The Electrical Field (23 page)

Chisako flicked her hand again, this time to say she wanted no more of the topic. She stared into her teacup. I
thought of how she’d lingered before her reflection; I was convinced that if I now returned to that abandoned room, I’d find it there in the mirror, just as she’d appeared to me that day.

“Do you read tea-leaves, Saito-san?” she asked, holding out her cup to me. I looked at the meaningless scatter, the disorder trapped there.

“No, no.” I slid back in my chair, away from the cup. The sight of those fragments set off a churning inside me, a wariness of what was to come. I feared more was expected of me than I was capable of giving. “I don’t know these things,” I muttered.

“Come now, Asako.” She coaxed me forward. “Just tell me what you see. There’s nothing more to it.” She laughed gently and grasped my wrist, pulling me hard towards her and the cup. “Please,” she let out in a desperate singing whisper. “Please,” she repeated in a squeal that was no longer her voice but simply a sound, one I’d heard once before. It threatened to disturb me now as it had then. I pulled away from her with equal force as she tugged me towards her, unrelenting. My hand was white from her grasping; she was a strong, vital woman, after all. This was how it happened; it wasn’t entirely my fault, my clumsiness. For as I resisted her, my other elbow jerked back, knocking my cup, from the tray to the floor, the tea casting its shadow of green over the ivory carpet. Instantly she let go.

I gasped. “Gomen nasai,” I uttered frantically, scanning the room for a cloth to blot up the stain. I dropped to my knees and began scrubbing with my sleeve. I could not bring myself to look at Chisako. I felt her hand, gentler, place itself
on my arm, urging me up. “Now then, Asako. You must do as I ask. As a kindness. Don’t worry about the carpet. Green tea doesn’t stain, you know that.”

Once again she held out the cup. I looked and still saw nothing; I felt like one of those little leaves, doused and flung about. But slowly, undone as I was, an image began to collect, or rather it was there waiting, like an eye, watching and waiting to be met by my own.

“What is it? Tell me!” Why it was so vital to her to know what I’d glimpsed in that cup, what it meant to her fate, I could not understand. In the end it could not have meant much. But I reported what I saw: what seemed plain as day to me there.

“It’s Yano’s dog,” I responded dutifully, pointing to the cup’s curving wall.

“No.” When she shook her head, she reminded me of a doll whose stuffing has thinned at its neck.

“There’s the snout,” I said, pointing. “And the tail.” The plume was what had caught my attention; it was unmistakeable.

Chisako stared intently into the cup for a second, shook her head again, then set the whole tray aside. “No, no, no,” she repeated, emphatically. “There must be something else. It’s only because you see that dog all the time. Now you’re imagining it here in my cup. How silly.” She began to pace the small room, which barely took a few steps back and forth.

Her response was perplexing. Why it should bother her so, this image that had shown itself, was a mystery to me.

“Baka no inu,” Chisako muttered, still pacing, her hands twisting. “Stupid, stupid dog,” she exclaimed, louder now,
with such vehemence. Then it struck me. If I had only thought of it before I spoke, I would have said something else, anything that popped into my head: a cat, a pig, a tree.

“We—Mr. Spears and I—we were visiting together at our spot. The little lot by the hill.” She paused briefly. “Perhaps you know it, Asako.” A vexed look danced across her face, as if this referred to something she wished to take up with me but would drop for the time being. Then a smile spread on her lips, the memory come out to play.

“Of course, we considered … a hotel, but that seemed too … well, you know. But Mr. Spears, he enjoys being out of doors. Especially now that summer’s almost here. Out in the wilds, he says.” Perhaps I imagined the flush of red beneath her powder as she told me this.

“It’s like a picnic, ne? I make those little sandwiches cut in triangles. A bit of tuna with parsley. I trim off the crusts just as you told me to, Asako. So they are smooth and white all around. He likes them like that.”

I lowered my voice. “Is that how Yano found out? The dog?” I began. I tried to recall seeing Yano without his dog, some late afternoon when I heard him calling out for it, when it might have strayed.

Chisako grew vexed again. “Baka no inu,” she repeated, cutting me off. “Dogs are such filthy creatures, aren’t they, Asako? They sniff around everywhere. They clean themselves with their own tongue.”

“Was Yano there, with the dog?” I dared to ask.

Chisako shook her head vigorously, if only to stop me from saying more. “Yano is a smart man after all. He may not know, yet he suspects.” She closed her eyes. “A man
knows his wife.” She must have learned this from one of her soap operas. Without opening her eyes, she sat back in her chair and stretched herself out, like a yawning animal. “He knows her body,” she said. Was this the voice she’d used to seduce her Mr. Spears? Or, I wondered bitterly, did she play the Japanese coquette? Covering her mouth when she giggled girlishly? Suddenly Chisako seemed quite ludicrous, even hateful, to me: a middle-aged woman, a mother, pretending to be a girl, playing the exotic temptress. I could see she was savouring some private moment, reliving it even as I sat there, and I was even more ludicrous, if that was possible. Waiting patiently, obediently, as she did so. I felt nauseated watching her with her eyes closed too long. I felt like some peeping Tom. She’d reduced me to that. I cleared my throat, rather too loudly, but I wanted to shake her. I wanted to punish this greedy woman, she who thought she could have everything she ever desired. For the first time I felt sympathy for Yano. This poor, ugly man being deceived by this heartless woman, beautiful as she was.

But suddenly she seemed to fall apart. Her face dropped into her hands, cupped as if to catch it. I’d witnessed her tears before, been moved by them, then later become suspicious. She sobbed silently at first but then her cries began to rack the air, and she waved at the television, and I, not understanding, looked in vain at the nick-nacks surrounding it. In that instant I glimpsed among them the glass dome with the rose, Mr. Spears’ gift. Chisako shook her head angrily, then flung out a hand to the knob. Instantly the screen flashed, blaring with crass voices and faces as she sobbed.

“He won’t leave her!” she cried. I tried to conceal my
impatience with her; what had become, for the first time, not envy but disdain.

“Who? His wife?” I had to say the word that she could not. “Of course he won’t leave his wife. Did you think he would?” She nodded meekly, acknowledging for once how naive she’d been. I felt the callousness in my tone, the superiority, and her cringing from it.

“He said he would.”

“And you believed him?” I was shouting above the noise of the television. I glanced at the screen, into the large faces of women, a jumble of colours and shapes. A soap opera, which told me it was already past noon. I reached over and turned it off.

Instantly she clicked it back on, angrily. “Kimi-chan, she’ll hear!” and she pointed to the wall. In the midst of it all, Chisako did not forget her daughter, her homely, sullen child in the next room. She slumped down, cradling her face in her hands. The rhythm of her sobs, of her body’s tremors, did not stop. It was a punishment inflicted on me, to have to watch. To see such passion, such pain, which I would never have in my life. Revenge for I didn’t know what.

At last her sobs turned to weeping. In spite of the puffiness and redness of her eyes, the blotches, there was a frightening clarity there, an understanding directed at me.

“You are so cold, Saito-san,” she said. “I would never want to be so cold.”

I was not stunned by what she said. I was not insulted, not wounded. For it was not the first time she’d said such a thing. I’d come to know it to be true. All my life, what I’d felt had been the promise of nothing. The risk of nothing,
which had frozen me to ice. Even as a child, as a girl adoring her older, handsome brother, I had been capable of great restraint.

I went to the window and clipped the curtain aside. Across the yard, the woman had disappeared from her kitchen. The window-ledge she had been cleaning was now neatly lined with small potted plants.

“You will not understand this, Asako.” Chisako’s controlled whisper reached me through the television’s blare. “But I have been special to him.” I turned not to her but to those plants at the neighbour’s window, the first in line with its budding blossoms.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me he made you feel special too,” I spat. I was steeping her love in bitter brine. Even I knew these cliches. Hadn’t I myself said such things on more than one occasion, blindly, blithely dispensing advice to a young schoolgirl experiencing her first love? And hadn’t I known that in every word Sachi had detected my ignorance, my despised naivety?

“If you mean to ask me about our sexual relationship, Asako, then I will tell you that yes, it is wonderful.” Chisako was ruthless, bringing me face to face with a certain experience of life I’d been denied, rubbing my nose in it.

“And I suppose you’re wondering if it’s true what they say about hakujin men, compared with nihonjin. Aren’t you, Asako? Ne?” She seemed to jab at me, in her delicate way, with these loathsome words. It was not the first time she’d brought up this topic, this crude preoccupation, though I was never certain if it was merely to taunt me.

I continued to stare at the flowerpots set in the window
across the way. African violets, alternating purple and white. I clung to them, unblinking, concentrating as hard as I could—in so doing, forbidding her to utter another word. She could go too far. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t doubt your superior knowledge in this matter,” I snapped back.

This seemed only to encourage her. “Well, Asako,” she replied, bristling, “I cannot say for all, but I can say that with my friend I feel very—” For some reason she froze then, watching me.

Several seconds elapsed. “Yes? Go on.” I was completely composed by then. Had drawn myself up. I urged her on with my cold, cold authority. It was true what Stum had said of me: I could be formidable.

But she remained frozen there, staring at me, unable to go on. After a time she closed her eyes again, shutting out the sight of me. Suddenly she relented. “I tell you these things, Asako, only because I wish for you to experience them too, some day. But not for you to suffer as I do. I want you to find pleasure in what is good.” She said this gravely, solemnly; as trite as it sounded, I almost believed her. Her eyelashes pressed into the puffy flesh beneath her eyes, which were locked shut. I almost laughed, with the rattle of my nerves, but controlled myself. I reminded myself of the reason I’d been summoned here; me, Chisako’s lowly lady-in-waiting.

“You see, it’s true: I am special to him.” She leaned back in her chair, eyes still shut, entirely at ease like this. “But perhaps not special enough.

“Mr. Spears is a handsome man. To see yourself in such a man’s eyes, as he holds you—” She grew breathless, absurdly
so. Yet I was touched, I could not deny it. “I find I can’t stop myself.” I believed her; I believed her powerlessness. Her wanting to be powerless.

“His eyes,” she murmured. “So deep and large. Not like nihonjin.” Her voice turned petty, against herself. “So small, like slits.”

I found myself poised at the edge of my chair. Wanting to touch her, console her. Be of some use. “But Chisako, you are … utsukushii.” Tearfully I said this, believing it with all my heart. It was the word Eiji had used to describe cherry blossoms to me. When they first bloom. Their fleshy pink in spring. This is what I recalled as Chisako sat with me, her eyes pressed shut, each a furled bloom.

Blindly she shook her head. “No, Asako. You are being kind, I know. Yano says that to me too. Not often, but he whispers it in my ear now and then. He can be a fool too, you see. After all the ugliness he saw in Japan, I am beautiful to him.” I thought of Yano as he had once stood before Chisako’s haphazard arrangement of withered daisies. Utsukushii, he’d murmured, amid her derisive laughter.

Sitting in her small room, opposite me, Chisako was smiling a private smile into the darkness before her. That same darkness threatened to engulf me as well, even as I sat wide open to the light. “It was terrible,” Chisako went on. “Maybe Yano told you. Such sickness, ne? People shut themselves away. It was better they kill themselves, to spare their loved ones the sight of them, day after day.” She shuddered. “But you must know all this, Asako. Ne?”

I nodded, though she could not see me. She seemed to sense my movements, to move in sympathy with me. She
paused to let me take all this in, even as her eyes remained tightly shut. Now it appeared, from the twisting of her lips, that she was attempting to quell a nausea arising from these thoughts.

It was not entirely true that I knew what Chisako spoke of. I understood the facts of it. I could recall sitting by the Nakagawas’ contraband radio in the camp, hearing the news unfold, distant and elusive as the speck Eiji had pointed to on Port Dover’s horizon. In my girlish mind I saw a tiny upward rush of dust; I thought of those patches of matsutake deep in the forest, away from the camp, when they said “mushroom cloud”.

“Yano told me it was like paradise for you, coming here,” I said quietly. I scrutinized her face for the slightest twitch or tremor. She didn’t move. I wondered if she had fallen asleep.

Her eyes finally opened with a startled yet languorous expression, as if she were waking from deep, satisfying slumber. “I would not say paradise,” she said, “but I am grateful Yano brought me here, away from that place.” A tear rolled down her cheek, melting away what was left of her makeup, exposing the marred skin under it.

“I’m so sorry, Chisako,” I stammered. “Your family, your parents, they were in Hiroshima …”

Chisako’s eyes suddenly seemed to hold a smile, though her mouth did not, and the trace of that tear remained. “Asako, you are confused,” she said. “My parents died before the war. I never saw those things, but of course I heard.” Her eyes shut.