East is East

At lunchtime he went outside and crouched in the bushes until the hakujin with the stiff back and wirebrush hair had hung the lunch bucket on its hook and marched back up the path and out of sight. Ruth wouldn’t touch the food at first—little sandwiches of cucumber and sausage, with fresh-cut vegetables and raspberries in cream for dessert—but he insisted. He was half crazed with hunger, but he felt so guilty and he owed her so much—and so much more after last night—that he couldn’t see her deprived. She was so skinny, and all because of him. “We share,” he said, going down on his knees before her and touching his forehead to the floor, “please.”

She laughed when she saw him prostrate himself, and finally she gave in, pushing her typewriter aside and clearing a place on her worktable. They ate in silence, but he saw, with gratitude, with love, that she left him the lion’s share. While he was clearing up and she lingered over a cigarette, he broke the silence with a question that suddenly and unaccountably popped into his head: “Rusu, please and forgive me: how old are you?”

She threw back her head to draw at the cigarette, exhaling the answer: “Twenty-nine.”

“You divorce?”

She shook her head. “Never married.”

He took a moment with this, brushing crumbs from the table, crossing the room to lean out the door and replace the lunch bucket on its hook. “In Japan,” he said, “a woman is married at twenty-four. For a man, twenty-eight.”

Ruth was smiling, a sly sardonic look in her eye, and he had a sudden vision of her in the Big Apple, in a townhouse with a bathtub the size of his obāsan’s apartment, pictures on the walls, chrome and leather furniture and the ubiquitous deep-pile rug, and he saw himself coming home to her there, a salaryman in suit and tie and carrying a neat calfskin briefcase. “And how old are you?” she asked.

He was twenty. Just. But he looked older, he knew he did, and he didn’t want to disappoint her with the disparity in their ages. “Thirty-one,” he said.

Her eyebrows lifted. Twin plumes of smoke escaped her nostrils. “Really?” she said. “Three years past the limit. I’m surprised at you, Hiro—you ought to be married yourself.”

She spent nearly all of the next few days with him, returning to the big house only to sleep at night. He didn’t ask her about that, about the sleeping arrangements, and he was still tentative around her. He wanted her, and he tried to tell her that with his eyes or by casually brushing against her as she rose from her desk. At one point, after watching her work through all the interminable hours of the day, he came up behind her and laid a hand on her shoulder. “Not now,” she said, pulling him to her for one of those quick pecking kisses the Americans are so fond of, “I’m still working.” Later, when she came back from the big house with dinner for them both, he made a mute appeal—a movement of the hands, a slow melt of the eyes—and she saw it, and acknowledged it, but she told him she wasn’t feeling very well. “The heat,” she said, and she deflected the whole subject of their involvement with a question about Japan: was it this hot over there?

And then one evening she went back to the big house for cocktails and she didn’t return. It was seven and his stomach was growling. It was eight and the sun was gone and he began to give up hope. But then maybe—just maybe—she’d be back in the night. He waited for hours, brooding. What did she want with him, anyway? Was it all a game to her, a joke? And when was she going to fulfill her promise, when was she going to get him out of this stinkhole? He felt bitter sitting there in the dark without her—bitter, and though he wouldn’t admit it to himself, jealous too—and he forgot all about his gratitude and the debt he owed her, and he got up from the rocker and flicked on the light over her desk.

There it was: her story. One page in the typewriter, the others scattered across the desk as if they’d been dropped there by a sudden gust of wind, pages x’d out, scrawled over, stained with coffee and ink. How many times had he straightened them up for her, how many times had he arranged her pens and pencils and rinsed her coffee cup? He’d never looked at a word. Not because he wasn’t curious, but because he was ashamed to. How could he violate her privacy like that after all she’d done for him? That’s how he thought, that’s how his obāsan had raised him. But now, having sat and brooded in the dark and with the jealousy of the lover on him, he thought differently. He didn’t give a damn for her privacy. He sat down, shuffled the pages, and began to read: