Norwegian Wood (25 page)

Reiko shook her head and ate a few grapes.

“It was a sickness,” she said. “The girl was sick. She was like the rotten apple that ruins all the other apples. And no one could cure her. She’ll have that sickness until the day she dies. In that sense, she was a sad little creature. I would have pitied her, too, if I hadn’t been one of her victims. I would have seen
her
as a victim.”

Reiko ate a few more grapes. She seemed to be thinking of how best to go on with her story.

“Well, anyhow, I enjoyed her for a good six months. Sometimes I’d find something she said a little surprising or odd. Or she’d be talking and I’d have this rush of horror to realize that the intensity of her hatred for some person went way beyond reason, or it would occur to me that she was just way too clever, and I’d wonder what she was really thinking. But, after all, everybody has their flaws, right? And finally, what business was it of mine to question her personality or character? I was just her piano teacher. All I had to care about was whether she practiced or not. And besides, the truth of the matter is that I liked her. I liked her a lot.

“Still, I was careful not to tell her anything too personal about myself. I just had this instinctive sense I’d better avoid talking about such things. She asked me hundreds of questions—she was dying to know more about me—but I told her only the most harmless kind of stuff, like things about my girlhood or where I’d gone to school, stuff like that. She said she wanted to know more about me, but I told her there was nothing to tell: I’d had a boring life, I had an ordinary husband, an ordinary child,
and a ton of housework. ‘But I like you so
much,’
she’d say, and look me right in the eye in this clingy sort of way. It sent a thrill through me when she did that—a
nice
thrill. But even so, I never told her more than I had to.

“And then one day—a day in May, I think it was—in the middle of her lesson, she said she felt sick. I saw she was pale and sweating and asked if she wanted to go home, but she said she thought she’d feel better if she could just lie down a while. So I took her—almost carried her—to the bedroom. We had such a small sofa, the bed was the only place she
could
lie down. She apologized for being a bother, but I assured her it was no bother and asked if she wanted anything to drink. She said no, she just wanted me to stay near her a while, which I said I’d be glad to do.

“A few minutes later she asked me to rub her back. She sounded as if she was really suffering, and she was sweating like crazy, so I started to give her a good massage. Then she apologized and asked me if I’d mind taking off her bra, it was hurting her. So, I don’t know, I did it. She was wearing a skintight blouse, and I had to unbutton that and reach behind and undo the bra hooks. She had big breasts for a thirteen-year-old. Twice as big as mine. And she wasn’t wearing any starter bra but a real adult model, an expensive one. Of course I’m not paying all that much attention at the time, and like an idiot I just keep on rubbing her back. She keeps apologizing in this pitiful voice like she’s really sorry, and I keep telling her it’s O.K., it’s O.K.”

Reiko tapped the ashes from her next cigarette to the floor. By then I had stopped eating grapes and was giving all my attention to her story.

“After a while she starts sobbing. ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask her. ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘It’s obviously not nothing,’ I say. ‘Tell me the truth. What’s bothering you?’ So she says, ‘I just get like this sometimes. I don’t know what to do. I’m so lonely and sad, and I can’t talk to anybody, and nobody cares about me. And it hurts so much, I just get like this. I can’t sleep at night, and I don’t feel like eating, and coming here for my lesson is the only thing I have to look forward to.’ So I say, ‘You can talk to
me
. Tell me why this happens to you.’ Things are not going well at home, she says. She can’t love her parents, and they don’t love her. Her father is seeing another woman and hardly ever comes home, and that makes her mother half crazy and she takes it out on the girl; she beats her almost every day and she hates to go home. So now the girl is really wailing, and her eyes are
full of tears, those beautiful eyes of hers. The sight is enough to make a god blubber. So I tell her, if it’s so terrible to go home, she can come to my place anytime she likes. When she hears that, the girl throws her arms around me and says, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, but if I didn’t have you I wouldn’t know what to do. Please don’t turn your back on me. If you did that, I’d have nowhere to go.’

“So, I don’t know, I hold her head against me and I’m caressing her and saying, ‘There there,’ and she’s got her arms around me and she’s stroking my back, and soon I’m starting to feel very strange, my whole body is kind of hot. I mean, here’s this picture-perfect beautiful girl and I’m on the bed with her, and we’re hugging, and her hands are caressing my back in this incredibly sensual way that my own husband couldn’t begin to match, and I feel all the screws coming loose in my body every time she touches me, and before I know it she’s got my blouse and bra off and she’s stroking my breasts. So that’s when it finally hits me that she’s an absolute dyed-in-the-wool lesbian. This had happened to me once before, in high school, one of the upperclass girls. So then I tell her to stop.

“‘Oh, please,’ she says, ‘just a little more. I’m so lonely. I’m so lonely, please believe me, you’re the only one I have, oh please, don’t turn your back on me,’ and she takes my hand and puts it on her breast—her very nicely shaped breast, and, sure, I’m a woman, but this electric something goes through me when my hand makes contact. I have no idea what to do. I just keep repeating no no no no no like an idiot. I’m like paralyzed, I can’t move. I had managed O.K. to push the girl away in high school, but now I can’t do a thing. My body won’t take orders. She’s holding my right hand against her with her left hand, and she’s kissing and licking my nipples, and her right hand is caressing my back and side and bottom. So here I am in the bedroom with the curtains closed and a thirteen-year-old girl has me practically naked—she’s been taking my clothes off somehow all along—and touching me all over and I’m writhing with the pleasure of it. Looking back on it now, it seems incredible. I mean, it’s crazy, don’t you think? But at the time it was like she had cast a spell on me.”

Reiko paused to take a puff on her cigarette.

“You know, this is the first time I’ve ever told a man about this,” she said, looking at me. “I’m telling it to you because I think I ought to, but I’m finding it awfully embarrassing.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

“This went on for a while, and then her right hand started to move down, and she touched me through my panties. By then, I was absolutely soaking wet. I’m ashamed to say it, but I’ve never been so wet before or since. I had always thought of myself as kind of indifferent to sex, so I was astounded to be getting so worked up. So then she puts these slim, soft fingers of hers inside my panties, and … well, you know, I can’t bring myself to put it into words. I mean, it was totally different from when a man puts his clumsy hands on you there. It was amazing. Really. Like feathers or down. I thought all the fuses in my head were going to pop. Still, somewhere in my fogged-over brain, the thought occurred to me that I had to put a stop to this. If I let it happen once, I’d never stop, and if I had to carry around a secret like that inside me, my head was going to get completely messed up again. I thought about my daughter, too. What if she saw me like this? She was supposed to be at my parents’ house until three on Saturdays, but what if something happened and she came home unexpectedly? This helped me to gather my strength and raise myself on the bed. ‘Stop it now, please stop!’ I shouted.

“But she wouldn’t stop. Instead, she yanked my panties down and started using her tongue. I had rarely let even my husband do that, I found it so embarrassing, but now I had a thirteen-year-old girl licking me all over down there. I just gave up. All I could do was cry. And it was absolutely paradise.

“‘Stop it!’ I yelled one more time, and smacked her on the side of the face. As hard as I could. Finally, she stopped and raised herself up and looked into my eyes. The two of us were stark naked, on our knees, in bed, staring at each other. She was thirteen, I was thirty-one, but, I don’t know, looking at that body of hers, I felt totally overwhelmed. The image is still vivid in my mind. I could hardly believe I was looking at the body of a thirteen-year-old girl, and I still can’t believe it. By comparison, what I had for a body was enough to make you cry. Believe me.”

There was nothing I could say, and so I said nothing.

“‘What’s wrong?’ she says to me. ‘You like it this way, don’t you? I knew you would the first time I met you. I know you like it. It’s way better than doing it with a man—isn’t it? Look how wet you got. I can make you feel even better if you’ll let me. It’s true. I can make you feel like your body’s melting away. You want me to do it, don’t you?’ And she was right. Doing this with her was much better than doing it with my husband. And I
did
want her to do it even more! But I couldn’t let it happen, ‘Let’s do this once a week,’ she said. ‘Just once a week. Nobody will find out. It’ll be our little secret.’

“But I got out of bed and put on my robe and told her to leave and never come back. She just looked at me. Her eyes were absolutely flat. I had never seen them that way before. It was as if they had been painted on cardboard. They had no depth. After she stared at me for a while, she gathered up her clothing without a word and, as slowly as she could, as if she was making a show of it, she put on each piece, one at a time. Then she went back into the room where the piano was and took a brush from her bag. She brushed her hair and wiped the blood from her lips with a handkerchief, put on her shoes, and went out. As she was leaving, she said, ‘You’re a lesbian, you know. It’s true. You may try to hide it, but you’ll be a lesbian until the day you die.’

“Is it true?” I asked.

Reiko curved her lips and thought for a while. “Well, it is and it isn’t. I definitely felt better with her than with my husband. That’s a fact. I had a time there when I really agonized over the question. Maybe I really was a lesbian and just hadn’t noticed until then. But I don’t think so anymore. Which is not to say I don’t have the tendencies. I probably do have them. But I’m not a lesbian in the proper sense of the term. I never feel desire when I look at a woman. Know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“Certain kinds of girls, though, do respond to me, and I can feel it when that happens. Those are the only times it comes out in me. I can hold Naoko in my arms, though, and feel nothing special. We go around in the apartment practically naked when the weather is hot, and we take baths together, sometimes even sleep in the same bed, but nothing happens. I don’t feel a thing. I can see that she has a beautiful body, but that’s all. Actually, Naoko and I played a game once. We made believe we were lesbians. Want to hear about it?”

“Sure. Tell me.”

“When I told her the story I just told you—we tell each other everything, you know—Naoko tried an experiment. The two of us got undressed and she tried caressing me, but it didn’t work at all. It just tickled. I thought I was going to die laughing. Just thinking about it makes me itchy. She was so clumsy! I’ll bet you’re glad to hear
that.”

“Yes, I am, to tell the truth.”

“Well, anyway, that’s about it,” said Reiko, scratching near an eyebrow with the tip of her little finger. “After the girl left my house, I found a chair and sat there spacing out for a while, wondering what to do. I could hear the dull beating of my heart from deep inside my body. My arms and legs seemed to weigh a ton, and my mouth felt as if I had eaten a moth or something, it was so dry. I dragged myself to the bathtub, though, knowing my daughter would be back soon. I wanted to clean those places where the girl had touched and licked me. I scrubbed myself with soap, over and over, but I couldn’t seem to get rid of the slimy feeling she had left behind. I knew I was probably imagining it, but that didn’t help. That night, I asked my husband to make love to me, kind of as a way to get rid of the defilement. Of course, I didn’t tell him anything—I couldn’t. All I said to him was that I wanted him to take it slow, to give it more time than usual. And he did. He really concentrated on every little detail, he really took a long, long time, and the way I came that night, oh yes, it was nothing I had ever experienced before, never once in all our marriage. And why do you think that was? Because the touch of that girl’s fingers was still there in my body. That’s all it was.

“Oh, man, is this embarrassing! Look, I’m sweating! I can’t believe I’m saying these things—he ‘made love’ to me, I ‘came’!” Reiko smiled, her lips curved again.

“But even this didn’t help. Two days went by, three, and her touch was still there. And her last words seemed to keep echoing and echoing in my head.

“She didn’t come to my house the following Saturday. My heart was pounding all day long while I waited, wondering what I would do if she showed up. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. She never did come, though. Of course. She was a proud young thing, and she had failed with me in the end. She didn’t come the next week, either, nor the week after that, and soon a month went by. I figured that I would be able to forget about what had happened when enough time went by, but I couldn’t forget. When I was alone in the house, I would feel her presence and my nerves would be on edge. I couldn’t play the piano, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t do anything during that first month. And then one day I realized that something was wrong whenever I left the house. The people in the neighborhood were looking at me in a strange new way. There was a new
distance in their eyes. They were as polite as ever with their greetings, but there was something different in their tone of voice and in their behavior toward me. The woman next door, who used to pay me an occasional visit, seemed to be avoiding me. I tried not to let these things bother me, though. Start noticing things like that, and you’ve got the first signs of illness.