One Hundred and One Ways

by Mako Yoshikawa

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE RING OF the phone shatters my sleep, its sound oddly echoing my dreams. “Phillip?” I say hoarsely into the receiver, but my dreams have been about Eric and a nameless dark woman, and I do not receive a reply

  Hiding behind the bamboo that grew thickly on the sides of the road, my grandmother Yukiko staked out Sekiguchi’s imposing house for four days before she saw her.

  Yukiko’s house was smaller and she, at least, thought it prettier, shaded by a grove of cherry trees in a quieter part of town. She had one child, aged two, who played at home under the watchful eyes of a nurse, a girl who was born in the spring but was named for the fall: my mother. The ashes of another girl, dead of pneumonia at the age of two months, lay buried in an urn that was near, but not inside, Sekiguchi’s family tomb in the temple grounds just outside of Tokyo. Now Yukiko was round yet again.

  Every morning for the last four days, before she set out to lurk in the shadows of her favorite clump of bamboo, Yukiko had dressed carefully in her darkest kimono. She had long ago given up tying her obi in the butterfly fashion of the geisha, and opted now for a more decorous bow, as befitting a woman who was pregnant for the third time, a woman no longer available for hire. She carried a parasol partly as protection from the mild March sun, but mostly as another mode of concealment.

  She had reached a watershed in her relationship with her lover. Sekiguchi had bought her a house and had taken her from her geisha life, yet she knew from her old contacts at the geisha house that he had visited another establishment. He had been looking rather than sampling, ostensibly for the purpose of hosting another party, but she thought it odd that he had not mentioned it, and immediately surmised that he was toying with the idea of a second mistress.

  He doted on their daughter, but Yukiko knew he hankered after a son to carry on the line. She ran her fingers lightly over the smooth slope of her stomach, and fiercely willed that the child be a boy.

  She saw her in the late afternoon, when the shadows were lengthening and the air was growing cool, just as she was contemplating going home to ready herself for Sekiguchi’s arrival: he was coming over for dinner and also for the night. The large front doors, unused during the day, when Sekiguchi was at his bank, had opened to a flurry of activity, and Yukiko’s throat went tight with anticipation.

  Ever since her hysterical pregnancy, Eiko had lived in virtual seclusion. Sekiguchi still never talked of her, and Yukiko always, though often just barely, managed to resist the urge to ask. Forewarned by the gossip line, Yukiko thought she knew what to expect from this childless woman, her rival, who was (she sometimes thought with forgivable complacency) maybe barren and even frigid. She had heard countless accounts of Eiko’s nervous giggles, her shrill demands, and the good looks worn away by illnesses both real and imagined. But when Eiko Sekiguchi, borne aloft on a litter, came out of the house, Yukiko was astonished at how pretty she was.

  Eiko was in fact dying, although it was a process that would take another two years, and as the servants bore her closer to the bamboo, Yukiko noted the telltale traces: the almost skeletal fragility, the cheeks that were a little too flushed under the white makeup, the troublesome cough. But these traces did not detract from her beauty, which was exquisite. Small, pale, and perfectly formed, Sekiguchi’s wife embodied the Japanese ideal, in stark, humbling contrast to Yukiko, with her outlandish height, her olive coloring, and her mammoth breasts and feet.

  Unconsciously Yukiko had edged forward, so that she was almost standing on the road. Her parasol, forgotten, had floated down to rest upon her shoulder, exposing her to the direct light. She was, in fact, gaping, and so it was not surprising that Eiko noticed her. What was surprising was Eiko’s reaction. Her eyes lit upon Yukiko’s face, indifferently drifted away, and then quickly darted back and remained fixed there, and Yukiko knew that somehow she had been recognized.

  In Tokyo in the late 1930s, keeping a mistress was an honorable practice. Everyone knew that Kurokawa, the minister of finance, kept different houses for his two geisha women as well as for his wife; he was respected for the fact that he had had fourteen children, nine of them still alive. To be a spurned wife was neither shameful nor uncommon; to be a rich man’s mistress in a house of her own was a step up the social ladder from working at the geisha house. Yet for Eiko there were all the nights she did not even see her husband, the knowledge of the rejection, which lay like a permanent weight on her shoulders, and the thought that he might be waiting for her to die. For Yukiko there was fear, which she could confess only to her old friend, Kaori, for my grandmother was characterized above all by her pride. A constant voice in her head, her fear whispered that she was growing old, that she would lose Sekiguchi’s love and the house that she had given up her geisha life for, that he would ultimately spurn her if she did not bear him a son. Every morning she woke to the sound of this voice, she struggled in vain to evade it through the day, and at night she could not sleep because of its nagging.

  But at the same time Yukiko was also tormented by the thought that even if Eiko were dead, Sekiguchi would not marry her, with her past, which maybe was not sordid but was certainly not aristocratic and impeccable, as Eiko’s was.

  The motion of the litter rocked Eiko gently from side to side. The men carried her on their shoulders, which was still not high enough to escape the stench of the sewage that ran in an open stream along both sides of the path, a stench that Yukiko, well into her fourth day of spying, had long ceased to notice. The two women gazed at each other, Eiko’s head swiveling to keep Yukiko’s face in sight as the servants carrying her turned upon the road. Eiko began to cough again, and she buried her face in the sleeve of her kimono while her whole body shook. She emerged looking wan and tired, but she smiled wryly in Yukiko’s direction. Yukiko bowed then, bending her rounded body as far as she could, and after the shortest of pauses, Eiko followed suit, slowly inclining her head.

  They watched each other for as long as they could, Yukiko a tall figure standing at attention in front of the bamboo, Eiko’s white face hovering above the dark heads of the servants who bore her, an oval that gradually grew smaller until it was lost in the dust and the crowds. Then Yukiko sighed, closed her parasol, and went home to greet and love Eiko’s husband.

  I was standing by the pumpkins when I saw them. They were headed uptown, and together they were so tall and fair it seemed as if they belonged to another species.

  I recognized his walk first, his sauntering grace and the laziness that made him loath to waste motion. They walked side by side, smoothly in step, with long, slow strides that overtook the other people on the street. It was late January, and freezing. With long underwear, a turtle-neck, a sweater, and an ankle-length coat on, I was so bundled up I waddled, and still I was hunched with the cold. Clad in jeans, sweaters, and leather jackets, they moved easily, their arms swinging by their sides. She was thin and tall, only an inch or so shorter than he, with shining golden hair that fell to her shoulders, and more than one passerby turned to watch them go.

  From the shadows beneath the awning I watched them come closer, my mouth dry, and then she grabbed Phillip by the hand and dragged him into the store I was in, and I lost my head and dropped my basket, my books and plums rattling in their cage, and ducked behind the tomatoes.

  She led him straight to the eggplants and put him to work. Under her direction he sorted through them, picking up one at a time, slowly turning it over in his hand, and then tossing it aside. After watching him for a while, she nodded approvingly and began to scramble through the pile herself, picking up two at once, discarding some with decision and putting aside a small pile of possibilities for future inspection.

  They were happily absorbed in their eggplants when suddenly he turned around, and as she looked at him inquiringly, he darted a sharp glance around the shop. I ducked just in time, my heart pounding. Had he sensed my breathing, sniffed me out, heard my racing pulse from a distance of almost ten feet? Could he, half
-blind, see me cowering beside the onions? After a few moments, he turned back to his search, and I cautiously raised my head again. I could see their breaths as they chatted, and I imagined my own breath rising in white puffs above the tomatoes, like Indian smoke signals, betraying me. I tried to aim my breath downwards, letting it out in slow, careful exhalations.

  They took so long over the eggplants that a man waiting for a few moments behind them finally coughed and pushed his way gently but firmly past them. He picked up the one at the top of the pile and headed towards the counter, pausing only to say in a clear, cutting voice that rang even in my ears: “It’s just an eggplant, you know, it’s not a car.” Nonplused, Phillip and the woman stared at him while I snickered, but then Phillip shrugged and the woman laughed and shook out her hair, and they both bent their heads down and resumed their careful search.

  My feet were going numb when at last with a cry of triumph she brandished it aloft, the end of the quest, a prince among eggplants, the paragon of vegetables: plump and shiny, an even dark purple, neither too big nor too small, and cast in the quintessential bulbous shape. They gathered together, arms touching, while she cooed, oohed and aahed over it, and finally gazed down in silence like a fond and doting parent. He smiled and said something; she gave a shout of laughter, turned towards him, placed one black-gloved hand on his shoulder, and kissed him on the cheek.

  My elbow jerked involuntarily and a tomato rolled off the top of the pyramid and hit the ground with a soft plop. Though he could not possibly have heard, Phillip half-turned his head towards me, but the woman was speaking to him now, and he soon turned away.

  I watched them as they paid for the eggplant, left the store, and began walking again, faster and much more purposefully, downtown, in the direction of Phillip’s apartment. In a daze I stood up, my knees aching from the strain. I walked over and retrieved my basket, waited in line, bought the plums, and went home. I worked on a paper on Joy Kogawa throughout the afternoon, but in the evening I had to trash all that I had written.

  The next day he came over to laze around my apartment with me in the evening.

  “Why so distant?” he finally asked.

  “I have to get this paper done.”

  “Crikey,” he said. “Didn’t you say it’s due next week? I’ve never known you to start a paper so early. It was you, wasn’t it, at the market.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said, elaborately casual, absorbed in the papers strewn across my desk.

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “Oh,” I said, determined not to ask. Then the silence of him waiting became too long. “Where does she buy her shoes? She wears wonderful shoes.” Another pause, and I added, “She’s gorgeous. What’s she doing with the likes of you?”

  “You’re being silly,” he said, and though my eyes were still on my papers I could hear the smile in his voice. When I did not reply or turn around, he continued, “She wasn’t doing anything with the likes of me.”

  I drew a balloon and a school of goldfish, just to keep my pen scratching on the paper.

  “I don’t know where she buys her shoes,” he finally said. “Somewhere expensive. Nothing happened, Ki. She’s just a friend.”

  Turning around, I met his straightforward gaze and that crooked smile, and found I could not move, remembering her as she turned to kiss him, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining, a plump polished eggplant lying forgotten in her hand. If nothing had happened, it was not for lack of her trying.

  “I thought you enjoyed one-night stands,” I said. “I thought you always—”

  “Stop judging me,” he said, with more than a hint of sharpness. “You have no right.”

  I did not reply, my eyes scanning the room for Horse.

  “I’ve changed,” he said simply, his tone more level. “I haven’t gone out with any women for a long time, since I—well, since I moved to New York.”

  I was about to remind him that he had only been in New York for five months, but he had not finished speaking.

  “And so what if I did sleep around in the past? You did, too, and you enjoyed it just as much as I did.”

  On the brink of contradicting him, I hesitated, remembering all the tennis players, and before that the debate-team secretary who went to the Capitol with my virginity tucked under his belt.

  “Okay,” I said, sighing. “All right. It was fun at the time. Kind of, or maybe just sometimes, but then I started to hate myself for it.”

  He nodded.

  “Hey,” I said, “while we’re on the subject—how’d you know I was at the market?”

  He grinned. “I thought I saw you reflected in one of the mirrors. They’re all over the store, you know. But mostly it was a lucky guess, and a good bluff.”

  “Ah,” I said, turning back to my desk with a sudden longing for Kogawa’s novel, and the words that were like polished stones. I was looking down at what I had written, trying hard not to think about why he had not slept around since moving to New York, when he came up behind me and placed a hand on my shoulder. He moved so silently I jumped at his touch.

  The fingers of his other hand moved over my head, in the gesture I knew so well. “There,” he said triumphantly, bringing a white strand in front of my face to show me. “That’s my favorite one.”

  I looked down at my desk again, and after a while he dropped the white hair, letting it fall back into place among the black. He drew back a little, unnerved as I was, perhaps, by how close our faces were.

  “I have changed,” he said again, whispering now. “You’ve got to believe me.”

  Why? Because our friendship would suffer if I didn’t? Because I would respect you less, or because I would fear you more? I wanted to ask these questions and more, but I was too afraid. His words, uttered so quietly, confused me in a way I still do not like to remember, and in spite of the almost imperceptible note of pleading in his voice, I could not trust myself to speak. Instead I bent my head down and brushed my cheek against his hand as it rested on my shoulder, a touch so featherlight I was not sure he felt it. But before he moved away from me, his fingers cupped my face for a few moments, in a gesture that was a benediction.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WHEN I TELL my grandmother about Phillip, one of the incidents I will be sure to include is the night he began the practice of brushing my hair, for in a rather pleasing mirror effect, that story begins with me telling Phillip about how she used to keep her hair coiled in a box as she slept. I interrupted my own account by abruptly sitting up.

  “I’m going to get a hairbrush,” I told him. “I’ll be right back.”

  I went to the bedroom and rummaged through the clutter on the dressing table. Just as I found the brush, I heard Phillip speak behind me. “I’ll do that for you,” he said. I turned around and saw him leaning against the doorframe, Horse coiling around his ankles.

  He walked over, sat me down on the chair, and uncurled my fingers from the brush.

  “It’s really tangled,” I warned. We had spent the day in the park, playing Frisbee, and my hair was windswept and badly snarled.

  “Trust me,” he said, gathering my hair into a double handful at the nape of my neck.

  I examined myself critically in the mirror, noting how my face had changed within the past year, shucking off much of the softness of the cheeks and the chin. Though still unlined, my face had attained some of the rigidity of age. If I bent my head down to look at my scalp, I could usually catch a glimpse of at least two strands of white, glinting in an annoyingly conspicuous way against the black of my hair. “I’m going to get my hair dyed.”

  He put down the brush and held up a white hair like an antenna over my head. With me sitting in front of him and him stretching the strand as far as it would go, it reached up to his nose. “You don’t need to dye your hair. You probably only have ten white hairs, all told. And besides, I like them—especially this one.”

  He began brushing. He did so by holding a small secti
on near the roots in one hand and brushing it out with the other, so that my hair was not painfully pulled. Was it his weak eyesight that made his powers of concentration seem doubly intense? He peered closely at everything—a subway map, a book, the fur and face of Horse. I had no right to feel flattered.

  He whistled softly as he worked, a tuneless sound, but soothing.

  “You’re better than my hairdresser at this,” I said suspiciously. “How’d you learn?”

  “A woman,” he said, studiously bending his head over mine.

  Knowing I should not ask, I asked. “Who?”

  “A teacher at my high school,” he said, smiling, but his cheeks were flushed.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “She was an English teacher, actually.”

  “Of course. I’m a member of a corrupt breed.”

  “She had long brown hair, almost this thick,” he said, touching the outlines of mine. “It was a bitch to comb, probably because it was curly.”

  “That was good of you to take over, then,” I said dryly.

  He shook his head at my reflection. “She was thirty and hot as hell, and I was seventeen. I was so thrilled and grateful I would’ve washed her car and painted her house, inside and out, if she’d let me.”

  The static ripped through my hair with the brush, and mingled with the sound of his whistling. His hand moved slowly, rhythmically, up and down, up and down. My eyelids were beginning to droop, but not from drowsiness. Thoughts of the seventeen-year-old Phillip and the thirty-year-old English teacher, her hair streaming down her naked back, kept creeping into my mind. I shook my head (a movement that elicited a low admonition from Phillip) and began to talk.

  “Even when I was little,” I said, “my hair was long. My mom used to brush out all the knots every night, and then again in the morning. It hurt a lot when she did it.”