Except he wasn’t. She went upstairs, past people sitting or standing on the steps. Downstairs, into the study. He wasn’t there. Neither were his mushrooms.
She realized where he was. She went through the house. Strangers everywhere. On her patio too, cigarette ends wavering like fireflies, voices confidential. She walked past them, out onto the lawn. The grass was blue under the starlight. The sweat lodge a dense black oblong. She opened the door.
There they were, the whole Vanishing Breed. None of them had any clothes on. Just her father’s masks. She was thankful for the steam.
“Karmala. Finally. Close the door and grab a mask. It’ll do you good. The bowl is over there on the bench.”
She couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. The mask her father had been wearing was there, but it was atop the body of a flabby woman now. Steam drifted, hiding and revealing faces. She remembered them all from childhood: the curly-mustached green face with the earrings and the dot between the eyebrows; the slit-eyed face circled in fur; the long face from her nightmares with the striped cheeks and the O for a mouth; the straw-haired Protector . . . She recognized all of the faces, but had no idea which one belonged to her father.
Ichiban
Daiji was a college student when he first began to receive specific and more or less reliable information about the night world. On Monday mornings his classmates would recount for him their weekend exploits in Tokyo’s neon labyrinth: he heard about soaplands, where you were bathed in bubbly mountains of suds, then treated to sex right there on the slippery mat; and image clubs, where your chosen partner came to you as a stewardess, or as a nurse, or as a bride, or in any other costume you could imagine. And he heard about hostess clubs, where women as beautiful as TV actresses drank with you at your own private table. He heard about all these places, his friends educating him with a smirking, embarrassed bravado he secretly despised. But Daiji couldn’t afford to experience the night world firsthand. That, at least, was what he would tell his classmates when they invited him along on one of their drunken adventures.
After college he was too busy with work to let himself think about the pleasures available to him now that he had a good salary. He didn’t want to be distracted. Then also there was the habit of self-denial he had learned in all the years he had spent studying for high school and college entrance exams. He had taught himself that rewards were things to be postponed. (Once he got as far as the mirrored door of “The Shining Empire,” but then, confronted by his own earnestly frowning reflection, spun around and hurried away.)
It wasn’t until after he was married that Daiji started to explore Tokyo’s night world for himself. He would patiently set aside money from the small allowance given to him by his wife, practicing every possible austerity, exercising nearly ascetic restraint, to create another, even smaller allowance, with which he awarded himself a clandestine monthly visit to a pleasure palace. What he discovered was this: he didn’t like sex clubs. They made him feel exposed and ugly. Taking off his clothes in front of the girl was bad enough; but some insisted on helping him, smilingly unbuttoning his dress shirt (the last button was the worst), to reveal a quivering expanse of flab, like some awful present that should never have been opened. They might not have cared—anyway if they did they were always tactful enough not to show it—but he cared. Also, something about sex with a stranger felt wrong. Maybe it was because there was no flirtation, no pretense of romantic interest. Anyway he left these places feeling worse than when he had entered.
He found, to his surprise, that he preferred the hostess clubs, although there was no sex on offer at all. Instead, a seemingly endless parade of women joined him, one at a time, in a secluded booth. They knew how to talk to him. If he disparaged himself because of his weight or appearance, he was told that a heavy build and “frank” features were “signs of a real man”; and the hostess would go on to make fun of the angular, effeminate pretty boys so common in Japan today, the kind who spent their free time at the tanning salon or in front of the mirror plucking eyebrows. If, when asked his age, he sheepishly replied that he was thirty-five (“Basically over the hill, right?”), his partner would tell him she preferred older men: they were more mature and experienced. He knew, of course, that they were flattering him, and he soon realized that the women had all been taught the same soothing repertoire. It didn’t matter. Every time Daiji went to one of these clubs a stylized and abbreviated courtship was enacted. But, unlike a real courtship, it was rendered stress-free—by the professional skills of the women, and by the knowledge that they were, after all, only pretending.
If there was one thing that bothered him, it was the anxious wait at the table before the hostess arrived. He sat there, inert, helpless. The club’s invisible manager—like some fickle god who spoke only through his emissaries, the waiters—sent you a partner, and there was never any way to predict what sort of woman he would elect to confer upon you. For another five thousand yen you could, it was true, request the partner of your choice; but Daiji was on a strict budget, and he had never found anyone he liked so much that he was willing to exceed his allowance just to have her sit beside him again.
When, one night, he did finally make a request, it was for a woman he had never even met.
He was being shown to his seat when she swept past, a graceful figure in a silk cocktail dress. He caught only a glimpse: black hair, a pale throat, a face in profile. But it was enough. He thought: I hope someone like that comes to my table. Send me a good one tonight. And at first, when a hostess approached—his eyes registering a cascade of bronze curls and a skirt slit practically to the waist—he believed the manager had in fact favored him this evening. But then she sat down beside him, coming within the effective range of his vision, and he saw a plain face, coated with a layer of makeup which didn’t quite hide the furious red pimple on her chin . . .
The girl wouldn’t stop talking. She was a cheerfully self-absorbed monologuist, jabbering on obliviously in some rustic dialect she made no effort to correct.
“How about you?” she asked.
“What?” When he had stopped listening, about five minutes before, she had been fondly complaining about her hometown.
“Do you live in Tokyo?”
“No, in Saitama. I commute.”
“Me too!” she shrieked, grabbing his arm. “I commute too! It’s terrible, isn’t it?” She beamed at him with grateful fellow feeling, as if she had at long last found the one other person capable of understanding the trials of commuting to Tokyo every day.
He thought of the money he was wasting, and of the month-long wait before he would be able to come here again. When were they going to bring him someone new? He looked around the room, trying to make out the other prospects. Without his glasses, though, their faces were smudged featureless ovals. He always kept his glasses in his briefcase when he was at one of these clubs. They destroyed the fun-loving, carefree image he wanted to project.
“Who is that over there?”
“Hmm? Which one?”
“Second from the right. In the purple dress.”
The figure was hazy, but he thought it might be the woman he had glimpsed earlier.
“Purple dress? Oh. With her hair up? That’s Reina. Our Number One.”
Number One. He refused to feel awe at the words. Tokyo’s most popular hostesses enjoyed a special status. If TV dramas were to be believed, they led glamorous lives, vacationing on yachts and island resorts and sometimes bringing in more, between their salary and the gifts they received, than their wealthiest customers. Not that he bought into all that nonsense. In the end, they were just girls, after all, fundamentally no different than the one beside him right now.
“Is she your type?” the girl teased, giggling to show him she felt no jealousy or rivalry.
“I don’t know. I mean, I can’t really see from over here. I passed her when I came in and she looke
d . . . What’s she like?”
“Reina? She’s . . . very pretty. Do you want to invite her over?”
Invite her over? “No! Well. If— Would I be able to spend much time with her? Or would she be so busy . . . ?”
“Well, she might have to come and go, you know, if other customers request her. But tonight’s pretty quiet, so probably . . .”
And then, without really being sure what he was doing, he had gotten another five thousand yen tacked onto his bill for the privilege of having the club’s Number One sit next to him.
“It’s very brave,” the girl said after she put in his request with one of the waiters.
“What is?”
“Calling her over without ever having talked to her.”
“By ‘brave’ you mean ‘strange’?”
“No.” She patted his hand reassuringly. “It’s not strange. Just a little unusual. Because, you know, most men only request girls they’ve talked to before. That way they’re sure they’ll get along.”
“I hope I haven’t made a mistake . . .”
“Are you nervous?” She giggled again.
“A little, maybe . . .”
“But it’s exciting, isn’t it?”
And then a waiter came and called her away, and a moment later the club’s Number One stood over him.
“May I?” She gestured to the space beside him.
“Oh. Yes. Please.”
She sat down. From her purse she produced a card case. From the case she produced a business card. She presented it to him with both hands, bowing. “My name is Reina Aihara. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
As he accepted the card and stuck it in his breast pocket he looked her over.
Certainly she was pretty. She had sharp features set precisely in a pale round face. And there was what he had noticed when she passed him earlier: a slender, long-necked elegance, accentuated by the way her black hair was swept up into a perfect bun shaped like a seashell. Also, she had lovely, apparently poreless skin; if she wore makeup it was applied so subtly he couldn’t see it. Still, he felt faintly disappointed. For example, take that perfect skin. In a world where the women hid themselves behind a camouflage of dye jobs and hair extensions, color contacts and false eyelashes (not to mention the multihued splotches painted across their faces), her willingness to lay herself bare could be seen as courageous, but it could also imply an arrogant indifference to presentation. She might not need to wear makeup, but shouldn’t she put it on anyway, as a sign of respect to the customer? Then there was her smile. It happened on only one side of her face. The effect was so extreme that at first he suspected partial paralysis: one corner of her mouth rose up cooperatively enough; the other seemed to strain a little, but stayed right where it was.
She asked the typical questions about his life. Was he married? Yes. Did he have any children? No: not yet. What kind of work did he do? He worked in the dividend reinvestment department of a bank. She nodded with equal emphasis to every reply. He found himself mentioning, as if in passing, that he was a Tokyo University graduate. She made appropriate little awed sounds, and told him he must be very bright; but she didn’t look awed, and she didn’t treat him differently, the way people usually did . . . He even pulled back his sleeve, ostensibly to check the time, displaying the silver Rolex his parents had given him as a college graduation present. But she only said:
“Do you have to go now? Should I call for the check?”
Her cool formality started to bother him. The more he drank, the more it bothered him. He switched to plain Japanese, hoping it would encourage her to follow suit. She kept right on using honorific language, her words, like her manner, dignified and aloof. He sounded like a brute by comparison. But it was too late to go back to formal Japanese now. He soldiered on. He was drinking too much, he knew; he would be drunk soon. If he wasn’t already. It was all making him nervous, which made him drink more. And she kept obligingly refilling his glass from the decanter on the table.
And another thing: she didn’t touch his knee or his hand or his arm when she talked. She wasn’t flirting with him at all! How could this be the Number One?
Or maybe it was him. Maybe she just didn’t like him.
This thought had a temporarily sobering effect. His scalp went cold and seemed to shrink around his skull. Still, he was paying, wasn’t he? He was the customer here. There was no need to fawn all over her.
The man at the next table was giving his hostess a neck massage; her ecstatic moans suggested he was an expert masseur. At another table a guy was clasping the wrist of his partner and playing some sort of game with her fingers while she laughed hysterically. All around him, it seemed, paired figures nestled closer, inclining heads, merging fuzzily as they murmured to each other in the secretive voices lovers use.
“So,” he heard himself blurt, cutting her off in mid-sentence, “tell me: do you have a boyfriend or what?”
“No.” She dabbed daintily with her handkerchief at the condensation on his glass. “Not anymore.”
He instantly regretted the question. He must really be drunk, to ask something like that. What an idiot he was. Reverting to formal Japanese, he said: “I’m terribly sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that. It was—please forgive me.”
“No, it’s all right.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just, well, you’re very pretty and it seems odd, no, not odd, but surprising that you—”
“Really, it’s all right.” She paused. “We broke up last year. He couldn’t stand not being able to see me more. With this kind of work, it’s hard to have a relationship. And for me, now, my job comes first. I’m trying to save money, so I’m putting all my energy into it.”
“I respect that. I think that’s wonderful.”
He was about to ask her what she was saving for, but the waiter had come. He knelt and held out the leather folder containing the check. Daiji’s time was up.
In the past, after he paid, the girl beside him would always ask for his cell phone number and email address. But now the Number One was escorting him to the door, and she still hadn’t said a word. He couldn’t wait any longer.
“Do you think we could exchange contact information?” he asked.
***
The lights were all off in his apartment. He closed the door quietly, in case his wife had gone to bed. Then he slipped out of his shoes, and moved tentatively forward in the darkness.
A silvery light pulsed in the living room. His wife was sitting on the floor in her enormous pajamas. Hunched there in the dark before the TV screen, she looked to him for an instant like some nocturnal animal gazing up at the light of the moon.
“I’m home,” he said.
A sharp hand shot out of her sleeve and silenced him with a wave. On the TV a woman was giving a tearful account of some domestic nightmare or other. To conceal her identity, her face had been blurred and her voice electronically altered to sound like Minnie Mouse.
He stood there awkwardly, briefcase in hand, waiting for the commercial. They had been married for more than three years now, but she was still able to make him feel like an unwelcome visitor in his own home.
Courtship and marriage had not come easily to him. It had all been an ordeal that he had miraculously survived. After college, he had thought he might meet someone in his office. He was, after all, the assistant to the submanager, and well known to everyone as “that guy from Tokyo University.” But the women he worked with showed no interest in him. He watched them pair off with men in the office who had lower salaries and mediocre educational backgrounds. At twenty-seven he started to attend special parties organized for Tokyo University graduates and the women hoping to marry them. These were always ritzy affairs held in the banquet halls of the best hotels. The graduates mingled with stewardesses, models, and executive secretaries. Daiji marveled at the screening that must have been necess
ary to get only the best-educated and most beautiful prospective wives. But while his fellow graduates swooped down on their prey, bragging about jobs and cars and vacations abroad until the moment when, with a triumphant flourish, they could flip open their cell phones and deftly enter the women’s contact information, Daiji stood alone at a table munching forlornly on hors d’oeuvres and wondering what he could possibly use as an opening line. He knew he shouldn’t have to worry about this: he was a Tokyo University graduate, one of the elite, and these women were here to shop for men just like him. He had nothing to prove. But the end of these events always found him slumping home alone, dreading the inevitable inquiring call from his mother.
Finally, after his thirty-second birthday, his mother made it clear that she and his father didn’t intend to wait any longer. A matchmaker was arranged for. She was a friend of his mother, a squat ruddy woman who had known Daiji since he was a boy, although he couldn’t recall ever having spoken to her. Now she spread the forms out on the table with ceremonial care, as if laying out tarot cards. Her face, too, had the hokey solemnity of a soothsayer. Each form had a photo pasted into a space in the upper right corner. He scanned the pieces of paper, pretending to scrutinize the educational histories and work backgrounds of his potential future wives, while secretly letting his eyes stray to the little color photos. They were serious-faced women, all of them, staring back at him with the blank, composed look people have when their pictures are taken at the Department of Motor Vehicles. He had expected better candidates. He was a graduate of Japan’s number one university, wasn’t he? Not that they were ugly, but he couldn’t help thinking of the wives of his former classmates (all of whom were married by now); they seemed to be of a different class. Could it have something to do with the gap between high school and college on his curriculum vitae? Daiji had, it was true, failed the National Exam the first time. And as a result, he had spent twelve months in limbo, studying and worrying and waiting until he could try again the following winter. But did that one failure mean he wasn’t entitled to the best? The matchmaker wouldn’t say this in so many words. But he started to feel in her frustrated insistence that these were perfectly nice girls who would make wonderful wives a hint that he shouldn’t be aiming any higher, that his year in limbo effectively barred his entry to a better world. He became convinced that there were higher-class candidates—more beautiful, more sophisticated—that she was keeping from him. Accept reality, she seemed to be saying. Finally he agreed to meet one of the women in the photos . . .
The Involuntary Sojourner Page 10
