Netsuke (10 page)

10

SOMETHING IS ACCELERATING. His life is speeding up. This is an old feeling and yet there is something new going on, unfamiliar. The new room, too, is unfamiliar, and the netsuke all so strange, buzzing behind the glass in a new Spells all their own.

He takes out the erotic ones. They nest in the hand like a breast, the smooth heal of a woman’s foot, a delicate ear or elbow, the head of a cock, its root, the testicles, that delicacy, that weight. He can understand why people collect these, why they are so rare, so coveted. And then he notices that
all
the netsuke, not just the erotic ones, have this quality—even the frog crouching on the body of the persimmon, the twinned gourd, its cut stem erect as a nipple, a wasp feeding on the cleft of a plum. He is like a voyeur, turning these over and over, examining their little dimples, secret moles, and discolorations. In his hands the netsuke begin to sweat. He thinks that the more they are fondled, the more they will be his.

An illicit Saturday like so many others. A Saturday unlike any other. He looks out the window at the weight of the sky accumulating just beyond the city limits. In the distance, the mountains are already obliterated by rain. The traffic hums; the river slides past in silence as it does always.

Four o’clock, and already it is evening.

He is seized by uncertainty. The seconds pass with a terrible slowness. It is like swallowing nails.
Perhaps she will not come.
Three minutes past the hour. His wife will wonder why he has spent the entire afternoon at the garage. Soon it will be winter. His wife will be without her garden. When she is not in her studio, the house will ring out with his absence. She will brood upon the clues he has dropped in her path like luminous stones. She will take greater note of his moods. She will taste another woman on his tongue.

The phone rings. He leaps on it. He says:
Yes!

“It’s me,” Akiko says. “Don’t I get to see you today? I thought you were going to the garage. They said—”

“I came here instead to read some notes. And fell asleep on the couch. What time is it?”

“Almost four-thirty. Don’t forget, we’re having dinner guests—”

“Again?”

“I don’t see people all week. Not even my own husband.”

“Am I being scolded?”

“I’m sorry. No! I’m
not sorry.”
At which point Jello walks in. Incandescent.

“I have to finish up here,” he says. “I won’t be late. I’ll pick up some wine. Some champagne.” He looks on as Jello bends to the table and touches the netsuke he has left out.

“What are we celebrating?”

“Life,” he offers.

“Yours?” she asks. “Or mine?”

“Jesus!” he laughs. “I
am
in trouble!” His laughter reassures her, or so he hopes.

“O.K.,” she says. “No later than six. I need you to husk oysters.”

Outside the rain begins and in a moment slams into Spell’s high windows. Jello is nervously threading her hair with her long lacquered nails. They cannot kiss without moaning. He tears her blouse open. She is too excited, too triumphant to complain, although she is unsure how she will replace it. Or when. When the phone rings the room is darker, as if by necromancy, and the windows silvered with rain. Akiko wonders where he is. It is only just after six, but still … He puts down the receiver.
Shit,
he says.

“O.K., buddy. Time to close up shop, eh?” says David Swancourt.

“You make me crazy,” he says. “You make me forget everything.”

“You make
me
crazy, baby,” Jello says, and the acute banality of this phrase, uttered first by him and now by her, terrifies him. He says:

“We have to get out of here a.s.a.p.”

With a kind of tragic dignity, Jello stands, and carrying her panties and shredded blouse, all the rest, walks to the hall. In silence, they shower together, put on their clothes, walk out into the rain.

11

HE HAS CHANGED HIS CLOTHES for the third time that day. He is feeling unaccountably safe and renewed. He is an acrobat who has successfully walked a high wire in a gale. In the kitchen he kisses his wife behind the neck and at the table thinks he has never been more spontaneous, more brilliant. He talks about his Practice; he cannot let it go. No matter that the conversation rushes off in other directions. He always brings it back to the thing that matters: his good work with people, the way his clients flourish, the ways in which madness makes fools of the best of us, how fools become kings and assassins reclaim their innocence. The lives that split apart at the seams, the seas that bleed, the sons buggered by their fathers, the client who sees his thwarted life in every red light; how the world breaks apart only to reawaken, and demons cling for their lives to every star. Carelessness, exhaustion. What it is like to be marooned on an island of the mind. The car wrecks, the calls for help, the ones who drown, the ones who drink up an ocean before sitting down to dinner.

When much later he falls heavily to sleep, his wife notices that his heart is beating uncommonly fast.

12

AKIKO LIES AWAKE next to the man who was once her lover. He sleeps as if nailed to the bed, his face so knotted with pain it is almost unrecognizable. How is it possible? His youth and beauty have dissolved. She looks at his face in the moonlight unbelieving, and faults herself for this indiscretion. She thinks that despite the stories he has told her, or perhaps because of them, always the same stories and always told in the same way, she does not really know him. Akiko is at a loss; she is in way over her head.

Sleep finally begins to claim her. Halfway there she wonders:
What is that taste of another’s pleasure on your tongue?
A voice from her ascending dream answers:
Only death, brushing your lips with her wing. What is that sound?
she wonders, sinking into sleep.
Only the lid of the sky, only Death’s eye, snapping shut. Why is it I do not know these things?
she wonders, dreaming now, beside him. She hears his voice, the beloved’s voice answer:
Because I wanted to keep you safe.
In her dream she marvels:
Safe?

When Akiko awakens, her heart is hammering. She awakens stunned to the quick by a dream. In her dream she goes to the new office alone and opens the netsuke cabinet. They are gone; instead there is a vast collection of porcelain dolls, each only a few inches high, female, male, their genitals distinct. If their sex and the color of their eyes and hair varies, they are all otherwise identical.

That is to say except for one. Like Akiko’s, her hair and eyes are black. But what makes her unlike the others is the gaping hole that pierces her belly where her navel should be.

It is close to four in the morning. Akiko rises cautiously and makes her way in the dark into the hallway; in the dark she wanders the rooms of their house unable to quiet her heart, considering her dream. Entering the living room she sees the phone light blinking. A message left while they were sleeping, a brief message for him. A woman wanting him to call. A woman who called in the middle of the night. She recognizes the voice of the framer’s assistant. The one who spilled coffee on her portfolio months ago.

Perhaps it is true that catastrophes like to accumulate. Because Akiko now wanders in the chill air like a lost person, a homeless person, into the garden. When she reaches the carp pond, she sits down at the edge. In the distance at the world’s end the sky begins to whiten, and she sees that all the fish are dead or dying. She wonders how lethal this contagion actually is, how far it reaches. She knows how far it reaches.

He sleeps unusually late. As he sleeps, she gets on with her life. She makes tea. She calls the gardener. When he comes they discuss what needs to be done. He is an old friend by now and sets to work at once. The fish must be buried, the pond emptied, its pumps and rockery, everything, disinfected.

She pushes herself
through her paces.
And there is that other funny American expression she likes:
keep on truckin’!
In fact she is fighting for her life. When she looks back, all the clues he has left over the years blink on and off like the eyes of wolves in the dark of night. She decides to finish the triptych. An act of will and an act of faith in her capacity to live in a world that is collapsing.

The triptych is nearly complete. Paradise. Hell to the right, Limbo to the left. In the center, Eve, perfectly human, is receiving a hand grenade from a Minotaur who is clearly her own mazed husband. Her Paradise is a take on the Paradise of Islam, packed with nubile virgins, but also fantastical streetwalkers, temple whores, little girls, the gods and goddesses of love, copulating creatures of all kinds, lascivious boys, devastatingly gorgeous drag queens. If these figures are all distinct up close, from a distance they vanish, become a jungle of blossoms and extravagantly blossoming bushes and trees.

So, Adam, a Minotaur, dwells in a boundless harem. If Eden matters to him, it is only because it is sexed. Her Minotaur’s sex is scandalously large, gorged with blood, striking Eve’s thigh. His balls, dark as plums, quiver beneath. If Eve is aroused, creamy, her sex is folded into itself, hidden. Only the cleft, like the mark on a plum, is visible. And if Eve is eager to accept Adam’s gift, it is only because she is blindfolded.

When she returns to the house, he is gone and the girl’s message deleted. On the dining room table, she finds a note. The car. The garage. So: the world has shrunk down to this. This all-encompassing banality.

Later, much later when he returns, the Studebaker washed and waxed as a proof of a kind, of what? His fidelity? She tells him about the pond, the lost fish.

He is feeling generous, expansive, on top of the world. To his own astonishment he recalls that she had bought the fish in San Francisco.
We’ve been talking about a break,
he says.
Why not go to San Francisco? A long weekend. You could choose the fish you like.

“You know what I think?” Akiko says.

“No, Sweetheart, I don’t.”

“I think you are patronizing me.
Sweetheart.”
He hates her for this, and if he wonders what she knows, he does not ask. As for Akiko, there is so much she wants to say, but does not. So much she could ask, but will not. She has received her dream as a revelation. She knows that his lies are boundless, that he lies as he breathes, by necessity.

That night she roasts quail. Over dinner they circle the abyss like cautious lions. He tears his birds apart in his hands like a hunter from another century.