Light and dark

[98]

IT WAS a fact that Tsuda had received a phone call shortly before she arrived. Halfway up the stairs, the apprentice from the pharmacy had called out, sounding annoyed at having to go the trouble, “Tsuda-san, telephone!” Interrupting his dialogue with O-Hide, he had responded “Where from?” “Home, I guess,” the student had replied on his way back down the stairs. This brusque exchange after his immoderate absorption in a difficult conversation focused Tsuda selfishly on himself. Off to the theater and not a sign of her since, not yesterday or today, he hadn’t appreciated O-Nobu’s behavior, and now he liked it even less.

She’s fishing with a phone call.

This was his first thought. A call yesterday and again today and, for all he knew, again tomorrow, and only then, when she had done a fine job reeling him in, would she put in an unexpected appearance; such was likely to be her game. Judging by her usual behavior toward him, his expectation was hardly unreasonable. He could even imagine her smiling face when she surprised him with a supple entrance when he was unprepared. He knew well the strange power of that smile to steal into his heart. Brandishing that sharp weapon for just an instant, she never failed to vanquish him. To feel his mood being flipped over like a leaf in the wind despite his struggle to sustain it was like, as he might have put it, watching his own helpless fall into the arms of her magic.

Ignoring O-Hide’s advice, he hadn’t taken the call.

“I don’t need anything — ignore it.”

O-Hide didn’t know what to make of this. In the first place, it was entirely unlike her brother, with his aversion for carelessness. Second, this couldn’t be the brother who was invariably at O-Nobu’s beck. She concluded that Tsuda must be feigning indifference to his wife to conceal his normal pliability in deference to his sister. This was secretly not displeasing to her; even so, when she heard the apprentice loudly summoning her brother to the phone from below, she felt obliged to rise in his stead. She went to the trouble of going downstairs but to no avail: following the confusion created by the apprentice’s inattention, the line was dead.

Having gone through the motions of discharging her duty, O-Hide returned to her seat upstairs and took up again the thread of their conversation, by which time O-Toki, no longer able to endure the wait after her breathless haste, had abandoned the public phone booth and boarded a trolley. Not fifteen minutes later, Tsuda, surprised by her unexpected arrival, was no less surprised by her unexpected inquiry.

After she had left, he had trouble settling down. He felt confident he knew Kobayashi inside and out, but it had never occurred to him that he would barge into his home in his absence and attempt to draw O-Nobu into conversation when they were hardly on intimate terms — he couldn’t help being aghast at this, nor could he avoid thinking about it. This was not about whether to give him an overcoat. The problem here, entirely unrelated to the coat, was a personality that would permit Kobayashi to think nothing of wresting another man’s coat from the hands of his wife, whom he barely knew. Perhaps this was a second personality created as a survival response to his circumstances. But the real issue as it concerned him was the behavior this personality had manifested in O-Nobu’s direction. Craziness, apparently. Desperation. The cold eye he invariably trained on people who were content. He worried that among all the satisfied people Kobayashi knew, his old friend Tsuda and his new wife had been chosen to become paragons of satisfaction. Tsuda was well aware that he had prepared the foundation for this himself with his unrelenting contempt.

There’s no knowing what he might say.

A variety of fear rose abruptly in Tsuda’s chest. O-Hide, in contrast, burst out laughing. Her brother’s constant derogation of this fellow called Kobayashi meant nothing to her.

“Why does it matter what Kobayashi — san says? Nobody’s going to take a person like him seriously!”

O-Hide was familiar with one side of Kobayashi. But her knowledge was limited to things he had said in front of Uncle Fujii. And that was his placid side, as strikingly different from how he was when he was drinking as if he had been reborn.

“Not so! You’d be surprised.”

“Has he turned into such a bad person recently?”

O-Hide’s expression was incredulous.

“One match is all it takes to burn down a large house, if that’s what you want to do.”

“But if it doesn’t catch fire, it’s all over no matter how many match boxes you bring in! Sister isn’t the sort of woman a man like that can set on fire. Or at least…”