“Is it true?” I asked.
Reiko curved her lips and thought for a while. “Well, it is and it isn’t. I definitely felt better with her than with my husband. That’s a fact. I had a time there when I really agonized over the question. Maybe I really was a lesbian and just hadn’t noticed until then. But I don’t think so anymore. Which is not to say I don’t have the tendencies. I probably do have them. But I’m not a lesbian in the proper sense of the term. I never feel desire when I look at a woman. Know what I mean?”
I nodded.
“Certain kinds of girls, though, do respond to me, and I can feel it when that happens. Those are the only times it comes out in me. I can hold Naoko in my arms, though, and feel nothing special. We go around in the apartment practically naked when the weather is hot, and we take baths together, sometimes even sleep in the same bed, but nothing happens. I don’t feel a thing. I can see that she has a beautiful body, but that’s all. Actually, Naoko and I played a game once. We made believe we were lesbians. Want to hear about it?”
“Sure. Tell me.”
“When I told her the story I just told you—we tell each other everything, you know—Naoko tried an experiment. The two of us got undressed and she tried caressing me, but it didn’t work at all. It just tickled. I thought I was going to die laughing. Just thinking about it makes me itchy. She was so clumsy! I’ll bet you’re glad to hear that.”
“Yes, I am, to tell the truth.”
“Well, anyway, that’s about it,” said Reiko, scratching near an eyebrow with the tip of her little finger. “After the girl left my house, I found a chair and sat there spacing out for a while, wondering what to do. I could hear the dull beating of my heart from deep inside my body. My arms and legs seemed to weigh a ton, and my mouth felt as if I had eaten a moth or something, it was so dry. I dragged myself to the bathtub, though, knowing my daughter would be back soon. I wanted to clean those places where the girl had touched and licked me. I scrubbed myself with soap, over and over, but I couldn’t seem to get rid of the slimy feeling she had left behind. I knew I was probably imagining it, but that didn’t help. That night, I asked my husband to make love to me, kind of as a way to get rid of the defilement. Of course, I didn’t tell him anything—I couldn’t. All I said to him was that I wanted him to take it slow, to give it more time than usual. And he did. He really concentrated on every little detail, he really took a long, long time, and the way I came that night, oh yes, it was nothing I had ever experienced before, never once in all our marriage. And why do you think that was? Because the touch of that girl’s fingers was still there in my body. That’s all it was.
“Oh, man, is this embarrassing! Look, I’m sweating! I can’t believe I’m saying these things—he ‘made love’ to me, I ‘came’!” Reiko smiled, her lips curved again.
“But even this didn’t help. Two days went by, three, and her touch was still there. And her last words seemed to keep echoing and echoing in my head.
“She didn’t come to my house the following Saturday. My heart was pounding all day long while I waited, wondering what I would do if she showed up. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. She never did come, though. Of course. She was a proud young thing, and she had failed with me in the end. She didn’t come the next week, either, nor the week after that, and soon a month went by. I figured that I would be able to forget about what had happened when enough time went by, but I couldn’t forget. When I was alone in the house, I would feel her presence and my nerves would be on edge. I couldn’t play the piano, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t do anything during that first month. And then one day I realized that something was wrong whenever I left the house. The people in the neighborhood were looking at me in a strange new way. There was a new distance in their eyes. They were as polite as ever with their greetings, but there was something different in their tone of voice and in their behavior toward me. The woman next door, who used to pay me an occasional visit, seemed to be avoiding me. I tried not to let these things bother me, though. Start noticing things like that, and you’ve got the first signs of illness.
“Then one day I had a visit from another housewife I was on friendly terms with. We were the same age, and she was the daughter of a friend of my mother’s, and her child went to the same kindergarten as mine, so we were fairly close. She just showed up one day and asked me if I knew about a terrible rumor that was going around about me. I said I did not.
“‘What kind of rumor?’ I asked.
“‘I almost can’t say it, it’s so awful,’ she said.
“‘Well, you’ve gone this far, you have to tell me the rest.’
“Still she resisted telling me, but I finally got it all out of her. I mean, her whole purpose in coming to see me was to tell me what she had heard, so of course she was going to spit it out eventually. According to her, people were saying that I was a card-carrying lesbian and had been in and out of mental hospitals for it. They said that I had stripped the clothes off my piano pupil and tried to do things to her and when she had resisted I had smacked her so hard her face swelled up. They had turned the story on its head, of course, which was bad enough, but what really shocked me was that people knew I had been hospitalized.
“My friend said she was telling everyone that she had known me forever and that I was not like that, but the girl’s parents believed her version and were spreading it around the neighborhood. In addition, they had investigated my background and found that I had a history of mental problems.
“The way my friend heard it, the girl had come home from her lesson one day—that day, of course—with her face all bloated, her lip split and bloody, buttons missing from her blouse, and even her underwear torn. Can you believe it? She had done all this to back up her story, of course, which her mother had to drag out of her. I can just see her doing it—putting blood on her blouse, tearing buttons off, ripping the lace on her bra, making herself cry until her eyes were red, messing up her hair, telling her mother a bucket of lies.
“Not that I’m blaming people for believing her. I would have believed her, too, this beautiful doll with a devil’s tongue. She comes home crying, she refuses to talk because it’s too embarrassing, but then she spills it out. Of course people are going to believe her. And to make matters worse, it’s true, I do have a history of hospitalization for mental problems, I did smack her in the face as hard as I could. Who’s going to believe me? Maybe my husband, is all.
“A few more days went by while I wrestled with the question of whether to tell him or not, but when I did, he believed me. Of course. I told him everything that had happened that day—the kind of lesbian things she did to me, the way I smacked her in the face. Of course, I didn’t tell him what I had felt. There’s no way I could have told him that. So anyway, he got furious and insisted that he was going to go straight to the girl’s family. He said, ‘You’re a married woman, after all. You’re married to me. And you’re a mother. There’s no way you’re a lesbian. What a goddam joke!’
“But I wouldn’t let him go. All he could do was make things worse. Really, I knew. I knew she was sick. I had seen hundreds of sick people, so I knew. The girl was rotten inside. Peel off a layer of that beautiful skin, and you’d find nothing but rotten flesh. I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. And I knew that ordinary people could never know the truth about her, that there was no way we could win. She was an expert at manipulating the emotions of the adults around her, and we had nothing to prove our case. First of all, who’s going to believe that a thirteen-year-old girl set a homosexual trap for a woman in her thirties? No matter what we said, people would believe what they wanted to believe. The more we struggled, the more vulnerable we’d be.
“There was only one thing for us to do, I said: we had to move. If I stayed in that neighborhood any longer, the stress would get to me; my mind would snap again. It was happening already. We had to get out of there, go someplace far away where nobody knew me. My husband was not ready to go, though. I
t hadn’t dawned on him yet how critical I was. And the timing was terrible: he was loving his work, and he had finally succeeded in settling us into our own house (we lived in a little prefab), and our daughter was comfortable in her kindergarten. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, ‘we can’t just pick up and move. I can’t find a job just like that. We’d have to sell the house, and we’d have to find another kindergarten. It’ll take two months, at least.’
“‘I can’t wait two months,’ I told him. ‘This is going to finish me off once and for all. I’m not kidding. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.’ The symptoms were starting already: my ears were ringing, and I was hearing things, and I couldn’t sleep. So he suggested that I leave first, go somewhere by myself, and he would follow after he had taken care of what needed to be done.
“‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to go anywhere alone. I’ll fall apart if I don’t have you. I need you. Please, don’t leave me alone.’
“He held me and pleaded with me to hang on a little longer. Just a month, he said. He would take care of everything—leave his job, sell the house, make arrangements for kindergarten, find a new job. There might be a position he could take in Australia, he said. He just wanted me to wait one month, and everything would be O.K. I couldn’t say anything more to that. If I tried to object, it would only isolate me even more.”
Reiko sighed and looked at the ceiling light.
“I couldn’t hold on for a month, though. One day, it happened again: snap! And this time it was really bad. I took sleeping pills and turned on the gas. I woke up in a hospital bed, and it was all over. It took a few months before I had calmed down enough to think, and then I asked my husband to divorce me. I told him it would be the best thing for him and for our daughter. He said he had no intention of divorcing me.
“‘We can make a new start,’ he said. ‘We can go someplace new, just the three of us, and begin all over again.’
“‘It’s too late,’ I told him. ‘Everything ended when you asked me to wait a month. If you really wanted to start again, you shouldn’t have said that to me. Now, no matter where we go, no matter how far away we move, the same thing will happen all over again. And I’ll ask you for the same thing, and make you suffer. I don’t want to do that anymore.’
“And so we divorced. Or should I say, I divorced him. He married again two years ago, though. I’m still glad I made him leave me. Really. I knew I’d be like this for the rest of my life, and I didn’t want to drag anyone down with me. I didn’t want to force anyone to live in constant fear that I might lose my mind at any moment.
“He had been wonderful to me, an ideal husband, faithful, strong, and patient, someone I could put my complete trust in. He had done everything he could to heal me, and I had done everything I could to be healed, both for his sake and for our daughter’s sake. And I had believed in my recovery. I was happy for six years from the time we were married. He got me ninetynine percent of the way there, but the other one percent went crazy. Snap! Everything we had built up came crashing down. In one split second, everything turned into nothing. And that girl was the one who did it.”
Reiko collected the cigarette butts she had crushed underfoot and tossed them into the tin can.
“It’s a terrible story. We worked so hard, so hard, building our world one brick at a time. And when it fell apart, it happened just like that. Everything was gone before you knew it.”
Reiko stood up and thrust her hands in her pants pockets. “Let’s go back. It’s late.”
The sky was darker, the cloud cover thicker than before, the moon invisible. Now, I realized, like Reiko I could smell the rain. And with it mixed the fresh smell of the grapes in the bag I was holding in my hand.
“That’s why I can’t leave this place,” she said. “I’m afraid to leave and get involved with the outside world. I’m afraid to meet new people and feel new feelings.”
“I understand,” I said. “But I think you can do it. I think you can go outside and make it.”
Reiko smiled, but she didn’t say a thing.
NAOKO WAS ON THE SOFA with a book. She had her legs crossed, and she pressed her hand against her temple as she read. Her fingers almost seemed to be touching and testing each word that entered her head. Scattered drops of rain were beginning to tap on the roof. The lamplight enveloped Naoko, hovering around her like fine dust. After my long talk with Reiko, Naoko’s youthfulness struck me in a whole new way.
“Sorry we’re so late,” said Reiko, patting Naoko’s head.
“Enjoy yourselves?” asked Naoko, looking up.
“Of course,” said Reiko.
“Doing what?” Naoko asked me “— just the two of you.”
“Not at liberty to say, Miss,” I answered.
Naoko chuckled and set her book down. Then the three of us ate grapes to the sound of the rain.
“When it’s raining like this,” said Naoko, “it feels as if we’re the only ones in the world. I wish it would just keep raining so the three of us could stay together.”
“Oh, sure,” said Reiko, “and while the two of you are going at it, I’m supposed to be fanning you or playing background music on my guitar like some dumb slave. No, thanks!”
“Oh, I’d let you have him once in a while,” said Naoko, laughing.
“O.K, then, count me in,” said Reiko. “C’mon, rain, pour down!”
THE RAIN DID POUR DOWN, and kept pouring. Thunder shook the place from time to time. When we finished the grapes, Reiko went back to her cigarettes and pulled the guitar out from under her bed and started to play—first, “Desafinado” and “The Girl from Ipanema,” then some Bacharach and a few Lennon and McCartney songs. Reiko and I sipped wine again, and when that was gone we shared the brandy that was left in my flask. A warm, close mood took hold as the three of us talked into the night, and I began to wish, with Naoko, that the rain would keep on falling.
“Will you come to see me again?” Naoko asked, looking at me.
“Of course I will,” I said.
“And will you write?”
“Every week.”
“And will you add a few lines for me?” Reiko asked.
“That I will,” I said. “I’d be glad to.”
At eleven o’clock, Reiko folded the sofa down and made a bed for me as she had the night before. We said goodnight and turned out the lights and went to bed. Unable to sleep, I took The Magic Mountain and a flashlight from my knapsack and read for a while. Just before midnight, the bedroom door edged open and Naoko came and crawled in next to me. Unlike the night before, Naoko was the usual Naoko. Her eyes were in focus, her movements brisk. Bringing her mouth to my ear, she whispered, “I don’t know, I can’t sleep.”
“I can’t either,” I said. Setting my book down and turning out the flashlight, I took her in my arms and kissed her. The darkness and the sound of the rain enfolded us.
“How about Reiko?”
“Don’t worry, she’s sound asleep. And when she sleeps, she sleeps.” Then Naoko asked, “Will you really come to see me again?”
“I will, for sure.”
“Even if I can’t do anything for you?”
I nodded in the darkness. I could feel the full shape of her breasts against me. I traced the outline of her body through her gown with the flat of my hand. From shoulder to back to hips, I slid my hand again and again, driving the line and the softness of her body into my brain. After we had been in this gentle embrace for a while, Naoko touched her lips to my forehead and slipped out of bed. I could see her pale blue gown flash in the darkness like a fish.
“Good-bye,” she called in a tiny voice.
Listening to the rain, I dropped into a gentle sleep.
IT WAS STILL RAINING the following morning—a fine, almost invisible autumn rain unlike the previous night’s downpour. You knew it was raining only because of the ripples on puddles and the sound of dripping from the eaves. I woke to see a milky white mist enclosing the window, but as the sun rose
a breeze carried the mist away, and the surrounding woods and hills began to emerge.
As we had done the day before, the three of us ate breakfast and headed out to service the birdhouse. Naoko and Reiko wore yellow vinyl rain capes with hoods. I put on a sweater and a waterproof windbreaker. The outside air was damp and chilly. The birds, too, seemed to be avoiding the rain, huddled together at the back of the cage.
“Gets cold here when it rains, doesn’t it?” I said to Reiko.
“Now, every time it rains it’ll be a little colder, until it turns to snow,” she said. “The clouds from the Sea of Japan dump tons of snow when they pass through here.”
“What do you do with the birds in winter?”
“Bring ’em inside, of course. What are we supposed to do—dig them out of the snow in spring all frozen? We defrost ’em and bring ’em back to life and yell, O.K., everybody, come and get it!”
I poked the wire mesh and the parrot flapped its wings and screamed, “Shithead! Thank you! Crazy!”
“Now, that one I’d like to freeze,” Naoko said with a melancholy look. “I really think I will go crazy if I have to hear that every morning.”
After cleaning the birdhouse, we went back to the apartment. While I packed my things, the women put their farm gear on. We left the building together and parted a short way beyond the tennis court. They turned right and I continued straight ahead. We called good-bye to each other, and I promised I would come again. Naoko gave a little smile and disappeared around the corner.
I passed a number of people on my way to the gate, all of them wearing the same yellow rain capes that Naoko and Reiko had on, all with hoods up. Colors shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only. They floated over the earth in silence, carrying farm tools and baskets and some kind of sack.