A Woman's Nails Page 12

  Once they've settled into their seats, the old soft-shoe routine begins.

  I didn't have much time last week to prepare for today's lesson on account that I got stinking drunk at Umie the night before and ended up oversleeping. Only by the grace of God did I manage to scramble out of bed and into the office—unshaven, half-dressed and reeking of whiskey—two minutes shy of getting sacked.

  Believe me, this is not the way I'd like things to be, but I couldn't help myself what with Reina away on business. There was little else but the drink to distract me from the depressing fact that, as my twenty-seventh birthday approaches, I am doing absolutely nothing with my life. After two months in Fukuoka, I am not an inch closer to where I want to be and as lonely as ever and I am depressed as hell about it.

  Having alarmingly little time to prepare my lesson, I blindly pulled Philip Roth's Professor of Desire off my bookshelf as I sprinted out the door of my apartment. It is, again, only by the grace of God that I didn't puke the contents of my entire digestive system from tonsils to sphincter on the way. After punching in—that is, after having Yumi punch me in because my hands were shaking too much—I ran off several copies of the book's final chapter, then passed them out at the end of the lesson.

  Hungover as I was, I could not be bothered with going into the finer points of the novel, so I summarized briefly how the protagonist, David, had come to his decision to marry Claire because, in his words, she was enough. After years of seeking more, more, and yet still more, he came to settle for someone who was enough. I then asked them to read through the passage at home and recall why they had themselves accepted their own husband's proposal. For an assignment I had pulled right out of my hairy arse, I must say, it wasn't bad at all.

  After an animated discussion about David's decision and what they think it means, it's the women's turn to tell me their own stories.

  “He was on his way to marry another woman, but she changed her mind at the last moment,” Hiroko begins with a laugh. A garrulous, cheerful woman in her mid fifties, Hiroko's a goofy materfamilias of sorts for this bunch. “He was a friend of the family's, my uncle's friend, and I'd known him since I was a child, so . . . Well, when he came back to our village, he asked me to marry him, instead.”

  “And?”

  “And, I said, yes,” she replies with a light-hearted cackle.

  I laugh, too, out of disbelief. I find it utterly incomprehensible at times how some people are able to get through life rather happily without putting any thought or effort into it. Is it all a matter of attitude? Am I asking too much out of life? Should I just be content with what I have, that is, with enough?

  Eriko speaks next. “I was taking sailing lessons and . . .”

  “Sailing lessons?”

  “Yes, and my husband was the instructor. One day out of the blue he said ‘I will marry you.’ I wasn't even interested in him and . . . and, hadn't even thought about marrying anyone, let alone him. But, but he asked, so . . . I talked to my parents about it, they agreed and the next thing I knew we were married.”

  I’m too flabbergasted to respond. I just blink and gesture for Fumiko to go next.

  “I met my husband by o-miai,” she says. “My mother knew his mother and arranged for us to meet and we decided to get married.”

  “You mean, several months down the road, right? After you had dated for a while, right?”

  “No, no. We decided that day.”

  “That day?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you're happily married?”

  She just giggles.

  2

  Mie showed up at my apartment in the evening. She was wearing a tight pair of denim hot pants and a red halter-top that threatened to burst open and release those wonderfully breasts of hers.

  She looked gorgeous.

  Kicking off her sandals at the genkan, she stepped into my kitchen, dropped a canvas bag on the floor, and pulling out a large bottle of saké said, “Let's drink!”

  Mie always brought in so much warmth and brightness with her and there wasn't anywhere else in the world I wanted to be but in that ugly kitchen of my miserable apartment in Kitakyûshû because that’s where she was.

  I popped my head out of the kitchen window and hollered for Ben to come over and help us with the bottle of saké. More than happy to oblige, he hopped over with one shoe on, the other in his hand, a bag of Calbee potato chips in his clinched teeth. The three of us sat on the old tatami mats of my living room taking turns pouring cups of saké for each other. The lighter the bottle became, the louder our laughter. It was one of the best nights of my life.

  Every night with Mie was.

  The next morning, Mie, Ben and I packed ourselves into her Ford Escort and departed for the hot spring resort of Beppu, several hours' drive to the east in Ôita Prefecture. After a full day of sightseeing, which included a tour of the "hells" of Beppu, and both Ben’s and my first experience in a Japanese hot spring, we checked into a ryokan, where we had dinner and saké served to us in our room.

  We must have still been drunk from the previous night because it didn't take long before the three of us were at it again. Ben tied the obi from the yukata around his head, and stuck chopsticks up his nose making us laugh as if it were the funniest thing in the world. And it was. It really was.

  Later in the evening, once we had literally drunk the hotel dry of nama saké, Mie and I took a bath together. She was drunk and sentimental, the way she often became after a binge like that.

  “Why you, Peador?” she asked, burying her face in my chest. “Why do I feel this way for you? I've never felt this way about any other foreigner before. Why you?” Then, she began to cry. I held her in my arms and kissed the tears as they fell down her cheek. It only made her cry more.

  I gently raised her chin so I could look into those tear-filled eyes of hers and spoke what had been warming my heart that whole day.

  “I love you, Mie-chan. It's been so long since I loved someone. I love you. I love you. I love you.”

  “Why do you love Mie-chan?”

  “Why? Why? Why do you ask why? Can't you see it in my smile whenever we're together? Can't you read it in my letters? Can't you feel it when I kiss you? Mie-chan, I've never loved anyone as much as I love you.”

  Two days later and back at my apartment in Kitakyûshû, Mie first suggested what had already been on my mind: that I move to Fukuoka the following spring and live with her.

  “I want to move now,” I replied hugging her. It was then that I decided: Mie-chan would be the one I would marry.

  10

  YUMI

  1

  “What do you think of me?” she asks.

  It’s a light question, but it’s been hanging over us the whole evening, as heavy and oppressive as the June humidity, as inevitable as the rain. And, here I am without an umbrella to keep me from getting soaked.

  It is amusing, in a sadistic way I suppose, to recall the rapid evolution of my co-worker's feelings towards me. Within a month of my employment, the house that Yumi's disgust had built would soon be engulfed in a desperately out-of-control conflagration of unrequited love.

  At the beginning, I was happily ignorant of both the powerful forces of nature at work and my influence upon them. Each morning, I would arrive at the office to find Yumi in comparatively high spirits, grinning from ear to ear with those dreadful Chicklet teeth of hers. The tide was high, the sea calm, the harbor bathed in the inviting light of another lovely dawn. But, as morning passed awkwardly and quietly, the tide would start to recede, and by the end of the day all the emotional garbage Yumi brought with her to work was exposed, like rusting bicycles in the black silt.

  But really, how could I have known the impact I had on Yumi's frail emotions when I was completely absorbed in the struggle to keep my own insanity in check after the debacle with Mie? I was no Mother Teresa. I didn’t have an infinite well of compassion from which to draw sympathy for my co-worker. No, Yumi, I had decided,
was going to have to deal with her own infatuation herself, and with the best of intentions, I hoped liked so many others who are cornered that the problem would just go away, were I to ignore it.

  My other co-worker, Reina, like me, had initially hoped that by turning a blind eye to Yumi's mood swings, everything would work out in the end. But Yumi, I would learn, wasn't the type to let her misery go unrecognized. She didn't merely dabble in the art of suffering; she was a ham and demanded an audience for her Passion Play.

  As Yumi suffered upon a cross to which she had nailed herself--no help from me, not even to steady the nails as she drove them in--rather than ask God to forgive those who did not know what they had done, Yumi chose instead to spread the suffering around. And so, driven mad with jealously, she imparted her wholly unsubstantiated, though correct, suspicions to our boss, Abazuré, that Reina and I were having an affair.

  In-company romances are nothing new in Japan; they happen all the time. Japanese television dramas wouldn’t get past two episodes if there wasn’t romantic intrigue between co-workers in the story. And, if you ask anyone where they think the best place to meet a prospective spouse is, they'll probably reply, “At work”. But, what might have only raised eyebrows or inspired some snickering in an ordinary office was cause for opprobrium because Reina was still, scandal of scandals, married. And, unlike in large companies where such dalliances ensured that female staff who met heartbreak or their future husband in the office would resign allowing a new cohort of nubile women to fill their shoes, I was the one who was dispensable. Indeed, unbeknownst to me as so precious little was at the time, Abazuré was always on the lookout for any grounds, however trivial, to sack the fulltime gaijin and replace him with another gaijin, once his contract was up. This was how the bitch operated.

  Once the cat was out of the bag, Abazuré wasted little time in setting the Inquisition into motion. Should I have expected any different? Once again, I was asked to follow Abazuré to the small room she used for her weekly interrogations. We sat at the second-hand dining table facing each other.

  There was a fascist vein in my boss and Freon flowed through it. She reminded me of a gregarious, yet sadistic POW camp kommodant, who'd befriend the prisoners one moment only to put a bullet in their head a moment later for the laugh she might find in it. Abazuré could be charming if it served her to be so. The business she ran was testament to this. But, she was also a sociopath, and an alarmingly unpredictable one at that. A volatile gas, the tiniest spark would set her off in a bat of the eye. She could go from fair skies to tempest, reasserting her authority over us with the delicacy of thundering jackboots.

  I was on pins and needles my first few months at the school, and if the woman hadn't been AWOL for days at a time, I seriously doubt my employment would have extended beyond June when my contract was up for review.

  Not one to mince words when she was furious, Abazuré had little use for the Japanese tendency to hem and haw, to crowd out the message with pleasantries: no sooner had my butt settled into the electric chair than the juice was flicked on.

  Rumors were circulating that Reina and I were having an affair, she began with her usual fevered irritation. I had gotten used to seeing her like this, all tensed up, her knuckles white and her hot breath hissing out of flared nostrils. She demanded to know the truth, leaving me with no choice but to give her anything but that. It would have been foolish to appeal to her sense of fairness and reason, because it had become obvious she had none. I looked at the woman I'd grown to despise, at the closely cropped, unnaturally black hair that never ever seemed to grow, at the deep lines etched into her furrowed brow and engraved like parentheses around the scowl. I looked into the steely eyes she had fixed upon me, at the contempt therein, and began to weave a bold tapestry of shameless lies. I had nothing to lose.

  It seemed to work. The sun shown again on Abazuré's fickle mood and I soared upon that flying tapestry of deceit through cloudless skies.

  I was in the doghouse with Reina, though. For all her usual cheerfulness and blithe indifference to the office politics, Reina was reduced to a smoldering cauldron of vitriol in her apartment later that evening when I told her what had happened.

  “I hate those bitches!” She stormed around the small living room, banging her clinched fists against her thighs and kicking up a cloud of dust and cat fur.

  “I hate them! I hate them! I hate them! I hate them! I hate them!”

  It surprised me how personally she took it. There was no consoling her; anything I said or tried to do just added fuel to her fire.

  “I'm going to quit!” she finally decided before breaking down and crying.

  It would take a full week before she'd show any signs of having calmed down. Even still, she was adamant in her refusal to talk to Yumi, except when necessity made it unavoidable. After several days of this, Yumi finally came to me and asked with grave concern if something was the matter with Reina.

  Oh, Yumi could be a nasty piece of work herself, all right! The audacity! The callousness! The ruthlessness! I could have wacked her, but then I had to be the rare voice of reason in the office, a remarkable position for someone who has a habit of spouting off unthinkingly.

  So, I met Yumi in secret after work.

  It was a warm evening in late May. The sun had already set, but the sky was filled with a beautiful soft pinkish-orange twilight that made everything seem more distinct and within reach. We walked the perimeter of the small lake in Ôhori Park talking about what Reina and I had been accused of. Yumi feigned innocence of the matter testing my patience again. I took a deep breath, and told her I knew it was she who had spread the rumor, stopping her in her tracks.

  “I'm . . . sorry, Peador,” she began. All the air had gone out of her; the words having nothing to carry them were all but inaudible. “I, I, just thought that . . .”

  With all the reserve I could muster to keep myself from strangling Yumi, I touched her shoulder gently and smiled. “It's okay. If anyone should apologize, it's me. I understand how you could have misinterpreted Reina and my friendship. At any rate it's behind us, and I want to keep it there because I want the three of us to be friends again.”

  I damn near vomited, saying this, but, it had the desired effect on Yumi and she promised to make it up to Reina the following day.

  The next day, Yumi bounced into work beaming those awful teeth of hers and greeted me with a rare cheerfulness. While I was out in the afternoon, she and Reina mended fences.

  My problems with Reina, however, were only just beginning. When Yumi apologized to Reina she also admitted that she had misunderstood me all along. It was a realization, which would only serve to fan the flames of her love for me anew.

  It sent Reina through the roof, and, as the two of us were closing the office down for the night Reina accused me of leading Yumi on.

  “What the fuck you talking about?”

  “Oh, nothing, nothing at all!” she said. “It’s just that, everything you say is like the word of God to stupid bitch! ‘Peador's wonderful! Peador's perfect! Peador said this and Peador said that . . .’ You like it, don't you? You're leading her on because you like it. Well, you can fuck her for all I care.”

  “Get outta here! I'm not interested in her at all. God, all I wanted was for a bit of normalcy to return to the office.”

  “Jus’, just . . . don't talk to me ever again!” she said, pushing me away.

  I watched her walk away towards the parking lot wondering if she'd come back, apologize and make it up to me on top of my futon, but she didn't. So, I walked back to my apartment alone where I tried to untangle the knot of emotions inside me with a large bottle of saké.

  2

  The following week, it was my turn to be ignored by Reina. If I spoke to her, she’d pretend not to hear. If I needed her assistance, she’d suddenly be caught up in frenetic activity. As for communication, the most I could expect from her was a nod, a shrug or a finger pointed in the general direction of what
I was looking for. And that was when she was feeling generous. The rest of the time, all I could do was sit at my desk and silently observe her from behind. The muscles between her shoulders and along her neck were still tense and screaming anger five days on.

  After a week, I couldn’t take it anymore and forced her to break the vow of silence by dogging her with invitations to dinner. Naturally, she refused at first, so I asked again politely. When she snubbed me, I asked again. And again and again and again. I pleaded when asking became useless. Begged when pleading didn't work either. I begged until she relented, relented with conditions: she chooses the restaurant; I pay. With payday still a few days off, my postal savings account was like a wishing well drained of its water, a handful of nickels, pennies and dimes lying in the slime.

  We walked to a nearby motsunabe restaurant after work. While a miso-based stew of pork haslets and God only knows what other piggy odds and ends wasn’t quite at the top of my list of things I wanted to eat, let alone flip the bill for, I was happy to have finally plied Reina’s rigid mouth open.

  After a few pitchers of beer the words, which she'd been so reluctant to part with, finally started to flow. And, the things I would hear!

  Reina was jealous. Jealous of Yumi's feeling for me, jealous of the time we had alone in the office each morning, jealous of how careful I was not to hurt Yumi’s feelings and so on. Jealousy is an ugly disease disfiguring everything in the most grotesque manner and it was my grave misfortune to have two co-workers stricken with it.

  It was so absurd, I was about to throw in the towel right then and there and quit. I wanted out, Out, OUT! But, having nowhere else I could go and no money to get me there anyway, all I could do was give Reina the same soft sell that I’d given Yumi earlier in the week.