Light and dark

[111]

THERE WAS nothing so very surprising about running into O-Hide at the clinic. The result of the encounter, however, was beyond surprising. Though O-Nobu was familiar with O-Hide’s attitude toward her, she hadn’t expected to find herself involved in the kind of scene that had just ended. Now that it was over, she couldn’t help interpreting it as a quirk of destiny. Certainly she wasn’t moved to discover a reason why the encounter should have been inevitable by reflecting on their connection in the past. To put her psychological state more simply, she felt no responsibility whatsoever for the incident. That was something O-Hide would have to shoulder alone. Accordingly, O-Nobu felt unexpectedly serene. At least she was unable to discover any reason for her conscience to be making her ashamed.

The interview had affected her in two ways. There was, first of all, the disagreeable feeling that had followed it. Folded into this unpleasantness was the prospect of strife that seemed almost certain to befall them through O-Hide’s agency. O-Nobu felt well prepared to make her way through the jungle of this conflict. But only if Tsuda would take her side from start to finish. When it came to that, she felt seven parts secure to three parts uneasy. She had to wonder, somewhat urgently, the extent to which, as a result of her actions today, she had managed to further diminish her cause for concern. At the very least she felt that she had earned some confidence in that regard by doing everything she could to demonstrate to Tsuda her genuine intention to buy, or possibly to repurchase, his love.

While this had to be accounted the most important aspect of what she herself understood, the encounter had also generated, and delivered into her hands as a natural consequence, a second benefit she hadn’t recognized at the time. To be sure, it was only temporary: it had been O-Nobu’s good fortune to have evaded the eye of suspicion her husband would inevitably have directed at her. It was a change in Tsuda that had made this possible: it was as if, in terms not only of sentiment but of the focus of his consciousness, he was a different man before he had taken on O-Hide as an opponent and after she had begun to vex him. Having appeared at just the agitated moment when this transformation was occurring and undertaken to promote the natural surging of the wave, O-Nobu had, without realizing it, put money in her own purse.

She was spared, that is, the trouble of explaining the details of why the Okamotos had persisted in inviting her to the theater, and why it had become necessary to visit them at home the following day. Nor was there an opportunity to say a word about a subject she might have wished to bring up herself, Kobayashi’s visit and what he had said to her. Once O-Hide had left, their minds were completely occupied with thoughts of her.

They read this in each other’s faces. Just as O-Nobu was reappearing lissomely at the entrance to the room, in that instant, having seen O-Hide out and climbed back up the stairs, their eyes had locked. O-Nobu smiled. Whereupon Tsuda smiled too. There was nothing there save the two of them. Each of their smiles touched the other’s heart. O-Nobu, at least, felt that she was encountering for the first time in a long while the Tsuda she had known in the beginning. She scarcely knew what the smile that had risen from inside her signified. It was as if her face itself, assuming the form and shape of a smile, was a memento of a happier time. She stored the sensation carefully away at the back of her heart.

At that moment their smiles abruptly bloomed; they laughed aloud together, revealing their teeth.

“I was so surprised.”

Moving as she spoke, O-Nobu sat down next to Tsuda’s pillow. Tsuda’s reply was calm.

“I told you not to phone her.”

They were naturally drawn back to the subject of O-Hide.

“I don’t suppose that Hideko-san could be a Christian?”

“Why?”

“I was just wondering.”

“Because she left the money?”

“Not just that.”

“Because of her sermon?”

“That’s partly it. That was the first time for me. I’ve never heard Hideko-san sound so complex.”

“She thinks she’s a logician. She has to take everything apart and put it back together the way she thinks it ought to fit.”

“I’ve never heard her be that way before.”

“You haven’t, maybe — I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to her run on. She has a habit of making sturgeon out of a mudfish. She’s been influenced by Uncle Fujii, and that turns into poison.”

“What makes you say so?”

“She spent all those years at his side listening to him arguing about everything, and eventually she became as fluent a sophist as he is.”

Tsuda shook his head dismissively. O-Nobu forced a smile.