Beauty and Sadness (17 page)

Otoko was extremely fastidious, and on a morning like this, when the sticky heat of a Kyoto summer night had left her kimono damp with perspiration, she would normally have got out of bed as soon as she awakened. But instead she lay there with her head turned toward the wall, looking again at her sketches of a baby. She had had difficulty with them. Although her own baby had lived in this world for a brief time, Otoko wanted to paint a kind of spirit child, a child who had never entered the world of human beings.

Keiko was still sound asleep, her back turned to Otoko. The top of a thin summer linen coverlet was wrapped tightly around her body but had worked down below her breast. She lay on her side, legs together, both feet sticking out below the coverlet. Since Keiko usually dressed in Japanese style, her naturally slim, straight toes had seldom been cramped into high-heeled shoes. Her toes were so fine-boned and slender that Otoko felt as if they belonged to a different sort of being, not quite human. She had come to avoid looking at them. But
when she grasped Keiko’s toes in her hand she took a curious pleasure in the thought that they could hardly belong to a woman of her own generation. It was an eerie feeling.

A scent of perfume wafted to her. It seemed too rich a fragrance for a young girl, but Otoko recognized it as one that Keiko wore occasionally. She began to wonder why she had worn it last night.

When Keiko came home after midnight Otoko had been too engrossed in gazing at the sketches to pay any particular attention. Keiko hurried to bed without even bathing and promptly fell asleep. But perhaps Otoko thought Keiko was sleeping because she herself had soon dropped off to sleep.

As soon as Otoko got up she went around to the other side of Keiko’s bed, glanced down at her sleeping face in the dim light, and then began opening the wooden shutters. Keiko was always cheerful in the morning, and would jump up to help the moment she heard Otoko sliding back the shutters. But this morning she only sat up in bed and watched. Finally she rose, and said: “I’m sorry. It must have been almost three before I could get to sleep.” She started to take up Otoko’s bedding.

“Did the heat bother you?”

“Mmm.”

“Don’t put away my night kimono, please. I’d like to launder it.”

With the kimono over her arm, Otoko went in to bathe. Keiko came along to use the wash basin but seemed to be hurrying even as she brushed her teeth.

“Don’t you want to take a bath too?”

“Yes.”

“Apparently you went to bed still wearing yesterday’s perfume.”

“Did I?”

“Indeed you did!” Otoko was suspicious of her vacant air. “Keiko, where were you last night?”

There was no reply.

“Do take a bath. You’ll feel better.”

“Yes, later on.”

“Later?” Otoko looked at her.

By the time Otoko came out of the bathroom Keiko was selecting a kimono from the chest of drawers.

“Are you going out?” Otoko asked sharply.

“Yes.”

“You’ve promised to meet someone?”

“Yes.”

“Who is it?”

“Taichiro.”

Otoko did not understand.

“Mr. Oki’s Taichiro,” Keiko explained without hesitation, but omitting “son.”

Otoko’s voice failed.

“I went to meet him at the airport yesterday, and today I’ve promised to show him around the city. Or maybe he’ll show me around.… Otoko, I never hide things from you! First we’re going to the Nisonin Temple—he wants to see a tomb on the hill there.”

“To see a tomb?” Otoko echoed faintly.

“He says it’s the tomb of an old court noble.”

“Oh?”

Keiko slipped off her night kimono and stood with her naked back to Otoko. “I think I’ll wear a full underkimono after all. It looks as if it’ll be hot again today, but I wouldn’t feel right without it.”

Silently Otoko watched her dress.

“Now to get the obi nice and tight.” Keiko put her hands behind her back and gave a tug.

Otoko looked at Keiko’s face in the mirror as she applied some makeup, and Keiko noticed Otoko’s reflection too. “Don’t stare at me like that.”

Otoko tried to soften her expression.

Peering into a wing of the dressing table mirror, Keiko toyed with a lock of hair over one of her beautifully shaped ears, as a finishing touch. Then she started to rise, but sat down again and picked up a bottle of perfume.

Otoko frowned. “Isn’t last night’s perfume enough?”

“Don’t worry.”

“Rather fidgety, aren’t you?” She paused. “Keiko, why are you seeing him?”

“He wrote to let me know he was coming.” She got up, went over to the chest of drawers, and hastily put away several extra kimonos she had taken out in making her selection.

“Fold them neatly,” Otoko told her.

“All right.”

“You’ll have to fold them again.”

“All right.” But Keiko did not look back at the chest.

“Come over here, please,” said Otoko sternly. Keiko
came and sat down with her, looking straight into her eyes. Otoko glanced away, and suddenly asked: “Are you leaving without breakfast?”

“It doesn’t matter. I had a late dinner last night.”

“As late as all that?”

“Yes.”

“Keiko,” Otoko began again, “why are you meeting him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re the one who wanted to meet.” That seemed clear enough from Keiko’s uneasiness. “May I ask why?”

Keiko did not answer.

“Must you see him?” Otoko looked down at her lap. “I’d rather you didn’t. Please don’t go.”

“Why not? It has nothing to do with you, has it?”

“Certainly it has!”

“But you don’t even know him.”

“You’ve spent a night with his father, and yet you don’t mind seeing him?” Otoko could not bring herself to utter the names “Oki” and “Taichiro.”

“Mr. Oki is your old lover, but you’ve never met Taichiro. He has no connection with you. It’s just that he’s Mr. Oki’s son—he isn’t your child.”

The words stung Otoko. They reminded her that Oki’s wife had given birth to a daughter shortly after her own baby died. “Keiko,” she said, “you’re seducing him, aren’t you?”

“He wrote
me
that he was coming.”

“Are you on such good terms with him?”

“I don’t like your choice of words.”

“What should I say? That you’re involved with him?” Otoko wiped her damp forehead with the back of her hand. “You’re a fearful person.”

There was an odd gleam in Keiko’s eye. “Otoko, I hate men.”

“Don’t go. Please don’t. If you do, you needn’t come back! If you go out today, you needn’t ever come here again!”

“Otoko!” Keiko began to look tearful.

“What are you going to do to Taichiro?” Otoko’s hands were trembling in her lap. It was the first time she had spoken his name.

Keiko stood up. “I’m leaving,” she said.

“Please don’t go.”

“Hit me, Otoko. Hit me the way you did the day we went to the Moss Temple.” She stood there for a moment as if expecting a blow and then hurried out.

Otoko was bathed in a cold sweat. She sat looking out at the garden, her eyes fixed on the leaves of the square bamboo glistening in the morning sunlight. At last she got up and went into the bathroom. The rush of water startled her—perhaps she had turned it on too hard. Hastily she shut off the faucet, and then turned the water on again to a thin stream and began washing. She felt somewhat calmer, but there was a lingering tension in her head. She pressed a wet towel to her forehead and the back of her neck.

Returning to the other room, Otoko sat down facing her mother’s portrait and the sketches of her baby. A shudder of self-loathing passed over her. That came from living with Keiko, but it affected her whole existence, draining her strength and making her utterly wretched. What had she lived for, why was she still alive?

Otoko felt like calling out to her mother. Then she happened to think of Nakamura Tsuné’s
Portrait of His Aged Mother
, his last work before preceding her in death. Otoko found it deeply moving, in part because this final painting was of his mother. She had never seen the original, so it was hard to tell what it was really like, but even a photograph of it stirred her emotions.

The young Nakamura Tsuné had painted powerful, sensuous pictures of the woman he loved. He used a great deal of red and was said to have been influenced by Rouault. His
Portrait of Eroshenko
, one of his masterpieces, was a quiet, reverent expression of the noble melancholy of the blind poet, but in warm, lovely colors. However, in that last
Portrait of His Aged Mother
the colors were dark and cold, and his style was very simple. One saw a stooped, emaciated old woman seated in profile against the background of a half-wainscoted wall. A water pitcher stood in a niche in the wall just before her head, and a thermometer was hanging on the other side of her. Of course the thermometer might have been merely added for the sake of the composition, but Otoko was much impressed by it, as well as by the prayer beads dangling from the old woman’s fingers, which were resting on her lap. Somehow they seemed to symbolize the
feelings of the artist—himself on the verge of dying—toward death. So did the picture as a whole.

Otoko brought an album of Nakamura’s paintings from the closet, and compared his portrait of his mother with her own. She had chosen to make a youthful portrait even though her mother had already died. Also, it was by no means her last work, nor was there a shadow of death cast over it. Hers was in an entirely different style, traditionally Japanese, and yet with the reproduction of Nakamura’s portrait before her she realized the sentimentality of her own painting. She shut her eyes, forcing her eyelids tight, and felt herself going faint.

Otoko had painted her mother out of a fervent desire for consolation. She had thought of her only as young and beautiful. How shallow and self-indulgent that seemed, compared with the fervent devotion of an artist who was himself near death! Had not her life itself been like that?

She had begun her portrait by sketching from an early photograph of her mother, even showing her as younger and more beautiful than she was then. As she worked, Otoko had occasionally looked at her own face in the mirror, since she resembled her mother. Perhaps it was natural that the picture would have a kind of sweet prettiness—still, could one not also detect the lack of any profound inner spirit?

Otoko recalled that her mother had never allowed herself to be photographed after they came to Kyoto. The magazine photographer from Tokyo had wanted a picture of them together, but her mother had fled—because
of her grief, Otoko now suspected. She was living in Kyoto with her daughter like an outcast hiding in shame, and had even cut her ties with friends in Tokyo. Otoko too was not without the feelings of an outcast, but since she was only sixteen when she came to Kyoto her loneliness and isolation were different from her mother’s. She was also different in continuing her love for Oki, however wounded by it.

As she studied her portrait, and then Nakamura’s, she wondered if she should paint her mother again.

Keiko had gone to meet Oki Taichiro and Otoko felt that she was losing her. She could not suppress her anxiety.

This morning Keiko had not once mentioned “revenge.” She said she hated men, but that was nothing to rely on. She had already betrayed herself by leaving without breakfast, on the pretext of a late dinner the night before. What was Keiko going to do to Oki’s son? What would become of them, and what should she herself do, after all these years as a captive of her love for Oki? Otoko felt that she could not sit and wait.

Having failed to stop Keiko from leaving, all she could do now was try to pursue her and talk to Taichiro herself. But Keiko had not said where he was staying, or where they were to meet.

W
hen Keiko arrived at Ofusa’s tea house she found Taichiro standing out on the balcony, ready to leave.

“Good morning. Were you able to sleep?” She came over and leaned on the balcony rail beside him. “You’ve been waiting for me.”

“I was awake early,” he said. “The sound of the river made me want to get up and see the sun come over the Eastern Hills.”

“As early as that?”

“Yes, but the hills are too close for a real sunrise. The green of the hills brightens, and the Kamo glistens in the morning light.”

“Have you been watching all this time?”

“It was interesting to see the streets across the river come alive.”

“You couldn’t sleep? Didn’t you like it here?” Then
she added softly: “I’d be pleased if you were thinking of me, though.”

He did not reply.

“You won’t tell me?”

“I was thinking of you.”

“I made you say that.”

“But
you
must have slept well.” Taichiro looked at her.

Keiko shook her head. “No.”

“Your eyes are shining as if you did.”

“That’s because of you! Missing a night or two of sleep doesn’t matter.”

Her moist, radiant eyes were fixed on him. He took her hand.

“Such a cold hand,” Keiko whispered.

“Yours is warm.” He clasped each of her fingers in turn, marveling at their delicacy. They seemed incredibly slender and fragile, as if they could easily be bitten off. He wanted to take them in his mouth. Her fingers suggested a young girl’s vulnerability. And here before his very eyes was her lovely profile, the exquisite ears and long, slim neck.

“So you do your painting with these slender fingers.” He brought her hand up to his lips. Keiko looked at her hand. There were tears in her eyes.

“Are you sad?”

“I’m too happy! This morning I’d cry at your slightest touch.… I feel as if something has ended for me.”

“But what?”

“You shouldn’t ask me that.”

“It hasn’t ended, it’s begun. Isn’t the end of one thing the beginning of another?”

“Yes, but what’s done is done, it’s entirely different. That’s the way a woman feels. She’s reborn.”

He was about to draw her into his arms when the strength ebbed from his caress. She leaned against him. He gripped the balcony rail.

From the river bank just below them came the shrill barking of a little dog. A neighborhood woman taking her terrier out for a walk had run into a big Akita dog, led by a man who looked like a cook from one of the nearby restaurants. The Akita dog ignored the terrier, but the woman had to crouch and gather her barking, wriggling little dog into her arms. When she turned him away from the big one, the terrier seemed to be barking at the two of them on the balcony. The woman looked up and smiled politely.