by Bruno Noble
‘You’re beautiful,’ I had said.
Mie
Instinctively, I had known to upgrade my wardrobe. Sharon was delighted, and appointed herself as my personal shopping assistant and style adviser. What pleased me most was that, despite my change in title and my rising status in the bank, the nature of our relationship didn’t change: she would hang from my arm – like the giggly schoolgirl neither Keiko, Michi nor I had ever been – as we tripped from shop to shop and added bag after bag to our fists of bags of shoes, blouses, skirts and jackets.
We were shopping for pencil skirt suits when a lady approached Sharon who, chin in hand and head to one side, was considering me critically as I stood before a full-length mirror in a knee-length skirt and matching jacket. The lady, impatient and waving me aside with one hand by means of apology, I presumed, while using the other to hold an article of clothing under Sharon’s nose, reprimanded her with, ‘I don’t know why this store can’t be more clearly marked and the departments better indicated. It’s so frustrating. Anyway, can you please tell me where I can find more of these?’ It was more of a command than a request.
Sharon, ever so helpful as usual, replied, ‘Of course,’ and walked two aisles of suits from where she had been standing. ‘They’re here.’ She walked back to me and wrinkled her nose in amusement before contemplating me again. ‘Oh, Mie, what makes it so difficult with you is that everything suits you!’
The lady was back. ‘I don’t want a blue jacket, I want a black one. Where are the black jackets?’
Sharon took a step back from the blue jacket that had been pushed uncomfortably close to her nose.
‘A black jacket. Like this one, except black and not blue,’ persisted the lady.
‘I don’t know,’ said Sharon, looking at me with round eyes over the lady’s fist. ‘I could go and have a look if you want,’ she added helpfully.
‘You don’t know!’ exclaimed the by now extremely irate lady. ‘You don’t know! What’s the point of working here if you don’t know!’ She harrumphed and stamped her foot.
‘Oh, but I don’t work here,’ Sharon said, keen to rectify a misunderstanding.
The lady steamed. She raised her other fist, the one with her handbag in it, so that she shook both a handbag and a blue jacket under Sharon’s nose, and raised her voice to shout. ‘You don’t work here? Well, why do you pretend that you do? If I wanted to impersonate someone, it certainly wouldn’t be a shop assistant!’
‘I was only trying to help,’ said Sharon to the lady’s departing back, as a confounded shop assistant picked the discarded blue jacket up from the floor. While I considered the scene amusing, Sharon didn’t; her reaction betrayed her disappointment that she had been unable to help, and had caused offence instead. ‘I didn’t mean to upset her,’ she said dismally.
I put my arm around her and gave her a squeeze. She gave off a smell of talcum powder and day-old perfume. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let me get out of this suit and buy us some dinner,’ and I found myself holding her to me a little longer than I had intended to.
Sharon shook her head. ‘I’m working this evening,’ she said. ‘It’s a Saturday, remember?’
‘Oh well,’ I said, ‘I might see if David is free.’
*
I continued to see David for cinema outings and for cheap, informal dinners during which, when we weren’t arguing over films, I would quiz him on financial markets. I think he never gave up looking for a way in, as it were, but I kept my walls up, much as I clutched my handbag vertically on my knees. At the start of our friendship, he had been a willing teacher of the naïve girl from Tokyo and this had helped define him, at least in terms of his relationship with me; but as I learned more, I began to have my own opinions – on the eurozone, on the collapsed Japanese economic ‘miracle’, on monetary policies – so that he began to feel less useful to me. I told myself that I should hold back, keep my opinions to myself, but I struggled to do so. David accepted most of what I had to say and rarely argued a point. This was both pleasing and frustrating.
I found myself wanting David to want me to be more than a good friend, yet I was certain that I would reject his advances were he to make them overtly, and just that little bit less than certain that he was making them at all – surely, the occasional gifts of videos, the long sighs and the wistful looks constituted an approach of some kind, however timid? Was he too much of a gentleman to impose, or too afraid of rejection? Was he, to his mind, nobly rejecting the real-life role of Rex Harrison’s Henry Higgins? I bridled at the thought. I felt, after so long at the bank, very much his equal and had come to realise that, while my career remained on an upward trajectory, his had stalled, as he had been looked over for promotion on a number of occasions. I felt sheepish harbouring these thoughts; when I had been a desk assistant, it had never once occurred to me that he was seeking to exploit any advantage that being a corporate banking executive had given him over me.
It was, then, doubly surprising to me when David asked me to marry him. His proposal came as the last throw of the dice of a desperate man, a despairing lunge at the handrail of a departing bus that risked leaving him behind, alone at one of life’s windy, mid-route stations. I felt furious with him for having asked me with such forlorn defeatism, and for his generating in me the guilt that he was of course right to be less than optimistic. I was angry with him, too, for his poor sense of place and timing: a litter-strewn, draughty Camden bus stop at night after an Italian film that was based on a couple’s separation and on the futility of any attempt at a man’s and woman’s shared existence, on our kind’s essential solitude. Love, as in the love act, was portrayed violently, a power game, in which one seeks confirmation of one’s own self in domination of the other’s. I faced the discomfiting truth that, even if I had been going to reject him, I would have appreciated an extravagant dinner in a romantic restaurant and an offer on bended knee. I felt offended that a man too faint-hearted to so much as to try to steal a kiss from me could think I would concede to marry him. Unable to keep the incredulity from my voice, I said, ‘What?’
David asked meekly, apologetically, ‘Will you be my wife?’ and fumbled unsuccessfully for my hand.
If I had been capable of marrying one of all the men I had befriended up to that point in my life, it could have been David; my certainty and conviction of self would have more than made up for his weakness and deficiency of character. He would have made no demands of me and acquiesced to mine, I am sure. He would have accepted my stipulation that we maintain a perpetually platonic relationship, a forever unconsummated marriage. But, still, the thought of the conjoining of myself with another, even spiritually, sentimentally and intellectually, letting aside any physical coupling, filled me with revulsion.
Don’t be ridiculous! I wanted to shout, but was saved from that tactless rejection by the arrival at the bus stop of two other couples and, soon after, the number 88 bus, the open-back platform of which we climbed laboriously, the weight of David’s unanswered question hanging oppressively above us.
We took the winding, steep steps to the top of the bus and sat side by side behind a family that stretched across the bus’s very front seats in parody of what the future could hold for us. The parents sat to the right of their children, who sat directly in front of us so that, looking straight ahead, David and I could see our reflections above theirs in the bus’s wide windshield: a clear picture against the night sky. If this was David’s vision of his years ahead, it wasn’t mine.
I felt the pressure of having to deliver the response that David knew was coming and that I hated him for expecting, that he had known he would receive even as he asked the question.
Isabella
‘Gaia.’ Pierre beckons me, his eyes shifting left to right, along the dark and empty corridor, down and up, from my high-heeled shoes to my halter top, his cocked finger frozen in summons, his pupils black pricks in a backlit head, the silver halo of his hair interrupted symmetrically by two jugged
ears, his mouth and nose grey scars on a wasteground, the whole a Rorschach inkblot the meaning of which is indubitably clear.
My immediate thought is that Wanda must be away.
The light from Pierre’s office streams past and around him, finds me and pulls me in. I am back in Papa’s study: the look in Pierre’s eyes is the same as the look Papa had in his, the look of wanting something he shouldn’t have, of having what he shouldn’t want, of a man who has relegated shame and conscience to another time and place. The office is windowless and the couch in it stained. We both place our hands on my halter top; when he pulls up, I tug down. I clutch my breasts so that he can’t.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ pants Pierre. His exertion and anger in the artificial light lend him the illusion of having applied rouge. I can’t help but see his point of view: when I sleep with so many, why not with him?
My point of view is clear to me: I am my own homunculus, I sit behind the bridge of my nose and look out of two clear blue windows the shades of which fall and rise as I blink. Pierre insults me, or tries to; what he says is mostly correct. My resistance infuriates him.
From my pilot’s seat on the bridge, I manoeuvre towards an escape. I feel I am of my body but not my body, in it but not part of it; it is a craft to which I am essential but not it to me. I have to stand to better navigate and watch my feet below my lower eyelids’ lashes. I am clumsy: Pierre protests I have hurt him and holds his hand to his lip. I need to get out of his office and to think. It occurs to me, on this the first occasion I have defended my body, that my body might be essential to me. I am desperate to think. I turn the office door handle.
Wanda contemplates Pierre and me. He and I run our hands through our hair and pat it down at the same time, as though one were a mirror of the other. I smooth my halter top down. Pierre tugs at his shirt sleeves. Wanda’s eyes are dead in the gloom of the corridor but I don’t have to see them to know that I will have to find work elsewhere. Mrs Bobeckyj acted to save Gregor and Tomasz from me and, having deposed Jemma, Wanda will be ruthless in preserving Pierre for herself in much the same way. I look at Pierre who looks at Wanda who looks at me. We all know that we are what the other sees us to be.
I pull one lever and push another and turn, steady myself against the corridor wall and start to make my way up, driving forward and up, one mechanical step after the other, up.
Sharon
I saw less of Mie after our shopping trip. Increasingly, she spent lunch hours at her desk or in meetings and travelled and entertained clients over evenings and weekends. Months went by, long stretches of days in which our exchanges were limited to greetings, to business matters, to Japan desk assistant issues and to snatched conversations in the ladies’ loos and sandwich bar queues. In the recess of my mind lay the thought that Mie had discarded me, having been promoted so significantly above me, but I refused to believe it of her. Instead, I acknowledged the realisation that, really, we had little in common and had only been artificially tied by our jobs. I rationalised that Mie had long ago settled into her new life and, of my roles as guide, mentor and friend, not even the last needed remain.
And then, quite out of the blue, she invited me to dinner.
Surprised, pleased, grateful, I accepted immediately.
‘About tomorrow,’ said Mie. We were getting ready to go home. It was just gone five o’clock on a Friday and already the trading room was nearly empty, many of the bankers having left early to beat the traffic on their way to weekend, country retreats. Mie was arranging her things in a new handbag she had bought independently of me. She clicked the clasp close before I had finished tidying my desk and stood, the bag clutched. She frequently gave the impression of looking at me above glasses because her head seemed permanently ever-so-slightly inclined, as though she were about to bow.
‘Do you mind if David joins us?’
‘Of course.’
‘You do?’
‘I mean, no! I don’t mind. Of course, I don’t mind.’
‘I would particularly like him to see a Japanese film that will be on television. I thought that maybe, if you don’t mind, the three of us could watch it after dinner.’
‘I’d love to,’ I said, even though I didn’t share their interest in film.
Mie and David saw each other on weekends, I knew, but I didn’t know how far he had succeeded in extending their friendship beyond the purely platonic. I anticipated some insight into a relationship that revolved, to the extent that I could tell, around cinema outings and inexpensive restaurants. There was a sense in which they suited each other very much. Externally, they gave the lie to the idea that only opposites attract. They were similar in that their comportment was considered and sober, as though it would take much to excite them, and, by City standards, their dress would be considered plain. Internally, though, to the extent that one can ever have an insight into what people are really like, they seemed quite different. Mie was the hot knife to David’s butter. She had a steeliness, a self-confidence that contrasted with David’s embarrassed self-effacement. It was to me as though David provided the overflow container for Mie’s personality and, as such, was of some use to her.
*
Mie’s apartment reminded me of Sebastian’s just prior to his move to Japan, though, to be fair, while his had been simply bare, hers was austere, the apartment an objective representation of its owner’s ordered mind. In the last of the day’s natural light, we ate an Italian meal off lacquered trays on our laps, an antipasto, a pasta dish, some rice, some chicken and finely diced vegetables presented exquisitely and simultaneously in small bowls on the tray. David, in his evident pleasure in being in Mie’s company, was more animated than I had seen him before. He told us all about the double bill, the past custom for cinemas to show two films consecutively and repeatedly so that cinemagoers could enter the cinema at any point in either film and watch the end of the first film, the entirety of the second and only then the beginning of the first, leaving, should they wish, at the point in the first film at which they had entered.
‘But that’s mad!’ I cried. ‘You might get to know that it was the butler who did it before you even got to know what it was that he’d done!’
‘Yes, but it’s also true to life in a way, don’t you think?’ asked David, who had said more in two minutes than I had heard him say in ten years. ‘I mean, in life, sometimes, a person’s motivation for an action is only revealed afterwards and, anyway, this way, you think more about the why and the how than the what and the who.’
While I thought David might have a point, he spoiled it by looking slyly out of the corner of his eye at Mie, as though to gauge the effect of his words on her. Mie chased some rice around her bowl expertly and said nothing.
‘How come you remember so much about double bills?’ I asked David. ‘I only barely remember them. And then I think we only saw them on holiday in Wales.’
‘David was teased as a child and would take refuge from his schoolfriends in cinemas, wouldn’t you, David?’ said Mie.
‘They weren’t my friends,’ said David, deflated.
‘That’s why he grew to like films,’ said Mie. ‘He could cease being the victim and become the hero. Isn’t that right, David?’
‘Something like that,’ said David with difficulty.
‘He can be the dashing, romantic hero who goes down on bended knee and always gets the girl – isn’t that right?’
David swallowed.
‘Unless he doesn’t,’ added Mie nonchalantly.
David sat, emptied of his earlier enthusiasm, his wrists on his knees, his hands slack and his head bowed, his expression invisible to me.
‘David proposed to me,’ said Mie to me, seemingly by way of explanation. In the evening’s fading light her features were as if dictated by a malevolent elf at a typewriter, the straight underscore of her unpainted lips, the acute and grave accents of her painted eyebrows, the faint circumflex formed by her nostrils.
I hadn’t consi
dered Mie to be capable of such cruelty. The slope of David’s shoulders spoke of loss and hurt and humiliation. ‘Tell us about the film you want us to see,’ I said, desperate to give him some respite.
Mie considered David with an expression of regret so fleeting that I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined it, in the dusk of the room. ‘It’s a black and white film,’ was all she said. ‘Let’s have some fruit. Then we wash up. Before the film.’ She stood and squeezed David’s shoulder, moving her hand away only when he reached for it. She switched a corner lamp on, whose soft glow didn’t subject David to the critical examination the overhead light would have done.
David and I helped Mie tidy the trays and wash the dishes in an activity that made me think of Sebastian and the sudden, improbable thought of Mie and Sebastian, together as an item, entered my mind for no other reason than they both had a compulsion to wash dishes as soon as they had been eaten from. I reflected on her professional relationship with him and wondered how I would feel if it grew into something a little more personal. The idea that she might have rejected David for Sebastian was fantastical, but it entertained me.
David and Mie sat on a sofa and I sat on a large floor cushion from where we watched two poor peasant women, a woman and her daughter-in-law who inhabited a spectacular, extensive reedy marshland, seduce errant peasant soldiers and survive by killing wandering wounded samurai and disposing of their bodies down a deep pit – a black, quite vertical hole in the ground so wide that it could only be cleared at a running leap – having stripped them of their extravagant body armour that they would then go on to sell. The film finished and Mie turned the volume down; we sat in the near dark watching the credits roll. While Mie praised its cinematography and David enthused over its percussive jazz soundtrack, I tried to free my mind from the images of the hole, the hole in the ground that represented life for the peasant women and death for the samurai, and of the violence and desperation of the sexual act that gave fleeting meaning to grey lives. Crazily, I suspected that Mie and David had conspired to identify my childhood fantasy and adolescent fears and to present me with them in cinematic format.
