by Tracy Slater
Then, somehow, my mind took the leap itself, and suddenly I’d made the decision to go with the better possibility. The moment I did, it felt strangely right and solid. Perhaps, I thought, instead of uncaring, Toru was simply sure and strong. Perhaps, I thought next, Toru really would move to Boston, and into my meticulously cultivated life there I could add the one thing that had always eluded me: a deep and steady love.
• • •
A FEW DAYS LATER, we had our first fight. It was early July, and the Beijing afternoon was brutally hot and humid, the air wet-cotton heavy. As dusk neared, Toru and I went to a running track near the training center. I tried to go every few days, as did a few of the executive students, who would run with their bright white tube socks pulled halfway up their shins. The track was dusty, the grass in its center brown and old. We jogged slowly because of the heat. Toru’s socks, I noted approvingly, were pushed down around his ankles.
I had a vacation coming up when we got to Korea, a week off when I planned to go to a spa alone on Jeju Island, lie on the beach, have massages, and forget the sound of businessmen trying to speak English. Now I suggested Toru join me in Seoul the Friday my vacation ended so we could spend a night or two at a hotel in the city before heading back to the Korean training center, where the whole group would be staying for the program’s last month.
When I proposed the plan, breathing hard from the jog and the heat while Toru’s inhales and exhales stayed smooth, he only answered, “Maybe.”
“Maybe? What do you mean, maybe?” I exhaled harder.
“Maybe I can come. Depends on weekend’s assignments. What’s happening with program schedule.”
“Uh, okay,” I said flatly, straining to keep my frustration inside. “When can you let me know?”
“Maybe at Seoul. When I know schedule better.”
Suddenly, he didn’t seem very eager to spend a weekend together. Has something happened? My mind ticked back through the last few days. I couldn’t locate any rift, but now Toru seemed a few degrees cooler in his pragmatism.
“I need to go shower and change,” I said, as we wound down our slow loops around the dirty trail. A few other people were at the track, too: no one from our program, but I didn’t want to have an obvious disagreement in public. Even more, I didn’t know exactly what to say, but his nonchalance stung. Confounded, I gathered my water bottle, turned toward our dorms.
Toru waved as I left, bending down to begin his stretches.
We spent the next twenty-four hours avoiding each other. I got to dinner late that night, slowed by a sudden heaviness in my limbs. I sat with Ji-na at a different table than Toru, avoiding his gaze in the cafeteria, where the buffet always made me shudder. The Beijing training center kitchen specialized in fried chicken feet and a dish of sautéed rooster crowns, the scrawny claws and flimsy, yellowing cartilage pooling in oil at the bottom of their metal pans. I had been eating a lot of fried rice.
The next day in the classroom, Toru and I continued to keep our distance. Everything around me suddenly felt grayer, the fascination of East Asia fading to a dirty scrim of strange accents and nauseating foods. That night, we still had not acknowledged each other except for quick, sad nods in the dining room. Then the whole class went to one of the training center’s karaoke halls, where we were joined by members of the Chinese Ministry of Commerce for some sort of celebration—the cause of which I never fully understood but assumed had to do with the ubiquitous combination of business, drinking, and letting down your guard.
The music was booming, and three older Chinese ministry men grabbed me and Ji-na to join them onstage for a song. I had always hated karaoke, but I knew I had to play along. We chose a Beatles number and, blushing wildly, I muttered along while the men threw their arms around my and Ji-na’s shoulders, swaying back and forth, and belting out “Hey Jude” in their accented English. I noticed Toru slip out during our performance.
Ji-na giggled madly, but she was used to karaoke, and she stayed behind for one more tune while I bolted off the stage as our song ended.
They chose “Let It Be” next, and I sat on one of the tawdry lounge’s faux-leather couches, watching them sing under the too-bright lights from the little stage, and I smiled a frozen grin while the other students laughed and high-fived me. “Good job, good singing!” they enthused kindly. “You shouldn’t so embarrass! Berry good!” another added, until tears welled in my eyes. I was suddenly, poundingly, miserably homesick. The adventure of the last two months felt small and diminished, and the thought of making it through my last month of the program without Toru as my secret salvation seemed intolerable.
“Headache,” I said, pointing to my forehead, and I made another mad dash, this one for the door.
I walked around outside for a while, the training center and other campus buildings gloomy in the twilight, dark shapes hovering in humid air. I was rounding the corner of one building, heading back to our dorms, when I saw Toru on the path in front of me, a figure emerging out of the dusk.
“Oh. Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he answered, looking down, kicking an absent stone with his shoe.
“I had to leave, I . . . you know I hate karaoke,” I stumbled.
“I feel sad,” Toru said simply, looking up at me, meeting my eyes. “Don’t know what’s happened, why we don’t talking, but I feel low. Too low.” The lamps from the path haloed the space around him, his dark eyes reflecting a slice of their light.
I felt a swish of relief, as if the gray inside me were being swept by cool wind.
“Me, too,” I said. “I don’t want to fight, don’t want to not talk.”
“So what’s happened?” he asked. “Why did you change so sudden?”
“Why didn’t you want to come to Seoul with me for the weekend?”
“I didn’t say didn’t want. I said maybe.” Toru looked at me carefully, narrowing his eyes.
“Well, why only maybe?” Now I looked down and kicked my own imaginary stone, my little ballet flats growing dusty at the toe.
“Maybe, maybe I can come, I tried to explain,” he said. “I don’t know what program schedule will be, don’t know if I can take time away that weekend. Of course I want, but don’t know if I can. So maybe. I said maybe because it’s true.”
“Okay.” I was relieved but still frustrated. “But I need you to make clear that you want to come away with me, that if you don’t come, it’s only because you can’t. I didn’t understand that. I needed you to explain that.”
“So just misunderstanding?” he said, his expression loosening into softer planes. Then he shook his head. “Don’t like to say something that’s not true.” A pique of annoyance crept back into his tone. He glanced down again, then back up at me. The pathway light left half his face in shadow. “So I said maybe.”
Then he sighed and reached out to grab my hand. He told me he’d been too low without me next to him, that everything since the night before had felt too bad. “Doesn’t really matter, I guess,” he said, “why misunderstanding was. Just let’s be together again.”
I squeezed his hand and brought it quickly to my chest. Then, looking around to make sure no one could see us, I dropped it reluctantly. I still didn’t understand why he needed to be so literal all the time. Why did he have to focus on the “maybe” part, the pragmatic part, instead of on the part that matters, instead of explaining he wanted to be together? But I was too tired, suddenly, to work it through; I didn’t even know how to explain the term “pragmatic,” and mostly, I just wanted to surrender to the relief inside me.
We turned to walk back together in the direction of the dorms. “Yes,” I said gratefully. “Let’s just be together again.”
• • •
BY THE END OF JULY, we were staying just outside Seoul, our last stop in Asia before the students headed to Boston to finish their degrees. I’d gone to Jeju Island for my va
cation, and on my way back, Toru met me for an overnight at a hotel in the city. I felt a spike of joy at having a whole day and night alone with him when I could hold his hand in public, when he didn’t have to rise before dawn to sneak back to his room.
We explored the city’s downtown, then rested at a café among the cobbled streets and antique houses of the Insa-dong area. We drank sweet yuzu tea, hot and thick and lemony. Then we went to get haircuts in the neon-lined Gangnam neighborhood at a salon whose windows advertised American hair products, suggesting they might speak some English.
Sitting in the high salon chair, I turned my head while the Korean hairdresser cut and combed, and I watched Toru through the mirror on the room’s other side. I flushed warm at the ease and fluidity of his movements reflected back at me, the carefree shake he gave to his own clipped hair. He ran his fingers over his strong round skull, the baby whiteness beneath. He was turning toward me with a smile when the phone call came.
Hearing it ring, I turned my eyes back to my hairdresser, listened to the snipping shears slicing through my hair, watched the severed lanks in their slow deadfall to my feet. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that Toru reentered my line of vision.
At first, I didn’t notice the difference in his expression, didn’t see the disbelief fixed across his features. But then I heard him say, through the soft chops of scissors, “There’s been an accident.”
He stared blankly at me for a moment. Then, “I must to go back to Japan.”
My hair half cut, I turned fully toward him. “What?”
“I must go back, go home. I need to take cab to the airport and go back. Now.”
Confused, my hair still lopsided and unfinished, I paid the bill quickly, throwing money onto the counter, then followed Toru into the street. As if in a dream or slow-motion movie, we hailed a taxi. His mother was lying in a coma in a hospital in Japan, he told me as the cab veered toward the highway for the airport. A devout Catholic who went to church each morning, she had been run down by a drunk driver while walking just past dawn to pray. The car had dragged her some distance before the driver sped off. That had been Friday. Now it was Sunday, and Toru’s father and sister in Japan, who had been searching all weekend, had finally located his mother in an Osaka emergency room. They waited until they were sure to call Toru.
Suddenly, he shivered, and then, for the first time, I saw him break. Tears, then a shaking through his limbs.
By the time we reached the airport, the last flight out to Japan had already left. Toru would have to wait until morning. I stayed with him at the airport hotel while he became too numb to cry. We slept on and off, tears seeping down my own face as he lay rigid and still.
He left at dawn, and I went back to the training center, now numb myself. The Korean faculty director’s face was dark with anger as my cab pulled up. I had phoned the night before to tell him I would be staying with Toru at the airport. Now, as I stepped out of the idling taxi, he eyed me sideways, then sighed as if he had always known what was coming: this awful breach of decorum by his young American female faculty member. But I no longer cared. The secret of our relationship was out. Let them fire me, I thought, then turned silently on my heel, my hair still lopsided, and walked away.
When Toru flew back to Korea a few days later to finish the program, I went again to meet him at the airport. “My mother will never wake,” he told me. “The doctors say there is no chance she will live. But she will stay in coma for about a month.”
“Why did you come back?” I asked, unable to hide my shock. “Why not just stay there, forget about finishing the program?”
“It’s my duty to finish,” he said softly. “I’ll see her again in two weeks, when I go back to Japan before starting Boston module. She won’t wake anyway before then, they’re sure.” He paused. “And what can I do there, just waiting,” he finally said, not a question, not a finished sentence, not venturing to name what would come at the wait’s end.
I nodded, hoping mostly just to support him even though I didn’t really understand why he’d returned. Maybe the program’s scheduled normalcy will help him cope, I thought. Maybe he’d find some relief for a few more weeks before going back to say his final good-bye, to watch his mother slip from unconscious sleep to death. It was a reprieve I was praying would soothe him somewhat, until we got another call that night. A few hours after Toru had boarded his fight from Japan to Korea that afternoon, his mother died.
• • •
MY HEART BROKE for Toru. But I knew immediately what would happen next, and what it would mean for us.
I had learned enough about Toru’s culture and family, his place as chonan, or eldest son, to know that eventually he would return, indefinitely, to Osaka to care for his now-widowed father. In Toru’s worldview, one never, ever shirked one’s duty. So in nine months’ time, after finishing his graduate work in Boston, with the late May sun shining gloriously through the soft New England air, he would undoubtedly go home.
And if we were to be together, at least for the foreseeable future, I, too, would have to go back to Asia. I’d have to leave the only place I’d ever truly believed I could live with some sense of stability and security. And I would have to find some way to begin making Toru’s world my own.
I had two thoughts when I realized these were bound to be my options: there is no way I will be able to do this, and there is no way I cannot try.
THREE
TORU RETURNED TO SEOUL almost immediately after his mother’s funeral in Osaka, finishing the last week in Korea with the rest of his class. He was quieter than before, but he had always been reserved, especially in public.
For our last week in Asia, we still aimed for discretion, even though our overnights at the airport had clearly outed our relationship. In our few private moments together, I held Toru close, but I never saw him cry again, at least not until he was back at the airport nine months later, this time in Boston, leaving me.
When he first arrived in the U.S. on a warm August day soon after the Seoul module’s end, our life together in my hometown felt as close to perfect as I’d ever known. Toru’s company rented furnished apartments near campus for him and each of his Japanese colleagues. Only Toru and Makoto, the two youngest students, were unmarried, but none of the other Japanese men brought their spouses or children with them to the U.S., even though they would be gone for almost a year. This was not unusual: Japanese businessmen are frequently expected to have greater loyalty to their companies than to their wives. Most shufu, or housewives, I would come to learn later, accept this as fact. In a common arrangement known as tanshin-funin, many married couples live apart because of the husband’s job. Even Toru’s parents had done so for a few years, his father shuttling back from Tokyo to Osaka on weekends when the children were young.
I had quit teaching in the Asia executive program almost immediately after arriving home, but we decided I would never spend the night at Toru’s apartment, since the other Japanese students lived in his building, too, and we thought it would be weird to run into them as a couple. In addition to my one class that fall at the prison, I was also still teaching writing on the regular campus at the business school—four sections for first-year standard MBAs—so we rarely spent any time together there, either.
But on weekends, Toru would come to my little studio in the South End, and it felt like my world was pretty much complete. I was home, in a place I could navigate almost with my eyes closed. Unlike in Asia, when I walked down the sidewalk in Boston, not only could I read every street sign or store name, recognize all the food on market shelves, I could read the people, too. When someone smiled, laughed, shook his or her head, I knew exactly what was meant. The subtle but constant disorientation of the Far East lifted like a fog burning off in bright, sudden sun.
Weekday mornings, I would wake in my apartment and luxuriate in the feeling of home. On the weekends, I took Toru to my favorite c
afé in Central Square. I’d read the Sunday paper over a steaming soy chai latte and strawberry scone while he flipped through his business textbooks, eating plain buttered toast and drinking black tea with milk, exactly as he did every morning in Japan.
We went running along the Charles River from Boston to Cambridge, and I loved turning the corner together by the BU boathouse on the loop back, the huff of our breaths in sync, the city skyline rising along the water. Thin white boats unzipped the river’s surface as their rowers pulled their arms in unison. The air was crisp, gliding over my skin, a weightless force holding me perfectly in place. Beyond, sailboats bobbed in the distance like little Brahmin toys, while Beacon Hill rose up, the golden crown of its statehouse winking in the sun.
In public, our roles had reversed, especially from our dynamic in Japan; I was now the one who knew the language and culture. Of course, Toru could read English quite well; almost all his fellow citizens can. But most learn it in school from native Japanese instructors who teach grammar and vocabulary, not speaking. Despite his enrollment in an American graduate program, he still struggled verbally. When we went to restaurants, Toru would try to order with broken syntax—“Ahh, I’ll gonna have a steak?” he’d say, pointing to the menu—and the servers would always turn to me, even if Toru had been basically understandable, as if the very idea of communicating with an accented speaker made them nervous. I’d feel protective of him then and annoyed at the person waiting on us. But I couldn’t be sure that, in all my years of waitressing during graduate school in my twenties, I hadn’t done the same thing.
By now, our own communication challenges had woven a familiar rhythm into our relationship, fodder more often for humor than prolonged frustration. Toru had become used to my sayings and intonations, and I with his. Of course, there were still times when our conversations got tangled. One night at a Thai restaurant, he tried telling me about a giant crab he’d seen in Thailand, and I thought he was talking about a club, some kind of disco. He mimed jerky arms and legs, and I thought, Oh, he must be trying to explain a dance club. Weird-style dancing though.