South of the Border, West of the Sun

14

She wore a white dress and an oversize navy-blue jacket. A small fish-shaped silver brooch graced the collar of her jacket. The dress was simple in design, with no decorations of any kind, yet on her, you’d swear it was the world’s most expensive dress. She was more tanned than the last time I’d seen her.

“I thought you’d never come here again,” I said.

“Every time I see you, you say the same thing,” she said, laughing. As always, she sat down next to me at the bar and rested both hands on the counter. “But I did write you a note saying I wouldn’t be back for a while, didn’t I?”

“For a while is a phrase whose length can’t be measured. At least by the person who’s waiting,” I said.

“But there must be times when that word’s necessary. Situations when that’s the only possible word you can use,” she said.

“And probably is a word whose weight is incalculable.”

“You’re right,” she said, her face lit up by her usual smile, a gentle breeze blowing from somewhere far away. “I apologize. I’m not trying to excuse myself, but there was nothing I could do about it. Those were the only words I could have used.”

“No need to apologize. As I told you once, this is a bar, and you’re a customer. You come here when you want to. I’m used to it. I’m just mouthing off to myself. Pay no attention.”

She called the bartender over and ordered a cocktail. She looked closely at me, as if inspecting me. “You’re dressed pretty casually for a change.”

“I went swimming this morning and haven’t changed. I haven’t had time,” I said. “But I kind of like it. I feel this is the real me again.”

“You look younger. No one would guess you’re thirty-seven.”

“You don’t look thirty-seven, either.”

“But I don’t look twelve.”

“True enough,” I said.

Her cocktail arrived, and she took a sip. And gently closed her eyes as if listening to some far-off sound. With her eyes closed, I could once more make out the small line just above her eyelids.

“Hajime,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about your bar’s cocktails. I really wanted to have one. No matter where you go, you can never find drinks like the ones here.”

“Did you go somewhere far away?”

“Why do you say that?” she asked.

“Something about you,” I replied. “A certain air. Like you’ve been gone for some time far away.”

She looked up at me. And nodded. “Hajime, for a long time I’ve….,” she began, but fell suddenly silent as if reminded of something. I could tell she was searching inside herself for the right words. Which she couldn’t find. She bit her lip and smiled once more. “Anyhow, I’m sorry. I should have got in touch with you. But I wanted to leave certain things as they are. Preserved, so to speak. Either I come here or I don’t. When I do come here, I do. When I don’t … I’m somewhere else.”

“There’s no middle ground?”

“No middle ground,” she said. “Why? Because no middle-ground things exist there.”

“In a place where there are no middle-ground objects, no middle ground exists,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“In a place where no dogs exist, there are no doghouses, in other words.”

“Yes; no dogs, no doghouses,” Shimamoto said. And she looked at me in a funny way. “You have a strange sense of humor, do you know that?”

As it often did, the piano trio began playing “Star-Crossed Lovers.” For a while the two of us sat there, listening silently.

“Mind if I ask you one question?”

“Not at all,” I said.

“What’s the deal with you and this song?” she asked. “Every time you’re here, it seems, they play that number. A house rule of some sort?”

“No. They just know I like it.”

“It is a beautiful song.”

I nodded. “It took me a long time to figure out how complex it is, how there’s so much more to it than just a pretty melody. It takes a special kind of musician to play it right,” I said. “Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn wrote it a long time ago. Fifty-seven, I believe.”

“When they say ‘star-crossed,’ what do they mean?”

“You know—lovers born under an unlucky star. Unlucky lovers. Here it’s referring to Romeo and Juliet. Ellington and Strayhorn wrote it for a performance at the Ontario Shakespeare Festival. In the original recording, Johnny Hodges’ alto sax was Juliet, and Paul Gonsalves played the Romeo part on tenor sax.”

“Lovers born under an unlucky star,” she said. “Sounds like it was written for the two of us.”

“You mean we’re lovers?”

“You think we’re not?”

I looked at her. She wasn’t smiling anymore. I could make out a faint glimmer deep within her eyes.

“Shimamoto-san, I don’t know anything about you,” I said. “Every time I look in your eyes, I feel that. The most I can say about you is how you were at age twelve. The Shimamoto-san who lived in the neighborhood and was in my class. But that was twenty-five years ago. The Twist was in, and people still rode in streetcars. No cassette tapes, no tampons, no bullet train, no diet food. I’m talking long ago. Other than what I know about you then, I’m in the dark.”

“Is that what you see in my eyes? That you know nothing about me?”

“Nothing’s written in your eyes,” I replied. “It’s written in my eyes. I just see the reflection in yours.”

“Hajime,” she said, “I know I should be telling you more. I do. There’s nothing I can do about it. So please don’t say anything further.”

“Like I said, I’m just mouthing off to myself. Don’t give it a second thought.”

She raised a hand to her collar and fingered the fish brooch. And quietly listened to the piano trio. When their performance ended, she clapped and took a sip of her cocktail. Finally she let out a long sigh and turned to me. “Six months is a long time,” she said. “But most likely, probably, I’ll be able to come here for a while.”

“The old magic words,” I said.

“Magic words?”

“Probably and for a while.”

She smiled and looked at me. She took a cigarette out of her small bag and lit it with a lighter.

“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star,” I said. “It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist anymore. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”

Shimamoto said nothing.

“You’re here,” I continued. “At least you look as if you’re here. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe it’s just your shadow. The real you may be someplace else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long time ago. I reach out my hand to see, but you’ve hidden yourself behind a cloud of probablys. Do you think we can go on like this forever?”

“Possibly. For the time being,” she answered.

“I see I’m not the only one with a strange sense of humor,” I said. And smiled.

She smiled too. The rain has stopped, without a sound there’s a break in the clouds, and the very first rays of sunlight shine through—that kind of smile. Small, warm lines at the corners of her eyes, holding out the promise of something wonderful.

“Hajime,” she said, “I brought you a present.”

She passed me a beautifully wrapped package with a red bow.

“Looks like a record,” I said, gauging its size and shape.

“It’s a Nat King Cole record. The one we used to listen to together. Remember? I’m giving it to you.”

“Thanks. But don’t you want it? As a keepsake from your father?”

“I have more. This one’s for you.”

I gazed at the record, wrapped and beribboned. Before long, all the sounds around me—the clamor of the people at the bar, the piano trio’s music—all faded in the distance, as if the tide had gone out. Only she and I remained. Everything else was an illusion, papier-mâché props on a stage. What existed, what was real, was the two of us.

“Shimamoto-san,” I said, “what do you say we go somewhere and listen to this together?”

“That would be wonderful,” she said.

“I have a small cottage in Hakone. It’s empty now, and there’s a stereo there. This time of night, we could drive there in an hour and a half.”

She looked at her watch. And then at me. “You want to go there now?”

“Yes,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes. “But it’s already past ten. If we went to Hakone now, it would be very late when we came back. Don’t you mind?”

“No. Do you?”

Once more she looked at her watch. And closed her eyes for a good ten seconds. When she reopened them, her face was filled with an entirely new expression, as if she’d gone far away, left something there, and returned. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

I called to the acting manager and asked him to take care of things in my absence—lock up the register, organize the receipts, and deposit the profits in the bank’s night deposit box. I walked over to my condo and drove the BMW out of the underground garage. And called my wife from a nearby telephone booth, telling her I was off to Hakone.

“At this hour?” she said, surprised. “Why do you have to go all the way to Hakone at this hour?”

“There’s something I need to think over,” I said.

“So you won’t be back tonight?”

“Probably not.”

“Honey, I’ve been thinking over what happened, and I’m really sorry. You were right I got rid of all the stock. So why don’t you come on home?”

“Yukiko, I’m not angry at you. Not at all. Forget about that I just want some time to think. Give me one night, okay?”

She said nothing for a while. Then: “All right.” She sounded exhausted. “Go ahead to Hakone. But be careful driving. It’s raining.”

“I will.”

“There’s so much I don’t understand,” my wife said. “Tell me one thing: am I in your way?”

“Not at all,” I replied. “It has nothing to do with you. If anything, the problem’s with me. So don’t worry about it, okay? I just want some time to think.”

I hung up and drove to the bar. I could tell from Yukiko’s voice that she’d been mulling over our lunchtime conversation. She was tired, confused. It saddened me. The rain was still falling hard. I let Shimamoto into the car.

“Isn’t there someplace you need to call before we go?” I asked.

Silently she shook her head. And, as she did on the way back from Haneda Airport, she pressed her face against the glass and stared at the scenery.

There was little traffic on the way to Hakone. I got off the Tomei Highway at Atsugi and headed straight to Odawara on the expressway. I kept our speed between eighty and ninety miles per hour. The rain came down in sheets from time to time, but I knew every curve and hill along the way. After we got on the highway, Shimamoto and I said hardly a word. I played a Mozart quartet quietly and kept my eyes on the road. Shimamoto was lost in thought as she looked out the window. Occasionally she’d glance over at me. Whenever she did, my throat went dry. Forcing myself to relax, I swallowed a couple of times.

“Hajime,” she said. We were near Kouzu. “You don’t listen to jazz much outside the bar?”

“No, I don’t. Mostly classical music.”

“How come?”

“I guess because jazz is part of my job. Outside the club, I like to listen to something different. Sometimes rock too, but hardly ever jazz.”

“What type of music does your wife listen to?”

“Usually whatever I’m listening to. She hardly ever plays any records on her own. I’m not even sure if she knows how to use the turntable.”

Shimamoto reached over to the cassette case and pulled out a couple of tapes. One of them contained the children’s songs my daughters and I sang together in the car. “The Doggy Policeman,” “Tulip”—the Japanese equivalent of Barney’s Greatest Hits. From her expression as she gazed at the cassette and its picture of Snoopy on the cover, you’d think she’d discovered a relic from outer space.

Again she turned to gaze at me. “Hajime,” she said after a while. “When I look at you driving, sometimes I want to grab the steering wheel and give it a yank. It’d kill us, wouldn’t it.”

“We’d die, all right. We’re going eighty miles an hour.”

“You’d rather not die with me?”

“I can think of more pleasant ways to go.” I laughed. “And besides, we haven’t listened to the record yet. That’s the reason we’re here, right?”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t do anything like that. The thought just crosses my mind from time to time.”

It was only the beginning of October, but nights in Hakone were chilly. We arrived at the cottage, and I turned on the lights and lit the gas stove in the living room. And took down a bottle of brandy and two snifters from the shelf. We sat next to each other on the sofa, as we used to do so many years before, and I put the Nat King Cole record on the turntable. The red glow from the stove was reflected in our brandy glasses. Shimamoto sat with her legs folded underneath her. She rested one arm on the back of the sofa, the other in her lap. The same as in the old days. Back then she probably wanted to hide her leg, and the habit remained even now. Nat King Cole was singing “South of the Border.” How many years had it been since I heard that tune?

“When I was a kid and listened to this record, I used to wonder what it was that lay south of the border,” I said.

“Me too,” she said. “When I grew up and could read the English lyrics, I was disappointed. It was just a song about Mexico. I’d always thought something great lay south of the border.”

“Like what?”

Shimamoto brushed her hair back and lightly gathered it behind. “I’m not sure. Something beautiful, big, and soft.”

“Something beautiful, big, and soft,” I repeated. “Was it edible?”

She laughed. Her white teeth showed faintly. “I doubt it.”

“Something you can touch?”

“Probably.”

“Again with the probablys.”

“A world full of probablys,” she said.

I stretched out my hand and laid it on top of her fingers on the back of the sofa. I hadn’t touched her body for so very long, not since the plane ride back from Ishikawa. As my fingers grazed hers, she looked up at me briefly, then down again.

“South of the border, west of the sun,” she said.

“West of the sun?”

“Have you heard of the illness hysteria siberiana?”

“No.”

“I read this somewhere a long time ago. Might have been in junior high. I can’t for the life of me recall what book I read it in. Anyway, it affects farmers living in Siberia. Try to imagine this. You’re a farmer, living all alone on the Siberian tundra. Day after day you plow your fields. As far as the eye can see, nothing. To the north, the horizon, to the east, the horizon, to the south, to the west, more of the same. Every morning, when the sun rises in the east, you go out to work in your fields. When it’s directly overhead, you take a break for lunch. When it sinks in the west, you go home to sleep.”

“Not exactly the lifestyle of an Aoyama bar owner.”

“Hardly.” She smiled and inclined her head ever so slightly. “Anyway, that cycle continues, year after year.”

“But in Siberia they don’t work in the fields in winter.”

“They rest in the winter,” she said. “In the winter they stay home and do indoor work. When spring comes, they head out to the fields again. You’re that farmer. Imagine it.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And then one day, something inside you dies.”

“What do you mean?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Something. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You toss your plow aside and, your head completely empty of thought, begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That’s hysteria siberiana.”

I tried to conjure up the picture of a Siberian farmer lying dead on the ground.

“But what is there, west of the sun?” I asked.

She again shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Or maybe something. At any rate, it’s different from south of the border.”

When Nat King Cole began singing “Pretend,” Shimamoto, as she had done so very long before, sang along in a small voice.

Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue

It isn’t very hard to do

“Shimamoto-san,” I said, “after you left, I thought about you for a long time. Every day for six months, from morning to night I tried to stop, but I couldn’t. And I came to this conclusion. I can’t make it without you. I don’t ever want to lose you again. I don’t want to hear the words for a while anymore. Or probably. You’ll say we can’t see each other for a while, and then you’ll disappear. And no one can say when you’ll be back. You might never be back, and I might spend the rest of my life never seeing you again. And I couldn’t stand that. Life would be meaningless.”

Shimamoto looked at me silently, still faintly smiling. A quiet smile that nothing could ever touch, revealing nothing to me of what lay beyond. Confronted with that smile, I felt as if my own emotions were about to be lost to me. For an instant I lost my bearings, my sense of who and where I was. After a while, though, words returned.

“I love you,” I told her. “Nothing can change it. Special feelings like that should never, ever be taken away. I’ve lost you many times. But I should never have let you go. These last several months have taught me that I love you, and I don’t want you ever to leave me.”

After I finished, she closed her eyes. The fire from the stove burned, and Nat King Cole kept on singing his old songs. I should say something more, I thought, but I could think of nothing.

“Hajime,” she began, “this is very important, so listen carefully. As I told you before, there is no middle ground with me. You take either all of me or nothing. That’s the way it works. If you don’t mind continuing the way we are now, I don’t see why we can’t do that. I don’t know how long we’d be able to, but I’ll do everything in my power to see that it happens. When I’m able to come see you, I will. But when I can’t, I can’t. I can’t just come to see you whenever I feel like it. You may not be satisfied with that arrangement, but if you don’t want me to go away again, you have to take all of me. Everything. All the baggage I carry, everything that clings to me. And I will take all of you. Do you understand that? Do you understand what that means?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And you still want to be with me?”

“I’ve already decided, Shimamoto-san,” I said. “I thought about it when you were gone, and I made my decision.”

“But, Hajime, you have a wife and two children. And you love them. You want to do what’s right for them.”

“Of course I love them. Very much. And I want to take care of them. But something’s missing. I have a family, a job, and no complaints about either. You could say I’m happy. Yet I’ve known ever since I met you again that something is missing. The important question is what is missing. Something’s lacking. In me and my life. And that part of me is always hungry, always thirsting. Neither my wife nor my children can fill that gap. In the whole world, there’s only one person who can do that. You. Only now, when that thirst is satisfied, do I realize how empty I was. And how I’ve been hungering, thirsting, for so many years. I can’t go back to that kind of world.”

Shimamoto wrapped both her arms around me and rested her head on my shoulder. I could feel the softness of her body. It pushed against me warmly, insistently.

“I love you too, Hajime. You’re the only person I’ve ever loved. I don’t think you realize how very much I love you. I’ve loved you ever since I was twelve. Whenever anyone else held me, I thought of you. And that’s the reason why I didn’t want to see you again. If I saw you once, I knew I couldn’t stand it anymore. But I couldn’t keep myself away. At first I thought I’d just make sure it was really you, then head home. But once I saw you, I had to talk to you.” She kept her head on my shoulder. “Ever since I was twelve, I wanted you to hold me. You never knew that, did you?”

“No, I didn’t,” I admitted.

“Since I was twelve, I wanted to hold you, naked. You had no idea, I suppose.”

I held her close and kissed her. She closed her eyes, not moving. Our tongues wound round each other, and I could feel her heartbeat just below her breasts. A passionate, warm heartbeat. I closed my eyes and thought of the red blood coursing through her veins. I stroked her soft hair and drank in its fragrance. Her hands wandered over my back. The record finished, and the arm moved back to its base. Once again we were wrapped only in the sound of the rain. After a while, she opened her eyes. “Hajime,” she whispered, “are you sure this is all right? Are you sure you want to throw away everything for my sake?”

I nodded. “Yes. I’ve already made up my mind.”

“But if you’d never met me, you could have had a peaceful life. With no doubts or dissatisfactions. Don’t you think so?”

“Maybe. But I did meet you. And we can’t undo that,” I said. “Just as you told me once, there are certain things you can’t undo. You can only go forward. Shimamoto-san, I don’t care where we end up; I just know I want to go there with you. And begin again.”

“Hajime,” she said, “would you take off your clothes and let me see your body?”

“You want just me to take off my clothes?”

“Yes. First you take all your clothes off. I want to look at your body. You don’t want to?”

“I don’t mind. If you want me to,” I said. I undressed in front of the stove. I took off my yacht parka, polo shirt, blue jeans, socks, T-shirt, underpants. Shimamoto had me get down on both knees on the floor. My penis was already hard, which embarrassed me a little. She moved back slightly to take in the whole scene. She still wore her jacket.

“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 married 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.