Sputnik Sweetheart

4

The summer holiday of my first year in college I took a random trip by myself around the Hokuriku region, came across a woman eight years older than me who was also travelling alone, and we spent one night together. It struck me, at the time, as something straight out of the opening of Soseki’s novel Sanshiro.

The woman worked in the foreign exchange section of a bank in Tokyo. Whenever she had some time off, she’d grab a few books and set out on her own. “Much less tiring to travel alone,” she explained. She had a certain charm, which made it hard to work out why she’d have any interest in someone like me—a quiet, skinny 18-year-old college kid. Still, sitting across from me in the train, she seemed to enjoy our harmless banter. She laughed out loud a lot. And—unusually—I chattered away. We happened to get off at the same station at Kanazawa.

“Do you have a place to stay?” she asked.

“No,” I replied. I’d never made a hotel reservation in my life.

“I have a hotel room,” she told me. “You can stay if you like. Don’t worry about it,” she went on, “it costs the same whether there’s one or two people staying.”

I was nervous the first time we made love, which made things awkward. I apologized to her.

“Aren’t we polite!” she said. “No need to apologize for every little thing.”

After her shower she threw on a dressing gown, grabbed two cold beers from the fridge, and handed one to me.

“Are you a good driver?” she asked.

“I just got my licence, so I wouldn’t say so. Just average.”

She smiled. “Same with me. I think I’m pretty good, but my friends don’t agree. Which makes me average, too, I suppose. You must know a few people who think they’re great drivers, right?”

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

“And there must be some who aren’t very good.”

I nodded. She took a quiet sip of beer and gave it some thought.

“To a certain extent those kinds of things are inborn. Talent, you could call it. Some people are nimble; others are all thumbs… Some people are quite attentive, and others aren’t. Right?”

Again I nodded.

“Okay, consider this. Say you’re going to go on a long journey with someone by car. And the two of you will take turns driving. Which type of person would you choose? One who’s a good driver, but inattentive, or an attentive person who’s not such a good driver?”

“Probably the second one,” I said.

“Me, too,” she replied. “What we have here is very similar. Good or bad, nimble or clumsy—those aren’t important. What’s important is being attentive. Staying calm, being alert to things around you.”

“Alert?” I asked.

She just smiled and didn’t say anything.

A while later we made love a second time, and this time it was a smooth, congenial ride. Being alert—I think I was starting to get it. For the first time I saw how a woman reacts in the throes of passion.

The next morning after we ate breakfast together, we went our separate ways. She continued her trip, and I continued mine. As she left she told me she was getting married in two months to a man from work. “He’s a very nice guy,” she said cheerily. “We’ve been going out for five years, and we’re finally going to make it official. Which means I probably won’t be making any trips by myself any more. This is it.”

I was still young, certain that this kind of thrilling event happened all the time. Later in life I realized how wrong I was.

I told Sumire this story a long time ago. I can’t remember why it came up. It might have been when we were talking about sexual desire.

“So what’s the point of your story?” she asked me.

“The part about being alert,” I replied. “Not prejudging things, listening to what’s going on, keeping your ears, heart, and mind open.”

“Hmm,” Sumire replied. She seemed to be mulling over my paltry sexual affair, perhaps wondering whether she could incorporate it into one of her novels.

“Anyway, you certainly have a lot of experiences, don’t you?”

“I wouldn’t say a lot,” I gently protested. “Things just happen.”

She chewed lightly at her nail, lost in thought. “But how are you supposed to become attentive? The critical moment arrives, and you say okay, I’m going to be alert and listen carefully, but you can’t just be good at those things by snapping your fingers, right? Can you be more specific? Give me a for instance?”

“Well, first you have to relax. By… say, counting.”

“What else?”

“Think about a cucumber in a fridge on a summer afternoon. Just an example.”

“Wait a second,” she said with a significant pause. “Do you mean to tell me that when you’re having sex with a girl you imagine cucumbers in a fridge on a summer afternoon?”

“Not all the time,” I said.

“But sometimes.”

“Maybe.”

Sumire frowned and shook her head a couple of times.

“You’re a lot weirder than you look.”

“Everybody’s got something weird about them,” I said.

“In the restaurant, as Miu held my hand and gazed deep into my eyes, I thought about cucumbers,” Sumire said to me.

“Gotta stay calm, gotta listen carefully, I told myself.”

“Cucumbers’?”

“Don’t you remember what you told me—about cucumbers in a fridge on a summer afternoon?”

“Oh, yeah, I guess I did,” I recalled. “So did it help?”

“A little,” she said.

“Glad to hear it,” I replied.

Sumire steered the conversation back on track. “Miu’s apartment is just a short walk from the restaurant. Not a very big place, but really lovely. A sunny veranda, house-plants, an Italian leather sofa, Bose speakers, a set of prints, a Jaguar in the garage. She lives there alone. The place she and her husband have is somewhere in Setagaya. She goes back there at the weekends. Most of the time she stays in her apartment in Aoyama. What do you think she showed me there?”

“Mark Bolan’s favourite snakeskin sandals in a glass case,” I ventured. “One of the invaluable legacies without which the history of rock and roll cannot be told. Not a single scale missing, his autograph on the arch. The fans go nuts.”

Sumire frowned and sighed. “If they invent a car that runs on stupid jokes, you could go far.”

“Put it down to an impoverished intellect,” I said humbly.

“Okay, all joking aside, I want you to give it some serious thought. What do you think she showed me there? If you get it right, I’ll pay the bill.”

I cleared my throat. “She showed you the gorgeous clothes you have on. And told you to wear them to work.”

“You win,” she said. “She has this rich friend with clothes to spare who’s just about the same size as me. Isn’t life strange?

There are people who have so many leftover clothes they can’t stuff them all in their wardrobe. And then there are people like me, whose socks never match. Anyway, I don’t mind. She went over to her friend’s house and came back with an armful of these leftovers. They’re just a bit out of fashion if you look carefully but most people wouldn’t notice.”

I wouldn’t know no matter how closely I looked, I told her. Sumire smiled contentedly. “The clothes fit me like a glove. The dresses, blouses, skirts—everything. I’ll have to take in the waist a bit, but put a belt on and you’d never know the difference. My shoe size, fortunately, is almost the same as Miu’s, so she let me have some pairs she doesn’t need. High heels, low heels, summer sandals. All with Italian names on them. Handbags, too. And a little make-up.”

“A regular Jane Eyre,” I said.

All of which explains how Sumire started working three days a week at Miu’s office. Wearing a suit jacket and dress, high heels, and a touch of make-up, taking the morning commuter train from Kichijoji to Harajuku. Somehow I just couldn’t picture it.

Apart from her office at her company in Akasaka, Miu had her own small office at Jingumae. There she had her desk as well as her assistant’s (Sumire’s, in other words), a filing cabinet, a fax, a phone, and a PowerBook. That’s all. It was just one room in an apartment building and came with an afterthought-type of tiny kitchen and bathroom. There was a CD player, minispeakers, and a dozen classical CDs. The room was on the second floor, and out of the east-facing window you could see a small park. The ground floor of the building was taken up by a showroom selling Northern European furniture. The whole building was set back from the main thoroughfare, which kept traffic noise at a minimum.

As soon as she arrived at the office, Sumire would water the plants and get the coffee-maker going. She’d check phone messages and e-mails on the PowerBook. She’d print out any messages and put them on Miu’s desk. Most of them were from foreign agents, in either English or French. She’d open any ordinary post that came and throw away whatever was clearly junk mail. A few calls would come in every day, some from abroad. Sumire would take down the person’s name, number, and message and relay these to Miu on her cellphone. Miu usually showed up around one or two in the afternoon. She’d stay an hour or so, give Sumire various instructions, drink coffee, make a few calls. Letters that required a reply she’d dictate to Sumire, who’d type them up on the word processor and either post or fax them. These were usually quite brief business letters. Sumire also made reservations for Miu at the hairdresser, restaurants, and the squash court. Business out of the way, Miu and Sumire would chat for a while, and then Miu would leave.

So Sumire was often alone in the office, talking to no one for hours, but she never felt bored or lonely. She’d review her twice-a-week Italian lessons, memorizing the irregular verbs, checking her pronunciation with a tape recorder. She took some computer classes and got to where she could handle most simple glitches. She opened up the information in the hard drive and learned the general outlines of the projects Miu had going.

Miu’s main work was exactly as she had described it at the wedding reception. She contracted with small wine producers, mostly in France, and wholesaled their wine to restaurants and speciality shops in Tokyo. On occasion she arranged concert trips by musicians to Japan. Agents from large firms handled the complex business angles, with Miu taking care of the overall plan and some of the groundwork. Miu’s speciality was searching out unknown, promising young performers and bringing them to Japan.

Sumire had no way of knowing how much profit Miu made from her private business. Accounting records were kept on separate disks and couldn’t be accessed without a password. At any rate, Sumire was ecstatic, her heart aflutter, just to be able to meet Miu and talk to her. That’s the desk where Miu sits, she thought. That’s the ballpoint pen she uses; the mug she drinks coffee from. No matter how trivial the task, Sumire did her best.

Every so often Miu would invite Sumire out for dinner. Since her business involved wine, Miu found it necessary to regularly make the rounds of the better-known restaurants to stay in touch with the latest news. Miu always ordered a light fish dish or, on occasion, chicken, though she’d leave half, and would pass on dessert. She’d pore over every detail of the wine list before deciding on a bottle, but would never drink more than a glass. “Go ahead and have as much as you like,” she told Sumire, but there was no way Sumire could finish that much. So they always ended up with half a very expensive bottle of wine left, but Miu didn’t mind.

“It’s such a waste to order a whole bottle of wine for just the two of us,” Sumire said to Miu one time. “We can barely finish half.”

“Don’t worry.” Miu laughed. “The more we leave behind, the more people in the restaurant will be able to try it. The sommelier, the headwaiter, all the way down to the waiter who fills the water glasses. That way a lot of people will start to acquire a taste for good wine. Which is why leaving expensive wine is never a waste.”

Miu examined the colour of the 1986 Médoc and then, as if savouring some nicely turned out prose, carefully tasted it.

“It is the same with anything—you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can’t learn it from a book.”

Taking a cue from Miu, Sumire picked up her glass and very attentively took a sip, held it in her mouth, and then swallowed it. For a moment an agreeable aftertaste remained, but after a few seconds this disappeared, like morning dew on a summer leaf. All of which prepared the palate for the next bite of food. Every time she ate and talked with Miu, Sumire learned something new. Sumire was amazed by the overwhelming number of things she had yet to learn.

“You know I’ve never thought I wanted to be somebody else,” Sumire blurted out once, perhaps urged on by the morethan-usual amount of wine she’d drunk. “But sometimes I think how nice it would be to be like you.”

Miu held her breath for a moment. Then she picked up her wineglass and took a sip. For a second, the light dyed her eyes the crimson of the wine. Her face was drained of its usual subtle expression.

“I’m sure you don’t know this,” she said calmly, returning her glass to the table. “The person here now isn’t the real me. Fourteen years ago I became half the person I used to be. I wish I could have met you when I was whole—that would have been wonderful. But it’s pointless to think about that now.”

Sumire was so taken aback she was speechless. And missed the chance to ask the obvious questions. What had happened to Miu 14 years ago? Why had she become half her real self? And what did she mean by half, anyway? This enigmatic announcement, in the end, only made Sumire more and more smitten with Miu. What an awesome person, she thought.

Through fragments of conversation Sumire was able to piece together a few facts about Miu. Her husband was Japanese, five years older and fluent in Korean, the result of two years as an exchange student in the economics department of Seoul University. He was a warm person, good at what he did, in point of fact the guiding force behind Miu’s company. Even though it was originally a family-run business, no one ever said a bad word about him.

Ever since she was a little girl, Miu had had a talent for playing the piano. Still in her teens she had won the top prize at several competitions for young people. She went on to a conservatoire, studied under a famous pianist and, through her teacher’s recommendation, was able to study at a music academy in France. Her repertoire ran mainly from the late Romantics, Schumann and Mendelssohn, to Poulenc, Ravel, Bartók, and Prokofiev. Her playing combined a keen, sensuous tone with a vibrant, impeccable technique. In her student days she held a number of concerts, all well received. A bright future as a concert pianist looked assured. During her time abroad, though, her father fell ill, and Miu shut the lid of her piano and returned to Japan. Never to touch a keyboard again.

“How could you give up the piano so easily?” Sumire asked hesitantly. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay. I just find it—I don’t know—a little unusual. I mean, you had to sacrifice a lot of things to become a pianist, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t sacrifice a lot of things for the piano,” Miu said softly.

“I sacrificed everything. The piano demanded every ounce of flesh, every drop of blood, and I couldn’t refuse. Not even once.”

“Weren’t you sorry to give up? You’d almost made it.”

Miu gazed into Sumire’s eyes searchingly. A deep, steady gaze. Deep within Miu’s eyes, as if in a quiet pool in a swift stream, wordless currents vied with one another. Only gradually did these clashing currents settle.

“I’m sorry,” Sumire apologized. “I’ll mind my own business.”

“It’s all right. I just can’t explain it well.”

They didn’t talk about it again.

Miu didn’t allow smoking in her office and hated people to smoke in front of her, so after she began the job Sumire decided it was a good chance to quit. Being a two-packs-of-Marlboro-aday smoker, though, things didn’t go so smoothly. After a month, like some animal that’s had its furry tail sliced off, she lost her emotional grip on things—not that this was so firm to begin with. And as you might guess, she started calling me all the time in the middle of the night.

“All I can think about is having a smoke. I can barely sleep, and when I do sleep I have nightmares. I’m constipated. I can’t read, can’t write a line.”

“Everybody goes through that when they try to stop. In the beginning at least,” I said.

“You find it easy to give opinions as long as it’s about other people, don’t you?” she snapped. “You’ve never had a cigarette in your life.”

“Hey, if you can’t give your opinion about other people, the world would turn into a pretty scary place, wouldn’t it? If you don’t think so, just look up what Joseph Stalin did.”

On the other end of the line Sumire was silent for a long time. A heavy silence like dead souls on the Eastern Front.

“Hello?” I asked.

She finally spoke up. “Truthfully, though, I don’t think it’s because I stopped smoking that I can’t write. It might be one reason, but that’s not all. What I mean is stopping smoking is just an excuse. You know: ‘I’m stopping smoking; that’s why I can’t write. Nothing I can do about it.’”

“Which explains why you’re so upset?”

“I guess,” she said, suddenly meek. “It’s not just that I can’t write. What really upsets me is I don’t have confidence any more in the act of writing itself. I read the stuff I wrote not long ago, and it’s boring. What could I have been thinking? It’s like looking across the room at some filthy socks tossed on the floor. I feel awful, realizing all the time and energy I wasted.”

“When that happens you should call somebody up at three in the morning and wake him up—symbolically of course—from his peaceful semiotic sleep.”

“Tell me,” said Sumire, “have you ever felt confused about what you’re doing, like it’s not right?”

“I spend more time being confused than not,” I answered.

“Are you serious?”

“Yep.”

Sumire tapped her nails against her front teeth, one of her many habits when she was thinking. “I’ve hardly ever felt confused like this before. Not that I’m always confident, sure of my talent. I’m not that nervy. I know I’m a haphazard, selfish type of person. But I’ve never been confused. I might have made some mistakes along the way, but I always felt I was on the right path.”

“You’ve been lucky,” I replied. “Like a long spell of rain right after you plant rice.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“But at this point, things aren’t working out.”

“Right. They aren’t. Sometimes I get so frightened, like everything I’ve done up till now is wrong. I have these realistic dreams and snap wide awake in the middle of the night. And for a while I can’t work out what’s real and what isn’t… That kind of feeling. Do you have any idea what I’m saying?”

“I think so,” I replied.

“The thought hits me a lot these days that maybe my novelwriting days are over. The world’s crawling with stupid, innocent girls, and I’m just one of them, self-consciously chasing after dreams that’ll never come true. I should shut the piano lid and come down off the stage. Before it’s too late.”

“Shut the piano lid?”

“A metaphor.”

I switched the receiver from my left hand to my right. “I am sure of one thing. Maybe you aren’t, but I am. Someday you’ll be a fantastic writer. I’ve read what you’ve written, and I know.”

“You really think so?”

“From the bottom of my heart,” I said. “I’m not going to lie to you about things like that. There are some pretty remarkable scenes in the things you’ve written so far. Say you were writing about the seashore in May. You can hear the sound of the wind in your ears and smell the salt air. You can feel the soft warmth of the sun on your arms. If you wrote about a small room filled with tobacco smoke, you can bet the reader would start to feel like he can’t breathe. And his eyes would sting. Prose like that is beyond most writers. Your writing has the living, breathing force of something natural flowing through it. Right now that hasn’t all come together, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to—shut the lid on the piano.”

Sumire was silent for a good 10, 15 seconds. “You’re not just saying that to make me feel better, to cheer me up, are you?”

“No, I’m not. It’s an undeniable fact, plain and simple.”

“Like the Moldau River?”

“You got it. Just like the Moldau River.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I replied.

“Sometimes you’re just the sweetest thing. Like Christmas, summer holidays and a brand-new puppy all rolled into one.”

Like I always do when somebody praises me, I mumbled some vague reply.

“But one thing bothers me,” she added. “Someday you’ll get married to some nice girl and forget all about me. And I won’t be able to call you in the middle of the night whenever I want to. Right?”

“You can always call during the day.”

“Daytime’s no good. You don’t understand anything, do you?”

“Neither do you,” I protested. “Most people work when the sun’s up and turn out the light at night and go to sleep.” But I might as well have been reciting some pastoral poems to myself in the middle of a pumpkin patch.

“There was this article in the paper the other day,” she continued, completely oblivious. “It said that lesbians are born that way; there’s a tiny bone in the inner ear that’s completely different from other women’s and that makes all the difference. Some small bone with a complicated name. So being a lesbian isn’t acquired; it’s genetic. An American doctor discovered this. I have no idea why he was doing that kind of research, but ever since I read about it I can’t get the idea out of my mind of this little good-for-nothing bone inside my ear, wondering what shape my own little bone is.”

I had no idea what to say. A silence descended on us as sudden as the instant fresh oil is poured into a large frying pan.

“So you’re sure what you feel for Miu is sexual desire?” I asked.

“A hundred per cent sure,” Sumire said. “When I’m with her that bone in my ear starts ringing. Like delicate seashell wind chimes. And I want her to hold me, let everything take its course. If that isn’t sexual desire, what’s flowing in my veins must be tomato juice.”

“Hmm,” I said. What could I possibly say to that?

“It explains everything. Why I don’t want to have sex with any men. Why I don’t feel anything. Why I’ve always thought I’m different from other people.”

“Mind if I give you my pennyworth here?” I asked.

“Okay.”

“Any explanation or logic that explains everything so easily has a hidden trap in it. I’m speaking from experience. Somebody once said if it’s something a single book can explain, it’s not worth having explained. What I mean is don’t leap to any conclusions.”

“I’ll remember that,” Sumire said. And the call ended, somewhat abruptly.

I pictured her hanging up the receiver, walking out of the telephone box. By my clock it was 3.30. I went to the kitchen, drank a glass of water, snuggled back in bed, and dosed my eyes. But sleep wouldn’t come. I drew the curtain aside, and there was the moon, floating in the sky like some pale, clever orphan. I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep. I brewed a fresh pot of coffee, pulled a chair over next to the window, and sat there, munching on some cheese and crackers. I sat, reading, waiting for the dawn.