Raw Silk (9781480463318) (35 page)

“I guess not; I’m impressed. But on the other hand, look at Montgolfier’s balloons. You could hardly find a closure more symmetrical, either in the functioning, or in the paintings round the rim.”

“You know what they look like?”

“C’mon, they sell cheap prints of them for college rooms. There’s nothing esoteric in knowing about balloon design.”

“Well.” He chewed the last of the fourth muffin round and said through it, “It’s a paradox then. I’m a paradox. I can handle that. Why do you care so much for pattern?”

“I come by it honestly too, I guess. My dad was the careful old kind of carpenter that wouldn’t put two boards together out of true, and wouldn’t work for anyone who wanted it sloppier than his principles. It kept us poor, his principles. But when he drove the last nail in a cabinet or a hamburger stand—I watched him do it—and stood back, you knew that something had been accomplished. Brought to closure.”

“You liked him? Your dad?”

“Yes. You remind me of a soap opera.”

“That’s a pretty shitty thing to say.”

“No, it’s only an idea I had once, that the reason soap operas work is that the men in them listen to the women.”

“Don’t men listen to women?”

“See? You give a distinct impression of wanting an answer to that.”

“I do. Don’t they?”

“Not in my experience. Well, some do. Queers listen.”

“I think that’s a pretty shitty thing to say.”

We laughed, he paid his bill and I paid mine; he ushered me out the door and south along the streetcar line toward the Demachi Yanagi. He walked with a loping lurch; his head leaped forward annoyed that his legs wouldn’t follow it fast enough. I skipped to keep up, then he’d notice I was falling behind and miss his stride to wait for me. So we proceeded, creaky-pullied, into the low-rent shopping section at the bottom of Gosho Park. He didn’t talk while he walked, he put all his concentration into getting there, but when we hit the street of shops he pulled up under a streetlamp and brought out, “It’s probably that they’re afraid of finding out how mad you are.”

“What?”

He stuck his fingers under the spiky hair to scratch his nape. “If men don’t listen. They’re probably afraid of finding out how angry women are. Because otherwise they wouldn’t would they?”

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Find out. I mean, it’s socially acceptable for a woman to show fear but no anger, isn’t it? Just as it’s socially acceptable for a man to show anger but not fear.”

All my life I have been running up against stuff from dubious sources that seemed to me important and profound. Once my mother gave me a book called
Helen Welshimer’s Talks to Girls,
which contained the opinion that the three necessities of happiness were: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for. It also contained a number of parables proving that you should brush your teeth and carry Jesus along with you in your sex life, so I have known that this formula was to be distrusted. Still, I have not found a better. Once a dorm counselor at art college, comforting me over a souring romance with a mulatto graphics student named Chips Bayena, assured me that there was no issue of politics, race, religion or class that could not be overcome in a love affair, “as long as you like the way his hair grows down the back of his neck.” This lady read
McCall’s
and
The Upper Room,
in the former of which I found a variation of this insight also printed. Still, it keeps coming back to me with more force than, say, “Remember the Lord thy God, to keep his commandments,” or “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart.” I think I have a female mind, but I don’t know what to do about it.

“That sounds pretty … fucking accurate to me,” I said.

We tried four little shops in quick succession, where Montgolfier pawed through trays of wooden, glass, bamboo and metal beads, and finally settled on a string composed of carved cedar balls punctuated at intervals by cylinders of ivory.

“You think?”

“You’ve got taste. I just wonder if Catman does.”

“I think I’ll risk it.” He pressed the bottom on his digital watch. “I’ll have to get him out of the hotel by ten. Shall we taxi back?”

Montgolfier hadn’t Japanese enough either to make the bead transaction—he held up fingers and grunted, used pidgin English and spread his money on his palm—or to direct the taxi driver, which I therefore did. I thought it pretty poor to be in Japan six months and not be able to buy a string of beads. But even as I was making this judgment he pointed out the window at a tea shop with a marquee in English.

“Look at that:
DRINK FOR LADY, WITH NUTS.
I saw one called
SNACK OF LADIES
once. And the monorail in Tokyo—have you been on the monorail? That accordion sort of section between the cars, they call it the diaphragm and you’re not supposed to leave your luggage there. So there’s a sign,
DEPOSITING ON THE DIAPHRAGM IS NOT ALLOWED.
They show up our language, don’t they? Don’t they show our language up?”

So I told him about my proposition on the Takayama train, and when he guffawed at it I laughed as well, with a nervous sense of being untrue to myself, betraying a perspective that was only temporarily in abeyance.

I sat in the restaurant section with a cup of coffee again while Montgolfier went up to get Catman, and after a while they came down, Catman hunchbacked under his pack and the minister drawing him along with both hands, one on his elbow and the other on the string of beads, as if he were leading an animal. He urged him out the double doors, and I turned to watch through the window as Montgolfier hailed a taxi, hugged the boy, said something intensely close to his face, and put him in. He made the peace sign again and stuck his head in to talk to the driver—I guess after all he could make a destination clear if he wanted to—then stood in the middle of the traffic lane gesturing peace till the cab was out of sight. He came back in and ordered coffee, preoccupied and moody once again.

“You did all you could.”

“No. No, I didn’t. I should’ve gone with him to the train. But it’s my last day in Kyoto and I haven’t seen the Koko Dera. Don’t you think it would be some kind of crime against aesthetics not to see the Koko Dera?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it.”

“You haven’t? And you were here two weeks?”

“I told you, everything was closed when I got out of the Center. And it was too far away for the weekend, when there was so much else to see.”

“That’s got to be a crime against aesthetics. Have you got plans?”

“Well”—my handbag was in my lap and I clutched the top of it over my passport case—“I’ve got one errand to run, to … confirm my ticket, but I could do it this afternoon, I guess.”

“We’ll take a taxi. It’s not that far.” He sloshed his coffee cup and frowned. “I should have gone with him to the train.”

“It probably wouldn’t have made much difference.”

“No, I guess you’re right. But … it’s Christian greed again. Haven’t you ever felt that you failed at something, not because you could’ve done any good, but because you didn’t do all you could’ve done that wouldn’t have done any good?”

And then—it doesn’t seem to me that I had any choice in the matter; the frame, the context had been provided and it was reflex, necessity, to fill it—I began to tell him about Frances and I ended telling him all about Frances. Her coming to East Anglian, her circular reasoning, her suicide attempt, her paintings, the Rubigo, the windowpane, Holloway, the Carnaby Award, the Dorset home. It tumbled out headlong. I’d never spoken of her to anyone since Malcolm left, and I thought I was talking too long, that we should be getting to the Koko Dera; but when I said so Montgolfier restrained me, ordered more coffee, told me to go on. Sometimes I stumbled, contriving slightly to leave out Oliver’s part, out of loyalty to Oliver maybe but also out of more immediate loyalty to Montgolfier. We’d set up the self-protective rules of our conversation, and they included only warm and positive references to home.

He listened—well, I’ve already established that he listened. When I got to the Dorset home he sat very still, with his hands in his lap, one over the other and the fingers twined, nodding, nodding me on.

“She couldn’t come over the doorsill. I know a little of how that feels. But all the same I do it. She couldn’t. Could, not. I don’t think she ever will.” And he turned up a look of such simple comprehension that I had to drop my eyes.

“It’s a drag, isn’t it?” he said. “But it’s not your fault.”

“No. Neither is Catman in Hiroshima yours.”

“No. Okay, that’s a more than fair exchange. Thanks.”

“Thanks.”

Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks.

K
OKO DERA. THE MOSS
Temple. Acres, I don’t know how many, of moss-carpeted rolling park. Moss in mottlings of color from gray to green to lime to gold to amber to brown, lit greener through the pines, lit gold and scarlet through the turning deciduous autumn trees, moss underfoot in the paths and eiderdown-deep on the riverbanks. All the blues of the sky are rescinded in green and amber light. Steppingstones and carp ponds, bamboo groves and fern, parakeets calling attention to their color through the leaves. Having learned how to talk in the morning, I learned how to be still at noon. On a September Monday we had Koko Dera, not to ourselves, but to a degree of emptiness that made the few
kimono
ed strollers mere decoration, figures on a ground. I don’t know if the Koko Dera is natural or man-made, and Montgolfier didn’t know, and we agreed not to buy a guidebook. But if man-made, then the landscape artist knew a little about omnipotent form, and if natural, then nature must have something approaching an artist’s turn of mind. It calmed me, but breathlessly.

Montgolfier, also, who had lunged and talked as if incapable of repose, now strolled and was silent, sat, said nothing or almost nothing for an hour. Sounds shifted through the light and shadow in a pattern of their own: shells strung from a shingled boathouse, bells, the leaves fluent, water flowing, bird call. There was a full, hollow resonant whack from time to time, distant and deceptive as the paths wound in various ways. Finally we came upon its source, a thick bamboo segment resting on a stone and at an angle across a rod. A narrow trough spilled water into it from the stream above. When the bamboo was full, the weight of the water tipped it forward to spill itself empty in the stream, and the bamboo rocked back and struck the stone with the shuttle whack, to be filled again. Carp, gray but of majestic—pompous!—size and grace, ignored the sound and drifted round the stone.

I said, calmly but conscious that the calm was fragile, “Would you mind stopping here a while? I’d like to sketch that. I tried to do the carp in Takayama, but it didn’t work.”

“Sure, do.”

I didn’t have my sketchbook, having abandoned it in Takayama, but I had
Black Rain,
so I opened the hard cover and used it as both easel and sheet, propping it on my knees. Montgolfier lay back in the moss, not watching, for which I was grateful. Thanks. I sketched, the bank and the bamboo and one carp. I tried for the sense of movement, the tension of fish against water and water weight in wood, but it didn’t have that, it was a sketch like a convalescent’s walk. It was well composed, and minor; the things were recognizable. It was a start.

“Can I see?”

“I’d rather you didn’t. It isn’t very good. Do you mind? Professional arrogance; it’s only an
esquisse,
not meant for public consumption.”

“Whatever you say.”

Reluctantly, we headed out of the park. And emerging blinking, bloated, cloyed with the romance of the Koko Dera, we crossed over to the Koryuji Temple, which houses the earliest art treasures of Japan. This—I adjusted to it jerkily—was an experience palpably cultural, palpably good for me. The great stone and wooden buddhas are so familiar from reproduction that it was hard to find them interesting, though with a certain effort I could see that they were genuinely serene. Montgolfier was a good guide here—he found his energy again—because he knew all the symbols, even of the Thousand-Armed Kwannon, who holds the mirror for beauty, scepter for power, balm for comfort, a sword for—oddly—cutting through to the heart of truth. And a dozen, though not a thousand, others I’ve forgotten. The demons were impressively savage and the twelfth-century beams were silver-gray as polished stone, and my feet began to hurt.

“Do you know about the lotus symbol?”

He’d stopped in front of a granite figure, serenity epitomized but missing half its nose, with one hand held forward in the sign Montgolfier had sent off after Catman, and in the other an open lotus, blade-sharp petals ascending from the palm. I was put in mind of France’s frog and the lily that murdered it.

“Not really.”

“Well, the lotus is rooted in the river mud, and the stem pushes up through water so that its head, the blossom, lives in air. And it sends its fragrance toward Nirvana, like the meditation of an aspiring mind.”

“That’s the chain of being, isn’t it? Isn’t it the same as Christianity?”

“How so?” He was leaning over the barrier to study the figure’s hand.

“Earth, water, air and fire. The medieval Christians believed that the universe was a chain from the foot of God, with everything in its rank and place, from the lowest inorganic rock, through plants and animals to man, whose mind made him half an angel. It’s the same idea, isn’t it, except that the Middle Ages thought of it the other way around, everything descending link by link from the foot of God.”

“Hey.” He turned and frowned at me. “You’re all right, aren’t you?”

Everything changed.

Everything changed, the jig was up; he held my eyes too long. I held his back. Jesus Christ, I thought, human beings are the dimmest, damnedest creatures. The goddam chain of being, out of, what was it, my sophomore year? Jesus Christ. Fidelity is a way of life, but there’s no decision in it. It just is: I’m going to bed with him.

Everything having changed, he bounced restlessly past the rest of the imperial treasures.

“That’s a piss-pernicious idea, though, everything in its rank and place.”