One Hundred and One Ways

by Mako Yoshikawa

  I did not feel struck by a bolt of lightning when I saw him. He swore later that when we met a kind of subterranean recognition flickered in my eyes, but I know he did not greatly impress me when we were first introduced. I like big men, and Phillip was thin and not terribly tall. He was wearing an outfit made up largely of denim, and I thought he seemed the way a Midwesterner should seem. He carried with him a feeling of open spaces, perhaps because he had a way of gazing far, with eyes slightly narrowed, or perhaps because he moved with grace and ease, unimpeded by the constraints of a room.

  When I was close enough to shake hands, I was taken aback by his eyes, in spite of Russia’s warning. As soon as they focused on me, they began to jump back and forth from one end to another, flickering as quickly as a candle. I could not make out their color in the dim light of the bar.

  We ordered drinks, pulled up stools, and sat around the counter. Phillip had found us a quiet corner, with enough space so that we could face each other. Russia sat cross-legged, perched unstably on her stool.

  I had to curb an urge to fidget. When I felt nervous during parties at college, the surest remedy was to fix upon one man, listen to him, flatter him, flirt with him, and eventually retire with him to his room or mine, or failing that a dark corner where the noise of the party would not overly intrude. But I could not do that with Phillip and Russia there.

  “Kiki. Yo, Kiki, are you with us?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “What was the question?”

  Russia clucked her tongue. “It wasn’t a question. You know, you are hopelessly out of it.” She said it so affectionately I had to smile. She turned to Phillip. “Kiki lives in a world of her own.”

  I glanced over at Phillip. He was absorbed in the bubbles of his drink.

  “I was talking about a certain bad time in my life,” she said, going back to her story. “I was flat broke, and the town was in a recession. I tried to get a job flipping burgers at Wendy’s, but twenty-two other people applied, and they ended up hiring some brain surgeon, I think because he could be called upon to administer the Heimlich maneuver if a customer choked on a fry. Oh, and he also had an advanced degree in meat cooking from the Cordon Bleu.”

  I rolled my eyes at her exaggeration, but she continued undaunted.

  “I took to haunting the local mortuary, hoping that that would make me the first to hear of any sudden job openings. My desperate situation had forced me to be creative. And you know what they say,” she said, casting a sidelong glance at me. “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

  “And propinquity is the mother of love,” I said, rousing myself.

  “Love covers a multitude of sins,” she shot back.

  “The sins of our fathers have long shadows,” I said, beaming.

  “Nice circling back to the parent thing,” she said admiringly, a good loser.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She turned to Phillip. “Sorry—I know it’s awful and pretentious, but we are graduate students.”

  If he was disgusted or confused or bored, he was too polite to show it. “Go on with your story about the mortuary,” he said.

  “Oh right,” she said. “It paid off big-time, because the mortuary ended up hiring me. Well, okay, the hospital did, but I heard about the job through the mortuary. It was my job to take dead peoples eyes from the hospital to the lab, so they could be packaged and shipped off to people needing a new pair,” she said, putting up one knee and resting her chin on it. “My boss was this really scary woman. She was all hunched over, with a hump like Igor’s”—here she demonstrated the hump by fearfully contracting her shoulder—“and she had a nose like a witch and a pair of gimlet eyes.”

  I laughed a little at this point, and she did, too.

  “Really,” she told me. “It might sound hard to believe, but she really was like that.” She paused to take a long drink from her beer. “Anyway, this woman used to actually chortle with joy whenever there was a snowstorm or a blizzard at night, because there’d be a lot of fresh young eyes to be had the morning after, you know, from all the accidents on the road.”

  “Ugh,” I said, and Russia nodded.

  “Well,” she continued, “one day I made the mistake of telling her that I have perfect vision, and after that I didn’t have a moment’s peace on the job. Whenever I turned around I would catch her watching me, sizing me up as if I were some kind of lamb she wanted to slaughter.”

  Again I started to laugh, but Russia ignored me and went on straight-faced.

  “I used to have nightmares about her sabotaging the traffic lights and the stop signs around my neighborhood so she could get hold of my twenty-twenty vision. And then,”—she said, pausing theatrically—“one night, when Chernobyl—that’s my dog—had a stomachache and was making so much noise I couldn’t sleep, I looked out the window and there she was, sprinkling something that looked like magic powder all over my street.”

  “My God,” said Phillip.

  “You said it,” said Russia. She drank from her bottle again. “Pretty upsetting, isn’t it. Well, you can bet that I didn’t drive on my street anymore after that. And I quit my job the next day, too.”

  “Did your dog get over his stomachache?” Phillip asked.

  “Yup,” she said. “But a year later he got hit by a truck and died.”

  “I guess my eyes would be safe, at least,” he said. “I’m hardly twenty-twenty.”

  Russia paused, but only for a second. “Are you kidding?” she said lightly. “She would kill for a pair of eyes like yours. Blue and yellow eyes are in high demand.”

  He smiled back at her, and even in the dim light of the bar I could see Russia’s pale skin flush. “That’s some story,” he said. “I mean about the woman, not the dog.”

  “And the amazing thing is that it all really happened,” she said.

  As she talked, Russia rested one hand loosely around her beer and used the other to support her chin. She does not rely on her hands to speak. Her fingers are slender with short unvarnished nails. Although some days she dresses so wildly that even jaded New Yorkers turn to look at her on the street, her hands always remain the same, plain and unadorned like those of a girl.

  I may have been fidgeting, because Russia turned towards me. “What are you looking at? Did you see someone you know?”

  “Nothing so exciting,” I confessed. “I was just thinking of going to the bathroom.”

  “Well,” she said in a sprightly tone, her arched brows an invitation, “no time like the present.”

  “Carpe diem,” I said. “Seize the day.”

  “A stitch in time saves nine,” she said, and then shrugged. “Okay, so that kind of works.”

  “Make hay while the sun shines,” I said triumphantly.

  Phillip cleared his throat, and we turned to look at him. “Haste makes waste,” he said.

  Russia and I laughed.

  “On that note—” I said, sliding off my chair.

  “Oh—” Russia drew me close to her and whispered in my ear. “Check for spare rolls of toilet paper, okay?”

  “All right,” I said. As I walked off, she apologized offhandedly to Phillip. “Girl talk, sorry about that.”

  When I returned, Phillip was busy ordering drinks. Russia turned towards me.

  “So?”

  “At least five spare rolls,” I reported.

  “I don’t want Phillip to know. He’s a good Catholic boy, and he might disapprove.” She let a few minutes pass, and then she slung her big leather bag over her shoulder. “I’ve got to pee,” she announced, and stood up and walked away.

  Left alone, Phillip and I had nothing to say to each other. After throwing him a small, quick smile, I looked away. I am always ill at ease in a bar, but even under better circumstances, I would have been hard pressed for a suitable topic of conversation. What did I have in common with a good Catholic boy from the Midwest, a high school dropout who had been all over the world?

  But I did think that at leas
t I should try to help advance Russia’s cause. “She’s very funny, isn’t she,” I said, nodding at her vacant seat.

  “She is,” he said. “And she has a heart of gold.”

  I was a little taken aback by the broad sweep of his assessment, but for the sake of good manners, I acknowledged it with a vaguely affirmative mumble.

  Having fulfilled my social obligations, I had a sip of my Coke and then I looked away again, out at the other people in the bar. He startled me again by saying my name.

  “Yes?” I said.

  He was a couple of feet away from me, and he neither leaned forward nor talked very loud; I could barely hear him over the bar din. “Don’t I know you?” Without pausing, he answered himself. “I know you.”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I mean, I know you’re Phillip, but that’s about it.”

  “Ah,” he said, sitting back so that his voice became even fainter, and his face almost lost in the shadows. “I could have sworn that you recognized me when we met.”

  “Really?”

  “I thought something flickered in your eyes, a kind of—well, a kind of subterranean recognition.”

  “Oh,” I said. “What an interesting expression.” As soon as I said that, I felt like kicking myself for sounding so condescending. Ineptly I tried to make amends. “I mean, I would have liked to have experienced a subterranean recognition when we met, but I don’t think I did.”

  “We played hopscotch together.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, bewildered. “I’ve never even been in the Midwest.”

  He looked across at me without changing expression. “No, we played hopscotch together in the park. Don’t you remember?”

  I began to shake my head and then I stopped. “Riverside Park?”

  He nodded.

  “In late August?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re the guy—”

  “—hopscotching across the street.”

  “You waved at me.”

  “I did.”

  I sank lower into my stool. “How embarrassing.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, didn’t I look pretty silly? A grown woman in heels and a skirt playing hopscotch all by myself?”

  He was silent for a moment, gravely considering. “Yes.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “But I started hopscotching with you.”

  “That made it worse.”

  “I don’t understand that.”

  “It was a private moment. I thought I was alone. I wanted to be alone.”

  He sighed. He shifted in his seat, and his face reemerged from the shadows. His eyes, still for once, gazed directly at me, and they were blue. Mine are black. “You were alone. So was I.” He shrugged. “That’s why I waved at you from the other side of the street.”

  Once again he had startled me. I could not hold his gaze and I looked away. Then my eyes slid back to meet his. “Got it,” I said. Then Phillip and I smiled at each other for the first time.

  Her leather bag swollen with toilet paper, Russia came back from the bathroom to find us talking like old friends. “What’s going on?” she asked, a little nervously.

  “Oh, well—” and we tried to explain, we wanted to include her in our conversation, yet no matter how we tried, she sat there confused and alone, her eyes returning not to Phillip but to me, her smile pasted on like the strawberry color of her lips.

  It was not Russia’s fault. Nobody could understand the two of us because we spoke a private language of our own making. Our conversation seemed endless, and it would have been so if he had lived. The talk came tumbling out of us when we were together, yet just as easily we could sit in silence; our friendship ran deep and constant, water beneath a bridge of words.

  Even now, when I close my eyes, it is as if he had taken up permanent residence in the secret place inside my eyelids.

  I have a healthy bank-account balance, and a promising academic career that I have worked hard to achieve. I love and need the solidity of my home and my possessions, the illusion of stability that they confer upon the infinitude of space.

  He had dropped out of high school, and he was a self-proclaimed vagabond who never had a fixed address; often in his travels, he did not even have a temporary bed, but slept under the largest available tree or in the shelter offered by rocks. He usually had no money, and sometimes not even the vaguest idea for a potential source of income, and he had not one profession but a hundred. His ambitions and his plans extended only to the next place he wished to see. He seemed to float in space, unencumbered and undefined, aimless but perhaps no less lost than I am.

  He was mugged in Rome, threatened by a gang with guns in Ecuador, and for reasons he never could fully determine, he was held for two nights in a jail in Turkey. Not long after we met, he swore to me that he was finally tired of traveling, and that New York City was where he would settle down. But I never really believed him. He had climbed mountains and hiked through jungles; he had waded through the most dangerous rivers of the world. He died alone on a treacherous mountain path in Nepal, and—who knows?—perhaps that was a destiny that he courted.

  Even at my wildest at Princeton, I remained a good student first and foremost, setting myself a rigorous regimen of work and exercise and following it scrupulously, punishing myself with double the workload when I failed to live up to the plan. I aspire to the mainstream, and it is with a sense of desperation that I cling to the straight and narrow.

  But in spite of all our differences, Phillip and I had this in common: we both knew what it is like to have parents who no longer speak to each other. Before I met him, I only knew people who had perfect childhoods. They had all been raised in dream homes replete with loving parents, grandparents, siblings, and dogs, and had turned out supremely well adjusted as a result. Eric, the former boy wonder of Long Island, typifies this phenomenon, but even Russia, who seemed so unconventional when I first met her, has two very sweet and somewhat elderly parents living in a big run-down house in Connecticut, and an adorable younger brother who deserves every bit of the attention that she lavishes so generously upon him. Until I met Phillip, I secretly nursed a suspicion that all the marriage statistics lied, and that in actuality I was one of the very few to come from a broken family in America.

  He had had a lot of lovers in his life, and Russia may have had reason to be shocked when I told her how many men I have slept with. Eighteen lovers for a twenty-six-year-old woman might not seem unreasonably high even in the era of AIDS, yet it may be so considering that I was a virgin until I got to college. I have, in fact, been sexually active only for the past eight years, and then with a vengeance. Sometimes I think it a miracle that I have not yet caught AIDS, but then I remind myself that all of my lovers have been such nice clean boys, upper-middle-class Ivy League types from dream homes, and that when it comes to venereal diseases, God is even more chary of his miracles than usual.

  Phillip and I had five months together as best friends, and all the time that we spent together (clothed, casual, chatty) set up a physical barrier between us that we were never able to overcome completely, except at the very end. Even now, though, I am not absolutely sure that becoming friends was a mistake. If I had slept with him on the night I met him, instead of talking with him into the early hours of the morning, it is quite possible we would never have seen each other again.

  Although I thought what we had was so different and special, when I leave the confines of my apartment and walk around outside, I know it was not. The great romances of literature and history do not arouse my envy, and I am left cold at the thought of a passion that could electrify the stage. But the sight of an old couple helping each other down the stairs makes me feel so wistful that even though I know I should look away, I cannot. I wish I could have had that with Phillip, and yet even as I wish it, I know I am being corny and unrealistic and stupid, because of course the cards were stacked against that from the start. For while almost by definition
every true lover feels that his or her love is extraordinary, only a very small handful of lucky ones can actually prevail over the extraordinary to achieve a garden-variety domestic happiness.

  I push myself off the bench, hobble a few blocks more, and then trudge up the stairs at 103rd Street to exit the park. One day, after climbing up these steps, Phillip and I turned around to look back at the way we had come. It was early November, and the leaves lay in piles around the trees. The park sloped down green and grassy to the boulevard, where Rollerbladers made moving points of neon color, and then there was the highway with all the traffic, and beyond that the Hudson River, shiny and blue; farther past that was New Jersey, rendered picturesque by distance, and finally there was the infiniteness of the sky, with the sun sinking, but still yellow. We were quiet for a time, the wind riffling through our hair, and then Phillip turned to me and put an arm around my shoulder. He spoke in pig Latin; we often did so when we were alone in public together.

  “Someday, Ki,” he said, gesturing grandly towards the west, “someday all this will be yours.”

  I laughed, my face turned up to him. For a few seconds, he looked at me without speaking, and then he laughed as well, the sunlight glowing warm upon him.

  “Actually, I’m just kidding.” He gazed out at the horizon again. “It’s yours already.”

  Obaasama, I will say. You who have been displayed, sold, coveted, haggled over, purchased, traded, kept, and owned. You whom countless men have paid for and sampled. You who have survived earthquakes, a world war, a fire. Grandmother, can you teach me how to carry on once love becomes a ghost?

  The shadows are beginning to lengthen.

  When I open the door and stumble into my apartment, Phillip is the first thing I see. He reclines on top of the bookshelves, flat on his back, so that only his profile is visible. I greet him in silence, as usual, but with relief as well, thinking I should have known better: he is no mouse, to scamper away because of one poorly aimed shoe.

  I check the answering machine. The red light shines forth without blinking; Eric still has not called, and I cannot find it in myself to cry.