The Appetites of Girls (38 page)

I said nothing, wanting him to beg, to sicken and choke on his own regrets. But I knew he was right.
He
had betrayed nothing.
I
had been the fool.
I
was the one who had filled my head with silly notions, sugary delusions.

In the past, when faced with a setback, a bit of hard luck, quickly I had dusted off disappointment, the grit of humiliation. More than once friends had marveled at my capacity for nearly instant recoveries. This was my trademark. “You’re a rock, Francesca,” they’d said. “If only we could be more like you!” So I refused to be shaken by this nonsense with Carlos, to be haunted by a few sentimental and short-lived daydreams. Evening after evening, I stayed awake for hours watching late-night talk shows so that I would stumble into bed exhausted—no time for remembering or wondering, for running a hand in the dark over the cool of the empty sheet beside me. Each morning I made long lists of daily errands—notes to write, calls to return, chores to be completed in my new apartment—revising them regularly, filling my mind with practical matters, filling my schedule, stopping up the spaces where loneliness tried repeatedly to seep in.

As the newest member of
Outdoor Playground
(or
OP
, as I learned to call it), I would exude the same professionalism and confidence I had been known for at
Real
. But small things, I found to my disgust, began to unhinge me. Criticisms for an editorial mistake that had not been mine stunned me. An exasperated glance from Jo Redding, one of the ad executives, whom I’d accidentally jostled at the ladies’ room sinks, made my eyes smart. And then this: twice within the same week a fitful dream about Sanjeev, the friend of Setsu and Ruth with whom I’d spent a spring afternoon at the beach years before. In both dreams, I lost him in a crowded market square. I had an important message to give him, but in the chaos of vendors hawking wares and throngs of shoppers and
pedestrians, he is impossible to find. I had woken cold with sweat, unnerved by the strangeness of the dream and my mind’s unearthing of buried memories.

Soon my appetite seemed as unpredictable as my moods. For days on end, I would desire little, feeling sated, even bloated, after a mere buttered roll, a modest bowl of soup. But after these periods of abstinence came roaring, ravenous hunger, the amount I could consume sometimes frightening me. And the fullness that followed was not accompanied by the thrill of protest or the satisfaction of having scoffed at societal pressures, but rather by nausea, stomach cramps, a lethargy resulting from my own insufficient will.

So this was no time to be embarking on a new relationship. This was a time, I told myself, for self-fortification, for weeding out the thoughts, the habits that were softening me, weakening me. What did I care that Jonathan, one of
OP
’s staff writers, flashed me dimpled grins across the table during meetings? That he left gifts on my desk of boxed pencils, notepads, and paperclips from the supply room, and, one day, even a small grass nest with two bluish eggs inside, which he had found beneath an oak in Central Park? He’d mistaken me for the sort of woman who’d be charmed by this kind of attention. But he was knocking at the wrong door. This was the
last
thing I needed.

“You are wasting your energy,” I told him when he asked me for the third time in as many weeks to join him for dinner. But he was undaunted by my rebuffs and only shook his head, smiling as if still unconvinced by my refusals.

The stronger Francesca, the Francesca I had been just months before, would have stood her ground. With each of Jonathan’s advances, she would have toughened further until he had thrown up his hands in defeat. But in my current uncertain, distracted state, I could not master the will for prolonged opposition, and on what must have been his fifth or sixth attempt to date me, I gave in.

What I swore to myself would last only one evening turned into two,
then three, then Saturday afternoon strolls around the park’s boating lake and picnic sandwiches under the trees along the edge of the Great Lawn. Despite myself, I found I thought often of Sharon, wondering what it was about Claude that had made her fall in love. Something about the way Jonathan pulled absentmindedly at the back of his hair when concentrating or cocked his head to one side when listening for birdcalls or to far-off music or to me as I spoke, reminded me of how my brother, Christopher, had looked when we were young, drawing close to me, losing himself in the stories he liked for me to read him from our
Treasury of Children’s Tales
. Time and again I stopped the instinct to ruffle Jonathan’s hair, to fold my hand in his.

Just after the Memorial Day holiday, Mother called to say she had run into the Frasiers having lunch at Olivia’s. Sharon and her new husband had been with them, having flown east for the long weekend. “She asked for your number. She said she would give you a call soon.”

“Oh, that’s nice.” But it irritated me the way Mother said it as if she thought I’d been anxious for such news. And I felt suddenly irritated with myself, too, remembering my sappy reaction to Sharon’s wedding announcement. Years ago, when Sharon and I were girls, our families had both frequented Olivia’s for Sunday brunches, often sitting just tables apart. Sharon always coloring contentedly in her yellow Disney coloring book or—when we were older—looking up at her parents every now and then, between small, polite bites of her French toast, to add chirping comments to their anecdotes or observations. How was it she remained oblivious to Father’s smiling winks at her mother over the heads of the other diners (gestures I knew my own mother pretended not to see, stiffening in her chair, her cheeks pink)! Sharon was blind as a mole rat! But I knew what Mother and Father were thinking: that it was too bad
I
couldn’t uncross my arms and be as pleasant as Sharon was. I’d known it by the way Mother invited me into contrived, cheerful conversations. But this had only made arguments swirl up in me like hot, twisting air before I stuffed down my cheese omelet. And later, I would
congratulate myself for my fortitude, for refusing to imitate goody-two-shoes Sharon.

Why, exactly, was Mother phoning now anyway? It was the third time since last Monday. Was she checking up on me? Because of my silly sniffling during one or two of my calls after I’d moved out of Carlos’s? Would she hint around again about Jonathan as she had the last time we spoke, annoyingly remarking on how thoughtful he sounded? Did she think talk of Sharon’s happiness would fill me with sentiment, inspire me to find this for myself? She spoke of Sharon’s new haircut—short, but according to her, surprisingly flattering. The sweet cape near Coronado Beach she and Claude were hoping to buy—they’d shown Mother and Father a picture. The job Claude would eventually be taking in the West Coast branch of Mr. Frasier’s firm. I imagined Mother cooing over Sharon and her husband and the Frasiers as they nibbled their chicken crêpes and watercress salads. I had not yet told Mother what I had discovered after rereading Sharon’s announcement: Claude was a graduate of Oceanside High School, no mention of a college. And Sharon with her bachelor’s and her master’s. There would be worlds of things they could never
begin
to discuss. Great dull spots in their shiny future. But something about the way Mother’s breath dropped into a slow hum made me stop myself.

“She just seemed
happy
,” Mother said, and then, for a time, she was quiet—while the faint treble of Judy Garland’s voice sounded from her stereo—as if she were remembering something she’d once wished for, something she thought Sharon had found.

•   •   •

S
pring unwound into summer and then early fall. Despite my better judgment, Jonathan and I began to spend longer days together—all-day Sunday excursions to Cold Spring Harbor or up the Palisades Parkway to Bear Mountain. On one drive to Boscobel, a historic home and museum along the Hudson, Jonathan pulled the car over to watch a
red-tailed hawk perched on a high, thin limb. He leaned forward to give me a better view. “They look so stoic, but did you know red-tails mate for life? It makes you wonder if their feelings run deeper than we know.” Jonathan squinted, gazing through the windshield, then turned to me with the same look of appreciation and intensity. And I felt he was seeing through me to things that had never been uttered aloud, but things he somehow understood.

I had quarreled with myself over the best time to bring things to a close. The following Saturday, during a weekend in New Hampshire, I told him point-blank. It was what I had been meaning to say for weeks, even months: “I’m sorry. Very sorry. You and I want different things. I’m just not looking for anything long-term.” But when I spoke them, the words sounded all wrong. I had practiced them at home so that I would not falter, but each time, a conversation I’d once overheard between Ruth and Setsu our first year together returned to me:

“I could never be like Fran, could you?”

“
No, it’s funny, isn’t it—the way she just needs no one at all.”

Afterward—silently, behind my closed door, into a balled-up woolen scarf—ridiculously I had sobbed. Now, in Jonathan’s presence, what I meant to be resistance began to unravel. And he had arguments: “Are you sure about this, Francesca? Please, I want to be with you. No, it’s more than that. I feel—no, I
know
—I love you.” He took one of my hands into both of his. “Do you think you might love me?” So I hesitated. For too long I wavered. Until it was too late. Until something broke and I succumbed, until all willpower faded.

Some lessons take longer to learn than others. If I had obeyed my own stubbornness, I could have gone a lifetime without ever learning mine. But as I gazed into Jonathan’s eyes on the morning we were married, I understood with a certainty that steadied even my bridal jitters that I had been waging futile battles, seeking strength in empty places.

On the evening of our first wedding anniversary—before Jonathan’s transition into finance, before my graduation from law school, before a house, before children—we left our rented apartment on East Eighty-first Street and took the Number Six train to Canal Street. From there we meandered to Mulberry in search of the most affordable yet romantic Italian restaurant we could find. To our delight, our host seated us at a small linen-covered table in the back corner of a lantern-lit patio. A breeze stirred the leaves of potted plants crowding the patio’s high brick walls and swayed the strands of lanterns strung overhead. “Let’s order whatever our waiter recommends,” Jonathan suggested. So we were brought heirloom tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella, homemade linguini, paper-thin cutlets of veal with capers. A slow forkful and then another: the mozzarella sliding to the back of my mouth like milk, the veal melting on my tongue. And I realized as Jonathan paused to beam at me that I was not gobbling my food in defiance. My stomach did not churn from an emptiness I had never been able to fill. This was only pleasure. And for what seemed the first time in more years than I remembered, I could truly taste every flavor. Then when I’d savored enough mouthfuls, how surprisingly easy it seemed to push my plate aside. Too long it had taken. But now I knew. I felt what it meant to be satisfied.

(Setsu’s Story)

•
1995
•

F
or two weeks, I learned when I arrived, Toru had left his bed only to bathe and to empty his bladder and bowels. “Such injustice!” Shiro mashed the flats of his palms together as we stood in the hall outside Toru’s bedroom door. “I would take his place in this if I could.” He reached for my hand as if to say, “Only you and I understand. We endure this together.”

The three of us would now share Toru’s apartment off Broadway on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Having both of us here, Shiro believed, might lift Toru’s spirits. It was Shiro who had ushered me into the apartment as if he were the brother I had seen only occasionally over the past five years. “Please come in, little sister. Toru is sleeping. He needs his rest, so if you don’t mind . . .” He had gestured toward my shoes, indicating that I should remove them and place them in the foyer on a small rack beside two pairs of men’s loafers, one pair shiny and uncreased, a pricey brand I recognized as Toru’s, the other misshapen and scuffed.
“Even the slightest noises disturb him these days. You can appreciate this, I’m sure.”

Shiro had been one of a handful of Japanese music students whom Toru had taught until the illness, as he claimed, made teaching an impossibility. I remembered first meeting Shiro at Toru’s concert in Franklin Center. He had sat in the front row, not far from my family, and for an hour and a half dabbed repeatedly at his nose with a handkerchief he kept wadded in the sleeve of his wool sweater. But not once did his eyes stray from the stage, from Toru’s fixed jaw, his lightning fingers. After Toru’s final encore, he had slipped eel-like through the crowd so that he could introduce himself to my parents and me, accompanying us to Toru’s dressing room. As we walked, Shiro had trailed me so closely his shoes caught on the straps of my slingback heels. He had curled his fingers around the knob of my shoulder. “Tell me—what was it like?” he had said, leaning so close that I could see the flecks of yellow-brown in his black eyes. And so I had understood that he envied me, for
I
was the sister of Toru.

Shiro led me down a dimly lit corridor to the apartment’s third and smallest bedroom, a room, I gathered, Toru had once used as an office. “Too much light is a source of irritation.” Shiro pointed to the half-lowered shade. Then, for some seconds, he paused in my doorway. “Well, let me leave you to your unpacking,” he said, still without shifting. He pulled a rumpled tissue from his breast pocket and blotted his nostrils. “It’s really so good to have you.” Here his voice cracked with sentiment. And though we had met only twice before, I sensed that if I had not stooped to unzip my bags, he would have approached to embrace me.

•   •   •

I
t was during my second month of unemployment that my mother had suggested I make the call to Toru. I was, once again, short on the payment for my studio rental in Cambridge. “You’re twenty-five, Setsu. He’s your brother. How many years will you let pass?” She had sniffled with
relief when I eventually acquiesced. “Life is too fragile to harbor grudges, don’t you think?” By this she meant that now, with Toru’s condition, it was petty to withhold forgiveness. Unreturned holiday calls, the mailed birthday gifts that went unrecognized, Toru’s absence from my high school and college graduations, from the party my roommates had thrown the year I turned twenty-one (though he had been in Providence that weekend visiting friends)—these, in the scheme of things, were small matters.

But I knew the unspoken reason for my mother’s request. I knew the guilt that plagued her now that she could only make occasional visits to Toru. In the winter she had required surgery to replace her hip. Trips to New York had become difficult for her, and she could make them only with my father’s assistance, leaving her far less time for Toru. So I was the perfect solution, wasn’t I? I who was always expected to sacrifice myself for Toru. Mother’s conscience would be clear as sky after rain if I would only yoke myself to Toru in her stead. But it was unfair to blame her, selfish, I knew, to expect her to give more consideration to my feelings with all that now weighed on her. Still, the truth of it was I would call because I feared if I didn’t, I would make the same stupid, stupid mistake I had made too many times to count—give in to James, returning, despite what I knew. That there would always be others. Younger ones, doting ones, ones whose telltale scents lingered on James’s hand towels, in the upholstery of his couch, and whose proclivities, whose most intimate pleasures would reveal themselves in the things he later asked of me.

I called Ruth first, then Francesca, who was living in Manhattan. “I think I may be moving to New York. We’ll be able to see each other regularly now,” I said. I told Opal during my stay at the small ranch house she and her fiancé, Campbell, had been renting in northern Massachusetts since their engagement the previous spring and Opal’s return to New England for her work at a graphic design firm. We were sitting on the screened porch, listening to the twitter of warblers and finches on the square of fenced lawn and the tap of insects against the windows. But
when she heard my plans, Opal said little. “But the things you told me of Toru . . . Are you sure this is what you want?”

“Beggars can’t be choosers, right? I guess my choices are limited.” I laughed to show she needn’t worry, that I was making the best of the situation.

Opal replenished my half-emptied glass of iced tea with the pitcher on the low table between us then resettled in her armchair, the wicker creaking gently as she folded her bare feet under her. The skirts of her yellow sundress fanned around her on the cushion of her chair. How much prettier she looked now than in the drab clothes she’d worn over the last few years. She traced her thumb and forefinger down the narrow line of her nose, her old reflex when pinching back what she felt she should not speak aloud. “You know the small bedroom here is yours as long as you like.”

And I knew she meant it. But I couldn’t. Every time Campbell reached for her hand, even when he smiled at her without speaking, even when he called her name from another room, I felt the loss that seemed to live just below the surface of every, every breath.

Then, three days into my visit, through my parents, James tracked me down. I should have guessed he would. He had never given up anything without a fight. It was why, this time, I had uttered no warning, not so much as a whisper, quietly terminating my lease, packing my studio, and procuring a storage locker for the furniture I could not use for the foreseeable future. And then one evening, while James attended a faculty meeting, collecting those belongings of mine that had been kept in his apartment and slipping away at dusk. How long would it take him to realize that his hall closet and bedroom dresser drawers were cleared of my coats and clothes and shoes? His bathroom cabinet emptied of my moisturizers and soaps? I had known to fill my mind with other things as the train rattled along the tracks in the dark to Opal’s, where she had agreed I should come.

But when James called, he made no accusations. This time he spoke only regrets, even apologies. “Setsu— Oh, God, Setsu . . . These few days have made me see that
nothing
matters but you.” His voice was different, quavering, almost like a young boy’s. “Tell me, Setsu, are you really going to walk away from all we’ve had? Do you even care what this does to me?”

“Please don’t say that. I can’t. No, I can’t do this anymore. I won’t!” I felt each word as it ripped from my throat.

Then only long silence. James had begged me. A thing I had thought he would never do, and I knew he never would again. And then his voice was his own once more. “I have made a mistake. A very bad one.” And I knew it was not only the phone call he meant. But me.

I found Opal in her garden pulling small clumps of crabgrass from between the paved stones of the short path between her driveway and front porch. “So does he know it’s really over?”

I nodded. “It was strange, though. At first he sounded so changed, almost broken.” It was some time before I could speak again. “Do you know, for the first time he admitted—”

“Setsu! You aren’t reconsidering, are you? After what he’s done? After all the chances he’s been given?”

“No. No! Of course not. That’s really not what I meant—”

“Oh, good. That’s good.” With her gloved hand, Opal shook soil from the roots of the crabgrass, then brushed the clods of dirt back between the stones, patting them into the earth. “Because it’s so easy to toss our lives away, isn’t it?” She smiled. “So easy to believe our own deceptions.”

Yes, and maybe for some of us it was easier than for others. Among the blades of crabgrass in a section of the path Opal had not yet reached, grew a single narrow weed with a violet flower. It was moments from being plucked, but kneeling, I touched it. It nodded then straightened, unaware of its fate. Its delicate petals were double hearts, each petal
etched with veins of white. It was so perfect, I almost had the silly urge to ask Opal to spare it—a common weed! Yes, moving in with Toru was the right thing. I was glad his apartment was waiting. Glad to have no opportunity to contemplate returning to what would undo me.

•   •   •

I
t was through Shiro that I had made the arrangements in the end. “I take care of Toru’s correspondences now,” he’d said. “One less thing for him to concern himself with, you see.” Toru would continue to cover the rent. The modest income I would be making through the position I’d been offered at Isaac’s Music House selling instrument replacement parts and sheet music—a far cry from my previous employment as an analyst for Ridley Lauer (but a temporary solution until I could find something more lucrative)—would go toward my portion of the utilities, grocery bills, and the cost of the apartment’s upkeep.

Shiro’s contribution was similar. “It’s the very least we can do considering his generosity. I’m sure you will agree,” he had said in a hush, as if we were speaking of something sacred. So I had nodded my head, though
generosity
was not the first word that had come to
my
mind—the percentage of earnings I would part with being considerably larger than what would come from Toru’s savings. And how much could Shiro possibly make from the articles he wrote for classical music magazines?—work he was grateful to be doing from home so that he could be of regular assistance to Toru.

Toru’s disappointments had begun a year earlier, the first incidents occurring while on tour in Japan. Twice he had fumbled the final movement of Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” Then, the following month, a disastrous performance at Ballantine Hall. Uncomplimentary reviews had followed. So he’d booked appointments with doctors. His body was uncooperative, he’d insisted. He had complained of muscle pains, restless sleep, monstrous headaches. The first five doctors had found nothing; still
Toru had canceled two concerts with the Santa Fe orchestra, claiming, my mother had told me later, that his head was as heavy as rocks, that he could not possibly budge from his hotel room.

I assumed Toru’s symptoms were temporary, nothing more than anxiety. When my mother called again, I suggested this: “Perhaps the strain of these letdowns . . .”

“Oh, no! Please don’t repeat such a thing to Toru!” I heard the clinking of her glass-beaded necklace as she wound and unwound the strands of it, a habit of hers in nervousness. “He says he feels it in his bones, the curse of disease. This has all been such a blow to him, you know, your brother the perfectionist.”

It was not long before Toru found another physician, one who gave a diagnosis for what the others had not—a chronic lack of energy, a syndrome with a name my mother could not remember. He had given Toru capsules, informational pamphlets on his condition, advice for treating it. I had called Toru that first night to offer my sympathies, and in his voice I heard a stirring, a forcefulness that I had remembered but had not expected. “So you can see, this was
not
my imagination,” he had said. I thought I could hear the rattling of pills in a jar, the click-click of a bottle cap turning.

“Yes, Toru, yes. So very sorry.”

•   •   •

I
organized my belongings on the shelves of my room’s shallow closet and in a single emptied drawer of a small maple chest in the corner (the other drawers stuffed with music scores, spare cakes of rosin, G, D, A, and E strings still coiled in their paper envelopes). I placed my violin in its case against a corner wall. Now, I hoped, with a predictable and less demanding schedule, I might finally find time for more than the sporadic practicing I had done my last couple of years at Brown and while at Ridley. I heard Shiro pacing the corridor. At times there were long pauses
between steps, as if his foot hovered before finding a spot on the floorboards least likely to groan, least likely to rouse Toru. For an hour or more, the apartment was otherwise noiseless until several coughing grunts sounded from the direction of Toru’s room. When I emerged into the hall, Shiro’s pacing had ceased. For some moments, he said nothing, seemingly contemplating whether or not this would be an acceptable time to escort me to Toru.

Toru reclined on a large bed, his shoulders disappearing into a stack of wide pillows. Despite his recent illness, he had retained some of the bulk that he’d carried throughout adulthood. A small fold of fat showed above the neckline of his silk robe, his face rested like a boiled dumpling above his blankets, and his arms, which stretched before him, seemed to sink heavily into the depths of his duvet. A dimpled wrist slid out from his glossy sleeve to remove a set of black plastic headphones from his ears, and as I watched him, a familiar sensation returned to me, a sudden awareness of the smallness of my body compared to his. My weight had hardly fluctuated since high school. “A mere puff of air could blow you away!” Toru had sometimes mocked when we were children. Even then, his legs, his chest, his hands had made two of mine. Toru blinked at me placidly, as if my presence in his apartment were an everyday occurrence. “
You
haven’t changed.”