Arthur Golden - Memoirs of a Geisha

Nobu picked it up himself, and turned it slowly by its spine. “Fetch the young maid who greeted me,” he said. “Tell her I want the package I brought.”

I did as Nobu asked and returned to the room to find everyone waiting. He was still holding my hair ornament by the spine, so that the flowers dangled down above the table, and made no effort to take the package from me when I offered it to him. “I was going to give it to you later, on your way out. But it looks as if I’m meant to give it to you now,” he said, and nodded toward the package in a way that suggested I should open it. I felt very embarrassed with everyone watching, but I unfolded the paper wrapping and opened the little wooden box inside to find an exquisite ornamental comb on a bed of satin. The comb, in the shape of a half-circle, was a showy red color adorned with bright flowers.

“It’s an antique I found a few days ago,” Nobu said.

The Chairman, who was gazing wistfully at the ornament in its box on the table, moved his lips, but no sound came out at first, until he cleared his throat and then said, with a strange sort of sadness, “Why, Nobu-san, I had no idea you were so sentimental.”

Hatsumomo rose from the table; I thought I’d succeeded in ridding myself of her, but to my surprise she came around and knelt near me. I wasn’t sure what to make of this, until she removed the comb from the box and carefully inserted it into my hair just at the base of the large pincushionlike bun. She held out her hand, and Nobu gave her the ornament of dangling safflowers, which she replaced in my hair as carefully as a mother tending to a baby. I thanked her with a little bow.

“Isn’t she just the loveliest creature?” she said, speaking pointedly to Nobu. And then she gave a very theatrical sigh, as though these few moments were as romantic as any she’d experienced, and left the party as I’d hoped she would.

It goes without saying that men can be as distinct from each other as shrubs that bloom in different times of the year. Because although Nobu and the Chairman seemed to take an interest in me within a few weeks of the sumo tournament, several months passed and still we heard nothing from Dr. Crab or Uchida. Mameha was very clear that we ought to wait until we heard from them, rather than finding some pretext for approaching them again, but at length she could bear the suspense no longer and went to check on Uchida one afternoon.

It turned out that shortly after we’d visited him, his cat had been bitten by a badger and within a few days was dead from infection. Uchida had fallen into another drinking spell as a result. For a few days Mameha visited to cheer him up. Finally when his mood seemed to be turning the corner, she dressed me in an ice-blue kimono with multicolored ribbons embroidered at the hem-with only a touch of Western-style makeup to “accentuate the angles,” as she put it-and sent me to him bearing a present of a pearl-white kitten that had cost her I don’t know how much money. I thought the kitten was adorable, but Uchida paid it little attention and instead sat squinting his eyes at me, shifting his head this way and that. A few days later, the news came that he wanted me to model in his studio. Mameha cautioned me not to speak a word to him, and sent me off chaperoned by her maid Tatsumi, who spent the afternoon nodding off in a drafty corner while Uchida moved me from spot to spot, frantically mixing his inks and painting a bit on rice paper before moving me again.

If you were to go around Japan and see the various works Uchida produced while I modeled for him during that winter and the years that followed-such as one of his only surviving oil paintings, hanging in the boardroom of the Sumitomo Bank in Osaka-you might imagine it was a glamorous experience to have posed for him. But actually nothing could have been duller. Most of the time I did little more than sit uncomfortably for an hour or more. Mainly I remember being thirsty, because Uchida never once offered me anything to drink. Even when I took to bringing my own tea in a sealed jar, he moved it to the other side of the room so it wouldn’t distract him. Following Mameha’s instructions, I tried never to speak a word, even one bitter afternoon in the middle of February when I probably should have said something and didn’t. Uchida had come to sit right before me and stare at my eyes, chewing on the mole in the corner of his mouth. He had a handful of ink sticks and some water that kept icing over, but no matter how many times he ground ink in various combinations of blue and gray, he was never quite satisfied with the color and took it outside to spill it into the snow. Over the course of the afternoon as his eyes bored into me, he became more and more angry and finally sent me away. I didn’t hear a word from him for more than two weeks, and later found out he’d fallen into another drinking spell. Mameha blamed me for letting it happen.

As for Dr. Crab, when I first met him he’d as much as promised to see Mameha and me at the Shirae Teahouse; and yet as late as six weeks afterward, we hadn’t heard a word from him. Mameha’s concern grew as the weeks passed. I still knew nothing of her plan for catching Hatsumomo off-balance, except that it was like a gate swinging on two hinges, one of which was Nobu and the other of which was Dr. Crab. What she was up to with Uchida, I couldn’t say, but it struck me as a separate scheme-certainly not in the very center of her plans.

Finally in late February, Mameha ran into Dr. Crab at the Ichiriki Teahouse and learned that he’d been consumed with the opening of a new hospital in Osaka. Now that most of the work was behind him, he hoped to renew my acquaintance at the Shirae Teahouse the following week. You’ll recall that Mameha had claimed I would be overwhelmed with invitations if I showed my face at the Ichiriki; this was why Dr. Crab asked that we join him at the Shirae instead. Mameha’s real motive was to keep clear of Hatsumomo, of course; and yet as I prepared to meet the Doctor again, I couldn’t help feeling uneasy that Hatsumomo might find us anyway. But the moment I set eyes on the Shirae I nearly burst out laughing, for it was certainly a place Hatsumomo would go out of her way to avoid. It made me think of one shriveled little blossom on a tree in full bloom. Gion continued to be a bustling community even during the last years of the Depression, but the Shirae Teahouse, which had never been important to begin with, had only withered further. The only reason a man as wealthy as Dr. Crab patronized such a place is that he hadn’t always been so wealthy. During his early years the Shirae was probably the best he could do. Just because the Ichiriki finally welcomed him didn’t mean he was free to sever his bond with the Shirae. When a man takes a mistress, he doesn’t turn around and divorce his wife.

That evening in the Shirae, I poured sake while Mameha told a story, and all the while Dr. Crab sat with his elbows sticking out so much that he sometimes bumped one of us with them and turned to nod in apology. He was a quiet man, as I discovered; he spent most of his time looking down at the table through his little round glasses, and every so often slipped pieces of sashimi underneath his mustache in a way that made me think of a boy hiding something beneath a floor covering. When we finally left that evening I thought we’d failed and wouldn’t see much of him-because normally a man who’d enjoyed himself so little wouldn’t bother coming back to Gion. But as it turned out, we heard from Dr. Crab the next week, and nearly every week afterward over the following months.

Things went along smoothly with the Doctor, until one afternoon in the middle of March when I did something foolish and very nearly ruined all Mameha’s careful planning. I’m sure many a young girl has spoiled her prospects in life by refusing to do something expected of her, or by behaving badly toward an important man, or some such thing; but the mistake I made was so trivial I wasn’t even aware I’d done anything.