Toru . . .forgive . . .
Rachel
* * *
. . . VANYA NEXT DOOR SMELLING OF HAOLE, I can smell it through the wall. God, she carries it around like a trophy. And Ming smelling of her habit. Yet, I’m the one Pono judges. Eyes coming after me all these years. Fingers rubbing the fabric of my clothes, appraising, approximating. As if I’d stolen them! No one to turn to, to complain to. Jess’s first trip home in three years, and she’s silent, timid as a child. What has happened to her? How life has smoothed her sharp-edged tongue . . .
. . . Once when we were ten . . . me calling Jess “haole, fish-belly haole.” The awful silence, then Jess screaming, screaming. “At least I know who my father is. At least I’m not illegitimate like you!” And running, mist from sea-coated coffee trees blanketing my skin. And hiding in the rocks all night, sea urchins sucking at my feet. Something like a cluster of wet rubies moving toward me, I still see its flaming eyes, horrible as that word . . .
. . . Illegitimate. Knowing it. Had always known. Run Run hilahila everytime I asked. Saying my father had died in the war just before my birth. What war? I was born in 1952. Saying Mother died in childbirth, a broken heart. Lies, all lies. I had heard the whispers, the child who stood just outside the door. How I hated Jess, her truth-running mouth, her motherfather life . . .
. . . Father. I didn’t even know his name. Toshio, Run Run said, which I think had been her father’s name. Staring at my mother’s photograph, thinking, “Why, she was just a girl,” praying for her dear, departed soul. Then, one day classmates jeering. “Your mother isn’t dead. She ran away. She didn’t want you.” Confronting Pono, Run Run. Their faces hanging, tired of the he. . . . And understanding she was somewhere in the world. Unimaginable, to never know her, be without her, tomorrow, all my tomorrows . . .
. . . One day, I turned to Jess. “Yes. I am a bastard. There is nothing I can do.” We were twelve, but for that moment she looked very old. Sobbing, begging my forgiveness . . . That day was our healing, our celebrational swim out beyond the reef, a thing forbidden. Out where the ocean floor dropped to nothingness . . . O how waves lifted us, sitting us on foam like birds! Then soaring, slamming us down. Jess smashed up against me in the deep, trying to hold me in our drowning . . . Hours later, Vanya finding us unconscious on the sand, Jess’s wrist broken, still holding on to me . . . Maybe some acts of faith are stronger than forces of nature, having the power to keep us afloat . . . The miracle that day, not our survival, but that the rift between us had healed . . .
. . . Then one day Pono staring at me, leaving me paralyzed, the way small animals hypnotize themselves before the predator. What have I done? Run Run brushing my hair, polishing my skin with lemon and kukui oil. “She see you coming beautiful like yoah mama. Wonder what do wit’ you.” Do with me? Why not love me. Hold me in her arms. “She do love you, silly girl. More dan de ot’ers. Hard for her show dis kine affection. Too much choked out of her. Someday you know everyt’ing, Rachel. Hang yoah head in shock.” I have always been in shock, eyes begging, so thirsty to be held. Ming saying Pono is shy, cannot show emotion. Okay for Ming. She’s Pono’s favorite. Or Vanya, dark and moody, Pono’s carbon copy. I am nothing to her, a mistake . . .
. . . Ming’s folks, Auntie Holo, Uncle Tang, poor but loving, enough love for me. I live for the times I visit them in Kalihi! Uncle Tang full of laughter, jokes, his wonderful gwai goo, his presents—kittens, baby owls. His frog-lip soups, sizzling chicken platters, so much smoke we wear napkins on our faces like outlaws! His double spatulas juggling mango and macadamia flapjacks. And even now, in old age, his Gong Fu exhibitions, two fingers splitting melons, ZAP! O laughter, innocence! O miracle of father-knowing . . .
Rachel stares at her image in a mirror, anoints her face with an unguent made of arsenic and human placenta. With delicate motions, her fingers stroke upward from neck to temple, the scent of the unguent at first alluring, then oppressive, overwhelming, as if something huge were standing in the shadows of the room, something with a vast, indomitable will. She squints, ignores the beauty of her face, sees only microscopic ditches, incipient wrinkles on the brow.
. . . I’m no longer a child, Hiro’s child, the toy he dresses, undresses, attaches strange things to. I am becoming middle-aged, his nightmare. If I am old, then he is ancient. Is sixty ancient for a man? When he looks forty? When he is virile as a goat?. . .
She drops her slip straps, studying teethmarks just below her nipple, talismans of his homecoming. Marks of his leavetaking reflected in her eyes, the whites sucked from them so they seemed smaller.
. . . Auwē, I was just a child, he was the father I’d been searching for. Sixteen, visiting Ming’s folks. One night looking over a wall into the neighbor’s yard . . . This man, naked, bathing with a garden hose. So blue and evil-looking, I had to know him. Knowing if I stayed with him, nothing in this world would ever hurt me . . . The moon full, he looked like living mold. Tattooed. All of him. Everything. And climbing the wall, walking up to him entranced. Did we speak, I don’t remember. His tattooed penis rising, a snake dressed for a masquerade ball . . . Letting him take me right there, two lizards in wet grass. His skin changing colors in the moonlight, volcanoes on his back smoking, flowers on his shoulders blooming as if from radiation. Hiro. Twenty years older, handsome, thuggish, moving like a thoroughbred . . .
. . . And afterwards . . . there was no afterwards, only always . . . he wouldn’t let me leave his side, dressed me, taught me how to eat and drink. Bombay Sapphire neat. One night, a diamond in the Sapphire. We eloped . . . Pono’s wrath, disowning, abandoning me as my mother had. Run Run taking the ferry to Honolulu, confronting Hiro. Raising her fist at him, bowed legs shaking like Shoyu kegs. “I been like Rachel’s mama, neh? She just a baby. You make her sad, I bust you up. Kill you good, foah shoah!” Hiro smiling, taking Run Run in his lap. “I cannot hurt her, Rachel owns my heart”. . .
. . . He loves that I am so ready for passion, ready to take and take. And he takes me, his child, still growing, forming, without guile. I love his smell, gin, English cigarettes, contraband . . . Hiro fearing no one, but when he speaks of his father his face taking on the look of mourning. And maybe that is the beginning of something, discovering your protector, your lover, the one you journey with through great heat, he, too, has been discarded. He has been laid bare. And he begins to tell . . .
. . . When he was ten Hiro’s father sent him from Honolulu home to Japan to be educated. Instead he became a gangster. In Kyoto he studied Kendo, “the way of the sword,” and adopted the philosophy of Bushido: the way of the warrior, prepared to die at any moment, which is the only way to live . . . He believed the true Samurai had the heart of a criminal. At thirty-six, finally returning to Hawai‘i. His father, seeing the tattoos, disowning him. The night before he leaves, bathing under that garden hose, Fate casting my eyes his way . . .
. . . And O the early years. Stepping outside the family, strolling the grounds of the Royal Hawaiian like tourists, dancing at the Halekūlani like bored peacocks! People staring because we look like nothing else. The house he gives me in Kahala, overlooking the sea, neighborhood of long driveways, white-coated servants raking gravel, prize-winning koi. Meals eaten with Burmese imperial jade chopsticks. Even our own small grove of whispering, rare tortoiseshell bamboo . . .
. . . Hiro, my Yakuza, his business the “water trade”—liquor, prostitution, drugs—up and down the Asian coast, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Tokyo. His growing absences. When he is home, artists and buffoons swaggering in our gardens on Sunday afternoons. And gangsters . . . People I grow to hate, part of his world that takes him away from me. I compete with them in dangerous ways. Flirting, insulting, laughing at a Laotian drug czar’s regrettable taste in Western clothes . . . Even koi in the pond surface, staring at each stranger like a thought in some very cold-blooded mind. Hiro’s absences increasing through the years . . .
. . . I learn to beg, beseech. “Why do you stay away? S
pend so much time in Hong Kong?” Sipping his Bombay Sapphire, his gaze raising my temperature, making me want to undress. “Because, Hong Kong leaves me alone.” Years accumulate, making me needy, not letting him breathe . . . Hiro saying when he’s with me, it’s like he’s poured into me, like something swallowed by an animal drinking. Says he wears his gun to protect himself from me. My beauty . . .
. . . Decade of twenties becoming thirties. My face remaining eerily young. The tyranny of rituals. Beauty tonics of crushed pearl. Bitter nightly drafts of Gyokuro, rarest of green Japanese teas, so precious one drinks it from thimbles. Baths of seaweed, ginseng, shark-liver oil. Masks of pureed buttermilk and brains. Then becoming forty . . . maybe my look of enduring youth is really the high color of terror, the games Hiro and I play, death/lust games with Fugu: the body’s dizziness, its shock, making my blood rush to the surface. . . .
. . . Sometimes when he sleeps I want to smother him, join him on the other side. Maybe his absences are how we keep from killing each other. But when he’s gone, my periods of squalor. Wrecking cars, running down peacocks. Throwing emeralds at the gulls. Gold-threaded silk kimonos slashed . . . Waiting, waiting for him. Ming says I should fill my days with works of charity, like other wealthy women. What does one say to other women? How does one sit? Besides, there is my origami, brush painting, calligraphy lessons, my ikebana, lessons on the shamisen, tea ceremony lessons . . . Fittings for my costumes, geisha wigs, impersonation wigs, of young girls, young boys, long red Mikado wig reaching to the floor. Our private theater, any, every fantasy . . .
. . . Then, I feel it with my loins, even my pupils enlarging. Back from another trip, he is home, on the lawn, approaching. White suit and tie, black gangster’s shirt, long Mandarin fingers, sleek as a cat, eyes narrow as seeds . . . So aristocratic in his bearing, I have to look away. Hiro. Almost sixty, looking like a man of forty. Hair still black and slick as a croupier. Yellow face still handsome. My breathlessness, my eagerness to love him, peel his clothes off expertly like skinning an animal . . .
. . . And always, he is affectionate, attentive. Precious gifts from the Orient, rubies, ancient museum-quality robes. And very private gifts . . . Harigata, hand-molded by a blind girl. Higozuki, of living wasps. And one anniversary, three pearls implanted in his foreskin, adding such gravelly shock and rapture. And sweet netsukes, graceful copulation of couples locked in jade . . . Handcuffs of braided, silkworm filaments, fear of tearing them from my wrists giving such intensity to pleasure. Games aging, childless, couples play. Me coming to him naked under Empress robes. His nipples wet with rare rice brandy. It trickles down his stomach, my tongue chasing. One long yellow icicle finger tracing my thigh, tracing endlessly, until I start to quiver, until my hair falls down . . .
. . . His “aviary” collection, the rarest pleasure sheaths. Feathered Bird of Paradise. Long-beaked Toucan. His “reptile” collection, Gaped Chinese New Year Dragon. Handmade Lizard from Cambodia, great green fleshy crest . . . O dreamy, delicate task of outfitting Hiro, watching him grow more erect. Slipping the green-crested lizard over his member, slowly, solemnly, as if dressing a rare, prehistoric doll . . . Skin of the pleasure sheath astonishingly thin, thin as vapors, so I feel each contraction, feel his eyes narrow as blood drives through his heart. Him watching me electrified, bucking, cantering green crests. His childless child in endless rut . . .
. . . His aging child, shackled to her island. O the years. I dream of travel, journeying, of searching in the world. (Mother, come home, I forgive you, even though you were a slut.) I cannot. The fear of seeing Hiro—Singapore, Macao—laughing with young whores. Fear of finding the woman who threw me away. And throwing me away again. Brush painting, making sketches of her, wondering how she looks, if she remembers. Is she somewhere, sketching me? Does she know my name? Rachel, torn leaf on the ancestral tree. Half known, half suspected . .
. . . The others say I’m a concubine, a slave. Living in fantasy. Is it so great a sin? Secrets? Deep secluded privacy? Vanya’s life a spectacle. Divorce, death. Rage. Broadcasting her lust, the smell of strangers on her skin. Ming with her deadly secrets, her little pipes. Jess always running from us, keeping her distance. As if we were contagious . . . Yet, Pono’s eyes are always after me: extravagance, my useless life. When did love, devotion, loyalty turn useless, extravagant? Maybe she’s jealous, having never loved. Maybe Vanya’s jealous, possessing only memories and grief . . .
. . . Run Run my only consolation. “Pono love you as a child. You don’ remember how she rock you, sing you, hug you every hour?” Memory of eyes popping, lungs hurting, thinking she was trying to smother me. “Silly girl. That how much she love you. Feeling go through her heart like lightning. Frighten her, so she step back . . .” They are always stepping back all of them. Why not give me a little credit, my fairness, generosity, always bearing gifts . . .
. . . Buying Toru his first Arabian stallion after he kicked heroin, became a paniolo. And that whole year before, who was at his side? Even when he was too crazed to recognize me . . . Consulting with his doctors, sitting near his padded cell, listening to his screams. Who else came every single day. Christmas. Birthday. Days of hurricanes. Tsunami—waves rolling through the city, my driver deserting, leaving me in a floating car. Did I panic? Run for home? I dragged myself to high ground, then walked six miles in killer shoes . . . I know those hospital corridors by heart, awful, ammonia smell, swish of midnight mops. I know how many tiles in every hall . . .
. . . Just give me a little credit. Rachel, bearer of gifts. Early years of Ming’s illness. Vanya, off with her Samoan. Who took their children in?. . . Sounds of young voices like chimes across the lawn, laughter in my lonely house. Days and months of playing at motherhood with other people’s children. Not wanting my own, afraid of sharing Hiro . . . Then Ming’s son and daughter suddenly adults, bored with Aunty Rachel. Vanya’s son, my favorite, drowned. Shock, weeping servants. Even nature mourned. Gardens with no appetite for soil. The bamboo dead. Koi floating belly-up. Heart broken, my tongue stilled for weeks . . . Hiro rocking me, astonished at my grief. And really, whose loss was I mourning? Should I have had a child? I, who without Hiro, hardly breathed . . .
. . . Still Vanya comes, asking donations for this and this. Kōkua South Point. Kōkua sacred forests. Kōkua Literarcy Campaign. Kōkua the Sovereignty Movement. Scholarships. Educate our children. I give and give, feeling her continuing disdain. . . . Even Jess says my life is foolish, wasteful, not seeing how I count on her, on them, to stand by me, be loyal to my loyalty. Carrying Hiro’s secret infidelities like corpses on my back, I become a keeper of accounts . . .
. . . Perfumes in his clothes, stains of many women. Tallying each scent. Shredding his silk robes, making funeral pyres of his hand-tailored shirts, shantung suits, even ostrich-skin slippers burning to black knots of leather . . . He laughs at me across the flames. My jealousy excites his passion. His kimono open, his penis blue and beckoning. When I am old, what will I leave behind? No deeds. No offspring. No meaning echo of my days. I will be despised. A concubine. A keeper of accounts . . .
Jess
* * *
SHE CIRCLES HER ROOM SLOWLY, an eerie sense of being watched. Assuming a somewhat aggressive stance, she flings wide a closet door, then another. Nothing. She searches through dresser drawers, only lavender sachets. She even looks under the big hikie’e in the corner covered with Batik. She imagines something damp brushing against her arm. Mosquito netting on the big four-poster trembles like skin. Jess stares, willing it still. She rummages in her duffel bag, unswivels the top of a bottle of Rémy Martin and pours a modest drink. She listens.
. . . Why do I always get the haunted room? And these mosquito nets, as if we were living in Java. She never accepted that Hawai‘i is not the tropics. It’s north of the Equator . . .
She shakes the net a little, watches prismatic dust dance down in lamplight.
. . . Human cells sloughed off down the decades. How many pounds are
in this room? How many generations?. . .
She studies her reflection in an old bamboo-framed mirror. Jumpsuit, jungle trooper boots, so out of place here, but she likes the precision and suggested toughness they impart. And the cropped hair, the way it makes her eyes jump out alert, a certain mineral brilliance. Altogether, a paramilitary air. She circles the room again, avoiding the lānai, knowing what is out there, how it will get to her. After three years away, she feels she’s established a sort of equilibrium, but knows she could lose it in a minute.
. . . As usual, she’s given me the room farthest from the others. Why does she always do that? Keep me on the outside?. . .
She doesn’t see it’s the best room, a corner room, with almost a wraparound view of Kona District from the sprawling lānai. Far down on the right will be the glittering lights of the town of Kailua, ocean liners blinking in the harbor. To her left, the ghostly blue flanks of Mauna Loa. Down below, fringing the shoreline, swaying bamboo and palm groves, the City of Refuge in the distance. And before her, laid out like a gift, the sea, foam breaking its dark glass surface, a sickle of moon, stars bright as little suns. And somewhere out there in the dark, lava, whole deserts of it. It is all waiting, looming, so powerfully there.
At first Jess ignores it, too busy striking sparks, looking for the subtext, the accusation in everything. It will take days, slow hours, to relearn what she forgets each time she leaves this place—that this island, this lushness, is stern, tenacious, that the vast, invisible will, the mystery of nature so in abundance here, is what saves her from herself. That if she just leaves things alone, doesn’t question, and accuse, there will be no need for answers, there will be no need for anything, everything will be all right. She feels the Rémy entering her blood, a semi-ease. She sighs, bends, unlaces her boots.
Shark Dialogues Page 26