Yoshie was worried about drawing our neighbors’ attention. He felt hyperconscious of his appearance, the way he dressed, his accent, the food he bought. He was afraid he’d have to start all over again with his efforts to assimilate, that he was back at square one.
Sure, for a couple of months people gave us funny looks. I was a white woman who thought she was liberated, among other middle-class beliefs. And Yoshie was a double intruder. Not only a guy from some distant land, but also a yuppie carrying a briefcase. Gradually, they got used to seeing him around and stopped looking askance at him. They began to chat with him in stores. Greeted him in the street. Exchanged banter with him. And before long, he was on a first-name basis with every shopkeeper on the block.
Whenever we went out, he’d end up introducing me to someone. He’d adopt AAVE to put people at ease. Yoshie became an even bigger fan of the neighborhood than I was. He acted like moving there had been his idea.
He was crazy about Harlem’s music. Not just what was playing in the clubs we went to on weekends, many of which no longer exist. He maintained that the neighborhood had its own subterranean rhythm, a special beat beneath its streets. As a matter of fact, we were out walking when he came up with that famous TV commercial for Me. You know, the one with the multicolored balls bouncing up Fifth Avenue until they reach Harlem. There, they change into scoops of ice cream in all different flavors, sampled by laughing children. Then the camera pans out to show families of different races and classes having dinner, and watching the commercial on a Me TV set.
Critics praised the ad for its inclusive message and its interracial imagery, for using the metaphor of technology as an egalitarian utopia, or whatever. I was bemused. Those were my values, not his. If I remember correctly, sales of Me televisions in the States doubled that year. Yoshie used to tell me that advertising is a self-fulfilling prophecy. For a product to sell, you have to say that it’s selling.
* * *
Once we’d resolved the issue of the apartment, we organized ourselves with relative ease. I guess like any couple built on mutual respect, we argued only about trivial stuff.
I can recall a serious disagreement over how to decorate the apartment. I like things in pairs or sets. Yoshie visualized everything in singles. Odd numbers didn’t bother him. He loved subtlety, I preferred clarity. He liked things to be movable, multipurpose. I was partial to stationary objects. I don’t want to know what that all said about us.
One of his foibles was to drag that dreadful old black-and-white rug with him everywhere. He insisted on spreading it out in the center of the living room. I gave in. I had won the battle of the neighborhood, so I let him have his way about stuff like that.
His obsession with banjos had turned him into an otaku, a word he taught me himself. His instruments started to invade every wall in the apartment. I half-jokingly accused him of trying to conquer my territory with my own country’s weapon. He had a substantial collection, which I imagine was valuable. He declared proudly that he’d stolen the French ones from a music store in Paris, when he was a penniless youth. I envied him those adventures. Who wouldn’t want to live in Paris? The French, my love, the French, he’d reply. We often said we’d go there together. We never did.
I think it was around that time that we discovered the banjo player Charlie Tagawa, who became one of Yoshie’s idols. They were both Japanese immigrants and had studied economics. Zenzo, his first name is Zenzo! he objected to the guy’s stage name. What wrong with that? He said that if he ever went on a business trip to California, he’d try to meet him in person and ask him.
Despite learning to enjoy each other’s music, the only group we truly felt the same about was the Beatles. Well, not entirely. We both agreed that Abbey Road was superior to Sgt. Pepper. But John was my favorite. I particularly admired him in his later years, when he was politicized and a feminist and had the guts to break with the entertainment industry. Who refused to become a slave to his teenage persona. Who, rather than settle for a young groupie, had married an older artist who wasn’t exactly a beauty. Who had shown us that we’re not the same at twenty as we are at thirty. And the cherry on top was that he was living in my city.
Yoshie preferred George, because he was the foreigner in the group. The one who reminded the other three that the East existed as well. In any case, he thought that taking a rock star as your role model was stupid. He argued that messianism was adolescent, too, which is why he defended Paul. That all he demanded from a musician was good music. That Lennon’s violins were cheesier than McCartney’s, and that of the two solo albums that had just come out, Band on the Run was far superior to Mind Games. As for Ringo, well, we both loved the guy.
Living together improved not only Yoshie’s English, which he spoke with obsessive precision, but also the idea we had of each other. We lost some of that blind trust that unites strangers and we gained a sort of reciprocity. Everything between us became verbal, more argumentative, less intuitive. We were able to communicate more easily than ever, with a new expansiveness, in the same way that we were able to disagree with greater understanding and openness.
After we moved in together, he began to express viewpoints and objections, and he even complained in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Maybe it was just the normal frictions of sharing the same space. And yet I sensed that the reason was mostly linguistic. He had moved in with me, and also with my language. It was no longer a mere work tool, he now knew how to sleep, yawn, and brush his teeth in English.
He now understood puns and was keen to invent some of his own. You could say that he fell in love with my language all over again. This made up for the vague affront I felt at him being able to manage without me. I still have the blackboard he gave me. I placed the easel next to my desk and we would write messages to each other. More than about practical matters, they were a kind of intimate code or collaborative thinking. One of us would scrawl a random sentence. The other would rewrite it the next time they walked past. And it would gradually evolve, until it became the summary of something we couldn’t quite figure out.
When we decided to move in together, we knew that both of us would frequently have to go away, in my case to cover events in other cities, or to interview people or research an article. And in Yoshie’s, to visit other Me branches or to attend creative training sessions or meet with investors, shareholders, or whatever they were (I’ve never been able to distinguish all that well between people who earn a lot more money than me). At first I was worried that these trips might make living together a problem, but they ended up bringing more relief than conflict.
Those brief interludes were like a sort of ventilation system. They kept us fresh, ready to rediscover the joy of meeting up again. They were a reminder of how lucky we were to be sharing our time and space. And that there’s no closeness without distance. On the other hand, we were constantly being forced to re-adapt. The person coming home doesn’t usually have the same expectations as the one doing the welcoming. This impeded the flow that comes only with daily interaction. At times, our relationship behaved like a skittish animal, retreating with each period of absence.
If ever being together wasn’t enough, a little pot never hurt. Smoking in silence brought us closer again, filled us with ideas and questions that drifted about in the smoke. In those days I was more likely to take uppers, which in my profession were as common as typewriters. They gave you the necessary reflexes to make you feel quicker than the news itself. Of course, the illusion lasted only a couple of hours, but by then you already had yourself half an article. Occasionally, Yoshie would take hallucinogens, the ideal counterweight to his world of figures, sales accounts, and other deceptively tangible realities.
I have to confess that our conflicting schedules made me slightly anxious at night. To me his sleepiness was somehow a form of abandonment. I felt he was deserting me when I was at my peak, elated after finishing an article. At the end of my working day, the night was still young. For Yoshie, on the other
hand, night was the end of everything. During weekends and vacations our conjugal jet lag was less pronounced. But not by much, because Yoshie’s body was a punctual mechanism. He was wedded to his schedule. That’s what I thought. In fact, neither of us was willing to break with our own routines. Maybe that’s why we didn’t hurt each other too much.
Once, after he returned from a trip, I noticed Yoshie behaving particularly strangely. He wasn’t distracted in his usual way, fretting over some problem at work. Instead he seemed to have come back with different facial expressions, a different voice, different gestures. Like an actor who overplays naturalness, some stereotypical idea of it. After eating our dinner in silence, I opened a second bottle of wine and asked him what was the matter. Then, almost immediately, he told me he’d had a fling.
As I filled both our glasses, what I most wanted to know was whether it had meant anything to him, whether he had special feelings for this person. He assured me he didn’t. It was simply a release, the culmination of several difficult weeks of bad reports and failed business deals. While I finished my wine, I asked him if this might continue, if we were talking about a more serious liaison. He swore that it wasn’t like that at all, that he scarcely knew the woman and had slept with her only once, or only during that trip (he stupidly specified, as if the exact number of intercourses was of any great interest to me).
I rose very slowly from the table. Then hurled my glass onto the floor. Kicked my chair. And asked him why in hell he had told me. If you’re going to do these things, I screamed at him, you’ve got to be more grown-up about it. You own up to them only when they’re serious, and when they aren’t, you keep them to yourself without dragging the other person down. It’s a different kind of generosity, I said.
I meant what I said. Particularly since I’d had the odd fling myself, and had never allowed it to affect our love for each other.
Then I asked him to clear the table and sweep the floor. And I went to take a shower.
* * *
Yoshie seemed reluctant to go on marches. When I first met him, he’d smile skeptically whenever I told him I was attending one. Not that he was against the causes we were supporting. He just disagreed that taking to the streets and stopping traffic was in any way useful. Or perhaps he simply mistrusted any initiative by an angry crowd. I’d like to believe that Harlem and I helped to change his mind a bit.
Along with some colleagues from the paper, I would often go to civil rights rallies. It wasn’t only about defending the dignity of African American citizens. Actually (did we realize this at the time?), it was about the dignity of the entire nation. By disrespecting black people we were disrespecting ourselves and misunderstanding our own country.
I had similar thoughts, and still do, about the feminist struggle. I’m not talking simply about achieving complete equality for women, but about ceasing to maim ourselves as a society. About damn well realizing, once and for all, that them is part of us.
How could I forget the graceful anger of James Baldwin? A guy who was capable of writing with equal perceptiveness about blacks and whites. Women and men. Gays, straights, bisexuals. There aren’t many like him. He came on the scene at a time when an African American author talking about gay whites was still somehow shocking (and when no straight white person had the slightest interest in finding out if gay black people even existed). We hadn’t forgotten the banners in Arkansas: RACE MIXING IS COMMUNISM. How easy it is to feel ashamed of them now. I wonder if we’re able to recognize their present-day equivalents.
The other major issue, of course, was Vietnam. The peaceful Dr. King, swayed by all those young people of the Black Power movement with whom he never really saw eye to eye, became increasingly passionate, until he came out against the war and was shot to death. The same way they stopped Ali from being able to box, because he was a tough guy who refused to fire a gun. I think that’s when a lot of white women started to broaden our focus: when we got the relationship between racism, militarism, and patriarchy.
I’d have given my right arm to interview Angela Davis. Before they threw her in jail, Governor Reagan (yes, that Reagan) had ordered them to expel her from the university. A black female activist, she was doubly discriminated against. Triply, if you counted her lesbianism. I’m afraid that included her own comrades.
The most exciting thing about Watergate was that it democratized the political debate. Virtually everybody, regardless of color, creed, or class, seemed to have an opinion. The coverage was so extensive that there was no longer an elite of experts, only millions of viewers. I think that the problem with Vietnam (as with most of our wars) was the opposite one. We had a minority determined to know what was going on, most of whom were activists. The rest of the population knew relatively little and preferred not to know too much.
Until they saw the press photograph of the little girl and the napalm, as far as a lot of people were concerned, kids in Vietnam didn’t die. All that violence was happening light years away from our bedrooms. But that scream, running straight at us, was the embodiment of our nightmares. The girl’s back was in flames, but we can’t see it in the photo. We can’t see the past. Only an excruciating present that demands explanations. This ellipsis in the photograph, which leaps from eye to memory, was pure journalism. Some people weren’t sure if it should be published, not because of the violence but because of the girl’s nudity. Where civilian massacres are concerned, we mustn’t descend into obscenity, you know.
In the end, the girl survived. Her name is Kim, and now she’s a Canadian citizen. Closer and closer to us.
Yoshie loved TV sets, but he hardly ever watched television. He believed less in the contents than in the box encasing them. I wonder whether something similar wasn’t true of Nixon, who seemed much less interested in telling his people the truth than in being seen by them. He forgot that the appetite for narrative is never sated, that we spectators need plot development and a satisfying ending.
Even Yoshie was unable to resist a political thriller in real time. While we were watching the live hearings (needless to say, on a brand-new Me color set), he told me that he thought the United States was trying to wipe away the blood of Vietnam with the Watergate papers. The napalm, the Agent Orange, and the cluster bombs, all with a bunch of illegal tapes. His remarks struck me as unusual.
I realized that very week, one of Nixon’s lawyers referred to Senator Inouye as “that little Jap.” Besides being on the Watergate commission, Senator Inouye was the most prominent U.S. politician of Japanese origin and a war hero who had lost an arm fighting the Nazis.
The lawyer finally apologized and, in a further show of diplomacy, added that he wouldn’t have been offended if someone had called him “a little American.” For some reason, he appeared to believe that the senator was less American than he was. I can picture Mr. Inouye’s right arm, abandoned on some battlefield, slowly giving him the finger.
* * *
Before I was with Yoshie, I admit to having signed a petition against paying taxes in protest against the war (along with several friends who now make six figures). I’m afraid that our agenda didn’t include what might happen in Saigon after the troops left.
We Beat fans were on the lookout for a copy, stolen if necessary, of the anti-war poems anthologized by Diane di Prima’s publishing house. That woman gave the impression that she was leading several lives, all of them exhausting. Also Lenore Kandel’s banned booklet that a court in San Francisco had declared blasphemous and obscene. Naturally, this boosted sales once it came back into circulation. How can one forget that Buddha on the cover copulating with an enviably supple female? As a thank-you for the success it had gained due to the ban, the author donated some of the proceeds to the police. Whenever we bumped into an officer, my girlfriends and I would recite a poem for him. We felt like a cross between Gandhi and Patti Smith.
The universities were in turmoil, or maybe it’s just that the students had come to their senses all at once. There was even a student
uprising at the university where Ralph lectured (although his politics majors boasted that they were apolitical). I don’t recall exactly what happened. I know that they rebelled against the authorities and took over the dean’s office to demand changes to the system. Actually, the boys occupied the deanery for male students, and the girls the deanery for female students. I guess every revolution has its red lines.
Yoshie used to tell me that I couldn’t start the day without my dose of anger. And he added, jokingly or not, that our sex life depended on it. That I felt hornier after ranting about politics.
He was more moderate in his personal, and of course his economic, politics. He thought that all strident declarations inevitably strayed into the ridiculous. I learned to wait a little before expressing my opinions. And he, to the extent that his temperament allowed, became slightly more radical.
I seem to remember persuading him to accompany me on one or two anti-war demonstrations, as well as a few antinuclear protests. Yoshie said that every place he had lived had either been subjected to, perpetrated, or feared such an explosion. That it was all a matter of concentric circles.
One day I asked him if we could do an interview for the paper. He told me he’d rather swim back to his native village.
A while before, groups of women in different cities had gone out demonstrating. They were mothers of families, with no clear political allegiance, who called themselves Women Strike for Peace. Those are the first female protests I can remember. They’d discovered that breast milk had been contaminated by radiation in Nevada. I wonder how many women in Nevada thought about the women of Nagasaki. Maybe a lot, maybe just a few. Dozens of nuclear tests were carried out aboveground in that state. Troops were stationed there, a few miles from the explosion. They say you could see the atomic clouds from Las Vegas.
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