Alone in a darkened corner at Nissho, an exclusive Japanese restaurant near the Miyako Hotel in Japan-town, a thick winter fog out the windows, she had sat contemplating her death. She would use seconal and alcohol, starting with a small bottle of sake. After lunch she would walk slowly back up to her apartment and sit by her window, watching the fog, and drink the bottle of Meursault. She would disrobe and take a hot bath. She would swallow the pills and draw the clean silk sheets up over her naked body. And she would go to sleep.
That was where life, after thirty-four years, had led her.
She could not have said precisely where she had failed, or which failure had marked her Rubicon. Should she have tried harder with her family? Tried to communicate more and break the icy bonds of reserve? There had been two sisters and a brother, living with her parents in a square and empty house under the flight path to Moffatt Field in Sunnyvale. Passive. ‘Remember, we are Japanese.’ Her father never able to get over his internment in Arizona during World War II, when he was a boy, snatched with his whole family from his home. The excuse for his whole life – ‘We will never belong.’ Harboring the hatred and disappointment in who he was, who they all were, doling it out to her mother, to his children, to May.
Starting college at Berkeley, glad to be rid of them, letting the family fall away. Running out of money in the first semester, taking a job selling shoes to gaijin with their huge feet; marrying Sam Hoshida, ten years older than she, because his landscape work got her out of the shoe store.
Another semester in college then, with Sam supporting her. Another year with a man who grew quiet and bitter as he came to know she was using him. Wearing better clothes, becoming conscious of her beauty, other men making her aware of it.
There was a teaching assistant, then, a half-Japanese, Phil Oshida, for whom she left Sam, for love. They married and she miscarried three times in two years; she could never have children. He hated her for that, felt pity and hate, trying to disguise them as love. She thought that was where the big fall had begun – when the only person she’d ever let herself care for gave up on her.
She got her meaningless degree in political science and her second divorce. She was a shell, empty and used up at twenty-four.
The first time it happened, she hadn’t planned it. She had gone to Hawaii for a one-week vacation, her first vacation from her meaningless job at the Bank of America. Of course, as always, she was on a budget – the package was a round-trip ticket, hotel and one meal a day. She let a student on Christmas break from USC buy her an ice cream near the beach. He was big and built and blond and all-American and told her he liked her bathing suit. Could he buy her dinner? He had lots of money. His parents lived on Hilo. Next day he asked her if she’d like to go with him over to his parents’ house. He was straightforward. He was going back to school in a week, he had a girlfriend, so no commitments, but they could have a good time.
No actual money changed hands, although he did pay for her rebooked return flight. But the experience gave her the idea of what could be done. She quit her job at the Bank of America, shortened her name to Shinn, and started to make a good living, alone, discreetly.
But there she was at Nissho’s, still a shell, carrying her father’s victim-load around with her. Men had been doing what they wanted with her for ten years. She couldn’t be further debased or devalued. She was still in demand, but there was no May Shintaka anymore, not even, she thought, much of a May Shinn, and she didn’t really care. Her usefulness, if she’d ever had any, was at an end.
Then Owen Nash had walked to her table. He sat down, uninvited. She raised her eyes to look at him. ‘Yes?’
‘Are you as alone as you look?’
Of the many men she had known, she recognized something in Owen Nash that she thought she had given up on.
In her business – it was inevitable – you got to thinking all men were the same, or similar enough that the small differences didn’t matter.
Here was a man, though, who on first meeting caught you in an aura, swept you up in it. He stood over her, looking down, giving off a sense of power, with a massive, muscular torso, a square face and eyes that vibrated with life and, half-hidden, suffering…
She stared at him, not wanting to acknowledge what she intuitively felt – that this man already knew her, knew what she was feeling. ‘Are you as lonely as you look?’ An old pickup line. But this, she felt, wasn’t just that. He was telling her that they were connected, somehow. Suddenly, with nothing else holding her to her meaningless life, she wanted to know how the connection worked and what it might mean.
He had reserved the private room in the back, but had been watching her from the kitchen, where he was helping prepare the side dishes to accompany his main course of fugu, a blowfish delicacy in Japan that killed you if you prepared it wrong.
After sharing the meal, they both waited for the slight numbness on the tongue. Owen had brought a bottle of aged Suntory whisky and they sipped it neat out of the sake cups.
During the meal, he had gotten back some of what she would come to know as his usual garrulous persona. Now he ran with it, laughing, loud in the tiny room, emptying his sake cup.
‘I think you’re unhappy,’ she said. ‘If the fish had been wrong, it could have poisoned you.’
He drank his whiskey. ‘There’s risk in everything. You do what you need to -’
‘And you need to risk death? Why? Someone like you?’
They were alone in the room, sitting on the floor. The table had been cleared – only the Suntory bottle and the two cups were left on the polished teak.
‘It’s a game,’ he said, not smiling. ‘It’s something I do, that’s all.’
She shook her head. This wasn’t any game for him. ‘I think that’s why you came over and talked to me. You recognized me. I am like you.’
She told him she wanted him to follow her – she would show him what wanting to die was really like. They walked twenty blocks in the deep fog to her apartment. He followed her up the stairs. In the foyer, she stepped out of her shoes and went into the bathroom, where she turned on the bath. She went to the refrigerator and got out the wine, opened it. It was as though he weren’t there.
She went to her dresser and took off her earrings, her necklace. Unbuttoning the black silk blouse, she felt him moving up close behind her, but he didn’t touch her, didn’t speak. That was the understanding. She continued to disrobe – her brassiere, her slacks, the rest.
She finished the first glass of wine in a gulp and poured herself a second, which she brought to the bathroom. The bath was ready, the mirror steamed. He sat on the toilet seat, watching her lather, occasionally sipping from the Suntory bottle he’d carried with him.
She stood and rinsed under a hot shower, then stepped out and over to the medicine cabinet, where she took down the prescription bottle and poured the pills, at least twenty of them, into her hand. She lifted her glass of wine, threw back her head and emptied her hand into her mouth.
Which is when Owen moved, knocking the glass out of her hand, smashing it to the tiles, grabbing her, his fingers in her mouth, forcing the pills out into the sink, the toilet, onto the floor.
That had been the beginning.
The shrine was gone in the clang of the bars, the door opening. ‘Shinn. D.A.’s here to see you. Move it.‘
Remember who you are, she told herself. You are not what they think you are.
It wasn’t quite eleven in the morning. Out the windows, through the bars, she saw the sun high in the sky.
The interview room was like a cell without toilet or bars. It was furnished with an old, pitted gray desk and three chairs. She sat down across from the man, casual in jeans and a rugby shirt. He introduced himself, Mr Hardy, and some woman he called a D.A. investigator. He would be taping this interview. He asked how they were treating her.