A Wild Sheep Chase (5 page)

“Some, yes,” she said quietly.

“Some?”

“Sure. But to put it another way, I’m more accustomed to the self who doesn’t show her ears.”

“Which is to say that the you when you show your ears is different from the you when you don’t show your ears.”

“Right enough.”

Two waiters cleared away our dishes and brought the soup.

“Would you mind telling me about the you who shows her ears.”

“That’s so long ago I doubt I can tell it very well. The truth is, I haven’t shown my ears once since I was twelve.”

“But when you did that modeling job, you showed your ears, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, “but not my real ears.”

“Not your real ears?”

“Those were blocked ears.”

I had two spoonfuls of soup and looked up at her.

“Tell me more about your ‘blocked ears.’”

“Blocked ears are dead ears. I killed my own ears. That is, I consciously cut off the passageway…. Do you follow me?”

No, I didn’t follow her.

“Ask me, then,” she said.

“By killing your ears, do you mean you made yourself deaf?”

“No, I can hear quite fine. But even so, my ears are dead. You can probably do it too.”

She set her soupspoon back down, straightened her back, raised her shoulders two inches, thrust her jaw full out, held that posture for all of ten seconds, and suddenly dropped her shoulders.

“There. My ears are dead. Now you try.”

Three times I repeated the movements she’d made. Slowly, carefully, but nothing left me with the impression that my ears had died. The wine was rapidly circulating through my system.

“I do believe that my ears aren’t dying properly,” I said, disappointed.

She shook her head. “That’s okay. If your ears don’t need to die, there’s nothing wrong with them not dying.”

“May I ask you something else?”

“Go right ahead.”

“If I add up everything you’ve told me, it seems to come down to this: that up to age twelve you showed your ears. Then one day you hid your ears. And from that day on, not once have you shown your ears. But at such times that you must show your ears, you block off the passageway between your ears and your consciousness. Is that correct?”

A winsome smile came to her face. “That is correct.”

“What happened to your ears at age twelve?”

“Don’t rush things,” she said, reaching her right hand across the table, lightly touching the fingers of my left hand. “Please.”

I poured out the rest of the wine into our glasses and slowly drank mine.

“First, I want to know more about you,” she started.

“What about me?”

“Everything. How you were brought up, how old you are, what you do for a living, stuff like that.”

“It’s your ordinary story. So utterly ordinary, you’d probably doze off in the middle of it.”

“I like ordinary stories.”

“Mine is the kind of ordinary story no one could possibly enjoy.”

“That’s okay, give me ten minutes’ worth.”

“I was born in 1948, on December twenty-fourth, Christmas Eve. Now Christmas Eve doesn’t make a very good birthday. I mean, you don’t get separate birthday and Christmas presents. Everyone figures they save money that way. My sign is Capricorn and my blood type is A—a perfect combination for bank tellers and civil servants. I’m not supposed to get along well with Sagittarians and Libras and Aquarians. A boring life, don’t you think?”

“I’m fascinated.”

“I grew up in an ordinary little town, went to an ordinary school. I was a quiet child, but grew into a bored kid. I met this ordinary girl, had an ordinary first romance. When I was eighteen, I came to Tokyo to go to college. When I got out of college, a friend and I set up a small translation service, and somehow we scraped by. Three years ago, we branched out into P.R. newsletters and advertising-related work, and that’s going fairly well. I got
involved with one of the women who worked at the firm. We got married four years back and got divorced two months ago. No one reason I can put it all down to. I have an old tomcat for a pet. Smoke forty cigarettes a day. Can’t seem to quit. I own three suits, six neckties, plus a collection of five hundred records that are hopelessly out of style. I’ve memorized all the murderers’ names in every Ellery Queen mystery ever written. I own the complete
A la recherche du temps perdus
, but have only read half. I drink beer in summer, whiskey in winter.”

“And two days out of three you eat omelettes and sandwiches in bars, right?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“What an interesting life.”

“It’s been boring so far. It’ll probably be the same from here on. Not that that bothers me. I mean, I take what I get.”

I looked at my watch. Nine minutes, twenty seconds.

“But what you’ve just told me isn’t everything, no?”

I gazed at my hands on the table. “Of course that’s not everything. There’s no telling every last thing about someone’s life, no matter how boring.”

“May I comment?”

“Certainly.”

“Whenever I meet people for the first time, I get them to talk for ten minutes. Then I size them up from the exact opposite perspective of all they’ve told me. Do you think that’s crazy?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head, “I’d guess your method works quite well.”

A waiter came, set the table with new plates, onto which another waiter served the entrée, topped with sauce by still another waiter. A quick double play, shortstop to second, second to first.

“Applying this method to you, I’ve learned one thing,” she said, putting the knife to her sole mousse. “That your life is not boring. You wish your life was boring. Am I off base?”

“Maybe not. Maybe my life isn’t boring, maybe I don’t really seek a boring life. But effectively it’s the same thing. Either way I’ve already got what’s coming. Most people, they’re trying to escape from boredom, but I’m trying to get into the thick of boredom. That’s why I’m not complaining when I say my life is boring. It was enough to make my wife bail out, though.”

“Is that why you and your wife split up?”

“Like I said before, there’s no one thing I can put it all down to. But as Nietzsche said, ‘The gods furl their flags at boredom.’ Or something like that.”

We took our time eating. She had seconds on the sauce, and I had extra bread. Then our plates were cleared away, we had blueberry sorbet, and about the time they came out with espresso I lit up a cigarette. The smoke drifted about only a short while before it was discreetly whisked away by the noiseless ventilation system.

People had begun to take their places at other tables. A Mozart concerto played from the overhead speakers.

“I’d like to ask you more about your ears, if I may,” I said.

“You want to ask whether or not my ears possess some special power?”

I nodded.

“That is something you’d have to check for yourself,” she said. “If I were to tell you anything, it might not be of any interest to you. Might even cramp your style.”

I nodded once more.

“For you, I’ll show my ears,” she said, after finishing her espresso. “But I don’t know if it will really be to your benefit. You might end up regretting it.”

“How’s that?”

“Your boredom might not be as hard-core as you think.”

“That’s a chance I’ll have to take,” I said.

She reached out across the table and put her hand on mine. “One more thing: for the time being—say, the next few months—don’t leave my side. Okay?”

“Sure.”

With that, she pulled a black hairband out of her handbag. Holding it between her lips, she pulled her hair back with both hands, gave it one full twist, and swiftly tied it back.

“Well?”

I swallowed my breath and gazed at her, transfixed. My mouth went dry. From no part of me could I summon a voice. For an instant, the white plaster wall seemed to ripple. The voices of the other diners and the clinking of their dinnerware grew faint, then once again returned to normal. I heard the sound of waves, recalled the scent of a long-forgotten evening. Yet all this was but a mere fragment of the sensations passing through me in those few hundredths of a second.

“Exquisite,” I managed to squeeze out. “I can’t believe you’re the same human being.”

“See what I mean?” she said.

“See what I mean?” she said.

She’d become so beautiful, it defied understanding. Never had I feasted my eyes on such beauty. Beauty of a variety I’d never imagined existed. As expansive as the entire universe, yet as dense as a glacier. Unabashedly excessive, yet at the same time pared down to an essence. It transcended all concepts within the boundaries of my awareness. She was at one with her ears, gliding down the oblique face of time like a protean beam of light.

“You’re extraordinary,” I said, after catching my breath.

“I know,” she said. “These are my ears in their unblocked state.”

Several of the other customers were now turned our way, staring agape at her. The waiter who came over with more coffee couldn’t pour properly. Not a soul uttered a word. Only the reels on the tape deck kept slowly spinning.

She retrieved a clove cigarette from her purse and put it to her lips. I hurriedly offered her a light with my lighter.

“I want to sleep with you,” she said.

So we slept together.

The manifestation of her full splendor, though, I had yet to await. For the next two or three days, she exposed her ears only intermittently, then hid those marvels of creation behind her hair again and returned to ordinariness.

To her, it was as if she’d tried taking off her coat at the beginning of March. “I guess it’s still not time to show my ears,” she said. “I’m not entirely comfortable with them yet.”

“Really, I don’t mind,” I said. Even with her ears covered she wasn’t bad.

She’d show me her ears on occasion; mostly on sexual occasions. Sex with her with her ears exposed was an experience I’d never known. When it was raining, the smell of the rain came through crystal clear. When birds were singing, their song was a thing of sheer clarity. I’m at a loss for words, but that’s what it was like.

“You don’t show your ears when you sleep with other men?” I once asked her.

“Of course not,” she said. “They probably don’t even know I have ears.”

“What’s sex like for you without your ears showing?”

“A duty. Dry and tasteless, like chewing newsprint. But that’s okay. Nothing bad about fulfilling a duty, you know.”

“But with your ears out it’s a thousand times better, isn’t it?”

“Sure.”

“Then you ought to show them,” I said. “No need to go out of your way to put up with such dull times.”

Dead serious, she stared at me and said, “You don’t understand anything.”

For sure, there were a lot of things I didn’t understand at all.

For instance, the reason why she treated me special. I couldn’t for the life of me believe I might be any better or different in any way than anyone else.

But when I told her that, she only laughed.

“It’s really very simple,” she said. “You sought me out. That’s the biggest reason.”

“And supposing somebody else had sought you out?”

“At least for the present, it’s you who wants me. What’s more, you’re loads better than you think you are.”

“So why is it I get to thinking that way?” I puzzled.

“That’s because you’re only half-living,” she said briskly. “The other half is still untapped somewhere.”

“Hmm.”

“In that sense, you’re not unlike me. I’m sitting on my ears, and you’ve got only half of you that’s really living. Sure seems that way, doesn’t it?”

“Even if that were the case, my remaining half couldn’t possibly compare to your ears.”

“Maybe not,” she smiled. “You wouldn’t have any idea, would you?”

And with that smile in place, she lifted back her hair and unbuttoned her blouse.

That September afternoon toward summer’s end, I took the day off and was lying in bed with her, stroking her hair and thinking about the whale’s penis. The sea, a dark lead-gray. A brisk wind beating against the aquarium window. The lofty ceiling, the empty exhibition room. The penis severed forever from the whale, its meaning as a whale’s penis irretrievably lost.