The Elephant Vanishes (22 page)

“Now, there you’re wrong,” I interjected. “What I do has nothing to do with what anybody else does. I just go along burning my own calories in accordance with my own ideas about things. What other people do doesn’t concern me. I don’t smirk at them; I don’t even look at them. I may be a good-for-nothing, but at least I don’t get in the way of other people.”

“That’s not true!” cried Noboru Watanabe in something like a reflex action. “You’re not a good-for-nothing!” He must have been brought up well.

“Thank you,” I said, raising my wineglass to him. “And by the way, congratulations on your engagement. Sorry to be the only one drinking.”

“We’re planning to have the ceremony in October,” he said. “Probably too late to invite the squirrels and bears.”

“Not to worry,” I said. Incredible, he was making jokes!

“So, where will you go on your honeymoon? I suppose you can get discount fares?”

“Hawaii,” my sister answered curtly.

We talked for a while about airplanes. Having just read several books on the crash in the Andes, I brought up that topic.

“When they ate human flesh, they would roast it in the sun on pieces of aluminum from the airplane.”

My sister stopped eating and glared at me. “Why do you have to talk about such awful things at the dinner table? Do you say things like that when you’re eating with girls you’re trying to seduce?”

Like a guest invited to dinner by a feuding married couple, Noboru Watanabe tried to come between us by asking me, “Have you ever thought of marrying?”

“Never had the chance,” I said as I was about to put a chunk of fried potato in my mouth. “I had to raise my little sister without any help, and then came the long years of war …”

“War? What war?”

“It’s just another one of his stupid jokes,” said my sister, shaking the bottle of salad dressing.

“Just another one of my stupid jokes,” I added. “But the part about not having had the chance is true. I’ve always been a narrow-minded guy, and I never used to wash my socks, so I was never able to find a nice girl who wanted to spend her life with me. Unlike you.”

“Was there something wrong with your socks?” asked Noboru Watanabe.

“That’s a joke, too,” my sister explained wearily. “I wash his socks, at least, every day.”

Noboru Watanabe nodded and laughed for one and a half seconds. I was determined to make him laugh for three seconds next time.

“But
she’s
been spending her life with you, hasn’t she?” he said, gesturing toward my sister.

“Well, after all, she’s my sister.”

“And we’ve stayed together because you do anything you please and I don’t say a thing. But that’s not a
real
life. In a real, grown-up,
adult
life, people confront each other honestly. I’m not saying the past five years with you haven’t been fun. It’s been a free and easy time for me. But lately, I’ve come to see that it’s not a real life. It hasn’t got—oh, I don’t know—the
feel
of what real life is all about. All you think about is yourself, and if somebody
tries to have a serious conversation with you, you make fun of them.”

“Deep down, I’m really a shy person.”

“No, you’re just plain arrogant.”

“I’m shy and arrogant,” I explained to Noboru Watanabe as I poured myself more wine. “I have this shy, arrogant way of returning trains to the depot after an accident.”

“I think I see what you mean,” he said, nodding. “But do you know what I think? I think that after you’re alone—I mean, after she and I get married—that you are going to start wanting to get married, too.”

“You may be right,” I said.

“Really?” my sister piped up. “If you’re really thinking about getting married, I’ve got a good friend, a nice girl, I’d be glad to introduce you.”

“Sure. When the time comes,” I said. “Too dangerous now.”

W
HEN DINNER WAS OVER
, we moved to the living room for coffee. This time my sister put on a Willie Nelson record—maybe one small step up from Julio Iglesias.

My sister was in the kitchen, cleaning up, when Noboru Watanabe said to me with an air of confidentiality, “To tell you the truth, I wanted to stay single until I was closer to thirty, like you. But when I met her, all I could think of was getting married.”

“She’s a good kid,” I said. “She can be stubborn and a little constipated, but I really think you’ve made the right choice.”

“Still, the idea of getting married is kind of frightening, don’t you think?”

“Well, if you make an effort to always look at the good side, always think about the good things, there’s nothing to be afraid of. If something bad comes up, you can think again at that point.”

“You may be right.”

“I’m good at giving advice to others.”

I went to the kitchen and told my sister I would be going
out for a walk. “I won’t come back before ten o’clock, so the two of you can relax and enjoy yourselves. The sheets are fresh.”

“Is that all you think about?” she said with an air of disgust, but she didn’t try to stop me from going out.

I went back to the living room and told Noboru Watanabe that I had an errand to run and might be late getting back.

“I’m glad we had a chance to talk,” he said. “Please be sure to visit us often after we’re married.”

“Thanks,” I said, momentarily shutting down my imagination.

“Don’t you dare drive,” my sister called out to me as I was leaving. “You’ve had too much to drink.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll walk.”

It was a little before eight when I entered a neighborhood bar. I sat at the counter, drinking an I.W. Harper on the rocks. The TV behind the bar was tuned to a Giants-Swallows game. The sound was off, and instead they had a Cyndi Lauper record going. The pitchers were Nishimoto and Obana, and the Swallows were ahead, 3-2. There was something to be said for watching TV with the sound off.

I had three whiskeys while I watched the ball game. It was the bottom of the seventh, score tied 3-3, when the broadcast ended at nine o’clock and the set was switched off. Two seats away from me was a girl around twenty I had seen there a few times. She had been watching the game, too, so I started talking to her about baseball.

“I’m a Giants fan,” she said. “Which team do
you
like?”

“They’re all the same to me. I just like to watch them play.”

“What’s the fun of that? How can you get excited about the game?”

“I don’t have to get excited.
I’m
not playing.
They
are.”

I had two more whiskeys on the rocks and treated her to two daiquiris. She was a major in commercial design at Tokyo University of the Arts, so we talked about art in advertising. At ten, we moved on to a bar with more comfortable seats, where I had a whiskey and she had a grasshopper. She was pretty drunk by
this time, and so was I. At eleven, I accompanied her to her apartment, where we had sex as a matter of course, the way they give you a cushion and a cup of tea at an inn.

“Put the light out,” she said, so I did. From her window you could see a big Nikon ad tower. A TV next door was blasting the day’s pro-baseball results. What with the darkness and my drunkenness, I hardly knew what I was doing. You couldn’t call it sex. I just moved my penis and discharged some semen.

As soon as the moderately abbreviated act was finished, she went to sleep as if she couldn’t wait any longer to be unconscious. Without even bothering to wipe up properly, I got dressed and left. The hardest thing was picking out my polo shirt and underpants from among her stuff in the dark.

Outside, my alcoholic high tore through me like a midnight freight. I felt like shit. My joints creaked like the Tin Woodman’s in
The Wizard of Oz
. I bought a can of juice from a vending machine to sober me up, but the second I drank it down I vomited the entire contents of my stomach onto the road—the corpses of my steak and smoked salmon and lettuce and tomatoes.

How many years had it been since I last vomited from drinking? What the hell was I doing these days? The same thing over and over. But each repetition was worse than the one before.

Then, with no connection at all, I thought about Noboru Watanabe and the soldering iron he had bought me. “You really ought to have a soldering iron in the house. They come in handy,” he had said.

What a wholesome idea, I said to him mentally as I wiped my lips with a handkerchief. Now, thanks to you, my house is equipped with a soldering iron. But because of that damned soldering iron, my house doesn’t feel like my house any longer.

That’s probably because I have such a narrow personality.

I
T WAS AFTER
midnight by the time I got home. The motorcycle was, of course, no longer parked by the front entrance. I took the elevator to the fourth floor, unlocked the apartment
door, and went in. Everything was pitch-black except for a small fluorescent light above the sink. My sister had probably gotten fed up and gone to bed. I couldn’t blame her.

I poured myself a glass of orange juice and emptied it in one gulp. I used lots of soap in the shower to wash the foul-smelling sweat from my body, and then I did a thorough job of brushing my teeth. My face in the bathroom mirror was enough to give me chills. I looked like one of those middle-aged men you see on the last trains from downtown, sprawling drunk on the seats and fouling themselves with their own vomit. My skin was rough, my eyes looked sunken, and my hair had lost its sheen.

I shook my head and turned out the bathroom light. With nothing on but a towel wrapped around my waist, I went to the kitchen and drank some tap water. Something will work out tomorrow, I thought. And if not, then tomorrow I’ll do some thinking. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on.

“You were so late tonight,” came my sister’s voice out of the gloom. She was sitting on the living-room couch, drinking a beer alone.

“I was drinking,” I said.

“You drink too much.”

“I know.”

I got a beer from the refrigerator and sat down across from her.

For a while, neither of us said anything. We sat there, occasionally tipping back our beer cans. The leaves of the potted plants on the balcony fluttered in the breeze, and beyond them floated the misty semicircle of the moon.

“Just to let you know, we didn’t do it,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Do anything. Something got on my nerves. I just couldn’t do it.”

“Oh.” I seem to lose the power of speech on half-moon nights.

“Aren’t you going to ask what got on my nerves?”

“What got on your nerves?”

“This room! This place! I just couldn’t do it here.”

“Oh.”

“Hey, is something wrong with you? Are you feeling sick?”

“I’m tired. Even I get tired sometimes.”

She looked at me without a word. I drained the last sip of my beer and rested my head on the seat back, eyes closed.

“Was it our fault? Did we make you tired?”

“No way,” I said with my eyes still closed.

“Are you too tired to talk?” she asked in a tiny voice.

I straightened up and looked at her. Then I shook my head.

“I’m worried. Did I say something terrible to you today? Something about you yourself, or about the way you live?”

“Not at all,” I said.

“Really?”

“Everything you’ve said lately has been right on the mark. So don’t worry. But what’s bothering you now, all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know, it just sort of popped into my mind after he left, while I was waiting for you. I wondered if I hadn’t gone too far.”

I got two cans of beer from the refrigerator, switched on the stereo, and put on the Richie Beirach Trio at very low volume. It was the record I listened to whenever I came home drunk in the middle of the night.

“I’m sure you’re a little confused,” I said. “These changes in life are like changes in the barometric pressure. I’m kind of confused, too, in my own way.”

She nodded.

“Am I being hard on you?” she asked.

“Everybody’s hard on somebody,” I said. “But if I’m the one you chose to be hard on, you made the right choice. So don’t let it worry you.”

“Sometimes, I don’t know, it scares me. The future.”

“You have to make an effort to always look at the good side, always think about the good things. Then you’ve got nothing to be afraid of. If something bad comes up, you do more thinking
at that point.” I gave her the same speech I had given Noboru Watanabe.

“But what if things don’t work out the way you want them to?”

“If they don’t work out, that’s when you think again.”

She gave a little laugh. “You’re as strange as ever.”

“Say, can I ask you one question?” I yanked open another can of beer.

“Sure.”

“How many men did you sleep with before him?”

She hesitated a moment before holding up two fingers. “Two.”

“And one was your age, and the other was an older man?”

“How did you know?”

“It’s a pattern.” I took another swig of beer. “I haven’t been fooling around for nothing all these years. I’ve learned that much.”

“So, I’m typical.”

“Let’s just say ‘healthy.’ “

“How many girls have you slept with?”

“Twenty-six. I counted them up the other day. There were twenty-six I could remember. There might be another ten or so I can’t remember. I’m not keeping a diary or anything.”

“Why do you sleep with so many girls?”

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I guess I’ll have to stop at some point, but I can’t seem to figure out how.”

We remained silent for a while, alone with our own thoughts. From the distance came the sound of a motorcycle’s exhaust, but it couldn’t have been Noboru Watanabe’s. Not at one o’clock in the morning.

“Tell me,” she said, “what do you really think of him?”

“Noboru Watanabe?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He’s not a bad guy, I guess. Just not my type. Funny taste in clothes, for one thing.” I thought about it some more and
said, “There’s nothing wrong in having one guy like him in every family.”

“That’s what I think. And then there’s you: this person I call my brother. I’m very fond of you, but if everybody were like you the world would probably be a terrible place!”