Koibumi

by Hildred Billings

  “Tsch! I wasn’t gonna!” Great. Fuck Haruka one time and suddenly Reina was stamped with “Haruka Fucker” on her forehead. “Honestly, give me some credit.”

  It was Aiko’s turn to tsch over the phone. “I know you. I need to explicitly tell you not to have sex with someone, sometimes!”

  In the end, Reina couldn’t debate that. She reaffirmed she would be home later and hung up as the train pulled into the station.

  The ride to Shinjuku was barely ten minutes, but it was a quiet, awkward ten minutes full of Kaori holding back sobs and Reina trying not to sit too close to her. Since it was Friday night the train was packed with party-goers and salarymen on their way to get drunk. Odds were Ni-chome would be packed as well.

  And it was.

  The main street was full of gay revelers, mostly men, hanging outside of bars and soliciting each other for sex and more drinks. Bars had their doors wide open and underground clubs throbbed to electronic music. This should be a night for fun. Were Reina with her wife or going to meet another lover, she knew what places she would go to for certain good times. But this wasn’t about partying. Nor was it about sex, although some drunk men whistled at her and Kaori, who walked close enough together to be mistaken for girlfriends.

  They entered a nondescript bar at the end of the street, the type of place only known to older patrons and their friends. Like with most other lesbian bar owners, Reina knew the proprietress from her youth and had a tab there.

  As luck would have it, the bar was relatively empty when compared to most other places that night. Reina led Kaori in and sat her down at the front bar. One beer apiece later, they were finally free to speak again.

  “Do you really not know why they fired you?” Reina asked over the top of her beer bottle.

  Kaori shook her head. “I had no warning. I wasn’t in trouble lately. I was summoned into the section chief’s office and told not to come back next week. It can’t be budget cuts. Every department needs a secretary!”

  Reina sucked in her cheeks – she hadn’t heard of any new hires lately, either.

  The beer in Kaori’s bottle disappeared more with every second. Yes, get drunk. That solves everything. Or so Reina wanted to believe. What good was the world if alcohol didn’t solve problems?

  “Kao-chan!”

  Haruka bounded through the entrance, her eyes wide and face wet in the summer heat. She still wore a beret over her short hair and let a jacket hug her torso. Reina looked at her with relief; Kaori gawked at her in disbelief.

  They embraced while Kaori explained what happened. Haruka stroked her girlfriend’s hair and nuzzled her cheek while she sobbed into her shoulder and asked for another beer.

  “What am I going to do?” she asked the moment Haruka sat on a stool and ordered her own drink. “I don’t have much money, and it will take so long to find another job. It’s summer time! The job searching season is over!” She cried into her arm, Haruka patting her shoulder.

  “It’ll be fine, Kao-chan. If you have to, you can move in with Father and me.” Haruka’s father was also gay. Together they ran a tea shop catering to gay customers – in recent months Aiko had taken to buying special blends there. Sometimes Reina wondered if her wife was scoping out the local goods. I wouldn’t blame her. Reina lit a cigarette to help wash down her beer. One glance toward Haruka reminded her of their night together, and how lovely that body had been. If nothing else, Aiko had good taste.

  “Even if I dump most of my bills, how will I help take care of my family? It’ll be winter soon enough. Do you know how cold it gets in Iwate? There were times icicles formed in my bedroom!”

  “Enough for now,” Haruka said, holding her girlfriend in her arms. “You should be thanking Reina-san for bringing you here to forget about it for a little while.”

  Kaori sat up and turned her head toward Reina, eyes betraying her plight to look like she hadn’t forgotten her ex-coworker was there. “Yamada-san! Thank you for taking care of me!”

  Reina finished her beer and took another drag from her cigarette. “Least I could do.” She stood up from her stool and rearranged her wallet in her pocket. The cigarette tapped against an ashtray before going back into her mouth. “Take care of yourself, and good luck with your shit.”

  Ah, finalities. So she wouldn’t see Kaori at work again. That didn’t mean they would never see each other in general. It was a small gay neighborhood. The densest in the world.

  Reina wasn’t two steps away from the bar before Kaori latched onto her.

  “Please, Yamada-san! Stay! I don’t know when I will see you again!”

  The cigarette almost choked Reina. She coughed on a plume of smoke and pulled it out of her mouth, ribs still shaking beneath Kaori’s hold. “I have a wife to get home to.”

  Kaori leaned her cheek against Reina’s arm. “Why are we gay?”

  Both Reina and Haruka gawked at her. This shit? Here? Right now? “Eh?” she asked.

  “Eh?” Haruka echoed.

  Kaori released Reina and fingered her beer bottle. “All of this could be solved if I…married a man like my parents keep telling me to.”

  The last thing Reina wanted to do was look into Haruka’s face at that moment – but she did. Dipshit! That poor young woman instantly reacted with ache marring her tomboyish beauty, her body easing away from Kaori on its own accord. In no world should one girlfriend fend the other off like that. “You don’t mean that, do you?” Haruka sounded meeker than a mouse.

  “I don’t know. It’s not that I want to be with a man. You know that.” Even though she now only addressed Haruka, Reina slipped back onto her stool and extinguished her cigarette. “It’s just that it’s so hard living like this. I can’t support myself and help my family as a single woman. And though I love you, we can’t get married legally so it can help my family. When I think about all the things I’ve wanted and could never have…my heart starts to break.”

  Haruka took her girlfriend’s hand. “What can’t you have?”

  “Security.”

  That shit’s a lie. There was no such thing as security. Reina’s parents once had it, before her father croaked and left behind an impoverished widow. She and Aiko occasionally had it, until Reina’s job was threatened and they were left to try and eat their own love. Security was for foolhardy individuals who thought following some stupid life path would save them from certain doom. Reina wanted another cigarette already.

  “If you start following that train of thought now,” she began, catching Kaori’s attention, “you’ll only find madness. And you might end up like me one day, wondering why you’re such a clusterfuck of gender failings.” She had never gone into detail with Kaori about her recovering disorders before.

  “That’s right,” Haruka continued. “I don’t want you hurting yourself over this. We’ll get through it. Just because something like this happens doesn’t mean you stop breathing.”

  Kaori smiled a little, although her mien remained downtrodden. “Still, don’t you think life would’ve been easier if we weren’t programmed to go against the way things are?”

  “Ha! Life would be easier if I had millions of yen. Guess what never happened.” Or at least Reina had never seen that much money.

  “Kao-chan, I promise to help you achieve your dreams. Anything you want.”

  That finally got a spark behind Kaori’s eyes. “Anything? Truly?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well, I always wanted to get married…”

  Haruka grimaced a little, but did not falter. She’s been dreaming about it too, just not right now. Reina knew when a woman was as scared of marriage as she was – Haruka wasn’t that type, if all her romanticism said anything.

  “And maybe have a baby one day…”

  Haruka practically fell off her chair, beret tumbling.

  “Good luck with that.” This was where Reina finally left. Once women started talking about babies, she was out. Out. “There’s a fundamental issue when a lesbian wants
a baby.” Thank God she couldn’t have any.

  “Kao-chan,” Haruka said, as Reina moved behind her, “if that’s what you really want down the line, we’ll find a way to make it happen. I promise you.”

  Before she could gag at their moment of affection, Reina snuck out of the bar and made her way home. She popped a message to Aiko and mused over her own fortune: the number one perk to being a lesbian was that she never had to worry about getting pregnant. Nor did she have to worry about getting her wife pregnant. Thankfully, Aiko had given up all her ideas of babies.

  There were days in which Aiko swore she could recite her spouse’s life story without missing a detail. She had her chance to practice that Saturday when Chloe came over.

  They had discussed it earlier that week, right after a phone call from their friend Mayumi, who begged them to participate. “Especially you, Reina,” she had said. “You’re a god damned legend and it’s not like you have to use your real name. Plus it’ll be in English.” It took another three hours of talking for Reina to agree to meeting with Chloe again. When Aiko called her, the foreigner squealed over the phone.

  Now she sat at their living table, surrounded by pads, pencils, and an audio recording app on her smart phone. Reina sat across from her fielding her questions, while Aiko mediated as the bridge between Japanese and English.

  “When did you first know you were a lesbian?’ Aiko asked her on behalf of Chloe. “And she means an actual event, not you talking about vaginas.”

  “Same difference, right?” Reina played with the handle on her coffee mug. “I guess the moment I decided I was a lesbian for sure…hm. I was sixteen, first year of high school. I was in the locker room changing for gym when a really pretty girl took off all her clothes. For some reason I couldn’t stop looking at her. Before I had stared at dirty lesbian comic books, trying to figure myself out, and touched myself to the thought of kissing and touching other girls. But it was that day I thought, ‘Wow, she’s really beautiful. I want to know what it’s like to make love to her.’” Reina drank coffee nonchalantly, as if she talked about her first car. “I then thought that it must mean I was a lesbian. It was a label and a life I took upon myself without regret or further consideration. From that day I was a lesbian. I’ve never looked back.”

  Chloe scribbled down as many notes in English as she could, tongue sticking out and freckles squirming across her face. “And how about when you lost your virginity?”

  Aiko flushed on her spouse’s behalf. She heard the story once or twice before, but compared to her own first time story – with Reina, in a love hotel, on Christmas day – it was boring. Still, Aiko found the breath to ask Reina the question. She put her coffee back down without apprehension.

  “The first time I had sex was shortly after that. Without having to worry about pregnancy or disease – back then, I didn’t know I could still get diseases from other girls – I decided I would do it soon. Even as a teen I was really sexual. When I hit puberty around thirteen I couldn’t stop touching myself. First it was to stare at the hair growing on my crotch, and then it was to keep punching my boobs to make them grow.” Reina laughed. “It didn’t work.”

  Aiko smiled to herself. Sometimes she wondered what a Reina with breasts would be like. It would’ve made her gender disorder even worse.

  “But, yes, I was really sexual. I had already had orgasms by myself so deciding to move to the next step, and do it with another girl, was more practical than nerve wracking. The girl I did it with was a classmate who I had already practiced kissing with. One day I asked her to do it with me. We went back to my house since my mother wasn’t home and tried it out. It was awkward sex, but not bad. Although to a young virgin I guess I was really excited about it.” Reina drummed her fingers on the table. Aiko relayed her spouse’s answer to Chloe, who appeared crestfallen at the lack of a juicy sex story. Those come later.

  And they did. Once Reina was initiated into the world of sex, her quest to become the most experienced woman began. They only had enough time that afternoon to go over Reina’s high school years – the years she had sex with a third of the girls she ever would. Classmates, all of them. She and her friend Michiko, whom she met a year later, had a revolving door system for the curious girls wanting to know what pleasure felt like. One of those girls had been Tomoko, who would later become one of Aiko’s friends in college. Tomoko. Aiko hadn’t heard anything about her in decades. Not since she dropped out of university after having a sexual identity crisis because of Reina.

  By the time they wrapped up Reina’s graduation party at a friend’s house, at which she experienced her first orgy, Aiko’s throat was hoarse and Chloe had left her jaw on the floor.

  “Thank you so much for sharing that,” she said, flipping her notebook shut and turning off her phone. “I’ve never heard a story quite like that. Is there more?”

  Aiko didn’t bother to translate. “Of course. Reina’s always been on a quest to ‘experience’ women.” She smiled. “It makes her interesting.”

  Chloe agreed, and expressed a need to depart.

  “I’ll go with you to the train station,” Aiko said. “I’m going to my mother’s house right now.” She had promised her mother that she would help her sort through some items left lingering in storage. As the youngest daughter it was expected of her to drop everything and attend to her mother’s whims back home.

  That left Reina behind, who said she wanted to take a nap and watch TV. Aiko told her she would be back in time to make dinner. After securing her purse and pecking her spouse on the lips, Aiko slipped into her sandals and left the house with Chloe.

  “Thank you again for helping me translate,” she said, as Aiko closed the front gate behind her. “I don’t think my Japanese is good enough to understand Reina’s dialect.”

  Aiko snorted. “When she talks about her experiences, she sounds a bit like a man, doesn’t she?” Reina’s natural speech reflected that of a young, arrogant man. Oftentimes Aiko became concerned that her spouse would age into an old uncle and achieve the ultimate form of inconceivable Japanese.

  Chloe shouldered her backpack, red hair burning in the sunlight. “She’s an interesting woman. You must love her a lot.”

  A sigh rippled through Aiko’s body – or maybe that was the heat. “I love her more than anyone I’ve loved in my life.” She had to, if she wanted to stay with Reina. There were times during their long relationship she had to reevaluate whether or not the pains of being with Reina’s personality were worth it. Yes, every day. Easy to say on the good days.

  “Have you considered my request?” Chloe was perspiring more than a polar bear in the heat. “I understand if you’re too busy, of course.”

  Aiko hesitated. “I guess I’m not sure what it is you want me to do. Write an essay? But about what, exactly?”

  “It can be about anything you want. Long or short, it doesn’t matter.” Chloe jumped out of the way as a car rolled by. “Mayumi is writing a brief account of what led her into activism. Another woman is writing about a hate crime she experienced. What matters is that it’s from your heart.”

  “And about being gay, right?”

  Chloe’s bun came undone in the humidity. “It would help keep with the theme.”

  “Hmm.” Aiko still didn’t know what to write. In high school and university she was good at writing essays, but that was about book reports and current events. A mini-autobiography? Where to begin? “I suppose I’ll always be best well known as Reina’s girlfriend. For the first couple of years we dated, people didn’t expect us to stay together.” What meandering, eye-opening years those had been.

  “Really? Why not? You two look so good together!”

  Aiko laughed. “Reina went through a lot of girlfriends. And I was really naïve and inexperienced in lesbian living. Nobody thought Reina would stick with me for so long.”

  “Oh, so they thought she would dump you because she got bored?”

  A twitch overcame Aiko’s facial n
erves. “Yes, more or less. But she didn’t dump me.” There was one time she tried to break up with Aiko shortly after they moved in together, but it wasn’t willed by Reina’s heart. Sometimes her logical side took over and still mucked things up. “I’ve had twenty years to think about why I love her.”

  Chloe stopped in the middle of the street, mouth blossoming into a smile. “That’s what you should write about!”

  “Eh? Really?” Aiko asked. “An essay about why I love Reina?”

  “Don’t you think that would be an interesting companion piece to her interview? To be honest, even in America people will probably be shocked by her lifestyle and experiences. If she keeps answering questions the way she does, readers will start thinking you’re a Catholic saint. Or an axe murderer in the making.”

  “Why I love Reina, huh?” The train station came into view, and Aiko withdrew her coin purse to buy a ticket. “It could be an interesting exercise.” If she wrote anything for Chloe, she intended for it to be in English. She was long overdue practice.

  “You could write it like a love letter.”

  Coins fell from Aiko’s fingers as she laughed loud enough to scare away the pigeons. “Koibumi!” she said in Japanese. “Oh, it’s been a long time since I wrote one of those!”

  In the end Aiko agreed to attempt writing such a letter for Chloe, but made no guarantees she could finish anything satisfactory. It’s only fair I try. As the train lurched around the city she pondered what she would say in a love letter-like essay. “When we make love it’s like my whole body is being born again.” That only served to make her think about her mother, whom she was en route to visit.

  Chloe got off at a major station, leaving Aiko alone with more thoughts and more passengers getting on and off. By the time she reached her childhood neighborhood she had already decided to open her love letter with, “It takes a special woman to love and cherish someone like Reina Yamada. If you ever meet someone like that, please let me know!”

  She was still chuckling when she reached her natal home, a large and modern two-story house surrounded by tulips. Laundry and futons hung out to air dry over the balconies before the rain returned. Aiko considered calling Reina to arrange for her to do the same back at their house. Who am I kidding? She’ll conveniently forget.