A Gesture Life Read online

  There were two young men sitting on an old sofa on the front lawn, passing a bottle of liquor and a strange-looking pipe between them. One would tip back the bottle while the other lit the short pipe, and from the smell I knew it was probably marijuana they were smoking. The heavy sweetness of the odor was reminiscent of the time I was stationed in Burma during the war, when some of my comrades would hang certain giant leaves to dry and then cut them up to smoke. Everyone preferred real cigarettes, of course, but there was never enough of them (and toward the end of the conflict, none at all), and the leaves provided a bit of mirth and laxity to our spirits, if also a seizing headache at evening’s end.

  The men noticed me through the hazy light and motioned excitedly for me to approach them. They had longish hair in the prevailing style and swarthy, unshaven faces, though I could tell from their voices that they were in their twenties, the youthful ring still there.

  “Hey, man, c’mover here, yeah,” the skinnier one said to me. “Hey, Sonny, look, man, it’s like, ‘The Master.’ Hey, old-timer, c’mover here and have a toke with us.”

  I decided to speak to them, as I thought to ask them if they knew Sunny, and whether she was inside.

  “Hey, man,” the same one said, handing me the pipe. “Would you mind calling me ‘Grasshopper’? Will you say it?”

  “I’m looking for my daughter.”

  “Yeah, sure. Will you just say it?”

  “Do you know her? Is she inside?”

  “Just a sec, old-timer, first things first. C’mon, say it for us. Say, ‘Well done, Grasshopper.’”

  “The entire phrase?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  So I said to him, “Well done, Grasshopper.”

  At this they instantly broke out in laughter, the skinny one slapping his knee as he bellowed. His thick-cheeked friend was slower in his movements, not laughing as soundly but almost silently, as if he’d tickled himself with a funny idea.

  I asked them, “Do you know my daughter, Sunny? Is she inside the house?”

  The skinny one kept laughing but thumbed toward the front door, waving me to go in. All the while he kept saying the phrase to his friend in a choppy, halting voice, not at all as I had spoken it. My accent has never been perfect, and was less so then, but I’ve always been somewhat proud of my flowing verbiage, and that I speak in the familiar, accepted rhythms.

  “Is she inside?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” the skinny one said, hardly able to look at me without gasping, “everybody’s in the house.”

  “Thank you.”

  I returned the pipe (untried) and ventured up the tumbled, cracked concrete steps to the door. I banged the fake brass knocker but even I could hardly hear it for the loudness of the music inside. The knob hung loose and was almost falling off and the door swung open with a slight push. The place was raucous and crowded. As there was no foyer I was immediately in the small living room, where people were crammed onto the sectional L-shaped sofa, as well as sitting on its back and low arms. People were dancing everywhere, couples and then sole men unsteadily swaying to themselves. What struck me immediately was that a number of the partygoers were black and Puerto Rican; colored people were a rare sight in Bedley Run, especially at social events, and never did one see such “mixed” gatherings. I, certainly, would sometimes find myself at Mary Burns’s country club for social hours and dances, the only one of my kind, a minor but still uncomfortable feeling, like the digging edge of an overstarched collar. But here everyone seemed unconcerned, and I was strangely heartened by the fact, though my next thought was that Sunny wasn’t simply involving herself intimately with all these men white and brown and black, but was living with them as well, with no other company but theirs.

  I didn’t see her anywhere in the room. There were glances and bemused stares but no one seemed to care much about my presence as I went from one group to the next. I was surprised by how few women there were, perhaps a handful out of the crowd of twenty-five or thirty. They looked much older than Sunny, at least twice her age, sallow and fleshy and long-traveled from their youth. I was reminded of the women who sat on stools outside certain alley shops of my native seaside town, their faces painted the colors of crimson and ash, languorous popular songs filtering out beneath the lanterned eaves of their tiny “houses.”

  The house kitchen was a rancid, overflowing mess of bottles and ashtrays and spaghetti sauce–stained dishes, the doorless cupboards mostly bare except for a few cans of chili and soup. Down the corridor to the bedrooms there were people sitting on the floor against the walls, drinking beer and smoking while they waited for the bathroom. I could see the doors of the two bedrooms down at the end, and suddenly I was deeply afraid of what I might do if I found her behind one of them. I couldn’t bear to imagine what awful sight it might be, what horrible tangle and depravity. I had only really seen Sunny with boys at the country club, all of them in their tennis whites and sneakers, or at the cotillion-type gatherings in the evenings, their bodies orderly and arranged and the touching in steady orchestrations, the careful waltzes and reels. Even then I used to wonder how I should feel when I saw some severely slim, tall lad place his hand on the small of her back, let it slip down a notch, whether I ought to burn with indignation or shiver or stand back in prideful and surrendering melancholy. And if she were only mine, of my own blood, would the feelings run different? Would I tremble and shake with an even purer intensity?

  The first door was half-opened, and when I peered inside a group of a half-dozen or so young people were sitting in a circle, passing around a large pipe. Someone jeered at me and as I didn’t see Sunny among them, I quickly shut the door. I knocked on the other door and announced myself as loudly as I could, but there was no answer. I repeated the action but to no avail. I tried the knob and found it, like everything about the house, unsecured. A stereo was playing its own blaring music. The room was illuminated by a bizarre flowing-liquid bulb of a lamp, the light poor and in a dizzying mix of colors, and in the dim I saw a large bed with high corner posts, a gauzy sheet thrown over as a makeshift canopy. Two figures languidly wrestled within the lair; I called to them, but again could hardly hear my own voice. Then one of them, I thought the man, kneeled up on the bed and lay on the other. The two began then, moving in that clipped, rolling action I dreaded to see. I shuddered with the thought that she was under him. I couldn’t hear them and they couldn’t hear me, and I approached the veiled bed. They didn’t see me, being in their own realm. Were I an assassin, they would have been doomed.

  I touched the netting at the foot of the bed, and at that moment the music paused and a murmur rose up—she had noticed me. And yet she didn’t rebel. It was hard to see and I called her name and she cooed, and what I could make out finally was that she was beckoning me, darkly, taunting me with the vile display of her carnality. I had with me a small dagger, which I sometimes carried for self-defense, but now I felt its menacing weight in my breast pocket, its leather scabbard hard against my chest. My heart flooded black, and at that moment I wished she were nothing to me, dead or gone or disappeared, so that I might strike out at the bodies with the full force of my rage, tear at them with whatever strength I could muster.

  “Hey, man, it’s not like a block party,” a gruff voice said. “You gotta be invited.”

  “Sunny,” I said, suddenly unable to speak but weakly. “Sunny…”

  “Let him in, sugar,” a softer voice lazily answered. “C’mon. C’mon, sugar, yeah, come inside.”

  The record repeated and the woman inside the bed reached out to me. She had turned on a bed lamp. Her fingers were long and thin, and I realized it wasn’t Sunny at all. She had a narrow, drawn expression with sleepy eyes. She smiled faintly, her lips moving, saying something. Her partner had already ceased caring about my presence, and he went back to his business, his hips working their way between her heavy, stippled thighs. But she kept her attention on me, unctuously gesturing, and even as he leaned and bucked i
nto her she held out her open hand to me, as if I should take it when I crept my way inside.

  I left the room straightaway, nearly stumbling over the huddled drinkers and smokers in the narrow corridor. All of a sudden the house seemed unbearably small and stifling. Someone was flicking on and off the hall and living room lights, and the effect was maddening and disorienting. Most everyone in the house began to dance, the music having changed from rock songs to the incessant beat of disco music, which was immensely popular at the time. But to me everything seemed a jangle of limbs. I began to feel that this house, these people, the party, were spinning out of control. The living room was transformed into a rank swamp of bodies, and having no path of exit, I stepped outside the back kitchen door as quickly as I could.

  It was a great relief. And there, as I stood on the ruined cobble of the patio under a wide starless sky, the reports of music and voices playing off the hidden trees, an image of another time suddenly appeared to me, when I began my first weeks of service in the great Pacific war. I was initially stationed in Singapore, awaiting my orders to whatever front I would be sent to.

  One evening, my comrades and I were on our way to a welcoming club, a grand house which was once a prominent British family’s residence but was now used as a semi-official officers’ club, with the usual entertainments. There was no sanctioned establishment as yet, and we young officers were more than grateful for the outpost.

  My mates, Lieutenants Enchi and Fujimori, and I had eaten our dinner at a cart stand and were strolling to the club, a yellow two-story colonial structure with a double veranda and white columns. Enchi was already quite drunk, as usual, and Fujimori didn’t have far to go. Drinking was never very alluring to me, but that night I had decided to take a few glasses of rice spirits with dinner. We were to be shipped out to our respective fronts in a matter of days, each of us assigned as medical assistants to bases that would serve the forward units. It was an august time, those first years of the war, and everyone to the man was supremely hopeful of a swift and glorious end to the fighting.

  Enchi was talking about the girls that were to be brought to the club that evening. He was excited and speaking quite loudly, his face flushed with drink.

  “I heard there are to be local girls there tonight, young ones, perhaps even virgins.”

  Fujimori said to him, in his customary dry manner, “You wouldn’t know it if they were, Hideo, you grand masturbator.”

  “I certainly would!” Enchi cried, coming up and slinging his arms about us, so that we were a trio. “Your sister isn’t a virgin, let me tell you”

  It was an old joke from him, and Fujimori was of course unperturbed. He unhinged himself from us and replied, “Well, let’s see if you can manage your way inside one tonight. The last time, I practically had to aim you. But you don’t remember. You never remember.”

  I wasn’t with them on their last “outing,” as I had little interest in pleasure-for-hire, but that evening I thought I would at least accompany them, if only to see if their exploits matched the accounts I’d listened to, which were always extremely colorful.

  “My good friend Jiro,” Enchi said to me, lurching us forward with his heavy steps, “why don’t you join us tonight? What is it? Are you not so fond of women? You can tell me.”

  “I’m not fond of women who are prostitutes,” I said, though in truth I’d made several of my own visits, in secret. “Besides, they’re all old and probably diseased. Made of face powder and cheap perfume.”

  “That’s why you ought to stay around tonight!” Enchi replied, poking me in the chest. I pushed him away and he nearly fell down on the road. Fujimori was up ahead of us, calling in a strange voice after some schoolgirls walking on the other side of the canal. Enchi went on, “These are fresh girls who are coming. You’ll see. They’re not the old Japanese aunties who are shipped in. I’m tired of them, too, you know. It’s like screwing a bag of soybean curds, just all mush and mess.”

  “I wonder what they must say of you, Hideo.”

  “No matter, no matter,” he said, shaking his large, squarish head. He had the habit of closing his eyes when beginning to speak. Within a month, I would receive a telegram from Fujimori that Enchi had been killed in Borneo, torn apart by a mortar round outside a medical station. “I’m not proud, Jiro. Not proud at all. I’m only looking for a bit of satisfaction. Just a little bit and I’ll die happy.”

  As we approached the clubhouse, we saw a crowd of soldiers outside. Fujimori had already reached them. Usually such gatherings would be loud and boisterous, but there was a stillness about the air that seemed unnatural. They were standing in a group at one side of the house, near the front of the wide veranda. Fujimori was ordering them to make way for him, being an officer. When we ran up, there were other officers now coming out from the main entrance, shouting orders at the group on the ground.

  “Move back! Don’t touch anything!”

  “I’m a medical officer,” I heard Fujimori say. He sounded grave and sober. “But it doesn’t matter. She’s in no need.”

  “I say move back!” The man speaking was Major Irota, chief of staff to General Yamashita. He was the only one out of uniform—in fact, he was wearing a blue silk robe and was slipperless. “Who saw what happened? Speak up!” The men stood silent, except for Fujimori, who was kneeling by a girl. Enchi and I were standing beside him. The girl was naked, and the skin of her young body looked smooth and perfect, except that her head was crooked too far upward. It was obvious her neck was cleanly broken. She was quite dead.

  “No one saw anything?” Major Irota shouted. “Very well. I expect it to remain so. Now I want all of you off these grounds immediately. Lieutenant, you’ll bring the girl inside.”

  He was ordering Fujimori, and as nobody had any choice in the matter I helped him carry the body inside. Enchi stood aside, looking slightly sick. Fujimori lifted her by the armpits and I took her legs. She was astoundingly light; one of us could have easily done the job. We brought her inside while Enchi followed. The major motioned for us to go to the back of the house, the duty officer leading us to a cramped room behind the kitchens. We laid her out on a butcher’s table, and he ordered us to wrap her in burlap. We would do so and then report to the duty officer that the body was ready.

  The girl was the first dead person I had ever seen. She was neither homely nor pretty. She was just a girl, otherwise unremarkable, perhaps fifteen or so. I kept thinking she looked to be Korean, with her broad, square face. She barely had any pubic hair. Her palms were lighter-toned than her hands. The same with her feet. I lifted and turned her as Fujimori spread the cut-up sacks beneath her. Enchi was sitting in a chair in the corner, watching us as he nervously smoked.

  “It’s only one floor,” he finally said, quizzically. “She must have landed just so to snap her neck like that.”

  Outside, when I first lifted the girl, I had noticed two girls’ faces peering over the ledge of a second-floor window. They looked scared more than sad. Then they were quickly pulled back inside.

  “Perhaps she made sure to land on her head,” he said, but Fujimori didn’t answer. He had placed the sacks over her chest and shoulders and around her legs and was now winding the cord tightly to bind her.

  “It’s like one of those English-style roasts, eh, Fujimori?”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m not trying to be humorous,” Enchi said.

  “Shut up, anyway,” Fujimori said again, this time quite grimly. He pulled a bag over the girl’s head and wound the cord about her neck, then weaved the loose end through the bindings on her torso. He neatly slip-knotted it, and soon enough he was done. We then stood there for a moment, looking at his unusual work.

  “How skilled, us medics,” Enchi said from his chair. “The major will be impressed.”

  The atmosphere in the house that evening was typically rowdy. No one seemed mindful of what had happened a few hours earlier, that a girl had leaped to her death from one of the very ro
oms now being employed for the officers’ entertainment. Enchi was so drunk with rice wine that he had passed out in the parlor room, never making it upstairs, and Fujimori, who always grew quieter as he indulged, was sitting glumly among the regular working ladies, sipping at his porcelain drinking cup. We didn’t say much to each other after preparing the girl. We had caught sight of the duty officer and a corporal carrying her body out the back of the house, to a light transport truck. They counted aloud and swung it up and in like a sack of radishes. One could clearly hear the full sound it made on the metal bed, deep-voiced and surprising.

  I wandered upstairs, eventually. I wasn’t particularly interested in the entertainments of the new girls. But I kept thinking about them looking over the edge of the sill, how they’d gazed transfixedly at the body. On the landing, several men were playing a card game, gambling while they awaited their turn in the bedrooms. One of them was complaining that the wait would be longer, as now there was one fewer than before.

  “Say, what are you doing?” he barked at me. I was walking down the wide, ornately papered hallway. “There’s an order here, if you haven’t noticed. We’re the next group.”

  “I’m not waiting.”

  “You’re surely not,” he said, rising from his kneeling position. He teetered slightly before gaining his feet. “I’ll make certain of that.”

  “I told you I’m not on the queue.”

  “Then where are you going?”

  “Can’t you see I’m a medical officer?”

  He peered at my lapel insignia and nodded. Then he realized that I had been one of the men to carry in the body. “Oh, I get it. You’re here to save us from the clap. But don’t you think you ought to have checked the girls before they got started? It’s a bit late now, isn’t it?”