At Clare House she can tell by the way her fellow workers have begun to treat her that they know about her changed circumstances. Some are overly friendly, others almost hostile.
She hasn’t told Edward about Joseph; he would be certain to write to Dr. Harper about it. She can’t bear the idea of Dr. Harper being disappointed in her.
So a new address, Dr. Harper writes.
Is your room better than the last? No shared shower, I hope. The address suggests that you have had a promotion at work. It’s uptown, isn’t it? Let me know how life is treating you.
In her reply she is vague. Her uptown address implies more than a small promotion, but it’s true that she’s no longer the hat-check girl. The director, on Joseph’s insistence, has put her on the front desk, where she gives out information, guides people to the exhibits, looks too exquisitely turned out to be there at all.
Returning each evening to the apartment, to its air of serenity, she is always pleased to find Joseph there. He waits with her whiskey and his martini ready: “First drink of the day,” he lies. Joseph, she knows, likes her company in the little ritual, and although she often would have preferred tea, she doesn’t want him to be the only one giving.
Her life is more comfortable than it has ever been, but nothing dispels her dark days, those times when she wakes with a snake squirming in her stomach, the sensation of panic that there is still something left to be done for her mother. The pain at the loss of Tamura, the fear that she will never see Cora again, are always there waiting to surface. She feels spoiled, imprisoned by luxury, lost.
In the museum she studies the families who come with more than a little interest. Mothers with their children, little hands held fast, and the secret smiles between them. Once, watching a father clumsily attempting to button his child’s coat, she was transported back to the time on the bus that took Cora away, Cora in her little buttoned-up felt coat.
“It’s cold outside,” the father said, patting the little girl’s head as she struggled against his efforts. “Gotta keep you warm, honey.”
She’s anxious that Cora might not be in such a family. The picture of that happy little group, the father on bended knee, the mother smiling, often returns to alarm her.
“I know that you can never forget Manzanar.” Joseph is good at picking up on her mood. “But I’m going to show you a different world, Sati. Take you to wonderful places. We’ll travel and I’ll teach you to ski and to sail. Wait till you see the yacht. She’s a beauty, and there’s nothing as great as being out there on the water. You’ll love it.”
The months roll on, six of them gone before she realizes that she can’t go on working at Clare House. Photographs of her and Joseph are appearing in the society pages. People approach her in the museum, smiling, making a fuss.
“It is you, isn’t it?”
She and Joseph are caught at the opera, at the white gloved fund-raisers, at the sort of lush parties she had never before suspected existed.
Mr. Joseph Rodman and his companion Miss Baker at the Plaza Hotel Review. Miss Baker is wearing a stunning full-length Balenciaga dress with emerald earrings from Tiffany’s.
She blames herself for the hollow feeling that she can’t get rid of, the sense she has that she is an impostor. It seems ungrateful not to appreciate what she has been given, but it’s all too much and she wants to start again at the beginning. She’s swimming in Joseph’s slipstream, not making her own life, and this particular American dream, as indulgent as it is, is not her dream. It’s more like Lily’s or Artie’s dream, she thinks. Joseph’s life is like cotton candy, tempting at first, then so sickly sweet that your teeth begin to ache.
Dr. Harper’s postcard comes as it did the year before on the date of Tamura’s death:
Things change, memories fade, but I will always remember Tamura Baker with gratitude.
The same two lines as last year, a tradition now she knows he won’t break while he lives. She holds the card close to her heart, picturing her mother’s face, hearing again the sound of her voice. It’s time to live up to Tamura, to act for herself.
On the morning she hands her notice in at the museum, the city looks shabby, uncared-for. It has rained in the night and the steaming sky suggests there’s more to come. A chemical sort of green streaks the clouds, gobbling up the light. The buildings and sidewalks have morphed to gray, litter flaps around in the gutter. She passes two down-and-outs sleeping in the hard bed of a doorway, their heads beneath old newspapers, their feet slippered in paper bags.
Inside Clare House the glow of the overhead lighting lifts her mood. The air is warm, centrally heated, so that people loosen their scarves and take off hats as soon as they are through the door. She loves the place, doesn’t want to leave, but her colleagues there have become as ill at ease with her as she is with herself. And it’s not fair to the director, who forgives her lateness, forgives the Mondays she can’t make it in because Joseph wants to stay on Fishers Island, go sailing with her and Hunter, and lunch at the Yacht Club.
Joseph’s generosity to the museum assures indulgence, a looking the other way at lateness, at absence. The director thinks it a small price to pay, a little lateness, a day or two missed. Strange that she should be there at all, but the museum has the best of the deal.
It’s not the way it was meant to be, she thinks, as she apologizes to him. Things were meant to be normal, a job, meeting someone, marriage and children. Oddly, those things seem harder now to attain than the lifestyle of the Manhattan rich.
“Of course I understand,” the director says. “Your life has changed since you started here. I could tell you were meant for better things. When will you go?”
She hadn’t thought of when. She will need time to tell Joseph, for him to get used to it. The director will need time to replace her, and she will need time to find another job, a place to live. She is suddenly nervous about what lies ahead.
The director, noticing her hesitation, feels a stab of sympathy. She seems unsure, a little afraid. He can’t help thinking the girl is out of her depth, pitched in the middle, in the tug-of-war between ordinary and extraordinary.
“Take the rest of the day off and think about it,” he says kindly. “Weeks, months, if you would prefer. Whatever you decide is fine with me.”
She walks around the city at a loss as to what she might do to fill the day. Joseph will be out, but the housekeepers from the service he employs will still be cleaning the apartment. He can’t bear being there while they’re working.
She had laughed at him when he told her how uneasy he is with them, but she can’t face the cleaners herself today.
In a half-smart café she idles time away nursing a coffee that’s weak and tastes of chicory. From her window seat she watches a bunch of girls coming out of a bakery, biting into giant pretzels and laughing; there’s a woman in a phone booth wearing a red shallow-bowl hat, a match for the velvet collar of her coat. She is shaking her head, gesticulating with her hand as she speaks; a man flags down a cab, but it doesn’t stop. She can’t hear his shout, but guesses it’s a curse, recognizes his crude finger gesture.
Nothing out here is perfect, the weather’s bad, people don’t smile much, everyone seems in hurry, but it’s real life and she wants to join in.
By the time she gets back, the apartment, dim in late afternoon shadow, smells of polish, and the freesias that are Joseph’s favorite flower. She turns the lights on and a Charlie Parker record for company, and makes herself a cup of tea to drink while she bathes.
It still feels strange to be in Joseph’s apartment without him there. His afternoons are spent at the country club drinking with Hunter or at the Racquet or Union Club being smart with the Madison Avenue tribe. He whiles away his days waiting for the evening, when he will take her out, show her off in uptown restaurants and the smart functions that have melded into one in her mind now.
Tonight they are going to a hospital benefit. Just the thought of it brings on a sigh. She know
s she will feel as nothing against Joseph’s people, their sureness, their smart show of boredom.
When Joseph has had enough of it he will send her home in a cab, go on to indulge in the life he keeps secret. She doesn’t mind, she tires long before him and would prefer to read anyway. He is always there when she wakes, though, making—without vodka, he says—his morning Bloody Mary, her tea.
“You’re a man for the moon hours,” she tells him, and he laughs.
Before he showers she can smell the night on him, kerosene, she thinks, and something sharp, it’s not unpleasant.
“Why kerosene?” she asks.
“You imagine it,” he says, not wanting to tell her it’s the lamp oil from Li’s place, where he buys his share of bliss.
He wants her approval, can’t imagine that he would get it if he were to tell her the truth of his life. Never mind his need of opium, what would she make of his lovers, those uptown boys who claim to be the sons of Russian princes, and the less salubrious breed who strut between Seventh and Hudson dressed up in boots and Stetsons?
But she has guessed Joseph’s secret. He is living a lie, and the damage of it is always there between them. It’s not so much that he looks at men when he is out with her, more that he never notices women, unless to observe how badly they are dressed, how overperfumed.
“Just spray in front of you, dear girl,” he advises. “Then walk into the mist. It’s vulgar to overscent.”
Whenever she thinks of the time after the riot at Manzanar, those boys kissing at their barrack door, she knows that Joseph is like them. She had thought that what she had seen was the result of some strange after-riot electricity in the air. But of course it hadn’t been that, it’s something more, something she can’t get a handle on. It makes her feel ignorant, let down by her years of reading. Where had she missed it in those novels that seemed to leave out nothing of life? Had she failed to see a coded message in those lyrical sentences that more worldly people would have been aware of ? She is irritated with Joseph. Why didn’t he tell her? She didn’t have him down for a cheat. She doesn’t know if she approves or not, but Joseph is still Joseph, after all, whatever his needs.
Alone in her marbled bathroom, she spies the shockingly expensive bottle of Patou’s Joy perfume on the beveled-glass shelf. Its luscious tones call to mind a grown-up sophistication that is not hers. The scent, which she doesn’t like, which doesn’t suit her, is the real thing—she’s the phony.
“You’re going to love this perfume,” Joseph had said, handing her the exquisite crystal bottle. “It will be your signature fragrance. It’s very you.”
“Very me?”
“Mmm, smoky and not too sweet. It doesn’t smell like makeup as most of them do. You know that powdery Max Factor scent.”
She didn’t know. Often doesn’t know what Joseph is talking about.
She catches a glimpse of herself in the bathroom’s mirrored wall and pauses, sponge in midair. With her hair wet, and makeup-free, she might still be the girl from Angelina. She throws the sponge at her reflection and watches a soapy trail sneak down the mirror.
“Where have you been?” she asks quietly, and answers herself: “In a coma, perhaps.”
It’s hard to hurt a friend, but he must be told that she can’t marry him. If she marries at all, she knows now that it must be for love.
And she will tell him that she doesn’t mind about that thing he wants to keep from her, the thing she doesn’t have a name for. She is glad not to be ignorant about it anymore. And after when she leaves the soft bed of his life they can still be friends. More equal friends. She can’t take from him anymore. She must start again, do better.
She will be forgotten soon enough, she imagines, even though she and Joseph have become quite the beautiful couple. Her picture appears so often in Harper’s Bazaar that she can’t anymore walk Fifth Avenue without being recognized.
“You never take a bad photograph,” Joseph tells her when they relive their social life through the magazine’s society pages.
And there in the pictures is the polished woman who is her but not her, a manicured, gleaming woman with the light capturing her just so. The girl from the camp is lost, the angry girl in her mother’s hand-me-down jacket and twice-heeled shoes. Where’s the sense in her life now? It’s a film, a play, an ongoing dream.
The articles never mention the Japanese in her. Well, who could tell? Who could be sure? Those eyes, the elegantly long neck, the fine skin, all surely good enough indications of breeding. And nobody wants to stir up the bitterness, after all. This is New York, the victorious capital of the world, where nothing shocks, where its “pulled-up-stakes” minorities must go on believing in its endless possibilities. There should be no horizons, no barriers to anything in this earthly paradise.
She can’t help wondering if Lily, trawling through her hand-me-down magazines, sees and recognizes her. She hopes so, not so much for revenge, more that she doesn’t want Lily remembering her as a victim. If Lily is capable of it, she doesn’t want her pity.
She has stayed too long in the bath; the water has cooled to the wrong side of comfort, and the skin on her fingers has wrinkled. Shivering a little, she examines herself in the mirror, looking to find in her face, her body, what men might see. All she sees, though, is a girl watching. She looks at her nakedness and it is nothing to her, as it is to Joseph, as it was in the end to Haru.
In her wardrobe, shimmering like jewels, hang the evening dresses from Molyneux and Coco Chanel, lavender silk, gold satin, and her favorite, the Dior midnight-blue velvet that she will wear tonight to the hospital benefit.
There are gloves and little beaded evening bags, lace handkerchiefs, nylons so fine they would seem invisible when held to the light if it hadn’t been for their seams. It’s odd, but she’s looking forward to living without such luxuries; such beautiful things are a responsibility. She can’t remember, though, where the clothes she brought with her have gone. It’s unsettling.
You will be fine, my girl, Tamura’s voice comes to her, as though it is there still in the ether. She will always be able to hear Tamura’s voice.
She thinks of Cora’s little knitting-wool hair bow and everything in her hurts.
Daughter of Happiness
There’s something very sweet about Joseph when he gets home. He has brought her flowers, a cloud of dark anemones with the white ones taken out so that their garnet colors put her in mind of old tapestries.
“Don’t know why they put those white ones in,” he says. “White flowers only go with white flowers.”
She is amused by him caring about such things, and touched that he takes such care when choosing her something as simple as a bunch of flowers. For a moment she wavers, wondering if she is doing the right thing in leaving Joseph. Being rich doesn’t make his need of her any less, and will she ever do better than him, ever be safer than she is with him? Maybe he is right to question whether true love exists. Tamura had despaired of her never taking the sensible path. Perhaps for the first time she should take it now?
Two hours later, as the band at the hospital benefit plays “Rum and Coca-Cola,” she is in a different frame of mind. Among Joseph’s smart friends, those sure-of-themselves bankers and their urbane wives, the familiar feeling of loneliness has overtaken her. It’s not so much that Joseph’s friends exclude her, more that they judge her on the superficial level of her Japaneseness. She is Joseph’s exotic girlfriend, not one of them but someone who adds color to their numbers. She will never be an intimate among them, never be at ease with them. She suspects that Joseph has chosen her for the same reason. That exotic thing always in the mix. It comes to her that the so-called safe path is not for her; that it is quite likely a life with Joseph may be neither safe nor sensible.
And Joseph tonight is adding to her disenchantment. There’s something wrong with him, she can tell. His movements have speeded up and he seems distracted, not quite connected to what’s going on around him. He has left
her twice at their table, heading off somewhere with mumbled excuses as if he is late for an urgent appointment. She is used to his mood shifts, but it is uncomfortable being left at the table to charm in his place.
“Come and dance with me,” she says, catching sight of him lurking behind a pillar.
“Sure,” he says, slurring the word a little. “Sure.”
He is clumsy on the floor, not like Joseph at all, who is usually precise in his steps, easy to follow. Exposed out there under the bouncing light of the revolving mirror ball, she wishes she hadn’t asked him to dance with her, wishes that she hadn’t come this evening, pretending that this is her life, that she is at home here among this other tribe.
And suddenly Joseph is spinning her and she is falling, twisting her ankle, breaking the heel of her shoe, and Joseph is on the floor beside her, smiling a lopsided smile, his eyes looking at but not seeing her. What is the matter with him?
“Let me help.” The voice is deep, not quite baritone. “Give me your arm, lean on me. It will hurt to put weight on that foot.”
She lets him take her weight as she limps back to their table.
“I’m Abe Robinson, by the way. I’m a doctor.”
“I won’t be long, dear girl,” Joseph mumbles, and rolls his way to the bathroom.
Abe Robinson has her foot in his hands, putting pressure where it hurts, wincing when she does at the pain of it.
“Not broken,” he assures her. “But a sprain can hurt worse, I know.”
“Thank you.” A familiar feeling runs through her, the same one she experienced when she first caught sight of Haru.
“No more dancing for a while.” He says with a smile.
“Shame,” she says, returning the smile, attempting lightness. “Will you have a drink with us?” It’s foolish, but she doesn’t want him to go.
A Girl Like You Page 28
