A Woman's Nails

by Aonghas Crowe

  I ran off towards Platform Two, flying down a second flight of stairs, three steps at a time, towards the platform, but mid decent a soft bell chimed, the doors closed and the train departed.

  “Ah, fuck me!” I yelled, the curse echoing throughout the station.

  Plodding down the remaining steps, I came to the platform and made my way to a row of seats where I plopped down. As I waited I drank the two cans of Georgia coffee.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long. Within a few minutes a second train came, but before I could count myself the lucky beneficiary of an efficiently-run, white-gloved public transportation system, I learned that the train wouldn’t take me all the way to Ôhori Park. I would have to change trains at yet another shûten.

  Time was ticking.

  3

  The shredded contract lies on the tabletop before me and Abazuré has a look on her face like I have wasted her time and, would you just now go. If it wasn’t for the fact that my visa is going to expire in less than a week and I now have no other prospect for employment, I would flip Abazuré and that other bitch in the office the bird and storm out of the building. But I need the job. Good God, do I need ever it.

  As Abazuré glares at me, the realization that I've made a huge mistake hits me like a kick in the gut and I can't take it anymore.

  “I'm sorry,” I say standing up, “but, I'm feeling very ill.”

  I dash out of the classroom, pass the lobby and office, and hurry towards a door that has “o-tearai” (honorable hand washing) written in Chinese characters on it. Opening the door and hoping my troubles are over, I discover they've only just begun: the school has a fucking Japanese style toilet.

  Oh, for the love of God!

  Taking a crap on a Japanese style toilet is like trying to take a dump into a lady's shoebox. In the floor of a slightly raised area is a narrow porcelain trough barely a hand's length wide over which you’re expected to squat as you do your business.

  I mount it and squat as well as my stiff Achilles tendons will allow me, but my arse is hovering precariously above my pants gathered at my ankles.

  With the forces of nature in motion, I grab onto a large sewage pipe that runs from the ceiling down to the floor and hold on to it for dear life. I then lean back and peer down between my legs like a bombardier might until the target comes into sight. When it does, it’s bombs away!

  The collateral damage is worse than expected: half of my payload lands far off target.

  Good grief!

  After I’ve done my business, I spend several minutes tidying the toilet up. No matter how much I wipe the porcelain down, a heavy smell of death hangs in the restroom.

  I look in the small cabinet above the toilet hoping to find a book of matches, but there is none. Next to a few rolls of the rough toilet paper I sanded my ass with, I find a can of what, judging by the picture of a field of flowers on it, must be air freshener.

  I give the room a liberal spray, and stir up the air with my arms, but an obtrusive hint of pooh lingers stubbornly in the sweet floral fragrance.

  Several minutes later, I return to the small classroom and apologize to Abazuré. "I'm not feeling very well,” I tell her. “If today's meeting weren't as important as it is, I would have cancelled it and suggested meeting later in the week when I was feeling better."

  Abazuré softens somewhat. She's still visibly irritated, however, with the foul souvenir that has trailed me back into the room, the woman cannot doubt my candor. I am plainly ill.

  Just then a shriek comes from the direction of toilet. The young woman in the office has ventured into no-man’s land.

  Serves her right.

  Abazuré stands up and leaves me alone in the classroom (Could you blame the woman?) and returns a few minutes later with another contract, which she places on the table before me. She asks that I read through it.

  As I go through the contract, my jaw drops onto the tabletop. Each item in the contract is written in the bluntest of terminology--namely, do this and you'll be fired; do that and you'll be fired. There is no room for mistakes at The American School.

  If I am ever late--regardless of illness, accident, ill-timed bowel movements, or what have you--my employment will be terminated on the spot.

  I swallow hard and sign the contract. What else do you expect me to do?

  Once all the paperwork is complete, Abazuré instructs me to meet her at Immigration next week, the day before my visa expires.

  “If you are even a minute late,” she warns, “I will have no choice but to look for someone else. Am I understood?”

  “Y-yes, you are.”

  “Well, then. See you next week.”

  4

  “Fired if I'm late?” I shake my head in disbelief as I make my way back to the station. “Fired if I'm ever absent? Fired if I ever accept presents from the students?”

  I take the subway to Hakata station where I then transfer to a limited express that takes me back to Kitakyûshû. As we travel away from Fukuoka City, the train crosses the Tatara River. It’s from the bridge that spans that slow and muddy river that I can see a solitary tall apartment building and the flashing neon lights of a pachinko parlor beside it. It's where my ex-girlfriend Mie lives and works. It's where I fell in love with her, experiencing some of the happiest days of my life, and where my heart was broken one morning last October when she left me for the second and final time. It has become a Mecca of sorts for me, towards which my prayers are offered. And every time I cross this bridge, either coming or going, I crane my neck so as to keep the building in sight on the off chance that I might catch a glimpse, however fleeting or distant, of Mie. In a similar manner, I signed Abazuré's contract this morning putting my pride up as collateral on the off chance that I might be able to one day meet Mie again.

  A rational person would have probably told Abazuré to shove the contract up her small, flat arse and gone back to America or wherever, dignity intact. Unfortunately, I stopped functioning on reason the day Mie dumped me. Pure impulse and desperation has been my guide. So, I signed my name on the dotted line knowing that more than anything in the world, I wanted Mie back in my life, or, at least, to find someone who'll help me achieve the seemingly impossible: to forget her and move on.

  Someone, perhaps, like Nozomi . . .

  2

  NOZOMI

  1

  I got Nozomi’s phone number off of a bulletin board at the International Center in downtown Fukuoka a few weeks earlier. I’d been visiting the center on a weekly basis during the past several months looking for my next English teaching gig and a new place to hang my hat. Thanks, or no thanks, to the International Center I’m now Abazuré’s newest kept boy and will be moving next week to a small coastal village in the western suburbs of Fukuoka City where I’ll be sharing a condominium with three other Americans.

  The bulletin board at the International Center’s is divided into several categories: Language Instructors Wanted; Language Students Wanted; Items for Sale; Events; and Friends Wanted. Having found a job and a place to live, it’s the last of these, which I have started foraging through, hungrily searching for a woman to help forget.

  Many of them are like me, seemingly starving for someone to love them. Sadly, few, precious few, of the women I’ve actually gone to the trouble of meeting have been able to distract me from the very memories I’m trying to forget.

  Day in and day out, I am constantly reminded of my loss. My apartment, where Mie and I once made love, is now a cold mausoleum of sorts, where the remains of dreams are interned. Ghosts of the past occupy every inch of the place and the only thing that alleviates the heartache is the subtle palliative I’ve found in words written and spoken by women and the possible intimacy of a stranger as lonely as me.

  2

  On my way home from work one evening, I stop by a public phone outside a small mom-and-pop rice shop to call Nozomi, a woman whose name is full promise: Nozomi means hope. It’s only my second time to call h
er. Three days earlier when I first called, we had such a good conversation that she asked me to call her back later in the week so that we could arrange a day to meet.

  Inside the telephone booth I take Nozomi’s number out of my pocket and place it on top of the green phone. I also remove a phone card I’ve been holding onto for months from my wallet.

  Whenever I look at the phone card, a tsunami hits me: a wall of nostalgia rushing towards me and sweeping me hard off my feet, hurling me towards the most vivid memories--Mie in my arms, Mie in my bed, and Mie in my life. Try as I might to grab onto one of theses images from the past, and hold it against my chest as if they were real, I am always drawn away by the force of receding waters into a cold, black sea of loneliness, the images torn from my hands. Only the hope that I might one day embrace Mie again or find someone else I can hold on to is all that keeps me from drowning.

  I examine the unused metallic phone card and trace my finger over the logo Mie created--Lorelei with the wings of a butterfly and the name, Lady Luck. It is the last one of a stack she had given me shortly after we first met, and I’ve been holding onto it like the assiduous custodian of a religious relic.

  I slip the card into the slot and Lady Luck rests a moment like the host on a communicant’s tongue before being consumed with an electronic chime, Amen.

  I dial Nozomi’s number and as the phone starts to ring, my throat grows dry with expectation.

  After our first call, I returned to my apartment and for the first time in the months, the merciless ghosts of the past had been quieted. Something in Nozomi’s voice and in her words assured me of what my friends had been trying to tell me: that there were other women out there, better women even, who would help lay the past to rest. There would be other women who would find a way to coax a smile out of my frown, other women who would make me laugh, other women who would make me savor the joy each day presented rather than merely survive as I had been doing until the night when the promise of deep, dreamless sleep awaited me.

  The phone rings again.

  It’s been such an awful day and I’ve felt like crap for most of it. The only thing keeping me going is a one-act play I’ve been performing all day in my head: The curtains open and the protagonist is standing at a phone booth dialing a woman’s number. The phone rings, the woman answers and the two are engaged in a conversation that has him dropping all his change into the coin slot. Before he runs out of money, though, the woman invites him out for dinner and drinks the coming weekend. The man smiles, the curtain closes.

  3

  The phone rings again.

  I consider asking Nozomi out for drinks and karaoke. I’ve been a crowd-pleaser all year with syrupy renditions of ballads from the sixties and seventies. I have even mastered several Japanese pop hits. I couldn’t go wrong with karaoke, especially now that karaoke boxes, small private rooms with settee, table, and lights that dimmed are all the rage. No, she wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to belt out a few songs for an hour or two. Yeah, I’ll ask her out for drinks and karaoke.

  The phone rings again and Nozomi answers.

  “Nozomi, hi. It’s me, Peador. Genki?” I ask.

  She answers that she’s fine. When I inquire about her day, she sighs and says something I can’t catch then falls silent.

  It is an altogether different person I’m talking with today and I’m tempted to ask if something’s wrong, but worry doing so will only have her retreating further. So, I try to be genki and akarui as a friend advised because Japanese women love the cheerful, spirited type. They won’t give you the time of day if you’re kurai, she said, that is if you’re dark and brooding. I tell her about the great job I got recently, that I’ll be moving to Fukuoka in a few weeks, but it’s not getting me anywhere.

  Nozomi interrupts me. “Peador,” she says, “have you got a girlfriend?”

  I tell her I don’t.

  “Last night an American called me.”

  All the kindness that made her voice so sweet to the ear, made me want to crawl into its warmth and curl up into a ball is gone. She’d rather hang up than go to the trouble of telling me.

  “Go on.”

  “He asked me if I’d ever had sex with an American.”

  “He didn’t!”

  “He did!”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Unbelievable,” I say.

  “I told him I hadn’t and wasn’t interested in doing so, then hung up.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I reply with a sincerity I needn’t manufacture. “There are a lot of creeps out there, Nozomi. You really must be careful.”

  Who am I to talk, though? Wasn’t my intention all along the same as this American’s: to get laid? Did I really occupy a higher moral position merely because I possessed something resembling patience and tact?

  “You know, I have a boyfriend, a Japanese boyfriend,” Nozomi says. Her tone accuses me of assuming things I haven’t. “I’m not some Yellow Cab who’ll sleep with any foreigner just because he called me up.”

  I’m at a loss for words. Not that it matters, though, because before I can reply, she says, “Sayonara” and hangs up. The Lady Luck card pops out and the phone starts beeping.

  Dumbfounded, I stare at my reflection in the glass before me for a minute before taking the telephone card and stepping out of the booth. As I head down the hill and back to my dismal little apartment, my head is as clouded as ever. Hopes dashed by a girl, named Nozomi.

  3

  RISA

  1

  I move to Fukuoka at the end of March and settle into my new job. The schedule is dead easy and so far I have no complaints except that I am working six days a week instead of five. One morning I mention to my co-worker Yumi that it would be nice to have the occasionally Saturday off as well so that I could do a bit of traveling on the weekends, because I wasn’t really in Japan to work all the time, ha, ha, ha. Later in the day, my boss takes me aside to reprimand me for complaining about the schedule.

  “If you’re really not interested in working here,” she says, “I’ll be happy to find someone to replace you. I’m sure you’ll have plenty of time to travel, then.”

  My conversations with Yumi are reduced to sparing exercises in polite banality after that. We comment on the weather, on the beauty of the sakura which were in full bloom my first week on the job, the azaleas which have started to blossom, and the mud nest the sparrows have built under the awning of the boutique downstairs, then fall silent. I retreat to the morning’s paper, she busies herself with whatever it is that she does at her desk before me. It’s very weird to say the least.

  Most afternoons I’m free for four to five hours until it’s time to teach the evening class. On warm, sunny days I go to either of the two large parks that are near the school to write letters or read a book or wander. When the sky is overcast, I take a bus downtown, to Tenjin, and browse for books or CDs.

  Evenings at the school are a huge improvement over the grim mornings. Yumi and the boss leave for the damp, dark caves they must surely inhabit shortly after I return from my afternoon break, meaning I am alone with Reina, a vivacious woman with wavy brown hair who teaches the junior high students in the evenings.

  Yumi and Reina are like night and day, and the heavy veil of silence Yumi drapes over each morning is torn apart in the evening as soon as Reina punches in. Yumi and Reina do, however, share one thing: dread. Just as I dread my mornings alone with Yumi, I dread saying good-bye to Reina each night. Because there is nothing waiting for me but a sixty-minute-long train ride back to the condominium I’m living in. The condominium is located deep in the countryside, surrounded by untilled rice fields and an unshakable loneliness.

  Though I am allegedly sharing the condominium with two other Americans, I am more often than not the sole inhabitant of the eighth story, four-room mansion, as the Japanese call it. My “roommates” are MIA on the weekends and don’t usually come home until well after I have ret
ired to bed most weeknights.

  I am no early bird, but my boss has so put the fear of being sacked into me that I find myself waking at the crack of dawn. I trudge like a somnambulist through a path between two rice fields to the unmanned station where I catch the seven-thirty train. I’m usually in town early enough that I can drop in at a shitty little coffee shop called, only God knows why, Henry the Eighth, where I have the môningu setto of tôsuto, bâkon, sukuramburu eggi ando kôhi (i.e., the morning set of toast, bacon, scrambled eggs and coffee) before confronting Yumi and her intractable gloom.

  In the middle of April once I’ve settled into a routine, I go to the International Center to look for a Japanese teacher and, I am embarrassed to admit, put a card on a bulletin board there, seeking “friends.”

  I have often heard from the woman I have contacted through the International Center that I am the only person who has bothered to call them, so I don’t expect much of a response from my own card. Boy, am I ever wrong!

  The day after my card is up, calls start pouring in. It takes several minutes to get through all the messages that have accumulated on the answering machine at the condominium while I was away at work. Three days later, letters written on adorable stationery start to arrive. By week’s end, I’ve got over a dozen women eager to meet me, and so like a starving man standing before buffet, I pencil in as many of them as I can into my Saturday and Sunday.

  2

  Shortly after work Saturday evening, I hurry downtown where I meet with Bachelorette Number One, a plain-looking young woman in her early twenties who leads me with a string of “please, please, please’s” to a coffee shop in a maze-like underground shopping arcade. As soon as we sit down, she produces several sheets of paper from her handbag and starts to read from it.

  “My name is Hitomi. It’s nice to meet you.”