Late that afternoon I called the coffee shop and invited her to dinner.
“Is your ear better now?” she asked.
“No problem now, thanks to you.”
“I hope no more bugs bite you,” she said.
“If you don’t mind, could I see you later today?”
“Sure. I have nothing going on. Why don’t you come to the shop after I close up, whenever works.”
I hung up, checked what I had in the fridge, and ran through a menu of what I could make. Nothing fancy, by the looks of the ingredients I had, but I could throw together an impromptu dinner. I could make some clam sauce, and I had a chilled bottle of Chablis in the fridge.
As, one by one, I mentally listed the details and steps of a menu, my mind began to calm down. Being occupied with practical issues like this helped me to forget any other problems. Like when I remembered the title of that Gerry Mulligan tune.
Just before evening, when I saw Mrs. Soeda, she told me that both of Yellow Submarine Boy’s brothers planned to return to Tokyo tomorrow.
“They’re quite discouraged to not have found any clues about M**’s whereabouts. But they have work and studies and can’t stay here forever.”
“I feel sorry for them, but I guess it can’t be helped,” I said. “Are there any leads in the police search?”
Mrs. Soeda shook her head. “I’m not saying the police here are incompetent, but neither can you say they’ve been much help. This is a small town, without many people coming and going, and the only crimes they deal with are domestic disturbances and traffic accidents. They’re understaffed, too, and don’t really know what to do.”
“A thought occurred to me,” I said. “Say the boy really did run away somewhere far away, no matter where he went, I think he’d wear that Yellow Submarine parka. It’s like a second skin for him. I can’t see him leaving it behind.”
“I feel the same. If he did go far away, he’d wear that parka. It makes him feel safe.”
“But the parka was left behind.”
“Yes, that’s what his mother said, that the parka was left behind. That sort of bothered me, so I asked her a number of times to make sure, and she insisted that he didn’t wear it.”
After I finished my work at the library and arrived at the coffee shop, it was just after six thirty. The long winter was finally drawing to a close, the sun clearly setting later than before, the cold a degree less biting. Clumps of snow along the road had shrunk in the noontime sunlight, and the runoff from this had made the water level rise in the river.
A Closed sign hung on the glass door of the coffee shop, and the blinds were lowered. I pushed open the door and went inside. She was alone on a stool at the counter, reading a book. Not a paperback but a thick hardcover book. She shut the book, turned, and smiled at me. The bookmark showed that she’d nearly finished.
“What are you reading?” I asked as I shrugged off my duffel coat and hung it on the coatrack.
“Love in the Time of Cholera,” she said.
“You like García Márquez?”
“I think so. I’ve read most of his books, but I especially like this one. This is the second time I’ve read it. What about you?”
“I read it a long time ago. When it first came out,” I said.
“I like this particular passage,” she said, opening the book at her bookmark and reading it aloud.
Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza remained on the bridge until it was time for lunch. It was served a short while after they passed the town of Calamar on the opposite shore, which just a few years before had celebrated a perpetual fiesta and now was a ruined port with deserted streets. The only creature they saw from the boat was a woman dressed in white, signaling to them with a handkerchief. Fermina Daza could not understand why she was not picked up when she seemed so distressed, but the Captain explained that she was the ghost of a drowned woman whose deceptive signals were intended to lure ships off course into the dangerous whirlpools along the other bank. They passed so close that Fermina Daza saw her in sharp detail in the sunlight, and she had no doubt that she did not exist, but her face seemed familiar.
“In his stories the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, are all mixed together in one,” she said. “Like that’s an entirely ordinary, everyday thing.”
“People often call that magical realism,” I said.
“True. But I think that although that way of telling stories might fit the critical criteria of magical realism, for García Márquez himself it’s just ordinary realism. In the world he inhabits the real and the unreal coexist and he just describes those scenes the way he sees them.”
I sat down on the stool beside her and said, “So you’re saying that in the world he inhabits, the real and the unreal are equivalent and that García Márquez is simply recording that.”
“Yes, I think that might be the case. And that’s what I like about his novels.”
While working, she always had her hair tied back, but now had let her hair down, and it fell straight down to her shoulders. When she brushed back her hair, I caught a glimpse of small silver piercings in her ears. She never wore them while working. Her earlobes were, as she said, small and hard-looking.
Talking about García Márquez’s novels made me think of Mr. Koyasu. If she had met him, I think she might have simply accepted the fact that he was already dead. Unconnected with magical realism or postmodernism or anything.
“You like to read, don’t you,” I asked.
“I’ve read a lot since I was young. Work keeps me busy now so I can’t read much, but I get a bit of reading in when I can. After I came here, I had no one I could talk to about the books I read, which made me sad.”
“I could be someone you talk to, I think.”
She smiled. “Well, you are a head librarian, after all.”
“How about your daily routine—the one cigarette and the glass of single malt?” I asked.
“I’ve already smoked the cigarette. Haven’t got to the whiskey yet, though. I was waiting until you got here.”
“Shall we go to my place and have dinner? I can whip up something simple.”
She tilted her head a fraction, eyes narrowed as she considered this. “If you don’t mind, could we order in pizza instead, and have beer? I’m in the mood for that, somehow.”
“Sure. Pizza sounds good.”
“Margherita’s okay?”
“Whatever you feel like having.”
She punched in a number on her speed dial and ordered the pizza, like she’d done it before. She added three types of mushrooms as a topping.
“It’ll be here in a half hour,” she said, glancing at the clock on the wall.
During the thirty minutes we waited for the pizza, we sat beside each other at the counter and talked about books we’d read recently. All the while sipping on single malt.
“Would you like to see my room?” she asked after we’d finished the pizza.
“The apartment upstairs?”
“Yeah, it’s small, with a low ceiling and cheap furniture, a totally nothing room, but it works for me. If you don’t mind going.”
“I’d love to,” I said.
She cleared away the pizza box and plates and switched off the lights in the shop. She led the way up a narrow staircase beyond the kitchen. The room upstairs wasn’t as terrible as she’d suggested. It was cramped, with low ceilings, but felt like a clean, neat attic room. There was a sofa bed (a sofa at this point), compact electric cooking equipment, a table and chair by the window as a workspace, with a laptop computer on the desk. A chest of drawers and a closet, books in a small bookcase. No TV or radio as far as I could see. The bathroom was the size of a large phone booth, but you could manage to take a shower there (moving around would take some doing, however).
“Most of the furniture was already here. Things the previous tenant had. The only thing I bought new was bedding, so I could basically start living here without bringing anything with me, which I was grateful for. Laundry and cooking I can do downstairs, and when I want to have a nice soak, there’s a public hot springs nearby. The quality of life could be improved, of course, but I can’t really complain.”
“And you’re close to work, that’s for sure.”
“It is convenient, I’ll give it that. I can buy things online, most of the things I need for the shop are delivered, and anything else I need I can pick up at the neighborhood stores, so there’s little need to go out. But living like this for so long makes me remember The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. The room she hid out in in Amsterdam. With low ceilings and tiny windows…”
“But you’re not being pursued by anyone, and don’t need to stay out of sight. You just need to go ahead and live the life you’ve chosen.”
“But living in such a tiny place, going back and forth from the first to the second floor, I get that feeling sometimes. An obsession with being chased, maybe, the feeling that someone, or something, is doggedly after me and I’m kind of in imminent danger and have to hide.”
She took two chilled cans of beer from the fridge and poured them out for us. We sat next to each other on the sofa, drinking beer. Not the most comfortable sofa, but I’d seen lots worse.
“It’d be nice if I had music here, but I don’t,” she said.
“No worries. I like the quiet,” I said.
Holding her and kissing her just happened naturally. She didn’t resist—in fact, she leaned closer to me. But she didn’t want to take it a step further, and I knew that. I just held her, and we kissed, that’s all. It’d been ages since I’d kissed anyone. Her lips were soft and warm, and slightly moist. It’d been a long time since I’d felt that—how warm a body can be and how that warmth can be felt by another.
We stayed that way for a long while, arms around each other. Each lost in our own thoughts, I imagine. I stroked her back with my palm, and she stroked mine with hers.
But as we did, I couldn’t help noticing something. Her entire slim body seemed to be tightly bound up with something. The twin peaks on her chest in particular were carefully guarded by some kind of rounded, artificial material. This dome-like material wasn’t metal, but a little too hard to be called clothes. Resilient, but plenty strong enough to repel anyone. I went ahead and asked, “Why does your body feel like this? It’s like you’re wearing a bodysuit of armor.”
She laughed and said, “It’s a special undergarment that fits tightly against my body.”
“I don’t exactly get it, but isn’t it sort of uncomfortable?”
“It can be uncomfortable, but my body’s mostly used to it, so maybe I don’t really feel it anymore.”
“So you always wear this bodysuit underneath? This special undergarment?”
“Yes, this all-in-one underwear. I do take it off when I want to relax and when I go to bed, but when I’m with anyone else, I always wear it.”
“But you’re quite slim, with such a nice figure. You don’t need to force yourself to wear something that tight.”
“Maybe not. We’re not in Scarlett O’Hara’s time. But wearing it makes me feel at ease. Like I’m completely protected. Safeguarded.”
“Safeguarded from…me, for instance?”
She laughed. “Let me put it this way—I’m not that worried about you. I don’t think you’d force anything on another person. What I’m protecting myself from is something more generic.”
“More generic?”
“More hypothetical.”
“Hypothetical Things vs. Special Underwear.”
She laughed and shrugged in my arms.
“So what you’re saying, to put it plainly, is that taking it off isn’t easy?” I asked.
“No one’s actually tried it, but I imagine it would be complicated.”
“Wearing your special armor, you’re completely protected from all things hypothetical.”
“There you go.”
Silence continued for a while, and my mind flicked backward, on its own, to when I was seventeen. Like a castaway carried along by a strong tide. Inside my mind, the scene around me switched tracks.
I started thinking about your body. About the swell of your breasts, about what lay underneath your skirt. Imagining what was there.
But as I was imagining all this I suddenly realized a part of my body was totally stiff. Like some indecent marble ornament. Inside my tight jeans my erect penis was terribly uncomfortable. If it didn’t simmer down, I doubted I could stand up.
But when it gets that hard, it doesn’t go right back down, as much as I try. Like a big jumpy dog that never listens, ignoring the leash you’re tugging on with all your might.
“What are you thinking about?” she whispered in my ear.
My consciousness was pulled back to the present. The second floor of the coffee shop, her cozy little dwelling. Us hugging on the sofa. Her body tightly constricted by her underwear, diligently defending her against all things hypothetical.
“I’m sorry I’m so useless,” she said. “I really like you and want to help you if I can. I mean it. But I just can’t bring myself to do so.”
I pondered this in the ensuing silence. And I tried verifying the thought that came to me.
“You don’t mind if I wait?” I asked.
“By waiting…you mean waiting until I feel more proactive about that part of life?”
“It doesn’t have to be proactive.”
“You mean feeling more receptive to it?”
I nodded. She gave that proposal some serious thought. Then she looked up and said, “I’m very happy you’d say that, but it might take a long time. Whether proactive or receptive, I might never feel that way again. There are a few issues I have to work through first.”
“I’m used to waiting.”
She thought about this again.
“I wonder if I’m worth waiting for.”
“That remains to be seen,” I said. “But there’s a certain value in wanting to wait, even if it takes time.”
She said nothing and pressed her lips against mine. Her lips were warm and soft and, unlike the rest of her body, were open to me.
As I walked home, I thought about the feel of the warm, soft parts of her, and the hard, protected parts. The moon was beautiful that night, and I was still a bit tipsy from the whiskey and beer.
“I’m used to waiting,” I’d told her. But was I, really? My breath hung there in the air like a white, hard question mark.
Was I used to waiting, or was it that I just wasn’t given an alternative?
And what is it I have been waiting for all this time? Did I really grasp what it was I was waiting for? Was I simply patiently waiting for it to become clear what I was waiting for? Like a series of nested wooden boxes, a smaller box inside a larger one, an endless succession of exquisitely crafted boxes one after the other. The boxes grew progressively smaller—as did what lay at the center of it all. In my forty-some years, was this the true state of affairs of my life until now? What was the starting point, and where did the destination lie—if indeed there was one? The more I thought about it, the less sure I was. At a loss was more the right expression. The crisply clear, cold moonlight illuminated the surface of the river, gurgling along with all the water from the melted snow in it. There were all kinds of water in the world. And they all flowed from high to low. A self-evident, unhesitant fact of life.
Maybe I’d been waiting for her.
The thought suddenly struck me. Waiting for this thirtysomething woman who ran a nameless coffee shop all on her own, wrapped up tightly in her special protective bodysuit, defending herself from all the hypothetical things (presumably) lying in wait around her, this woman who was unable to respond to any sexual acts.
I liked her very much, and I knew she liked me. Of that there was no doubt. In this small town surrounded by mountains we were (probably) both seeking each other. Yet something kept us apart—something impenetrable, something like, for instance, a high brick wall.
Had I been waiting until now for her to appear? Was this the new wooden box I’d been given?
My feelings for her were not the same as the ones I had at seventeen for that girl. That was clear. Those overwhelmingly powerful feelings, a laser-like focus on one object, etching it into me, would never return (and even if they did, I doubt I could handle the intensity). The feelings I had for the coffee shop woman were more diffuse, more sensible, wrapped in soft clothing, restrained by a certain wisdom and experience. Something to be grasped over a longer time frame.
And another important fact was this—I was not seeking all of her. Her entire being wouldn’t fit, perhaps, in the small box I possessed now. I was no longer a seventeen-year-old boy. Back then, I had all the time in the world. But not now. The time I have now, and the ways I can use it, have become so limited. What I sought now was the gentle warmth that lay inside, beneath her defensive wall. And the rhythmic beat of the heart that lay pulsing beneath.
At this point was I asking for too little? Or too much?
A nostalgia for Mr. Koyasu came over me. If he were here now, there was so much I would tell him, so much advice I could seek. And I’m sure he’d give me valuable suggestions. The sort of mysterious, ambiguous advice befitting a bodyless soul. And like a gaunt dog chewing on a bone, I would savor that advice for a long time.
I realized I had only known Mr. Koyasu as a dead person. Yet he was so full of life, and I had only vivid, vibrant memories of his presence, his personality. I wondered how he was doing. Did he still exist somewhere—where, I couldn’t even imagine—or had he returned to nothingness?
Fermina Daza could not understand why she was not picked up when she seemed so distressed, but the Captain explained that she was the ghost of a drowned woman whose deceptive signals were intended to lure ships off course into the dangerous whirlpools along the other bank.
García Márquez, a Colombian novelist who had no need of the distinction between the living and the dead.
What is real, and what is not? In this world is there really something like a wall separating reality from the unreal?
I think there might be. No, not might—there is one. But it’s an entirely uncertain wall. Depending on circumstances and the person, its texture, its shape transforms. Like some living being.