Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder - Stories

When I got home, my husband was in the kitchen deep-frying something.

The whole time we were dating, and since we’d been married, he’d never once cooked anything.

“What’s going on?” I asked, shocked.

“I saw it on TV and just felt like trying it out,” he said, without even looking up. He’d been in bed a lot recently—was he feeling better?

“I’m impressed you figured it out,” I said. When I looked around the stove where he was standing, I saw a jumble of brand-new cooking equipment, including a thermometer and some metal trays for laying out the hot food to soak up excess oil. “I didn’t know where to find everything, so I bought what I needed from the supermarket,” he said.

“What about work?”

“I left early.”

“Okay.” I started putting my groceries away into the refrigerator and the pantry. What had happened to the mantra, the temptation? The question was in my throat, but the sound of the oil popping and the whine of the extractor fan surrounded my husband like a wall, and there was no opening for me to speak to him.

“Sit down, San. I’m making us the deep-fried special tonight,” he said in a slightly injured tone. Apparently, I was getting in his way.

I took a seat on the couch, where my husband usually sat. Zoromi had followed me, so I stroked her fur for a while, but I still felt unsettled. “Do you need me to show you where the paper towels are? You can use the grill rack that came with the microwave to let the oil drip off.” As I commented on this and that, my husband brought me a highball and plonked it down on the table.

“You sit and drink this and watch some TV,” he said, and picked up the remote and pressed play on a variety show he’d recorded. Without another word, I did what he said, and sat and sipped at the highball, which was a drink I didn’t even like. I tried concentrating on the TV screen, but the show’s appeal was entirely beyond me.

After a half hour or so, I heard him say, “Here it comes,” and when I went to the table I saw a mound of fritters on a large serving platter, the bran pickles I’d bought earlier, inexpertly sliced, and two empty glasses laid out in a plausible way. There were even small dishes for condiments, with a choice of salt, sauce, or lemon juice.

“Quick, San,” my husband said, and I sat in my seat and picked up my chopsticks.

My husband sat down next to me, took the top off a bottle of beer, and started pouring it into my empty glass.

“What’s going on?” I said again. I couldn’t help feeling spooked.

“It makes a nice change, doesn’t it?” My husband poured himself a beer as well, held it up, and said, “Cheers.” His Adam’s apple moved happily up and down. He drank so fast it was as if the beer were soaking straight into his body.

I had a mouthful as well. The mild bitterness and alcohol content spread through my mouth and felt pleasant.

“They’re best eaten hot.”

I tentatively extended my chopsticks toward the fritters piled on the serving dish. They looked a little lumpy, but the batter was a tawny golden color. My appetite whetted by the smell and the sound that had pervaded the room, I dabbed salt on the batter and threw it in my mouth.

It was good. I’d feared that it might be undercooked, but the filling was the ideal texture, and the batter made a satisfying crispy sound between my teeth.

“Where did you learn to do this?” I said, huffing as I moved the hot fritter loosely around my mouth.

“It’s my first time,” he said, huffing like me.

“It looks like you got your appetite back.”

For the first time in a good while, he seemed to be enjoying his food. He reached for another fritter and said, “Yeah.” There was much more I wanted to ask, but he just kept saying, “Best hot, San,” so I dutifully shoveled down the fritters. Onion rings. Squid. Prawn. Sweet potato. Chicken. They were all tasty. I had them with sauce, and then with lemon juice, and the mountain on the serving dish, which I’d thought we could hardly finish between the two of us, began diminishing before our eyes. In silence we devoured the fritters and guzzled down more beer. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had this much to drink.

“So you’re feeling better,” I said, slightly drunkenly, once my belly was filled up. I could feel a rosy flush around my eyes.

My husband was still eating in silence, picking up the fritters with his fingers now rather than his chopsticks.

“What do you think it was, in the end? I know it wasn’t the summer slump,” I said. My husband cocked his head to one side as if to say, Yeah, I don’t know what it was, and I heard myself laugh. I felt relaxed for the first time in months. “By the way, I was telling Miss Kitae about the game today, and she asked whether you’re feeling tempted by something.”

“Something?”

“She didn’t say what. But I guess there was no need to worry,” I said, and laughed again, louder.

Then I noticed there wasn’t even a smile on my husband’s face, and my expression sobered.

“You are feeling better, aren’t you?” I asked again.

My husband didn’t respond, and continued eating, keeping his reptilian eyes cast down at his plate.

I looked at his expressionless profile and remembered that I hadn’t seen his face from the front in a long time.

I took a long swig of my beer.

“Maybe I’ll go into business, open a fritter joint,” my husband said quietly, licking the oil off his fingers. His voice sounded both like my husband’s and like that of a complete stranger, and though the last mouthful of beer suddenly tasted of nothing, I gulped it down without meaning to.

I went to see Hasebo in her and her husband’s new place, and got home late afternoon to find my husband, who seemed to have left work early again, standing pensively in front of a pan of oil, holding a pair of cooking chopsticks.

“Should we open a window?”

The heat of the frying had steamed up the apartment. My husband, who’d been gazing into the pan as if he were searching for his long-lost mother, finally reacted to the beep emitted by the AC remote and said, “San, welcome home.” It sounded hollow, as if half of him was still wandering through some dream.

The tray on the countertop held a lavish pile of battered and breaded ingredients. Not again. Just the sight of it seemed to bring last night’s fritters back up to my throat. Truthfully, my stomach had begged for mercy long ago. But what was the right thing to do when a sick person told you the only thing that gave him relief was deep-frying fritters?

It turned out that the fritters were just a replacement for the coin-tinkling game, and my husband was still unwell.

He once again installed me on the couch and handed me a highball. Helpless to refuse this strangely solicitous husband, I brought the glass to my lips and stared dimly at the variety show. There was still nothing interesting to me about it. But soon enough, between the sounds of deep-frying coming from the kitchen and the cacophonous cries on the TV, I felt a mist descend over my head. Stirring from the couch seemed like a huge effort.

“Tell me where you’ve been today,” my husband said, having moved me to the table and eagerly poured me a beer.

He sounded almost like a wife, I thought. “To Hasebo’s new place.”

Beside me, I thought I saw my husband nod. But maybe he didn’t nod—maybe he was just staring at me. I felt an uneasy rustling down the left side of my body as I picked up my chopsticks. I moistened my mouth with the pleasantly foamy beer and picked up a fritter as I was told. No rice, no miso soup—my husband was only interested in deep frying. “That’s bamboo shoot. And that one, that’s chum with yam bulbs,” he told me proudly. “I’ve made a light ponzu sauce for you tonight.” My husband said his digestion wasn’t so good lately, and he hardly touched the platter, making me eat most of it.