After Dark (2 page)

Mari frowns and shakes her head.

The waitress brings the chicken salad and toast to the table. She pours fresh coffee into Mari’s cup and checks to make sure she has brought all the ordered items to the table. He picks up his knife and fork and, with practiced movements, begins eating his chicken salad. Then he picks up a piece of toast, stares at it, and wrinkles his brow.

“No matter how much I scream at them to make my toast as crispy as possible, I have never once gotten it the way I want it. I can’t imagine why. What with Japanese industriousness and high-tech culture and the market principles that the Denny’s chain is always pursuing, it shouldn’t be that hard to get crispy toast, don’t you think? So, why can’t they do it? Of what value is a civilization that can’t toast a piece of bread as ordered?”

Mari doesn’t take him up on this.

“But anyhow, your sister was a real beauty,” the young man says, as if talking to himself.

Mari looks up. “Why do you say that in the past tense?”

“Why do I…? I mean, I’m talking about something that happened a long time ago, so I used the past tense, that’s all. I’m not saying she isn’t a beauty now or anything.”

“She’s still pretty, I think.”

“Well, that’s just dandy. But, to tell you the truth, I don’t know Eri Asai all that well. We were in the same class for a year in high school, but I hardly said two words to her. It might be more accurate to say she wouldn’t give me the time of day.”

“You’re still interested in her, right?”

The young man stops his knife and fork in midair and thinks for a moment. “Interested. Hmm. Maybe as a kind of intellectual curiosity.”

“Intellectual curiosity?”

“Yeah, like, what would it feel like to go out on a date with a beautiful girl like Eri Asai? I mean, she’s an absolute cover girl.”

“You call that
intellectual
curiosity?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“But back then, your friend was the one going out with her, and you were the other guy on a double date.”

He nods with a mouthful of food, which he then takes all the time he needs to chew.

“I’m kind of a low-key guy. The spotlight doesn’t suit me. I’m more of a side dish—cole slaw or French fries or a Wham! backup singer.”

“Which is why you were paired with me.”

“But still, you were pretty damn cute.”

“Is there something about your personality that makes you prefer the past tense?”

The young man smiles. “No, I was just directly expressing how I felt back then from the perspective of the present. You were very cute. Really. You hardly talked to me, though.”

He rests his knife and fork on his plate, takes a drink of water, and wipes his mouth with a paper napkin. “So, while you were swimming, I asked Eri Asai, ‘Why won’t your little sister talk to me? Is there something wrong with me?’”

“What’d she say?”

“That you never take the initiative to talk to anybody. That you’re kinda different, and that even though you’re Japanese you speak more often in Chinese than Japanese. So I shouldn’t worry. She didn’t think there was anything especially wrong with me.”

Mari silently crushes her cigarette out in the ashtray.

“It’s true, isn’t it? There wasn’t anything especially wrong with me, was there?”

Mari thinks for a moment. “I don’t remember all that well, but I don’t think there was anything wrong with you.”

“That’s good. I was worried. Of course, I
do
have a few things wrong with me, but those are strictly problems I keep inside. I’d hate to think they were obvious to anybody else. Especially at a swimming pool in the summer.”

Mari looks at him again as if to confirm the accuracy of his statement. “I don’t think I was aware of any problems you had inside.”

“That’s a relief.”

“I can’t remember your name, though,” Mari says.

“My name?”

“Your name.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t mind if you forgot my name. It’s about as ordinary as a name can be. Even I feel like forgetting it sometimes. It’s not that easy, though, to forget your own name. Other people’s names—even ones I have to remember—I’m always forgetting.”

He glances out the window as if in search of something he should not have lost. Then he turns toward Mari again.

“One thing always mystified me, and that is, why didn’t your sister ever get into the pool that time? It was a hot day, and a really nice pool.”

Mari looks at him as if to say,
You mean you don’t get that, either?
“She didn’t want her makeup to wash off. It’s so obvious. And you can’t really swim in a bathing suit like that.”

“Is that it?” he says. “It’s amazing how two sisters can be so different.”

“We live two different lives.”

He thinks about her words for a few moments and then says, “I wonder how it turns out that we all lead such different lives. Take you and your sister, for example. You’re born to the same parents, you grow up in the same household, you’re both girls. How do you end up with such wildly different personalities? At what point do you, like, go your separate ways? One puts on a bikini like little semaphore flags and lies by the pool looking sexy, and the other puts on her school bathing suit and swims her heart out like a dolphin…”

Mari looks at him. “Are you asking me to explain it to you here and now in twenty-five words or less while you eat your chicken salad?”

He shakes his head. “No, I was just saying what popped into my head out of curiosity or something. You don’t have to answer. I was just asking myself.”

He starts to work on his chicken salad again, changes his mind, and continues:

“I don’t have any brothers or sisters, so I just wanted to know: up to what point do they resemble each other, and where do their differences come in?”

Mari remains silent while the young man with the knife and fork in his hands stares thoughtfully at a point in space above the table.

Then he says, “I once read a story about three brothers who washed up on an island in Hawaii. A myth. An old one. I read it when I was a kid, so I probably don’t have the story exactly right, but it goes something like this. Three brothers went out fishing and got caught in a storm. They drifted on the ocean for a long time until they washed up on the shore of an uninhabited island. It was a beautiful island with coconuts growing there and tons of fruit on the trees, and a big, high mountain in the middle. The night they got there, a god appeared in their dreams and said, ‘A little farther down the shore, you will find three big, round boulders. I want each of you to push his boulder as far as he likes. The place you stop pushing your boulder is where you will live. The higher you go, the more of the world you will be able to see from your home. It’s entirely up to you how far you want to push your boulder.’”

The young man takes a drink of water and pauses for a moment. Mari looks bored, but she is clearly listening.

“Okay so far?” he asks.

Mari nods.

“Want to hear the rest? If you’re not interested, I can stop.”

“If it’s not too long.”

“No, it’s not too long. It’s a pretty simple story.”

He takes another sip of water and continues with his story.

“So the three brothers found three boulders on the shore just as the god had said they would. And they started pushing them along as the god told them to. Now these were huge, heavy boulders, so rolling them was hard, and pushing them up an incline took an enormous effort. The youngest brother quit first. He said, ‘Brothers, this place is good enough for me. It’s close to the shore, and I can catch fish. It has everything I need to go on living. I don’t mind if I can’t see that much of the world from here.’ His two elder brothers pressed on, but when they were midway up the mountain, the second brother quit. He said, ‘Brother, this place is good enough for me. There is plenty of fruit here. It has everything I need to go on living. I don’t mind if I can’t see that much of the world from here.’ The eldest brother continued walking up the mountain. The trail grew increasingly narrow and steep, but he did not quit. He had great powers of perseverance, and he wanted to see as much of the world as he possibly could, so he kept rolling the boulder with all his might. He went on for months, hardly eating or drinking, until he had rolled the boulder to the very peak of the high mountain. There he stopped and surveyed the world. Now he could see more of the world than anyone. This was the place he would live—where no grass grew, where no birds flew. For water, he could only lick the ice and frost. For food, he could only gnaw on moss. Be he had no regrets, because now he could look out over the whole world. And so, even today, his great, round boulder is perched on the peak of that mountain on an island in Hawaii. That’s how the story goes.”

Silence.

Mari asks, “Is it supposed to have some kind of moral?”

“Two, probably. The first one,” he says, holding up a finger, “is that people are all different. Even siblings. And the other one,” he says, holding up another finger, “is that if you really want to know something, you have to be willing to pay the price.”

Mari offers her opinion: “To me, the lives chosen by the two younger brothers make the most sense.”

“True,” he concedes. “Nobody wants to go all the way to Hawaii to stay alive licking frost and eating moss. That’s for sure. But the eldest brother was curious to see as much of the world as possible, and he couldn’t suppress that curiosity, no matter how big the price was he had to pay.”

“Intellectual curiosity.”

“Exactly.”

Mari went on thinking about this for a while, one hand perched on her thick book.

“Even if I asked you very politely what you’re reading, you wouldn’t tell me, would you?” he asks.

“Probably not.”

“It sure looks heavy.”

Mari says nothing.

“It’s not the size book most girls carry around in their bags.”

Mari maintains her silence. He gives up and continues his meal. This time, he concentrates his attention on the chicken salad and finishes it without a word. He takes his time chewing and drinks a lot of water. He asks the waitress to refill his water glass several times. He eats his final piece of toast.

Y
our house was way out in Hiyoshi, I seem to recall,” he says. His empty plates have been cleared away.

Mari nods.

“Then you’ll never make the last train. I suppose you can go home by taxi, but the next train’s not until tomorrow morning.”

“I know that much,” Mari says.

“Just checking,” he says.

“I don’t know where you live, but haven’t you missed the last train, too?”

“Not so far: I’m in Koenji. But I live alone, and we’re going to be practicing all night. Plus if I really have to get back, my buddy’s got a car.”

He pats his instrument case like the head of a favorite dog.

“The band practices in the basement of a building near here,” he says. “We can make all the noise we want and nobody complains. There’s hardly any heat, though, so it gets pretty cold this time of year. But they’re letting us use it for free, so we take what we can get.”

Mari glances at the instrument case. “That a trombone?”

“That’s right! How’d you know?”

“Hell, I know what a trombone looks like.”

“Well, sure, but there are tons of girls who don’t even know the instrument exists. Can’t blame ’em, though. Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton didn’t become rock stars playing the trombone. Ever see Jimi Hendrix or Pete Townshend smash a trombone onstage? Of course not. The only thing they smash is electric guitars. If they smashed a trombone, the audience’d laugh.”

“So why did you choose the trombone?”

He puts cream in his newly arrived coffee and takes a sip.

“When I was in middle school, I happened to buy a jazz record called
Blues-ette
at a used record store. An old LP. I can’t remember why I bought it at the time. I had never heard any jazz before. But anyway, the first tune on side A was ‘Five Spot After Dark,’ and it was
great
. A guy named Curtis Fuller played the trombone on it. The first time I heard it, I felt the scales fall from my eyes. That’s
it
, I thought.
That’s
the instrument for me. The trombone and me: it was a meeting arranged by destiny.”

The young man hums the first eight bars of “Five Spot After Dark.”

“I know that,” says Mari.

He looks baffled. “You do?”

Mari hums the next eight bars.

“How do you know that?” he asks.

“Is it against the law for me to know it?”

He sets his cup down and lightly shakes his head. “No, not at all. But, I don’t know, it’s incredible. For a girl nowadays to know ‘Five Spot After Dark’…Well, anyway, Curtis Fuller gave me goose bumps, and that got me started playing the trombone. I borrowed money from my parents, bought a used instrument, and joined the school band. Then in high school I started doing different stuff with bands. At first I was backing up a rock band, sort of like the old Tower of Power. Do you know Tower of Power?”

Mari shakes her head.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Anyhow, that’s what I used to do, but now I’m purely into plain, simple jazz. My university’s not much of a school, but we’ve got a pretty good band.”

The waitress comes to refill his water glass, but he waves her off. He glances at his watch. “It’s time for me to get out of here.”

Mari says nothing. Her face says,
Nobody’s stopping you.

“Of course everybody comes late.”

Mari offers no comment on that, either.

“Hey, say hi from me to your sister, okay?”

“You can do it yourself, can’t you? You know our phone number. How can I say hi from you? I don’t even know your name.”

He thinks about that for a moment. “Suppose I call your house and Eri Asai answers, what am I supposed to talk about?”

“Get her to help you plan a class reunion, maybe. You’ll think of something.”

“I’m not much of a talker. Never have been.”

“I’d say you’ve been talking a lot to me.”

“With you, I can talk, somehow.”

“With me, you can talk,
somehow
,” she parrots him. “But with my sister, you can’t talk?”