She stopped at the brick entrance of the nearest residence, surrounded by yew trees, and for the first time seemed to relax. She had Ogi wait at the foyer as she went in, bustling noisily just past the door and then inviting him in. A spacious living room/kitchen greeted Ogi, a sparse woods visible on a steep slope outside. The lace curtain on the inset window was drawn, block- ing the unusually strong sunlight that had made them both perspire on the walk over. Ogi sat down on a sofa, his position affording him an angled view of the scenery to his right, and gazed at the framed picture hanging on the wall in front of him, a colored print of a railroad station constructed of iron, viewed from the front, and a plan, drawn in pencil, that continued on the same paper.
"This is where I escape to," said Mrs. Tsugane, catching what Ogi was looking at as she brought in a liter bottle of Evian and two fluted glasses. "My husband picked that up in France. He has a number of sketches of railway bridges too, all of which have a pagoda on them, obviously not of practical use but more as a type of monument."
"It's from the end of the nineteenth century, around the time the Eiffel Tower was built," Ogi said, noting the date on the print.
"That was the age when metal structures had a religious feel to them,"
Mrs. Tsugane said. She sat down on the sofa, waiting for Ogi's gaze to move from the print to her. "It's been so many years, but I wonder what happened to my missing panties? How about telling me the details?"
Ogi blushed, and felt like he was left dangling stupidly in the air. He fingered the Evian bottle on the low table, wondering how he should begin, as Mrs. Tsugane leaned forward and stretched out her hand as if she were about to slap his knee. Instead, she leaned back and said, in an intelligent, serious tone, "Please don't get angry, but just hear me out. I'm not doing this to have fun at your expense. It's just that recently I feel anxious, as if I'm stuck in a rut, and I feel a lot of nostalgia for those old days, and for the high school student who was so curious about my panties. I can imagine how tough it must have been for you, with your brother and his wife always leaving you out of their activities. And I wonder why I didn't do anything to help include you."
"The other day, after I got back to my apartment, I thought a lot about that," Ogi said. "Back then I just put your panties on and felt a gentle calm come over me and went to sleep… but I can't remember at all what hap- pened the next morning."
His words felt forced to him, a sense of reality missing from them. He blushed even more, afraid she might think he wasn't telling the truth, and took a sip of water. But Mrs. Tsugane seemed to accept everything he said.
She even inclined her head coyly to one side.
"This might be a naive question, but when a young man wears a woman's panties-assuming everything's normal with him-don't things get out of hand?"
"Not for me. Everything settled down nicely. It felt like my whole body was cocooned in a fluffy softness, and I slept soundly."
As she listened to Ogi, a yawn came to her flushed, small, round face, taking Ogi by surprise. Despite this, she appeared still to be deep in thought, and finally said, in a low voice, "Maybe you wanted to become a girl, you poor thing."
That certainly made sense, Ogi mused, when you consider how his geni- tals subsided and how calmly he slept after putting the panties on. Having confessed, his face red and drooping, Ogi realized that he might seem to be enjoying a kind of masochistic solace in all this, which made him blush all the more.
Mrs. Tsugane stared steadily at him for a time, then gulped and, steel- ing herself, made a decisive announcement.
"Certainly you don't strike me as girlish now. The subconscious desires you had as a young boy are still with us, inside your trousers. And the girl I used to be and the woman I am right now are very happy, I can tell you. Your brother and sister-in-law teased me no end about the panty incident, but it also brought on some erotic dreams. Why don't we reward our formerly naive selves? What do you say? Let's do it!"
Up the spiral staircase with its metal banister that ascended from the entrance with its vaulted ceiling, there was just one large bedroom, with a toilet and bath attached. The room contained little more than a vanity mir- ror and chair, an oak sideboard, and a double bed spilling over and occupy- ing the rest of the space. Mrs. Tsugane turned down the bedspread and light blanket and, standing firmly on the rug, legs set apart, took off her skirt, shrugged off her silk slip, and let it drop to the floor. After carefully remov- ing her stockings, she was taking off her panties when a faint smile spread lines from her flushed eyelids to her cheeks. Ogi didn't like that particular look, which was directed at him, but not to be outdone, he enthusiastically sloughed off his clothes.
Only three minutes into sex, as Ogi was moving vigorously up and down, his passion rising, Mrs. Tsugane pushed up her slim arms against his chest. Ogi was annoyed, but she modestly explained that she felt she was going to come first, and wanted him to get off her. She turned around, face down, hoisting up to a comical height the two white globes of her rump and the reddish slit between. She had all the seriousness of purpose of a little girl absorbed in play and Ogi, once again in a good mood, couldn't suppress a smile, feeling proud that such an intelligent older woman would openly show him such passion.
Ogi enjoyed remembering their sexual activities for many days there- after. Even when he was taking care of the inquiries related to Patron's name list-and the number of replies they received exceeded a hundred-he'd be possessed by fragmentary mental pictures of Mrs. Tsugane's body, and of her fingers, and of his as they moved over her. He made out a schedule of visits to the university town Mrs. Tsugane lived in, taking care of all the business at hand up to the last possible moment-sending out Patron's letters, getting in touch with people by e-mail, fax, and, when necessary, by phone. For her part, Mrs. Tsugane, with her insatiable desire and stamina-at least from the view- point of an inexperienced youth-responded to Ogi's every need. What's more, she displayed the kind of good sense appropriate to an older woman.
One day between bouts of sex as they lay sprawled out, resting their weary bodies, Mrs. Tsugane, puffing on a cigarette, said, sounding less like she was addressing Ogi than reciting lines from a one-man play, "Please don't tell anyone about what's going on between us. After my husband gets back from abroad, we won't be able to meet as frequently, and we'll both have time to do some soul-searching. In my experience, even if you try very hard to ana- lyze a physical relationship, one that's just begun, you'll find it meaningless to do so."
Innocent, and at the same time moralistic, Ogi listened to her, dead se- rious. A moment later, though, as Mrs. Tsugane, lying face down, slid up and reached out for the ashtray, Ogi's attention was riveted by the red lines on the outer part of her small buttocks attached to thick thighs, and by her anus, like a dried jujube-tree fruit, the only part of the sweaty flushed inner flesh of her skin that wasn't soaked, like an ornamental button amid the pubic hair surrounding it.
In the end, innocent young Ogi put these words of a most discreet and experienced older woman on a back burner and didn't pursue their implica- tions. After three weeks of bliss, though, the day came when he had to face an inevitable reality, on the heels of which he was ambushed by jealousy and ended up angry and miserable: Mrs. Tsugane's husband was coming back from Europe the following day.
Ogi learned that they wouldn't be seeing much of each other since she was going to take some time off from her job and spend a week with her husband at their cottage in South Izu before he reported back to his design center. When he heard this, Ogi felt like breathing a sigh of relief for his penis, which had never had such a workout. Perhaps eager to reward him for the time they'd have to be apart, when Ogi arrived at her refuge on this final day Mrs. Tsugane had laid out a plastic sheet on the rug at the foot of the bed, as well as a professional-size bottle of body lotion Ms. Asuka had given her.