A Personal Matter (18 page)

“How did it go? Did you tell him it was food poisoning and stick up for your rights?”

“I told you, I had a hangover.”

“Great! That’s just great!” the boy jeered as though in disgust. “You know you’re fired!”

Bird put the key in the switch and started the motor. Instantly his legs were bathed in sweat; it was like stepping into a steam bath. Even the steering wheel was so baking hot that Bird’s fingers recoiled with a snap.

“Son of a bitch!” he swore.

The student laughed, delighted. “What are you going to do when they fire you? Sensei!”

What do I intend to do when they fire me? And bills still to be paid at two hospitals! Bird thought. But his head was frying in the sun and would not give birth to a single viable plan, only ooze rivers of perspiration. With vague uneasiness, Bird discovered he was once again in the grip of diffidence.

“Why don’t you become a guide? Then you wouldn’t have to worry about making a few lousy yen at a flunk-out school; you could squeeze those dollars out of foreign tourists!”

“You know where there’s a guide service?” Bird asked with interest.

“I’ll find out—where can I reach you?”

“Maybe we could get together after class next week.”

“Leave it to me!” the student shouted with excitement.

Cautiously, Bird drove the sports car out into the street. He had wanted to get rid of the student so he could read the letter in his pocket. But he discovered as he accelerated that he was feeling grateful to the boy. If the student hadn’t put him in a joking mood as he drove away in a grimy sports car from a job he had just lost—how wretched he would have felt! It was certain; he was destined to be helped out of impossible situations by a band of younger brothers. Bird remembered that he needed gas and drove into a station. After a minute’s thought he asked for high test, then from his pocket took the letter which, according to that student superstition, was guaranteed to be entirely captivating news.

Mr. Delchef had ignored an appeal from the legation and was still living in Shinjuku with a young delinquent. He was not disillusioned politically with his own country, not planning spy activity or hoping to defect. He was simply unable to take leave of this particular Japanese girl. Naturally, the legation was most afraid that the Delchef incident might be used politically. If certain Western governments used their influence to launch a propaganda campaign based on Mr. Delchef’s life as a recluse, the repercussions were certain to be widely felt. Accordingly, Mr. Delchef’s government was anxious to get him back to the legation as quickly as possible so that he could be sent home, but enlisting the cooperation of the Japanese police would only publicize the incident. If, on the other hand, the legation itself attempted to use force, Mr. Delchef, who had fought with the resistance during the war, was certain to put up a terrific fight and the police would become involved after all. With nowhere else to turn, the legation finally had
requested the members of the Slavic languages study group to try as quietly as possible to persuade Mr. Delchef of his folly. On Saturday afternoon, at one o’clock, there was to be another meeting in the restaurant across the street from the university Bird and the others had graduated from. Since Bird was closest to Mr. Delchef, his friend wrote, everyone was particularly anxious that he attend.

Saturday, the day after tomorrow: yes, he would go! The pump jockey, like a bee suffusing the air around its body with the fragrance of honey, was wrapped in a caustic gasoline haze. Bird paid him and pulled away from the gas stand with a roar of exhaust. Assuming the telephone call announcing the baby’s death wouldn’t come today, or tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow, acquiring an outside errand to occupy the irritating hours of the reprieve was certainly a stroke of good luck. It had been a good letter after all.

Bird stopped at a grocery store on the way home and bought some beer and canned salmon. Parking in front of the house, he walked up to the front door and found it locked. Could Himiko have gone out? An arbitrary rage seized Bird, he could almost hear the telephone jangling for long, unheeded minutes. But when he walked around to the side of the house and called up at the bedroom window just to make sure, Himiko’s eye peeped reassuringly from between the curtains. Bird sighed and, sweating heavily, walked back to the front door.

“Any word from the hospital?” he asked, his face still taut.

“Nothing, Bird.”

It felt to Bird as if he had squandered energy along a huge perimeter by climbing into a scarlet sports car and circling Tokyo on a summer day. He found himself caught in the claws of a formidable lobster of fatigue, as if word of the baby’s death would have invested the day’s activity with meaning and fixed it in its proper place. Bird said gruffly: “Why do you keep the door locked even in the daytime?”

“I guess I’m scared. I have this feeling a disgusting goblin of misfortune is waiting for me just outside.”

“A goblin after you?” Bird sounded puzzled. “It doesn’t look to me as if you’re in the least danger of any misfortune right now.”

“It hasn’t been that long since my husband killed himself. Bird, aren’t you trying to say in your amazing arrogance that you’re the only one around who has to watch out for goblins of misfortune?”

It was a terrific wallop. And Bird escaped the knock-down only
because Himiko turned her back on him and hurried back into the bedroom without following through with a second punch.

With his eye on Himiko’s naked shoulders glistening with fat in front of him, Bird struggled through the heavy, tepid air in the dim living room, and was stepping into the bedroom when dismay brought him to a halt. A large girl about Himiko’s age, no longer young, was lounging on the bed beneath the haze of tobacco smoke that hung over the room like a gaseous cloud, her arms and shoulders bared.

“It’s been a hell of a long time, Bird,” the girl drawled a hoarse greeting.

“Hey!” Bird said, not yet the master of his confusion.

“I didn’t want to wait for the phone call all alone so I asked her over, Bird.”

“You didn’t have to work at the station today?” Bird asked. This was another of Bird’s classmates, from the English department. For two years after she had graduated, the girl had done nothing but amuse herself; like most of the girls from Bird’s college, she had turned down every offer of a job because she considered them all beneath her talent. Finally, after two years of idleness, she had become a producer at a third-rate radio station with only a local broadcasting range.

“All my shows are after midnight, Bird. You must have heard that vomity whispering that sounds as if the girls are screwing the whole radio audience with their throat,” the producer said with syrup in her voice. Bird recalled the assorted scandals in which she had involved the radio station that had so gallantly employed her. And he could remember perfectly well the disgust he had for her in their student days, when she had been not only a big girl but fat as well, with something he could never quite put his finger on around her eyes and nose that reminded him of a badger. “Can we do something about all this smoke?” Bird said with reserve, depositing the beer and canned salmon on the TV set.

Himiko went to open the ventilator in the kitchen. But her friend, without troubling herself about Bird’s smarting eyes, lit a new cigarette with unsightly fingers with silver-polished nails. In the light of the silver Dunhill’s orange flame, Bird saw, despite her hair hanging over her face, the sharp creases in the girl’s brow and the tiny spasms rippling her darkly veined eyelids. Something was gnawing at the girl: Bird grew wary.

“Don’t either of you girls mind the heat?”

“God, I do, I’m just about to faint,” Himiko’s friend said gloomily. “But it is unpleasant if the air is swirling around in a room when you’re having a good talk with a close friend.”

While Himiko moved briskly around the kitchen, wedging the beer into spaces between the ice trays, dusting the tins of canned food, and inspecting the labels, her producer friend watched disapprovingly from the bed. This dog will probably spread the hot news about us with terrific zest, Bird thought; I wouldn’t be surprised if it got on the air late one night.

Himiko had thumbtacked Bird’s map to the bedroom wall. Even the African novel he had concealed in his bag was sprawled on the floor like a dead rat. Himiko must have been reading it in bed when her girlfriend arrived. So she had thrown the book on the floor, gone out to unlock the door, and then left it lying there. Bird was peeved: his African treasures were being treated so carelessly, it had to be a bad sign. I suppose I won’t see the sky over Africa as long as I live. And no more talk about putting money away for the trip, I just lost the job I needed to keep alive from day to day.

“I got fired today,” Bird said to Himiko. “The summer program, too—everything.”

“No! But what happened, Bird?”

Bird was obliged to talk about the hangover, the vomiting, the indefatigable puritan’s assault, and gradually the story turned into a dank, unpleasant thing. Bird sickened, wound up quickly.

“And you could have defended yourself in front of the Principal! If some of the students were willing to say it was food poisoning, there wouldn’t have been a thing wrong with letting them back you up! Bird, how could you have consented so easily to being fired!”

That’s a point, why did I accept being fired so easily? For the first time, Bird felt an attachment to the instructor’s chair he had just lost. That wasn’t the kind of job you just threw away half-jokingly. And what kind of report could he make to his father-in-law? Would he be able to confess that he had drunk himself unconscious on the day his abnormal baby had been born, and then behaved so miserably the next morning because of his hangover that he had lost his job? And on the Johnnie Walker the professor had made him a present of …

“There wasn’t a single thing left in the world that I could justifiably
assert my right to, it was that kind of feeling. Besides, I was so anxious to cut short that interview with the Principal, I just agreed to everything; it was reckless as hell.”

“Bird,” the girl producer broke in, “are you saying that you feel as if you’ve lost all your rights in the world because you’re just sitting around waiting for your own baby to die?”

So Himiko had told her girlfriend the whole nasty story!

“Something like that,” Bird said, annoyed at both Himiko’s indiscretion and the girl producer’s forwardness. It was easy even now to imagine himself in the middle of a scandal widely known.

“It’s the people who have begun to feel they have no more rights in the real world who commit suicide. Bird, please don’t commit suicide,” Himiko said.

“What’s all this about suicide!” said Bird, at heart threatened.

“It was right after he began feeling that way that my husband killed himself. If you hung yourself in this same bedroom—Bird, I’d be sure I was a witch.”

“I’ve never even considered suicide,” Bird declared.

“But your father was a suicide, wasn’t he?”

“How did you know that?”

“You told me about it the night my husband killed himself, trying to console me. You wanted me to believe that suicide was the kind of ordinary thing that happens every day.”

“I must have been all upset myself,” Bird said limply.

“You even told me that story about your father beating you before he killed himself.”

“What story is that?” the girl producer asked, her curiosity igniting.

But Bird remained morosely silent, so Himiko told the story as she had heard it.

One day Bird had approached his father with this question; he was six years old:
Father, where was I a hundred years before I was born? Where will I be a hundred years after I’m dead? Father, what will happen to me when I die?
Without a word, his young father had punched him in the mouth, broke two of his teeth and bloodied his face, and Bird forgot his fear of death. Three months later, his father had put a bullet through his head with a German army pistol from World War I.

“If my baby dies of undernourishment,” Bird said, remembering his father, “at least I’ll have one thing less to be afraid of. Because I
wouldn’t know what to do if my child asked me that same question when he got to be six. I couldn’t punch my own child in the mouth hard enough to make him forget his fear of death. Not even temporarily.”

“Just don’t commit suicide, Bird, all right?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Bird said, turning away from Himiko’s swollen, bloodshot eyes his own eyes that felt as if they were beginning to show disorder.

The girl producer turned to Bird as if she had been waiting for Himiko’s silence, “Bird, isn’t this waiting around for your baby to weaken on sugar-water in a distant hospital the worst state you could be in? Full of self-deception, uncertain, anxious! And isn’t that why you’re so run down? It’s not just you, either, even Himiko has lost weight.”

“But I can’t just yank him home and kill him,” Bird protested.

“At least that way you wouldn’t be deceiving yourself, you’d have to admit that you were dirtying your own hands. Bird, it’s too late now to escape the villain in yourself, but you had to become a villain because you wanted to protect your little scene at home from an abnormal baby, so there’s even an egotistical logic to it. But what you’re doing is leaving the bloody work to some doctor in a hospital while you mope around playing the gentle victim of sudden misfortune, as if you were really a very good man, and that’s what’s bad for your mental health! You must know as well as I do, Bird, that you’re deceiving yourself!”

“Deceiving myself? Sure, if I were trying to convince myself that my hands were clean while I wait impatiently for my baby to die when I’m not around, certainly that would be dishonest,” Bird said in denial. “But I know perfectly well that I’ll be responsible for the baby’s death.”

“I wonder about that, Bird,” the woman producer said in utter disbelief. “I’m afraid you’ll find yourself in all kinds of trouble the minute the baby dies, that’s the penalty you’ll pay for having deceived yourself. And it’s then that Himiko will really have to keep a sharp eye on Bird to see he doesn’t kill himself. Of course, by then he’ll probably be back with his long-suffering wife.”