Piercing

6

‘YOU REMIND ME OF somebody,’ the masseuse said. ‘I can’t remember the name, but some actor. Do you know who I mean?’

She was a big-boned woman who talked a lot. She looked so little like the woman he’d stabbed ten years ago that Kawashima couldn’t suppress a wry smile when he first saw her. She wore slacks of a thin, glittery material, a gaudy sweater, and a silver fox half-coat. Kawashima had, as a matter of fact, been told that he looked like certain actors or singers before. But he was sure his resemblance to any celebrity was too tenuous to be fatal, especially if he changed his hairstyle and wore glasses. He offered the woman something to drink. She asked for a glass of beer, and he got one for her and another for himself. Sipping at his beer, Kawashima asked her if it wasn’t dangerous, going to the hotel rooms of men she’d never met.

‘Usually you can tell if a guy’s OK just by looking in his eyes, so I haven’t had any real problems personally, but some of the girls have had bad experiences. I don’t mean anything really scary, but, like, letting guys stick their dirty fingers in there to make a little extra money and ending up with an infection or whatever. That’s the sort of thing you hear about, anyway.’

Kawashima stripped, dimmed the lights, and lay face-down on top of the bedspread. The woman sat on the side of the bed and lightly ran her fingernails over his back and buttocks and hamstrings, tracing leisurely circles on the surface of his skin. He felt like a patient being pampered by a nurse. As she helped ease him over on to his back, the woman was telling him about the man she lived with, explaining that he was the one who’d bought her the fur half-coat. She placed a box of tissues next to her on the bed and rubbed oil into her left palm, then began stroking his already erect penis. He lifted his head from the pillow and asked if she wasn’t going to undress as well. Without pausing the motion of her hand, she told him it would cost an extra ten thousand. ‘I’ll pay it,’ he said, and she wiped her hand with a tissue, reminded him that he mustn’t touch her, and wriggled out of her clothing.

Wanting to get a better look at her soft belly and the marks left by the elastic of her pantyhose, he switched on the bedside lamp. The woman made no attempt to conceal her body. It was a body that stirred nostalgic feelings in him: skin your fingers could sink into; breasts with visible veins and dark, downcast nipples; arms and waist and thighs that jiggled with the slightest movement; the pathos of pubic hair; the cracked, yellowed nail of a big toe. He’d once been so accustomed to this sort of body that when he first slept with Yoko the firmness of her flesh actually felt strange to him. Yoko was now twenty-nine and had given birth to a child, but when you touched her neck or arm or ass, the flesh still pressed back. Looking at the supposedly thirty-eight-year-old ass flattened against the bedspread, Kawashima thought: There’s something non-threatening about skin like this. Soft as a spongecake left over from Christmas; skin that yielded to your touch rather than resisting defiantly. It was as if the very cells were conscious of their age and had ceased to assert themselves.

He was drinking this body in with his eyes when he came. The woman wiped him off with a hot, wet towel.

After handing her over 30,000 yen and sending her on her way, he lay back on the bedspread, still naked. He was enveloped in a sort of weightless tranquillity that was like nothing he’d ever experienced before. Far from any danger of his nervous system going haywire. Kawashima had never understood the how or why of those episodes of his — the explosions of shock and terror and rage, the total loss of control — but they always left him feeling miserable afterwards. He’d often wondered if one couldn’t train oneself to develop nerves that wouldn’t crack like that. But the reality, he thought, staring up at the ceiling, is that I’ll probably have to go through this sort of thing forever. He’d just spurted a large volume of semen, and though it had occasioned him no more excitement than a good sneeze, he was enjoying the after-effects. It felt good just lying there gazing at the ceiling. He was aware that the good feeling existed side by side with a chilling sort of loneliness, but even that wasn’t all bad. He was picturing the masseuse’s bulky thighs when something important occurred to him, and he sat up in bed and reached for his briefcase. He opened it, took out the notes, and added a couple of lines:

The woman must be not only young but petite. A large woman would be more difficult to control in the event of any unforeseen glitches.