The Typist
Page 7
Arthur nodded, titillated, I thought, by the idea of our deception, and I wondered how much of all this Namiki understood. Again, I met Ridges’s eyes in the mirror but I could no longer read his face. Arthur extended his hand to Namiki across my legs. “I’m Arthur,” he said. “My dad is the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific.” I nearly laughed out loud. He’d used Bunny’s official title, but you hardly ever heard it like that—everybody just used the acronym, SCAP—and it sounded oddly formal, almost royal. Namiki took his hand in both of hers and bowed three times in quick succession, making a noise in the back of her throat each time—hai, hai, hai—like she’d been arrested by a sneezing fit.
“This is Namiki,” I said, and Arthur said, “Pleased to meet you, Miss Namiki,” and we rolled on through Little America, turning heads as we passed.
Bunny’s Cadillac was parked out front when we returned. I wanted to make a quick getaway but I knew that would look suspicious, so I followed Arthur inside and we found his mother in the kitchen, peering over the shoulder of her cook, supervising dinner preparations the way her husband managed battle plans. Arthur was still buoyant from the afternoon, running on excitedly about the movie and what a good time he’d had, not a word about Namiki. After a few minutes, Mrs. Bunny dismissed me and I told Arthur I’d see him next week, relief flooding through me like we’d pulled off a crime.
On my way out, Bunny called to me from down the hall. He was reclined on a sofa in a sitting room, feet on the floor, head and shoulders propped on a nest of pillows, an unlit pipe jutting from the corner of his mouth like a sarcastic remark. He was scratching notes on a yellow legal pad. All around him, the floor was littered with files.
“Nice day?” he said.
“Yessir.”
“Good movie?”
“Yessir.”
“Listen,” he said, and I worried for a moment that the tentacles of his influence ran so deep he’d already heard about Namiki, but all he said was, “What’s Alabama gonna do this season? I saw in the paper where they lost to Tulane. That’s quite an upset.”
“They’ll be all right, sir. They’ve got Harry Gilmer.”
He drummed his pencil on the pad. “Let me ask you something. What’s your opinion of morale in my command? Seems to me morale has fallen off a little since the summer.”
As far as I knew, morale was fine and I wondered if his concern didn’t stem from the way the press had been treating him, if the morale in question might be his own. But I wasn’t about to tell him that.
“No matter,” he said. “I’ve got an idea that just might help right the ship.”
“Is that so, sir?”
“Were you aware that Bill Bertelli is attached to the Second Marines?”
“Bullet Bill, sir? The fullback?”
“Not just any fullback. He was a two-time All-American at Holy Cross.”
“He’s here in Japan, sir?”
“He is indeed. And not just him. Calvin Thomas is a coreman at the field hospital in Yokohama, and Marty Vaughn is a cook on the Bonhomme Richard, just off the coast.”
I knew the names. Thomas had been voted MVP of the Rose Bowl in 1939 and Vaughn had been tackle at Ole Miss. I’d heard his number called a hundred times over the radio when they were playing Alabama.
“By my count, there are at least fifteen men with real college football experience stationed in the Pacific. And I’ve hardly begun to look. There’s no telling who I’ll turn up. It strikes me as a serious oversight to have such talent handy and not make something of it. I think we need a football game.”
I was washed with a vague uneasiness as I walked home. Nothing I could articulate. Just the sense that something was off kilter in the world and I was to blame for whatever it was. The rain had blown over by then and I tried not to let the uneasiness bother me, but as I passed the baseball diamond, empty now, and the row of shell-shattered abandoned buildings, busted-out windows gaping at me from across the street, whatever I was feeling began to coalesce around the idea of the lost umbrella. Its absence had gone unnoticed, but I began to think that if I managed to retrieve it I might somehow make up for the lies I’d convinced Arthur to tell. That was the worst of it, I thought. I’d made a liar out of a little kid.
Last winter, I’d heard a story about a lieutenant in the Diplomatic Corps who’d left his coat on the back of a chair in a sake bar. He realized he’d forgotten the coat as soon as he stepped out into the cold. He went back for it right away but it was already gone. In seconds, someone had snatched it up and spirited it away. A waiter suggested that he try the yamiichi. A winter coat would fetch top dollar that time of year. Technically, the black market was illegal, but it’s important to understand that, without it, the locals wouldn’t have been able to survive. Food was still rationed and household goods, all the ordinary items people needed to make a life, were in short supply while the factories were rebuilt or converted from military use. Even before the surrender, yami-ichi stalls were popping up all over Tokyo, but after a year of occupation several of these two- or three-stall clusters had grown into full blown bazaars, hundreds of vendors doing business on spread blankets and homemade tables and out of lean-tos built from scraps. Bunny knew the score. He kept the MPs away from the yami-ichi on the excuse that it was important for the Japanese to police themselves. And the local police were more or less indifferent. Every morning, a patrol would sweep in, round up a handful of lawbreakers, and haul them off to court, where they would be processed, fined, turned loose, and back at work by afternoon. Maybe a policeman would pocket a little something for himself, but goods were rarely seized in bulk. The raids were so regular the vendors sometimes hired stand-ins to be arrested in their stead. That way, they wouldn’t have to lose a day’s profit or risk being robbed by a competitor while they were gone. Bunny did make it a court-martialable offense for a GI to be caught doing business on the yami-ichi, but the local police were afraid to bother the GIs and, before long, officers and diplomats were dispatching houseboys in search of hard-to-find items for their wives. As for the lieutenant, so the story went, he did indeed find his coat at one of the stalls. The problem was the proprietor refused to give it back. He’d paid 7000 yen for the coat, he said. He was sorry for the lieutenant but he required compensation. The lieutenant threatened to have the man arrested but they both knew he was bluffing. The story ends with the lieutenant haggling over his own coat.
The market I had in mind was located in a kind of ersatz square behind Ueno Station, the space cleared by American B-29s. It was close to the theater, the most likely place, I thought, for somebody to pawn Bunny’s umbrella. You could buy almost anything, not just consumer goods—clothes, food, sundries—but industrial products as well—lumber, gasoline, fertilizer, all diverted from government supplies. There were stalls selling fish and crabs and frogs, selling stockings and perfume, selling dirty books and dirty magazines, American whiskey, Russian vodka, cigarettes, tea leaves, jewelry; tents in which panpan girls took men between their legs next to tables offering free Bibles and tables manned by communist pamphleteers and tables set up like outdoor bars serving katsutori soku, selling bags of rice and grain, salvaged rubber, tatami matting, watches, record albums, record players, silverware, secondhand kimonos and school uniforms, boots, sandals, cameras, brass buttons—all of it pawned or traded by somebody in desperate need of something else, sweet potatoes, melons, live chickens, live songbirds, bricks and mortar, ink and paper, dye, bolts of cotton, spools of copper wire, candy, toys, and more and more and on and on, all the ingredients for building a new civilization at your fingertips and marked up three hundred percent. I didn’t make it very deep into the market before I realized it was no use. Either the story about the lieutenant was false or he was the luckiest man alive. There was just too much ground to cover. I stood there for a long time, the market swirling around me, sound and motion and stink, the world gone dizzy in my sight, the sun disappearing behind Ueno Station, its shadow cutting like a b
lade down the center of the square. Then I turned and walked away and hired a rickshaw to take me home.
That night, I flinched awake from a dream about my father. In real life, he was a big man, broad-shouldered, well over six feet tall, big enough that he should have been clumsy, though he was not. When spoken to, he had a habit of letting long pauses hang in the air before replying. This made for awkwardness sometimes, especially with people who didn’t know him, but he believed it was important to give due weight and consideration to whatever had been said. When I called home to tell him I was married, there had passed a ruminant, staticky silence before he answered, “I hope you’re happy, son. There’s nothing else for it now.” In the dream, however, he moved in a strange, mincing way, like a parody of a French Quarter queer, and he spoke in rambling, high-pitched, womanish bursts that made no sense and dissolved into hysterical laughter at the end of every sentence. Nothing overtly frightening but the dream brought me awake like a vision of my own death, left my heart pounding, made the actual world seem slippery and false as my senses put out feelers in the dark. I rubbed my eyes, blinked, rubbed my eyes again. I picked up a familiar scent—Clifford’s foot powder, though I failed to place it right away—and in the next instant I heard breathing and then Clifford sat up like a vampire on his bed and I flinched again, pressing myself against the wall.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“Hey, buddy,” Clifford said.
“What’re you doing here?”
“Waiting for you to wake up.”
He swung his legs to the floor and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. I couldn’t see him very well but there was a thickness to the quality of his voice that made me sure he was drunk. The moon was just a wisp outside the window, enough to graze his cheeks with light but not enough to brighten the room.
“I had the weirdest dream,” I said, and when he didn’t answer, I asked him, “What do you want?”
“I want to know why you’re after my girl.”
His voice was so calm it took a beat before I registered the meaning of his words, and then the calmness of his voice was as menacing as any sound I’d ever heard.
“What are you talking about?”
“First that business with the nigger. Now this thing with Bunny’s kid. I thought you were my friend. No shit. That’s how big a fool I am.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“That’s exactly what I been telling myself all night. Whenever I got a problem with Namiki, I said to myself, who’s right there to help me out—Van is, that’s who. The only married man in the whole fucking army don’t cheat on his wife. And the more I kept telling myself, the fishier it sounded. Maybe I had it wrong. Maybe he’s not such a nice guy. Maybe he doesn’t want to fuck Fumiko. Maybe he wants to fuck somebody else. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like every time I turn my back on Namiki, there you are.”
“Listen, Clifford—”
“Shut your mouth,” he said. He scratched his chin, his neck, pushed his fingers down under the collar of his shirt to scratch his chest. He stared at me for a long moment in the dark. Then he began to weep. His crying frightened me as much as his calm, and for a few long seconds, I didn’t do anything at all, just let him sob into his hands, waiting to see how all this would play out, but he kept on crying and eventually I said, “What’s going on? What happened?”
He sucked in a breath, trying hard to pull himself together. “I’m losing her,” he said. “Every night, she comes home smelling like GIs. I’ve told her to quit, but she needs the money for her family. That’s what she says. She won’t quit unless she can get the money some other way.” He dropped his eyes, worried a hangnail on his thumb. “I keep thinking about what you said, how she’s playing me, and then I start figuring she’s got her eye out for a man who can give her what she needs.”
“I’m an idiot,” I said.
“There’s ways to get the money. That’s not the problem. But I don’t want money to be the reason she’s with me.”
In the hall, somebody barefooted past our room, headed for the latrine.
“Did I ever tell you about Palawan?” Clifford said.
The answer was yes, but I figured there was a reason the story was on his mind. Clifford’s tank had been part of a flying column sent out ahead of the front line to liberate an internment camp. The fighting wasn’t much but it was enough to slow them down and they arrived too late. The Japs had burned the prisoners alive, rather than allow them to be rescued. Men, women, children—all of them civilians who’d been living in the Philippines before the war. “It wasn’t just prisoners,” Clifford said. “There were guards, too. Lined up on parade ground. Their CO called them to formation and just went on down the line—pop, pop, pop.” He made a pistol with his free hand and touched his index finger to his temple. I hadn’t heard this part before. “It was me that found him, the CO, hiding in the closet in his office. He had the pistol in his mouth but he couldn’t pull the trigger.”
“What’d you do?”
Clifford said, “I put him down.”
He wiped his eyes, his nose, his lips. I still wasn’t sure what he would do, but all of a sudden I was too tired to be afraid.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I mean it,” he said. “You’re a good man. I know that.” He stood and began unbuttoning his shirt. “Listen, you mind if I sleep here tonight? I told Namiki off pretty good before I left.”
“It’s still your room,” I said.
VII
I suppose I understood that nothing had been concluded with my wife, but when her next letter arrived I stood there marveling at her handwriting on the envelope, like my name and address contained a secret code, until the clerk said, “Anything else?” and I carried the letter back to the barracks to read it in my room.
I can’t tell you how grateful I am to have married such a decent man and how your decency makes me ache the more, knowing I don’t deserve it. I wish you were the father of this child. That may sound strange. I’m sure it is strange. But my life has been nothing if not strange these seven months. My feet are swollen and my face is all pimples. On the rare occasions when Mother can bear the sight of me, she predicts that I will have a boy because I am carrying so low. I think she’s right. The baby kicks all night long. He’s so stubborn. He’s only ever still if I’m in motion, so I walk and walk and walk that he can rest. Mother is too ashamed to let me wander around the neighborhood so I pace the house, but that drives my father crazy when he’s home. I don’t mean to complain. This mess is of my own making. I know that. But it doesn’t feel like a mess sometimes. I can’t help falling in love with my baby even if he refuses to let me sleep. I can’t help my happiness. I can’t help feeling comforted by your letter. Don’t misunderstand. I’ll never forget the trouble I’ve caused. But I have one last favor to ask. Boy or girl, I’d like your permission to name the baby Francis. I’m sure that sounds strange to you as well and I’ll understand if you refuse. I’ll understand if you never reply to this letter at all. If that happens, I won’t bother you again.
I read the letter over and over again, until I became aware that I was smiling—close-lipped and complicated but still a smile. I was remembering our first kiss. Three, maybe four seconds. I pulled away, not her. There were so many kisses after the first. Beneath the clotheslines behind her parents’ house. In the back row of the Lyric. On the hood of a borrowed Ford, parked somewhere private, the radio whispering from the dashboard, the world in turmoil, the whole universe spread out over our heads.
Here, now, it was time for dinner, but the idea of sharing a table in the mess with other men, going through the motions of an ordinary night, made the muscles knot around my spine, so I folded the letter and returned it to its envelope and tucked the envelope under my pillow, inside the pillowcase, on the off chance that Clifford or somebody showed up and got curious. I headed for the street, intending to
walk over to my sake bar, but on the way I changed my mind. For a few minutes, I loitered on the bench at a bus stop, nagged by hunger but without the will to help myself. Another man, local, approached and took a seat beside me and then the bus arrived, sighing and screeching like every bus in every city on the planet. The man got on and I followed him up the steps, not thinking about where I was going, thinking instead about this child who was not my child, this child who would or would not have my name. I sat next to a woman holding a pot-bellied pig. When she got off, her place was taken by another woman, about the same age, this one holding a rooster. I felt like the victim of a practical joke. For three hours, I rode that bus on an imperfect loop around the city, all the way back to where I’d boarded—through Denechofu, where Fumiko lived with her mother, and the Ichigaya district, where the International Military Tribunal conducted its affairs, and the Oimachi neighborhood, where Clifford was holed up with Namiki. Little by little, night erased the world. There were times in the army when I was glad no one had ever asked me to be a hero, and this was one. Back at the barracks, I went upstairs and closed the door and typed a letter to my wife. I told her about Bunny and Arthur. I told her about Clifford and Namiki. I told her everything that had happened to me since I first set foot in Japan. It was the longest letter I’d ever written. I told her it was all right with me if she wanted to name the baby Francis and asked her to please send me a picture when he or she was born.
There is no telling how many pages I typed during a single month in Japan. I prepared documents regarding crop yields and runaway inflation and traffic patterns and school curriculum and immunization practices and prison overcrowding. I typed an analysis of voting patterns, based on the previous election. I typed a report on “man hours lost” due to walkouts organized by the Reds and a statement from Bunny condemning “disorderly minorities.” I typed more than one report on the progress of the trials. Tojo was scheduled to testify in the last week of October. Bunny wanted Arthur to bear witness—the event had significant historical value in his eyes—and Arthur wanted me to go, so Bunny cleared my schedule with Captain Embry and Ridges picked me up at the barracks and on that day I typed nothing at all.