“About marriage.” She refrained from adding, You idiot.
He conceded he had with a no-big-deal shrug. “I have thought about it. Emphasis on thought.”
“And what have you concluded after all this thinking?”
“I haven’t concluded anything.”
“So you plan on staying safe and single for the rest of your life?” It was a low blow. She almost winced when she said it.
He sat there silently for a while. “Exam’s over, okay?” He shoved Genji into his backpack and stood up.
Elly jumped to her feet. “Where are you going? We’re not finished.”
He didn’t appear to care. “If you really knew me,” he said, as he strode toward the stairs, “if you knew my grandfather, if you knew how much I’m like him, you wouldn’t think rushing into marriage with me was such a good idea. As it says in the Bible, ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’”
“No quoting scripture. That’s cheating.” Elly quickened her steps to keep pace. “At your age I’d think you’d have had plenty of time already.”
He turned to face her. “Well, maybe I’m just screwed up enough that it’s going take a bit longer than the statute of limitations allows around here.”
She hit him in the chest with the palm of her hand—more a shove, but hard enough to knock him off balance. She hadn’t intended to hit him or shove him—she’d simply acted before the impulse reached her brain.
“Ow,” he said, though he looked more startled than hurt.
Elly stepped in closer, ready with the words to accompany the blows. “Don’t you say that, not to me, not knowing what I know about you.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know enough. You hold the trust and respect of both my uncles, and that’s no small thing.” She switched into Japanese, a language more appropriate to the subject. “Don’t pretend that the esteem they hold you in is the result of you pulling the wool over their eyes.”
He met her gaze. “Point taken, but I was referring to myself.”
“So you’re really a jerk in private? I don’t buy it.”
His face flushed with anger, but he didn’t respond. He straightened the backpack on his shoulder and disappeared down the staircase.
Fight or flight. He’d taken the latter option. She was left without an opponent. The adrenaline drained from her muscles. Elly slumped back to the bench. She sat down and held her face in her hands. What kind of a crazy person was she turning into? Crazy enough to push him across a line she shouldn’t have. Now she knew she could punish him indefinitely and he would never respond in kind, something no man should ever have to reveal to another person.
Connor was only glad she’d aimed for the rib cage and not the stomach, else he’d be puking his guts out. Worse, he knew exactly what had prompted it. “Passive-aggressive” wasn’t supposed to make the other person aggressive. When he retreated, the other person wasn’t supposed to follow. She wasn’t playing the game right, dammit. Didn’t she understand the well-honed qualities of Being Careful and Being Practical and Not Taking Chances? He’d been desperate enough to say he was like his grandfather. In any argument between his parents, that was his mother’s coup de grâce: “You’re just like your father!” And Elly hadn’t batted an eye.
She obviously didn’t know the rules.
He composed an email to her. No quoting scripture, she’d said, and he could respect that. Bible bashing was a truly pointless exercise. But he wanted to explain himself, and the references were in his rhetorical quiver.
His arguments went back to that whole Corianton business in Alma 39, from which the Brother Bushnells of the Mormon world got their reasons for tossing sex into the abominable sin category (though it seemed obvious to Connor that Alma’s remonstrations had less to do with the going-after-the-harlot part than with the forsaking-the-ministry-and-generally-being-a-bad-example part).
He stopped typing. He was talking himself out of his original argument. Exactly what sin was he supposed to forsake? He didn’t lust after her. They were married in the dream. Didn’t that count for something?
Then why didn’t he leave before they made love, why only after? Because the dream wouldn’t let him. Because the dream wanted him to choose. Choose her. And he wouldn’t, because he resented like hell having to make the choice in the first place. He reserved the right to wait until the time was right, however long that took.
He caught his breath and let it out. No. Enough with the self-analysis. When at the bottom of a deep hole, the first rule was: stop digging.
Alicia was hanging around the front desk when Connor arrived at the Writing Center on Tuesday.
“What?” he said. He checked the time. “You’re off.”
“You got another note.” She pointed at the break room. Connor retrieved the envelope from his slot. Alicia said, “It was that cute Japanese girl again.”
Connor didn’t reply. He extracted the note, facing Alicia so she couldn’t peek over his shoulder. It was from Elly. “I still want to talk,” she wrote in her unmistakable handwriting. “I promise not to yell at you or hit you. The dragon lady will behave. Promise. Wednesday, same time and place, okay?”
“Ah, and he smiles,” said Alicia.
“Don’t you have a class to go to?”
“I believe I do. Say hello to—what was her name? You didn’t say.” “No, I didn’t.”
“Well, say hello for me.”
After Alicia left, Connor went back to the computers and logged into his mail account and confirmed that, yes, he’d be there.
It was a cloudless afternoon. The early evening sun burned through the mezzanine windows. Elly was seated away from the bright glare, the sunlight setting afire the auburn highlights in her hair. Connor stopped in his tracks. A sound, a chime, sweet and poignant, rang inside his soul. At moments like this, frightening moments, the haze lifted from his brain and he realized, as if being shown a private glimpse of heaven, that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. He couldn’t comprehend how he could exist in this life without her in it.
The smell of baking bread wafted up from the pizza concession in the food court below. It was an almost intoxicating combination. She looked up and saw him and smiled.
“Hi,” he said.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He clapped his right hand against his chest. “Nice right hook.” He sat
down opposite her and saw the mortified look on her face. “No problem,” he assured her. “Only my ego got bruised.” “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. But—” She began again, “You know the scroll that hangs in Nobuo and Yuki’s living room?”
“Resolute in learning, reluctant in wrath.” He’d memorized the classical Japanese text. “Your great-great-grandfather did the calligraphy, as I recall. I never did get an explanation about what it meant.”
“There are actually two scrolls. The one my mother has reads: Reluctant in learning, resolute in wrath. The one describes how Oh women are born, the other what they should become. We’ve always been a volatile lot, apparently. Though reluctant in learning seems a chauvinistic dig. Mom said he penned them to admonish his daughters. There’s a time to be resolute and a time to be reluctant.”
“What, did you get into fights a lot?”
“No—well—yes, I did get kicked out of kindergarten. Mom says it was for beating up the other kids. In my own defense, they were teasing me because I was haafu. My hair was a lot lighter back then. I think they enrolled me in a Japanese public school so I would learn to behave myself.”
“I do have a hard time seeing you as a bully.”
“I’m not, I’m not. It’s just that my way was always the right way.” She grinned. “More likely because I was always the tallest kid in my class, until I started attending the International School in Yokohama. Japanese elementary school socialized the aggression right out of me, the way it’s supposed to. The thing is, now th
at it’s showing up again out of the clear blue, I don’t know how to deal. I’m doing things I never dreamed of, like hitting people and yelling at them. I’ve never done that before.”
“Until you met me.”
“Well—” she conceded. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
It was Connor’s turn to smile. “I know where you’re coming from. I can usually figure out why I do the things I do, but way after the fact. Even when I know the why, I have a hard time keeping myself from doing it again. Like this passive-aggressive business. It’s a guy thing, to begin with. It’s a McKenzie guy thing to the nth degree. Give me the best advice in the world and I’ll find a reason not to do it because it wasn’t my idea. If nothing else, McKenzie men have always prided themselves as masters of their emotions. Which means getting as far away from them as possible. We’re so good at running away, I often wonder how my grandfather and father ever got married.”
Elly laughed. “My roommate Melanie says the same thing about me. She says if I don’t get myself a go-between I’ll never get married.”
“My Uncle Martin once warned me that the older and smarter you get, the more good reasons you can come up with for not getting married. It’s his ‘logic defeats evolution’ theory. He’s a veterinarian. My Aunt Wanda, though, I have the feeling if I gave her the slightest opening, she’d take to matchmaking in a New York minute.”
Elly inquired softly, “But don’t you think we’ve already got one, a gobetween, I mean?”
Connor looked away and fumbled with the clasp on his backpack.
Chapter 14
Freud’s Couch
I n her dreams that night, Elly returned to the house in Provo. She was dressed as before in the white kimono. The sun shone down on the empty street. The driveway was a straight, clean line of asphalt, recently swept. The car crouched like a pensive cat inside the garage, the silver mustang on the grille plate gleaming from the shadows.
It was only after she started up the walk that she saw the boy. He was sitting by himself atop the porch steps, engrossed in a large manual that covered his lap. He glanced up, blue eyes under dark brows, and seemed not at all surprised to see her there.
“What are you reading?” she asked. He held up the book: Chilton’s Ford Mustang/Cougar 1964–73 Repair Manual. At the same time his head snapped up and to the left, the way a grazing deer freezes and flicks its gaze about at the sound of a breaking twig.
Elly glanced over her shoulder. A tall man strode up the walk. The boy’s grandfather. He was thinner than the Connor she knew, showed a higher forehead, his silver hairline receding. But she couldn’t miss the resemblance. There was a hard, determined look in his eyes. The look of a man who felt he’d been disrespected, even if on a matter of no great moment. He extended his right hand. The boy held out the book, shrinking as far away from his grandfather as was physically possible.
The man reached to take the book from the boy. As his hand extended, Elly seized the old man’s wrist. “No,” she said.
He cast a puzzled look at his arm and then at her, for the first time acknowledging her presence. Then everything dissolved away, and there was only the two of them, bathed in the stark light. He finally spoke, his voice gruff, annoyed. “I never touched the boy. He’s got no cause to fear me.”
“Yes,” Elly said, speaking the words that suddenly echoed in her mind, that were not her own but became her own as she said them. “What you never did could fill the ocean. Yet all that nothing would never be enough.”
They agreed to meet again on Friday, and Connor made another stab at composing his thoughts in an email. If his fate before the court depended on oral argument, he’d never stand a chance.
The night before, he’d journeyed back to Kudoyama. He ended up at a bar in an alley off the main drag. To make things that much weirder, Pat Morita had an American cowboy tagging along with him—a burly man decked out in jeans, a Stetson, and cowboy boots—the whole John Wayne outfit. The two of them wanted to know what he was doing there without Chieko. How should he know? These dreams weren’t his idea.
Connor stared at the computer screen. He typed, “The older you get, the more invested you get in your tatemae (what the rest of the world can see) and the more you hide your honne (that which is privy to you alone). Easy enough to do when you’re single, especially when you’re single and Mormon. What’s frightening is contemplating what’s going to happen when somebody finds out how immense the gulf is between your tatemae and your honne.”
He clicked the send button before he could talk himself out of it. Connor leaned against the mezzanine railing watching the little soap operas playing out in the Terrace Court. He didn’t hear her come up behind him until she said, “First of all, Connor, everybody’s screwed up.” She pressed on, not giving him time to respond. “Second, you haven’t got much of a tatemae. You’re pretty much honne all the way down. What I see is what I get. You don’t know how reassuring that is.”
She was right, he didn’t know.
“Third, it scary, and I’ve done nothing but show you the worst side
of me. But I don’t want to live my whole life being scared.” She turned to him. “Connor, let’s not have this argument, okay? Forget about getting married. I shouldn’t have brought it up like that. Just don’t leave me. Please. Stay with me till we wake. That’s all I want. I’ve given you no reason to trust me, but trust me this once. Don’t be afraid of me.”
His expression softened. “I’m not afraid of you, Elly.”
She clasped his hand, a firm yet gentle touch. Then she walked away. Nobuo’s terminology lists arrived (as they always did) Friday morning (Friday night, Japan time). Connor checked the attachments but didn’t get around to reading the cover message until that evening. Nobuo had added a P.S.: “My daughter and wife have been debating whether you and Chieko are dating. I try to keep out of such matters, but they insist I ask.”
Good grief, was his initial response. How did they know? Because Elly had asked for his email address. And dating? Were they? That was a good question. Not really. Fighting, yes—dating, no. He’d think of a better answer when he mailed back the corrections.
Connor went outside and watched the sun setting into the mountains beyond the flat plate of Utah Lake. He was making this all too complicated. Why not just stay in the dream? She asked him to stay. It obviously meant a lot to her. If there was going to be sex, shouldn’t there be affection as well? Even if there’d never be any physical contact between them, wouldn’t that make a difference?
Something—someone—had woved the threads of their individual lives together, creating a binding cord between them. In this span of days between Tanabata and Obon, between the Bridge of Birds and the Festival of the Dead (the time of year at once occurred to him), whose graves had stirred? Whose spirits had returned during this haunting season? Did he have to ask what they wanted? The dreams lacked all subtlety. But he wouldn’t have listened otherwise.
Be practical, he told himself. He was a McKenzie. He was good at being that. He knew he’d been offered something extraordinary, the best thing that had ever happened in his life. But he was scared. If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be condemned. He might as well invite in the wrecking crew. Loving her would change everything.
For the first time in his life, he found himself contemplating a possibility antithetical to the McKenzie mind: surrender. Not to fate (though that was a tough one for those ornery Celts). But a surrender of the pride that masqueraded as character, yet in the end revealed itself as little more than dumb stubbornness in disguise.
It was all about Newton’s First Law: A body in a uniform state of motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. It had been his father’s family vacation transportation strategy: plot the straightest navigable line between where they were and where they wanted to end up in eight hours, and drive.
Ever since that distantly-remembered death
when he was seven years old, Connor had been running straight ahead and in one direction—away. An external force had now been applied to his trajectory. It was time to stop and turn around and take the path less traveled, and that might make all the difference.
The Weaver and the Herdsman
T he Tanabata festival, adopted from the Chinese “Night of Sevens,” commemorates the union of two celestial lovers, the stars Vega and Altair. In Japanese they are called the Weaver (Orihime) and the Herdsman (Kengy ).
The lovely Orihime was the daughter of the Heavenly Emperor, a vain ruler jealously fond of the gorgeous cloth his daughter wove on her loom. Yet watching from his throne on the Pole Star, even his cold heart could not ignore his daughter’s despair as she spent day after day weaving together the threads of starlight. A prisoner of her loom, all her wondrous fabrics could not mask the darkness of her solitude.
So her father arranged a marriage with a loyal retainer of the court. His name was Kengy , and he tended the royal herds in the meadows across the River of Heaven. The marriage proved a most propitious union. The two were devoted to each other from the start, so deeply in love that their other cares and responsibilities faded from their attention. The Emperor’s admonitions were ignored by the young couple. The loom gathered dust and the cattle roamed far and wide on the astral plains. In a fit of rage, the Emperor banished Kengy to the distant shores of the Milky Way.
Only once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month ( Tanabata), does he repent of his anger and permit the ferryman to cast off from the harbor of the Moon and carry Orihime across the River to her beloved’s arms. Even so, if she has not completed her weaving to his satisfaction, he will forbid the ferry to cross. When that happens, we must call upon the magpies to fly up to the stars and weave a Bridge of Birds over which the princess can cross, else the rain of her tears will flood our homes and farms and put us all at peril.
Because peril has always been the price of true love and devotion.
The Path Of Dreams Page 8
