The Appetites of Girls (39 page)

I shrugged, uncertain how to respond to his observation. Aside from my size, it seemed to me I looked quite different from the last time I had seen him. My hair, once straight and hanging past my shoulders, was now styled in a series of layers that fell no lower than the base of my neck. And my girlish frocks and pleated skirts had been replaced by tailored pants, collared shirts.

“It’s been too many years, yes, Toru?” I took a few steps forward so that I stood at the center of his carpeted floor, wondering if I should continue toward him. That would be the sisterly thing to do, wouldn’t it? To perch at the foot of his bed, where we could chat more intimately? But before I could make a choice, Toru squeezed his knuckles to his temples.

Shiro rushed past me, bumping me slightly. “What is it? Is it a headache, T?”

T? Nobody in our home had ever shortened Toru’s name in this way, and I tried to interpret Toru’s reaction, but his eyes were pinched shut, two tight, wrinkled knots. Shiro snatched a small white plastic bottle from Toru’s bedside table, tapping its side until two red-orange capsules dropped into his palm. “Open, open,” Shiro murmured, and Toru’s lips parted, his pale pink tongue protruding just beyond his teeth.

“Could you?” Toru’s voice was a whisper now, too, as he turned to Shiro, motioning toward the overhead light. Only once it had been extinguished did Toru’s eyes reopen. “You can’t possibly understand how fortunate you are to have your health, Setsu.” He spoke with an uncharacteristic evenness, a softness; but I noticed, despite the gloom, a contracting in his cheeks and around his mouth, an expression I knew well. It was the way he had watched me in childhood during our shared lessons with Mrs. Dubois.

•   •   •

A
t Ridley Lauer, I had given thought to nothing beyond the next report, the next project, though even this, according to management, had not been enough. When Tilly Spaulding had terminated my employment, she had smiled and folded one thick hand over the other, baring her white teeth. “You’re a pussycat, and we need a tiger,” she’d said, her attempt to turn my rejection into some sort of compliment. For days I had fumed over her comment, fantasized about things I could have said in retaliation, revelations of what the whole office knew: that she could smile all she wanted, but it would do
nothing
to soften her—she had all the feminine wiles of a hyena dismembering its prey. That the fires of hell would form icebergs before a man ever looked at
her
with desire. But though these imagined retorts amused me, they did little to lift my mood. And later I had worried it was Tilly who had seen some truth in me: a passivity, a
compliance. Wasn’t this, years before, what Ruth and I had found we had in common? And what Francesca had often criticized me for? Maybe this was part of the appeal of Isaac’s Music House—here my responsibilities were nearly error-proof and never required confrontation.

It was late October, the weather fluctuating from mild, almost spring-like, to blustery and raw. On warmer days, I often walked the twenty-eight blocks from Toru’s to Isaac’s. In rain or chill, I waited on the west side of Broadway to catch the downtown bus. Each time I entered the shop, I was struck by its particular, pungent scent; but it was one I did not dislike, a mix of rosin and newly printed books, which clung to my clothes after I’d left. As I worked, I studied the musicians who entered, especially the young ones with their encased instruments nestled under their arms, their brows deeply creased above their glasses as they scoured bins of Mendelssohn concertos, Tchaikovsky symphonies. In their stooped shoulders, their slow-blinking eyes, the traveling of their fingers over the sheets of music, I saw their focus, their purpose. And as I watched, something ached in me, an almost imperceptible tugging, a sensation I would never have had time to distinguish from any other during my frenzied days at Ridley Lauer. From fragments of their conversations, their postures, the tones of their voices, I found hints of their successes—a lucky audition, a well-received performance. But even when their tensed jaws, their bowed heads gave evidence of failures, I envied them, for they seemed to follow an inner voice calling them to strive, to struggle toward
something
.

It was Shiro’s belief that no part of Toru’s body escaped the ravages of his condition. “Even his intestines give him trouble,” he confided to me one morning as I stood beside him at the kitchen counter, watching him stir a small pot of thin oatmeal and spoon applesauce into a bowl, one of two breakfasts alternately served to Toru on a gray plastic tray with blue handles. I was breaking off bite-sized pieces from a low-fat berry scone, which I had picked up, along with a hot tea, from the corner bakery.
“Certain foods can be irritating, even painful for him to digest,” Shiro explained. He glanced at a smudge of blueberry on my thumb, and I sensed he felt this was somehow disrespectful, my consuming of foods Toru could no longer eat. So I could not refrain from sucking noisily the bit of scone on my finger. It was not that I believed Toru’s illness was an invention. Purplish shadows ringed his eyes, and to his every movement there was a sluggishness. But what had become of Toru the feisty one? Toru the fighter? Only now and then did he rise to circle the apartment, pausing to gaze out a window, squinting into the light. Sometimes, after such excursions, he would call for Shiro to give him his arm as he made his way back to his room. As they passed, Toru would turn toward me with lips curled ever so faintly, as if savoring some victory. And I could not help wondering if some hidden part of him found pleasure in this, the pampered easiness of his current life.

The majority of his waking hours Toru spent propped up in bed, browsing through magazines and paperback mysteries or, more often, with pencil in hand, examining lined pads of paper crammed with notes, which he turned facedown into his sheets whenever Shiro or I drew close. Other times, he would remove one of a collection of cassette tapes from his night table drawer and insert it into the portable Walkman he’d bought in high school. He seemed rarely to tire of these, often rewinding a single tape again, again, again until I thought his ears would grow sore from so many hours in tight-fitting headphones.

“The life of Riley, wouldn’t you say?” A small huff escaped me, sounding more like a snicker than I had intended. Toru had fallen asleep openmouthed, his cassette player in one hand, the silver television remote in his other. Shiro was unfolding the powder-blue cashmere blanket that lay at the foot of Toru’s bed, smoothing it so that it draped Toru’s arms and shoulders, and he blinked at me with wide, humorless eyes in that infuriating way he had of making my words sound more callous than I had meant them.

One morning, as I helped Shiro scrape our breakfast plates at the kitchen sink, he shook his head, pointing a potato-white finger toward the half-swallowed boiled egg and untouched dry toast on Toru’s tray.

“He will never mend, you know, if he eats like this.” Then, though there was no one else around, no one to overhear us, he took a step closer, until I could feel the hot moisture from his nostrils. “I hope you don’t mind my saying so, Setsu—I hope you don’t think I’m crossing a line—but
this
only makes things more difficult.” He indicated the remnants of my spinach omelet, my partially finished buttered roll. His lips flattened against his gums in a half-smile, revealing a morsel of the dry toast he had shared with Toru caught in his teeth.

“Shiro, there is a limit to what I will sacrifice—” I began to say. Did he really expect me to eat the mush he cooked for Toru!

But Shiro peered at the kitchen door as if concerned we would be disturbed. “I suppose it would not matter if Toru were not so attached to you. You must realize how he
relies
on you.”

For a moment I forgot the sour smell of Shiro’s breath and the stub of his knee bumping mine. What was he saying? Was this a joke, his idea of a tease? A repeated disappointment from my childhood surfaced, having been long submerged:
I am nine or ten or twelve; Toru, eleven, twelve, fourteen. He is on his bedroom floor arranging pictures of his life in Japan in a three-ring leather album given him by our parents; he is constructing a fort with logs from our backyard woodpile; he is at the kitchen table, scanning the
Encyclopedia Britannica
for his report on Louisiana. And I am watching at a distance I have carefully gauged is close enough to observe but far enough not to irritate. “Why are you just standing there, Setsu? You want to help?” “Yes! Yes, please,” I say, never, never learning. “Well, then, this is what will help me: if you GO AWAY!” So I bow my head, jabbing my fingertips into the corners of my eyes to plug up the tears.

“You must have misunderstood,” I said to Shiro.

But he shrugged his shoulders and splayed his hands, palms outward, as if to say, “I know what I hear. I know what I see.” And he seemed so sure that I could not ignore the temptation to believe him.

In the days following, I woke early in the morning or lay late at night in my fold-out bed studying the slivers of light slicing between the slats of my room’s Venetian blinds, wondering if there were really things Toru had said of me to Shiro, kind or complimentary things. Certainly the Toru I knew would never talk this way, but maybe in his current condition . . . Perhaps I had been too preoccupied with my own frustrations to notice something in him had changed.

So, “I’ll have what Toru is having,” I said to Shiro one evening as he prepared unsalted noodles, boiled vegetables, clear soup. As we ate, I searched for topics of conversation I thought might distract Toru from his troubles. I described the musicians I had met at Isaac’s the previous day, the well-known cellist who had stopped in briefly to purchase a new D-string, the beautiful recordings I had heard on the shop’s sound system. But when I spoke of these things, Toru massaged his temples as if trying to stave off another headache. So I learned the subjects that most pleased him—recountings of his many adventures, his past successes. “Do you remember your debut performance at Merrick Hall?” I would ask, or, “What about your concert with the Lansing Symphony Orchestra? Mother wrote me letters describing how masterfully you played each piece.” Then Toru would direct Shiro to a drawer in his bedside table that stored photographs documenting these events, and I would point out details in the images—the expansiveness of the crowd, the grandeur of the hall, Toru’s own confident, determined expression. From the same stuffed drawer, Shiro dug out various programs saved from Toru’s appearances, and I would remark on the difficulty of the pieces he had tackled, compliment him on his notable career until the darkness in his eyes began to fade. Then a tiny shudder would move through my chest at the thought that
I
had been the one to cheer him. And how he needed it. Why had I not seen before the depths of his torment?

It was not long before I began to notice, as I stepped out of Toru’s building on my way to work, a fluttering of the fifth-floor curtains: he was watching me—he the prisoner, I the escapee. And when I returned
later in the day, I saw how he manically busied himself with his tapes or notepads, sometimes refusing to acknowledge my arrival. So I smiled, with an expression I hoped spoke kindness and sympathy, the only offering I could think to give in recognition of his suffering. And because Toru’s hardships were greater than my own, I would endure the repeated grazing of Shiro’s fleshy hand or thigh or chest as he reached across me to adjust Toru’s tray, pass him a napkin, whisper some small reminder in his ear. I would not overly dwell on what I put aside for our time together: the missed invitations to join Rachel from Isaac’s at Mallory’s Pub; the repeated canceled dinner plans with Francesca, and once with Ruth when she was home with her family in Riverdale—“Just a subway ride north of you,” she’d said; the various master classes and music recitals announced in the several newspaper clippings I kept tucked inside my straw handbag, not one of which I had yet to attend. I would not even brood over the practicing I had hoped to do at home (this now an impossibility as our suppers extended later and later into the night, Toru often nodding off as we talked, lulled into slumber by pleasing recollections, not to be roused, the cautious padding of Shiro’s feet would remind me, by the living room television or my portable radio, and
surely
not by the unmuffled strains of a bow on strings). These were things I could place on hold for a time. The same way I turned my face from my reflection, stepping out of Toru’s shower at the close of the day—no need to stare at what I knew was true, that there was less of me now since following Toru’s diet, that the skin drew tighter across my pelvis, my ribs, the bones of my shoulders.

But then a new thought came to me, a possible solution, dancing before me like sunlight on water. It was early evening when I rapped on the shut door to Shiro’s room.

“What a surprise, little sister!” Shiro leaned in the doorway as an interior mildewy smell, as of damp papers or wet wool, wafted into the hall. Though it was not yet evening, he had unfurled his shades, the only light in his room emanating from the small, single-bulbed lamp on his night table.

“I miss music, Shiro,” I said. “I see that you have found a way, somehow, to put it aside, but I feel—I don’t know—a void, I guess.” Shiro said nothing, only studied me in silence. So I continued. My expectations were modest, I explained, yet if I were ever to take lessons again, I would need space to practice. “This room is the farthest from Toru’s. With the door closed, with Toru’s door closed, how much would he really hear?” An hour a day is all I would ask, if Shiro would be generous enough to spare me these small intervals.

For a moment Shiro’s lips parted as if he had the inclination to smile. “If circumstances were different, Setsu. But I have a duty to Toru, you understand, to limit all
unnecessary
disturbances.” He shrugged his shoulders as if to say,
I hope you wouldn’t ask me to compromise that
. “Surely, you of all people . . .” Shiro’s trace of a smile stretched into a long, thin-lipped grin, and he shifted his feet until he was just inches from me in his room’s entry.