East is East

That was a surprise. At first he thought he’d missed her somehow, but then he remembered his last postprandial stroll out to the cabin and how he’d found her sitting there in the dark. He was going to call out, but something made him stop. She was talking to someone, her voice a murmur, indistinct, a current of admonition or urgency to it, as if she were scolding a child. And then the screen door wheezed open, slapped shut. Saxby froze. There was someone on the porch, and it wasn’t Ruth.

The Dogs are Barking, Woof-Woof

When ruth came to him out of the night, he was dreaming of his mother, his haha, his okāsan, the soft-smiling girl in the miniskirt who’d brought him into the world and suckled him and looked deep into his eyes. It was a dream of the cradle, an oneiric memory, idealized and distilled from the stack of photographs his grandmother kept in the bottom drawer of her dresser. The photos flapped through his dream like a riffled deck of cards and he saw his mother standing outside a cram school with her guitar and the strong heavy legs and handsome wide face he’d inherited from her; saw her on the futon, thinner now, eyes fixed on the kicking infant framed by the crook of her arm; saw her alone in a crowded bar, bottles winking like stars behind her. And then her face pulled back and rose like the moon into the sky above him and she was Chieko, the wide-hipped girl he’d met in a dive in the Yoshiwara District, her arms around him, lips tugging at his own like sentient things. …

Then the door rattled and he knew the police had come for him with their Negroes and their dogs.

But no: it was Ruth’s voice coming to him out of the shadows. Ruth’s voice. Fumbling for his shorts, the latch, was something wrong? No. Did she want him to turn on the light? No. She was wearing some sort of musk, a scent that came from a bottle and brought him back to his dream, to Chieko and the scintillating lights of the Yoshiwara.

Ruth kissed him, her lips cool on his own, and he felt her tongue in his mouth. Her dress was chiffon, electric against his skin. He didn’t understand—they were friends, she’d told him, only friends, and the big butter-stinker with the hair like rice paper and the leaping pale eyes, he was her lover. But her dress fell to the floor as if tugged down by invisible hands and she held him, her flesh pressed to his, the pure white long-legged puzzle of her involved in him now, and he didn’t try to understand, didn’t want to, didn’t care.

In the morning, in the fullness of the light, she raised her head from his chest and looked into his eyes. He felt her there, poised against him, and he listened to the soft murmur of life awakening in the trees and held on to that cool gray gaze with a prick of emotion that must have showed in every line of his face. She seemed to be deciding something, sizing him up, reviewing the night and the moment and the sudden flurry of her options. “Only friends,” he murmured, and it was the right thing to say. She smiled, opening up, blossoming, and then she kissed him and everything fell into place.

She went back to her other house, the big house, before the sun was out of the trees, and later she brought him rolls and fruit and meat cut in strips. While he ate, she sat down at her typewriter and began hammering away at the keys with a furious racket. After an hour or so, during one of the long pauses in which she stared out the window and murmured to herself in a faraway voice, he cleared his throat and asked her what it was she was writing.

“A story,” she said, without looking up.

“Thriller?”

“No.”

“Love story?”

She turned in her chair to look at him. He was sprawled in the loveseat, thumbing through a news magazine—crack, AIDS, children gunned down in the schoolyard—bored to the very roots of his hair. “It’s a tragedy,” she said, “very sad,” and she pantomimed the emotion with a downturned mouth.

He thought about that for a moment as she went back to her typing. A tragedy. Of course. What else? Life was a tragedy. “About what?” he asked, though he knew he was keeping her from her work and he felt guilty about it.

“A Japanese,” she said, without turning her head. “In America.”

This was a surprise, and before he had a chance to absorb it, he blurted, “Like me?”

Now she turned. “Like you,” she said, and then she was typing again.