My Year of Meats (4 page)

During the shooting the following week, Jane had hesitated when she saw the new bedding and asked again about the old quilt, which Suzie had already washed and sent off to her sister in Wisconsin, who collected antiques. That was the big joke, that the quilt was so old you could call it an antique. Jane frowned and consulted with Mr. Oda, the director, in Japanese, then she asked if there was any way to get it back quickly. But Suzie had sent the package by parcel post, because airmail was so expensive. There wasn’t any real hurry for it to get there, after all, and now it was probably on a mail truck somewhere between here and Sheboygan. Jane had looked stunned. She explained that it was the
old
quilt they liked, because it had old-fashioned, wholesome family values. The new quilt was not interesting, she said, and Mr. Oda seemed very angry and decided not to shoot in the bedroom. Suzie felt terrible.

Fred was furious with her for caring so much, for spending all the money on the new comforter and towels, for agreeing to the shoot to begin with. But when Jane had first called her, all the way from New York City, Suzie thought the TV show might be just the thing to help her and Fred feel positive about their lives again, especially since it was the Valentine’s Day Show. And even though the Romantic Evening Kiss scene had been difficult at first, by the end everyone seemed satisfied, and even Fred was in an okay mood by then, but maybe that was just the champagne.

It all went wrong with the Coca-Cola Roast. Jane had seemed so excited when Suzie first described it over the phone to her in New York City. But when it came time to actually cook it, she and Mr. Oda appeared disappointed because there were so few steps. That was the whole point, Suzie tried to explain. It was quick ‘n’ easy. Yet instead of appreciating this fact, they just seemed annoyed. The meat-cooking section was the most important part of the show, Jane said. It had to be interesting. So to make up for not having
enough
steps, the director decided to take lots of different shots of the
same
steps over and over again. But Suzie had bought only enough ingredients to make
one
rump roast, so they had to go out to the grocery store and buy a dozen economy-size bottles of Pepsi because the store had run out of Coke. Unfortunately they couldn’t find another rump roast that looked the same, and in between each take, Suzie had to wash off the raw meat in the sink and pat it dry with paper towels and make it look new again.

It was kind of funny at first. Jane stood off to one side, funneling the Pepsi into the Coke bottle, which Suzie then poured onto the tired rump, over and over again, until the meat turned gray. Finally they told her to put it into the oven a few dozen times, and when that was over she was so relieved—but then, out of the blue, Jane asked for the matching, already cooked roast she was supposed to have prepared in advance, so they could shoot her taking it back out of the oven without wasting time. She was supposed to have prepared the meats in
multiples
, Jane groaned, in
stages
. But Suzie hadn’t understood this. There was no help for it, and they all just had to wait for the roast to cook, and it was the longest three hours Suzie had ever spent. The crew went out to the van, where she could hear them laughing.

Later they shot her and Fred and the kids eating the Coca-Cola Roast for dinner, but the kids were cranky because they didn’t like the taste of the Pepsi, and Mr. Oda kept screaming at Jane, and Jane kept telling the kids to act like they were enjoying their meat, until finally Fred stood up and walked out the door.

She should have known then. She should have just put her foot down, put a stop to the whole thing. Then Fred would have just come home eventually, like he always did, and the Sociological Survey would never have happened, and she would never have learned about the cocktail waitress, and the neighbors wouldn’t have, either. And right now she would be happy—well, not happy, perhaps, but at least asleep. She wiped her nose again and inspected the silvery streak that lay on the nonabsorbent surface of the polyester. It looked like a slug trail. At least, Suzie thought, she would ask her sister to send the old quilt back, since she just couldn’t seem to stop crying.

“Well?”

Kenji, my elegant, sloe-eyed office producer, leaned back in his chair, feet propped delicately against the editing console. He was eating cashew nuts from a small cloth sack. He gazed pensively at Suzie’s horrified expression—slack—jawed, incredulous—frozen on the screen.

“The Survey’s a bloody bore,” he offered. He’d been educated in England, one of the new breed of issei, first-generation Japanese immigrants, who wore his British accent like his Armani suit, casually draped, with a sense of perfect global entitlement.

“... could have cut out quicker and thrown in a couple of reaction shots of someone laughing.”

“No one was laughing,” I told him.

“Oh.”

Our office was located in the East Village. It was an improbable location for a Japanese TV production company, since most tended to cluster around Rockefeller Center, a secure, Japanese-owned neighborhood. Kenji had preferred SoHo, but Kato had nixed the idea because the rents were too expensive, and so we settled here. I thought it was great, five blocks from my apartment, but Kenji, who lived on the West Side, was still annoyed.

When the first edited episodes of
My
American Wife!
arrived from Japan after airing, the New York office staff crowded around the VCR in the conference area to watch the fruits of their labors. The disappointment was palpable—
My American Wife!
was dumb. Silly. After the first few shows, the New York staff stopped watching.

The program looked liked this: The Wife of the Day appeared in a catchy, upbeat opening ... she introduced her husband and her children ... she led us on a tour of her hometown and her house ... and she ended up in her kitchen, where she cooked the Meat of the Week. Occasionally there would be a special regional or seasonal theme, but at first the programs stuck to this format, embellished with various “corners,” with titles like “My Hobby,” “Lady Gossip,” “Pretty Home,” “Romantic Moody,” and the “Sociological Survey,” which purported to investigate “Timely Topic in American Home and Nation.” Okay, it was really dumb.

I was upset. I may have been glib in my pitch and clumsy in my initial dealings with the wives, but I honestly believed I had a mission. Not just for some girl in the next millennium, but for here and now. I had spent so many years, in both Japan and America, floundering in a miasma of misinformation about culture and race, I was determined to use this window into mainstream network television to educate. Perhaps it was naive, but I believed, honestly, that I could use wives to sell meat in the service of a Larger Truth.

I mean, this was an amazing opportunity for a documentarian.
My American
Wife! was broadcast on a major national network on Saturday mornings, targeting Japanese housewives with school-age children, who represented the largest meat-eating slice of the population. The show played opposite cartoons, which wasn’t easy. But the first episodes we’d shot had scored ratings of up to 7.8 percent and penetrated approximately 9,563,310 households. This was very good. With an average of 3.0 persons per household, an estimated 28,689,930 members of the Japanese population watched our show, and the sponsors were pleased. I mean, that’s a lot of sirloin.

Part of the success was due to the marketing angle that the Network chose.
My
American Wife!, they assured the Japanese audiences, was produced “virtually entirely” by a real American crew, so the America conveyed was
authentic
, not one distorted by the preconceptions of jaded Japanese TV producers.

But of course it wasn’t real at all. Already, by February, I sat through each program out of a sense of responsibility and residual loyalty to an ideal. Kenji watched them all too. He didn’t get out of the office much, or out of New York, and maybe that’s why he liked the shows. As we stared at Suzie’s frozen face, I wondered: Were we even seeing the same thing?

“Fred, the husband, left her right after the Survey....”

Kenji popped another nut into his mouth. “Was it your fault?” He had taken off his Italian loafers and was trying to operate the edit deck controls with his toe. His socks were made of fine knit silk. “Will we get sued?”

“No. I don’t know. I doubt it. He was having an affair with some cocktail waitress, but he got so bent out of shape at us being there, and mad at Suzie for inviting us, that after he flipped his card, he told her. Everything. Right there, in front of us, in front of her family, the whole neighborhood. You see that expression on her face? That’s her reaction shot. The director didn’t speak a word of English and didn’t understand what the guy was saying—he just had Suzuki keep on filming.”

“Who was the director?”

“That bonehead Oda. Afterward, when we were watching dailies at the hotel and I explained what had happened, Oda got all excited and suggested using Fred’s confession, then cutting to a sex scene with the cocktail waitress.”

“He was serious?”

“Totally. He didn’t get the concept of ‘wholesome.’ I had to call Tokyo and get Kato to explain the mandate of BEEF-EX to him.”

Kenji shrugged, sat up, and rewound the tape. Suzie’s face recomposed briefly, then Kenji hit the Play button again. The Japanese announcer’s voice-over asked, “Have you ever had an extramarital affair?” The participants held up their Survey cards, and-the camera zoomed in on Fred’s big YES. The sound-effect track swelled with canned laughter, and Suzie’s face collapsed into its expression of horror, punctuated with a resounding
boinnggg!

“That’s awful,” Kenji said, grinning. “But it works....”

“It makes me sick. How can we send this tape to her? The whole thing is a lie. Here, watch the ending.”

Suzie and Fred were curled on the pink shag rug in front of the fire, toasting each other with glasses of champagne. They had put the kids to bed early, the narrator murmured, and it was time for that special Valentine’s Day moment, time to forgive and forget. They leaned slowly in and kissed, and when their lips met, Oda had laid in a cartoon heart, emanating from the point of contact and throbbing to fill the screen. It was a cheap computer graphics effect, like a TV ad for phone sex.

“It’s sweet,” Kenji said.

“It’s dumb.”

“It’s television.” He rewound it and played the scene again. “Nice graphics. How’d you shoot that kiss, if the husband had left her?”

“Out of sequence. We shot it the first day we got there.”

“Smart girl.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Listen, it’s great. Makes it look like they had this minor tiff but everything turned out all right in the end.”

“But it didn’t. It’s a lie. Kenji, I should be directing these. I could do a much better job. I could make it real....”

Kenji took out a carefully pressed handkerchief and dusted his fingertips and then the corners of his mouth. He was only in his early thirties, but his tastes—pressed handkerchiefs, fussy wines, antique cameras, and high-end audio equipment—had stiffened into those of a confirmed bachelor. Pachelbel and Delibes composed the sound track to his life, and listening to these melancholy strains, he would gaze eastward, out the window ,of his TriBeCa loft, past Liberty in New York Harbor, past London, and all the way back to Tokyo. He saw himself as a courtier, banished by his lord to a rude provincial capital.

“Yes, well, bring it up with Kato,” he concluded. “But essentially you do direct them now, you know. You choose all the content. The only thing you don’t do is cut.”

“But that’s big, Kenji. Editing is what counts. I mean, look what Oda did....”

“Well, listen,” he said, punching Rewind and cutting me off. “At least you got good meat and the kids are cute and there’s enough side-bar activity to keep things lively.” He swung his feet to the floor and stood to leave. At the door, he turned back.

“What do you want me to do about sending her the tape?”

“Can we cut out the
boinnggg?”

“No. Anyway, that’s dishonest too.”

“Well, then we can’t send it. If she calls, tell her the show got canceled.”

The rewinding image on the monitor caught his eye and he smiled. I turned just as the large Coca-Cola bottle sucked the last of its contents upward, off the bubbling meat.

“Mmm,” said Kenji. “Great product shot.”

I shook my head. “It’s Pepsi, Kenji. Not the real thing at all....”

I imagine Shōnagon, the master thief, hiding in her nook of history, watching me slip in and out of darkened rooms and steal from people’s lives. I hope she is laughing from behind her long silk sleeves.

One requisite of a good documentarian: you must shamelessly take what is available.

It was March, the “Ever-Growing Month,”
¹
and we’d been shooting since the beginning of the year. Suzuki was the cameraman, one of the best videographers in the business. He had an enormous face, like a big round moon, that sweat like a Gouda when he got drunk. His hair was long, and while he worked he wore it tied back tightly in a ponytail like a Heian courtier, but after work, at the bar, he would untie it and let it flow like molten obsidian down his back. His eyes were Heian too, mere slits, as though someone had taken a razor blade and drawn bloodless incisions into the swollen skin. You could never tell if they were open or shut, or if he was watching you. “He has a great eye,” I liked to say to Americans and watch them glance dubiously at him and wonder, Where?