Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder - Stories

“When I get fuzzy we can’t talk about anything important.”

My husband dipped the tips of the chopsticks into the bowl of egg-and-flour mixture, and flicked them over the hot oil. “There’s no need to talk about important things when we’re at home, is there?” he said.

“Then when are people who stay at home supposed to talk about them?” I said quickly. I had to face it today—I had to question him before I lost my human form.

But the more anxious I felt, the more sluggish my husband seemed to become. “The thing is, San,” he said, adjusting the heat on the stove. “You keep saying we need to talk, but is that even true? Maybe you’d like to talk about important things. But do you have anything important to say?”

I started to feel less sure of myself. I focused on feeling strength in my stomach. “What about having children? It kind of got put on hold, and we haven’t mentioned it since. How do you feel about it?”

“How do you feel about it?” he said, and I found myself at a loss for words. “See, San? There isn’t really anything you want to talk to me about, is there?”

“What about your ex-wife?” I said in desperation. But I knew as soon as I said it that it wasn’t a conversation I particularly wanted to have.

“You’re like me, San. You don’t really want to think about anything, and there’s no need to pretend that you do,” my husband said, and took one of the ginger shoots lined up on the cutting board and dropped it into the pan. “We don’t want to have to face the big stuff, you and me. That’s why being with you is so easy.”

You’re wrong, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t get the words out.

“How could you have lived like this for four years otherwise?”

A shiver went down my spine. Like this. What was he trying to say?

“These past four years, did you ever once say you wanted to go out and find work?” my husband said in a syrupy voice, still gazing into the foaming pan.

A quail egg plopped its way into the oil.

“What did you think when you found out I already owned an apartment?”

Another egg went in.

“I knew from the start you’d never leave this place.”

His voice wasn’t my husband’s. But I could no longer recall how my husband’s voice sounded.

“I think you understand it all, San. Why you married me, and why I married you.”

I felt the hairs on my body stand on end.

As I opened my mouth to scream, I felt something hot fall into it.

“They’re best eaten hot.”

It was hot. So hot I thought I was about to burn myself. But the more I told myself I had to spit the fritter out right away, the more my mouth huffed and my tongue moved to taste it. The delicate aroma of in-season gingerroot rose to my palate.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. It’ll start to taste good soon.”

My husband looked at me.

His face, which I hadn’t seen in a long while, was a perfect half-and-half mixture of my husband and me.

My husband continued throwing ginger shoots and quail eggs into my mouth, one after the other. It was horrifying, but also delicious. As I moved my mouth to keep up with the onslaught, the taste started to change into something I knew well.

“You thought you were the only one feeding yourself to me?” he said, twisting his body into a coil and smiling thinly. I cried out and tried to peel him off me, but it was too late.

I couldn’t breathe. But the sense of revulsion gradually lessened, and soon enough, with tears in my eyes, I was filling my mouth with the familiar substance. “It’s good, it tastes so good,” I said, coiling, and breathlessly continued to revel in the taste of the thing I knew so well.

We ran into Mr. Arai just once after that, at the entrance to the apartment complex.

Mr. Arai, who was collecting his mail from the mailroom, stopped as soon as he spotted me and my husband, and said, “Oh!”

“It’s been a while,” I said, and bowed lightly.

“I see,” Mr. Arai said, looking at the two of us in turn. “You decided against placing something between you.”

“Yes. I felt that we could make it work without that.”

“You weren’t so averse to it, then.”

“I guess not.”

“I see. I see.” Mr. Arai nodded again, and looked up at my husband, who was listening to our exchange suspiciously. “Well, there are plenty of very similar married couples out there. You’re right. Perhaps it does work,” he said, and walked off briskly toward the east wing.

I wanted to ask him what we looked like to him, but I watched him go in silence. Not long after that, Kitae told me that the two of them had decided to move back to San Francisco.

It was October, and several out-of-season typhoons made landfall in quick succession. People were saying it was because there had been so few during September that we were getting them now.

My husband had gotten a doctor’s note and taken paid leave from work, and, providing me with the couch and highballs and the TV, took on the housework with a kind of relish.

That day, the biggest typhoon of the year was forecast to approach. Drops in air pressure triggered my migraines, so I’d been in an especially bad mood since morning. I started drinking earlier than usual to compensate.

“I went shopping on the main street today,” my husband said after dinner.

“Uh-huh,” I said from the couch, not really listening. Thanks to the painkillers I’d taken for the migraine, on top of the fritters I’d stuffed myself with yet again, my head felt even fuzzier than normal. Watching from behind as he eagerly folded the laundry, I thought, He’s finally progressed to shopping at the local shops.

“The butcher’s was closed. Apparently the owner fell sick last week? The old greengrocer said so.”

“Hmm,” I said. I’d heard about that only the day before yesterday myself.

“And our dry cleaner’s going to be changing hands soon.”

I knew that too. My husband noticed that my glass was empty, and got up smoothly and brought me a refill. What an attentive wife he was.

He waited quietly until I’d taken my first sip, and then continued. “Zoromi’s cat food’s going up next month. By sixty yen!” he said triumphantly.

But this was information I ’d told him yesterday. Caught you out , I thought uncharitably, and looked at my husband, who had sat back down in front of the laundry. “Eighty yen, not sixty.”

When I corrected him, my husband simply repeated himself. “Zoromi’s cat food’s going up next month. By eighty yen!”

He has no shame. “Only housewives understand what it’s like to run a household,” I said, taking a big swig of my highball. But my husband was pretending not to have heard. He was spreading a bath towel and demurely folding one corner to another. Utterly shameless , I thought again.

“You wouldn’t know anything about being a housewife,” I said, raising my voice without meaning to. My husband, who was sitting flat on the wood floor, kept his hands moving, folding the laundry assiduously.

“There’s no point in clinging to me like this,” I said to my husband’s back. “It only relieves the suffering a tiny bit. It doesn’t get rid of the temptation. I think you may as well give into it already, actually. What’s the point of killing yourself trying to keep up the appearance of being human?” Letting the headache and the alcohol loosen my tongue, I hurled my real feelings at him. The words seemed to spew out of me in a torrent, in exact proportion to the amount of fritters he’d forced me to eat.

“You only say that to try to trick Husband!” My husband, who still had his back to me, suddenly emitted a screeching, high-pitched voice I’d never heard before from somewhere around the nape of his neck.