I REMAINED DOGGEDLY YOUNG for half of my life. And the next day, I realized I was growing old. I think he showed up right around then. Maybe that’s why everything happened so fast. We were both starting to appreciate what time does to you if you wait too long.
Outlandish as it may seem, we met at a funeral at Green-Wood Cemetery. There was the scent of rain, but it wasn’t raining. The deceased, if I remember correctly, worked at the Japanese embassy’s press office. I assume we both knew him professionally. I was listening attentively to people giving their condolences. I focused on each speaker as though I were about to interview them. From those who spoke emphatically, as if they were afraid to appear vulnerable, to those who broke down without shame, who in my view were the wisest.
I felt out of context, or maybe the complete opposite. After all, in a cemetery you are never more in context. So I wandered off to take a breather. I started to think of all the stuff you usually think about when you see a coffin. Work nonsense, a friend’s birthday, buying a new pair of shoes, the upcoming election, making an appointment with the hairdresser, your niece’s dress. Anything that takes you away from there. I was jittery the way you get at funerals. That urge to flee and change your life, just when you feel you’ve understood something.
That’s when I bumped into Yoshie. We looked at each other and smiled. I’m not sure if we started walking together then, or if we had already been strolling side by side. We moved away from the mourners, supposedly to smoke a cigarette. And I don’t quite know how, but almost without exchanging a word, we started to fool around.
When we pulled apart to head back to the ceremony, he asked me my name. He repeated it several times, Lorrie, Lorrie (or rather, Lohie, Lohie), trying to hear it properly or to savor it.
If I’m being honest, it wasn’t that I was especially attracted to him, more like my body was telling me what to do. I never admitted this to Yoshie, but in that moment, I suspect that I’d have done the same with almost any decent-looking guy who showed an interest in me. I imagine it was a sort of involuntary response. A physical protest at my surroundings. As a matter of fact, this had happened to me before. I don’t mean letting the first man who came along grope me. I just mean feeling horny when I was at a cemetery.
He’d been living in New York a few years. With the odd exception, he spoke decent English. I find that speaking any language other than your own is admirable. Yoshie was prone to exhibiting his linguistic efforts as those of us who aren’t bilingual tend to do. He was still able to marvel at everything he heard. In the middle of a conversation, for no apparent reason, he could look astonished or happy, and you knew it wasn’t because of what you were saying, but because he’d become suddenly aware of the language he was communicating in.
He had trouble tolerating irony, and thanks to his difficulties, I realized that in English, we overuse it. We really do use it for everything, be it diplomacy, euphemism, or an insult. He attributed this to America being a modern empire, an expert on negotiation. I replied that Henry James was the one to blame.
Yoshie struggled with phrasal verbs, which he would mix up in the funniest ways. He would confuse switch on with turn on, run out with run over, and so forth. These misunderstandings didn’t so much get in the way of our communication as feed my imagination. For example, according to him we lived in New Oak. I loved the idea of us being forest dwellers. Other good ones were the way he pronounced peace as piss or Coke as cock. Slipups like these were liable to turn any innocent topic into a risqué conversation.
I remember one evening we were at a movie theater on the Upper West Side, the Thalia. No, the New Yorker. With the sloping floor and the legendary murals, it was as quaintly pretentious as we were. He asked the vendor for soft porn instead of pop corn. The girl looked at us, bemused. But he kept insisting we were both desperate for soft porn. I’m sorry, sir, stammered the girl, we don’t sell anything like that. Of course you do! Yoshie replied angrily. Why do you think all these people came here?
But what confused him most was intonation. In a musical sense, he never stopped sounding foreign. I found that sexy. He maintained that in English we count and even narrate in an interrogative tone. As if to make sure the other person is still listening. Yoshie attributed this to a combination of pedantry and insecurity specific to the English-speaking world. He had theories about everything. Especially things he knew nothing about.
He wasn’t entirely off base about the insecurity, though. I had this face, few curves, and more than a few misgivings about my body. I could go a whole day without eating and then scarf down half a dozen Milky Ways. As soon as I’d finished chewing them, I’d go brush my teeth. I did it quickly and guiltily, hurting my gums. Like I wanted to erase not only any traces of food, but also the memory of having eaten. I was skinnier than I am now. I liked to take up very little space when I spoke. I was under the impression that being skinny and being smart were related.
I’m afraid that when we first met, I was still way too scared of getting old. Obsessed with staying young, just as I was ceasing to be that. It’s a trap we women fall into the minute we let down our guard, however much we think we’re feminists. I laugh now when I remember what I used to consider old.
We’ve become both more understanding and more hypocritical on the subject of age. There’s no such thing as an old woman nowadays. No one would dare call us that in public. We’re all young seniors or happily mature, about to conquer our freedom. Go fuck yourself, honey. We’re old. Period. And proud of it. Well, not entirely. I’d love to be, I don’t know, not twenty or anything. That’d be awful. Or even thirty. But fortysomething or fifty? Definitely. If someone gave me the option, I wouldn’t choose to start over, I’d just ask for a second adulthood. God, I’d enjoy it so much better this time around.
Of all the extensive and pathetic comments men permit themselves to make about women’s bodies, one I particularly despise is how good we look for our age. Not just because no one says this to a man, or even because, at this point, it’s the only flattery I get. But because it doesn’t make any sense. Do only women of my generation have an age? Don’t young women also have a very specific one that determines what we think about their appearance? Aren’t they better or worse for their age? Or are they a fucking absolute, until suddenly, they get old like us?
My idea of old age is different. I just don’t want to depend on anyone to buy food or go to the bathroom. As long as I’m still able to do those things, personally I couldn’t give a shit how old I am. Beyond that, I don’t know. If things get unpleasant, one has other options. I prefer not to think about that too much. In the meantime, I have my adorable nieces and nephews who visit and make a fuss over me. I try not to let them see how excited I am when they come. Otherwise, they wouldn’t enjoy coming here so much. They have enough on their plate with poor Ralph.
My brother, Ralph, and I grew up in Washington Heights, like most of the Solomon family. My parents were liberal about everything unimportant, conservative about the important things, and Jewish very much in their own way. I dreamed of going to Hunter College, like my radical friends who didn’t want to stay virgins. I also had the occasional fantasy about studying physics at Swarthmore.
Unfortunately, my parents listened to Grandpa Usher, who had been the shammes at a synagogue before I was born. Invariably, he ended each conversation on the matter by removing his pipe from his cavernous mouth and declaring: When you’re ready to have a serious conversation, my dear, we’ll pick up where we left off. And so they got me a scholarship to a liberal arts program at Barnard College instead. Which cost more than Hunter or Swarthmore and forbade skirts more than two inches above our salacious knees.
After a whole semester of chaste behavior, during which I was permitted to attend a few classes at Columbia, I refused to follow my family’s plan for me. Thanks to a couple of good dramatic scenes, including threats of suicide I had no intention of carrying out, I finally got my way. And that’s how I ended up studying journalism at NYU, which had just gone completely coed. Those years were incredibly formative, as it were, with regard to my extracurricular education.
After graduating, I spent some time at Stinson Beach and Topanga Canyon, California. There I read about Buddhism and did some other things I’d rather not get into. I soon tired of this and went back to New York, where I applied for every job available. I worked for a variety of publications, the most sophisticated of which was a weekly food-industry magazine. My task was to appraise canned products. The following year I landed my first contract with a tabloid, which, out of professional pride, I will permit myself not to name.
As much as I despised that rag, it enabled me to earn a living and gain my freedom at last. Working there was my real training. I learned to pursue a story, whatever it might be. To make it sound more urgent, important, and controversial than it actually was. To write with one eye on the facts and the other on the readers. To produce open-ended, structurally flexible copy, in case anything changed at the last minute (and it always did). It was a lesson in raw journalism.
What most intrigued me was how willing the victims of those dramas, or their relatives, seemed to be interviewed. I never quite figured out why. Did we pressure them too much? Did they need some sort of therapy? Had they spent their whole lives feeling like no one cared about them? Or were they simply more shameless than I’d imagined?
I joined the Liberty Chronicle sometime after that. I had to work my way up the ladder, starting as the girl who made coffee, then replacement typist, then proofreader, accidentally. With a bit of luck and patience, I finally joined the culture beat. It was my second choice after politics—the Chronicle’s forte, and probably the only reason people bought our newspaper. I instantly loved the job. It seemed to me ideal, a way to write without writing. To take part in a life of culture without the absurd pretense of being a creator.
That paper spoke of a different world from the one we live in today. As ever, dissidents were in the minority. But here’s the difference, it was a minority that truly believed in the possibility of challenging the system. It believed that, however fucked-up things were, they could change. My nieces and nephews accuse me of being a pessimist. They insist that rebellion still happens, just not on the streets. When I ask their kids where the young radicals are nowadays, all they talk about is social media.
How the hell can they expect so much from the tech industry? Don’t they realize it’s in the hands of Big Business? Of course, they reply, the same way newspapers like yours were owned by large publishing companies.
The newsroom at the Chronicle was like a political convention with typewriters. There were Democrats, Socialists, Anarchists, Social Democrats, loyal and not-so-loyal Communists, moderate liberals, pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet Marxists, Black Panther sympathizers (my doing!), as well as the odd Maoist. And among all those men who confused revolution with testosterone, an increasing number of women. Two or three were connected to militant feminist groups. To be honest, I was never that radical. I was just happy if my male colleagues didn’t comment on my legs during meetings.
In its early days, before I joined the newspaper, people like the economist Paul Sweezy used to contribute. The eternal candidate Norman Thomas. Upton Sinclair, James Baldwin, and other authors. The son of Ring Lardner, who was one of the office’s heroes. Activists like Ella Winter, Paul Robeson, and Bayard Rustin. Even the then-promising novelist Norman Mailer, who, against all evidence, was also young once.
For my part, I did everything I could to meet my favorite authors in person. I got to interview Susan Sontag, who showed more interest in my hair than in my novice questions. Robin Morgan, one of the few autographs I’ve ever asked for. Kurt Vonnegut, who made it a condition that we talk in bare feet. And Mary McCarthy, who cooked me a meal and ended up getting me drunk.
I remember we managed to publish two long interviews with Lennon (in particular about issues like the arrest of John Sinclair) and Bowie (about sex, drugs, and sex). Sadly, I didn’t get either of those assignments, even though I begged my boss. They were given to some guy who’d worked longer on the beat. That, and he had a big swinging dick.
The Chronicle was valued for its coverage of international affairs and for our caustic reporting on the cultural scene. The idea was to bring to the mass media the brazen style of The East Village Other. Or, to a lesser extent, Rat, which I read with a mixture of admiration and frustration at what was so obviously porn for straight men. That is, until a bunch of female workers mutinied and took the office by storm.
In national news, our focus was on the civil rights movement. We stood out because we went for what nowadays is called independent journalism. Which just means that we had more ideas than money. In addition to Vietnam (which, at the time, was the subtext of virtually everything we said, wrote, or thought), we opposed nuclear testing, much to Yoshie’s pleasant surprise.
We also appeared to side with various anticolonial movements in Asia and Africa, though I’m not sure how deep our understanding was. We had a few veteran correspondents out there, who accepted less pay because no one else would publish their lengthy articles.
As I was promoted within the paper, I witnessed the rise of the student movements, which I would have loved to have been part of during my time in college. These activists were attempting to construct a political space outside of the two-party system and the style of the old left. They believed more in taking to the streets than in institutions. I covered some of the cultural events they organized. My bosses thought this was important. They saw it as a way of converting the new generations into future readers of our paper.
That made me feel vaguely guilty, as if somehow I was taking advantage of them. Well, I probably was. And I should add that none of these scruples prevented me from continuing to do so.
When the next generation of female journalists came along, I noticed they no longer believed in peaceful feminism, or in the meritocracy. They were basically fed up with all that, as well as with those nice guys (our lovers, boyfriends, brothers) who claimed to support women’s lib while continuing to objectify us.
Supposedly my job was to show these women the ropes, but in fact, I was the one learning from them. The paper soon started to publish occasional articles about the harassment of women in the workplace. We were proud when they caused quite the stir. Which was interesting, because at the Chronicle we’d had cases similar to the ones we were denouncing.
By then I had my independence and a chaotic lifestyle, which aroused a rather twisted interest in some men. They seemed to want to bring order into my life. When they discovered that I actually liked my chaos, they fled. My relationships were usually short-lived. That is, until I met Yoshie. I was surprised that I got along so well with a businessman, he wasn’t really my type. Maybe that’s why it worked. I had to reexamine the idea I had of myself. People like me (meaning those who have no money) were a great relief to him. He said we were the only ones who didn’t try to talk business with him.
I’ve always been aware of an obvious truth, the one behind the lie. The myth that love has anything to do with fate. Couples are the product of chance. The man with whom you end up raising a family, buying a house, and celebrating your birthday isn’t someone you choose after a careful casting session. Most of the time he’s simply the guy who happens to be around, or who shows up when you’re thirtysomething and want some emotional stability.
A lot of women in my generation were convinced of the need to be unfaithful from time to time. That this was a perfectly reasonable way of being sure that we’d truly chosen our partner. That we weren’t just staying with them out of fear or repression, but because we really wanted to. If that was the case, then so much the better for us. And if not, it was high time we realized it. That was our way of thinking. I’m sure we had fun. And sadly, some of us ended up alone.
Generally speaking, Yoshie was fairly well adapted to Western ways. After all, he’d lived in Europe. He’d had a relationship with a girl there, at an age when nothing was really serious and everything seemed way too important. A girl, so he said, who never wanted to come visit him after he’d left France.
Every so often, he’d have these authoritarian outbursts that drove me nuts. If he tried to go samurai on me, I’d cut him off midsentence and walk out. For some reason, he found this fascinating. He didn’t quite believe I could do such a thing to him, and felt the need to have it repeated, just to make sure. I was flattered by his persistence. He must’ve been considerably attracted to me not to be put off by my behavior.
Around that time, I objected to marriage and the contract of ownership it entails. I thought women were more enslaved by the institution of family than by capitalism. Personally, I was always against procreation. I’ve had enough with my nieces and nephews (and their kids after that) to satisfy my meager maternal instincts. Being a working woman was complicated enough, I didn’t even want to think about how it would feel to be a working mother. My girlfriends who had kids insisted I was wrong. That your children actually set you free. From yourself, your ego, your phantoms. My phantoms are my children, I’d tell them. I’ve been nurturing them my whole life.
Yoshie and I agreed on that point. His experiences seemed to have shown him the recklessness (and also the terror) of continuing to populate the planet. As if he’d come to believe that every family, in one way or another, was close to extinction. All the same, I’d sometimes imagine myself with children. More precisely, with daughters. But I suspect this was just another form of narcissism. Those imaginary daughters were more or less myself as a child.
I didn’t want to have a baby, and Yoshie didn’t want to get me pregnant. This gave me a kind of sexual freedom. A freedom that in turn left me feeling guilty. It’s hard not to feel guilty about the things you don’t want. The tyranny of procreation reared its head on all sides. In my family. At work. In my social circle. In the media. In biological theory. In art. And, of course, in my head. That’s why, after I reached a certain age, being happy without kids started to feel like a silent act of rebellion. I don’t know, or I can’t remember, to what extent Yoshie shared these beliefs, but in any case, we seemed pretty aligned.
For example, we were both weary of couples who could talk only about their offspring. Of course, there are practical reasons for that. But often it was also a pretext for them to subject us to other forms of despotism. Moral pressure. Implying that we were missing out on something. Interestingly, this harassment never occurs the other way around. People without kids never try to impose their viewpoint on others, or to make themselves the example.
Before hooking up with Yoshie, I tended to separate love and sex. I thought that mixing them might prove fatal. This was an ideological position, a defense mechanism, or possibly both. I got the impression that some men (alas, the ones who were more fun in bed) derived some twisted pleasure from my emotional unavailability. They found rejection exciting. As if space alone enabled them to feel uninhibited, to go further. I think I’m right in saying that they found it easier to sleep with us without the burden of emotions or responsibilities, to immerse themselves without thinking. Or maybe some of them got their kicks from wounded pride, from the sexual rage they felt at not being so terribly special to us.
I’d had my share of flings, and at least where men were concerned, I preferred to get straight to the point. With the girls I was sometimes attracted to, the pace was different. Not that they were prudes or anything (they were usually more imaginative in bed), but with them, it was possible to mix affection and desire without getting hurt too badly. But I soon learned that with men, the important thing wasn’t really the sex itself so much as the possibility of it. You didn’t have to actually sleep with them to keep them interested. You just had to act like you might.
I still have a clear memory of our first date, which was at my place. It was a few days after our bizarre encounter at the funeral. We’d already met for coffee (coffee and a tea, actually) to make sure that neither of us was as crazy as our behavior at the cemetery might’ve suggested. We both seemed nervous. When you meet someone for the first time, the lack of expectations lowers inhibitions and allows you to act recklessly. After all, you can’t spoil an image you don’t yet have.
But this time, we sat on the couch not knowing what to say to each other, or how to initiate something that had previously required no preamble whatsoever. Yoshie stared at the ceiling and smiled at me out of the corner of his eye.
As usual, I turned to music for help. I made sure not to choose anything too sensual, which would only have made us feel more awkward. The last thing we needed was a voice from the record player egging us on, like: Go ahead, young ’uns, go on and touch each other. In the end, I put on a record by Phil Ochs, my idol at the time. His ironic, combative voice gave me the courage to laugh at how scared I was.
I guess some people might consider poor Ochs’s lyrics totally dated. Okay, how about this one? “I love Puerto Ricans and Negroes / as long as they don’t move next door…” Or this one? “Yes, it must have been another land / That couldn’t happen in the U.S.A.…” As for this last song, I prefer not to wonder whether he’s referring to our future. “Back to the good old days / God save the king!”
Despite everything, I still believe some things could never happen here. He could never win, I’m sure of that. We’d never allow it. We’d never choose a wall in this land of immigrants, or a guy who believes that climate change was invented by the Chinese, who surrounds himself with deniers, and is in the pay of energy lobbyists. A guy who claims you can learn all you need to know about missiles in an hour and a half, and who just can’t wait to have access to the nuclear button.
Anyway, while the music played, I went to get us some drinks. When I came back to the sofa, I found Yoshie with his shirt off. He looked very serious. And then I saw his scars.
Like most of my friends, I have more than a few operations under my belt. An appendectomy. A stent. That valve in my lung, after which my doctors insisted I lay off the cigarettes. Cervical cancer. Two abortions, neither of them with Yoshie. (He was convinced he was sterile, that his sperm had somehow been jinxed.) And that tumor in my breast, which changed how I perceive things, including pleasure. It no doubt affected my relationship with Yoshie.
That happened a couple of years before we met. I had to have an operation for mastitis. I’m aware that this is a common condition among women who breastfeed, but I’d gotten it without having kids. I can’t help seeing the irony in that. They put me on antibiotics, which didn’t work, and that’s how I developed a big lump. I went to see my gynecologist. I didn’t want to worry anyone, or create drama for no reason. Actually, I had a date with a very good-looking journalist later that evening. I decided to keep it, not knowing what was going to happen. I felt that to cancel it would be to assume the worst.
No sooner had the gynecologist examined me than she asked if there was anyone waiting for me outside. She made an urgent call to a colleague at a clinic and advised me to have a relative take me there. No way, I told her. I belong to one of those families that overreact to any sort of health scare by getting sicker than the patient. So I took a cab to the clinic instead. From there I made a brief call to my mother, as I did every day, without saying a word about the situation. I pretended to read while I waited. They performed a biopsy and it was painful. Then I left. I changed clothes, took another cab, stopped at a pharmacy to buy the drugs they’d prescribed. And then I went out to dinner with the good-looking journalist, who was not allowed to touch my left boob.
I spent the next week with my mind elsewhere as people were talking to me. Besides the terror, there was also bewilderment. I felt I was the victim, not of a health scare, but of a serious misunderstanding, and that I was living someone else’s life.
When they told me that it was only an infected mastitis with an abscess, and could be remedied with an easy operation, my relief was so overwhelming that I felt liberated from my own body. Now my body was more closely related to survival than to beauty. Or to the beauty of survival. The doctors warned me that my breast would suffer some damage from the operation. I replied that I earned my living with my brain, and then I signed the consent form.
They made three small incisions in the lower part of my left breast. As soon as it healed, I went to see a plastic surgeon. The solution he offered was to scrape out the entire breast and replace it with silicone. To add insult to injury, he recommended I have both my breasts done if I wanted them to be symmetrical. I wasn’t interested. Not if it meant removing healthy tissue to insert a block of garbage.
At first, the scars were quite obvious. Now they’re only really noticeable when I’m lying down. There’s a void, a void filled with meaning. No one has ever seemed to mind this asymmetry, but I realize I’m no oil painting. I guess my charms have aged better than my two tits. One and three-quarters tits, to be exact. Or maybe they liked my freakishness. Why not? Let’s call it my lefty charm.
The largest scar, at the base of my breast, has become the most important part of my body. Like that old Cohen song: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” The other day I read an article about Marilyn Monroe’s last photo shoot. The biggest diva of them all, and apparently even she had a scar on her belly from a gallbladder operation. So, even Marilyn had a gallbladder! The scar isn’t visible in those nude photos (which just goes to show, nude photos are never truly nude), and yet that was what distinguished her. Not her ass. Or her boobs, which were nothing special. But that incision. Her insignia.
That first evening together, when I came back to the sofa carrying our drinks, I found Yoshie with his shirt off and he showed me his scars. A fine mesh covering his forearms and back. They looked like inner branches, as if he were carrying a tree. Then I showed him mine. He touched them. Kissed them. Blessed them. We felt light, a little ugly, and very beautiful.
Later, in bed, when our breathing had calmed again, we examined the blemishes on our bodies. We gave each other a tour of all the parts of our bodies we were normally embarrassed about, and we recognized one another.
Yoshie looked shorter lying down than standing up. His upper and lower body weren’t quite in proportion. He had a different kind of harmony.
Another memory I have from that night is Yoshie learning to pronounce the word thigh, which he would confuse with tight. I joked that if he insisted on calling a thigh tight, then mine wasn’t a good example. He practiced the word, pressing his forefinger into my thigh. According to him, from that moment on he’d imagine my legs whenever he said it.
Our eyelids growing heavy, and our legs entwined, I had the feeling that the mattress was expanding. As if it were breathing along with us.
I never understood how, despite being a smoker like me, he had such a keen sense of smell. Yoshie smelled between the lines. He could deduce bodies from their clothes, fruits from their peels. I wonder if this was related to our shared obsession with supermarkets, especially at night. He was crazy about these stores and their contradictions of delicious and horrible smells, of filth and cleanliness.
My palate was less discerning but I found that combination of sordidness, desire, and capitalism to be deeply erotic. To see all of the things you could take home with you, devour, and introduce into your body. I’ve always suspected that in supermarkets, it’s not the products you’re paying for, but that orgy of possibilities, that lustful illusion of freedom. If it weren’t for that seductive fantasy, consumerism would be easy to resist.
We never did it in a supermarket. Our bashfulness got the better of us in the end. Instead, I had to be content with a few quick gropes between the aisles. I would clench my thighs until we got home, trying to hold on to that wonderful frisson. Some of it always got lost along the way. In the end, we couldn’t avoid feeling a little disappointed. That’s the second rule of consumerism.
Yoshie was intrigued by my habit of painting my nails after I masturbated. For me, both things are part of the same impulse. Touching oneself is the opposite of being dirty. It cleans you, reboots you. Pleasuring yourself gives you a shine.
Timid with strangers? Overly serious? Not at all. If anything, Yoshie was rather extroverted, which for some reason surprised me. Probably because of the stupid stereotypes we have about the Japanese. I can see how someone might misinterpret his initial silences. The truth was that he used this restraint to his advantage, winning the sympathy of people who were eventually amazed to discover his sociable side.
Part of his charm was that ability to make each of us believe that we’d managed to get close to someone so hopelessly shy, which also allowed him to get along with people he had little in common with. Including my brother, Ralph, who developed an inexplicable affection for him, considering how radically different they were. He had disliked all my previous boyfriends, which wasn’t so strange. I always dated guys who were the antithesis of my family.
Yoshie wasn’t reticent, he just had a delayed reaction. He always had a lot to say about things, though rarely while they were happening. He wasn’t being cautious, he was simply terrified of being wrong. He’d sooner keep quiet than make a mistake. Before he spoke, he wanted to be sure that his opinions would outshine yours. That way he wouldn’t waste time on unnecessary debates. This made him a skilled businessman. Meanwhile, as a journalist, heated debates were an occupational hazard for me.
He would alternate between lengthy periods of calm and sudden outbursts of rage. In that respect, we complemented each other. My moodiness was tempered by his typical serenity. On the other hand, when he did let off steam from time to time, he could do so without much opposition from me. My day was invariably punctuated with so many petty disputes that by the time I got home, I didn’t have the energy for any major arguments.
Best of all were his roars of laughter whenever we made up. There was something primitively sexual about his exuberance after a fight. I’ve always thought that the way we laugh reveals who we really are. We can put on a face, adopt a tone, control our gestures. But it’s very difficult to laugh insincerely. I’ve known laughs that are nervous like their owners. Tight-lipped laughs that conceal more than they show. Or shrill laughs desperate for attention. Some are strangely long-winded and don’t want to end, as if masking pain, while others grow gradually louder as they gain confidence. Some are a single burst that cleaves the air before snapping shut like a knife. Others sound rough, because they’ve been through a lot. None of these describe his laugh.
With other people, he hardly ever mentioned his native country. He had spent practically half his life abroad. I think it was a subject that was awkward for him to talk about with anyone other than his closest friends, he was fixated on the idea of assimilating as much as possible. He would often downplay the differences between our two cultures, and preferred to point out what they had in common. I saw this as a gesture of devotion, now I’m not so sure. There was always a part of him that he refused to share, something that ran much deeper. The one thing he consistently talked about was his aunt and uncle, whom he truly worshipped.
I knew he was a victim of the bomb practically from the get-go. He blurted it out that first night, when he showed me his scars. I was shocked. I couldn’t help feeling guilty, and grateful that he was telling me. His secret brought us closer together. Naïvely, I believed that if he was willing to tell me about something so big, then he was unlikely to hide the small things. I was so young, I didn’t yet understand that sometimes, revealing a difficult truth gives you more of a license to lie.
Yoshie couldn’t bear people pitying him. Whenever he got to know someone better, he would reveal his secret so calmly. He’d let them pose the usual questions and answer succinctly. And then he’d never raise the subject again. That way he could avoid their lamentations or having to give further explanations.
I admit I found it weird that an atom bomb survivor would choose to live in the United States. And that he could be so fascinated by our way of life and our music, particularly jazz. That was one thing we didn’t agree on. I preferred hard rock and protest songs.
Another thing that surprised me about Yoshie was that he loved the Mets, whom I’d rooted for all my life. Of course, back then I had no idea that the Japanese adore baseball. And I would never have imagined that hamburger in Japanese is a hanbāgā, or that they call beer bīru. These were the things I learned right away. What took me longer to work out was that he saw assimilation as a kind of personal challenge. I think he thought that if he integrated successfully into the world of his former enemy, then maybe he could vanquish the ghost and leave it behind forever.
Maybe there was another reason for Yoshie’s behavior, one that wasn’t so benign. Japanese companies were determined to overtake America and Germany, especially in the tech industry. Maybe outstripping Western brands was a question of postwar pride. I read the other day that Japanese companies are investing more than ever in American businesses. A famous life insurance company, for example, and a pharmaceutical company specializing in nervous system disorders. It occurs to me that both are related to war.
Around the time that Yoshie and I started going steady, aspects of Japanese culture were becoming consumer items here. All of a sudden, Japanese products were equated with perfection and elegance. You know, the idea that any radio manufactured in Osaka would sound superior to some junk from Detroit. We were in the midst of the so-called Japanese economic miracle, which the finance section in newspapers talked about incessantly. I remember the articles were full of praise, but also a sense of alarm. Our former enemy and present-day ally was becoming a fierce competitor. Experts seemed to be hinting that there was something suspicious about this growth, and that we must do something to stop them.
I doubt Yoshie could’ve risen so quickly through the ranks at his company at any other time. People who are lucky (and especially those who are unlucky) depend on hard work and chance as much as they do on politics. He was doing great at his job, and was extremely proud about his position at the company. He was marketing director of Me’s main office in Lower Manhattan.
The name of his company obviously caught my attention, how could I forget Me? The word means “eye” in Japanese. Yoshie explained to me that the founder, with great commercial foresight, had taken advantage of that fact, ensuring that we foreign consumers would remember the brand while learning a simple word in his language. I don’t know if this also occurred to Me’s founder or if it was a coincidence, but it’s interesting that eye has the same sound as I. As though, just there, English had an intimation of Japanese.
Yoshie was like a working machine. His own most efficient slave driver. He and his colleagues were a reminder of what capitalism could be. But I believe they had a totally different mind-set from that of American employees. Compared with the way things worked at my newspaper, for example, the Me employees stayed behind the scenes. Individual initiative seemed less important than teamwork.
I found this philosophy very wise, if a little nerve-racking. It meant that nothing you did was entirely on you. It also meant you could never change anything alone. On the contrary, he replied, it’s the opposite that’s nerve-racking. Trying to change everything on your own. Believing that you should. Believing that you can. There’s no worse delusion.
At first, I couldn’t help but feel flattered by what I thought was Yoshie’s deference. It was such a relief after all the pushy guys I’d dated, who were always trying to impose their will on me. It took me a while to realize that he just had difficulty saying no, and that this didn’t always mean he agreed with me. How the hell can a society function when insistence is considered poor taste, while failure is forbidden? That seemed to me an appalling combination. The amalgam of a Japanese problem and an American one.
From the impression I got from the employees at Me, the Japanese had been taught to fight their foes to the death, only to show them respect, loyalty, and even admiration the moment they were declared friends. Yoshie introduced me to many of his compatriots, and I noticed they would do anything to change the subject so as to avoid mentioning the atom bomb to an American. He saw this as a token of goodwill. Apparently we could annihilate one another, but we couldn’t regret it together.
As far as I can recall, there was only one time that I’d succeeded in getting one of his colleagues to mention the subject in my presence. It was his old friend Kamamoto, or Yomamoto, or something like that. Seeing an opportunity, I ventured to suggest that, considering what had happened, it was inevitable that his people should feel some bitterness toward Americans. Yoshie’s friend just kept shaking his head and smiling at me.
It is the wish of all good people in my country, Yomamoto or Kamamoto said very solemnly, especially those of us who have endured the worst, that we be alone in experiencing this. What we desire, dear madam, Kamamoto or Yomamoto went on, is for the disaster to be a lesson to the world, so that it may never happen again. (He referred to it as the disaster, which struck me as too vague for something as definite as the bombs.) It is our duty to serve as an example. That is why I consider friendship much more valuable than bitterness.
Yoshie stared at him in silence while he spoke.
No American school could have done a better job, I thought.
Even among liberals, Yoshie avoided criticizing our country. And he didn’t argue for pacifism when we socialized with my colleagues from the newspaper. Whenever we started to discuss international affairs, he’d look at me helplessly out of the corner of his eye, and then I’d feel the urge to hold him tight and take him to bed with me.
But if ever anyone (including my beloved brother, Ralph) tried to defend the heroics of World War II, that was a different story. The slightest attempt to justify the bombings by invoking the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Potsdam Declaration, or the doctrine of necessary evil would turn Yoshie sober.
He didn’t bother criticizing the monstrosity of nuclear annihilation, or to point out the difference between military and civilian victims. Didn’t argue that the bombs could have targeted only local infrastructure, or been dropped at a time when there were fewer civilians around. He didn’t cite the Geneva or Hague Conventions. He didn’t even mention his family, who were at the root of all his silences.
He was simply content to remind us that, after decades of peace, our country still had many army bases in Japan. That, like the French, we continued to carry out all kinds of nuclear tests. And that those things didn’t stem from emergency circumstances, but from the same age-old political interests, which existed before and long after the war.
Incidentally, some of my colleagues had no idea that American bases in Okinawa took up one-fifth of the main island. That its inhabitants were forced to live alongside the army of their former enemy and, worse still, its nuclear arsenal. It made me wonder what the hell our newspaper was even writing about.
After meeting Yoshie, I admit I also had a lot of reading up to do. There were so many things we never spoke about here. I was amazed to discover that we still had jurisdiction over several Japanese airfields, even in Tokyo. It took us about thirty years to hand some of them back. If I’m not mistaken, Yokota is still an American base to this day.
Facts like these, which I didn’t know or otherwise had long forgotten, made me realize that censorship didn’t occur only in Japan. In subtler, more veiled ways, perhaps, it also happened here. No one had told us the truth about what we did when we won the war. Or, of course, about the consequences of the bombs. Military secrecy has always been far, far more important to us than democracy.
Given that we’re supposed to embody the great democratic ideal, we can never admit our very own authoritarianisms. Oh, not here. The quest for freedom, prosperity, and security (or at least one of the three) drives each and every one of our actions. And if things get really ugly, we resort to political assassination. Yoshie found this astonishing. He told me that he knew of no other Western power that had assassinated so many of its presidents. I don’t recall the exact stats. I think I prefer not to know them.
I remember the tenth anniversary of the Tsar Bomba, at a time when I was growing increasingly committed to Yoshie. We published a special report about it that day in the Chronicle. It’s been long forgotten by now, but it was the most powerful explosion in the world. Three thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. It’s a number so big that it sounds like a typo you make at the end of a long day, when your fingers are going too fast and you add an extra zero. But I know it’s correct because it was one of our headlines: THREE THOUSAND TIMES HIROSHIMA.
The Cold War was at its peak, and the Soviets had been looking for a dramatic way to demonstrate their might. They’d wanted to respond to the missiles we’d developed and to our tests in the Pacific. To me this seemed to prove that the nuclear deterrence theory was a failure, a lie, or both. The only effect it had was to intensify the urge for self-preservation of the enemy, which in turn triggered our own. We call this vicious cycle military defense.
The blast radius from the Tsar was big enough, I don’t know, to wipe several American cities off the map in seconds. The shock wave caused a tremor that registered on every seismograph on the planet. Yes, I know it didn’t kill anyone on that occasion, because it was just an experiment on an island in the Arctic. But knowing that didn’t allay my fears. It upset me to imagine all the pain it could have caused anywhere else.
I wonder what kind of grief unborn tragedies deserve. The ones you know could have occurred. I feel that to answer this would be a political achievement.
Once he got comfortable with Yoshie, Ralph, who as well as being conservative is tremendously knowledgeable—yes, he’s that type of conservative—began to criticize Japanese imperialism. We Americans love to expose foreign acts of barbarism. I’d even go as far as to say we get a kick out of it, possibly because it gives us an excuse to go on committing our own.
My brother would invite us to lunch, for instance, and between mouthfuls would speak of the tortures in Nanjing. Of the suffering the Japanese had inflicted in China and Korea. Including (and he looked at me as he said this, because he knew just how much these things freaked me out) the Korean sex slaves exploited by the soldiers. Apparently, there were about a hundred thousand of them. They called them comfort women. I admit that I’d never heard of them then and I wondered how the hell my brother had.
Whenever I tried to talk to him about our military occupation of Japan, Ralph would mention the annexation of Korea. He reminded me that Japanese troops had appropriated its land, subjugated the farmers, and seized their crops. The inhabitants were prohibited from using their own language and were even forced to take Japanese names. Laws were changed to enable Japan to import huge numbers of Koreans, who were used as forced labor in its armaments and coal industry. What would you say, my brother asked me, if we were doing things like that in Vietnam?
During one of these diatribes, Ralph even confessed to Yoshie how at the climax of World War II (that was the word my brother normally used, climax), everybody at his school had repeated the words sung by our Chinese allies against the Japanese invaders:
Arise! All who refuse to be slaves!
Let our flesh and blood become our new Great Wall!
As the nation faces its greatest peril,
All forcefully expend their last cries.
Arise! Arise! Arise!
Our millions beat as one.
Brave the enemy’s fire, march on!
Brave the enemy’s fire, march on!
Braving the enemy’s fire!
March on! March on! On!
Having heard the song frequently at home when I was a child, I knew the lyrics by heart. Preppy girls would also chant it while raising money for charity in the city center. That same song would later be adopted by Chinese communists as their national anthem. How much more ironic can you get?
My brother seemed oddly enamored of those World War II years. Of course, he was too young to be drafted, and, in any case, he would never have passed the physical because he’d wrecked one of his knees playing football. For a long time, I attributed this nostalgia to his political beliefs. Now I have a different theory. Those war years coincided with his coming-of-age. He was growing up fast. Starting to feel like a man. The world might get blown to pieces, but for him life was just beginning.
Ralph had the nerve to say, in front of Yoshie, that the Japanese government was equally if not more responsible than ours for the bombs. It had ignored the Allies’ ultimatum. August 3 had been the deadline, my brother insisted, and the emperor had had an extra three days to surrender if the lives of his people mattered so much to him.
From the get-go, Yoshie merely agreed. Ralph was astonished that he refused to counter. Then, in a whisper, Yoshie added that America’s reasons for dropping those bombs hadn’t been to protect Japan’s neighbors in Asia, and even less to promote democracy in the region. After all, it had also killed many of the Koreans held hostage there.
Wait a minute, wait a minute, my brother interrupted. Okay, so a few innocent Koreans died. How can you demand compassion from the enemy when…?
And no massacre should be justified by a previous one, Yoshie went on coolly. Otherwise we’d be fighting the same war forever.
The way I saw it, the bombs didn’t signal the end of World War II so much as the start of World War III. Which is why I often pointed out that since then, the world in general, and our country in particular, was less safe.
Ralph argued that although the atomic bomb had been an extreme solution, objectively speaking it had saved many more lives (both American and Japanese) that would have been lost had the war continued.
This line of reasoning drove me nuts. To compare real dead bodies with theoretical ones seems to me an obscene exercise. And above all, I don’t believe this problem should be reduced to a statistic, which is what we always do whenever anything gets too complicated. What about the ethics? The fact that the extermination was premeditated? Our leaders knew beforehand that a significant part of the population would die. Those people weren’t collateral damage, or unavoidable casualties of war, or anything. I saw a qualitative difference there.
But my brother argued that there was essentially no difference between dying from a bomb, from a bullet wound, or from being run over by a tank. According to him, if every life was of equal value, then a death was just a death. It didn’t matter by what means. I remember him saying this to us one night, while my nieces and nephews were asleep.
Yoshie chimed in to say that perhaps it didn’t matter to the person who died. Or at least to those who died instantaneously, because many others suffered protracted deaths or illnesses. It did matter hugely, however, to the families mourning their dead. And to society, which, whether consciously or unconsciously, grieved with them.
I suspect that when my brother attempted to justify the nuclear genocide, it came from a place of fear. If he acknowledged the enormity of what our country had done, we’d be in a position where we’d have to fear some kind of reprisal.
Ralph rejected the word genocide. And he admonished me for using it to refer to something that wasn’t the Shoah. He argued rather ingeniously that if anything, a nuclear attack was an omnicide. Okay, I protested, that’s even worse. Killing everyone, indiscriminately?
He replied in that tone of his, halfway between successful lawyer and eldest son: You’re wrong, my dear, quite wrong. It’s still preferable, despite everything. Or would you have preferred us to select our victims according to race, religion, or class? We would never have done a thing like that. Look, I’m not saying that the A-bomb isn’t every bit as brutal as you say. But at least it responds to a radically democratic notion of war. It establishes no distinction or privilege among victims. Doesn’t it make you sick that civilian casualties, as newspapers like yours like to call them, are in fact always the poor? And here I thought you were a leftist, Sister.
Arguing with Ralph is no easy feat. Like Grandpa Usher, he has authority running in his veins. My mother used to say that, as a child, my brother didn’t beat up on his friends because he wasn’t able to reason, but in order to get them to argue with him. He would literally punch them to make them listen to his opinions. And if they still disagreed with him, he would apologize for hitting them.
Like the rest of my family, he truly hated it when people compared any other massacre to what the Nazis did, even as metaphor, and I understand why. If everything can be compared to Auschwitz, he’d say angrily, then it serves only to normalize Auschwitz.
According to Ralph, my boyfriend and I championed a reductive pacifism. My brother maintained that Japan’s current stance was too self-serving. It opposed war and nuclear weapons, yet accepted our military protection. Japanese diplomacy was taking advantage of our alliance with its ambivalence. Yoshie argued that it wasn’t ambivalence, but impotence.
Despite not seeing eye to eye, Ralph and Yoshie never really lost their tempers with each other. They were content to engage in a different kind of male ritual—neither of them budged an inch. The curious thing is that when Yoshie wasn’t there, my brother took his side against my family.
When we were alone at home, Yoshie would let down his guard. Occasionally he would speak of his fear during the bombardment, which he said felt physically similar to the panic you feel during an earthquake. The insignificance of your body. The permanent threat of it happening again. The sensation that clings to your senses. Like when your ears go on hearing an alarm even after it has stopped, he said.
Ever since I was young, I’d considered waking up early to the sound of an alarm clock a divine punishment, the ultimate misfortune, the end of all happiness. At least for a few minutes. But as soon as I’d had a shower and a cup of coffee (well, two), I’d realize it wasn’t so bad.
Yoshie got up early because he had to, and also, I suspect, by choice. Whereas the working hours of a journalist are as unpredictable as the news. That’s to say, they happen at any and all times. Your day is no longer divided into hours. Your week is no longer divided into days. Your time becomes an open-ended pursuit, a fever that subsides only once you’ve caught your prey. For many years, I adored that rhythm governed by chaos. If anyone had told me back then what my routine would become—breakfast at dawn, running errands in the mornings, and tending to my beloved plants—I’d have called them a bigger liar than Nixon.
I loved that in my job, I never knew what to expect. Having to be alert in the newsroom, on the street, at home. Observing people without being seen. Cab chases or running like crazy to catch up with someone. Getting a call from the newspaper and having to pack in a hurry. Editing a sentence just before it goes to print. Going out for a late dinner and getting drunk after finishing a difficult job. Transcribing interviews into the early hours. Continually juggling a succession of deadlines. The thrill of feeling that I wouldn’t make it and then finally making it. Adrenaline as a form of love.
Journalism is bipolar, and so are those of us who practice it. We veer daily between euphoria and despair. Between sudden disappointment and our next discovery. Many people are like that, but we have a professional excuse. We’re addicted to the scoop. Deadline junkies. I imagine this affects the way we relate to others. If a person didn’t strike me as unusual or exceptional, complicated even, I found it impossible to feel attracted to them. Did others find me as surprising, as special? What a cruel question.
I documented every interesting thing I saw or heard, jotted it all down, because you never know. That was how I avoided depression. I didn’t always know why I was taking notes, but the act of doing it reassured and inspired me. In the end, I found it impossible to read a book, watch a film, or talk to someone without imagining that sooner or later I’d be writing an article about it. Or an obituary. In the end, it was all useful. A lot of the facts I mention now were in my notes from back then.
I can’t say exactly when I grew tired of that life. I know that if I could travel back to the time before I met Yoshie, I’d be a journalist again. But if I were a young person today, I’d look for a different occupation. That’s what I told that Argentinian guy who interviewed me. News doesn’t really matter these days. Actually, nothing really matters. There are a billion other things waiting for you to click on them. How can you write seriously when you can no longer take reality seriously?
Even if I had the same vocation as in those early years, I have no idea what I would do in this jungle of giant corporations and investment funds, how I would earn my living in a gig economy of instant layoffs. Nowadays, what counts isn’t who reads you but who finances you. Your investors are your public. People no longer want to pay for quality information. They’re prepared to spend a fortune on the devices they use to read, but not a cent on what they’re reading. A newspaper’s income doesn’t come from its readership. One day they’ll invent media that doesn’t even require an audience.
And what about those new toys? Outside demands and pressures have grown as much as or even more than technology. On any objective ledger, exploitation has increased. I know, I sound like an old woman. The world has never been a very nice place. So where the hell did I get all my youthful optimism back then?
I wonder whether these concerns seem ridiculous to my great-nieces and great-nephews. They seem so savvy about today’s world, they fit into it with such ease. In fact, the youngest has dreams of becoming a journalist, bless her.
It’s a despicable, beautiful profession. If you don’t do it right, it will stick out like any of those mediocre works of art we had to write about. After all, watching art is an art.
Early on in my career, I remember that writing in the imperative was de rigueur. If you didn’t use it at least half a dozen times in one article to rouse your readers, you were at serious risk of failing to connect with the middle class.
Second, you had to create a sense of intrigue by starting off with a question. This was practically obligatory if you were writing about a chamber music ensemble, a French sociologist, a philosopher of language, or any of those things that scare people off.
Third, you had to try to pull off the most outrageous comparisons. For example: “The Andy Warhol of medievalism.” “The Joe Frazier of peace.” “The Virginia Woolf of movie starlets.” “A masterful combination of Fellini, Engels, and Mickey Mouse,” or “An explosive encounter between Proust, Eva Perón, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.”
But most important, you had to analyze the classics through the aesthetic of camp and glam. What would Haydn in black leather have sounded like? What would have become of Tolstoy if he’d had a penchant for sequined boys? Could graffiti improve the Sistine Chapel? All of a sudden, these questions became transcendental. There came a point when post-Marxism, semiotics, and structural anthropology were acceptable only if they were being used to introduce a punk rock band.
In the small world of underground criticism, the use of such unfashionable concepts as content, conclusion, or (even worse) message was strictly prohibited. We saw them as distortions that tainted the aesthetic experience. They could ruin your reputation over the course of a weekend.
Naturally, all this had a sexual connotation. We expected to enjoy art without preconceptions, the same way we wanted to fuck without having to worry too much. We were sick and tired of keeping our distance. We demanded skin. We wanted to touch. To conquer our senses as we fought for control over our own bodies.
Yes, it was time to assault the pantheons of high culture with our base instincts. What we never imagined was that the latter would replace the former. As an old friend who wrote for the Chronicle said to me, this amazing wave led many theorists to abandon their prejudices, but an equal number of dilettantes to cling to theirs.
The visceral was trendy again, and it seems to be enjoying a comeback. Cultural journalism became a celebration of pain. If a novel didn’t churn your guts, you hadn’t really read it. If a record didn’t make you go deaf, you hadn’t heard it. If you didn’t feel actors were flaying themselves alive onstage, you were unworthy of the theater. I started to think that art schools would be replaced by nursing courses.
I wonder whether this was somehow related to how tortured we were by the war in Vietnam and the agony of Watergate. If you think about it, Nixon’s resignation sparked a rhetorical healing process. Public opinion was focused on national reconciliation and first aid. Our new president spoke a lot, you know, about patching up wounds. Politics, the media, and psychology came together in the illusion of an instant cure.
Nobody had done anything wrong. Or if they had, it was for the common good. No one was actually guilty. Or rather, they were both the guilty party and the victim. Justice was less important than forgiveness. So you went to your shrink, who told you to go easy on yourself. In other words, if you dug too deep, everyone might end up being implicated, starting with you. It was in your interest to cooperate a little.
In all fairness, Mr. Ford had made history. He became vice president and president without getting a single vote. During his brief mandate, he also had time to pardon his boss without trial. My brother thought this was the least we could do for someone who had sacrificed his job for the good of the nation.
Rather than making a living as a journalist, I was just scraping by. I realize that would be a luxury nowadays. The fact is that, for a few years, I could barely pay the rent on a one-room apartment with about half a kitchen and not quite a bathroom. Nor could I afford regular visits to the therapist, the way my mother had all her life. She was convinced that her shrink was as crucial to her survival as her butcher.
Yoshie was horrified by therapists. He believed they couldn’t help you, or that their help made you feel worse. I explained that they teach you to think about your problems. Even more than we already do? he protested. I accused him of having a resistance to therapy. Resistance is good, he retorted.
At some point in our relationship, which to my surprise was becoming increasingly serious, Yoshie and I decided to move in together. I’d say it was a big step for us both, I mean as individuals. He’d never officially lived with anyone before, or so he said. And I’d promised myself a very long time ago that I’d never do it again.
In California, I’d been in an abusive relationship with a controlling boyfriend when I was too young to understand what that meant. At twenty, living with him was a forgivable mistake to have made. But at thirtysomething, no way. My biggest fear was that Yoshie wouldn’t respect my space, that he wouldn’t accept my chaotic habits, the erratic hours I kept, the trips I made for the paper. I was in love, yet pretty much convinced things wouldn’t work out.
When we met, I was living in an area of Queens where a lot of Manhattan cabdrivers refused to go at night. Those motherfuckers would tell you, I don’t do Queens, ma’am. I really loved that borough, with its mishmash of identities, and I detested how some people reacted when you told them where you lived. New York has always been divided into three areas. The Wow, the How nice, and the I see.
Yoshie was keen for us to move to Manhattan, and had difficulty accepting my only condition. That we live in a place where we could afford to split the rent, a place that would be mine as much as his. The thought of depending on his money to pay for my own apartment horrified me. He had classic fantasies about the city center. The wide avenues of Midtown. The fatuousness of the Upper East Side. At the time, Me was expanding. It had just launched those old color TVs with the Cromesonic system. His successes made me happy, but that was his budget to spend, not mine.
Before making a final decision, we considered the West Side. If I remember correctly, we looked at several options there. Either we didn’t fall in love with any of them or they were too small for his damn banjo collection. More and more Latinos were moving into the area. When I asked for advice, my contacts told me it was going downhill. And from what great white heights? I’m afraid they weren’t able to say.
We ended up renting a fairly spacious apartment in central Harlem, which was the most I could afford. We were steps away from the Apollo Theater and Spanish Harlem and not that far, it turned out, from my family’s neighborhood, where I wouldn’t have gone back to live in a million years, by the way.
He was more enamored of the apartment than of the area. He couldn’t have imagined that in the future other yuppies would live there. Ironically, the whole of Harlem is becoming hip nowadays, meaning expensive. Meaning on its way to becoming mummified. It’s the same old process. They start to build, plant a few trees, prices go up, and they kick out the locals. Afro-fusion restaurants, hell yeah. But barbecues and kids playing in the streets? Hell no. Property speculation is a toxic stain chasing out cities, which have to flee to survive.
Yoshie seemed traumatized by the prospect of moving to a different neighborhood. He’d barely set foot outside of downtown and the environs of Central Park. I don’t think he’d heard of the Harlem Renaissance, the New Negro, or any of the other black cultural movements. I suspect he even thought Harlem and the Bronx were the same place. As far as he was concerned, Manhattan ended on Ninety-Sixth Street. He took some convincing. I explained that if he really wanted to assimilate, he had to experience all four corners of the city. I wonder whether there wasn’t a bit of racial prejudice going on there as well. I don’t suppose he would ever have admitted it.
Near where we lived, African American girls, some of them minors, hung around in bars and on street corners, pacing slowly up and down, as though aging with each step. I would see them soliciting white guys who came uptown. Watching them brought to mind Claude McKay’s poems, which still packed a punch back then.
Through the long night until the silver break
Of day the little gray feet know no rest;
Through the lone night until the last snow-flake
Has dropped from heaven upon the earth’s white breast,
The dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet
Are trudging, thinly shod, from street to street.
Those white sons of bitches treated Harlem like their private hunting ground. And they were the ones who most claimed they loved the place.
As for me, I guess I hoped to behave like the writer Jean Toomer, who, thanks to his mixed heritage, was considered both black and white, or neither, depending on who was looking at him. But coming from a nice, typical Jewish family, I’m afraid my aspirations were slightly self-righteous.
When we first moved there, it was difficult for me not to feel awkward when striking up conversations with strangers. Like an idiot, I exaggerated my friendliness, as if, instead of just mutual respect, they needed to be treated with kid gloves. I was trying to convey notions of equality that can’t be shown in a single moment, only applied over time.
I soon realized that my inadvertent condescension made them uneasy. Apparently, they didn’t give a damn if I was a liberal, signed petitions, or thought of myself more or less as a supporter of civil rights. All they wanted from me was to be left alone. I found that frustrating. Only when I relaxed and learned to be a bit rude with everyone, including Latinos and African Americans, did I start to feel that I fit in with the locals.
One evening, Yoshie and I were out walking after having dinner downtown and seeing a Cassavetes movie. I don’t remember which one. We had just started living together. It was summer. We were happy and reasonably tipsy, so rather than take the subway or a cab, we decided to walk home. Getting back to our new neighborhood took longer than we’d imagined, or maybe it was a weekday, because the avenue was deserted. Around 115th Street or so, with my typical nocturnal high spirits, I suggested a nightcap. Yoshie was ready for bed, but he agreed with that generosity that exists solely in couples who are still honeymooning.
The movie, it’s coming back to me now, was about two people who are exact opposites, poles apart, and unexpectedly end up falling in love. Cassavetes used a technique based on muscle memory. The basic idea is that actors repeat the same gestures and actions over and over, until they become not as much a role as part of their own behavior and identity. I wonder whether this could work in reverse. Whether we could omit something over and over, until the event in question is erased from our memories.
Anyhow, we stopped for a drink at a nightclub near our apartment. The live music was over, and the place was almost empty. We were the only customers whose skin was a different color. No one said anything to us. No one messed with us. But Yoshie admitted that he was struck by the looks people gave us, the way their bodies stiffened as soon as we came into their field of vision, the conversations dropping off as we walked into the room. When the barman served us our drinks, the counter between us suddenly seemed a lot wider than before.
Yoshie was worried about drawing our neighbors’ attention. He felt hyperconscious of his appearance, the way he dressed, his accent, the food he bought. He was afraid he’d have to start all over again with his efforts to assimilate, that he was back at square one.
Sure, for a couple of months people gave us funny looks. I was a white woman who thought she was liberated, among other middle-class beliefs. And Yoshie was a double intruder. Not only a guy from some distant land, but also a yuppie carrying a briefcase. Gradually, they got used to seeing him around and stopped looking askance at him. They began to chat with him in stores. Greeted him in the street. Exchanged banter with him. And before long, he was on a first-name basis with every shopkeeper on the block.
Whenever we went out, he’d end up introducing me to someone. He’d adopt AAVE to put people at ease. Yoshie became an even bigger fan of the neighborhood than I was. He acted like moving there had been his idea.
He was crazy about Harlem’s music. Not just what was playing in the clubs we went to on weekends, many of which no longer exist. He maintained that the neighborhood had its own subterranean rhythm, a special beat beneath its streets. As a matter of fact, we were out walking when he came up with that famous TV commercial for Me. You know, the one with the multicolored balls bouncing up Fifth Avenue until they reach Harlem. There, they change into scoops of ice cream in all different flavors, sampled by laughing children. Then the camera pans out to show families of different races and classes having dinner, and watching the commercial on a Me TV set.
Critics praised the ad for its inclusive message and its interracial imagery, for using the metaphor of technology as an egalitarian utopia, or whatever. I was bemused. Those were my values, not his. If I remember correctly, sales of Me televisions in the States doubled that year. Yoshie used to tell me that advertising is a self-fulfilling prophecy. For a product to sell, you have to say that it’s selling.
Once we’d resolved the issue of the apartment, we organized ourselves with relative ease. I guess like any couple built on mutual respect, we argued only about trivial stuff.
I can recall a serious disagreement over how to decorate the apartment. I like things in pairs or sets. Yoshie visualized everything in singles. Odd numbers didn’t bother him. He loved subtlety, I preferred clarity. He liked things to be movable, multipurpose. I was partial to stationary objects. I don’t want to know what that all said about us.
One of his foibles was to drag that dreadful old black-and-white rug with him everywhere. He insisted on spreading it out in the center of the living room. I gave in. I had won the battle of the neighborhood, so I let him have his way about stuff like that.
His obsession with banjos had turned him into an otaku, a word he taught me himself. His instruments started to invade every wall in the apartment. I half-jokingly accused him of trying to conquer my territory with my own country’s weapon. He had a substantial collection, which I imagine was valuable. He declared proudly that he’d stolen the French ones from a music store in Paris, when he was a penniless youth. I envied him those adventures. Who wouldn’t want to live in Paris? The French, my love, the French, he’d reply. We often said we’d go there together. We never did.
I think it was around that time that we discovered the banjo player Charlie Tagawa, who became one of Yoshie’s idols. They were both Japanese immigrants and had studied economics. Zenzo, his first name is Zenzo! he objected to the guy’s stage name. What wrong with that? He said that if he ever went on a business trip to California, he’d try to meet him in person and ask him.
Despite learning to enjoy each other’s music, the only group we truly felt the same about was the Beatles. Well, not entirely. We both agreed that Abbey Road was superior to Sgt. Pepper. But John was my favorite. I particularly admired him in his later years, when he was politicized and a feminist and had the guts to break with the entertainment industry. Who refused to become a slave to his teenage persona. Who, rather than settle for a young groupie, had married an older artist who wasn’t exactly a beauty. Who had shown us that we’re not the same at twenty as we are at thirty. And the cherry on top was that he was living in my city.
Yoshie preferred George, because he was the foreigner in the group. The one who reminded the other three that the East existed as well. In any case, he thought that taking a rock star as your role model was stupid. He argued that messianism was adolescent, too, which is why he defended Paul. That all he demanded from a musician was good music. That Lennon’s violins were cheesier than McCartney’s, and that of the two solo albums that had just come out, Band on the Run was far superior to Mind Games. As for Ringo, well, we both loved the guy.
Living together improved not only Yoshie’s English, which he spoke with obsessive precision, but also the idea we had of each other. We lost some of that blind trust that unites strangers and we gained a sort of reciprocity. Everything between us became verbal, more argumentative, less intuitive. We were able to communicate more easily than ever, with a new expansiveness, in the same way that we were able to disagree with greater understanding and openness.
After we moved in together, he began to express viewpoints and objections, and he even complained in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Maybe it was just the normal frictions of sharing the same space. And yet I sensed that the reason was mostly linguistic. He had moved in with me, and also with my language. It was no longer a mere work tool, he now knew how to sleep, yawn, and brush his teeth in English.
He now understood puns and was keen to invent some of his own. You could say that he fell in love with my language all over again. This made up for the vague affront I felt at him being able to manage without me. I still have the blackboard he gave me. I placed the easel next to my desk and we would write messages to each other. More than about practical matters, they were a kind of intimate code or collaborative thinking. One of us would scrawl a random sentence. The other would rewrite it the next time they walked past. And it would gradually evolve, until it became the summary of something we couldn’t quite figure out.
When we decided to move in together, we knew that both of us would frequently have to go away, in my case to cover events in other cities, or to interview people or research an article. And in Yoshie’s, to visit other Me branches or to attend creative training sessions or meet with investors, shareholders, or whatever they were (I’ve never been able to distinguish all that well between people who earn a lot more money than me). At first I was worried that these trips might make living together a problem, but they ended up bringing more relief than conflict.
Those brief interludes were like a sort of ventilation system. They kept us fresh, ready to rediscover the joy of meeting up again. They were a reminder of how lucky we were to be sharing our time and space. And that there’s no closeness without distance. On the other hand, we were constantly being forced to re-adapt. The person coming home doesn’t usually have the same expectations as the one doing the welcoming. This impeded the flow that comes only with daily interaction. At times, our relationship behaved like a skittish animal, retreating with each period of absence.
If ever being together wasn’t enough, a little pot never hurt. Smoking in silence brought us closer again, filled us with ideas and questions that drifted about in the smoke. In those days I was more likely to take uppers, which in my profession were as common as typewriters. They gave you the necessary reflexes to make you feel quicker than the news itself. Of course, the illusion lasted only a couple of hours, but by then you already had yourself half an article. Occasionally, Yoshie would take hallucinogens, the ideal counterweight to his world of figures, sales accounts, and other deceptively tangible realities.
I have to confess that our conflicting schedules made me slightly anxious at night. To me his sleepiness was somehow a form of abandonment. I felt he was deserting me when I was at my peak, elated after finishing an article. At the end of my working day, the night was still young. For Yoshie, on the other hand, night was the end of everything. During weekends and vacations our conjugal jet lag was less pronounced. But not by much, because Yoshie’s body was a punctual mechanism. He was wedded to his schedule. That’s what I thought. In fact, neither of us was willing to break with our own routines. Maybe that’s why we didn’t hurt each other too much.
Once, after he returned from a trip, I noticed Yoshie behaving particularly strangely. He wasn’t distracted in his usual way, fretting over some problem at work. Instead he seemed to have come back with different facial expressions, a different voice, different gestures. Like an actor who overplays naturalness, some stereotypical idea of it. After eating our dinner in silence, I opened a second bottle of wine and asked him what was the matter. Then, almost immediately, he told me he’d had a fling.
As I filled both our glasses, what I most wanted to know was whether it had meant anything to him, whether he had special feelings for this person. He assured me he didn’t. It was simply a release, the culmination of several difficult weeks of bad reports and failed business deals. While I finished my wine, I asked him if this might continue, if we were talking about a more serious liaison. He swore that it wasn’t like that at all, that he scarcely knew the woman and had slept with her only once, or only during that trip (he stupidly specified, as if the exact number of intercourses was of any great interest to me).
I rose very slowly from the table. Then hurled my glass onto the floor. Kicked my chair. And asked him why in hell he had told me. If you’re going to do these things, I screamed at him, you’ve got to be more grown-up about it. You own up to them only when they’re serious, and when they aren’t, you keep them to yourself without dragging the other person down. It’s a different kind of generosity, I said.
I meant what I said. Particularly since I’d had the odd fling myself, and had never allowed it to affect our love for each other.
Then I asked him to clear the table and sweep the floor. And I went to take a shower.
Yoshie seemed reluctant to go on marches. When I first met him, he’d smile skeptically whenever I told him I was attending one. Not that he was against the causes we were supporting. He just disagreed that taking to the streets and stopping traffic was in any way useful. Or perhaps he simply mistrusted any initiative by an angry crowd. I’d like to believe that Harlem and I helped to change his mind a bit.
Along with some colleagues from the paper, I would often go to civil rights rallies. It wasn’t only about defending the dignity of African American citizens. Actually (did we realize this at the time?), it was about the dignity of the entire nation. By disrespecting black people we were disrespecting ourselves and misunderstanding our own country.
I had similar thoughts, and still do, about the feminist struggle. I’m not talking simply about achieving complete equality for women, but about ceasing to maim ourselves as a society. About damn well realizing, once and for all, that them is part of us.
How could I forget the graceful anger of James Baldwin? A guy who was capable of writing with equal perceptiveness about blacks and whites. Women and men. Gays, straights, bisexuals. There aren’t many like him. He came on the scene at a time when an African American author talking about gay whites was still somehow shocking (and when no straight white person had the slightest interest in finding out if gay black people even existed). We hadn’t forgotten the banners in Arkansas: RACE MIXING IS COMMUNISM. How easy it is to feel ashamed of them now. I wonder if we’re able to recognize their present-day equivalents.
The other major issue, of course, was Vietnam. The peaceful Dr. King, swayed by all those young people of the Black Power movement with whom he never really saw eye to eye, became increasingly passionate, until he came out against the war and was shot to death. The same way they stopped Ali from being able to box, because he was a tough guy who refused to fire a gun. I think that’s when a lot of white women started to broaden our focus: when we got the relationship between racism, militarism, and patriarchy.
I’d have given my right arm to interview Angela Davis. Before they threw her in jail, Governor Reagan (yes, that Reagan) had ordered them to expel her from the university. A black female activist, she was doubly discriminated against. Triply, if you counted her lesbianism. I’m afraid that included her own comrades.
The most exciting thing about Watergate was that it democratized the political debate. Virtually everybody, regardless of color, creed, or class, seemed to have an opinion. The coverage was so extensive that there was no longer an elite of experts, only millions of viewers. I think that the problem with Vietnam (as with most of our wars) was the opposite one. We had a minority determined to know what was going on, most of whom were activists. The rest of the population knew relatively little and preferred not to know too much.
Until they saw the press photograph of the little girl and the napalm, as far as a lot of people were concerned, kids in Vietnam didn’t die. All that violence was happening light years away from our bedrooms. But that scream, running straight at us, was the embodiment of our nightmares. The girl’s back was in flames, but we can’t see it in the photo. We can’t see the past. Only an excruciating present that demands explanations. This ellipsis in the photograph, which leaps from eye to memory, was pure journalism. Some people weren’t sure if it should be published, not because of the violence but because of the girl’s nudity. Where civilian massacres are concerned, we mustn’t descend into obscenity, you know.
In the end, the girl survived. Her name is Kim, and now she’s a Canadian citizen. Closer and closer to us.
Yoshie loved TV sets, but he hardly ever watched television. He believed less in the contents than in the box encasing them. I wonder whether something similar wasn’t true of Nixon, who seemed much less interested in telling his people the truth than in being seen by them. He forgot that the appetite for narrative is never sated, that we spectators need plot development and a satisfying ending.
Even Yoshie was unable to resist a political thriller in real time. While we were watching the live hearings (needless to say, on a brand-new Me color set), he told me that he thought the United States was trying to wipe away the blood of Vietnam with the Watergate papers. The napalm, the Agent Orange, and the cluster bombs, all with a bunch of illegal tapes. His remarks struck me as unusual.
I realized that very week, one of Nixon’s lawyers referred to Senator Inouye as “that little Jap.” Besides being on the Watergate commission, Senator Inouye was the most prominent U.S. politician of Japanese origin and a war hero who had lost an arm fighting the Nazis.
The lawyer finally apologized and, in a further show of diplomacy, added that he wouldn’t have been offended if someone had called him “a little American.” For some reason, he appeared to believe that the senator was less American than he was. I can picture Mr. Inouye’s right arm, abandoned on some battlefield, slowly giving him the finger.
Before I was with Yoshie, I admit to having signed a petition against paying taxes in protest against the war (along with several friends who now make six figures). I’m afraid that our agenda didn’t include what might happen in Saigon after the troops left.
We Beat fans were on the lookout for a copy, stolen if necessary, of the anti-war poems anthologized by Diane di Prima’s publishing house. That woman gave the impression that she was leading several lives, all of them exhausting. Also Lenore Kandel’s banned booklet that a court in San Francisco had declared blasphemous and obscene. Naturally, this boosted sales once it came back into circulation. How can one forget that Buddha on the cover copulating with an enviably supple female? As a thank-you for the success it had gained due to the ban, the author donated some of the proceeds to the police. Whenever we bumped into an officer, my girlfriends and I would recite a poem for him. We felt like a cross between Gandhi and Patti Smith.
The universities were in turmoil, or maybe it’s just that the students had come to their senses all at once. There was even a student uprising at the university where Ralph lectured (although his politics majors boasted that they were apolitical). I don’t recall exactly what happened. I know that they rebelled against the authorities and took over the dean’s office to demand changes to the system. Actually, the boys occupied the deanery for male students, and the girls the deanery for female students. I guess every revolution has its red lines.
Yoshie used to tell me that I couldn’t start the day without my dose of anger. And he added, jokingly or not, that our sex life depended on it. That I felt hornier after ranting about politics.
He was more moderate in his personal, and of course his economic, politics. He thought that all strident declarations inevitably strayed into the ridiculous. I learned to wait a little before expressing my opinions. And he, to the extent that his temperament allowed, became slightly more radical.
I seem to remember persuading him to accompany me on one or two anti-war demonstrations, as well as a few antinuclear protests. Yoshie said that every place he had lived had either been subjected to, perpetrated, or feared such an explosion. That it was all a matter of concentric circles.
One day I asked him if we could do an interview for the paper. He told me he’d rather swim back to his native village.
A while before, groups of women in different cities had gone out demonstrating. They were mothers of families, with no clear political allegiance, who called themselves Women Strike for Peace. Those are the first female protests I can remember. They’d discovered that breast milk had been contaminated by radiation in Nevada. I wonder how many women in Nevada thought about the women of Nagasaki. Maybe a lot, maybe just a few. Dozens of nuclear tests were carried out aboveground in that state. Troops were stationed there, a few miles from the explosion. They say you could see the atomic clouds from Las Vegas.
Three Mile Island hadn’t even happened yet. If you add up the people affected by that catastrophe and those living in the vicinity of power plants, uranium mines, and nuclear test sites, as well as the officials participating in all those maneuvers, you realize that upward of a million Americans have been exposed to atomic radiation.
How relationships fall apart is a mystery. We don’t know when it happens or why. All we know is that it takes us by surprise, like one of those natural disasters made worse by human intervention. In my and Yoshie’s case, I couldn’t say exactly what happened. We lived together peacefully. We were more attuned to each other than ever. When we were together, we gave off an unsettling appearance of happiness.
Everything had become predictable. Our gestures, our responses, our Sundays. Our arguments and reconciliations, our positions in bed. The novelty was over. Peace was killing us. Then it hit me. I didn’t know how to live, let alone love, without adrenaline.
You spend years creating rituals with someone, and then one day you realize that you don’t like that person anymore. You’re just in love with the ritual. And yet you feel incapable of separating, so you spend the rest of your life cultivating the perfect ritual with the wrong person.
In all fairness, the situation at work didn’t help, or it confirmed what I was already feeling. The Chronicle’s circulation was dwindling, it was in debt, and then came the first round of layoffs. The atmosphere at the office became hostile. We no longer went out for beers together, we didn’t even go on marches. We would work late. Everyone wanted to prove that they were making more sacrifices than the person next to them.
We veterans had our backs against the wall for a while, watching as they canned our colleagues, and kept assuring ourselves that it couldn’t happen to us. After each layoff we feigned indignation and heaved a sigh of relief. It was like a fucking Brecht poem. The newcomers at the bottom of the pay scale survived. So did a few seniors whose dismissal (like mine) would’ve been too costly. I felt lucky and wretched. In other words, salaried.
Everywhere there were budget cuts, downsizings, zero-hour contracts. Although the situation at Me was never as drastic, it, too, suffered the effects of the recession and the oil crisis. Behind the calm that Yoshie maintained (which could set my teeth on edge), he seemed more anxious than usual. Sometimes he would come home after dinner and find I wasn’t there.
The evening of Nixon’s resignation, I threw a party with a few friends. Yoshie was away, and he caught an earlier flight back. We invited the guests to our apartment. Fed them everything we had in the kitchen. We debated, got drunk, got high, danced, and then collapsed, exhausted. When we got up late the next day (was it a weekend?) I could see with alarming clarity, despite my headache, or maybe through that pain, what had been wrong for a while. I had the feeling, I don’t know, of a rude awakening, like when you’re dreaming and suddenly someone pulls up the blinds.
We held out one more summer. But that morning, I knew it was over. We’d been waiting so eagerly for the start of a new era, and we were barely able to celebrate it. I wonder to what extent political hopes fill the gaps in our lives. Whether a shared rejection does more to bond us than any of our virtues.
I was the one who took the initiative. I conveyed my doubts and disappointments to Yoshie. At first he seemed surprised. He interpreted my attitude as an attack, and he denied the seriousness of our problems. During that last year, it seemed he’d been living with someone much happier than me.
After that, we had some bruising arguments. He fluctuated between bitterness and exaggerated indifference. I tried to not lose my cool. Assuming he was telling the truth, this was the first time anyone had dumped him. His male pride had lost its virginity and gained something hard to define, which you get only when someone dumps you.
I think I’d grown bored of our life together, or I’d started to check out other people, or possibly both. I suspect the same went for him, even if he hadn’t the courage to admit it. I was particularly attracted to a young intern I’d been flirting with at the newsroom. I laughed a lot more with him than I did with my boyfriend, and for me, that has always been the sign.
Yoshie couldn’t understand my unwillingness to fight for our relationship. He spoke to me about strength, endurance, perseverance. I tried to explain to him that for me a couple wasn’t like a battle that you refused to lose. When it stopped working, moving on was the least bloody outcome for both parties.
Little by little, he accepted the situation, or at least he stopped resisting the inevitable. I came back one day from covering an event in Philly, only to discover that, without a word of warning, he’d moved out his stuff. I mean all of it. Our apartment had been left precisely half-empty and spotlessly clean. As if nobody had ever lived there with me. What struck me most were the walls stripped of banjos, the tiny perforations. And the bare space in the center of the floor, right where the rug used to be. He had left his keys on my side of the bed.
I soon found out that Yoshie was living in a loft in Tribeca or SoHo, I’m not quite sure which. I moved into my present apartment in Brooklyn, near the Gowanus Canal. I found it thanks to that young intern, with whom not much happened in the end.
During that period, I broke my personal record for eating chocolate bars. And for the first time in my adult life I heard my mother ask me if I had gained weight. Ralph seemed sad that we had split up, I even thought I saw his eyes grow moist when I told him. He embraced me warmly, and told me I could stay at his house for as long as I wanted. You never know how my brother’s going to react.
Fed up with losing money, one of the owners of the Chronicle decided to cash in his shares. A few of the section heads got together and bought him out. This changed the internal dynamic of the paper. There was more opinion, less news. That was our new style and it was less costly. The editorial line became more radical. We gave more space to militant movements, and yet it became increasingly difficult to disagree with the editors. A few colleagues proudly declared that we weren’t journalists but activists. Sales continued falling at the same rate as our spirits.
It was around that time that Phil Ochs took his own life. According to him, he had died a long time ago. Later it was revealed that the FBI kept a five-hundred-page file on his activities. It still considered him a dangerous individual even after his death.
Just like the country, I began a new life. I met up again with Richard. I think we had always liked each other, but when he was available I was with someone else and vice versa. We had unfinished business. Despite claiming to be a liberated woman, I hadn’t yet learned how to live alone. I avoided the grieving process by eagerly moving on to the next challenge. Which part of me identified with Yoshie in this?
In the meantime, Carter seemed better at winning people over than at making decisions. He might be the only guy who did a better job governing after he left office. In spite of everything, there was some good news. The Egypt-Israel peace treaty and the agreement with the Soviets to restrict nuclear warheads. I felt sad for not being able to celebrate that with Yoshie.
After a prudent silence, we met up again. We both avoided asking questions about the other’s love life. It was all very civilized. In other words, we were terrified of being hurt.
Every New Year, Ralph would send him a card with drawings by my nieces and nephews. I invited him to one of my birthday parties, which I’m afraid was unforgettable. In the summer of ’77, during that damned heat wave.
My guests had just arrived when the power went out. It was the blackest of nights, both indoors and out. Richard lit every candle we had, and announced that the entire apartment was my birthday cake. There were fires, looting, chaos. They arrested so many people that they didn’t know where to put them all. Nor do I understand how they managed to identify them in the dark. My guests had to sleep on the floor. Yoshie and I agreed that this proved we shouldn’t meet too often.
I heard from him until he moved to Latin America. After that we lost touch. That wasn’t all I lost. All of a sudden, everyone seemed young except me. I had always been young, I had to go on being so. Even my drugs (which by then I rarely took) started to sound antiquated. Crack was all they talked about in the media.
The paper’s editorial line became more moderate. We criticized Reagan, but sounded only cautiously Democrat. Sales rallied a little, then took another nosedive. We started to get paid late.
Before the end, the editors made a last-ditch attempt by aligning with the new green parties. I was asked to start writing about art and the environment. I actually enjoyed it. Our readership less so. In the end, the Chronicle filed for bankruptcy and closed for good. Almost everything in my memory has closed down.
Fortunately, I had racked up a lot of years in the profession. I had made my name, as they say, so I managed to get by. I continued to freelance for various publications, some better than others, including some magazines that reminded me of the ones I’d cut my teeth on. Then I realized I had aged more than my métier.
We haven’t heard from each other since. To be honest, I’m not even sure what became of him. I saw his name mentioned somewhere a couple of times, that’s all. It amazes me how seemingly important people are in your life, and the ease with which they cease to be.
I still live alone, in the same small apartment in one of the less pricey areas of Brooklyn. I don’t have a lot of expenses or a lot of savings. I think I can feel proud of that. It’s all that remains of our revolutions.
Sometimes I find it hard to believe just how much these streets have changed. I can still remember what they were like when I was young. Transvestites, criminals, cheap dives. Those were crazy times. Worse times, I suppose. A long way from these indie stores with their tattoo artists and their artisanal beers in the backyard.
There’s a toxic canal close to where I live. I’m not quite sure why, but dirty water makes me think about the past, more so than clean water. That ugly canal, lined with workshops and warehouses, once had its glory days. Now it’s just pollution and expectation, a mixture of waste and opportunity. As soon as you cross a bridge, you’re back in the present.
I know there are voices in the depths of those waters. Voices of all the people who navigated them, poisoned them, gazed into them. Stagnant voices. One day they’ll need stirring. Everything I see speaks to me of what I can no longer see. My city is an echo.
That’s why I was surprised to remember Yoshie like this. I had rarely thought of him until that Argentinian journalist contacted me and sent me all those questions. Some were way too personal. Even so, I told him nearly everything I knew. Let’s call it professional solidarity.
Except this time it wasn’t just his face that came to me. A face that no longer exists. Suddenly, I could hear his voice, too, seeping back to me like a gas. It was just for an instant, in the kitchen, as I read the news about that bonsai.
Apparently, at the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., there is a four-hundred-year-old white pine bonsai. A master gardener from Japan gave it to us for our bicentennial, around the time Yoshie and I split up. Not much was heard about it until a few months before 9/11. In the spring of that year, two Japanese brothers went to the arboretum to see their grandfather’s bonsai.
The family owned a nursery in Hiroshima, barely two miles from ground zero. The tree was strong enough to survive the bomb. Strong and fortunate. As the story goes, it had been planted behind a thick wall, which protected it from the shock wave. I’ve seen in the papers the photos they took of it after the explosion. There it is amid the rubble, intact, the little pine.
If the fact that they presented us with such a tree is incredible, equally incredible is that it has already doubled its life expectancy, and spent a tenth of its history transplanted in Washington. For the tree to have lived this long, many people must have cared for it. I don’t know what that means exactly. But hell.