by Jack Hodgins
If it was, Hiroshi didn’t seem to mind. As a taxi pulled up to the curb he bent to open the door. “Naturally that is where he will hang it. To gaze on this handsome face every morning is bound to relax his rigid muscles, just exactly what he may need.” When he looked up at Weins he winked.
How many people had winked at Weins in his life? Not many. Maybe that was why he felt this flood of gratitude. He’d been caught by surprise. Ducking into the taxi while Hiroshi held the door, he wondered which he’d found: a youthful friend or a son. God knows he needed both, though he hadn’t thought of it before. And hadn’t dreamed of finding either in this place. “Domo. Domo,” he said, his first attempt in the several days he’d been here. If he’d got it wrong, or mispronounced it, Hiroshi didn’t correct him. “Do itashi mashite,” he said, and shut the door.
IV
In retirement this man had taken the name of Soseki. Weins was supposed to call him Soseki-san. In his present mood, when he considered the restaurant owner’s appearance, he couldn’t help thinking there was much to be said for an early death. In the case of heroes, that is, and giants. According to Hiroshi this man had once been both. Weins wasn’t proud of entertaining such callous thoughts but he hadn’t asked to come here either, had he? It had been Hiroshi’s idea, not his, to phone the others and arrange to meet here for dinner. Apparently Hiroshi had played the part of this man in some movie based on his youth. Weins assumed his back hadn’t been so twisted and bent-over then. Now his flesh, which had once inspired both fear and awe in the ring, sagged like runny dough at his neck and jowls. His skin, poor fellow, might have been stained with piss from a pregnant cow.
Not that you saw very much of it. A three-piece suit hid most: a sunken chest, a soft round belly, two short and skinny legs. Since Weins had witnessed Mabel’s stretch marks at their worst, he imagined what couldn’t be seen. Not beautiful. Even his face had the sad and wrinkled look of a melting mask. If Weins still wanted to meet a sumo wrestler after the failure of his visit to the arena, this wasn’t a face that could cancel his disappointment. He found it hard even to look. Compared to him, the woman in that play was a raving beauty, even after her ruin.
The only English word the old man seemed to know was “where-come,” which he repeated several times as he showed them into a private room at the back of his premises. “The western room, he calls it,” Hiroshi said. The reason was fairly obvious. A large dining-room table, regular chairs (a relief for these aching legs), and several covers from the Saturday Evening Post on the walls. When he spoke to Hiroshi in Japanese he leaned close and muttered something through his teeth, as if he were afraid or ashamed to be heard by the others. Maybe he didn’t like the way Eleanor lowered the silver lids of her eyes when she was trying to figure you out.
“He says,” Hiroshi explained, “that a young lady will be with us in a moment to bring us something to drink, but in the meantime we can enjoy the view.”
The view of what? The room was a windowless box. Weins wondered if you were supposed to imagine your own view, staring at a blank white wall. But the old man dragged a sliding panel open to reveal a garden — a stretch of gravel so white and clean you could see the perfect patterns of a rake’s tines circling a single lump of rock. This reminded Weins of a fresh-mowed prairie field from the air, where the farmer had had to manoeuvre his combine around an immovable boulder. You didn’t plant or weed this kind of garden, Jill had explained to him once, you only changed the patterns of the rake occasionally, then sat to enjoy it. A good idea, when you thought of Mabel’s fights with weeds and rain and reluctant begonia plants. In boxes along the edge of the garden there was a row of short and snaky trees, but none that Weins could name. Some flared, like wind-blown hair, some hunched in poodle-cut puffs. All perched on the brink of that sudden drop above — here it was again — the moat. Wherever you went in this city, it seemed you were confronted with the Emperor’s big ravine and its thick green nearly motionless bottom of water.
From here (wherever here was) you couldn’t see anything more of the other side than you could see from in front of the hotel. A bank of green leaves, a thick jungle of trees, and a glimpse of tiles on a pagoda roof. You were told the Emperor worked outside in his garden just like a regular farmer but no one had ever gone so far as to suggest he might be sighted climbing around in the trees at the edge of his moat. Weins could hope. The slightest flash of movement over there and he would wave.
Mabel would know how he felt, if she were here. She would also understand why. But Mabel hadn’t arrived. Finishing a little nap, according to Eleanor, who’d stepped out of the taxi with no one but sulky Conrad in tow. “You know what she can be like. Too much excitement and she’s got to get her feet up above her head before her temples start to throb and drive her crazy.” She sent word that the play had been so wonderful she could hardly breathe, but that fifteen minutes with her eyes shut ought to revive her. She would come along on her own.
Where other people simply let themselves wind down as the day wore on, Mabel was in the habit of reviving herself as often as she found it necessary. A few minutes with her feet on a table could do it. Running cold water over her wrists might help. A minute of sleep over a hand of whist could work a miracle. When others were played out and ready for bed, Mabel would be lively and fresh. If it weren’t that things got dark and quiet at night, encouraging the habit of sleep, Mabel could have survived on a life of occasional catnaps around the clock. She often threatened to do just that. But what she would do with those extra hours was never clear enough to risk it. Fifteen minutes of rest and she’d arrive here as good as new, ready to rave about her Kabuki play and explain the plot. If she saw Weins looking across the moat at the Emperor’s private grounds she might not stop her excited chatter but she would understand how he felt. He wouldn’t have to explain.
Nor would he have had to explain it to Jill, if she’d been able to come. But Jill, Hiroshi’d explained, was escorting an octogenarian pianist from Montreal to his first Tokyo performance. You could count on Jill to be tied up with somebody weird. Above fashions, concerts, and even foreign culture, her greatest passion was for genius, wherever it could be found. Hiroshi, she said, was a genius on the screen, whenever they gave him a chance. Her boss was a genius of the diplomatic kind. The artistic geniuses who passed through her hands on their tours were her favourites, especially if they needed some pampering. From ballet dancers to potters, if they came from back home to show off their talents, she was the one who arranged things for them, and held their hands. She was a person who understood these things, she was a person who would understand immediately how Weins was feeling right now, about the man who lived on the farther side of the moat.
To expect Eleanor to understand at all was a different matter. Guessing people’s feelings was not her strength. With Conrad you wouldn’t try. He’d skulked and scowled around at everyone since he’d stepped out of the taxi, as if he’d been brought here by force. When the sliding wall opened, letting in light, instead of admiring the view he cringed and turned away. To preserve his sense of aesthetics or protect his eyes? You didn’t have to get closer than this — ten feet away — to guess from the smell how he had spent his afternoon. His fiery eyeballs provided a second clue. If Hirohito appeared on the opposite bank and called them over, he’d be too tipsy to take along.
He pushed past Weins and stepped out into the garden. Ignoring the row of stepping-stones, he walked through the white raked gravel, leaving footsteps, and stopped to peer unsteadily over the railing. If they were lucky, maybe he’d jump. It was only a short drop to the grass and then the long steep roll down the bank of the moat to the water.
“That green crap down there looks thick enough to walk on.”
Was he planning to try it himself? Weins followed the stepping-stones out to the trees and looked down. The water was farther down than he’d thought. “To walk it you’d first have to fly.”
Conrad’s laugh was a hiccup that jerked his
shoulders. Weins said that one of the men in this book he’d been reading had tried to walk on water in his youth but failed. It ruined his life. “You might say it forced him into retirement when he was hardly more than a boy.”
It was a fact, but Conrad squinted at Weins as if he thought he was making it up. “A book?” He made it sound as if reading a book was one sure sign of senility.
Maybe it was. Maybe it was a sign of senility if you tried to make sense out of anything, let alone books. Mabel said she chose this one because he had a lot in common with someone in it. She couldn’t have meant the fellow who tried to walk on the water. The difference between them was that the man in the book had tried, while Weins had not. In Oregon he’d dived for the bottom straight off, like someone who knew his place. The other fellow might not have known his place but at least he’d made an attempt. The man who dived straight to the bottom of water instead of trying to walk on its top was a man who’d had the stuffing knocked out of him by early retirement. Weins knew people who’d died of boredom within six months of retirement because they couldn’t dream up anything compelling enough to get them out of a chair. He suspected the old man on the bicycle felt much the same, pedalling round and round the imperial grounds without change. He never dared to strike off into the traffic of Tokyo streets where he would almost certainly be killed — or might, on the other hand, escape.
Hiroshi called them inside. “Soseki-san wishes to know if Jacob Weins enjoyed this afternoon’s basho. He would like to know which wrestler was your favourite.”
Weins hated speaking to someone through a translator. He didn’t know who to look at. With everyone else in the room looking at him he would rather be quiet, but that would be hardly polite. “Tell him if I had to have a favourite it would be that poor fellow who’ll get demoted now and quit.” It was true, his legs still ached from straining to help that poor bugger from being pushed from the ring.
Conrad’s sneer was audible. A hiss. “What’s the matter, Jake, you think wrestlers ought to stay in the ring till they die, an old man’s division?” The notion was apparently so silly that Conrad had to blow out a mouthful of air. He opened Eleanor’s giant purse on the table and rooted around inside until he came up with a bottle of Scotch. Uncapped, it sat while he searched the room for a glass. There wasn’t one.
“Soseki-san says you should not worry about the defeated one, it is Soseki-san himself who should worry since the defeated one will probably open up a restaurant just like this and become the competition!”
The old man watched Weins’s face eagerly for a response. Obviously, he was expected to laugh. The old man thought it was such a funny thought that the minute Weins cracked a smile he banged his fists on his knees and shook his head. Boozy Conrad burped. Eleanor hummed a bar or two of her opera and lit a cigarette. Hiroshi moved closer to Weins. “Soseki-san is considered a freak to have lived so long,” he said. “It is very unusual.”
“How old is he?” Eleanor asked. The restaurant owner might have been a chair or a vase to her. Weins guessed the man to be eighty, if he judged by what he could see.
“Sixty-one.”
“The same as you!” Eleanor said, turning to Weins. “Exactly the same age as you!”
He could wallop the side of her head. If there were a mirror in the room he would run to it. How could he be sure that when he looked he wouldn’t be faced with a wrinkled old crock like the one across the room? Born the same year, maybe they’d aged at identical rates and he’d just never noticed before. A cold fist twisted his gut: he recalled the look of surprise and dismay on the face of the woman down on her knees on the stage.
Hiroshi slipped into Japanese for the benefit of the old man, who nodded gravely and offered a few words back. His eyes, nearly buried in the folds of drooping skin, shifted from Hiroshi to Weins. “He says his liver will kill him off soon, but he is happy all the same to have outlived his own expectations.”
“Something to ask him,” Conrad said. “Ask if it’s true what we’ve heard, that sumo wrestlers are trained from boyhood to hold their testicles up inside their bodies.”
“Conrad.” Eleanor’s eyes flashed warnings from across the room. Weins had never heard of this; was Conrad making it up to shock them?
“You didn’t know that?” Conrad looked delighted. “Jesus.” He shook his head, as if he’d never met such a dummy before. “Well doesn’t it make some sense? You saw what they do to each other. Did you think they were wearing jock-straps inside those fancy loincloths maybe? Ha ha!” His red eyes were ready to pop. “Ask him, Hiroshi, ask him. Jake here wants to hear it from the horse’s mouth.”
“When I’ve already heard it from the horse’s ass? Don’t bother.” He didn’t want to hear it from anyone, he’d already heard enough. Maybe Hiroshi guessed it, he looked embarrassed. Wasn’t it enough that in this bloody country you were encouraged to sympathize with women who turned out to have a man’s equipment inside their clothes? Was it necessary, now, to discover you’d been cheering for men who didn’t. He could never have guessed that such an upside-down confusing place existed in this world. He was going home.
But not, apparently, without first doing something about this tiny cup put into his hand by a young woman who’d come into the room with a tray. A quick sniff confirmed his suspicions: warm sake, like the stuff he’d spilled in the arena. Weins would happily have turned it in for a tall cold glass of beer, but it looked as if Hiroshi was making decisions for them all tonight. “I have ordered a special Japanese dinner I think you will like,” he said.
Weins doubted it. His stomach doubted it as well. Hiroshi, however, was getting to know him better. “No squid, my friend, I promise.”
The young woman smiled as if she understood, then moved on to offer a glass to Eleanor, who was unable to take her eyes off the pink brocade kimono. Was there anyone in this city who wasn’t dressed up in a costume? Besides himself that is. It seemed to Weins that what he’d been seeing since he set foot in this place was a parade of them. The actors in that play were no exception — everyone seemed to have something that suited a role. Joggers, street-cleaners, workmen with their hard hats and towels, businessmen in their white shirts with the rolled-up sleeves. Even the visitors knew what they ought to wear — all except Weins. He wore these baggy pants that felt like something he might have put on by mistake in a public changing-room. While someone like bloody Conrad, when he pulled on those skin-tight jeans, probably felt more like himself when dressed than when he was not. To borrow the jerk’s own words: it wasn’t fair.
Once the old man had gone off to supervise their meal, Weins asked Eleanor why they hadn’t gone with Jill to the piano recital. What did they do instead? “Are you kidding?” Eleanor said. “We went over to Jill’s but he plunked himself in front of the television set and drank his way down through a bottle of Hiroshi’s Scotch. There was nothing left for me to do but go shopping and buy these pearls.”
She struck a pose, with one tanned hand laid out against the necklace at her throat, and waited for something to be said. Weins didn’t know what it was. Hiroshi, who was an actor himself and therefore more used to the type, apparently did. “And very beautiful pearls too,” he said. “Obviously of excellent quality.”
Eleanor closed her silver eyelids a moment, treasuring. Then pouted her lips accusingly at Weins. “You see how a gentleman notices these things.” Leaning against the end of the open wall she crossed her ankles and arranged the folds of her skirt with the crimson nails of one hand. “I am even thinking of taking a Japanese lover. Jill knows what she’s doing.” She slid a look at stinko Conrad. “Besides their beautiful manners, darling, they also have lovely behinds.”
Oh hell. Was she trying to provoke Conrad into a fight? He looked dangerous enough already. Scowling up out of those reddened eyes he appeared to be blaming them all. But it was Weins’s name that he barked. “Jake.” His own head jerked back from the force. “You knew I wanted to go!”
Everything,
it appeared, was Weins’s fault. Was a reputation for deserting people his fate? It was time for Mabel to arrive and add her two bits’ worth. The bunch of them could put together a case: the man who let others down.
Eleanor lighting a cigarette kept her gaze steady on something out over the moat. “You sat and watched the same damn thing that they were watching. For Christ sake, cut it out, you’re becoming a bore.” She shifted her gaze just enough to give Weins a look that begged for sympathy.
“Back home I thought I’d made one hell of a catch this time but get him over here and he acts like a dork. Conrad, try to be civil.”
Hiroshi’s gentle voice was almost a shock, after Eleanor. “Well, at least you saw it on television. If you had come with us you would have been disappointed, the place was packed, you would not even have got in the door.”
Conrad shrugged. He almost smiled. “Did you see that sonofabitch crack the little fellow on the back of his neck? What a bastard. And that pig that used his stomach like a battering ram.”
So Conrad had been watching when his man in orange was defeated. The end of a career meant nothing at all to him, of course, how could it? Just one more loser cast aside, it was part of the sport. “Oh Jesus those bastards remind me of that bohunk in the logging camp. I told you about him, Jake. Seven feet tall with a gut — shit, I’d like to’ve seen him take on one of those guys!” He was nearly back in his normal form. His eyes bugged out, his fingers raked in his hair, the beads of sweat were glistening on his upper lip. “One day — oh hell, he was a mean and filthy man — one day he sees this greenhorn whistle punk having a snooze behind a tree and he takes offence. A friend of mine, this was, who liked a siesta after lunch. Well this big bugger lets out a roar and practically flies through the bush and lands feet first right on top of the kid. Holy shit, what a way to wake up!”
