Country of Origin

by Don Lee

  Island Blue was the largest indoor pool complex in the world, an aquatic paradise with water slides, hot tubs, saunas, tanning booths, and restaurants, all festooned with happy Polynesian decorations. The main pool was bigger than a football field, and it swelled and undulated via a state-of-the-art wave machine that produced, if one was extremely kind in describing it, rideable surf.

  “Does it feel just like home?” Julia laughed.

  Both of them took in the spectacle, amazed. It was a perfectly sunny, warm day outside, with many miles of agreeable coastline nearby, yet Island Blue was packed with over a thousand splashing, cavorting Japanese beachgoers. Only, the beach was indoors, and it was completely fake—a huge rubber mat sculpted and colored and texturized to resemble sand. Everything in Island Blue, including the palm trees, tropical flowers, and lava boulders, was fake, made of Styrofoam or plastic or rubber, the entire vista climate-controlled with a pleasant trade-wind breeze, equatorially bright with stadium lights, and fragrant with the smells of anthuriums, orchids, chlorine, and mildew.

  Tom shook his head. “The Japanese are a very strange people,” he told Julia. The Japanese preferred their simulations, their imitations, to the real thing, happy to accept sacrifices in translation as long as they were made in favor of convenience and predictability, like the orderly, patient fashion with which everyone waited in lines—lines for everything, interminable lines for the pineapple hanbaga, for the restrooms, for the surfboard rentals, for the waves, even. A line to get into the lineup. Throughout the day, Island Blue ran half-hour periods of designated “Wave Time” in which surfers and boogie boarders could, one by one, hop on a waist-high wave and ride it to the beach mat.

  “So, come on, get a board,” Julia said.

  “What?”

  “I want to see you surf.”

  “What?”

  He tried to get out of it, but Julia was relentless. He found himself going one step further, hoping he would think of something before he had to take another, until he was actually standing in line, holding his rental board with a hundred other surfers, all of them tricked out in fancy Day-Glo rashguards and OP shorts and puka shells.

  What was he going to do? he wondered, panicking. Julia—comely even in her conservative one-piece Speedo—reclined on one elbow on the beach, reading a book, waiting to see him rip it up on the water. But as he watched the surfers in front of him, he began to relax. The wave machine pumped out a wave every thirty seconds. Theoretically, sixty of them should have gotten a turn with each half hour of Wave Time, yet it was more like twenty. People fell. They didn’t paddle into position quickly enough. They chickened out and let a wave pass. Even if Tom kept his place in line, it would take at least three hours before he reached the head of the line.

  Three chirpy tones from an electronic bell rang through Island Blue, followed by an announcement that this particular Wave Time was owari—over. Tom dropped out of the line and walked over to Julia.

  “This is ridiculous,” she said. “I want to see you. There’s got to be something we can do.”

  “I don’t mind,” he told her, lying down on a towel beside her. “I’m happy to sit here with you.”

  She thought for a second. “You look a little like Gerry Lopez, don’t you?”

  Gerry Lopez was a professional surfer, a superstar on the circuit. Tom occasionally studied surf magazines. “I don’t look anything like him.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Julia said, and she hopped up and approached one of Island Blue’s employees, a girl bedecked in a lei, hula skirt, and coconut bra, and then to a man in an aloha shirt, flip-flops, and a cowboy hat, apparently a manager, whom she brought over to where Tom lay.

  “Kochira wa Gerry Lopez-san desu,” she said. “Gerry Lopez, wakarimasu ka?”

  “Ee, domo. Dozo yoroshiku onegai shimasu,” the man said, bowing and bowing, ever so pleased to meet the great Gerry Lopez. He barked a string of instructions into his walkie-talkie, and within minutes the staff had cleared the swimmers from the water.

  “You’ve got the pool to yourself for half an hour,” Julia said.

  Word quickly spread that the champion surfer, the grand master of the Banzai Pipeline, was on the premises, and spectators were already ringing the pool, pointing at Tom, cameras flashing. He began to sweat. He leaned toward Julia and whispered, “There’s a slight problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “I sort of exaggerated my surfing skills.”

  “So you’re no Gerry Lopez. That’s all right. Trust me, no one will say a peep. They’ll believe what they want to believe.”

  “It’s not going to work.”

  “Why not?”

  “The truth is, I never actually learned to surf.”

  Julia stared at him, not understanding. “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t surf. I don’t know how to surf. At all,” Tom said, petrified. “I lied.”

  She looked at him blankly, then burst out laughing. “Well, fuck me dumb and call me Molly,” she said. “Did you ever live in Hawaii?”

  “No.”

  She laughed again. “Well, fuck me running backwards. How about UCLA? Did you go to UCLA?”

  “No.”

  “Well, fuck me sideways,” she said. Then, startling him, she exclaimed, “I love this! Is your name really Tom Hurley?”

  She thanked the manager but said that Gerry had changed his mind, his back was acting up, and then she and Tom lay on the beach and talked, interrupted only intermittently by requests for photos and autographs.

  She made Tom tell her everything. “Why Hawaii?” she asked, and he told her he had passed through Hawaii on vacation in his early teens, and it had been the one place he’d ever visited where he hadn’t had to explain himself, where it had seemed possible to be both Asian and American at the same time. When people asked what he was, he found it simpler, and more appealing, to say that he was Hawaiian, and then a personal mythography, one that included surfing, had evolved.

  His father, a GI from South Boston in the Seventh Infantry, had been part of the occupation forces in Korea after World War II. He had met Tom’s mother in Seoul, where she was working in a music store, and he had gotten her pregnant. Like a good Irish Catholic boy, he had married her and taken her to his next PCS in Germany, where Tom was born. They spent five years in Europe—Heidelberg, Ausburg, Chievres, Vicenza—and the next six years in the States, shuttling to eight different Army posts: Fort Jackson, Fort Riley, Fort Ord, Fort Campbell. The list went on, broken by one overseas assignment, a year back in Seoul on Yongsan Eighth Army base, when Tom was twelve.

  After Korea, they spent six months in Fort Devens, and then his father left for Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, while Tom and his mother stayed behind in Massachusetts. For a short time, they were helped out by his father’s family in Southie, a lending hand that was swiftly withdrawn when his father filed for divorce. From there, he and his mother lived in a series of one-bedroom apartments, eventually landing in a public housing project in Brockton, a factory town twenty miles outside of the city. His mother worked two jobs, manning an industrial sewing machine at a shoe factory during the day and cleaning offices at night. Tom worked, too—supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, hardware stores, anything he could find. He had time for little else. No steady girlfriends, no leisure activities. He was briefly on the swim team at school, but he missed so many practices, the coach cut him. After high school, he painted houses, installed fences, moved furniture, dropped in and out of Massasoit Community College, thinking at any moment he would be drafted and sent to Vietnam. Then, out of the blue, he received an inheritance. His father’s aunt, the one relative who’d ever been kind to Tom, had made him the beneficiary of her life insurance, ten thousand dollars. He gave half to his mother and took the other half to move cross-country to Southern California, where he got his degree from Cal State, Northridge.

  “When did you see your father last?” Julia asked.

  “When I was thir
teen, fourteen. I heard he served two tours in Vietnam and got a Purple Heart. I don’t know where he is now. I’m sure he got remarried to a nice girl from Southie and had a boatload of kids.”

  “I think the last time I saw my father was when I was two. I don’t remember him. He was number three.”

  “Number three?”

  “My mother was married seven times. I have nine half-brothers and -sisters. She used to joke that at least none of us was born on a pool table.”

  He was perplexed. “This was in Boston?”

  “No. Port Arthur, Texas.”

  “But didn’t you grow up in Boston?”

  She cocked her head at him. “Boston’s just the last place I lived in the US, when Vincent was at Harvard.”

  “But you said—” Tom tried to remember what she had said. He had pictured her in Chilmark and Chestnut Hill and the Buckingham School, but now he couldn’t recall if she had ever mentioned such places.

  “I suppose we’re a lot alike,” Julia told him. “I say things that can be misconstrued.”

  “You’re not well-to-do?”

  “What a quaint phrase, well-to-do. No, I come from a long line of white trash—deep-fried and double-wide,” she said, slipping for a second into a Texas accent. “I busted my ass to get into Princeton so I could marry a Yankee blue blood, and what did I do? Idiot that I am, I fell in love with a Jap. Oh, Vincent has some money. His family owns a paper manufacturing plant in Aberdeen, Washington. But he has this stupid patriotic streak and joins the CIA. Have you ever heard of anything so silly? He knew what he’d be going up against, but he didn’t care.”

  “What’s he up against?”

  She smiled. “This is what I like about you.”

  They hit traffic going back to Tokyo. At first, it was clear sailing. They were laughing, roaring down the expressway with the top down, and Tom felt released. He and Julia were more alike than he could have ever imagined. He felt he could tell her anything now, and she would not judge him. They put their heads back and enjoyed the wind, bathed by bands of crimson and magenta from the sunset, a fiery sky made more eerie by the blur of smog. But then it was bumper to bumper for miles, and with each minute stuck in the crawl of cars and trucks and buses, the warmth and cheer of the day seemed to bleed away.

  “I can’t stand this,” Julia said. She honked her horn pointlessly, and the people in the adjacent vehicles glanced over at them, miffed. This was a country in which drivers switched off their headlights at intersections as a courtesy. “Let’s move,” Julia said, and she kept changing lanes, trying to find a faster flow. Two and a half hours they were trapped in the traffic, and there was no rhyme or reason to it. It was a Saturday, so it wasn’t rush hour; there were no ball games or special events, there wasn’t an accident, nothing to rubberneck.

  The last kilometer was the worst. They could see the off-ramp to Roppongi in front of them, but the closer they got to it, the slower they seemed to go. At long last they reached the turnoff, and Julia whooped. “Free at last!” she screamed, and she floored it, zooming down the elevated expressway to the parallel surface road, carving between the concrete support columns from the outside lane to the faster one underneath the expressway, and then swinging left onto a narrow street that was a shortcut to Akasaka. She didn’t make the turn. She hit a woman riding a bicycle. Julia was almost able to avoid her, but she didn’t. She clipped the back wheel of the bicycle, causing the woman to jerk up into the air, twirl in an awkward helicopter spin, and land on her back, after which Julia sideswiped a parked red car, gouging the door panel with her bumper before coming to a rest.

  They looked behind them at the woman, who was motionless on her back for five horrifying seconds. Then she slowly sat up, and—the oddest of things—she raised her hands and adjusted her hair clips.

  “Thank God,” Julia said.

  “Go,” Tom whispered.

  “What?”

  “Go!” he yelled.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Julia sped away. She stared ahead and drove, her hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. A mile or so away, she abruptly parked at a curb and shut off the engine. “Oh, God!” she cried. “Did we really do that?” She sat quietly for a second, then looked at Tom, grabbed his head with both hands, and kissed him rapaciously.

  When she let go of him, she appeared as shocked as Tom by her impulsion. She dug into her purse for a cigarette and lit it. “We have to go back,” she told him.

  “I don’t think she ever saw us,” he said. “The woman. She was always facing away. Do you think anyone else saw us?”

  Julia’s hands were shaking. “I don’t know,” she said. “Jesus! What am I doing!”

  “She didn’t look like she was really hurt.”

  Eyes closed, she expelled a long cloud of blue smoke. “I don’t know,” she said morosely. “Maybe not.”

  “I don’t think she was. And the car we hit—we didn’t do that much damage, did we?”

  She turned to him. “No,” she said, and the import of the word—such a simple, prosaic word—hung between them.

  “We can’t go back,” Tom said. “There’d be no point now.”

  Julia leaned forward and pressed her forehead against the steering wheel. “Let’s go somewhere,” she said quietly.

  THEY DROVE to a rabu hoteru, a love hotel, in Ikebukuro. Hundreds of these hotels dotted Tokyo, renting rooms by the hour, rooms that were paeans to kitsch, done up in campy, lurid themes: Arabian harems, alpine chalets, tiki hut delights. On a lark, Tom had gone to one in Shibuya with Sara Sobeske once, the building designed to resemble the Taj Mahal. This one in Ikebukuro was fashioned after a Scottish castle and was called, aptly enough, Loch Love.

  The hotels were always new, immaculate, and extremely discreet. As soon as Julia parked her convertible in the underground garage, an attendant—a skateboarder in a track suit—rolled over and clipped a plastic placard over her license plate. On the way to the hotel, Tom and Julia had checked her car for damage. The left corner of the bumper was crumpled from hitting the parked car, but that was all. Nothing remarkable, hardly worth mentioning. Even the attendant didn’t seem to notice.

  Inside the small, elegant lobby, only the desk clerk’s hands were visible through a gap for the exchange of cash and keys. No names, no registration. On the adjacent wall were photos of the rooms. If a photo was illuminated, the room was available, and they could press one of two buttons for the desired duration, either the two-hour “Rest” or the overnight “Stay.”

  “Which room do you want?” Tom asked.

  “I don’t care,” Julia said. “You choose.”

  There was one with a bed shaped like a space capsule, another like Cinderella’s glass slipper. There was a Roman bath, a Texas rodeo. Tom chose the most sedate-looking room, “Bunny Hop,” which turned out to be a tacky approximation of a seventies bachelor pad, an homage to Hugh Hefner. Rotating circular bed, fully mirrored ceiling, everything draped in shag. Inside the doorway of the room, Tom flicked a switch, and recessed lights illuminated fluorescent black velvet wall paintings of naked women.

  “Uh, no, I don’t think so,” Julia said, and turned off the black lights.

  He kissed her, tasting residual chlorine from the pool, exhaust smoke from the expressway. He began undressing Julia, unbuttoning her blouse and unclasping her bra. Kissing her neck, he cupped her breasts, slid down to suck lightly on her nipples, then undid her pants, slipped off her shoes, and rolled down her underwear. He rose back up, fingertips trailing along the backs of her thighs, caressing her buttocks, and kissed her again, mouth opening wider, tongue mingling. He pulled off his shirt, unbuckled his belt, and tucked his erection between her legs and rubbed it along the blond, warm furrow of her flesh.

  He picked her up and carried her to the circular bed, kissed and licked and stroked her entire body, taking his time. He spread open the hood over her clitoris and flicked his tongue on it ever so gently, and when he felt her tensing, he inserted a fi
nger into her vagina and curled it up so her hips rose and she grabbed his head and tugged hard on his hair and moaned.

  Eventually, he swam up and kissed her again, and then leaned back on his knees. He held his cock and slowly traced the tip along her genital lips, and then dipped his penis—just the head of it—inside her for a second, and then withdrew.

  “Just do it,” Julia whispered.

  He entered her fully and stayed there awhile, pressing his pelvis into hers, moving in small circles, steadily widening the radius and slipping in and out, shallow thrusts, interspersed by a deep, long one. Hooking his arms under her knees, he lifted her legs, squeezing them against her chest, then, holding one calf in the air, he twisted her around, flipping her onto her stomach while he was still inside her, as if she were on a spit, never losing his rhythm, and fucked her from behind.

  “There’s something very professional about this,” she said. “Were you ever a gigolo?”

  At first he took the question as a compliment, but later he wondered: Had his lovemaking been that clinical? He had made her come, but the entire evening, she appeared at a remove, as if she herself were a professional, doing a job. They dressed and rode the elevator to the lobby, got in her car, and drove away from Loch Love, and all the while Julia did not speak to him. She looked very, very tired.

  When they arrived at the usual corner in Akasaka, she told him, without a hint of affection, “No one can ever know about this.”

  NIGHTS AFTERWARD, the image of the woman they’d hit—floating in the air, slowly spinning—kept returning to Tom, and he kept asking himself why he had forced Julia to leave the scene. He thought perhaps he had been seized by a moment of hysteria, worried how they would explain being together in her car. Nothing between them had yet happened, but the mere appearance of impropriety would ensure that nothing ever would, and he had wanted something to happen. Perversely, a part of him, a manipulative part he hadn’t known existed, had instinctively sensed that the accident would help him. It would bind them together. It would be their secret, their shared burden. It would make Julia beholden to him.