“Uh huh.”
She tap-taped her nail on the receiver.
“It was really hard work getting your phone number.”
“Yeah?”
“I asked around at J’s Bar. I had the bartender ask your friend for me. A real tall, weird guy. He was reading Moliere.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
Silence.
“Everyone looked sad. You didn’t show up there for a week, so they were saying you must be sick or something.”
“I never knew I was so popular.”
“Are you….mad at me?”
“For what?”
“For saying all those terrible things to you. I wanted to apologize for that.”
“Hey, you don’t have to worry about me. You care about me, you might as well be feeding beans to pigeons.”
She sighed, and I could hear the flicker from her cigarette lighter coming through the receiver. After that, I could hear Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. She must’ve been calling from the record store.
“I’m not really worried about your feelings. I just feel like I shouldn’t have talked to you like that,” she said quickly.
“You’re pretty hard on yourself.”
“Yeah, I’m always thinking about the kind of person I’m trying to be.”
She was silent for a moment.
“You wanna meet up tonight?”
“Sure.”
“How about 8 o’ clock at J’s Bar. That okay?”
“Got it.”
“…um, I’ve been having a rough time lately.”
“I understand.”
“Thank you.”
She hung up.
19
It’s a long story, it happened when I was twentyone. Still a lot of youth left, but not as young as I once was. If I wasn’t happy with that, the only choice I had was to jump off the roof of the Empire State Building on a Sunday morning.
I heard this joke in an old movie about the Great Depression:
‘You know why I always have my umbrella open when I walk by the Empire State Building? ‘Cause people are always falling like raindrops!’
When I was twenty-one, at least at this point I wasn’t planning to die. At that point I’d slept with three girls.
The first girl was my high school classmate, and when we were seventeen we got to believing that we loved each other. Bathed in the lush twilight, she took off her slip-on shoes, her cotton socks, her thin seersucker dress, her weird underwear she obviously knew didn’t fit her, and then after getting a little flustered, took off her wristwatch. After that, we embraced each other atop the Sunday edition of the Asahi Shimbun.
Just a few months after we graduated from high school, we suddenly broke up for some forgettable reason. After that, I never saw her again. I think of her every now and then, during those nights when I can’t sleep. That’s it.
The second girl I slept with, I met her at the Shinjuku station on the subway. She was sixteen, flat broke, and had nowhere to sleep, and as an added bonus she was almost nothing but a pair of breasts, but she had smart, pretty eyes. One night, when there were violent demonstrations sweeping over Shinjuku, the trains, the busses, everything shut down completely.
“You hang around here and you’ll get hauled off,” I told her. She was crouched in the middle of the shutdown ticket-taker, reading a sports section she’d taken from the garbage.
“But the police’ll feed me.”
“That’s a terrible way to live.”
“I’m used to it.”
I lit a cigarette and gave one to her. Thanks to the tear gas, my eyes were prickling.
“Have you eaten?”
“Not since this morning.”
“Hey, let me get you something to eat. Anyway, we should get out of here.”
“Why do you want to get me something to eat?”
“Who knows?” I don’t know why, but I pulled her out of the ticket-taker and we walked the empty streets all the way to Mejiro.
That incredibly quiet girl’s stay at my apartment lasted for all of one week. Every day, she’d wake up after noon, eat something, smoke, absent-mindedly read books, watch television, and occasionally have uninterested sex with me. Her only possession was a white canvas bag which held inside it: a thin windbreaker, two T-shirts, one pair of blue jeans, three pairs of dirty underwear, and one box of tampons; that’s all she had.
“Where’re you from?”
Sometimes I asked her this.
“Someplace you don’t know.”
Saying that, the refused to elaborate. One day, when I came back from the supermarket clutching a grocery bag, she was gone. Her white bag was gone as well. A number of other things were gone as well. Some loose change I’d scattered atop the desk, a carton of cigarettes, and my carefully washed T-shirt. On the desk there was a torn piece of paper like a note, bearing the simple message: ‘rat bastard’. It’s quite possible that was a reference to me.
My third partner was a girl I’d met at our university’s library, she was a French Lit major, but in the spring of the following year she was found in a small forest past the edge of the tennis courts, hanged. Her corpse hung there unnoticed until past the beginning of spring semester, for an entire two weeks it dangled there, blown around by the wind. Even now, nobody goes in those woods after the sun goes down.
20
She was sitting at the counter of J’s Bar looking ill at ease, stirring around the almost-melted ice at the bottom of her ginger ale glass with a straw.
“I didn’t think you’d show.”
She said this as I sat next to her; she looked slightly relieved.
“I don’t stand girls up. I had something to do, so I was a little late.”
“What did you have to do?”
“Shoes. I had to polish shoes.”
“Those sneakers you’re wearing right now?”
She said this with deep suspicion while pointing at my shoes.
“No way! My dad’s shoes. It’s kind of a family tradition. The kids have to polish the father’s shoes.”
“Why?”
“Hmm...well, of course, the shoes are a symbol for something, I think. Anyway, my father gets home at 8pm every night, like clockwork. I polish his shoes, then I sprint out the door to go drink beer.”
“That’s a good tradition.”
“You really think so?”
“Yeah. It’s good to show your father some appreciation.”
“My appreciation is for the fact that he only has two feet.”
She giggled at that.
“Sounds like a great family.”
“Yeah, not just great, but throw in the poverty and we’re crying tears of joy.”
She kept stirring her ginger ale with the end of her straw.
“Still, I think my family was much worse off.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Your smell. The way rich people can sniff out other rich people, poor people can do the same.”
I poured the beer J brought me into my glass.
“Where are your parents?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“So-called ‘great’ people don’t talk about their family troubles. Right?”
“You’re a ‘great’ person?”
Fifteen seconds passed as she considered this.
“I’d like to be one, someday. Honestly. Doesn’t everyone?”
I decided not to answer that.
“But it might help to talk about it,” I said.
“Why?”
“First off, sometimes you’ve gotta vent to people. Second, it’s not like I’m going to run off and tell anybody.”
She laughed and lit a cigarette, and she stared silently at the wood-paneled counter while she took three puffs of smoke.
“Five years ago, my father died from a brain tumor. It was terrible. Suffered for two whole years. We managed to pour all our money into that. We ended up with absolutely nothing left. Thanks to that, our family was completely exhausted. We disintegrated, like a plane breaking up mid-flight. The same story you’ve heard a thousand times, right?”