He ate dinner with Natsuo as usual, Tomiko quietly asleep.
“You were late,” she observed as they were halfway through the curry their maid had prepared. “Are management leaning on you?”
“A bit.”
“That means they want to promote you.”
“Perhaps,” he said absently.
He was still thinking about the shoulder scented like bergamot tea and its ancient tattooed character.
“It’s just a thought,” she said tactfully. “It would be wonderful if they promoted you. We could get a jeep.”
“What would we do with a jeep?”
“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Couldn’t we drive to a jungle somewhere and swim in a waterfall?”
What a foolish idea, he thought. Why would anyone want to buy a Jeep and swim in a waterfall?
“Whether they promote me or not,” he said instead, “I am quite content. The salary is more than enough but I might have to work a little later on some nights. It’s normal, I guess.”
“Then I’ll contact Koyabashi and ask her if she’d like to play cards at the Raffles. They have a group that plays there every week. Just the girls.”
It was a ridiculous idea but maybe it could have its uses. He kept his mouth shut. Then looked into her cool, restrained eyes and wondered if she had instinctively understood the manner in which his mind and heart had wandered off for a while, without saying a word. It would be a small miracle if she had not, but he let her talk on about her atrocious cards party until she ran out of steam, and her eyes rose suddenly, enormous with a distant grief.
They lay mutually antagonized and distant in the bedroom that night. Storm clouds amassed on the horizon, momentarily visible when lightning flickered below them. When she had fallen asleep, Ryu continued to think about his unexpected evening and the mystifying antiquity and elegance of the tattoo. He wondered about the other girls in the establishment, the leafy streets of Geylang and the calm that seemed to possess them at a certain hour. The calm, perhaps, of a thousand individual lusts rushing toward their premeditated satiations. The city had suddenly acquired a new dimension for him, and he had time to enter it again and again.
The following day, he worked alone in his seventh-floor office. He was filled with a hurried concentration. Come noon he took a punctual bento lunch with his immediate superior at a small Japanese place on the street and talked about the accounting software they had just installed at a well-known supermarket chain.
“Everything all right at home?” Mr. Inoue asked halfway through the dreary meal. “How is Natsuo adapting to her new city?”
Ryu shrugged. “She seems fine. The heat bothers her a little.”
“The heat, eh? Well, the heat bothers everyone.”
This wasn’t exactly helpful, and Inoue pressed on with a few more questions. Did the alienness of the new culture oppress them?
“Oppress?” Ryu shot back irritably. “It’s as good a place as we’ve ever lived. We even have lavender milk from Hokkaido.”
Ryu’s days began feeling longer. Between bouts of intense work he gazed through double-glazed windows at the sadly luminous monsoon skies alternately drenched with sunlight and flurries of rain. Out of their depths, huge atomic clouds materialized in slow motion, filled with a supernatural light.
Four days later he went back to the same house in Geylang; he had taken their business card on the previous visit. Golden Lotus Happy Massage. Now it was late afternoon and he had taken off an hour early so as not to arrive home late. The street sank into a watery dusk as he walked up to the outer door and rang the musical bell.
The same mama-san opened. Cheryl, however, was not there. He decided to wait with his tea and read the magazines on the tables. No other customers came or went. The mama-san explained that it was the unstable weather. His time was slipping away but after a half hour Cheryl appeared, dropped off by the parlor delivery car. She was dressed like a secretary, buttoned up and crisply prim, in a tartan skirt and glossy heels, a strawberry umbrella folding itself as she burst through the colored beads and showering the linoleum floor with water. She saw him at once; he rose and, with absurdly correct Japanese etiquette, bowed at the waist.
“I didn’t think I see you again, lor,” she said as they undressed with the windows open onto a small lawn. “Shall I close them?”
“No, leave them. I don’t mind the heat tonight.”
A quiet purr of cicadas came from the trees, the wet shrubs.
They felt more familiar to each other, the humor came more spontaneously. This time he forgot the hour and relaxed into their play, and when it was done he saw that three hours had passed. She said it didn’t matter, it was not a busy day of the week, and they showered together at the end with a slow-tempoed affection and deliberation. He asked her again about the tattoo.
“What if I said I didn’t know?” she said, smiling. “I just saw it in a tattoo shop in town.”
“What a strange thing to do.”
“Tattoos are always a whim. Maybe I was drunk. At least it’s only on my shoulder.”
“Your beautiful shoulder. It looks very at home there.”
“It’s a spell, you know — I know that it’s a spell. The man who did it said it was.”
“Why would you want a spell?”
They walked out lazily into the reception area, where the mama-san was asleep in a corner.
“It’s protection,” she said with a mischievous smile. “One never knows who one needs protection from, lor.”
“Not from me, anyway.”
He kissed her cheek and promised he would come back at the same time the following week. His courtly manner seemed to charm her. At least he told himself that it charmed her, that between them there was a quick, subtle bond which had matured with a beautiful suddenness. This unpredictable swiftness had created its own delicacy.
It was remarkable, he thought as he drove back to his office in a taxi, how the bonds leap from one skin to another without any prompting. Like the tropism of plants. He went up to the empty office and called his driver, pretending that he had worked late. He must always arrive in Bayshore in the company car.
Tomiko was still up when he stumbled into the apartment, oddly disheveled and incoherent, complaining as he now always did of the overwork. Natsuo was in an evening dress, pointless in the circumstances (had she gone out by herself?), and slightly tipsy from gin-and-tonics which she had been making for herself. The boy ran up to him and asked him at once to go up to the garden and water the bonsais.
“All right,” Ryu said, quite relieved. “Let’s go make our garden grow. If Mummy will let us.”
He went over to kiss his wife on her cheek. “Did you go out?”
“The card game at the Raffles, remember?”
“Ah, yes. Did the Japanese girls have a good gossip?”
“We played bridge and missed autumn in Kyoto.”
“You know,” he added softly, “you shouldn’t drink when you’re alone with Tomiko. It isn’t necessary. He can sense everything—”
“There wasn’t anything else to do,” she retorted, flaring up. “You were two hours late. Are they really working you that hard?”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
“Or not at all — I don’t want to talk about it.”
He went up to the roof with Tomiko. The act of watering outdoor plants during the rainy season was purely symbolic, but for that very reason the boy loved to do it. He was prospering at the American School and his English was now almost fluent. Into his flowing Japanese he would drop entire English sentences as if they were universally understood. They puttered around the bonsais they had set up and then stood on the parapet and watched the jittery lightning ever present on the horizon. He was a neat and punctual boy, somewhat like his father in that respect, and there was something neat and punctual about the way he approached the small events of his life. He took his father’s hand now and asked him why Mummy was drinking so many sodas by herself — could Ryu not come back a little earlier from work?