A Woman's Nails (18 page)

We walk hand in hand from the station to her
apartment not speaking a word.

The apartment is a mess as always, books and magazines on the floor, clothing piled on the table and chairs, open bags of recyclables in the kitchen. Cleanliness is not one of Reina’s virtues. To make matters worse everything, including my bowl of rice the next morning, is covered with her cat's gray hairs. It’
s a miracle the cat isn’t bald.

Her bathroom, too, where we've often had sex in the morning is a horror story as always. Black mold has crept malignantly from the base of the walls upward towards and across the ceiling to the vent in the center from where it looks intent upon mounting a moldy raid on the world outside.

Reina pours me a beer then sits down beside me on the living room floor and begins massaging my shoulders. I take an awkward sip from the beer and wonder what Mike is up to, whether he's gone home or is drinking orange juice at The
Big Apple
. I wonder what he thinks of this night, if he feels as if he's made any progress along the
meandering
path
that
lead
s
to Reina’s heart. Despite all the men who adore Reina and want to be with her, I am the one she is with, the one she is massaging, the one she is undressing, the one
whose dick she is now sucking.

“
The
next time you spend the night,” she tells me, “
I want you to bring
condoms.”

We have unprotected sex not once, but several times throughout the night. I sink so deeply inside her and fuck her so hard that she eventually bleeds. Still, she continues to move her hips above me, back arched, her round breasts flushed and protruding, nails digging into my chest, breaking the skin.

“Don't you love this?”
she says as she comes and comes and comes.

When hints of dawn begin to break through the kitchen window, she falls asleep in my arms. Dust and cat hairs are airborne in the warm light. After a while, I manage to fall asleep myself. I dream of talking Mie out of her marriage with Tetsu. It is so vivid, so believable that when I wake I am disappointed to find Reina asleep besides me.

Reina and I continue to sleep with each other for another month out of mutual loneliness and convenience. Though she must know the day will come when we no longer share a bed, she continues all the same to search my heart and thoughts for something that just isn't there.

9

MIE

1

A few minutes after nine on Thursday morning the students start to trickle in and the lobby soon echoes with their excited clucking. For many of them, I've been told, my lesson is the high point of their week, an unsettling
thought if ever there was one.

Babysitting is provided, so many of the young housewives come with their children. Sleeping infants are strapped tightly like papooses to their mothers' backs. The more bashful of the toddlers fret unless their mothers carry them in their arms, while the naughtier children bolt in with the subtlety of thunder and stir
up a perfect storm of mischief.

Although the kids—o
bvious benefact
ors of grandparental largesse—a
re dolled up in pricey outfits, wearing vivid t-shirts with
kôan
-like
[5]
sayings, such as “happiness is eating a potato”
, the mothers are dowdy, fright
fully so. Many of them are the “good wives”
of bureaucrats or professors from the prestigious national university, meaning their husbands, like the
samurai
of the past, have all the status one could hope for, but none of the income. Though only in their mid-thirties, they look and act much older. Their limited experience in society, however, has them carry on like Catholic high school girls. The good kind, that is.

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 an
d ended up oversleeping. Only by the grace of God did I manage
to scramble
out of bed and into the office—u
nshaven, half-
dressed and reeking of whiskey—t
wo
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 m
y hands were shaking too much—I
ran off several copies of the book's final chapter, then passed the
m 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 ma
rry him, instead.”

“And?”

“And, I said, yes,”
she repli
es 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 ta
king sailing lessons and . . .”

“Sailing lessons?”

“
Yes, and my husband was the instructor. O
ne 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 yo
u had dated for a while, right?”

“
No, no. We deci
ded 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 tho
se 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 bott
le of
sak
é
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
sak
é
. 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
sak
é
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, sever
al hours' drive to the east in Ô
ita 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
sak
é
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
sak
é
, 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 o
ther 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 love
d 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 foll
owing 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 con
flagration 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.