The Elephant Vanishes (20 page)

“On a date? Or to a hotel?”

“Both,” I said with a smile. “The two go together. You know. Like a toothbrush and toothpaste.”

“Maybe. I’ll think about it.”

“You do that. Thinking is good for you. It keeps you from getting senile.”

“Where do you live? Can I come and visit?”

“Sorry. I live with my sister. We’ve got rules. I don’t bring women home, and she doesn’t bring men.”

“Yeah, like she’s really your sister.”

“It’s true. Next time I’ll bring a copy of our lease. Sunday okay?”

She laughed. “Okay.”

I watched her go in through her gate. Then I started my engine and drove home, listening for those clutch noises.

The apartment was pitch-black. I turned on the light and called my sister’s name, but she wasn’t there. What the hell was she doing out at ten o’clock at night? I looked for the evening paper but couldn’t find it. Of course. It was Sunday.

I got a beer from the refrigerator and carried it and a glass into the living room. I switched on the stereo and dropped a new Herbie Hancock record on the turntable. Waiting for the music to start, I took a long swallow of beer. But nothing came from the speakers. Then I remembered. The stereo had gone on the blink three days earlier. The amp had power, but there was no sound.

This also made it impossible to watch TV. I have one of those monitors without any sound circuitry of its own. You have to use it with the stereo.

I stared at my silent TV screen and drank my beer. They were showing an old war movie. Rommel’s Afrika Korps tanks were fighting in the desert. Their cannons shot silent shells, their machine guns shot silent bullets, and people died silently, one after another.

I sighed for what must have been the sixteenth time that day.

I
HAD STARTED
living with my sister five years earlier, in the spring, when I was twenty-two and she was eighteen. I had just graduated from college and taken my first job, and she had
just graduated from high school and entered college. Our parents had allowed her to go to school in Tokyo on the condition that she live with me, a condition we were both glad to accept. They found us a nice, big two-bedroom apartment, and I paid half the rent.

The thought of living with my sister was an almost painless proposition. Not only did we get along well, as I mentioned earlier, but our schedules matched well, too. Working for the PR section of an appliance manufacturer, I would leave the house fairly late in the morning and come back late at night. She used to go out early and come home as the sun was going down. In other words, she was usually gone when I woke up and asleep by the time I came back. And since my weekends were mostly taken up with dates, I didn’t really talk to my sister more than once or twice a week. We wouldn’t have had time to fight even if we had wanted to, and we didn’t invade each other’s privacy.

I assumed she had her own things going, but I felt it was not my place to say anything. She was eighteen, after all. What business was it of mine who she slept with?

One time, though, I held her hand for a couple of hours—from one to three in the morning, to be exact. I found her at the kitchen table, crying, when I got home from work. Narrow-minded and selfish as I am, I was smart enough to realize that if she was crying at the kitchen table and not in her room she wanted some comforting from me.

So I sat next to her and held her hand—probably for the first time since elementary school, when we went out hunting dragonflies. Her hand was much bigger and stronger than I remembered. Obviously.

She cried for two hours straight, never moving. I could hardly believe the body was capable of producing such quantities of tears. Two minutes of crying was all it took to dry me out.

By the time 3:00 a.m. rolled around, though, I had had it. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Now it was my turn, as the elder
brother, to say something, though giving advice was definitely not my line.

“I don’t want to interfere with the way you live your life,” I began. “It’s your life, and you should live it as you please.”

She nodded.

“But I do want to give you one word of advice. Don’t carry condoms in your purse. They’ll think you’re a whore.”

When she heard that, she grabbed the telephone book that was sitting on the table and heaved it at me with all her might.

“What are you doing snooping in my bag!”

She always threw things when she got mad. Which is why I didn’t go on to tell her that I had never looked in her bag.

In any case, it worked. She stopped crying, and I was able to get some sleep.

Our life-style stayed exactly the same, even after she graduated from college and took a job with a travel agency. She worked a standard nine-to-five day, while my schedule became, if anything, looser. I’d show up at the office some time before noon, read the newspaper at my desk, eat lunch, and finally get serious about doing a little something around two in the afternoon. Later, I’d make arrangements with the guys from the ad agency, and we’d go out drinking till after midnight.

For her first summer vacation, my sister went to California with a couple of friends on a package tour put together by her agency. One of the members of the tour group was a computer engineer a year her senior, and she started dating him when they came back to Japan. This kind of thing happens all the time, but it’s not for me. First of all, I hate package tours, and the thought of getting serious about somebody you meet in a group like that makes me sick.

After she started seeing this computer engineer, though, my sister began to glow. She paid a lot more attention to appearances, both the apartment’s and her own. Until then, she had gone just about everywhere in a work shirt and faded jeans and sneakers. Thanks to her new interest in clothing, the front closet
filled up with her shoes, and all the other closets were overflowing with wire hangers from the cleaner’s. She was constantly doing laundry and ironing clothes (instead of leaving them to pile up in the bathroom like an Amazonian ants’ nest), always cooking and cleaning. These were dangerous symptoms, I seemed to recall from my own experience. When a woman starts acting like this, a man has only one choice: to clear out fast or marry her.

Then she showed me his picture. She had never done anything like that before. Another dangerous symptom.

Actually, she showed me two pictures. One had been taken on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. It showed my sister and the computer engineer standing in front of a swordfish and wearing big smiles on their faces.

“Nice swordfish,” I said.

“Stop joking. I’m serious.”

“So what should I say?”

“Don’t say anything. This is him.”

I took the photo again and studied his face. If there was one single type of face in the world designed to arouse instant dislike in me, this was it. Worse, something about him reminded me of a particular upperclassman in a high-school club of mine, a guy I hated—not a bad-looking type, but absolutely empty-headed and a real whiner. He had a memory like an elephant; once he had some picky thing on you, he’d never let go. He made up for lack of brains with this phenomenal memory.

“How many times have you done it with him?” I asked.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said, blushing. “You don’t have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.”

The second photo had been taken after the trip. It showed the computer engineer by himself. He wore a leather jacket and was leaning against a big motorcycle, his helmet perched on the saddle. His face had exactly the same expression as in San Francisco. Maybe he didn’t
have
any other expressions.

“He likes motorcycles,” she said.

“No kidding. I didn’t think he put on the leather jacket just to have his picture taken.”

Maybe it was another example of my narrow-minded personality, but I could never like motorcycle freaks—the way they swagger around, so pleased with themselves. I kept my mouth shut and handed the picture back.

“Well, then,” I said.

“Well, then, what?”

“Well, then, what comes next?”

“I don’t know. We might get married.”

“Has he proposed?”

“Sort of. But I haven’t given him my answer.”

“I see.”

“Actually, I’m not sure I want to get married. I’ve just started working, and I think I’d like to take it easy, play around a little more. Not go crazy like you, of course …”

“That’s probably a healthy attitude,” I offered.

“But I don’t know, he’s really nice. Sometimes I think I’d like to marry him. It’s hard.”

I picked up the photos again and looked at them. I kept my sigh to myself.

This conversation happened before Christmas. One morning after New Year’s, my mother called me at nine o’clock. I was brushing my teeth to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”

She asked if I knew the man my sister was seeing.

I said I didn’t.

She said she had gotten a letter from my sister asking if she could bring him home two weeks from Saturday.

“I suppose she wants to marry him,” I said.

“That’s why I’m trying to find out from you what kind of man he is. I’d like to learn something about him before I actually meet him.”

“Well, I’ve never met the guy. He’s a year older than she is and he’s a computer engineer. Works at one of those three-letter places—IBM or NEC or TNT, I don’t know. I’ve seen his picture.
A nothing kind of face. Not my taste, but then I don’t have to marry him.”

“Where did he graduate from? Does he have a house?”

“How should I know?”

“Well, would you please meet him and find out about these things?”

“No way. I’m busy. Ask him yourself when you meet him in two weeks.”

Finally, though, I had no choice but to meet my sister’s computer engineer. She was going to pay a formal visit to his family’s home the following Sunday, and she wanted me to come with her. I put on a white shirt and a tie and my most conservative suit. They lived in an imposing house in the middle of a nice residential neighborhood in Meguro. The 500CC Honda I had seen in the photo was parked in front of the garage.

“Nice swordfish.”

“Please,”
she said, “none of your stupid jokes. All I’m asking is that you restrain yourself for one day.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

His parents were fine people, very proper—maybe a little too proper. The father was an oil-company executive. Since my father owned a chain of gas stations in Shizuoka, this was by no means an unthinkable match. The mother served us tea on an elegant tray.

I offered the father my calling card, and he gave me his. Then I managed to dredge up all the proper phrases to explain that I was here to represent my parents, who were unfortunately unable to attend, owing to a previous engagement; we hoped that on some future date acceptable to both parties they might be allowed to pay their formal respects.

He replied that his son had told him much about my sister and that, meeting her now, he saw that she was far lovelier than his son deserved. He knew we came from an upstanding family, and as far as he and his wife were concerned they had no objection to the “present discussions.” I imagined he must have had our family background thoroughly investigated, but he
couldn’t possibly have found out that my sister had not had her first period until she was sixteen and that she was chronically constipated.

Once the formalities ended without mishap, the father poured me a brandy—pretty decent stuff. As we drank, we talked about jobs of various kinds. My sister poked me now and then with the toe of her slipper, warning me not to drink too much.

The computer engineer, meanwhile, said nothing, but sat next to his father all the while with a tense expression on his face. You could see right away that he was under his father’s thumb, at least while he remained in this house. It figured. The sweater he was wearing had a strange pattern of a kind I had never seen before, and its color clashed with his shirt. Why couldn’t she have found somebody a little sharper?

The conversation reached a lull around four o’clock, and we stood up to leave. The computer engineer saw us as far as the station. “How about a cup of tea?” he urged. I didn’t want tea and I certainly didn’t want to sit at the same table with a guy wearing such a weird sweater, but it would have been awkward for me to refuse, so the three of us went into a nearby coffeehouse.

They ordered coffee and I ordered beer, but the place didn’t serve beer so I ordered coffee, too.

“Thanks so much for coming today,” he said. “I appreciate your help.”

“Just doing what’s expected of me,” I said simply. “No thanks necessary.” I had lost the energy to make wisecracks.

“She’s told me so much about you—Brother.”

Brother!?

I scratched an earlobe with the handle of my coffee spoon and returned it to the saucer. My sister gave me another healthy kick, but its meaning seemed lost on the computer engineer. Maybe he only got jokes in binary notation.

“I envy the two of you being so close,” he said.

“We kick each other in the leg when we’re happy,” I said.

He took this with a puzzled expression.

“It’s supposed to be a joke,” grumbled my sister. “He likes to say things like that.”

“Just a joke,” I concurred. “We share the housework. She does the laundry and I do the jokes.”

The computer engineer—his name was Noboru Watanabe—gave a little laugh, as though this had solved a problem for him.

“You two are so bright and cheery,” he said. “That’s the kind of household I want to have. Bright and cheery is best.”

“See?” I said to my sister. “Bright and cheery is best. You’re too uptight.”

“Not if the jokes are funny,” she said.

“If possible, we’d like to marry in the autumn,” said Noboru Watanabe.

“Autumn
is
the best time for a wedding,” I said. “You can still invite the squirrels and bears.”

He laughed. She didn’t. She was starting to look seriously angry. I excused myself and left.

Back at the apartment, I phoned my mother and summed up the afternoon for her.

“He’s not such a bad guy,” I said, scratching my ear.