by T. C. Boyle
Already he owed her a debt—an on—that he could never begin to repay, not even if he were back in Japan and working in a factory and he saved every yen he made for the next six years. The thought humiliated him, made him feel even lower than he had the night before when he’d come to her in rags. In Japan, any favor, any gratuitous kindness, however small or altruistic, saddles its receiver with a debt of honor that can only be redeemed by repaying the favor many times over. It has become so ritualized, so onerous, in fact, that no matter what their extremity, people are terrified of being helped. You could be run down in the street and insist on crawling to the hospital rather than have a stranger lend a hand—and the stranger would no doubt run the other way, out of respect for your pain and the impossible burden he’d be laying on your shoulders were he to help.
Hiro had been inculcated with the subtleties and minute gradations of this system all his life, his grandmother the most rigorous on appraiser in all Japan—she could instantly translate any gift or favor into the precise material worth of its return, and she had nothing but contempt for anyone who fell short by even a yen. Help an old woman across the street and you got a hand-knitted sweater, a box of cherry chocolates and an invitation to tea. Accept the invitation and you owed the old woman a two-week vacation in Saipan, where she would sift for the bone fragments of her unburied sons; refuse it, and commit a crime second only to mass murder. The whole society was one vast web of obligation. Fail, break a strand of the web, and you’ve lost face, 120 million tongues clucking tsk-tsk-tsk.
Suddenly, he wanted to hide himself. She’d be coming any minute now, bobbing up the path on her long white legs. What would he say to her? And what if she wanted a cup of coffee? What then? Mortified, his ears stinging, he cleaned up the mess and left her his rags, neatly folded, in humble acknowledgment of what she’d done for him, and then he dashed out the door to hide himself in the bushes.
He was squatting over the battered sneakers in a dapple of sun, feeling every one of his hundred and seven oozing cuts, scratches and infected insect bites and thinking nothing, nothing at all—just existing—when she came up the path. Her hair was drawn back in a ponytail that bounced behind her as if it were alive, and she looked waif like in a pair of baggy white shorts and an oversized T-shirt. The T-shirt featured the silhouette of a racing scull, oars in motion, and the baffling legend CREW THANATOPSIS. Hiro held his breath, though she could have passed within a foot of him and never noticed, so thick was the vegetation along the path. As she approached the cabin, she slowed her pace, stealthy suddenly, as if she were stalking something. He watched her mount the steps on tiptoe, ease back the screen door and hold it open just a moment too long, and then glance shrewdly round the clearing before stepping inside. The door slammed behind her like a slap in the face.
All that day, Hiro crouched there in the undergrowth, drowsing, swatting mosquitoes, fighting down the importunities of his hara and listening to the tap-tap-tap, tapata-tapata, tap-tap of her typewriter. When the sun was directly overhead, he was briefly aroused by the sudden appearance of a deeply tanned hakujin who noiselessly separated himself from the trees and crept across the clearing, step by silent step. For one joyous instant Hiro thought he’d discovered a means to repay his debt and then some—the man was a rapist, a mutilator of women, an escaped maniac, and he, Hiro Tanaka, would fly into action and give his benefactress the great good gift of her life—when to his disappointment and gratification both, he noticed the familiar glittering treasure of the lunch bucket tucked under the man’s arm. The man was lithe and trim beneath the plane of his towering high flattop, and he sneaked up the steps and silently hung the lunch bucket on the hook beside the door. Then he stole away like a thief.
For most of the afternoon, Hiro contemplated that lunch bucket with mixed emotions—he couldn’t take it, no, he owed her too much already; but then she’d offered it to him, hadn’t she? At least she had yesterday. But who could speak for today? Maybe she was hungry, maybe she felt she had a right to her own lunch—or a cup of decaffeinated coffee with artificial sweetener and nondairy creamer. He couldn’t take that lunch away from her, couldn’t face her: what would she think of him? As it turned out, she never went near the lunch herself, but more times than he could count she got up from her desk to cross the room and peer through the mesh of the screen to see if it was still there. He felt terrible. He felt like a baited animal, a squirrel or fox lured to the trap. But most of all, he felt hungry.
When she left for the day—when he was sure she’d gone and had forced himself to count backward from a thousand just in case—he stole out of the bushes, snatched the bucket on the run and careened back to his hiding place, the fish-paste sandwich—was that tuna?—already in his mouth. After he’d eaten it, after he’d licked clean the wrapping paper and probed the crevices of the box for the last hidden crumbs, he felt tainted and polluted, like the alcoholic who succumbs to the temptation to take that first forbidden drink. Still, he was starving, getting along on a fraction of what he normally consumed, and though he fought it, the scenario repeated itself the following day. And that was when he reached his moment of crisis.
He could not, would not demean himself before her again. What did he think he was doing? Did he intend to crouch forever in the bushes outside the fly-speckled window of the only Amerikajin who’d shown him a ray of kindness? What was he going to do—grow a long black beard and eat dirt all his life, live like a caveman or a hippie or something? No, he had to get to Beantown, the Big Apple, to the City of Brotherly Love; he had to blend in with the masses, find himself a job, an apartment with western furniture and Japanese appliances, with toaster ovens and end tables and deep thick woolly carpets that climbed up the walls like a surging tide. Then he’d be safe, then he could play miniature golf and eat cheeseburgers or stroll down the street with an armload of groceries and no one would blink twice. The moment he finished the second lunch, the ultimate and final lunch, he started off down the path for the blacktop road that would lead him to a distant wide sun-streaked highway and all the glorious polyglot cities of the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Behind a Wall
of Glass
“Now, saxby, I’m warnin’ you—if you get one drop of water on that furniture …”
The aquarium had been in place for less than an hour, and already Saxby was filling it from the green plastic garden hose that snaked in through the open window. The tank was too long by half a foot, and when he and Owen hadn’t been able to negotiate the tricky corner in the hallway outside his bedroom, they’d set it up on the window seat in his mother’s sitting room. He’d covered the seat itself with a double sheet of visquine, but Septima was concerned for the Hepplewhite highboy that stood to its immediate left and the three-hundred-year-old mahogany sideboard that loomed up out of the grip of the wallpaper on the right. “Hush now,” he said, reassuring her, “I wouldn’t harm one little thing in this house, you know that,” and he manipulated the hose with one hand while with the other he arranged his aquatic furniture—the rocks he’d plucked from the Carruthers’ seawall and boiled for hours in the colony’s big stewpots to discourage unwanted algal and bacterial blooms, and the long wet strands of water lily, pickerel weed, bladderwort and redroot he’d brought back with him from the Okefenokee. “Hell, I’d be throwing away my own inheritance if I did.”
“Saxby, you stop that now,” she shot back with a grin that exposed the long fossilized roots of her teeth. She loved to hear him go on about his inheritance, even if he made a joke of it—what she wanted above all, what she planned to make him swear to on her deathbed, was that he would stay on in the house after her, overseeing the colony’s operations in her stead and living a long and fruitful life in the brilliant company that would call Thanatopsis home on into the limitless future.
“Seriously, though, Mama—it’ll be beautiful when I’m done. You’ll see.”
Septima was sunk in the vastness of a chintz-covered easy ch
air, her feet propped up on a matching ottoman, and her book—a bookclub selection on the history of rice-paper manufacture in Wu Chan Province during the twelfth century—spread face-down in her lap. “I know it will, honey,” she said, a faint distracted quaver working its way into her voice, as if, just for a moment, age and infirmity had caught up with her, “but that highboy is priceless, simply priceless, and I remember your grandmother Lights saying—”
He turned to her in that moment, water dribbling from his fingertips, sleeves rolled up past his elbows, and gave her a smile so rich it stopped her in midsentence.
“What?” she said, grinning. “What is it?”
“You,” he said. “Look at you: you’re treating me like I was six years old again—and believe me, I wouldn’t complain if you’d only go back to making me corn muffins and drizzled honey in the mornings and tucking me in at night.”
His mother said nothing, but he knew she was enjoying it, this vision of her hulking big sinewy twenty-nine-year-old son as a breathless pigeon-toed little boy who couldn’t stop eating corn muffins, who looked up into her eyes as if they contained all the answers to all the questions in the universe and followed her, step for step, through the days and weeks and months of her younger and less complicated life. After a moment he turned back to the tank, shifted the hose, adjusted the filter intake, patted a mound of gravel over the roots of the pickerelweed he’d planted in the near corner. There was the murmur of the water, the soft play of the fronds on his skin, the slow soothing pleasure of doing something, making something, of building a world with his own hands. A period of time was erased—five minutes? ten?—before he spoke again. “So how’s Ruth been keeping?” he said, glancing over his shoulder.
Septima set down her book and peered up at him over the wings of her reading glasses. Little ripples of surprise crested on the brittle white beach of her hairline. “You haven’t seen her yet?”
“Just for a second. I was bringing the tank in with Owen and she was on her way out the door—said she was going back out to the studio …”
“At this hour?”
Saxby shrugged. The water felt suddenly cold on his hands.
“She missed dinner? And cocktails?”
“I guess.” The tank was three-quarters full now, and its water seemed as gray as a field of stones. “I could always have Rico fix her something—or we could get a loaf of bread and a package of Swiss down at the Handi-Mart.”
His mother’s eyes had a faraway look. He imagined she was summoning up the hundreds of artists who’d passed through Thanatopsis House in her time—from the minor to the major, from the unknown and unknowable to the celebrated and great—and calculating just how many had ever missed cocktails. He lifted his hands from the cold tank and buried them in a towel. “It’s no big deal,” he said, “I was just—”
“You don’t have to worry about Ruth,” she said suddenly.
“Oh, I wasn’t worried”—he gestured with the towel—“it’s just that she’s new here and she feels a little out of her league, I guess—a little overawed, maybe—and I feel bad about it. I told her I was only going to be gone two days, but then two stretched into four and …” he trailed off.
“Saxby, honey,” she said, and her voice was cloudy again, shivered with age, “stop foolin’ with that thing and come on over here and sit with your mother a minute.”
The outside of the glass was beaded with condensation, the hose running liquid ice up out of the deep roots of the earth, and he realized it would be three or four days at least until the water warmed up enough to put the fish in. The thought was mildly depressing—the excitement was in the completion, six days of labor and one to kick back and see that it was good—and he took a step toward his mother and hesitated, giving the tank one last critical appraisal. He watched the plants nod and bow in the current generated by the hose and the big humming filtration system, saw the secret caves and hollows and piscine apartments he’d sculpted of rock, ever so briefly admired the scope and magnitude of the thing—six feet long and two hundred gallons!—and then sidled across the room to ease himself down at the foot of his mother’s chair. Immediately he felt her hand on his shoulder, the maternal fingers tugging gently at his ear.
“I want to tell you somethin’,” she said, her voice trembling still, but infused now with a bright contralto hint of playfulness, “and I want you to listen to me. We don’t ever disturb our artists at work, no matter what the hour or how anxious we are to”—she paused—“to show them how much we’ve missed them. Now do we, honey?”
He didn’t answer. He was listening to the slow, steady heartbeat of the pump circulating the dense atmosphere of the little world he’d brought to life behind a wall of glass, and all of a sudden he felt sleepy.
“Workin’ through dinner,” Septima sighed, and her cool lineal hand massaged the nape of his neck, “that girl must really be on to somethin’.”
It was late—past one—by the time he finally did get ruth to bed, and he was a little miffed—just a little; he’d been around too, after all—that she wasn’t a whole lot more anxious to leave the billiard room and fall into his arms. They’d had an omelet and a bottle of wine together in the kitchen about nine, and she’d been coy and sexy and he’d tugged at her blouse and pinned her up against the meat locker to rotate his hips against hers and feel his blood surge. “Let’s go fool around,” he said, and she said sure, but led him instead up the stairs to the billiard room.
The usual crowd was there—Thalamus, Bob Penick, Regina, Ina and Clara, the new guy, Sandy, and a couple of others—but there’d been a change in the interior weather since he’d been gone—that much was apparent the minute they stepped in the door. “Hey, Ruthie!” Thalamus cried, rising up out of his chair at the card table like a lizard skittering off a rock, and someone else shouted “La Dershowitz!” and only then did they acknowledge him, though he’d been gone four days.
Ruth poured herself a waterglass of bourbon—neat—and took a seat between Thalamus and Bob at the card table. Sandy and Ina were playing too—the usual, five-card stud—and so was a guy he’d never seen before, a gawky character with dyed hair and a splotched face who looked as if he’d been put together with spare parts. Regina was draped over the billiard table, rattling off one daunting and professional shot after another, and the two women in the far corner—he didn’t recall their names—were absorbed so deeply in conversation they might as well have put a Plexiglas wall up around themselves. And where did that leave him? To sit and listen to Clara Kleinschmidt go on about Schoenberg and the twelve-tone scale till his brain dissolved from boredom?
As the evening wore on, Ruth did get up and pay some attention to him—Why was he brooding? she wanted to know—but she skipped round the room like the Queen of May, and always found her place again at the poker table—beside Thalamus. Saxby drank vodka and brooded, though he denied he was brooding, and made small talk with Peter Anserine and one of his disciples, who’d paid a rare visit to the billiard room; discussed the fine points of bedding irises with Clara Kleinschmidt, who proved to him that she was more than just a composer; and finally, in desperation, challenged Regina Mclntyre to a game of eight ball, which he lost without taking a single shot. As he became progressively more inebriated, the elation he’d felt over setting up the aquarium and beginning a new project dissipated like a stain in water. And then it was late and Ruth fluttered up to squeeze his arm and give him a kiss with a lot of tongue in it, the guy with the splotched face shook his hand and introduced himself as the INS agent he’d spoken to on the phone, and Irving Thalamus cuffed him on the shoulder and told him a lewd story about Savannah and a whore he’d once had there. Ruth won thirteen dollars and fifty-two cents.
Later, in bed, after he’d stripped her garment by garment and run his fingers the length of her and showed her how much he’d missed her in the most essential ways, he lit a cigarette and wondered aloud about the sudden shift in billiard-room relations. They were in his room
, the room he’d had since he was a boy, just down the wainscoted corridor from his mother’s room. The night was close, palpable, breathing in through the screen with a sharp wild whiff of the marsh and the tidal creeks and the slow wet burning death of vegetation. Ruth lay apart from him, her skin silvered with sweat in the light of the moon. And then she leaned into him, her breast flattening against his bicep as she lit a cigarette off his. Her face glowed in the flare of tobacco, she exhaled with a deep sweet luxurious breath, and told him that the billiard room was hers, no problem, and that now—finally—she was really starting to enjoy herself.
He reflected on this for a moment, leaning back against the headboard of his childhood bed, squeezed tight and sweltering against her, shoulder to shoulder and flank to flank. His cigarette glowed hot in the dark. “Miss me?” he murmured.
In answer, she took hold of his penis and smoothed it against her palm, a touch as soft and silken as a fluttering sail. “I’ll give you three guesses,” she said in her smokiest voice and leaned over to kiss him.
He felt that touch and flexed his thighs, tasted her lips and smelled the heat of her. “What about Thalamus?” he said.
She let her hand go slack. “What about him?”
“I don’t know,” he said, looking away though he knew she couldn’t have seen his eyes in that light, “it’s just that he seems awful friendly all of a sudden …”
Her hand started up again, proprietary, insinuating. “Jealous?” she breathed.
He set his cigarette down on the edge of the scarred night table and covered her rhythmic hand with his own. He held her there and rose up with a screech of the old bedsprings to kneel between her thighs and bring his face down to hers. Thalamus was nothing, a joke, dried up and juiceless, a string of jerky in a slick plastic wrapper. He could have run him down, could have denigrated him, but he didn’t. Instead, he answered her question. Plainly. Simply. Truthfully. “Yes,” he said.