The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men (8 page)

Claire applauds.

Gradually the spotlight narrows, and the magician lifts from his black table a long samurai sword, unsheathed with a hiss and inserted into the light with one upswung stroke. Then Hadashi raises the moth to his lips for a farewell kiss before setting it to flight. It makes the same uncertain circle as before and seems at first to alight on the gleaming point of the
katana
. The wings, though, never stop fluttering. I assume it’s merely a problem of balance until gradually I come to understand. The creature is impaling itself.

For a long time it struggles, its task made more difficult by the increasing width of the blade. For a moment I slip back into the story itself, amazed at how diligent the moth is, how like a bird it beats its wings against the resisting steel. And how like a fairy tale it dies. Hadashi’s hand never falters though. Claire and I are seated close enough to the scene—or perhaps this is only my imagination—that we can see the glistening point as it breaks through the animal’s back. Still, it takes an eternity for the wings to stop beating, a time during which the spotlight shrinks into an even narrower column of light, until at last we see only the pale hand of the master, the cold silver blade, and the slowly stiffening wings.

When the spotlight widens, Hadashi is with us again, smiling his slight smile and passing the sword to an assistant. Then he places a hibachi on his table and makes a fire with another snap of his fingers. Burns a strip of rice paper to show the fire is real. Next he takes off
his coat and replaces it with a chef’s apron before setting an ordinary skillet into the flames. All of this he does without a word, letting the fire do its work until he has a dab of butter sizzling in the pan, adding, after a moment, a handful of sugar and a touch of sherry as the mixture begins to caramelize. Then lets the blaze lick higher, tilting the skillet this way and that until crackling blue flames halo the edges. And then, with one smooth motion, he swallows the moth between lid and pan. Just like that.

It is at this point that I become more fully conscious of Claire. What I mean is that I realize I’ve left her without a significant role in the story so far, not even a reaction to the magician’s act. So I listen for her words as Hadashi snatches the lid away and flips the contents into the air, the moth flying once again beautifully, radiantly into the upper darkness, while I seem to hear her saying something about home, going home. And I begin to think that my idea of amusement might be a bit droll for someone just out of her teens.

“There’s no need to be upset,” I assure her. “It’s just an illusion. Just a moth. And anyway”—I try to make her smile—“they do it to the women all the time.”

“Do what, Jack?”

“The magicians. They stick ’em with swords.”

“I think I want to go home.”

That makes me pause. Finally I ask, “When you say you want to go home, do you mean to my place? Or home to your parents … in New Orleans?”

5

Now I can tell she’s all out of patience, and why not? Yesterday she flew a thousand miles to spend the night in a pink cheap motel near the hospital in order to be with me today because I have no wife, no other children, and the weight falls where it always does. I can see the tightening of her shoulders and the clenching of the jaw and the deep,
deep breath she takes. “Pop,” she exhales at last. “Do you want me to see if they’ll give you something to make you sleep?”

“Why would you do that?”

“It’s okay to be nervous. You just need to save your strength.”

“I’m not nervous.”

“They do this operation all the time. It’s almost routine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your story. It was just a dream, or maybe the medication. Anyhow—I think your imagination was giving you a picture of yourself as Claire. Who naturally wants to go home, because you’re somewhere you’ve never been before and it’s a little unfamiliar and a little frightening. But it’s going to be okay. I promise.”

“This is what they taught you in graduate school?”

“Pop, there wasn’t a Japanese magician. Dr. Hadashi is your doctor. I met him yesterday. In this room. Here.”

“You’re telling me how to write my own story?”

“Your ‘magician’ was using a scalpel, and even in your dream the moth ‘came back to life,’ didn’t it? It’s going to be okay.”

So this is to be our Thanksgiving and Christmas, is it? The long sleepy interlude after the feast when we plop down in stuffed comfort and talk. Like families. Only now she’s telling me I’m a coward. And I am in one sense. But this isn’t going to be the dream story she suspects, not by any measure. It’s something else entirely. And what I’m trying to confess is that after the marriage to her mother failed and the novel succeeded—shortly after that combined tragedy—I began taking my students to lunch. That’s what I’m trying to tell her.

Only now I’m wondering if she realizes that Hadashi is the same surgeon who operated on her mother. And that that’s why I chose him. We live in such a small space, after all, and for such a short time. We have to expect these coincidences. I wonder if that’s occurred to her yet.

6

I first met Claire from the bed of one of her housemates. What I mean of course is that they all shared a bungalow on Charles Street and treated me, the four of them, with a nonchalance that seemed at the time like a holdover from the sixties. I was Jack. They were sweet. And what was the harm of it until the one crisp November morning when I raised myself on one elbow, still in the musky warmth of Katie and the previous night, to uncover enough of a coincidence to make the story of the Japanese magician into tragedy: Claire and I both had early classes. She was the dark one. The tall thin one who looked like a movie director’s idea of an art major—large, liquid eyes and a face too intelligent for her to be cast simply as “housemate number two.”

Then, after I rubbed my face and untangled some of the bedcover, I found her still in the hallway, still staring at me and made beautiful by a morning light too delicate to cast a shadow. And so I suggested, “Hi?”

“Hi,” she said. Like someone encountering a foreign language.

Why was I surprised? It was her house after all, and I was the stranger struggling to get his feet on the floor and taking care to rearrange the sheets over the bare shoulders lying next to me and sniffing and rubbing my face again like an old drunk. And she had every right to stare the way they stare when they think they’re safe. When they reach that dangerous plateau where you can actually see them thinking “we’re all adults here.”

“You need to use the bathroom first?” she asked.

“Ah, no. You go ahead.”

There. As simple as that. My moment of unfaithfulness to Katie, with whom I had been unfaithful to Ashley, with whom I’d been unfaithful to Ann Marie, my wife. It would be the moment in the film of my life in which the camera crept close and tried to find some flicker of a decision working its way across my face. Except that there isn’t any decision of course, just a need to find something I had been searching
for. Trying to clear my head and maybe even to determine if her robe really was hanging open and if it was the thinness of her thighs or my own imagination that vastly exaggerated her sex. This was the moment when I dropped my eyes and spoke so softly that I
must
have known it was already a secret between us. Like a man enslaved.

Later, downstairs, we shared bagels and juice. She had transformed herself. In the fairy tale it would have been into a princess, I suppose. Here, a fashion model. While I had stuffed myself into jeans and T-shirt, the motley of middle age. We talked in conspiratorial voices, stumbling past the awkwardness of it all until she said something like “you’re the writer, right?” and maybe giggled. I’m not sure.

“Yeah,” I said, because a
yes
would have been unbelievable, “a literary genius.” And then I did the eyebrow thing and crooked a smile, saying, “Do you see my socks over there somewhere, maybe on the floor?” Which is what convinced her, I believe. Not flowers or fancy words. Socks. Because women really don’t believe in the ritual of romance. They believe in breakfast. That’s the secret, I have found. Letting them see that you’re watching them eat, caressing their food with your eyes. Marriages have been made on less.

Except then I heard myself saying, “Katie and I are having lunch at the Depot. You want to come along?”

And her saying, “Why?” Not one of the responses I had anticipated.

“I’m working on a story. And I was wondering if you’d be interested. Either of you. Or both.”

Claire drew back an inch and smiled polite incomprehension. How could she know what I meant? I hardly knew myself.

“It’s a story about food,” I improvised.

She stopped chewing. Swallowed and hardened her eyes, showing, I suppose, that you can carry this silliness too far.

“Not about food actually, but a chef. I’m basing it on a real person. Named Hadashi. Who has a reputation for giving performances that are a bit over the line. Dinner extravaganzas, that sort of thing. He cooks children or something.”

Claire spread butter on her bagel, bit, and chewed provocatively. “Hmmm. What does he really do?”

“A little magic, a little culinary art, a little pornography. At times I think he can be a bit indelicate, so if you’re put off by …”

“He’s some kind of performance artist, right?”

“Look, the only thing I know for certain is that there’s sex above and below and inside of everything we put into our mouths….” I waited, and she waited with me to see how this new silliness would end. “And that your other housemate, Samantha …” I drew my finger through the faint film of grease coating the tabletop, making an elegant snail’s path that stopped in front of her plate, where I pressed down hard, then lifted, so that the residual stickiness tugged at the skin of my fingertip. “… and her friend Jamie were making love on this table exactly one minute before you sat down.”

She laughed out loud.

Perhaps that was when I fell in love. I don’t know. It was hard to tell at the time, and I was as vacant as an empty room. I knew that Claire was one of the little literary girls who hang around every literary event at every college in the country. Then disappear. So I must have known from the start that I would lose her. I just didn’t know what it would mean. I suppose I thought the story itself would save me.

I mean, if you’re the writer … right?

7

Hadashi did not look beyond our table when he asked for volunteers. And he was reaching out his hand even before Claire rose up from her seat. Whispering to her while she ascended the stairs, as if I had nothing at all to do with this part of the story. My friend Robert, always on the periphery of darkness, stood close enough that I could see the confusion, then the alarm, spreading across his face.

“I thought she wanted to go home,” I shrugged.

He gave me a tense smile, Robert did, and then slipped away to the bar, where he engaged one of the waitresses in conversation, both of them glancing at me from time to time. Though I gave them nothing in return. My eye stayed upon Hadashi and the magic he was working in the delicate light that I had seen somewhere before.

When he hypnotized her, it was like a courtship. He did it without orb or pendulum, just soft words and slight touches of the hand, caressing her shoulder as he whispered, lifting one of the wavelets of her hair—all the things that I myself had not thought to do. And soon she was asleep, responding occasionally with a murmur or a moan too private to be translated. Until finally Hadashi lifted Claire’s hand into the light, where it seemed to float. Then he lowered it, soothing her body at the same time with those wavering motions of his hand. Then he brought his face closer to hers and gave her the same kiss he had given the moth.

I had to blink to convince myself I had not been hypnotized as well.

During this interlude a mute, faceless corps of attendants began to rearrange the stage. They transformed the empty space into an imaginary banquet hall, with pasteboard columns and crumbling arches. The veils and tapestries of a castle. A wooden table as long as a ship—one chair at either end and a vast expanse between. All of this accomplished against a backdrop of half a dozen figures straining to roll a crude new shape onto center stage, a machine of some sort, an iron engine with levers and dials and hinged doors leaking an orange glow. It was as massive as a locomotive and, very soon, as loud. What it gave out was the rush of a blowtorch, and what we saw inside, through the one low portal, was a hurricane of fire.

Then four more attendants emerged, carrying on their shoulders a metal tray, which they lowered onto the banquet table. It looked like a shallow coffin, blackened by fire and dented by long use, its meaning made more obscure by the last figure to leave the stage, who emptied two buckets of water into its length. The whole scene was
like watching a circus, our eyes flitting among dark impressions and being drawn back inevitably to the one figure whose slightest movement suggested new illusions and new meanings. And it was not long before he had refocused our attention by making the most mundane of gestures. Hadashi took up a pair of scissors from his table of props and raised them above his head, making several snips into the air. Nothing mysterious, he seemed to be saying. Scissors. Just like the ones you use at home.

Then he stepped behind Claire, making with his left hand a sweeping gesture as if to offer, ladies and gentlemen, an appreciative view.

Then raised the scissors again with his right hand and gave two distinct snips above her head. The blades sliced through the air, and Claire’s dress fell to her feet. Then her underclothing, rings, watch, and necklace fell away with the second snip. I saw it and did not doubt the magic, because I already knew the truth of her. Her breasts hardly noticeable except for their delicate whiteness. Her body straight and sad. A pillow of thick, dark hair where her legs met. She was as frail and lovely as a luna moth. And as cold and quiet as a corpse.