Watchlist (37 page)

She peeled off her pants and zebra-print thong and straddled the horse. He never wanted her to wash first. Her feet dangled a few inches above the concrete floor where Mr. Ukaga kneeled, naked now except for his kneepads and the classic, bulky Polaroid camera hanging around his neck. His face was cast upward as if waiting for a vision of Yahweh. She sat up straight and spread her legs and leaned forward a little, making sure her entire crotch pushed through the hole.

He moaned as he moved into position directly under her. She felt his breath on her like a curious finger. Then he began to take pictures.

She tilted her head back. Her breasts looked great in the ceiling mirror. Solid C-cups, resting coolly in the lime-green satin bra she'd lifted from Sogo last week. Dropping ninety bucks on a bra was a waste, especially when the only person who'd see it was ambivalent about tits.

“How do you call this?” he asked from beneath her.

He made her list all the English names she could think of. Cunt. Poontang. Pussy. Slit. Twat. Muff. Cooze. She began making things up. Juju-gum. Washiki. She used words from her GRE prep book: Conflagration. Affable. Magnanimous. He liked that one, magnanimous. “Magnan-i-mous,” he said, gazing between her legs, snapping photographs. She could only hear what was happening beneath her: the click of the shutter, the whirring of the machine spitting out a photograph, and the tap of it hitting the floor.

After ten minutes, they moved on to the lipstick, powder, and perfume. He was fussy about her sneezing and brought a mask so she didn't succumb to the unladylike affliction. The only thing he didn't photograph was the finale, oral sex. Was he embarrassed? His cock—well, she'd seen larger turnips. Which made blowjobs a cinch. Sucking him off was like working a cough drop that didn't dissolve. He usually came, politely pulling out right before, after a minute. Then he collected his photographs, paid her more than was owed, and urged her to get home safely.

T
HE ZEBRA-PRINT THONG
was the first thing she'd stolen. She took it because it was overpriced at ¥4800, and because it seemed too insubstantial to be owned. She ripped off the Sogo tag, stuck it behind the dressing room mirror, and put the thong on beneath her regular underwear. When she opened the curtain, there were no clerks or police waiting. It was like her coworker had said:
In Japan, foreigners are the most visible group, but the least seen.
No one gave her so much as a look as she strode awkwardly out of the store. In the crowded Shibuya station bathroom she removed the thong and spun it around her finger. It reminded her of a helicopter propeller before takeoff. She felt more powerful and free than she had in a long time. There were a dozen women in the bathroom with her, hundreds of people in the station, thousands on the city streets above, and not one could see what she was doing; not one knew what she'd managed.

*

T
HE ASSIGNMENT HAD
started out like any other, an email from Mimi that she read on the staff room computer while sipping green tea during lunch. The drink's bitterness felt healthy.

He wanna tall French girl. You can pass, yeah?

I only took a year of French.

He don't want talk, he wants tall. Six feet.

I'm a five-foot-ten Canadian Jew.

You wear heels, yeah? Set you up for 7pm. He's nice guy. Speaks some English and works at Kawasaki College. Physics department.

Her train was delayed and when she arrived at their designated meeting spot, outside a shuttered bank, she spotted him pacing. His hands were balled up in his pockets. She rushed over, apologizing in Japanese, English, and as an afterthought, French. He looked her over and said in Japanese, “Too many relationships begin with the words ‘I'm sorry.'”

She liked him.

He looked her over, nodded, and jerked his chin toward a cab waiting at the corner. As they got in, he put his hand on her leg. “How tall, without shoe?” he whispered in what even she could tell was terrible French.

She exaggerated her height to make up for her lateness. “
Cent . . .
quatre-vingts centimètres
,” she replied.

He sighed and, thankfully, switched back to Japanese. Her being late was a great turn-on, he explained. He loved the suffering it caused him. He loved imagining her in her bathroom, powdering her armpits, spraying perfume on her wrists, slipping on a delicate pair of panties, applying lipstick, blotting it. Would she let him photograph her doing these things? “
J'adore les femmes françaises
,” he whispered.

She pushed out a laugh, panic beating in her chest. She didn't wear perfume or lipstick and she had never heard of powdering one's armpits. “
Mais oui
,” she managed, looking into her lap.

S
HE DIDN'T KNOW
what he did with the photographs. Kept them in albums, maybe—hid them away, a secret pleasure he might visit in the night while his family slept. Or he could be posting them online at a fetish site, getting “likes” and comments from viewers around the world. She wondered what they'd have to say about her labia, her untamed pubic hair, her arid armpits.

Though it was taboo during these gigs, she couldn't stop herself from asking about the wives and children she knew must be stashed away in an apartment or house in this compartmental city. It was one thing she liked about Tokyo, the cubby-ness of it, the ease with which one could get lost yet still feel part of things. No one on the planet knew where she was. She could look without being seen.

When she'd asked Mr. Ukaga after their third meeting if he had a family he replied in English, “There are two daughters.” He didn't offer anything more. Something about his tone, his face when he'd spoken, the phrasing—“there are,” not “I have,” as if to distance himself from them, or to acknowledge them in the smallest way possible—left her with nothing to say. She finished dressing. As she left, he handed her his business card and told her that his hobbies were opera and cooking.

She walked back to the station that night instead of taking a taxi. Though cab drivers were the most discreet people in a city full of discretion, she couldn't shake the feeling that she'd be discovered moonlighting in this not-quite-legal profession. It was strange: ever since Mr. Ukaga had started taking the pictures, she'd felt different. Not just more visible but more solid. As if he were bringing her to life with his gaze.

*

T
HE MORNING AFTER
their fourth encounter, she took a walk through Shimabukuro to the gleaming Sogo building. First stop: women's clothing. She bought a thick black sweater with skulls embroidered across the chest—not her style, but that didn't matter since she'd be returning it later. The salesgirl stapled the receipt to the outside of the large plastic Sogo bag and Tara continued shopping.

In the imported candy section, which smelled like strawberry Suave shampoo, she slipped a pack of root beer gummies into the bag on top of the sweater. She rode the escalator to the second floor and in the electronics section added two CDs (Catalonian music, a mix of up-and-coming Japanese songwriters) to her take. The small items slid into the folds of the sweater. Undetectable. The paid-for sweater was like a lead vest at a dentist's office: it protected what was underneath it.

She walked the floor, ending up in accessories. Cheerful panpipe music descended from a place too high up to see, like a light snow you didn't notice until it accumulated on your sleeve. Tara felt happy there in that huge store with its unending square footage and its bright lights and hum of commerce and things upon things upon things in all their colors and crispness, waiting to be touched, to be used, to be made valuable. She slid a scarf from a rack. It was blood red with turquoise specks. She wrapped it around her neck, fluffed it. The soft material reminded her of Butterball, her childhood cat. She'd mistreated him, tugged his whiskers, tossed him high into the air and onto the couch, rubbed his belly too hard. But he still curled up in her lap afterward. Yes, she'd used him for her own amusement.

That was the thing about being objectified, she thought. It implied usefulness, purpose. She picked up a thick plastic coin purse with a cartoon daisy on it. Printed across the bottom were the words,
Dinosaurs went extinct around the time of the first flower.

She took the scarf into the dressing room along with three pairs of lace panties. With nail clippers, she snipped the tags off the panties and put them on over the underwear she was already wearing. She left the dressing room, put the scarf back, and went down the escalator. She lingered near the sales bins at the front of the store. Her heart thundered. The store was crowded; no one looked at her despite her height, her light hair. Despite five years in the country, she couldn't understand them fluently, couldn't read most of the signs around her. She'd been in a sensory-deprivation tank once during college—an experiment in the psychology department that'd paid eighty-five dollars for half a day's work—and living in a foreign country was not unlike the hour she'd spent in the tank.

Her blood was fuzzy. She walked toward the sliding doors. Stepped outside. Her immediate desire in these moments was to look at every item she'd stolen, admire it, feel like life had bestowed a bonus. But she knew better. She kept walking, step, calm step, step—

A hand on her arm. Its grip was not light.

“
Issho ni kite
”—come with me—said a woman's voice, and she was pulled back into the store.

B
Y THE TIME
the worst was over, it was almost 9:00 p.m. She'd been sitting in a back room on the first floor of Sogo for almost three hours. The police had come, taken down her information, her foreign registration number, grilled her about connections to violent criminals. They made her show them the contents of her bag but let her remove the panties behind a screen. She paid for the items she'd stolen with cash from her wallet. They said in Japanese, then wrote down in English, what amounted to: “We can take you to jail, or you can call someone to pick you up if you promise never to come back.”

The only numbers in her phone were work-related, along with a few coworker acquaintances, an Australian ex-boyfriend, and her ninety-two-year-old neighbor who came over at least once a week to bring homemade pickles and ask her to turn down her music.

Then she spotted Mr. Ukaga's card in her wallet.

He showed up within an hour, quite a feat considering he'd come from work in Ikebukuro during rush hour. He spoke authoritatively to the fat woman who'd grabbed her arm. They bowed to each other but the woman held her bow longer, and lower. A young security guard fiddled with the computer. After a second, a black-and-white image of Tara appeared on the screen. She was in the candy section, holding the gummies. She looked 100 percent guilty.

Her face burned. How could she have thought she was being smooth?

How could she have thought no one was looking?

Mr. Ukaga watched the video intently. When she slipped the candy into the bag, he murmured. Both she and the security guard glanced at him. Only Tara noticed the slight bulge in his pants.

I
T WAS A
Friday, but he took her to the love hotel anyway. “I will pay twice,” he said. She asked if they could stop for a bottle of something stiff and he had the taxi driver wait at the curb while he fetched champagne from an import shop. He popped the cork in the back seat. It was the first time she'd had the real stuff, direct from France.

“What's your first name?” she asked after a long swig. Bubbles spilled over the bottle's rim and onto her blouse. She didn't care.

“Toshio.”

“Toshio, what do you do with the pictures of me?”

He motioned for her to drink more. “I throw them away when you leave, of course. It would be unwise to be found with such things.”

She was deflated. His reasoning made sense, though. Why had she expected him to treasure these grotesque images? These disembodied parts that were scarcely identifiable? Why had she assumed his fetish was in the keeping, not in the doing?

At the hotel, they went through the routine: horse, makeup, perfume. He in his robe. Pictures of everything. He'd planned this, she realized; he'd brought the supplies when he came to pick her up at the store.

She'd stop this job. She didn't need the money. She
liked
the money—loved it, even—but every part of it now felt tedious. From her knees, she said, “Did you know? Dinosaurs went extinct around the time of the first flower.”

“What a thought,” he said, scooping the Polaroids from the ground. She thought he might throw them into the trash immediately now that the secret was out, but he only set them on the side table beside the lipsticks. “The first law of thermodynamics.”

“Conservation of . . .” she began, forgetting the rest. She sank to her knees. But he stopped. Walked to the door, slipped the cactus cover off the fire alarm. He laid his hand on the red, exposed box.

“It's emergency. Ha. Ha. Come to Pah-ree?” His prick softened into a sleeping mouse.

“Paris?” She smiled.

He hopped, hand on the alarm. “Yes, yes. Bring magnanimous.”

“Is this a role-playing thing?”

“No play.” His face was serious. “We go.”

She didn't understand. Was this a game? His price for having rescued her today? If so, she had no idea what the rules were. How to please.

“We could go. But we'd need to study. You know I'm not really French, and they hate when you can't speak their language.”

“It's okay! Bring magnanimous. Dinosaur. Flower.
Dee-no-sare!
Fleur!
Does not matter.”

She thought about what he'd said—
there are two daughters
. He hadn't mentioned a wife.