Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder - Stories

She started making a strange gesture. She was desperately trying to hold down her chin, which kept rising. “You want to pull your chin back down?” I asked, and her eyes wordlessly answered in the affirmative. Using my thumb and index finger, carefully, to avoid breaking her delicate jaw, I tried repeatedly to push it down. But her jaw pointed resolutely upward, immovable. There was nothing more I could do. It was my favorite of her angles. It accentuated her beautiful neck and flattered her already-slim face. She cried out with an animal sound.

“What now?”

She was pulling the hem of her skirt down, and I tried to help her. The knee-length skirt of her dress was shrinking upward with incredible force. Stiletto heels were sprouting from the soles of her shoes.

“Not me,” I said, shaking my head at her as she grimaced in pain. “I’m not that kind of man.”

“Stop trying to defend yourself. This is what you wanted!” A man I didn’t know yelled at me, and a flying rock grazed the side of my face. When I looked toward where the voice had come from, an old man was slowly getting backed into a corner by an old woman, who was wearing fishnet stockings and a skirt with a hem far north of her knees.

“We have to accept that we’re responsible for the physical effects they’re experiencing!” He bent to pick up another rock, and then made an appeasing gesture with his other hand to distract the old woman’s attention.

“But why now? Why all of a sudden?”

“Sudden? Hardly. This could have happened at any point since humans first appeared on this earth.”

“Exactly!” It was a young man sitting behind me, being stared down by a woman in a police uniform. “Life’s not worth living if you’re not tending to the whims and demands of a high-maintenance lover!”

Everywhere I looked, each and every woman was transforming into a legendary beauty of unbelievable gorgeousness. I turned to my girlfriend, still wiping off the lipstick that kept staining her lips.

“I know you were worried about my ex. It’s true that being with her was exciting: I was always on tenterhooks. But I forgot all about her long ago. If you got the impression I found you in any way lacking, there’s no truth to that at all.”

Her black-rimmed eyes opened wider as she heard what I was saying. So she had been feeling insecure. Of course she’d never really wanted to duel at all. I continued to wipe off the lipstick.

“Don’t change. I just want you to be yourself.”

The old woman growled and leapt onto the old man. The old man shuffled and fell back. He held up his rock, but as he was about to strike, he stopped himself and slowly lifted both hands above his head.

The young people behind us had started too. I took my lover’s hand in mine, and we resumed walking down the riverbank. The stilettos growing out of her shoes seemed to have given her the ability to move much faster and more dynamically. I thought she might have broken some of my fingers. I stopped us every once in a while to wipe off more of the lipstick.

She was no longer out of breath. Her nose was growing ever more beautiful in the light of the setting sun. Her eyes gave me chills. Her chin was held proudly aloft. Of all the women at the river, she was the most devastating beauty. I was continuously swabbing at the lipstick now, but I couldn’t keep up. “I’m sorry,” I said, crying again.

It came into view as we approached the bridge, a classic location for a duel: several hundred couples engaged in a melee defying all imagining. Battle cries rang out into the distance, screams, the clash of weapons, men begging for their lives from lovers who seemed beyond language, belated confessions of love…

“Don’t change. I love you just the way you are,” I said.

There on the riverside, with tears streaming down my face, I picked up a barbed wrecking ball from the ground near my feet and swung as though my life depended on it. My girlfriend leapt high into the air and evaded it easily, so I tossed the wrecking ball aside and ran into the river. She chased me with superhuman speed, even though the water came to her waist. Just as I thought I had reached the other side, she grabbed a fistful of my hair from behind and yanked it out of my head. A wail of pain escaped my mouth, but I managed to clamber onto the shore and acquire a stun gun from a man who almost mowed me down. When I looked back, my girlfriend was right behind me, coming at me with a ferocious expression I’d never seen before. I pressed the stun gun to her ribs and released the current. She opened her eyes wide and stumbled backward. I followed, maintaining the pressure of the gun against her body. She staggered and nearly fell. I was about to press the button again when she weakly said, “Stop. Please. No more. Help me.”

Weeping, I swung at her head with a club I’d taken off a man I’d kicked to the ground. She fell back into the river with a splash, and drifted slowly downstream.

On the way home, I slowly recited the list of our special places. “The amusement park. The movie theater. The park with the unusual swings. The public petting zoo. Our parents’ homes. The courtyard at the college where we met…”

I knew then that she’d let me defeat her. When I told her I loved her the way she was, it must have gotten through to her somehow. I couldn’t stop crying. I walked past the old man, who had expired with his arms still outstretched in entreaty. My sweet, kind lover! I’d rather die than ever lose you.

In my decades as a columnist, I have been honored to have had the opportunity to respond to the worries and fears of so many women everywhere in the Q&A format, but the time is fast approaching for this celebrated series to come to an end. As you all may have started to suspect, I have reached the limit of my living ability to blithely continue spouting phrases like “your feminine radiance,” or “a natural lifestyle,” and so forth, not only mentally but also on the purely physical level. As of this issue, I am writing to you from a hospital bed.

When I expressed my desire to retire from this column, the editorial team was kind enough to ask me to reconsider. It’s a reader favorite, they said; it’s been running since our very first issue; you’ve made it this far, so you may as well make it your life’s work; you still have a niche as a grandmother hot in pursuit of beauty beyond age. All much appreciated. Sadly, it is not within my power to live up to these kind expectations. However, in this issue, my last, the team has gone all out on a fifty-eight-page extravaganza of a feature, under the title “If You Can Do It, We All Can!” I myself intend to do my part by responding to as many of your questions as humanly possible. Without further ado, let’s start with some from the editorial team: Thirteen Things We All Want to Know, But Thought It Was Probably Too Late to Ask.

Thank you, as ever, for reading.

Q. What do you think people think of when they think of you?

A. (1) Both men and women find me attractive; (2) I have a great deal of integrity; (3) My age, and the experiences that have come with it, have refined me as a woman; and (4) I keep my promises to family.

Q. Tell us about your thirties.

A. Having just made my start as a cover model for women’s magazines at that age, and because of the media interest that went with it, I felt under pressure to say things that conformed to the image of a “desirable woman.” My main memory is of women my age who welcomed me, as someone who had already borne and raised children, as a manifestation of the hope that they, too, could continue to enhance their feminine radiance. I enjoyed living up to everyone’s ideal, and I believed I was doing a good thing. I probably had some innate talent for it, and soon enough I was in constant demand as a spokesperson and an arbiter of taste—a position that was cemented by my advice column, which first appeared in this magazine.