A Woman's Nails (16 page)

Let me tell you, it was with great relief when I first learned of the Japanese tolerance for drunks. Staggering home after three or four too many seemed to be a national pastime of sorts, second only to
beisuboru
. And, best of all, you didn't have to
suffer through the guilt trip “
c
oncerned friends”
would lay into you the way you had to in the States if you enjoyed the pint too much. No, tell someone here you liked to drink, and they'd buy you a bottle of expensive Scotch or
shôchû
. Mention that you’re hung over, and they'd kindly offer you
mukaezake
.

“
Kampai
,”
I said with a little more life in me this time and clinked my mug against Reina’s glass of oolong tea.

“Can I have a sip?”
she asked.

“Sure.”

She took a healthy swig of beer, let out a long sigh, then started at it again, and ende
d up drinking half of my beer.

“
You
want to order one for yourself?”

“I do, but, um . . .”
she replied.

“But, what?”

“
But, one w
ill just lead to two and . . .”

“
And who's the
aruchû
now, Reina?”

“
You are! You should
have seen yourself last night.”

I was hoping we wouldn't have to go down that road, that Reina would have the decency to let me forget about the whole evening.

The details of the previous night were like disconcerting pieces to an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. Every now and then, an image would flicker through the haze just long enough for me to grab it, turn the image around, and try to guess where it fit into the big, incommodious picture.

Though I clearly remembered collapsing to the floor of the phone booth and wailing like a kicked dog after calling Reina, how I had got home was still obscured in a pea soup fog of amnesia. For all I know, I may very well have been beamed up to the Mother Ship, anal-probed, and dropped like a spent cartridge just outside my apartment building. In any event, Reina had been waiting for me at the gate of my apartment, crouched down and playing with a stray bob-tailed cat when I arrived.

“Been here long?”
I asked.

“No,”
she said, standing up, and straightening her skirt.

The spectacle I had made of myself in front of Mie, however, was burned into my memory. And as I revisited the awful night in my mind, sketchy details I would have preferred
to forget started trickling in.

The soup thinned and I remembered collapsing to the floor of the phone booth, banging my head against the glass door, and, staggering--yes, that was how I had got home--staggering, and attacking piles of garbage ou
tside of condominiums, yelling “
Why, Mie? Wh
y
?
”
all the way home.

Each time Reina ordered something, the master would echo her order in a booming voice, then remove two skewers of each from a refrigerated display case before us that
ran the length of the counter.

I reminded Reina that I wasn't hungry, but rather than listen, she added okra, asparagus and
enoki
mushrooms wrapped in bacon, and
shishamo
(smelt) to the order. And, after a moment's thought, she also asked for grilled rice balls and
miso
soup, making me wonder how the slim woman was planning to eat it all by herself.

“You told me a lot of things,”
She said with a queer smile.

“Oh, did I?”
I asked with a nonchalance that belied my unease.
Things? What things?
I scavenged my brain for any scraps of conversation we might have had, but found none that might explain the smile on my co-worker's face.

“Mie said she still loved me,”
I had told Reina. I had been lying on the floor with my head in Reina’s lap, a ca
n of beer resting on my chest. “She says, ‘
I love you,
Peador, but I can't marry you.’
What th
e fuck's that supposed to mean?”

“Do you want to marry her?”
Reina had asked, brushing the bangs from my eyes. Every now and then, she would raise my head slightly, and put the can of beer to my lips so I could take a sip, easing the flow of difficult words.

“
Yes . . . No
. . . I don't know . . . I did,” I had replied. “
I still do, I guess . . . But God, she left me twice. Two times . . . And now this. I
don't really know anymore . . .”

“Be a dear,” I said to Reina, “and refresh my memory.”

“I'm not going to tell you,” she sing-songed. “
But don't you worry, Peador. All you're little secret
s are safe with me.”

“Secrets? What secrets?” Curiosity was eating me. “I have no secrets.”

“
No, y
ou don't. Not after last night,”
she replied, covering her mouth with her hand and giggling.

In the end, it didn't really matter what I may or may not have told Reina that night in my apartment so long as it enabled me to step away from the disappointing reunion with Mie and begin thinking of the relationship, firmly and unfortunately, in the past tense, rather than continue to pine away in the subjunctive.

Golden Week
began at the end of April with
Green Day
, a national holiday commemorating the late emperor Hirohito's birthday. Why Green, you might ask: because his majesty the
Shôwa Tennô
was an avid
environmentalist
, of course. I suppose it one day be said that Japan's motives in the Pacific War were originally of an
ecological
nature. But, I digress . . .

With woefully little yen in my postal savings account and air fares prohibitively expensive, I had no choice but
to spend the slew of holidays—
G
reen Day
,
Constitution Day
, a generic “
National
Holiday
” and
Children's Day
—in
Japan. While the boss would be away in Hawaii, and Yumi off to a new Dutch-themed amusement park called
Huis Ten Bosch
, Reina didn't have plans, so I invited her out for dinner. Unfortunately, just as I was doing so, Yumi stepped into the office, putting me in the uncomfortable position of having to extend the invitation to her, as well.

An odd thing happened when I did: the sourpuss sweetened. An uncharacteristically genuine smile, Chiclets teeth and all, c
racked broadly across her face.

Hey, Mikey! He likes it!

Dinner with a punctured spare tire wasn't half as bad as I had expected. Exfiltrated out of the pernicious shadow of our boss, Yumi wasn't quite her dreary old self. Best of all, she couldn't stay out late. She was leaving early the next morning for, of all things, a Dutch-themed amusement park called
Huis Ten Bosch
.

Such a pity
.

After dinner, Reina and I saw Yumi off at the station. With a bright smile and a double-handed wave, she turned, stepping into and quickly disappearing among the throng of commuters that moved like a tidal surge towards the ticket gates.

“
Y
umi's certainly in a good mood,” I said to Reina. “What's up with her?”

Reina laughed through her nose.

“
What's that
supposed to mean?”
I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you laughing?”

“I promised not to tell.”

“
Promised
who
? Not to tell
what
?”

“Nobody and nothing,” she answered as she
skipp
ed playfully
away.

“You and your little secrets,”
I said, tagging after her.

It was still early and I was a few drinks shy of where I needed to be to keep the regrets and memories seeping into my mood, so I asked Reina if she would like to join me for another
drink.

We made our way to
Umie
where several beers later Reina spilled the beans: Yumi was in love, madly in love, with dear old me.

“Oh, you gotta be kidding,” I said. “
Ja
panese joke, right? Ha, ha, ha.”

“
No, it's
true
!” she replied. “Yu-chan was so excited about going out with you tonight she wou
ldn't shut up about it all day.”

“
Funny, but I was under the impression tha
t she didn't care much for me.”

The girl recoiled whenever I came into the office, left annoying memos on my desk rather than simply turn around and talk to me directly, and, worst of all, was constantly tattling on me. If it was love Yumi had been dishing me, I dreaded tasting
her scorn.

“
I'm serious, Peador. I know men can be obtuse, but you must have noticed
how dressed up she was tonight.”

Well, yes, I had noticed that. Yumi had been dolled up, in her own funereal way. The make-up had been more theatrical than usual and her long black hair had been let down rather than pulled back into the thick ponytail she normally wore at work.

Graduating from beer, Reina and I moved onto cocktails, and with each drink moved closer towards each other. Where we had been sitting across a small table from each other at first, we were now side-by-side, legs touching, hands wai
ting to be held.

There had been chemistry between us from the beginning, a strong affinity that would have brought us together sooner or later. Alcohol merely provided the catalyst.

It was well past two when we left
Umie
, and the subway had long stopped running. Looking back, it had probably been Reina's intention all along to have sex with me that night, but as decorticated of confidence as I was, I couldn’t take anything for granted. When Reina asked if she could spend the night at my place until the subway resumed service in the morning, I didn't run excitedly through an inventory of the delightfully decadent possibilities; I merely considered myself fortunate that one of the better nights I'd had in a damned long time didn't need to end yet. I took Reina's hand and we walked, chatting and laughing all the back to my apartment. It was the same route that had, only a few nights earlier, witnessed a very different Peador.

At my apartment, Reina asked if there was something she could change into.

There were, of course, the cotton shorts and tank top that Mie had left, among other things, neatly folded in a sacristy of sorts at the back of my top drawer. It seemed a sacrilege to disturb them and awaken the memories resting with them, so I gave her an oversized T-shirt and
a pair of boxer shorts, instead.

After changing, Reina lay next to me on the
futon
, nuzzling into my chest. I put my arm around her slim body, and kissed her broad forehead, her nose, her lips. There was a familiarity in our caresses and kisses, as if we'd been sleeping together for years. And yet, it still c
ame as surprise when she said: “
You can hav
e sex with me, if you want.”

Never before had sex been solicited to me so dispassionately by someone. I didn't quite know what to say. Yes, I wanted to have sex. An erection you could crack walnuts with was testament to that. But much more than the sex Reina was offering, I just wanted to forget Mie.

Before I could reply, Reina was already raising her arms
above her head and whispering “
Banzai!
”
so that I could remove the T-shirt. She slipped the boxer shorts over her bottom and down her slim legs to her ankles, where she kicked them off, and lay completely naked, stripped even of her modesty, next to me. As the rising sun began to fill my apartment with golden warmth and the chirping of birds filtered through the morning's silence, she undressed me.

Reina spent most of the
Golden Week
holiday with me, either at my empty little apartment or hers, having sex--when she liked--two or three times in the evening, once or twice in the morning, occasionally in the afternoon. She would then go on to spend the following weeks, first wondering and later fretting over, what meaning there was in my penis poking in and out of her vagina. A lot happened during those weeks; still, something more important did not. Two weeks into the relationship, I was just as ambivalent about falling in love with the woman as I had been in having sex with her the first time.