Please Enjoy Your Happiness (4 page)

Yes, you had secrets, the first of which I heard when I walked into your hospital room and saw you lying in a wrought-iron crib. Someone had placed a single white gladiolus flower in a chipped glass vase on the table by the window.

We did not say anything for several minutes. There was a lot of sunlight coming through the window, and it blinded me until I found a corner of the room where I could see you better. Your eyes were following me around the room – that I knew. Everything in the room was white, including your face, but the pupils of your eyes were as black as the seeds of a longan tree. Finally you said, in a kind of English that sounded as if it had been rehearsed, ‘Paul. I am a very bad woman. Can you forgive me?’

What a big question that was to put to a kid right out of high school. You addressed me as if I were an adult. Did you know at that moment that if you continued down that path I would fall in love with you? Did you believe that I, a mere boy, would love you without ever breaking your heart?

‘Yes! Yes!’ I exclaimed, without understanding what I should
forgive. I was just so happy that you were not dead and that my life as a man with you as my guide would not come to an end because you were gone. You were sitting up straight in that crib. I put my arms round you. You were rigid. ‘I am so sorry,’ you said, again and again, and for one strange moment I thought you thought I was going to hit you.

‘I have to tell you a story,’ you said. I think that instant was the dawn of my lifelong fascination with the stories that burden every human being, regardless of nationality or culture. Those stories – mixtures of memories and forgetfulness and of fantasy and dread – are the stuff of fretful dreams until peace comes with death. Up until this moment you were Yukiko, the strong woman with a fragile beauty who talked to me about poetry and politics, who guided me like an angel to the door of all the arts. You swung that door wide and said, ‘Enter,’ knowing that I would be captivated. You sensed that in me. I had not been to college yet. That would not happen until after my four years in the navy. You could mould me and shape me and introduce me to all those hints of Japan’s two-thousand-year-old culture and history I picked out every day in your grimy port city and at the Mozart café. There also was ‘our’ bookstore in Thieves Alley, across the street from a honky-tonk glistening with flashing neon. The first time we met we talked, and you said, ‘Come,’ and you took me across the street by the hand, placed me in front of the bookshop owner, and bought me a copy bound in pale green silk of
Senryu
, translated by R. H. Blyth, a collection from the mid-1700s of darkly cynical and humorous verses similar to haiku. I mean, I was still a teen! What were you trying to lay on me? I still have the book, of course. Your fingerprint is on the title page, where you wrote, ‘To a nice boy from a wicked woman. – Yukiko, with love.’

In fact, you mentioned that book in your second letter to me, which I received when I was at sea.

You wrote this letter after you slashed your wrists. But I know now that you attempted suicide not because of me. Even if other conversations are just fragments, I can remember the story you told me when we were able to meet again at the Mozart café word for word, as if it had been written on a scroll you gave me to take care of for the rest of my life.

‘A certain girl has to tell you a story,’ you said again. ‘You see, this girl had a daughter . . .
I
had a daughter. She was ten years old. For a long time, my daughter was sick with tuberculosis. My mother died from TB. It was terrible, and unfortunately my daughter caught TB from my mother. Don’t ask me about the father of my daughter. He is dead, so long ago . . . My daughter was my last relative alive. When I got the news from the hospital that she had died and I was not there because I had to work at the bar to earn money, I wanted to kill myself. She was the last of my family. Now I am alone. She was so bright and funny . . . not like me, her so serious mother. So I decided to die . . . I am so sorry to have to tell you this because you are
a good boy and now my story is your story too. I am part of you and you are part of me.

‘I need to tell you that I put on that white dress because in China it is the colour of mourners and because I knew that somewhere I would meet my daughter again, and I wanted to be pure. Yes . . . pure. So pure, which I am not. I am not, Paul. I am not a good woman . . . And then somehow, by fate – I think that is the right word – you came to my room at that hotel. You were like a star shining bright above me. I had to use my dictionary to look up those words.

‘Yes, you are young. You are full of hope, and even though I am a very bad woman, because of you I glow with light because you care about me in the most beautiful way, like a man who is good of heart. Yes, like a man, even though you are not yet a man. And now I am here. I am still living. I will always be a little bird in the tree, singing, singing, always happily, I hope. Yes, I can hope. Please remember me and listen for my song.’

3

Blue Woman

It occurs to me that after you cut your wrists – and I became part of your story – you started writing much more poetry. First the blood flowed from your body. Then came a flood of verse. The ship sailed away on a three-week cruise to the Taiwan Strait and to Hong Kong. And then it returned to Yokosuka. As soon as I walked down the gangplank to the dock, after saluting the flag and taking the obligatory rubber in a wrapper from the officer of the deck, I went looking for you. You were not at the White Rose. They said you were probably still convalescing. I walked in the rain to the Mozart coffee shop, stepping into doorways and alleys to avoid running into navy shore patrols that might have detained me for attempting to enter a forbidden area. The Mozart was forbidden. The brute force of that rule was beyond my comprehension, even then.

Your head was cocked to one side. There was an open book on the table in front of you. Your eyes were closed. There was that smile on your face that happened when you were in the
presence of beauty. You were listening to the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, my father’s favourite, and the needle on the record was getting to the point where the sublime ‘Ode to Joy’ chorus would begin. I could see you were anticipating it:
Joy, o wondrous spark divine.
There was the first rose tint of excitement on your face for the coming force of the chorale. Your long fingers were tapping the table. I stood looking at you for a while. You were truly lost in something I was not a part of. It was wonderful seeing you like that, so alive, entranced, vivid in your private world. You were like my father, who stood and conducted the Ninth, as the 78-rpm records he treasured spun on the blond-wood Ferguson record player, while I sat there uncomprehending. You pulled a notebook from your purse and began writing, first slowly, and then hurriedly as the chorus swept you up. I knew that you were writing poetry. You suddenly saw me, and you jumped up, spilling espresso out of the tiny cup. You ran and threw your arms round my neck and said, your voice triumphant, ‘I knew you would come back to me, my sweetheart.’

You stood and looked at me. Your eyes explored my face: first my eyes, then my lips, each cheekbone, the close-cropped black hair, and last, my grin. ‘You missed me, I think,’ you said, after you had studied all my details. You called those details ‘credentials’. You looked at me as if the short time we had known each other was altering the boy I was. Your fists were clenched at the sides of your hips. You were right in front of me, and you were not going to move. The chorus was soaring. I had to help you back to the table. You started laughing. The manager nodded politely. Public displays of affection were rare in Japan in those days, but you, with your books and your love of music and that look you had, were one of the manager’s
favourite customers. I am sure that he had never seen a mature Japanese woman throw herself into the arms of a young foreigner. But he nodded in my direction, quickly brought coffee to the table, and then said playfully to you in Japanese: ‘So, he is the one, this young man. Your Anthony Perkins!’ Your face turned scarlet. I am laughing now when I think about that. I blushed too, as I did when I was a youngster. How much I wish that I were nineteen again, and a woman such as you with your red lips, stalked by tragedy, who devoured literature and wrote poetry and who wore an unknown perfume whose fragrance I can still recall, was waiting for me.

‘I have to tell you something,’ you said. ‘It is another secret. A certain woman is in love with a certain man, but he does not know it. Do you know that woman?’

I nodded yes. Do you remember that nod?

‘A certain man is in love with a certain woman, but he does not know it. Do you know that man?’

I nodded yes again.

‘In my country,’ you said, ‘that is the perfect formula for a love affair that will have a beginning and an end. I have always wanted to be in love with a man who did not know I loved him. How bittersweet that love. How unforgettable. A love that I can take with me until I die. Do you understand?’

Well, of course, I did not understand. You were talking to someone who was not even twenty. Bittersweet? What did I know then about bittersweet! All I knew was sunshine. Laughter. Sunlight. Adventure. Your secret unleashed a score of unfamiliar feelings. I felt as if I were an infant taking his first step.

The manager of the Mozart was watching us discreetly. I saw him go to the shelf where the record player was located. He
turned up the volume. You took my hand and pulled me closer, so that we sat side by side.

‘You know Beethoven?’ you asked. The chorus was at its zenith. ‘You have come back to me,’ you said, ‘at my favourite moment.’ You tightened your grip on my hand, leaned back in your chair. ‘I love life. I love something as simple as sitting with you like this . . . Do you understand, Paul-san?’

That was not the end of the letter. You delighted in adding a P.S., or a P.P.S., and even a P.P.P.S. on occasion.