Netsuke (6 page)

16

YOU FILL A HOUSE with precious things; they break. You fill a heart with precious things; it breaks. In the end it all breaks. All night long I hear bones snapping. My nights are my star chamber. In my dreams the elusive sweetness of the world is just around the corner: up a tree, waiting in the silver tower, at the top of the mountain, in a box secreted at the bottom of the sea, in the flame of Aladdin’s lamp. And always between these legs or maybe those: the divine secret of sweetness.

Is it, I wonder, the same sweetness that seizes the fish when it spills its sperm. And the tigers when they fuck? The serpents as they coil and uncoil, thrashing in the mud together? Could it be that this elusive sweetness is at the heart of everything? Coupling, striving for delight. As once in Tahiti, Samoa, such places—

17

LATE IN THE DAY I received a call from a man named David Swancourt, a young man most likely, with an unusually engaging voice, disquieting, restless, intimate. Intrigued, I played his inquiry over a number of times before returning his call. I managed to reach him at once and we made an appointment for the following Friday in the new office.

Then: a shower (the downtown Spells has both a private shower and a restroom for clients, a luxurious restroom like a picture gallery), a nap, and a call to Akiko to discuss where we would meet.

One thing I am compelled to do, because it promotes coherence, is to take Akiko to a restaurant
where I have eaten with a lover.
Or in a risky part of town where I have engaged, if briefly, with marginalia. To be healthy one needs to bring the disparate parts of one’s puzzle together and in this way defuse prevailing habits, promiscuity’s fevers. At the same time it provides proof for myself and my wife—who labors beneath the weight of the clues I have inadvertently left in her path—that our life, hers and mine, is
singular,
is the
real one,
the one that
actually matters,
so that the clues are disarmed and whatever pain she feels anesthetized. Or so I intend.

I was wanting the Red Dragon, a funky place she dislikes. I like its shadows, its intimacy; I like its dragons; above all I like the fact that I had been there with the Cutter a number of times. I liked the risk of this. She lives nearby and came often; I knew I was pushing things. I said to Akiko,

“I wonder if you would be up for the Red Dragon?”

“O,
god!”
she said. “You know I never am.”

“Last time you said the dumplings were O.K.—”

“We could go to the Vietnamese,” she countered. “We both like the Vietnamese.” I thought it over. The waitresses there were wonderfully attractive. There was a time when I had been involved with one. I could never decide if it was sex she wanted, or a father, or a green card. She did want money. A beauty with expensive tastes. I recalled a pair of boots she asked me to buy for her. Over a thousand—

“Are you still there?”

“I’m thinking,” I said. “The Dragon’s spareribs are in the Dragon’s favor. They have that soup you like.”

“You are impossible,” Akiko said. But she was laughing.

We pulled into the parking lot at almost the same moment. Akiko looked great; she was wearing silk jeans the color of pewter and silver sandals with what must have been a four-inch heel. She was wearing a white silk sweater. I could see at once that she was a little nervous. She’s no longer the person she was. She’s watchful. She notices now when I look at women. For that matter, she notices pretty women often even before I do. She has developed a flair. It used to be she was secure in her own beauty. I dislike this insecurity of hers; it has made her less lovely. She enters the restaurant looking fretful. Lovely, surely, but fretful. Yet she used to like pretty women. She was one of their tribe. Now she resents them.

The Cutter is very pretty. As we enter the Red Dragon, the Cutter, who has been sitting in the shadows in the back, sees us at once. It’s uncanny. It’s as if she has been waiting there. She walks toward us and she calls out:
Doctor!
And being the bitch she is, she ignores Akiko and gives me a hug. I can feel Akiko wired, thrumming with anger and fear. When I introduce them, Kat barely glances at her. She knows she holds the heat. The moment lasts ten seconds but it seers Akiko just as if the door of a furnace had suddenly blown open. When we sit down I shake my head and say,

“A client.”

“Now I’ve
seen
it.” Akiko looks totally lost.

“It’s a long process,” I tell her. “And as much as I’d like to, I can’t control every aspect of this. She’s a rude person. Not a good person. Pretty impossible, in fact. She had no right … I’m
sorry,”
I say. “This has upset you. Me too. But Akiko. It doesn’t
mean
anything. The meaning is here. Between us.” I take her hands in mine and put them to my lips. I kiss her hands, her fingers, and then I put them to my forehead. When I feel her little hands against my forehead I think that if I knew how to weep I might have wept at that moment. The oddest thing.

Yet this reassures her. Perhaps this is the thing that keeps us going; Akiko is so easily reassured. So eager to trust me. It doesn’t make any sense. But she relaxes; I feel the tension in her hands melt away. In a moment she is caressing my face. When I open my eyes her own face is open. Her eyes are tired, but their expression has softened.

“You once told me,” she says with real sweetness, real heat, “that I stung your face and hands.”

“And tongue.”

“I want … I want to sting you again.”

“And you shall, my love,” I promise, “once this difficult passage is over.”

When our food arrives, I notice the delicacy with which she lifts her dumplings, one by one, with her chopsticks. The delicacy of her perfect teeth, her mouth; the delicacy of her face. Why does the sight of my wife eating dumplings enrage me?

When the very air within one’s marriage grows thin and dim, there is nothing to do but set out to find a richer, brighter air. When the glass is fractured, a new glass must be procured. These days my wife does not know what to do with her tenderness.

If I were Akiko, I’d be out fucking men.

18

HOURS PASS IN DREAR. I attempt to extricate a client from a life lived leaping from one frying pan into another. After she leaves I suffer the professor who is exhausted by absolutely everything. All that civilization has to offer: markets, dumpsters, embalmers, highway patrols. I recall something Akiko said the night before:

“I wonder why it is the animals, the birds and fish, manage to live so much more gracefully than we do. And now we are killing them all off. And soon there will be just people like you and me, and all that simple grace will be gone from our lives.”

And I said this terrible thing. I said: “No one will miss it.”

But now I can see her point, because I have no choice but to suffer the professor’s fearful and sinister stories, fearful and sinister because they recall the acute, the suffocating misery of my infancy. As of late, I enter Drear with a dire sense of foreboding. I have come to dread the professor, whose visits are as chilling as a visit to the morgue.

Beyond the French doors, off in the distance, I see Akiko gazing into her beloved carp pond. And I envy her.

Then there are the hours in Spells, the elastic days, days rich in event, ripe with diversions. Days of figs and thorns. Yet Mr. Horner, as he must, returns home in time to sup. The wife across from him, a galaxy away, is hopeful, inquisitive, rich in beauty, promise, yet … I try her patience. I try her capacity to trust. I am her snake, she is my grass. She is vulnerable; when she breaks, all the king’s horses and all his men will be unable to fix her. Should I smile, I would give myself away. Therefore I come to table scowling like a pirate. In this way the evenings pass.

“Why?” she mocks, “the dark look?”

“I don’t like what I do.” I think: You have failed to lick me clean of bile and brimstone and tar.
You have failed to release the Minotaur from his nightmare. I cannot forgive you.

“What are you thinking? I feel like you are on the moons of Mars, or worse.”

“Worse?”

“Another galaxy entirely.”

“I am impossible to live with.”

“I didn’t say—”

“I am,” I insisted. “Even I can’t stand it.”

The dinners follow one another; it’s like being on an infernal carousel. She has grilled salmon; the fish has a crust of nuts; gilded like the helmet of a king.

“How do you do this?” I ask.

“I like to cook for you.” Then, quietly: “When I looked in the mirror today, I saw that I am fading. I suppose this is why you are no longer eager to be my lover.”

I was startled and knocked off balance by this bravery of hers. I had seen it before, but it had always taken me by surprise. I am not used to bravery. Not from men. Not from women.

“We can end this,” she said simply. I took my time considering how to respond.

“I am troubled,” I said hesitantly, searching for the right words, the right modulation, “in my Practice, it is the
Practice,
Akiko. Not you. Never you. You are exactly what I have always longed for.” If I said this from need, love or from perversity, I do not know. “I am troubled in my Practice,” I told her, Friday nipping at my heels, “and exhausted.”

Yet there are many evenings when I relish the quiet, when Akiko takes on a pearly glow like a fantastic creature born of the sea. In these hours the mystery at the heart of things exists exactly where we embrace, or read to one another, or walk together among the fallen leaves to the lake … and I suppose these are the hours that allow her to continue to give me the benefit of the doubt.

But is this any different, I ask myself, from what it was sometimes like with the Cutter not so long ago, when it seemed we were the children we had never been, she and I, on the verge of a great adventure. In those moments I could see what she saw: a vast, nebulous world just beyond the city’s rim, a vaporous promise dazzling in the heat of my lust for her like a sumptuous mirage. But it was, after all, only a thing of shimmering heat, only an illusion briefly entertained, that under the impact of the day and its demands, her anger and her appetite, is dissolving now, at the speed of light.