Raw Silk (9781480463318)

by Burroway, Janet

  He listened—well, I’ve already established that he listened. When I got to the Dorset home he sat very still, with his hands in his lap, one over the other and the fingers twined, nodding, nodding me on.

  “She couldn’t come over the doorsill. I know a little of how that feels. But all the same I do it. She couldn’t. Could, not. I don’t think she ever will.” And he turned up a look of such simple comprehension that I had to drop my eyes.

  “It’s a drag, isn’t it?” he said. “But it’s not your fault.”

  “No. Neither is Catman in Hiroshima yours.”

  “No. Okay, that’s a more than fair exchange. Thanks.”

  “Thanks.”

  Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks.

  23

  KOKO DERA. THE MOSS Temple. Acres, I don’t know how many, of moss-carpeted rolling park. Moss in mottlings of color from gray to green to lime to gold to amber to brown, lit greener through the pines, lit gold and scarlet through the turning deciduous autumn trees, moss underfoot in the paths and eiderdown-deep on the riverbanks. All the blues of the sky are rescinded in green and amber light. Steppingstones and carp ponds, bamboo groves and fern, parakeets calling attention to their color through the leaves. Having learned how to talk in the morning, I learned how to be still at noon. On a September Monday we had Koko Dera, not to ourselves, but to a degree of emptiness that made the few kimonoed strollers mere decoration, figures on a ground. I don’t know if the Koko Dera is natural or man-made, and Montgolfier didn’t know, and we agreed not to buy a guidebook. But if man-made, then the landscape artist knew a little about omnipotent form, and if natural, then nature must have something approaching an artist’s turn of mind. It calmed me, but breathlessly.

  Montgolfier, also, who had lunged and talked as if incapable of repose, now strolled and was silent, sat, said nothing or almost nothing for an hour. Sounds shifted through the light and shadow in a pattern of their own: shells strung from a shingled boathouse, bells, the leaves fluent, water flowing, bird call. There was a full, hollow resonant whack from time to time, distant and deceptive as the paths wound in various ways. Finally we came upon its source, a thick bamboo segment resting on a stone and at an angle across a rod. A narrow trough spilled water into it from the stream above. When the bamboo was full, the weight of the water tipped it forward to spill itself empty in the stream, and the bamboo rocked back and struck the stone with the shuttle whack, to be filled again. Carp, gray but of majestic—pompous!—size and grace, ignored the sound and drifted round the stone.

  I said, calmly but conscious that the calm was fragile, “Would you mind stopping here a while? I’d like to sketch that. I tried to do the carp in Takayama, but it didn’t work.”

  “Sure, do.”

  I didn’t have my sketchbook, having abandoned it in Takayama, but I had Black Rain, so I opened the hard cover and used it as both easel and sheet, propping it on my knees. Montgolfier lay back in the moss, not watching, for which I was grateful. Thanks. I sketched, the bank and the bamboo and one carp. I tried for the sense of movement, the tension of fish against water and water weight in wood, but it didn’t have that, it was a sketch like a convalescent’s walk. It was well composed, and minor; the things were recognizable. It was a start.

  “Can I see?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t. It isn’t very good. Do you mind? Professional arrogance; it’s only an esquisse, not meant for public consumption.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Reluctantly, we headed out of the park. And emerging blinking, bloated, cloyed with the romance of the Koko Dera, we crossed over to the Koryuji Temple, which houses the earliest art treasures of Japan. This—I adjusted to it jerkily—was an experience palpably cultural, palpably good for me. The great stone and wooden buddhas are so familiar from reproduction that it was hard to find them interesting, though with a certain effort I could see that they were genuinely serene. Montgolfier was a good guide here—he found his energy again—because he knew all the symbols, even of the Thousand-Armed Kwannon, who holds the mirror for beauty, scepter for power, balm for comfort, a sword for—oddly—cutting through to the heart of truth. And a dozen, though not a thousand, others I’ve forgotten. The demons were impressively savage and the twelfth-century beams were silver-gray as polished stone, and my feet began to hurt.

  “Do you know about the lotus symbol?”

  He’d stopped in front of a granite figure, serenity epitomized but missing half its nose, with one hand held forward in the sign Montgolfier had sent off after Catman, and in the other an open lotus, blade-sharp petals ascending from the palm. I was put in mind of France’s frog and the lily that murdered it.

  “Not really.”

  “Well, the lotus is rooted in the river mud, and the stem pushes up through water so that its head, the blossom, lives in air. And it sends its fragrance toward Nirvana, like the meditation of an aspiring mind.”

  “That’s the chain of being, isn’t it? Isn’t it the same as Christianity?”

  “How so?” He was leaning over the barrier to study the figure’s hand.

  “Earth, water, air and fire. The medieval Christians believed that the universe was a chain from the foot of God, with everything in its rank and place, from the lowest inorganic rock, through plants and animals to man, whose mind made him half an angel. It’s the same idea, isn’t it, except that the Middle Ages thought of it the other way around, everything descending link by link from the foot of God.”

  “Hey.” He turned and frowned at me. “You’re all right, aren’t you?”

  Everything changed.

  Everything changed, the jig was up; he held my eyes too long. I held his back. Jesus Christ, I thought, human beings are the dimmest, damnedest creatures. The goddam chain of being, out of, what was it, my sophomore year? Jesus Christ. Fidelity is a way of life, but there’s no decision in it. It just is: I’m going to bed with him.

  Everything having changed, he bounced restlessly past the rest of the imperial treasures.

  “That’s a piss-pernicious idea, though, everything in its rank and place.”

  “Don’t look at me. You’re the Christian.”

  “Shall we walk back?” Brusque.

  “What, all the way to the hotel?”

  “Can’t you take it?”

  “Can we get a cab if my feet give out?”

  He walked angrily, out of the temple and across the tracks and abruptly into a shabby factory district like the Utagawa surroundings in Osaka. I stumbled keeping up and considered taking off my shoes, but I thought any show of eccentricity would make him madder.

  “Hey, Montgolfier. Your legs are longer.”

  He stopped and mumbled. A clutch of dirty children played a version of jackstones in the gutter. “We could find some tea, do you want to?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He stood watching the children a minute, breathed and decided to smile.

  “Your girl is nine.”

  “That’s right.” I’d figured out that Montgolfier was twenty-nine. I was thirty-five.

  “She can hold up her end of a conversation, then.”

  “I don’t remember a time she couldn’t.”

  He decided to laugh. He spotted a café down the block and we started off. “Every once in a while it hits me, I’ll see my kid next Sunday. I won’t know him, even though I know I won’t know him. Can a four-year-old hold up his end of a conversation?”

  “What do you mean, Sunday? I thought you were going back tomorrow.”

  “I get to L.A. tomorrow, but I won’t see him till Sunday. You’d think such a thing as a visiting right could be jimmied around a little after six months’ absence, but they’re very strict in California, very backward and motherfucking by the book. Fatherfucking,” he amended.

  He shoved through the beaded doorway, mad enough again that when the beads flapped in my face, he turned and brushed them off with apology. “I don’t actually live with my wife,” he said. I had picked th
at up, actually. “We haven’t lived together for about two years. She’s a great girl, though.”

  This embarrassed him. He picked a booth and hunched in it. The place was full of flies and smelled of fat.

  “Then why are you separated?” I was mad too. I wasn’t going to give him anything. Not anything but my sweet and tender body, goddam you, drifter. It wasn’t me that changed it. I was sticking to the rules.

  “Oh, she wanted something out of life that I didn’t want.” He picked up the menu, but it was in characters. “Two teas,” he said to the waitress.

  “Ni re-mon ti-i,” I said. “Dozo. What did she want out of life that you didn’t want?”

  “Hmm, well, what did she want?” He rubbed at his face with both his palms. “Whadshe …?” he muttered, turning the menu over and back over. “What did she want out of life that I didn’t want? Would you believe a trash compactor?”

  “Probably, if I knew what it was.”

  “A trash compactor is a modern convenience. You put anything into it that you don’t want. Anything. Potato peels, paper bags, bottles, plastic, dead cockroaches, anything. And it grinds it up and mashes it down, and at the end of the week instead of twenty one-pound bags of garbage, you have one twenty-pound block of garbage. Would you believe that?”

  “I believe you.”

  “You may believe me.”

  We drank, nervously, the tea.

  I felt that—to put it in these terms; I might as well—we were no longer equals, and I owed him something. Two strangers, halfway round the world from whatever they’re rooted to, “disembodied” with their bodies inconveniently functioning, and at the end of the journey so that the roots are back in sight: under such circumstances certain vulnerabilities are the norm. I might have said that. Or I might have balanced things by saying that I had left my husband too. What I said was:

  “Look, I think we’ll have to have a taxi from here.”

  “If you like. Your feet hurt?”

  “Yes, they do, but it isn’t that. I’ve got to get to a travel agency before they close. I have to decide whether I’m going to exchange my ticket, and I haven’t given myself much time to do it.”

  “You thinking of staying on a while?”

  “No, it’s a question of my daughter’s education.” Stilted as it was, this had an authentic sound to me. I don’t know what it was about Montgolfier that made things simple. But looked at from a certain perspective, a certain height, rather than under my usual emotional microscope, my dilemma concerned, at base, the education of my daughter.

  “You see, a few years ago I made a wrong decision, and sent her to a boarding school that amounts to a, you know … finishing school. There seemed to be good reasons for it at the time, and I didn’t realize what a mistake it was until too late. I kept not realizing it. But I don’t want my daughter finished.”

  “No,” he agreed, “that’s not the sort of thing you’d go out looking for.”

  “So now, as I said, she’s in Los Angeles—La Jolla—with some friends, and I have to decide whether to go there, and keep her there, or go back to England and wait for her to join me. As you can see, it’s a pretty big decision, and I haven’t left much time. My ticket’s for day after tomorrow, and I haven’t got enough money to stay longer.”

  “Can’t you just go back to England and take her out of that school?”

  “Well, no, I’m afraid. I’ve been pretty well through that. It isn’t possible. Oliver does want her finished.”

  “Oh.”

  “Trash compactor,” I explained.

  He picked at the corner of the menu, trying to slip his fingernail between the layers of frying cardboard, but his fingernail was too short. He drank some more tea and turned the cup in its saucer by the handle, several complete revolutions before he looked up, not directly at me but at a fly buzzing round my face.

  “Marriage doesn’t work,” he sermonized—apologetically, I thought, as if assuming accountability for the errors of his trade. “And living together is just a cop-out, marriage minus; it isn’t the ceremony that doesn’t work, for God’s sake. Of the two ideas, marriage is a better one as an idea, though it’s probably worse to do because it’s harder to clean up after. It isn’t a bad idea, really, it’s a pretty decent human try at fixing the nature of something you want to hold onto, but that can’t be fixed. It’s a decent enough aspiration, wanting to make love last, it just doesn’t—oh, well, I mean, I have known cases where it did, I’ve known as many as six or seven in the whad-ya-callit course of my career, where two people being together part of most days for most of their lives was a way of building something instead of breaking it down and dragging it behind you. But you try making that a norm, or a goddam duty, it’s like trying to make everybody in the world into a computer programmer or a, a, what?—some old craft, flint-splitter. Don’t you think?”

  “I think you put things pretty well.”

  “Yes—well, you seem to make me want to talk.”

  After which we fell silent again, and took more sips in succession than made for reasonable tempo. Then abruptly—I was getting used to the abruptness—Montgolfier stood up, paid for the tea, hustled me out toward a major-looking street, where after a short search we found a taxi. I directed it to the Karasuma-Shijo, and said that my friend would go on to the Palace Side. We rode in silence until we pulled up in front of the plate-glass agency and Montgolfier leaned across me to open the door.

  “Look, there’s a festival at the Shiramine Jingu tonight, gagaku and geisha dancing, it’s probably like a Japanese version of a Fourth of July picnic. Would that interest you? Have you got plans?”

  “That sounds fine.”

  “We could have dinner at the Akuho first, that makes it short enough to walk.”

  “I’ll wear a different pair of shoes.”

  He closed the door behind me and rolled the window down. “Do what you want,” he said then. “The thing is, to do what you want to do.”

  “I know. The thing is, to know what it is you want.”

  “You know. If you look at it, you know.”

  But that was something Montgolfier couldn’t make so simple. I went in and pored over schedules, discussed fares and times with the crisply patient girl behind the counter, verified the possibility of exchange. Then I counted my traveler’s checks. I had forty pounds left, which meant that I was ten pounds into the reserve that I’d brought in case of emergency. I had spent it, in emergency, for joss sticks and incense cups in Takayama. There was a certain symmetry to the proposed transaction, because if I went back to England I had just enough to pay my hotel bill, spend one more night in Tokyo, and get comfortably home. Whereas if I changed the ticket for the shorter run to Los Angeles, I would have enough of a refund to keep me there for a week or two, considering that I could undoubtedly stay with the Jeromes till they went back to England. In a couple of weeks I was bound to find a job at something. It wouldn’t matter, as long as it kept us while I looked for real work. And I could find real work too, eventually. There’s no pretending I don’t know my professional worth.

  But I could not decide. I stood with my ticket under my left hand in front of me on the counter, the schedule under my right, looking where my fingers pointed as if they could guide me of themselves. All the usual measures of arbitrary choice went through my mind: coin-flipping, pointing with eyes closed, dropping the two papers to see which hit ground first. But instead of bringing me nearer choice, these panic measures brought the panic back to my diaphragm, and the dough lump began to form itself in the breath space under my lungs. I couldn’t have it back. I had got so used, in less than twenty-four hours, to functioning, that I couldn’t let it form again, and take hold of me again. It. It. I pressed my hands down on the counter, holding on. Then it came to me with the beautiful simplicity of cowardice that I didn’t have to decide right now, there was still tomorrow morning. I could still decide tomorrow, and take the afternoon train to Tokyo. Whichever plane I took would
be the day after, so that would be all right.

  “Thank you very much,” I said to the girl. “I think I’ll sleep on it.” And turned swiftly out into the street, where I stood in front of the shop window next door, breathing, dissolving the lump.

  It was a small boutique with a windowful of obis and kimonos, and the mannequin in the center was exquisitely dressed. She wore a kimono in a handwoven raw silk copy of one of the twelfth-century Minamoto diamond patterns I had sketched in Tokyo, in muted shades of beige, rose and gray, bound at the waist by a plain tucked obi in the beige. The mannequin held a card in her upturned hand, like a lotus blossom, announcing that the outfit had been reduced to seventeen thousand and five hundred yen. About twenty pounds. That was absurdly cheap for handwoven silk. I looked down at myself; I was wearing a pair of polyester slacks that I’d safety-pinned behind at the waist, and a shirt over that, belted with another of my scarves, I went into the shop and tried the kimono on, but scarcely looking at myself, afraid to see. I mainly felt it, the soft roughness of the raw silk against my shoulders, the comfortable hug of the wide midriff—nothing had fit me for what seemed a long time. I bought it. I tucked the box under my arm and clung to it and, in a sheepish gesture of economy, took the streetcar back to the Palace Side.

  The lobby was crowded at this, cocktail, hour, and the television set turned loud for the ubiquitous Sumo match, but no Montgolfier. He hadn’t said where we were to meet or when, but he was resourceful enough to call my room if he wanted to. I picked up my keys, and the clerk handed me another of the pink notes. From Tyler Peer, at four-fifteen, and the box by “Please call back” was ticked.