When my grandmother pauses between her stories, stooping to drink from her tea, I will reach out to hold her by the hand. You do know, I will say, you do know how grateful I am that you’re here?
In Phillip’s absence my eating habits had changed, but so gradually that at first I had not noticed. It began innocently enough, out of a desire to keep things the way they were before he left. I would buy a pound of jelly beans because that was how much Phillip and I bought when we wanted a snack; I made three cups of buttered popcorn after dinner because that was the amount we always made. Since I was used to ordering sun-dried tomatoes and three different cheeses at the deli, I continued to do so, and of course four bagels with cream cheese and lox were a sacred Sunday morning tradition. The more I ate the more I wanted, and late at night I began going out to the Korean markets, which were always open, so that I could buy and eat whole bags of cookies.
Phillip’s body had been covered by snow. It smothered his nose and mouth and stopped his breath; its weight crushed his flesh and broke his bones, and eventually it froze his internal organs. I ate Phillip’s food for him. I ate because while he was dead I lived, and because the rhythmic chewing motion kept me from thinking at least for a while.
My body did not seem like my own, but a shameful and heavy burden I had to bear: a punishment for unacknowledged sins. I left the apartment unwillingly because of people’s eyes. I grew my hair long and kept it in front so that it covered my breasts and my stomach down to my belly button. I wore the clothes I had not worn since I was a teenager, shapeless sweaters huge enough to drown in.
Throughout the weekend that I was at home, my mother did not once mention the weight I had gained. At the time I was grateful for her tact, yet looking back I think it more likely that she simply did not notice. Although I thought then that it was a mistake when the scale at my mother’s house showed that I had gained only eight pounds, now I have to concede that I had made the only mistake, and that the change in my body was all in my mind.
In the mirror I expected to see Yukiko, not my glamorous, self-assured grandmother but the overweight teenager who, in an ironic twist, shared her name, a girl slouching with self-consciousness at her lack of grace and beauty. When I went to the bathroom and saw instead the calm loveliness of my face, unmarred by the monstrous body that I thought lay hidden inside my clothes, I was sure that the mirror was playing tricks. For when fate, acting on a sudden caprice, decrees that someone as young as Phillip should die, who or what can you trust?
I did not cry after Phillip left, but in April, two months after I heard about his death, three months after Horse had succumbed to the siren call of the full moon and fled through the fire escape, I woke up in the middle of the night, moved my legs carefully so that I would not accidentally kick our cat, and began to cry without realizing that I did so. Troubled with nightmares and bewildered by sleep, I sat up and began feeling around the end of the bed. While my hands searched the tufts of my comforter, I whispered for him, certain that my hands would come across his warm furry body at any moment.
“Horse? Horse, here kitty kitty.” I have a queen-size bed and I went over every inch of it at least three times. I continued calling out for him as I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my nightshirt and got out of bed. The floor was cold against my bare feet.
“Horse, Horse, Horse,” I said. I lurched through the hallway, tripping over the carpet. I could have switched on any or all of the lights, but instead I relied on the dim hall lamp alone. In the living room I checked for Horse in his basket, and then in his favorite hideout between the radiator and the bookshelf. I blew my nose on a napkin I had left on the coffee table. I did not stop crying, and I kept on calling out his name. In the kitchen I walked right over the space where I used to keep his catfood dish, yet I did not remember that Horse was gone until I saw the bars of the fire escape through the curtains of the window.
Repeating his name, I collapsed on the kitchen floor, and it was a long time before I could drag myself back to bed. I did not scream or kick or even sob very loudly; I simply cried steadily all through the night. It was as if my body could no longer contain the weight of the tears I had held back for years. They were seemingly endless and terribly bitter, each drop fresh with the memory of all the individual sorrows, so that when I cried I did not mourn only for Horse, but also for Phillip, my father’s love, and my mother’s hands.
In June, one month before I met Eric, a short man with burning eyes stopped me on the subway. Peering out beneath a ridiculous straw hat, his face seemed completely unfamiliar, and it took me some time to remember him as a Princeton classmate of mine. All I could recall of him was that he was something of a math star, and that he had hated rooming with a football player I had dated for a while. It was fortunate that he reintroduced himself, because on my own I would never have remembered his name.
We chatted about the usual things, college and careers and other classmates; he seemed to have achieved a modicum of success. Finally the conversation came to a close.
“Well,” he said, and then he paused, his head to one side. I was about to tell him I had to go when he suddenly shook his head. “You’ve changed so much.”
I shrugged. “We’ve all changed, haven’t we?”
Frowning, he shook his head again. “Not all that much,” he said. “But you seem like a different person altogether. You laughed at everything all the time in college, as if nothing in the world mattered. I despised you for being so shallow. I had a real crush on you, but I despised you at the same time.”
He was ugly but he was ugly in an interesting way, and I liked him for his bluntness. I was also physically stirred by the thought of him nursing a secret passion for me, perhaps touching himself as he contemplated my image in the dark. When I invited him to my apartment for a drink he accepted, and after giving him three bottles of Phillip’s old beer so he could relax and get his courage up, I went to bed with him.
It was the only sex I had had for some months. He surprised me by giving me a fair amount of pleasure in bed and yet afterwards, when I lay in his arms, I felt lonelier than I had before. I knew then how much I had changed. Instead of lying and avoiding his phone calls, I told him to his face that I did not want to be with him again. His hat in hand, he gravely thanked me before going home.
Seventeen months have passed since I burned the fingers of my left hand on the stove. The blisters healed long ago but the skin is different: harder and tougher, taut and almost glossy, the miniature ridges flattened and each tiny valley filled, without any more twisting pathways. My fingers are a blank. Where there once was a finely whorled pattern indicating a singular and fixed identity, there is only the unmarked smoothness of a clean sheet of paper. Now I would do the same to my memory if I could.
Russia had told me on the night I first met him that Phillip was not my type. She may have been right. He led the life of an ascetic in his tiny apartment on 99th Street, one of a long series of temporary homes. His room was clean but there was always a smell of mold and mustiness lingering in the air, and the walls were peeling and usually slightly damp. Yet I could have been happy with him there; the problem was that he never invited me to share it.
He was inherently elusive. Once he had wanted to be a priest. When I asked him why he had abandoned his childhood dream, he laughed and said the flesh was weak. I winced at the sound of that laugh. Traveling all the time, he was fickle with women and places alike, and even now I remain uncertain that our friendship was special at all. I may have been just one of a long series of temporary friends, and he may have been just a crush, an intense but insubstantial passion, doomed to be short-lived and dissatisfying as the other lovers in my past. If I had slept with him a few times, maybe he would have gone the way of all those college tennis players or the lanky debater I lost my virginity to, or even my oldest love, Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark: dimly remembered sources of feeling, reasons for laughter rather than nostalgia. As I lie sprawled on the sofa, the front of m
y hair still wet with sweat from the scare I had had in the park, I tell myself that the only difference between Phillip and all my ex-lovers is that with Phillip, I never had a chance to find out how far reality fell short of the fantasy.
Eric and I are compatible. I have had many lovers but almost no boyfriends, and certainly none like him. Although our professional lives move at a different pace, together we share an easy rhythm. We both love our work and we both bring it home with us; we do not disturb each other as we work and we support each other. From the beginning few compromises were needed in our domestic life.
For the last five months Eric and I have been all but living together. Our clothes hang in each other’s closets, and underwear of all kinds mingle in each other’s drawers and hampers. In our bathrooms our toothbrushes touch. I do love him; more than that, I need him.
Obaasama, I will say. Grandmother, isn’t this what love with Sekiguchi was like for you—sneaking up so quietly that for months you did not notice anything had changed? And if you staked your happiness on a second, quieter romance, who am I to run away when a love like that comes barreling through my door?
If my grandmother were here now, she could help sort out all these problems. No one is better qualified, for not only does she know what it is like to leave one love behind for another, but in the wake of Sekiguchi’s death, she also knows what it is like to want to hold on forever.
When I push myself up onto my elbows, I see Phillip sitting on the sofa across from me. He is almost within arm’s reach, closer than he has been for a long time. A half-filled cup of tea I had forgotten to finish this afternoon rests in front of him on the coffee table, and his long legs are crossed. A modest hand casually drapes over his genitals. Were it not for his nakedness and the fact that the light shines through him in patches, we could easily be taken for two people genteelly enjoying a late-night cup of tea.
“You’re not real,” I tell him. My voice is loud and harsh in the stillness of the room. “You’re a figment. A phantom born of loneliness and despair.”
He does not move. As always, his thoughts are veiled by the immobility of his face. He watches me attentively, as if waiting for me to tell the end of a story.
I wish he would move. His lips are sealed together and his eyes seem cold in their unwavering intentness. I cannot endure his stare for long, and I look down at my toes instead. We sit in silence for a long spell.
“I can’t depend on you,” I say at last. In spite of myself it is an apology.
I turn my attention inward, away from the physical presence in front of me, and I can hear my heart as I move to pick up the phone.
Eric’s answering machine answers. I begin speaking at the end of his message, after the beep.
“Hi, Eric, it’s me…. I want to see you. Please call me—I don’t want to beg but—well, I guess I’m begging.”
I hang up the phone. My hands are clammy and the fingertips are cold. Phillip is gone when I look up, but for many minutes afterwards, I sit and watch the indentation his weight left on the cushion, wondering whether he left a trail of footprints behind him on a mountain path in Nepal, or whether they, too, were buried and lost in the snow.
Grandmother, I will say, Phillip is dead, you see. Phillip died, and I do not want to spend my life living with his ghost.
Obaasama, I will say (begging for reassurance), did I do the right thing? After all that you have gone through, what would you have done in my position? In fact, I will say (looking directly at her, still so lovely in spite of her years, in spite of the new lines, formed after Sekiguchi’s death, that are like knife cuts in her face), what would you do if love comes knocking on your door yet again?
But the last is not a question that I will ever ask, for even as I think it, I can hear my grandmother laughing, and I see in my mind a door opening a crack only to swing swiftly shut.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
BY THE TIME history, in the form of a cruel war, caught up with my grandmother Yukiko, she was married.
With every bomb that fell, and there were many, more and more buildings were destroyed, and more and more people fled to the country. Streets that had been thronged were almost empty, and shops that had once displayed clothes and jewelry were abandoned to the bombs. The rain fell inside burnt-out houses.
Often the air-raid siren let off its high wail, and then Yukiko rounded up her three children and ran out to the bomb shelter that she and her husband had dug in the garden. There they huddled, smelling the damp earth and each other, until the bomb fell or the threat passed, and another siren went off to tell them it was safe to come out. One bomb had killed a teacher at their school; another a neighborhood girl who was, at three years old, the same age as my uncle Tadashi at the time. Still, the children were usually more bored than scared in the shelter, for there was nothing to do but try to catch glimpses of the bombs, which were as loud and spectacular as fireworks, and to listen to Yukiko’s stories.
While they fidgeted, yawned, and whined about hunger in the dark, she told them of her childhood in the north, and even a few choice details of her life as a geisha. They did not understand all her stories as children or even, for that matter, when they became adults, and they did not miss all those underground storytelling sessions when they moved to the countryside to flee the bombs.
As Tokyo had changed, so, too, had Yukiko. No longer beset by poverty or the disquieting growth spurts of adolescence, freed from the onerous obligations of her geisha career, and finally secure in her right to Sekiguchi’s full love and attention, she had bloomed, becoming the high-spirited woman that nature had intended her to be. In the countryside she played with her children, making a game out of catching the grasshoppers that they later fried and ate with a few precious grains of rice, and she laughed them out of their complaints about the meanness of the village children. On two memorable occasions, she hitched up the skirt of her kimono and shimmied up a tree, proving that beneath the exterior of a grand lady, she was still the tomboy who could outrun, outjump, and outclimb her brothers.
Yet only her children, her husband, and her servants saw this side of her. While her neighbors and the wives of Sekiguchi’s friends in Tokyo were always painstakingly polite to her, in subtle ways they also made it clear that they despised her for her former career, and that they could not forgive her for usurping the place of Sekiguchi’s young first wife, who had been universally loved for her sweetness. They had tried Yukiko for the crime of fawning her way into Sekiguchi’s bed and home, and they had found her guilty; they believed she had married him as a calculated move, for his money and position. They scorned her for her love of luxury and her collection of kimonos, and for the care she took to enhance her beauty. There were rumors, even, that Yukiko had had Eiko poisoned. Few were willing to countenance that she had actually killed Sekiguchi’s child bride, but most were in agreement that the upstart geisha had contributed much in the way of heartache to her untimely death: on the day that she had spied on Eiko being borne high aloft a litter, Yukiko had been seen, not just by Eiko but by at least one other person of the town. The considerable lore surrounding Yukiko thus included the story that she had gone to flaunt her good health, her expensive kimono, and her pregnancy in Eiko’s face.
There was yet one more reason that Tokyo’s high society looked askance at her: she was envied and, therefore, disliked for the indulgence accorded to her by her husband. For even aside from its provenance, theirs was an unusual marriage.
As a geisha, she had been trained to banter and also to speak intelligently with men, and she continued to do so even after she became a wife. When business associates came to visit Sekiguchi, Yukiko did not simply greet them and serve tea, but sat in on their discussions and sometimes even participated, much to the discomfiture of the guests. Disconcertingly blunt though her remarks often were, Sekiguchi granted them the same grave attention he gave to the comments of his friends, who had no choice but to follow his lead. As if that were not bad enough in the ey
es of Tokyo high society, she also traveled with Sekiguchi on all his business trips, to Europe, China, northern Africa, and even Canada, although they never quite made it to the States. While Sekiguchi sat through long hours of business meetings, she roamed foreign cities on her own. She had in common with Phillip a love of maps. She used to spend whole days poring over them, so that she could leaf through an atlas and point immediately to the dozen countries she had visited, and trace the exact routes she traveled with her finger.
Accused, on one hand, of cold-bloodedly finagling her way into a loveless marriage, and envied, on the other, for the success of that very same union, Yukiko called upon the reserve that had stood her in good stead as a geisha, and grew ever more aloof in public. If she ever felt lonely in her at least partly self-imposed isolation from Tokyo society, her children, at least, never knew it. Still, it could not have helped that now that she had a position to maintain, she found herself barred from the company of all her geisha friends.
By 1943, two years into the war, she had been living with Sekiguchi for eight years, and married to him for three. But when she was feeling dreamy after wandering through the city with her daughter, she would set off for home only to discover that her feet had led her unerringly through the maze of streets to her old neighborhood, the site of the geisha house.
In becoming the wife of the rich and influential Sekiguchi, Yukiko had given up her right to go back to that home. Deep in the swirl of preparations for the wedding, she had at first not given this matter enough thought: not until she was actually taking leave of her oldest friend did she stop to take stock of the full price of her marriage.
One Hundred and One Ways Page 19