The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  “So what is he,” Ancash asked, innocently enough. “Fiancé? Ethnic cousin? He seems pretty interested in your affairs.”

  “He’s a friend,” I said. We were drinking shochu straight from the bottle by then, passing it back and forth. “Why, are you worried because he’s bigger than you?”

  Ancash smiled. “Whatever chastity you have is safe with me,” he said, taking a shot and handing it back. “I fuck boys.”

  I choked, then tried to mask it. The most intelligent thing I could think of to say was, “So you are gay.”

  Ancash lifted an eyebrow. “Have you been taking bets?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Did you lose money? Or did I just make you millions?”

  I took another mouthful and wiped the back of my hand over my lips. I’d given up on grace and seduction. “I think I just lost, actually.”

  “How much?”

  “Not money. I mean—I was putting the moves on you. You know? I was going to seduce you. So I think I lost.”

  Ancash laughed out loud. I think it was the first time I’d heard him laugh, and the sound startled me. It made him seem much younger than he looked.

  “How were you going to do it?”

  “Seduce you? I’ve been playing it by ear. I was looking for my opening. I figured showing up at your apartment was already pretty blatant—with most men that would be enough.”

  “Maybe you were just being neighborly.”

  “But I don’t live here.”

  Ancash considered this. “How were you going to make the transition from stalking to seduction?”

  “We’re almost there. We’re sitting in your window, we’re drunk—well, I’m drunk—and you just asked about Praveen. So the way this should’ve gone is: you’d be all Is he your boyfriend? and I’d be all No, are you jealous? and you’d be all—whatever, I don’t know what you’d be all, but then I’d be like Because you don’t have to be. And then I’d kiss you.”

  “That’s an awful line,” Ancash said. “If you kissed me after a line like that, I’d wash my mouth out with soap.”

  I had to concede that Ancash had a point. “Okay, well then maybe it would go like this: we’d be staring out the window at Tokyo, and you’d be thinking about all the people you’ve loved and lost, and I’d be thinking about all the people I’ve loved and lost, and then we’d turn to each other. Slowly. In slow motion. And our eyes would lock.”

  “And we’d kiss?”

  “I mean, I guess. That’s usually how it goes.”

  “Would it be good?”

  “It would be fantastic. I’d be fantastic. Would you be fantastic?”

  “I’d be pretty fantastic, yeah.”

  “Well then, there you go.” I sighed, disappointed. “You’ve lost too. It’s your fault that we’ve lost an opportunity to be fantastic.”

  Ancash took the bottle of shochu from my hand and set it on the windowsill. Gently, deliberately, he took my face in his hands and turned it toward his. “Are you thinking about all the people you’ve loved and lost?”

  “Yeah,” I lied. I couldn’t take my eyes off his mouth. There was something about it—some uneven line, something a little lopsided—that made it look like he was always smiling and frowning at the same time.

  “Me too,” Ancash said, and brushed his lips against mine. They were cool and smooth, softer than I’d expected. I kissed him back, reflexively, and he let me; after a moment, he deepened the kiss and I felt the gentle slippery brush of his tongue against mine. And then he pulled back and let go of my face. I blinked at him.

  “And now we’ve been fantastic,” he said.

  “You really for real sleep with men?”

  “I really for real do.”

  “And not with women?”

  “Generally not.”

  “Generally?”

  Ancash shrugged. “Sometimes I make exceptions.”

  “Am I an exception?” I asked, less calculating and more genuinely curious.

  “I don’t know about an exception,” Ancash said, “but you’re certainly exceptional.”

  He was looking out the window so I couldn’t see his expression. I was going to ask him what that meant, and then I didn’t. We sat, side by side, passing the bottle back and forth. It was smooth and cool to the touch, like Ancash’s mouth had been, like his skin was when I leaned my head against his bare shoulder sometime during that long strange night, and let his quiet voice lull me to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  WE WERE INSEPARABLE AFTER THAT. I don’t know why. Even then it didn’t make much sense to me. But then again, maybe it was the only thing that did. Ancash dazzled me, he made me laugh and he didn’t ask questions and he called me things that I didn’t understand. Maria delle Tigri, sometimes. Maria della Notte Fonda. I would ask him what that meant, and he’d say, “That’s a painting by a famous Italian painter.” Or: “That’s a famous opera.” Or: “That was the name of Columbus’s fourth ship. You know, the one that got lost.” Ancash was always making me someone famous and captivating, singled out of history and held up to the light. And when I was in Ancash’s world, when I was famous mysterious Maria, I felt at home in a way I couldn’t remember having felt anywhere.

  * * *

  —

  I THOUGHT, LATER, THAT IF I hadn’t been so blinded by Ancash, I might have seen what was coming with Praveen. Maybe I could have stopped him. But maybe not. Ancash once joked that the virtuous may be the last to fall prey to vice, but they always fall the hardest; he was not thinking of Praveen, but I was.

  The girl was named Irina, Praveen told me. She worked in a kyabakura. They’d met outside her club—she was leaving work, Praveen was waiting for a taxi. It was love at first sight. She was charmed by his courtesy, and he was charmed by her Ukrainian accent and demure smile. He was also charmed—instead of repelled, as I would have thought—by the English translation of her profession. It soon became clear, however, that Praveen had an image in his head of “cabaret girl” that belonged more in a blushing 1950s musical than a Tokyo club.

  “Do you know what she does all night?” I asked Praveen. I was sitting on a cleared edge of his counter, eating one of the fruit cups that I’d brought him. Praveen had a cold and had canceled his classes, but he didn’t look sick. He looked uncharacteristically happy.

  “She does talking to people,” Praveen said. “That is how cabaret clubs work in Japan, just friendly and pretty girls talk to people. She helps men practice their English.”

  I took another spoonful of fruit and debated in my head whether or not to disabuse Praveen of his notions. “Well, yeah,” I said at last. “But you know how it works? There’s a menu, right? With pictures, and you can just point and ask for the girl you want.”

  Praveen was already frowning. “I do not like this conversation ‘menu,’ ” he reproved me. “You are talking about human peoples, Maria.”

  “That’s what it is though,” I protested. “So you order the woman, and she comes and listens to you talk and sure, you pay per hour, but most of the real money comes afterwards. She gets off work, you’re waiting, there’s a love hotel down the street—”

  Praveen cut me off again, angrily. “She is not going to love hotel down the street!” he said, sharply. “Irina is very good girl, Maria. She works hard for her family, they are waiting in Ukraine and very depending on her. She care about family, Maria.” He didn’t even need to say the not like you. “All she does is talking to men. But she likes me, she is thinking of quit her job and finding new one and I help her looking.”

  I ate a lone grape to buy some silence. I hadn’t met Irina yet, but I knew that Praveen and I, when we looked at her, would see very different things. Praveen would see all the innocence she was giving up, and I would see all the calculating knowledge that she wa
s gaining. And so, that afternoon, there just didn’t seem like much of a point to arguing.

  “Been on a lot of dates?” I asked him.

  “We see each other very often,” he reported, beaming.

  “Cool,” I said. “Good luck, man.”

  I would find out later that every one of those dates had occurred within the club, and Praveen had paid an hourly rate like everybody else.

  * * *

  —

  ANCASH QUIT HIS JOB BARTENDING the same day I got into my first street fight.

  The two were connected, of course. The owner of the bar was a stocky Romanian who felt strongly about maintaining the chastity (and presumably the heterosexuality) of his son. His son was a blond Ganymede, who felt equally strongly in the opposite direction. Ancash ended up in the middle, willingly enough, and so when I showed up to meet him after work, he was being held by two bouncers while the owner beat the shit out of him. In that moment, I flashed back to my first encounter with Ancash, blood-smeared but calm, and it seemed to make much more sense.

  What happened next is testimony to Ancash’s pervasive influence, or at least the extent to which I felt stupidly invincible when I was with him. I screamed at the top of my lungs and launched myself onto the back of the owner. He staggered under my sudden weight, then shook me loose long enough to backhand me. I reattached myself, clinging to him like a furious rat, gnawing on his shoulder and getting my blood all over his shirt. It was Ancash who pulled me away, and we fled through the streets of Roppongi while the bouncers shouted obscenities after us in Romanian and English, but didn’t follow.

  We jumped onto a JR train without checking to see where it was going. It was packed with businessmen and club kids, and while we got some glances, nobody bothered us despite the fact that we were both bleeding. We got off a few stops later at Shinjuku Station and went into the same restroom to clean up. A man who had been washing his hands at the sink glanced at the two of us and left in a hurry. When I looked in the mirror it struck me how similar we were in that moment: flushed, mouths red, eyes glittering.

  “That was crazy,” I breathed, mopping blood off my face with a paper towel while Ancash examined his ribs gingerly. “I’ve never done that before.”

  Ancash flashed me a look. “You’re wild,” he said, and even he seemed surprised.

  “Never seen a girl fight before?” His ribs were already purpling over, and you could see little starburst-ridges of color from someone’s knuckles.

  Ancash shook his head and met my eyes in the mirror. “Never seen anyone fight for me before,” he said. We were both quiet. I had no idea what he was thinking.

  We ended up buying shochu from a conbini store and drinking it on the steps of Shinjuku Station. I loved the color and chaos of Shinjuku—the kids decked out on their way to some crazy club, the host boys walking in trios with their hair in dyed-gold manes, the cabaret girls in high heels and short dresses, the salarymen rushing home (or to a bar, more likely), the foreigners stunned by all the neon and the TV screens set into the sides of buildings. Tokyo had all the power of New York but was more dangerous. In New York, you were always aware that you were fighting to survive. In Tokyo, you got seduced into letting your guard down. New York was like a bomb going off, Tokyo like a laser show that left you blind.

  “You should be a host boy,” I said, watching one of them try to work a girl without much success. “You’d get paid instead of getting in trouble.”

  Ancash smiled. “Doesn’t seem like a bad deal,” he said. “Especially when you get to dress like that just to talk.”

  “It’s not all talk,” I said. “You have to make patrons think you’ll fuck them in the end so they keep coming back. But you, Ancash, people just look at you and hope you’ll fuck them. After ten minutes, you’d have them hooked. And if they keep coming back, your stock goes up. It’s your dream job.”

  “Are you saying that I look easy?” Ancash pretended to be indignant, but I could tell that he was enjoying the idea.

  “Easy? Kid, you look effortless. That’s part of your charm, isn’t it, everything you do looks like you don’t give a damn.”

  “They call it sprezzatura in Italian,” Ancash said. “Maria di Sprezzatura. That’s a famous painting, you know.”

  “Is it.”

  “Yeah, commissioned by Louis the Fourteenth. Le Roi Soleil.”

  “There seem to be an awful lot of paintings of this Maria girl,” I drawled, leaning back against the steps. “Who was she, anyway?”

  “Isn’t that the question,” Ancash murmured, and the tone of his voice made me look up. His eyes were fixed on me. “You know, there are kyabakura that specialize in foreigners. You could pull it off too.”

  I looked at Ancash, startled. “Me? A host girl?”

  “Why not? You’re pretty. You’re charming. Or,” Ancash amended, “maybe you could be, if you were being paid.”

  “You have to tell people what they want to hear,” I said. “I can’t do that. There’s a reason why I don’t talk to my family anymore.”

  “It’s just a game,” Ancash shrugged, “and you’re the one who runs it, which automatically makes you the winner. They come in, flirt with you, think they’re falling in love with you—and it’s not even you in that booth with them. It’s someone you’ve created.”

  We sat in silence, watching the rush of crowds go by. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, I was hurting pretty badly where I’d gotten hit. I wondered if Ancash was as well. For some reason I kept thinking of Praveen saying, “Maria, what you are thinking!” and I wanted to laugh, but then suddenly I wanted to cry. I was on an out-of-control carnival ride, and Praveen—with his calmness, his sternness, his unflappable predictability—had been the only person who could, even briefly, make the carnival ride slow down. But now Praveen had hopped on his own carnival ride and it would all just keep going and going. And I thought of Ancash sitting in the window of his apartment, his mouth cool against mine, tasting of shochu, and then I imagined him dressed in the white button-down shirts and tight jeans of a host boy, flirting with rich-looking Japanese girls, letting their need create the character he would play—and I felt something strange and hot and tight in my stomach.

  Ancash nudged me with his shoulder. “Or don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t play a game where you’re the stakes. Maria, have you ever thought about going back home?”

  “Yeah.” I rubbed my forehead. My cheek throbbed. “No. I don’t know. You should understand.”

  “There’s a story,” Ancash said suddenly, “about this Buddhist priest who’s walking through a jungle when a tiger starts chasing him. He runs and runs but the tiger is really fast and just keeps gaining.” He stopped, pensive. “I think tigers can run faster than seventy miles per hour, actually.”

  “That’s cheetahs,” I said, but I could feel myself getting steady again. “So what happens?”

  “He gets to a cliff where wild grapes are growing, and the tiger is right behind him so he grabs on to the grapevine and starts scaling down it. And then he hears this snapping sound. He looks up and sees that the grapevine is breaking under his weight, and the tiger is leaning over the edge of the cliff snarling, and then he looks down and sees a long fall onto jagged rocks.”

  “What does he do?” I asked.

  Ancash watched a trio of host boys sit on the station steps opposite us, smoking and eyeing the crowd. He turned to me and grinned. “He plucks a grape off the vine,” he said, “and oh! how sweet it tastes.”

  Silence. And then I punched him in the arm. “Are you crazy?” I demanded. “That’s the ending? That’s stupid! It’s not even an ending!”

  Ancash smirked and didn’t reply. Now we both watched the host boys preening under the neon wash, smooth and aloof like marionettes.

  “But he falls,” I obj
ected. “I mean, right? He’s gonna fall.”

  “The fall is inevitable,” Ancash shrugged. “But the grape is unpredictably sweet.” He grinned, then, that luminous smile that fell short of his eyes. “Maria delle Uve,” he said. “Maria of the Grapes.”

  * * *

  —

  PRAVEEN STOPPED TEACHING NIGHT CLASSES. It wasn’t that he canceled them, so much as that they simply became immaterial to him. In the beginning, there was always a specific reason. Irina called, she wanted him to stop by the club and ask for her, the manager was getting angry at her for not having enough patrons, she was afraid of what might happen if Praveen didn’t come. Then Irina didn’t even have to ask. Praveen would show up at the club and wait for hours while she was with other patrons. He would walk around Shinjuku, buy ramen at a corner stall, drop by a video arcade, then go back to the club and ask, hopefully, in his horrible Japanese, for Irina-san. I only went with him once, when he called me from Shinjuku and asked if I wanted to get dinner together. He seemed distracted and strung out for the whole meal, but when I deposited him at the entrance of the kyabakura, he became suddenly urgent and eager. I caught a flash of Irina’s bleach-blond mane approaching and retreated before I could see more. The whole scene depressed me for days. Praveen was too good for this. He’d always been above me, looking down with a mixture of affection and disdain. Now he was on my level, and I didn’t like it.

  Ancash, on the other hand, was thriving. He went for an interview and was hired by a host club for men in Shinjuku Ni-Chome. He made quite a figure in sleek, white silk shirts, new dark jeans, his hair uncombed and shaggy. I knew that he would be popular, and he was. I didn’t tell him, but it was less difficult for me to know that he was chatting up men, turning that bright blank smile on them, leaning in to let them catch the scent of his cologne. They would come and go, leaving money and gifts in their wake, and in the end it would be Ancash and Maria again, shoulder to shoulder: cartoon characters, action heroes, spies, rock stars—two of a kind, and perfect.