“Well?” he said.
“Well what? I’m asleep.”
“Oh, c’mon,” he said. “Wake up, Van. You had a good time, right?”
That’s when it dawned on me.
“Are you responsible for tonight?”
He shrugged. “I did somebody a favor. No big deal.”
I was used to Clifford being cryptic on certain subjects, so I didn’t press. What was of greater interest was why he’d called in this favor for my benefit.
When I asked, he said, “You’re my roommate.”
“Be serious.”
He looked at his hands, looked back up smiling.
“I owed you one,” he said.
III
That spring, Emperor Hirohito held his own umbrella in the rain to announce his endorsement of what the locals called “MacArthur’s Constitution” and a new National Diet was elected, the first time in history women had voted in Japan, and the International Military Tribunal was gaveled into session, initiating war crimes trials, but none of these things had any real bearing on my life.
Every Tuesday after supper, I played penny-ante poker with a bunch of enlisted men from the OPS, Allen Duckworth and Walter Jernigan and Rudy Grand, among others. Eguchi dealt for tips. The stakes were negligible, but we were grave about our skill at cards. We squinted at our hands and sucked our teeth like there were hundreds in the pot. The most I ever won was two bucks. The most I ever lost was ninety cents.
Some of the men from the barracks organized a sightseeing trip down to Hiroshima one weekend, but I said no thanks. We’d all seen newspaper photos of mushroom clouds and we’d heard the phrase “splitting atoms,” but nobody had any idea what that really meant. For some reason, when I thought of the bomb, I imagined a star rising out of nothing, like the flare of a super-powered match, this tiny glimmer expanding, breathing, heating up, turning concrete and steel to dust, until finally the star collapsed, leaving the world cold and black where it had been. That was nothing I wanted to see.
In May, I signed up for a Japanese language class. You didn’t really need to speak the lingo to get by—the locals were picking up English in a hurry—but I liked the class, liked the language itself, how far removed every word was from its English counterpart. Rice was kome or gohan in Japanese, depending on whether it was cooked or not. Bird was tori. Love was koigokoro or ai or aijou or suki or ren’ai or aikou or koi.
The class was taught by a Staff Sergeant from Honolulu named Phil Takashi. We met every Saturday from 1500 to 1630 and afterwards, I’d do whatever homework we’d been assigned so I wouldn’t have to worry about it the following week. Then I’d treat myself to a bowl of noodles at a sake bar I’d found and practice my Japanese on the waitresses. This place was in the Yurakucho district and as I walked, I’d rename the world. Tree. Ki. Leaf. Ha. Flower. Hana. Sidewalk. Hodou. Soldier. Gunjin. Whore. Pansaku. Or panpan in GI parlance. At night, in the Yurakucho district, panpan girls were everywhere. They smoked and teased and sent young boys over with indecent propositions. “Hey Hey GI, you meet my sister.” It didn’t feel as tawdry as it sounds. The windows were lit with paper lanterns and the girls all smelled like ginger and you knew those boys weren’t anybody’s brother. They were young enough that if you turned them down, they’d hit you up for bubble gum or chocolate.
I’d arrive just as things were getting started. The bar would be lively with panpan girls wolfing a meal before heading off to work and local men, brushed with soot, half drunk, an hour or two from calling it a night. There were generally a few GIs, but not so many that the place lost its foreign charm. I’d take a stool and study the menu for a while, despite the fact that I couldn’t read it—in class, we learned phonetically because Sergeant Takashi said the characters were too difficult for pea brains like us—and I always ordered the same thing: kitsune udon. Thick noodles in a salty broth with fried bean curd. Plus a cup of sake. I didn’t care for sake really, but I was trying to learn a taste. Like a half-tuned radio station, chatter buzzed around my ears, and I enjoyed the feeling of being able to pluck an occasional word out of the air.
So it went every Saturday for a month until the night I spotted Clifford and Eguchi sitting in the corner with another man, local, his back to me. This other man was talking fast, slapping the table with his palm. Every so often Eguchi interjected, and I figured he was translating. Clifford listened with narrowed eyes. When the man was finished, Clifford smiled the smile he’d given me when I asked him to clean up his toe-nails. He shook his head, no, then stood and the others stood with him, and I noticed Clifford was wearing a sidearm. As they approached my stool, I waited for him to recognize me but his eyes were faraway.
It was Eguchi who said, “Look here, Major Clifford. It Major Van.”
Clifford blinked at me a second.
“I’ll be damned.” He put his hand on my shoulder and leaned in close and I could tell he was drunk. “What brings you here, Major Van?”
“Nothing. Noodles.”
“Hell with that,” he said. He turned to Eguchi and the other man. “Fuck off, you two.” Eguchi started to leave but the third man stared at Clifford for a moment. I could see now that he was about my age, his features distinguished by constellations of moles on both cheeks—a symbol of good luck in Japan—and the wisps of a new mustache. Eguchi took his arm and dragged him between the tables and out the door.
When they were gone, Clifford pointed at my cup of sake on the bar.
“That yours?”
I told him, “Yeah,” and he downed what was left.
“You’re with me,” he said.
He’d parked his jeep around the back. There was a boy, maybe nine or ten years old, sleeping in the driver’s seat. Clifford rapped his knuckles on the boy’s forehead and the boy came to, rubbing his eyes and grinning like he’d been interrupted in the middle of a pleasant dream. Clifford said, “Go on home now. Go to bed,” and pressed a few coins into the boys hand. I figured he’d engaged the boy to keep an eye on the jeep while he was inside. The boy hopped out and wandered off, counting his money, and Clifford took his place behind the wheel. He drove combat-style, with the windshield down. You kept the windshield down so the glass wouldn’t catch a glare and make you a better target. Or so I’d been told. Driving like that in peacetime was a way to let everybody know you’d been in the thick of it.
I had to talk loud over the wind.
“Are we going to the Oasis?”
He shook his head. “Namiki’s working tonight.”
I knew he’d been seeing her without me since the Ginza, but he hadn’t shared much in the way of detail. For a second, I couldn’t figure why he’d want to stay away, and then it dawned on me that he didn’t want to watch her dancing with other men. There were no streetlamps in this part of the city and the buildings blurred past, headlights jerking side to side when Clifford veered around potholes in the street.
“How’s Fumiko?” I said.
All of a sudden Clifford looked over and socked me on the arm. The jeep lurched, and I had to grab the wheel to keep us from running up on the curb.
“I knew it!” he shouted.
“What?”
“You want to fuck her.”
“No.”
“My man Van has had enough of self-abuse.”
“Leave me alone,” I said.
Inside of an hour, Clifford had gotten me as drunk as I’d ever been, and what I remember of that night I remember in hazy snatches, but I was still sober when he parked the jeep in front of an industrial-looking building in another part of the city I’d never seen. There was a milling, shifting line of Japanese men waiting to be admitted to whatever was inside. They glared when Clifford led me past them and around to a back door. He knocked with the butt of his pistol and the door was answered by a local in a pinstripe suit. Clifford said something in pidgin Japanese—I heard Eguchi’s name and the word tomodachi. Friend. The man took note of the pistol, turned, and preceded us up three flights of stair
s to a table in the back of a vast loft space, like the attic of a warehouse, which is probably exactly what it was. There were a dozen other tables scattered in the shadows. Mismatched chairs staggered in uneven rows away from the tables and toward a stage against the opposite wall. Across the stage was hung a velvet curtain with gold fringe, tattered but beautiful. I remember the luxuriousness of that curtain seemed out of place in such a practical setting. Clifford ordered for both of us, something called katsutori soku. I’m not sure what it was but it tasted like fruit and kerosene, and after my first glass the night began its skid into oblivion.
I remember that the room was full and hot and smoky and loud. I remember that ours were the only white faces and I felt both uncomfortable and privileged, as if Clifford were inducting me into some secret club. He was obviously drunk, but he possessed that veteran drinker’s gift for leveling off at a plateau, after which he kept pouring katsutori soku down his throat without additional perceptible effect. When I asked him what was behind the curtain, he just said, “You’ll see.”
At one point, later, he leaned across the table and said, “That man was a communist.”
“What man?”
“In the sake bar. With me and Eguchi.”
“Oh,” I said, already too far gone to imagine why he was telling me or what I should say about that or how this information applied to my life, now, in this place, which was beginning to glow and shimmer around the edges like a mirage.
Later still, he said, “Namiki wants me to get her an apartment. I keep telling her I’m a fucking corporal. I’m not made of money. But she won’t let me take her to a hotel. She’ll only come across if I get her a place of her own.”
I remember thinking that Clifford was being played, and then he bolted to his feet and backhanded me across the face, knocking me out of my chair, and I realized that in my stupor I must have said the words aloud. In the next instant, he was kneeling at my side, demanding that somebody bring some goddam ice, though ice was rare as diamonds outside Little America.
Likely I remember that second moment because Clifford’s blow rendered me briefly clear-headed, but the first I wouldn’t recall until weeks later, when suddenly his words leaped into my mind like someone was twisting my memory into focus with a knob. The rest of our conversation—and there was hours of it—remains lost in fog. Through it all was threaded the show itself, the reason for the stage and that splendid curtain, the reason all those men had come. When the curtain peeled back the first time, a complete hush fell over the crowd, no sound except the squeaking of pulleys. It took a moment to understand what I was seeing. In the middle of the stage was a huge gilt frame, and inside the frame was a kind of high-school-musical rendering of Botticelli’s Venus, every detail re-created with painted plywood and papier-mâché. Except rising from the clam shell was a very real Japanese woman in a wig. She was naked, like the Venus in the painting, though in this case you could discern the dark triangle of her pubic hair. She held the pose for a minute or two, let us drink her in, then the curtain squeaked shut again, and gradually the men were released from her spell and our voices rose to fill the room until the stage could be reset and the whole business was repeated with another re-creation. I’ve already stated the case against my memory, and even if I hadn’t been so drunk I didn’t know enough about art to recognize many of the paintings, but I remember women under trees and in bathtubs and on rumpled beds, all of them naked and pale, all bathed in the perfect silence of our adoration.
In June, something happened that made headlines in every newspaper in Japan. A local carpenter had been hired to build bookshelves on one of the upper floors of the Dai Ichi Sogo building. One evening, as he was riding the elevator down for the night, it stopped on the fourth floor and Bunny, along with a pair of aides, stepped on. The carpenter tried to bow his way out, intending to let Bunny have the elevator to himself, but Bunny insisted that he remain.
The man was so moved by the experience he wrote a five page letter to the Asahi newspaper. He described the incident with boggling thoroughness of detail and offered this commentary:
I have reflected on the courtesy of General MacArthur for many days, and I realize that no Japanese general or diplomat would have done as he did. I would go so far as to assert that never has a man of such character held sway over Dai Nippon.
The Asahi printed the letter in full and by week’s end every newspaper in Japan, along with a fair number around the world, had picked up the story. Life and Newsweek ran short articles and photos of the carpenter—at home and with his tools and in the famous elevator. A writer named Akira Nimura wrote a one-act play called The General and the Carpenter, which debuted a month after the incident and ran nightly through the summer and into fall. The locals had long admired Bunny from afar, the way they had admired their own Emperor before the war, but the story humanized him, made his greatness tangible and real. Before the elevator, they would never have presumed to write to him directly—the doors of extraordinary men, they seemed to think, should not be darkened by ordinary concerns—but in the weeks following the elevator incident Bunny received almost five thousand personal letters. A Japanese policeman wrote to request a pair of GI combat boots. A Buddhist priest wrote that he, not Emperor Hirohito, should be living in the Imperial Palace. Mothers wanted child-raising advice, and several women wrote asking him to serve as their stud in order that they might bear great children. Sick people wrote for cures, and prostitutes asked for protection against venereal diseases, and farmers wanted Bunny to temper the floods in the coming rainy season, and the grief-stricken requested safe passage to the next life for their loved ones.
I know all this because Bunny made up his mind that every person who took the time to write him a letter should receive an individual reply, all of which passed through the OPS for typing. For the most part, his responses were little more than form letters. I am grateful for your note and sympathize with your concern but such requests must be taken up with the proper authorities. Or I appreciate your confidence and will hold you in my prayers but requests of this nature must be addressed to an authority far higher than my own.
Eventually, actual form letters were printed up to serve the purpose but a great deal of that early correspondence was so personal and particular it couldn’t be easily dispensed with. For a month, twelve typists, including myself, were diverted to the task, and Bunny was so distracted that the machinery of occupation nearly ground to a halt while he focused on his love affair with the people of Japan.
Captain Embry sent me up to Bunny’s office one day with a batch of letters that required a signature before mailing. Usually, letters were left with one of his aides, but that day, Bunny himself was in the outer office when I arrived. He was in the middle of a conversation with his wife. Mrs. Bunny was petite and attractive, dark-haired, wearing a navy blue dress with lace trim at the collar and the sleeves. I thought I could hear traces of a southern accent in her voice.
“I’m not talking about a big production,” she was saying. “Just presents and cake and some of the officers’ children. A little party at the residence.”
There was no aide in sight and I wasn’t sure what to do so I stood there holding the letters and trying to draw as little attention to myself as possible. Neither Bunny nor Mrs. Bunny acknowledged my arrival.
“But it’ll turn into a big production,” he said. “You’ll have your party and the next thing I know the Russian ambassador will be in my office with hurt feelings because he wasn’t invited.”
“It’s Arthur’s birthday,” Mrs. Bunny said. “He’s a little boy and he’ll be eight years old and you’ll just have to deal with the Russian ambassador when the time comes.”
I remembered the boy I’d seen paddling a rowboat in the pool behind the residence. Bunny’s son. I was holding a box of letters to people who imagined his father had power over all that is seen and unseen.
Mrs. Bunny, however, seemed unimpressed.
“Oh, and I heard abou
t a magician,” she said. “Local fella. Breathes fire and swallows swords, all that stuff. For his finale, he turns a cricket into a butterfly.”
“Is a magician really necessary?”
“Unless you can turn a cricket into a butterfly, we’ll be needing entertainment for the children.”
Bunny didn’t answer, and Mrs. Bunny adjusted a badge on her husband’s chest. “I’ll take care of everything,” she said. “You just make sure you’re present and accounted for.”
Then she turned, and they saw me standing there. I tucked the letters under my arm and snapped to attention.
“Hello, soldier,” she said.
She kissed her husband on the cheek, wiped away a lipstick print with her thumb, and vanished in a cloud of flowery perfume. Bunny told me to put the letters on the desk.
“I remember you,” he said. “The fastest typist in Japan.”
I was surprised and flattered.
“You married?” he said.
“Yessir.”
“Where you from?”
“Alabama, sir. Mobile.”
“Then you know about Southern girls.”
“Yessir.”
“Lord have mercy,” Bunny said.
I waited for him to dismiss me but he did not. He picked up the letters, rifled through them. He pulled one out and laughed softly at what he read.
“This is my reply to a woman who wants me to tell her how to break her daughter of wetting the bed.”
He looked at me as if waiting for my opinion on the subject, but I didn’t know what he wanted me to say.
“Can you turn a cricket into a butterfly?”
“Nosir.”
“That’s too bad,” he said.
The following day was Saturday, and I woke with the idea in mind that I should get Arthur MacArthur a present for his birthday. I don’t know why. Likely, part of me hoped to ingratiate myself with Bunny, but another part, no less real, kept picturing a boy alone in a rowboat in a swimming pool in Japan.
The Typist Page 3
