Ogi had heard that Ms. Asuka worked in "adult entertainment," but it was only when he saw this bottle that he fully understood what this meant.
According to what he'd heard, the Our Own Moosbrugger fellow had used some of Ms. Asuka's contributions to pay a visit to her massage parlor.
They spread the lotion over each other's bodies and went through the same routine they normally performed on the bed. But this time Mrs. Tsugane didn't let Ogi pin her down; instead she got up on his chest and straddled him, facing away from him and bending over. As he knew it would, his penis trembled from this new workout as her head bobbed up and down on it.
Thinking to return the favor, Ogi stuck his neck out like a turtle, but with the rapid movement of her tight little rump, his tongue couldn't quite reach the red slit right before his eyes. He grabbed on to her glistening white butt, a hand on each hemisphere to hold it still, and relaxed his neck. But as Mrs.
Tsugane became more absorbed in performing fellatio, the bobbing move- ments of her head led her butt to rise and fall; Ogi touched his right index finger to the jujube fruit between her buttocks, and it slid in smoothly. As if to encourage the movements of his fingers, her rump gracefully slid down deeper and the young man's finger came to rest on a soft cocoon like a tiny ball of finely dried hay… After he returned to his apartment, Ogi finally realized what that had all been about. A few days before, as they took a break in bed, Mrs. Tsugane had mentioned that her furniture-designer husband had an interest in sca- tology and had shown interest in her urine and feces. Once it was out of the body it was dead, as far as she was concerned, and though she had urinated on him once, she didn't let him touch anything else, she said.
Mrs. Tsugane had given Ogi the body lotion bottle to throw away in the garbage cans outside the station on his way home, but as she did so she poured the remaining lotion into a small bottle of a generic brand of make-up, and put the apparently new container in her purse. Now when he recalled this he understood he'd been nothing more than a guinea pig in an experi- ment prepared for her returning husband's new sexual proclivities. And this became the trigger for the jealousy that consumed him the following week.
4
After a truly miserable week alone, when Ogi showed up at Mrs.
Tsugane's office she was on the phone, speaking slowly and deliberately.
She motioned to him to take a seat. Apparently she was talking with the PR department of a company regarding travel funding for a Polish avant- garde troupe that was scheduled to appear at the drama festival sponsored by the Culture and Sports Center the following spring. She had on a beige suit and, around her neck, a scarf of horizontal light green and grass-colored stripes. On his trip to Europe to the awards ceremony, Mrs. Tsugane had told Ogi proudly, she'd asked her husband to attend a famous scarf designer's show of his new collection.
As he listened to her endless phone call, Ogi remembered that long-ago summer day, her tank top, and her lush heavy hair cascading down her back.
Her hair now, bangs as well as the hair down the nape of her neck, was thin- ner and piled up on top of her head. He had learned that the wrinkles that ran from her eyes to the upper part of her cheeks grew darker as she got sexu- ally aroused, but now they were merely an indicator of aging skin; in her profile, as she quietly but persistently made her case over the phone, Ogi could see exhaustion seeping through.
She finally finished her call and hung up, a self-deprecating look on her face at having someone else witness her struggle over the phone.
"No matter how much I plead, they won't contribute the funds. Before the economic bubble burst, companies used to give money before they even heard what it was for. Nowadays, with the recession getting worse, they feel they've done their duty merely by listening."
Ogi nodded at her. He broached the topic he'd been thinking about all the way over on the Chuo Line train, his words sounding unnatural to him as he spoke.
"It seems it's impossible for Patron to come to a meeting of the Moos- brugger Committee. Not that he has no interest in Ms. Tachibana and her brother-quite the opposite. He wants to invite them to come to his own of- fice. I called her to convey the news and she seemed quite taken with the idea."
"If that's the case," Mrs. Tsugane said, staring fixedly at Ogi as if finally noticing him, "there's no reason for Ms. Tachibana to attend the Moosbrugger Committee anymore. She has a close friend in Ms. Asuka, and the other people on the committee are really not her type. This would mean too, wouldn't it, that you have no more business here? When we talked this morning, though we haven't seen each other for ten days, you didn't seem too enthusiastic about meeting me.
"Does this mean our relationship is over, now that my husband's back in the country? Did your sense of morality drive you to this decision? Surely you're not suddenly afraid of my husband?"
Ogi decided he'd best say nothing. Angry emotions welled up inside, but if he let her storm of words sweep over his head, this troublesome matter he didn't know how to begin to approach would simply resolve itself. The ten days of misery he'd experienced had made him think things out in a more adult way. It was worse than cowardly to put all the blame on her.
"I don't know if I can say anything about morality. But I do know that jealousy's made me miserable these past ten days, and there's no way out. If I said I was going to snatch you away from your husband, you'd be the first to laugh at me. But I still went ahead cooking up all kinds of silly schemes. Fi- nally, I decided that I couldn't keep on as I am, suffering from a jealousy that has me bent out of shape. In other words, the only way is to make a clean break."
"Isn't there some less drastic way?" Mrs. Tsugane asked. "Maybe we could go on as we are, for a while, and then say goodbye with only a mini- mum of pain."
"The pointless suffering I've been through made me realize that I can't stand being in this kind of pain anymore. If we keep on, my head will explode.
There's no other way. If we cut things off here I'll suffer for a time, but I can tough it out."
Mrs. Tsugane's small figure shrank farther into her chair, as she turned her pinked-rimmed eyes to Ogi. She licked her upper lip and the skin above it with her peach-colored tongue, which Ogi found, all over again, alluring.
"You're basically a very serious person, aren't you?" she asked. "Your parents are probably bemoaning the fact that, of all your brothers, you're the one who's gone bad and doesn't have a decent job, but you're still as serious as the high school boy I remember, jogging for all he was worth on the Nasu Plateau. So serious you just had to steal my panties, didn't you?
"I understand, so let's say goodbye. I'd like you to have a keepsake- and don't think a new pair of panties is what you want-so I'd like to give you a brand-new cassette player. With a cassette tape, too: music that Ms. Tachibana's younger brother composed. I listened to it a little this morn- ing, and it made me so sad I couldn't listen anymore. After your phone call, I had a premonition of what was going to happen. And now that it has, you can't expect me to listen to that music, can you? Farewell. Horseman, pass by!"
For about thirty minutes on the train to Shinjuku, Ogi sat with his head hanging down, but then he switched on the tape recorder and listened to the tape from the point where Mrs. Tsugane had stopped it. Each of the short pieces was made up of simple chord structures and melodies, but the music felt like the cries of a bared soul. So this is how a person lives with a mental handicap, Ogi thought, and how an unfortunate woman takes care of him all on her own. Heedless of the pair of high school girls who stared at him, Ogi felt tears coursing down his cheeks.