I buy a few cookies at a grocery store and use the toilet, a dreamy pink room with buttons beside the toilet labeled “please to wash bottom” and “press to play back flushing sound to muffle toilet sound” and “Powerful Deodorizer increased absorption strength for removing odors” and I wonder why that isn’t on a T-shirt.
Back at the hotel, I drift in the sleep of lost time zones and have a strange threatening dream of people baked into casseroles with only their heads showing, revolving in a display case.
I met Takeshi in San Francisco, where we were both visitors. He was a young Buddhist priest fresh from the training temple, sent to the United States to polish his English—already good, but with a thick accent. I was visiting the Zen temple where he was staying. There was no good reason for us to become friends, but we had a shared urge to exploit each other, to be a person one knew on the other shore. The confusing fog of status between us—an older woman and a younger man, foreigners, a lay teacher and a priest—was not much of a concern. In Japan, he had the upper hand except for the difference in age, an odd gap somewhere past older sister. But I am American, the mother of two grown sons, and comfortable with the peculiar dance of Buddhist rank and how much of it mattered in the soft social world of the States. Shortly after we met, he told me that he had no memory of his life before the age of eighteen because he had had a blood clot from “too much running.” Maybe that helped too; maybe his amnesia included the early social programming that made him uncomfortable with such things as friendship outside the lines.
He was not free of all his conditioning. He is the eldest son of a temple priest, and the pressure to follow the father’s path in such a family has no equal in America outside the military and the police. In some families, it doesn’t matter if you believe in Buddhism any more than it matters if you like the army; the path is laid out the moment you are born. But the finishing-school trip to America and the city on the water had tainted him. He loved it so, and longed to stay. I’ve been told by other Japanese friends that it takes only one visit to the US to become less than wholly Japanese—to feel forever a little awkward in the homeland. To be changed by those soft social boundaries.
Takeshi and I hung out for a few days, went out for meals, talked about a lot of things. He helped me with my poor Japanese and I helped him with his much better English. We wandered the streets of San Francisco, admiring the light; he was particularly entranced with the bakeries. We made plans to meet in Japan some months later. Before we said goodbye, he told me (a little ashamed and a little sad) that he wished for more than a longer stay in America. He wished for another life, to be another.
“Not go back to be a priest,” he said, not go back to his father’s role in a little temple attached to his parents’ house where he and the unknown wife he was expected to find would live for the rest of his life.
After a day of recovery, much of it spent dozing on the thin hotel bed, I find my way onto the Shinkansen bullet train. The bullet train is as comfortable as a living room and bento girls walk up and down the aisle bearing hot tea and tidy meals. The emerald rice fields and factory towns, the massive apartment blocks and marshes of tall grass pass in a blink.
Takeshi is waiting on the platform, younger and shorter than I remember. He is dressed in the neat pressed samue, the clothes that mark him as a priest and that he wears almost all the time when he is not in formal robes. He looks pleased to see me, almost giddy. His—and his parents’—house is connected to a small complex of temple buildings, a narrow, cramped two-story box. He shows me to my double tatami room with a thin futon and buckwheat pillow, and then to the bath, where every guest will want to go—sink and changing area in one room, shower and tub in the other, automatic toilet in yet another.
I bathe and we eat a long, long dinner with his mother and grandmother, kneeling on tatami for hours. His grandmother’s spine is deformed; the postwar years of hunger twisted an entire generation. She is barely four feet tall and bent almost ninety degrees at the waist. She is also, I begin to suspect, demented, giggling, touching my sleeve, murmuring to herself. I have brought gifts, and give her a large fancy bar of soap. She tries to eat it.
His mother presses more sake on me and I refuse, but Takeshi advises me to drink—to, as another Japanese friend told me, “Get it over with.” I go to bed a bit drunk, cold, and feeling immensely clumsy in the little room with its precise and simple furnishing.
The next day, we drive for hours into the Noto Peninsula to visit a few important temples and spend the night at an onsen, a hot springs resort, in the traditional town of Wajima. My simple Japanese won’t do for research, and I know that a male priest will open doors for me that I could never open as a woman alone. In his turn, he is testing the way. He hopes to lead small tours up to Wajima, a center of traditional lacquerware—a way to make extra money and, he tells me frankly, get away from home and the temple and the endless, numbing duties of the priest.
He gets lost several times. “Oh!” he says calmly. “Wrong road.” We double back, and he makes a note. We talk about San Francisco, his memories of the city burnished like a dream, and his so-limited future destiny. Egrets bob in the fields of deep-green rice, water glinting silver between the shoots. This is hilly country, a wilder land, green and empty, with fog twisting between dark hinoki cedars.
We reach Yokoji, once a vital center of Soto Zen Buddhism in Japan, and now cared for as a historical site. This was also a center for women’s practice, and to my delight there is another priest visiting who knows all about the women’s history here. He guides us around the property without hurry, showing me where the women’s buildings used to be in a moist, shady dell, telling stories of the distant and the recent past. Takeshi stands one step behind me in the translator’s corner, speaking quietly for us both before we finally say goodbye.
We stop for bitter foamy green tea and adzuki-bean biscuits in a tea shop; Diana Ross is singing “Love Child.” The young woman who bows deeply when she brings the tea is wearing a T-shirt that reads A POSITIVE SOCIAL CONTAGION.
I ask Takeshi, not for the first time, to justify the policy that still keeps women out of most of the training temples. After all, they were welcomed at Yokoji, alongside the men—centuries ago. Then they were not. I had wanted to do such a thing; I had wanted it greatly; I had made the start of an effort to leave my life for a time and do what he had done. What he had not wanted to do and did anyway, I had wanted to do very much and could not.
“So many difficulties,” he says. “Men and women practicing together, no. Must be separate. And that is against the Dharma. And so better for no women.”
I correct his English. “Better for you,” I say, “that there are no women.”
He is pleased with this construction. “Yes!” he agrees. And that, he seems to think, is that.
A typhoon is coming, he tells me after talking briefly with the tea-shop attendant. The rain is slashing at us sideways as we dash to the car, distant thunder pounding. We drive on, past pine trees and seagrass and stands of bamboo bending in the slate-gray storm. We round the curve of the peninsula and are beside the sea all at once, the entire distant horizon black.
Takeshi is unworried about the storm, and we stop as planned at Sojiji-soin, a training monastery much like the one he attended. A crowd of young men in samue meet us cheerfully at the gate, a few greeting Takeshi by name. They are younger than my sons, compact and homogenous, seeming glad of the disruption in their day and each taking a turn to shake hands with the American woman. It is a beautiful place, dim and moist in the rain, thick with story and time. In such a place, the group moves as a body—sits and eats and sleeps as a body, turned in one direction. One doesn’t love it or hate it; one just does it. Most of these young men are simply the eldest sons of temple priests.
We reach Wajima in a torrent. “What do you want to do?” I ask.
“Drink beer!” he says. He stops at a store and returns with beer, whiskey, and grilled-shrimp-and-pepper-
flavored Pringles.
We check into the onsen, a great curve of hotel next to a rocky, wave-spattered shore. He directs me to the baths, tells me to enjoy a soak, and to meet him in the dining room—“in your yukata,” he adds, the plain kimono available in my room. I am the only woman in the huge women’s bath, where a deep tiled tub is filled with clear, steaming water next to a wall of glass looking out at the sea. There is a precise etiquette for the bath and I’m glad to be alone; I’ve stumbled through the steps several times in front of silent, observant women. The bath is delicious and the green water reflects the strange light: harsh beams of white sun breaking through the sooty storm here and there, the frothy waves splattering the black rocks below.
It is strange to go to the dining room in what feels to me like a bathrobe and slippers that are far too small. But all the guests scattered here and there are wearing yukata as well, as are the men in the bar watching a samurai soap opera, as is Takeshi, who is already there, waiting. He orders and soon large lacquer trays arrive, with many compartments filled with small servings of all kinds of food.
Takeshi spears a prawn, chews, looks around. He is enjoying this little trip away from home. I think he is enjoying the fact that people aren’t sure what to make of us together here. He has had one taste of other, and it was enough. I’ve had more than one—how else does a round American woman of a certain age end up practicing a foreign religion? I could calculate the probability, but what is probable in a human life? There have been times when I thought it would be better not to taste at all, because a new taste lingers. It reminds us, always, of what might have been, what might be otherwise, if one had chosen otherwise—if even a single step had been different. We are all gaijin, strangers to our own lives at times, waiting for that train.
We go back to his room and sit on the tatami by the window, where thick white clouds slide across the sea in front of the implacable storm. He pours me a little whiskey and leans back with an enormous bottle of beer and we watch the typhoon breathe and slowly fade. We don’t talk. He looks terribly sad, sitting cross-legged on a thin futon, staring out to sea.
I love it here. I love Japan, the odd collision of known and strange. I love the way they sometimes do small and ordinary things so well: a giant bee in a fragrant flower beside a trickle of water from a bamboo tube where nothing need be at all. I love Zen and the practice, the temples and the silence; I love what I chose. Takeshi sits and drinks and watches and finally falls asleep, the yukata still neatly tied and his big bare feet crossed on the tatami.
The next morning I wake up early and sit by the big windows, watching the rough shore, aware that I am coming down with a cold, my chest hot and tight. There is a fine misting rain over the thick green hills. We are going to the market and another temple full of young men a lot like my friend and not much like me. I feel a little wretched and full of joy; I love it here, and I don’t have to stay.
For Sandra
Robert Duncan
—With an Afterword by Margaret Fisher
“Poems in Prose & Verse,” by Robert Duncan.
Copyright © 2016 the Jess Collins Trust, reproduced with permission.
POEMS IN PROSE & VERSE
1.
The warbler draws, I
write, drawing the words,
what do the birds say
sweeter than the water
of the friendship, amitié
that would guide my
hand, I too, even as Kitaj’s
little song beneath his
breath
to sing
2.
Talking of cities, Rome,
Venice, London, New York,
Paris where we are, San
Francisco where we will yet
to be—how lovely vistas
and residences come to us,
walks and rests. As if just
for our souls’ sake, for our
spirits these concerts, these
museums, these façades,
these rumors of great hours
were presented. We were
meant, all our lives, to be
here where we together are
wherever
in this change of weather
3.
What else could ever be a
gift but this little suite of
poems given me in addressing
you as a form of gift—
Of my hand, this script, this
souvenir we will remember.
Let the sun
attend some morning
light alone it seems can say
in transforming our rooms and
rues, “bathing” our intent.
It is a ruse of this verse
to need the universe
to give a sense of what
it means I in turn form
for a gift, for a membrance
of being born—
4.
It must be simple and so
light. It must go
with only words to touch
such centers in the soul
a smile might spread
and like a drawing
be immediate, searching
and yet beyond account
speak for me
I did not know what else
to you Love’s mystery
could come thru
in riming a response
in the beat the heart
means to be felt
entirely gift .
5.
So there must always be lovely
women in me calling forth this
delight in being, this consolation
in reverie. Dark as the dream
be, and harsh as the measures
of what proclaims itself Reality—
always clear, always sweet
this cup of water Rachel at the
fountain offers me. Always
cool and medicine complete,
her voice, her touch, her
momentary lingering regard
softly softly wood dove
I hear the last echoes in the
well. How soft, how close
the star above.
one copy only made of this
little suite that would be
sweet for Sandra Fisher
her birthday gift May 6
1982 at 61 rue Galande
—Robert Duncan
Afterword
Margaret Fisher
SANDRA FISHER AND ROBERT DUNCAN
Robert Duncan wrote five “Poems in prose & verse” to Sandra Fisher for her thirty-fifth birthday. The poems memorialize an event that transpired between them in Paris. Because the poems allude to an aspect of their friendship that we cannot know, the principals having passed away, this introduction will set the scene: a seduction scene, “sweeter than the water / of the friendship …” (poem 1).
In the spring of 1982, Robert joined his good friends the American painters Sandra Fisher and R. B. Kitaj for a month of work in Paris. They expected to set up shop in a building near the rue de l’Odéon and the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where, according to Sandra, Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola) had lived when he painted his quixotic canvas The Street. In the end, Sandra and Kitaj rented apartments in a different building, but Balthus remained ever present in their thoughts, letters, and conversations during their yearlong Paris sabbatical. They had recently made a pilgrimage to the Villa Medici in Rome to see interiors memorialized in paint by Balthus—fireplace, windows, baseboards, floor and wall designs—against which he had placed such vibrant and shocking nude figures as to implicate his viewer in a fantasy world of seduction. Since January the two painters had taken to posing their own models in the first-floor apartment by the heat of the fireplace. The memory of Balthus’s Roman light tempered the cold, damp months in Paris that passed under the shadow of the ancient church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Sandra wrote to me in the coded language of nineteenth-century romanti
cism:
From my earlier fears of the cold winter here, Paris has become the most romantic place possible! The fireplace at rue Rollin has become the center of my life. Of course, I have twice as much work preparing for a model than I do in London. Also, am painting a small head of M____, the copyist I met in the Louvre. He’s extremely handsome, with a blue serpent tattooed on his forehead! Since he doesn’t speak English, my French is improving enormously!
Robert’s arrival mid-April, followed by mine soon after, lowered the temperature for a time. We were no match for fires stoked by long hours of drawing and painting the nude figure, undoubtedly fueled by fantasies of Balthus and his marble fireplace. Or so I thought, until I came upon Robert’s poem among Sandra’s papers. “It is a ruse of this verse / to need the universe / to give a sense of what / it means” (poem 3). That was written for Sandra, who knew what Robert was getting at. The outside reader needs something of Sandra too, for access to Robert’s meaning. Her unmatched beauty and keen intellect, augmented by erudition, consummate social accomplishment, restless ambition, expressed sensuality, and a predilection for fantasy and seduction combined to produce a potent cocktail. Many men never recovered from her effect on them, nor wanted to. Robert appears to recover his equilibrium with a “souvenir” in a new genre, “a little booklet cahier,” meant to deflect Sandra’s charms, savor the moment, and catalog, in poem five, the contradictory forces that inform his identity.
My older sister made her reputation on the male nude, sometimes caught in flagrante delicto, in the act, and always as the natural object of her desire. It is the subject for which she will best be remembered. Eighteen years after her death, Germaine Greer—feminist author, art critic, and provocateur—counted Sandra among the best six painters of the male nude: Pontormo, Rubens, Degas, Munch, Schiele, and Fisher. Sandra often said she wanted to bring the heat of close studio quarters into the painting, the excitement engendered between painter and model, and wanted to get that into the painting. Sandra’s American contemporaries had used the nude to rail against the socioeconomic conditions of their time. Like Balthus, Sandra’s nudes evidence no discontent, no displacement, crime, malaise, ennui, social inequality, or political bias. But unlike Balthus, who refused to link his paintings to his biography, Sandra made no secret of the pleasure she took in the anticipated scandal of her subject or in the seduction of her models. Her models, for their part, often enjoyed the lasting friendship that followed upon her charm and seduction.
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