Lost Girls and Love Hotels (7 page)

I’m fourteen. Frank’s sixteen.
Frank is slowly retreating from the world. I’m growing boobs. And getting skinny. It happens over the summer vacation before grade ten. I grow two inches. There’s a heat wave. Maybe I sweat the fat off. My chest swells like bread in an oven. I lie in bed, survey my body under the tent of the cotton sheet. I can see the outline of my ribs. It makes me think of greyhounds.

Sometimes I lock the bathroom door and strike poses. Sometimes I wink at myself. Lean into the mirror, lips parted for a kiss. Mom says I’m blooming. I smell funny. Like fruit going bad.

In phys-ed class the next year, the girls eye me suspiciously. I feel like I’ve broken some code of conduct. We’re learning to dive, but I can’t do it. It seems wrong to leap into
the hands of gravity that way. For amusement. For course credit.

The boys start to notice me, too.

I’m kept after school to learn to dive.

“Keep your chin tucked in,” barks the teacher. “Keep your legs together.”

In science class, we make little models of DNA molecules. It’s like a map, the teacher tells us. Everything we are is mapped out in our genes. He has the gene for red hair. That’s recessive. It’s rare. It’s why family members share traits. It’s why some diseases run in families.

I wonder what’s mapped in me. The crazy gene. The loser gene. My hair is the color of straw. I wonder if that gene is rare.

I get paired up with Tony Varda. I was taller than he last year, but he’s grown. At first, I’m nervous. Each movement, each facial expression seems forced and awkward. Then I begin to watch him. The thin layer of sweat on his forehead. The jerkiness of his hands. The way he can’t look at me. I let my eyelids go heavy. Look out from under them and curl my mouth up into a half-smile. He fumbles with the little plastic sticks and balls. “Here. Let me,” I say.

It happens like that. Like instinct. I know how to torture boys. Exquisitely. Maybe it’s mapped in me.

W
e go up in one of the little elevators in one of the hundreds of narrow buildings in Asakusa. These entertainment buildings are everywhere in Tokyo. Along all the main streets. They look like dingy office buildings, except for the neon and chaotic signage. In the elevator, I look at the backlit building guide. Forty-eight little bars and restaurants and karaoke places in one little six-story building on a street with hundreds of little buildings, in a city with hundreds of streets like this.

“Japanese pancake,” Kazu says.

“Huh?”

He points to something written in kanji on the building guide. “For eating.
Okonomiyaki
restaurant.”

“Oh, okay.”

The hallways in these buildings are always dodgy. The various odors of all the bars and restaurants seeping into the
corridors. Melding into an aroma peculiar to these places—something like old cigar smoke and dirty underpants. Kazu’s mobile rings, and he nods at me in apology, holds his palm out to me like telling a dog to stay and wanders down a few feet away for privacy.

I look at my watch. Almost nine. Dip one hip down an inch or two and sulk. A door flies open, and two salarymen carrying a third by his armpits stagger out. A wistful country song accompanies them. Then three Thai hostesses. Lurid pink lips. Soft hips compressed in spandex dresses. The salaryman being carried looks like he’s going to vomit. Everyone is yelping. Some money is exchanged. Some bowing is done.

I walk to the end of the hall and duck out the fire escape for air. There is no air. The exterior of the building is tented by enormous vinyl sheeting, stretched over the frame of the fire escape, advertising beer and loan sharks and hairspray. I imagine a fire breaking out. The advertisements melting in the heat, suffocating the revelers in the building with toxic fumes. The fire spreading to the adjacent buildings, consuming city blocks, eating the city like a neon Dresden. The thought of it raises my pulse. A mixture of fear and morbid glee.

I yank at the side of one of the vinyl sheets, pull it aside like a curtain, and peek out at the street. Three squat men in white uniforms carry an enormous fish as big as two of them put together. I can hear their grunts of effort over the noise of the street. They pass a group of Japanese hostesses. Puffy down jackets over their slinky dresses, calling out to
passing salarymen. Pretty girls with pain in their faces. When the fish carriers pass, the girls call out to them, too.
Gambarimasu
! Do your best.

“Are you okay?” Kazu asks. He’s standing in the fire escape doorway. A look of real concern on his face. I watch him for a second. Behold this
look
. I don’t want Tokyo to burn down.

“Yes,” I say and take his hand.

The
okonomiyaki
place is full of wood and smells like smoke and onions. A few groups of three or four people are scattered in the booths that line the room. The comforting din of it relaxes me. We find a booth in the back. The center of the table is a griddle. Kazu switches it on and signals for the waiter.

“Have you tried Japanese pancake?” Kazu asks.

“Only from the
konbini
.”

Kazu waves his hand. “Convenience-store kind is not so good.”

The waiter plunks down a large bottle of beer and two squat glasses. He and Kazu speak to each other in clipped, guttural Japanese. The kind that men use together in comfortable situations. They share an abbreviated little laugh, and the waiter disappears.

“Why did you come to Japan?” Kazu asks me.

“International human friendship,” I say with a smile.

“Serious answer,” Kazu says without a smile.

“To be alone.”

“In Japan? Alone?”

“It’s an easy place to be alone.”

Kazu watches me for a moment. Picks up the beer bottle and pours me some. After he puts it down, I reciprocate. The beer foams up a little and spills onto the table.

“When I was a young man—sixteen, seventeen—” Kazu tells me, “I wanted to be a chef. I was apprentice at a big restaurant. Very high-level Japanese cooking. Every day I was in a small kitchen.” He makes a chopping gesture. “Maybe ten or twelve other cooks. So close our elbows always are touching elbows. Six
A.M
. to maybe ten o’clock nighttime. Six days a week.” The waiter pours the batter onto the table and Kazu shoos him away, pokes at the blob of batter, squid bits, and cabbage, perfecting its shape. “After working every day, do you know what I had to do? Part of Japanese culture? I had to take a bath with the other cooks. Giant round bath. All together.” Kazu unclips his cuff links. Small diamonds that might look garish on anyone else. Rolls up his sleeves. His shirt is immaculately pressed. I imagine his wife leaning over an ironing board, dressed in Dior and stiletto heels. “It is not easy to be alone in Japan,” he tells me.

“So why didn’t you become a chef?”

He sniffs, offers me a shake of his head for an answer. “About alone in Japan. Yes. Now I’m thinking my grandfather did it. I remember now. After retirement he walked to the sea every day. One hour from the house. Every day he sat in the same place, on a big rock, and smoked tobacco all day. His father was a fisherman. My grandfather, forty years post office. After that, watching the sea. Sitting on one
rock. Smoking and watching from sunrise until nighttime. Alone.” Kazu’s eyes become glassy for a moment. Nostalgia taking hold. Then he comes back. “My family was thinking he was weak of mind. Fault of age.”

“Did you think so?”

“In truth I wanted to try it. When I was a boy. Sea watching.”

“Go with him?”

“No,” he says. “Alone. Different rock.” He takes a smoke out of my pack, but doesn’t light it. Just turns it in his hands. “Tell me what happened to you in Canada.”

I adjust my posture. Shift my butt back on the bench and straighten my back. “I saw the white girl who’s missing. The one on the posters. At Shinjuku Station.”

“Different person, I think. Answer my question please.”

“No. I recognized her.”

“Many blond-hair gaijin in Tokyo, I think.” He reaches over and touches my hair. “Example. Margaret.”

“I know it was her. I have a feeling.”

“Ah,” he says. “Feeling.”

“Maybe she’s hiding out or something.”

Kazu prods the bubbling batter with the spatula. “I don’t think so.”

“Maybe she’s in trouble.”

“You ought to forget this.” In one swift movement, Kazu flips the pancake, but it’s too soon. Batter oozes out the side. “She’s dead,” he says.

I want to say
It could have been me on the posters
. “No. It was her I saw,” I tell him.

“Use your brain. This happens.” He scoops up the fractured
okonomiyaki
into a little hill in the center of the table and signals for the waiter. “We’ll start again new pancake.”

Start again. Impossible.
“Don’t bother,” I tell Kazu. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

I go to stand up, but Kazu reaches across the table and grabs my wrist. “You need food. Sit down.”

We sit there quietly for a few minutes. Sipping beer and staring through one another. Both of us lost in the past. “
Natsukashii
,” Kazu says absently. A word I don’t understand. But I like the sound of it. The sibilant gush of it. I repeat it back to him.
Natsukashii
. Feel the uncanny joy of the alien. He nods at me.

“Is your grandfather still alive?” I ask.

“Dead,” Kazu says.

I’m fifteen. Frank’s seventeen.
Mired in the theater of high school. Anyone with eyes can tell. All the fat kids look alike. Faces somewhere in the middle of their cheeks. Lips squished up into grotesque puckers. The popular girls, too. Carbon copies. They all have shiny hair and noses like dolls’. Two expressions. Evil and vacant. Ditto for the weirdo loser intelligentsia. Bad posture. Bad eyesight. A penchant for disturbingly violent doodling. Frank falls into the latter category. I’m in limbo. “You just haven’t found your niche,” Mom tells me. The way she says “niche” rhymes with “bitch.”

Frank and I avoid each other scrupulously at school. I almost despise him when I see him in the halls. His hunched-over walk, eyes darting side to side. Frank is like a car crash in slow motion. I wince and wait for the crush of
impact. Finally begin to turn away. Wish it was just over with.

“So,” I say to Tony Varda. “Sometimes my mom goes away on business.”

“Yeah?” I can hear his labored breathing, the way he’s holding the receiver too close to his face. I think for a minute that I ought to tell him the receiver harbors bacteria. That he’ll turn into a crater-face if he keeps pressing the phone into his cheek that way. I wonder why guys are so repulsive. Why I like them despite it.

“You could stay over,” I say. Something happens to the words on their way out. In my throat, they’re jittery, unnatural. But they emerge brazen. I feel vulgar. It feels good.

“Yeah?”

“Can you say something else?”

“Huh?”

“Something other than yeah?”

He snorts.

“Don’t you want me?” Vulgar retreats. Pushed out by pathetic.

“Yeah,” he says with a puff of breath into the mouthpiece.

My stomach is twisting. It’s in my throat.
Say “I like you.” Say “You’re so pretty.”

“I’ve gotta go bad. Meet me after school tomorrow,” he says. “By the creek.”

I put down the phone and imagine the two of us lying on a bed of red leaves, canopy of trees over us. Tony touching
me like something in a museum. Something that might crumble at his touch. In my fantasy, Tony does not have white spittle collected at the corners of his mouth. In my fantasy, I am not a loser.

Frank comes downstairs, into the kitchen. “What’s wrong?” I ask him. He’s sweating. His hands are making claw-like movements under his chin.

“Okay. Okayokayokay.” He sits down. “Where’s Mom?”

“I dunno—”

“Is she home?” he screams. “Okay. This is it. It sounds crazy, but this is it. This thing—this guy was in my room.”

“What guy?”

“He was short. More than short. He was—he was a troll or an elf or a gnome or something. I’m not entirely sure of the difference. If I were to venture a guess in spite of my ignorance, I’d have to say he was a gnome. And he was like prismatic. A rainbow gnome. He was there and gone so fast.”

“Frank—”

“Don’t tell Mom.”

“But—”

“Oh what’s happening? What’s happening?”

“Maybe it was a dream,” I say. I touch his shoulder.

Frank grabs my hand. “It wasn’t a dream.” He says the words slowly, deliberately. The neighbor’s dog lopes in the kitchen door. Smiling. Looks at the two of us and licks his chops.

“It was the beginning of a new era,” Frank says.

O
n mock-interview day at Air-Pro Stewardess Training Institute, Ms. Nakamura instructs me, “In classroom, firm but kind. In mock interview, only firm.”

Ms. Nakamura is in some special mock-interview day get-up. Her hair is pulled back so tightly I can see that she’s had to pencil in her eyebrows an inch below where the shaved-off ones are. Her normal little tight suit replaced by a white shift dress with a dramatically long white coat worn precariously over her bony shoulders, like a cape. It makes me nervous to look at her. As though at any moment laser beams might shoot out of her eyes and burn me up.

“You will conduct the interviews with Mr. Shawn from head office.” Nakamura starts to swivel around on her high heels. “Mr. Shawn!”

Mr. Shawn appears in the doorway of the interview
room. He has a dimple in his chin, pasty skin, and eyes set so close you are forced to focus on the dimple to avoid going cross-eyed.

He walks over stiffly, as though his arms will not rest comfortably by his side. “Shawn,” he says. “Head office.”

Before I can introduce myself, Nakamura tells me that Mr. Shawn is “very tough cookie” and shoos us into the interview room to prepare.

“It’s a piece of cake, really,” Shawn tells me, handing me the interview sheet. “I ask the questions in blue. The pink ones are yours. We go back and forth.”

I look at the sheet. Shawn’s questions are things like “Tell me about your international experiences” and “What current affairs are you interested in?” I have to ask things like “How do your parents feel about your career goal?” and “What would you say to a passenger who hands you a dirty diaper to dispose of?”

Mr. Shawn leans back in his chair, gazes out through the two-way mirror at the recruits standing stiffly. “Shit, I love my job. These girls are prime.”

“Prime what?”

“We have a joke at the head office. All of the cabin-related questions can be correctly answered with ‘Give him a blow job.’”

I just stare at him. Sitting slackly. Cross-legged. His socks don’t match. Above the socks, a grotesque patch of pale, sparsely haired skin is visible.

“You know, like, ‘What would you do if an obviously intoxicated passenger asks for another drink?’” His eyes
resemble two pissholes in the snow. “Give him a blow job! Get it?”

The first recruit performs perfectly. Her face frozen into an expression equally wistful and fanatically ambitious. At moments, during the interview, as she details her love of animals and the novels of Milan Kundera, her desire to provide superior cabin service and “experience the architectural delights of many countries,” I almost envy her. Her single-minded purpose. Her innocence. I try to remember back to the time, around the age of eight, when I wanted to be a veterinarian. How I’d hover past bedtime with library books devoted to the profession. Dogs in tiny casts, horses giving birth in grotesque detail. Somehow these girls had retained some of that wonder that I struggle to recall.

Although she never once answers her cabin questions with offers of oral sex, Mr. Shawn gives her a nine out of ten, and, with a creepy stare, compliments her on the way she holds her body.

Mock-interview day passes like a skipping record. Beautiful girl after beautiful girl. I begin to champion them, these specimens of the unjaded. Firm becomes firm but kind, becomes just kind.
My parents support me in my career choice
. Eager to escape the hamster wheel of office work and domesticity.
I’m interested in the exciting world of aviation.
To stay in hotels in strange cities, like an expense-paid pajama party.
I want to share with the world the culture of Japan.
Have sex with big men with big cocks.
I would suggest to frightened passenger that he take deep breaths and
read the in-flight magazine.
Maybe I’m not so different from them—we all want to fly away.

On the way out, Mr. Shawn shakes my hand. “Well,” he says. “Don’t worry. It will get easier.” I lean into the handshake and call him an impotent little weasel boy. He deflates suddenly. Wide eyes and pursed lips. Foreign woman. Cryptonite to the Western supermale in Japan. He reflates. Nods, “Oh, good one. Ha ha. You had me there for a sec.” I give him a firm little squeeze on the shoulder. In the elevator, I share a high five with two of the recruits, make it to the street, breathe in steam from a noodle-vendor’s cart and something more unusual—the rarefied air of international human friendship.