Country of Origin

by Don Lee

  “He’s dead, Lisa.”

  She reached up to his face. “Make love to me,” she said, weeping. “Please. Take me somewhere and be with me,” she said, kissing him.

  FOURTEEN

  THE POLLS had them tied. Growing desperate, Carter proposed lifting sanctions if Tehran would release the hostages, and Reagan accused him of using the hostage crisis as a political football. Deploring the humiliation and disgrace of the whole situation, Reagan wasn’t too charitable, either, about the gasoline crisis and double-digit inflation. He won in a landslide, carrying forty-three states.

  Tom and Julia were meeting once a week now, always at a different love hotel. Maybe she had been right before—he hadn’t really been in love with her then—but he thought he was now. She warned him not to become too invested.

  “This is strictly temporary,” she said. “You and I both know it can’t last.”

  “Why not?”

  “Trust me.”

  “You have no affection for me whatsoever?”

  “None,” she said, “whatsoever,” and she bent down and briefly took his penis in her mouth.

  “You see, you do like me,” he told her.

  “Certain parts of you.”

  They were in the Julius Room of the Plaza T Hotel in Otsuka. Modeled after a Roman bath, the room was decorated with faux-marble walls and columns and divided into a series of closet-size chambers, the first of which was the tepidarium, where Tom and Julia were applying oils to each other’s skin.

  “You don’t want to be in love,” Julia said. “Being in love puts you at a terrible disadvantage.”

  “It sounds like you have a history.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” She massaged oil into his back. “It’s very possible that I’m just using you, you know.”

  “For what?”

  She sucked on his earlobe. “A respite?” she said. “The thing about affairs is they exist in a vacuum. A real relationship is about functioning in each other’s worlds, the intersection of your jobs and family and friends. It’s about the future you agree to build together, the ambitions you share. You’ve never experienced any of that, have you?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Have you ever wondered why?”

  They moved into the sudatorium for a sauna, sitting on a bench of wooden slats. Although Julia would not admit it, he knew she was attached to him now, yet each time they saw each other, he worried it might be the last, that she might suddenly decide to break it off. She was still largely a mystery to him. She could be moody and condescending. She carried herself with so much bravado, but he sensed an underlying sadness about her, the source of which he did not fully grasp. After seeing her photography show, for instance, he had kept marveling about her talent, but she had demurred, saying, “I’m not really gifted. You don’t know enough about art to differentiate between substance and surface. It doesn’t really matter, anyway. I’ll always be defined by the man I’m with. That’s all I am to people.”

  In the soft light of the sauna, Tom looked at Julia, wondering how she defined herself with him. All his life, he had been the type of man with whom women had affairs but did not marry—hitherto a comfortable role for him, one he had always sought. “Does your husband ever ask you questions?” he said.

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Where you’ve been—things like that. Does he suspect anything?”

  “He’s oblivious.”

  “Maybe not,” Tom said, and he recounted his conversation with Vincent Kitamura at the art gallery.

  “Why have you waited so long to tell me this?”

  “I didn’t know what to make of it. What would he do if he found out about us?”

  “I doubt anything.”

  “He doesn’t love you?”

  “Of course he loves me,” she laughed. “How could he not love me?”

  “Are you still sleeping with him?”

  “I’m not discussing this.”

  “I don’t have the right to ask?”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “You’re still attracted to him.” The thought of it—that she still might be sleeping with her husband—was almost more than he could bear.

  “Next you’ll ask who’s better, who’s bigger,” Julia said.

  “So?”

  “You know what the difference between you is?” she said. “Vincent has true beauty. You—you have insouciance.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “That’s all you’ll get from me.”

  “No, really.”

  “Really?” she said. “Okay, let me ask you, why did you join the Foreign Service?”

  “To travel, I guess.”

  “To travel. Not to stem the tide of communism? Not to promote constitutional democracy and the principles of free trade around the globe?”

  “That, too.”

  “Don’t you find it ironic that the people who are supposed to represent the United States are the ones who least want to live there?” she said. “It’s rather depressing, when you think about it. Do you ever get depressed?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t think you do. Your lack of self-awareness is quite spectacular.” She lightly slapped his face. “That’s oddly appealing to me.”

  They had worked up a good sweat, and they switched to the hot tub in the caldarium.

  “If Vincent and I ever had a child, he’d look like you, wouldn’t he?” Julia said.

  The question surprised him. “I suppose so. Does he want a baby? Do you?”

  “Children don’t interest me,” she said. “Is that a terrible thing to admit?” She splashed cold water from a fountain onto her face. “You’ve always had white girlfriends, haven’t you?”

  “No, not always.”

  “Any Asian women?”

  He shrugged.

  “Have you been back to Korea since that time you were a kid?”

  “No.”

  “Any plans to?”

  “I might visit. I don’t know,” he said, becoming irritated with the inquisition.

  “You ought to go. It’d be good for you. Like a pilgrimage. A group of us went last year. Our guide insisted we visit an orphanage just outside Seoul. I guess there’s a new mandate to encourage Americans to adopt, and there were a few Amerasian babies there. They had the kids sing songs for us with hand motions. The staff was so proud of them, but the place was medieval. Positively medieval. Stifling. Filthy. There were pails at the foot of each bed—buckets of slop.”

  “Of what?”

  “Slop,” Julia said. “It was gruesome.”

  When they couldn’t stand the heat of the caldarium anymore, they moved into the last chamber, the frigidarium. They were supposed to jump into the cold-water bath to close their pores, but they both hesitated in front of the small pool.

  “We could skip this one,” Tom said. They were already shivering from the change in room temperature.

  “You just want to possess me,” Julia said. “That’s all men are really interested in. Women are different. This is painful for me. You don’t know. Each time I see you, I’m in anguish. It sickens me, what I’m doing. I love Vincent—you’ll never know how much—but our marriage is falling apart, and every morning, I wake up in grief.”

  Tom turned to her. “Are you going to leave him?” he asked.

  She stepped into the cold water and sat down in the tiny pool. “People don’t have affairs to get out of their marriages,” she said, looking at him mournfully. “They have them to prolong them.”

  WITHOUT NOTICE, assistant Inspector Iso Yamada dropped by the embassy, strutting into Tom’s office in a trendy suit.

  “There’s been a development in the hit-and-run case,” Yamada said. “Do you remember the hit-and-run case? The green Alfa Romeo Spider?”

  “Vaguely,” Tom said. He had been hoping it had been forgotten. As promised, he had called Yamada and given him Julia’s new address at Minami Aoyama Daiichi Mansion, an
d two patrolmen had gone by to inspect her car, but nothing had happened after that.

  “It was quite a coincidence,” Yamada told Tom, casually pacing around the room, not bothering to sit. “Ms. Tinsley has an accident the very night I call you about her. She crumples up the front of her car, and we can’t tell if it was damaged before. We ask her apartment building security, her neighbors who park next to her—no one can remember if there was damage on her car before. So we can’t prove anything, even though it really does seem like too much of a coincidence.”

  “That’s a shame,” Tom said.

  “Yes, a shame. It’s surprising how unobservant people are. But fortunately someone who is a little more observant has come forward. He happened to see our request for information on the bulletin board outside a koban, a police box. A young man. He’s a parking attendant for a hotel in Ikebukuro called Loch Love. Do you know the hotel?”

  The skateboarder in the track suit, Tom thought.

  “He remembers a green Alfa Romeo Spider at the hotel just around the time of the hit-and-run,” Yamada said. “He remembers noticing damage on the front bumper when he put the cover over the license plate. The driver was a gaijin woman fitting Julia Tinsley’s description. She was with a man who looked mixed-blooded, haafu, in his early thirties, tall, in good shape. I recalled a haafu man who came to the station not too long ago to talk to a witness, Harper Boyd. He seemed to fit that description very well. Could that have been you with Julia Tinsley, or is that another coincidence?”

  Yamada ran through the various penalties for violating the Road Traffic Law—vehicular assault, leaving the scene of an accident, obstruction of justice, conspiracy. “I’m sure this will not be very good for your career,” he said. He turned his back to Tom and stood in the doorway, gazing out at the waiting area for the visa section. “You might have to stamp visas maybe. Is that something you ever have to do?”

  “No, not anymore.”

  “That’s too bad,” Yamada said, stepping in front of Tom’s desk. “Because I have a brother, you see. His name is Masahiro. Masahiro Yamada. He’s very stupid. He wants to go to the United States, but his visa application has been rejected.”

  “He applied here?”

  “That’s what I understand. I wonder if it’s possible for his application to be reevaluated and maybe receive some special consideration this time. What do you think of that? Do you think that’s possible?” As Yamada left the office, he placed his brother’s passport on top of Tom’s desk.

  Benny, it turned out, had reviewed the application himself. A JO named Dan Haesler had done the initial interview with Masahiro Yamada, and everything had seemed to be in order. He had filled out Form DS-156, the Non-Immigrant Visa Application, for a B-2 tourist visa, and had included his photograph, his employment and financial history, and his application fee. But, as his brother had said, Masahiro Yamada was an imbecile. He was an apprentice sushi chef, and Haesler had been told to look at food workers with suspicion: not infrequently, they were flown to the States for jobs in Japanese restaurants. So, as a formality, Haesler asked Masahiro Yamada if he planned to work in the US during his visit, and Yamada, the nitwit, said yes. Where do you plan to work? Haesler asked. Yamada proudly named a sushi restaurant in Camden, New Jersey, and then, realizing what he had just done, tried to take it back. Haesler would have none of it. He told Yamada his visa application would be denied, and began gathering the papers on his desk.

  “Guess what he did next,” Benny said in his office, feet up.

  “What?” Tom said.

  “He tried to grab his application. Danny got in a tug-of-war with him. Yamada managed to yank a couple of the sheets free, and he balled them up and ate them.”

  They laughed.

  “Danny swears he saw a staple go down.”

  They laughed harder.

  “Not the brightest light in the house,” Tom said.

  “I’ll say.”

  “So you already signed off on the review?”

  “Yeah,” Benny said, still laughing.

  Each visa refusal made by a JO had to be reviewed by a supervisor, who could, at that point, easily overturn the decision. Once the supervisor approved it, however, the refusal took root in the system and was much more difficult to change.

  “Well, you know that case I’ve been working on?” Tom said. “With the missing girl? Lisa Countryman? There’s a cop who might be able to help me with the case, but he wants a favor. Yamada’s actually his brother.”

  “What?”

  “He says his brother made an honest mistake,” Tom said, and launched into the story he had devised. “He’s not planning to work. He’s chasing after some girl from Rutgers who was teaching English here. He’s got a bad case of puppy love. The girl doesn’t even know he’s alive. The cop says his brother needs to go to Jersey and see for himself what’s up. Once he gets his heart stomped on, he’ll give up on the girl and come back to Tokyo.”

  Benny dropped his feet from his desk. “Are you asking what I think you’re asking?”

  “Benny, he made an honest mistake. He was nervous.”

  “I don’t buy it. He named the restaurant. He gave Danny the address. Samurai Sushi on Route 9.”

  “This is how it works here,” Tom said. “It’s all quid pro quo. It’s a system of little favors back and forth. As far as trade-offs go, this one’s not reprehensible, is it? It’s a pretty venial request. It’s pretty harmless. Especially for what we’d get in return. We might be able to find out what happened to Lisa Countryman and give her family some peace of mind. We can look away this one time, can’t we?”

  “Maybe you can, but I can’t,” Benny said.

  “Come on, Benny.”

  “I can’t do it. I can’t believe you’d even ask me to do it.”

  “Benny, it’s such a little thing.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. We’re not going to talk about this again. Do you understand?”

  He hadn’t expected Benny to be so moralistic. Jorge, maybe, but he had hoped Benny would be more flexible. “Listen,” Tom said, “the truth is, I’m in a little trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “A car accident.”

  Benny lifted his palms into the air, baffled. “You don’t have a car.”

  “It was a friend’s car.”

  Benny stared at him. “This has to do with that woman, doesn’t it?”

  “I borrowed her car and got into a little fender-bender.”

  “That’s bullshit. You’re covering for her. Were you even in the car?”

  “Does it matter?” Tom asked. “I’m involved, Benny. It’s my neck.”

  “It’s your fucking prick,” Benny said. “You stuck it where it doesn’t belong.”

  IT WAS a cruise ship theme. The room in Hotel Peach Time in Uguisudani was outfitted with brass portholes and a soundtrack of ocean swells, broken occasionally by a foghorn, and there was a heated waterbed that was designed to undulate as if they were on the high seas.

  “What’s the penalty?” Julia asked Tom, lying on top of him.

  “Your license will get revoked for two years. You’ll have to pay some fines. And of course restitution to the woman and for the repairs on the other car.”

  She gently ground her pubis against his cock. “Two years? That long?” she said. She lifted her hips and felt to see if he was hard again.

  “Give me a minute,” he said. She was so wet. The first time they had made love in Ikebukuro, back in August, she had faked having an orgasm, he realized long ago, because when she came with him now, she forgot herself in a way that frightened him a little.

  “What about you? What’ll happen to you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. It’ll be pretty serious.”

  “Are you sure you won’t be able to change your friend’s mind?”

  “I’m sure.”

  She subtly arched and unarched her back, her breasts moving up and down his chest. “This
is so exasperating. It’s all the agency’s fault. Why’d they have to make Vincent’s cover so complicated? Well, I know why. It’s about pedigree. If I had a diplomatic blue plate, this would be irrelevant,” she said. “I’m going to have to ask him to fix it.”

  “How?”

  “He’ll just do it. He’ll make it go away. That’s what he does.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Tom said.

  “What point?”

  “The cop was implying he’ll tell Vincent about us if his brother doesn’t get the visa,” Tom said, embellishing.

  “Do you really think he’d do that?”

  “What would he have to lose?”

  Inexplicably the thought of getting caught aroused Tom. He lifted Julia up and positioned his erection underneath her and had her sit down on it, and the delicious heat of her, the slippery, suctioning enclosure, made him gasp. She pulled her knees up and coaxed him upright so they sat straddling each other. The shift in position made the waterbed oscillate. “Wait,” Julia said. “All of a sudden I feel seasick.” They stayed still for a minute, then she told him, “Okay, I’m okay,” and they began moving again.

  “I’d like this—us—to last a little longer,” Tom said. “I’m enjoying this. What about you?”

  “What?”

  “Are you enjoying this?”

  She opened her eyes. “I’m enjoying this.”

  “I’m glad,” he said. “Because I wouldn’t want you to do anything you weren’t enjoying.”

  “I’m enjoying this very much.”

  When they finished, they lay together on the floor, pulling the sheets and pillows down with them, opting for solid ground. “Couldn’t you just issue the visa yourself?” Julia asked. “You’re a Consular Officer.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s got to have Benny’s signature on it. Or Jorge’s. He’s the NIV chief.”

  “You showed me that trick,” she said. “You could forge Benny’s signature.”

  He laughed. “You’re serious?”