A Quiet Life (25 page)

“Eeyore. shall we go?” I said. “I feel guilty about us watching Mr. Arai without his knowing it.”

Eeyore appeared to suffer no lingering attachment either, and moved away from the steel sash.

*  *  *

The following week, after Eeyore's music lesson, I told Mr. Shigeto and his wife about Eeyore having taken up swimming. I told them it was formal training, something quite different from what Father had tried with him before, since now he had a competition swimmer for a coach.

“There's no better way to learn than to receive formal training,” Mr. Shigeto said. “With your stature, Eeyore, I think you'll look magnificent doing the crawl, if you learn to swim well. And, of course, swimming's good for you. You may find your practice sessions hard, but I hope you'll keep at it.”

“I've tried many things so far,” Eeyore replied, “but from now on, let me keep at it in the water!”

Mr. Shigeto and his wife, and I too, heartily laughed, although we knew that Eeyore, as usual, had intentionally said it off-key. As though to remind Eeyore of the difficulties he encountered in his music lessons, however, Mrs. Shigeto added, “You mean in the water
too
, don't you?”

I had already written to Mother that Eeyore had taken up swimming. I never imagined, though, that while I was telling Mr. Shigeto and his wife the same thing I had written in my letter, my parents in California were panicking because of one line in it:
he has a wonderful coach, Mr. Arai.
On second thought, though, something had struck me as weird about Mr. Mochizuki's demeanor, too, when he saw Mr. Arai emerge from the locker room with Eeyore.

Outstripping the wind, a letter from Father reached me in reply to mine. Such a prompt response was unprecedented, for none had ever come within ten days. But this one had come before Eeyore was to have his third session with Mr. Arai. It so happened, Father added, that a sociologist, friend of his was returning to Japan from a conference at Berkeley, and so he had entrusted him with the letter to mail me by special delivery from Narita. Though Father had started the letter calmly,
it immediately revealed his anxiety, and I read it with tension. The first thing I understood from it was that he had discerned circumstances which, however pressing, prevented him from directly talking to me on the phone. The letter started with words that told me he was happy Eeyore had taken up swimming.

“… But now. about his coach. It never occurred to me that Mr. Arai, with whom I am also acquainted, had returned, and so he was not at all on my mind when I thought of introducing you and Eeyore to the athletic club. And to be quite honest. I was shocked to know that he is coaching Eeyore. There was quite an involved and serious rumor about him when he left the club five years ago. I intend to make an overseas call, and talk directly to Mr. Shigeto about it, explain things to him, and ask him to go to the club to inquire about the situation. Machan, I hope you won't take offense at my doing this without first discussing the matter with you.

“This could be, should I say, undue worry on Mama's part, but after hearing about the rumor in question from me, she asked me to convey this to you. She says that even if Eeyore is to receive instruction from Mr. Arai, she would want you to abide by the principle that you meet with him only where other people are watching. … As for his compensation, I will write Mr. Osawa and ask him to bill it to our home together with our membership fees.”

I read this letter with a heavy heart. It left me with a negative feeling toward Father and Mother, which to be very frank I had allowed to develop in me. I was also at a loss as to what to do about Eeyore's coming session, which was going to be the next day. But then Mrs. Shigeto called.

“Ma-chan, about Eeyore's swimming practice tomorrow,” she said, “how about finishing Eeyore's music lesson before
that, and then go to the club with Mr. Shigeto? K-chan recommended the club to him a long time ago, and he bought a membership then. For a while, he got so involved in swimming that, when we went to Warsaw via Moscow, he plunged into that heated open-air pool in the snow, the one in which Muscovites swim from early in the morning. He is now what the club calls a ‘dormant member,’ but he called them and found out that all he needed to do to restore full membership was to pay this year's facilities fee. You should see him in his swim-suit, the one he wore at the spa in Czechoslovakia—he's another Esther Williams!“

So after the music lesson, Mr. Shigeto accompanied us to the club. When he emerged from the men's locker room after helping Eeyore change, I laughed to myself, for his swim suit, looked like one of those marathoner's outfits with the pants and athletic shirt attached to each other. At the same time, though, I felt it must have flattered him—he must have even looked gorgeous in it—when and where he had worn it as the latest style.

We walked down the hallway past the drying room but did not enter it, which would have been Mr. Arai's usual way of going to the pool, and went down the flight of stairs to the pool. Going down the stairs, Mr. Shigeto's barefoot steps were firm. The lower half of his body was so hefty and sinewy that, in comparison, Eeyore's legs—and even Mr. Arai's legs, for that matter—looked modest. Eeyore was walking beside Mr. Shigeto, and Mr. Arai was waiting for us behind the glass doors to the full-time members' pool. Mr. Arai had been unfriendly toward Mr. Shigeto, and toward me too, when I introduced them to each other, but his white teeth and his rose-pink gums showed when he smiled at Eeyore. He immediately started doing warm-up exercises with Eeyore, and so all we could do
was stand at a distance, and, feeling like pupils forsaken by their teacher, repeat the movements that he was demonstrating to Eeyore.

Like the week before and the week before that, children taking lessons in the large pool were creating an excitement that reverberated throughout the natatorium. And in the pool where you could do high dives, middle-aged women in aqua suits floated in silence, slowly and gropingly moving their arms and legs in the water. We entered the full-time members' pool, where Mr. Arai and Eeyore practiced in the lane farthest from the entrance, while Mr. Shigeto and I watched from the lane next to theirs. The pool was practically empty, save for a few swimmers, all adult females, one of them the corpulent Mrs. Ueki, hanging on to a lane marker, dejection suffusing her classically featured face.

“This exceeds by far what I heard! Mr. Arai's coaching!” Mr. Shigeto exclaimed. Then, taking a break from his observation of Mr. Arai's instruction, he removed his glasses, placed them on the edge of the pool, and started off with an older Japanese-style lateral stroke. Without glasses, Mr. Shigeto looked like a samurai. His old-fashioned strokes made ripples that formed behind his large ears and flowed gently around his chin. On the return lap he did the trudgen stroke. Seeing him do these two strokes, both of which are done with the eyes above the water, I understood why he showed no interest in Father's goggles, which I had brought for him.

When I started off, doing the crawl, he immediately realized my level of ability and followed me, controlling the speed of his trudgen stroke and maintaining the distance that, separated us, so I could continue with my laps. I did three laps this way, but given my physical condition, Mr. Shigeto's easy pace was taxing, and I had to stop for a rest. When I raised my body
to look back down the lane we were swimming in, I saw no Mr. Shigeto. I was bewildered for a moment, but I soon saw him emerge from underwater with his right arm extended straight before him—perhaps another old-style Japanese swimming technique—holding a yellow swim cap, which he handed to Mrs. Ueki in the adjacent lane. The expression on her face was one of despondence, yet she gestured to Mr. Shigeto, and to me as well, that she wished the best for Eeyore, who was practicing hard.

Eeyore was now trying to swim on his own from about the middle of the lane. Mr. Arai was shouting instructions next to his ear, and was himself nodding at each word he emphasized. Eeyore—his head of short-cropped hair covered with a swim cap and looking so much larger than Mr. Arai's—also repeatedly nodded as though to demonstrate his resolve.

Pushed at the shoulders and waist by Mr. Arai, Eeyore floated and started swimming with uneven but large strokes. He didn't lift his face to breathe, but he swam to the end of the lane, effortlessly resumed his upright posture, and appeared to desperately look about for Mr. Arai, who he seemed to have difficulty spotting through his goggles. Mr. Arai gently threw himself forward into the water, butterflied—though he rarely did this stroke—to his pupil's side, and praised him for his accomplishment. Both Mr. Shigeto and I vigorously applauded. …

When Eeyore was commuting to the secondary division of the special-care school, he once went swimming at the club with Father, and fell into the pitlike pool, which had a net over it the last time I saw it. When they got home that day, Eeyore looked meek and gentle, as though he had been caught doing some mischief. By then, however, he had regained his spirits. Father, though, looked on the verge of tears as he reported the
whole story to Mother. These, he said, were the words Eeyore had spoken to comfort him on the train home: “I sank. From now I shall swim. I think I shall really swim!”

Time has passed since then, but just as he had promised Father, Eeyore now
really
swam. I thought I should write to Father in California and let him know this. After all, he was in a “pinch” so serious—something I couldn't identify—that Mother had left Eeyore here, to accompany him to America and stay at his side. The news that Eeyore had swum should encourage him, like the words he had spoken on the train coming home after almost drowning. …

I told Mr. Shigeto about this as he continued to carefully watch Mr. Arai, who was making Eeyore go over the arm movements. Mr. Shigeto gave a reply that revealed his full insight into my motivation.

“Ma-chan,” he said, “I thought you'd be angry at K for discussing things with me without consulting you first. But you aren't a stickler for things like that, are you? That's the best form of filial piety toward a man of K's disposition.”

We went up to the drying room, and there was Mr. Arai, sitting as always, with downcast eyes, beside his training gear. Eeyore, who sat next to him that day, with a serious look on his face, also remained silent. I saw this attitude as one befitting people who had just finished a disciplined workout, though for Mr. Arai it would be only a short respite before his “body-killing” program. I was also proud of them because both gave off the air of people who frequented the pool with a definite goal in mind. Their demeanor sharply contrasted with the relaxed atmosphere of the drying room when occupied by people like Mr. Mochizuki, the perspiration-dripping man, and the effeminate but sharp-tongued, mustached individual, who I'm starting to have a hunch is the proprietor of a beauty parlor.

After a while, Mr. Shigeto, sounding like he wanted to get at least this across, broke his deferential silence, and said, “Eeyore, you swam very well. You listened closely to Mr. Arai's criticism and instruction. You even swam an extra fifteen meters just before coming out of the pool! It's amazing what you did.”

“Yes, I did very well!”

“And, Mr. Arai,” Mr. Shigeto said, “your coaching techniques deserve equal compliment.”

Mr. Arai looked up at Mr. Shigeto, with eyes askance and red from the pool water, but bright and sharp, as though they had been honed with an emery wheel of irascibility.

“It's because Eeyore's the kind of person who does exactly what I tell him to do,” Mr. Arai said. “But learning to breathe is going to be difficult. Myself, I hope he keeps it up even when it gets more difficult. …”

“I think I will keep it up even when it gets much more difficult,” Eeyore said.

“I see that you two have established a firm coach-trainee relationship,” Mr. Shigeto said. “Mr. Arai, did you talk with K much, when he was commuting almost daily to the club?”

“No, not very much,” replied Mr. Arai, turning to me with a probing look. “Myself, I once even asked him if I could visit and talk with him at his home, but he said no.”

“Oh, no!” Eeyore said, so ruefully that I had to put a word in.

“Father enjoys joking with people,” I said, “but characterwise, he's an introvert, and he doesn't have many acquaintances he can call new friends. …”

“When you get to be our age,” Mr. Shigeto remarked, “it's troublesome to make new friends. It's nice if it happens naturally, like the way I made friends with Ma-chan and Eeyore.”

Mr. Arai let his head fall in a nod, and then, with a vigor that seemed almost savage, he kept toweling off the beads of perspiration that surfaced from every pore of his upper body, though frankly I thought them too pretty to wipe off.

On our way home from the pool, Mr. Shigeto treated us to some Italian food at a restaurant in the Shinjuku Station Building. He loosened the ties that bound my reserve by explaining that Mircea Eliade, whose correspondence he was directly translating from Romanian, had whetted his appetite for Italian food, for just then he was working on the letters Eliade had written as a young man traveling through Italy. He then carefully studied the menu with an attentiveness I thought Japanese seldom show. And the assortment of dishes he ordered was such as to make Eeyore, an experienced and earnest viewer of gourmet programs on TV, utter just the right exclamations of praise upon tasting each dish. Mr. Shigeto, elated by Eeyore's reaction, carefully observed, with narrowed eyes, how skillfully he used the knife and fork to eat his spaghetti. I think there was a certain grace about Eeyore's relaxed bearing that made Mr. Shigeto feel good, in the way he used his entire body to reveal the sense of satisfaction and fatigue that had come from spending a fulfilling day consisting of a music lesson and some swimming. …

Before long, Mr. Shigeto matter-of-factly divulged the real purpose of his having invited us to dinner. He had heard from Father about Mr. Arai's past, about an incident that had occurred when Mr. Arai was a law student at a private university five years ago, the details of which he would not relate to me at this point in time, since part of it was mere rumor. And he believed my character was not of the curious sort that would badger him with questions about it. Mr. Arai had actually been involved in a troublesome incident, but Mr. Shigeto thought that for me to know more about it might cause my feelings
toward him to take a path in an unfavorable direction. In other words, Father in California, by recalling the incident, was now discomfited at the fact that I had become acquainted with Mr. Arai. However', were Father and Mother to learn that my and Eeyore's relationship with him would be limited to Eeyore's swimming lessons, and that Mr. Shigeto would accompany us to the pool each time, they would be immediately unfettered from their pressing cares. …