Читать книгу In Plain View - Julie Shigekuni - Страница 11

2

It seemed unfortunate though predictable that two weeks into September the heat had edged back up. Instead of temperate late-summer weather, the day of the party arrived even hotter than had been forecasted, stressing the cooling unit until its usual hum became a bleating roar. Daidai had spent the morning with WD-40 and a screwdriver, coaxing it back into quietude, and then a good part of the afternoon cursing it, along with the oven that couldn’t contain its heat, which she regretted not having considered when she let Hiroshi convince her to go with premade hors d’oeuvres á la Whole Foods. Louise had shown up with a bag of cherries fresh from the fruit stand in one arm and one of peaches in the other, which Daidai and she had pitted and skinned and spooned into the tart shells Louise had rolled out and baked the night before. Offsetting Daidai’s anxiety over the heat, the tarts beamed good cheer, set primly in a row across the high counter alongside bowls of raspberries, apples, and plums for fruit saketinis.

With the guests due to arrive, Louise took over the last-minute preparations and sent Daidai into the bedroom to change out of her sweat-stained, fruit-glaze-spattered T-shirt. That morning she’d lain out a Picasso-blue patterned sundress alongside a chiffon blouse and pale melon skirt, unable to choose between the two. Now, faced with the decision, one appeared drab, the other self-effacing. Back in the closet, her eye caught on her orange-sherbet sundress buried in the back. Simple but short. Sexy—maybe too short? She’d tried for six years to affect the right look at the museum and should have paid more attention to her legs. Daidai looked at herself in the full-length door mirror, at her freckles dancing across her heat-stained cheekbones. She placed the more conservative outfits back on hangers and, after mouthing an apology to her high-minded mother, shut the door to the walk-in closet behind her. Hiroshi had purchased some nice-smelling French perfume as an anniversary gift, which she spritzed into the air, and practiced a smile, which appeared spontaneously later that evening when she spotted her husband motioning to her from across the room.

Hiroshi planted his hand firmly on the small of her back in a gesture she read as proprietary, a remonstrance for her choice of an immodest outfit. Leaning in, she clamped her teeth around the flap of his earlobe, just hard enough to shift his attention inward. She’d worked too hard to be criticized. Taking a deep breath, she let her thoughts move from the work she’d done to prepare for the party to the fact that it’d soon be over, and she calmed down a little. Hiroshi loved her, but he was afflicted with an unusual degree of social anxiety. They both were, and it made them perfect for each other: she consumed with worry that she might not fit in, and he put off and at the same time attracted to her for the ways she didn’t.

Beginning on his right, Hiroshi introduced the new assistant professor, who sneezed several times when her cheek brushed against Daidai’s, embarrassing them both in front of the rest of the group, all grad students, who waited in turn to be acknowledged. Daidai found something nice to say to each of them while keeping her distance in case her perfume should cause another fit of sneezing. For entertainment, she looked intermittently through the cutout window at Louise, who was showing off her skills as a bartender, until a woman roughly her own age, though clearly not American in her economical gestures and cadences, surprised Daidai by brushing past her outstretched hand.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Satsuki Suzuki,” she spoke into Daidai’s ear. “You smell so good!” The air between them vibrated as she and Daidai pressed shoulders.

The overt gesture of affection had been enough to make the students stop their private asides and stare, but Satsuki offered no explanation. Inclining her head slightly in Daidai’s direction, she looked up with a broad smile that revealed an uneven set of teeth, each pushing at the next to be the one out in front. It was the only awkward feature on her lively, intelligent face.

“Very nice to meet you.” Daidai looked past the group of curious first-year onlookers, whose mass of eyes and nervous tics underscored Satsuki’s singular presence in the room.

After dinner, Satsuki breezed into the kitchen followed closely behind by a tall, good-looking student she didn’t bother to introduce. “Your home has a very festive spirit tonight,” she said in accented but perfectly intoned English, clearing a spot for her empty drink glass, which she then set on the countertop with both hands. “I wanted to tell you how much I’m enjoying myself.”

“I’m glad,” Daidai said, sensing there might be something more that the woman had come to say.

“The seaweed salad was delicious. I never would have thought to add lemon.”

“Thank you.” Daidai smiled, indicating her readiness to converse. Perhaps more time was needed for the woman to formulate her words in English. “I made the drinks and desserts, but everything else came ready-made from Whole Foods,” she said, stalling.

“A wise decision, I think.” Rejecting Daidai’s hesitancy, the woman turned to the person behind her. “Daidai Suzuki, meet Leonard Quan.”

“Nice to meet you, Dr. Suzuki,” Leonard said, showing impeccable manners.

“Very nice to meet you, Leonard.” Daidai extended her hand after drying it on a kitchen towel while Satsuki looked on. “Thanks for coming to the party.”

“This is too much work for one person.” Satsuki glanced over her shoulder at the empty drink glasses, flatware, and plates stacked in the sink.

It was too much, Daidai would have agreed, were it not for Louise, whose movements in the big room she monitored from the corner of her eye. “It’s fine. Go enjoy yourself.” Daidai waved the two back to the party.

But rather than leave, Satsuki reached under the sink and located a pair of kitchen gloves, which she handed to Leonard. “These should fit.” Satsuki wiped her elegant fingers on the dish towel Daidai had used and stood by to watch Leonard put them on before excusing herself out of the kitchen.

“You two friends?” Daidai asked, wanting to understand the exchange she’d just witnessed.

“Housemates.” Leonard’s thumb joints bulged uncomfortably in the yellow gloves.

Daidai pondered what she perceived to be Leonard’s predicament: the financial constraints that necessitated a housemate, the awkwardness built into social functions stemming out of academia. “You don’t have to help me clean up,” she said, wanting to give him a break.

Leonard laughed. “I don’t mind. I’m not a very social person.”

“I’m not either.”

With nothing more to say to each other, they turned their gaze to the cutout window to view what they’d confessed they were not. Satsuki was chatting up a group of students, and then, finding them to be inadequate conversationalists, she turned over her shoulder to interrupt Hiroshi’s conversation with the new assistant professor. Above the party clatter, her gestures rang clear. Choose me. Flipping her hair close to Hiroshi’s ear, she reached out to brush his arm with her fingertips, signaling that something he’d said had pleased her.

Once the countertop had been cleared, Daidai joined her friend behind the bar. “Who do you like?” she asked, conjuring the game they liked to play.

Louise wiped a strand of hair from her face and set her gaze on the crowd. “They’re mostly very young,” she said, noncommittal. “Except for the new assistant professor, and who’s the older student?”

“The one our age?” Daidai laughed. “Foreign?”

“Japanese.” Now it was Louise’s turn to laugh.

“That would be Satsuki Suzuki.” Louise’s choice of whom to single out amused Daidai.

“Watch out for that one!” Louise said, just as she was interrupted by a request for another round.

Folding herself back into the party, Daidai wondered what Louise had seen and was disappointed when Louise refused her invitation of a drink once the guests had gone home. Work, she complained, saying that she needed some sleep.

Left behind with Hiroshi, Daidai kicked off her heels and sipped at a glass of mineral water while her husband assessed the newly configured program. “The new assistant professor’s going to be a nice addition.”

“How about the incoming grad students?”

“We’ll have to see.”

“I think Satsuki Suzuki has a crush on you,” Daidai teased Hiroshi, wanting to gauge his response to the woman’s flirtatiousness.

“Half the first-years have a crush on me,” Hiroshi replied, and smiled. “And having met you, I’m sure the other half now have one on you. Isn’t that how the school year always starts out?”

Daidai winced, wondering when Hiroshi had become so cavalier.

“By October they’ll have moved on.”

“If you say so.” She shrugged, satisfied by this admission.

“I think you’d like Satsuki,” Hiroshi said, and continued without waiting for a response. “Her father’s an art dealer. She seems quite knowledgeable as well.”

“No thanks.” Daidai yawned. Hiroshi had clearly enjoyed the attention, but she didn’t need to hear the remarks of another amateur art collector. Even from a distance, she’d found Satsuki’s interest in the objects lying around their flat overblown.

After refilling his wife’s mineral water, Hiroshi shook up the last of the saketinis, creating for himself a mixed-fruit bomb. “To our Period of Reinvention.” He raised his glass in a toast, then reached across the couch and squeezed his wife’s big toe, signaling an end to Daidai’s stint as a hostess. “Thank you for throwing a great party.”

Done with the praise, Hiroshi wanted sex. Daidai figured he’d have been as enervated from the festivities as she was, but he seemed intent on fucking, thrusting into her with frenzied abandon. Lying beneath him, her eyes open to his bizarre expressions, Daidai wondered whether he was even making love to her. He looked like someone involved in the pursuit of secret pleasures, and she tried to visualize his experience. Something new was happening. Watching the structure of his face shift beneath the creases of his cheekbones and the crinkles of his tightly shut lids, Daidai felt his movements slow. He seemed to be straining to feel inside her, or just to feel, drifting away and then needing to locate her as he shifted his position like an explorer lost somewhere inside her body.

The new students had been introduced, including one in particular who seemed intent on pleasing him. She felt him trying something out, which she rather resented, though she wondered if she judged him too harshly. What if she was the person of interest? What if it had been her all along? Lying beneath Hiroshi, whose body she knew so well, she shut her eyes and tried to relax, to feel the pleasure of his guttural bellows and the quickened pace of his breathing.

Connecting instead with the place inside herself that had lain for so long vacant, she wondered if it would ever be filled. Wasn’t sex, after all, about the creation of a life?