In the Age of Love and Chocolate b-3

by Gabrielle Zevin

  I went straight to his room. He was hooked up to an oxygen tank. He hated such measures, so I knew the end must be near. Every time I saw him, there was less of him. I had a strange thought: if Yuji did not die, perhaps he would simply disappear.

  “I promised not to die while you were away,” he said.

  “It looks as if you barely kept that promise.”

  “How was America?”

  I told him of my adventures, eking more excitement and humor out of my travels than there had actually been. I wanted to amuse him, I suppose. He reported the progress that had been made with the Japanese clubs. We spoke of our parents, none of whom were living. Without thinking, I asked him to say hi to my mother, my father, and my nana if he happened to see them in Heaven.

  He smiled at me. “I think you know I am not going to Heaven, Anya. One, I am not a good man. And two, I don’t believe in such a place. I didn’t know you believed either.”

  “I’m weak, Yuji,” I said. “I believe when it is convenient for me to believe. I don’t want to think that you might end up nowhere, in some black void.”

  The rain cleared, and though his doctor was against it, he wanted to go for a walk. The grounds of the estate were lovely, and despite the humidity, I was glad to be outside.

  The act of walking and talking soon proved too much for Yuji Ono, and even with his oxygen tank in tow, he quickly lost his breath. We stopped at a bench by a koi pond. “I do not like dying,” he said mildly after his breathing had regulated.

  “You say that as if you’re speaking of a food you dislike. I do not like broccoli.”

  “I don’t remember you being funny,” he said. “It is my upbringing. We are taught to keep much inside. But I don’t like dying. I would rather be alive to fight, to plan, to plot, to connive, to win, to betray, to eat chocolate, to drink sake, to tease, to make love, to laugh my head off, to leave my mark on this world…”

  “I’m sorry, Yuji.”

  “No. I don’t want your pity. I only want to tell you that I don’t like it. I don’t like the pain. I don’t like the affairs of my physical body being a matter of daily discussion. I don’t like looking like a zombie.”

  “You’re still handsome,” I told him. He was.

  “I’m a zombie.” He smiled at me crookedly. “We should be like the fish,” Yuji said. “Look at them. They swim, they eat, they die. They don’t make such a production of these little things.”

  * * *

  Yuji passed early the next morning. When Kazuo told me, I bowed my head, but I did not allow myself to cry. “Was it peaceful?” I asked.

  Kazuo did not reply for a moment. “He was in pain.”

  “Did he have any last words?”

  “No.”

  “Did he have any message for me?”

  “Yes. He wrote you a note.”

  Kazuo handed me a slate. Yuji’s stroke was very light. I squinted to make it out before realizing the message was in Japanese. I handed the slate back to Kazuo. “I can’t read this. Would you translate for me?”

  Kazuo bowed deeply. “It does not make much sense to me. I am very sorry.”

  “Try. If you don’t mind. Maybe it will mean something to me.”

  “As you wish.” Kazuo cleared his throat. “To my wife. The fish does not die with regrets because the fish cannot love. I die with regrets, and yet I am glad I am not a fish.”

  I nodded.

  I bowed my head.

  I had not loved him, but I would miss him terribly.

  He had understood me.

  He had believed in me.

  Is this better than love?

  And maybe fish do love. How could Yuji even know?

  * * *

  Perhaps it was a sign of denial but I had not brought black clothes to Japan. One of the maids lent me a mofuku, a black mourning kimono. I put it on, then looked at myself in the mirror. I seemed older than twenty, I thought. I was a widow and maybe this was how widows looked.

  The funeral began like any funeral. I had, at this point, been to more than my share. This one was in Japanese, but it doesn’t particularly matter what language a funeral is in. The tiny room had light pine walls, like the interior of a poor man’s coffin, and was so packed with Yuji’s colleagues and relatives that I could not even see who was in the back. Incense was burning on the altar, and the air smelled sickly sweet, of synthetic frangipani and sandalwood. (No matter how old I get, I will never stop associating the scent of frangipani with death.) Orchids leaned in a blue vase, and a white lily floated in a shallow wooden bowl.

  People say that the dead at funerals look peaceful. It’s a nice sentiment, if untrue. The dead look dead. Perhaps the body is peaceful—it does not cough or wheeze or argue or move—but it is a husk, nothing more. The body that had once been Yuji Ono was dressed in his wedding clothes. The hands were clasped over his favorite samurai sword and had been positioned so that his amputated finger was not in view. The mouth had been forced into a strange almost-smile, an expression Yuji had never worn in life. This was not Yuji to me, and this was not peace.

  The priest signaled us to come and leave incense at the altar. After that, people went to view the body, though there was not much to see. He was a layer of wasted flesh over a pile of bones. Sophia’s poison had killed him leisurely and dreadfully.

  Though it was customary to acknowledge the widow, a woman with a shroud of black hair and a wide-brimmed, charcoal-colored hat walked right past me on her way to the altar. She was taller than almost anyone at the funeral.

  Even from behind, the woman appeared overcome. Her shoulders shook, and she was whispering. I thought she might be praying, though I could not make out the words or the language. She lifted her hand and moved it in a way that could have been the sign of the cross. The longer I regarded her, the more her hair seemed to take on the waxy quality of a wig. Something was off. I stood and walked the three steps to the altar. I meant to set my hand on the woman’s shoulder, but I caught her hair instead. The black wig slipped down to reveal brown hair.

  Sophia Bitter turned around. Her large dark eyes were red and her eyelids were swollen like lips. “Anya,” she said, “did you imagine I wouldn’t come to the funeral of my best friend?”

  “I did actually,” I said. “Seeing as you killed him, good manners would dictate that you should sit this one out.”

  “I don’t have good manners,” she said. “Besides, I only killed him because I loved him.”

  “That is not love.”

  “And what would you know about love, liebchen? Did you marry Yuji for love?”

  I pushed her against the casket. We were attracting the attention of other funeral-goers.

  “He betrayed me,” Sophia insisted. “You know that he did.”

  I felt my fingers begin to spread toward my machete. I thought of Yuji asking me to kill her, but for better or for worse, I was still not the murdering kind. Sophia Bitter had committed atrocious acts, but in my memory flashed a picture of the girl Yuji had described. Sophia had once been young and unpopular and embarrassed. She had thought herself ugly, though she couldn’t have ever been more than plain. She had murdered perhaps the only person in the world who had loved her. And for what? For power? For money? For chocolate? For jealousy? For love? I know she told herself it was for love, but it could not have been.

  “Go,” I said. “You’ve paid your respects, for what they are worth, and now you should leave.”

  “I will be seeing you, Anya. Good luck opening the rest of the clubs in Japan.”

  “Is that a threat?” I imagined her making a disturbance at one of our openings.

  “You’re a very suspicious young woman,” she said.

  “Probably so. If we were in America, I’d have you arrested.”

  “But we are not. And poisoning is the perfect crime. It takes patience, but it’s so very hard to prove.”

  “By the way, what are your plans after the funeral?”

  “Will we be having lu
nch?” she asked. “Girl talk and chocolate. Unfortunately, I leave tomorrow. You are not the only one with a business to run, though you act as if you are. This leaves no time for you and me to catch up. What a pity.”

  “I feel so sorry for you,” I said. “He loved you, and you killed him, and now no one will ever love you again.”

  Her eyes turned black with hate. I knew even as I was saying it that nothing except the belief that others found her pitiable could have had such an effect on that woman. She lunged toward me, but I wasn’t scared of her. She was weak and stupid. I called Kazuo over and asked him to show her the door.

  XIX

  I VOW TO BE ALONE

  THOUGH IT WAS THE MIDDLE of the day, I went back to Yuji’s house to my room to sleep. I was psychically tired, if not physically so. I lay down on my bed, not even bothering to remove my black kimono.

  When I awoke, it was past midnight, and the room felt cramped and musty. My clothes reeked of incense, and I craved a walk, a bit of fresh air. Though I was not particularly concerned for my safety, I strapped my machete underneath the kimono.

  I took the same stone path I had traveled with Yuji not so many days earlier. I arrived at the koi pond and sat down on the ancient stone bench. I watched the orange, red, and white fish as they swam and jumped about. I contemplated these fish. It was so late—were these a peculiar breed of party fish? When did fish sleep? Did they sleep?

  I loosened my kimono, which the servant had tied too tightly.

  I looked at my hands and at my wedding band. So much for that experiment, I thought.

  There was much moonshine that night, and I was able to see my reflection in the water. I looked at Anya Balanchine as the fish swam across her face. She seemed on the verge of tears, and I hated her for that. I took off my wedding band and threw it at her. “You chose this,” I said. “You don’t get to feel sad.”

  I was twenty years old. I had married and now I was a widow. In that moment, I determined that I would never marry again. I did not like the jewelry that said you were owned, the pretentious pageantry of weddings, or the fact that joining your life to someone meant inviting sadness in your door. For love or for any other reason, I was not for marriage, or perhaps marriage was not for me.

  The business had made sense with Yuji, but the whole arrangement had become so complicated. I could see no reason to join my life to anyone else’s in the future. If you married for love, you always fell out of love (cf. my parents, Win’s parents). If you married for business, the relationship refused to stay business. Furthermore, I had worked hard, made tough choices, and built something other than a starry-eyed teenager’s house of dreams. I did not wish to inherit anyone else’s history and mistakes nor did I wish mine on anyone. Besides, who could I be with who wouldn’t judge me? Who would ever understand why I had done all these things I’d done? I sat on that rigid stone bench in a foreign country in the middle of the night, and I thought, Why on earth would I ever get married again?

  So I determined to be alone. Maybe occasionally, I would take a lover. (The Catholic schoolgirl in me was scandalized by the thought; I told her we’d been thrown out of Catholic school so she should shut up.) Theo had effectively been my lover, and look how well that had worked out. Definitely better to be alone. I would fill my spare time with productive hobbies. I would take up reading like Imogen, go to cooking school, learn to dance, volunteer with orphans, become a more involved godparent to Felix. I would write my memoirs.

  (NB: Even many years later, it is hard for me to admit this. Marrying Yuji Ono, despite the good it had done the Dark Room, would probably go down as the worst mistake of my life. As anyone who has read these accounts knows, I have made many. That night, I was not quite ready to admit that the error had been mine and not perhaps the institution of marriage itself.)

  In the middle of having these thoughts, I felt something hit me in the back, underneath my left shoulder blade. It felt wrong, but that said, it did not feel significant either. It felt blunt, of medium size, harmless. It felt like a softball or a grapefruit. But when I looked down, my chest was pierced by the sparkling tip of a blade. Suddenly, the blade retracted and I began to bleed. It did not hurt much, but this was just adrenaline. I tried to retrieve my machete from beneath my kimono, but the garment was so voluminous, I could not reach it quickly. As I turned my neck to see what was coming, the blade penetrated again—this time, somewhere in my lower back. I tried to stand, but my right foot gave out, and I fell, slamming my chin and neck on the stone bench. Above me, Sophia Bitter held a sword. The look in her eye said she would not stop until I was dead.

  How had she broken in to the estate? Who else was with her? I did not have even a moment to contemplate. I wanted to live. I needed time to get to my machete, so I decided to talk to her. “Why?” My voice was barely more than a whisper—I had injured my larynx when I’d fallen into the bench. “What have I ever done to you?”

  “You know what you’ve done. I would rather poison you, but I have neither the time nor the access. I’ll have to make do with this.” She drew back the sword and she raised it in the air.

  “Wait,” I whispered as loudly as I could. “Before you kill me … Yuji said to tell you something.” It was a pathetic ploy on my part, and I had almost no faith that it would work.

  She rolled her eyes but lowered her weapon. “Speak,” she said.

  “Yuji told me—”

  “Louder,” she said.

  “I can’t. My throat. Please. Closer.”

  She crouched down so that we were eye to eye. I could feel her breath on my cheek. The scent was slightly acrid, like she had been drinking coffee. I thought of Daddy making coffee for my mother on the stovetop. Oh Daddy, it might be nice to see you again. I felt my eyelids start to drop.

  “Speak,” she repeated. “What did Yuji say?”

  “Yuji said … He was so handsome, wasn’t he?”

  Sophia slapped me across the face, but I didn’t even feel it. “Stop stalling!”

  “Yuji said that the fish have no regrets because…”

  “You are not making any sense.”

  I was about to pass out when I felt something tickle my thigh. Of all things, it was the peacock feather I’d put in my sheath—Win’s feather. Get the machete, I thought. Machetes are meant for chopping, not piercing, and my injuries had left me at a serious disadvantage. But I knew this was my only chance.

  I wrapped my fingers around the machete. I pulled up my arms as high as I could, and I thrust forward, piercing what I hoped would be her heart. I withdrew the machete. She fell over into the koi pond, and strangely, I remember feeling guilty for the disturbance it would mean to the fish.

  Sophia Bitter had once given me good advice. What had she said? It isn’t tough to have injured someone if you ought to have killed them.

  I tried to scream for Kazuo, but my voice would not work. I could tell I was bleeding out fast, that if I did not get medical attention soon, I would die.

  I tried to stand, but I could not. My left leg felt dead. I did not have time to be scared. I dragged myself by my hands along the stone path. It was perhaps a thousand feet back to the house, and I knew I was leaving a trail of blood behind me.

  My heart was beating faster than I can ever remember it having beaten. I wondered if it might give out.

  When I was about halfway there, a man with a hook for a hand came out of the bushes. I knew him. My advantage, in that moment, was not that I would be able to outrun anyone, but that I was level with the ground.

  “Sophia!” the man called.

  Obviously she did not reply.

  I saw him look at the bloody trail, but he did not pause to consider that it led toward the house and stopped. At that moment, Yuji Ono’s cat began walking on the path in the direction of the koi pond. Upon spotting me, the cat paused—I worried that she might come over—and then she meowed, attracting the man’s attention. She continued walking to the koi pond, and he followed her.

>   I pulled myself to Kazuo’s room. The adrenaline had begun to wear off and the pain was nothing short of excruciating. I scratched at the door. Kazuo was a light sleeper, and he was immediately on his feet.

  “Sophia Bitter is dead. Her bodyguard is on the estate. There may be others, I don’t know. Also, I may need to go to the hospital,” I managed to say.

  I had always thought I’d die young. I thought I’d die because of something to do with crime and chocolate, but it was Sophia’s love (and my own poor choices) that had done me in.

  Sweet Jesus, I thought just before my heart stopped, Sophia Bitter had really loved Yuji Ono. It almost made me laugh: some people never got over their high school boyfriends.

  THE AGE OF LOVE

  XX

  HAVING VOWED TO BE ALONE, I AM NEVER ALONE

  WHEN I AWOKE, I was in a hospital bed. Without knowing why, I could tell that this was different from any other time I had been injured. I was not in pain, but my body had a peculiar, ominous numbness to it.

  The miniature nurse said something encouraging in Japanese. It seemed like she was saying, “Yay, you are not dead!” But I couldn’t tell. She scurried out of the room.

  Moments later, a doctor came in, and with him were Mr. Delacroix and my sister.

  I knew whatever was wrong with me must be serious if Natty had been summoned to Japan. She took my hand. “Anya, you’re awake, thank God.” Her eyes filled with tears. Mr. Delacroix stayed in the corner, as if he were being punished. It did not strike me as particularly odd that he had come, as there was business to attend to in Japan. With me indisposed, either he or Theo would have needed to make the trip.

  I tried to speak, but there were tubes in my throat. I pulled at them, and the nurse grabbed my hand.

  “Do you remember what happened to you?” the doctor asked. It was a relief that he spoke English.

  I nodded because that was the only response I could make.