“You go all the time to see your Western women.”
“That’s different.”
“Tell me, are they fat German fraus or Englishwomen with faces like horses? It’s the Englishwoman you’re always calling, that cow.”
“A horse or a cow, which is it?”
She sucked on her cigarette hard enough to light her eyes. “Westerners smell of butter. Rancid butter. The only good thing I can say for you, Harry, is that for an American, you don’t smell so bad.”
“There’s a lovely compliment.” Harry pulled on pants for dignity’s sake and fumbled for cigarettes. Michiko had a physical horror of Western women, their color, size, everything. They did seem a little gross next to the fineness of her hands, the sharpness of her brows, the inky curls at the base of her white stomach. But, call it a breadth of taste, he liked Western women, too. “Michiko, I hate to remind you, but we’re not married.”
“I don’t want to be married to you.”
“Good.” She was an independent free-love Communist, after all, and he was grateful for any dry rock he could stand on when talking to her. “So what the hell are you talking about?”
She had the kind of gaze that penetrated the dark. Harry sensed there was some sort of silent conversation going on, a test of wills that he was losing. Michiko was complicated. She might be Japanese, but she was from Osaka, and Osaka women didn’t mince words or back down. She was a doctrinaire Red who kept stacks of Vogue under a Shinto shrine in a corner of the room. She was a feminist and, at the same time, was a great admirer of a Tokyo woman who, denied her lover’s attention, had famously strangled him and sliced off his privates to carry close to her heart. What frightened Harry was that he knew Michiko regarded a double suicide of lovers as a happy ending, but she’d be willing to settle for a murder-suicide if need be. It seemed to him that the safest possible course was to deny they were lovers at all.
“You’re never jealous, are you, Harry?”
“How do I answer a question like that? Should I be?”
“Yes. You should be sick with it. That’s love.”
“No,” Harry said, “that’s nuts.”
“Maybe you just wanted a Japanese girl?”
“I think I could have found an easier one.”
Some Americans did take up with Japanese women for the exoticism. Harry, though, had been raised in Japan. A corn-fed girl from Kansas was stranger to him.
Michiko’s long look continued, as if she were sending out small invisible scouts to test his defenses.
“The Western woman, is she married? If she’s here, she must be married.”
“I had no idea when I found you on the street and took you in like a wet stray that you were going to be so suspicious.”
Suspicion was in season. Harry moved to the side of the window to look down on the street, at the flow of figures in dark winter kimonos. The evening was balmy for December. The warble of a street vendor’s flute floated up, and at the corner a customer in a black suit shoveled noodles from a box into his mouth. In front of a teahouse at the other end of the block, a taller man nibbled a bun. Plainclothesmen had always watched missionaries, too. It was as if he’d inherited a pair of shadows.
“I saw them,” Michiko said. “Are you in trouble?”
“No. Harry Niles is the safest man in Japan.”
“You’ve done nothing wrong?”
“Right or wrong doesn’t matter.” He remembered his father, a Bible thumper with never a doubt in his righteousness. Harry’s confidence was in his unrighteousness, his ability to dodge the consequences.
“So, are you going to leave?” Michiko asked. She took a long draw on her cigarette and rearranged her limbs, leaning back on her hands, legs forward, ankles crossed. He could just make out her eyes, the dark caps of her breasts. “You can tell me. I’m used to men who disappoint.”
“What about the men in the Party, your local Lenins?”
“The men in the Party talked all day about the oppression of the working class, but every night they headed to the brothels. You know why I chose you, Harry? Because with an American, I had no expectations. I couldn’t be disappointed.”
Harry didn’t know quite what she meant. The big problem with Michiko was that she acknowledged no rational position, only emotion in the extreme, whereas Harry regarded himself as pure reason.
“Do you want us to burn down, Harry?”
It took him a moment to notice his cigarette carried an ash an inch long. People who lived on straw mats had a ready supply of ashtrays. The one he picked up was ceramic and said PACIFIC FLEET OFFICERS CLUB-PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII around a gilded anchor. Hawaii sounded good. Sunday would be the pre-Christmas party at Pearl, the same as at all U.S. Navy officers clubs around the world.
“Know what?” Harry said. “We should have a party. We’re too tense, everyone is. We’ll have a few friends over. A couple of the old reporters, artists, movie people.”
“That’s like the club every night.”
“Okay, Michiko, what would make you happy? I’m not going anywhere, I promise. The entire Japanese Empire has marshaled its forces to keep me here. I’m blocked by land and sea and air. Even if I went to the States, what would I be, what would I do? My talent is speaking more Japanese than most Americans, and more English than most Japanese. Big deal. And I know how to buy yen and sell a movie and read a corporate ledger.”
“Harry, you’re a con man.”
“I’m a philosopher. My philosophy is, give the people what they want.”
“Do you give women what they want?”
Michiko was capable of retroactive jealousy. She had nothing in common with the mousy Japanese wife or mincing geisha. Harry slipped behind her and picked his words as carefully as a man choosing what could be a necktie or a rope. “I try.”
“With all women?”
“No, but with interesting women I try hard. You are interesting.”
“Other women?”
“Boring.”
“Western women?”
He slid a hand around her. “The worst.”
“How?”
“Too big, too busty, too blond. Just awful.”
She took a deep drag, and her cigarette flared. “I should burn you every time you lie. They’re really awful?”
“Unbearable.”
“There won’t be a war?”
“Not with the United States. Just war talk.”
“You won’t leave?”
“No, I’ll be right here. Here and here and here.” He put his lips to the beauty marks on her back. “And do the things I really might.”
“So you’re staying?”
“As long as you want. I’m telling you true…” He dug his fingers in her hair, soft and thick as water.
“You swear?”
He whispered, “If I could be with you.”
“Okay, okay, Harry.” Michiko let her head loll in his hand. She stubbed out her cigarette and pulled off her socks. “You win.”
THE HAPPY PARIS had originally been a tearoom. Harry had transformed it with saloon tables, a bar stocked with Scotch instead of sake and a red neon sign of the Eiffel Tower that sizzled over the door. Half the clientele were foreign correspondents who had been blithely assigned by the AP, UPI or Reuters without a word of Japanese. Some were mere children sent directly from the Missouri School of Journalism. Harry took mercy on them as if he were their pastor and they were his flock, translating for them the gospel of Domei, the Japanese news agency. The other regulars were Japanese reporters, who parked motorcycles outside the club for a quick getaway in case war broke out, and Japanese businessmen who had traveled the world, liked American music and knew one Dorsey brother from the other. The closer war seemed, the more people packed the Happy Paris and all of Tokyo ’s bars and theaters, peep shows and brothels.
They didn’t come for geishas. Geishas were a luxury reserved for financial big shots and the military elite. But if it was a rare man who could afford a geisha, a couple of yen could buy even a poor man the attentions of a café waitress. Waitresses came in all varieties, sweet or acid, shy or sharp, wrapped in kimonos or little more than a skirt and garter.