A Woman's Nails (11 page)

“Tell him . . . I love him.”

I write the simple words down on the only piece of paper available, a mauve napkin with a picnic basket and squirrels in one corner, write her words verbatim with ellipsis indicating the pauses each time she’s too overcome by emotion to continue. When I look at what she has had me write, I realize they are the v
ery same words Mie spoke to me.

Mie and I spent a quiet weekend together at her apartment in Fukuoka, rarely leaving her bed. We made love, rested, made love again, and then after taking a shower together, fell into each other’s arms and did it one m
ore time before falling asleep.

W
hen I had returned to Kitakyûshû
, I took a long walk by myself along the bank of the slow-moving Onga River, listening to a cassette Mie had made for me with some of her favorite songs. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and felt vulnerable and weak because of it. I was lost in that painfully comfortable limbo, having fallen in love but distressed that the sentiment might not be mutual. That evening I walked up the hill to the cluster of mom-and-pop shops where the only public telephone in the neighborhood was to be found. The booth was alive with mosquitoes, moths, gnats and ticks, every kind of bug imaginable. Braving the insects, I dialed her number. That’s how badly I wanted to hear her voice, wanted to hear her say, “I love you . . . I miss you . . . I want to see you.”

“I miss you, too, Mie.” I told her, with my throat taunt. “I want to see you, too.”

“I’ll tell him,” I promise.

“Peador?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I talk to you?”

“Of course.”

Machiko speaks for an hour, describing how she first met Chris. She had been walking along a street in town a month ago when she noticed him. Just like that, she went right up to him and asked if he were American. He said, yes, and the two of them started talking. They ended up spending the afternoon together chatting in a coffee shop.

“I was so sad and lonely before I met Chris,” she says sniffing. “But, he’s made me so happy.”

I start to cry. Mie had made me happy, too, at a time when I was desperately homesick and missing all of my friends back in Portland. I tell Machiko a little about Mie, only a little because to tell her the extent of what has been weighing on my heart all these months would be unbearable.

“Do you still love her?”

“Yes,” I answer, tears flowing down my face, my nose running.

“Then call her.”

“She’ll just hang up on me.”

“Try,” she encourages. “Give her one more chance.”

6

I stare at the phone for more than half an hour, befor
e finally dialing Mie's number.

How many times did I try to call Mie? How many times did I linger by the phone, wanting to make this very call, but was held back by fear, the fear that the relationship was dead, the fear that Mie was gone and would never come back no matter what I did or said? How many times? I should have moved on and found someone else, anyone, if only to fuck away the memories, if only to mend my heart by breaking others’.

Machiko is right, I have nothing to lose by calling, so I dial Mie’s number.

“
Moshi-moshi
?”

Mie's familiar deep voice breaks the silence that has enveloped me since Machiko hung up.

“Hi.”

“Who is it?”
she asks.

“It's me . . .”

“Peador?”

“Yes,”
I say painfully
, my throat was dry and tight. “Yes, it's me, Peador.”

Mie sounds genuinely happy to hear from me, which catches me off guard.

We exchange bland pleasantries like two old middle-aged women. She mentions the warm weather we've been having asks if I had a chance to drink under the
sakura
blossoms. I tell her I did, that I'm now working near West Park, one of the best places to see the cherry blossoms.

“I'm glad to hear that,” she says. “Do you like the your new job?”

“It's not bad,” I tell her. “
A million times better than working for tha
t idiot last year in Kitakyûshû
but then just about anything would be better than anothe
r year with him.”

She speaks of her own hatred for the tiring and boring routine at the
pachinko
parlor, then brightens up when she tel
ls me that she got a new puppy.

“He
likes to drink beer,” she adds.

Six months may have passed since we last spoke, but she is still the Mie I fell in love with and have
been missing all these months.

Mie asks how I look, whether I've grown my hair out or have kept it short, and so on. Finally, she asks me if I have a girlfriend.

I tell her I don’t.

“No?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“
R
eally.”

“I don't believe you.”

I have no idea why everyone is finding this so hard to accept. Am I missing something here? Am I better looking, more charmi
ng than I believe myself to be?

“
I don't have a girlfriend,” I say. “Haven't had one
since you . . .
”

“I'm sorry.”

The tears begin to fall, betraying me again. Women will tell you that they want their men to express their emotions, but nothing turns a woman off faster than a man blubbering pathetically into the receiver of the phone and that's exactly what I begin to do. And I’ve never h
ated myself more than I do now.

“
I'm so lonely, Mie . . . I mi
ss you . . . I want to see you.”

6

REINA

1

“
You
should have called me earlier,” Mie says brightly. “We could have met.”

I did, but you kept hanging up on me, remember?

“I wanted to . . .”

“
Say, what are you doing Monday? If you're fre
e, how about getting together?”

The invitation is made so casually that I can hardly believe my ears. Six months earlier Mie was talking to me through the slit of a chained door and now she acts as if a reset button has been pressed. It's the spring of 1992 all over again.

Can we go back to zero? Can we meet as if for the first time like we did one year ago? Can we get drunk in your bedroom and fall into each other's arms again? Can we wake up the next morning, half undr
essed and a little embarrassed—but
happy, to
o—about
what had happened?

“
Monday?” I said. “
This
Mo
nday?”

“
Yes,
this
Monday. Are you free?”

My nose is running and my eyes are filled with tears, and yet I’m smiling. It feels like ages sinc
e I last managed a genuine one.

“
Yeah, Mie, I
'll be free after eight-thirty.”

“
Alright
y
then. Let's meet in front of the Oyafukô Dôri
Mister Donut
. Okay? You
know where that is, don't you?”

Of course I know where it is. We went there on Father's Day last year, the day after you left Tetsu
. . .

I let the receiver fall from my hand onto my lap as soon as she hangs up. I don't know what to make of what has just happened or what Mie’s intentions are. She made no mention of Tetsu.

Have the two of them broken up? Has she been waiting all these months for me to contact her?

I go to my room and lie on my
futon
where I am overcome by a rare peace of mind, and, for the first time in months, I sleep like the dead.

2

All day Sunday, my co-worker Reina helps me move out of the condo into the new apartment closer to work, an effort taking most of the day because of the size of
her car necessitates two trips.

Reina drives a Mitsubishi
Pajero Mini
. When I ask her if she knows what
p
ajero
means, she says she doesn't, that she loves the car so much she wouldn't care if it meant
dust box
. She means
trashcan
, but after schlepping the last of my belongings from the eighth floor condominium I don't really feel like correcting her English.

“
I'm only going to tell you because you said it wouldn't affect the way you feel about your wonderful little car here, but
p
ajero
means
masturbate
in Spanish.”

“
N
o!”

“Yes!”

“How embarrassing.”

“
I'm sorry to be the one to have told you,” I say, laughing. “Why, of all the things on this bountiful earth of ours, why would they ever name a car
that
?”

“
Ma
ybe they liked the sound of it.”

3

My new apartment is on the fourth and top floor of a medium-sized concrete-and-tile building. It's representative of the crap that was thrown up during the bubble economy. The real estate boom of the 1980’s had every knucklehead with a bit of cash burning a hole in his pocket build on any old plot of land he could get his hands on with the expectation that prices would keep going up and up and up.

The apartment building was apparently built on land that used to be the landlord's mother's garden. Her dilapidated wooden house remains, uninhabited and leaning, as if from fatigue, against the apartment building. Thanks to the condominiums towering fifteen-stories high to the southeast, south and west, most the sunlight is blocked. The whole house languishes in a damp and perpetual shade with the exception of one northern wall that gets a flash of sun in the afternoon. The wall is covered with a thick coat of ivy that has invaded the slats of wood and worked its way to the clay beneath it. The tiled roof, black with slime, is slowly disintegrating, the shattered remains of tiles and mortar litter the ground below the eves in a narrow mossy ditch, like dandruff o
n an old man's boney shoulders.

Near the house and sharing the same sliver of noonday sun is a small
Shin
tô
shrine. A stray black and white cat with bobbed tail passes through the miniature red
torii
gate and crawls into a space under the shrine, disappearing into the darkness underneath.

The apartment itself is unremarkable. Shaped like an
L
, with a kitchen nook and an adjacent utility room/bathroom just off the long and narrow living room area, but is redeemed by an exceptionally large balcony that overlooks an oasis of green: the vast garden belonging to one of the few houses remaining in the neighborhood.

My new apartment, though not as comfortable as the condominium I've just given up, comes with enough amenities--a washer and dryer, a small fridge, an air conditioner and even a toilet equipped with a heated seat and bidet--that I don't feel as if I'm sliding back into the same kind of impoverished squalor I had to endure the y
ear I lived in Kitakyûshû
City.

Even Reina thinks I was lucky to get it. She would say so: it was her, after all, who found the apartment for me.

4

Reina and I end up spending the whole day together; precisely what I hoped would happen when she first offered to help me move. At a time when loneliness has been suffocating, the half hour I spend alone with her at the end of each wor
kday has been like pure oxygen.

My desire to be with Mie aside, I might even have asked Reina out if it weren't for the fact that I was standing at the very end of a discouragingly long queue, hands dug deep into my pockets and looking stupid just like all the other me
n who were infatuated with her.

Reina locks up her Mitsubishi
Jerk-off
as I carry the last of my things up the four flights of stairs. She checks my mailbox and then follows behind me. Once in the apartment,
she hands me a pile of flyers.

I sit down on the hardwood floor, back against one of the sliding glass doors that open on to the balcony. She takes the place next to me, sitting close enough that our sweaty arms and legs touch.

There's a menu from a pizza delivery company called, God
only knows why, Pizza Pockets.