Читать книгу In Plain View - Julie Shigekuni - Страница 12

3

When Daidai awoke the next morning she found Hiroshi next to her, his hand draped across her back while he scanned the newspaper. He was glad to feel her stirring, which meant he could start reading to her about the events that had amused him while she slept. Reaching over her when she failed to adequately respond, he handed her a coffee mug, which she set back on the nightstand, finding its contents distastefully cold.

She was only vaguely aware of when he’d traded the newspaper for student work, and the next thing she knew he was urging her up. Bounding from the bed and returning with a fresh cup of coffee, he clapped his hands with excitement. This was the Hiroshi she loved, ready and waiting for whatever came next, wanting to know whether she’d prefer a walk along the shore or a stroll through the Santa Monica promenade. They could sit outside at their favorite café or catch a matinee. Her brain hadn’t yet begun to function, but his seemed not to have lost its high from the night before, and she doubted he’d accept her being too tired as an excuse.

“How about we drive out to Gardena for dinner?” he said, having apparently noted her failure to move in response to his suggestions. “We’ll pick your mother up and have an early dinner.”

Daidai smiled, holding her arms up and pulling him off his feet when he leaned over her, planting kisses along his hairline and on both his cheeks. Despite her qualms with him, he could be incredibly sweet. It had been her habit since her father’s death the year before to visit her mother on Sundays. Hiroshi went along when he wasn’t too busy prepping for the upcoming week, but he hadn’t gone in months, and Daidai knew how happy it would make Mako to see him. While Mako loved her daughter, Daidai suspected she preferred spending time with her son-in-law, who fit so naturally with her idea of a good man. It was one of the things that had drawn Daidai to him.

Hiroshi went out of his way to indulge Mako, stopping at Marukai without being asked, then pushing the cart down the congested aisles with the old woman hanging on his arm, smiling at her idle chatter over the high price of Japanese imports that could be gotten only at this Marukai, not the other one downtown, which reminded him of meals his mother had made him before she passed. Daidai didn’t believe in fate, but she remembered the evening she’d driven with Hiroshi to meet her parents, how afterward it had seemed her destiny that he should be part of her family. Seeing Mako’s face light up now, she wondered why he’d stayed away so long.

Mako ordered tempura udon, her favorite, and insisted that Hiroshi take the shrimp off the top. To Daidai she gave a Japanese sweet potato, saying how good satsumaimo was for the immune system as well as digestion, and maybe fertility, too.

She praised Hiroshi lavishly for his promotion, referencing her late husband with a sigh, how pleased he would have been to see Hiroshi rising up through the ranks of academia, dispelling any vestige of doubt that Daidai might not be doing the right thing in giving up her career to plan a family, because without family there was no future, and without a future what did they have to look forward to?

It was late in the evening when they dropped Mako off. Daidai watched from the backseat as Hiroshi rushed around from the driver’s side to open the passenger door, holding his elbow out to escort Mako up the driveway to the front door, and inserted her house key into the lock, knowing Mako had trouble with her eyesight at night. Seeing the interior light flash on as she reseated herself in her mother’s place, Daidai nodded in approval at her husband’s flawless performance.

“Do you know how much I appreciate you?” she said as he belted himself in for the drive home.

“I appreciate you, too,” he said, reaching across the gearshift to kiss her.

The drive back to the Valley took twice as long as it normally did, with everyone returning home from their weekend pleasures. Worried about the toll all the activity might take on her husband, Daidai was surprised on Monday morning when Hiroshi hopped out of bed and left the apartment singing. He returned at the end of the day with flowers in hand: three burnt-orange gerberas collected in a Ball jar, tied with a purple bow, attached to which was a thankyou, addressed to her, that read, I thought these would look good with your name.

Clever Satsuki—though she didn’t know Daidai had chosen her name randomly at the age of three. Carolyn Ann had been her given name. Her mother had decided on that one, which she’d later been told she’d rejected in full and even abbreviated versions. She would not respond to Carolyn, or to Carrie or Ann, or to Lynn or Annie. For no apparent reason, she’d answer only to Daidai. It wasn’t until much later that she learned that the name she’d chosen for herself translated in Japanese to mean “bitter orange.” But perhaps she’d been predisposed to liking the nickname Daidai because orange turned out to be her favorite color. And then along came vibrant Satsuki and her gift of the flowers.

“I guess she wants to be friends with you,” Hiroshi teased.

“She wants to use me to get closer to you,” Daidai teased back.

“Can’t you just accept the gesture without prejudice, as an offer of friendship? Besides, aren’t gerberas your favorite?”

Hiroshi was right about her fondness for gerberas, but these looked like the antennae of some gigantic species of insect, reaching into the air for purchase, as if they’d come looking for something, or signifying something. Daidai felt certain of that and was perturbed by Hiroshi’s insistence that they and their bearer be viewed as innocent. “If Satsuki wanted to be my friend, she could have delivered the flowers to me herself. She knew where to find me.”

Hiroshi shrugged, a sign Daidai construed as his tacit acceptance of what she’d said—that, of course, she’d been right. Satsuki hadn’t brought the flowers to her, she’d brought them to him. Imagining the scenario one step further, Daidai saw the grad student showing up at her husband’s office, half hidden behind the doorframe, flattering him with her stated desire not to interrupt, even though she’d shown up precisely to do just that.

As if to confirm that she’d imagined correctly, Hiroshi sat across the kitchen dog-faced, suggesting that of the three he might be the only innocent one: Hiroshi, steadfast and trustworthy in his affections, his brand of linearity a big part of why she’d married him. But after five years of marriage, he was no longer the person he’d been. Her groin still ached from his roughness with her two nights earlier, and the ache should have informed her new understanding of him.

But instead of feeling that she’d been wronged, she felt remorse. Her husband’s passing interest in one of his students didn’t justify her scrutiny, and she well realized that the problem could be hers alone. Without her own work to occupy her thoughts, she’d grown anxious. She needed to relax. Turning her attention back to the flowers, she admired them anew, each stem arching upward to show off its own personality.

For nearly a week, the burnt-orange gerberas added a splash of color to the windowsill. Daidai changed their water daily until the morning she woke to find the last blossom overturned. That same day, in the produce section of Whole Foods, while she bagged Persian cucumbers for a recipe Hiroshi wanted to try, a hand with slender fingers tipped with French-manicured nails held up a Japanese pickling cucumber for her to inspect. “These are better,” the bearer of the cucumber said.

Daidai laughed at the pimply proboscis, made all the more grotesque by Satsuki’s delicate fingers. “What are you doing here, Satsuki?”

“Where else do you shop?” She smiled demurely.

Daidai replayed the question twice before answering, her attention shifting from the whiteness of the woman’s fingers to her impressively shiny teeth. “I tried those once,” she said, still not understanding. “They’re bitter.”

“That’s because they’re for pickling!” Satsuki laughed, tossing the spiny cucumber into the batch of slender, darker green ones Daidai had been sorting through.

Satsuki gave no advanced warning before showing up the next afternoon, this time on the doorstep carrying a heavy, round stone, which she claimed to have brought with her from Japan. Where just the day before Daidai had thrown out the flowers, believing Satsuki’s stint in the apartment over, now the woman had returned with a small boulder, presenting what seemed to be yet another puzzle. Even beyond that, wasn’t it strange for a grad student to show up unannounced at her professor’s apartment? Was there a different code of etiquette in Japan, one that prevented Satsuki from understanding this?

Daidai followed Satsuki into the kitchen, where she rolled the stone onto the countertop. “I’ll need it back, but I want you to use it,” she said, blotting a line of sweat from above her lip with her tongue. Out of breath, perhaps from the stairs, still she looked lovely with her eyes alight, her skin flushed and flawless, her fingers visibly trembling.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know what this is for.” Daidai turned from her observation of Satsuki to the stone.

“Its weight will speed up the pickling process.”

“Oh, of course.” Hadn’t her mother used a similar stone for pickling vegetables? Daidai recalled the exchange at Whole Foods the day before while she rummaged through the vegetable bin for the cucumbers, embarrassed to have missed her cue.

That afternoon, Satsuki demonstrated in quick, even strokes of the knife her prowess as a chef, transferring the thinly sliced cucumbers to a bowl, then mixing them with salt using her bare hands. She talked as she worked, glancing up to make eye contact when she wished to emphasize a point. The weather had turned fine in the week since the party, yet a memory of heat lingered in the kitchen.

The stated purpose of her return three days later was to check on the pickling process. Lifting the stone and the plate beneath it, she pinched a sample and declared the batch of Japanese-style pickles ready for consumption. Hiroshi arrived home from campus to the table being set for otsukemono, which was served over hot rice with a cup of genmai tea. Pleased with the meal, he ventured into the kitchen for a refill of water and returned palming the pickling stone like a football. “Where’d this come from?” he asked, apparently having not noticed that it had sat on the countertop for three days.

“I brought it with me from Japan.” The question had been asked of Daidai, but Satsuki addressed Hiroshi directly.

“Sansen ishi. Ii desu neh! My mother had a similar one.” Hiroshi held the stone at eye level, tossing it into the air a few times before turning down the hall to his office. “This one would make an ideal paperweight.”

“You can’t have it, Hiroshi,” Daidai called to her husband’s back. “It belongs to Satsuki. Can’t you see she was using it?” Daidai surprised herself with her harsh response, but she’d felt left out of the repartee between Hiroshi and his student, and of the secret knowledge of pickling stones apparently known to everyone but her.

“It’s okay, really.” Satsuki reached across the table and touched Daidai’s arm to keep her from following Hiroshi. “Hiroshi can borrow it. I don’t need it right now.”

In mid-October, halfway into the semester, Satsuki brought a gift of tea. She’d just arrived and was standing with Daidai in the foyer, explaining how she’d had the tea sent from Japan, when Hiroshi came bounding up the stairwell. Satsuki’s visit had not been well timed, the purpose of Hiroshi’s lunchtime appearance being sex, prescribed by the fertility specialist at six-hour intervals when Daidai was ovulating.

“Hiroshi and I are late for an appointment,” Daidai lied, struggling to avert an awkward moment in case Satsuki should wonder over Hiroshi’s arrival home in the middle of the day. “Could you come back tomorrow for a pot of tea?”

Satsuki clasped her hands in front of her, barely waiting for the invitation to be made before responding. “Would two o’clock be good?”

Daidai was not in the mood for sex that afternoon, nor was Hiroshi. Neither bothered to undress fully. He slid his pants down perfunctorily while she pulled her T-shirt over her head and released the clasp on her brassiere, lifting her heavy breasts to give him a good look before letting them drop. She pinched his flaccid cock, flipping it from one side to the other, deliberating on the task at hand before resigning to take him in her mouth. Alternating long strokes with light, teasing whispers, she began a private conversation with his cock, shutting him out when he writhed beneath her, issuing orders. She didn’t need his help to get what she needed from him. Let him rant about being late for class. She’d take her time, make him return with an ache and a still-fluttering heart. Besides, it would be over soon enough. No use for him to go on to someone who’d waited him out before. With the crisis inevitable, she shifted herself onto him and bore down, riding him hard until his load poured into her.

The doctor had suggested twenty minutes on her back postcoitus, which she timed while cycling her legs in the air for exercise. Out of the corner of her eye she watched Hiroshi rush to tidy himself up, wondering whether he’d run into Satsuki when he returned to campus that afternoon.

True to her word, Satsuki returned the following afternoon at two straight up to prepare a pot of the very fine tea she’d brought over the day before.

“What’s the occasion?” Daidai asked, waiting for the tea water to boil.

“No occasion,” she said. “Just an excuse to spend more time with you.”

Pouring water over a measure of leaves, Daidai breathed in the distinctly foreign, woody aroma, considering it an irony that her job at the museum had taken her all over Asia but never to Japan. “Haven’t you made friends in the program?” she asked, shaking herself from her reverie.

“I don’t find any of my fellow students particularly interesting,” Satsuki said, after appearing to give the question some thought. “I’m far more interested in what you do. Hiroshi says you’re an art curator.”

Daidai smiled her assent, volunteering nothing more, wondering what had prompted Hiroshi to discuss her work with his student.

“What is your area of specialty?”

“Postwar art made by Japanese living on the West Coast. You’re familiar with wartime internment, I assume?”

“Of course.” Satsuki narrowed her eyes, as if homing in on an object in the distance. “This subject is very interesting to me. Were your parents imprisoned during the war?”

“No. My mother’s family still lived in Japan at the time. And my father is Irish,” Daidai explained. Having tried to avoid the subject of her work, she was irritated by Satsuki’s probing.

“But this was Hiroshi’s parents’ experience?”

“Yes,” Daidai said, believing she’d hit upon the underlying reason for Satsuki’s interest. “Hiroshi’s parents were both interned. They were children at the time. I’m interested in the generation that was born after the war. Not enough is known about the experience of people like Hiroshi. But I believe the trauma is as pervasive as lung damage caused by secondhand smoke, damage that began decades ago. It needs to be studied.”

“Japan is so different.” Satsuki shook her head. “We are an almost entirely homogenous society.”

“What about Japan’s treatment of non-Japanese?”

Satsuki shrugged. “I’ve never had non-Japanese friends.”

This position, of never going out of one’s social milieu, seemed to Daidai to sum up the life experience of so many Japanese, a primness that she’d found stultifying. “I was a curator—for the Asian American Art Museum downtown,” Daidai clarified. “I’m not anymore.”

“You were laid off, then? Or did you quit your job?”

“I left to start a family,” she said, aching to change the subject.

“You’re pregnant?”

“Not yet. I hope to be soon.”

“I see,” Satsuki said, taking up again with her imperious nodding.

“Hiroshi and I have had some trouble conceiving, so we’re trying to increase our chances by following my monthly cycle.” Having tried to avoid the subject of her personal life, at last Daidai relented. “I went on leave because the fertility specialist recommended slowing my schedule down. That’s what I’m doing at home—trying to have a baby.”

Satsuki stared back, wide-eyed and unblinking. It took her a minute to respond. “Thank you for trusting me with that information,” she said, though the way she looked then, like someone who’d just been slapped, filled Daidai with regret. “I’m glad to know something of your life. I didn’t want to breach your privacy by asking, but like I said, I’m curious about you.”

“In that case, I’m sorry for responding so tersely,” Daidai said, feeling the relief of having spoken the truth.

“Don’t be sorry.” Satsuki smiled. “I hope your baby will call me Auntie, since there’s no possibility of a baby in my future.”

“Why not?” Was it that she didn’t want a baby or could she not have one? Daidai felt suddenly foolish for being so preoccupied by her own life circumstances that she’d not considered Satsuki’s.

“My upbringing warned me against bringing children into the world,” Satsuki said, giving nothing away.

“How so?” This new line of questioning only pointed out to Daidai that she knew nothing about Satsuki’s childhood. But rather than show embarrassment, Satsuki reached across the table and patted Daidai’s hand, the muscles around her mouth relaxing into a smile. “You want to know about me?”

Daidai nodded politely, but withdrew her hand, unable to explain the anxiety with which she felt suddenly stricken.

“You might already know that my father is an art dealer,” Satsuki began, fixing Daidai with her gaze to gauge what she knew. “Did Hiroshi tell you?”

“You tell me.” Daidai wrapped her hands around her cup of tea. Soothed by its curved shape and warmth, she tried to push her negative response to Hiroshi’s mention of the art dealer father out of her mind. “I really don’t know anything at all about your personal history.”

“My father’s family owned a framing business.” Satsuki sighed before continuing, seeming to find the information tedious. “My father came from a generation of craftsmen known for their meticulous work, but he proved himself to be a maverick. He used acid-free and organic papers made from recycled materials long before ecological concerns made it trendy to do so. His given name was Ichiro, but his parents called him Ichiban, meaning ‘Number One.’ He was their only son.”

Hearing about Satsuki’s father, Daidai thought of Hiroshi, how he’d been the center of his mother’s life; her death had come as a terrible blow. A year later his father had died, shortly before he’d met Daidai, the complete loss of family cementing Daidai’s place in his life.

“My grandparents were of a traditional mind-set when it came to boys. In Japan, during my father’s time and even now, a son occupies a position of great importance. My mother was not the wife my grandparents would have chosen.”

“I don’t understand,” Daidai interrupted. “Why would your mother not be accepted?”

Satsuki’s smile barely concealed her shock. “It isn’t that difficult to understand. My mother grew up on her own from a very young age, without parents or financial resources. My parents’ courtship began because she was a gifted painter, and my father recognized what her talent might mean for him. He allowed her to use his framing shop as a studio, where he set up a corner as a makeshift gallery for her to show and sell her work. In return for her use of the space, he bought the pieces he liked at a discount. When this worked out well, he began making similar arrangements with other artists, which was how he rose to prominence in the art world.”

Daidai was losing patience. It was not hard to see the power benefactors held in the art world, but what did this have to do with Satsuki’s statement that she would never have children?

“The painters whose work he promoted, these were all women,” Satsuki continued, seeming to recognize Daidai’s impatience, yet lingering on her words. “This got people talking. My father made a name for himself among buyers as a patron with exquisite taste and a fine eye for promise. It was only natural that the relationship between my parents would develop. He was a good businessman in need of an artist, and she was tired of the hardships created by anonymity and poverty. In practical terms, the need of each for what the other had to offer made them perfectly suited for marriage.”

“So what about your upbringing made you decide not to have children?” Daidai asked, seeing that her question might go unanswered. “I assume it’s that you don’t want to have children, not that you can’t.”

Satsuki turned her gaze out the high window. “Children deserve more sweetness than most adults are capable of giving them,” she said, indicating with crossed arms an unwillingness to be pressed further.

Unable to imagine her life without the certainty of her mother’s affection, Daidai reached a hand across the table and brushed Satsuki’s forearm. “I don’t think everyone should have children, but I think you’re very sweet,” she said, thinking not of Satsuki but of her own mother and the week that had gone by since she’d seen her.

“Thank you for saying that.” Satsuki opened her arms to clasp Daidai’s fingertips and beamed a toothy smile across the table.

Daidai nodded. “I didn’t start to think about wanting a family until recently.” Though her comment had been innocuous, a strange thing happened then. Satsuki’s facial muscles began to twitch and her smile quivered until it looked broken. “What’s wrong?” Daidai asked, worried about a possible problem with the woman’s health.

“Nothing’s wrong.” Satsuki quickly composed herself. “Do you really find me sweet?”

“I do,” Daidai said, having stopped listening.

“I’m glad,” Satsuki said, “because I enjoy your company.” And from that afternoon on her frequent visits to the apartment made this clear.