Midnight and the Meaning of Love (23 page)

“Arigato!”
she said softly with great excitement. She then continued forward toward her seat, her slim legs swishing in some new Levis. She wore black Adidas on her feet and rocked her small purse on her backside instead of in front of her or on her side like most American girls did.

The brief exchange with Yuka got my mind to roaming. For the past week in Brooklyn I hadn’t had the ease or comfort to let my thoughts run free. Like sand spilling through the narrow passage in an hourglass, I had been in a mad race against time. I had to focus, control, and execute precisely. Now I laid my study cards down and closed my eyes.

Mayonaka

First darkness and then a small spotlight. Akemi’s thick, natural lips appeared. They began moving, speaking to me in her foreign tongue. Her voice was a melody of whispers. Her words were not as important as their intensity—or the subtle shapes that her lips made when forming certain phrases. She had perfectly white teeth in both worlds, the real one and the one I was seeing now, and a pretty, pretty smile. Uniquely shaped eyes wide and dark, filled with both curiosity and mischief, hers were magnetic and seductive. Those eyes of hers always shined for me and reflected my image. In them were written her confessions of love.

I saw her long, pretty neck and lean and feminine shoulders where her dark hair draped. The feeling of her was all softness mixed with nothing else but sweetness. She was always warm for me, and got more warmer the closer I came to her. Even when her lips were not moving, her silence was elegant and she made it known in her every gesture and movement that everything she had was exclusively for me.

Suddenly I opened my eyes and the seductive images slipped away.
Absence is a powerful aphrodisiac
, I thought to myself. But I didn’t want to go too deep, feel too much, too soon, or have a private reaction in a public place. Instead I reached into my inside right pocket and pulled out the translation of the letter Akemi had written to me a week ago on Saturday, the last day that we saw one another in New York City. It was sealed in an envelope. Even though I’d had the option, I had refused to read it while still standing on American soil and before I was coasting through beautiful blue and white swirled skies to the Land of the Rising Sun. I didn’t want to know or hear anything from
her that could possibly interrupt or delay or distract or discourage my journey to get what belonged to me—her. Now that I was suspended midair with no possibility of anyone or anything turning me back, I opened it and read it slowly, carefully.

MAYONAKA

We are young, but not too young to love.

We are naïve, but not too naïve to know what we are feeling.

Who put this love into the atmosphere and this craving into our bodies? Who put this love into the atmosphere and this craving into our bodies?

Who put this feeling into our hearts and these thoughts into our minds?

Who brought us together, if we were supposed to be apart?

We did right. So why do they say us is wrong?

If not speaking any words in common could not stop our love,

If being divided by culture or blood relations or even oceans

Could not stop our love,

What can stop our love?

No one, none, nothing …

OTOSAN

Please don’t hate my father, because Okasan loved him so,

And I love my mother more than anyone could know.

She has returned to the Earth but lives on in my heart.

Sometimes still, we speak, even though we’re worlds apart.

Daddy asks me what do you see in him?

I answer, a hot spring on top of a cold mountain.

Or my bare skin against a sizzling hot rock.

Remove him from your heart!

Could I pull my teeth out, one at a time?

Or maybe peel off all of my own skin beginning with my fingers?

I couldn’t ever …

I need him, like a poor girl needs everyday rice.

He is the deepest feeling I have ever felt,

Like water rushing down from the steepest waterfall.

If you are asking me not to love him, kill me.

But if I should be reborn, I would love him still.

My soul loves his soul. His soul loves my soul.

No one can say they love Akemi, yet try to separate me from this feeling.

MAYONAKA, they could never understand us. How could they? They don’t even want to.

MAYONAKA, I’m so nervous …

I read it once. Then I read it again, more slowly than the first time. I imagined my wife locked in the bathroom in the VIP section at the Museum of Modern Art on the day of the New York and American debut of her artwork. Wrapped in an awesome kimono with a multimillion-dollar hairstyle, she stood barefooted on the cold marble floor with pretty feet and designer toenails. She was drawing kanji onto the page of her letter to me, the black ink smeared only by her tears, her heated thoughts and fears put into poetic verses. The crowd waited for her, while she worried and waited for me. I could tell from her letter that she had argued with her father, her heart being pulled to one side by the man who had sired her and pulled the other way by the man she had married.

But I didn’t know, never knew. She knew I didn’t know what was happening to her. So she sent a woman flying by foot to my job in Chinatown to deliver a letter to me written in a language that I couldn’t understand because she felt that it was urgent and that something was about to go desperately wrong. And even still, she didn’t spell her situation out clearly, or fill the pages up with rage and curses. She knew that would be
too much
. She knew me and what I was capable of. So she tried to convey the seriousness of the situation in the carefully placed words of her poem. I could feel my love for her swelling in my chest.

After the feeling subsided some, my brain took over and shifted strictly into strategy. I looked up the word
otosan
, although I believed I already knew what it meant. It means father, and
okasan
means mother.

“Would you like chicken or beef?” The fight attendant had returned. “For your dinner service,” she added.

“I don’t want anything, thank you,” I told her.

“Something to drink?”

“No, nothing,” I responded. She smiled and moved on to the next passenger.

All that hard memory work only ate up two more flight hours. Just as I reclined, random people in the cabin began getting up and heading for the bathroom. I glanced down the aisle and saw that there was a line building up. I decided to try out Yuka’s music and slipped on the headphones. She was listening to Megadeth,
Killing Is My Business
. She must’ve liked heavy metal, ’cause that’s what I was hearing. It was cool as long as it was instrumental. The bass player and the guitar player were killing it, but then some dude started screaming out his lyrics. His voice was so loud, rough, and scraggly that I couldn’t even figure if he was singing in Japanese or in English. I fast-forwarded and the music got worse. I took it off and laid it to the side.

“The in-flight movie selections for your enjoyment tonight are
Dragon Ball: Curse of the Blood Rubies
or
The Color Purple
.” The announcement was made in Japanese and then in English.

Unfastening my seat belt, I got up to head to the men’s room. I needed the short walk to splash some cold water on my face. As I walked the narrow aisle, the now-familiar flight attendant approached heading in the opposite direction. I turned sideways to allow her through, yet still she brushed her body against me. And when our bodies connected, she paused right there. “When you’re finished in the lavatory, stay in the back. I’ll come and quiz you,” she said with a lowered voice, and then smiled and flashed forward. I didn’t know what the fuck she was getting at.