Lost Girls and Love Hotels (4 page)

I’m nine. Frank’s eleven.
It’s a year before Dad leaves. All the signs are there. Mom and Dad are like animals in a too-small cage. Frank and I are the runts of the litter. Trampled in their battles.

“Shake my hand,” Dad says suddenly at dinner. He stretches his hand across the table to Frank. Dad’s on a mission to make Frank a man. I’m not sure what an eleven-year-old man would be like, but apparently sports are important. And standing up straight. “Losers slouch” is the word around the house.

“Oh for God’s sake, Ted,” Mom says. “Can we eat in peace, please?”

“Shake it Frankie.” Dad jerks his arm.

Frank half rises, sticks his spindly arm out. He’s grown. Taller, not bigger. His fingers are long and bony. The underside of his elbow is red with eczema.

“Mom, why don’t we have music playing at dinner? Like at restaurants,” I ask.

Frank slips his bluish hand into Dad’s hairy red one.

Mom smiles. “That’s a good idea Mags.” She stands up quickly and scampers into the kitchen on her tippy-toes. It’s her “I’m-angry-and-exhausted-and-undervalued-but-I’m-going-to-be-cheerful-goddamn-it” walk.

Frank takes a few shallow breaths and gives Dad a limp handshake. Dad looks expectant, like there’s more to come. There isn’t more.

The Captain and Tennille play on the radio in the kitchen.

“If you want to get anywhere in this world,” Dad says, “you have to have a firm handshake. Rule number one. It’s simple.”

Mom sits back down, arranges her cloth napkin on her lap, straightens her back. “More ham anyone?” The beast sits in the middle of the table, adorned with pineapple slices and cloves.

Dad’s hand goes out again. “Here, Frank, watch me.”

“Mom, I can’t stop imagining the pig’s head and tail,” I say.

Dad shakes Frank’s hand firmly. A grin sprouts on his red face and collapses again into his normal glower. “See?”

“That kind of hurt,” Frank whines.

Tennille sings “Do That to Me One More Time.”

“Now you try Frankie.” Dad’s arm is twitchy with sinew and vein. Once is never enough.

Frank takes a deep breath, puts his hand in Dad’s, and
squeezes, suddenly and violently. I can see Frank’s fingers strain. Dad’s hand compresses, his fingers fold into one another, his Adam’s apple bobs. I can almost hear a crunch.

“Good job, son,” he says.

Frank smiles.

Dad is redder than usual. “Okay, that’s good.”

“Can we eat by candlelight?” I suggest. “Like in
Hart to Hart
?”

Mom sighs. “Let go Frank.”

For a second I can see the white imprint of Frank’s hand on Dad’s when he releases his grip.

“Better,” Dad says, giving his hand a stretch. “Better.”

“Candlelight?” I say again.

Mom poises the knife over the beast. “Maybe next Sunday, hon.”

T
he dead girl has put me on edge. Suddenly she’s everywhere. And nowhere. She vanished a month ago, and her picture has started to pop up all over Tokyo. She peeks out from collages of rave flyers, posters for art exhibitions, J-pop singles, suicide hotlines. In the trains, she looks down from the gossip magazine adverts, a disembodied head eyeing the groggy human cargo. It’s always the same photo, a head-and-shoulders shot, her eyes dead-center, following me wherever I stand. Her mouth is curled up at the corners into a Mona Lisa grin, as if she’s hoarding a secret. Only she knows where she is. Running. Hiding. Captive. Dead.

Sometimes when I go clubbing, high on something, with the dead girl staring down at me from giant electronic billboards, I silently curse her. She’s a downer, grinning beside her vital statistics, warning me, taunting me.
Whenever my eyes meet hers, I feel like I’m turning to liquid, seeping into the cracks and crevices of the world—afraid I’ll never be able to retrieve my damp remains when I choose to get a life.

So I troll the city. A different neighborhood every Sunday. On Sundays, I love Tokyo. It opens like a flower for me, parades its multiplicity before me—cute Japanese boys with artfully streaked and teased hair; designer bag–carrying office ladies walking pigeon-toed in kitten-heeled mules;
kogaru
, the deeply tanned bad girls, frosty-lipped and glittering; kimono-clad old ladies, plucking their mobile phones from bamboo-handled handbags. On Sundays, the broad boulevard of Omotosando is like Paris. Paris with its history erased and rewritten by a schizophrenic comic-book artist.

I always start out in Ikebukuro, at the Sunshine Building. The elevator to the sixtieth floor goes dark when the doors close, phosphorescent stars appear on the walls, on the ceiling. I feel like I’m floating, like the carriage will take me somewhere other than a room with lots of windows and an overpriced canteen. The white-gloved elevator girl chirps something inconsequential, something vaguely sensual in her little-girl singsong. The ride never lasts long enough.

From the windows, I get a three-sixty of the city. Tokyo from above looks like the insides of a machine, mammoth and gray. No square of space goes unused—buildings seem compressed, squished together like commuters on a rush-hour train. The traffic, even on a Sunday, coils through the
city in one long centipede. Small patches of green look wrong. They should be removed—like photos of an old lover—they only cause bouts of melancholy, craving, attachment.

For my ten-dollar admission fee, I get a handy reference map, a photo of the tangled machinery of Tokyo with cute cartoon koala bears marking points of interest. I look out at the city that stretches out farther than I can see, stretches out into an eerie moonscape, the dirty floss of pollution obscuring still more of it. I imagine that it’s a maze, that there’s a way in, a way out, that the dead girl is trapped somewhere in a nightmare of dead ends. I look down at the map and choose a place to get lost in.

Sometimes I end up in Shimokitazawa. Wander the narrow little streets around the station. Go from secondhand clothing shop to café to secondhand clothing shop. The Japanese in Shimokitazawa are a bit looser than the rest of the Tokyoites. The men in straw hats and Hawaiian shirts. Girls in dreadlocks and clothes from India. Smelling of incense and escape. I stay until I’m wired on coffee and the jazz clubs open up. Blow half a week’s wages on the table charge and ten-buck beers. Sway a little to the whine of the saxophone.

Other days, it’s out into the suburbs, to the rent-a-dog park, where I pay thirty bucks to lead around a confused-looked beagle for two hours. Watch housewives freak out when their rent-a-dog assumes the pooping posture. They lay out a neat square of paper towels on the grass and then wipe the poor beast’s bum with wet-naps. The whole sur
real spectacle of it inevitably leads me to the nearest bar. After a few glasses, I start to concoct drunken schemes to liberate the rent-a-dogs. Balaclava and ninja slippers. Wire clippers and Milk Bones. Dogs following me around the city, like a weak-livered Moses.

Today I’m in Jimbocho, the book district. The shops overflow with words—there are comic-book stores, cookbook stores, shops with musty ancient tomes, others with hardcore porn proudly displayed, unabashedly browsed. The pedestrians in Jimbocho seem uniformly beige as they wind through the narrow streets, pausing at the little tables set up outside the storefronts, looking for stories, waiting to be colored in like paint-by-numbers.

I find a shop that sells English books, ride the phone booth–sized elevator up six floors, and lose myself in the stacks. And there is Kazu. Crouched down in the classics section, his head turned at an awkward angle, reading the spines. His shoes are shiny. His feet small. Through the neatly pressed white linen of his shirt, I can see the faint purple outline of his tattoos, the bulge and twitch of the muscle that runs down his side. Something about his body, the brutal bulk of his neck, his legs, emanates violence. But his movements, the way he runs his hands over the books—slowly, as though he might wake them—is delicate, almost girlish.

He’s in my territory, surrounded by English. I feel emboldened, and walk over to him, stand so close that his knee nearly brushes my shin.

“Remember me?” I ask, conjuring up the words from my throat. They come out perfectly, a rough pull to them, a challenge in the tone.

Kazu looks up the length of me, takes his time, lingers for a moment at my mouth, my eyes. Time bends for me, lets me feel a tiny fissure in my chest. Opening. A place to crawl into and rest. I want to fuck him right here, with Henry James and Jane Austen watching.

“She never told me your name.” Kazu stands, brushes some invisible dust from his pant legs. “Honestly speaking, she never told me her name.”

“I’m Margaret.”

“Ashita Kazuyuki. Please call me Kazu.”

“You speak English well.”

“Iya, iya.
Just I’m studying. More to learn.”

“And you read.”

“If time is okay.”

Two high school boys in high-collared military-style uniforms appear at the end of the aisle. They take one look at us, a blue-haired gaijin and a gangster, turn on their heels and walk away quickly.

“What do you look for?” Kazu asks. His cheeks are two perfect circles of red.

What do I look for? Calm. Home. Good coffee. Happiness. Oral sex. Oblivion.

“Fiction,” I say. “Something dark.”

“Can I suggest?”

“Please.”

“Abe Kobo
no Woman and Sand
.”

“
Woman and Sand?
”

“Story is a man is prisoner in the sand hole with the woman. He is digging every day by force. Digging, digging. He must dig or the hole will fill up. He tries to escape and can’t escape. Hates the woman, then loves the woman.”

“So what happens?”

“He can escape, but finally he stays in the sand hole. Digging.”

“He stays for love?” I moan.

“No, for digging.”

I hear the buzz of the fluorescent lights. Is it louder than normal? For some reason, in Japan, I always expect things to happen like they do in cartoons, for giant red hearts to erupt from people’s chests, for connect-the-dot lines to appear in the air when lovers’ eyes meet. I could swear that Kazu is reading my mind. A smile creeps onto his face. “I would like to introduce you to a good sushi shop.” He says words quickly, like the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun. “The shop is near to here.”

Kazu is a careful driver. He keeps both hands on the wheel and ignores his mobile phone that rings and bleeps and blips. The car smells new. Kazu smells like apples. I bite my fingernails and wonder where we’re going.

I haven’t been in a car since the night I arrived in Tokyo. A cab from the airport. In the plane, I took a sleeping pill, washed it down with three glasses of white wine, a beer, and two cognacs. Eight hours later, I woke up to the final-
descent announcement, swollen feet, and a voice inside my head. The voice said,
You are such a fuckup.

The voice is the smart me. The me that I’ve pushed farther and farther back into my head, the me that I’ve ignored, abused, neglected, subdued with pills, shushed with booze, violated with bad sex with worse men. The voice is pissed off. It wakes up before me, lies in wait, pounces on me in the rough space between sleep and waking, when I’m vulnerable.

You are nothing.

I was wedged in the middle seat between an old Japanese couple. It was two hours into the flight before I realized they were together, that I was separating them. The old woman huddled next to the window like a cornered animal. Her husband pounding whiskey in the aisle seat. They hadn’t asked me to switch seats, had hardly spoken to one another. In retrospect, I remembered sad little glances that passed between them, over me. I felt a soft twinge of embarrassment, a tiny whoosh of compassion, then I quickly switched to anger. They were scared of me, scared to try to communicate with me. They were socially awkward, isolationist island people with a fear of everything different, and damned if I was moving for them. I wasn’t sure whom I hated more, them or me.

You’ll just wander from place to place, hoping the next plan will work out.

The plane lurched and bumped as it descended. The old lady tossed her hand across my lap and grabbed her husband’s arm. He shot her a look. Embarrassment. Gave me
a little series of tiny head-bows and pushed his wife’s arm back.

The wandering will last but the hope won’t.

The old man stared out the window as the plane breached the cloud cover. Tokyo appeared as a constellation of lights below us.

It’s getting late.

The wings of the plane seesawed as the lights coalesced into a blinding neon blur. The old lady grabbed her armrests.

Wake up!

The plane was almost down. I was almost in Japan. I could start anew, couldn’t I? I put my hand over the woman’s. Squeezed. She flipped her hand over and squeezed back. The wheels touched down. Bump. Bump. The woman sucked in her breath. I closed my eyes. The voice shut up.

“Kazu, where are we going?”

“Ginza,” he says. “Very good shop. Good sushi.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Food and communication,
ne
?” He looks over at me, squints. “Nervous?”

“Not really.”

“Good. Never worry. Just eating. Talking. No funny business.”

I laugh at his earnest expression, the way his eyes dart from the road to me to the road to me.

“What? No hanky-panky either?”

“Sushi,” he says. “Beer if you want.”

I smile at him. Cross and recross my legs.

Kazu looks over at me. “What is hanky-panky?”

“It’s like sex, but not quite.”

“Oh! Hanky-panky. Okay.
My baby does hanky-panky
. Always I wondered. What is the hanky-panky? Sex but less,
ne
? I understand.”

We’re stopped at the huge intersection at Ginza—land of the ten-dollar cup of tea, the thousand-dollar-a-bottle hostess bar, a never-never-land where everyone pretends the bubble never burst, where salarymen still brag that the United States is Japan’s farm and Italy is its shopping mall. Through the tinted windows of Kazu’s car, Ginza looks a little tired, slumping a little under the pressure of false promises.

Kazu drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “Do you
want
hanky-panky?” he asks.