An Exotic Marriage
One day, I realized that I was starting to look just like my husband.
It wasn’t that someone pointed it out. It occurred to me by accident, while I was sorting through some files that had accumulated on the computer, comparing photos from five years ago, before we were married, to more recent ones. I couldn’t have described how, exactly. But the more I looked, the more it seemed as if my husband was becoming similar to me, and me to him.
“The two of you? I can’t say I’ve noticed it,” my brother, Senta, said when I mentioned it. I had called him to get help with the computer. He spoke in his usual slow way, like a languid animal resting by water. “You must have just adopted each other’s expressions from spending a lot of time together.”
“By that logic, you and Hakone should look even more alike,” I said, double-clicking on a folder as he’d instructed.
Senta and his girlfriend, Hakone, had started dating in their teens, so they’d been together twice as long as my husband and I. We’d gotten married a year and a half after we met.
“Being married must be different from just living together,” he said.
“Different how?”
“Dunno. More… concentrated?”
Senta directed me to drag the folder containing the photos over to the icon of the camera.
“I’ve done this before,” I said. “Every time I try, it goes boinng! right back to where it came from.”
As expected, I had to contend with the boinng! at least twice, but eventually managed to back up the photos. I told him we were thinking of selling our refrigerator on an online auction site soon and asked him to think of any tips, and then we hung up.
I took a package to the post office for my husband. On the way back, I saw Miss Kitae sitting on a bench inside the dog run. When I knocked on the glass, she looked up and beckoned to me, so I decided to stop in for a minute.
Our apartment complex had a private dog run. It was a small park that had been created by decking over the top of the roof that extended over the entrance, and could be accessed from the hallway on the second floor. I pushed open the heavy steel fire door.
“San, dear, over here,” Kitae said, patting the empty space next to her on the bench. “Visit with me for a bit. I know you’re not busy.”
She pulled her customized shopping cart toward her and passed me a canned coffee from the rear pocket. Her beloved cat, Sansho, was on a string leash and curled up on a cushion on top of the cart like a piece of decor, as usual. Kitae brought Sansho out to sun in the dog run every day after lunch, saying it was only fair, since she paid the same rent as our neighbors who had dogs. Kitae was nearly thirty years older than I was, but she exuded health and had a marvelously straight back. Her skin was so dewy she could have easily been mistaken for someone in her fifties, if not for her gray hair. She pulled off white jeans better than I could ever hope to.
I had first met her in the waiting room at the veterinary clinic I took my cat to, where she’d confided in me at length about Sansho’s toilet problems. Our apartment complex was a large one, unusual for the area, with two wings, a west wing and an east wing. The resident turnover was quite high, and most of us didn’t socialize with our neighbors. Kitae was probably the only one I could claim to know. At first, I’d kept some distance from her strange habit of dragging her cat outside against its will, but as she kept greeting me, I gradually started to get to know her, partly out of interest in Sansho, who always lay unmoving on the cushion like a stone statue.
I sat down next to her and pulled up the tab on the canned coffee. “What a nice day,” I said, even though the humidity was making my T-shirt cling damply to my skin.
“I can’t stand the Japanese summer. So wet and miserable.” Kitae looked across the sunny wooden deck and pulled an exaggerated grimace. Before moving here, she and her husband had lived in an apartment in San Francisco. She’d told me recently that they’d bought it when they were still young. When its value had skyrocketed, it had been good news—until their property taxes went up too, and they’d had no choice but to sell up and come back to Japan.
Really, San, it was five million yen a year, for an apartment we’d already paid for. Five million! What a joke!
I’d seen Kitae’s husband around just once—my impression of him was of a gentle man smiling while he listened to Kitae talk, like a jizo statue, or Sansho.
Kitae asked after anything exciting going on in my life.
“I’m starting to look like my husband.” I found myself telling her about the photos.
She stopped waving the hand she’d been using as a fan and said, “Dear me,” displaying an unexpected level of interest. “Tell me again how long you’ve been married.”
“Coming up to four years.”
“Now, I could be wrong—I haven’t known you long enough to say—but you should be careful. You’re accommodating, San, and before you know it, girls like you get all—”
A corgi running around on the deck barked at a butterfly, and I missed the end of Kitae’s sentence. I hoped she might repeat herself, but she was too busy lifting up her bangs with one hand while flapping the other to cool herself.
“Show me those photos next time,” she said.
“I will.”
Kitae pulled her cart over to scratch Sansho under his jaw. It seemed like a good time to leave, but then she took out an individually wrapped cookie from the rear pocket of the cart and started talking again.
“A married couple I know,” she said, and I nodded and hurriedly sat my bottom back down firmly on the bench. Her story, which she told me while breaking the cookie into pieces, went like this.
There was once a husband and wife. Of course, Kitae knew their names and faces—they were old friends of her and her husband’s. The two couples had socialized together, but after Kitae and her husband had moved to San Francisco, they didn’t get the chance to meet again until nearly ten years later.
During those ten years, the other couple had moved to England. Kitae visited London and arranged to meet up with them. When she arrived at the restaurant, they stood up to greet her—“Long time no see!”—and Kitae was astounded at what she saw.
“They’d grown identical, like twins,” she said, closing her eyes as though she were recalling the sight.
“Did they resemble each other to begin with?” I asked.
“That’s the thing. They’d been nothing like each other. Which was why I wondered, just for an instant, whether they’d had plastic surgery.”
During the meal, Kitae tried to compare the couple’s faces, looking discreetly from one to the other. She considered that it might have been the result of their aging, but the degree to which they’d changed couldn’t be put down solely to the effects of time. Plus, and this was very strange indeed, when she considered the individual features separately—eyes, noses, mouths—the two of them were clearly different people. But the moment she saw their faces as a whole, somehow they seemed like mirror images. Kitae felt uneasy, as though she were being duped.
“Was it the way they ate? Their mannerisms or their body language?” I accepted a piece of cookie.
She leaned her head to one side, thinking. “Maybe that was part of it. But it was more that there was something drawing them closer. As if they couldn’t help but imitate each other.” She frowned.
The even more surprising thing was that the wife was tucking happily into platters of oysters and lobster, which she’d disliked years ago. As far as Kitae could recall, it had only been the husband who’d had a fondness for those things. When she casually brought that up, the wife said, “What? Really?” and looked startled. After a while, she said, “That’s not true. I’ve always loved oysters,” and turned to her husband. “Isn’t that right?”