Once Removed

by Mako Yoshikawa

  At the beginning of our relationship, the fact that Vikrum and I could not touch in public gave us an erotic charge. We would sit together in a restaurant, a proper six inches between us, aching to touch. It became a challenge, a game that we used to play, to see who could hold out for longer in that state of longing, as sharp and dazzling as sunlight reflecting off a blade. One of us always gave in, standing up abruptly in our prearranged signal of defeat, before we had time to do more than sample our food and, on one or two occasions, before it had even arrived. We compared the feeling that that game gave us to the thrill of being handcuffed by a lover to the bedpost; there was the same inability to act, the same need to submit, helpless in the current, to our desire. We even made jokes about it (stupid ones that only struck us as funny at the end of our game, when we were clawing at each other with relief, but then they made us laugh until we could not breathe), such as: who needs handcuffs when we've got restaurants?

  Less than a year has passed since either of us has made a joke about handcuffs, but it feels as if it has been far longer.

  I turn back to the geese. Having picked over the crumbs thoroughly, they are beginning to wander. “Why do you keep asking me about Rei? You've got a bee in your bonnet on the subject.”

  “You don't know, do you.” It is a statement rather than a question. “She disappeared on you seventeen years ago, and you didn't know why then, and you still don't.”

  The breeze is picking up. I turn my face toward it; the rush of air is pleasant in the unseasonable warmth of this late September day.

  “Vikrum?”

  “Yes, love.”

  “I've been thinking a lot about Hana lately,” I say. “Because of Rei and all.”

  “Sure,” he says. If he is confused by the shift in the conversation, he does not show it. “That seems natural enough.”

  “And I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

  “Anything,” he says. “Name it.” The nature of his reply, as well as the promptness with which it came, a mark of his trust in me: his certainty that I would not ask him something he could not do, no matter how much I wanted it.

  “I want to meet your children.”

  He blinks. “Claw, you know I'd like nothing more. But you also know how kids are,” he says. “They'll blab about their dad's new friend—”

  “Five minutes,” I say. “Please. We'll set it up as an accidental encounter. I'll say hi, maybe shake a small hand or two, and move on.” When I came up with the idea of asking Vikrum for this favor, a scant two minutes ago, I had resolved not to beg, but I had not known then how dearly I wanted it granted. “Please,” I say again. “I'll skip the paw-shake, if you want. All I want is a chance to say hello to your daughter and son. That's all I'm asking for. It's not much, really, is it?”

  Vikrum closes his eyes for a moment, and then he shakes his head. “No,” he says, his voice muted. “It's not much at all.”

  “Thank you,” I say. He is quiet for so long that I reach out and pluck at his shirtsleeve: despite my best intentions, it is a gesture that turns into a caress, and I quickly drop my hand. “So you were asking me about Rei.”

  “I was, wasn't I.”

  “So ask.”

  “Okay,” he says, rousing himself. “Right, then. But only because you're demanding that I do so. Why did you and Rei lose touch for so many years? Do you even know?”

  “Why do you have to ask me if you're so smart? Not to mention trained in the ancient arts of mind reading yadda yadda?”

  Shaking his head at me, Vikrum smiles so sweetly that I cannot help but smile back.

  If I told him about the cancer that had been in the center of Rei's left hand, he would almost certainly stop pestering me about her. Yet that is not my secret to tell. Suppressing a sigh, I turn and face him. “It was her mother's doing.”

  He is still, waiting for me to continue.

  “Hana fell in love with someone else. Naturally she wanted Rei and Kei—that's Rei's older sister—to look at this new man as their stepfather. And she decided that the best way to do that was to make a clean break with her old life.”

  “You're saying that she actually forbade Rei to see you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you said she wasn't an evil stepmother.”

  “She's not, really. Don't get me wrong—I hated her, always have and maybe always will, and it was horrible and cruel to separate us. But in terms of helping her new husband fit into the family, who knows, she might have been right not to let me and Rei see each other.” The explanation trips off my tongue: hardly surprising, given that I have made it to myself so many times over the years. “Rei really loved my dad. She looked at him as a father, and he thought of her as a daughter. The new guy didn't stand a chance with me around as a constant reminder of her old life.”

  Moving as one, perhaps at some hidden signal that I have once again failed to catch, the geese begin to waddle toward the water. The sun is sinking; Vikrum should be getting home soon.

  “I can't imagine you hating anyone,” he says. His right arm has crept up onto the back of the bench; while it remains discreetly out of reach of my shoulders, his fingers hold tightly to one strand of my hair. “She must have really hurt your dad.”

  “She did. Very, very badly. But I hated her long before that. Besides, sometimes I think I can't really blame Hana for falling out of love with my dad. She was still grieving over her first husband, Rei's dad, when she and my father met. Hana and Seiji—now, that was a real love story.”

  With a tenacity that I would under other circumstances term admirable, Vikrum ignores the bait and sticks to the story at hand. “Your stepmother—what was she like?”

  “You know how I always brought home sick animals and so many of them died? She used to give me bits of her jewelry to bury with them. Something beautiful to accompany them into the land of the dead, she'd say. Rhinestone brooches and the like. In retrospect, it was environmentally appalling, but it was kind. While she wasn't much of a cook, she'd remember what foods I liked, hummus and eggplant and pumpkin pie, and she always made sure to buy them for me when I came to stay there for the weekends. Even so, she was kind of—well, she was kind of absent. My mom's absentminded. She'd forget to pick me up or make me lunch, and it's a miracle she hasn't burnt the house down, she leaves so many pots burning on the stove.”

  “Ah,” says Vikrum appreciatively, and I know that he is squirreling away this acorn to add to his store of information on my mother. He loves to hear about her, and he is convinced, circumstances notwithstanding, that they are destined to be great friends.

  “But Hana seemed almost secretive. For all that she was a really dutiful mother and stepmother and wife, her heart wasn't in it, ultimately. It could have been because she was an artist, but who really knows? Nothing she did ever really made sense to me.” Beginning with why she showed no interest in the possibility of marrying a real live prince and ending with why she never told my father the precise reason she was leaving him.

  “She was born and raised in Japan?”

  I nod. “She always liked it better here, though. After her first husband died, she took Rei and Rei's sister back to Japan with her. Then, after about a year there, she bundled the kids into another plane. They headed for New Jersey, where she found a job teaching art, and eventually hooked up with my dad.”

  There is a short silence. “Wow,” says Vikrum at last. “She must be tough as nails.”

  “You think?”

  “Are you kidding? For a Japanese woman of that generation to do all that on her own? She probably didn't have much support from her family to become an artist, for starters; I'm betting her parents also weren't thrilled with the idea of her running off alone to some crazy country on the other side of the world, their grandchildren in tow. And then she finds security in the form of another husband, and leaves him to boot. That's a lot of broken rules right there.”

  Mixed in with the grudging admiration that Hana ofte
n seems to inspire, at least in me, there is a hint of what sounds like envy in his voice. The first time that Vikrum saw the woman he eventually married, she was in a photograph proffered to him by his parents. In my presence, at least, he has never railed against the way in which his family establishes and controls the parameters of his life; indeed, he has not once uttered a word of complaint on the subject. Sometimes I think that he just does not want to give voice to his anger, but usually I know that the welter of cultural expectations placed upon him is so much a part of him that he is afraid what will happen once he allows himself to begin to resent it.

  Still, that does not mean he is altogether free of resentment. Is it possible that a very secret part of him envies my stepmother for the coolness with which she walked away from her family and, later, from a marriage? Or is it just wishful thinking on my part to wonder if that is so?

  “It's a real twist that after Hana left your dad, he and your mom got back together,” Vikrum says suddenly. “It makes Hana seem more—more guilty, somehow, a real home-wrecker. It's weird enough for you, but it must be really weird for Rei.”

  I look away again, forcing myself to focus on the two women speed-walking by the river, their elbows swinging freely back and forth. When Rei and I get older, perhaps we, too, will wear baseball caps and go speed-walking along the Charles. But then my concentration snaps away from them like a rubber band.

  Is Vikrum right; would the news of my parents' remarriage strike Rei as strange and even intolerable?

  So, there it is, the unbidden guest who squats squarely in my view—the thought that I have been trying to dodge for the past week with more than modest success. I should have told Rei about my parents' reconciliation right away, the day that we first met up.

  And then, hard on the heels of that thought, comes its inevitable and even more unpleasant corollary: I will have to tell her soon.

  I shake my head quickly, clearing it, and turn back to face Vikrum.

  His brows have inched together. “Aside from being a home-wrecker, though, your stepmother really doesn't sound so evil. Wait a second,” he says, electric in that infectious way that he has when he gets an idea. He was known as one of the more inspiring teachers in his graduate department at Columbia, and it is not hard to see why. “Something's not right here. How do you know that Rei's vanishing on you is her mother's fault? Did Rei say that to you when you two got together?”

  “Well, no. In fact, she said it was her idea. But I know she's just protecting her mother—”

  Before I can finish the sentence, he is nodding.

  “You see, it just doesn't add up,” he says. “She couldn't have just disappeared because of her mother.”

  “But she did,” I say, speaking politely but with emphasis. I lean my head to the right so that Vikrum is forced to let go of my hair. “I'm telling you what happened: Hana decided we shouldn't meet, so we didn't. Rei felt guilty about the way Hana treated Dad. She felt so ashamed, she went along with the whole plan in part to punish herself. That's how it happened.” That's how it must have happened: there is no other possible explanation. But Vikrum is caught up; his eyes are gazing into the distance and he does not seem to hear.

  “Let's just think it through. After all, you were both seventeen by that time, on your way to college. It's not as if you needed your parents to bring you together. Maybe there's another reason that—”

  “Rei would never, ever have betrayed me! We were so close, and she could never be so cruel—”

  “Whoa,” Vikrum says, holding his hands up. His eyes are on me now, and they look bewildered. “Why are you yelling? And how can you possibly even suspect that Rei would have betrayed you? Why would anyone ever do that to you?”

  For a second I cannot speak. In a moment he will leave to go and have dinner with his family. But then I realize that he is only speaking the truth: it is not me being betrayed, of course, but them. I clear my throat. “I thought you were implying—”

  “I wasn't.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “I'm sorry if that's what you thought.”

  “Me too. It's getting late, you need to go home soon.”

  “I know,” he says. “I'm going.”

  We sit. Arms folded, I look out across the water. Moving their oars in enviable unison, a crew of eight streaks by. Off to the left, the Harvard bridge, by far the most prosaic of all the thoroughfares across the Charles, with neither the airy grace of the Weeks footbridge nor the impressive dignity of the Longfellow, shimmers hazily, rendered lovely by the change in light. “Go ahead and laugh if you want to,” I say at last. “I don't see what's so funny, but I wouldn't want you to choke.”

  “I'm sorry,” he says again. “I don't think I've ever seen you get quite this huffy. . . .”

  “I'm delighted that my indignation is fodder for your entertainment.”

  With that, Vikrum lets out a shout of laughter that is worthy of Rei. “You are such a goose, do you know that? I'm not laughing at how mad you are. It's just that you worry so much about everybody. Your students, your family, me . . . the goddamn geese on the Charles, for crying out loud.”

  Then, suddenly, his arms are around me, my face placed firmly against his. The pathways in front of us are teeming with people, any of whom might be a colleague of Vikrum's, a parent of his children's friends, an acquaintance of his wife; far beyond them lies Medford, invisible to our sight but no less present. I should be disentangling myself from the warmth of his embrace and the familiar smell (clean and masculine and tangy) of his body; I should be scolding him for his growing recklessness in the past two months. But it takes all of my effort just to utter six words. “You need to go home soon,” I say once more.

  He sighs so deeply that the rise and fall of his body rocks my own. “I know,” he says, as if our prior exchange had been a rehearsal, this the main performance. Then, very gently: “I'm going.”

  We sit locked together as the shadows grow more steep, the air cools, and the sky to the east turns a deep blue. When the wind picks up around us, the crumbs left behind by the birds scatter and tumble until soon they are all gone.

  Chapter Eleven

  New Jersey, 1974–82

  “GROWING UP, MY MOTHER ALWAYS HAD PAINTBRUSHES rather than dolls,” Rei would say to Claudia, who'd nod: they, too, disliked dolls, preferring Frisbee or books or, better yet, stories such as these. “She never thought about having children.” Hana was too busy thinking about colors and shapes, about the lines of the tree branches outside her window and the way the sunlight slanted down on the ragged pink sweater lying on the sofa. Her parents liked to tell the story of the first time she ever got hold of a paint set: Hana had dabbed blobs of blue and green onto her sister's and brother's faces and arms until they were both completely transformed. Throughout her childhood, Hana's paintbrushes and paints were her most prized possessions as well as her most constant companions. So used to holding a brush was she that on the rare occasions she took a break, her right arm felt mysteriously too short. She used up all the pencils in the house until they were stubs and dried out the ink in all the pens with her doodling. During the war, when paper was scarce, she covered old newspapers, her sister's clothes, and even the neighbor's sweet-natured white dog with the outlandish images that leapt out as if long pent up from her hand.

  It was at the age of sixteen that she put into words the goal by which she resolved to live the rest of her life: to try to put as much beauty into the world as she got out of it. It wasn't a goal that could be achieved, of course. It was absurd even to think of trying, when, even after the war, even after most of the city around her lay in ruins, there was beauty to be had for the taking wherever and whenever she looked: the soft gray of the evening sky; a clump of dandelions growing in a crack in the road; the profile of her silver-haired grandmother as she sat, knitting in hand, and gazed at the floor in a moment of contemplation.

  Yes, it was a ridiculous ambition. Yet when Hana thought about devoting years
to achieving that all too clearly unattainable goal, she was unable to imagine a life that would be better spent.

  PAINTING CONSUMED HANA, perhaps, she was forced to admit, because a part of her always remained unsatisfied with what she did. Her dissatisfaction stemmed partly from her own inadequacies as an artist—it seemed as if she were continually cursing the clumsiness of her hands and her lack of technique and craft—but if that were her only problem, she would have been fine: whenever she was confronted with yet another dismal product of her labor, she just vowed again, with all of the fierce determination that was perhaps her defining characteristic, that she would work even harder, and that someday, somehow, her eyes would be sharper, her hands more deft, and her lines more sure. No, what proved a far more insurmountable obstacle was that while she struggled to paint pictures as Sasaki-sensei, her art instructor, said—an exact copy of nature—she never wanted to; the pictures in her head, vague and ill-defined though they were, seemed always far superior to the ones that appeared on the canvas in front of her and, more to the point, to the ones that appeared beyond it, the lake or the sunflowers or the bowl of peaches or whatever it was that Sasaki-sensei wanted her to reproduce.

  But if not lakes, if not peaches, if not even sunflowers (her favorite flowers, their colors so vivid and their shapes so bold, but at the same time almost ugly, their giant heads drooping a little with their own weight), then what was it that she wanted to paint? Hana wasn't sure. She admired but at the same time had no desire to participate in the delicate, ephemeral arts of Japan, the flower arrangements and the tea ceremony and the painstakingly careful folding of origami. She herself wished to create art that would shout out she was here long after she was gone. Her wish to make art that was both substantial and strong was such that, despite her love of the limitless array of colors that could arise with the mixing of paint, she thought sometimes that what she really wanted to do was sculpture: something that would slash against the landscape, loom up and create shelter, and cast shadows in the grass.