That night he led me through the double doors and waved at the doorman, and he hit the elevator buttons so fast I did not know we were going to the eleventh floor until we got there. Our footsteps muffled by the carpeting, we walked in silence down the long hallway from the elevator to his door. There are many doors along the corridor of Eric’s apartment building, and they all look the same, off-white with the shiny brass knob and the numbers in matching gold above. I may have been more nervous than I realized, because I found something frightening in the thought that any one of those doors could be his.
His door was a little different, though, since it came at the very end of all the rows of other doors, and was sheltered and private, on an angle from the rest. Neither of us had said anything since we had stepped out of the cab, and we entered his apartment still without speaking.
He turned on a few lights, but the room remained pleasantly dim. His apartment is so well insulated that it is always very quiet, and the thick carpeting further deadens the noise. High though my apartment is, city noises break into my bedroom late at night, and after I spend a lot of time at Eric’s place, I find myself missing the sounds of traffic, loud music muted by distance, even the occasional car alarm going off.
I sat down on one end of the black leather sofa. He pulled out a chair from the dining table and turned it around before he sat down, so that he straddled the back between his legs. I crossed my ankles. He was watching me quietly, perhaps expectantly. I looked down at my hands as they twisted around each other on my lap. We sat together like this for a long time, maybe a minute, and then he broke the silence. “You’re the damnedest woman.” He spoke seriously, and though the term did not sound too flattering, the tone of his voice made it seem a compliment.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re strange,” he said. “Different.”
“How so?”
“Well, a.) because you don’t talk much.”
I was a guest and had no desire to prove him wrong. I smiled and waited quietly for him to continue.
“And b.) because any other woman would be curious about my apartment.”
“I’m curious about your apartment,” I said.
“Then why haven’t you looked around?”
“Good idea,” I said. “I will.”
With my hands clasped behind my back, I walked around and examined his living room. There was one healthy-looking plant on the windowsill, but everything else was gray or black or white. The room was fashionably bare of furniture, and it was absolutely spotless.
“It’s so clean,” I said. “Is it always like this?”
“Yes. I like things to be neat.”
Electronic equipment lined the walls of the room. There was a very chic black television, a VCR, a large stereo and strange-looking speakers. There was even a movie camera tucked away in the corner. I peered into the lens of the camera and saw myself distorted, my nose swollen and my eyes and mouth tiny and obscure. “Wow,” I said.
He stood up and pushed the chair in. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a fun toy.”
“What do you tape?” I asked, and then I caught myself and laughed. “Never mind—you don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to.”
“I’ll answer it,” he said. “The firm recommends that trial lawyers see themselves on tape, so mostly I just watch myself giving speeches. Not exactly X-rated.”
“No,” I agreed, and then I stopped because I had seen his bookshelves, and in the murky light, they looked very full.
But when my eyes got used to the lack of light, I found that I was able to scan the shelves in less than five seconds because there was not much to see after all: well-bound and identical-looking books like rows and rows of encyclopedia sets, beautiful and clean and doubtlessly very expensive. There was nothing scruffy and paperback to mar the uniformity of these books; perhaps he kept his pleasure reading by his bed. Phillip did not finish his last year of high school and he had always done poorly in English, but he had had a few dog-eared copies of novels, many of them by Peter Matthiessen, that he had taken with him on all his travels, and in New York he had accumulated an enormous pile of biographies and political histories that he bought in the Strand and other secondhand bookstores. Eric went to Yale as an undergraduate and then immediately to Harvard Law School, but he was not a reader. I sat back with my legs stretched out in front of me and my fingers half-buried in the richness of the carpet. I needed a rest.
I looked up at Eric. His ankles crossed and his arms folded, he leaned against the wall and watched me. He threw a stark shadow against the wall, and his lips wore a faint, fixed smile. We looked at each other for a while in that position. I was trying to think how I could leave gracefully, and he was just smiling quietly, and then he slowly walked over and knelt down on the ground beside me.
He put his hand under my chin and tilted my face upwards. He had not seriously kissed me before, but he was clearly about to do so now. He smelled nice, like a lotion, and I could feel the heat of his breath upon me.
“Aren’t you nervous?” I asked quickly, just before his face came into contact with mine.
For a split second he paused, and then he shook his head. “No,” he said, and then he kissed me.
It was an aggressive male kiss, with lots of strong tongue reaching towards my throat, and I judged it a failure. It was not really his fault. He had to bend down quite a bit to reach my lips, and my head was tilted at an awkward position: it was almost inevitable that our teeth would clash. First kisses are usually not much good, but I was disappointed anyway. I was suddenly conscious of how inelegant I looked sprawled on the floor with my legs sticking out in front of me; my skirt was bunched up by my thighs, and my feet splayed awkwardly outwards. I tucked my knees under me and tugged at the ends of the skirt. It fell around me in a circle, leaving me framed like a frog on a lily pad.
He was panting a little and I furtively wiped at the corner of my mouth, where his tongue had been too avid. He kissed me again more slowly, and this time the feel of him traveled down my spine to warm my body. Then he took me by the hand and led me into the bedroom, austere and modern like the rest of his apartment. The stream of light from the hallway showed me that there were no books on the nightstand next to his alarm clock—all I could see was a package of condoms. I laughed to myself at that because I had condoms in my purse as well. In fact I was well prepared for the night: before leaving the house, I had packed my purse with a small travel kit for my contact lenses, my toothbrush, and all of my makeup.
Eric moved towards the bed and I shut the door behind us. He called out softly to me and I groped my way towards him, my hands outstretched in front of me so that I would not trip and fall in the dark. It was a windy night but at his window the blinds did not rattle, and his radiator worked far more efficiently and quietly than mine did at home.
The sex was excellent.
Afterwards, while he slept, I crept around the room to gather my clothes together. Naked on my hands and knees, I felt for my bra beneath the bed. In spite of the heater and the plush carpeting, I was chilled.
He woke up when I sat down on the bed to put my shoes on. Still half-asleep, he reached out and put a hand on my knee.
“What’re you doing?” he asked.
“I have to get home.”
He was hoarse with sleep. “Can’t you spend the night?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Are you serious? Come on, you don’t really mean that.” His words were cut off at the end by a huge yawn.
“I have some things to do tomorrow.”
“Like what?” He propped himself up on an elbow, and squinted in an effort to see me. “Kiki, tomorrow is Sunday. There is absolutely no reason for you to go home. I’ll make you pancakes in the morning and we’ll read the Times together.”
“I don’t like pancakes.”
He laughed. “You sound like a little girl. I
’ll buy you bagels instead—is that better?” He pulled me down on top of him, and began to unbutton my shirt. “You’ve got to stay. I insist.”
I did not get home until late afternoon of the following day. My body still bore Eric’s imprint, as if he had been a careless criminal leaving clues to his identity all over the scene of the crime. It was not an unpleasant feeling, and I caught myself humming Beethoven as I put the kettle on.
Sipping on my tea, I looked around the kitchen. It was not in good condition, for after Phillip left, I had avoided it as much as I could. For so long, the entire space, all sixty-odd square feet of it, had seemed crammed to overflowing with his presence—the actual, living Phillip, not the pale shadow of him that hid mouselike in the closets and corners of my apartment.
It was in the kitchen, more than any other place, that Phillip shed the cool that he wore like a cloak. The very act of preparing food together, an act that he took very seriously, though with varying degrees of success, unleashed memories of both his mother and his travels in him, and brought him close to something approaching a state of pure bliss. When he was in the kitchen, he was a terror and a delight—vibrant, noisy and, above all, clumsy, dropping dishes and knocking over glasses of water and wine as he waved his arms around, searching for the words and gestures to convey all the wonders of Europe. He was a fearless cook, trying soufflés as well as fancy Thai dishes, and he attempted to make bread probably every other week, thus ensuring that both of us were regularly doused with flour. When we washed dishes together, as my mother and I had always done when I was at home, he sang while I beat out the rhythm on the sink, soapy water sloshing in four-four time onto the floor. On a couple of nights, when the hour was very late, we hauled ourselves on top of the counter and danced to the accompaniment of our voices.
Standing in the kitchen on that Sunday afternoon in August, with Eric’s fingerprints all over my body, I barely recognized anything around me. It was as if I had been away at Eric’s apartment for weeks instead of a night. The gleaming Formica of the counter defied dust and dirt, but the old, dried-out onions had sprouted spring-green stalks, the potatoes had white knobs sticking out all over them, and light orange hairs and the green top were growing back on a shriveled carrot I had left out on a plate. A single ant, one of the last of the tribe haunting my kitchen during the winter, appeared out of nowhere and marched across the white expanse of the kitchen counter.
Even food that had never been alive had miraculously found a life force. Blue-green mold brightened the bread by the toaster, and when I took the milk out to add into my tea, I found that it had changed into a curd with a strong sharp smell. The food had relapsed into the habit of life, just as nails and hair grow to crazy lengths on a body in the grave.
For more than three years, ever since the fire, my grandmother has been stupefied with grief. On some mornings, she—a woman who, blessed with the constitution of a peasant, has not been really sick in all of her seventy-four years—all but refuses to get out of bed. During the day, her stare is often glassy; her expression, blank.
Obaasama, I will say (for the sake of politeness, knowing her answer before my own question), do you know what it feels like to forget that you are dead?
Then, after she shakes her head, I will describe for her that tingling sensation, so like pins and needles in the feet.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IT JUST so happened that she was looking out the window when Sekiguchi approached the geisha house for the first time. Although the path was placed on level ground, he walked on it with the flat, uncontrolled gait of someone coming down a steep hill. Yet he moved quickly, so that the dust flew around his ankles in a cloud. His head was absurdly large, his body squat. As he came closer, she saw that his features were oddly blurred, his right eye drooping and his mouth twisting down, as if someone had thrown a bucket of water on him, and his face had melted.
The owner of once morbidly unwieldy breasts, Yukiko did not smile, instead keeping her eyes fixed solemnly upon him until he disappeared through the entranceway of the geisha house.
My grandmother was eighteen, and already completely accustomed to the feeling of the high, tightly bound obi of a full-fledged geisha. If she was not already versed in the one hundred and one ways to love a man, she was at least well on her way. She had lost her virginity two years earlier, during a middling large earthquake, and the two events were linked irrevocably in her mind: the muggy morning, the noontime cool winds, and her sense in the split second before the quake struck that the earth gave a downbeat, like the intake of a breath before speech. He had been a heavy man with soft, pampered hands, who paid a lot for the privilege of deflowering her. He hurt her, poking and prodding so roughly that she almost cried out, and although she knew the other women would be disappointed in her, she tried to push him away, her fingers fluttering in vain against him. By the glow of the fire she saw his face flush a dark red, as if he were suddenly drunk, and when the earth moved, she confused it with his shudders.
When it was over she wanted to laugh, it had been so quick.
Her work, consisting as it did of looking pretty, going to parties, and lying under a man, was not difficult. She enjoyed her status and sometimes, even, her job, and was especially grateful when she considered the arduous work she did in the rice fields as a child.
Her activities in the bedroom were not only limited to business, for she had a steady boyfriend, a man younger than most of her clients, and far poorer, too. Yukiko had met Jun at the local fish market, where he worked, the smooth long muscles of his thighs and arms shown off to full advantage as he bent down to lift and carry crates of fresh shrimp and eels.
Theirs was an easygoing relationship, blissfully free of what she considered was the inevitable condescension that came hand in hand with paying for her time. Jun was reserved about his feelings for her, but she, for one, was sure this was love. She was especially appreciative that he expected so little from her. When she was with him, she relaxed, so much so that she could feel her prized posture slowly beginning to slump, and her normally careful speech gradually starting to slur. After a few hours by his side, she could barely force her muscles to raise her to her feet.
Yukiko thought Jun well worth the conniving and duplicity required to carry on an extracurricular affair, one that did not feed the already full coffers of the geisha house. Kaori, her futon-chum of her apprentice years, was less sure, but feeling that the geisha house owed it to Yukiko, she helped to arrange their secret trysts.
Yukiko was the most successful geisha of the house. She had a steady pool of clients who came back again and again, and she took in a lot of yen in tips. Yet even when she talked back to the men and flirted, as all the geishas were trained to do, there was an air of remoteness about her. Proud and tall, she intimidated some of the clients, and alienated others.
When in bed with them, she was helpful but distant, musing on earthquakes, and the pungent odor of fish.
A week after she had watched him make his flat-footed way to the geisha house, Yukiko met Sekiguchi at a party that he hosted. She concluded that he looked worse, on closer inspection, than he had through the window. His skin was pitted to the point that it no longer seemed like skin, but rather the surface of some alien land: ravaged, ruined, lunar. His right eye, pulled down in a steep droop, was glazed over; when he talked with people, he had to turn his head so that he could peer at them out of his left. He was clearly a familiar sight to his friends, but his face and his sidelong glance unnerved the other geishas, their gazes flickering away from his face and then back again.
He said little during the party, but whenever he spoke, the men fell respectfully silent, to an extent perhaps beyond the courtesy accorded to the man footing the bill.
Yukiko was repelled by his appearance, and determined not to show it. She marched up to him as well as she could on her knees, the sake decanter in her hand. “Let me pour for you,” she said.
They stared at each other. She kept her eye
s steady in spite of the face, which was far worse than she had thought, and she saw him slowly smile, and knew he liked her for her boldness.
His skin aged him, and she was startled when he told her that he was only twenty, an astoundingly young age to host a geisha party, and a mere two years older than she.
The geisha house was serviced by a redoubtable network of gossip. The geishas had spies and informers everywhere—servants of the rich, mostly, but also the destitute members of the upper and middle classes, who were reduced to selling whatever they could (kimonos, books, the secrets and scandals of their friends) in an effort to stave off ruin for another day.
By these means Yukiko heard tell of Sekiguchi’s success. Young though he was, his financial acumen was already widely known; his capacity for hard work, legendary. He had a talent for leadership, which gave rise to rumors of a political career in the offing.
She also heard of his past. He had been a handsome, robust boy, although shy and quiet, until the age of four, when he had been struck by a nearly fatal case of smallpox. By the time he recovered, almost a full year later, he was a different child. Handsome and robust no longer, he seemed to have shed his shyness as well, and he began speaking out, in the process revealing an incisive intelligence that not even his mother had suspected. Had it not been for the smallpox, speculated the gossips, his life might well have been an unexceptional one.
She learned, too, that he was married. His wife was sickly and, after two years of marriage, still childless.
After the party, Sekiguchi began visiting her regularly. He did no more than drink tea—an expensive drink, for he of course had to pay for her time. She sat on her knees with her feet tucked under her, chatting to him for an hour, and through years of practice she was still able to stand up at the end to bid him good-bye, despite the tingling of her feet. He sat cross-legged, listening to her talk, and sipped at his tea.
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