by Sara Dillon
Often she would wheel over her empty baby stroller and say, Bye bye Mommy, I am going to Kazakhstan to get a baby now, and off she would go into her room, returning a few minutes later with one of her little dolls all wrapped up. It was easy to make her happy in those days in Cambridge.
I didn’t so much live through the seasons as worry through them; I was getting older, my spirits rose when the birds began to sing again after the long winter; I treasured the first snow; the first autumn breeze, the first day of summer, Memorial Day, Labor Day, all were occasions to lament the passing of time, and yet I actually enjoyed nothing. I hated every day for what it was and treasured every day for what I knew it could be but stayed separate from me in some dazzling other world behind a pale curtain.
Madina, you are pushing too many times with your foot, push off once and then glide the scooter, glide and glide the scooter, that’s what it’s for, I told her. Still, in frustration, she worked the scooter forward, pushing her foot once, twice, three times, and almost falling sideways.
The very day after Thanksgiving started the Christmas season; we decorated the attic apartment, putting white lights all around every window. Madina wanted to be the very first to buy a tree at the corner stand. I would carry it home over my shoulder and haul it up the two long flights of stairs.
I dreaded each appearance in the classroom, and hated the words jurisdiction, countertrade, and doctrinal. Decanal was another word I couldn’t stand. Just as in law school I had hated eggshell plaintiff and pareto optimality. I hated to hear people say they loved teaching; hated being expected to say it myself. To love the classroom, love being the boss, the one up front talking about confirmed letter of credit; were they mad? All I wanted, after all, was rescue, adoration, revelation and transcendent, possessive joy. September rain chased the heat of summer, then on to the deep fall and into winter, summer, winter, summer, the people on the T a throwback to Czarist Russia, sullen and down-trodden.
I’d never felt especially American, God knows, let alone in a crowd of lawyers. I thought of the tigers Madina and I had seen at the Franklin Park Zoo, white tigers with pale stripes, pacing, pacing back and forth at the wall, first to the right and then to the left. Did the tigers expect something to happen, or was it just habit, or was there just no choice but to continue pacing?
Between Daddy’s notion of kindness and Gramma’s brandy on a rainy afternoon, nothing had prepared me for this utter emptiness, the desert of sounds and concepts. When the very first birds returned in the spring and began to sing at four or four thirty, I cried with gratitude to them. I thought of the long winter and the silence without them. I remembered the long green lawn at our pale stucco house in upstate New York and my summer dress; I had never known how to turn that vision into a life in the day to day. I had no idea still.
And if you get hit with a tennis ball, who may you sue and how many days do you have and what if the tennis ball is made in Liberia but got a stamp on it in Taiwan, who can you sue now and same facts what if the phone rings and the assistant picks it up but there is a defect in the phone and the notice is given but never heard, do you see analogies with the tree falling in the forest, then who is liable. Who can you sue if you drop your briefcase with all your papers in the street then someone finds them and doesn’t return them but you intended to live another life but didn’t.
The mockingbird; 2007
Calvin—I know you don’t answer me much and there are various theories as to why—as between Una and myself. Are you threatened or are you just bored or have you gone into some other zone where it doesn’t matter? Didn’t you write me a poem about birds once, that I could raise birds to a whisper or some such? I am bowled over by the birds this spring—as if I never heard them before. They work so hard at it; they sing from 4:30 on; the world is filled with this birdsong. Madina drew a picture of birds and wrote Te Te Te for tweet. By the way, I am teaching at Stannard again in the fall and getting ready with what I will give them to read—my idea is to make it about narrative and sanity—I had this idea and it explains everything—deviation from or coming in nearer to the desired narrative as the measure of joy—it really makes everything clear; I can explain it to you some time.
Calvin wrote back that he could hang in there without having narrative and sanity explained to him, but in fact it did make everything clear for me.
I could get Emmet interested in the birds. In the early morning, I would whisper, Who is calling you? And he would say, his shallow eyelids still cloudy with sleep, Birdies.
Had they always started in so early, in years gone by? I had no recollection of such an extraordinary thing; what were they doing up at that hour. There had to be a story and it was according to the story that we chose or rejected things; we feared counter narrative and fought against it. Some had a small, narrow sense of narrative; maybe it was just that they had a boring narrative; and others were nearly overwhelmed by the strength of one.
As for the mockingbird, it seemed to me that I could talk to it. There was a mockingbird that sang the first two bars of All Around the Mulberry Bush, over and over, starting at dawn and sometimes on into the dusk, All Around, whoop whoop. I began to answer him, The Monkey Chased the Weasel whoop whoop. I sat on the little front porch with my coffee and chatted back and forth to the mockingbird.
At least I imagined it was a mockingbird; perhaps I was wrong on this. I’d read that mockingbirds were mimics and they seemed to have some ability to connect with people and play tricks on them. Maybe they did no such thing; maybe someone wrote that after too many bourbons, I’ve no idea. I couldn’t see any actual bird, as they stayed well hidden in the trees.
At Park Baun, the birds were incomparable, the trees had been lush with them, teeming. Hence the fox hole and the feathers that festooned the grassy place in the ground where the fox’s world went underground. An endless supply, I suppose he thought. The farmers hated both foxes and badgers, the last vestiges of wild life in Ireland, pretty much everything truly wild long gone, gone for several hundred years, all those people crowded in, trying to get as much out of every square patch of ground as they could; what could thrive? But the birds; they must have sailed high, forgiving, enjoying the scenery as much as ever a person did.
It was resilient, the narrative, the story line.
It could get by without much in the way of substance, but what it couldn’t brook was real opposition in the way of facts on the ground, a contrary story line. I mean, you could endure endless hours of boredom and emptiness, holding onto your tattered narrative like a child going to preschool clutching a beloved rag doll; but let the wrong person so much as breathe on you or lay a hand on your arm and horrors, that was an intolerable thing.
I had to wear my same boring clothes, black, white, white, black, odd times the slightest hint of navy blue, back to black, white, beige, black. My hair was parted the same way, as far back as college, high school even, the same hairdo, the same black slacks. And lipstick, even when spending the evening with just myself.
Mommy, you have lipstick on? asked Emmet, who disliked sticky things.
No, I would lie.
Then he, not believing, would run his finger along my lip and stare, investigative, unsure and suspicious.
My favorite thing as a child was to go to bed on a summer’s evening, too light to really sleep, imagining the birds, at one with them in the second floor room I shared with Una.
When my mother had said goodnight and Una had probably drifted off; faded flowers on the wallpaper, darkening at last. I could last through a lot; but I would not let anything hors de narrative touch me.
Tokyo at a distance; still there, 2007
The Greensboro Free library could get awfully quiet of an afternoon. I hadn’t yet invested in a computer for the house; I had something against screens, how they pulled you in. But I could spend a few minutes at the computer in the library and find out what was going on from Galway to Ulaan Bataar. I could even spend some time back in Tokyo, t
hough I feared remembering most of that, me in a white dress on the platform at Ochanomizu on a hot day, an unbearably hot day, the smell of tea literally baking in the heat of the station market. The crowded streets, the kissaten. It was a mental excursion I could not allow myself often.
It is a funny thing, the internet. What you can find there.
I hadn’t sought him out in any way, and we had parted company one cold and dreary winter’s day in Tokyo; whether he had made a silent promise to return would remain a mystery, and it is imperative that at some point you lose interest in solving such a mystery. It was demeaning to want to know too much. What’s more, or on the other hand, there was always a grave danger of assuming the wrong things, and trusting too much to one’s intuition.
It was a different take on things, what I found about Kido on the internet.
The children were off at school and day care and I was free to wander around the town, listen to the radio, work on my poetry cycle. And, maybe due to that self-destructive character flaw, I went to the Greensboro Free and had a look to see what Kido had been up to in recent years.
Elizabeth Bowen I think it was wrote that with respect to the young war dead, they didn’t simply die, as we always had the sense of living out their time along with our own; that we were aware of the time they ought to have had but didn’t. Thinking of Kido was like that for me; I had assumed something was broken off between us, unresolved cruelly, forcibly. I had assumed that this reinforced his earlier sense of tragedy and frustration. Even as I gravitated to thoughts of Kido, I avoided him.
I assumed all the while that Kido loved me.
And then I checked off the years for him and for me; his children were growing up, then grew up, and still no Kido. A few years, then more years, a decade, two decades, and still no Kido.
Maybe he was too old and tired and worn down or maybe simply the desire of that time had disappeared, though I wasn’t sure what that would feel like for him. I didn’t ponder it too much, as that would be demeaning. Degrading to wonder, impossible not to wonder.
And then there, on the computer, there they were, his family, his wife’s blog, his own photos and silly interviews and it was as if, after all these years, Kido died at last for me. Right there in the Greensboro Free Library.
Maybe I’d just given him ideas for a few great songs way back when, more profit for the production company.
It was his wife’s blog that did it first. A blog; how did I stumble on it?
As unlikely as it would have been to have Kido turn up at the front door now, with the bloom of youth more or less entirely faded, still I had no idea things were this bad.
These days, he was apparently making songs and selling them along with cosmetic products.
Una had often said, When a man wants something, he will step over his own grandmother to get it. I’d made a million excuses for him on this score: the Japanese sense of obligation, Japanese repression of the artist, the fear of condemnation, the fear of losing everything, the tyrannical record companies, the refusal of the wife to divorce, the fact that he would not see his children if he left them, on and on, so on and so forth. When in fact, Una had it right, and I hated to admit it now, when I had less to fall back on than ever before. Una with her less noble vision had it right: If Kido had really wanted to, he could have come to get me. We could have married. He would have been at my door decades ago; he would have done more than used my letters as a basis for a hit song or two.
Now, as he got older, he seemed to be writing songs that doubled as jingles for face powder and lipstick.
On this ultimate point at least, Una had been correct.
I’d never thought much about Kido’s wife, having decided early on that she was irrelevant to Kido and me and that somehow that marriage of his had happened, but was not something to spend time contemplating. Well, she more than made up for this by writing about virtually everything she did, every day, on her blog.
A blog, a blog about your own daily life, can you imagine. In her case, it seemed a good move, I had to admit. Going to the spa, drinking carrot juice, flashing around bills for hotel facials and bath salts, new shoes, designer sunglasses. And not just that—still clips from foreign movies, fashion shows, photo shoots featuring herself—and she was not young any longer; she was older than me. There was frequent mention of the “great Kido-san,” her dear husband. There were links to interviews in which she wept over how wonderful it was to have been born Japanese. There was something deeply maudlin about it; resounding praise for various singers and actors, how marvelous they were, how she loved and adored them; profound thanks for all they had done, how she loved loved loved them; happiness sublime that they could all see each other and share profound moments of mutual thanks and such like.
Yikes. Waiting twenty-five years and more had perhaps been unwise.
In interviews, she told of how she’d fallen ill several years before, and how Kido had rushed to her side and spent every day in the hospital, watching her for signs of recovery. Her dear children, her dear husband.
Kido, as I remembered him disappearing under the heavy trees on a hot Tokyo night, and my own thought that I would somehow marry him and we would have all the messy troublesome stuff that went with it; I had been ready. I hadn’t wanted to escape from Kido, it was the one time I had not wanted to escape.
But then again, I never had the option, and who knows.
After years of being kept in the shadows, Kido’s wife was blogging away, photos of herself at various luxury onsen resorts, going to rock concerts, attending receptions put on by fashion companies. Which brand of sunglasses, which brand of sneakers, was best.
Well, whatever.
More power to her, I guess.
I left the Greensboro Free in a daze.
Kido had died at last.
Kido was gone. There was no red thread of destiny, there was no aura or sense of shared genius. Well, I had waited more than twenty years at my peril.
No promises broken, as he hadn’t made any. Not even the courage or dash to be a cad. I gave him ideas for a few wonderful songs; I had believed as I watched him sing them that he loved me in an irreplaceable way. Well, that was twenty years ago, more.
His children were grown up, in the entertainment business in their own right, his wife was out and about, wearing a great reddish wig, net gloves like a teenager might wear. More power to you, Okusama. Una had been right. A man would step over his own grandmother to get what he truly wanted.
All my theories on Japanese life seemed very long past and more or less useless; the lack of necessary oppositions in that life; such as, artist versus non-artist, men versus women, groups and clubs as against the courageous seeker of absolute love, the pair of us standing, as it had been in my Japanese tale, on the bridge in Paris.
He liked the very first love letter I wrote to him, way back then, when my ex-husband Yukito, poor man, had not answered his own phone, but rather I did, and with the duplicity and sneakiness of which I was so capable then, I’d answered instead and said, Yes, I am Catherine, I wrote to you, yes.
So we met, and kissed, and touched in that particular life-changing way. I won’t make any grand statements about how I know that much to be true, but something was, surely. I won’t go as far as Yukito or Una and say that it was all just rubbish and nonsense.
Yet stay at home Kido did, subjecting himself to those awful Japanese interviews, where the interviewer says, And what do you like for breakfast, and the interviewee pauses and laughs nervously and replies at last, Well, I do like a bit of miso soup, and the interviewer—or maybe two or three of them—falls over with surprise and says, Hey, wow, is that right, my my, whoa . . .
And oh, Kido-san, you wouldn’t be the type who could, well, make it yourself . . .?
Hmm, perhaps I could . . .
And more oohs and ahhs and feigned shock and amazement by the interviewers. He stayed for that and must in some way have liked it, the attention, the fawning, the base
ment bars in Tokyo where he would slither in, wearing sunglasses all the time, day or night, seeing his fellow travelers in the “entertainment world.”
And Lord, while I was on it, why did I choose Japan of all places? It could have been France, where love and rebellion went hand in hand; poetry and street demonstrations, Leo Ferré singing Avec Le Temps. No, I had to choose Japan, with its salary men dying of overwork, its artists hopping in rivers to make sure that no untoward behavior could erupt from the soul or psyche. And not only that, to have in the back of my mind for twenty-five years that I might, in my silent way, overcome it all, by the very power of my self.
In most Japanese dramas the only plot element was a secret, and only about fifty words were used in an entire ten-part series—How are you, Hmm, It’s a little sad, but well, How are you, let’s try hard, let’s.
It could have been Greece, Sardinia, Corsica or Lake Como—but no, it was Japan. Enduring the rainy season, dazzled by summer, short, sweet and over so quickly, I chose the greatest genius and then over time, silently and without apparent reference to me at all, watched the almost wordless connection unravel.
What a fool you’ve been, Gramma would have said, as she would have to anyone who’d had an affair that went nowhere, except that this was not even an affair properly so called, but something infinitely more bizarre and more about my own unvarying inability to trick joy out of silence.
And if we had been together, Kido and I. What did I want it for, what had I been thinking of?
Well, it went something along the line of messages. I thought that there were unspoken messages one could not send unless; unless he had been a great genius and in desperate need of uniting the imagined with the real, he could not have written and sung what he did. I don’t think that notion was naïve; it was probably factual. But as for the distortions caused by little Japan, the groupism, I don’t know. Perhaps I was trying to make excuses again.
