something happened that day between my father and me that caused me to become like those fallen soldiers. I was in pain, but the heat of the pain was turning to numbness, the cold of the clay, and soon I lay in bed like a lump of clay.

  But there is more. You must know that I have adored you. And we once shared an erotic heat, coupled with love, inseparable from love, and this is a thing I have never known before or since. I know you have longed to retrieve it, and this confuses me, or, rather, my response is more complex. I feel deeply sad about this loss of ours because I precipitated it. It seems I am incapable of sustaining any healthy impulse for very long. I hate the ease with which I lied to you as much as I hate your mistrust of me, your justifiable anger.

  As a child I was plagued with guilt for the smallest infractions. I do not believe I was as bad as my parents thought. Only this: they were both in a rage against a world that was always off kilter.

  And so my siblings and I matured in a house built upon a cesspool. Some sort of invisible slime covered everything, and this was incomprehensible to me. I imagined it was my fault. My parents both spent an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom. They could never be clean enough, nor could we. Our lives were ruled by black magic. What I mean to say is every aspect was ritualized, from the washing of sinks to the brushing of teeth.

  My lovers are many things. They are bonfires within that bleak servitude, moments of heat and light. They are toys, they are archangels, they are demons. They are things to possess and to battle, to bring down. As were you, Akiko, they are hope. To annihilate.

  When he is done, he pushes the page away with disgust and stands. He is feeling very strange. It is as if ice water is spilling on his head. Or in his skull. Yes: that is it, exactly. It feels as if his brain is bathed in ice water.

  The letter pools darkly on the table like a malefic eye. It has a power, a terrible power all its own. He knows he must destroy it at once. He tears it into a thousand pieces before flushing it down the toilet. He thinks: If the world is a dream, then fucking is as close to awakening as I can get. If the world is real, then fucking is as close to dreaming as I can be.

  A number of days will pass, a week. There is a silent understanding between them, a truce of a kind. They are temporarily giving one another time to think. Or, at least, this is how Akiko understands it. She knows that when they speak, it will be momentous, that nothing will ever be the same. Not only between them, but within herself. She has moved into the studio and has abandoned the house, its kitchen, its theatrical elegance, its deceptive solidity.

  14

  LIKE A FERAL CREATURE fallen into a deep hole, Akiko paces. The studio, the house, the garden, the woods—even the air—all conspire against her.
The world is leeched of luminosity and the clues accumulate. In a drawer she finds a book of names and numbers; she finds a handful of mysterious keys.

  She broods over their second trip to Mexico. He had insisted upon a beach notorious for its danger. People drowned there every year, and the wife of a local doctor had broken her neck in the surf. He pretended to know nothing about it.

  Her husband is not an emotional man. He is studiously calm. This calm of his is determined. Muscled, even.

  She remembers how she watched him vanish each day. How, without a word, he plunged into the sea, pushing forward and riding the waves until he’d reached the outer banks of high water. This ferocity of his had impressed and silenced her. And she recalls his impatience when she had refused to follow him, voicing her fear of the severe riptide, the height of the walls of water; how a new fear she had refused to acknowledge (because it was a fear of him) had in that moment claimed her.

  The acute strangeness of this memory is unfathomable.

  And there is another:

  One night, they had gone to a party at the Crucible. The beautiful boys in drag—chimeras he called them—circled him all evening. Had he given then appreciative glances, or had they been drawn to his frank virility, his vitality, his—could it be?—apparent susceptibility? Whatever it was, it was clear to everyone that in that hour, her husband was the prize they sought.

  Not long after there was a patient, a new one, who seized his interest and whom he talked about over dinner. The patient, barrel-chested, hairy, showing up for therapy in a tight green leather skirt, high-heeled boots. She comes to think he had possibly told her everything but for the most important thing: their fucking. (This was back when she still blamed herself for her inability to understand, to appreciate the arcane process that went on behind closed doors. Day after day, week after week, year after year.)

  She wonders if he fucks the city the way he had fucked the sea. She knows he does. A kind of horror overtakes her. It is a new feeling. She begins to entertain the possibility that her husband has brought her down in any number of uniquely imagined ways.

  Akiko prepares herself for their encounter. She does not know, cannot know, that for him to be seen unmasked is an absolute impossibility. She does not know, cannot know, that in his solitude he has begun to somber in an ancient dream, a filthy dream, a prehistoric dream as old as he is himself.

  Already the flies of death are buzzing inside his skull.

  15

  HE MOVES to the downtown cabinet. Three days a week he returns to Drear, ignoring the house, its garden, the park—to continue his work with clients. He has a new client in Drear, a man of middle age both unlike him and yet in whom he somehow sees himself: a man whose life is a failure. A man who has never married, who has always been a child, who has held on to his childhood fears, his longing for a vanished—volatilized!—mother, his lifelong conviction that her vanishment was the result of an inherent flaw all his own, that he was both unable to keep her safe and unable to replace her loss for his father’s sake. He describes the child he had been like a small circus animal unable to fulfill bewildering balancing acts for equally bewildering masters. As a child he was a weakling, preposterously insecure, and now he is still that way. He is also the Prince of the Non Sequitur, a Duke of Small Talk, the Earl of Platitudes. He is an eternal boy, an unhappy boy, dressed in a man’s paper suit and as light as a feather fallen from the breast of a bird.

  He is as thin as a wafer when he might have been someone of substance, someone like the doctor; someone robust!

  But his doctor also wears a paper suit. In fact, he is rapidly failing. Since moving into Spells he is taken up with a terrible obsession—the snuff films he had begun to watch with the Cutter and cannot let go. Somehow he finds himself within them; he recognizes some truth about himself and the world that received him. In other words, their weather is familiar. It is the weather in which he spent his infancy and the weather in which his illness thrives.

  At the same time he is attempting to extricate himself from both Lucy and the Cutter. Both of them clinging like glue. These days he is fighting to survive in an aquarium filled to the brim with glue. He wishes to be free of them both, to be alone with, seared and absolved by, the fever he shares with David Swancourt. Sex with Jello is rougher. He cannot, perhaps never will, get enough of her.

  One night he and Jello are together in Spells, fucking like beasts on the floor. The Cutter shows up, maybe on a hunch, and finds the hall door open. The office is locked, but standing by the door, she can hear them and begins to scream. She demands he open the door. She demands he let her in. She says she knows he is fucking somebody. She says she thought she was the only client he had ever, would ever, fuck.

  He and Jello fall apart and sit silenced, like scolded children, staring at the floor, waiting for it to stop, waiting for her to go. Finally she leaves, but first gives the office door a terrific volley of blows with her fists.

  He sits naked and afraid, frozen in place and terribly ashamed. He thinks he must do the impossible: shed not only his skin, but acquire a new mind, a new brain entirely, a new heart. A new life! Or end this one, which might be easier. For the first time, David Swancourt sees just how vulnerable he is. Just how old. Until now he had thought of him as a “mature” man, a “mature, professional man.” A “man to count on.” But today Jello’s lover has collapsed, is dwarfed by what is clearly a catastrophe. David stands and gathers Jello’s clothes, her shoes, her hair, from the floor. With difficulty the Minotaur rises and ashamedly laughs; he says:

  “I’m so sorry. I though I’d gotten rid of her.”

  “So, baby …” David Swancourt says slyly in Jello’s voice, “I’m not the only fuckable client?”

  “She,” he says it slowly, as forcefully as he can, although he is shaking, “was the only other time. This,” he makes a gesture of the hand, taking in the room as though it were the entire world, which in fact it is, “this … What happens here between us, is unique, unique in my life.” He looks so tender, so worried, so forlorn, and suddenly somehow so trustworthy, that David relents, and Jello replies:

  “I know it, baby.”

  Jello takes her time in the bathroom. She showers, applies her makeup, dresses slowly, pressing away creases with her hands. When she enters the street, she sees the Cutter, who has been waiting, perhaps for him, perhaps for them both. The Cutter sees right away what Jello is, and with an intake of breath, bites her lower lip. And Jello sees the glittering woman she wishes to be: her full breasts, her thin ankles and slender feet, her woman’s throat, her pussy, the whole package. She is submerged in a sense of acute helplessness.

  A cab approaches, and the Cutter flags it down. As David Swancourt watches her climb into the backseat, he understands that his lover, his doctor, needs his patients in the same way they need him. That the sex he exacts from them plays out the imperious need he has—for reasons beyond his own capacity to understand—for a sexuality driven by death.

  David Swancourt hates his doctor for playing this deadly game of his. For fucking Jello rather than protecting her.

  Jello returns to her little room in the Crucible where she looks at herself, undone as she is by the Cutter, and cries. David apologizes; he says:

  “I should have kept you to myself. Why did I need to show you off to that fucker, who never replaced the blouse he tore from your body, did nothing but fuck you hard in the ass, no different from the other dicks in town—”

  Jello replies. She says:

  “Betrayal is the only thing you guys know.”

  David says:

  “You’re right. And now he’s betrayed us both.”

  Jello disagrees:

  “No. It’s his fault. He is the doctor! He was supposed to protect the two of us. He was supposed to show you how to love me. But instead the two of you fucked me over. And maybe that’s all I can hope for. Being fucked over and over.”

  Jello throws herself on the bed in agony. Her ago
ny is his. In their agony they are perfectly joined. At last they fall asleep like Siamese twins, sharing a body, an agony, a heart.

  16

  THE WEATHER IS CHANGING; already the air is much colder. The Cutter is angry; she’s devastated. Because she had prided herself in her uniqueness. The affair with her shrink had given her a powerful sense of her own specialness. A femininity so heady he had broken all his rules. How she had fawned upon him when she was not tormenting him! Each instant so precious because they had so little time. He said: We are the thieves of time. And this was true. The time he spent with her was stolen from his other patients, his wife. When they fucked the world was reborn. Their fucking was the one thing she trusted.

  The Cutter directs the cab to the Chinese restaurant. As the city smears past, she thinks of his wife, so unexpectedly Japanese. Dressed, she thought, to kill. But Kat had seized the upper hand, if briefly, holding him in front of his wife, cutting her off, rubbing her out. Before he turned and walked away, his wife beside him, her own prettiness no longer easy to overlook. And she, the client, had gone off alone to her corner, their corner, while the shrink and his wife spoke together about the ineffable things that bind couples together despite all the odds.

  And then she thinks of Jello again. The commotion they made in his office! Like a fucking battleground! She imagines walking into that office, at that very moment, and blowing herself up.

  It’s as if a thick wall of glass, an entire building of steel and glass, has shattered in her face.

  The restaurant’s familiarity is briefly a comfort. The waiter, solicitous; brings her a drink. In their booth she thinks: and yet. That innocence of his. The way he shuddered and cried out that first night when, as she nestled against him, the film, unabashedly evil, tore into the room.