The Lonesome Bodybuilder

by Yukiko Motoya

  “No Sansho today?” I said, noticing that the ever-present polka-dotted cart was nowhere to be seen.

  “No Sansho,” Kitae said distractedly. She looked over to a brown dog that was trying to climb the fence. Normally, she would have insisted I sit down and keep her company. I waited a little, wondering if something was wrong, but she didn’t say anything more.

  The sun was nearly directly overhead. The light, which spent the morning thwarted by the apartment building, would soon overcome it and blaze triumphantly down onto the bench. Picturing Kitae’s perfectly pale hair frizzling under its rays, I didn’t feel right just leaving, and asked her, “Would you like to go to a café?”

  Am I overstepping? Until now, we’d only met at the vet and the dog run. For a moment I worried, but Kitae glanced up with a look of mild surprise and said, “Sure. Let’s go. There’s a place I know near here that does a good red-bean shaved ice.” With that, she started walking with powerful steps that belied her age.

  We headed for a café off the main shopping street. It was an old-fashioned establishment with sooty lace curtains in the window. Kitae sat down at a corner table, took out a white terrycloth handkerchief from her pocket, and wiped her brow. “You know, I feel like a neapolitan spaghetti. Won’t you have a bite to eat too?”

  I decided to follow her recommendation of a red-bean shaved ice. I’d just had egg-and-lettuce fried rice for lunch.

  It seemed presumptuous to ask whether something had happened, so I picked at the shaved ice for a while, listening to the sound of the TV filtering out from behind the counter, until Kitae abruptly stopped stirring her glass of water with her fork.

  “Don’t think me heartless,” she said. When she saw I was at a loss as to how to respond, she continued, “I’m sorry, that’s a lie. I’d rather you did think so.”

  Either way, I thought, this doesn’t sound like a conversation to be taken lightly. “Of course, no, neither of those,” I said, dismantling the mound of ice with my spoon.

  “It’s about Sansho,” Kitae started, looking down at the neapolitan spaghetti the server had brought over. “His accidents just wouldn’t clear up.”

  If I remembered right, it had been midsummer last year that the accidents had started. Kitae had been going to the vet with this problem for almost a whole year.

  “I took him around to all the best clinics, but nothing seemed to help.” Kitae let out a sigh as she reached for the grated cheese.

  Our cat, Zoromi, had also gone through a phase of peeing outside her litter box when she’d first arrived as a kitten, perhaps as a form of protest at having been separated from her mother. The smell of cat urine had been overwhelming, and no amount of scrubbing with cleaner would get rid of it. What was more, once a spot on the rug was marked with her pee, Zoromi kept using the same spot. It was an expensive rug we’d invested in right after we got married, but, exhausted by the strain of repeatedly taking it in for dry cleaning, we’d tearfully evicted it from the apartment.

  While our issue had resolved in about a month, when I thought of the despair I felt, wondering whether we’d be locked in the urine battle forever, I still broke out in a sweat. Because I hadn’t heard any more about Sansho’s problem, I’d assumed it had cleared up too.

  But Kitae had been dealing with it all this time. Half admiringly, I asked, “So how is it now?”

  It must have been the strain of having kept quiet about it for nearly a year: the lid popped off Kitae’s mouth like a cork shooting out of a bottle.

  “I thought I was going to have a breakdown. I know you had your rug issue, but Sansho started in the hallway just inside our entrance. In the beginning I looked on the bright side, thinking at least laminate was easy to clean. But he kept going in the same corner, and eventually it soaked into the wood. The smell got worse, and after a while I had to tape up a litter pad there where the wall met the floor. It was no time to worry about appearances, I tell you.”

  Having said that much without stopping for breath, Kitae finally let go of the canister of grated cheese she’d been clutching. A thick layer of cheese had settled on her spaghetti, like the aftermath of a major snowfall.

  “But that was only the beginning,” she continued. “Maybe it never would have happened if I hadn’t interfered.”

  Feeling, perhaps, that he’d been deprived of his chosen spot, Sansho started to go to the toilet on anything and everything fabric in the apartment. He went around deliberately marking cushions, laundry, the couch, and even the bed where Kitae and her husband slept. The two of them tried every tactic suggested by the vets, but nothing worked. They upholstered the sofa and the bed in litter pads and packing tape. They even covered their comforter and their pillows. As a result, there was an unpleasant rustling sound when they tried to sleep. At one point, they tried confining Sansho to his cat carrier. But he kept up such a piteous cry you’d have thought he was watching his mother die, and Kitae couldn’t stand it. That was when an acquaintance mentioned that a change of scenery had cured their cat of the same problem. Kitae had started taking Sansho outside as though clinging to a lifeline.

  “Do you know how many litter boxes we have around the apartment right now, San?” Kitae said, watching the back of the bored-looking waitress who’d just topped up our water. “Thirteen. Thirteen! I don’t know anymore whether the cat lives with us or if we’re the ones staying in the cat’s bathroom!”

  Kitae laughed. I still didn’t know what to say, so I just kept on ferrying the red beans one by one to my mouth. Her whole situation seemed like a muddy bog where struggling would only get you sucked in deeper.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “We’ve had to decide to let him go.” Of course, they would have preferred to find him another home, but there was no way someone would take him. They considered leaving him in the grounds of a shrine, but it seemed unlikely that Sansho, at nearly eleven, could start over as a stray. They’d searched and searched for a solution, until Kitae had stopped being able to eat.

  That explains why I haven’t seen her for a while, I thought.

  “Which was why we thought of the mountains.”

  “The mountains?” I said.

  There were tears in Kitae’s eyes. “Yes, we thought the mountains, that could work.”

  Having said that much, Kitae finally started on her untouched neapolitan spaghetti. I realized I’d grown quite chilly because of the red-bean ice, and asked the server, who was watching TV behind the counter, to turn down the AC. I glanced at Kitae, who looked like a shrunken balloon, gazing down at her spaghetti and moving her fork obscurely in the noodles.

  For our honeymoon, we’d gone to the Andes.

  My husband, who had happened to see a clip of Machu Picchu on TV while we were deciding on our destination, had suggested we might as well take the opportunity to go to South America.

  With no background knowledge whatsoever, we’d signed up for a package tour recommended by the travel agent. I only found out after we’d paid the fee that Machu Picchu was a historic ruin of an ancient city that came into view atop a cliff at an altitude of approximately 2,400 meters above sea level. To get there, we’d have to take a plane, a bus, a train, and then another bus. It wasn’t a trip to be taken lightly. Every informational website I checked emphasized the importance of making sure we were physically prepared for the rigors of what would be a demanding route.

  We decided to start taking nightly walks to build up our stamina. But my husband would stop after a thirty-minute circuit of the local park, saying he’d had enough.

  “If it comes to it, San, I’ll just rest at the hotel, and you can record it all on video for me,” he said.

  But to my surprise, once we were in Cusco, while other members of the tour went down one after the other with altitude sickness, my husband alone walked around as if he’d sprouted wings on his back. I held my breath, thinking he was overdoing it and would crash later in the trip, but the next
day, when we reached Machu Picchu, he said, “I feel a lot stronger than usual,” and continued exploring the ruins with even more spring in his step.

  “I guess I just needed more altitude this whole time,” he said once we were back in Lima, the capital. While the other tourists, having recovered from the thinner air, were out making the most of an hour of free time, my husband reverted to his usual self and refused to even acknowledge the possibility of getting up from his seat at Starbucks. That was the memory that came to mind when Kitae mentioned mountains.

  A few days later, my friend Hasebo, whom I’d known since high school, asked me to organize the after-party for her upcoming wedding. At first I demurred, saying there must be someone better for the job, but she said I seemed like the one with the most spare time to plan, which was true, so I agreed. For a while my days were as busy as back when I’d had my office job, and before I knew it the rainy season had given way to high summer.

  “Look at you go,” my husband would say every time he noticed me rushing around with party preparations in the blazing heat. “I can’t believe you said yes. I wouldn’t do it if you paid me.”

  “What else could I do? It’s Hasebo,” I said, feeling offended. He’d obviously forgotten how much she had done for us at our wedding.

  “Hasebo—she was married before, right, already has kids? Then what difference does it make? Why are they even bothering with a wedding?”

  “That’s why they’re doing the reception with family only, and all their friends are invited to the after-party,” I said, recalling how I’d taken charge of most of the preparations for our wedding too.

  “Make sure you get her to pay you, if it turns out to be too much work,” he said, and without waiting for a response to this piece of totally unreasonable advice, turned back to the TV.

  Each time I looked at my husband lying on the couch, I had the strange impression I was living with a new kind of organism that would die if it exerted itself in any way. Even when I told him about Sansho’s toilet accidents, his only response was to pick up Zoromi from the floor and say, “Zoromi! You’re not going to cause me any extra trouble, are you? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  How was it that he could have so little compunction about always letting someone else pick up the slack? I wanted to ask, but no doubt this exotic creature would consider the question just another thing that was too much effort to deal with. How had I ended up married to a completely different species of being from me?

  I’d seen Kitae in the dog run several times since our last conversation, but between being short of time and feeling hesitant, I hadn’t gone over to talk to her.

  Do you really think Sansho’s going to make it in the mountains? I’d almost said this to her as we stepped out of the café when we last met. But just before I could, my lips had crumbled and instead I’d said, “I’ll try the neapolitan next time,” and on that irrelevant note we’d gone our separate ways. I resolved to ask her the next time we talked, but at the same time I also expected I wouldn’t be able to, and those two feelings had hung suspended in the air ever since.

  I was on my way back from a big stationery store in Shinjuku where I’d acquired supplies of construction paper and self-adhesive vinyl sheets for the after-party when I remembered that the dental clinic where Hakone worked was nearby. I decided to drop in. I hadn’t had a chance to thank her properly for her and Senta’s help selling the refrigerator.

  As I went down the steps leading to the basement floors of her office building, I saw Hakone at the reception desk and caught her eye. While I was dithering about whether to go inside or not, Hakone said something in the ear of the other receptionist and came out to me, pushing open the glass door.

  “San! What brings you here?” She was probably surprised by how much shopping I had.

  “I was just passing by.” I put down the stationer’s branded bags. “Thank you so much for everything with the auction. It’s quite a lot of work, isn’t it, selling things online?”

  Once I’d realized that taking photos for the listing was only the beginning of a process that involved a mountain of tasks like signing up for a seller ID and answering questions from watchers, I’d ended up passing the whole business over to the two of them. When Hakone messaged me saying someone had asked when and where the refrigerator had been purchased, I took my time looking for the warranty. Then Senta called and said, “Sis, our rating goes down if we don’t respond immediately.” Apparently even a small drop in your rating meant that buyers would avoid doing business with you. I could hardly repay Hakone’s kindness in letting us use her seller ID by damaging her reputation, so I’d looked frantically for the paperwork. The whole thing had been a weight on my mind until the buyer left feedback that they’d safely received the item.

  “It’s amazing that someone actually bought it for seventy thousand yen, though,” Hakone said. “When we posted our old fridge, it got zero bids. Nothing.”

  “It is. Especially since I was planning to pay a waste collection company to get rid of it. Seventy thousand yen for that!”

  “I’d never even heard of it, but I guess it’s a really popular foreign brand?”

  “I bet it was his ex-wife who’d wanted it to begin with. He’d never go for anything so flashy himself.”

  “But he sprang for it.”

  “He was trying to impress her. Oh, Hakone, I think you’re being called.” The other receptionist was waving and pointing to the phone.

  “I’m almost done for the day, so if you want to wait a few minutes, I can leave with you.”

  “Okay. Why not, while I’m here?”

  I followed Hakone into the waiting room. Inside the space, which smelled like disinfectant, a woman with long hair was sitting on the bench, head lowered, looking at the floor. “We get a lot of slightly strange patients here,” Hakone had told me once, when I’d come in to get my teeth whitened.

  “Strange?” I’d asked.

  “Our clinic director doesn’t believe in tooth extraction, and has books and gives talks about how you shouldn’t let your dentist extract any teeth, no matter what. Because of that, we get patients from all over the country who believe their lives have been ruined by losing teeth under other doctors. Which gives it a different atmosphere from other clinics, I guess. I’d recommend going elsewhere for treatment.”

  Hakone was six years younger than I was, but it had been nearly ten years since Senta had first introduced us, so I didn’t have to worry about her not feeling at ease to tell me what she really thought. She looked like a lady-in-waiting from a Doll Festival display, and I thought her creaseless eyelids were cute on her, but she seemed to have a complex about them and once seriously asked me whether I thought she should have plastic surgery. She had scaled my teeth for me when I’d come here before, even though, as far as I knew, she wasn’t a qualified dental hygienist. Without thinking too deeply about it, I’d asked about some stubborn discoloration, whereupon she’d said, “I’m sure a quick polish will get rid of that for you,” and had gone at the tooth surface with the drill. Thanks to that incident, I still had a tiny dimple on the bottom of one of my front teeth.

  I sat on a bench behind the one where the other woman was, flipping through a magazine. Soon Hakone came out of the door behind the reception desk, having changed out of her uniform. When I got up, the bag with the construction paper rustled loudly, but the woman on the bench kept looking at the floor, as she’d done the whole time, and didn’t move an inch.

  “He says his ex-wife’s been sending him strange garbled emails recently,” I said. We’d found a table in the seating area of the department store’s food hall. I was still thinking about the ex-wife following the refrigerator conversation.

  “You must be concerned,” said Hakone, sounding anything but as she took a pair of disposable chopsticks out of their packet.

  “Maybe I should have gone for that one too,” I said enviously, looking into Hakone’s bento box
as I took the rubber band off my own.

  “You can have two slices of my steak if you give me some of your eel.”

  I’d brought her to the store, promising to buy her something new to wear, or anything else she wanted, but Hakone had headed straight for the escalator down to the basement food hall and asked for a bento. “I saw it on the local news the other day. They had a feature on department store deli eats, and the Spicy Fillet Steak Summer Set Bento just looked so delicious,” she said, flattening her plump eyelids in anticipation.

  Maybe partly because of the TV feature, the late-afternoon deli counters were thronged with people. Banners positioned around the floor advertised the Beat the Heat Bento Expo.

  Hakone swiftly referred to the floor guide and said, “This way,” and took off without sparing a glance at the stalls she passed. I followed, but never having been very good at walking through crowds, I kept barging into people’s shoulders, and by the time I caught up, she had already joined the line for the steak bento. I’d planned to just wait for her, but I saw a banner for the Special Selection Four-Eel Taste Test Bento and was tempted into getting one. It featured eel sourced from the Shimanto River, Lake Hamana, the Mikawa region, and Miyazaki Prefecture, grilled both with sauce and without. I carefully took a piece of each and placed them on top of Hakone’s rice.

  “Do you think he’s still getting them? The weird garbled messages?”

  “Probably.”

  “Has he said?”

  “No, but you can just tell these things sometimes.”

  “Huh. Aren’t you worried? Didn’t you say his ex-wife was really good-looking?”

  “Really good-looking. Like that actress from the movies.”

  “And she’s got long legs?”

  “Really long legs.”

  “How did he split up with a person like that and end up marrying you?”

  “I wonder.” What would you think if you saw his true form? I thought. I shivered, then looked up and saw there was an AC vent embedded in the ceiling right above my head. “Hakone, are you and Senta thinking about getting married yet?” I asked, getting a light blouse out of my bag.