Coin Locker Babies (21 page)

“Well? You like it? It cost me plenty,” said D.

“Pretty mushy, seems to me.”

“But do you think you can sing it?”

“It won’t be easy, but I’ll give it a try.”

Rising from the massage table, D stared out at the skyscrapers as he rubbed the oil off with a towel.

“You’d better,” he said, “because you’re going to buy me one of those, Hashi.”

The black woman took her money and, pulling free of D’s hand which lingered on her hip, changed into a woolen dress without bothering to remove her boots. She stuffed her wig in her handbag while telling him, in Japanese, that he should stretch his neck and shoulders mornings after he’d been out late. When she’d gone, D gave his shriveled penis a flip and smiled at Hashi.

“What do you say we go down to The Market and buy us some boys? I hear there’s some new talent around.”

“D, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“What? If you’re after another of those rice omelettes, you’re out of luck—all I’ve got here is some soba.”

“I want you to make Neva my manager.”

“That old lady? Why?”

“She’s a wonderful person.”

“OK, OK, maybe you’re right. Fine, consider it done. But as I was saying, how about us picking up a couple of kids at The Market and having a little party? It’s been a while… And what’s all this stuff about women all of a sudden? Don’t tell me you’ve suddenly changed your ways. You haven’t started liking all the sloppy things that go on down there, have you?”

“I don’t do men any more,” Hashi announced.

“Well, listen to him,” said D. Having finished dressing, he reached for the phone and yelled into the receiver, “Soba—now!”

A few minutes later, a secretary came in carrying two bowls of noodles. D pulled a blue can from the drawer of his desk and
removed the lid, spooning a mixture of chicken fat and pineapple into his soup.

“Want some? Comes from Taiwan. Can’t beat it.” He licked the grease from his fingers as Hashi shook his head. Hashi ignored his noodles, staring at D, whose lips were glistening. He then said softly:

“Neva and I are planning to get married.”

Neva had one ambition in life: to design an angel’s costume.

Her father had been a musician who played the piano when he was younger, or so she was told, but he had never been able to earn his living that way and finally took a job accompanying singers on an accordion in a cafe. Neva’s mother was a student who had frequented the cafe, and the two had married against their parents’ will.

Shortly after Neva was born, her mother had developed lung trouble. The doctor said it was probably the result of a new medicine she’d taken during pregnancy to ease the birth. At any rate, the young couple soon realized that it wouldn’t do to have a baby and an invalid living in the same tiny house—all they could afford on an accordionist’s salary—so they swallowed their pride and Neva and her mother went home to live with her parents.

At her family home, an old inn in Okayama, the reception was less than warm; her parents had been urging divorce for some time, but Neva’s mother refused to listen. Nevertheless, it was beneath the high ceilings of this ill-lit, ancient inn that Neva was raised until she was fourteen. Her mother would sit all day in a murky room, coughing her lungs out and dabbling at her watercolors. Since the lung disease was thought to be potentially infectious, Neva had never been hugged or held close by her, so she was only too willing to pose for her, sitting perfectly still
on a chair, hands on her knees, as her mother stared at her for hours on end. Nice, too, was the way she always made her look prettier than she really was. While she painted, Neva’s mother often talked to her, telling her that both of them deserved a better home than this.

Her accordionist father came to visit twice a year, bringing with him dolls and toys that you couldn’t get in the country. He would pick her up again and again and rub his cheek against hers, and when dinner was over he would sing and play the accordion for them. But somehow Neva always hated this skinny man, perhaps because her mother invariably cried after each of his visits.

At about the time Neva entered elementary school, the accordion player stopped coming to see them. Her mother’s illness seemed to stay the same, never much worse or much better. Neva was the tallest in her grade and an excellent student, but one didn’t often see her smile. It was in the fifth grade that she first got her hands on some dress material and a needle and thread. She wanted to make a snow-white dress, like the one her mother always painted on the little girls in the pictures for which Neva posed, and having found the right material, she worked on it every evening until late. When it was done, she showed it to her mother before anybody else. “It’s a dress for an angel,” she was told, and was given a big hug.

After that Neva made any number of white dresses, and with each new dress she received a hug. Once, her mother even began to cry as she held her. As Neva remembered it, this must have happened in summer; her mother’s sweat was cold and clammy, and when she had felt it against her skin she’d had a terrifying thought: when she dies, there will be no one left to touch me at all. Even now she had no idea why this had occurred to her; possibly it was brought on by the excitement of finally being touched by
a mother who had kept her distance for so long. At any rate, she had suddenly been convinced that no one would ever hold her close again. And unfortunately the idea caught on, and by the time Neva began attending middle school, it was firmly rooted in her mind. When, for example, the boys in her class refused to join hands with her during folk-dancing practice, she took it as a sign, not of the usual shyness of that age, but that her premonition was coming true, and it made her shiver. She bought a book on sewing and turned out one white dress after another, but now, each time her mother wrapped her arms around her, she felt surer than ever that no one else would do this after she was gone.

Though her mother was against the move, Neva entered a private girls’ high school in Tokyo that was run by missionaries, and from there went on to university. One summer, during a college festival where she was selling some dresses she’d made, a young man stopped and began talking. It was hot, and the student—a tall, tanned boy—suggested something cool to drink. Neva agreed, and by the time she’d finished her fizzy soft drink, she had decided to marry him. That night, she allowed him to do anything he wanted; she still didn’t know his name, but she did know enough to avoid mentioning marriage or related subjects, and things went fairly smoothly. In the days that followed, she refused him what she had allowed once and instead spoke of a certain Swiss fashion-design prize which, if she were lucky enough to win it, would allow the man who married her to lead a pretty easy life. She also let it be known that her family owned a large inn in Okayama, but these facts came out gradually, almost accidentally, as the occasion arose. A year later, the two were married.

After graduating, the young man became an utterly average employee in an utterly average company, his only source of pride
being his physique. As for Neva, she felt absolutely no love for this muscular husband of hers; he had simply been the first man who had ever tried to touch her. Accordingly, she took no pleasure at all in married life, and one suffocating day followed the next with the one consolation that she was at last free of her old obsession. She resisted her husband’s desire to have children and, not having the money to open a design shop of her own, went to work as a stylist; but with the fading of the phobia went her enthusiasm for angels’ clothes.

Ten years passed this way, Neva hardly knowing if she was dead or alive, and then one day she discovered a lump in both her breasts. They proved to be malignant. Neva cried when they told her she would lose the breasts, but at the same time she realized that the operation brought with it a strange hope: she would probably be able to divorce her husband afterward. Somewhere in her sadness lay a spark of joy; when her breasts were gone, she could leave this man.

Her divorce was finalized while she was still in the hospital, and with the marriage now behind her, the old familiar worry was waiting. Who, she asked herself, would want to look at the hideous scars? Who would touch her flat, fleshless chest? This time, however, the thought was not a painful one; nor, in fact, was it an illusion any longer but a reality. Still, there was no reason to fear the truth; she simply faced facts, cried for a few days, and that was that.

Hashi, however, had opened Neva’s scars and let the loneliness she had stored inside flow out. That first evening, in the taxi home, he had grabbed her hand, and Neva had decided then and there that it was time she gave herself a treat. She had taken him up to the apartment, undressed him, and licked his body all over, and while doing this she felt desire for the first time, felt she
wanted him to touch her absent breasts. Neva’s ministrations had given Hashi an erection and he was generally beginning to revive. When she turned on the light and asked him to feel her chest, he blinked and glanced down as if uncertain what he’d find; then he burst out laughing, a deep, pleased laugh. Thinking that he was laughing at the idea of touching someone so ugly, Neva had begun to cry, but Hashi took her in his arms and held her tight. Gently rubbing her flat chest, he licked and nibbled his way down her side as his cock pressed against her thigh. “Heaven,” he had murmured.

D had been unable to resist a little sarcasm when he agreed to make Neva Hashi’s manager: “You lucky bastard, you. What could be better for a fairy’s first?” As for Neva, even after she understood why Hashi had laughed that night, it made no difference. So what if he was queer? She couldn’t care less; it had been a great fuck, he had lapped her up as no one else had ever done, and those lonely memories of hers were laid to rest where they could no longer do her any harm.

It wasn’t long after this that she went to work designing costumes for Hashi’s concert tour. Two dreams, it seems, had come true at once: she had an angel to love, and she was making that angel snow-white satin clothes to wear.

There was still time before he was to meet Neva for dinner and he had forgotten to buy flowers—Neva liked orchids—so Hashi decided to pay off the cab and walk the rest of the way. A huge Christmas tree stood in front of the flower shop, but inside the air was warm and smelled of damp leaves. As Hashi entered, he was greeted by the shopkeeper, a dark man whose chest hair, threading through an ivory necklace, peeped out of his
open-necked
shirt. He was cutting roses. Hashi ordered five orchids: white with just a touch of red at the edges. While the flowers were being wrapped in silver foil, a man in a fur jacket—obviously queer—walked in the door.

“You know what I’m just dying for?” he announced. “Bougainvillea, and masses of it, stems and all.” The owner of the place put down the orchids for a moment and went to a refrigerator at the back of the shop. When he came back, his arms were filled with bougainvillea.

“What do you need them for?” he asked the fur jacket.

“We’re having a Christmas pageant, and I’m going to put some in my hair and play Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. Now be gentle with the little things, the petals drop off if you so much as sneeze at them.”

It was the first time that Hashi had seen the brilliant color of the flower; the ones he’d kept as a souvenir of his mother had
long since turned brown. “I wonder what bougainvillea means botanically,” he mumbled. The shopkeeper smiled and shook his head, but the man in the fur said “Must have something to do with buggers, don’t you think?” and winked at Hashi. Hashi laughed. I didn’t realize they were so fragile, he was thinking. Why would my mother have put some in the locker with me? That woman writer said it was because they were the fanciest thing in the flower shops at the time… As he stood lost in thought, the fairy breezed by him and out of the shop, crimson petals scattering on the shoulders of his silver fox jacket.

Back in the street, a dog sat next to a blind old man playing a violin. Every time the wind blew, the tune seemed to go astray, perhaps because the man’s fingers were numb from the cold. The dog’s breath came in white clouds. A group of drunks came by, and one called to the others to stop as he sat down in front of the dog and began to open a small box of sushi. The dog, a hairless breed of some sort, sniffed at the food, then looked up at its master. Without stopping his playing, the man croaked:

“What is it?”

“Just thought I’d give your dog some of this here tuna,” said the drunk.

“Sorry,” said the old man, “but he can’t eat anything raw.” The drunk had grabbed its collar and was trying to force the fish into its mouth.

“Hey, you stupid mutt, this is fuckin’
toro
!” he said. The dog curled its tail, let out a howl, and tried to wriggle free while the blind man apologized and went on playing. “All right, then,” the drunk conceded, and, stuffing the remaining sushi into the man’s money can, he left. As Hashi walked away, the old musician was squatting by the can clawing out bits of rice and throwing them on the ground.

In Roppongi, young drifters had lined the street with makeshift stalls consisting of nothing but flattened cardboard boxes on which jewelry, original paintings, or perhaps a private collection of poetry were spread. One group had a Christmas cake they’d probably found in the garbage behind some bakery, which was being devoured in great handfuls. A young girl, back hunched against the cold, had a safety pin through the flesh of her cheek from which a large tag dangled with the words “Punk Forever!” written on it. The pin looked slightly rusty, and though it was hard to tell in the dim light, the skin around the hole in her cheek seemed to be infected. From time to time she took a tube of ointment from her pocket and dabbed at it. At the moment her cheek was stuffed with cake, which didn’t prevent her, however, from taking her turn inhaling from a plastic bag filled with paint thinner.

A young man nearby, seated in Zen meditation, had painted his face in the red, white, and blue of the French flag. Though it was December, he wore nothing over his T-shirt, nor any socks with his rubber sandals. Another man was tending a display of blowguns which he demonstrated for any willing passerby, and the show seemed to be working, as a small knot of people had collected around his stand. The guns, consisting of nothing more than lengths of lead pipe and cone-shaped rivets wrapped in paper, packed a surprising punch, and the man was able to stick the darts in a board ten meters away with apparent ease. The sign next to his display read: “Lethal.” As Hashi was watching the demonstration, someone tapped him on the shoulder. Turning, he found himself looking at a scraggly face whose smile revealed missing teeth in front.

“Hashi, it’s me,” hissed the man. It was Tatsuo. He was selling a book of poetry at a stand next to the girl with the safety pin;
The
Bee’s Remains
, it was called. “It’s not my book,” he was quick to tell him. “This weird old guy writes this stuff, has them printed up, and then gives them away free… But Hashi, you’re getting to be a star, right?” Though Hashi tried to refuse, Tatsuo pushed a copy of the book into his pocket as he went on: “I’ve heard your record. Most folks around here don’t like it much, but when anybody says anything bad about it I punch them out for you.” Tatsuo was staring at Hashi’s bouquet. “Those sure are pretty. Must be from the south. Flowers, fish, everything’s prettier down there, you know.”

“Tatsuo, I’m afraid I’m in a hurry,” Hashi interrupted.

“Oh… Well, OK, if that’s the way it is.”

“How’s Emiko?” Hashi thought to ask, and suddenly Tatsuo seemed to come to himself and covered his toothless mouth with his hand.

“Lost more of my teeth,” he muttered. “They pulled them out without even giving me any novocain. That jock brother of yours hid my shotguns somewhere, and I couldn’t tell them where even when they tried to get it out of me by pulling my teeth. Shit, that hurt—even worse than getting my ears shredded. Guy wasn’t even a dentist, not that it would have made much difference…”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve really got to go,” said Hashi.

“You know, those were good times we had together. Seems like years ago now, but it was just yesterday… So, you rich now? Have you been to Cebu? Seems all the rich people go there sometime. You been yet?”

“Let’s talk some other time—soon—OK?” said Hashi, beginning to walk on, but Tatsuo caught him by the sleeve.

“Look, I know you’re in a hurry, but there’s just one thing I’d like you to do for me. Uh … I don’t mean to be a nuisance, but if you should get to Cebu and run into Emiko, could you say
hello for me? Tell her I may have lost my teeth but I’m doing fine. Tell her I’ll never hit her again. You’re sure to be going, aren’t you? You’re rich now; you’ve got to go. You should bring back a guitar—they’ve got handmade ones dirt cheap. You can’t make any money selling that mother-of-pearl shit everybody brings back—guitars are the only way to go. Singapore Air is the cheapest way to get there. Air India’s cheap too, but you get nothing but curry to eat. You transfer to a domestic flight in Manila; takes another fifty-eight minutes from there. From Japan, with transfers and all, it’s six hours, twenty-nine minutes. Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Six hours and twenty-nine minutes—no time at all—and you’re there. I’ve already been sitting
here
more than four hours…”

Hashi said nothing, and Tatsuo hadn’t let go of his sleeve, so Hashi transferred the orchids to his other hand. Tatsuo extracted a small circle of glass from his pocket; it was a ring.

“I read in a magazine that you’re engaged,” he said. “This isn’t much, but it’s my present to you. And if you’re my friend, you’ve got to like it. That’s what friends do—give each other stuff…” When Hashi put the ring in his pocket, Tatsuo smiled his toothless smile and released his grip on the sleeve.

“Well, be seeing you,” said Hashi, and he walked on down the street. He turned now and then to look back over his shoulder, and each time Tatsuo could be seen hopping up above the heads of the crowd and waving.

“My throat hurts from smoking too much,” Neva was saying as they sat across from each other at the restaurant. Between them were the orchids, which Hashi had asked the waiter to put in a vase.

“Do you think bougainvillea are pretty?” he said suddenly.

“Why do you ask?” said Neva.

“They had some at the florist. I kind of liked them.”

“They don’t have any smell,” said Neva.

“The woman who abandoned me put some of them in the coin locker before she left.”

“Really? She must have been fond of flowers.”

“Why do you suppose she did that, though?” Hashi asked, but Neva just looked down at her drink and drained it in one gulp. Hashi watched her for a minute, then laughed and changed the subject.

Neva was, in fact, feeling uncomfortable, but not for the reason Hashi imagined. She was thinking that it was only a week until the Christmas Eve broadcast during which Hashi would meet that very woman. The woman’s name and address had already been discovered; Hashi alone knew nothing about it. D had told her to say nothing unless she was sure she could convince him to go through with it. It seemed he had thought of telling Hashi himself several times but hadn’t been able to. “Tell him if you can,” D had said. Neva couldn’t.

On the other side of the table, Hashi was wondering why seeing Tatsuo had left such a bad taste in his mouth. No doubt it had something to do with the damage that old friends did to the carefully reworked memories he’d made to match his TV image. These fresh, cheerful memories, free of any sense of shame, just crumbled to pieces when confronted with a living, breathing part of his past. The thought made Hashi shudder. It made him wish them all dead, these people who knew him as he once had been. Tatsuo’s toothless smile came floating into his head. With an effort he managed to push Tatsuo out of the way, only to have Kiku take his place. There was no getting rid of Kiku.

“Hashi?” said Neva, calling him back to the present. She was
wearing a velvet dress with a low neckline, and he reached across the table to slide his hand under the material. “Not here!” she scolded as he squeezed the spongy bra and stiff wire. Dinner was just a prelude, like foreplay, Hashi thought, filling his mind with images of Neva’s body. A man’s chest above, a cunt below. He wondered what the huge sort of breasts one saw in magazines would feel like; the only thing like that he’d ever touched was on a cow. Probably pretty sexy… So how about someone with a woman’s breasts and a cock? That would be perfect; probably sprout wings on the back if they ever came up with that.

The waiter brought the hors d’oeuvres and then soup served in turtle shells. Hashi took a spoonful of the soup and found it so delicious that he soon forgot all about Kiku and Tatsuo.