The Involuntary Sojourner

by S. P. Tenhoff

  The matchmaker, who had been pushy and maternal throughout the selection process, telling him authoritatively who would be best for him and why, seemed now to have lost her voice. She sat anxiously in her kimono at the end of the table while they all took perfunctory sips of green tea, he and the girl and both of their mothers. He had to admit it: the girl was, as the matchmaker had promised, better than her picture. Not beautiful, but above average, definitely. Her face was pleasant, and she came from a good family, and she was talkative, which annoyed him at first, but certainly made things easier for him on their dates, since he didn’t have to endure awkward silences: she would always fill those spaces with some kind of small talk. There was nothing at all wrong with her. On their fifth date, they went to a love hotel—she suggested it matter-of-factly as they drove past the fairy-tale-castle spire of the HappyTime Inn—and she was sweetly understanding when he got overexcited and spurted all over her thigh before anything had even really begun. He felt that he loved her then—for accepting him, for not making him feel ridiculous.

  His proposal set in motion a complex and mysterious machine, and before he knew it he and his new bride were bowing together in the dark wooden gleam of a shrine, gold panels dancing around them, while the priest, a young man with the face of a predatory bird, intoned blessings in a whining voice and shook zigzags of the purest white paper over their heads.

  “Dinner’s in the fridge,” his wife said when the commercial finally came. “You can heat it in the microwave.”

  He went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and then realized he was still holding his briefcase. He set it down and gazed into the cheerily lit box at bowls shrouded in translucent plastic wrap. He wasn’t hungry, really; in fact his stomach felt a little upset.

  What he really needed was a bath to calm him down. As he undressed and started the bathwater, he remembered the way his mother always had dinner and a hot bath ready for his father when he came home. His mother might not have been the sweetest wife, but she was a dutiful one. No one could take that away from her. Speaking of duties, he hadn’t called his parents in over a month. His mother would be feeling neglected. But he could already imagine the first words out of her mouth (after scolding him for not calling more). They were the same words she said every time he called: “Is she pregnant yet?” Producing a child: the next test for him to pass. There was no way to tell his mother that his present relationship with her daughter-in-law made it physically impossible to give her the grandchild she kept demanding.

  When he thought of his mother he often felt annoyance. Annoyance, and an obscure guilt. But now another feeling came over him—or maybe it had been there all along and he was just now noticing it—and it was so unfamiliar that at first he didn’t recognize the feeling for what it was.

  He sat on the tub’s edge listening to the roar of the water and gazing at his soft white legs splayed on the tile. It had never occurred to him that he was unhappy. If someone had asked him if he was satisfied with his life he would have said, “Sure, I’m as happy as anyone, I guess.” He never would have thought he had anything to be especially unhappy about. But now it seemed to him that the things that filled his life fell short.

  The tub was nearly overflowing. He turned off the faucet. Gingerly he dipped a foot into the steaming water (he had made it almost too hot), then stepped inside, one leg after the other, bracing himself against the rim of the tub and cautioning himself that he was still a little drunk. Cupping his hands over his crotch, he slowly lowered himself to a squat.

  He had hoped for more when he was young. Everyone did. There was nothing special in that. But not everyone graduated at the top of his high school class. Not everyone got into the nation’s best university. Hadn’t he earned the right to hope for more?

  The fact was, he had settled for second-best. In his job, certainly: it was the kind of work his mother had called “dependable.” And his marriage? His marriage was like his job: it had seemed challenging and hopeful in the beginning, but had turned out to be neither; instead, it was a routine that maintained itself as long as he put in the effort of showing up every day.

  He had settled for second-best in his life.

  But should he be blaming himself? Hadn’t he been led to believe that, with hard work and a good education, something more would be waiting for him? He scooped up a handful of water and splashed it over his clenched face. How could he blame himself when he had done everything he was supposed to do?

  By the time he climbed out of the tub he wasn’t sad anymore. Instead, he felt . . . outraged. As if he had been wronged. As if he were the victim of a broken promise.

  This feeling remained as he dried himself off and walked through the dark apartment. The television was off. His wife had gone to bed without saying good night. In the bedroom he heard her snoring wheezily from under a mound of covers. He crawled in beside her, making the bed rock more than was necessary and rustling the sheets. But she slept on, snored on.

  For a long time he lay on his back, unable to shake the sense that a promise had been broken. He felt almost sick. The main thing was to keep everything from moving. He lay very still. His mind, too, needed to be stilled. But the thought was there. A promise had been broken. The words seemed to turn and turn above him like the chirping birds that crown the injured heads of characters in children’s cartoons. They circled dizzyingly, accompanied by the music of his wife’s snoring.

  ***

  Daiji stared at his phone’s empty square, his thumb poised above the keypad. Occasionally the thumb twitched nervously, but otherwise it didn’t move. He had started and erased two text messages. Now he couldn’t decide what to write. He couldn’t decide whether he should be writing anything at all.

  When he checked his mail the morning after going to the club, he had expected a message from the Number One. In the past, when he gave a hostess his email address, she could always be counted on to compose for him a cute little text message right after she finished her shift, thanking him in a cryptic baby talk interspersed with the hearts and stars and smiley faces teenage girls put in as if in some new system of punctuation. But this time there was nothing. He waited another day. Nothing. He told himself he would wait one more day and then forget about her. She had said she would contact him; he may have been drunk, but he remembered that clearly. Still, she was Number One. Maybe she expected the customer to do the contacting. Maybe it was a kind of test. If so, what arrogance! What made her so different from the other women? The answer was simple: she was the most popular one in the club. If she had come to expect special treatment, there was nothing he could do about that. He either accommodated her, or . . . And if she was waiting for a message, he should send it soon. He had let three days slip by already. She might think he was rude. Or uninterested.

  He went into the office bathroom and locked himself in a stall. Hello Reina. All right: but what next? It was best to keep it simple: just thank her for the other evening. He keyed in and immediately erased this message. The point was this: he was the customer. Shouldn’t she be thanking him? In his second message he asked her how she was; he said he was worried, since he hadn’t heard . . . No. It sounded angry and desperate.

  His thumb twitched. He stared at the display.

  He had been in here on the stool for too long; people would start to wonder what had happened to him. All right. His thumb came down onto the pad decisively. Hello Reina. Sorry to be so late in writing to you. Thank you for the other night. I had a wonderful time. I hope I can see you again. And without giving himself a chance to change his mind, he selected SEND.

  Two days later she sent him a brief and very polite message thanking him for his email and for visiting the club. He read it five times, then sent a reply, thanking her for thanking him for his email, and asking if he might have the honor of inviting her to his table again the next time he visited the club. This time she answered almost immediately, telling
him she was the one who would be honored. And then, attached to the end of the message, came the inconsequential personal comment that passed through him like a tremor, leaving everything in its wake gaping and shattered: I’m so tired . . . After I finish this message I’m going to take a nice long bath.

  He started to check for messages five or six times a day. Although everyone in the office sent and checked mail during work hours, he found himself hiding his cell phone under the desk like a schoolboy using it to cheat on an exam . . . When, in one message, she warned him to take care because a typhoon was coming, he was touched at her concern, although he knew perfectly well that what she had written was nothing more than a formulaic expression. And when, in another message, she mentioned attending a friend’s wedding, and wondered whether she would ever get married herself, he felt his chest constrict with a horrible mixture of desire and regret.

  ***

  At the door he requested Reina. The doorman bowed and ushered him inside.

  The place was busier than it had been the time before, and almost half of his one-hour set passed before the Number One was able to come to his table. Daiji kept squinting, craning his neck, trying to distinguish her blurry shape from all of the others. After an initial attempt at conversation, the girl beside him had given up and, stiffening, primly withdrawn the knee that had been touching his. She gazed silently into her lap, where she clutched a damp flowered handkerchief. Every thirty seconds or so, the girl used the handkerchief to wipe away nonexistent condensation from his glass. Finally she was called away and the Number One took her place.

  “Thank you so much for asking to see me,” she said, bowing.

  The first time he met her this cool formality had unnerved him; this time, though, he had the memory of her text messages, and this changed everything: her most banal words seemed now to be perfumed with a secret meaning only he could detect . . .

  “I’m glad you remembered me,” she said.

  “How could I forget?” he said, smiling. The way these words came to his service impressed him (where had they come from?). The result was impressive too: she blushed and shyly averted her eyes.

  “Are you surprised to see me?” he said in an intimate tone, leaning toward her. He wasn’t nervous at all! For the first time in his life he felt suave and masterful.

  “Yes, very! Surprised and happy.”

  “I brought you something.” He opened his briefcase. “It’s nothing special; just a little thing, but . . .”

  She looked gravely at the package in his hand before accepting it. The look on her face made him feel like a messenger delivering bad news rather than a suitor offering a token of affection.

  She slowly unwrapped the package. Then she opened the box and took out his gift by its loop of chain, her fingers spread starfish-fashion. A gold pendant in the shape of a heart dangled from the chain. She set it gently on her other hand. Embedded in the heart was a diamond. It had seemed larger in the store; now it resembled a stray speck of glitter, something that could be wiped away with a stroke of her thumb. On her face was a look of pity—she might have been looking at a tiny wounded creature that had landed on her palm.

  He felt humiliated. The pendant was cheap. He had been assured that it was real gold—14 karat—and that the diamond was real too. But it was a poor man’s present, bought on sale at a discount department store. He couldn’t afford anything more with his allowance. He had overextended himself as it was.

  “Thank you.”

  She returned it to the box and quietly put the box in her purse.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know your taste, so I—”

  “It’s very nice. Thank you.”

  “But you don’t like it. I can take it back and get something else if you prefer . . .”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “Was I wrong to give you a present?”

  “It’s just that, well, to be honest, when men give me things, I feel like they’re expecting something in return.”

  “. . . Oh! No! No, I’m not expecting anything. I just gave it because I wanted to, because I wanted to express . . . So no, you know, no strings attached.”

  “Then thank you.”

  “So, is it all right? For me to have given you that. I know it wasn’t anything much. The problem is, I really don’t know what would make you happiest. If you would tell me . . .”

  She set an extra ice cube in his drink and stirred it meditatively before answering. “The easiest thing,” she said, “would be for us to go shopping together. We can have dinner afterward, and then you can come with me to the club. It’ll be a shopping date.”

  “Really? Yes! Yes, definitely.”

  A date! Then he thought of something.

  “Does it bother you that I’m married?”

  She seemed surprised by the question.

  “Not at all. I prefer married men. It makes everything less complicated.”

  ***

  The problem was money. Or, rather, the problem was his wife. Because his wife controlled the money. In the past, to save for his monthly visit to a club, he would, for instance, occasionally go hungry, skipping a meal (or if he absolutely had to eat, sitting at a counter elbow to elbow with college students and manual laborers, contenting himself with a four-hundred-yen bowl of rice topped with fatty gray meat). He had also found he could shave a little off his commuting expenses if he followed a circuitous route to work and back, changing trains four times each way. But this time none of these measures would be sufficient. There was no telling what the Number One might decide to pick out for herself. And he couldn’t risk not having enough money to pay for it. He had to be ready. Credit cards were out of the question, since his wife paid all the bills. He knew there was only one answer, although it took him a week to admit it to himself and to begin devising a plan.

  He would have to dip into the special savings account. Every month a portion of his salary was automatically deposited into this account, which, over the last three years, had grown nearly large enough for the deposit on a house. They never touched this account, so she wouldn’t notice a temporary withdrawal. Later, he would find a way to replace the money.

  This account represented a rare point of agreement between Daiji and his wife. They argued about his mother. They argued about children (he wanted them, or at least felt that he was supposed to; she had, as she put it, “done her best” during the first year of their marriage—although increasingly with stoical distaste, as if at an unavoidable household chore—but she didn’t get pregnant, and for a long time now had barely touched him, let alone . . .). They had never, though, argued about getting a house. They both wanted to live in a real home, a place with room to spare, instead of the cramped apartment they shared now, and they were both willing to endure frugal, even meager existences to get it.

  On Saturday mornings his wife took an English class at the YWCA. This class was the one luxury she allowed herself, fitting as it did into some absurd dream she maintained of an “international lifestyle.” As soon as she left he started his search. Three hours later he found the bank passbook and stamp hidden between the pages of the instruction manual for “Belly Zapper,” an electric-stimulation exercise belt which his wife had bought for him after seeing it advertised on TV, and which now languished, neglected, in the bedroom closet.

  He arranged to meet the Number One in front of a department store near Tokyo Station. It was a popular meeting place for dates, and when he arrived, fifteen minutes early, the sidewalk was crowded with young men and women. They glanced around nonchalantly or consulted their cell phones, pretending that they weren’t waiting for someone’s arrival. Standing among them he felt old and ridiculous. What was he doing here anyway? He thought of the Number One, and felt an impulse to leave, to turn and run away while he still could. He told himself if she didn’t appear in the next sixty seconds he would go home and nev
er contact her again. After a minute passed he decided to grant her sixty more seconds. He found an unobtrusive spot near the wall in the shadow of a pillar. Here he waited for seven minutes before remembering that he was still wearing his glasses. He snatched them from his face and slid them furtively into his briefcase. Instantly the people around him were replaced by poorly painted watercolor figures. He watched them as they came and went in an enigmatic blurred dance.

  One of the figures came near. It was the Number One.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. “How long have you been standing here?”

  “Oh, not long. I just arrived a few minutes ago myself,” he lied, not wanting her to feel bad about being late.

  “Didn’t you see me? I’ve been waiting right over there for ten minutes.”

  “Really?”

  He started to bow frantically, bobbing up and down as he spoke. “Sorry!”—bob—“I should have”—bob—“looked more”—bob—“carefully—”

  “Never mind . . . So. What should we do now?”

  Hadn’t they already agreed to go shopping today? Hadn’t she called it a “shopping date”?

  Then he realized that it was, for some reason he didn’t yet understand, necessary for him to say it himself.

  “Let’s go shopping,” he said.

  “All right. Do you want me to help you pick out something for yourself?”

  “No. No, not for me. For you. Let’s go find something for you,” he said.