“It seems strange to be the only naked one.” I laughed.
“It’s lovely, Hajime,” she said. She came close to me, gently cradled my penis in her hand, and kissed me on the lips. She put her hands on my chest, and for the longest time licked my nipples and stroked my pubic hair. She put her ear to my navel and took my balls in her mouth. She kissed me all over. Even the soles of my feet. It was as if she were treasuring time itself. Stroking time, caressing it, licking it.
“Aren’t you going to undress?” I asked.
“Later on,” she replied. “I want to enjoy looking at your body first, touching and licking it as much as I want to. If I got undressed now, you’d want to touch me, right? Even if I told you no, you wouldn’t be able to restrain yourself.”
“You’re right about that”
“I don’t want to do it that way. It took us long enough to get here, and I want to take it nice and slow. I want to look at you, touch you with these hands, lick you with my tongue. I want to try everything—slowly. If I don’t, I can’t go on to the next stage. Hajime, if what I do seems a little odd, don’t let it bother you, okay? I have to. Don’t say anything, just let me do it.”
“I don’t mind. Do whatever you like. But I do feel a bit weird being stared at like this.”
“But you are mine, right?”
“Yes.”
“So there’s nothing to be embarrassed about, is there.”
“Guess you’re right,” I said. “I’ve just got to get used to it.”
“Just be patient a little bit longer. This has been my dream for such a very long time.”
“Looking at my body has been your dream? Touching me all over, with all your clothes still on?”
“Yes,” she answered. “I’ve been imagining your body for ages. What your penis looked like, how hard it would get, how big.”
“Why did you think of that?”
“Why?” she asked incredulously. “I told you I love you. What’s wrong with thinking about the body of the man you love? Haven’t you thought about my body?”
“I have,” I said.
“I’ll bet you’ve thought about my body while you’re masturbating.”
“Yes. In junior high and high school,” I said, then corrected myself. “Well, actually, not too long ago.”
“It’s the same with me. I’ve thought about your body. Women do too, you know,” she said.
I pulled her close to me again and slowly kissed her. Her tongue slid languidly inside my mouth. “I love you, Shimamoto-san,” I said.
“I love you, Hajime,” she said. “There’s no one else I love but you. May I see your body a little more?”
“Go ahead,” I replied.
She gently wrapped her palm around my penis and balls. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “I’d like to eat it all up.”
“Then what would I do?”
“But I do want to eat it up,” she said. As if gently weighing them, she kept my balls in her palm for the longest time. And licked and sucked my penis very slowly, very carefully. She looked at me. “The first time, can I do it the way I want to? You’ll let me?”
“I don’t mind. Do whatever you want,” I said. “Except for eating me up, of course.”
“I’m a little embarrassed, so don’t say anything, okay?”
“I won’t,” I promised.
As I knelt on the floor, she put her left hand around my waist. She kept her dress on but with her other hand peeled off her stockings and panties. Then she took my penis and balls in her right hand and licked them. Her other hand she slid under her dress. Sucking on my penis, she began to move her other hand around slowly.
I didn’t say a thing. I figured this was her way. I watched the movements of her lips and tongue, and the languid motion of her hand beneath her skirt. Suddenly I recalled the Shimamoto I’d seen in the parking lot of the bowling lanes—stiff and white as a sheet. I recalled clearly what I’d seen deep within her eyes. A dark space, frozen hard like a subterranean glacier. A silence so profound it sucked up every sound, never allowing it to resurface. Absolute, total silence.
It was the first time I’d been face-to-face with death. So I’d had no distinct image of what death really was. But there it was then, right before my eyes, spread out just inches from my face. So this is the face of death, I’d thought. And death spoke to me, saying that my time, too, would one day come. Eventually everyone would fall into those endlessly lonely depths, the source of all darkness, a silence bereft of any resonance. I felt a choking, stifling fear as I stared into this bottomless dark pit.
Facing those black, frozen depths, I had called out her name. Shimamoto-san, I had called out again and again. But my voice was lost in that infinite nothingness. Cry out as I might nothing within the depths of her eyes changed. Her breathing remained strange, like the sound of wind whipping through cracks. Her regular breaths told me she was still on this side of the world. But her eyes told me she was already given up to death.
As I had looked deep into her eyes and called out her name, my own body was dragged down into those depths. As if a vacuum had sucked out all the air around me, that other world was steadily pulling me closer. Even now I could feel its power. It wanted me.
I closed my eyes tight And drove those memories from my mind.
I reached out and stroked her hair. I touched her ears, rested my hand on her forehead. Her body was warm and soft. She sucked on my penis as if trying to suck out life itself. Her hand, communicating in some secret sign language, continued to move between her legs, under her skirt. A short time later, I came in her mouth; her hand under her skirt ceased moving, and she closed her eyes. She swallowed down the very last drop of my semen.
“I’m sorry,” Shimamoto said.
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” I said.
“The first time, I wanted to do it this way,” she said. “It’s embarrassing, but somehow I needed to. It’s a rite of passage for the two of us, I guess. Do you know what I mean,?”
I pulled her to me and rubbed my cheek against hers. Her cheek felt warm. I lifted up her hair and kissed her ear. And looked into her eyes. I could see my face reflected in them. Deep within her eyes, in the always bottomless depths, there was a spring. And, ever so faintly, a light The light of life, I thought Someday it will be extinguished, but for now the light is there. She smiled at me. The usual small creases formed at the corners of her eyes. I kissed those tiny lines.
“Now it’s your turn to take off my clothes,” she told me. “And do whatever you want.”
“Maybe I’m a little short on imagination, but I just like the regular way. Okay?” I said.
“That’s all right” she said. “I like it too.”
I took off her dress and her bra, set her down on the bed, and kissed her all over. I looked at every inch of her body, touching everywhere, kissing everywhere. Trying to find out everything and store it in my memory. It was a leisurely exploration. We had taken so very long to arrive at this point, and like her, the last thing I wanted to do was hurry. I held off as long as I could, until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Then I slowly slid inside her.
We fell asleep just before dawn. I don’t know how many times we made love, sometimes gently, sometimes passionately. Once, in the midst of it, when I was inside her, she became possessed, crying violently and pounding on my back with her fists. All the while, I held her tightly to me. If I didn’t hold her tight, I felt, she would fly off into pieces. I stroked her back over and over to calm her. I kissed her neck and brushed her hair with my fingers. She was no longer the cool, self-controlled Shimamoto I knew. The frozen hardness within her was, bit by bit, melting and floating to the surface. I could feel its breath, far-off signs of its presence. I held her tight and let her trembling seep inside me. Little by little, this is how she would become mine.
“I want to know everything there is to know about you,” I said to her. “What kind of life you’ve had till now, where you live. Whether you’re m
arried or not Everything. No more secrets, ‘cause I can’t take any more.”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll tell you everything. So don’t ask any more till then. Stay the way you are today. If I did tell you now, you’d never be able to go back to the way you were.”
“I’m not going back anyway. And who knows, tomorrow might never come. If it doesn’t I’ll end up never knowing.”
“I wish tomorrow would never come,” she said. “Then you’ll never know.”
I was about to speak, but she hushed me up with a kiss.
“I wish a bald vulture would gobble up tomorrow,” she said. “Would it make sense for a bald vulture to do that?”
“That makes sense. Bald vultures eat up art, and tomorrows as well.”
“And regular vultures eat–”
“–the bodies of nameless people,” I said. “Very different from bald vultures.”
“Bald vultures eat up art and tomorrows, then?”
“Right”
“A nice combination.”
“And for dessert they take a bite out of Books in Print.”
Shimamoto laughed. “Anyhow, until tomorrow,” she said.
And tomorrow came. When I woke up, I was alone. The rain had stopped, and bright, transparent morning light shone in through the bedroom window. The clock showed it was past nine. Shimamoto wasn’t in bed, though a slight depression in the pillow beside me hinted at where she had lain. She was nowhere to be seen. I got out of bed and went to the living room to look for her. I looked in the kitchen, the children’s room, and the bathroom. Nothing. Her clothes were gone, her shoes as well. I took a deep breath, trying to pull myself back to reality. But that reality was like nothing I’d ever seen before: a reality that didn’t seem to fit.
I dressed and went outside. The BMW was parked where I left it the night before. Maybe she’d wakened early and gone out for a walk. I searched for her all around the house, then got in the car and drove as far as the nearest town. But no Shimamoto. I went back to the cottage, but she was not there. Thinking maybe she’d left a note, I scoured the house. But there was nothing. Not a trace that she had ever been there.
Without her, the house was empty and stifling. The air was filled with a gritty layer of dust, which stuck in my throat with each breath. I remembered the record, the old Nat King Cole record she gave me. But search as I might it was nowhere to be found. She must have taken it with her.
Once again Shimamoto had disappeared from my life. This time, though, leaving nothing to pin my hopes on. No more probablys. No more for a whiles.
15
I got back to Tokyo a little before four. Hoping against hope that Shimamoto would return, I had stayed at the cottage in Hakone until past noon. Waiting was torture, so I killed time by cleaning the kitchen and rearranging all the clothes in the house. The silence was oppressive; the occasional sounds of birds and cars struck me as unnatural, out of sync. Every sound was twisted and crushed beneath the weight of some unstoppable force. And in the midst of this, I waited for something to happen. Something’s got to happen, I felt sure. It can’t end like this.
But nothing happened. Once she made up her mind, Shimamoto wasn’t the type of woman to change it I had to get back to Tokyo. It seemed farfetched, but if she did try to get in touch with me, she’d do it through the club. At any rate, staying in the cottage any longer made no sense.
Driving back, I had to force myself to concentrate. I missed curves, nearly ran red lights, and swerved into the wrong lane. When I arrived at the club parking lot, I called home from a phone booth. I told Yukiko I was back and that I was going straight to work.
“You had me worried. At least you could have called.” Her voice sounded hard and dry.
“I’m fine. Not to worry,” I said. I had no idea how my voice sounded to her. “I don’t have much time, so I’m going to the office to check over accounts, then directly on to the club.”
At the office, I sat at my desk and somehow managed to pass the time until evening. I went over the previous night’s events. Shimamoto must have gotten up while I was asleep and, without sleeping a wink herself, left before dawn. How she got back to the city I had no idea. The main road was far off, and at that hour of the morning it would have been next to impossible to get a bus or taxi in the hills around Hakone. And besides, she had on high heels.
Why did Shimamoto have to leave me like that? The entire time I drove back to Tokyo, the question had tormented me. I told her I would be hers, and she said she’d be mine. And dropping all defenses, we made love. Still, she left me alone, without so much as a word of explanation. She’d even taken the record she’d said was a present. There had to be some rhyme or reason to her actions, but logical thinking was beyond me. All trains of thought were sidetracked. Forcing myself to think, I ended up with a dully throbbing head. I realized how worn out I was. I sat down on the bed in my office, leaned against the wall, and closed my eyes. Once they were closed, I couldn’t pry them open. All I could do was remember. Like an endless tape loop, memories of the night before replayed themselves, over and over. Shimamoto’s body. Her naked body as she lay by the stove with eyes closed, and every detail–her neck, her breasts, her sides, her pubic hair, her genitals, her back, her waist, her legs. They were all too close, too clear. Clearer and closer than if they were real.
Alone in that tiny room, I was soon driven to distraction by these graphic illusions. I fled the building and wandered aimlessly. Finally I went over to the club and shaved in the men’s room. I hadn’t washed my face the entire day. And I still wore the same clothes as the day before. My employees said nothing, though I could feel them glancing at me strangely. If I went home now and stood before Yukiko, I knew I would confess it all. How I loved Shimamoto, had spent the night with her, and was about to throw away everything–my home, my daughters, my work.
I know I should have told Yukiko everything. But I couldn’t. Not then. I no longer had the power to distinguish right from wrong, or even grasp what had happened to me. So I didn’t go home. I went to the club and waited for Shimamoto, knowing full well my wait would be in vain. First I checked at the other bar to see if she was there, then I waited at the counter of the Robin’s Nest until the place closed. I talked with a few of the regulars, but it was just so much background static. I made the appropriate listening noises, my head filled all the while with Shimamoto’s body. How her vagina welcomed me ever so gently. And how she called out my name. Every time the phone rang, my heart pounded.
After the bar closed and everyone had headed home, I stayed there at the counter, drinking. No matter how much I drank, I couldn’t get drunk. In fact, the more I drank, the clearer my head became. It was two a.m. when I arrived home, and Yukiko was up and waiting for me. Unable to sleep, I sat drinking whiskey alone at the kitchen table. She came in with her glass to join me.
“Put on some music,” she said. I picked up a nearby cassette, flipped it into the deck, and turned down the volume so as not to wake the kids. We sat in silence for a while across the table from each other, drinking whiskey.
“You have somebody else you like, right?” Yukiko asked, staring straight at me.
I nodded. Her words had a decided outline and gravity. How many times had she gone over these words in her mind in preparation for this moment?
“And you really like that person. You’re not just playing around.”
“That’s right,” I said. “It’s not just some fling. But it’s not exactly what you’re imagining.”
“How do you know what I’m thinking?” she asked. “You actually believe you know what I’m thinking?”
I couldn’t say a thing. Yukiko was silent too. The music played on softly. Vivaldi or Telemann. One of those. I couldn’t recall the melody.
“I think it’s likely you have no idea what I’m thinking,” she said. She spoke slowly, enunciating each word distinctly, as if explaining something to the children. “I don’t think you have any idea.”
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Seeing I wasn’t going to respond, she lifted her glass and drank. And very slowly, she shook her head. “I’m not that stupid, I hope you know. I live with you, sleep with you. I’ve known for some time you like someone else.”
I looked at her in silence.
“I’m not blaming you,” she continued. “If you love someone else, there’s not much anyone can do about it. You love who you love. I’m not enough for you. I know that We’ve gotten along well, and you’ve taken good care of me. I’ve been very happy living with you. I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“There’s no need to apologize,” she said. “If you want to leave me, that’s okay. I won’t say a thing. Do you want to leave me?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “Can I explain what’s happened?”
“You mean about you and that woman?”
“Yes,” I said.
She shook her head emphatically. “I don’t want to hear anything about her. Don’t make me suffer any more than I already have. I don’t care what kind of relationship the two of you have, or what plans you’ve made. I don’t want to hear about it. What I do want to know is whether or not you want to leave me. I don’t need the house, or money–or anything. If you want the children, take them. I’m serious. If you want to leave me, just say the word. That’s all I want to know. I don’t want to hear anything else. Just yes or no.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You mean you don’t know if you want to leave me or not?”
“No. I don’t know if I’m even capable of giving you an answer.”