One Hundred and One Ways

by Mako Yoshikawa

  These phone calls in the middle of the night shock me to the core, leaving my hands tingling. After replacing the receiver, I bring my sheets up to my chin, and meditate on the question of calling Eric.

  He worries about me because I live alone. He even made me a set of keys for his apartment, to be used whenever I am lonely or frightened, and it is too late to call him. Although situations like that occur all the time, I have never once used his keys. At this very moment, though, I could sit up, put on clothes and a light jacket, pick up my purse and the keys, and catch a cab downtown. Perhaps he would welcome me with a glad drowsy kiss; his bed would be warm with his body. It cheers me just to know that even at 4:14 on a Monday morning, there is someone, somewhere in the city, who would be happy to see me.

  Like all the women in my family, I sleep so poorly that I dread going to bed, the hours spent lying awake, eyes wide open staring up at the ceiling and all around the walls. When I feel bored and playful, I use the light of my alarm clock to make hand shadows on the wall, geese or rabbits or noiseless barking dogs. When I feel glamorous, I practice artsy model poses, the wrist bent, the fingers extended, and the pinkie up.

  My preoccupation with hands may have started with my mother, who loved to play Chopin on the piano. I think she loved Chopin almost as much as she loved my father. Once our house overflowed with preludes. I remember standing on tiptoe near the piano and watching her fingers, long and thin and supple, how it seemed that they sang as they glided across the keys. I started lessons at the age of five, but though my fingers were later so deft and confident on the typewriter, they were clumsy and thick on the piano, noisy and songless even after hours and hours of practice. I gave up after four years of frustrating lessons, and when my mother’s fingers grew deformed, the joints grotesque and swollen with arthritis, the piano sat in proud and silent splendor for years. When eventually it fell hopelessly out of tune, there was nobody to notice or care. On the most desolate nights, when missing Phillip becomes a physical ache, I make shadows of myself playing scales on the wall.

  Sometimes I get up and read until daylight, and once in a while I turn on the television set and flip through the channels; little interests me, but perhaps I am not being fair since few good shows could be on during the gray hours between night and morning. The television is perched at the foot of my bed, balanced rather precariously on the top of my dresser, and it is placed sideways so that I can see it while lying down. I rather like it there. The potential of the blank screen intrigues me, even though some nights I am sure that it will fall off the dresser and smash my toes in.

  The television is from Eric, a present bought without any special reason. When I thanked him for it, he kissed me and told me it was a necessity. “I’m going to coax you into the twentieth century before it’s over,” he said. “By the time I get through with you, you’ll be handling VCRs and CDs with ease, a bona fide nineties woman. Just wait—it’ll be painless and even fun.”

  I wake at noon to sunshine slanting across my bed, and a singing in my body that extends all the way down to my toes. Why this shiver of happiness, this overflowing of delight, this absurd notion that my toes will burst into strains of Handel’s Messiah? Rolling over to my side and stretching my back until it arches into a smile, I review the options, and then I remember: just three months more, and my grandmother Yukiko will be coming to America.

  She will be here in mid-November, just in time for Thanksgiving. We will sit around the table together with my mother, three women from three different generations, and then, after Yukiko’s first American turkey, as I stack the dishwasher and she leans her long body against the kitchen stool, I will ask her about her secret love, for she had one, too: she, too, knows what it is like to love two men at once, at least for a while. I will ask her about desire, that topic which (in spite of meandering discussions on the side effects of birth control) I could never quite broach with my mother. It will be different with Yukiko, since we will meet as women of the world. She will be amused at the extent of my experience, nothing more.

  I will tell her of the space, secret and inviolate, that I once shared with Phillip. I will tell her of how I have grieved for him for over a year, and of how I live with him still, and she will nod and understand.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PHILLIP CAME TO New York on a two-day layover from Africa, and stayed because he fell in love with the subways.

  He had ridden in most of the great subway systems of the world: Moscow, Vienna, Paris, and London, but it was the New York subways, clunky and dirty and often hopelessly inefficient, that he loved. When I pressed him to explain why, he did not even stop to think. “They remind me of dinosaurs,” he said.

  He had spent his childhood on a farm in Iowa. “Where there was enough corn,” he told me, summoning a flat drawl from his past, “to drive a feller crazy. Certainly it drove this feller crazy. There was miles and miles of corn, a whole ocean of it, on land that was as flat as this table.”

  “I’d be curious to see it,” I said.

  He looked up at me thoughtfully. “We could take a trip there, if you really want to, but I’d be willing to bet you wouldn’t like it, either. There’s a lot of sky there, and not much else, and I think most city people can’t take that. My mom hated it, you know. You wouldn’t think anybody could get cabin fever in a place with that much sky, but she did, and so did I.”

  After his mother ran away, Phillip took care of his father for years. He left town just as his father’s second wedding was winding to a close. His father’s new wife was a lusty Greek woman who fed the wedding guests food soaked in olive oil until their faces had a sheen to it. She loved the Iowan sky.

  I used to like to imagine Phillip on the night he left home—shivering a little in the cool air, swatting at the occasional mosquito, a scrawny seventeen-year-old with a jean jacket slung over his shoulder, and one thumb held out in proudly indifferent supplication. These days, though, I try not to think about his past, mostly to avoid sinking into the black hole that the word “if” opens up: if Phillip had been born with normal sight, if he could have passed the eye test for his driver’s license, if relying on the kindness of strangers and friends had not been his only way of getting around his hometown, maybe he would not have felt the need to travel all the time. Maybe he would have stayed in New York with me forever.

  But then again, if those ifs had occurred, he might never have left Iowa in the first place.

  Earthbound as he was, it is small wonder that he left the cornfields, where nothing stirred for miles except the breeze and, of course, the corn. I never told him, because he hated pity, how sorry I felt for him, condemned to standing on the side of the road as his classmates (on whom licenses conferred wings) flew by.

  He had a gift for stillness. Although his eyes flickered from side to side with a will of their own, he could keep his body motionless for hours at a time. He did not seem to feel the need to flex a muscle periodically, or to stomp his feet to get the blood flowing, as most people do. At boring movies I would shift the weight of my body, jog my knee up and down, and scratch at nonexistent itches, while he, just as bored with the film, would not even twitch. Often he came over while I was reading and I would forget he was there, so quietly did he sit, wrapped in his own thoughts.

  But at the same time he was deeply restless. By the time I met him, he had been almost ceaselessly on the move for nine years. He was happiest when he was traveling, and it was a revelation to him as well as to me that he did not have to be biking across South America to feel as if he were on the move. It was enough for him to ride on the subway, rolling the names of the stops like exotic spices on the tip of his tongue: Smith, Carroll, Bergen, Jay Street, York.

  Whether through practice or just a natural sense of balance, he remained unfazed by the jerks and lurches of the trains. I glared but he still shook with laughter when I ended upon the lap of the same old man for the second time. “Go with it,” he said, “sway with it. You’ve got to lea
rn to move with the train.”

  We took long rides in which the journey rather than the destination was the point, on routes that crisscrossed the city according to a master plan that he had carefully devised. We also racked up a lot of hours in coffee shops, parks, and my apartment. I always took the sheer amount of time we spent together for granted—a presumptuous move, for when it came to Phillip, I had a lot of competition. As Russia had told me before she introduced us, he was a chick magnet, and one of the highest magnitude.

  He had what I call the X-factor, the intangible element that renders its lucky possessor irresistibly, mystifyingly sexually attractive. Shy to the point of rudeness, he made no effort to charm women or even, often, to talk with them, and inured, perhaps, by a lifetime of female adulation, he barely seemed aware of the stir that he caused, and the excitement that he left simmering and unsatisfied in his wake.

  Moreover, in spite of a certain lanky grace that made people turn in the streets to look at him, he was not actually good-looking. Eric, with the well-drawn planes of his face, his pale coloring and dark eyes, is far more handsome than Phillip ever was, but it was Phillip women loved, looking at him with a yearning that was not only sexual, although, of course, it predominantly was. Drawn to him as to sunlight, waitresses in coffee shops and bars, bank tellers, shop attendants, acquaintances of mine or his whom we ran into in the street, striking, glamorous Russia and old Mrs. Noffz, my confused neighbor from across the hall, all found excuses to hover around him; they glowed in his presence and sighed wistfully as they said good-bye, all the while darting speculative looks in my direction, as if wondering what made me so special, or weighing their chances against me.

  Perhaps they, too, fell for his air of calm, and the hunger that lay-hidden beneath it like a steel trap.

  One night in October, Phillip and I were walking by an alley near my street when we heard a crash of garbage cans and a startled animal’s cry. We had to move three trash bags and one plastic bin to find the cat, and even then we almost missed him because he was crouching in the shadows. He looked tough and ugly with blood caked over his left eye and across his back, and he was so dirty that I could only guess at the color of his fur. We spent a long time talking to him before he even let us near; he spat and growled but we had him trapped and he was too weak to protest for long. I could see the relief in his eyes when he finally gave in and let us approach, and though we could not avoid touching the raw wounds, he surprised me by lying limp and relaxed in my arms. Phillip carried him into my apartment, and by then I was already in love with him for trusting us.

  “This is one big cat,” said Phillip, panting a little from the weight.

  “Well, I always wanted a horse,” I said.

  I poured the cat a bowl of water and opened a dusty can of tuna fish that I found in the back of a cupboard. He was ravenous but I fed him only a little, saving the rest for later.

  “I wish I knew what to do,” I said, gnawing on my knuckles. “Maybe we should call someone, a vet or something.”

  Crouched on his knees, Phillip was enthralled, staring at Horse as he washed himself. “What, are you kiddin’?” said Phillip. “This cat lucked out. I used to be a lifeguard, you know. I know CPR.”

  I laughed, my knuckles still close to my mouth, and watched them from behind my hair. Phillip picked the cat up and held him at arm’s length, just out of reach of his claws, and looked into his eyes. “Don’t worry, you’re in good hands,” he told him. “You’re going to love it here.”

  Horse responded with a throaty growling sound. “You better put him down,” I said, backing away cautiously, but Phillip just laughed. “Don’t you recognize a purr when you hear one?”

  I kept my distance. “That’s a purr?”

  “So he’s a little rusty,” said Phillip, sounding defensive.

  Doughty old warriors both, Phillip and Horse had a natural respect and understanding for each other. Phillip caressed Horse roughly, mashing his mangled ears against his head with a brutal tenderness that made me wince but also dream, and Horse responded by purring in his rusty way, and sometimes even keeping his nails sheathed.

  I cleaned Horse as best I could, and eventually his wounds healed and most of his fur grew back. While he was large and strong, he was ugly even after his fur was clean, and though he grew to care for me, he was surly and ill-tempered, and he never became truly affectionate. But I doted on him just as much as Phillip did, for when I woke up terrified by my unremembered nightmares in the middle of the night, the warm solid weight of Horse would press against my feet when I moved, and as if sensing my need, he would put up with my hand on his back, even purring until I fell asleep.

  On an unusually warm night in January when the moon was full, Horse escaped down the fire escape and never came back. Phillip and I spent the night looking for him, and much of the next three days, too, but he had vanished. Even though New York City is not exactly a haven for stray cats, Phillip insisted that Horse would thrive, battered body and all. He said Horse would lord it over the other toms, stealing all their rats and their fish-heads, if not all their women. I was still worried, but I had to agree with Phillip in the end.

  Horse is tough, a direct descendant of the feline hero who inspired the nine-lives myth. He is probably happier as the resurrected king of the dark and twisting alleys than he ever was in my apartment. Still, I have not stopped hoping that some night, perhaps when the sky is cast over, he might yet return. Cleaning out the cupboard last week, I came across two cans of catfood. I wiped off the dust on them and left them there, next to Horse’s old monogrammed dish.

  I blame his escape on the moon. I had left that window open many times before, and he had never once tried to get out.

  I cried at Horse’s desertion, but I did not cry when Phillip left. Maybe that is why I still see Phillip everywhere and in all things. The lopsided crescent moon looks like his crooked smile, every pen and pencil seems like one of his long skinny fingers, the slats of the toaster remind me of the scar along his stomach. When I look in the mirror, I see myself with his eyes and now, as I pull my gaze away from the ceiling and sit up, I notice that he is watching me from the northeast corner of the living room. I do not know how long he has been there. Flanked by a quartet of violet moths, he is standing on his hands. He remains as solidly balanced as if he were on his feet, and his hair defies gravity, lying flat around his ears. His face is not reddened by blood draining into his head, and his features show no trace of strain.

  In the summer of his twenty-second year, while working on a construction site, Phillip stepped onto a loose beam one foggy morning, and slipped. He fell only fifteen feet, but he hit concrete, and so the local media (Nevada, or maybe Wisconsin) hailed his survival as an Act of God. His brush with a higher authority left its mark, though, and I can see his old wounds from where I sit now: the paler, shinier, and slightly raised surface of the line on his stomach, the gash on the inner side of his left forearm where the flesh was removed to patch in his torso, and the three deep scratches that run across his left rib cage. Like those saints in medieval pictures, whose bodies are naked, impressive, and riddled with arrow wounds, Phillip is beautiful because of his scars.

  He observes me solemnly from his upside-down perspective, and as I gaze back I feel saddened at how much weight he has lost. Throughout the summer Phillip has been getting increasingly thinner. Motionless and bone-thin as he is now, he no longer seems human: throw a tattered kimono on him, and he would be indistinguishable from the scarecrow that my grandmother had built with her brothers when she worked in the rice fields as a child.

  His weight loss is not the only change that I have noticed in him in the past few months. Some of his features have also begun to blur—a development that I can only chalk up to the passing of time. I am beginning to forget. Yet although I had expected that after my engagement to Eric, even more of Phillip would fade, instead he is looking more and more solid and real. The contours of his muscles are sharp and clear
today; the planes of his face are shaded in detail. I can even make out the individual strands of the fine blond hair growing on his legs.

  I study his face for signs of anger or disapproval, but he is as unreadable as ever. His unblinking gaze is hard to take, and I turn away. I wish he would talk. I loved his voice, with its ghost of a Midwestern accent, its trapped laughter, and its easy note of teasing.

  Obaasama, I will say. Grandmother. You, too, know what it’s like to hear a voice with your body, don’t you? Like music played on a lower floor in the building, a vibration traveling through the ground and into your feet.

  He said that the crunch of snow was what made it worthwhile. It was December, and we were talking about the trip he was planning to Nepal; I had told him that I like watching winter through the window, from the inside of my apartment.

  “Snow in New York is beautiful,” I explained. “It covers up the dirt on the streets and it makes all the traffic seem quieter. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

  He laughed and shook his head at me. “In the mountains, the air is so fresh, so sharp, and so cold that your lungs ache whenever you breathe in.”

  “That’s hardly a recommendation.”

  “Well, it’s true, it isn’t always fun. Once I was absolutely positive my toes had fallen off with frostbite.” He paused. “But you’ve got to trust me on this. In the very early morning, the crunch of snow underfoot makes it all worthwhile.” He leaned forward then, stretching his arms out to grip the edge of my side of the table. “Come with me,” he said, his eyes shining with excitement. “We’ll climb the mountains together, and trek across all that snow, and you can hear the snow yourself.”

  I smiled at him. “But I have school.”