A Woman's Nails (19 page)

But really, how could I have known the impact I had on Yumi's frail emotions when I was completely absorbed in the struggle to keep my own insanity in check after the debacle with Mie? I was no Mother Teresa. I didn’t have an infinite well of compassion from which to draw sympathy for my co-worker. No, Yumi, I had decided, was going to have to deal with her own infatuation herself, and with the best of intentions, I hoped liked so many others who are cornered that the problem would just go away, were I to ignore it.

My other co-worker, Reina, like me, had initially hoped that by turning a blind eye to Yumi's mood swings, everything would work out in the end. But Yumi, I would learn, wasn't the type to let her misery go unrecognized. She didn't merely dabble in the art of suffering; she was a ham and demanded an
audience for her Passion Play.

As Yumi suffered upon a cross to which she had nailed herself--no help from me, not even to steady the nails as she drove them in--rather than ask God to forgive those who did not know what they had done, Yumi chose instead to spread the suffering around. And so, driven mad with jealously, she imparted her wholly unsubstantiated, though correct, suspicions to our boss, Abazuré, that Reina and I were having an affair.

In-company romances are nothing new in Japan; they happen all the time. Japanese television dramas wouldn’t get past two episodes if there wasn’t romantic intrigue between co-workers in the story. And, if you ask anyone where they think the best place to meet a prospective spou
se is, they'll probably reply, “At work”
. But, what might have only raised eyebrows or inspired some snickering in an ordinary office was cause for opprobrium because Reina was still, scandal of scandals, married. And, unlike in large companies where such dalliances ensured that female staff who met heartbreak or their future husband in the office would resign allowing a new cohort of nubile women to fill their shoes, I was the one who was dispensable. Indeed, unbeknownst to me as so precious little was at the time, Abazuré was always on the lookout for any grounds, however trivial, to sack the fulltime
gaijin
and replace him with another
gaijin
, once his contract was up. This was how the bitch operated.

Once the cat was out of the bag, Abazuré wasted little time in setting the Inquisition into motion. Should I have expected any different? Once again, I was asked to follow Abazuré to the small room she used for her weekly interrogations. We sat at the second-hand
dining table facing each other.

There was a fascist vein in my boss and Freon flowed through it. She reminded me of a gregarious, yet sadistic POW camp
kommodant
, who'd befriend the prisoners one moment only to put a bullet in their head a moment later for the laugh she might find in it. Abazuré could be charming if it served her to be so. The business she ran was testament to this. But, she was also a sociopath, and an alarmingly unpredictable one at that. A volatile gas, the tiniest spark would set her off in a bat of the eye. She could go from fair skies to tempest, reasserting her authority over us with the delicacy of thundering jackboots.

I was on pins and needles my first few months at the school, and if the woman hadn't been AWOL for days at a time, I seriously doubt my employment would have extended beyond June when my contract was up for review.

Not one to mince words when she was furious, Abazuré had little use for the Japanese tendency to hem and haw, to crowd out the message with pleasantries: no sooner had my butt settled into the electric chair
than the juice was flicked on.

Rumors were circulating that Reina and I were having an affair, she began with her usual fevered irritation. I had gotten used to seeing her like this, all tensed up, her knuckles white and her hot breath hissing out of flared nostrils. She demanded to know the truth, leaving me with no choice but to give her anything but that. It would have been foolish to appeal to her sense of fairness and reason, because it had become obvious she had none. I looked at the woman I'd grown to despise, at the closely cropped, unnaturally black hair that never ever seemed to grow, at the deep lines etched into her furrowed brow and engraved like parentheses around the scowl. I looked into the steely eyes she had fixed upon me, at the contempt therein, and began to weave a bold tapestry of shamele
ss lies. I had nothing to lose.

It seemed to work. The sun shown again on Abazuré's fickle mood and I soared upon that flying tapestry of deceit through cloudless skies.

I was in the doghouse with Reina, though. For all her usual cheerfulness and blithe indifference to the office politics, Reina was reduced to a smoldering cauldron of vitriol in her apartment later that evening when I told her what had happened.

“I hate those bitches!”
She stormed around the small living room, banging her clinched fists against her thighs and kicking
up a cloud of dust and cat fur.

“
I hate them! I hate them! I hate them! I hate th
em! I hate them!”

It surprised me how personally she took it. There was no consoling her; anything I said or tried to do just added fuel to her fire.

“I'm going to quit!”
she finally decided before breaking down and crying.

It would take a full week before she'd show any signs of having calmed down. Even still, she was adamant in her refusal to talk to Yumi, except when necessity made it unavoidable. After several days of this, Yumi finally came to me and asked with grave concern if something was the matter with Reina.

Oh, Yumi could be a nasty piece of work herself, al
l
right! The audacity! The callousness! The ruthlessness! I could have wacked her, but then I had to be the rare voice of reason in the office, a remarkable position for someone who has a habi
t of spouting off unthinkingly.

So, I met Yumi in secret after work.

It was a warm evening in late May. The sun had already set, but the sky was filled with a beautiful soft pinkish-orange twilight that made everything seem more distinct and within reach. We walked the perimeter of the small lake in Ôhori Park talking about what Reina and I had been accused of. Yumi feigned innocence of the matter testing my patience again. I took a deep breath, and told her I knew it was she who had spread the rumor, stopping her in her tracks.

“
I'm
. . . sorry, Peador,”
she began. All the air had gone out of her; the words having nothing to carr
y them were all but inaudible. “I, I, just thought that . . .”

With all the reserve I could muster to keep myself from strangling Yumi, I touched her shoulde
r gently and smiled. “
It's okay
. If anyone should apologize, it's me. I understand how you could have misinterpreted Reina and my friendship. At any rate it's behind us, and I want to keep it there because I want the th
ree of us to be friends again.”

I damn near vomited, saying this, but, it had the desired effect on Yumi and she promised to make it up to Reina the following day.

The next day, Yumi bounced into work beaming those awful teeth of hers and greeted me with a rare cheerfulness. While I was out in the afternoo
n, she and Reina mended fences.

My problems with Reina, however, were only just beginning. When Yumi apologized to Reina she also admitted that she had misunderstood me all along. It was a realization, which would only serve to fan the
flames of her love for me anew.

It sent Reina through the roof, and, as the two of us were closing the office down for the night Reina
accused me of leading Yumi on.

“
W
hat the fuck you talking about?”

“
Oh, nothing, nothing at all!” she said. “It’s just that, everything you say is like th
e word of God to stupid bitch! ‘
Peador's wonderful! Peador's perfect! Peador said
this and Peador said that . . .’
You like it, don't you? You're leading her on because you like it. Well, y
ou can fuck her for all I care.”

“
Get outta here! I'm not interested in her at all. God, all I wanted was for a bit of no
rmalcy to return to the office.”

“Jus’
, just . .
. don't talk to me ever again!”
she said
,
pushing me away.

I watched her walk away towards the parking lot wondering if she'd come back, apologize and make it up to me on top of my
futon
, but she didn't. So, I walked back to my apartment alone where I tried to untangle the knot of emotions inside me with a large bottle of
saké
.

2

The following week, it was my turn to be ignored b
y Reina. If I spoke to her, she’
d pretend not to hear.
If I needed her assistance, she’
d suddenly be caught up in frenetic activity. As for communication, the most I could expect from her was a nod, a shrug or a finger pointed in the general direction of what I was looking for. And that was when she was feeling generous. The rest of the time, all I could do was sit at my desk and silently observe her from behind. The muscles between her shoulders and along her neck were still tense an
d screaming anger five days on.

After a week, I couldn’
t take it anymore and forced her to break the vow of silence by dogging her with invitations to dinner. Naturally, she refused at first, so I asked again politely. When she snubbed me, I asked again. And again and again and again. I pleaded when asking became useless. Begged when pleading didn't work either. I begged until she relented, relented with conditions: she chooses the restaurant; I pay. With payday still a few days off, my postal savings account was like a wishin
g well drained of it
s water, a handful of nickels, pennies and dimes lying in the slime.

We walked to a nearby
motsunabe
restaurant after work. While a
miso
-
based stew of pork haslets and G
od only knows what
other piggy odds and ends wasn’
t quite at the top of my list of things I wanted to eat, let alone flip the bill for, I was ha
ppy to have finally plied Reina’
s rigid mouth open.

After a few pitchers of beer the words, which she'd been so reluctant to part with, finally started to flow
. And, the things I would hear!

Reina was jealous. Jealous of Yumi's feeling for me, jealous of the time we had alone in the office each morning, jealous of how
careful I was not to hurt Yumi’
s feelings and so on. Jealousy is an ugly disease disfiguring everything in the most grotesque manner and it was my grave misfortune to have t
wo co-workers stricken with it.

It was so absurd, I was about to throw in the towel right then and there and quit. I wanted out, Out, OUT! But, having nowhere else I could go and no money to get me there anyway, all I could do was give
Reina the same soft sell that I’
d given Yumi earlier in the week.

“
There's nothing I can do ab
out Yumi,” I began. “
You know as well as I do that she lives in a fantasy world.
No matter what I do or say, she’
ll use it as just one more reason to fall even deeper in love wit
h me. If I farted, she
’
d
say they smellt of roses!”

“
They
do not
smell li
ke roses!”
Reina said laughing. It was
the first time in weeks that I’
d heard her laugh and it was a relief to have gotten through at last. She was a damn hard nut to crack, Reina. What in the world could have happened to her in her 29 years of life to make her like that?

Halfway through our third pitcher of beer, she rested her head on my shoulder, wrapped her arm around mine then asked calmly, reasonably, convincingly to do something to make that cunt Yumi stop.

There I was claiming to possess the power nece
ssary to douse the fire in Yumi’
s heart and, in the same breath, agreeing to let Reina spend the night where she would dig her nails so deeply into my chest I'd carry the scars like the stigmata long after we broke up for good.

3

Several days later, I yielded to the inevitable and invited Yumi out for dinner. Poor Yumi was tickled pink with the prospect and sent Reina up the wall talking about it. But Reina had no right to speak; she was the one who put me up to it. I was instructed to tell Yumi point blank, no holds barred, that she had better graduate from the junior-high-school-girl crush she had on me because there was no way in hell, none whatsoever, that I would ever be interested in her.

I took Yumi to an “Itarian”
restaurant of her choice, a small unremarkable place downtown that had been featured on TV recently. After an insipid meal with sour red wine, I broke it to her.