A Girl Like You

by Maureen Lindley

  “Don’t tell me you’re a secret heiress.”

  “Not unless you count ninety dollars or so as the definition of heiress.”

  He can’t stop the pity he feels from reaching his eyes. She has ninety dollars to face the rest of her life with, small change to him. It would scare him witless to have so little, yet she seems unafraid.

  “In any case, Joseph, what you see, what you think you know, is only the smallest part of who I am.”

  “Who are you, then? Tell me the worst of it.”

  “Well, for one thing, I’m not as nice as you think.”

  “Did I ever say that I thought you were nice?”

  “No, but anyway, apart from that you would find me very hard to live with. There are days when I don’t want company, when nothing much pleases me, when you would find me horrible to be with.”

  “I know that already, Sati, I’m the same. We will leave each other to our own devices on those days.”

  “I’m argumentative, you know? I wouldn’t give you an easy ride.”

  “I know that too.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t stop there.” She is irritated by his refusal to let her off the hook. “I take long showers that use up all the hot water and I refuse now to wait in line for anything. And however you might want to change me, in the way that men do, it won’t work. If my father couldn’t do it no, one can. Would you want to be saddled with such a person for a wife?”

  “I would,” he says, joining her on the sofa. “There are six bathrooms in this place and the hot water never runs out. Shower to your heart’s content. I’ll see to it that you never have to wait in line for anything. And the last thing I want to do is change you.”

  “I’m not a virgin, you know.” She hopes to shock, to stop the marriage talk.

  In the pause as he thinks about it, he realizes that he knew that she wasn’t. She is too complete to be a virgin. That guy Haru she told him about, he supposes. It hardly makes a difference, except that she is being honest with him, whereas he can’t find trust enough to be the same with her.

  He puts his arm around her, feeling the womanly slope of her shoulder, the swell of her breast against his chest. Because it is Sati and her body is slim, pared down, it isn’t unpleasant, but it is disturbing. It’s hard for him not to shy away from the way women are made, from the heat that comes off them. They are designed to drip milk and blood, and there is something animallike at their core, something deep and murky. He has felt a faint disgust at it since infancy, since first being aware of the smothering sensation he suffered as a baby at his mother’s fulsome breasts.

  He feels himself drawing away and rallies. He must marry, that’s that. He wants her, just doesn’t want her. They are the answer to each other’s problems, they are synchronicity.

  “Well, I’m not a virgin either.” He smiles. “So we are equal, dear girl.”

  “Stop, Joseph. Please let’s stop talking about it.”

  “Take a chance on me, Sati. Don’t be like those dreamers waiting for fortune to shine on them. They always die disappointed, you know.”

  She moves on the sofa, creating a space between them, wishing she were somewhere else. Joseph isn’t giving up.

  “Just imagine for a moment all those dull little rooms in New York, filled with people growing old, hoping to win life’s lottery. To be chosen!” he says. You know that Only in America thing? It works for one in a million, maybe. You could be the one.”

  “They may have love, Joseph. You always dismiss love.”

  “Because that’s the biggest con of all, don’t you think? Put up with all the dross and wait for the great romance, the one true love that will surely transform everything.”

  “Perhaps when it comes, it does. Perhaps it’s worth waiting for.”

  “I thought that you had already been burned by that fire.”

  “Mmm, maybe.”

  “You have to make things happen yourself, Sati. Take the opportunities when they come.”

  “And you’re my opportunity, Joseph?”

  “Why shouldn’t I be? Look, it can get pretty cold out there on your own, you know. You have so little to lose just now, so much to gain if you say yes.”

  On her third glass of champagne, and caught up in the force of Joseph’s words, she is relaxing into the idea. Being married to Joseph would be an adventure, would be extraordinary. And what if she waits for true love, what guarantee is there that it will ever come? Maybe it has already left for good, left with Haru. Maybe its very nature is to be one-sided, to wound the one who loves most. She’s had enough of being the one who loves most.

  Joseph feels the give in her, the leap to the finish line in himself. It would be too hard to lose now; he will never find anyone who fits the bill as well as Satomi Baker. She is off beat, unexpected, and off the New York society radar. She is his last chance to save himself from those uptown girls with their long teeth and above-reproach credentials.

  “There is no reason, Joseph,” his mother insists, “why you shouldn’t marry a Whitney, or a Cameron. The Rodmans have earned their place in society by now, I should think.”

  “God forbid it, Mother. The boredom would kill me.”

  He can’t imagine ever being bored with Satomi. She is open to the world, to ideas, and surprisingly sure of herself, given her background. He likes the idea of being a teacher in their relationship even though she is not always in the mood to listen to him. It is something he can offer her that has nothing to do with money. These days the thought of being married to her seems like something he wants rather than something imposed on him.

  “Say yes, Satomi. Don’t sleepwalk your life away waiting for things to happen to you. Decide that they will.”

  And in the moment, in the picture he has drawn so vividly of the kind of life that he can offer her, but mostly in the terrible idea that it is possible to sleepwalk your life away, she hears herself asking for time.

  “Of course, of course. Take as much time as you need.” It’s in the bag, he thinks. “Absolutely no hurry.”

  A memory of the honest intimacies of love, of Aaron lightly touching Tamura’s hand as he passed her, of Tamura lighting his cigarette with sweet concentration, comes to her with a pang. She dismisses it. The thought of making things happen, of not waiting around for luck to choose her, is suddenly appealing. Luck hasn’t done such a great job for her in the past, after all.

  “I should have gone down on one knee, shouldn’t I?”

  He kisses her lightly on the lips, the lime-sharp cologne scent of him overpowering. She leans into him, returning the kiss, feeling his mouth close against her half-open one, feeling herself a fraud. Could she love him, make love with him? He is almost handsome, certainly glamorous. It’s not enough, she knows.

  If she turns him down, will she ever get out of her dismal room, with its brick wall view, the memory of Mrs. Copeland an ever-present ghost in the hallway? There are times when that room seems to her to be the loneliest place on earth. How long had Mrs. Copeland been fading in hers before her death? Perhaps Joseph is right. You have to seize your opportunities.

  “Your family, Joseph? Can’t imagine they’d be happy about you choosing me, somehow.”

  “There’s only my mother, some odd upstate cousins. They hardly matter. I never see them if I can help it.”

  “How sad for you.”

  “Not really. My father’s opinion is the only one I ever cared for, and he would have loved you.”

  Uptown

  “You can’t stay in that awful place. You don’t have to decide the marriage thing now, just come and stay as a guest.” Joseph’s insistence, her own fear of stasis, had driven the decision.

  “I can’t bear the thought of you in that nasty little room. Look at all the space here. Have your own rooms, as many as you want.” A nervous tick had fluttered at the corner of Joseph’s right eye. If she turned him down it would probably mean that marriage was off the table too.

  “I won’t bother you
. I’ll just be your landlord for the time being. Only a nicer one than you have at present.”

  “But what will people think?”

  “What people?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  “It’s nobody’s business but ours.”

  “Still no pressure?”

  “I told you, no hurry.”

  “Well, maybe for a while.”

  “Or forever, if you like.”

  She is shaky about it. It feels risky, the choice a loose woman might make, certainly one Tamura would have advised against. Is this the rashness in her that Haru saw when he called her dangerous?

  Her regular kind of life has collided with Joseph’s extraordinary one and she feels like a child grasping at something too big for tiny hands to hold on to. But since Mrs. Copeland died she can hardly bear to be in her building anymore. Things have changed there, and not for the better.

  A woman in her early sixties has moved into Mrs. Copeland’s room. She has a tight unfriendly smile, a buttoned-up way of walking, and the smell of cheap rye and perspiration wafts from her as she passes. She hadn’t been there a week when she began banging on the wall when Satomi played the radio, although her own plays on high volume all through the night.

  Satomi, glad to go, has packed up her things and moved in with Joseph. But strangely, while living with him has dispelled her loneliness, it has only added to her sense of displacement. Questions come to her mind so that she can’t settle; is she grabbing at the chance to forget the past, is she excusing herself from the promise she made to Cora? Is she letting Dr. Harper down, failing to live up to Ralph Lazo’s example?

  Be honest, she tells herself, you wanted to be saved. But from what? From the effort of making her own way, perhaps, from collecting dimes to feed the gas meter in her insistently cold room, or from the shower water running cold before she’s had time to rinse the soap from her hair. But it’s mostly, she thinks, from the dreadful fear she suffers of nothing changing. I wanted to be saved from real life, she thinks. Perhaps, after years of want, it is simply greed for a bigger slice of the cake.

  Joseph finds himself completely satisfied in the waiting for her answer. He has done his part. He isn’t breaking his promise, it’s just on hold. For the moment nothing needs to change and he is at peace.

  But in his splendid apartment the girl she knew has been replaced with another, less certain one. Who is this person wandering the huge rooms, gazing at paintings worth thousands of dollars, trailing her fingers on sculptures of the kind she would normally only see in museums? Nothing in her past life had hinted at the one she lives now with Joseph. She’s in alien territory, attempting to merge. In her daydreaming moments she imagines herself becoming part of the art, alive only when looked at.

  Sometimes to steady herself she has to close her eyes, to hold life at bay for a moment or two. She summons pictures of Angelina’s woods, wraps herself in its greenery, smells the wild mint that she imagines still grows around the sitting stone, and sees the fox, wild and clean. She breathes deeply, gathering herself like an actress waiting for the camera to roll so that she can play her part. It has all happened too quickly, she has hardly had time to adjust to city living, and life with Joseph may be luxurious, but it’s big and scary too.

  What more could you possibly want? she asks herself, and knows the answer.

  What she wants is Tamura making tea on their little stove, dented metal mugs, a radish or two in the right season. Oh, to sit with Tamura on the barrack steps, the mountains dark as forests in the distance, the sound of Yumi arguing with Eriko, and Cora’s little arms around her neck, the sweet child smell of her. That was real life, this one the fantasy.

  It’s so strange to miss Manzanar, isn’t it? Eriko writes in her latest letter.

  I can’t quite remember how to be out in the world. An alarm triggers in me at noon, shouldn’t I be going to the mess hall? My eyes still hold the ground looking for wood for the stove. Three years out of a lifetime is hardly much, yet it seems like the bigger part of it.

  Satomi is herself still held by Manzanar, by a horrible longing for it. Dr. Harper says he understands. He thinks she is missing it in the way a soldier might miss the war. You don’t want to go back, but nothing in the so-called real world engages you quite as much.

  Joseph says he understands too. Perhaps he does. He has offered help with finding Cora, but she can tell that he’s not eager to back his offer up with action.

  “Perhaps the time is not right yet,” he says, thinking this extra dimension of Cora will move them further apart.

  Neither of them mentions what they know now, that love is the key, after all; that they are missing that mysterious transformer that turns like to love. They are both pretending.

  She finds herself longing for Haru, not so much emotionally, that hunger is fading, but for the physicality of him, for the man scent of him. Joseph smells of soap and cologne, of minty toothpaste and hair cream. There’s no balance, it seems to her, between them, they are too compatible.

  At night in her lofty room, sleep holds out stubbornly against the ache in her, an ache that she knows Joseph can’t cure. She tells herself it’s just a primitive urge, the animal part that isn’t subject to reason. She’s embarrassed by it, but the sensation won’t go away. It’s like defrosting, she thinks, that painful, burning itch when you hold frozen hands to the fire.

  Disturbed by the daily compulsion she feels to run, to scuttle back to a life dictated by her own circumstances, she overrides her fears with a determination to hold on to the Satomi Baker that Tamura would recognize.

  “I’m a kept woman,” she jokes with Joseph. “It’s got to stop.”

  “You insist on paying rent, so you’re not kept in the true sense,” he says. He hardly knows what to do with the cash she hands him every week. He tips hotel doormen more for whistling down a cab.

  “You’re sort of my protégée.” He likes the sound of it better than the kept woman thing.

  “Well, at least stop buying me presents all the time. You know I can’t return the favor.”

  “You must have the right clothes. How can I take you anywhere without the right clothes?”

  He escorts her to Dior, enjoying as much as her the parade of evening gowns cut from fabrics so fine they feel like gossamer.

  “You’ll need a fur to go with that, shoes for that bag, earrings if your hair is to be swept up.”

  There are twelve negligees in her dressing room drawers. A glut, she thinks. Their colors blush reproachfully through sheets of thin tissue, peach and primrose, lilac and eau de nil. No such thing as mend and make do in Joseph’s world. She can’t deny, though, that she loves the feel of silk, the slope of the high-heeled shoes. It’s all a sham, she thinks, but the thrill of dressing up is a childlike pleasure. Will she ever be able to settle now for less?

  “Who needs twelve nightgowns?” she had groaned at the sight of them.

  “Just a start, dear girl,” Joseph had said, the bit between his teeth now.

  He has found a new and distracting occupation. He hasn’t enjoyed himself so much since what he thinks of now in retrospect as his good war. He was playing a part in that too, playing the straight guy, a guy just like the rest of them.

  “I wanted to be like them, not the spoiled rich guy.”

  She feels pity for him, can’t imagine that he pulled that one off.

  “It’s hard to have secrets,” she says.

  Joseph had turned down his mother’s bought offer to work in the White House as some sort of an assistant to an assistant, choosing to spend his war years in the Army instead.

  “I don’t want to cower at home while the rest of you go to war,” he had told Hunter, who was already in uniform.

  “What were you doing while I was in Manzanar?” Satomi asks.

  “I was in the thick of it in Italy. A bit of a shaky start, I suppose, but I got used to it.”

  She’s surprised. It’s hard to picture Joseph in uniform, har
d to picture him fighting. When she says as much, he looks hurt.

  She couldn’t know it, wouldn’t guess at it now, but he had been determined not to whine about things; he may have been afraid, but he couldn’t bear the idea of being a coward too. Along with his fellows he had experienced the minor and major miseries of war with stoicism and a black sort of humor that his comrades came to rely on; sleeping in wet clothes, the lack of tobacco, stinking mud in their boots were better borne with humor.

  The physical difficulties he suffered are forgotten; the memories of dead bodies, bloated silhouettes floating downriver, blood and limbs and the carnal stink, are not so easily let go.

  “You’re not the only one with unwanted snapshots in your head,” he tells Satomi. “Still, I don’t regret it. I enjoyed the friendships. It was good being with guys who had your back.”

  “You still have friends, Joseph.”

  “Yes, you and Hunter. The rest are hardly what you would call friends.”

  “Why don’t you have a get-together with your Army buddies?”

  “Because it could never be the same again. Money distances you in civilian life, sets you apart.”

  Joseph’s fortune is over thirty million dollars. Less than the Woolworth heiress, which irritates his mother, but he’s getting there. In addition, he owns a sixteen-story apartment building on Fifth Avenue, a spacious house on Fishers Island above a long white Connecticut beach, and now his father’s beloved yacht Windward.

  All this, and he doesn’t even have to run the family business, which rolls on, an unstoppable juggernaut, adding to his wealth by the minute. He’s the major shareholder in the Rodman group of companies, but it’s a relief to the board that he won’t be joining them. He may be a Rodman, but they know what he is, and besides, he has no head for business.

  “You hardly need to work, Sati,” he says, floating the idea of enrolling her in an art appreciation class. “You deserve to be educated.”

  “No, I must work.” Her tone leaves no room for argument.

  The longer she is with Joseph, the stronger her doubts become, the more she questions her reasons for being with him. As much as it feels safe, it doesn’t feel right. If it’s a means to an end, she doesn’t know what that end might be. She doesn’t like the feeling that she’s being anesthetized or that she’s using Joseph.