Despite the two years that separated them, Yukiko and Sekiguchi seemed so close in age that it came as a shock to them both when he gave in during the winter of his seventy-third year to a mild, local variety of flu, and emerged a week later looking old. For some years, it was true, he as well as Yukiko had been teetering on the brink of old age, but the suddenness of his plunge, as well as the depth of it, took them by surprise.
Once begun, his decline proceeded rapidly. Although his good eye remained beady and bright, his bad one swelled until it was almost shut, and his left leg often could not bear him up at all. Soon he could no longer sit up on some mornings. The doctors were perplexed. Bowing their apologies, they could only say that it was as if the smallpox that had almost killed him as a boy was now determined to carry him to his death.
Stubbornly Sekiguchi insisted on keeping his job, and Yukiko encouraged him in this. On the days he remained home, sullen and bad-tempered with his pain, she sat by the bed and teased him lightheartedly about being an old bear. When he dropped off to sleep beside her, she never stayed to watch over him, but ran errands or wrote, or took naps in the baths that were her primary indulgence. The wives of his friends whispered of what seemed to be her indifference, and possibly even a desire to speed him to his death. Even the neighborhood women, who had come to tolerate if not accept her, began to say that now that Sekiguchi was reliant on her, she was finally letting her geisha heart show.
In the village where they lived, just a half-hour commute from Tokyo, the people still talk of his death. The medical report stated that Sekiguchi was killed by complications arising from the blow to his head. At least there is that, the thought that he died fast. They had to sift through the ashes to find his body, but while his hair was singed away, only his right elbow was burned, and not even too badly: nothing worse than what an iron could do to you, or a hot stove.
He died on a cool dry night in June, a mere three days short of the monsoon season. A small earthquake, just large enough to set a paper cup rolling, began an electrical fire in their house. At the time there was a brisk breeze blowing, and this fanned the flame into ravenous life. A good fifteen minutes passed before the fire department was notified, and by then the house was already doomed.
It seemed certain that both Sekiguchi and Yukiko were already dead, having suffocated from the smoke in their sleep or, at the worst, been burned alive. The eastern side of the house, which included the master bedroom, was already engulfed in flames. The light timber that made up the house burned well, and even as the firefighters arrived, part of the wall collapsed with a dispersal of sparks that looked like fireworks. All the firefighters could do was make sure that the flames did not spread to the northern side of the house, where Yukiko’s study and the bathhouse were located, and beyond which lay the servants’ quarters, separated from the main house by a few yards. Not all the men were needed to ensure this, and the others joined the neighbors and the handful of old servants, huddling in their kimonos and nightgowns, who were gathered around the fire with their arms folded, and their faces reflecting the flicker of the fire.
It was the youngest maidservant, a mere fifty-seven years old, who heard the singing first. She called out to the others to listen, but her voice was thin and weedy, and only those standing immediately beside her heard. The singing came from her left, and the maidservant guessed that Yukiko had been caught in the bathhouse, which is in fact what had happened. Yukiko never could rest easy after an earthquake.
My grandmother is, of course, a lousy singer. She has a fair sense of rhythm, which had helped her as a dancer, but when she sings, her voice, like mine, strays in and out of tune. Naturally low, her voice was also husky with age by then, and she was surrounded by a raging fire. Yet one by one the crowd fell silent, straining to hear. The song was so faint that the youngest maidservant would have thought she dreamed it, were it not for the others listening around her.
Yukiko sang an old folk love song, and at the end of each verse, she called out Sekiguchi’s name. There was always a pause before she began the next verse, and as they listened, the women of the neighborhood, who had whiled away the afternoons gossiping about Yukiko’s cold geisha heart, bowed their heads in shame, knowing they had slandered her.
The smoke was so thick that many among the crowd were coughing. Still the voice continued, tuneless but serene. When almost half of the roof caved in, all knew that the destruction of the bedroom was complete, and they held their breath, waiting, until the voice came through again, weaker now, but still clear. Unconsciously they shuffled forward. The heat warmed the frail bones of the old servants, and reddened their cheeks as if they were young again.
The voice receded slowly, ebbing in and out of reach like the tide. Sometimes the wind, dying now, would float a wisp of song towards the crowd, until at last the voice came so faintly and so infrequently that they knew they had wished it into being. Inwardly they sighed about the growing stillness of the air, as if it were the wind and not the heart of the singer that had failed them.
Almost twenty more minutes passed before all the flames were extinguished. Through the efforts of the fire department, the servants’ quarters and Yukiko’s study as well as the bathhouse were spared.
They say that for a long time afterwards, the crowd remained at the house, swaying a little as they waited among the embers, their bodies leaning forward as if they still strained to hear.
The fire took Yukiko’s kimonos, Sekiguchi’s books, their antiques, and their home. Stored in the tea box where she once kept her hair, more than half of the nine volumes of Yukiko’s diaries survived. My mother read what was left of them, but she had to guess at the pieces that were missing, and so sew together her mother’s life with scraps from her own. It is a job that I have continued. The bedtime stories that my mother told me have become hers and mine as well as Yukiko’s, and protected by the tea box that came from her, they are a legacy from my great-grandmother, too.
When the firefighters were finally able to break through to the bathhouse, they found Yukiko lying on the ground with her eyes wide open and alert, and it seemed that the only damage she had sustained were a few minor cuts and bruises on her face and arms. But she was silent when they asked her questions, and they eventually came to the conclusion that the trauma had made her mute.
She was laid on a stretcher and carried into a waiting ambulance, and as the number of miles between her and the smoldering remains of her house grew, she began to wonder if her forgetfulness would one day take from her the memory of this night, too. She did not talk for the remainder of the night and through all of the next day, and it was not until the following morning, when she lay gazing up at the white ceiling of her hospital room, that she finally let out a cry, for she had suddenly known that her forgetfulness would not erase from her memory that hour that she spent trapped inside the bathhouse, and the slow dying of her hopes for the husband she still longed to hold.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
ALTHOUGH THE BALLOONS still make my bedroom a riot of colors, while they once were smooth and shiny, they now are shriveled and dull. Littering the floor, they rustle and roll in the dust, and we cannot walk anywhere without kicking at least a few; nudged by our feet, they take off briefly and clumsily before falling and hitting the earth again. Just three days ago, only the ceiling prevented them from floating away to indefinite heights. Now sedately and prudently they refuse to leave the ground; if the floor were removed from beneath them, they would indifferently drift down to the bottom of the earth, dragged to the depths by their own weight. In another three days or so, they will wither away into pieces of colored rubber, just as they were at first, and it seems as if nothing will last forever.
“There are so many of them,” I say to Eric as I join him in the living room. He is reading briefs; I am on the last few pages of a Virginia Woolf novel.
“Fifty-two, to be exact,” he tells me. “The store was offering a baker’s dozen deal, so I got fifty-two for the pr
ice of forty-eight. Quite a bargain, don’t you think?”
“There are only fifty now. I gave two away to Mrs. Noffz—I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mrs. Who? Oh, of course, your batty old neighbor.” One morning a few months back, when Eric was tiptoeing out of my apartment and quietly easing the door shut behind him so he could leave for work without waking me, Mrs. Noffz scared him half to death by creeping up behind him and commenting loudly on the odds against a snowfall in May. To this day, Eric swears that she made a reference to “an Indian winter,” but I tend to think that he made that part up: Mrs. Noffz does not dabble in word play, and her English mistakes are problems of pronunciation rather than vocabulary.
“I wish you wouldn’t call her batty,” I say. “She’s really rather sweet.”
“Hold it right there,” he says. “Just last week you were making fun of her, too. What makes you so self-righteous all of a sudden?”
“I always liked her. I guess I started feeling guilty about being mean to her behind her back.”
“I suppose you’re right. We shouldn’t make fun of the poor old thing. After all, think how lonely and miserable her life is,” he says, shuddering.
He is making a special effort to be agreeable, as he has been for the past five days, ever since we argued about Theresa Chan; our life together has been unwontedly smooth of late. Today, though, I am feeling terribly contradictory. “I don’t think her life is so bad,” I tell him. “And I don’t think she’s particularly lonely.”
He snorts with laughter. “Kiki, be serious. The woman doesn’t do anything. My grandmother might not be running marathons, but she plays bingo at the club and she gets a big kick out of game shows and soap operas, and in three months she’s moving to Florida, where the family will go to visit her at least once a year. Didn’t you tell me that Mrs. Noffz doesn’t even own a television?”
“Her parrot gets nervous around radioactivity,” I explain.
“Let me recap here: the woman has no job, no visible family, apparently no friends other than that droopy bird, and nothing but the weather to keep her occupied. According to you, she hardly ever leaves the apartment. What kind of life is that? I would call it a supremely pathetic existence, and that’s almost an understatement.”
“I don’t leave my apartment very much.”
“Come on, you two are apples and oranges. Mrs. N. is an old lady who has nothing to do. It just so happens that you like to study and work at home, and you have a brilliant career and years and years of life and happiness still ahead of you, and of course,” he says with a self-mocking smirk, “of course you have me. To wit: romance, a love interest, a socially endorsed sexual release and potential source of 2.2 babies in the tried-and-true American fashion. Speaking of which”—he leans forward and grabs my hand—“let’s adjourn to your bedroom and commence making some 2.2 right now.”
I gently pull my hand away “I don’t think Mrs. Noffz would be any happier if she had a boyfriend or 2.2 babies.”
He is beginning to lose patience. “You mean she wouldn’t be any less unhappy Well, you may be right there. But Mrs. N. is a crazy dried-up old woman whose virginity is probably still intact. What do you want to bet that she calls herself ‘Mrs.’ solely for the sake of status?”
With difficulty I manage to keep my tone light. “Not for the sake of status,” I say. “She would never do that. I’ll bet you anything you want.”
“All right, maybe not. But why is she so damn concerned about the weather when she never goes outside? The whole apartment building has heating, and she does have an air conditioner, doesn’t she?”
I hazard a guess. “Because it gives her some contact with the outside world?”
“But that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you. She has no contact with the outside world. If you never go outside, what’s the point of worrying about the weather?”
“She has to go out to buy food,” I say.
Eric is warming to his subject. “She’s so tiny that I’m sure she eats practically nothing at all. Even with her bird to feed, she probably doesn’t have to go shopping more than once a week, tops.”
“She takes walks.” I am feeling defensive.
“In any event, it probably has been years since anybody gave her a present, so it was charitable of you to give her a few balloons. She’s almost certainly dying of loneliness. I know I would be, if I were in her situation—God forbid.”
“I don’t think she’s lonely.”
He stares. “How can you say that when the woman stalks you just so she can chat to you about the weather?”
“I know,” I say. “But at the same time I don’t know… it seems to me she’s being polite more than anything else. I don’t think she’s actually hungry for human companionship. I’m just one of her daily rituals—she feeds her parrot and she checks out the weather and she chats with her neighbor.” I am tired and cross and so I try to instill a note of finality into my next comment. “Oh well, I guess you don’t know her as well as I do.”
“No,” he says, “thank God I don’t, but it is sweet of you to care about her so much.”
We smile at each other and then we return to our reading. The subject is closed, yet for some time afterwards I continue to think about Mrs. Noffz and the spareness of her life, honed down to the basics over the years: sleeping, eating, feeding her parrot, watching the changes of the seasons through the safety of her window, maybe taking out a tired old memory and hugging it to herself in the comforting quiet of the late afternoon, living with the vagaries of the weather and the humors of Mabel as her sole worries.
I glance over at Eric, studiously flipping through the pages of a brief, and remember once again how Phillip had said that on her mantelpiece Mrs. Noffz keeps a photograph of her and a friend. The two of them wear identical hats; so floppy and wide are the brims that their faces, cast in the shade, are equally hard to tell apart.
When my grandmother Yukiko comes to visit the big city, I will introduce her to Mrs. Noffz on our way out. Down in the lobby I will make sure my grandmother’s coat as well as my own is buttoned to the top, and then we will pause for a moment at the door, bracing ourselves for the briskness of the wind, the shrunken but upright figure of Mrs. Noffz still in our thoughts.
Obaasama, I will say (tucking her arm under mine), you know firsthand, don’t you, the twisting, downhill paths that lead to such a life.
With Eric striving for harmony in the household, life proceeds in a fashion that I have dubbed contentment, real-life style. While a far cry from the bodice-ripper ups and downs that I knew with Phillip, when I felt as if my very knuckles hummed with life, this existence is not a bad one: the worst that can be said is that I sometimes feel as if I am half-asleep, and that I cannot be bothered to rouse myself. But then again, perhaps this feeling arises because I am living out a dream.
I like to think of this life that Eric and I have arrived at in terms of the ending that Jane Austen’s heroines (those lively, slightly untamed girls) finally meet—not their success in romance and the marriage market, but rather the fate that awaits them beyond the margins of the book, after the last page is turned. A pleasant enough existence, no doubt, but hardly the stuff that drives narrative, or pulls in readers, or keeps everyone concerned fully awake.
In this state of sleepy contentment, it seems that Theresa Chan could actually add to our store of riches. For in spite of the occasional moments when I (my father’s daughter, after all) snap awake with a desire to bash Eric’s head in with an iron, I like the idea, if not the actuality, of dealing with a problem other than Phillip for a change. It was not so long ago that I thought that there would always be the same three people to consider in this relationship, as well as in this apartment.
Besides, Eric has contended with Phillip so patiently that I almost have no option but to try to forgive.
It is Tuesday, eight days since I got back together with Eric. Thinking to give my mother an account of recent events, I tried
and tried to call her, but she (strolling the aisles of the Asian foodstore? flipping through the periodicals in the public library? catching a movie at the art cinema?) has not been at home, though I called her four times in three days. I was beginning to worry again, when I finally reached her yesterday. “I’ve been busy,” was all she said in reply to my queries. I must have been irritated by her terseness, for I did not tell her after all how I cried when I went to Tiffany’s with Eric, and of how he came back to me anyway.
The third week of August has begun, and Eric is taking a vacation from work. He has been spending it here with me. The apartment has been feeling smaller and smaller: usually I dread going anywhere beyond the familiar environs of the Upper West Side, yet today I am glad to get out, even if it is only for a visit to the gynecologist.
Although I told Eric I am going in for a standard checkup, I made the appointment with the doctor specifically in order to get tested for AIDS. When I once tentatively suggested to Eric that we both get tested, he looked at me incredulously for a second and then laughed as if he thought I was joking, so I decided not to bring up the subject with him again. Besides, at that point it was too late: if he had it, I did, too. This morning I woke up with an urgent need to know whether I was going to die soon because of the virus.
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