Sometimes she thought, yes, she would walk out into the world beside him. If, first, she could tattoo his face. Brand him with a delta like the Greeks. Stamp his forehead like the Roman gladiators, MINE. Often, listening to him, his life, this man who led a dozen lives, Rachel felt unused, unlived, she felt like stabbing him. Now he bent a little, wheezed again. She sat back, imagining a time when Hiro would be old, soft-skinned, soft-mannered, almost frail, except for his tattooed penis, blue, swaggering masquerader. She reached for him between his legs.
Gently, so gently, she fondled him, feeling three distinct masses in the foreskin and penile skin. He sighed. Genuine pearls, perfectly round, sturdy, firm. Implanted for her coital pleasure. They caused him no discomfort, actually embellished the configuration of his already embellished penis, and in coitus they delayed his orgasm, giving her more pleasure, for longer periods. Now it rose between his legs and Hiro followed, rising from the tub, lifting her in his arms so they seemed borne on the steam of the bath to the bed, with no sense of having made the journey.
And sweet delays O small titillations . . . stroking her stomach ever so lightly with a delicate fan of hummingbird feathers, stroking until her rosy skin shivered, seemed to reach up to the fan. And then slow journeying—Hire’s fingers opening a lacquered box, inside a sleek and shining ant, silk thread tied round its midriff, lured into Rachel’s ear by a daub of sweet rice honey.
And her eyes swinging back and forth in almost-terror as the ant began its journey how many humans Hiro asked perceived the erogeny of the inner ear and Rachel’s jerks goose bumps starting at the back of the neck creeping over the face and scalp sweat darting along the shoulders trickling down the arms that visual shiver up the spine then chills enveloping her body as the ant writhed in some thickening canal tugged gently backwards now and then by Hire’s finger on the thread then creeping on foraging brushing tiny hairs that triggered tiny nerve cells that traveled to her brain O pleasurepain and Rachel yipping feeling drunk off-balance little feelers footsteps scratching scratching echoing as it fought suffocation in some oily seedy jungle gasping struggling in little death-throes and Rachel freezing pleasurepain and Hiro penetrating heaving on her in her Rachel feeling the groping sliding O surprise pearls being polished by the pushing pulling of his skin the rhythm honing polishing their luster bright reflections like a heat refracting light from sea-translucent layers gems glowing in her turning Hiro iridescent moans her moans her leapings silk thread lost in tangled hair something dying in her skull tiny corpse sneezing out of her tomorrow and she was and she was and she was coming coming coming leaping bucking up the air and Hiro thrilled so thrilled at how she lit up in her coming took flight withdrew from him into her eyes right at the height of pleasure withdrew foiled him coming like a solitary comer in the precinct of her own alone coming in a way that led him pushed him thrust him over some brink of terrible onrushing he was diving leaping crashing growing old yes old in his coming his fatigued ejaculation like pearls in foreskin he would they would grow soft grow old wear down by rubbing toxins body acids heat. We are subject to decay.
They woke at dusk, exhausted, his dry sperm tarried on her thighs. Far in the distance the glitter of Waikīkī, lights profiling giant ocean liners, winkings of small freighters waving fractionally against the tide. Across the lānai breezes blew them “Malaguena” from an orchestra in some hotel. Rachel sighed, lay her arm across his chest, while his long, yellow fingers gently brushed her nipples. And she thought how theater, costumes, little tricks gave their lovemaking the aspect of piety. Yet there was nothing pious in it, it was fantasy, escape, what people did to beat back fear, beat back waves of lonely respiration.
“Does it mean we’ve lost desire for each other? That we can’t make love without these ... accessories?” In the early years, they hadn’t needed props, only each other.
“No.” His voice was gruff and tender. “It means only that we are children, after all. We need a little make-believe.”
“At our age? When love should be enough?”
“Even now, Rachel. Especially now. Love. Lust. Different but ... somehow not inseparable, not indistinguishable. They imitate each other. Imagine loving me, without desiring me.”
“I have,” she said. “When we’re old and there’s only remembering.”
He half sat up and smiled. “You’re very self-conscious these days.”
This was something new, for she had always shown a lack of curiosity about people and things, perhaps out of fear of arousing people’s curiosity about her. But lately, Rachel seemed restless, full of questions, sloughing off her usual elusiveness. He noticed a disturbance in her eyes, a luster, as if in her mind slumbering things had wakened and sat up. She seemed to want to turn life this way and that, examine it, make pronouncements. It detracted from her air of innocence, that girlishness he found so charming, so in need of possessing.
Yet, who possesses whom? he wondered.
Away from her, he could still feel her hold on him. Sometimes he went to other women without wanting to, without needing to, but needing to push her back so he could breathe. Rachel’s beauty was extreme, her love morbidly stern, all-encompassing, her passion the lust of every child-whore he had ever craved. She was what charged him, relaxed him, drew a blind over the ugly world he knew. She was all that would be left when he lost track of life’s meaning. She was behind him, beside him, pulling his strings like a puppet.
He glanced at her and she was quiet, still troubled, still pondering, and it disturbed him. He knew her perversities, her waywardness, knew that in subtle ways, by sheer will, remarkable agility, she could destroy him, destroy his desire for her. Which would destroy everything.
“Be careful,” he said softly. “You’re becoming unadorned, very ... down to earth.”
She stood up slowly from the bed, wrapped a kimono round her shoulders. “Perhaps it’s age. One begins to look at things. Is it unattractive?”
“It can be dangerous. I know there are regrets. No children, no grandchildren, laughing in this house. A house without echoes. My fault, I suppose. You were enough pleasure, enough child for me.”
She remembered the years of staring at her cousins—manifestly pregnant—with disgust, the notion of a parasite living in her womb a horror.
“I’m no victim, Hiro. I chose my fate. We lived as we were meant to. My only regret has been losing you, continually losing you. I have never been enough. And, why? I wonder why?”
Gracefully, he slid into a robe. “Rachel, Rachel. Why question everything? There’s not always a reason. Life is not that logical. Perhaps I am evil. Perhaps you’re a sorcerer. Perhaps we’re just children lost at sea.
She sat in her bath, studying runic marks on her breasts, stomach, thighs, Hiro’s teeth seeking refuge in her skin.
. . . His mother died when he was six. He couldn’t stop crying, this boy, this child, crying for days. His father rowed him out beyond the reef and threw him in and rowed away. He was a man when he reached shore . . .
That was his life, all the youth he had before he was sent away to Japan, defying his father, becoming a Yakuza, member of the criminal underworld. She thought of the nights she toyed with cutting her wrists. Of hanging herself in the bamboo grove. Her Mercedes over a cliff. Nights, and months, and years of his comings and goings. And yet he says I never leave him, am always with him, keeping after him. Perhaps my steady gaze rides the eyeball of every whore he penetrates in his pleasure-palaces on the Ginza, the backstreet gutters of his water trade!
In the past two years, she had rounded forty, and the centrifugal force of that rounding, impelling her out away from the center of things, of her ego for instance, gave her an odd, a new perspective. She began to see how Hiro had dominated her all these years toward an end almost impossible to grasp, the desire to desire beyond satisfaction. He had driven her to excite herself for someone else, someone unseen who watched them. Someday Hiro would die and she would be left naked and craving, recorded in
the blinking eye of something cold, unknown. Something, perhaps, outside the species.
Then, one night it came to her that all these years the thing unknown, the faceless voyeur, was her husband. He had watched her, kept her at bay, so she would never have enough of him, never know him entirely. In that way she would never outgrow him, never grow bored with him. He would be her sickness, obsession, her judge and executioner. She would want him unto death. She thought of him now in the gentlest way, felt ignoble before him. He was suffering. He had always suffered.
At dinner, he scowled at the dishes—beef fillets in cream and brandy, buttery squash, Pouilly Fumé in crystal.
He called softly to the cook, “Take it away. Bring plates of bean curd, cuttlefish. Crack seed. And sake.”
Rachel laughed. “You want Run Run kine food!”
Hiro shook his head. “This Western, early death food. I see it on faces everywhere, capillaries, apoplectic cheeks.”
While they ate, he looked round the room at urns, porcelains, ancient bronzes, and seemed to discard them with his gaze. How strange objects look when we no longer want them. When we are freed from the thingness of things.
He dabbed at his dish with no appetite. “Tomorrow, our dinner of Fugu Akirame! And now ... is it playing time?”
In the candle-lit playing room, subtle incense of clove and sandalwood, he watched as Rachel’s shapely arms grew from her silk kimono of indigo splash pattern. Hair done up in the peach-cleft style, head slightly inclined, her fingers stroked the shamizen so delicately the sounds evoked the haunting notes of a young soprano drifting in a barren world, searching for her lover.
Three strings of catgut, the surface and underside of cat skin, body shaped and with the sound reminiscent of a banjo, the ancient shamizen could—in the hands of an amateur—be played in a way that injured: twanging, dissonant sad squalls. Or the sounds could be transporting, ethereal. The song Rachel played subsided into six low notes, repeated over and over, lighter and lighter, like wasps circling, higher and higher, the young soprano finding her lover wounded and dying from stag wounds, their souls transported above the temporal world.
Rachel bowed, began a new song. Leaning down, she concentrated then began plucking sounds out of nature, sounds of a place of extremes. And as she played, Hiro understood she was playing the sounds of the Big Island. First flowing sounds, like contours of volcanoes that had shaped most of the island—Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, Hualālai. Then sounds of molten lava erupting from open fissures. Destruction. Black, arid deserts, heat, sound of distant steam plumes rising from new volcanic vents, bubbling below the surface, looking for its next outlet, its next eruption.
Then plucking softly, dreamily, she drifted into valleys of the Big Island, bamboo forests, royal palms, hurricanes of butterflies in fields of vanda orchids. One by one, sounds of island animals issued from the rasping strings, neighing horses, calling steers, the squeak of mongoose, grunting and charging of wild boar. Mynahs mating, geckos chittering in guava trees. She plucked out this world, her world, with closed eyes, her perfect face glowing, hands dissociated from her body, carrying out a will of their own as she drew sounds of the island’s eerie mana, drawn from the presence of sacred sites, temples and burial grounds.
Then Rachel drew out sacred sounds of the hula, the ancient narrative dance designed to enhance the meaning of mele, singing-chants containing legends, genealogies, the history of Hawaiians. It was the sound of dancers accompanied on gourd drums, of kāne and wāhine in malo and kīkepa, wearing dog-tooth anklets, sacred fern and feather crowns. This was not the cheap, flirtatious hula danced for tourists. These were sounds of warriors, movements quick and bold, movements of the hands, not hips, dancers who didn’t smile, who danced to honor ancients, or call down death on enemies.
Then from the strings of the shamizen came the rhythm of a single drum, insistent chanting of a voice, deep, haunting, untranslatable, the sting and hurt of history. So often, it seemed, Hiro had forgotten Rachel’s native blood. There was so much of him in her—culture, gestures, taste—he chose to think of her as his creation, pure-blood Japanese. Now, he saw her Hawaiian side draw closer to the surface.
Beads of sweat shone on her brow, even her neck perspired with the effort of her playing, the physical love she felt for that island manifested in her skin, her expression, her hands upon the strings. All of those heartrending sounds on three strings! It seemed a miracle. It made him weep a little. And, maybe Hiro wept because he saw how much she loved that place, how she belonged there. The Big Island was her history, blood she loved was there. And he had left her alone too many years.
Late that night she talked, as if she needed to hear it to understand it. “Something is happening. Pono thinks she’s dying. These kahuna dreams. She takes her mysterious trips more often. I’ve thought of following her, but she would kill me, strike me dead ...”
“She is old,” Hiro said. “Allow her her precious secrets.”
“I’m scared, Hiro, maka‘u for all of us! Vanya’s throwing herself away on strangers. Toru talking about killing haole developers. And Jess ... I think she wants to come home. She’s such a kanaka, real island girl. But ‘come home to what?’ she asks. Everything is falling down.”
“And how is Ming?” His voice was especially gentle, knowing she was ill.
Rachel wept and clung to him. “Ming! She’s becoming transparent. I swear, I can see right through her. What will happen? What will I do?”
He held her, hugged her like a child. “You were the orphan. You had to invent yourself, create a life from nothing.”
“Like you,” she whispered.
“Yes. Perhaps, like me. It gives one endurance, perseverance. You, my Rachel, will survive. You will be amazed.”
Flowers tossed and brooded in the trades, splashed palettes on the lawn. Wasps hummed like airborne samurai; now and then a hornet snorting down. They stood beside the pond, feeding Hiro’s prize koi, Hiro monkish and benign in kimono and slippers. He moved with care along the stepping-stones traversing the pond, and when he bent, she saw he was going bald. His hair had been black and thick, and now the skull shone through. Three koi surfaced, scales brilliant in the sun.
“The bravest of fish,” Hiro said. “When caught, they await the knife calmly, without flinching.”
He knelt slowly, clearing the surface of the pond with chopsticks, delicately extracting a leaf, the feather of a bird, gestures serene as a lama. Through the years she had learned that he spoke mostly by implication. She had to look for the echo, not the sound, the shadow not the light, but in this instance he spoke unequivocally.
“I have taught you many things. Now you must learn patience.”
“Why?”
“It outlasts greed. Life will come at you when I am gone. You will need patience to outwit it.”
“Don’t talk like that. Life will be over when you are gone.” She took up a pair of chopsticks, endeavoring to help him clear the pond, stabbing at the water ruthlessly. Her jeweled hairpin fell into the water, immediately swallowed by a large, robust koi.
“You!” she shouted, chasing the koi round the pond, kimono skirt held up between her legs like a diaper.
Hiro sat down laughing, rocking back and forth. A half-tame peacock skittered by, pursuing Rachel as she pursued the koi, the bird fan-tailed, screeching like a witch. Alarmed, Rachel kicked off her getas, running barefoot from the thing. Kori-Kori, the gardener, bounded over from a jasmine bush, attacking the peacock with a rake while it lunged after Rachel, Rachel screaming, running round and round the pond. The koi who had swallowed her hairpin, swam in circles, head just above the water as if observing everything. Hiro lay back helpless, tears streaming down his face.
Later, composed, they sat in their little teahouse facing the ocean, sipping green tea. And this man, who had always used language as a means of exclusion rather than expression, began to talk.
“What the world knows of me is mythical. But you, ah, you, dear Rachel. Yo
u make me laugh and weep. Say and do.”
She smiled, somewhat shy. “Why now, Hiro? Why do you tell me so much now?”
“Because. It is time.”
In that fugitive instant, her ribs creaked, she felt her heart shudder. She wondered if he were dying, his life shortened by the tattoos, too little free skin left to breathe. She closed her eyes, seeing him a boy of sixteen, when he had begun the tattoos, finally reaching completion at twenty-six. She saw him hour by hour, inch by inch, braving the insertion of black nara ink that turned blue when perforating live flesh, and the deadly Indian Red ink that glowed brown beneath the surface of the skin making a tattoo shine, and slowly poisoning the body.
She thought of this man with no childhood to speak of, and how the tattooist’s needle was perhaps the first thing to pierce his unfeeling and unfelt existence. She knew the whores from Bangkok and Hong Kong and Macao meant nothing to him. Perhaps she meant nothing to him. Perhaps his deepest love had been for his sensei, the tattooist, penetrating him for ten years.
He’s dying. He knows it in his skin. “Hiro! Are you in pain?”
He smiled, reached for her hand. “No. It’s not as interesting as pain. More a .. . premonition.” He lied because it was important, lies allowed him to defy reality, the truth. “Forgive me, dear. Words are such a nuisance.”
“No!” she cried. “I’ve waited almost thirty years for you to talk. How else can we know each other.”
He sighed, poured more tea. “Does one ever really know the other? Do we know ourselves? We live in doubt. And vanity. And in the end we go to silence.”
He looked so beautiful and stoic then, in the shape of his head, the grace of his bones, long mandarin fingers holding a tiny porcelain cup. But the exalted elegance of him was marred by the brutal blues of his chest mounting the open V of his kimono, blue wrists leaking from his sleeves, the missing digit of a finger.
Shark Dialogues Page 33