32.
Extra Circumspect, From Now On

STRANGE FORCES were at work in Fumiko, but she remembered her decision, and though she had not expected to fulfill it this quickly, considered it a solemn promise to herself. So once Masako and Junichiro were safely inside the castle she summoned her courage and sought out Ace Bledsoe, who was easy enough to find. He had gone around to the sunny side of the castle and was sitting on a stool with a book in his hands, reading aloud in the spidery tongue.

Ace noticed her mid-sentence and stood up. He was holding a book of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, given to him by Colonel Morgan when he’d first joined the Mighty Abolitionists. At first he hadn’t understood the essays, but recendy, especially during the sea voyage, he had committed parts of one of them to memory. He had not, in fact, been reading, but reciting it when Fumiko came upon him. “To believe your own thought, to believe what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense, for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—and our first thought it rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.”

He thought it was both beautiful and true, and was trying to make it his code, the way he intended to live his life from then on. He had the feeling that if he could speak his “latent conviction” to the woman who approached him now, she would speak her own back to him.

“I appreciate what you all did for Ned the other night,” he said. “Not everyone would take in a wounded stranger.”

“Shall we walk together a minute?” Fumiko asked him. “Shall we remove ourselves to the forest, so I can speak to you honestly, without a visitation from Masako? She’s inquisitive and if she sees us she will defeat my purpose before I even start.”

She gave him a demure smile and gestured toward the path that led to Masako’s marsh. She had watched only his mouth as she spoke to him, and was satisfied to find that her heart did not flip over in her chest. Yes, she’d been right, he was a normal man, fervent, perhaps, and kind, but as men often were at moments like this, utterly unaware of what she’d been feeling, of how he had ruined her peace of mind. She smiled again, surer now that she would free herself, once their little walk was done.

Ace moved along behind her, pleased with the effort she was making. It was the first time anyone other than Manjiro, and Kyuzo a little bit, had tried to talk to him since Ned’s injury. It hadn’t been bad, though, being left alone. Today, especially, he was glad to have some time away from Ned, whose constant harping on the fact that he wasn’t feeling any pain had been driving Ace to distraction.

He thought he’d better try to hold up his end of the conversation.

“I always thought Ned talked too much,” he said. “I’ll bet he’s doing it again with your menfolk or with the carpenter they took him to visit. I’ll bet he’s telling them how he wished he had a nicer partner than me, or someone a little less serious, at least. He says I spend too much time worrying about my life, and in actual fact I’m not easy to get along with. I’d like to remedy that.”

That was not what he’d meant to say and he was surprised. How could he remedy such a thing?

“There was a wonderful old teahouse down this way once,” Fumiko told him. “When I first married Einosuke we used to come here and sit, to try to get to know each other. I hardly remember it now, but at the time I was deeply disappointed, really in pain, for though he seemed a decent enough man I didn’t want to be married to him. I was such a sentimental girl. I cried myself to sleep almost every night, once I heard him snoring. I just did not feel he was a jibun no ki no atta hito, a kindred spirit with myself. Does that sound selfish to you? Did you know your wife before you married her? Are marriages arranged in America as they are here in Japan?”

It took her breath away to say such things, to tell this unvarnished truth and ask such pointed questions. She had never done it before out loud, not even with Tsune. She had spoken slowly, though of course she knew he wouldn’t understand, and she had watched him as she spoke, determined to get everything finished, even at the expense of looking into his eyes. Her own eyes were moist and her lips were dry.

Ace nodded when he was sure she was finished. He had recognized it as something deeply felt and said, “I’ve a little confession to make about Ned. I used to like to go fishing when we were both holed up on Colonel Morgan’s farm, practicing for some new show. There was this nice little stream running through his place, but I really only went there for self-communion, you know, to get away from everyone and think about how my life was going and such. I even talked aloud to myself so taking Ned with me was out of the question.”

He smiled and Fumiko thought, “Can sounds such as those truly make up a language?”

What she said, however, was, “I suppose it is really too much to ask, even in America, that a man recognize the woman he marries for herself, for what she is and what she feels, and not merely as an extension of himself. I suppose it is too much to ask that he see her.” She paused, embarrassed. “I hope you won’t think it horrible of me to talk this way. I hope you will understand that Einosuke is really a most wonderful husband in every other way. It’s just that he rarely penetrates my heart.”

The heart he rarely penetrated was in her throat.

“So I used to try to trick him,” said Ace, laughing a little and raising his eyebrows. “Sometimes I’d say I was going off to write a song, and other times I’d lie down in Colonel Morgan’s barn and pretend to be napping, all in search of solitude, you know, all in search of time alone. Ned was suspicious, I think, but sooner or later he’d get interested in something else and I could sneak off. Hell, there was only the one stream, so nothing would have been easier than finding me. I used to think he was stupid, but of course that wasn’t the case. Ned had his own kind of dignity. I guess that’s why I’m saying all this now.”

Fumiko looked at him. She had stopped thinking about Einosuke. What she wanted to do was touch this man, to break the spell her dream still held over her by putting her hand on his face. And so she did it, even before he stopped talking. She reached up and touched his cheek with the middle three fingers of her right hand, letting them slide from his eye socket to the corner of his now unmoving mouth. It was at once the bravest and the most provocative thing she had ever done.

She kept her fingers there for the merest seconds, though it seemed far longer. And when she finally released him Ace nearly fell. He bent toward the ground, steadied himself, then picked up a twig and pretended that that had been his intention all along. He stood again and passed the twig between his fingers like a coin. It was a trick his father had taught him, that he hadn’t tried to do in years. She watched as it wove itself around his knuckles, then took it from him and placed it out of sight, inside her kimono.

“I will go back before you,” she said. “We must, of course, be extra circumspect from now on.”

She put her hand on his, kept it there until she’d moved a half a step toward the castle, then let it go and held her palm out, so he might know what she meant.

Ace watched her walking back over an entire bed of twigs, the brothers and sisters of the one she had taken from him.

Little bits of nature, one indistinguishable from another, all of them spread about.