Midnight and the Meaning of Love (66 page)

“Pekko pekko da,”
I told her in Japanese, meaning “I’m hungry.” She smiled and stretched her limbs like a cat. Her movements were slow as though
she
had only needed to satisfy one hunger.

“Come on,” I rushed her as I laid out what I wanted her to wear. She saw. There was no resistance in her. She showered. When she emerged in her
yukata
, a beautiful, long, colorful Japanese dress with amazing sleeves, a kind of summer kimono, I was moved in a real big
way by how incredible she looked. Now she was covered—arms, legs, shoulders, hips, thighs, and calves. But she seemed even
more
seductive to me.

She went through her LV Cruiser bag and pulled out some Japanese socks with slots to divide her toes. She slid into a pair of wooden shoes with the socks on. She took small steps toward me. I slipknotted her hair. When she glanced down at the desk, I lifted the passports and Pan Star ship tickets and said, “
Ashita
Busan, Korea,” letting her know we would travel tomorrow. She smiled brightly and clapped her hands together twice. She swept up the 350,000 yen with her fingertips and then embraced me. I felt her ease the folded stack of bills into my back pocket. She kept holding on to me as though she never wanted to let go.

“Akemi, should I eat you for dinner?” I asked her. She released her hands and smiled a smile that made me wonder if she understood what I had just said. I grabbed her hand and said, “Come on. No more for you.”

“Chotto matte,”
she said softly. She walked over to her handbag and opened it. She pulled out a small box and lifted the top. She began speaking in Japanese to me while walking my way with something concealed inside her small hand. As I leaned against the wall, she touched my hand and placed a band of gold on my married finger. She scolded me. I imagined she was asking,
Where is your wedding ring? Have you lost it or is it off for some other reason?
But I couldn’t be sure. Besides, I didn’t mind the way she went about loving and claiming me. I checked out the ring. It was engraved in kanji. When I kissed her on her cheek and acknowledged,
“Arigato gozaimasu,”
she smiled.

“And where are your bangles?” I asked her. She looked puzzled. I gestured, holding her wrist in my hand. She rushed back to her bag and dived in and placed the two diamond bracelets that I gifted her for our wedding over her fingers. I grabbed my Jansport and pulled the two gold bangles out that she had given to her friend to attract my attention. I slid them over her fingers and onto her wrist.

“We good now?” I asked her. She leaned against my body. The silk of her
yukata
aroused me, but I told myself to move. A man gotta eat, and if I gave in to her seduction every time it moved me, I would be living inside and between her thighs unable to do anything else.

* * *

Purposely, I avoided returning to the Lebanese restaurant where I had made prayer and broken my fast with a cup of water and two dates. My curious wife and I strolled down the side streets of Osaka, her dressed in her beautiful
yukata
, no head covering, yet concealed behind an exotic umbrella, in the cloudless, rainless night. I enjoyed the silence this time because of our mutual mood. We were in a kind of war, but we were at peace.

Easily, as we walked by, my wife pointed out her red Epi leather LV trunk and suitcase. They were positioned front and center in the window in a now closed and darkened shop that featured used expensive designer goods, from the tiniest purses to the heaviest handbags and even luggage. She didn’t have to show me. I trusted her. But it was good that she did. I needed my wife and me to become closer and even tighter than we were so far. This was the only real way for us to protect our marriage. She had to really know me, my thoughts and all. She had to follow what I told her to do, without even a slight change here and there. She had to get in a perfect rhythm with me. If she couldn’t, I knew that any outsider could exploit the weakness and attack our love.

Cooks from Kashmir prepared our extra-spicy meal. It was a small dinner place that gave off the feeling that we were eating in a good friend’s brick-oven kitchen. There were four other female customers who were also wrapped up in their traditional clothing and eating alongside their husbands. Kashmir is an Islamic country also. The restaurant owner had a unique style of wallpaper plastered across one wall of his intimate setting. It was actual photography of revealing scenes of the beautiful mountain lands of Kashmir. As Akemi and I observed it, the waiter said to me, “You are looking at a piece of heaven, my country.”

The dark-skinned Kashmiri waiter, while pouring water into my wife’s glass, also became distracted as he glanced at my pretty wife. Apparently he was looking at a piece of heaven also. Even with her body well covered, she needed her long dark hair wrapped. I knew that. I told myself, one step at a time,
inshallah.

In between dinner and dessert, I slid Akemi the green study cards with the kanji explanation of Ramadan, so that she would understand
why I would only be sharing meals with her after sunset each evening. She laid each card out and read it, following the kanji with her pretty painted black fingernails. She looked up at me.

“Hai! Wakarimashta,”
she said, meaning that she understood.

The waiter brought over some honey-laced fruits.

“Who?” Akemi said in English.

“What?” I asked her.

She pointed to the kanji on the cards. “Who?” she repeated and held out her hand. I gave her the other cards, knowing she wanted to ask me something.

“Who Japanese write?” she spelled out with my study cards.

“Tsuwakeshya,”
I told her in Japanese, meaning translator.

“Woman?” she asked.

“Hai!”
I told her.

“Chiasa.” “Chiasa,” she repeated softly.

On the way back to our hotel, I copped a duffel bag at a uniform store. Japan was so big on hard work that worker’s clothes and accessories could be purchased at all hours of the night. Akemi wanted the pink duffel. But I knew that I would be the one carrying it, of course. So I chose brown.

* * *

Seated on the floor back at our hotel room late night, both Akemi and I listened to some music on her antique handheld battery-operated radio. We sat it in the corner as we read the books that we had purchased from an impressive bookstore that took up an entire building and was packed with books from all around the world and plenty of curious customers, night readers. She was reading a book on pregnancy and childbirth. I was reading a travel guide about Korea.

It seemed she liked my study cards. She positioned her version of an English sentence on the bamboo floor using them. “Two boy, two girl,” were the words on the cards she laid down. I smiled. She was asking about our twins, inshallah.

I answered with the cards: “Son good, daughter good also.” She laid down her promise, “Akemi, Mayonaka, one daughter, one son.”

Around midnight, she and I were stuffed inside a phone booth together. She leaned her body against mine as I followed up with Haki and let him know I had secured the tickets. He wished me a safe
trip, apologized for earlier, and then said, “I am here until I achieve my PhD. So remember, brother, you have a friend in Japan.”

“Chiasa, are you good?” I asked Chiasa when she picked up.

“So good. You called!” she said with soft-spoken excitement.

“I told you I would.”

“I know,” she said even softer.

“Is everything okay with your grandfather?”

“Perfect.”

“What did he say?”

“He asked me how was ninja camp,” she said. “I had told him that I would visit my sensei in Osaka. That’s why I left Kyoto that afternoon. I had to make sure I did it, since I told grandfather that I would.”

“I want you to introduce yourself to my wife. Say anything that you would like to say.”

“Anything?” she repeated.

“Anything,” I assured her, and handed Akemi the phone.

Umma answered the phone excited. “Say
salaam alaikum.
” I pronounced the Arabic greeting for my wife slowly as I held the phone to her ear.
“Salaam alaikum,”
she said softly. “Akemi, Umma love!” she added with great joy.

Holding my wife from behind while talking to my
umi
on the phone was a simple but high moment for me. I am most at ease when I am pleasing the women I love. If I have come up short, or disappointed or failed them, I say nothing. I just keep on pushing and working and fighting until I get it right and a smile spreads across their faces the way I was certain it was on Umma’s pretty face, and the way it was on my wife’s pretty face right then.

A yolk-yellow sun, a white sky; the bluest sea, mounds of gold sand, and an aggressive, warm, and moist wind: it’s Busan, Korea. More fishing boats and barges, ships, cruisers, and yachts than you could imagine. Cargo containers were carrying everything from every corner of the world. The scenery made more unusual by the green mountains, the buildings and homes were unevenly stacked and woven around the boats and the water, not vice versa.

Crooked and curved alleys flossed privately owned small businesses, hundreds of them, with thousands of outdoor vendors. Every Korean was at work, it seemed—the grandfather, the grandmother, the mother, the father along with running toddlers and babies clinging on breasts, backs, and butts. It felt like they all knew one another well. Maybe block by block they were all related. What’s for sale? Everything! A nation of hustlers, not even an insect or snail was safe.

As Akemi and me moved around on foot, our eyes were equally filled with curiosity and amazement at these new images. Even the feeling here was different and special. Korean people were staring, not ignoring. Some seemed in awe of Akemi separately, and of me individually as well. They seemed even more stunned by the two of us together.

Maybe it was the colorful explosion on her
yukata
, the third beautiful one she had worn and I had seen. Maybe it was because she walked slowly as they hurried. She was dressed for leisure and luxury. They were dressed for labor. Or maybe it was because she was with an African man in the narrow streets ram-packed only by Koreans. Or maybe it wasn’t none of that. Perhaps it was the pressure of sixty
vendors positioned in a row, all selling the same products. All of them were trying to capture the attention of the same customers to secure a sale. I was puzzled over how exactly that could ever be profitable. I even wondered how one man explained to his business neighbor. “Yes, I am opening my spot right next door to yours and selling the exact same things!” The only way for one vendor to gain an edge on his competitor was with his display style.

This is a place that looked and felt fully lived in. They were unable to keep it clean, neat, and tightly organized as every street was in Japan. In fact, here in Busan I saw a grandmother out in the street dressed in lime-green gauchos and a pink and purple blouse, sporting a mean black afro while squatting on her couch, which she had parked on the curb. Her legs were cocked open as she was cutting and cleaning fish as swiftly as me and Cho. She rocked an orange visor and had a baby strapped to her lower back. She brought a smile to my face naturally.

On the next block, the product changed, but the number of dealers didn’t. I finally figured out there were entire alleys dedicated to only one category of goods. For example, all seafood and meats, or thirty noodle stores in a row, or exclusively fruits and vegetables and nuts. There was even a block dedicated to the red pepper and other powerful spices.

The Korean everyday greeting was a long leap from a simple American “hi.” Instead they called out
“Anyonghaseyo”
to one another. There were no blank faces here, no lack of emotion, and no strange silences. Everyone was expressing something and voices were both raised and lowered and the language filled with musical melodies.