A Woman's Nails (14 page)

We sit under a canopy of black lights and neon beer signs on precariously high stools around a narrow table that wobbles. Yuki is wide-eyed and bubbling over with childish excitement. She says she's never been to a
gaijin
bar and asks if I come here a lot. This is precisely what I'd like to ask of Mie because the thought of her hanging out at grotty
gaijin
bars like this all these months since she dumped me is disturbing.

“
N
o, I've never been here before,”
I reply. While it is a relief to learn that Mie, too, is a virgin of sorts, the unsettlingly vivid image of her hanging out here and flirting with men, particularly other foreign men, is now seared into my mind. I've never been the jealous type; this is a new emotion for me.

“It's just like America,”
Yuki says earnestly, compelling me
to ask her whether she's been. “
Me? No, never.
I haven't even been to Tôkyô.”

“Yuki wants to go to America,” Mie informs me. “
I told
her she should go to Portland.”

“I wanna g
o, wanna go, wanna go!”
Yuki cries. The girl wants to go so badly she can barely contain herself.

Mie asks if I've been home since . . . since, well, you-know-when . . . since we last met.

“To Portland? Nah, not yet.”

“
N
o? I'm surprised to hear that.”

Me, too. Time
flies when you're having fun. “
It's been ov
er a year now. Thirteen months.”

“
Eh? Thirte
en months? Aren't you homesick?”
Yuki asks.

“
Sometimes
, yes . . . But, not right now.”

“
Ne
, have you got a girlfriend,” Yuki says.

The question was bound to come up sooner or later, but now that it has I don't know how to reply with Mie sitting next to me. When I hesi
tate to answer, Mie tells her, “
Oh-chan says he doesn't have a girlf
riend, but I don't believe him.”

“
No way!” Yuki says.

Whatever
.

Yuki, I'm now told, doesn't have a boyfriend, either, obliging me to register similar disbelief at the revelation. “Unbelievable! Yuki, you're much too cute to not have a boyfriend
.
”

I do try to be polite.

Yuki then says something that surprises me: there aren't enough men in Fukuoka. And as if to refute any doubt she supports this
dubious claim with statistics: “
You know there is only one man for every eight women in this city? Maybe I
should move to Tôkyô.”

Hearing this from someone as adorable as this Yuki here ought to be like music to my ears, but to be honest, all I really care to listen to is that sweet old melody sung once more from Mie's soft lips that dear old Tetsu is no longer a leading character in her life pageant. Unfortunately, Mie seems to have lost her voice.

I take my box of
Hope
cigarettes and Mie's
Zippo
lighter out of my pocket, remove a cigarette and light up.

“
Ah, I
was wondering where that went,”
Mie says of the lighter.

“You left it behind,”
I say handing it to her.

“
Is it really okay?”

“
Of course, it
is
yours, after all.”

“
Yeah, I guess it is, isn't it. Thanks
.
”

“Don't mention it.”

Mie removes a pack of
Mild Sevens
from her handbag, lights up, and before the two of us can become pensive, Yuki bails us out of the sinking mood by suggesting we order something to drink. Mie says she'll get it and stands
up leaving me alone with Yuki.

The girl is still somewhat
gaijin
struck, giggling like a teenager whenever I look at her. I don't know why it is, but some Japanese just can't help themselves when they meet foreigners. Given half a chance, they'll rattle off an arbitrarily arranged list of silly questions, which form a hurdle you're obliged to clear before something resembling a true conversation can take place. And so while Mie is away fetching the drinks, Yuki asks whether I like
sushi
or those god-awful fermented soybeans called
nattô
that smell like old gym socks. She wants know whether I can use
o-hashi
(chopsticks) or read the
hiragana
script, and so on until Mie rescues me with a
Corona
.

Mie shows Yuki what to do with the wedge of lime, then we clink the
necks of the bottles together. “
Kampai!
”

“
Natsukashii ne
,”
Mie says, alluding nostalgically to the times we drank i
t at her apartment last summer.

“Ne,”
I say. Just looking at the slim clear bottle stirs up so many fond memories. The weekends spent with Mie in Fukuoka, the drives to the beach, the evenings drinking in her apartment, the wild drunken sex all night and the mornings nursing our hangover with
Pocari Sweat
only to do it all over again until Tuesday mornings when it was back
to work in god
forsaken Kitakyûshû
. “
Natsukashii ne.
”

Yuki asks me why I came to Japan, another standard question people here are always itching to put to me. The Japanese seem to like simple, predictable and preferably concise answers when engaging someone in small talk, communicating abstract ideas or revealing things too personal doesn't quite go down well, so I brush t
he question courteously aside, “It's a long story.”

“I'd like to hear it,”
Yuki says. “Tell me, tell me, tell me!”

“Me, too,”
says Mie.

It occurs to me only now that Mie never knew why I came to or what I wanted to do once here in Japan. Oh, I'm sure I must have tried to explain, but a year ago my Japanese was an embarrassment. To her, I must have appeared little more than a shiftless, albeit romantic, wanderer. How different I must have been from her Tetsu who had become a policeman, because, well, his father and grandfather and, who knows, maybe even his great grandfather had also been policemen. If Tetsu’s father had jumped off a bridge, I wonder if he would have taken a swan dive off it, as well? When I had asked Mie, somewhat rudely I later regretted, why on earth she had ever been interested in marrying a cop, she replied matter-of-factly: for stability. Mie often did that to me, offered an answer that would just stop me in my tracks. What about love and romance, inspiration, or even fate, I protested. In this economy, she explained, those are luxuries a woman can't afford, she replied. Once, when I learned that Mie's mother had had her learn the piano and cello as I child, I asked her if she would do the same with her own children. Of course, she would. For
shitsuke,
she added, and started thumbing through a tattered Japanese-English
dictionary.

“
For aesthetic pleasure,
”
I wondered out loud.
“
In order to develop a deep and long-lasting love of music?
”
Nah, don't be so naïve, Peador. Finding the word in the dictionary, Mie handed it
to me and pointed at the entry:
s
hitsuke
, I discovered, meant “
discipli
ne.”

As much as I loved Mie, as painful as her absence has been, it's hard to continue denying what I had already realized but had difficulty accepting: the uncomfortable fact that I never really knew Mie and Mie knew even less about me.

So, I have to go into the long and tired tale of how Peador had wanted to be an architect and designer, but after finishing university, didn't have the means to continue onto a master's program thanks to a mountain of student loan debt accruing at ten percent and unsupportive parents who believed the school of hard knocks would make their son a stronger person despite his pleading that he it wasn't
strong
that he wanted to be, it was
employable
. The reason I came to Japan, I then tell my small but captivated audience, was two-fold, that is if you exclude the burning desire to escape from my family and America: to save money for graduate school and, if possible, learn more about Jap
anese design and architecture. “
You know,
niseki icchô,
”
I say in conclusion.

“Huh?”

“
Niseki icchô
,”
I say again and pantomime throwing an invisible rock at two imaginary birds until I realize th
at what I'm actually saying is “
two
stone
s, one bird
”
rather than “two birds with one stone.”
Though this may be a far more accurate description of my experience in this country so far, isn't quite what I meant t
o convey, so I correct myself: “
Isseki
ni
chô
.”

Yuki praises my Japanese, exclaiming how
jôzu!
it is, but, to be honest, I think she's just dickin’ with me. Mie says she had no idea.

“
The problem is, though, my train kind of . . . derailed, if you will. I wasn't able to do any of the things I expected t
o do during my first year here.”

“
Ôen suru ken,
”
they reply, telling me they'll
be rooting for me, so I should “
ganbatte!
”
I shouldn't give up. I assure them that I don't give up easily. I wouldn’t still be here today if I did.

4

After drinking the bar dry of
Corona
s the three of us switch to whiskey and waters. I know I'm going to regret it tomorrow morning, but I'm still hoping for a repeat performance of that first night ever with Mie, hoping that even if words fail me, then perhaps alcohol will succeed as it has in the past in loosening this ex-girlfriend of mine up.

It is unfortunately obvious, though, that Mie has her own ideas of how she'd like the evening to end. She never gets very personal, never lets on to what is happening in her life, whether she is still with Tetsu. Not once does she even drop a hint about our common past. Instead, Mie tries her best to sell me on this co-worker of hers, and even informs me that Yuki has an apartment of her own, a nice place not far from Tenjin, that I ought to visit.

Yuki seconds this. “
Yes, yes. By a
ll means, do come over anytime.”
She writes her phone number on the back of a business card, and after making me promise to call her, excuses herself to stagger off to the restroom. Mie and I are alone for the first time all evening.

“I think Yuki likes you.”

“Humph, that's nice to know.”

It's hard to hide my lack of enthusiasm. I mean, sweet as the girl is, she just isn't Mie. She can't even begin to compare; this ex-girlfriend of mine set the bar too goddamn high.

“She your type?”

“My type?”
I'm almost drunk enough that
I could smack Mie for asking. “
I think you already hav
e an idea what my type is like.”

“
She's a good person. I think she'd
make a nice girlfriend for you.”

“Do you now?”

“
Yes, I do. I really do
think you'd make a nice couple.”

“
You really believe that's why I wanted to see you tonigh
t? So I could meet someone new?”

“
It's just . . . You sounded so . . . I don't know . . . so
sad and lonely over the phone.”

“
I was . . . I still
am
sad and lonely, Mie-chan. But dating someone like your Yuki isn't going
to help me in that department.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? What are you, stupid?”
I drink the rest of my whiskey quickly. Some of it trickles out of the corner of the glass, runs down my chin and neck. I grab her hand which she's done a fabulous job of keeping out of my reach and taking a deep breath to keep
myself from exploding, begin, “
I'm sorry, Mie. It's been a long, long, long fucking time since we last met. I don't know how
you've
spent the last six months, but, let me tell you,
I've
thought about you each and every day since you left me. And as
sad and lonely
as I've been, I've managed to carry this foolish hope in my heart that maybe, just maybe if I became a better person or if circumstances changed, if fortune deigned to smile rather than shit upon me for once, then you and I could be together again and everything would be
okay
. And here we are finally together again and you can't wait
to pawn me off on someone else.”