A Woman's Nails (3 page)

I take the subway to Hakata station where I then transfer to a limited express
that takes me back to Kitakyûshû
. As we travel away from Fukuoka City, the train crosses the Tatara River. It’s from the bridge that spans that slow and muddy river that I can see a solitary tall apartment building and the flashing neon lights of a pachinko parlor beside it. It's where my ex-girlfriend Mie lives and works. It's where I fell in love with her, experiencing some of the happiest days of my life, and where my heart was broken one morning last October when she left me for the second and final time. It has become a Mecca of sorts for me, towards which my prayers are offered. And every time I cross this bridge, either coming or going, I crane my neck so as to keep the building in sight on the off chance that I might catch a glimpse, however fleeting or distant, of Mie. In a similar manner, I signed Abazuré's contract this morning putting my pride up as collateral on the off chance that I might be able to one day meet Mie again.

A rational person would have probably told Abazuré to shove the contract up her small, flat arse and gone back to America or wherever, dignity intact. Unfortunately, I stopped functioning on reason the day Mie dumped me. Pure impulse and desperation has been my guide. So, I
signed
my name on the dotted line knowing that more than anything in the world, I wanted Mie back in my life, or, at least, to find someone who'll help me achieve the seemingly impossible: to forget her and move on.

Someone, perhaps, like Nozomi . . .

2

NOZOMI

1

I got Nozomi’s phone number off of a bulletin board at the International Center in downtown Fukuoka a few weeks earlier. I’d been visiting the center on a weekly basis during the past several months looking for my next English teaching gig and a new place to hang my hat. Thanks, or no thanks, to the International Center I’m now
Abazuré
’s newest kept boy and will be moving next week to a small coastal village in the western suburbs of Fukuoka City where I’ll be sharing a condomin
ium with three other Americans.

The bulletin board at the International Center’s is divided into several categories: Language Instructors Wanted; Language Students Wanted; Items for Sale; Events; and Friends Wanted. Having found a job and a place to live, it’s the last of these, which I have started foraging through, hungrily searching for a woman to help forget.

Many of them are like me, seemingly starving for someone to love them. Sadly, few, precious few, of the women I’ve actually gone to the trouble of meeting have been able to distract me from the very memories I’m trying to forget.

Day in and day out, I am constantly reminded of my loss. My apartment, where Mie and I once made love, is now a cold mausoleum of sorts, where the remains of dreams are interned. Ghosts of the past occupy every inch of the place and the only thing that alleviates the heartache is the subtle palliative I’ve found in words written and spoken by women and the possible intimacy of a stranger as lonely as me.

2

On my way home from work one evening, I stop by a public phone outside a small mom-and-pop rice shop to call Nozomi, a woman whose name is full promise: Nozomi means
hope
. It’s only my second time to call her. Three days earlier when I first called, we had such a good conversation that she asked me to call her back later in the week so that we could arrange a day to meet.

Inside the telephone booth I take Nozomi’s number out of my pocket and place it on top of the green phone. I also remove a phone card I’ve been holding
onto for months from my wallet.

Whenever I look at the phone card, a
tsunami
hits me: a wall of nostalgia rushing towards me and sweeping me hard off my feet, hurling me towards the most vivid memories--Mie in my arms, Mie in my bed, and Mie in my life. Try as I might to grab onto one of theses images from the past, and hold it against my chest as if they were real, I am always drawn away by the force of receding waters into a cold, black sea of loneliness, the images torn from my hands. Only the hope that I might one day embrace Mie again or find someone else I can hold on to is all that keeps me from drowning.

I examine the unused metallic phone card and trace my finger over the logo Mie created--Lorelei with the wings of a butterfly and the name,
Lady Luck
. It is the last one of a stack she had given me shortly after we first met, and I’ve been holding onto it like the assiduous
custodian of a religious relic.

I slip the card into the slot and Lady Luck rests a moment like the host on a communicant’s tongue before being consumed with an electronic chime,
Amen
.

I dial Nozomi’s number and as the phone starts to ring, my throat grows dry with expectation.

After our first call, I returned to my apartment and for the first time in the months, the merciless ghosts of the past had been quieted. Something in Nozomi’s voice and in her words assured me of what my friends had been trying to tell me: that there were other women out there, better women even, who would help lay the past to rest. There would be other women who would find a way to coax a smile out of my frown, other women who would make me laugh, other women who would make me savor the joy each day presented rather than merely survive as I had been doing until the night when the promise of deep, dreamless sleep awaited me.

The phone rings again.

It’s been such an awful day and I’ve felt like crap for most of it. The only thing keeping me going is a one-act play I’ve been performing all day in my head: The curtains open and the protagonist is standing at a phone booth dialing a woman’s number. The phone rings, the woman answers and the two are engaged in a conversation that has him dropping all his change into the coin slot. Before he runs out of money, though, the woman invites him out for dinner and drinks the coming weekend. The
man smiles, the curtain closes.

3

The phone rings again.

I consider asking Nozomi out for drinks and
karaoke
. I’ve been a crowd-pleaser all year with syrupy renditions of ballads from the sixties and seventies. I have even mastered several Japanese pop hits. I couldn’t go wrong with
karaoke
, especially now that
karaoke boxes
, small private rooms with settee, table, and lights that dimmed are all the rage. No, she wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to belt out a few songs for an hour or two. Yeah, I’ll ask her out for drinks and
karaoke
.

The phone
rings again and Nozomi answers.

“Nozomi, hi. It’s me, Peador.
Genki?”
I ask.

She answers that she’s fine. When I inquire about her day, she sighs and says something I
can’t catch then falls silent.

It is an altogether different person I’m talking with today and I’m tempted to ask if something’s wrong, but worry doing so will only have her retreating further. So, I try to be
genki
and
akarui
as a friend advised because Japanese women love the
cheerful
,
spirited
type. They won’t give you the time of day if you’re
kurai
, she said, that is if you’re
dark and brooding
. I tell her about the great job I got recently, that I’ll be moving to Fukuoka in a few weeks, bu
t it’s not getting me anywhere.

Nozomi interrupts me. “Peador,” she say
s, “have you got a girlfriend?”

I tell her I don’t.

“Las
t night an American called me.”

All the kindness that made her voice so sweet to the ear, made me want to crawl into its warmth and curl up into a ball is gone. She’d rather hang up than go to the trouble of telling me.

“Go on.”

“He asked me if I’d ever had sex with an American.”

“He didn’t!”

“He did!”

“Just like that?”

“Yes.”

“Unbelievable,” I say.

“I told him I hadn’t and wasn’t interested in doing so, then hung up.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I reply with a sincerity I needn’t manufacture. “There are a lot of creeps out there, Nozomi. You really must be careful.”

Who am I to talk, though? Wasn’t my intention all along the same as this American’s: to get laid? Did I really occupy a higher moral position merely because I possessed something resembling patience and tact?

“You know, I have a boyfriend, a
Japanese
boyfriend,” Nozomi says. Her tone accuses me of assuming things I haven’t. “I’m not some
Yellow Cab
who’ll sleep with any foreigner just because he called me up.”

I’m at a loss for words. Not that it matters, though, because before I can reply, she says,
“Sayonara”
and hangs up. The
Lady Luck
card pops ou
t and the phone starts beeping.

Dumbfounded, I stare at my reflection in the glass before me for a minute before taking the telephone card and stepping out of the booth. As I head down the hill and back to my dismal little apartment, my head is as clouded as ever. Hopes dashed
by a girl, named Nozomi.

3

RISA

1

I move to Fukuoka at the end of March and settle into my new job. The schedule is dead easy and so far I have no complaints except that I am working six days a week instead of five. One morning I mention to my co-worker Yumi that it would be nice to have the occasionally Saturday off as well so that I could do a bit of traveling on the weekends, because I wasn’t really in Japan to work all the time, ha, ha, ha. Later in the day, my boss takes me aside to reprimand me for
complaining about the schedule.

“If you’re really not interested in working here,” she says, “I’ll be happy to find someone to replace you. I’m sure you’ll have plenty of time to travel, then.”

My conversations with Yumi are reduced to sparing exercises in polite banality after that. We comment on the weather, on the beauty of the
sakura
which were in full bloom my first week on the job, the azaleas which have started to blossom, and the mud nest the sparrows have built under the awning of the boutique downstairs, then fall silent. I retreat to the morning’s paper, she busies herself with whatever it is that she does at her desk before me. It’s very weird to say the least.

Most afternoons I’m free for four to five hours until it’s time to teach the evening class. On warm, sunny days I go to either of the two large parks that are near the school to write letters or read a book or wander. When the sky is overcast, I take a bus downtown, to Tenjin, and browse for books or CDs.

Evenings at the school are a huge improvement over the grim mornings. Yumi and the boss leave for the damp, dark caves they must surely inhabit shortly after I return from my afternoon break, meaning I am alone with Reina, a vivacious woman with wavy brown hair who teaches the junior high students in the evenings.

Yumi and Reina are like night and day, and the heavy veil of silence Yumi drapes over each morning is torn apart in the evening as soon as Reina punches in. Yumi and Reina do, however, share one thing: dread. Just as I dread my mornings alone with Yumi, I dread saying good-bye to Reina each night. Because there is nothing waiting for me but a sixty-minute-long train ride back to the condominium I’m living in. The condominium is located deep in the countryside, surrounded by untilled rice field
s and an unshakable loneliness.

Though I am allegedly sharing the condominium with two other Americans, I am more often than not the sole inhabitant of the eighth story, four-room
mansion
, as the Japanese call it. My “roommates” are MIA on the weekends and don’t usually come home until well after I have retired to bed most weeknights
.

I am no early bird, but my boss has so put the fear of being sacked into me that I find myself waking at the crack of dawn. I trudge like a somnambulist through a path between two rice fields to the unmanned station where I catch the seven-thirty train. I’m usually in town early enough that I can drop in at a shitty l
ittle coffee shop called, only G
od knows why, Henry the Eighth, where I have the
môningu setto
of
tôsuto, bâkon, sukuramburu eggi ando kôhi
(i.e., the morning set of toast, bacon, scrambled eggs and coffee) before confronting Yumi and her intractable gloom.

In the middle of April once I’ve settled into a routine, I go to the International Center to look for a Japanese teacher and, I am embarrassed to admit, put a card on a bulletin board there,
seeking “friends.”