My Year of Meats (21 page)

The second fax read:

“It’s your gig, primarily. You can handle it as you like. But I’d watch it if I were you....”

Kenji had a habit of sneaking up behind you on his soft Italian soles. I knew he had read the faxes and posted them on the board. He watched my reaction, then added:

Kenji’s position was complex, I knew, as the despised and lowly courtier, exiled from the capital of Tokyo to the island of Manhattan, U.S.A. On one hand I think he genuinely liked me and wanted to support me. On the other, he wanted me to fall on my face so he could take over directing and get to go to exotic parts of America, where he could take photographs with his antique Leica and eventually get himself noticed and recalled to the capital. And maybe find a wife. I understood his ambivalence and was accordingly a bit wary.

“Great, so now you spy for the enemy.”

“
Baka
na koto
—don’t be an idiot. Here. This call just came in.” He handed me a pink telephone message slip.

It was from the Indiana State Film Office. The number on it was Sloan’s.

I turned my back on Kenji and dialed.

“BEEF-EX is paying your rent,” Kenji continued. “And mine too. So don’t get all
auteur
on me, Takagi. It’s just too boring.”

“Screw you, Kenji,” I said as he walked out the door. I mean, I was happy about the ratings. It wasn’t an Emmy, and eight o’clock on Saturday morning wasn’t the greatest slot in the world, but still I wanted to celebrate a little or at least have someone to commiserate with. I was annoyed that everyone was getting so bent about some dumb lamb chops, when obviously it was the story that counted. Then Sloan answered the phone, and as soon as I heard his voice my heart was in my throat, and suddenly I remembered that nothing was simple anymore. But he sounded really glad to hear from me, and the blood was pounding in my face, and by then it was too late to change my mind, so I invited him to New York and told him I’d pick him up at La Guardia.

Sloan sauntered off the plane carrying a brown paper bag with two bottles of champagne that he’d asked the stewardess to chill in the first-class kitchen, and he looked great, a long-limbed, languid musician. I had intended to bring him home, but at the last minute I changed my mind. There was nothing wrong with my apartment. I was actually quite proud of it, newly cleaned and gleaming. But at the last moment I had a total crisis of the imagination—I just couldn’t picture him superimposed on all my ancestors’ photos and pieces of my family history as I told him I was pregnant with his child. It was far too cozy, too personal. I was scared.

Then it occurred to me all of a sudden that maybe I loved him precisely because he was not part of my life, and what turned me on about our relationship was its anonymity. Until Fly, anyway, it had been as neutral, sanitized, and comforting as a plastic ice bucket and a well-stocked minibar. And if I couldn’t have more, I certainly didn’t want less. I flagged a gypsy limousine at La Guardia and we drove across the George Washington Bridge to the Palisades Motor Lodge, just over the New Jersey border. I imagine Sloan was relieved. He liked these semipublic spaces, rooms just recently vacated and still redolent of someone else’s miseries, spurts of joy, and jaw-cracking ennui. We spent the weekend tangled in the polyester sheets, celebrating the mouthwatering diversity of meats, and then he took a cab back to the airport. I didn’t tell him about the pregnancy. I figured it could wait until I’d seen the doctors, had the ultrasound, had more information.

When I got back to my apartment, I reread Ueno’s fax. Of course he had never mentioned the ratings. That was fine with me. But the reprimand pissed me off, as did his attempt to curtail my freedom as a documentarian. I understood that he had to answer to his superiors at the agency, and ultimately to his American clients, and that my programming was undermining his credibility with BEEF-EX. But I chose to ignore this understanding, as I would ignore the new censorship he imposed. I couldn’t help it. “Beef is Best.” Hah. He was base. His wanton capitalist mandate had nothing to do with my vocation.

Thinking back now, I wonder that my rage was so misdirected. The real targets were closer to home: Ma, for her credulous nature, for taking a drug that deformed me; Sloan, for impregnating me so casually and wanting so little from me; and me, for wanting so much more and yet not even able to tell him I was pregnant. Ueno was a distraction. I plunged furiously back into work again, hounding the researchers for a new American Wife. I wanted to make a real statement with my next program, really teach Ueno a lesson. I didn’t want to think about Sloan. I didn’t want to think about the baby, a small bean by now, clinging by a slender root hair to such insubstantial soil. If I had paid more attention, things might have turned out differently. But I was like Shōnagon’s archer, standing there with my trembling bow, unable to launch the arrow, yet aware somehow that when I did, it would go off in the wrong direction entirely.

Prick. Prick.
My blood
lips lick
dew drop
dew drop
pretty ruby red.

 

The air in the bathroom was thick and humid. Akiko could smell her fertility whenever she peed or even spread her legs. She’d stopped wearing skirts because of this, afraid John would notice. For a while after the incident with the lamb chops, when Akiko fell into the television, John stayed away at night, sleeping in town at a capsule hotel. When he returned he seemed to have forgotten all about the incident. Now he was sleeping in the futon next to hers, but he still hadn’t touched her.

“Still nothing?” he asked.

“No.”

“Tell me when,” he said, rolling away from her. “Just tell me when it starts. Otherwise there’s no point.”

She was lying to him, of course. She’d menstruated twice since the lamb chops, and she took great care to wrap up her soiled pads, tuck them into the waistline of her trousers under her shirt, then smuggle them out of the bathroom and into the deep pockets of her winter coat, which hung in the closet. She collected them there, and first thing in the morning, after John left for work, she wrapped them in a plastic bag and took them downstairs to the large cement trash can near the playground. She had never learned to use flushable, internal methods of sanitary protection. Never felt comfortable sticking things up there.

One day, chopping green onions to garnish the miso soup, she cut herself on the fleshy part of her forefinger. The cut was deep, and she stood there for a long time, bouncing her hip against the kitchen counter, watching the’blood infuse the pale walls of flesh, collect in the crevice, then swell up over the edge as she squeezed the wound open and shut. She had stopped writing articles on “Complications Need Not Be Complex,” “Breast Pumps: It’s the Fit That Counts,” and “Yes, You’re a Mother, But Don’t Forget You’re a Wife.” Now she was writing only lists and poetry. Not good poetry, perhaps, but exciting poetry, words she’d never dared write down before. And ever since the lamb chops, she had stopped purging. The animal stayed down. She felt it, rutting and brooding in her darkness, exuding its fecundity from time to time and fueling her imagination. This excitement coexisted with the dread that John would discover her new secret. The two emotions followed each other with such regularity that they seemed to have blended into a continuum, the two halves of her thumping heart.

Lara and Dyann stood side by side on the small lawn in front of their split-level ranch house in Northampton, Massachusetts. They were nervous, laughing and bumping softly into each other for support. From time to time the backs of their hands brushed and their fingers entwined for a brief squeeze before releasing, quickly, well-trained in circumspection. Oh stood in front of them, holding up a sheet of white paper, while Suzuki set the white balance on the Betacam. When they were ready, I stood next to Suzuki, asked him to roll, focused the women’s attention on the camera, then counted down their cue for action.

“Hi, I’m Lara,” said Lara, with a straight face and a rigid smile, “... and this is my wife, Dyann.”

“I’m Dyann,” said Dyann, starting to snicker, ”... and this is my wife, Lara.”

“Today we’d like to give new meaning to My American Wife!” They burst. out laughing, and we cut. The line was dumb, but the translation into Japanese would be just fine. Suzuki was beaming. He liked the lesbians a lot.

Maybe America had radicalized him, but it was Suzuki who convinced me that it would be fine to put lesbians on the show. There was nothing unwholesome about their lifestyle, he argued. The women were pillars of their community: one was a district attorney, the other a well-published author; their tiny children were unusually smart and cute; and they were exemplary mothers, both of them. If I was serious about wanting to use
My American Wife!
as a platform to further international understanding, he urged, then why not do a show about alternative lifestyles, something that was not often tolerated in Japan. He was right, but I was nervous. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, with the added benefit of twisting Ueno’s knickers, but one small hitch had come up—the women were vegetarians. Lara and Dyann suggested Pasta Primavera for the Recipe of the Day, yet even with a scene of the sweet babies in the garden picking plump and luscious vegetables, I didn’t think I would get away with this. I mean, lamb was one thing, and lesbians were another, but vegetarian lesbians were something else entirely.

The two women sat on the couch. On the coffee table sat a gilded turkey baster, mounted like an obelisk on a small square marble base. Suzuki had just finished shooting a family portrait—Lara and Dyann on either side, sandwiching the two little girls, who held the baster proudly in front of them like a pet or a trophy they’d won. Now the girls were playing with Oh. They had made animal eyes and ears and stuck them on the fuzzy wind sock that covered his boom mike, and Oh was using it to nuzzle their faces. Suzuki nodded that he was ready to start, and the girls settled down on my lap to watch.

 

Dyann: We shopped for the sperm together, you know, tried to find donors who matched each other.

Lara: Dyann wanted to give birth first, and it was easy to find a match for me ... more or less generic white, Eastern European peasant stock, you know.

Dyann: A gorgeous blond, with blue eyes ...

Lara: Without my cataracts, however ...

Dyann: Interested in computer programming....

Lara: That part was easy. Most of the donors were computer programmers.

Dyann: Now,
that
truly frightened us....

Lara: But for Dyann it was difficult because she’s black, and what we didn’t know is that there just isn’t a big market for black sperm.

Dyann: Yeah, apparently black men don’t have a lot of problems with potency ...

Lara: Or maybe it’s that only whites are obsessed with their progeny ...

Dyann: Or have the cash to buy it if they ain’t got it.

Lara: So it took us quite a while to find a bank that had more than one black donor, but finally we found one in California that had a match for Dyann.

Dyann: He ain’t no computer programmer, old Mr. 0579. He’s a writer, just like me, jerking off, you know, only he gets the option of doing it with his dick into a bottle for money. I do it with a pen on paper and get paid shit.... Now, who’s the smarter father? I ask you.

Lara: Dyann, don’t be silly....

 

Dyann rolled her eyes at us and pursed her lips in a prim imitation of Lara, who caught her at it, reached over, and punched her tenderly in the arm. The two little girls, seeing the potential for a tumble, squirmed in my lap, and I set them on their feet and pushed them forward. They didn’t need any encouragement. They careened across the room and hurled themselves into the thick of it. Suzuki snatched the camera off the tripod head and followed them. Oh brandished the fuzzy boom-pole animal and made the little girls squeal.