A Woman's Nails (13 page)

I went for a five-kilometer run around Ôhori Park, then took a leisurely walk through the usually quiet and deserted castle ruins which I discovered were now alive with the pink and purple azalea blossoms. I doubled back, walking along the moat, its dark green still water dotted with plate-sized lily pads. The diversion didn't have much of an appetite; hardly an hour was gobbled up.

Back at my apartment, I began unpacking my things and putting my apartment in order. I removed Mie's articles. Her yellow toothbrush joined mine in a stainless cup by the sink, her pajamas took priority position in the top drawer of the wardrobe. I also went to some lengths to erase any sign of Reina having been in my apartment, picking up the occasional hair, putting the empty cans of
chu-hi
[4]
and beer in a bag for non-burnable garbage on the balcony. Last but by far not least, I tossed the package of
Whisper
sanitary napkins Reina had, for Lord knows what reason, left behind. In the remaining hours, I studied Japanese, looking up all the things I'd been wanting to say to Mie for the past six months, all the things I'd been wanting to ask her every day that passed since she closed the door on me.

Back at work in the afternoon, I went to the lobby and sat on a bench butted up against the tinted windows and looked out at the still life below. White compacts and delivery vans were stopped at a red light. An old woman hunched all the way over like a candy cane paused for an eternity before attempting to cross the four-lane avenue. Arthritic, knobby hands clutching for dear life onto the handle of a small stroller-like shopping cart. Without it, she probably would have toppled right over. She took a step, a small one, bringing her closer to the shopping cart, then pushed the cart an arm-length away and stepped slowly towards it again, making her way across the avenue like an ancient inchworm.

Every time the phone rang in the office, I got a case of the jitters, worried that Mie was calling to cancel, that something preventing us from meeting had come up. Will she be held up at work and be forced to postpone the date for
kondo
, for another time?

Japanese often chime “
let's do it
another time
,” but you soon realize this “other time” is just another way of saying “
nev
er in a million years, buster.”

It was the last words Mie had spoken to me when she left my a
partment seven months earlier. “
Kondo,
”
she said
and drove off never to return.

Anxiety filled my thoughts, crowding out any of the elation I should have been feeling about seeing Mie again. It was to be expected, after what I'd gone through. Six months on, I'm still shell-shocked from the bomb she dropped on me.

2

8:40 and still no sign of Mie.

The air is cooler than I expected and the longer I wait the more I wish I'd dressed for warmth rather than The Sell. My inability to exaggerate or embellish upon my own accomplishments, let alone mention them, is one reason, I suppose, that I am so fussy about how I dress. I don't dress for success so much as I dress to avoid the almost certain failure that my modesty invites. Clothes make the man, the lesser the man, the more he dep
ends on them to help him along.

What is it I wanted my linen suit to communicate to Mie? That I'm too broke to buy something warmer? Nah, that wasn't it. That, somehow, despite all the crap that happened last year, in spite of my former boss's attempts to bury me, that everything has managed to work out al
l
right in the end; that I'm not a complete failure; that I still have a fighting chance to get through this life with my dignity intact; that, more than anything, I deserve another chance with Mie. And so, in my effort to impress Mie, I now shiver in the chill of an early spring night.

A half block down the street a young man in a crisp white shirt and a black apron tied around his waist passes out discount tickets for a
karaoke
bar.

Across the street on the corner, two young women, who are dressed to kill, fuss over a middle-aged businessman. He scratches his balding scalp, vacillating between options: going home to a frigid wife, or blowing money he doesn't have drinking with the hostesses. He scratches his head again, and then nods. The women c
heer and lead him away by hand.

Several men and women, company freshmen judging by the uniformity of their simple black suits, huddle around a fallen co-worker, who's splayed out and unconscious on the sidewalk. They try to lift him, but he's g
one all rubbery from the drink.

And then there’s a darling girl in a ponytail and a tight fitting red and white outfit emblazoned with the
CABIN
logo across her chest. She stands in front of a cigarette vending machine attempting to dissuade customers from buying other brands. Hell, it works for me. I'd give up Hope
—my
Hope
cigarettes, that is—to
share a cabin with her any day. And I mean it. She looks my way and waves. I look around to see who's she's waving at but find no one. She waves again. I wave tentatively back and she smiles.

A customized van with tinted windows, spoilers and bright blue lights under its low-riding chassis rumbles by shaking my fillings loose. The angry music blasting from the van competes noisily with
Mister Donut
’s
cheerful playlist of Golden Oldies. As the van turns off of Oyafukô, a
b
ô
sôzoku
motorcycle gang rumbles into the narrow street, zigzagging recklessly and revving their engines until they caterwaul like tigers in heat. A patrol car follows lackadaisically behind, protecting and serving none.

Some minutes later, a clapped-out pick-up makes its way down the street. A miserable ditty crackles out f
rom a dirty speaker lamenting, “
Warabi mochi
. . .
Warabi mochi
.”

The first time I ever heard this mournful song, I was moved by curiosity to look up the meaning of its enigmatic lyrics in a dictionary only to be further confounded by what I found: bracken-starch dumplings. What the hell is bracken and why is the s
ong selling them so depressing?

I check my watch again. 8:45.

C'mon, Mie. Where the devil are you?

Fifteen minutes is nothing, though, considering I've already been waiting a half a year for her. Six long, lonely months. I never gave up hope. Doubt may have gnawed that hope to shreds, but I haven't given it up.

You'd think I'd know what I would want to say to Mie after having waited so long to see her again, but I don't. What will she say to me? And how will she act? What are the odds of my getting her back? Do I even want her back after all this time? Now that I am finally here, it occurs to me that I never considered that. It has been too far beyond my limited imagination since she left me to think of the break up as anything other than my having been robbed of a profound and rightly deserved happiness. If only my future self would journey back to this present moment and tell me to open my eyes and take in all the beautiful women passing by, and, with a gentle elbow to my ribs, convince me of the very thing that has been nagging at me since my move: that, maybe, just maybe, I am better off without Mie, and that, starting at this very moment I should take the first step towards moving on with my life by standing the bitch up. Should the future me indeed pay myself a visit, I seriously doubt if I would be very convincing. Aga
in, I'm not much of a salesman.

I step inside
Mister
Donut
to get out of the chill, and am greeted by a clo
yingly aromatic mélange of the “world's best coffee,”
month old frying oil, and cigarette smoke. Through the unhealthy miasma a small table in the furthest corner comes into view. It’s the very same table at which Mie and I waited out a sudden downpour on Father's Day last year. Tho
ugh the donut shop is hopping, “our table”
remains empty, a
s if it's been reserved for us.

I want to take my place at the table and relive that day, to hold Mie's hand as I did then and talk to her about moving to Portland with me. I long to hear the words she spoke to me that rainy afternoon, that there was nothing more in this world she wanted t
han to live with me in America.

Mie had left her boyfriend for me the night before and was now mine--my girlfriend, my lover. And, looking into her warm brown eyes I thought I knew who the mother of my children was destined to be. Mie was mine, and as the rain poured heavily outside I couldn't begin to imagine that I would ever feel as forlorn, confused, or as bitter as I have been all these months. It was inconceivable that the happiness I was feeling then would be so ephemeral or that four short months later the only thing that would sustain me through the autumn and winter would be the emaciated hope languishing within this miserable heart of mine, the hope that the red string tying us together and which had helped me find Mie was merely frayed, not broken.

3

“
O-Kyaku-sama. Anô
. . .
O-Kyaku-sama
,”
a young woman behind the
counter calls
out to
me.

“
Hai?
”

“
Gochûmon okimari deshôka?
”

Have I decided what
to order? I tell her I'm waiting for some
one and she makes a slight bow.

When I turn around and look towards the entrance I notice Mie standing on the sidewalk just outside the entrance of
Mister
Donut
. She hasn't seen me yet, so I wait a moment before exiting. She is as beautiful as I've remembered her, painfully so, and every little thing I adored about her rushes back to me, that
tsunami
of
memories washing over me again.

How on earth did I ever expect to move on, let alone fall in love with someone else, when that woman, that unforgettable woman standing there, was t
he one who had broken my heart?

I have to suppress the urge to run outside and hold onto her so tightly that she'll never be able to leave me again. Taking a deep breath, I take a step towards the automatic doors. As they open I softly call out her name,
“Mie-chan.”

S
he doesn't hear me. My heart is in my throat, pounding away madly, stifling any sound. I could almost cry.

“Mie-chan.”

She turns
towards me and says, “Oh-chan.”

It’s been months since anyone called me Oh-chan. Tears threaten to well up in my eyes. I take a step towards her, my hand extended. She takes it, the touch warm, familiar and comforting. It’s as if I had been holding it all this time.

“
Hisashiburi ne
,”
I say. It’s b
een a long time, hasn't it.

“
Ne
.”
She looks me as if to take an inventory
of this former lover of hers. “
Y
ou've lost weight, haven't you?”

It's not the
only thing I've lost, Mie-chan.

“
And, y
ou've gone and cut you're hair, too. It's so much nicer when it's
longer, Oh-chan. It's so . . . “

“Messy, I know.”

“
No, no. It was curly . . . Ad
orable. I really liked it long.”

I want to hold her and kiss her and tell her how much love her, how much I've missed her, how much . . . But before I have the chance, she turns to beckon a young woman over.

“
I've, um, invited a friend along. Yuki-chan. We work together. I guess I should have told you, but
, well, she wanted to meet you.”

“
Meet
me
?”

This Yuki-chan skips over to us, a bright smile on her pretty face.

“
Hajimemashite
,”
I sa
y to her with a slight bow.

“Wow!”
she says. “You’re Japanese is really good.”

After int
roducing us quickly, Mie says, “
Ikimashôka
,”
so we take off down the street past the cute
CABIN
cigarette campaign girl, the
warabi mochi
vendor who's now standing behind his pick-up serving a customer, and an Israeli selling cheap jewelry and other tchotchke on the sidewalk. The Israeli nods at me, and Mie's co-worker asks if he's my friend. I reply that I've never seen him before in my life, which the girl finds enormously funny. It keeps her tittering for a while just as it had done to Mie a year ago.

Mie leads us through a cracked tinted glass door into a well-known bar on the first floor of a run-down
karaoke
building called the
Big Apple
where the cheap beer and even cheaper women attract South American men and boys up from the Navy base in
Sasebo like flies to warm shit.