“How’d you find out I work here?” she said, sounding irritated.
“Just a coincidence. I came to buy a record.”
“Which one?”
“A Beach Boys album with California Girls on it.”
Looking deeply suspicious of me, she got up and took long strides over to the record shelf, then brought it over to me like a well-trained dog.
“How about this one?”
I nodded, looking around the store with my hands in my pockets.
“I also want Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3.”
She was silent this time, coming back holding two records.
“We’ve got Glenn Gould and Backhaus, which one do you want?”
“Glenn Gould.”
She set one record on the counter, then took the other one back to the shelf.
“What else?”
“A Miles Davis album with Girl in Calico.”
She took a little longer this time, but finally returned with the record.
“And?”
“That’s it. Thanks.”
She lined up the three records on the counter.
“You’re gonna to listen to all of these?”
“Nah, they’re presents.”
“You’re a generous guy.”
“Seems that way.”
She shrugged her shoulders uneasily, five thousand five hundred and fifty yen, she said. I paid her and took the records.
“Well, anyway, thanks to you, I was able to sell three records before lunch.”
“That’s great.”
She sighed and sat in the seat behind the counter, starting to look through her pile of receipts.
“Are you always working in this store all by yourself?”
“There’s another girl. She’s out to lunch right now.”
“And you?”
“When she comes back, we switch off.”
I took a cigarette from the pack in my pocket and lit it, watching her work.
“Say, if it’s okay, how about we go out to lunch together?”
She shook her head without looking away from her receipts.
“I like to eat lunch alone.”
“Me too.”
“Really?”
She deprioritized her receipts, looking annoyed, and lowered the needle onto a new record from Harper’s Bizarre.
“So…why’d you invite me, then?”
“Just wanna shake things up once in a while.”
“Shake ‘em up by yourself.”
She went back to working on the receipts at hand.
“Forget about me, already.”
I nodded.
“I think I said it once already, but I think you’re a complete sleazeball,” having said that, with her lips still pursed, she flipped the receipts through her four fingers.
16
When I entered J’s Bar, the Rat had his shoulders on the bar and his face grimaced while reading a telephone book-sized, incredibly long Henry James novel.
“Is that a good read?”
The Rat looked up from his book and shook his head from side to side. “Still, I’ve been reading it very carefully, ever since our talk the other day. ‘I love splendid deception more than the drab reality,’ you know it?”
“Nope.”
“Roger Vadim. A French Director. And this one, too: ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’”
“Who said that one?”
“I forget. You think it’s true?”
“It’s a lie.”
“Why?”
“You wake up at 3am, you’re hungry. You open the fridge and it’s empty. What do you do?”
The Rat thought it over, then laughed in a loud voice. I called J over and ordered beer and French fries, then pulled out a wrapped record and handed it to the Rat.
“What’s all this?”
“It’s a birthday present.”
“But my birthday’s not ‘til next month.”
“I won’t be here next month, so I’m giving it to you now.”
With the record in his hand, he was still thinking.
“Yeah, well, I’ll be lonely once you’re gone,” he said as he opened the paper, pulled out the record and looked it over.
“Beethoven, Piano Concerto Number 3, Glenn Gould, Leonard Bernstein. Hmm…I’ve never heard this. Have you?”
“Never.”
“Anyway, thank you. I’ll just come right out and say it, I’m really happy.”
17
For three days, I kept trying to find the girl’s phone number. The girl who lent me the Beach Boys record, that is.
I went to the office at our high school and looked up the register for our graduating class, and I found it. However, when I tried calling it I got a recorded message telling me the number was no longer in service. When I called Information and gave them the girl’s name, the operator searched for me, and at the end of five minutes, she told me there was no number listed in their directory under that name. That was the good thing about the girl’s name, it was unique. I thanked the operator and hung up. The next day, I called up a bunch of our former classmates and asked if they knew anything about her,
but nobody knew anything about her, and most of them only vaguely recalled her existence from our school days. The last person I asked, for some reason I didn’t understand, said, ‘I don’t have a damn thing to say to you,’ and hung up on me.
On the third day, I went back to the high school and got the name of the college she’d gone on to attend. It was the English department of a second rate girl’s school. I called their office and told them I was a quality control manager from McCormick’s Salad Dressing and had to ask her something from a survey she’d filled out and that I needed her current address and phone number. I apologized and told them it was very important that I speak to her. They asked if I wouldn’t call back in fifteen minutes after they’d had time to look it up. After drinking a bottle of beer, I called them back and the person in the office told me that she’d dropped out of school in March. The reason she’d quit was to recover from an illness, but they didn’t have the slightest idea why a girl who was well enough to eat salad wasn’t back enrolled in classes again.
When I asked if they had a contact address for her, telling them even an old one would be okay, he checked for me. It was a lodging house near the school. When I called there, a matronly-sounding lady said she didn’t know where the girl went after moving out, then hung up on me, as if to say, ‘you don’t want to know anyway.’
That was the end of the last line thread connecting us.
I went home and drank beer by myself, listening to California Girls all the while.
18
The phone rang.
I was lying atop a wicker chair, half-asleep while gazing at a book I’d left open. The sudden evening rainstorm was comprised of big drops of water that wet the leaves of the trees in the yard before it passed. After the rainstorm was gone, the sea-smelling southerly wind began to blow, shaking the leaves of the potted plants on the veranda just a little, then went on to shake the curtains.
“Hello,” she said. Her voice was dark and controlled; she spoke as if her words were settling on a thin glass table. “You remember me?”
I pretended to think about it for a minute.
“How’s the record business?”
“Not so good…it’s like there’s a recession or something. Nobody’s listening to records.”