Refreshing though the breeze is, when Eric turns back from the window, his face is once again stern. He shakes his head vigorously, so that his unruly lock of hair falls loose, and hangs in front of his eyes. His voice, when he begins speaking, is clenched with anger, like a fist. “You’ve never appreciated me. I’ve always been there for you, or at least I’ve tried to be. You never bother to remember how I held you when you were sad about Phillip, how I stayed awake and rocked you until you slept.”
“That’s not true,” I say. My voice cracks, and I will myself not to cry.
“Dammit, tell me the truth,” he says, yelling now, “admit it: you forgot about all those times, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t forget,” I say, pleading, hoping, but at the same time doubting that he will believe me. “I will never forget,” I add in a whisper: it is a promise, made as much to myself as to him.
A long pause, during which I realize I can no longer hear him breathing. I never did caution him against his habit of holding in his breath.
“We belong in different stories. We want different things in life. It’s not right between us—it never has been,” I say, and then on a sudden impulse I ask, “You know that just as well as I do, really, don’t you?”
He looks up sharply at this question, but does not deny it. “People change,” is all he says.
Doused in the glow of the late sun, we face each other across the kitchen counter.
“Once I walk out of here, I will never come back to you again,” he warns. When I do not respond, he continues, “You’re going to regret this.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Probably. But I know we’ll both regret it more if we go ahead and get married.”
As he nods, once again I see it: the acknowledgment of the truth of my words, passing like a ripple over his face.
“That’s it, then?”
“That’s it,” I say, and for once my voice rings loud and clear.
He stands and goes back towards the living room. Stooping to gather together his papers, he walks to his briefcase. He puts his papers away carefully, stacking them into a neat pile, lining up the edges so they will not crease. After closing his briefcase, he, the man with the most agile fingers that I have ever seen, fumbles with the latch on it for a long time, so long that I step forward to help him. But just before I reach him, the latch closes with a snap, and he picks up his briefcase and turns. Only then do I learn the reason for the failure of his fingers, usually so capable and sure: Eric is blinded by his tears.
He drops his briefcase, sinks into the nearest chair, and covers his face. Except in movies I have never seen a grown man cry before, and Eric cries with messy racking sobs and lots of noise, as I do. I remain still, momentarily too shocked to move.
For the second time in the hour, I find myself thinking of my mother. After my father left us, she shut me out of her life for years. So now I know, firsthand, how she came to do so. Mourning Phillip, I placed myself in the center of the universe, and moved forward without bothering to see that others lay in my path.
I walk over to Eric and crouch beside him. When I clasp my arms around him, he does not push me away. Eventually my touch quiets him, as so often his has quieted me.
Soon he is only sniffling, then he is rubbing his eyes dry. His shoulders slump in a defeated way. He takes my hand and spreads it out and examines it as if he has never seen it before, even though it has caressed the secret parts of his body hundreds of nights, thousands of times.
“I hope to God,” he says, drawing in a deep, shuddering breath, “I hope to God that you don’t end up wasting your whole life.”
It takes me a second to realize that he means these words well. I try but I cannot find the words to respond in kind, and so I am silent as he stands and once again picks up his briefcase. Like a little boy he wipes the back of his hand against his runny nose, yet he is every inch a man. He looks into my eyes, but he is looking right through me as if I had stopped existing, and I can tell that he does not want to see me ever again.
He gets up and walks to the front door; he opens it and turns. I am still standing by his empty chair. “I’ll be seeing you, Kiki,” he says, debonair in his sarcasm.
“I wish you well with your life,” I say, finally finding my tongue, but I am speaking to the door, pulled shut so quietly behind him.
Obaasama, I will say. Grandmother, dear, is there ever an easy way to say good-bye?
Then I will kneel on the floor at her feet, and I will place my head on her lap. She will place her fingers (so long, says my mother, and so cool) upon my head, and she will rock me and fold me to her as I cry like a child.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I SPEND ALL my Labor Day weekends with my mother and we celebrate them faithfully, not with visits to the beach or barbecues but in our own way, with one special dinner in the middle of the holiday. This morning, as I showered, dressed, and packed a bag of clothes and books, I felt almost pleasantly adrift in that tinge of melancholy that accompanies these weekends. Even now the mood is still with me, only slightly tarnished by the wait at Penn Station.
Really this day should have brought me nothing but dread, since I have not yet told my mother about Eric, letting her know instead only that he would not, after all, be coming home with me this weekend. I can think of no easy way to break the news to her. Still, as I sit in the train now, watching the view from my window get steadily greener as New York City slips farther and farther away, dread is the last thing I feel.
These Labor Day weekends with my mother are tinged with melancholy not only because they carry with them the earliest hints of an ending, the sense that nature is beginning to shut itself down, that the leaves are beginning to fall, the flowers are turning to seed, and the hours of sunlight are lessening with every passing day; rather they are so because the thought of saying good-bye always rests heavy at least on my mind. Even now, when I no longer spend my summers with my mother, the academic schedule has been a part of my life for so long that I cannot help but think of this first weekend in September as the last time that I will see her for months.
It is odd, perhaps, given how far apart we have grown, given how all our conversations skid lightly across the surface of our lives, that my throat still tightens when I say good-bye to my mother, but she is so very frail, and so very alone in her quiet home filled with beautiful things.
That I have been feeling buoyed today in spite of this sadness is probably due to the fact that I woke today with the comforting sense that I can see, albeit only dimly, the contours of the rest of my life. The job prospects for English Ph.D.’s these days being what they are, I will probably not get a job after finishing my dissertation. Then I will move back home with my mother and my grandmother and we will all live together, three generations of women, under one roof, and these Labor Day weekends will be shaded with melancholy only because they bring with them the first signs of autumn.
Since Eric left, I have been dusting myself off and checking for bruises and broken bones, as after a fall.
Mostly I have been reading to pass the time. Eight days ago, on the evening that he and I parted ways, I reread my favorite parts of Love in the Time of Cholera. I did not wake up until the middle of the afternoon on Friday, and then I lay in bed for almost an hour without moving. After I got up I collected all of the balloons into a black garbage bag. It had taken three trips in a packed elevator to bring them up to my apartment, but by Friday the balloons were so shrunken they all fit into the bag with room to spare. I went to the living room and emptied the trash from the wastepaper basket into the space that was remaining. Covering the bright colors of the balloons, the gray moths fell out in a seemingly endless flurry: I had not known how many there were until I saw them dead. Afterwards the bag was full but very light. I took it out into the hall and left it in the pile with the other garbage, and I spent the rest of the day reading T. S. Eliot.
On Saturday I left the apartment building for the first time since Eric’s d
eparture. While sitting on a bench in the park, I noticed a few ants crawling inside a potato-chips bag. Almost without thinking I reached out and squeezed two of them to death between my printless index finger and thumb. I regretted my action afterwards, and would have brought them back to life if I could. They had far more of a right to be there than I did.
I spent all of Sunday at the library, working on my dissertation. On my way home I saw Russia looking into the window of the liquor store on West 115th Street. I had not seen her at all throughout the summer, and I had not had a real conversation with her for more than half a year, but I went up to her and stood at her side. “Hi.”
She wheeled around, and looked startled when she saw me. “Oh, hi.”
“It’s good to see you,” I said. “It’s been such a long time. Where have you been?”
“Oh, I’ve been around.” She laughed a little awkwardly. “You know me, I’m always around, aimlessly flitting through these streets.”
“That’s funny. I feel like I never see you.”
“Yes, well, I see you. I wave and once or twice I even call out to you, but you never notice.”
“Oh.” I did not know what to say.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I don’t take it personally. I know how you live in your own little world.”
She had said something very close to that on the night I met Phillip. “I’m sorry I didn’t return your calls last winter,” I blurted out abruptly. “I know it was a long time ago, but I never did apologize—”
“I had an inkling of what you were going through. It’s okay.” For a while we stood and looked at each other, her hands thrust casually into the back pockets of her jeans, mine hanging on to the straps of my knapsack. Then she turned and looked into the window again. “Hey, I love this cat, don’t you?”
Curled among the bottles was a sleeping black cat. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never seen him before.”
“Really? He’s out here all the time, and look—they even have a huge photo of him.” She pointed out the photo and I dutifully admired it, and she also showed me how there was a picture of the cat painted on the awning of the shop. We agreed that the store owners must be very special people.
“Kiki,” she said suddenly, “are you doing anything on Friday? I’m having some friends over for dinner. Actually,” she corrected herself, “we’re having some friends over. Do you remember Alex from Comp Lit? We started going out in February, and we moved into a place together just last week.”
“Oh,” I said,“ That’s great. Congratulations.”
She smiled. “Thanks. It’s a bit scary, you know, but so far it’s been going really well. Anyway, can you come by? I’d love for you and Alex to be friends.”
She had a heart of gold and I had always known it. She did not hate me because I took Phillip away and I had always known that, too. It was with something approaching regret that I shook my head. “I can’t make Friday,” I said. “I’m going home this weekend.”
“Oh. That’s too bad,” she said. “Well, maybe another time.”
“I’d like that,” I said politely.
“Good. Well, I should be going.”
“Me too.”
“I’ll see you around.”
“Bye,” I said.
Neither of us moved. For the second time we gazed at each other in silence beneath the spare shade of the shop’s awning. There was a moment when I thought she was going to say something, but she did not, and then I reached out and clutched her in my arms.
I had forgotten how much I loved Russia’s hugs, which are quick and so hard I can feel all her bones.
When I woke up on Monday, I discovered that I had developed a tic under my right eye. It bothered me as I called up the gynecologist’s office and waited to find out the results of my blood test, and then it disappeared. That evening I celebrated my AIDS-free status by ignoring the pain in my tendon and successfully completing a seven-and-a-half-mile run.
Mrs. Noffz and I talk more often than we used to. On Tuesday evening, when I heard her keys clinking in the lock of her door, I went out to the hallway and we shared our thoughts on the possibility of more rain. I found myself smiling without strain when she came out to talk to me on Wednesday, just as I was off to buy some iced tea. For the rest of the day, I periodically caught myself listening for her as I passed my front door.
Last night as I was reading on the sofa, I looked up and saw a lone moth fluttering in the light. For a second I looked up at it with hope, and then I saw that it was just a common gray moth, blind and blundering and stupid. As I read, it luxuriated in the warm glow of the lamp. Finally I put out the light, and after a long time it found its way out the open window and flew away into the night.
Now today, throughout the morning and early afternoon, I had floated on a sure sense that life would finally stop offering me unwelcome surprises. Yet my confidence was misplaced, it seems, for when I am sitting on the porch with my mother, after the flurry at the station and the drive back home, after I dropped my bags off in the room I still have and she brings out the tea, what she says makes the smile on my face freeze, and the pleasant breeziness of the day seem suddenly chill.
“Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”
She has played this trick on me before. The bad news is that she needs another dangerous operation, maybe to replace yet another joint; that they are putting her on yet one more experimental drug with horrifying side effects; or that the troubling cough she had over Christmas was actually pneumonia. The good news is never good news, really: rather just that the operation has a sixty to seventy percent chance of success; that the medication, despite its side effects, is known to have cured some friend of a patient of her doctor’s, or even (and I could tell from her face that she knew she was grasping) that the new Japanese restaurant in the neighboring town has been booked up for weeks, but because of her bad cough, the nice woman over the phone took pity on her and gave her a reservation for tonight.
I hate this trick, not only because it inevitably means that I have to endure a sharpening of the worry pangs I always feel when I am around my mother, but also because it means that I have to pretend that I can see the silver lining that she points to so cheerfully, the flip side to the problem that I, no matter how I squint, can only see as dull gray. So it is in a small voice that I answer her. “Oh, the bad news, please.”
She regards me quietly over her cup of steaming hot water. She still likes to say that we drink tea together and I keep up with the pretense for her sake, but because her insomnia has worsened as she has grown older, she in fact had to give up caffeine a few years back: just one more of the countless pleasures, both great and small, that she has had to leave by the wayside in the journey of her life.
“It’s about your grandmother,” she says.
“Well?” I say, setting my cup down with a clatter. “Is she okay? When’s she coming?”
“She’s fine, but she’s not coming. She’s decided instead to go back,” she says, adding hastily: “Don’t worry. You’ll still get to meet her, of course. It’s just that we’ll have to go to Japan—”
“She’s decided to go back?” I ask, bewildered. “To—to Hokkaido? To her parents?”
“Well, as you know,” says my mother, explaining, “she had a best friend at the geisha house—”
“Kaori,” I say. “I remember.”
“Kaori’s at another geisha house now—a rather famous one in Kyoto. She trains apprentices. She’s helped make the arrangements for your grandmother to live at the same house, doing the same kind of work.”
Stunned, too startled, even, to feel any disappointment, I only half listen as my mother’s voice goes on, explaining how Yukiko has agreed to give up half of her fortune to the geisha house for the privilege of becoming a member of it, and how furious my two Aunt Tomokos are at this decision: in their eyes, naturally, defecting from the status quo is bad, but nothing compared to the fact that it entails depr
iving their sons of all that is rightfully theirs. My mother recounts how the Tomokos asked her to intercede on behalf of the family, and how she, like her brothers, refused. She tells me how excited Yukiko is at the prospect of this return, more animated and happy than she has been since Sekiguchi died.
“So you see,” says my mother, winding down, “she loved being a geisha.”
So the rumors were true, then. The neighbors and the wives of Sekiguchi’s friends who had guessed at my grandmother’s cold geisha heart had been right all along.
Yukiko and Sekiguchi were a love story for the ages, a romance as lush and overblown as any found in the fairy tales that my father told me at bedtime, or in the bodice rippers I later devoured as a teenager—and as false as well. She had not loved her husband. She had married him out of calculation, for his money and his position, and then, having once wed him, she found she had made a grievous mistake. Trapped in a gilded cage, she was a Cinderella who yearned to wallow once again in the dirt of the hearth, in the games, the flirtations, the dirty jokes made at her own expense, and the many, many men, so much so that she was willing to trade back her wealth for this old life of pleasure.
But then I remember the song, sung in that off-key voice, which had transfixed a group of servants at a fire.
“She loved Grandfather,” I say, willing it with my words.
My mothers eyebrows arch in surprise. “Of course,” she says, scolding, even laughing a little, taken aback at my gift for the obvious. “You know that.”
“I know that,” I repeat weakly, letting out my pent-up breath all at once, in the unhealthy habit I have caught like a cold from Eric. “Of course.”
“She was completely in love with your grandfather,” continues my mother more seriously, “from the beginning, all the way until the very end. But she loved being a geisha, too.”
“Why? All those men pawing at her, and she having to play all those games, and go through all those stupid rituals—”
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