One day a woman from my animal behavior class and I went to a park and soon fell in love. She wasn’t tall in the mathematical sense but appeared so because her neck was long, her hands large. Miko was born in Tokyo but grew up in Ohio, figure skating competitively until she discovered the pleasures of poli-sci. Early on I told her I couldn’t skate, and she rubbed my nose and whispered a tale in Japanese that I took to mean: Even if you had no legs, I’d love you.
We became a couple who liked to take long rides in the country. Sometimes we left school early and drove winding roads into terrain pulverized by Ice Age glaciers. The prairies were wide, the sky above stretching all ways as we cuddled and cooed in a small forest abutting a farmer’s field. As we held hands, we pinched our noses to block the cow dung, and each time we found a birch tree we kissed. We were at ease and so we grew.
Weeks on, though, clouds of moodiness would sometimes envelop me, especially when we went into a certain café and there was no place to sit. Standing, my thighs would shake. It didn’t matter that another less populated café stood two blocks away; it was that one or nothing. In those moments, caught in the entry, unmoored, Miko would try to rub my arm or back but I would twist away, and this only made me feel worse because then we didn’t have a place to sit and I didn’t have her touch. If I didn’t have one, I couldn’t have the other. I felt scared and a little lonely. I thought if I could just explain my state of mind to Miko during these curious, cruel moments she might forgive me and never leave.
I saw the situation as me being in debt to Miko. Though she probably would’ve understood an English explanation well enough, I decided to fashion one in Japanese. The easier I made it for her and the harder I made it for myself, the better I would feel—though a quarrelsome part of me believed by going to such trouble, I’d earned the right to act withdrawn in the future.
I visited the office of Japanese studies and soon met an American-born professor. I don’t remember how I found out Professor Crestor liked pound cake, but I considered the dessert a gift for helping me construct the letter of explanation to Miko. A predilection for pound cake wasn’t on her CV on the department’s page or on her internet dating profile—a sweet, fatty, filling thing just seemed the best way to go.
Over the course of a few weeks we put together a fifteen-thousand-word letter of contrition. As I read my sorrowful lines out loud in English, Professor Crestor, short with a slanty, unsmiling mouth, would nibble on the pound cake and fidget with the CD player in her office. She preferred piano music, but only liked certain pieces on her many piano music CDs, often having to eject the CD after only one or two pieces played from a possible fifteen.
We could have finished the document sooner, but Professor Crestor wanted to tell me about her ex-husband and how brilliant he was. Apparently he’d been an astronaut, but one who never made it out of the control center. I asked how he could have been considered an astronaut if he never went into space, but she ignored this and told me how in the fall she’d travel to Germany and present a paper on the role of the tea ceremony in Japanese culture and how she used to love Berlin more than she did now, which reminded her how much more she also used to love Tokyo. Where did they go? she asked, and answered herself, I can’t say, as she stared at the dark books lining her office.
Luckily Professor Crestor was unlike Miko and not very attracted to or interested in me. If they were similar she might have tried to interject some secret commentary into the letter warning Miko about how I shouldn’t be trusted, especially since I bought the cheapest pound cake in town. Where Miko was calm and graceful, Professor Crestor was loud and awkward. Flitting about her office, she often tripped on her Persian rug and swore in both English and Japanese, sometimes German. Whereas Miko never cried, Professor Crestor would sob as she composed the symbols of my sentiments. When I first thought it was the sad piano music that made her break, and attempted to power off the CD player, she swatted my hand and told me the sad piano music kept her from crying more. I’ve had a different life, she said, while lighting a cigarette with pale, shaky hands. But I still like to help people. I still like to see others succeed, though it’s funny that you love a Japanese woman yet won’t attempt to learn her language—but that’s me. Compared to you I’m a different person. I used to be thinner. Teachers sit many hours of the day.
My few weeks with Professor Crestor made me cherish Miko more than ever. After sharing space for more tortuous hours, I walked through the university cemetery, my eyes leaking. How could I have treated my lovely Miko like I had when there were Professor Crestors in the world? And what if I became a male version of Professor Crestor? Had I already? I knelt down by a Dwight Vogel who died in 1965. It could have been anyone down there but I felt close to Dwight in a way I couldn’t explain. He was different from Professor Crestor, even from Miko. He didn’t judge, he didn’t say anything—just remained.
On the sly I began to compose a companion document in English for Miko. It described Professor Crestor and all her foibles and how my exposure to her had altered the light in my eyes. I told of wicked conversations that made my stomach burn. I detailed the way she mashed her cigarettes into a white marble ashtray, twisting and pressing with guttural moans until the butts were shredded fuzz, while she argued with me about the English meaning of forgiveness versus the Japanese.
I had kept what I did every Wednesday a two-hour secret because to talk of Professor Crestor without the original letter she authored might have angered Miko, though in five months I’d only seen Miko mildly upset once and only because I insisted she get drunk. Though slight, Miko could drink five bottles of sake and not lose a step. Therefore, it cost around $150 to get us both blitzed at a Japanese restaurant. Though I paid the bill she was perturbed and started kicking my shins. When she realized what she was doing she shrieked and stepped onto the first city bus she saw to disappear for the night.
The day we finished composing the letter, Professor Crestor invited me to her house for dinner. In trepidation, I countered with the idea of a Saturday lunch and she grudgingly agreed. She still wanted wine and told me which store to visit as well as the exact wine she wanted. I went to the store and bought the wine, but I couldn’t enter that woman’s house. I invited Miko over to my apartment and we drank a few glasses before I gave her the two letters. I was going to have her read the Japanese one first but at the last moment pulled it away and insisted she set her soul on mine.
Miko brightened when I handed her this letter and I thought for a moment the other might not be necessary. But by describing Professor Crestor pityingly, did I identify with her? Were Professor Crestor and I so much alike? Maybe we had sprung from the same emotional tree, while people like Miko were anchored higher, stronger in spirit, unbothered if the sun didn’t come out for a week.
We sat on a couch by the window. I wanted to touch Miko and for her to touch me. We drank Professor Crestor’s wine instead. She kept watch out the window, finding or faulting some part of the landscape. Not touch—my mind only wanted to know hers. All these thoughts curled into confusion, and I took the almost empty wine bottle and stowed it behind the couch. How could I give or give up and relax? With her in no hurry to read my letter, I offered the other and she read a paragraph or so before her head sunk.
I accepted this as sadness, proof I would soon lose my most precious human contact. But Miko, all watery eyes, refused my reading of her. She told me she knew I was sorry and the letter as a gesture was important, but not its contents.
I opened my lips to again voice my regrets, but she covered me with her small hand and asked if I was ready.