“Isso, foi otimo,” she said, turning her head to me. That was delicious.
I smiled. “Otimo,” I repeated. My limbs felt jellified.
She covered my hand with hers and squeezed my fingers. We were quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Can I ask you something?”
I looked at her. “Sure.”
“Why were you so reluctant, at first? I could tell you wanted to. And you knew I wanted to.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, flirting with sleep. “Maybe I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I’m the one who should have been afraid. When you said you had something you wanted to finish, I half thought you were going to try to spank me again.”
I smiled, my eyes still closed. “I would have, if you’d deserved it.”
“I would have made you sorry.”
“You didn’t. You made me happy.”
I heard her laugh. “Good. You still haven’t told me what you were afraid of.”
I thought for a moment. Drowsiness was settling on me like a blanket.
“Of getting involved. Like you said, I haven’t been with someone for a long time.”
She laughed again. “How can we be involved? I don’t even know who you are.”
With an effort, I opened my eyes. I looked at her. “You know better than most,” I said.
“Maybe that’s what scares you,” she replied.
If I stayed any longer I would fall asleep. I sat up and ran a hand over my face.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I know you have to go.”
She was right, of course. “Yeah?” I asked.
“Yeah.” She paused. Then: “I’d like to see you again. But not at the club.”
“That makes sense,” I said, my mind having defaulted to its usual security setting. She furrowed her brow at my response. I saw my mistake, smiled, and tried to correct. “After tonight, I don’t think I could respect that ‘no below the waist’ rule, anyway.” She laughed at that, but the laughter wasn’t entirely comfortable.
I used the bathroom, then made my way back to the foyer, where I pulled on my still-wet clothes. They were cold and clinging.
She came over as I was lacing my shoes. She had combed her hair back and was wearing a dark flannel robe. She looked at me for a long moment.
“I’ll try to help you,” she said.
I told her the truth. “I don’t know how much you can really do.”
“I don’t either. But I want to try. I don’t want… I don’t want to wind up someplace where I can’t find my way back.”
I nodded. “That’s a good reason.”
She reached into a pocket of the robe and pulled out a piece of paper. She extended her arm to hand it to me, and I noticed the diamond bracelet again. I reached out and took her wrist, softly.
“A gift?” I asked, curious.
She shook her head slowly. “It was my mother’s,” she said.
I took the paper and saw that she had written a phone number on it. I put it in my pocket.
I gave her my pager number. I wanted her to have a way to contact me if something came up at the club.
I didn’t say, “I’ll call you.” I didn’t hug her because of the wet clothes. Just a quick kiss. Then I turned and left.
I made my way quietly down the hallway to the stairwell. I could tell she thought she wasn’t going to see me again. I had to admit that she might be right. The knowledge was as damp and dispiriting as my sodden clothes.
I came to the first floor and looked out at the entranceway to the building. For a second I pictured the way she had hugged me here. It already seemed like a long time ago. I felt an unpleasant mixture of gratitude and longing, streaked with guilt and regret.
And in a flash of insight, cutting with cold clarity through the fog of my fatigue, I realized what I hadn’t been able to articulate earlier, not even to myself, when she’d asked me what I was afraid of.
It had been this, the moment after, when I would come face-to-face with knowing that it would all end badly, if not this morning, then the next one. Or the one after that.
I used the rear entrance, where there was no camera. It was still raining when I got outside. The day’s first light was gray and feeble. I walked in my wet shoes until I found a cab, then made my way back to the hotel.
12
THE NEXT DAY I contacted Tatsu via pager and our bulletin board, and arranged to meet him at noon at the Ginza-yu sento, or public bath. The sento is a Japanese institution, albeit one that has been in decline since not long after the war, when new apartments began to feature their own tubs and the sento became less a hygienic necessity and more a periodic indulgence. But, like all indulgences that are valued not just for their product but for their process, the sento will never entirely disappear. For in the unhurried rituals of scrubbing and soaking, and in the perspective of profound relaxation that can only be derived from immersion in water that the meek might describe as scalding, there are qualities of devotion, and celebration, and meditation, qualities that are necessary concomitants to a life worth living.
Ginza-yu exists at both geographical and psychological remove from the nearby shopping glitz for which its namesake is best known, hiding almost slyly in the shadow of the Takaracho expressway overpass, and making its presence known only with a faded, hand-painted sign. I waited in a doorway across the street until I saw Tatsu pull up in an unmarked car. He parked at the curb and got out. I watched him turn the corner into the bathhouse’s side entrance, then followed him in.
He saw me as I came up behind him. He had already taken off his shoes, and was about to place them in one of the small lockers just inside the entrance.
“Tell me what you have,” he said.
I retracted a bit as though hurt. He looked at me for a long moment, then sighed and asked, “How are you?”
I bent and took off my shoes. “Fine, thanks for asking. You?”
“Very well.”
“Your wife? Your daughters?”
He couldn’t help smiling at the mention of his family. He nodded and said, “Everyone is fine. Thank you.”
I grinned. “I’ll tell you more inside.”
We put our shoes away. I had already purchased the necessary accoutrements at the convenience store across the street-shampoo, soap, scrubbing cloth, and towels-and handed Tatsu what he needed as we went in. We paid the proprietor the government-mandated and -subsidized four hundred yen apiece, walked up the wide wooden stairs to the changing area, undressed in the unadorned locker room, then went through the sliding glass door to the bath beyond. The bathing area was empty-peak time would be in the evening-and, like the locker room, almost Spartan in its unpretentiousness: nothing more than a large square space, a high ceiling, white tile walls dripping with condensation, bright fluorescent lighting, and an exhaust fan on one wall that seemed forlorn from its long and losing battle with the steam within. The only concession to an aesthetic not strictly utilitarian was a large, brightly colored mosaic of Ginza 4-chome on the wall above the bath itself. We sat down to scrub.
The trick is to use hot water at the spigots where you sit, filling the sento-supplied low plastic pail with increasingly painful bucketfuls and pouring them over your head and body. If you bathe using only tepid water, the soaking tub will be unbearable when you first try to enter it.
Tatsu completed his cleaning cycle with characteristic brusqueness and got in the bath ahead of me. I took a bit longer. When I was ready, I eased in beside him. Immediately I felt my muscles trying to shrink back from the heat, and knew that in a moment they would give up their fruitless struggle and surrender to delirious relaxation.
“Yappari, kore ga saiko da na?” I said to him, feeling myself begin to unwind. This is great, isn’t it?