One Hundred and One Ways

by Mako Yoshikawa

  I have gotten tested three times before. The first time was in July, four years ago, one day before my mother had her first arthritis operation (a left shoulder replacement); the second was in September of the following year, two days before I arrived in New York to set up house by myself. I was tested the third time a year and a quarter ago, the day before my oral examinations.

  I take a bus across the park to the gynecologist’s office. To take the subway I would first have to go all the way downtown to Times Square, and then switch trains and directions, doubling back to climb uptown to the doctor’s office. It bothers me that that route is so roundabout, even though it is still almost certainly faster than the bus. Phillip always fretted about the elephantine pace of buses, and the stops they make every couple of blocks, to let passengers on and off.

  The gynecologist I go to is not, I think, a very good doctor, and he is quite definitely not a nice person. He is a terribly old man from an unidentified Eastern European country, and he tends to be brusque and even mean as he squints between my legs. Perhaps the only advantage in going to him is that he does not seem to have many other patients, so I can call him in the morning to schedule an appointment in the afternoon, as I did today. My mother consulted him when she was a newly married woman fresh off the plane from Japan, and she has continued seeing him ever since. She says that when she first met him, he was already terribly old, and she does not appreciate his rudeness any more than I do. Regardless, I doubt that she has ever considered looking for a new doctor: old attachments die hard on that side of my family.

  The nurse is as indifferent to the ideals of serving humanity as the doctor. She, too, is old, probably nearing seventy. Her face is well lined and her hair iron-gray, and she wears far too much makeup, yet even that cannot disguise the delicacy and refinement of her bones. Her voice, nasal with a broad Brooklyn accent, comes as a disappointment, and so does her name. In the office, at least, she goes by the unlovely title of Nurse Maude, and it fails to do her justice to the extent that whenever I see her, I think of all the possible names her parents could and should have given her: Lilith, Cleopatra, Lolita. I do not like her, but if it turned out I had AIDS, she would make the perfect angel of death.

  “How many people have you had sexual intercourse with since you were last tested?”

  “Three.”

  “Did you use condoms?”

  “No.”

  She stops writing. Disdainfully she gazes at me over the rim of her glasses, and then she takes them off.

  “You are playing with fire, young lady.”

  “I like to live dangerously,” I reply, or at least that is how I want to reply. Instead I am overwhelmed with guilt and I find myself senselessly apologizing to her.

  “Don’t apologize to me,” she says crisply. “It’s your life.”

  She puts her glasses on and adds a few more lines to my file. When I stand up to go, she does not return my good-bye.

  I kiss Eric.

  “It’s like a real marriage with you coming back and me here, isn’t it?” he says.

  Trying to figure out what is wrong, I smile absently at him.

  Something is different about the apartment. I look around, but all seems as it should—the crimson rug beneath the coffee table, the cushions scattered on the floor, Eric reading documents as he reclines on the sofa, his ankles crossed and his feet up higher than his head.

  Yet even though the windows are half open, when I breathe in there is an unfamiliar odor in the air, a funny smell that tickles my nose and makes me feel like sneezing.

  I think of reaching for the book by the phone but I am filled with vague feelings of dread, with terrifying presentiments of disaster. When I realize what is missing, I try hard to be casual.

  “Eric?”

  “What,” he says. He does not look up.

  “Eric,” I say. “Eric, where are the moths?”

  From where I stand, I can see that his eyes are not moving across the page. Yet he still does not look up from his document. “I got rid of them for you.”

  I take a long, deep breath. “You what?”

  “I sprayed them with insecticide. Don’t worry—I was extra careful about getting a spray that was safe for human beings.”

  “But—”

  “But what?” He puts down the document with an abrupt gesture and gazes levelly into my eyes, challenging me. It seems clear that for now, at least, he is not concerned with trying to make it up to me for Theresa Chan.

  I blink, and then I look away. “They were special moths. You know that.”

  “Kiki, Kiki, Kiki,” he says, sighing and sitting up. “They were just common, run-of-the-mill moths.”

  “No, they weren’t.” I cannot bear, even, to look at him. “They were purple. I’ve never seen purple moths before.”

  He shakes his head and makes a sound that begins as a groan and ends on a laugh. “Christ,” he says. “What are you—color-blind or crazy or both? They were just everyday gray moths, Kiki, maybe just a little larger than usual, but otherwise completely ordinary. Take a look again—they’re in the trash can.”

  “I am not crazy,” I tell him. “I just want to live in a world more beautiful than yours.”

  “What bullshit that is. There’s only one world. There are different interpretations of it, of course, but there’s only one world.”

  “Okay, fine,” I say. “It’s just a question of words. I’d rather live in a more beautiful interpretation than yours.”

  “Kiki, you’re being an idiot. We’re not going to talk about this anymore. I’m going to watch the news.” He gets up and walks away, towards the bedroom. “They were just gray, a-dime-a-dozen moths, really.”

  “They were violet, and they glowed in the evening,” I say, knowing how absurd that sounds but not caring, yet when I look in the trash can into which he has swept up their remains, I find that what he says is true: the moths are gray and ashen as death.

  The evening is cool and soft. In silence we walk along Riverside Park to a restaurant, and we talk no more than is strictly necessary during the meal. I am aware of Eric glancing at me from time to time as we eat. After we get home, we read in separate rooms, and at around midnight I take a long bath by myself. I am brushing my wet hair in front of the dresser when he enters the bedroom. Barefoot, he makes little noise, but I see him coming up behind me in the mirror.

  We are watching each other as he comes up behind me. His lips curve up in a little smile, and his eyes are humorously pleading. When he places his hands on my shoulders, I stop combing in midstroke, and the brush remains caught in my hair.

  “Are you still sore about those moths?” Lightly he massages my shoulders and we look at ourselves, a couple, in the mirror. “Forget about them. You’re silly to be so angry when I did it for you. I wanted to save your sweaters and your rugs before it was too late, and besides, I didn’t like the way you were so attached to them. I mean, they’re parasites, after all. Your attachment was—well, it was a little odd. I never thought you’d be this angry, though.” His voice is gentle, and his reflected image is handsome and dignified as he stoops to kiss my neck; I force myself to smile when I see how sour and ungracious my countenance seems in comparison. “I don’t really understand why you’re making such a big deal about it,” he adds.

  Then I say what I should have said before, instead of babbling nonsense about special moths. “But it was none of your business.” Simple and trite, these are the words I have come up with, repeatedly worked over, and mulled and remulled throughout the whole long evening, and they have the desired effect: Eric’s self-assured smile slips, his eyes widen, and he apologizes.

  Later, after sex, as we lie panting side by side on the bed, I tell myself that it is really only a problem of language.

  Two more days in somnolent mode, and then on Thursday afternoon, a newspaper article on declining mortgage rates gets Eric started on one of his favorite topics.

  “Think about it: we could have a
cozy home in the suburbs, buy two cars, raise children….”

  I know he is only a quarter serious, so I usually tune him out when he talks about our future in the suburbs, but today I attempt to enter the fantasy with him. I envision him and me and the children, smiling with strained smiles in front of a cozy home, safely and neatly closed in by a white picket fence: a snapshot. Then I think of rows and rows of houses, completely the same save for the shade of paint, each with a man, a woman, and 2.2 children (the .2 only a pair of legs, cut off more or less in the center of the thigh) standing in front of it. Of course that is not really the future that Eric wants, even aside from the problem of our poor fraction of a child, but there is something in that image of rows and rows of families and houses, all identical, that cuts to the heart of my life with Eric.

  With Phillip no longer a presence to distract me as I lie in Eric’s arms, with this one major impediment to our everlasting happiness out of the way for good, I had assumed that life with Eric would be one long song. Yet instead it seems that Phillip (along with the reminder that he carried of the persistence of the past) prevented me not only from being completely with Eric, but also from regarding him with clear sight.

  My eyes narrowed against the late-afternoon light, I look across the room at Eric, still rattling off mortgage rates, and I think back on that chance encounter at the concert hall, when I—all but sick from missing Phillip—mistook a handsome stranger’s move to sit beside me as the predatory act of an Asian-woman stalker. I recall the walk afterwards through a light summer rain, under his umbrella. My birthday, when he cut his hand on a bottle that he had hid behind a bush in Central Park. Dinners in restaurants, fancy and small; walks through the streets at night; cab rides across town. The unexpected, impromptu proposal, which came with a glimpse at the hole in the heel of his sock. Long nights spent wrestling over sweat-dampened sheets, once with Phillip watching from the window.

  I remember, too, Eric’s squirming silences on the subject of the prank phone calls, and the neediness in him that drove him back to Theresa Chan, after I had cried when we went shopping for a ring. I recall the moths, and how I loved them; I picture the busy fingers that twine into my hair, ensnaring me so that I cannot escape from Eric’s side at night.

  I think of the feeling that I have had, that I have been half-asleep for the past ten days.

  I had thought that what Eric and I had was a romance that could be preserved in celluloid. During these past thirteen months, when Phillip haunted me still, threatening, as I concluded so wrongly, to pull me deeper into the shadows of my apartment, Eric seemed a knight, always ready with his offer of shelter. He (with his two feet planted firmly in the outside world of offices and mortgage rates and law) was an anchor for me: I hitched a string around him and tied it to my ankle, and that was enough to prevent me, as he himself said, from floating away into the sky, never to be seen by any mortal again.

  In this way, edging in sideways, I come to it, the recognition of a truth I had known all along, deep inside, without ever being able to put it into words. Phillip’s appearances were never an obstacle to the blissful existence that I was fated to share with Eric. The fact that I missed Phillip, that I pined for him and mourned him so deeply that he returned to me, was, instead, the reason I began going out with Eric in the first place. If I had never met Phillip, then I would not have stayed with Eric for as long as I have.

  Fully alert for the first time in days, I sit up. For once, the questions that drift through my mind have nothing to do with my grandmother. Will my mother think I am crazy for what I am about to do? Will she scorn me, or sigh with disappointment at the choice that I have made?

  “Eric,” I say, interrupting him as gently as possible. “Eric, I need to ask you a question.”

  Deep in his spiel, which has gone from mortgage rates to the price of fancy cars, Eric looks up, bewildered. The sunlight slants across his face, and makes him blink.

  “Yeah? Have I sold you on the house yet?” He taps on the paper in front of him. “It does sound good, doesn’t it…. Come into the kitchen with me—I want something cold to drink. Christ, it’s hot. Even with the air conditioner on, I can’t seem to get cool.”

  Following him to the counter, I sit down on one of the barstools. “Eric—”

  “What?” he asks, deftly pulling out two glasses with one hand, and then opening the refrigerator and pulling out the milk carton with the other. “What do you want, iced tea?” I nod and he takes out the bottle while still holding on to everything else; the glasses clink together, but somehow he manages to place everything safely onto the countertop. He opens the freezer and takes out three ice cubes, which he drops smoothly into my glass.

  “What is it?”

  “I wanted to know whether you still want to marry me. Because I’ve been thinking we might want to reconsider, or at least hold off on announcing the engagement, and I thought you might be, too,” I say, speaking quickly but clearly.

  He passes me my tea and pours some milk out for himself. He regards me solemnly over the rim of the glass as he drinks. “Not this again,” he says, after he has drained the glass and wiped the milk mustache off his face. “I thought we already took care of your doubts.”

  “This is different.”

  “How about we do this?” he asks. “How about we talk about this later, in a few hours or so—by which time you’ll have changed your mind all over again.”

  With a few swift and sure movements, he puts the milk carton and the iced-tea bottle back into the refrigerator, and places his glass in the sink. Then he starts to walk away.

  I swivel on my chair and speak to his retreating back. “I’m not going to change my mind.”

  Without stopping, he tosses a few words to me over his shoulder. “Tomorrow you’ll be saying something different.”

  “No, this time I’m sure.” Something in my voice holds him, and he turns slowly.

  “We’re going to be rational about this.” He walks back towards me and sits down on a stool across the counter, so that we face each other. He takes a deep breath. “First of all, what have I done wrong? Or rather, what haven’t I done right? Haven’t I always been there for you? Haven’t I always been patient and supportive?”

  The image of a delicate face with arching eyebrows is only the briefest flash in my mind. “You’ve been great,” I tell him.

  “Well then,” he says, ending the argument. “Just try to be somewhat normal, Kiki. A little rationality is all it takes.” He stands up and stretches. “I know you can do it, too.”

  “We need to reconsider the engagement,” I say again, stubbornly. The phrase hangs in the air between us, and I know, suddenly, that it is not only the engagement that will be ending, but our relationship, too.

  “Why?” he asks, glaring at me now. “Is this about Phillip again—or rather, still? I knew I should have sent you to a therapist when I first heard about him, but I thought we could deal with it on our own—”

  “No, it’s not about Phillip. Or Theresa, either,” I say slowly, thinking it through.

  “Then what the hell is it about?”

  I pick up my iced tea, in which the ice cubes have already melted away into slivers, and then I set it down again, untasted.

  I want to tell Eric that I (believing that the key to happiness lay hidden in the maze of love stories that make up my family’s past) had taken the lessons contained in my mother’s and grandmother’s lives too much to heart. I want to say that I had latched on to him in part because I had been terrified of turning into my mother, of growing old while mourning a man I could not have.

  I would like to say to Eric that when he and I fought or disagreed, it had been too easy to dismiss the differences between us as growing out of the long shadow cast by Phillip’s absence. That only now, with Phillip well and truly gone, can I say that Eric and I do not belong in the same story; that the narrative he has scripted and drafted me into is not what I would write.

  He will be a
ngry at the implication that I used him to avoid being like my mother; he will mock me, not unjustifiably, for thinking that our lives (those messy, sprawling things) could be compared to the neatly packaged form of a story in a book.

  But I want to tender this explanation to him, so I do, albeit in a halting, roundabout way.

  “I’ve been out of control of my life for so long,” I say. “It might just be a question of timing, but I think I started going out with you too soon after Phillip died. Everything happened too fast. And now that I’m truly over Phillip—”

  “You used me just to get over Phillip, and now that you’re over him, you just—”

  “That’s not true,” I say, cutting in. “Or at least I never meant to use you, anyway. But I do think I got together with you for all the wrong reasons.”

  He gestures grandly for me to continue.

  “I got together with you because I didn’t want to be like my mother, mourning a lost love forever. And that’s not enough of a reason for us to stay together.”

  “In case you forgot,” he says, breaking in with some impatience, “that was over a year ago.”

  “I know,” I tell him unhappily. “But there’s also the fact that for pretty much this entire year, whenever we fought, I always figured—and I think you did, too—that the disagreement had something to do with Phillip. And now that we can’t blame Phillip anymore for all of our problems, it’s a lot harder to ignore that you and I don’t really have that much in common.”

  For a moment there is a look of understanding on his face, and his head inclines in what is an almost imperceptible, perhaps even unconscious nod of acknowledgment.

  A rare breeze, probably off the river, bats against the window, then, and makes us both turn. Eric reaches over and opens the window a crack, the muscles in his forearms flexing as he pulls. While warm, the wind is a welcome relief from the stillness of the air. It steals into the room and picks at the sleeves of Eric’s T-shirt, and tries to lift the napkins that lie in a heap upon the counter. It winds itself around us like a cat.