Fidelity
Episodes from Three Lives in Japan
By Alex Shishin
Published by Smashwords
Copyright 2012 Alex Shishin
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Acknowledgements
“Booger Eater” was published in slightly different form in LITnIMAGE. “Booger Eater Mon Amour” and “Booger Eater Forever” were published in slightly different forms in Eclectica. “Booger Eater Bereft” and “Fidelity” are published for the first time in this ebook.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Booger Eater
2. Booger Eater Mon Amour
3. Booger Eater Forever
4. Booger Eater Bereft
5. Fidelity
BOOGER EATER
The voluptuous student from Amagasaki, her hair dyed platinum blonde, puts her pencil, eraser first, up her miniskirt, draws it out and holds it before the nose of the young woman next to her. The other student cranes her neck slightly and sniffs it. The first student, whom Aurora Tanabe nicknamed “Booger Eater,” whispers something in Osaka dialect and the other student covers her mouth with her hand. In disbelief, Hank Hashimoto, their English Communication teacher, loses track of what he was saying and lets the class go five minutes early.
Booger Eater has done it again.
In this private Osaka junior college for women Booger Eater stands out. While the demure and proper students in the class speak of their pets and hobbies, Booger Eater talks about going to love hotels with her now ex-boyfriend who works in a convenience store. One time this boyfriend called her mobile phone in the middle of class and they had had a spat in front of everyone. Several times she talked about her father hitting her. Another time said she had lent him twenty thousand yen after he lost all of his money playing mahjong. When she and her boyfriend broke up Booger Eater announced it to the class.
Booger Eater’s “what new” anecdotes are invariably along the lines of seeing a baby throw up on the Midosuji subway line or a news item about a policeman arrested for urinating off of Ebisu Bridge. But she does not eat nose dirt--not as far as Hank knows. Aurora gave her that nickname after she told the class that if you didn’t have pickles to put on your rice you could use your hana kuso (nose shit) to make it salty.
Booger Eater only wears miniskirts and likes to sit with her legs splayed. Since her breakup she has tended to sit in the front row. Hank figures this is for his benefit and tries not looking at her, which is not easy. If Booger Eater is not sleeping, she is either drinking soda or eating. He has repeatedly told her not to do these things in class and she has always answered with a noncommittal, “Okay, okay”--which is about the only English that she knows.
Detoxing in his office after nearly an hour and a half of Booger Eater, Hank finds himself smiling. Another Booger Eater adventure. Though an oddball in the prim and proper ladies’ school, she has many friends. And though she is a poor student, there is a universal fondness for her among the faculty. Everyone has a Booger Eater anecdote. Ironically, Aurora Tanabe, beautiful, intelligent and poised, was never a favorite of the faculty, though she was Japanese-American, like Hank. That was why her two-year contract wasn’t renewed, Hank has assumed, unless it was because they had discovered his and Aurora’s secret affair. Hank, tenured and respected as a scholar, cannot be easily fired. He almost wishes he was so that he could have followed Aurora.
She promised to return from San Francisco in a few months, but he never saw or heard from her again. The posts he wrote to her e-mail bounced back.
A year has passed and he remains in love with her.
A mutual attraction between them was there from the first. At her welcoming party they sat apart and smiled at each other. Sitting next to him in the taxi, Aurora briefly touched his leg with hers. Unease about becoming involved with a colleague made Hank keep a professionally cordial distance from Aurora. On an unusually sweltering April day just before Golden Week she came into his windowless and stuffy office without knocking and announced, “I have the most beautiful breasts in Osaka.” Then she locked the door and removed her top.
“Here?” Hank said not getting up from his desk. “Are you crazy?”
“Seize the moment or regret it forever,” Aurora said.
Naked, they made love on top of Hank’s desk, sweating wonderfully on each other. Later, they took the Bullet Train to Akashi city, getting off at Nishiakashi and getting on a local train to Okubo-machi. Since Hank kept his beater commuter bicycle at the station, they walked for forty minutes to his apartment near the Inland Sea.
Hank’s memories of the next hours appear in soft focus. Aurora seemed to float about the apartment. Touching his racing bicycle, she said she loved cycling. Admiring his black and white photographs, she told him she was also photographer. Did he enjoy cooking? She did too…
Aurora spent the entire Golden Week with him. Not long after, she all but vacated the dingy apartment the college provided for her and moved in with Hank, bringing her racing bicycle in a carrying bag on the train.
Again, Hank’s memory shifts into soft-focus to the evenings when they walked along the path that runs parallel to Okubo Beach. With the sky and sea turning from gold to purple as the sun set, Awaji Island’s lights coming on and island of Shodoshima silhouetted in the distance, Aurora declared that not Capri, not Nice, not Tahiti, not Malibu ever provided such a view. He asked her to marry him. She said she yes. Then she told Hank her contract would not be renewed.
Aurora!
Is she ill or dead? Did she meet another man? Or is she about to surprise him by suddenly appearing at his apartment with her luggage?
There is a knock on the door.
Booger Eater enters.
“I was itchy when I put my pencil up my skirt,” she says in Japanese. “I wanted to scratch.”
“I didn’t see anything,” Hank answers in Japanese.
“Yes you did. You thought I was putting it you-know-where. Well I wasn’t.”
“I am sure you didn’t. Not that I saw anything. Really.”
“I’m in a bad mood these days since I dumped my boyfriend,” Booger Eater says.
“What happened?” Hank asks, happy to change the subject.
“He had no time for me.”
“Maybe he was busy.”
“Another girlfriend. That always happens.”
“Always?”
“This time I am sure it happened,” she says. “You don’t have a girlfriend now, do you sensei?”
“I’d rather not talk about my private life.”
“Sure. It’s okay. In the meantime you can look up my miniskirt all you want. I don’t care.”
“I do not--! I never look up anyone’s skirt! Don’t tell people I look up your skirt--because it is not true!”
“I really like your class, sensei,” she says. “I wish my English wasn’t hopeless. Well, see you next week. Have a nice weekend.”
Commuting home by train, Hank worries about what Booger Eater might be saying about him. Have a nice weekend, indeed! How can you have a nice weekend when a student tells you that you’re looking up her skirt? Have a rotten weekend, Booger Eater!
On Saturday he gets up early and rides his bicycle along Okubo Beach’s pedestrian and bicycle pathway. It is too early for other cyclists, runners and dog walkers to be out. Only the cat feeders, retired folks, are about. They will be doing the same, feeding feral cats, in the evening. They look after these cats like pets, taking them to the vet when they are sick and having them neutered. On many occasions he and Aurora joined the legion of cat feeders, both being cat lovers.
Everything reminds him of Aurora. In the year she since departed he has not been with another woman.
Hank takes a longer ride than he first intended, coming to the Awaji Island ferry. He boards it, cycles on Awaji until noon and then takes the ferry back.
When he rides up to his apartment building he sees Booger Eater sitting on a cement embankment. She is wearing a matching lavender top and miniskirt and black mesh stockings. Her eye shadow is white. A cigarette protrudes from her crimson lips. He despises smokers. Aurora did too.
“May I come up to your apartment,” Booger Eater says.
“No, you may not,” Hank says.
She follows him to the elevator.
“Put that filthy cigarette out!” he says.
She drops it, steps on it and gets into the elevator. She gets out with him on the third floor and follows him into his apartment. He rests his bicycle against the wall and tells her to leave.
In remarkably good English she says, “I don’t eat boogers!” Then in Japanese: “Tanabe-sensei had no right to call me that name!”
“Is that why you came here?” Hank asks in Japanese. “Tanabe-sensei meant no harm. No one believes you do anything like that.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I have the most beautiful breasts in Osaka,” she says.
Damn it! Booger Eater listened to him and Aurora make love in his office! Had she spread stories? He says, “Keep your clothes on and leave.”
She takes off her top and bra. Her breasts are beautiful. In fact, beneath her wretched makeup and garishly dyed hair this vulgar girl is more attractive than he could have imagined.
“Please don’t do this,” he pleads, and tries not to look at her.
“I know you loved Tanabe-sensei,” she says. “I envied her, but I knew she was going away.”
“You knew nothing of the sort.”
“She had a going away feeling about her.”
“Her contract wasn’t renewed.”
“She turned it down. She wanted to get away.”
“I don’t believe that!”
“She would have done everything to stay in Japan if she loved you. She was just like my last boyfriend. She was afraid of being loved.”
It startles him to think that Booger Eater, standing preposterously bare-chested in front of him, might be intelligent and even possess a normal human soul.
“She left her expensive bicycle with me,” he counters.
“That’s how much she wanted to escape from you. You’re grungy. I brought you French soap. Take a bath and I’ll scrub your back.”
“No!”
“I’ll stop smoking if you love me.”
“I can’t love you! You’re my student. I can’t.”
In the shower with Booger Eater, Hank tries to remember her real name. There are fifty students in his English Communication class and he can remember only a few of their names. Although he has often heard her name mentioned and roll-called her many times, try as he might he can only think of her as Booger Eater. I’ll have a lifetime to remember her name, Hank thinks.
BOOGER EATER MON AMOUR
From Western Sahara to Marrakech, from Marrakech to Paris, from Paris to Osaka, from Osaka to Akashi: at sunset Aurora Tanabe stands in front of Hank Hashimoto’s apartment door in Okubo-cho. She glances nostalgically at the Inland Sea and Awaji Island’s first evening lights and unlocks the door with the key she has carried with her for the last eighteen months.
Hank is stunned, never having expected to see Aurora again. He heard nothing from her after she left Japan for their native San Francisco. He has a surprise for her.
“You’re sleeping with Booger Eater!” she exclaims. “Booger Eater? Booger Eater?”
This was the nickname Aurora gave Erena Wada when teaching at Hank’s junior college in Osaka. The occasion was Erena’s remark in Aurora’s English conversation class that if you didn’t have dried pickles you could use your nose dirt to make your rice salty. Erena has not forgiven her.
“I’m not blaming you,” Aurora says. “I blame myself for not contacting you. I was in the Amazon jungle in Brazil. Then I was working with refugees in Africa. I had other priorities. I know what you must’ve thought. But you are the last man I made love to.”
“God, Aurora,” Hank says.
“I half-expected you’d have someone when I took this chance,” Aurora says. “But why Booger Eater? That stupid girl with her dyed hair and her crotch-level miniskirts. I still remember how she would call her boyfriend on her cell phone in class. And how she ate her lunch and drank her soda pop in the middle of my lessons--when she wasn’t sleeping. Please don’t tell me you love her.”
“After you disappeared, I was like a ripe apple that falls into the first hands to touch it,” Hank says. “Erena straightened out. She graduated at the top of her class. She’s now a secretary at a fine arts university. She’s happy there because everyone is kind of weird.
Aurora sighs and says, “Hank, darling, after I take a shower, make love to me.”
“I can’t. I have a commitment,” Hank says.
Aurora speaks softly: “Darling, I am going to wash off the Sahara Desert in your shower. Then I will come out naked with my long legs, my perfect breasts, and my angelic face, and I will kiss you. If you can resist me, I will e-mail the Pope and recommend you for sainthood.”
Later in bed with Aurora, as she drifts into sleep, he says, “Please marry me this time.”
“I’m jet lagging, Hank,” Aurora whispers. “Do something about Booger Eater before we get engaged again.”
“I’ll see her this weekend,” Hank says. “I’ll fix it.”
Aurora mumbles something, nuzzles her face against his shoulder, and sleeps.
In the morning Aurora says, “I’m glad you saved my racing bike. And the tires are inflated. Has Booger Eater been riding it?”
“She’s terrified of bikes,” Hank says.
“Those inflated tires show you’ve always loved me. Cancel your classes, Hank!”
“It’s summer vacation,” Hank says.
They make love all day. In the evening they take a walk along the pedestrian and bicycle path that parallels Okubo Beach. The island of Shodoshima forms a purple silhouette against the orange ball of the setting sun. Aurora remarks, “There is no sight like the sun sinking into the Sahara Desert. But nothing else beats Okubo’s sunsets. Do you remember our walks here, Hank?”
Hank remembered Aurora when walking with Erena on the path. Now he poignantly remembers his evening walks with Erena and how she would warn him about stepping in dog shit and complain about people who didn’t clean up after their beasts when no one was looking. However beautiful the sunset is and however good it is to hold Aurora’s hand, guilt nags at him.
In bed that night he wants to confess to Aurora his confused adoration for her and his lover whom she will only call “Booger Eater.” Instead, he asks her about Brazil and Western Sahara. She replies, “It’s all so deep inside me that I cannot bring it out yet. Just love me, Hank.” She goes to sleep with a serene, dimpled smile. He drifts into a troubled sleep fretting about the two women he loves.
Before going off to Osaka to meet Erena on Saturday morning, he says, “Aurora, I’m going to be honest with her. I’ll make a clean break.”
“Do anything you think is right. I cannot put restrictions on you. I’m here on a tourist visa and I have my own responsibilities if I want to stay in Japan with you. I’ll be on your computer all day.”
“Aurora...”
“Carte blanche, Hank. I mean it.”
Erena is wearing her usual miniskirt, a pink one, when she meets Hank at Umeda JR in Osaka. She also wears a matching pink tank top that does much to reveal her ample breasts. She has dyed her hair platinum blonde again. Hank looks about to see if any of his colleagues are nearby.
“We have to talk,” Hank says.
“I’ve got to meet my aunt in three hours,” Erena says. “I reserved a love hotel in Namba. We have less than two hours for sex.”
“People can hear you,” Hank says.
“How do you like my hair? I went back to blonde after reading about Marilyn Monroe in a weekly magazine. She did it with President Clinton.”
“Kennedy,” Hank says. “And no one knows if it’s true. Don’t believe everything you read in weekly magazines.”
“You know what?” she whispers into his ear. “I dyed my pubic hair. When you have your face down there you won’t find a single black hair.”
“That’s my girl!” Hank laughs and takes her hand.
Her hand goes limp. “What do want to talk about?”
“Nothing special. Summer vacation.”
Her hand tightens around his, and she says, “Let’s catch a taxi.”
In bed with Erena, Hank thinks of Aurora’s taunt body and her breasts quivering as if electrified--and falls in love with Erena’s body all over again.
Erena’s voluptuous body wriggles and jiggles, and her breasts bounce and slap together. He cannot leave her, Hank thinks, as she straddles him and howls. He’ll talk to Aurora.
“Let me blow you,” Erena says climbing off. “I’ll show you what I learned from a cool porno movie scene.”
“Do your parents know you watch pornography?” Hank asks.
“Sure. I watch porno with my father. It is the only time we don’t fight.”
“Your father? What does your mother think?”
“As long as she can watch her Korean soap operas and cry, she doesn’t care. Of course, if they knew I was having sex, they’d kill me. Lie back and pretend I’m Marilyn Monroe.”
As they are leaving the love hotel, Erena says, “Do you suppose Marilyn Monroe dyed her public hair?”
Her deadpan seriousness makes Hank guffaw. Perplexed at first, she laughs with him.
There is no one more fun to be with than Erena, Hank thinks. With Aurora he shares interests in cycling, photography, and cooking, but he remembers few shared moments of easy laugher.
At Umeda JR she asks with the same deadpan seriousness, “What did you want to talk about?”
He tells her about Aurora.
“I guess I won’t be seeing you,” she says.
“Erena-san!”
“Booger Eater to you!” she says and walks away.
Hank, holding back tears, watches her about to disappear into the hurrying crowd. Before she disappears, she turns around, cups her hands to her mouth and shouts, “I still have the best breasts in Osaka, Hank Hashimoto!”
On the Rapid Service train back to Okubo, he thinks, “Served me right. That was my girl, and I have lost her.”
Returning home he finds a handwritten letter from Aurora. It says that she has had a long-standing offer to teach at the University of French Polynesia in Papeete, Tahiti, and has decided to accept. The e-mail she got told her to come immediately. She is taking the next plane to Tahiti. She apologizes for disrupting his life, which she realizes she had no right to do. She closes with, “Be good to Booger Eater. I will always love you.”
Served me right again, Hank thinks.
For days Hank does not have the courage to contact Erena. At his favorite coffee shop by Okubo JR, he finally texts her, using the best Japanese he can: “Erena-san, I made a terrible error. I’m sorry. I love you. Hank.”
He immediately receives a text in English: “I’m Booger Eater!!”
He texts back in English, “I love you. Please forgive me. Hank.”
There is no reply, and a week passes. He is in the same coffee shop when she texts a nude picture of herself, clumsily taken with a cell phone camera. He quickly deletes it and writes back: “Do you mean you want to see me? Hank.”
Erena texts: “Umeda JR at 12:30 tomorrow. Booger Eater.”
At the sandwich shop, Erena says, “I understand. You did it with Tanabe-sensei because men are like that. They stick out; that’s why. That’s what my mother told me.”
“Your mother?”
“Remember when I said my father borrowed twenty thousand yen from me because he said he lost his money playing mahjong? Actually he went to a soapland and did it with a foreign girl who had red hair. My mother found her calling card with her picture in his jacket pocket. She didn’t say anything to him. She just tore it up. She told me men have to have other women because they stick out. ‘Don’t forget that when you marry,’ she said.”
“I was a fool,” Hank says.
“I understood you. But don’t think I wasn’t hurt. I cried myself to sleep every night before you texted. I really wished a handsome guy with a big one could come out of the shower and kiss me. Only I knew Tanabe-sensei would go away like before. I didn’t expect her to disappear so fast. What’s in Tahiti?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. Please forgive me. I will never, never do something this stupid again.”
“Go to Tahiti and solve your business with Tanabe-sensei,” Erena says.
“I don’t want to go to Tahiti,” Hank says.
“You’re going anyway,” she says. “And you had better know some French.”
After Hank disembarks at Tahiti Faa’a International Airport, he takes a bus to the university. The University of French Polynesia is small. He soon finds a man who knows Aurora and speaks excellent English. He is a tall and muscular man of mixed Polynesian and European stock. Hank thinks he is the most handsome man he has ever seen and wonders why someone this beautiful should look so sad. The man tells him, “Aurora left for Africa yesterday. I came home expecting to see her, and there was this note.”
Hank hurriedly shakes the man’s hand and takes the bus back to the airport to have his return flight changed to the next available one. He then finds a computer and e-mails Erena, telling her what happened. “I’ll be home in two days,” he writes. “I love you, Erena mon amour. Hank.”
After arriving at Narita Airport, Hank texts Erena, “I must see you. I got a present for you from Tahiti. Hank.”
Just before catching the plane for Kansai International Airport, he gets her text: “Are you sincere? Booger Eater Mon Amour.”
A few minutes prior to boarding, he texts, “What do you want? I already spent a fortune on Tahiti, thanks to you. I love you. Hank.”
In the airport bus to Kobe, Hank reads Erena’s latest text: “Risk everything. Booger Eater Mon Amour.”
After coming home, Hank takes off all his clothes and puts a fifteen-millimeter lens on his Nikon D3. He stretches out on the bed, holds the camera as high as he can, and photographs himself. He uploads the image into his cell phone. Knowing he can be arrested for indecency and get fired, Hank sends the image to “My beloved Erena, a.k.a. Booger Eater Mon Amour.”
Erena, naked, dyes her hair red.
BOOGER EATER FOREVER
“You read Japanese better than I,” Hank Hashimoto says to his wife, Aurora Tanabe, who unlike himself went to Saturday Japanese school in San Francisco. “It’s from my ex-girlfriend.”
Aurora reads the letter.
“Weird,” she says. “A dinner invitation from Booger Eater and her illustrious husband. Their place. No explanation. I should stop calling Erina that. If she hadn’t dumped you for Yuji Kato we wouldn’t be married.”
Erina Wada was Aurora’s student at Hank’s junior college in Osaka. Aurora nicknamed her “Booger Eater” after Erina said in English conversation class that if you didn’t have pickles you could salt your rice with your own nose dirt. She became Hank’s lover when Aurora suddenly left him. She was still Hank’s lover when Aurora returned after eighteen months and seduced him. She continued to be Hank’s lover after Aurora suddenly left him again.
“Funny,” Hank says. “If her husband wasn’t a sculptor I might not have searched you out.”
“Oh?”
“I saw Kato’s naked bronze of Erina in front of Shin Kobe Station and it bugged me. It made me determined to find you.”
“How come you never told me that, Hank? It’s cute. It’s funny. A statue of your ex-girlfriend greeting people to the Shinkansen for all eternity. Booger Eater forever. Maybe people will start rubbing her breasts for good luck. Then her breasts will become shiny while the rest of her turns green with age. How do you feel about going? It might be fun.”
“I’m okay if you are. Maybe Erina’s husband will find you a university post.”
While Hank is driving from their village outside Osaka to the sculptor’s house on Mount Rokko in Kobe, Aurora says, “Considering I left you twice you were absolutely insane to look for me, Booger Eater’s statue or not. I didn’t deserve it.”
“Right,” Hank says.
Aurora laughs and says, “You know, there was one thing I liked about Booger Eater when she was my student. Slob that she was, she was forthright. She talked about going to love hotels and having violent fights with her father. Right in class.”
“She could be so funny without meaning to be,” Hank says.
“And vulgar without meaning to be. She ate her lunch and talked with her mouth full to her friend while I was teaching. And those crotch-level miniskirts. How did you straighten her out so she could graduate at the top of her class?”
“I made her give up smoking. Smoking was the first domino to fall. Then the rest of her bad habits went.”
“It was love, Hank. I’m so glad I got you back. She was stupid to dump you.”
“Maybe I was her last bad habit,” Hank says. “Don’t forget I dumped her when you showed up.”
“She took you back after I ran off to Tahiti.”
“Some bad habits are harder to discard,” Hank says.
Yuji Kanto’s large Western-style house overlooks Kobe. Kato himself answers the door. In his fifties, he is tall and heavy-set with a thick mustache, muttonchops and shoulder-length hair. He greets Hank and Aurora in a loud baritone, apologizes for his lack of English, and says, “I am so glad you came! Erina-san is getting ready. She was afraid you wouldn’t come.” Escorting them to his ground floor studio, he says, “We were happy when Hashimoto-sensei and Tanabe-sensei married.”
“I’m not a sensei anymore,” Aurora says. “Just a housewife looking for part-time university jobs.”
“My big studio is at my university,” Kato says. “That’s where I do all my castings.”
There are charcoal sketches of Erina on the walls and clay models of her on a wooden table in the small studio.
After the sculptor has gone upstairs to fetch Erina, Aurora whispers, “A shrine to Booger Eater.”
“Shhh!”
“Can’t take me anywhere,” Aurora whispers back.
In the living room they meet Erina dressed in a formal kimono. She goes down on her knees to welcome her guests and thank them for the gift they brought. It is the first time Hank and Aurora have seen her not dressed in a miniskirt and her hair not dyed.
The dining room is Western-style and the dinner is French. “My man’s a gourmet chef,” Erina says as she serves the salad and consommé.
“Would anyone care for wine?” Kato says.
“Please,” Aurora says.
“I’m driving,” Hank says
“I cannot drink any more,” Kato says. “The doctor won’t let me.”
“The women will drink,” Erina says and pours Aurora and herself a glass of Chablis.
The couples are presently quiet. Erina breaks the silence.
“My father borrowed twenty thousand yen from me again,” she says. “He said it was because he lost at mahjong. But I’m sure he is doing it with that red-headed foreign woman in the soap land.”
“Ah-ha-ha-ha!” Kato laughs. “I like Erina-san’s father. We used to drink together.”
“That’s how we found out Yuji-san has a weak heart,” Erina says. “Fortunately the ambulance got to us in time.”
“Oh dear,” Aurora says in English and puts down her wine glass.
“Since he stopped drinking he’s lost weight. Time for the main course. Help me, Yuji-san.”
They bring in the coquille St. Jacques.
“You have a beautiful home,” Hank says.
“Yuji-san worked hard for it” Erina says.
“I’m surprised how my life turned out,” Kato says. “I have my family to thank. They stood by me and my work when I was struggling. They supported me after my marriage collapsed and when I was sick. They love Erina.”
“His ex-wife ran away to France,” Erina says.
“We never got along,” Kato says. “In retrospect I’m happy she knew French.”
“You family sounds like mine,” Aurora says. Behind me, no matter what.”
“Like Tahiti?” Erina says.
“Erina-san,” Kato says.
“Sorry. I have a big mouth.”
“That’s right,” Erina-san. And when I came back to San Francisco from Tahiti and hid in my room and cried for a month,” Aurora says. “My mother comforted me. She said there is nothing I did that is as crazy as what she did. She ran off to Las Vegas to be a showgirl at eighteen and married a poor Japanese-American short order cook.”
“Who now owns Tanabe’s, a one of the best Japanese restaurants in San Francisco,” Hank says.
“Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! I’d love to meet your family,” Kato says.
“If only I knew then there’d be a happy ending to my stupidities,” Aurora says.
“Are you happy?” Erina asks.
“Very happy,” Aurora answers.
“Good. Hank-san and I were happy, only not happy enough.”
“I’d better say it,” Kato says. “We’re sorry, Hank-sensei. You are happy now, but Erina-san and I hurt you. We are deeply sorry.”
He bows deeply to Hank and Erina bows too.
Hank and Aurora bow. Hank says, “Whatever happened was best for all of us.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Aurora says.
“Me too,” Erina says and downs her wine. “Dessert time!”
“Sit,” Kato says. “You’ll drop it.”
“Too much wine,” Erina says and fills her glass and Aurora’s. “Do you still call me Booger Eater?”
”I wouldn’t think of it,” Aurora says and drinks.
Hank nudges Aurora’s foot with his and she nudges him back.
“I don’t care,” Erina says as Kato brings in the dessert tray with the fruit parfaits. “I call myself Booger Eater sometimes when I am so happy that I don’t believe it’s me.”
“Is that English?” Kato asks as he distributes the desserts.
Erina tells him what “Booger Eater” means in Japanese.
“Ah-ha-ha-ha!” he laughs.
“How did you two find each other again?” Erina asks.
“First tell me how you and your husband met,” Aurora says.
“We’d better have more wine,” Erina says.
“We’d better.”
“You should take some wine home with you,” Erina says. “We have rooms of it.”
“How did you meet?”
“I was a secretary at his university. One day he asked me to pose for him. Before we knew it we were in love.”
“I see,” Aurora says.
“It’s not like how you might think. We didn’t do it until we were married.”
“I’m moved,” Aurora says.
Hank nods.
“We got married a week after we met,” Erina says.
“Ah-ha-ha-ha!” Kato laughs.
“And I had a woman problem before then...”
“Ah-ha-ha-ha! Ah-ha-ha! Erina-san, you’ll give me a heart attack!”
“That’s not funny,” Erina says. “I hope you’re not drinking behind my back.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Good. Don’t forget your medication before bedtime. Your turn, Aurora-san.”
“Actually, we got married just after we reunited.”
Hank says, “But finding Aurora took a long time, though we’re both from San Francisco. I emailed her home in San Francisco and the emails kept bouncing back. Finally, one day I saw on the Internet that she was having a photographic exhibition at a Nob Hill gallery. I took time off from school and flew to San Francisco. I found the gallery and surprised Aurora.”
“That’s an understatement,” Aurora says. “We hadn’t seen each other for two years.”
“Are you a professional photographer?” Kato asks.
“I have a Master of Fine Art from the San Francisco Art Institute but I never made money from photography,” Aurora says.
“So anyway, you met at the gallery,” Erina says. “What happened next?”
“We hugged and kissed and cried,” Aurora says. “Then we had a great quickie wedding with his folks and my folks in Reno and beat it to Japan because Hank had to teach.”
“I was expecting something more dramatic,” Erina says.
“We’d already had enough drama. Way too much,” Aurora says.
“Yuji-san,” Erina says. “You need a man and a woman to model for that sculpture you’re designing with me in it, don’t you?”
“You’ll be working with professional models, Erina-san.”
“I don’t feel right with professional models. How about Hank-san and Aurora-san?”
“I need nude models,” Kato says.
“I don’t mind being nude with Hank-san and Aurora-san. Do you two mind?”
“I think it’ll be fun,” Aurora says. “Hank, let’s do it. It’s for art’s sake!”
“Well, all right,” Hanks says, “If everyone feels comfortable with it.”
“Are you usually so accommodating?” Kato asks Hank.
“He’s very flexible,” Aurora says. “I introduced him to a nudist beach when we were in Germany and he took to being naked with other naked people like he’d done it all his life.”
“I’ve never been to a nude beach,” Erina says. “Isn’t it difficult for the men because they have to walk around sticking out?”
“Ah-ha-ha-ha!” Kato laughs.
Erina gives him a puzzled look.
“I have to be professional,” Kato says to Hank and Aurora. “If you feel the least uneasy don’t think of posing. But to tell the truth, I like working with amateurs. You’ll get the best fees I can give.”
“I’m fine,” Aurora says.
“Me too,” Hank says.
Erina removes her kimono. Hank and Aurora undress and fold their clothes over chairs in the dining room.
They go into the living room. Aurora and Erina look at each other’s bodies and then look at Hank. Hank looks at Kato opening his sketchbook.
“You should take your clothes off too,” Yuji-san,” Erina says.
“I’m the artist,” he says. “Artists leave their clothes on.”
Kato has Erina stand with her arms raised. He then has Hank and Aurora stand to the right and the left of Erina a few paces back and raise their arms. “Hold it as best you can,” he says.
Fifteen minutes later it is over. Erina wraps herself back up in her kimono and Hank and Aurora dress.
“Perfect!” Kato says. “From only these sketches I can get to work tomorrow! I’ll need Erina-san to pose for me one more time since she’ll be the central figure. And Hank-san and Aurora-san, thank you so very much! You’ll be rewarded handsomely.”
“And you’ll be part of an immoral work of art,” Erina says. “What are you calling this sculpture, Yuji-san?”
“Jealousy.”
“Jealousy?” Erina says. “Who’s jealous?”
“Art and life are two different things,” Kato says.
“So why do you have a big one in your pants?”
“Ah-ha-ha-ha!”
“Sometimes things that sound funny aren’t funny,” Erina says.
As they drive back to their village Aurora has her head on Hank’s shoulder.
“It was nice of Yuji to promise to find you a university job,” Hank says.
“It really was. And giving us all that wine. Erina told me she’ll send another box of wine to us. You know, I forgot to ask her if she was listening when I seduced you in your office. When I said I had the nicest breasts in Osaka. You once mentioned she used that line when she seduced you.”
“I’m glad you didn’t ask,” Hank says.
“Hank, how do you feel about being naked tonight?”
“I only hope my school doesn’t find out. Germany is one thing. Japan is another.”
“Are you ticked off?”
“No.”
“Honest?”
“I’m not ticked off, Aurora. Whatever happens, I believe we’re lucky to have worked with this noted and enigmatic artist.”
“What’s Erina going to do when he dies?”
“God, Aurora.”
“Hank, I want to die before you die. I can’t face life without you.”
“I hope you don’t get a hangover from tonight, Aurora.”
“Hank, make love to me.”
“We’ll be home soon.”
“I mean now. Stop at the next love hotel.”
“Aurora.”
“I mean it, Hank. Do it if you love me.”
“Okay. One love hotel coming up.”
Hank finds a love hotel and drives into the parking garage.
Aurora’s head is on his shoulder and her eyes are closed.
“Aurora,” say Hank. “Aurora? Aurora?”
Aurora opens her eyes.
BOOGER EATER BEREFT
The most beautiful blonde that Aurora Tanabe Hashimoto has ever met in Kobe sips her Café Latte Grande and then says, “Poor Erina. I still can’t believe it.”
Aurora says, “It caught us all by surprise. We knew Yuji Kato had a weak heart, but he was doing everything right. He wasn’t drinking. Kept to a strict diet. Erina made sure he took his medication daily on time. She thinks his sculpting workload put too strain on him. He was working late on castings at his university studio when he went.”
“I remember him as a big Falstaffian guy,” Jillian says. “Loud, hearty laugh and flaring muttonchops. My Adrian knew him at the university. I met him with Adrian at that little gallery here in Motomachi. He took us out drinking. He could really put it away then. I hear he was quite a rake.”
“Not when he was married to Erina. He was totally devoted to her.”
“The first monogamous celebrity I’ve known then,” Jillian says. “When I lived with Bob it was groupies all the time and friends with benefits all over the country. I figured it was what I had to put up with living with a minor sports hero. Is this too much for you?”
“It’s not something I hear every day,” Aurora says. “Tell me more.”
“Well, the only time I was less than amused, shall we say, was when he announced he was marrying one of his friends with benefits.”
“God, Jillian.”
“I would have moved out immediately if I wasn’t broke. I lived a celibate life for six months, in which time I ghost wrote his autobiography to keep from being kicked out, would you believe.”
“Then you met Adrian at the bookstore in Manhattan,” Aurora says.
“And ten minutes later we were in a taxi headed for his apartment in Queens. Right there in the taxi, as he was pawing me, he said he’d marry me in a minute if he could. I said he could marry me any time he wanted.”
Aurora says, “Back up, Jillian. I just don’t get how the dickens Bob could dump a trophy lover like you for anyone else.”
“The lady in question was rich and connected, honeychild. Bob was a mass of sports injuries and had already missed a season. He knew he was finished. He also knew he wasn’t famous enough to sell toothpaste on TV. He had no head for business. Can you believe I sympathized; I understood. I loved him that much.”
“I can believe it,” Aurora says.
“When I moved in with Adrian he gave me his history of shagging wives and other people’s girlfriends. He told me he made it with his principal’s wife and was consigned to one of those teacher detention rubber rooms on unspecified charges. Then he asked how I felt about going with him to Japan. He used his rubber room time to get a post as his present university. I thought what the hell and married him. You met Adrian once, I believe.”
“Handsome guy,” Aurora says. “Can I ask you something?”
“He hasn’t screwed around once since we met. Maybe that’s why he and Yuji Kato were such friends. Repentant coxcombs.”
Aurora sips her latte. “Hank is devoted,” she says.
“That three devoted men I can name, one down. Poor Erina.”
“I have yet to see her cry,” Aurora says. “And we’ve been quite close these past few years. I’ve helped her catalogue Yuji’s work and photograph it. I photographed her when she was posing for Yuji. Whenever we got together here for coffee we’d giggle like school girls.”
“What I don’t get is why she keeps that secretary job at the university,” Jillian says. “Thanks to all of those orgasmic Yuji Kato statutes you see all over town she must be rolling in coin.”
“It’s her mother,” Aurora says. “Her mother told her to hold on to that job no matter what because no one knows what the future will bring.”
“I had lunch with Erina when I visited Adrian at the university. Erina told me you nicknamed her ‘Booger Eater’ when she was your student.”
“I regret that. I deeply regret that. Please delete that from your memory,” Aurora says. “I won’t even tell you why I called her that.”
“She said she was a rotten student,” Jillian says. “I cannot imagine her as a wild child talking to her boyfriend on her cell phone in class.”
Aurora says, “I never imagined that the girl who ate lunch and burped while I was teaching would become the dearest friend I’ve ever had. I have Hank to thank for straightening her out.”
“As a teacher?”
“As a lover.”
“That’s a story,” Jillian says.
“A rather convoluted story. How about another latte? It’s my turn.”
“Just a small one for me,” Jillian says.
When Aurora returns, Jillian asks, “How are you for time?”
“Easy. Hank and I will have our usual Saturday dinner with Erina at her place at six and stay overnight. That way Hank doesn’t have to drive and can drink wine with us. Yuji was quite a wine connoisseur once.”
“You do this every weekend?”
“We did it occasionally when Yuji was alive. Now we’ve been doing it every weekend. We love cooking together.”
“And you are comfortable sleeping in a house with your husband’s ex-lover?”
“Perfectly comfortable,” Aurora says. “Anyway, it’s a big house and we get the whole second floor.”
“You’re really liberal-minded, Aurora. I’m so glad I ran into you.”
“Jillian, can I confide in you? I think you’re the one person who can understand.”
“Shoot,” Jillian says.
“Erina is lonely. She has put on a stoic front since Yuji died. But I am sure she cries and cries when she’s alone. Yesterday, when I was over, she said she wanted Hank and me to move in with her. I said we would certainly pay rent if we did. I also said I had to talk to Hank; but I haven’t.”
“You should,” Jillian says.
“I know, I know, Jillian! We have to move and what Erina is offering is great. We love our big old farmhouse in the country. But with Hank now at the university in Mikage and me at the junior college on Rokko Island the commute is onerous. Try and find an affordable place around Kobe that isn’t a cubbyhole.”
“Tell me about it!” Jillian says. “Why haven’t you talked to Hank?”
“Because of what I said to Erina. I can only tell you. I said I’d share Hank with her. I can’t believe I said. But I didn’t take it back.”
Jillian pushes her latte aside. “So what happened, Aurora?”
“Her face was radiant for the first time in ages. She hugged me and didn’t speak for a few minutes. Then she thanked me and said it was a beautiful idea but she was afraid Hank wouldn’t approve. What do you think Jillian?”
Jillian looks at her watch. “It’s a beautiful idea. I’ve got to rush, Aurora.”
When Jillian walks past the picture window she is holding her cell phone to her ear.
Aurora gets on her cell phone.
“Hank darling, drop everything and get to Erina’s pronto. I’ll explain there.”
FIDELITY
The big two-storey Western-style house of Yuji Kato, the late sculptor, looks down from Kitanozaka on Kobe’s foggy midnight glow. The first floor lights come on. Then the second floor lights. Kato’s widow knocks softly on the bedroom door of Hank and Aurora Hashimoto, professors at the fine arts university where Kato worked until his death eleven years ago. “It’s your bad student,” she says.
“Wait a moment, Erina-san,” Aurora says.
“Am I interrupting anything?”
“No, but just a second.”
Aurora and Hank throw bathrobes over their naked bodies. Then Aurora opens the door.
“I had another nightmare about Yuji-san,” Erina says. “It was terrible. Terrible.”
“I’ll go to Erina’s room while you have your girls’ talk,” Hank says.
“Here, take your pajamas,” Aurora says in English. Switching to Japanese, she says, “Erina will probably want to sleep with you tonight.”
Hank leaves the lights on in Erina’s large but sparsely furnished room after hanging his bathrobe on its usual hook in the closet, donning his pajamas and climbing into Erina’s American king-size bed. Resting on his side, unable to sleep, he surveys the tidy room, his eyes moving from the writing desk to the shelves filled with cookbooks and then to the cork bulletin board that takes up almost an entire wall. It is filled with photographs of Aurora, Erina and himself from their many trips around Japan and abroad. The best are Aurora’s, taken with her Leicas. The others were taken with a compact digital camera that Hank and Erina share.
There are many photographs of France. There are more of San Francisco. Of these, most are of Hank’s parents’ row house on Forty-Seventh Avenue in the Sunset district and Aurora’s parents’ Pacific Heights mansion where you can see the Golden Gate Bridge from Aurora’s old room. There are also photographs of the family restaurant, Tanabe’s New Tokyo, on Mason Street. Hank’s parents and Aurora’s parents know Erina as their children’s kind landlady and they treat her like a daughter, speaking to her in labored second generation Japanese because Erina knows practically no English.
Aurora and her older brother will sell the mansion and the restaurant when their parents pass on but Hank, an only child, with keep the house on Forty-seventh Avenue when he inherits it. This is what Aurora and Erina want.
Hank looks at the only photograph of the late sculptor that Erina displays in her room. It is on the desk, where Erina, with Aurora’s help, manages her business affairs. Aurora took the black and white picture shortly before his fatal heart attack. Kato’s wide, side-whiskered face, filling the frame, is laughing.
Next to the photograph rests a miniature of one Kato’s last statues. It is special to Hank, Aurora and Erina because they posed nude for it. Hank and Aurora’s figures are small compared to the figure of Erina standing before them. The three figures have their arms raised in an oval. Erina’s figure is looking up. Kato insisted that the statue could only be viewed properly from the front and straight on. One version stands in an alcove in a performing arts center in Tokyo. The other stands in an alcove in a private museum in Kobe. Kato called the statue Jealousy. He never explained why. Hank wonders if Kato recalled the statue when stipulating in his will that if Erina remarries she will lose control of his estate and it will go into the public trust.
It occurs to Hank that in the ten years the three have been together they never had a serious disagreement. If there have been moments of conflict between the two women, they did not allow him to know. He thinks Aurora and Erina might be lovers but does not believe it is his place to ask.
Keeping the light on, Hank puts Erina’s pillow over his eyes. A distant foghorn sounds. He remembers how, years ago, Aurora detested Erina when she taught her at the junior where they began their academic careers in Japan. Erina drank Pepsis and talked on her cell phone in class. Today she is the secretary to the president of the fine arts university.
First Aurora was Hank’s lover. When she left Japan Erina became his lover. After Aurora returned, he dumped Erina, and when Aurora left again, Erina took him back. Then she dumped him for Kato and he ended up marrying Aurora, whose whereabouts he discovered through the Internet. Now he has them both. Only they follow an unspoken rule that the two women will not make love to him at the same time.
Aurora and Erina became inseparable before Kato’s death. When Erina invited them to live with her shortly after being widowed, Aurora said on impulse that she would share Hank with her. Having said it she did not take it back. Erina thought it was a beautiful idea. Hank thought it was a bizarre idea. He felt so for years after he acquiesced.
Hank and Aurora have only told their best friends, Adrian and Jillian Pyne, American expatriates, about their relationship with Erina. If anyone else has breeched the invisible walls surrounding the Kitanozaka house he is not aware of it.
Shortly after one in the morning the light in Hank and Aurora’s room goes off. Moments later the first floor lights go on. Erina enters her room, removes her clothes and gets into bed with Hank. Hank undresses. Erina goes down on him.
“You taste like Aurora,” she says.
“How would you know?” Hank says.
“Yarashi,” she giggles and slaps his knee. “I want you to taste like me,” she says and straddles him.
Later, her head on his shoulder, Erina says, “Aurora was so comforting. I dreamt that Yuji-san was shouting at me. It never happened in real life. It was I who shouted at him. Everyone in my family was always shouting. So I thought that was the natural thing to do. Only Yuji-san would never shout back at me. He would just say, ‘Why are you shouting?’ Then I stopped shouting. I feel so bad about shouting at him. Have I ever shouted at you and Aurora since we started living together?”
“No,” Hank says.
“Maybe Yuji-san was shouting at me in my dream because I have not done enough to promote his art.”
“You’ve done enough, “ Hank says. “More than enough. Isn’t it enough that he rules you from the grave by preventing you from marrying and keeping the estate?”
“I don’t want to get married!” Erina says. “Yuji-san never would have put that part into his will without my consent. I wanted him to. I told you that before, Hank-san. Why won’t you believe me?”
“Forgive me, Erina-san,” Hank says.
“Don’t you see how I can never, never stop missing him,” Erina says.
“I’m deeply sorry.”
“Make love to me again, Hank-san.”
At half past two in the morning, Erina switches on the lamp by the bed and awakens Hank.
“Aurora-san must be lonely,” Erina says. “Let’s go to her.”
The first floor lights come on. Then the second floor lights.
Erina carefully opens Hank and Aurora’s bedroom door. “Your bad children are here,” she whispers.
A soft laugh issues from the darkness and then Aurora turns on the reading lamp next to the futon. She pulls the covers back.
Aurora and Erina fall asleep holding hands across Hank’s chest.
In Hank’s fading consciousness Yuji Kato is smiling at him and saying, “Are you always so accommodating?”
“Yes,” Hank mumbles as he drifts into a sound and dreamless sleep.
Author’s Message
Dear Reader: Thank you for reading Fidelity: Episodes from Three Lives in Japan by Alex Shishin. Your author hopes you enjoyed it. If you are interested in other works by the same author here is some useful information.
Alex Shishin publishes fiction, non-fiction and photography. His recent book, Rossiya: Voices From The Brezhnev Era, a Russian-American memoir of a train odyssey around the USSR and Poland, published by iUniverse, is available through various online distributors, including Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com. as a print on demand (POD) paperback. An ebook edition is available from the iUniverse online bookstore.
Smashwords has published three other books by Alex Shishin to date: Nippon 2357: A Utopian Ecological Tale, “The Bridge of Dreams” and “Predators”: Two Short Novels and The Cyber Dust Stories: Lost Short Stories and Essays from the Internet Centering on Japan.
Shishin’s anthologized short stories include “Mr. Eggplant Goes Home” in Student Body: Stories About Students And Professors (University of Wisconsin Press) and “Shades” in The Broken Bridge: Fiction From Expatriates In Literary Japan (Stone Bridge Press).
Alex Shishin is coauthor with Stephan F. Politizer of Four Parallel Lives of Eight Notable Individuals, published by Smashwords.