Bicycle Days (23 page)

“I will be some minutes in preparing,” she said. “And so you must wait for me here, Alec. It is proper to wear a yukata. It is proper also to kneel. With the cushion, it will not be so painful.” Then she left the room.

Alec changed into the yukata, which fit him perfectly. He
settled down to wait for her, squatting at first the way he had seen Toshiro Mifune do in
The Seven Samurai.
When that grew too uncomfortable, he knelt down on the cushion, resting his hands on his knees.

She appeared a few minutes later, carrying a round lacquer tray of bowls and containers and odd-looking implements. A napkin the color of her obi was tucked in at her hip. Putting down the tray, she knelt at the entrance of the room and made a single bow. Then she rose and entered, set down the tray in front of the kettle and brazier, and knelt again.

“Tea ceremony is about beauty and waiting,” she said. “And there can be great pleasure in waiting. Tonight, I would like to do that for you, Alec. To make you wait and give you pleasure.”

Kiyoko picked up a ceramic bowl from the tray and placed it by her knee. She took the red napkin from her hip and folded it, then used it to wipe a lacquer caddy and a thin bamboo tea scoop. When she was finished, she moved the napkin to her other hand and fitted the lid on the kettle, which was steaming. Her hair fell over her shoulder as she leaned forward. Lifting the kettle, she filled a shallow tea bowl with hot water. She picked up a wooden tea whisk, dipped its head in the water and lightly knocked its handle against the edge of the bowl three times. Her hair fell back into place.…

Alec remembered watching her in Nobi’s kitchen, the way her hands had danced over his chest. They were dancing now, but the rhythm was different. Slow dancing. Seconds falling like raindrops from her fingers. Hot water being emptied out, tea bowl being wiped. Three and a half rotations for the outside, four for the inside. Seconds draining into minutes, tiny oceans of anticipation washing over him as he looked on.

She did not have to speak. The careful attention paid by her hands to whatever they touched told him everything. Objects were wiped to purify, not to clean. The tea scoop was rested against one side of the tray, and the napkin hung over the other because that was the way it had always been done. Forever. Her hands said so. To each object they gave promise, picking up in
one place, setting down in another, slow dancing and leading, in tune with the ceremony and the passing of time. They whispered to him, her hands. After every movement, every second and minute, they said pay attention, hold on, wait. Wait for pleasure. Already his heart was beating through him like a drum, filling his ears. Already he was missing things, gestures too subtle for him to understand. How long had he been waiting?

And then Kiyoko made tea for him. Alec watched her whisk it into a green froth. He watched her move on her knees around the brazier and toward him, carrying the half-full tea bowl in front of her like an offering. She smelled of freshly washed hair and cotton and faintly bitter tea. Turning the bowl round on her palm, she handed it to him. He had seen this part of the ceremony in a movie and knew what to do. He turned the bowl round to study its simple beauty. But he did not see it. He saw beyond it to the line of her neck, the fullness of her mouth. He drank the tea in one gulp and thought it tasted as thick and gritty and green as it looked. She took the tea bowl from him and set it aside.

Her eyes were fixed on his as she began to unwrap the obi at her waist. There was no rush. As if a dam were slowly crumbling, the red river of silk began to flow around her kneeling form, around and around, until it seemed there was neither beginning nor end to it. Like a warm tide, it lapped against his knees and thighs, rose higher and grew stronger, stirring him until he thought he might go under. The obi ran itself out then and, spent, dropped to the tatami. Kiyoko arched her back and let the kimono slide off her shoulders. It fell to rest beneath her like a trampled bed of wildflowers. On her knees she moved until her naked body was full against him. Dizzy, waiting, slow dancing, Alec felt her hands loosen his belt and the yukata fall away, felt the shiver-shock of her burning skin against his own, her dark nipples reaching into him, her wetness spreading over him like warm milk. He lay back and heard her whisper: “It has been a long time.”

T
wenty-four hours later Alec and Mark stepped quickly from the dance club into the heavy night air, Alec in the lead, refusing to stop until he could no longer hear the music pulsing up from below. They had been in the crowded basement almost four hours, drinking gin and tonics and dancing with two seventeen-year-old models from New Jersey. Alec had been there only once before and in fact had vowed never to return. But he had been reluctant to take Mark to any of the places he went with Japanese friends or business acquaintances, afraid that people would take them for some kind of American tourist package. Though it occurred to him now that being trapped in a basement with two vapid teenagers from New Jersey was not much better than being labeled a tourist.

He had had too much to drink. They both had, really, although Alec’s certainty that he was involved in a social ordeal had prevented him from ever feeling very giddy. Now all he felt was a light-headedness that made him think he might still be
able to laugh. He thought it would be nice to be able to laugh just then, a real belly laugh. It seemed a long time since he had laughed like that, and for a moment he hungered for it, as if not having laughed deeply was the same as not having eaten a full meal. But dizziness rose over his head like a dark hood, and no solutions came to him.

They reached the corner and stopped, neither one of them quite sure what to say. It was one-thirty in the morning, but in Roppongi the sidewalks were still filled with people. Across the street, eager young men and women stood as always in front of the Almond coffee shop, checking their watches, still waiting for their boyfriends or girlfriends to show up. It was never too late to hope in Tokyo, Alec thought as he watched them. Time never ran out, people never stayed away too long, just put themselves to bed for a little while before the neon turned off at daybreak. They came back to wait again, and their lithe figures seemed always to be hovering by the chrome entrance of the Almond, beneath the pink-and-blue canopy, cool in their linen suits and silk dresses. It was all chrome and neon and youth and energy and waiting. Tonight it made him sad.

“How about if I walk you to the hotel?” Alec said after a while. “It’s not that far.”

They turned left down the main avenue, heading in the direction of the business district. Within two blocks, most of the people had been left behind. The street itself became a kind of stranger, and it seemed to Alec to offer only strangeness to those who walked its shadowy, rough line. He looked over at Mark, who was smiling to himself.

“What’s so funny?”

“The Plotzner girls. Remember?”

“Julie and Katie.”

“Identical twins.”

“Right. I was with Julie.”

Mark shook his head. “Katie. Her hair was shorter.”

“It was one of those weekends you came up to see me at school,” Alec said. “What was it, my junior year? We were in
that beige-and-gray hotel room with those huge orange beds. Jesus. What a place.”

“The New Haven Concord,” Mark said.

Alec laughed at the name, remembering how he had lied to Katie Plotzner, telling her he was far from a virgin. And then how scared he had been when she tore off her clothes and sat down on the bed.

He said, “It’s still hard to believe it really happened that way. You’ve got to wonder what the hell we were thinking about.”

He had thought Mark would be laughing with him—after all, they had been through the same thing at the same time, on different beds in the same hotel room, with girls whose looks were so similar they might have been the same person—but when he looked over again his brother’s face looked tight and unhappy.

“You know,” Mark said finally, “I bet you no one else in the world knows that about you—about exactly what the hotel looked like, about who was with Julie and who was with Katie. Any of that stuff.”

Unsure of how to respond, Alec turned away from Mark, as if he had suddenly recognized the building across the street as an architectural treasure. When he turned back, Mark was walking with his head down in intense concentration, like a little boy trying not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk.

Mark cleared his throat, a low rasping sound with a hitch in the middle of it. “You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about when Mom and Dad split up.”

Alec stared at him for a few seconds before speaking. “Why?”

“What do you mean,
why?”

“I mean, I don’t really want to talk about it. Just let it go.”

“Let what go?”

“The divorce. Everything. It happened a long time ago.”

“It wasn’t that long ago,” Mark said. “You remember the actual night it happened—when I went up to school to see you?”

“Of course I remember.”

“The way you’re talking, I’m not so sure.”

“People don’t forget things like that,” Alec said.

“Some do.”

“Maybe they do. I don’t.”

“You were crying in the stall of the bathroom on the third floor of your dorm,” Mark said quietly, as if to himself. “I had looked for you in your room, but no one knew where you were. And I didn’t know where else to look. Finally, I just went into the bathroom to take a leak. So I was standing there at the urinal, staring at the wall or whatever, and I heard you sniffle. You must’ve been trying really hard to be quiet, because that was all I heard for a little while, not even any breathing. But then I heard it a couple more times, and I knew someone was crying in there. It made me feel strange, like I was spying on someone I didn’t even know. But I would’ve felt worse just leaving, knowing someone was crying alone in the bathroom. So I said something. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d I say?”

“You said my name.”

“And then what?”

“What’re you getting at?”

“Just tell me what I said next.”

Alec made a show of peering around the area in which they were walking. “What, is there an audience around here I should know about? Or how about a huge applause sign that lights up when we speak our memories out loud? I guess I’m just missing the point.”

“Just act like I’m telling a story, okay? And tell me what I said. That’s all. It’s not much to ask, is it?”

Alec gave a loud sigh. “I came out of the stall after a while. You asked me if I wanted to go get a pizza before curfew.”

“Right,” Mark said. “So we went and got a pizza. I stayed with you then. I cut two days of classes to be with you.”

Alec looked out of the corner of his eye, saw Mark staring right at him. “We’re brothers.”

“Yeah, we’re brothers. And we counted on each other.”

“That’ll never change. You know that.”

“Then maybe you at least owe me an answer. Maybe you at least owe me that.”

A white car drove by. Two kids stuck their heads out the back window and yelled something in Japanese. Alec heard the word
gaijin,
foreigner, but that was all. Mark seemed oblivious of the whole episode.

They were close to Mark’s hotel now. Alec could see the neon characters extended in a vertical line out over the sidewalk, about a block and a half away. He thought about the first time he had seen the movie
Jaws,
with the little boy swimming happily on the raft, and the huge killer shark going after him. If he could just make it to shore before it was too late.…

Mark stopped walking. Alec was two steps past him before he stopped and turned around. Things had turned serious quickly, though that had been happening a lot lately, now that he thought about it. He was supposed to say something, there was no doubt about it.

“I don’t think your living here is a good idea, Mark.”

Mark’s entire face appeared to contract as he listened, a grimace that began with the eyes and spread outward; the look of a person who could just as easily hit someone as cry. When he spoke, his voice was barely audible. “Tell me why not.”

“Because right now being alone is too important to me,” Alec said. He saw Mark start to shake his head. “No. Listen. Remember what you were saying about living at home—how nothing belongs to you, not the apartment, not the TV, nothing? Well, I always felt like that. Like I was there just to
watch
things happen. It’s like you’re empty, because nothing’s yours. You have no control over anything. All those afternoons when you were out playing football and Mom and Dad were working—for a while then I tried to make things my own. Isn’t that strange for a kid? I took tours of the apartment. I went through Mom and Dad’s closets. I found old clothes you wouldn’t believe: Dad’s old prom suit, Mom’s miniskirt from the sixties. I found Grandpa’s gold pocketwatch, an old stadium coat, your old baby
blanket. Everything. Rings, shoes, broken pieces of china, loose buttons, letters. The whole family history. No one else recorded it the way I did then, tried to understand it the way I did. I guess I thought that if I knew every single thing that our family owned and touched, our history would become mine in some way. But I was wrong. I didn’t know anything. And then I tried to get away from what was going on at home. The thing is, I couldn’t. Not really. Then you came up to school when it happened—the whole scene in the bathroom and the pizza and the two days of talking. And you did help. You really did. But it was as if you had caught up with me, too. As if I knew then for the first time that I couldn’t really get away from home, as if even my problems weren’t my own anymore, but yours, and you were going to deal with them for both of us. I couldn’t stand that. Not even when we were both at different colleges, when you didn’t come up to see me so much, when Mom and Dad finally stopped calling every other day to make sure I hadn’t gone crazy. I guess I should’ve been able to handle it by then. But I couldn’t. No matter where I went, I couldn’t get far enough away. And now I’m here and I’ve got hold of this feeling that I’m finally starting to belong to something, to some people. I need that feeling—the way you need something you’ve never been able to get your hands on. I’m sorry, but I need it.”