Lost Girls and Love Hotels (3 page)

Y
ou bring Masa (or Hiro, or Toshi, or Takuya) home. He was the best of the desperados lingering around the bar after the ugly lights had been turned on. Try to explain in beginner’s English that you want to be tied up and gagged. You hold out a necktie and a bandanna to him. He looks at you like a baby bird fallen from the nest. Gestures—hands above your head, wrists together, approximation of arousal on your face. His pupils dilate. He blushes. The idea seems to snap into place in his mind and, like most of them, he’s all over it, all over you, and finally you’re getting wet.

You like it like this because the guy, the body on top of you with a penis and a pulse, won’t pretend to be tender, won’t pretend he loves you, or even likes you. He won’t pretend anything at all, because you’ve given him permission not to. Yeah sure, if he’s angry, if he hates his mother,
hates his job, his life, the world, you might end up with bruises. If he’s smart, the bruises won’t show when you’re dressed. But mostly, you like it like this because it’s the only thing that turns you on.

He has lost all gross motor control, he’s all over the place, one knee on the futon, one knee on the floor, fumbling with the necktie that still has a knot in it from last time and looks like a noose. He yanks at the knot with his teeth, apologizes in polite Japanese, jerks his head to the side, sighs in exasperation. You’re not sure whether this is fun or tragic. “Give it to me,” you mumble through the gag. Lucky you started smoking again and stopped biting your fingernails. Yank. Twist. The tie is unknotted. “Now fuck me please.”

The guy sits down at the edge of the futon, his chin drops.

You pull the bandanna from your mouth. “What is it?”

“
Gomen
—. I can’t.”

You wriggle out of your constraints, sit up, and light a smoke.

“I want to know your mind,” he says.

“No you don’t.”

“
Maji-de
. It’s true. I’m interesting.”

“Bet you are. Now go home.”

“No.”

“Run along, now,” you wave at him. “Shoo!”

He gives you a look. Something between need and pity. For a moment, you think about asking him to spoon you. Your body assumes the position. He looks down at you like
a parent at a sick child. You close your eyes, imagine being laid out on a slab, pink and vulnerable. The door clicks shut and you are safe. Alone.

The alarm clock casts a strangely comforting green glow over the tiny room. 5:29. Nothing good ever happens between five and six. You feel the hangover lying in wait, the drugs exiting your body like bugs under your skin. If you were smart, you’d prepare for the morning, soften its punch with a glass of water and an ibuprofen by the bedside. You’d wash off your makeup, so you wouldn’t look like Alice Cooper when you wake up.

But you’re not smart.

You plop your thumb in your mouth and instantly connect to something else, throw a switch in your psyche and you are back, way back, before all the bad choices, the wrong turns. Nestle the pad of your thumb against the nubby landscape of your palate, hook your index finger over your nose, leave the rubble of the present, and retreat to an imagined past.

I’m eight. Frank’s ten.
Dad has a new job selling luxury vehicles. New job, new house. A monster home with a spiral staircase, a Jacuzzi, and a garage big enough for another family. Frank closes his eyes when we drive through the subdivision—there are no streets, only drives and points, circles, cul-de-sacs—“Makes me dizzy,” he says. All the houses. All the same.

Our front lawn is still unsodded, the faux Victorian cornices unpainted. Something about the contractor. Mom and Dad fight about it all the time.

Christmas is coming, and today is family-photo day. In a month or so, the fireplace mantle will be chock-a-block with family photo cards. Perfect families lounging by crackling fires, wearing argyle sweaters and bibbed velvet dresses. Shiny-haired, straight toothed, button-nosed fami
lies. We have to make our card. Dad is stressed. Frank and I get uglier every year.

Sometimes, when we’re all sitting around the kitchen table—Frank with his bug eyes and skin condition-du-jour, twitching and jabbering until Dad says “Quit it,” me like an overgrown baby, bloated and fleshy—Dad looks us over and seems to deflate. Unsuck his stomach. Take off his smile like a too-tight uniform. Things have not turned out as he’d planned. We have not turned out.

Mom’s still pretty. Big eyes, big boobs, big auburn hair that looks silky but feels crispy. On a good day, she looks like a tired twenty-five-year-old. Most days, she looks like someone standing in the middle of an intersection, the light turning yellow, the bottom of her brown-paper grocery bags fallen out, cans rolling into traffic, a carton of eggs smashed at her toes. A person whose day has fallen to pieces. Every day.

They make a nice couple, Mom and Dad. If they rented a couple of Sears catalogue kids, if Mom took one of her pills and Dad had a three-finger scotch, they’d make a nice photo.

Mom’s rubbing Frank’s scabby chin with a vinegar-soaked rag, trying to get the crust off so she can put the ointment on so the impetigo doesn’t take over his face. Frank doesn’t move. Doesn’t cry or flinch or anything. The doctor says his face is contagious. He’s been excused from school. Frank hates staying home. I think he’s lucky—school is a nightmare of extroverts and dodgeball.

Dad comes downstairs in his chinos and forest-green
shirt, red-and-green-striped rep tie, Sperry Topsiders. Barrel-chest. Burt Reynolds mustache. He takes one look at Frank sitting motionless on the stool, Mom with her yellow dish-gloves and blood-soaked rag. “Oh for Christ’s sake, Liz. Today?”

“Ted—”

“How’s that going to look in the photo? Open sore! Happy holidays!”

“I have to remove the crust or—”

Dad holds up his palm. “Okay. Okay. I’m going to eat now.”

It’s my turn now.

“Margaret, why aren’t you dressed?” Dad whines.

Mom sighs. “Get dressed Mags.”

I start thinking about the hypnosis record. Frank plays it sometimes on the old record player. He says you don’t need a pocket watch at all, just a soothing voice and a firm stare. I think about the sound of the record. The Indian man’s voice.
Fizz-clop. Fizz-clop. Your body is heavy, heavy. Sink into it. Fizz-clop
. Dad pours some cereal into a bowl, but it comes out too fast, overflows onto the counter, the floor.

I can’t move.

Mom frowns. “Mags! Go! Giddy-up!”

Feel the pull of gravity.

Dad slams the cereal box down. “What’s wrong with you?”

I look at Frank, at his blank stare, at his raw chin, at Dad’s cereal, Mom’s gloves. The smell of vinegar and blood and peanut butter fills my nose. Saliva floods my
mouth and I think,
No please no please no.
Frank turns his head and looks at me. Smiles.
It’s okay.
Hands on my knees, face down. I throw up my Captain Crunch on the faux Spanish tiles. It splatters and hits the knees of Frank’s dress pants, the hem of Mom’s Christmas dress. Frank doesn’t move. Mom pulls her gloves off. Dad says “Damn!” I feel the pull of gravity.

Down.

Down.

I
wake up to the drone of the little man crawling through the neighborhood in his truck at twenty kilometers an hour, moaning into his loudspeaker, “
Yaki-ii-MO, Yaki-ii-MO!
” The song is so depressing. The first time I heard it, I thought it must be a Japanese death cult recruiting members. It was saddening to find out the banal truth—he was only hawking tubers. The song, the “Sweet potato, delicious sweet potato!,” is getting louder.

I’m still in the numb phase of my hangover. Brain scooped out. Belly screaming for food.

I throw my robe on.
Where’s the sash?
Shit. Some guy left me in bed one night with the sash tied around my ankles—so tight my feet swelled up. Ines had to rescue me, cut the sash off me with a pair of nail scissors. It was a running joke for two weeks.

The truck is almost at the corner when I reach the street,
the low sad song trailing away. I scream after it. “Hey! Wait!
Chotto matte!
Hello.
Moshi moshi!
” I laugh at my word salad of Japanese and English. My slippers go
flop! flop!
as I run, one hand in the air, waving madly, the other clutching my robe so I don’t flash the neighborhood.

The truck stops, and I walk panting toward the little man, whose face is frozen in an expression revealing horror, delight, and confusion.

“
Futatsu o kudasai,
” I say, holding up two fingers. The smell of the roasted sweet potatoes fills my nose. Smoke billows up from the back of the truck.

The withered little troll sings thank-you, hands me the paper bag with both hands, steals a peek at my bare legs when he bows.

A sudden and bizarre urge overtakes me—to skip back to the house, click my heels like Frank and I used to do as kids. It was fine for me to do it, to yelp and click, but Dad said Frank looked like a little faggot. Eventually we stopped clicking altogether. Walked like normal people. I resist the urge.

When I get inside, I realize I’m turning Japanese. I look down at my feet, at my “Cherry Girl” room shoes—the kind with little plastic reflexology nubs on the insoles, the kind emblazoned with a cheerful half-mouse, half-human, apple-cheeked cartoon character—I look down and feel a little wave of horror. I’ve worn my room shoes outside! I’ve contaminated my “Cherry Girl” room shoes with outside dirt. I’ve already stepped up from the
renkan
, the all-important two-foot-square space that separates the
outside
from the
inside
. The outside dirt and chaos is on my “Cherry Girl” room shoes. I’m bringing it inside. Not sure what to do, not sure why I even care, I take off my “Cherry Girl” room shoes and carry them upstairs.

The-Guy-Whose-Name-Nobody-Knows is shuttling yet another Japanese girl out of his room. To her horror, we meet at the top of the narrow staircase. The-Guy-Whose-Name-Nobody-Knows shuttles girls out of his room several times a week. Different girls. Usually late at night or early in the morning. They do the walk of shame down the length of the yellow-walled hallway, past the sour-smelling row of toilet rooms, down the stairs to the front door. Sometimes I listen for the passionless little kiss before the door closes, for the awkward exchange of mobile phone numbers. After they leave, The-Guy-Whose-Name-Nobody-Knows usually goes into the kitchen and nukes a frozen burrito. He tells me twice a week how to order frozen burritos and canned ravioli from the Internet. They are, he insists, “a lot cheaper than that Japanese shit.”

The guy says little else to me or anyone else in the house. We are simply ugly reminders that he is not the exotic, globe-trotting, boy-band-member look-alike that he likes to think he is. He is doughy and pale. During the week, he wears bad suits that don’t fit properly, and on the weekend, bad jeans that don’t fit properly. He has many T-shirts that advertise the many exotic places he’s visited. On nights he isn’t fucking Japanese girls, he probably reads his passport, wishes the high school jocks could see him now. One long-haul flight and he’s gone from zero to hero.

The girl being shuttled has buck-teeth that distort her otherwise doll-like face. She walks like a wind-up toy. Squeaks a little when we meet on the stairs. Her hand assumes the mouth-shield position—Japan’s answer to orthodontics. I smile at her. She bows at me. The-Guy-Whose-Name-Nobody-Knows puts his hand on the small of her back, urging her forward, urging her out. The sweet potatoes smell sweet. “
Kirei desu
,” I say to the girl being shuttled. You’re pretty.

I don’t want to listen for the passionless kiss or the mobile phone tango. I want to eat my sweet potatoes and enjoy my strange blend of melancholy and contentment. I know it won’t last. It’s a fine balance, struck when the precise amount of intoxicant produces a temporary amnesia, a dulling of the capacity to fixate, deconstruct, analyze. When life is reduced to this step, then that step, to the way water tastes to a dry mouth, the way kindness comes easily at these times, fits into the moment like a lover’s body curling into mine. When life is not out there. It’s here. And here. And here.

I want to enjoy it while it lasts, before the midday plummet, when my only recourse will be to sleep or buy useless shit.

I try to ignore the dinginess of the hallway, the yellowing stippled walls, the hemorrhaging garbage bin under the
PUT YOUR CLAP HERE
sign. I try to laugh at the fact that I live in a flophouse by Japanese standards. By any standard. I tell myself that everything is experience, that someday I’ll see all of this as part of a puzzle, that it will amount to
something, that
I
will amount to something. For a moment, my mind starts up that old neural pathway, toward despair, toward worst-case-scenario territory, but I make it to Ines’s door in time.

The door is ajar, so I burst in and hold the bag of potatoes over my head like a trophy. I’m afraid I’m manic, but I push the thought aside, swim awhile in my sudden energy, the excitement only aromatic vegetables can engender. “Ta-da!” I scream, attempting a click, failing, almost toppling over. My robe falls open and I stand there all goose bumps and hard nipples, panting, close to happy for the first time in months. I’m not sure why. I don’t care.

“Good morning gorgeous,” Ines says with a purr. She looks perfect. Makeup unsmudged, not a hair astray. “This is Kazu.” Ines pulls back the duvet and reveals a brown smooth man, painted with tattoos, ropy with muscles, curled in the fetal position, sound asleep.

“Oh shit, sorry.”

“Don’t be silly.
Entrée
. What’ve you got there?”

“Yaki-iimo,”
I whisper. Steam puffs out of the bag when I open it. “Who’s the guy?”

Ines grabs my hand, giggles, nibbles at the sweet potato. “Kazu. I think he’s a gangster or something. Very dangerous.”

I look at Kazu, his shaved head, pouty lips, high, broad cheekbones. Something about him triggers an uncomfortable animalism in me, erases for a moment all my accumulated angst, and transforms me into a walking appetite. I let my breath go. Try to collect myself. Tell myself he’ll wake
up and say something unsexy in pigeon English and all will be as it should be.

“Mmmm,” Ines says. She flashes me her cum face—chin up, mouth open, eyelids fluttering. “Fuck this is good.”

“I bet.”

“No this.” She takes another bite, runs her hand over Kazu’s shoulder. “
And
this.” His eyes open.

The sweet potato tastes like candy.

“Ohayo gozaimasu,”
Kazu says.

“Good morning baby.” Ines kisses his smooth head. My chest feels hot. “This is my friend. Isn’t she yummy?”

I pull my robe tight across my body.

“Threesome? What do you think, sweetheart?”

I breathe in a noseful of the air—Chanel No. 5 and corporeal indulgence. Hope that Ines will dismiss her suggestion with a laugh. The sober light of the morning is not the time for a threesome.

Kazu stretches like a cat. The cords of his neck tighten. “Time is?”

“Ten,” I spit out. So pleased to respond to him.

He sits up. Cracks his neck. Left. Right. I wonder if he really is a gangster. Ines is prone to exaggeration, and there is something sophisticated about Kazu. Something in his movements—the delicacy with which he lifts his body from the bed—that doesn’t seem fit for a gangster.

“I must go,” he says.

Ines pouts. “So soon?”

I catch myself slack-jawed. Saliva collecting in the trough of my lower lip. Embarrassment crawls on me like
ants. “I’ll go—give you some space,” I say. In the mirror propped up at the end of the bed, I catch my reflection. Mascara smeared under my eyes, blotchy skin, crazy medusa hair.
Fuck.
I scamper across the tatami mats, close the door behind me, lean on it, and suck air into my lungs. For a second, my eyes go squirrelly and the walls seem to pulse and buckle with my breathing.

Kazu.