Killing Commendatore: A novel (35 page)

“But don't men like women with big breasts?”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “When my younger sister was about your age, her breasts were small too. But that didn't seem to bother her.”

“Maybe it bothered her, but she just didn't mention it.”

“Could be,” I said. But I don't think that bothered Komi. She had other things to worry about.

“Did your sister's breasts get bigger after that?”

My hand continued to move the pencil swiftly across the page. I didn't respond to her question. Mariye watched my hand glide along the paper.

“Did her breasts get bigger after that?” Mariye asked again.

“No, they didn't,” I finally gave up and answered. “My sister died the year she entered junior high. She was only twelve.”

Mariye didn't say anything for a while.

“Don't you think my aunt's really beautiful?” Mariye said, abruptly changing subjects.

“Yes, she's a very lovely person.”

“Are you single?”

“Ah—
nearly,
” I responded. Once that envelope arrived at the law office it'd be completely.

“Would you like to go on a date with her?”

“That would be nice.”

“She has big breasts, too.”

“I hadn't noticed.”

“And they're really nicely shaped. We bathe together sometimes, so I know.”

I looked at Mariye's face again. “Do you get along well with your aunt?”

“We fight sometimes,” she said.

“About what?”

“All kinds of things. When we have a difference of opinion, or when she makes me mad.”

“You're an unusual girl,” I said. “You're quite different from when you're in art class. I got the impression you were very quiet.”

“In places where I don't want to talk, I don't,” she said simply. “Am I talking too much? Would it be better if I stayed quiet?”

“No, not at all. I like talking. Feel free to talk as much as you like.”

Of course I welcomed a lively conversation. I wasn't about to stay totally silent for nearly two hours and just paint.

“I can't help thinking about my breasts,” Mariye said after a while. “That's all I think about, pretty much. Is that weird?”

“Not particularly,” I said. “You're at that age. When I was your age all I thought about was my penis. Whether it was shaped funny, or was too small, whether it was working wrong.”

“What about now?”

“You're asking what I think about my penis now?”

“Yeah.”

I thought about it. “I don't give it much thought. It's pretty ordinary, I guess, and hasn't given me any problems.”

“Do women admire it?”

“Occasionally there might be one who does. But that might just be flattery. Like when people praise paintings.”

Mariye pondered this for a while. Finally she said, “You may be a little strange.”

“Really?”

“Normal men don't talk like that. Even my father doesn't say things like that to me.”

“I doubt fathers in normal families want to talk about penises with their daughters,” I said. All the while my hand continued to move busily over the paper.

“At what age do nipples get bigger?” Mariye asked.

“I'm not really sure. Since I'm a guy. I'd say it really depends on the person.”

“Did you have a girlfriend when you were a kid?”

“I had my first girlfriend when I was seventeen. A girl in the same class in high school.”

“What high school?”

I told her the name of a public high school in Toshima, in Tokyo. Outside of people who lived in Toshima, probably no one had ever heard of it.

“Did you like school?”

I shook my head. “Not particularly.”

“Did you ever see that girlfriend's nipples?”

“Yeah,” I said. “She showed them to me.”

“How big were they?”

I remembered the girl's nipples. “They weren't especially small, or big. Normal size, I guess.”

“Did she pad her bra?”

I tried to recall the bra my girlfriend had worn back then. All I had was a very vague memory of it. What I did recall was how much trouble I had slipping my hand behind her and unhooking it. “No, I don't think she padded it.”

“What's she doing now?”

What
was
she doing now? “I don't know. I haven't seen her for a long time. I imagine she's married, maybe with some children.”

“How come you don't see her?”

“The last time I saw her, she said she never wanted to see me again.”

Mariye frowned. “Was this because there was something wrong with you?”

“I guess,” I said. Of course the problem lay with me. No room for doubt there.

Actually, I'd recently had two dreams about this high school girlfriend. In one dream we were strolling along a river on a summer's evening. I tried to kiss her, but her long black hair formed a curtain in front of her face and my lips couldn't touch hers. In the dream she was still seventeen, but I had already turned thirty-six, something I suddenly noticed. And that's when I woke up. It was such a vivid dream. I could still feel her hair on my lips. Before this, I hadn't thought about her for years.

“How much younger than you was your younger sister?” Mariye said, again suddenly changing topics.

“Three years younger.”

“You said she died when she was twelve?”

“That's right.”

“So that would make you fifteen then.”

“Right. I was fifteen. I'd just started high school. And she'd just started junior high. Just like you.”

Now that I thought about it, Komi was now twenty-four years younger than me. Since she'd died, every year the age gap only increased between us.

“I was six when my mother died,” Mariye said. “She got stung by hornets. When she was walking in the mountains nearby.”

“I'm very sorry,” I said.

“She had an allergy to hornet stings. They took her by ambulance to the hospital but she was already in shock and went into cardiac arrest.”

“Your aunt moved in with you after that?”

“Yeah,” Mariye said. “She's my father's younger sister. I wish I'd had an older brother. A brother three years older.”

I finished up the first dessan and began a second. I wanted to draw her from several angles. This first day I planned to devote just to sketches.

“Did you ever fight with your sister?” she asked.

“No, I don't recall ever fighting.”

“So you got along well?”

“I suppose so. I never considered whether we did or not.”

“What does ‘nearly single' mean?” Mariye asked, again shifting subjects.

“I'll soon be officially divorced,” I said. “We're in the midst of handling all the paperwork, so that's why it's ‘nearly.' ”

She narrowed her eyes. “I don't get
divorce
. Nobody I know has ever divorced.”

“I don't get it either. I mean, it's the first time I ever got divorced.”

“What does it feel like?”

“A bit bizarre, I guess. Like you're walking along as always, sure you're on the right path, when the path suddenly vanishes, and you're facing an empty space, no sense of direction, no clue where to go, and you just keep trudging along. That's what it feels like.”

“How long were you married?”

“About six years.”

“How old is your wife?”

“She's three years younger.” Just a coincidence, but the same age difference as with my sister.

“Do you think you wasted those six years?”

I thought about it. “No, I don't think so. I don't want to think it was all for nothing. We had a lot of good times, too.”

“Does your wife think so too?”

I shook my head. “I don't know. I'd hope she would, of course.”

“You didn't ask her?”

“No. If I have a chance, maybe I will sometime.”

Silence reigned between us for a while. I focused on the dessan, and Mariye Akikawa was lost in serious thought—thoughts about the size of nipples, perhaps, or divorce, or hornets, or maybe something else entirely. Eyes narrowed, lips tight, both hands tightly holding her knees. She'd shifted into that mode, apparently, as I was capturing her earnest expression on the white page of my sketchbook.

Every day, exactly at noon, I could hear a chime from down the mountain. Ringing from some government office, or maybe a school, to announce the time. When I heard it now, I glanced at the clock and finished drawing. I'd managed to complete three dessan during this first session. All of them pretty interesting compositions, each one hinting at something to come. Not bad for a day's work.

Mariye Akikawa had sat on the chair in the studio, posing for me, for over an hour and a half. For the first day, that was enough. For someone not used to it—especially an active, growing child—posing for a painting wasn't easy.

Shoko Akikawa had put on black-framed glasses and was seated on the living room sofa absorbed in reading her paperback. When I came in she took off the glasses and stowed the paperback in her bag. The glasses made her look quite intellectual.

“We're all finished for the day,” I said. “If it's all right, could you come again the same day next week?”

“Yes, of course,” Shoko said. “It feels really nice to read here. Maybe because the sofa's so comfortable?”

“You don't mind?” I asked Mariye.

Mariye nodded silently.
I don't mind
, it meant. In front of her aunt she was totally changed, and had become taciturn again. Maybe she didn't like when the three of us were together.

They got into their blue Toyota Prius and drove away. I saw them off at the front door. Shoko, sunglasses on, reached a hand out the window and gave a few short waves goodbye. A small, pale hand. I raised my hand in reply. Mariye tucked in her chin and stared straight ahead. Once the car had disappeared from view down the slope, I went back inside. The house seemed suddenly barren. Like something that should be there wasn't anymore.

An odd pair, I thought, as I stared at the teacups still on the table. There was something peculiar about them. But what, exactly?

I remembered Menshiki. Maybe I should have taken Mariye out on the terrace so he could get a good look at her through his binoculars. But then I rethought that. Why did I have to go out of my way to do that, when he hadn't even asked me to?

Other opportunities would present themselves. No need to rush. Probably.

That night I got a call from Menshiki. The clock showed that it was past nine. He apologized for calling so late. Something silly came up and I couldn't get free until now, he said. I'm not going to bed for a while, I said, so don't worry about the time.

“So how did things go today? Did it work out well?” he asked.

“It did. I completed a few dessan of Mariye. The two of them will be coming over the same time next Sunday.”

“I'm glad,” Menshiki said. “By the way, was the aunt favorably disposed toward you?”

Favorably disposed? What a strange way of putting it.

I said, “Yes, she seems like a very nice woman. I don't know if ‘favorably disposed' is the right term, but she didn't seem particularly wary.”

I summed up what had taken place that morning. Menshiki listened with what seemed like bated breath, apparently trying to absorb as much detailed information as he could. Other than a couple of questions, he hardly said a word, and just listened intently. What sort of clothes the two had on, how they had arrived. How they appeared, what they'd said. And how I'd gone about sketching Mariye Akikawa. I told Menshiki all this, piece by piece. I didn't, though, delve into Mariye's obsession with the size of her breasts. That was best kept between us.

“It might be a little early, then, for me to show up next week?” Menshiki asked me.

“It's up to you. I can't say. I don't have a problem if you come over next week.”

On the other end of the line Menshiki was silent. “I'll have to think about it. It's kind of delicate.”

“Take your time. It's going to take a while to finish the painting, and there should be plenty of opportunities. Next week, or the week after that—either way's fine with me.”

I'd never seen Menshiki so hesitant before. Quickly decisive and never wavering—that was the Menshiki I knew.

I was thinking of asking him if he'd been watching my house with his binoculars this morning. Whether he'd been able to observe Mariye and her aunt. But I thought better of it. As long as he didn't bring it up, it seemed smarter not to mention that topic. Even if the place under surveillance was the house I was living in.

Menshiki thanked me again. “I'm really sorry to ask you to go to all this trouble for me.”

I said, “I'm not doing anything for your sake. I'm simply doing a painting of Mariye Akikawa. I'm painting it because I want to. I thought that's how we decided things were going to be. Both the private and public reasons for it. So there's no reason for you to thank me.”

“Still, I'm very grateful,” Menshiki said quietly. “In
a lot of ways
.”

I didn't really understand what he meant by “a lot of ways,” but didn't ask. It was getting late. We said a quick goodbye and hung up. But after I put the phone down, it suddenly occurred to me that Menshiki might be spending a long, sleepless night tonight. I could sense the tension in his voice. He probably had lots of things on his mind.

Not much happened that week. The Commendatore didn't make an appearance, and my girlfriend didn't get in touch. A very quiet week altogether. Autumn steadily deepened around me. The sky opened up, the air clear and crisp, the clouds like beautiful white brushstrokes.

I often studied the three dessan I'd done of Mariye. The different poses, the different angles. I found them fascinating, and suggestive. Though from the beginning I hadn't planned to choose one of them to use as the preliminary design for the painting. The point of doing those three sketches, as she herself had said, was so I could understand the totality of this girl. To internally assimilate her.

I looked at those three dessan over and over again, intently focusing, trying to construct a concrete picture of the girl in my mind. As I did this, I got the distinct sense of Mariye Akikawa's figure and that of my sister getting mixed into one. Was this appropriate? I couldn't say. But the spirits of these two young girls nearly the same age were already, somewhere—probably in some deep internal recesses I shouldn't access—blended and combined. I could no longer unravel those two intertwined spirits.

That Thursday I received a letter from my wife. This was the first time since I'd left home in March that she'd gotten in touch. My name and address and hers were written on the envelope in her familiar, beautiful, steady handwriting. She was still using my last name, I saw. Maybe it was more convenient, somehow, until the divorce became official, to continue to use her husband's last name.

I used scissors to neatly snip open the envelope. Inside was a postcard with a photo of a polar bear standing on top of an iceberg. On the card she'd written a simple message thanking me for signing the divorce papers and mailing them back so quickly.

How are you? I'm managing to get by, nothing to report. I'm still living in the same place. Thank you for mailing back the papers so quickly. I appreciate it. I'll get in touch when there's been progress in the process.

If there's anything you left at the house you need, please let me know. I'll send it to you. At any rate, I hope both our new lives work out.

Yuzu

I reread the letter many times, straining to decipher the feelings hidden behind those lines. But I couldn't detect any implied emotion or intention. She just seemed to be transmitting the clearly stated message that the words conveyed.

One other thing I didn't understand was why it had taken her so long to prepare the divorce papers. It's not that much trouble to get them ready. And she must have wanted to dissolve our relationship as fast as possible. Even so, half a year had passed since I'd left our house. What had she been doing all that time? What had been going through her mind?

I gazed at the postcard with the polar bear, but couldn't read any intentions in that either. Why a polar bear from the North Pole? She probably just happened to have the polar bear card on hand and used it. Most likely that's the case, I figured. Or was she suggesting that my future was like that of the polar bear, stuck on a tiny iceberg, directionless, carried away by the whims of the current? No—that was reading too much into it.

I tossed the card into the envelope and put it inside the top drawer of my desk. Once I shut the drawer it felt like things had progressed one step forward. Like with a
click
the scale had moved one line up. Not that this was my doing. Someone, something, had prepared this new stage in my stead, and I was simply going along with the program.

I recalled how on Sunday I'd talked to Mariye Akikawa about life after divorce.

Like you're walking along as always, sure you're on the right path, when the path suddenly vanishes, and you're facing an empty space, no sense of direction, no clue where to go, and you just keep trudging along. That's what it feels like.

A directionless ocean current, a road to nowhere, it didn't matter much. They were both the same. Just metaphors. I was experiencing the real thing, and being swallowed up by reality. If I had that, who needs a metaphor?

If I could, I wanted to write a letter to Yuzu to explain the situation I found myself in now. I didn't think I could write something vague like
I'm managing to get by, nothing to report
. Far from it. My honest sense was there was
too much to report
. But if I started writing about every single thing that had happened to me since I started living here, it would spin out of control. The biggest problem was that I couldn't explain well to myself what was happening. At least I knew I couldn't find a consistent, logical context in which to
explain
it all.

So I decided not to write back to Yuzu. If I did start writing there were only two ways to go: either explain everything that had taken place (ignoring logic and consistency), or write nothing. I chose the latter. In a sense I really was the lonely polar bear left behind to drift on an iceberg. Not a single mailbox as far as the eye could see. A polar bear has no way to send a letter, now does he.

I remember very well when Yuzu and I first met, and started dating.

On our first date we had dinner, talked about all kinds of things, and she seemed to like me. She said I could see her again. From the first our minds seemed to inexplicably click. Simply put, we seemed a good match.

But it took some time before I actually became her lover. Yuzu had another man she'd been seeing for two years. Not that she was head over heels in love with him.

“He's really handsome. Though a bit boring sometimes,” she said.

Very handsome but boring…There was no one I knew like that, so I couldn't picture that type of person. What came to mind was a dish of food that looked delicious but ended up tasting bland. Would anyone be happy with that kind of food?

“I've always had a weakness for good-looking men,” she said, as if making a confession. “Whenever I meet a handsome man it's like my brain goes out the window. I know that's a problem, but I can't do anything about it. I can't get over that. That might be my biggest weakness.”

“A chronic disease,” I said.

She nodded. “That could be. An incurable disorder. A chronic disease.”

“Not exactly great news for me,” I said. Handsome features weren't my strongest selling point.

She didn't deny that, and just laughed happily. At least she didn't seem bored when we were together. She had a lot to say, and laughed a lot.

So I waited patiently for things to not work out between her and this handsome boyfriend. (He wasn't merely good-looking, but had graduated from a top university and had a high-paying job at a top corporation. I bet he and Yuzu's father got along famously.) All this time she and I talked over all sorts of things, went to all sorts of places. We got to understand each other better. We kissed, held each other, but didn't have sex. Having a physical relationship with several partners at the same time wasn't her style. “I'm a bit old-fashioned that way,” she said. So all I could do was bide my time.

This went on for about half a year. For me, it felt like eternity. Sometimes I just wanted to give up. But I managed to hang in there, convinced that someday soon she would be mine.

And finally she and her handsome boyfriend broke up (at least I think they broke up—she never said a word about it, so it was conjecture on my part), and she chose me—not much to look at, not much of a breadwinner—as her lover. Soon after we decided to get married.

I remember very well the first time we made love. We'd gone to stay at a small hot-springs town in the country, and spent our first night together there. Everything went really well. Almost perfect, you could even say. Maybe a little too perfect. Her skin was soft and pale, and silky smooth. The somewhat slick hot mineral water of the hot springs bath, combined with the pale glow of the early-autumn moonlight, may have contributed to the beauty and smoothness of her skin. I held her naked body for the first time, went inside her, she moaned quietly in my ear, and dug her nails hard into my back. The autumn insects were in full chorus then, too. A cool mountain stream burbled in the background. I made a firm pledge to myself then:
Never, ever, let this woman go
. This may have been the most sublime moment of my life up till then. Finally making Yuzu mine.

After I got the short letter from Yuzu I thought about her for a long time. About when we'd first met, that autumn night when we first made love. About how my feelings for her had basically never changed, from the first moment up to the present. Even now I didn't want to lose her. That much was clear to me. I'd signed and sealed the divorce papers, but that didn't change things. No matter how I felt about it, though, the fact was that she'd suddenly left me. Gone far away—probably very far away—where even the most powerful binoculars couldn't afford me a glimpse of her.

Somewhere, while I was oblivious to it, she must have found a new, handsome lover. As always, her
brain went out the window
. I should have picked up on this when she started refusing to sleep with me.
Having a physical relationship with several partners at the same time wasn't her style.
If only I'd thought about it, I soon would have realized that.

A chronic disease, I thought. A serious illness with no prospects for a cure. A physical inclination that doesn't respond to reason.

That night (a rainy Thursday night) I had a long, dark dream.

In that small seaside town in Miyagi I was driving the white Subaru Forester (it was now my car). I had on an old black leather jacket, and a black golf cap with a Yonex logo. I was tall, deeply suntanned, my salt-and-pepper hair short and stiff. In other words, I was the man with the white Subaru Forester. I was stealthily following my wife and the small car (a red Peugeot 205) the man she was having an affair with was driving. We were on the highway that ran along the coast. I saw the two of them go into a tacky love hotel on the outskirts of town. The next day I came up behind my wife and strangled her with a narrow, white belt from a bathrobe. I was used to physical labor and had powerful arms. And as I strangled her with all my might, I screamed something. I couldn't hear what I'd yelled out—a meaningless roar of pure rage. A horrific rage I'd never experienced before had control over my mind and body. White spittle flew as I roared out.

As she desperately gasped for air, I saw my wife's temples convulse a little. I saw her pink tongue ball up and twist inside her mouth. Blue veins rose up on her skin like an invisible-ink map. I smelled my own sweat. An unpleasant smell I'd never smelled before rose up from my body like steam from a hot springs. It reminded me of the stink of some hairy beast.

Don't you dare paint me
, I ordered myself. I violently thrust out an index finger at myself in the mirror on the wall.
Don't paint me anymore!