“Yeah, well, I’ll be lonely once you’re gone,” he said as he opened the paper, pulled out the record and looked it over.
“Beethoven, Piano Concerto Number 3, Glenn Gould, Leonard Bernstein. Hmm…I’ve never heard this. Have you?”
“Never.”
“Anyway, thank you. I’ll just come right out and say it, I’m really happy.”
17
For three days, I kept trying to find the girl’s phone number. The girl who lent me the Beach Boys record, that is.
I went to the office at our high school and looked up the register for our graduating class, and I found it. However, when I tried calling it I got a recorded message telling me the number was no longer in service. When I called Information and gave them the girl’s name, the operator searched for me, and at the end of five minutes, she told me there was no number listed in their directory under that name. That was the good thing about the girl’s name, it was unique. I thanked the operator and hung up. The next day, I called up a bunch of our former classmates and asked if they knew anything about her,
but nobody knew anything about her, and most of them only vaguely recalled her existence from our school days. The last person I asked, for some reason I didn’t understand, said, ‘I don’t have a damn thing to say to you,’ and hung up on me.
On the third day, I went back to the high school and got the name of the college she’d gone on to attend. It was the English department of a second rate girl’s school. I called their office and told them I was a quality control manager from McCormick’s Salad Dressing and had to ask her something from a survey she’d filled out and that I needed her current address and phone number. I apologized and told them it was very important that I speak to her. They asked if I wouldn’t call back in fifteen minutes after they’d had time to look it up. After drinking a bottle of beer, I called them back and the person in the office told me that she’d dropped out of school in March. The reason she’d quit was to recover from an illness, but they didn’t have the slightest idea why a girl who was well enough to eat salad wasn’t back enrolled in classes again.
When I asked if they had a contact address for her, telling them even an old one would be okay, he checked for me. It was a lodging house near the school. When I called there, a matronly-sounding lady said she didn’t know where the girl went after moving out, then hung up on me, as if to say, ‘you don’t want to know anyway.’
That was the end of the last line thread connecting us.
I went home and drank beer by myself, listening to California Girls all the while.
18
The phone rang.
I was lying atop a wicker chair, half-asleep while gazing at a book I’d left open. The sudden evening rainstorm was comprised of big drops of water that wet the leaves of the trees in the yard before it passed. After the rainstorm was gone, the sea-smelling southerly wind began to blow, shaking the leaves of the potted plants on the veranda just a little, then went on to shake the curtains.
“Hello,” she said. Her voice was dark and controlled; she spoke as if her words were settling on a thin glass table. “You remember me?”
I pretended to think about it for a minute.
“How’s the record business?”
“Not so good…it’s like there’s a recession or something. Nobody’s listening to records.”
“Uh huh.”
She tap-taped her nail on the receiver.
“It was really hard work getting your phone number.”
“Yeah?”
“I asked around at J’s Bar. I had the bartender ask your friend for me. A real tall, weird guy. He was reading Moliere.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
Silence.
“Everyone looked sad. You didn’t show up there for a week, so they were saying you must be sick or something.”
“I never knew I was so popular.”
“Are you….mad at me?”
“For what?”
“For saying all those terrible things to you. I wanted to apologize for that.”
“Hey, you don’t have to worry about me. You care about me, you might as well be feeding beans to pigeons.”
She sighed, and I could hear the flicker from her cigarette lighter coming through the receiver. After that, I could hear Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. She must’ve been calling from the record store.
“I’m not really worried about your feelings. I just feel like I shouldn’t have talked to you like that,” she said quickly.
“You’re pretty hard on yourself.”
“Yeah, I’m always thinking about the kind of person I’m trying to be.”
She was silent for a moment.
“You wanna meet up tonight?”
“Sure.”
“How about 8 o’ clock at J’s Bar. That okay?”
“Got it.”
“…um, I’ve been having a rough time lately.”
“I understand.”
“Thank you.”
She hung up.
19
It’s a long story, it happened when I was twentyone. Still a lot of youth left, but not as young as I once was. If I wasn’t happy with that, the only choice I had was to jump off the roof of the Empire State Building on a Sunday morning.
I heard this joke in an old movie about the Great Depression:
‘You know why I always have my umbrella open when I walk by the Empire State Building? ‘Cause people are always falling like raindrops!’
When I was twenty-one, at least at this point I wasn’t planning to die. At that point I’d slept with three girls.
The first girl was my high school classmate, and when we were seventeen we got to believing that we loved each other. Bathed in the lush twilight, she took off her slip-on shoes, her cotton socks, her thin seersucker dress, her weird underwear she obviously knew didn’t fit her, and then after getting a little flustered, took off her wristwatch. After that, we embraced each other atop the Sunday edition of the Asahi Shimbun.
Just a few months after we graduated from high school, we suddenly broke up for some forgettable reason. After that, I never saw her again. I think of her every now and then, during those nights when I can’t sleep. That’s it.
The second girl I slept with, I met her at the Shinjuku station on the subway. She was sixteen, flat broke, and had nowhere to sleep, and as an added bonus she was almost nothing but a pair of breasts, but she had smart, pretty eyes. One night, when there were violent demonstrations sweeping over Shinjuku, the trains, the busses, everything shut down completely.
“You hang around here and you’ll get hauled off,” I told her. She was crouched in the middle of the shutdown ticket-taker, reading a sports section she’d taken from the garbage.
“But the police’ll feed me.”
“That’s a terrible way to live.”
“I’m used to it.”
I lit a cigarette and gave one to her. Thanks to the tear gas, my eyes were prickling.
“Have you eaten?”
“Not since this morning.”
“Hey, let me get you something to eat. Anyway, we should get out of here.”
“Why do you want to get me something to eat?”
“Who knows?” I don’t know why, but I pulled her out of the ticket-taker and we walked the empty streets all the way to Mejiro.
That incredibly quiet girl’s stay at my apartment lasted for all of one week. Every day, she’d wake up after noon, eat something, smoke, absent-mindedly read books, watch television, and occasionally have uninterested sex with me. Her only possession was a white canvas bag which held inside it: a thin windbreaker, two T-shirts, one pair of blue jeans, three pairs of dirty underwear, and one box of tampons; that’s all she had.
“Where’re you from?”
Sometimes I asked her this.
“Someplace you don’t know.”
Saying that, the refused to elaborate. One day, when I came back from the supermarket clutching a grocery bag, she was gone. Her white bag was gone as well. A number of other things were gone as well. Some loose change I’d scattered atop the desk, a carton of cigarettes, and my carefully washed T-shirt. On the desk there was a torn piece of paper like a note, bearing the simple message: ‘rat bastard’. It’s quite possible that was a reference to me.
My third partner was a girl I’d met at our university’s library, she was a French Lit major, but in the spring of the following year she was found in a small forest past the edge of the tennis courts, hanged. Her corpse hung there unnoticed until past the beginning of spring semester, for an entire two weeks it dangled there, blown around by the wind. Even now, nobody goes in those woods after the sun goes down.
20
She was sitting at the counter of J’s Bar looking ill at ease, stirring around the almost-melted ice at the bottom of her ginger ale glass with a straw.
“I didn’t think you’d show.”
She said this as I sat next to her; she looked slightly relieved.
“I don’t stand girls up. I had something to do, so I was a little late.”
“What did you have to do?”
“Shoes. I had to polish shoes.”
“Those sneakers you’re wearing right now?”
She said this with deep suspicion while pointing at my shoes.
“No way! My dad’s shoes. It’s kind of a family tradition. The kids have to polish the father’s shoes.”
“Why?”
“Hmm...well, of course, the shoes are a symbol for something, I think. Anyway, my father gets home at 8pm every night, like clockwork. I polish his shoes, then I sprint out the door to go drink beer.”
“That’s a good tradition.”
“You really think so?”
“Yeah. It’s good to show your father some appreciation.”
“My appreciation is for the fact that he only has two feet.”
She giggled at that.
“Sounds like a great family.”
“Yeah, not just great, but throw in the poverty and we’re crying tears of joy.”
She kept stirring her ginger ale with the end of her straw.
“Still, I think my family was much worse off.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Your smell. The way rich people can sniff out other rich people, poor people can do the same.”
I poured the beer J brought me into my glass.
“Where are your parents?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“So-called ‘great’ people don’t talk about their family troubles. Right?”
“You’re a ‘great’ person?”
Fifteen seconds passed as she considered this.
“I’d like to be one, someday. Honestly. Doesn’t everyone?”
I decided not to answer that.
“But it might help to talk about it,” I said.
“Why?”
“First off, sometimes you’ve gotta vent to people. Second, it’s not like I’m going to run off and tell anybody.”
She laughed and lit a cigarette, and she stared silently at the wood-paneled counter while she took three puffs of smoke.
“Five years ago, my father died from a brain tumor. It was terrible. Suffered for two whole years. We managed to pour all our money into that. We ended up with absolutely nothing left. Thanks to that, our family was completely exhausted. We disintegrated, like a plane breaking up mid-flight. The same story you’ve heard a thousand times, right?”
I nodded. “And your mother?”
“She’s living somewhere. Sends me New Year’s cards.”
“Sounds like you’re not too keen on her.”
“Yes.”
“You have any brothers or sisters?”
“I have a twin sister, that’s it.”
“Where is she?”
“About thirty thousand light-years away.”
Saying this, she laughed neurotically, pushing her glass to the side.
“Talking bad about one’s family is definitely no good. Makes me depressed.”
“Don’t worry too much about it. Everyone’s got some burden to bear.”
“Even you?”
“Sure. I’m always grasping cans of shaving cream and crying uncontrollably.”
She laughed happily at this, looking as if she hadn’t laughed that way in who knows how many years.
“Hey, why are you drinking ginger ale?” I asked,
“Did you swear off drinking?”
“Yeah, well, that was the plan, but I think it’s okay now.”
“What’ll you have?”
“Chilled white wine.”
I called J over and ordered another beer and a glass of white wine.
“Hey, what’s it like to have an identical twin?”
“Well, it’s kinda strange. Same face, same IQ, same size bra, you’re aggravated all the time.”
“People mix you up a lot?”
“Yeah, ‘til the time we were eight. That was the year I lost a finger; after that, nobody mixed us up again.”
Saying that, like a concert pianist concentrating, she set her hands down on the counter, her fingers lined up neatly. I took her left hand, and gazed at it carefully in the light from the recessed lighting. It was a small hand, cool as a cocktail glass, looking completely natural, as if it’d been that way since birth, four fingers lined up happily. That naturalness was almost a miracle, at least it was more charming than if she’d had six fingers.
“My pinky was cut off by a vacuum cleaner’s motor when I was eight years old. Popped right off.”
“Where is it now?”
“Where’s what?”
“Your pinky.”
“I forget,” she said, laughing, “you’re the first one to ever ask me that.”
“Doesn’t it bug you, not having a pinky?”
“Yeah, when I put on gloves.”
“Other than that?”
She shook her head.
“I’d be lying if I said I never worried about it. Still, I’m only as worried about it as other girls are about the thick hairs growing on their necks.”
I nodded.
“What do you do?”
“I’m in college. In Tokyo.”
“You’re visiting home.”
“Yeah.”
“What’re you studying?”
“Biology. I like animals.”
“Me too.”
I drank the rest of the beer in my glass and nibbled on a few French fries.
“Hey…there was this famous panther in Bhagalpur, India who, over three years, managed to kill 350 people.”
“And?”
“So they called this panther hunter, an Englishman, Colonel Jim Corvette, and he shot that panther and one hundred twenty-five panthers and tigers. Knowing that, you still like animals?”
She snuffed out her cigarette, then took a sip of her wine and gazed at my face as if admiring it.
“You’re definitely a little strange, you know?”