Not owning a tuxedo, Tōru had to put in a quick order for one. He slipped into it when, on the nineteenth, it was delivered, and went over to show Kinué.
“You look very good in it. Lovely. I know how much you wanted to take me dancing in it. What a pity that I should always be so ill. What a real pity. And that’s why you’ve come to show me. How very kind of you. That’s why I like you.”
It was obesity that had rendered Kinué immobile. She was in the best of health and she got no exercise, and in these six months she had fattened beyond recognition. The heaviness and immobility gave more immediacy to her illnesses. She was constantly taking liver pills, and she would gaze from the chaise longue through the trees at the blue sky, so soon to be lost. Her perpetual refrain was that she was not long for this world, and she was a great trial for the maids, whom Tōru had told that they were in no circumstances to laugh.
What Tōru admired was the cunning with which, offered a set of conditions, she would outflank them and raise defenses which would give her the advantage and reinforce her beauty and perhaps add a touch of the tragic to it. She had immediately sensed that he did not mean to take her out. So she had put her illness to the uses of the situation. Tōru thought he had things to learn from this so stubbornly guarded pride. She had become his teacher.
“Turn around. Oh, it’s very nicely cut. The shoulder line is beautiful. Everything looks good on you. Just like me. Well, you must forget all about me tomorrow evening and enjoy yourself. But when you’re enjoying yourself most, think for just a moment of the sick girl you’ve left at home. But just a moment. You need a flower in your lapel. If only I were strong enough I’d go and pick it for you myself. Maid, please. The winter rose, the red one, if you will.”
She had the maid pick a little crimson rosebud just coming into bloom, and herself put it in his buttonhole.
“There.” With the most languorous, evanescent of fingers, she pushed the stem through. She tapped the glossy silk of the lapel. “Go out into the garden and let me have another look at you.”
The corpulent figure seemed to be breathing its last.
At the appointed time, seven in the evening, Tōru pulled up in his Mustang, as directed by the map, at a wide, white-graveled drive in Azabu. There were no other cars yet.
Tōru was astonished at how old-fashioned Keiko’s mansion was. The lamps under the trees set off a circular Regency front. There was something rather ghostly about the place, the effect intensified by red ivy blackened by the night.
Tōru was ushered in by a white-gloved butler past the circular domed hallway to a parlor in the rich Momoyama style, and there seen to a Louis XV chair. He was rather ashamed to find himself the first guest. The house was brilliantly lighted but still. There was a large Christmas tree in one corner. It seemed out of place. Left by himself when the butler had taken his order for a drink, he leaned against the old-fashioned paned window and looked out through the trees at the lights of the city and a sky turned purplish by neon.
A door opened and Keiko came in.
The brilliant formal dress of the septuagenarian before him quite robbed him of speech. Sleeves trailing to the hem of the skirt, her evening dress was beaded over its whole surface. The shifting colors and patterns of the beads from the neck down over the skirt were such as to dazzle the eye. At the bosom, the wings of a peacock in green on a gold ground, waves of purple over the sleeves, a continuous wine-colored pattern down over the waist, purple waves and gold clouds on the skirt, the several boundaries marked in gold. The white of the organdy ground was set off by a threefold Western pattern in silver net. From the skirt emerged the toe of a purple satin slipper, and at the always proud neck was an emerald Georgette stole, draped down over the shoulders and reaching to the floor. Below her hair, cut shorter and closer than usual, hung gold earrings. Her face had the frozen look of one that had more than once been ministered to by plastic surgeons, but the parts that still remained under her control seemed to assert themselves all the more haughtily. The awesome eyes, the grand nose. The lips, like red-black bits of apple beginning to rot, tortured into a yet more shining red.
“I’m terribly sorry to have kept you waiting,” she said brightly. The face with its sculptured smile came toward him.
“My but you’re looking grand.”
“Thank you.” Briefly and abstractedly, in the Western fashion, she showed him her well-shaped nostrils.
The aperitifs came.
“Perhaps we should turn down the lights.”
The butler turned off the chandelier lights. In the flickering of the Christmas tree, Keiko’s eyes flickered, as did the beads on her dress. Tōru was beginning to feel uneasy.
“The others are late. Or is it that I am too early?”
“The others? You’re my only guest this evening.”
“So you were lying about the others?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I changed my plans. I thought I would have my Christmas alone with you.”
“I think I’ll ask to be excused, then.”
“Why?” Seated quietly, Keiko made no motion toward stopping him.
“Some sort of plot. Or a trap. Something in any case you’ve talked over with Father. I’m tired of being made fun of.” He had disliked this old woman from their first meeting.
Keiko was motionless. “If it were something I’d talked over with Mr. Honda, I wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble. I invited you because I wanted to have a good talk with you, all by ourselves. It is true that I lied to you, because I knew you wouldn’t come if you knew you were to be my only guest. But a Christmas dinner with only two people is still a Christmas dinner. Here we are both of us in party dress.”
“I suppose you want to give me a good lecturing.” Tōru was angry at himself for having let her make her excuses.
“Nothing of the sort. I just want to talk with you quietly about some things Mr. Honda would throttle me for if he were to find out. They are secrets that only Mr. Honda and I know. If you don’t want to listen, well, that is that.”
“Secrets?”
“Just sit down there quietly, if you will.” An elegantly sardonic smile on her lips, she pointed to the somewhat worn Watteau garden party on the chair Tōru had just vacated.
The butler announced dinner. Opening doors Tōru had taken to be a wall, he ushered them into the next room, where the table was set with red candles. Keiko’s dress jingled.
Not one to encourage conversation, Tōru ate in silence. The thought that the skill with which he managed his knife and fork was the result of Honda’s assiduous tutelage enraged him all over again. Tutelage to make people think him a long-time adept of a cravenness he had not known until he met Honda and Keiko.
Keiko’s fingers at knife and fork, beyond the heavy baroque candlesticks, absently quiet and diligent, like an old woman at her knitting, were a young girl’s fingers brought into old age.
The chilled turkey was tasteless, like the dry skin of an old man. The chestnut stuffing and the cranberry jelly had for Tōru the sourly saccharine taste of hypocrisy.
“Do you know why you were so suddenly sought after to become heir to the house of Honda?”
“How should I?”
“Very easygoing of you. You haven’t wanted to know?”
Tōru did not answer. Putting down her knife and fork, Keiko pointed through the candle smoke at his tuxedo front.
“It’s all very simple. It’s because you have three moles on your left chest.”
Tōru was unable to hide his surprise. Keiko knew of those three moles, the root of his pride, which through all his life should have attracted the attention of no one but himself. An instant later he had brought himself under control. The surprise had come from the fact that, by chance, the symbol of his own pride had coincided with a symbol of something for someone else. Though the moles may have set the something in motion, that need not mean that he had been found out. But Tōru had underestimated the intuitions of the aged.