The Lake (10 page)

I kept mulling over the composition as I brushed on the colors.

The area around the lake was going to be the most colorful, and I wanted to keep it balanced with the rest of the painting, so I would probably be doing it last. But I couldn’t leave those monkeys as ghosts. I’d give them some fun-looking colors, but nothing too loud, since they lived quiet lives. I’d use the happiest tones I could come up with. And I’d paint in some tea, too. And cake. I’d fill in the area around that harsh sleeping beauty with lovely, lovely colors.

Surprisingly, Nakajima didn’t stop living in my apartment even after I got wrapped up in the mural and began staying out as long as the sun was up.

For some reason, somewhere in the back of my mind I’d thought that as soon as I started working on the mural, he would vanish.

Sometimes I’d have a dream like that, and I’d wake up with my heart racing, bolting upright on my futon. Tears would be streaming down my cheeks—even I was startled. I had come home to find that Nakajima was gone, along with all his stuff. I rushed to the window, hurriedly slid it open, and looked out, but his window was dark. There was nothing to indicate that Nakajima had ever existed. To think that it was all over, so soon … That was how the dream went.

Each time I had it, I realized again that it could happen at any time.

And yet when I came home worn out from painting, Nakajima was always there.

Sometimes he had even started the rice cooker.

Other times he was asleep, exhausted from his studies. Stacks of incomprehensible books about biochemistry and genetic engineering and so on would be stacked up next to him, their pages marked with Post-its.

Nothing about our days together was certain. The only thing I could count on was that for the time being he was still here with me, still living.

One evening, I came home to find Nakajima lying on the floor, snoring.

His PowerBook was open on the low table where we ate our meals, so I assumed he must have fallen asleep while he was working. I brought a blanket over and was putting it over him when something caught my eye.

He had something tucked under his armpit. A hard-looking silver rectangle.

It was such a bizarre sight that at first I couldn’t for the life of me tell what it was. Actually, that’s not quite right. Maybe I did know what it was, and my brain just refused to accept it. Because it seemed so completely out of place, so surreal.

It was an old wire rack for toasting mochi.

A chill ran down my spine. It didn’t make sense.

It seemed like it would be painful to sleep with something like that stuck in your armpit, so I tried very delicately to slip it out. But he had it clamped there so tightly, like a child squeezing a thermometer much harder than necessary under his arm, that it would have been impossible to remove it without waking him.

I could see from the ferociousness with which he held on to the rack that it was extremely important to him, but even so, deep down, the discomfort I felt seeing it there lingered.

I thought long and hard about whether I should mention it when he awoke.

The thing was, I couldn’t very well pretend I didn’t know. Besides, this was my apartment. Should I slip out of the room when he woke up? That seemed kind of odd, too.

I wondered what it might mean. Maybe … that wire rack was actually the only thing that turned him on?

Did I love him so deeply that I could go along with something like that, if he had that side to him? Would I feel absolutely comfortable with it? (After all, there are all kinds of people … I once knew a guy who could only get excited by goldfish. He couldn’t masturbate or have sex or anything unless he had a goldfish in front of him.)

I wasn’t sure. The honest truth was that while I
might
love him that much, it was equally likely that I hadn’t yet reached that point.

I was still worrying about this when, just like that, Nakajima woke up.

He opened his eyes, bolted up in bed, and sat there dazed, unguarded, with the wire rack still under his arm.

“Want some coffee?” I asked.

“Oh, hey, Chihiro, you’re back. I guess I must have fallen asleep,” Nakajima said. “I didn’t sleep a wink last night.”

“You can keep sleeping if you want. It’s all right with me,” I said.

“No, I’d better get up. Coffee sounds great.”

With that, he casually took the rack out from under his arm. He gave a just-woke-up sort of yawn and sat staring blankly ahead, his hair tousled.

Then at last he noticed that I was staring at the rack, looking like I wanted to say something, and he said, “Oh, this? It’s a memento of my mother. I sleep with it under my arm when I get the feeling I’m going to have a bad dream.”

“Oh … I see,” I said, surprised at how easily the mystery had been solved.

“There’s no particular reason I chose the rack,” Nakajima said, evidently sensing from my expression that I was wondering what it had to do with his mom. “I just held on to it because it’s something she always liked, and she took good care of it. And it’s thin, so I can keep it between the pages of a book. I think it used to be my grandmother’s, and we used it in our family ever since.”

“That was the best memento you could find?”

“Well, I can’t very well sleep with papers, and I don’t wear jewelry, and stuffed animals are unsanitary, and I’d look silly wearing a woman’s watch … in the end this just felt right.”

“But what made it feel right? It looks like it’d hurt.”

“No, it doesn’t. It’s really thin.”

Nakajima held out the rack, smiling.

“It’s okay for me to touch it?”

“Sure.”

It was just an ordinary rectangular wire rack, a little browned from use. Light and hard and cool to the touch.

As far as Nakajima was concerned, it was just another everyday tool, like a toothbrush or a razor. That kind of bewildered me. How it was weird to me, but not to him.

“You’ve got the hard version of Linus’s blanket.” I laughed.

Nakajima blushed. “So is this really unusual and embarrassing?”

It was such an adorable reaction that I couldn’t suppress a smile.

“No, that’s not what I meant,” I said. “There’s no such thing as ‘unusual and embarrassing’ here. We’re at home, after all.”

“I’m glad. I thought maybe I was doing something crazy again.”

Casually but lovingly, Nakajima closed the rack between the pages of a book.

I think I must have been reeling a bit at what I had just said. Because my mom used to say almost exactly the same thing all the time about her club.

“There are no rules here, except that you have to sit properly at the bar when you drink. People can tell me anything they want. Things they wouldn’t usually say, things that wouldn’t be acceptable at work—it doesn’t matter. That’s what this place is for, after all: they come and pay money to buy themselves, their innermost hearts, a bit of freedom.”

She said things like that a lot.

She’d say it whenever a customer prefaced a story with the words
I’m ashamed to admit this
or
You’re going to think this is really disgraceful, but …

Her openness helped set people’s hearts free, including my dad’s.

I guess, I thought, my mom is still alive, here inside me.

“Do you mind if I ask how you can tell you’re going to have a scary dream?” I said.

“Not at all. Before I fall asleep, my eyes start moving really fast, and my head starts feeling heavy,” Nakajima said, his tone perfectly ordinary. “When that happens, I know I’m definitely going to have a nightmare. I suspect it has a lot to do with how my body is doing, like if I’m particularly exhausted, or if the air pressure is particularly low—stuff like that. I can’t go throw myself into my parents’ arms now, of course, and I can’t ask you to put up with that kind of thing, so when it happened today as I was going to sleep I just put the rack under my arm like I always do.”

I nodded sympathetically, though I felt more sad than anything.

That night, watching Nakajima’s back as he brushed his teeth, I cried a bit. I couldn’t help crying when I thought of him sleeping with that rack tucked under his arm whenever he got lonely, ever since his mother had died, as if doing so were as natural as taking medicine for a fever, or having someone give you a scare when you can’t stop hiccupping.

But what sense was there in crying?

After all, he had found a rational way to deal with his loneliness. The truth was, I thought, that I was insulting him with my tears.

And so I decided not to cry anymore.

But when I got up to go to the bathroom that night, the edge of the rack that was sticking out of the book Nakajima had put it in glinted in the dark, and that got me crying again.

Nakajima was fast asleep.

Suddenly it dawned upon me. He really isn’t the sort of guy who can just go off and spend the night at someone’s apartment, without giving it another thought. When he made up his mind to come here, it was because he really wanted to.

I was still pretty childish in those days—the truth is, I really
was
a child—but I prayed then, prayed until my head hurt, that I wouldn’t do anything to betray his trust, and that he would go on feeling comfortable here, in my apartment, forever and ever.

I had finished outlining the mural and it was time to fill in the colors; I no longer had any uncertainties about the finished design, which I was gradually coming to see in my mind’s eye. All I had to do now was keep moving toward that vision.

I enjoyed going out, spending each day moving my hands, without talking. This part was the most fun. Things progress most smoothly when the end is in view, and all you have to do is keep adding layers. I didn’t have to think anymore, and things had settled down enough that I could horse around a bit with the kids. The day before, I had let some girls paint an area pink. It ended up being more trouble than I had bargained for because I had to go back and fix the places where they had gone outside the lines, but that was kind of enjoyable, too. Fortunately I wasn’t really worried about keeping on a schedule.

Sometimes I found myself utterly alone. Somehow, miraculously, no one would come by, and it would be very quiet, and I was relaxed enough to notice.

So what was I thinking then, during those rare moments when I was feeling perfectly at ease, all by myself, in the absence of any children and my student helper, when even the composition of the mural had ceased to concern me? That’s not something I want to share.

I lean against the wall, pour myself a cup of lukewarm coffee from my thermos.

My butt is aching, there’s a crick in my neck. I feel like I’m getting a cramp in my arm. My whole body feels strangely cold.

As long as I keep moving my hands, though, I can forget all that.

That’s when I notice, all at once, that I’m alone, and I discover the vast sky overhead. In the distance, the flag over the school whips madly in the wind; other than that, it’s as if everything has come to a stop.

I prefer to keep the thoughts that come at times like that, as I sit drinking my coffee, to myself—the particular texture of the sadness I feel, say. I prefer to keep those thoughts private.

I’ve traveled a long way today, I often think to myself.

“We’re having boiled tofu for dinner.”

Nakajima was awake when I got home, and he welcomed me in an apron.

The scent of well-boiled
konbu
filled the room.

“You look like a gigolo,” I said.

My hands and shoes were covered in all different colors of paint. I threw down my bags in a rough sort of way, like a sailor who had just come into port.

“And the lady who’s keeping me is a construction worker,” Nakajima said. “I can’t imagine any woman coming back from the club she works at, all covered in paint and suntanned, with muscles like the ones you’re getting.”

“That’s true.” I laughed. “I guess I don’t look much like a hostess.”

I had on jeans and a sweatshirt; my hair was tied back; too much sunscreen had left my face blotchy; and I had paint all over, including on my socks and next to my nose.

“It always seems like such a waste preparing a meal for one,” Nakajima said. “A waste of food and a waste of time. But I don’t feel that way at all when I’m cooking for two.”

I stepped up from the apartment’s entryway and peeked into the kitchen.

“Thanks for cooking,” I said. “Wow, look how neatly you cut the tofu!”

The tofu in the pot was divided so precisely it looked as if he had used a ruler.

We washed our hands and sat down across from each other to eat.

My mother had always been at the club at dinnertime, and Nakajima seemed to have grown up in a rather unusual household himself, so it felt as though we were imitating some sort of lifestyle we didn’t really know anything about, playing at being a happy family. Neither of us took these moments for granted, and they made us truly content. We literally ate it up.

“It’s great, isn’t it, just eating tofu together like this,” I said.

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Nakajima said. “After I graduate, I’ve decided I’d like to get a scholarship and go to the Pasteur Institute as soon as possible. Just a little while ago I didn’t think I could, but now I do—in part because Chii assured me I’d be able to do it and in part because I’m with you now, and somehow that makes me feel like I can. It looks like I’ll be able to get my degree, so I’ve decided to go ahead and apply. Of course, I’ve got to ask for letters of recommendation and send in a sample article and an outline of my research and so on, and there’s an exam I’ll have to pass, but I looked into it and it seems they’re affiliated with an institute in Japan, and there’s this program now that should make it relatively easy for me to go. If I don’t make it this year I can try again next year. And if I’m accepted, I’m thinking I’d like to go for at least six months.”

At first it didn’t even occur to me to feel lonely; I was simply glad. Nakajima could only do things he was really enthusiastic about, so it was good that he felt this way.

“What would you do, then, Chihiro?”