Within the week, Frank had written back. She came in from the bath and there the letter was, laid out on the mahogany table beside a finger bowl and a single lily in the slim white vessel of a ceramic vase. The first thing she noticed was the artistry with which he’d addressed the envelope — he’d used a brush rather than a pen, his kanji as pristine and elegant as any Buddhist master’s or Shinto priest’s — and that touched her. She pictured him sitting over his drafting table with his finest brush, a look of utter absorption on his face as he dipped the tip of it in the well of the ink stone, funneling his genius into it, creating something beautiful. For her. Even before she read through the letter inside, the nine pages of apologies, pleas and regrets — he was the one at fault, a selfish unthinking lowly impostor of a man who saw what he wanted and took it, and damn the consequences, and could she ever forgive him because Krynska was nothing to him and he’d never so much as kissed her, he swore — her heart went out to him. She read through the letter a second time, then a third, every nerve and fiber of her stirring with the highest regard for the nobility of this man, for his grace, his beauty, his truth and wisdom, and she immediately wrote back, and what she wrote was so deep and so true she might as well have opened a vein and written him in blood.
But she wasn’t coming back to him. Ever. Or at least not until he made her his equal, not until the day he threw off the yoke of his prior attachment — his Pussy or Kitty or whatever she called herself — and pledged his troth before God and man alike so that no Krynska or Takako-San could ever threaten her again. That much she made clear. She had to. Just to preserve her own sanity.
His reply — more apologies, more pleas, more regrets — came by return mail, and the minute she’d read it through she clapped her hands and sent the maid for pen, paper and sake and wrote him back on the spot. Within the hour her letter was on the way to him and the following day another of his came to her, letters overlapping, reaching out, anticipating one another, so that over the course of the next two months they were able to hold an ongoing conversation through the slow but estimable Japanese mails, their pens assessing even the minutiae of their attachment, their love and esteem and mutual complaints — his snoring, eating habits, the way he sniffed his socks on removing them, his bossiness, his rusticity, and her faults too, though of course they were minor compared to his — and to branch out in the fullness of that conversation to easy companionable accounts of their day-to-day activities while they were apart.
His life was a frenzy of activity, of course. He was on the job site day and night, battling Hayashi-San and the Baron over every change and cost overrun, struggling with the permeability of the oya stone they’d quarried outside the city (it would forever leak, he feared, but it was beautiful beyond compare) and seeing to his mother’s needs. Yes, she was there. Still. She’d come all the way across the board-flat plains and jagged mountains of the West, endured the two weeks at sea and rushed to her (formerly) ailing son’s side only to come down with the very same complaint that had stricken him. It was low comedy, that was what it was, and Miriam, cleansed in the crucible of the bath and replete with the utter calm the pravaz gave her, laughed aloud at the thought of that gangling old lady — and how old was she, eighty, eight-five? — towering over the Japanese like a freak of nature only to be stretched out on a too-short futon and fed rice balls and water till she could only wish she’d stayed in Wisconsin where she belonged.133
And for her part? She told him of the sound of the rain, of the emerald beauty of the stands of bamboo that clustered on the hillside like queues of silent people waiting for something that would never come and the strange tiny birds that visited them. Of her daily rituals, her reading and writing and the solace of the baths. Of the shaven-headed monks in the temple with its painted dragons and graceful torii and the way it made her feel as if she could touch the spirits with the pointed finger of her mind when they chanted, all in unison, and let the charred spice of their incense rise round them in empurpled clouds. She was at peace, that was what she told him, and she never mentioned the pravaz or the pharmacy or the adept maid who would lay down her life for her if she but asked. All she could want, she wrote, was for him to take her in his arms. That was all. That would make her world complete. But she wasn’t holding her breath. And she wasn’t coming back.
Two months. A gap in the calendar. Slow minutes, slower hours.
Each day was a replica of the last, but she was never bored. The everlasting tranquility of the saints came to dwell in her and she lived as if she were floating free out over the earth in some aeroplane or dirigible — or no, on her own fledged wings. Still, there was the impenetrability of the language, the harshness and abruptness of it, nothing at all like the silken play of French. And the fish, the eternal fish, their opaque eyes staring up at her out of the multiplicity of the days, their sliced flesh raw as a wound, their tails, their lips, their appendages. And the mud. And the rain. Two months. She was ready for a change.
And so when, one evening after her bath, the maid’s soft swishing footsteps stirred on the wooden planks of the anteroom, followed by a heavier tread, a man’s tread, she sat up, fully alert. And when the shoji slid back with a soft click and he stood there grinning in the doorway, she was already on her feet, already moving across the tatami to him, her arms rising of their own volition to pull him to her. “Miriam,” he said, as the maid ducked away like the shadow of a bird and she fell into his arms, her blood surging so violently she was afraid she was going to crush him. But oh, the smell of him! The touch of his lips at her throat! “Frank,” she cried. “Oh, Frank, Frank, Frank.”
They stayed on there together for five days. She showed him the trails on the hillside, the temple, the shops, pointed out the little yellow birds and the funny old man at the tobacconist’s who’d cut a perfect pie slice out of his conical hat so he could see the sky above him. Frank found a trove of prints in an out-of-the-way shop even the Tokyo dealers didn’t seem to know about, haggling over a dozen rare specimens, including at least one he immediately inaugurated into the pantheon of his favorites — it was a Shunshō, very colorful, dating from 1777, of the actor Ichikawa Danjūrō V in a red robe. When the money changed hands, he looked as if he wanted to get up and caper round the room, but she held him back because he had to save face for the dealer and his children and everyone else who came out to stare as they all but minced up the street, arm in arm.
They bathed together. Sat out in their kosode in the evening and watched the sun plunge into the hills. They ate and laughed and made the futon rock on the tatami as if it were a creaking four-poster under the weight of the newest newlyweds in the oldest inn in Wisconsin. And when they left to go back to Tokyo — together — she had a shining promise to hold out before her, rarer and more beautiful than all the prints in the world: Kitty had relented after all these years and they were going to be married.
Just as soon as possible.
Three years later, as she sat fanning herself in the shade of an avocado tree in the back garden of Leora’s little Spanish villa in Santa Monica, she was still waiting. Frank had been true to his word, she couldn’t fault him there — or yes, she could, because he’d dragged his feet through every conceivable delay and evasion till she thought she was going to die unwed like some sad deluded cast-off little strumpet in a morality play. But at least he was free now, at least he’d seen to that. The divorce had been granted back in November and all that remained was to wait out the twelve-month probationary period before Frank could remarry, and the clock was ticking down on that too — in just over two and a half months she would be Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright.