Lost Girls and Love Hotels (12 page)

I’m nineteen. Frank’s been diagnosed.
It’s Thanksgiving, and I’m afraid of getting fat again. Frank sits in the living room, staring blankly at the television, rolling imaginary beads between his fingers and thumb.

“Frank! Come and help me with the gravy.”

Frank repeats, “Gravy.”

I sit at the kitchen table, chewing celery sticks into spikes and harpooning pimento stuffed olives with them. Strings of celery stick in my teeth. The waist of my jeans digs into my belly. I don’t want to be here. I want a drink.

Frank’s face is puffy, freckled with acne over his nose, on his chin. He looks like an old man. Like an old zombie. Tall and crooked and slow. I watch him stir the flour and water. He stirs like a watched person. He does everything like a watched person.

“Can I have a beer?” I ask.

“It’s early,” Mom says, pulling back the quilting of her oven mitt and making a show of checking the time. “Oh, go ahead. Make me a gin and tonic, will you? Do you know how?”

“Uh, gin and—” I snap my fingers, grimace. “Tonic?”

“Smart-ass.”

Frank repeats, “Smart-ass.” He begins to laugh but ends up shuddering.

I hand the drink to Mom and whisper, “Is he Rainman?”

Frank turns and screams, “WHO’S PEEPING?”

With her oven-mitted hand, Mom pats his back, shoots me a look. “Shhhh,” she says.

The beer makes me want a cigarette. I wonder what the cigarette will make me want.

In the bathroom, hidden behind the toilet, I find a balled-up tissue filled with half-dissolved pills.

Mom confronts Frank at dinner. “Are you taking your pills?”

Frank’s face twitches a little. “Yes.”

“The pills help you so I want you to take them—swallow them, okay?”

Frank jerks his head to the side. Smiles.

“Frank?”

“Mmm-hm.”

“Okay, let’s eat.”

What are those Buddhists on about, I think.
Stay in the moment.
Fuck the moment. I want to go back or forward—
any way but here, now. But I can’t go back—back to family dinners, begging Mom for a sip of her wine, teasing each other, telling stories, eating so much I have to undo the top button on my jeans. Can’t go forward—can’t meet Frank halfway, in some shadowy place where the world is like a reflection in a fun-house mirror, where the nuts and bolts of life disappear into a trippy dreamscape. A place like that must be better than this.

“Who’s the smallest woman in the world, Frank?”

No answer.

“Frank, what’s the world record for breath-holding?” I think I see something behind his stare, a fragment. But it vanishes.

Meet him halfway
. “Green, yellow, red! Green, yellow—”

Mom slams her fork down on the table. “Stop it, Margaret!”

“Fuck, Frank! Say something!” I grab his hand—it’s cold and sweaty—but he pulls it away, jumps out of his chair. Lets out a wretched bleat.

“Margaret!” Mom screams.

I see a warped reflection of Frank in the shiny black of the refrigerator door, his arm held over his head, the glint of the blade. That’s when I start running.

D
on’t go back to the house,” Ines tells me as I sit down.

“Seems to be the consensus.”

Jiro pours me some beer. He has a white hand-towel wrapped around his head, like a bandanna. He’s in his usual blue work clothes that look like a karate uniform. I loll my head around a bit. I’m still stiff. Jiro narrows his eyes. “Hard day’s night,
ne
?” He says this every night.

“Weird day’s night,
deshiou
?” I cackle. Glug down my beer. One of my neck stretches draws my eyes to the wobbly table in the corner. It’s stacked with shoes and handbags. A knapsack hemorrhaging clothes leans against the wall. Ines sighs. “Police showed up at the house today.”

For whom? I’m thinking. “For what?” I say.

“I didn’t stay long enough to find out. Let’s just say my
papers aren’t in order.” She points to a tiny run in her stocking. “I crawled out the window.”

“With all that shit?” I ask.

She glares at me. Nostrils flared. “A lot of cock-sucking went into getting that
shit
.”

“Kazu dumped me because his wife found out.”

“Don’t fight a Japanese wife,” Ines says. “You’ll lose.”

“I could take her.” I flex a bicep. Quickly pull my arm down again at the pathetic sight of it. Ping-pong ball on a noodle.

Ines sighs. “Let me tell you something about Japan. People think it’s run by men but that’s a myth. The women are in charge. Mothers. Wives. They control the money. Tough guy Kazu probably gets an allowance from his wife like all men in Japan do. The women fuel the economy with their shopping. Impeccable taste—most of them anyway. Luxury all the way. They stay behind the scenes because they’re smart. The men die from overwork and the women do the decorating. They’ve got it all figured out.”

“But I love him,” I say. Embarrassed by myself.

Nobody says anything for a few minutes. Jiro stands at a distance, hands clasped in front of him, lost in the melancholic love ballad on the radio. Ines, with her elbow on the bar, swirls the beer in her glass, inspects it as though it were fine wine. “I’ll go tan my tits in Bali.” She starts forcefully applying lipstick. “Change is good.”

“I can’t stop thinking about him. It’s like a rash. I mean, I fuck guys all the time. I can’t explain why he is different.”

“Fish have no word for water,” Ines says and downs her beer in one gulp.

“
Ashita ga aru
,” the men on the radio harmonize.
There is tomorrow.
It’s an infectious tune. The kind that makes you want to sway along.

“Fuck tomorrow,” Ines says. She has the look of someone who’s had the blood drained out of her. Pale and defeated.

“How old are you?” I ask her without thinking.

Perhaps because the question comes out of nowhere, sneaks up on her, she answers quickly. “Thirty-four,” she tells me.

I’d always imagined her as younger. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. But as soon as she says her age, I see the extra years on her face. In the brackets around her mouth, the slightly crepey skin under her eyes.

As though she is reading my mind, she puts her hands on her face and holds the skin back until she’s all cheekbones and slanted eyes. “Do you remember when you were about eighteen—what you imagined thirty-four to be like?”

“Like—adulthood.”

“Like death.” She drops her hands, and her face slips back into precarious youth.

“But you’re the sexiest thing ever,” I tell her.

“True,” she smoothes her hair down. “But still.”

The gap between songs on the radio is long and poignant. Jiro holds up our empty bottle of beer. “Drinking time?” he asks.

Of course.

Ines becomes serious suddenly. “I need to ask you a favor, darling. A big one.”

“Okay.”

“Give me your passport. Let me get out of the country, then report it stolen.”

“But we look nothing alike.”

“We all look alike,” she says, averting her eyes. Sucking on her cigarette.

“Sure,” I say. “My passport is your passport.”

Ines squeezes my bicep. The look on her face terrifies me.
You are a force of nature
, I want to say. “This is probably our last night together in Japan,” I say.

“Cause for celebration, gorgeous. What shall it be?”

“More beer?” I suggest.

“More everything.”

Through the yellowing frosted glass of the sliding doors, I see the outline of Adam. Tall—taller than the doorframe, spindly and ungraceful. Ines slinks off her barstool and locks the door.

“Come on!” Adam calls. “I’ve got a surprise for you birds.”

Ines looks at me. “What do you think?”

“Well, he does have a surprise.”

“Is the surprise a liquid?” Ines asks.

“No.”

“Chemical?”

Adam bangs on the door.

Ines presses her cheek against the glass. “If I open the door a slit, can you slip the surprise in sideways?”

“No, no, no. Fucking hell. It’s
cultural
.” He says “cultural” like a child sounding out an unfamiliar word.

Ines flips the lock open. “I’ve got to see this.” Adam slides the door open and enters with his nose in the air, decked out in a black suit and minister’s collar, fanning himself with a handful of tickets.

“Japanese thee-ah-tuh my friends.”

Ines grabs the tickets. Inspects them. Squinty-eyed. “Good God.” She hands the tickets to me. “They’re Kabuki tickets. At the fucking National Theater.”

“A small gift from the father of the bride to me—the holy man—to you. The skanky boozehounds. Enjoy. Enjoy.”

Ines plunks down on her stool and scowls. “Nice timing, Adam. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Leaving where?”

“Here. Japan. Have to get out before I’m deported.”

Adam turns to me. “And you?”

“I’ll stick around for a bit. Still got a good couple weeks before Air-Pro cancels my visa sponsorship.” I take a gulp of beer, sit up straight and proud. “I got canned for deranging the students.”

Ines shakes my hand. “Good work, Marge.”

“The state of you two! Couple of ne’er-do-wells.”

“Come boozing with us?” I ask Adam.

“Can I wear the collar?”

“Might have some trouble scoring,” Ines says.

I look across the bar. “And you Jiro? Come out with us?”

Jiro crunches his eyebrows together. “Eight years already I’m open. Every day. 7-11
ne
?” He starts to wipe the bar. We watch him. Watch the lines of his face shift. He stops, and I notice for the first time the faint line on his ring finger. The soft skin where a ring was worn for years. I’d like it if all of our past showed as marks on our bodies. On the bus you could read your neighbor instead of the newspaper. A history in scar tissue.

Jiro drops the rag. Lifts his chin. “
Hai!
Let’s enjoy together.” He grabs a bottle of wine from the high shelf. Then two more. “Only one life each person.”

We all follow Jiro. Each of us in our own reverie. Walking in a little clump for what seems like an eternity. When we turn onto the street that cuts through Yoyogi Park, I ask Jiro where we’re headed.

“My favorite Tokyo place. Spirit of Tokyo.”

When we reach the middle of the huge green space, he leads us up a pedestrian walkway, down into the park. Stops on the steps and sits down. “Sit! Please!” From his bag, he recovers a bottle of wine, four tumblers, and a bag of wasabi peas and dehydrated squid strips.

I look around. “This is it?” I ask. The spirit of Tokyo?

Adam crunches his nose. “Smells like piss, mate.”

Jiro pats his hand at us. From somewhere in his belongings, he shakes out a thin blanket and spreads it out at the top of the stairs. Sets up a little picnic.

Just as we’re about to clink cheers, the music starts. The soulful whine of a saxophone radiating from under the concrete stairs. Jiro takes a swig of wine. “Practice space,” he says. “Japanese apartment very small,
ne
?” Jiro lies back and points at the sky. A sheet of black strewn with stars. Tokyo is so alive with its own lights, I’ve never seen the night sky like this.

I think of the Sunshine Building and the panorama of Tokyo. Yoyogi Park sits near the center—just over to the west a bit. The sprawl of the city radiating around us. So many people. Lives. Below us, Jiro’s blanket, with a vague smell reminiscent of ciggies and incense. Wine spills gone to vinegar. And above us the stars.

The saxophone is melancholic. Sensual. Like a tranquilizer, it eases me onto a corner of the blanket, the low notes pressing on me like bags of sand, the high notes like fingers raking my scalp.

Jiro points at the three-quarter moon. “Lunatic,” he says.

Adam holds his glass out, “Just a few more months in Nippon and I will be.”

“Rabbit,” Jiro says. “Lunatic rabbit.”

“Lay off the vino, Jiro my man.”

Ines lays back on her elbow. “No, you pleb. He’s talking about the rabbit on the moon. We see a man, Japanese see a rabbit. It’s an old folk tale. A monk on a pilgrimage comes to a clearing in the forest and asks the animals for help. All the critters find food and shelter for him but the rabbit has nothing, so he throws himself on the fire as a meal for the
monk. The monk carries the limp little bunny body up to the moon.”

“Morbid,” I say.

“Life,” Ines tells me.

I want a happy ending. It must happen sometimes. Why not to me?

Quiet comes over us. Even Adam looks contemplative. Jiro hums a little to the music. He makes smoking look like a religious experience. When the wine is gone and the saxophonist packs up, we all look a little lost. Some clouds appear out of nowhere and obscure the moon.
Kill the music. Kill the lights.
Ines says, “I need to dance.” And we reassemble, pack up our picnic and depart the spirit for the flesh.

I don’t fight it. It just seems right to go to Bar Let’s Go. A gesture of sanity. Seeing things for what they are. This is what I do in Japan. Drink cheap booze and listen to the same ten songs over and over.

We find a table on the mezzanine. A lookout. I dig in my purse for a lighter and pull out Kazu’s envelope. Take a peek inside and realize the notes are all
ichiman-en
. There must be at least ten thousand dollars. “Drinks are on me,” I say.

There’s some commotion near the door. A pale worm of a gaijin being restrained by two meathead bouncers. A pack of onlookers collects to feed. I turn back to the bar. Order a bottle of champagne. Some whoops and hollers form the dance floor. Some more from the doorway. Can’t see for the crowd.

I look up at the mezzanine. At our empty table. The energy in the room has suddenly shifted. The crowd seems thin. Concentrated around the edges of the room. The exits and the restrooms. The champagne is plunked down in front of me. Ines grabs me by the shoulder. “Come on. The cops are here.”

“Wait,” I hold up the champagne bottle. “Let’s drink it in the loo.”

“They’re checking alien identification cards. Someone was attacked in the subway by a foreigner,” Ines says. “They’ve got Adam. His tourist visa is expired.” She points her chin at the door. Cops with flashlights are scrutinizing the contents of a blond girl’s purse. She stands slumped into one hip. Head held at an angle. The gathered clubbers look like a mangy pack of dogs.

Ines pulls me behind the bar. “
Gomenasai
,” she says, cutting a path through the startled bartenders with her tits. The bottle of champagne held overhead like a trophy. We find the swinging door into the kitchen and enter the tiny hot pit of chaos. The back door is propped open in hope of a breeze. We make for it. Sigh in relief and breathe in the decay and piss of the alleyway. I grab the champagne from Ines and pop the cork.” “Fuck, I never paid for this,” I laugh. Catch the cascade of bubbles with my mouth. A waiter appears at the kitchen door, waving a bill. A cop yells, “Stop!” The bottle shatters at our feet.

For two drunk girls, Ines and I run pretty fast. After a couple of blocks, I look back and watch the cop—he can’t be
more than five-feet-two, pumping his legs like a little robot. Blowing his whistle frantically. The look on his face—pure determination, bordering on lust—tells me he’s actually going to catch us. Then the wind carries a fetid smell over. “This way,” I scream at Ines, and dart down a back street near Shinjuku Station.

Once in the thick of the cardboard box city, which at this hour is darkened and quiet, we huddle between two boxes like kids playing hide-and-seek. The policeman’s whistle pierces the air, somewhere nearby. It feels like my heart will jump through my ribs. Curtains are parted on one of the boxes, and a brown, withered hand calls us in. I duck my head in the box. Ines pulls her heels off and slinks in. Inside is like a Morroccan tea house. Box leading to box. Rugs and cushions strewn everywhere. The gauzy-bearded homeowner crouches like a bird by the curtained front door. He looks like something made of leather. Tough skin stretched over delicate limbs. He gives us a suspicious look. Then gestures roughly for us to relax.

A cat is curled in the corner. It lifts its head up. Gives us a piss-off meow. By the doorway, I see an old pair of leather construction-worker shoes. Laid out carefully. Like artifacts. The man serves us gritty tea. Studies us.

“Nice place,” I say.

Ines translates.

“Good tea,” I say.

“Will you quit it?” Ines asks.

The little man seems to get the gist of it and hacks out a laugh.

We sit.

I think about harmony. About the cardboard box men. Itinerant workers outside the bonds of family, company, community. Cast into poverty after the bubble burst. Cast adrift. Permanently off-key.

I think about Frank. And me. Ines. Cast adrift.

I bury my head in my hands. Heels of my hands pressing into my eyes. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

“Shhhh,” Ines says.

Sounds outside die. No sign of the little cop and his whistle. Ines looks at me. “Okay. Let’s think darling. Where should we go? We have to be discreet.”

Discreet.

“I know the place.”

On the way out, I take a few notes from the envelope and slip them under the construction shoes. I nod thank-you. The man’s expression doesn’t change. He’s the symbol of something, but I don’t know what.