T. Boyle - The Women

“Your little Cho-Cho-San,” she said, and she was standing over him, her fists clenched. She wanted to kick him like a dog. “Your little whore. Is that why you want to go over there, for your whores? Wrieto-San? ”

“Miriam, damn you, damn you!” He scrambled to his feet, tugging at the folds of the nightgown as if it were a hair shirt, and she backed away from him — was he going to hit her? Well, let him. She didn’t care. She’d show his precious Orientals the bruises in the morning, wear them like battle scars.

“No,” she shouted, “damn you ! But tell me, tell me, Frank, is it really true what the sailors say, because you ought to know, you’re the one who deserted your first wife over there to go whoring with all the little buck-toothed fish-stinking geisha and if you think I’m going to tolerate that—”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Tell me,” she screamed, and she didn’t care if they heard her all the way to Yokohama and back, “is it true? Do they really have their little slits on backwards?” 122

In the light of day she began to see things more clearly. And calmly. She’d gone too far, she could see that now, but she’d been upset, she couldn’t help herself. Still, Frank had been good about it — he was in the wrong, he knew it — and he’d taken her in his arms and held her to him till all the bad blood had flushed out of her and then he’d taken her to bed. And loved her like no man ever had, not even René at his best. She was left drained and she slept the night through without recourse to her pravaz and her dreams were fluid and rich, the bed undulating beneath her like a stateroom on the high seas, and if she couldn’t have the SS Paris then she would have the Empress of China, and if the yokels of Wisconsin treated her like a leper, in Tokyo she would be Mrs. Wrieto-San, the daring and ravishing wife of the great man himself. They would marvel at her, at her style and her carriage and her Parisian manner and perhaps she’d turn back to sculpture, set up her own studio there, the materials cheap as water, and coolies — was that what you called them? — to do the onerous things for practically nothing, for yen, mere scraps of paper. Best of all, she would escape the narrowness of Chicago and the sterility of life in the countryside.

Edo. Old Edo. She lay in bed through the morning — long past breakfast — and stared at the prints on the walls until she felt she could enter them, climb into their richly colored depths and live there curled up in a ball of undiluted happiness. And what was all this — Frank’s screens and vases and all the rest — if not preparation for the voyage of her life?

That night, when they sat down to dinner, she held fast to Frank throughout the meal and she did the talking, or the better part of it, and if Frank could enchant Hayashi-San, well so could she. By the time they retired to the living room to sit before the fire Hayashi-San wouldn’t leave her side. His eyes — so dark they were nearly black — were fixated on her, roaming over her lips, her eyes, her tongue, her ears, her throat, and she recognized the look he trained on her from a hundred nights in the salons of Paris. All the while the little wife sat in the corner like a puppet with its strings cut while Frank lectured the architect and the earnestly nodding students — he barely glanced at the woman; he wouldn’t dare — and his mother, with her bobbing old white-crowned head, served the tea herself. There was a record on the Victrola — strings pouring out of the speaker in pulsing waves of warmth that seemed to float over the room as if the orchestra were there with them. Hayashi-San looked into her eyes. All the beautiful things in the room glowed in the firelight. She took the wrap from her shoulders, leaned back in the chair and let herself relax. She was going to Tokyo. Better yet: she was already on her way.

He wasn ’t much of a sailor and he ’d be the first to admit it. Give him a dingy or a canoe or even a sailboat out on the chop of Lake Mendota and he was fine, but the eternal pitching of the open sea took all the strength out of him. And, of course, leaving at the end of the year, 123some ten months after Hayashi-San had visited Taliesin, only complicated matters. On the first day out of Seattle the ship was overtaken by a storm sweeping down out of the Gulf of Alaska, the decks as slick as a hockey rink, his bunk — which he was unable to crawl out of except in those intervals when he staggered to the head — floating in mid-air like a magic carpet for a giddy moment only to plunge violently as if all the magic had been sucked out of it before it floated up again and then plunged back down. And came up. And down. And up and down and up and down. He couldn’t keep anything on his stomach, not even water, and when he was able to sleep his dreams were clotted with images of the Titanic and the Lusitania listing amid panic and chaos, and he woke, invariably, to the sensation of catapulting over Niagara in a barrel.

Miriam was a gem. She was as unaffected as a harpooner by the heavy seas, tucking away three hearty meals a day, walking the decks for exercise and lingering late in the first-class lounge, all the while urging him to take a spoonful of broth, China tea, brandy (purely as a digestif, of course), and sitting beside him in his agony for long stretches of time, reading aloud from the jumping pages of a kinetic book. She bathed him. Laid compresses on his brow. Massaged his cored-out muscles. She was at her best and sweetest and most motherly but nothing could awaken in him the slightest pulse of volition or the least tick of energy but the thought of the pier at Yokohama beneath his feet. It had been this way when he’d first come to Japan with Kitty 124and when he’d crossed the Atlantic with Mamah too. He wasn’t a sailor. He would never acquire his sea legs. If only they had transcontinental rail service, he thought, lying there miserably in his bunk, and he envisioned a bridge across the Bering Sea or maybe a tunnel as deep down as the core of the earth itself. Or what of those other Wrights and their airplane? Or a blimp. What about a blimp?

There were stretches during the two-week voyage in which he was able to sit at the drafting table and at least examine the preliminary plans, but it was impossible even to think of taking up a pencil, not with that infernal bounce and roll. Still, he was able to think things through all over again, the central problem one of engineering against the destructive force of the earthquakes that regularly ravaged the Japanese archipelago, another thing altogether from building on a stable lot in Chicago or Oak Park. He’d talked it over with his son John and Paul Mueller, both of whom had come along in the company of their wives to help set up shop, and with Antonin Raymond, the Czech architect he’d taken on as well, and his thinking was that he’d float the building on a series of piers, 125relying for support on cantilevered beams, much in the way of a waiter balancing a laden tray on the adjustable axis of one hand. The Japanese wanted a new and spectacular hotel to replace the antiquated Imperial the Germans had designed for them in the last century, a structure that would symbolize Japan’s ascent to the forefront of modern nations, and he was going to give it to them — a building that would be the glory of all Japan and stand proudly a hundred years and more even if the city around it was shivered to dust. 126

They were met at the dock by Hayashi-San himself and an entourage of some fifty others, including various dignitaries, members of the Imperial Hotel board, Japanese architects, representatives of the press and any number of beaming young students who looked as if they were about to faint dead away with the anxiety of staring into a white face for what might have been the first time in their lives. A band began to play, something with trumpet fanfares and an erratic drumbeat he didn’t recognize. Bows were exchanged. Gifts. Though there was a lingering chill over the ocean, the sun felt unnaturally hot on his face and he found himself sweating beneath the overcoat he’d slung casually over his shoulders. With Miriam at his side he went down the row of greeters, murmuring “Ohayō gozaimasu” and bowing to each of them in turn, feeling a burst of confidence and enthusiasm like nothing he’d ever known. He was free of it all, free of all the scandals, the bickering and tantrums of his mother and his aunts, the struggle to maintain Taliesin and his practice and keep his head above water financially, and as he bent to the last of the greeters, a white-haired ancient in samurai costume, he caught a single scintillating whiff of Japan on the breeze riding up off Yokohama Bay — an ineffable amalgam of broiled eel, incense and human effluent, and knew he was home at last.