T. Boyle - The Women

She came up the single step into the anteroom, furled her umbrella and perched herself on the edge of a bamboo bench to ease into a pair of the slippers lined up on a rack for just that purpose. There was the smell of the charcoal and of o-cha, the acrid vinegary tea the Japanese seemed to put away by the gallon, and she had a moment’s peace before an old woman in a robe and two bowing maids rushed out to greet her, their thin fixed smiles doing little to disguise their horror at encountering a white woman, a gaijin, soaked through and unaccompanied, washed up on their doorstep. They didn’t speak English. No one in the entire village did, as she was soon to discover, but she could have been a deaf mute and got what she wanted nonetheless. She used a kind of pantomime to enlarge on her few disconnected phrases— Dōzo, heya arimasu-ka, nemuri, yoku? 132 —showed the old woman a folded wad of yen and within minutes found herself barefoot in a tiny Spartan room, drying her hair in a towel while one of the maids served her tea.

Of course, she was wrought up, the scene in the apartment repeating itself over and over in her mind like a moving picture caught in a loop, but the pravaz calmed her and she took rice wine with her dinner — a kaiseki of twelve courses, faultlessly prepared, and was she beginning to appreciate the cuisine after all, or was she just starved? — and let the sound of the rain infiltrate her senses. Once the maid had cleared away the tray, she went into the little bamboo cubicle outside the bath and scrubbed herself all over, recording the process in the full-length mirror there, rubbing both hands slowly over her breasts, between her legs, into the small of her back, even lifting her feet one after the other to run the cloth over her soles and between her toes with the slow languorous ease of a bootblack, so that when she stepped through the door and onto the flagstones of the bath she felt as pure and regal as the empress herself.

Two old men and what appeared to be a woman bobbed in the steaming water, only their heads and bony slick shoulders visible. There were flowers, ferns. Paper lanterns. She shivered, wondering if it was as chilly at the Imperial Palace as it was here on these wintry flagstones, and then she slipped into the water, the old men and the woman studiously averting their eyes, and it was heaven. The next thing she knew the place was deserted, the lanterns burned low, and the maid was there with her robe, murmuring something in her own language that sounded as lovely as the whisper of cherry blossoms in the breeze, and then she was in her room, on the futon, beneath the blankets, and the rain ran a thousand fingers across the roof.

There followed a succession of days during which she saw no one but the maid and the shocked and silent cohabitants of the bath — and oh, they looked at her, stealing a pinched sideways glance as she strode naked across the flagstones, and let them, let them see her as she was in her skin: she had nothing to hide. The bath was a miracle. She lay in the water for hours at a time, dreaming, till her body felt as limp as if the flesh had fallen from the bone. It rained constantly, day and night. She kept her pravaz close at hand. She ate fried rice, boiled rice, rice with salmon and cod roe, udon noodles, skewered tofu. She drank black tea. Sake. And, finally, a bottle of good scotch whiskey the maid brought her. And was there a pharmacy in town? There was. She sent the maid out with an empty tube of the morphine sulfate tablets and the maid came back with it full.

All the while, when she could summon the energy, the desire, she sat at the low mahogany table in her room and wrote letters to Frank on the thin rippled rice paper the maid left for her on the tansu in the closet. They were angry letters, letters that dredged up all the sourness and hate of the past and the present too— Krynska, how could he? — and yet they were sentimental at the same time, rising on the wings of poetry to illumine for him the reclamatory power of her love and the hallowed bond they shared that no amount of perfidy or venality or stinking filthy philandering on his part could ever break. The letters drained her. Crushed her. The rain fell. And the maid — pretty, perfect, a bowing kimono-clad extension of her will — took the letters to the post office and sent them away.

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