The Midwest farmers’ daughters
Really make you feel alright,
And the Northern girls with the way they kiss,
They keep their boyfriends warm at night.
I wish they all could be California girls…
14
The T-shirt arrived in the afternoon mail three days later. It looked like this.
15
The following morning, I put on the scratchy new T-shirt and strolled the streets of the harbor town. Spotting a small record shop, I pushed open the door and went in. No other customers were there, just a very bored-looking young woman at the counter sipping a can of Coke as she checked sales slips. It took several minutes of shuffling through the record shelves before I realized I had seen her before. She was the girl with no little finger, the one I had found passed out on the bathroom floor a week earlier. “Hey,” I said. Startled, she looked at me, then at my T-shirt, then drained the rest of her Coke.
“How’d you find out where I worked?” she asked in a voice steeped in resignation.
“Pure chance. I came to buy records.”
“What’re you looking for?”
“The Beach Boys LP with the song ‘California Girls.’ ”
She nodded a skeptical nod, got up, strode over to the shelves, grabbed a record, and brought it back like a well-trained dog.
“This is it, right?”
I nodded. With my hands still jammed in my pockets, I scanned the store.
“I’d also like Beethoven’s Piano Concerto number 3.”
This time she came back carrying two records.
“We’ve got Glenn Gould and Backhaus. Which do you want?”
“Glenn Gould.”
She put one record on the counter and returned the other to the shelf.
“Anything else?”
“The Miles Davis album that has ‘A Gal in Calico.’ ”
This took a little extra time, but she came back with the record.
“Next?”
“That’s it. Thanks.”
“Are these all for you?” she asked, lining up the three records on the counter.
“No. They’re presents.”
“A bighearted guy, huh?”
“So it would seem.”
She shrugged uncomfortably and added up the bill: 5550 yen. I paid and took the parcel.
“Well, anyway, thanks to you I was able to sell three records before noon.”
“My pleasure.”
She sat back down behind the counter with a sigh and resumed going through the sales slips.
“So are you always here by yourself?”
“Another girl works with me. She’s at lunch right now.”
“And you?”
“I’ll go eat when she comes back.”
I pulled out my cigarettes, lit one, and stood there watching her work.
“Hey,” I said. “How about we have lunch together?”
She shook her head. “I like eating alone,” she said, her eyes never leaving the slips.
“I’m the same way.”
“Really?” She set the sales slips down with a weary sigh, put the new Harpers Bizarre album on the turntable, and lowered the needle. “Then why do you ask?”
“I try to change things up every once in a while.”
“Change by yourself.” She pulled the stack of slips closer and went back to work. “Now please leave me alone.”
I nodded.
“I told you this once before, but I think you’re scum.” Pursing her lips, she went back to flipping through the slips with her four fingers.
16
When I entered J’s Bar, the Rat was already there, his elbows propped on the counter and a frown on his face, plowing through a Henry James novel as thick as a telephone directory.
“Is that any good?” I asked.
The Rat raised his face from the book and shook his head no. “Still,” he said, “I’ve been reading a lot. Since the last time I saw you. Know who said, ‘I love a magnificent falsehood more than an impoverished truth’?”
“Nope.”
“Roger Vadim. French director. How about, ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is its ability to function while holding two opposite ideas at the same time’?”
“Who said that?”
“I forget. But do you buy it?”
“I think it’s bull.”
“How come?”
“Let’s say you wake up starving at 3 a.m. You check the fridge but it’s empty. So what do you do?”
The Rat pondered this for a moment, then burst out laughing. I called J over and ordered a beer and some fries, pulled out a package containing one of the records, and handed it to the Rat.
“What the hell is this?”
“Your birthday present.”
“That’s not till next month.”
“I’ll be gone by then.”
The Rat sat there thinking, the unopened package in his hand.
“Yeah, it’s going to be lonely without you around,” he said, taking out the record and looking at it. “Beethoven’s Piano Concerto number 3, Glenn Gould, Leonard Bernstein. Mmm. Haven’t heard it. Have you?”
“Nope.”
“All the same, I really like this! To be blunt.”
17
I tried to track down her phone number for three days. The number of the girl who lent me the Beach Boys record, that is.
The first day, I visited the office of our old high school and found a listing for her in the registry of graduates. When I called, though, all I got was a recording saying that the number was no longer in service. I dialed information and gave the operator her name, but after searching for five minutes she came back on the line to announce that no party by that name was listed in the directory. I liked the ring of “no party by that name.” I thanked her and hung up.
The second day, I began phoning other members of our class to see if they knew where she was, but not only did none of them know anything, most had forgotten she even existed. For some unknown reason, the last person I called snapped, “I don’t have time to talk to a shit like you,” and slammed down the phone.
The third day, I went back to our high school office and asked them to look up the name of the college she’d attended after graduation. It turned out she had enrolled in the English department of a second-rate school in central Tokyo. I phoned their office and told them that I ran the information desk at the McCormack Salad Dressing Corporation, and that I needed to find out her correct name and address to contact her about a survey we were doing. I hated to bother them, I added politely, but it was, after all, a very important matter. The guy said he would look, and asked me to call back again in fifteen minutes. I had a beer while I waited, but when I called back he told me that she had officially withdrawn from school in March. The reason, he said, was to recuperate from illness, but he had no knowledge of what the illness was, whether she had recovered to the point she could eat salad, or why she had chosen to drop out instead of taking a leave of absence.
Even an old address might help, I told him, so he checked their records for me. The number he gave me was that of a boardinghouse not far from the college. When I phoned, a person who sounded like the landlady answered: the girl had left in the spring for goodness knows where, she said, and then hung up. The way the line went dead made it clear she didn’t want to know, either.
That severed the last link between the girl and me.
I went home, opened a beer, and sat back to listen to “California Girls” by myself.
18
The phone rang. I was half asleep on my wicker chair, gazing with bleary eyes at the open book in my lap. An evening shower had come and gone, leaving the trees in the garden dripping. Then came a south wind that smelled of the ocean. It shook the leaves of the potted plants on the balcony and ruffled the curtains.
“Hello,” said a woman. She spoke like someone trying to balance a very fragile glass on a very wobbly table. “Remember me?”
&nbs
p; I pretended to be trying to place her for a moment.
“How’s the record business?” I asked.
“Not so hot. Business is bad all over, I guess. People just aren’t into records.”
“Oh yeah?”
I could hear her tapping her nails against the receiver.
“I had a hard time finding your number.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I had to go to J’s Bar. The guy who works there asked your friend for me. You know, tall guy, kind of weird. He was reading Molière.”
“No kidding.”
Silence.
“Everyone’s wondering where you disappeared to the past week. They’re all worried you’re sick or something.”
“I didn’t realize I was so popular.”
She paused. “Are you angry with me?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I said some really mean things. I just wanted to apologize.”
“Look, I don’t need your sympathy. If it’s bothering you, go to the park and feed the pigeons.”
She sighed. I could hear her lighting up a cigarette at the other end of the line. Then came the sound of Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. She was probably phoning from work.
“Your feelings aren’t the problem. I just shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.” She was talking very quickly.
“You’re pretty hard on yourself.”
“Yes, I try to be.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“Any chance I could see you tonight?” she said finally.
“Sure.”
“Eight o’clock at J’s?”
“Got it.”
Another pause. “Listen, I’ve had a rough time recently.”
“I understand.”
“Thanks.”
She hung up.
19
To keep it short and sweet: I’m twenty-one years old. Still plenty young, but not as young as I used to be. If that bothered me, my only option would be to take a flying leap off the Empire State Building some Sunday morning.
Here’s a joke I heard in an old movie about the Great Depression: “Every time I pass the Empire State Building, I open my umbrella. I mean, it’s raining people there.”
So, like I said, I’m twenty-one. No plans to die yet. I’ve slept with three girls so far.
The first was a high school classmate. We were both seventeen, and we believed it was true love. We found a spot in the bushes one evening; then she removed her brown loafers, her white wool socks, her pale green seersucker dress, her odd underwear (I could tell right away they didn’t fit), and last of all, after a moment’s hesitation, her wristwatch. Then we made love on the Sunday edition of the Asahi newspaper.
We broke up all of a sudden just a few months after graduation. I can’t remember why now—the reason was that trivial. Haven’t laid eyes on her since then, either. I think of her sometimes at night when I can’t fall asleep. End of story.
The second girl I slept with was a hippie chick I bumped into in the Shinjuku subway station. She had nowhere to stay and was flat broke (her chest was pretty flat too), but she had beautiful, intelligent eyes. The most violent antiwar demonstration Shinjuku had ever seen was raging that night, and the trains, buses, and everything else were completely shut down.
“If you hang around here you’re going to get busted,” I told her. She was squatting inside the chained subway entrance reading a sports newspaper that she’d plucked from the garbage.
“At least they’ll feed me.”
“It won’t be pretty.”
“I’m used to it.”
I lit a cigarette and gave one to her. My eyes were smarting from all the tear gas.
“Have you eaten anything today?”
“Not since this morning.”
“Let me buy you something. We can’t hang around here any longer.”
“Why would you want to treat me?”
I didn’t know the answer to that one myself, but I dragged her out of the subway, and we walked down the deserted streets all the way to Mejiro.
For the next week, this quiet girl crashed in my apartment. She would wake up after noon, eat, smoke, dawdle over a book, watch some TV, and sometimes have half-hearted sex with me. Her only possession was a white canvas bag that held a thick windbreaker, two T-shirts, a pair of jeans, three soiled pairs of underwear, and a box of tampons.
“Where are you from?” I asked her once.
“No place you’ve ever heard of,” she answered, and clammed up.
When I came back from the supermarket one day carrying a bag of groceries, she had vanished. Her white bag had vanished too. Not to mention a number of other things. Like the few coins I had left scattered on my desk, a carton of cigarettes, and my freshly laundered T-shirt. A sheet torn from one of my writing pads sat on the desk, an apparent farewell note. It consisted of a single word—“Asshole.” I guess she meant me.
The third girl I slept with was a French literature major I met in the school library, but the following spring vacation she hanged herself in the shabby grove of trees by the tennis courts. Her body wasn’t discovered until vacation ended and the new school year began—she had been swinging in the wind for two whole weeks. Even today no one goes near that grove after the sun goes down.
20
She was sitting at the counter of J’s Bar, looking uncomfortable and stirring what little was left of the ice in her glass of ginger ale with a straw.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” she said, sounding a bit relieved.
“I don’t stand people up. I just had something to do before I left.”
“What kind of something?”
“Shoes. I was polishing a pair of shoes.”
“Those sneakers?” she said in a skeptical voice, pointing at my basketball shoes.
“Fat chance. No, my father’s shoes. It’s one of the rules of our house. He believes that children should polish their father’s shoes.”
“Why?”
“Beats me. I guess he sees it as a symbol of something. At any rate, he comes home every night at eight, like clockwork. So before then, I polish his shoes and then run off to grab a beer.”
“That’s a nice habit.”
“You really think so?”
“Yeah. You should be grateful.”
“I’m grateful he only has two feet.”
She giggled.
“You must come from a respectable family.”
“Yeah, right. Respectable and broke. Makes me so happy I could cry.”
“But,” she said, still stirring her watery ginger ale with the tip of her straw, “my family was a lot poorer.”
“How can you tell?”
“By smell. Just like the rich can smell the rich, the poor can sniff out who’s poor.”
I poured the beer J had given me into my glass.
“So where are your parents these days?”
“I don’t feel like talking about it.”
“How come?”
“Respectable people don’t talk to strangers about family problems. Isn’t that so?”
“Are you a respectable person?”
She pondered this for a full fifteen seconds.
“I’m hoping to be. Trying my best, anyway. Isn’t everyone like that?”
I chose not to answer.
“Still, you should talk about that stuff,” I said.
“Why?”
“For one thing, you’ll have to tell someone at some point anyway; for another, if you tell me, I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
She smiled, lit a cigarette, and took three drags on it while she studied the grain of the wood-paneled bar.
“Five years ago,” she began, breaking the silence, “my father died of brain cancer. It was awful. He suffered for two whole years. All the money we had in the world was spent on his illness. It left us flat broke. Then, to make things even worse, the family fell apart. We were just too worn out. Those things happen, right?”
I nodde
d. “So, what happened to your mother?”
“She’s living somewhere. She sends me New Year’s cards.”
“Sounds as if you don’t like her very much.”
“Yeah.”
“Any brothers or sisters?”
“I have a twin sister. That’s all.”
“Where’s she?”
“Thirty thousand light-years away.”
She gave a nervous laugh and pushed her ginger ale to the side.
“It’s never a good idea to bad-mouth your family,” she continued. “Only leaves you down in the dumps.”
“Don’t let it get to you. Everybody’s carrying stuff like that around.”
“You too?”
“Yeah, every morning I clutch my can of shaving cream and weep.”
She laughed happily. It sounded as if she hadn’t laughed in years.
“So how come you’re drinking ginger ale?” I asked. “I can’t see you being on the wagon.”
“Mm, that was the idea. But I’ll have a drink now.”
“So what’ll it be?”
“White wine, the colder the better.”
I called J over and ordered a glass of wine for her and another beer for me.
“So what’s it like having a twin sister?”
“It feels kind of weird. I mean, you’ve got the same face, the same IQ, the same bra size…it’s a real turnoff.”
“Did people confuse the two of you a lot?”
“Until we were eight they did. Once I was down to nine fingers, though, they didn’t make that mistake anymore.”
She placed both hands on the bar, neatly lining her fingers up like a concert pianist preparing to play. I took her left hand in mine and examined it closely under the recessed lights. It was small and as cool as a cocktail glass, the three fingers and thumb complete and natural, as if they’d been that way from birth. Indeed, their naturalness seemed almost miraculous, a lot more convincing than six fingers would have been anyway.
“I got my little finger caught in a vacuum cleaner when I was eight. It popped off just like that.”
“Where is it now?”
“Where is what now?”
Wind/Pinball Page 5
