A Gesture Life Read online

  “Too big, I suppose.”

  “Well, you’ll be careful, I know,” she says, naturally pecking me on the cheek, though it’s the first time she’s ever done so. She looks as concerned as I’ve ever seen her. “I’ll stop by tomorrow, if you want. I’ve stocked the refrigerator with a few basics but we can pick up whatever else you’d like. You have all your prescriptions?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “I know you’ve managed all these years by yourself, Doc, but it’s nice to have a hand after spending time in a hospital. How are your shingles?”

  “The shingles?”

  “Your condition…”

  “Oh, very mild now. I’m recovering quickly.”

  “Okay then, we’re going,” she says, gathering her bag and cellular phone and pager, and motioning to the foyer to Renny as though she were urging him, and she says again, “Goodbye, say goodbye, Renny.” Then all the leave-takings are exchanged, the reminders reminded—of the fireplace and the oven and the new locks on the doors—and in a small caravan we all move to the foyer and open the door to the warm late afternoon light and in three breaths they are in her car and they are gone.

  Upstairs, in my bedroom, I take off my clothes and change into a pair of swim trunks, the ones I was wearing at the time of the fire misplaced somewhere at the hospital. I fold myself in a heavy terry robe and descend the stairs barefoot, smelling the tomatoey, garlic-laden chicken warming in the oven. Following Liv’s written instructions, I’ve set the timer for forty-five minutes at 325 degrees, and I open the wine (having found a brass corkscrew, a gift from Mary Burns) to let it “breathe,” though this certainly makes no difference to me. The time is just past four in the afternoon, and the leaves are petaling down from the treetops to float across the surface of the pool water like a fleet of tiny, colored punts and rafts. I don’t dive. The water is cool, bracing and fresh as with the first morning’s swim, and I’m surprised by my strength, or the strength the water seems to lend me.

  For years I would never enter water that was even slightly cool, being accustomed to the shore in Singapore and Rangoon, the tropical, bath-like waters of the Andaman Sea. In the days before the war began to go badly, my comrades and I would take trips to the beach on our leave days, to swim and play volleyball and eat fresh-caught sea porgies and spiny lobsters and eels. The natives had been instructed to prepare them with a tiny ration of shoyu and the local palm wine, an attempt intended to make us feel comfortable but which unfortunately served more to remind us of Japan than anything else, and our immense distance from it. There was (for the others) much drinking, of course, and then the usual exploits of the balmy, lanterned evenings, singing folk songs at the stars with girls who hardly knew how to speak our language.

  I used to swim after sunset on those occasions, the water placid and unrippled as I pulled my way through it. I could hear the laughter and joking of my comrades, and sometimes the strained, rote blandishments of their companions, the awkward attempts at flattery and passion which seemed unbearable to me, sober as I was. But as I swam I sometimes listened for the other ones, those girls who didn’t make much noise or speech, wondering at their quiescence as they lay beneath the palms of the shore, the snorting and grunting of men skipping out over the surface of the water in soft reports. Down the shoreline I would go, in my usual steady crawl, and each time I’d lift my face for air I glimpsed the limp strings of lights and the kerosene torches and the arm-in-arm straggles of youthful soldiers, joyously barefoot on their way back to the base, overfilled with wine and the mercies of fallen women.

  Once, in admonishment, I mentioned to Sunny what could happen to young women who strayed from the security of their families, how they would inevitably descend to the lowest level of human society and be forced to sell every part of themselves, in mind and flesh and spirit.

  “Is that so?” she answered.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “And how do you know so much about it?” she muttered, continuing to fold her clothes from the dryer. She had returned from the Gizzi house, to stay only briefly before moving on, this time out of town completely. There had been an incident at the house, a stabbing, in fact, a week or so after I made my visit there. James Gizzi had been the victim and was in critical condition at the county hospital. His friend, the black man named Lincoln, was accused of the crime and had not been arrested, having fled Bedley Run.

  I said, “I witnessed many things during the war.”

  She visibly paused at the notion, which was new to her, and had to refold a blouse before placing it on her neat stack of things.

  “You must heed me on this, Sunny. I have seen what can become of young women. It is often unpleasant. Perhaps even more so these days than during wartime. The newspaper is filled with stories of awful happenings in the city, where girls are tricked and abused. You’re going to live down there, you said.”

  “For now,” she answered limply, going back to her laundry. “I’ll probably move on.”

  “Where will you stay? How will you support yourself? You’re only eighteen and you have no skills or experience. You’ll need to work. I can’t give you enough money to support you forever.”

  “Don’t give me any then. I don’t want it.”

  “But how will you manage? I’ve always provided everything for you. I’m not saying this to criticize. It is simply the truth. You haven’t lived on your own. These past few weeks, for example, you’ve been under the care of others—”

  “I haven’t been under anybody’s care,” she said stiffly, her voice sharpening. She pulled the rest of her clothes from the dryer in a bundle. “You know where I’ve been.”

  I didn’t answer her.

  “You were by the house, I bet, weren’t you?”

  “I have no interest in watching you degrade yourself.”

  “But you came around, all the same.”

  “I was in the area and wanted to speak with you about coming back home. I should have known it would be a mistake.”

  Sunny carefully balled up a pair of red socks, her face quiet. “When did you come?”

  “On just one night. There was a party. But I assume there are always parties.”

  “Where was I?” she asked, not looking at me directly. I sensed she was feeling vulnerable, even ashamed, the latter emotion something I had rarely seen in her, and this took strong and sudden hold of me. She said in a far-off voice, “I must have been there.”

  “I did not find you,” I quickly told her. “I looked around the house. There were many people, and I saw things I would not wish to see again. But I did not find you.”

  Sunny didn’t pursue this line, and I was glad, for although my aim was to warn her of the disastrous life that lay ahead if she departed so young and unsupervised, I couldn’t bear to revisit the scene of that room at the Gizzi house, with the dull yellow lights and the two men and the piqued want of the faces. I had left before being subject to the sight of her being fully embraced, enjoyed by the kneeling man, and yet it was that moment’s picture of her pleasure and enthrallment that lingered with me, the expression she bore for the man who knelt there, the careless, open mouth, the hips turned out, the cord of her neck like an exposed wire.

  “You never talked about the war,” she said, now finished with the folding. She didn’t seem to want to leave the cramped laundry room. And there was a willingness and interest in her tone that softened me. This was in the period after the Vietnam War, when the young people weren’t so quick anymore to denounce those who fought, but began to consider the grim and terrible price all involved must have paid.

  “It’s strange to think of you as a soldier,” Sunny said softly. “I can’t imagine you in a uniform, with a rifle.”

  “I only carried a pistol,” I told her, seeing the chance to engage her. “It was an officer’s revolver, which I never shot, save a few times for practice. I was no good, you know. I never hit anything.”

  She smiled at this, freely. “You still have
it?”

  “No, no. I think it was lost during a maneuver. And everyone had to surrender their weapons at the end of the war, so I wouldn’t have it anyway.”

  “I thought you might have hidden it in your closet.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “In one of those lacquered boxes,” she said innocently. “Up on the shelf. There are so many of them, I remember. I saw them when I was little.”

  “I never showed those to you,” I said.

  “That’s true,” she answered, somewhat sheepishly. “I snooped one day. One day, that’s all. I opened one of them, and there was a piece of cloth folded inside.”

  “A what?”

  “A piece of cloth. I think it was silk. It felt like it. It was shiny, and a little tattered, I think. I thought it was someone’s, or used to be. Like a woman’s scarf, though it was completely black.”

  “It wasn’t,” I snapped at her, annoyed by the picture of her going through my things. “I don’t know where you learned to do things like that.”

  “I’m sorry, but I used to explore sometimes, when you were at the store all day. I thought you knew.”

  “I certainly did not. In any case, it wasn’t a scarf. It was a flag. From the war.”

  “Fine,” she said. “No need to get upset now.”

  “I’m upset,” I told her, “because what if I had stored a pistol there, or something else dangerous, and you had found it? What if something terrible had happened?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, but it’s like you, isn’t it? You’ve always been smart enough to know better, Sunny, and yet you’ve always had to push right up to the limits of others.”

  “Here we go, huh?” she said, stuffing her folded clothes into the white plastic basket.

  “Yes, here we go,” I answered, following her out and into the kitchen. She sat down at the table, the basket at her feet, almost waiting for my lecturing. This was often her stance, not slamming her door on me or departing the house, but rather defiantly sitting there and half-submitting, too, as if taking medicine from a doctor whose diagnosis she didn’t quite believe.

  “I’m happy that you decided on your own to stop living at that house. But you should have come to that decision earlier, certainly, or never gone there in the first place. Your willfulness will get you hurt someday. I think you know this, and yet you persist.”

  “I persist,” she said darkly.

  “Please don’t mock me. You are eighteen years old and you can show adult comportment and respect, the same I have always tried to show to you, even when you’ve been so troublesome.”

  “I’ve been more trouble to myself than to you, but I know you can’t believe that.”

  “I do believe that!” I said, my errant loudness surprising both of us. “This is my point precisely. You persist in behavior, despite your own knowledge of what is good for you and what is not. You must have known what leaving here and staying at that house would result in.”

  “You don’t know the half of it….” she said sharply, the color falling from her face.

  “I know enough!” I replied. “I know, for example, that you were often the only female in that entire place. I know what kind of men frequented there. Officer Como and her colleagues have records on a good number of them. When I heard of James Gizzi getting stabbed, I was almost sure that you had been hurt as well. Luckily, this wasn’t so, but your fortune cannot last for long. This path is reckless, and doomed.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry anymore. I’m out of there, and tomorrow I’ll be out of here. I’ll be on my way.”

  “Is that man hiding down in the city? This Lincoln Evans? Are you going to meet him?”

  She seemed surprised that I would know his name. She said, “It’s none of your business. And I wouldn’t tell you if I was going to see him. You’d just tell Officer Como, anyway.”

  “That man is a fugitive! He’s an attempted murderer.”

  “It wasn’t his fault!” Sunny shouted.

  “How can stabbing someone in the belly not be his fault? How is this possible?”

  She turned away in her chair and for a moment did not speak. Suddenly I felt afraid for her, and she said, “He was protecting me.”

  “From James Gizzi? Why?”

  “Just forget it.”

  I said, “This is what happens when you offer yourself so freely.”

  “I never gave myself to that shit,” she said, her voice breaking. “Never. And don’t you say I did. It was his house, but I never wanted anything from him. I never let him touch me. He’s disgusting.”

  “What was Gizzi doing to you? Please, you should tell me.”

  “It was in the morning,” she said, not looking at me. “Lincoln was out getting breakfast. I woke up, and he was holding down my arms.”

  “What are you saying? You didn’t say anything to the police. There was no mention of anything like this.”

  “Why would I bother?” she rasped. “Your cop friends all think I’m a whore, and they’d do anything to get their hands on Lincoln. They don’t want to hear that he was helping me.”

  “Did Gizzi…did he hurt you?” I asked her. “I’ll alert Officer Como, if this is true.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said, picking up the laundry basket. “It’s over. Nothing like that is ever going to happen to me again. I’ll kill myself before it does, I swear.”

  She stood up and hefted the basket and went upstairs. I would have suggested something then, that she stay a little longer before moving on, that I’d be happy to close the store for the weekend if she wished to do some shopping for clothes or other things I might provide for her, but she spoke those last words with such a finality and resolve—like a grown woman, in fact, charged and righteous—that there didn’t seem the appropriate moment and space in which to offer anything myself. I was simply shocked and outraged by what she had implied, but even more, if I’m to reflect fully, I felt the drug of fear course through me, and with it the revisitation of a long-stored memory of another young woman who once spoke nearly the same words.

  Sunny stayed that night at the house, though not in her bedroom. I hadn’t touched or disturbed a thing in there, not her many hairbrushes, not her books or records or her posters, in fact I hadn’t even cleaned or vacuumed, as I thought I should wait for her return. But instead of her own bed she chose to pull down from the closet some old quilts to make up a floorbed, spreading them three high in the family room in front of the fireplace. I sat in one of the wing chairs, somewhat to the side of her. She lighted a fire, which she always liked to do, and sat down before the small flame, blowing on it and feeding it with newspaper and kindling. When she was young, she would ask me nightly if we could light one, even when the weather wasn’t cold enough to do so, and often I would oblige her. She could spend hours in front of it, letting her face and limbs grow hot to the touch, and I would have to ask that she move back, for fear of her getting burned. She never wanted to use the fireplace screen because it dulled the heat, and that night of her brief return to the house, she pushed it aside as well. I used to lecture her on the dangers of flying sparks, reminding her that even one fiery mote could set a house ablaze, but she never seemed to hear me, only propping the screen to one side, happy to shield but a small corner of the room.

  It is ironic, of course, that I should have been the one who caused a near-conflagration, and put my beloved house in danger. But as with everything else, I have begun to appreciate—perhaps like my old friend Fujimori—the odd aspects of things, unsettling as they may be. Take this pool, for instance. I’ve always esteemed the dark stone inlay, not the painted blue surround that one sees so clearly from the sky when landing in most any American city, the azure rectangles and circles beside the dotted houses. The water in mine appears nearly lightless, whether in bright sun or dusk, and the feeling sometimes is that you are not swimming in water at all, in something material and true, but rat
her pulling yourself blindly through a mysterious resistance whose properties are slowly revealing themselves beneath you, in flame-like roils and tendrils, the black fires of the past.

  8

  WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN, I didn’t seek out the pleasure of women. At least not like my comrades in arms, who in their every spare moment seemed ravenous for any part of a woman, in any form, whether in photographs or songs or recounted stories, and of course, whenever possible, in the flesh. Pictures were most favored, being easy. I remember a corporal who in his radio code book kept illicit slides of disrobed maidens, a sheaf of which he had salvaged from a bombed-out colonial mansion in Indonesia. Whenever I walked by the communications tent he would call out in a most proper voice, “Lieutenant Kurohata, sir, may I receive an opinion from you please.”

  The women in his pictures were Western, I think French or Dutch, and caught by the camera in compromising positions, like bending over to pick up a dropped book, or being attended in the bath by another nude woman, or reclined in bed and pulling up a furry scarf between the legs. The corporal had perhaps a score of these, each featuring a different scene, replete with detailed settings and whatever scant costume, and he slowly shuffled through them with an unswerving awe and reverence that made me believe he was a Christian. Of course I shouldn’t have allowed him to address me so familiarly, but we were from the same province and hometown and he was exuberantly innocent and youthful and he never called to me if others were within earshot. I knew at the time that he had never been with a real woman, but he seemed to know their intimacies, as if in going through his photos he had become privy to the secrets of lovemaking, the positions and special methods and the favored styles of the moment.

  I myself, up to that time, was hardly what one could call experienced, but unlike the corporal I found little of interest in the hand-sized tableaux. They held for me none of the theatrics and drama that he clearly savored in them. Instead, I was sure, they smacked of the excess and privilege of a sclerotic, purulent culture, the very forces that our nation’s people and will were struggling against, from Papua New Guinea and Indonesia to where we were posted at the time, in the foothill country of old Burma, approximately 125 kilometers from the outskirts of Rangoon. The women in the photocards were full-figured, not quite young, though several of them were attractive in an exotic manner, such as circus performers who do bizarre tricks to force one’s eye.