DeLeo opened his musette bag. He had a fifth of bourbon in it, and cans of shrimp and other food. They did not drink the bourbon. Instead, they bought Japanese beer in quart bottles at the stops, opened the shrimp and ate and talked. The afternoon went pleasantly that way, thinking back to other journeys and days, to what had happened and what was to come. DeLeo was a good companion. He had always traveled. He was at rest while moving, and less military than ever. They fell asleep before dark, leaning on their elbows on the window sills. The porter had to wake them up to make the berths.
Cleve stepped outside at one stop just before he went to bed. It was a damp night, but calm and clean-smelling. The country air nourished his whole body. He strolled down the concrete platform alongside the quiet, sleeping cars. After a while he reached the end of the overhead shed and, still further on, the head of the train. A stocky engine stood there in chaplets of steam and vapors. The signalman bowed politely toward him. Cleve remained for a few minutes of uncertainty, expecting to see the train budge to a start at any time. Then he walked back slowly. The sky above him was curdled gray.
In the morning they reached Atami and the eastern coast. The town was built in a valley and along the sides of the mountains, all overlooking the cold, blue water. Cleve watched it from his berth. He was reluctant to get up. He would have liked to finish the trip this way, luxuriously. For a long while he did stay like
that, the pillow propped beneath his head. From Atami north, they skirted little fishing villages and followed a perilous, narrow strip of coastal road. Finally he got up. He washed lightly. Not more than thirty minutes later they were pulling into Tokyo.
They were rattling across the city, away from the station, in a taxi; and the tempo of everything had changed. The train had clattered through a night of leisure, but suddenly time began to race. It seemed to be streaming from them. There was an overwhelming sense of the vastness of the city. A year would have been inadequate for it. The few days they had to spend were dwarfed, and already every minute seemed to be one in which they were late for something.
The first hotel they tried had no rooms available. Neither had the second. They called the Club Heights and the Hosokawa. It was the same, filled up. They had not made reservations anywhere, and somehow, illogically, it seemed as if these hotels should be emptyâthey did not cater to Japanese, and almost everybody else ought to have been in Korea. DeLeo knew of others, however.
“Where?” Cleve wanted to know.
“The Astor is the nearest.”
They drove there. It was a small, expensive hotel implanted on a hill and heavily walled like a castle or fortress. Despite this, there seemed to be something impermanent about it, as if it would not last any longer than the war did. A sign announced that the bar and restaurant were open twenty-four hours a day. The desk clerk bowed as they entered.
“Do you have any rooms?” DeLeo asked.
The clerk pushed a fountain-pen stand forward, without a word.
Their rooms were in front, with a commanding view of the neighborhood. They were neat though sparsely furnished; and a worn, flowered appearance made them seem very old. A humble odor that was nothing specific persisted in them even after the bellboy had opened the windows.
They left their bags and went down to the bar to have a drink in the gray, luminescent daylight. That early made it like being in a resort off-season. From the glass terrace they looked out across the low roofs of the city crowded beneath the sky. DeLeo called for a menu.
“What will it be for breakfast, Cleve?”
“I don't know. What do they have?”
“Everything. I think I'll order a steak.”
“A steak. That sounds good. Order me one, too. And let's have another drink first, what do you say?”
“You're only old once,” DeLeo grinned.
After eating, they went up to the rooms to bathe and go to bed. It was a good, free feeling to have had too many drinks before noon. Cleve decided to shower when he woke up. He took off his clothes and lay down on the soft, fresh-linened bed. He closed his eyes and felt sleep slowly come upon him, taking him down. He could hear faint hotel sounds through the floor and walls, and out in the streets the traffic, fainter still.
It was afternoon when they awoke. They took a taxi downtown. The city was enormous and teeming with life. Cleve could feel its vigor as they drove through it, down narrow streets, past the endless small, wooden houses with bedquilts hanging out over their upper windows to air and wash strung across their fronts. Schoolboys in simple black uniforms were strolling home in groups, and children in bright clothes, red mostly and
sometimes plaid, ran past. A stream of bicyclists was always on both sides.
They stopped at the Gae-jo-en and went to the downstairs bar. DeLeo ordered martinis for them. It was still early, and the bar was empty. They were the only ones except for the bartender, polishing glasses. They finished two drinks apiece and went on to the Imperial. There, the first drinkers were just arriving, colonels of the staff, their ladies, and important-looking civilians. Cleve could feel the warmth of liquor spreading within him. As his eyes fell upon one person or another, he saw them with a clarity such that he would never forget what they looked like, and only seconds later as his glance moved on, he could not remember at all. He felt at once brilliant and doltish. He did not care. The only thing that bothered him was the grateful sense of well-being. It was good to be on firm land again, on earth, safe. His mortal knees had grown steady, but he was ashamed of it. He would have preferred not to have been so relieved and instead to have been uncomfortable, aching to return to combat.
He was not, though. He was happy, plungingly and briefly, like a runner who abandons a championship try halfway.
After a while, they walked outside into the mist. The blood was beating within them. Cleve gulped draughts of air. Down the wide, lighted boulevards and through the park they took a cab to the University Club. It was dark and reserved there. They went down a carpeted hallway, feeling the propriety of oak walls and the tall, carved doors. The cocktail lounge was livelier. A pianist was playing sentimental favorites. They sat at a table near this clear trickling of reminiscence that brought back forgotten years with each song.
“Another martini?” DeLeo said.
“Certainly There's nothing like ten or fifteen before dinner.”
“And we're here to enjoy civilization.”
A waiter took their order, and DeLeo disappeared to make a telephone call. Cleve waited, looking around the room openly in a mood that was between pleasure and intense longing. He saw two stunning Japanese girls enter with a group of Marine officers. The tables were thronged with couples. His nostrils took in the many perfumes.
Suddenly not long after DeLeo had come back, it was too late to eat. It was past nine o'clock. The time had fled silently Cleve lit a cigarette and watched its smoke as it was devoured. He felt himself racked by the sweetest of hungers. There was women's laughter in the room, and the sound of it overcame him with a flood of desire. He had suppressed it for months. Now it overflowed. He could hardly contain it, sitting there in the torment of desperate hunger. That was all there seemed to be of life now, the need to satisfy the hungers of the spirit and the flesh. Before, in what had amounted to a childhood extended, he had hardly been aware of them.
“I'm getting tired of this place, Bert,” he said.
“Good. Let's leave.”
“Where to?”
“Come on.”
“I don't feel like drinking any more.”
“I don't either. Come on. I made a call for us.”
“Miyoshi's?” Cleve asked. He could hear his heart pumping within him.
“That's right.”
They drove through the streets. Trains of lighted shops moved past. Trolley cars swayed in front of them, and bicyclists flashed
among the traffic. They crossed a wide bridge and curved down a long grade, as if into another, more subdued plane of the city. A river gleamed black alongside the avenue. Cleve had lost track of where they were. He sat deep in the rear seat of the cab watching, as there streamed dizzily past the strange displays beyond which his thoughts had already gone. Everything was distorted except for the desire that held him completely in a way only fear could match. Finally they turned into an alleyway between plain shopfronts and came into a dark courtyard. Someone came running out to open the door of the cab and lead them further. They reached an entrance flanked by garden stones. They changed their shoes to sandals and went in. There was muted music, floating along hallways floored with shining hardwood. They followed down these passages to a large, clean room, where they sat on tatami mats and waited. A girl brought kimonos for them. They took their uniforms off. She folded them neatly when she returned, stacked them on separate trays and took them out.
In the loose, laundered folds of the kimono, Cleve felt completely at peace. Even the vestments of the war were gone. He nibbled at what must have been fish pretzels on a tray. Soon the door slid open again, and two elaborately costumed, scrubbed girls entered, bowing politely, and sat down between them. They seemed as demure as schoolgirls. They talked shyly in broken English, giving their names. After a while, one went for a samisen. They reclined and listened to her play and sing in a distorted, high, haunting voice. The girls sat respectfully upright. One of the songs was “China Night.” It was DeLeo's favorite.
Shina no yoru.
They played it again and again for him, one singing and the other humming. A serving girl brought warm vials of wine on a tray.
Later, they went to the baths. They sang while the girls washed and rinsed them, and then climbed down together, all of them, into the smooth sand-colored tile pool. The water was clear and scalding. Everything was washed away. He floated in a dream of disconnected languor. The girl was in it, too, with her flawless skin and sturdy body sensuously distorted beneath the surface. Her hair was done up carefully, piled on her head, protected by a towering towel. She had abandoned the virtuous reserve of upstairs. She caressed him beneath the water. She presented herself to him deliberately. They laughed at nothing. They played like children in the steamy room.
In the thick bedroll on the tatami floor, she was as obliging as a new wife. He woke up twice during the night. She was instantly awake and seemingly pleased both times.
The next morning they were in the baths again at seven o'clock, sitting naked on the wooden stools or in the hot water, shaving. The soaking was like being born again. Outside, through the windows, the morning looked gray, and Cleve noticed a light scum on the surface of the fish ponds, but the spell was not gone. He was still king. He and DeLeo were brothers, sharing the riches of empire together. Beyond the roofs, he could see the tips of distant smokestacks with their blackened mouths beginning to issue smoke as the working day started for lesser men.
“We should never come back here, Bert,” he said. They were on a plateau of existence somehow, between safety and doom.
“Why not?”
“This is the greatest life in the world.”
“Certain parts.”
“All of it. It's the way to die, too.”
“I keep thinking there must be a better way,” DeLeo said.
“No. The way to go is in an instant, reaching for that highest one of the stars and then falling away, disappearing, against the earth. I wouldn't mind that, would you?”
“Some of your ideas, Cleve . . .”
“Ridiculous, eh? I've carried them around for years; and now, at the time they ought to be the truest, so few of them are worth a damn.
“Odd. Everything about this ought to be perfect for you and me. Here we are, by sheer accident, in the most natural of worlds, and of course that means the most artificial, because we're very civilized. We're in a child's dream and a man's heaven, living a medieval life under sanitary conditions, flying the last shreds of something irreplaceable, I don't know what, in a sport too kingly even for kings. Nothing is missing, and yet it's the men who don't understand it at all that become its heroes.”
DeLeo listened quietly.
“Or maybe they do understand,” Cleve said, “and I don't. Tell me, Bert, what do you think is important here?”
“It's a war,” DeLeo said. “MIGs.”
“Nothing else?”
“Staying alive.”
“That's not very much.”
“Without the MIGs, the rest doesn't matter.”
“You may be right.”
“Believe me.”
“My God, though, if someone tries . . .”
“It's not enough. In this greatest life of yours, you have to win.”
Cleve was silent for a while. He lathered his face and began to shave.
“If it's not enough,” he repeated, “this isn't anything to be proud of.”
“Maybe it's enough for me. Not for you, though.”
“We're the same.”
“Not really,” DeLeo said.
Cleve glanced briefly at him lolling in the bath, the water up to his neck and his eyes closed. When he looked back in the mirror, everything had changed somehow. The passionate moments had passed. It was as if the harsh light of day had suddenly fallen full on them.
The girls attended them until they were dressed and ready to leave. They seemed to share a regret that it was over with.
“You rear gentreman,” Cleve's said to him hesitantly.
“We're no gentlemen.”
“Yes, yes, you are.”
“No.”
She smiled. She seemed very small now and young.
“You good captain,” she insisted.