18mm Blues

by Gerald A. Browne

  Arrangements had been made for this visit a month ago. Through the intermediary in London who usually saw to such affairs on Kumura’s behalf. As always before there’d been the telephone conversations between Kumura and the female, the purpose being to confirm in his mind that she was neither stupid nor pretentious, qualities that even in the long-gone best of times had dampened Kumura’s erotic spirit.

  Kumura had rated her fascinating, which, according to his scale, was on the higher side. For instance, when he’d asked her name she’d been quick with the suggestion that he give her one. When he’d asked her age, just as quickly she’d thanked him for the opportunity to fib, said she loved to lie as much as she lied to love, was good at it because she had an excellent memory. Was he such a masochist that he insisted on the truth?

  Kumura was amused. He decided to call her Celia, an Anglo name that had always appealed to him, and, according to the photographs of her he’d been sent, he believed it suited.

  Now this stranger he’d christened Celia was in the house and up the stairs and on her way down the long hall to Kumura’s bedroom suite in the south wing. Kumura heard the clips of her high heels on the adobe tiles, drawing closer.

  He’d been informed of the progress of her journey from when she’d been picked up at her Belgravia flat and driven to Heathrow to a short while ago when his Falcon 50 had landed her at Muang Mai. In the interim she’d been allowed a two-day stopover in a suite at the Peninsula in Hong Kong. To recover from the long air trip. From one point of view that was thoughtful of Kumura, from another, to his benefit: she wouldn’t be tired and lagged. Experience had taught him that bought, temporary women, no matter how promising their dispositions at the outset, could turn and make matters ugly when not feeling up to par and their margin of tolerance was thin.

  The cadent clip of her heels was louder, more definite now, bringing her to him. His anticipation was peaking. He’d come to believe in the importance of anticipation in these sexual dramas. The eventual encounter and even the culmination ofttimes hadn’t been as enjoyable for him as his anticipation. That was why he’d insisted on reports of her on the way. To anticipate her, to accumulate in his mind impressions of the effort she was expending to get to him.

  She, this Celia, was at the door now. Kumura thought the thought that usually occurred to him at this juncture: that he should have bolted the door, allowed her rap on it to become a pounding, her insistence to increase to such an extent she became desperate and began sobbing.

  Her rap was a polite one.

  He didn’t go to the door, remained across the room from it so his first sight of her would be a full-length view. Told her to enter.

  She was in white, fashionably dressed, had on a short skirt that underslung her buttocks and conveyed that she knew how good her legs were. A tall blond with the sort of tight, conscientiously maintained body needed for success by women whose callings required exposure: showgirls, strippers and such.

  She was more attractive than her photographs had shown. And she moved well, Kumura saw, as she came to him with her hand extended and introduced herself as Celia. Her hand was moist, which gave away she was nervous, but there was no other indication of that, and if she was under the influence of a drug it wasn’t apparent.

  They sat across from each other. She asked permission to smoke, lighted a Dunhill with a cheap, throwaway lighter. Exhaled so vigorously her mouth was momentarily ugly. That was her first and, Kumura hoped, her last self-betrayal.

  The beginning was eased by discussion of her trip and London. Kumura inquired about where in England she’d been brought up and about her family, but he didn’t expect truthful replies. It struck him how spurious this entire encounter was. He fought off the thought by contending to himself that he’d be able to cause her pleasure.

  “How long will you want me here?” Celia asked.

  “I don’t yet know.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Why did you ask?”

  “Merely to get things arranged in my mind. I’m not in a hurry, it’s not that.”

  Now, Kumura noticed, she had less composure than she’d had initially. Perhaps because of his Orientalness and the possibility of bizarre requirements. It made him wonder what she expected he’d want done and, on the other hand, what genuinely to arouse and please he could do to her. This was the guessing game with rules assumed: to inquire or divulge outright would spoil. Best to discern and tacitly disclose, send subtle signals.

  “Would you care for something to drink, some wine perhaps?”

  “Not yet,” she said.

  “You’d like to freshen up?”

  “Yes.”

  Kumura rang for a servant.

  “Will we … will I be coming back here?” she asked.

  He told her she would. The servant showed her out.

  At once Kumura gave his attention to the blue pearl. He’d wanted some prelusive time with this Celia, to ascertain that she was appealing enough before preparing it. If she hadn’t been, if she’d been crass or brittle or dowdy he’d have sent her away and left the pearl intact.

  There it was, on the surface of his desk, the last of all that many he’d bought from Bertin. Initially, when he’d believed Bertin could supply him with more, he’d used them with a frequency close to wasteful. Then, when he realized no more were forthcoming, he’d rationed them to himself, and now, it had come down to this last one, his last eighteen-millimeter blue.

  Kumura cringed when he considered what lay beyond it, the inability without recourse. He remembered all too well what that had been like for him. In fact, he was able clearly to recall the first time impotency had chosen him: in the bed of a suite at the Carleton in Cannes with an Italian woman whose pleasure would have been his achievement. He’d been embarrassed rather than alarmed because it had never occurred to him before and, he thought, it wouldn’t again.

  But it did. It happened frequently. Then it happened more often than not. His penis became undependable, and because it couldn’t be depended upon it became predictably undependable.

  He consulted some of the most prominent London doctors, went from one to another along Harley Street. They expressed various theories regarding his condition but avoided offering diagnosis. How many medical hands clothed in powdered rubber gloves fingered at his flacid member and thought there but for the grace of something or other go I.

  Urologists asked: did he have an erection upon awakening in the morning? Some mornings? Did he have nocturnal emissions? Was he able to masturbate? Would he consider a penile prosthesis, a sort of splint to aid insertion?

  No, no, no, no, definitely not, were Kumura’s replies.

  Psychiatrists poked around among his childhood experiences and impressions. There was likely something causal there but they didn’t find it. One psychiatrist, a Swiss with Luther in his gray matter, had to bite his tongue to keep from commenting that Kumura was a womanizer and by being made impotent he’d gotten what he deserved.

  In many cultures, especially in the innately ashamed West, Kumura might well have been branded a womanizer. In Japan, however, his vigorous libido was a distinction. He was a swordsman to be reckoned with, a carnal samurai. He’d adored women all his life, it seemed, had been erotically aroused by them since infancy when his mother had shown off his penis to her female friends and allowed them to pinch it, boasted about his ochinchin, honorable tinkle-tinkle.

  He’d been sexually precocious, actively so, knew how to satisfy and did before he himself was able to orgasm. When that capability was his and for years after he thought of it as a physical fortune that never depleted, that only required an interval, often hardly more than a pause, to replenish.

  There were numerous pichi-pichi-gyaru (lively girls) in his young life. He preferred a pikaichi (dazzler) over one that was kawaii (cute) and he was wise to their guile, wanted to believe but seldom did when they asked him demurely to be yasashi (gentle) because their kuri-chan (little clit) was so sensitive.<
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  School in England was supposed to temper him but, of course, it didn’t. His parents believed the apparent propriety of the British would rub off on him. He, however, soon enough saw right through the British, disregarded their airs and got to their lust.

  The women he encountered in England appealed to him far more than the women he’d been with in Japan. Those perennial Japanese schoolgirl pretenders with their wistful confusion and reliance on demureness couldn’t hold a candle to the lithe and elegant English beauties who transformed so extremely in the little time it took to go from the drawing room to the bed.

  English women. He loved their polarity. He would lie in the perfectly contrived light of some luxurious West End female lair and, while making the most of another afterfloat, feel sympathy for his former comrades half a world away; who, no doubt, were still enduring brothel and bar, hanging around the Mikado hoping for a night, or even an hour of sensual largess from one of the rare hostesses considered beautiful. Oh, the energy expended in search of a smile genuinely naughty, an assertion that couldn’t be denied, a moan, shriek or wiggle truly induced. Unfortunate fellows, Kumura would think, as, beneath the sheet, long tapered female fingers found him and kept hold to enjoy even the first stirrings of another erection.

  This being Kumura’s nature one can well imagine the impact early impotency had on him. He was bereft, uninspired by everything, a huge portion of his existence, the most gratifying, fervent portion, had been obliterated. He stood naked before mirrors and gazed at his disinclined member. How much it had been loved, tactilely worshipped, how swift it had been to reply whenever called upon. And now…

  What was he to do inasmuch as medicine and psychiatry hadn’t supplied an answer? Was he to spend the rest of his life feeling the fraud, avoiding heated demands, scheming to dodge them?

  There had to be an answer. Perhaps he could find it. Might it be in a certain type of woman, in some particular aspect of a certain type. A quality of her voice, a shade of her eye, an ever so slight, subtle thing as her graceful or possibly ungraceful way of sitting? No use putting his hope there, he decided. He’d previously culled his preferences.

  Then aphrodisiacs.

  He thought he’d try anything, however his logic prevailed when presented with such purported panaceas as: male beaver fat, the ashes of frogs’ legs, mandrake root, alectoria stones and swallows’ wombs. A so-called sexpharmacist in Tokyo guaranteed results from both rhino horn and monkey testicles. Costly stuff. When neither had the slightest effect he was amused at himself for having tried them, reasoned that he hadn’t been ignorant enough for them. He heard tell of a substance newly developed in a research laboratory in France as an anesthesia, which in small doses affected the part of the primitive human brain where sexual impulses are based. He followed down the lead and found it was not newly developed, rather nearly developed, which meant that one of the ingredients of the substance was hope. The next time he inquired he was told the laboratory was no longer pursuing that project.

  It was by coincidence that blue pearl became a consideration. Kumura happened to be visiting his widowed mother in Hagoya for a few days. Late one night he was in his father’s library, which contained a collection of very old to most recent books on pearls and pearling. He happened to slide out a volume entitled Pearls as Remedies. He broke the book open to any page, which turned out to be the third page of six pages devoted to excerpts from Robert Lovell’s tome entitled Panmineralogicon, published in Oxford in 1661. The paragraph his eyes chose to fix on dealt specifically with the efficacy of blue pearl in the treatment of various ailments such as those involving the heart, eyes, nerves, and blood. It was, according to Lovell, exceptionally effective in reversing sexual dysfunctions.

  Kumura was mildly curious, mainly amused. It smacked of dried monkey gonads, he thought, otherwise wouldn’t Lovell have been more specific?

  A footnote referred him to another page farther on citing the Pharmacopeia of India, which stated that beyond doubt blue pearl was a sexual stimulant and a panacea for impotence. The recommended dosage was one-quarter to one-half grain, powdered.

  Blue pearl was also prescribed for impotence by Marabari, a noted thirteenth-century physician of Kashmir. By Li-Shu-Chin, the sixteenth-century naturalist. By the 1877 catalogue of the Nate Exhibition in Yedo, and as well by the nineteenth-century physician to the Maharaja of Tagore, one Sowindro Mohun, who claimed for blue pearl the curing of various disorders, including, most emphatically, sexual weakness. There were three entire pages relating case histories in which blue pearl had done the trick.

  Who would love thought it?

  And who was thinking it now?

  Not he, his well-educated sensible mind scoffed. The desperate ego-tattered side of him was only slightly less pragmatic.

  He read on and fell asleep there in the library with the volume Pearls as Remedies across his chest. But he didn’t sleep well. Imagination invaded his unconsciousness with blue pearls, had them ricocheting around in the container that was his head, being spat at him with machine gun rapidity by hostile oysters.

  Bright blue pearls.

  He’d never seen one. Though pearls had been the family business since 1874 and made the family fortune, he’d never heard mention of one by either grandfather or father. He asked his mother if to her knowledge there’d been any blue pearls. She started at the question, studied him for a long moment and pulled up the corners of her mouth into what could be taken as either a knowing grin or a commiserative smile.

  That reaction by his mother motivated him to put word out to the trade that he’d pay well for any natural pearls of blue. In response he was presented with quite a number of pearls that appeared a bit blue, had a hint or cast of blue as opposed to the usual white, pink or cream. None, however, were the deep, lively blue specified in the remedy book.

  Months went by.

  Blue pearls forfeited their place in the front of Kumura’s mind.

  A Burmese dealer showed up with two he’d obtained from an alcoholic beach person who’d found them among other tidal leavings in Mergni. They were only about the size of baby garden peas, were lumpy and ulcerated, so malformed they looked like some melted man-made substance. Nevertheless they were pearls and bright blue and that was what mattered.

  Kumura paid five hundred for them.

  The Burmese dealer thought perhaps Kumura had lost his mind and, just in case, demanded cash.

  Kumura put off trying the blue pearl remedy. He believed it would turn out to be merely another grasping measure and that the most he’d get out of it was temporary hope. No more than a speck of hope but better than none, so might as well prolong it a couple of weeks.

  The time came. Kumura didn’t make an important production of it. Alone, in the gloaming of a Saturday evening, he put on a silk robe and sat in a chaise on his terrace overlooking the sea. Sipping a brandy and soda laced with blue pearl while his hearing divided its attention between Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E Minor, Opus 64 and the birds chirping at the evening light.

  He drained his glass, closed his eyes.

  His thoughts wandered and decided on a road that returned him to an experience he’d had back in his virile days. January in Paris. At the Crillon with an American fashion model he’d met earlier at the Ritz bar. She was there in Paris to work in the Spring Collections. He was there on the excuse of business but really on the chance of the likes of her. She was a good half head taller than he in her stocking feet. Perfectly thin for the sake of clothes, with the small breasts that were mandatory then. How craving her breasts were, as though they’d been neglected. He loved them, gave them their due. The entire length of her body was greedy for sensation, the backs of her knees, her wrists and other pulse points, the pits of her arms. She was too proud to be ashamed, a private exhibitionist. She lay back gracefully, as though his eyes were cameras. Her well-tended fingers unfolded her vagina for him and he saw a reason other than passion for her immodesty. She was lovely down there, dai
nty and lovely, a delicate fleshy orchid, with her clitoris come out. Was she aware of how lovely she was down there? Aware by sense or comparison? he’d wondered. Though worthy of the tenderest homage, she was one of those who preferred less of tender, let him know in candid terms what she preferred, a trace of command in her tone but her voice never raised above a whisper. Let him know what she was feeling as he did those preferred things to her, whispered her descriptions in a surprisingly pleasant medley of sweet talk and obscenities.

  At the time he’d suspected she’d be one he’d not forget, so he’d made the most of her.

  He returned to himself on the chaise, opened his eyes. Didn’t trust the feeling, thought it might be imaginary, a phantom sensation, like people have who’ve lost a limb and feel as though it’s still there.

  But it was there, had gorged and distended and forced itself up and out through the overlap of his robe below where the robe was sashed. It was hard and usable and had transformed to that condition by his merely mentally meandering to a memory. That memory had come forward for its portion of reliving numerous times previously and all it had ever done was exemplify for his regret what used to be.

  Neither had the miraculous occurred. It was incredible but not miraculous, had a rational explanation. He’d just happened upon a remedy, that was all there was to it: an ancient passed-over remedy too esoteric for contemporary consideration, he thought, accepted, concluded, end of doubt.

  Blue pearl.

  A month later, fate had proved how timely and provending it could be when Bertin/Lesage had sought out Kumura with a bagful. How little Bertin understood their true value. And now, so many years later here was Kumura in the bedroom of his Mizner house in Bang Wan contemplating the last of those blues. No outlook for another supply. After this time, after this Celia, at 14.8 grains per dose (the Pharmacopeia of India had been way off on that point), there’d only be enough for nine more instances.

  He tried not to think of that, to focus his mind on the pleasure at hand. He unfolded the briefke that William had delivered, examined the pink sapphire it contained. A cushion-cut pink Ceylon of ten carats, a nice one. It was intended for Celia. The arrangement was service-compris but it had become his custom to throw in a little extra when deserved.