After we get home, we sit on the sofa in the living room until midnight. His kisses are sweet and I savor their taste on my lips. The room is completely dark; even the moths are sleeping.
I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth; he is so tired that he goes directly to bed. He is more asleep than awake when I get under the covers, and his voice is a murmur nearly lost in the quiet. “You know,” he says, “you seemed like such a little girl when you cried so hard at the jewelry store.”
“I guess I was acting like one,” I say, my voice low.
Without replying, he slips an arm over me, just below my throat. Its weight is warm and comfortable, yet I can tell that unless he remembers to take it off before he falls asleep, I will wake up with a stiff neck tomorrow.
“Eric?”
His breathing has already become deep and regular, and it takes him a long while to answer. “Yeah?”
“Oh, never mind,” I say, for what does a stiff neck really matter in the face of his love?
His arm enfolds me closely, and in less than a minute, I, too, am almost asleep. This time it is he who wakes me.
“Kiki.”
“Hmm?”
“I really missed you.”
I hesitate only a fraction of a second. “I missed you, too.”
He kisses me on the shoulder and then he falls asleep with his body curled around me like the shell around a snail, his fingers woven into my hair.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THIS HONEYMOON PERIOD, sweet and all-consuming as it is, has to bend itself around the obligations of the outer world, so the next day Eric and I resolve that we can see each other only if we work as well. Still, it is not until after yet another blissful interlude in the bedroom that Eric can concentrate on his papers, and I can pay attention to a book. I think I am just maybe becoming convinced by Eve Sedgwick when the phone rings.
“Hello?” I say, unsuspecting, lulled by the happiness of the last couple of days, but then the skin on my arms starts to prickle, because again I can hear the faint wail on the line and now it is finally, unmistakably identifiable: it is the sound of someone tunelessly humming. I listen for a while, hypnotized by it in spite of myself, before replacing the receiver on the hook. I sit on the couch, gazing down at my right knee, which is moving up and down like a restless schoolboy’s, and then I raise my head and look at Eric. Sitting across the room, he is engrossed in a yellow notepad, not even bothering to ask who was or was not on the phone, even though his head had jerked up at the first ring.
On a cold day last January, I had huddled behind a pyramid of tomatoes to watch Phillip and a tall blond woman choose an eggplant at the market. After I came home that afternoon, I had gone straight to the telephone, my fingers hanging suspended over the buttons for a few seconds, and then I had dialed Phillip’s number, heard one ring, and hung up quickly, incredulous that I was reenacting the pranks of adolescence.
“You slept with her, didn’t you,” I say.
Eric raises his head, his eyes wide, his brows high, and his mouth slack—the picture of innocence. “What are you talking about? Who are you talking about?”
“That Asian woman from your office,” I say. “Theresa Chan.”
He nods to himself, then, and I find myself astonished at how quickly he has given up his bluff. He must have wanted to confess for a long time. He sighs, his eyes meeting mine. “I slept with her a couple of times before I met you.”
“I knew it,” I say slowly. I am remembering the way she looked at me when I met her in the office, her head thrown slightly back and her eyes (thin and far darker than my own) cool and reflective as she watched me.
Then I cast my mind eight years further back, recalling what a tall man had said to me about what lies between an Oriental girl’s legs, and how I had run from him without offering a word in response.
“And the phone calls?”
Raking his fingers through his hair, Eric tells me how she had wanted to call him at my house one night, how she had demanded my number and how he had refused to give it to her. He says that he had hoped it had all blown over, until one afternoon, weeks later, he answered my phone, and it was her. “I don’t know how she got your number, and I don’t know what she was thinking. I don’t think she knew, herself,” he says. For the first time he looks troubled, the lines around his mouth drawn, and his hair, unsettled by his fingers, falling unregarded over one eye. “I knew I should have told you then, but I kept hoping it would just blow over, and she would find someone else…. I’m sorry, Kiki.”
“Did you sleep with her after you met me, too?” I say, the steadiness of my voice a minor miracle.
“No. Well, yes. Just one night. Remember when you called me last week to make up with me, and I wasn’t home? That night,” he says, and adds quickly, “But that wasn’t all my fault. You’ve got to take into account how I was feeling—I take you shopping for an engagement ring, and you burst into tears right in the store.”
I look at him in disbelief for a few moments, and then I close my eyes, forcing myself to slow my breathing, but when I open them and look again at Eric, my breathing quickens all over again: while he avoids my gaze, his face is not burning red with shame.
I want to throw a shoe at him, something considerably heavier and sharper than a loafer—a boot with high heels and buckles, perhaps. Then, when he goes on to tell me, speaking quickly in prime argumentative mode, that he cannot have an Asian-woman fetish because it was she who first made a move on him, I begin thinking about the satisfying crack of metal against bone. I scout the room for possibilities: the pokers by the fireplace, my cast-iron bookends, and the tall lamp that stands in the corner of the room.
“Besides,” he continues, oblivious to the danger he is in, engrossed in the same subject, “I can’t have a fetish, because I don’t even think she’s pretty. Her hair’s stringy, her face is plain, and she’s way too skinny.”
“That’s what it means to have a fetish,” I say, snapping. “You want to sleep with her, even if you don’t think she’s attractive, even if—what’s far, far worse—she’s stalking me over the phone.”
We stare at each other, yet I am still the only one who is breathing hard.
“You should have told me about the phone calls as soon as you had an inkling,” I tell him. “And how come you didn’t tell me you were seeing someone else when we met?”
Eric’s words are irritatingly reasonable, and his voice is maddeningly calm. “I just didn’t think it was worth mentioning. Why should we get into all that, just after we met, and unnecessarily complicate everything? What I had with Terry had nothing to do with you.”
We argue, or is it only talk, in loops, circling and circling back, only sometimes moving a little farther away.
“Were you at least planning to tell me about it at some point?”
“Yes,” he says decisively, and then he shakes his head and gives a rueful half-smile, one that would be disarming in any other context. “At some point far-off in the future, anyway. Maybe when we were old and married, with a dog and a mortgage and two children, and we could laugh at it together.”
His last phrase hangs in the air between us, and I think back to the first time that we met, the laughter we shared in the darkness a little more than a year ago. His mind must have traveled the same route, because he looks squarely at me and says, “I liked her all right, and who knows? Maybe it would have gone somewhere eventually, but then I met you, Kiki, and it might sound callous but she went clean out of my head.” He rubs the back of his neck with his hand, and suddenly asks, “Do you remember the first time we met?”
I shrug. “Sure.”
He slips off the sofa to sit on the ground, his legs slightly bent in front of him. “You were late getting back from the intermission, and had to walk by me to get in—”
“Do we have to get into this now?”
“—and you stepped on my foot,” he says with fondness. “Do you remember that?”
I sha
ke my head.
“And then your purse got caught on the armrest so you were stuck, wrestling with it and blocking my view completely, for almost a full minute,” he continues, inching closer towards me.
“I don’t remember that, either.”
“Your hair got in my face and made me sneeze.”
“Oh,” I say. “Well. So much for great beginnings.”
“But it was. You sat there shredding your program to bits without even realizing it. You were completely out of it—almost otherworldly, and I thought, if someone doesn’t pin that girl down, she’s going to float away into the sky, never to be seen by any mortal again.” He takes a deep breath and looks down at his knees. “I wanted to take care of you, to protect you—and maybe it sounds awful, but I wanted you to notice me. There was something about you—you were so klutzy and—and fragile, somehow. And beautiful, too, of course,” he adds.
“And Terry?”
“I told her about you right away. Honestly, I didn’t think she’d care. We weren’t all that serious, and I knew she was seeing other people at the time. But she was terribly upset about it anyway, whether or not she had a right to be.”
Eric is sitting beside me on the couch now, his body close though not quite touching.
I try to close my mind off, but the images I have been fighting flash in anyway, in glorious Technicolor and unwanted detail: the two of them entwined and kissing on a leather armchair, half-dressed and writhing on a gray carpet, and naked and straining in his bed. His face transformed with lust, the vein on his forehead enlarged, and those long, rounded calves in flesh-colored stockings, with the run crawling upwards from her heel.
He reaches out a hand and places it on my knee. His touch makes me shiver; I do not know whether from disgust or desire. “I know that what I did was wrong,” he tells me, “but you drove me to her.”
“I drove you to her,” I say slowly. “I drove you to her?”
“You did,” he says. “With all that talk about Phillip. The first time I was with her you had just been—”
“The first time?” I ask. “I thought you said it had only happened once?”
“Okay,” he says. “You might as well know. I was with her one other time, maybe a month after you and I started sleeping together, but that was it, I swear it.”
“You asshole,” I say with fervor, and I bend my head down, my hair a curtain for my face.
“Look,” he says. “I know I don’t have any right to the high moral ground here. And I’m not asking for it. But you haven’t been easy to deal with—it actually all started because I was jealous of you.”
“Jealous of me,” I say, for I have been transformed into an echo. “You were jealous of me.”
“Wait. Listen to me first. I did cheat on you, but it was revenge. I couldn’t bear it anymore, all that mooning over Phillip.”
His palm, resting on my knee, is beginning to feel both heavy and sticky: an unpleasant sensation.
“It was not just about revenge,” I say. “Take some responsibility, and stop blaming me for what you did.”
“Just listen to me for a second,” he says. As I reluctantly nod, he begins explaining: “It happened at a low point in our relationship, when I was starting to think you weren’t ever going to get over Phillip, and then my team got sent to Pittsburgh on that case, remember? She went, too, and—”
You lying, cheating bastard, I think. You coward, you conceited fool.
“—I tried to call, but—” He breaks off. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I don’t know how I’m looking at you.”
“I don’t know, either…. Talk to me,” he says, his face growing paler before my eyes. “What are you thinking of when you look at me like that?”
“You’re a bastard for having cheated, and a coward for having lied.” I sound all right, I think, but when I slap his hand off my knee, I find my hands are shaking, and I sit on them both, hard.
His eyes are a little out of focus when he looks at me, and it takes him a while to answer. “I guess I deserve that.”
After due consideration, I have come to the decision that with my aim, throwing a bookend at him is not enough punishment. Nor is it enough contact.
I want to punch him, fist against face, in the same way that my father beat up my mother at night, leaving purple circles around the eyes, swollen lips, bruised cheeks, and traces of blood that have to be scrubbed out of blouses with cold water in the morning.
Minutes pass in silence.
We sit apart from each other on opposite ends of the couch. As hunched over as Phillip ever was, Eric sinks his head into his neck; his legs sprawl open. My knees are curled to my chest, with my arms encircling them so that my body forms a tight ball.
“Are we going to get over this?” he says. His words wobble, and his voice breaks at the end; when I glance over at him, I see that his face is, finally, deeply flushed.
“No matter what, its going to take a lot of time,” I say, warning him. “And I might never get over it completely. But I’ll try.”
“Thank you,” he says.
I nod curtly.
I know about a few of Eric’s past lovers in a general way: his college girlfriend, Sylvia, raven-haired, ambitious, and mathematical, addicted to soap operas, the Wall Street Journal, and calculus; and voluptuous Elena, a gymnast and law student from Kiev, who could weave her arms around her well-contoured bottom in a way that defied belief—attachments born of a healthy sexual attraction, a trajectory of desire that rose and climaxed and ultimately fell. Those were relationships I could understand. But Theresa Chan is a pull that falls in another category, a threat so immediate I can taste its bitterness on the tip of my tongue.
The thought of her hovers in the background as I uncoil myself from my tight ball and lean towards Eric, who has one hand over his face, hiding his eyes. The run in her stockings is in my mind as I take hold of his wrist and lead him, wide-eyed now, and at first reluctant, to bed. I undress him slowly, and then quickly shed my own clothes. I hold his gaze as I climb on top of him with deliberation, more excited than I ever have been in my life. She is there as I watch his face grow stern, the vein on his forehead swell and, finally, his eyes close.
Grandmother, I will say. Obaasama. When you worked as a geisha, did you ever wrap your legs around a man and drain from him pleasure, feeling all the while as if you could kill?
When it is over, Eric closes his eyes again for a long moment. “Jesus,” he whispers, drawling out the word: it is a prayer.
Lying flat on my back beside him, the expanse of the bed stretching out between us, I choke back a wave of hysteria, and wish in vain for someone to share the joke: that I had been wrong in doubting Phillip and his love for me; wrong, too, in trusting in Eric and his devotion, but right, all along (in the most minor and bitter of all possible triumphs), in guessing at Eric’s fascination with yellow-tinted skin and thin black eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
AS SHE NEARED the end of her sixty-seventh year, my grandmother Yukiko found herself slipping into a forgetfulness that was itself both easy and delicious to forget. Names and faces slipped away from her, leaving her bluffing on the sidewalk or stammering over the phone. She misplaced keys, letters, books, half-finished cups of tepid tea, bowls of steaming rice and even, on one occasion, her new car, which she had driven out to the city and then forgotten, taking the subway, a train, and then a cab back, as she was used to doing. Worse still, while deep in search of something precious, on her hands and creaky knees, her head bent as she craned to see under the sofa or the bed, her papers and the furniture around her in disarray, she was apt to realize that she had forgotten what she had lost in the first place.
Yet as her grasp on the life around her crept stealthily away, her memory of the past rose up to embrace and console her as tenderly as a mother. The sights, sounds, and smells of her childhood, even those once believed long lost, returned to her with a clarity that astonished: the c
alls of her brothers as they played up in the trees, the milky eyes of the lord who owned them, her new breasts turned buoyant in the bath, the smell of grass that heralded the start of the long summers of the north, and the silken sound of her mother’s lisping whisper.
She remembered, too, the men whose sake-soaked breath she sometimes enjoyed and more often endured, and a flat-footed young man walking through the dust to the geisha house for the first time. She remembered the baby whose ashes were shut in an urn, and the others who shot up like bamboo, the pressure of her children’s bodies as they crouched beside her in the bomb shelter, and the almost-chicken flavor of the grasshoppers they caught in the rice fields. She remembered her lovely, heavy kimonos, their long sleeves billowing as they dried in the wind.
The authority of the past, and the newfound serenity and affection with which she reviewed it, was such that she almost did not care about the changes that had stolen over her body. Her hair, once so thick and full, had thinned and was tinged with gray. The breasts that had once shamed her with their size were sagging heavily now, while her ankles and wrists were thin as sticks, and almost as fragile. On rainy days, her bones ached. The only change that truly grieved her, however, was the thickness of her waist and hips, padding that she could not lose no matter how she tried. Still, she held herself upright as ever, with all of the self-consciousness of beauty intact, the careless bearing and imperious eyes of a woman who takes admiration for granted.
It was the most peaceful time of her life, and one rendered sweet by the fact that she shared it with her husband. They spent a lot of time reminding each other, usually to scant avail, of the numerous pills they had to take, preventive measures for the host of largely nonfatal ills that came hand in hand with their age. Neither of them slept much anymore, his old-age sleeplessness having finally caught up with her perennial insomnia, and they sat far into the night at the dining-room table, he studying the market at one end, she scratching away with her fountain pen in the middle. Their far sight grew keener as their near vision dimmed, so that they held their books and papers increasingly farther away from their eyes as they read. One autumn they made back-to-back appointments and acquired spectacles, thin pieces of steel and half-moon glass that they spent more time searching for than using.
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