by Sara Dillon
I wrote to Kido and told him where I was. He phoned in early fall, and we met at a station not far from where I was living. We walked together in the park that evening. We continued our agonized conversation about inevitability, he saying that Japan was not like that, that my idea was too American, and I insisting that this was what must be. There was no resolution; we met and parted, met and parted.
He would phone me at odd times and odd hours; the phone would ring once or twice, then ring again and it would be Kido.
Sugoi na, kimi, he would say. You are something. I spoke with extravagance: always, never, we must, we shall.
I also met Yukito every week or so, generally in some wonderful new restaurant he had found. He did not want to hear about Kido and me, or my plans. He placed his own particular limits on our conversations.
It was a bitter winter that year, unusual for Tokyo, which was generally so mild. I made my tofu and bean sprout dishes, the days and nights passed. I wandered about the city, and began to write prose in Japanese.
The first of the two novellas was about an American falling in love with a has-been Japanese actor; the second was about an American falling in love with a Japanese cello player who had true genius, but no belief in himself and no courage. I wrote away sitting in kissaten, and at the tiny desk in my tiny apartment near the river.
I dressed in the same way every day that year; black stretch pants and a white painter’s shirt. When it was cold, a black cardigan and coat. But never any deviation—the ankle pants, the white shirt. It became a kind of uniform and lasted for years afterward.
Kido asked me to tell him about my life, about America, about Vermont; he asked me what I thought of certain things, what about John Lennon, what about Japanese artists. We should have met before, long before, I should have known him when he was very young and I even younger; we should not have gone through those months and those ambiguous conversations. The absolute and the uncertain sat uneasily side by side; the spring came, hanami, then the rainy season, and Kido seemed to disappear again.
He knew that I was leaving on a certain date in August. August is so intense in Tokyo; the smell of baskets filled with hot tea leaves, the stalls and shoe sales, the crowded streets, the mercifully air-conditioned train cars, with shades pulled low, families with straw hats, heading out, out to festivals and the seashore. I saw from the ads that Kido, shy Kido, was to give a televised end of summer concert several days before my departure.
Well.
Kido, who had over the years become so bitter, so hidden, stood in front of thousands of people and sang of love in a way that astounded even me.
The city was hot, dark and muggy around the stadium; I sat in my apartment and watched on my tiny screen. Kido looked into the sky and sang of love in such a way.
It must sound absurd. Of course it sounds absurd. Yet it happened.
It seemed clear to me that Kido had decided to come to me. He would leave Japan and its restraints and its frightening entertainment world and he would come to me. And we would be free, and we would not escape again, not ever.
We could go to Paris; make a small home in Tokyo.
Una kept hanging up the phone on me. She not only refused to listen to anything about Kido, but also anything about Japan, at all, anything.
I went back to California after that. I ran and ran, white sneakers and white shirt, morning and evening, I ran everywhere. I even ran inside my student apartment, up and down. I worked on my dissertation, on the subject of Dazai Osamu, the twisted, lyrical, confused and thwarted Japanese writer who committed suicide after the war. I wrote about how he mocked himself, how there was a non-Japanese artist, proud of himself and lionized by a different tradition, inside the constrained and failed Japanese artist who could not be a team player and could only describe himself as “weak.” He could conceive of being loved, but knew himself to be a phantom. And at the place where I parted company, and knew myself not to be Japanese, Dazai actually enjoyed the sickness and sadness of this.
I suspected that Kido did as well. I mean that Kido probably enjoyed such a sickness and sadness.
The drama of Japan was in secrets, wondering what the other person was thinking, across the city or across the world. Secrets could go on for years, for decades. Though I had once believed myself to be Japanese, whether in a former life or not, everything about it familiar, everything my own, in the end I was not Japanese.
In the end, I wanted Kido to appear at the door. But he did not.
Soon after I got back to California, Kido released a strange little group of songs in English, strongly implying that he was in love and would be leaving Japan. His English was strongly accented, touching, artificial. Still, I appreciated the effort. I listened over and again, riding my bike in the dark around the campus.
I remember the sound of the fountains in the dark, and the sense of intolerable repetition.
After even a short while of this, I knew that wallowing in secrets was not for me. Listening to songs with hints and messages was not for me. There was too much of Dazai and the weak, lazy artist who sits on bar stools and laments the failures of love and the demands of Japan.
Then it all went dark.
Kido came out with a new album, called, quaintly, No No No—looming across the cover in English. The theme seemed to be, They won’t let me go, they won’t let me love. I had written to him asking, Why why why won’t you tell me?—Doo shite Doo shite—one song was called, of course, Why why why. It actually was. And so it went.
You see how it was. On the cover, Kido was dressed in traditional Japanese garb, the ironic message being, I am Japanese and they will not let me go.
Well, after that, I didn’t want to study Dazai and the self and the failed Japanese artist. I was not going to defeat those forces, and, frankly, decided to be done with it all.
I had left my novellas with Yukito, who found a publisher for them. I went over on a little book tour. On the inside of the book jacket, I had written up a kind of farewell to Japan.
And there I was, at last with my PhD, one that I didn’t want any more, and an expertise in a Japanese literature I did not want to think about any more. I took a job teaching at a major university; it was a plumb academic job, or so they said, but to me it was torture. At a dinner party, someone asked me to tell them about garden imagery in Japanese literature and it was then it struck me: I had to get out of this. I had to leave.
There were two ways I could have gone; how I wish I had gone back north, gone to some college, taught writing, gone to sit like a cat in the window and refashioned and reconfigured what had gone wrong.
But no. I did not do that.
Laugh though one may, after all this, I placed myself in the most alien and forbidding place imaginable. I went, incredibly, to law school.
Una says that I blame her for this; perhaps I do.
Book V
Mr. Merrill; 2007
I asked Sasha about the Russian proverb, the one about being born in a bright field and dying in a dark forest. He frowned and said he had never heard of it; I was slightly disappointed, but it wasn’t his fault. I had hoped it was better known than this. He tried to find something to say about it, though, and suggested that Russians are really into forests.
I’d been reading Eva Trout, again, when Sasha showed up at my office hour in the little library cubby. Why did I like the book so much? Probably its, for me, familiar take on self-imposed, expectant isolation. Resignation is not experienced; it is undergone.
Sasha looked over and asked what I was reading. As it was too hard to explain, and too unlikely to resonate with Sasha, I scarcely replied.
Just something I used to like, I said.
From Sasha’s point of view, I was a much older woman, probably close to his mother’s age. He liked to tell me his troubles; money, and being stopped for driving after just two glasses of wine. Like other Russians I’d met, he enjoyed hearing about me going to Kazakhstan to adopt the children. I always got on
well with Russians; I loved the way they complained, as an amusement, the way the Irish do. I really did not know how to live, and certainly did not know how to bond, without complaining.
But I was happy; I enjoyed stirring the coffee in the cup, enjoyed watching the snow fall from the trees.
It had not turned out as I thought, but at least it could still be something of a story.
At night I sang the kids the Barney song, I love you, you love me.
And in March I even wrote to John Merrill. I found him on the Saint Theo’s website, still there, still in his poetry seminars, older, thinner, but determined and completely recognizable, always sporting some different sort of hat.
Dear JM:
How I think of you! You will be surprised; I am back in Vermont, even teaching a seminar at Stannard State.
How are you?
What are you doing now?
Catherine Darcy
I didn’t hear back for a while, though I waited. I tried to think how old he would be now; what he might be like heading into old age. One afternoon, I saw his name come up on the e-mail and felt woozy with delight.
Catherine—Misplaced your email address, then found it, and still not sure this is the right one; doesn’t look familiar. So you are back; welcome back.
I am in my mid seventies, and not writing much. Not sure what to do, as this is all I’ve ever done and no poems seem to be there now.
Do you stay in touch with anyone from our seminar? Those were different times.
John
He was still there, in one sense still mine, still JM, still himself, cross and grumbling, but with the old, inexplicable gentleness. He was still there. I put my head down on the desk and cried.
I wrote and told Calvin the news that I’d heard from Merrill; that he was still there. I’d like to find someplace like that, not Saint Theo’s exactly, but something of Saint Theo’s as it was for us then, I wrote to him.
God, he wrote simply, are you still longing for the time when you were batting your eyelashes at everyone? And then, Not I, thanks. I’ve moved on.
It was hard for me to tell whether Calvin meant this. Had he really moved on that successfully? Una was convinced both that Calvin was dissatisfied with his life and work, and that he was pursuing younger women. As for being an antique book dealer, it sounded all right to me. As to the younger women, I had no way of knowing, but Una mentioned it every time Calvin’s name came up.
I’m sure he’s dating a younger woman now, she said, totally confident on this score. Maybe this was to help me see Calvin as disloyal, detached from our past, likely contemptuous of me as I was now.
I thought about what stories from the past John Merrill might like to hear. I wrote and reminded him of the young man who said in class that women like to do to men what they do to their hair. It hadn’t made sense, but lasted unscathed in my memory through all these years nonetheless.
It was a thrill, an honor, to report to Merrill on where I was, to exchange words with him again. It was like I’d come through a war, bloodied and roughed up, but still recognizable to him.
As I said and had predicted, the Stannard seminar was very small, less than ten students. Sasha among them, of course; most of the others seemed to consider me as somewhat haywire. I had settled on Geography, Self and Narrative. Imagine how that would raise eyebrows as it went out on student transcripts.
And why on earth shouldn’t I have my narratives; that is, without having to be an antiquarian? Why should they be forcibly removed, in the name of living in one’s time? Narrative with its astonishing coincidences, its unified and unifying icons and appearances, narrative that rejects acts of madness, narrative that tells you what to do far better than family, for instance, could.
Catherine, it’s good to remember that group of poets in your class, especially at the age I am. I will be going in for back surgery when this semester ends.
I don’t want to force myself to write, don’t want to be
Robert Frost.
I wanted to cradle John Merrill’s head in my arms, to shower him with thanks for remembering who I was and writing to me. Calvin I would continue to leave and return to, leave and return to, mostly as he would have it.
And then, the small seminar and the part-time position and the cubby at Stannard State, where I didn’t even have an office, and mainly chatting with Sasha during office hours—it seemed I would be allowed to rejoice over it. Calvin would ask if I was teaching pirate literature—the part about geography—but that also didn’t matter.
I would not be angry at Calvin, and doubted he was pursuing younger women. After all, he had once read to me from Alberti’s Concerning the Angels, despite his own preference for birds. I would forgive Calvin a lot for that alone.
Forgiveness
There were those, the vast majority, who chose to be taken by something. They met, and, even the very hard to please and full of themselves, married. They lived with an I love you sorta, don’t love you sorta, set of circumstances; they went to bed and conceived, they moved on into phases and either split or didn’t. They had a story, they had ups and downs, they expected this and knew it when they saw it. Their spouses were either surprisingly attractive or unattractive to others when brought along in tow to public events. Each decision they made carved out a certain period of their allotted time.
No such thing for me, of course. I resisted tooth and nail from my earliest childhood, no such small beer for me.
No such life for me.
There were those who might have been a good bet, if I could have brought myself to pause and consider.
We were in the Central Station in Budapest, Una and I. In our younger days, we made quite the duo, and more than one man agonized over which of us he liked best, or indeed whether he could only like us as a duo. We were walking down the stairs, in 1989, not so long before the fall of Communism, and arguing, we were of course arguing, about what I can’t recall.
As we walked down the stairs, a young man was coming in the opposite direction, from the top. At least I think so, though at times I ask whether I can be sure that it wasn’t the case that we were walking down and he walking up.
Whichever it was, he turned on a dime to walk in our direction, quickly and deftly catching me by the arm and telling me, Oh, it is not worth it to argue!
How funny he was, Vincenzo from Lake Como, in his trenchcoat and jaggedy hair. He was what you would think of as a family man, or would have been, a good one. He was acceptable to look at, sweet to hear speak, charming and dedicated.
We exchanged addresses, and I did write to him. He was, of all things, a water engineer. He invited me to come and meet his parents.
A water engineer! Una shouted. What would you do with a water engineer? Forget about it!
And so Vincenzo was relegated to my rather long list of persons encountered in railway stations, though he actually would have fit in another category for me: a husband. Not the glorious marriage to Kido that was the one I wanted, but a more modest marriage that sliced up time into pieces of bread, rubbed in oil, a dash of garlic.
Cambridge; 2007
We always came to the same hospital; one corner of it seemed to be Gramma’s own wing, at this stage. We knew all the waiting areas, the food on the cafeteria menu.
Una had phoned, and informed me in rushed and staccato tones that Gramma had pneumonia and was completely dehydrated. She tried to talk to Gramma and found her “loopy”; she was still loopy now, not doing well.
They don’t know if she’ll pull through this time. You never know, but this time she doesn’t look good.
Does she know what’s going on? I asked.
She’s in and out.
The kids were behind me in the corridor, armed with “activity bags” filled with unused crayons, drawing paper and legos. I stood at the doorway and felt relief that at least it was a private room. She looked so small, lying there, apparently asleep, in between one world and another. She was as small as a child,
unequal to the task of recovering, dressed in the kind of hospital gown she hated.
She had been really tall; tall and thin, a great dancer. She followed the dances all through the war, laughing with the GIs, spinning and spinning. She met Cardinal Cushing for tea, and had her photo taken with him, wearing a black veil over her hair.
How teeny she was now, fallen sideways against the edge of the bed. Her mouth was quivering the way it did when she was unhappy. I sat on the side of the bed and took her hand, something I almost never dared do. I rubbed the skin on her hand and felt that this time, she needed just silent comfort. She had done a good job without Daddy.
She may well be crazy as a loon most times, I thought, but she had done her best.
It was Una who had always longed for a different sort of mother; a mother who joined country clubs and ran meetings of women devoted to high-minded charities. In fact, Una would have taken most anything: a mother who skied, a mother who went on foreign holidays. What she was embarrassed, dissatisfied, by was a mother who sat and stewed, complained and brooded. But for me, at least that aspect of things was all right.
Gramma, I said. I had taken to calling her Gramma all the time. It would have felt strange to resurrect the childish Mom, let alone Mommy, at this stage.
Are you here? she asked. She looked extremely, amazingly old, although I was familiar with that trick her illnesses played. She could seem to be on death’s door, only to rally and get back home a few weeks later, dressed in matching pants and sweater, neat and fresh.
I’m here with the kids, I said. Madina and Emmet were intimidated by the hospital surroundings, and held back at the door. Emmet kept wanting to run his cars up and down the corridor floor, eliciting a sharp tug on his arm from Madina.
How did you get here? she whispered, off the point in a sense. After all these years, she still believed I couldn’t drive.
