A Gesture Life Read online

  I nod, even though I’m unsure whether I did or not, whether I ever understood at all how deeply that time might have affected her. I was so thoroughly organized in my convincing her (though none of it would have worked had she not been plain scared inside, a frightened girl of seventeen, no matter how sure of herself she was, or believed she was), that I couldn’t stop until it was complete. I forced her to do it. Had she decided not to, I don’t know what I would have done. In a way, it was a kind of ignoring that I did, an avoidance of her as Sunny—difficult, rash, angry Sunny—which I masked with a typical performance of consensus building and subtle pressure, which always is the difficult work of attempting to harmonize one’s life and the lives of those whom one cherishes. It is the systematic operation, which always and obtusely succeeds, the well-planned response to life’s uncertainties and complications. And then, too, it is a profoundly arresting thing to realize the exact mode and matter of one’s own life at the very moment it is becoming incarnate and true, namely, how after you have pushed aside and pushed aside and pushed aside again, the old beacons will bob up once more, dotting the waters before you like a glowing ring of fire.

  14

  NOW AND THEN, I sometimes forget who I really am. I will be sitting downstairs in the kitchen, or on the edge of the lounger by the pool, or here under the covers in my bed, and I lose all sense of myself. I forget what it is I do, the regular activity of my walk and my swim and my taking of tea, the minor trappings and doings of my days, what I’ve made up to be the token flags of my life. I forget why it is I do such things, why they give me interest or solace or pleasure. Then I might get up in the middle of the night and dress and walk all the way to town, to try to figure once again the notices, the character, the sorts of actions of a man like me, what things or set of things define him in the most simple and ordinary way. But I forget the usuals, who his friends might be, his associates; I forget even that he has a tenuous and fragile hold of family, this the only idea that dully rings of remembrance in his heart. He walks at night in the center of town and it is too dark to see even a reflection in the glass of his old store. He’s stopped by a patrol car and asked what he’s doing and he says nothing, I’m not really walking, I’m not really here, and he turns for home with the cruiser slowly trailing him, unintentionally lighting his way.

  When I reach the house and close the front door it’s then I think K has finally come back for me. It is the moment I think I feel at home. I am sure I was regarding her last night, her figure naked and pale, loosely enrobed in a black silken flag. The sight of her shook me. I saw her more clearly than I ever had before, as I was not dreaming or conjuring but simply reacquainting myself with her, as I might any friend of my youth. And so she visited me. Last night she lightly pattered up and down the hallway in her bare feet, pausing outside my bedroom door. I knew it was she. I sat up and told her to come in and she stepped to the foot of my lone twin bed. Though she sat down I couldn’t feel any press of her weight, and once again, for a moment, I was almost sure she was a spectral body or ghost. But I am not a magical man, and never have been. I am unversed in the metaphysical, have long become estranged from it, and if this can be so, I believe the metaphysical is as much unversed in me. We have a historical pact. And as deeply as I wished she were some wondrous, ethereal presence, that I was being duly haunted, I knew that she was absolute, unquestionably real, a once-personhood come wholly into being.

  “Lieutenant,” she asked demurely, her voice full of penitence. “Did you sleep peacefully last night? I hope you’ll forgive me if I say you look somewhat weary this morning.”

  “I do feel weary,” I answered. “Thank you for your concern. But what is it, K? It seems something is on your mind.”

  “I’m sorry to ask this once again.”

  “Please, K. You may ask me anything.”

  “I like to think so, Lieutenant.”

  “Well, then?”

  “Will we be going away soon, Lieutenant?”

  Her question was brand-new to me, but somehow I felt vaguely annoyed by it anyway. Even angry. I said to her, the hairs tingling on the back of my neck, “Where would we be going to, K?”

  “I had hoped we would finally travel to all the places we have spoken of. To Shanghai, and Kyoto, and perhaps even Seoul. Or some other place.”

  I didn’t answer, and she noticed this and asked if I was upset.

  “I’m not upset,” I said, quite tersely, causing her to inch back on the bed. “But I have to wonder, why being here is so abhorrent to everyone but me? We have everything that we require. And much more. We have an impressive house and property in the best town in the area, where we are happily known and respected. We have ample time and quiet and means. I have tried as hard as I can to provide these things, and we have been welcomed as warmly as anyone can expect. Everything is in delicate harmony. And yet still you seem dissatisfied.”

  “I am not dissatisfied,” she said, her eyes glassy and full-looking. “But I am anxious, Lieutenant. I do hope we might move on from this place. Nothing is wrong with it, nothing at all. But I know I will not die here. I cannot die here. And sometimes, sir, I so wish to.”

  Her words at first confused me, as I thought she was saying this wouldn’t be a suitable place for her to pass over to the next life. But then I realized she meant that it wouldn’t be possible, as if this house were some penultimate trap of living, sustaining her beyond the pale.

  “I don’t want you to die,” I said to her, feeling just as suddenly that this is a daily conversation we have, that we have gone over this ground before, and before. So I told her, as I always do, “I want you to live with me forever.”

  A faint, sad smile softened her face, and she let slip the black cloth from her shoulders and lay down with me beneath the covers. Her skin was cool and chaste to me, almost sisterly, alabastrine, and I thought I had convinced her to remain yet again, remembering now how many times I had done so, today and yesterday and all the days before that, in a strange and backward perpetuity. I keep winning her over with hardly an argument, though each time an ill feeling comes over me, the soiling, resident sickness you develop when you have never in your life been caught at something wrong, when you have never once been discovered.

  I lay back down and closed my eyes to sleep, sure that K would stay with me through the night. But when I woke up in the dim of predawn she was gone, and I put on my slippers and robe and went about the house, upstairs and down and even in the basement, in steady search of her. There were the remnants of a fire in the family room hearth, and I could not remember if I had lit one the evening before (I had been doing so periodically, if carefully, since that sudden conflagration). The scent of moist ash lingered in the air. For a moment I thought it smelled naturally of freshly tilled ground, of just-disturbed earth, but then I realized it was in fact not earth at all I was sensing but water. The scent was of the sea, a warm and gentle southern sea. Then I thought I saw a shadow pass outside the French doors of the kitchen, and being certain it was K, I quickly stepped outside. I called out and waited but there was no answer, no sound at all, not even the movement of wind through the tree branches. From the far end of the property the light of a reflection caught my eye, and with sharp anticipation I went to it, going around the pool and past the small cabana to the part of my property where the lawn ends and the wooded area between my land and the neighbor’s begins. I was quite sure I would find her, or come across the black silken cloth, left in a hurry by her on the ground. But there was nothing but brush and fallen leaves and the silent trunks of the trees. When I looked back across the precious, stately landscape of my property, it seemed I had traveled far miles to the place I was standing, as if I had gone round and round the earth in an endless junket, the broad lawn a continent, the pool a whole ocean, the house the darkened museum of a one-man civilization, whose latent history, if I could so will it, would be left always unspoken, unsung.

  When I was once again inside I thought to run t
he water in the upstairs hall bath, the one Sunny used when she was still living in the house. The faint smell was of a shut-off dampness and mold. As with her bedroom, I had completely gone over the surfaces with spackle and paint, and then had the tiles on the wall and floor regrouted, but the work was still old enough even with the room left unused that it looked quite grim and shabby. A hard crust of greenish scale covered the spigot, which ran very slowly, and over the years the drip had discolored the area around the drain with a watery-edged patch of rust. When I turned on the hot water the tap shook and coughed, and then with a violent spew a stream of reddish-brown liquid began to flow. When it finally cleared I shut it off and flipped down the lever for the drain, but it was slow and I had to wait for some time for the dirty water to swirl down and away before filling up the tub again, nearly right to the top. I stepped out of my clothes and sat in the minerally, prickling water. It was hot enough that I thought my flesh was dissolving, as if I were being rendered away to leave only the hollow drift of my old bones.

  I must say I appreciated the feeling. There is something exemplary to the sensation of near-perfect lightness, of being in a place and not being there, which seems of course a chronic condition of my life but then, too, its everyday unction, the trouble finding a remedy but not quite a cure, so that the problem naturally proliferates until it has become you through and through. Such is the cast of my belonging, molding to whatever is at hand. So I dipped my head beneath the surface and could feel the water swell over the edge of the tub and onto the tiled floor but I didn’t care. The intense heat felt so pure and truthful to me, so all-enveloping, that I wished there was a way I could remain within it, silently curled up as if I were quite unborn, as yet not of this life, or of the world, of anything moored to the doings and traces of humankind. I did not want innocence so much as I did an erasure reaching back, a pre-beginning, and if I could trade all my years to be at some early moment and never go forward again, I would do so without question or any dread.

  But perhaps the thought itself smacks of innocence, wanting not to know what I know, which is a fraudulent and dangerous wish for most anyone but the youngest child, but particularly for a man who is approaching the farthest region of his life. In fact a man like me should be craving every last bit and tatter of his memory. He should consider the character of all his times whether pleasurable or tragic or sad. He should at last appreciate the serendipity and circumstance and ironical mien of events, and their often necessary befalling. He should, some god willing, take firm hold of all these and call himself among the fortunate, that he should have survived such riches of experience, and consider himself made over again for it, gently refitted for his slow stroll to the edge. But all I seem to think of doing is to stop, or turn around, or else dig in for a sprint, a stiffened, perambling, old-man leap off the precipice. And if I could just clear the first jutting ledges and simply free-fall, enjoy the briefest flying, I should be very thankful indeed.

  * * *

  BUT PERHAPS RIGHTLY, there is none of that for me. And I recall now that it was K I saw when I finally regained consciousness after suffering the captain’s pistol blows. I was lying on a cot in the empty infirmary, where she was watching over me. I asked her but there was no guard or sentry inside, only she, though two men were stationed outside. Captain Ono had simply ordered her to sit with me, telling her that we should not attempt to leave, and so for several hours she had been changing the bloody dressings on my head.

  “The worst is a gash at your scalp, Lieutenant,” she said, touching her own head just above the temple to indicate where. “It’s not too deep, I think. But it is still bleeding. I don’t think you should try to touch it, or even move.”

  I wanted to speak but my jaw felt as though it were wired shut, not from injury but from a terrible swelling in my face. The bones around my eyes ached with sharp pain, and I could hardly see her for the poor light and the rheumy tears clouding my vision. They had already put my arm back in its joint. With a firm hand she lifted my head to give me a drink of lukewarm tea.

  “You are fortunate to be alive.”

  I nodded.

  “The captain could have killed you right there and then,” she said. She brushed my short hair with her hand, trying to unmat the dried blood. “I watched through the cracks in the wall. He could have shot you where you lay. He put his pistol at your head and he stood there but he didn’t shoot. Then he looked over at the infirmary, right at the spot on the wall where I was crouched, and he called to me and asked me what he should do.”

  “You?”

  “Yes. He was staring at me, at the wall right where I was peering out. He said I should tell him what to do. I couldn’t answer him because I was frightened and I thought he was taunting me, that whatever I said he was going to shoot you anyway. I was sure he was going to shoot you. But he waited and then asked me again, and finally I said he should spare you. He backed away, and I thought it was finished. But then he walked over and leaned down on the outside of the wall. He said he wouldn’t kill you, but only if I agreed to his bidding.”

  “Which was what?”

  She gave him another drink.

  “What was it, K?” I said, the tea running down my cheek.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Then you must say.”

  “No.”

  “Tell me. Please.”

  She said quite plainly, “That I would give my life for yours.”

  “Your life?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant.” She gazed at me coldly, then looked away. “But then the doctor already has that, doesn’t he, no matter what?”

  She then let out almost a laugh about it, as if the notion of her life being worth something was ridiculous, which of course it was, absolutely ridiculous. But I was as yet incapable of acknowledging that before her or myself or anyone else. Instead I wanted to tell her that everything about us wasn’t really as it seemed, that nothing was, not even the war, which had never quite arrived and probably now never would, that we—the soldiers, officers, the girls—all had somehow entered an untoward region of stasis from which we would soon find deliverance, that we needed only to persist for a short time longer, that we must hold fast to the general order of things.

  I said, “I will protect you.”

  K made a noise in her throat, as if to affirm me and rescue me at once. She said, “Please don’t try to be brave for me, Lieutenant. I have not given up anything. Do you think if any of us girls is still living they’ll let us walk out of here when the war ends? That we will go unharmed if they do? In my mind I didn’t give the doctor my life. All he really wanted was a last small concession from me. What was left of my will. So he has that. But the doctor has always had my life and my death. Perhaps now, Lieutenant, he has yours, too.”

  I shut my eyes for a moment and tried not to listen. Though she was right, I suddenly didn’t wish to hear such words from her. There was also a seam of anger in her voice but it was the anger that arises from fear as well as mistreatment or injury, and I could tell the doctor was haunting her, his specter making her see him even as she was looking at me. Of course I feared him, too, and the pained creature in me wanted to crawl deep inside a hole at the flash of his memory. But another part of me was drawn to that same receding, that awful, singular stillness of flesh one notices before the first stroke of the knife.

  And I said to her, strangely thinking of that, “I remember now, how he said you were with child.”

  “I heard him tell you.”

  “Is it true?”

  “No.”

  “He said you were pregnant not by him but by another, even before you came here.”

  “It’s not true.”

  “Are you lying to me, K? You don’t have to lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying,” she said. But she rose, turning away, her arms tight about her.

  “Let me see your body, then,” I asked, trying to figure if she were, and trying to believe how it could be mine.

>   “There’s nothing in me. There can’t be. If there is, then God forgive me for what I’ll do.”

  “Let me see you.”

  K stood still for a moment, then went over to the lone slatted window. The light from outside was gray and soft; an afternoon rain was falling gently, and in its cast she looked even younger than she was. Like a girl waiting to go play outside. And I thought she was about to leave through it, that she might really try to climb out, though of course there was nowhere to go. But instead she turned and gazed at me for what seemed a very long time. Her expression was not sad or fearful or confused. She untied the string of her baggy trousers and let them fall down at her feet. Her rough cotton blouse hung loosely over her belly, the patch below that showing darkly through the gauzy material. Her calves and ankles were thin, but her feet especially so, the tops of them shockingly bony, reedy and translucent. Though I was weak I sat up, not from desire but because I wanted her to stop. Though I could not say so. She loosened the waist knot of the blouse so that it came open and fell, and then she was wholly naked before the window, coolly burnished, smooth. Her middle seemed no fuller than the rest, which was underfed and thin but still of amazing riches to me. I thought she was the most beautiful statue of herself. I put out my hand and she came to me, not looking at me anymore, and I kissed the tepid skin of her, at her belly and below, and I could taste her, her sharp-sweetness and unwashedness and her living body underneath. My eyes and cheeks felt shattered but I pressed against her anyway, more than I could bear. I was nearly crying from the pain. She did not hold me but she did not push me away. I never meant for this but I could no longer balk, or control myself, and then something inside her collapsed, snapped clean, giving way like some storm-sieged roof, and then I descended upon her, and I searched her, every lighted and darkened corner, and every room.

  And yet afterward—I don’t know how long, for time seemed to bend upon itself inside the small ward—we were simply sitting on either end of the cot, not speaking, not meeting each other’s eyes. I could only glance over at her and see how she was bent over her knees and cradling her face in the crook of her arm. Not weeping or moaning, but figured in certain quiet. Almost hiding there, though I was sure—even as young and earnest and fearful as I was—it was not just from me; it was from that place and time, the whole picture and small detail, from the homely, dim structure about us, the squalor of the heavy air, from the ennui and restiveness of the entire encampment, the surreally distant war, and then of course from who I was as well. For in my own way I comprised it, my yearning and wishing and my wanton hope, the sum of which, at end, amounted to a complete and utter fraudulence. For that is, finally, what she would escape if she could, not the ever-imminent misery and horror but the gentle boy-face of it, the smoothness and equability, the picture of someone heroic enough to act only upon his own trembling desire.