The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “I need,” Frank gasped, and she could see how weak he was, how reduced and mortified, “I want, if someone could help me . . .”

  “What, Frank?” she heard herself cry out. “What do you need?”

  Krynska let her fingers slip behind his ears a moment, to feel in the hollows there, then pulled back his eyelids to peer into the whites of his eyes. When finally she lifted her head, she let her gaze sweep over Miriam and take in the faces gathered round them. “I’m afraid he’s got what we all contract here in Japan at one time or another, we non-Asiatics, that is”—a glance for the Baron, who was shouting over his shoulder for one of the servants to go and fetch the doctor—“and what he needs, most immediately, is a little privacy.” She pressed one hand to the cloth on his forehead and looked back down at him. “And a bathroom.”

  Dysentery was common enough in the Far East, where primitive sanitary practices encouraged its spread, and the Japanese Isles were no exception. No matter how often Frank sang the praises of the cleanliness of the country and its people, the rituals involved in the washing of the hands, the scouring of the public baths, the simplicity and purity of the tatami mats and the robes they wore, there was no denying it. Plumbing was nonexistent. Flush toilets unheard of. For all the rustic charm of the lavatories in the inns and private homes—the bamboo screens, the ferns, pottery, flowers—you were nonetheless squatting over a hole in the ground, no different from the hillbillies in the mountains of Tennessee. Miriam could only account herself lucky that she hadn’t come down with the scourge.

  The Baron summoned the local physician, who tapped and auscultated and peered into Frank’s ears and up his nose and confirmed Krynska’s diagnosis, after which Frank slept for the better part of two days while Miriam sat beside him in a state of nervous exhaustion and the others took rambles over the hillside, observed the farmers at work in their paddies, played parlor games and watched the cherry blossoms shimmer in the breeze. Then it was back to Tokyo—the driver stopping at intervals so that poor Frank could be helped out to relieve himself—and on to the premier physician in all the country, who tapped and auscultated and peered into Frank’s ears and up his nose and put him on a strict diet of water and rice balls and nothing else.

  She was shocked. And she took the man aside and told him so. “Is that all you’re going to do? Give him rice balls? Can’t you see he has a fever?”

  The man was tall for a Japanese, with a black brush of the chin whiskers they all seemed to affect. His English was minimal. They stood outside the door of the bedroom, surrounded by the artifacts Frank had collected. “Hai,” he said, bowing. “Rice ball.”

  “But he’s delirious, soaked in sweat. He’s—he’s been calling out in the night, talking nonsense.” She had a sudden vision of her son Thomas, stricken with influenza when he was boy, the sticks of his legs beneath the sweated sheets, the hair pasted to his forehead, his lips cracked and dry. She’d been sure he was going to die and she was so paralyzed by the thought she couldn’t nurse him, couldn’t look at him, couldn’t even pass by his door without breaking down.

  The doctor glanced across the room to where Hayashi-San, who’d attempted to act as interpreter, but with limited success, clutched his hands before him and bowed. “Dysentery,” the doctor said. “Very serious.”

  “But aren’t you going to give him anything? Any treatment, any medicine? You do know medicine, don’t you?” In exasperation, she turned to Hayashi-San. “Tell him medicine—what is the word for medicine?”

  Hayashi-San bowed again and said something to the doctor in Japanese, to which the doctor replied with his own bow before turning back to her. “Rice ball,” he said. “Only rice ball.”

  It must have been a month or so later when she came back from a shopping expedition, feeling as Japanese as she ever would, having haggled with various dealers over a brocade screen, a statue of the bodhisattva Guanyin Frank had had his eye on and a beautiful little inlaid rosewood table, to find Frank sitting up in bed, looking pleased with himself. Over the past weeks he’d made a steady improvement, graduating from the rice balls to broth, tea and finally noodles with bits of fish and vegetables, but he’d been irritable, frustrated, cursing his foreman, the houseboy, the diet and the delay in construction this was costing him, and, of course, taking it out on her whenever he could. But now he was propped up against the headboard, the bed strewn with books and papers, whistling one of his music hall tunes.

  “You look like you’re feeling chipper,” she said, removing her wrap and draping it over a chair.

  He didn’t answer. Just kept whistling.

  “I got the most adorable little table”—she held off telling him of the bodhisttva, knowing what a fuss he’d make of it, criticizing the smallest flaws, badgering her over the price no matter what she’d paid—“and a screen I thought was quite . . . What’s that I smell? Perfume?”

  The whistling abruptly died.

  There was a tray beside him, the tea things laid out, two cups, English biscuits, mochi. “And what’s this? You didn’t wait tea for me?”

  His smile flashed and faded just as quickly. She saw that his hair had been carefully combed and that he was wearing his best robe and one of his stiff high-collared shirts. And a tie. “Oh, yes,” he said, as if it were an afterthought, “Olga stopped by to see how I was doing, and we—”

  “Olga?” she repeated.131

  It was at that moment that the bathroom swung open and Madame Krynska—La Krynska, Olga—appeared, a washcloth in her hand. “Oh, Miriam,” she chirped, “I didn’t know you’d come back. How nice to see you.” And she proceeded across the floor of the bedroom as if she were in her own Polish hovel to bend over Frank and lay the wet compress on his forehead, just as she had that day in the country. “Isn’t it a marvel how well he’s looking?” she said, still bent at the waist and glancing over one shoulder, her petite pretty manicured hand pressed to Frank’s brow and Frank looking like a Pomeranian with a belly full of chopped liver.

  Miriam was astonished. Slack-jawed. So stunned at the audacity of this woman—of Frank, the cheat, the liar, the adventurer—that she couldn’t speak a word.

  “There,” La Krynska was cooing, her yellow hair burgeoning round her like some unnatural growth, like fur grafted to her head above the yellow paste of her Polish eyebrows, “does that feel better?”

  In her own room, in the drawer where she kept her pravaz—right beside it—Miriam also kept a pistol. It was a small shiny thing that held two shots only and she’d bought it in Albuquerque the day she arrived, when she was feeling low, and she couldn’t have said why she’d thought to buy it—she wasn’t suicidal, not at all, no man could make her sink to that level and no man was worth it, not even the high and mighty Frank Lloyd Wright—except that having it near her, in her purse or in the desk drawer, gave her a sense of security, of power in reserve. She’d never fired it. Never even given it a thought. Till now.

  “Miriam,” Frank called out in the voice of a dog, the petted voice, false and callow, “come join us. The tea’s hot still.”

  But she was already out the door, already crossing the hall to her own room and the drawer there. She was utterly calm. She fit the key in the lock and pulled out the drawer to reveal the pravaz and the pistol beside it and her hand never trembled the way it sometimes did when she was upset and needed a shot for relief. The pistol—it was called a derringer and she’d known women in Paris who carried such things in their purses in the most casual way—was cold to the touch, as if its shiny nickel plating had just been dug from the earth. She took it in one hand and crossed the hall to Frank’s bedroom, all the world solidly in place, his prints and rugs and statues, and La Krynska just bending to the teapot, a thumb pressed to the lid as she lifted it and poured.

  It took a moment. Frank’s eyes leapt at her and retreated. “Miriam, what are you—?”

  “I’ll kill her, Frank,” she said, and she was pointing the gun now, her finger on the miniature trigger,
a sudden tide of emotion gushing up in her so that she was no longer calm, even as her voice rose and rose till it was a shriek, “and you. I’ll kill you too. I’ll kill both of you!” she screamed. “And myself! Myself too!”

  Of course, she killed no one, least of all herself. But she would have—she knew it, she swore it—if that little Pole hadn’t bolted out of the room and Frank hadn’t come up out of the bed and wrestled the gun away from her. But it was finished in any case. He was a beast. A criminal. He didn’t love her and he never had, no matter what he said. And even before she heard the news that his mother was on her way to Tokyo—the old dragon herself—to nurse him through his illness, as if she weren’t perfectly capable, as if he hadn’t recovered already and put the rice balls and all the rest behind him, she moved out. Bolted the door against him, packed up two suitcases—and no, she wouldn’t shed a tear, not for him—and took the train back to the mountains and the dead cherry blossoms and any inn that would receive her. She was in Japan and she would live in Japan as she’d lived in Albuquerque, free of him, rid of him, in exile, one white face among all those yellow ones.

  CHAPTER 9: THE AXIS OF BLISS

  It was raining heavily as she walked up from the station to the squat wooden inn on the hillside, preceded by a porter carrying her suitcases. Her shoes were all but ruined in the rutted dirt street that resembled nothing so much as a streambed at this juncture, everything dripping and sizzling with the rain, but it didn’t really matter—they could toss them on the ash pit for all she cared. She was going native. Throwing off worldly things. Dwelling within herself. And to hell with Frank. She concentrated on the porter’s back as the planes of his muscles clenched and shifted under the weight of the suitcases, the water streaming from his straw hat that was like an inverted funnel, the hill rising ever more sharply. She put one foot in front of the other, trying her best to avoid the deeper puddles and thinking only of a bed and a hot bath. There was no one in the street. Nothing stirred. Just the rain.

  She came up the single step into the anteroom, furled her umbrella and perched herself on the edge of a bamboo bench to ease into a pair of the slippers lined up on a rack for just that purpose. There was the smell of the charcoal and of o-cha, the acrid vinegary tea the Japanese seemed to put away by the gallon, and she had a moment’s peace before an old woman in a robe and two bowing maids rushed out to greet her, their thin fixed smiles doing little to disguise their horror at encountering a white woman, a gaijin, soaked through and unaccompanied, washed up on their doorstep. They didn’t speak English. No one in the entire village did, as she was soon to discover, but she could have been a deaf mute and got what she wanted nonetheless. She used a kind of pantomime to enlarge on her few disconnected phrases—Dōzo, heya arimasu-ka, nemuri, yoku?132—showed the old woman a folded wad of yen and within minutes found herself barefoot in a tiny Spartan room, drying her hair in a towel while one of the maids served her tea.

  Of course, she was wrought up, the scene in the apartment repeating itself over and over in her mind like a moving picture caught in a loop, but the pravaz calmed her and she took rice wine with her dinner—a kaiseki of twelve courses, faultlessly prepared, and was she beginning to appreciate the cuisine after all, or was she just starved?—and let the sound of the rain infiltrate her senses. Once the maid had cleared away the tray, she went into the little bamboo cubicle outside the bath and scrubbed herself all over, recording the process in the full-length mirror there, rubbing both hands slowly over her breasts, between her legs, into the small of her back, even lifting her feet one after the other to run the cloth over her soles and between her toes with the slow languorous ease of a bootblack, so that when she stepped through the door and onto the flagstones of the bath she felt as pure and regal as the empress herself.

  Two old men and what appeared to be a woman bobbed in the steaming water, only their heads and bony slick shoulders visible. There were flowers, ferns. Paper lanterns. She shivered, wondering if it was as chilly at the Imperial Palace as it was here on these wintry flagstones, and then she slipped into the water, the old men and the woman studiously averting their eyes, and it was heaven. The next thing she knew the place was deserted, the lanterns burned low, and the maid was there with her robe, murmuring something in her own language that sounded as lovely as the whisper of cherry blossoms in the breeze, and then she was in her room, on the futon, beneath the blankets, and the rain ran a thousand fingers across the roof.

  There followed a succession of days during which she saw no one but the maid and the shocked and silent cohabitants of the bath—and oh, they looked at her, stealing a pinched sideways glance as she strode naked across the flagstones, and let them, let them see her as she was in her skin: she had nothing to hide. The bath was a miracle. She lay in the water for hours at a time, dreaming, till her body felt as limp as if the flesh had fallen from the bone. It rained constantly, day and night. She kept her pravaz close at hand. She ate fried rice, boiled rice, rice with salmon and cod roe, udon noodles, skewered tofu. She drank black tea. Sake. And, finally, a bottle of good scotch whiskey the maid brought her. And was there a pharmacy in town? There was. She sent the maid out with an empty tube of the morphine sulfate tablets and the maid came back with it full.

  All the while, when she could summon the energy, the desire, she sat at the low mahogany table in her room and wrote letters to Frank on the thin rippled rice paper the maid left for her on the tansu in the closet. They were angry letters, letters that dredged up all the sourness and hate of the past and the present too—Krynska, how could he?—and yet they were sentimental at the same time, rising on the wings of poetry to illumine for him the reclamatory power of her love and the hallowed bond they shared that no amount of perfidy or venality or stinking filthy philandering on his part could ever break. The letters drained her. Crushed her. The rain fell. And the maid—pretty, perfect, a bowing kimono-clad extension of her will—took the letters to the post office and sent them away.

  Within the week, Frank had written back. She came in from the bath and there the letter was, laid out on the mahogany table beside a finger bowl and a single lily in the slim white vessel of a ceramic vase. The first thing she noticed was the artistry with which he’d addressed the envelope—he’d used a brush rather than a pen, his kanji as pristine and elegant as any Buddhist master’s or Shinto priest’s—and that touched her. She pictured him sitting over his drafting table with his finest brush, a look of utter absorption on his face as he dipped the tip of it in the well of the ink stone, funneling his genius into it, creating something beautiful. For her. Even before she read through the letter inside, the nine pages of apologies, pleas and regrets—he was the one at fault, a selfish unthinking lowly impostor of a man who saw what he wanted and took it, and damn the consequences, and could she ever forgive him because Krynska was nothing to him and he’d never so much as kissed her, he swore—her heart went out to him. She read through the letter a second time, then a third, every nerve and fiber of her stirring with the highest regard for the nobility of this man, for his grace, his beauty, his truth and wisdom, and she immediately wrote back, and what she wrote was so deep and so true she might as well have opened a vein and written him in blood.

  But she wasn’t coming back to him. Ever. Or at least not until he made her his equal, not until the day he threw off the yoke of his prior attachment—his Pussy or Kitty or whatever she called herself—and pledged his troth before God and man alike so that no Krynska or Takako-San could ever threaten her again. That much she made clear. She had to. Just to preserve her own sanity.

  His reply—more apologies, more pleas, more regrets—came by return mail, and the minute she’d read it through she clapped her hands and sent the maid for pen, paper and sake and wrote him back on the spot. Within the hour her letter was on the way to him and the following day another of his came to her, letters overlapping, reaching out, anticipating one another, so that over the course of the next two months they were able to
hold an ongoing conversation through the slow but estimable Japanese mails, their pens assessing even the minutiae of their attachment, their love and esteem and mutual complaints—his snoring, eating habits, the way he sniffed his socks on removing them, his bossiness, his rusticity, and her faults too, though of course they were minor compared to his—and to branch out in the fullness of that conversation to easy companionable accounts of their day-to-day activities while they were apart.

  His life was a frenzy of activity, of course. He was on the job site day and night, battling Hayashi-San and the Baron over every change and cost overrun, struggling with the permeability of the oya stone they’d quarried outside the city (it would forever leak, he feared, but it was beautiful beyond compare) and seeing to his mother’s needs. Yes, she was there. Still. She’d come all the way across the board-flat plains and jagged mountains of the West, endured the two weeks at sea and rushed to her (formerly) ailing son’s side only to come down with the very same complaint that had stricken him. It was low comedy, that was what it was, and Miriam, cleansed in the crucible of the bath and replete with the utter calm the pravaz gave her, laughed aloud at the thought of that gangling old lady—and how old was she, eighty, eight-five?—towering over the Japanese like a freak of nature only to be stretched out on a too-short futon and fed rice balls and water till she could only wish she’d stayed in Wisconsin where she belonged.133

  And for her part? She told him of the sound of the rain, of the emerald beauty of the stands of bamboo that clustered on the hillside like queues of silent people waiting for something that would never come and the strange tiny birds that visited them. Of her daily rituals, her reading and writing and the solace of the baths. Of the shaven-headed monks in the temple with its painted dragons and graceful torii and the way it made her feel as if she could touch the spirits with the pointed finger of her mind when they chanted, all in unison, and let the charred spice of their incense rise round them in empurpled clouds. She was at peace, that was what she told him, and she never mentioned the pravaz or the pharmacy or the adept maid who would lay down her life for her if she but asked. All she could want, she wrote, was for him to take her in his arms. That was all. That would make her world complete. But she wasn’t holding her breath. And she wasn’t coming back.