10
meet the third man during my waiting week. I meet him in the most random of ways: in a CD shop in the Ito-yokado department store where I am on the brink of buying three CDs by Shang Shang Typhoon, an all-girl Okinawan band. It is the kind of impulsive purchase I’ve been making all week as I wait to call the professor again, as my time in Japan dwindles away, as I both yearn for and dread the coming of spring since spring means summer is coming next and in the summer, I will have to leave, will have to move to dreamy Iowa. Yesterday it was reams of rice paper, enough to wallpaper a small house; the day before that, three red paper umbrellas, the kind I could buy in the States for a fraction of the price. These trinkets, these CDs—they are an attempt, I know, to weigh myself down, to keep myself from floating away as if I were Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, jumping out of that hot-air balloon to rescue Toto and also trying to rescue herself. At the CD shop, a man comes up and starts asking questions, the typical ones that gaijin ask of one another in every Japanese town. Where are you from? How long have you lived in Japan? What kind of music do you like? Are you single? I answer honestly, that I like Japanese reggae pop at the moment, and that yes, I am single, but I’m sighing at the sheer predictability and audacity of this guy. So I start to walk away. Then Amir asks if I want to have coffee with him and for some reason I can’t explain — because he asks so easily, so sincerely, without guile? Because I am, despite a flicker of annoyance followed by a flicker of fear, feeling reckless right now? Because I want to speed I ................................................................................ 34 along in this waiting week in which I have ordered myself not to call the professor? — I say yes. Yes. I will have coffee with him. Coffee will be a distraction, a relief. We will go to a crowded coffee shop downstairs. Sit at a table, surrounded by strangers. Talk about nothing. Nothing, I think, will be very, very nice. Coffee would be nice. Amir smiles. He is tall and dark and looks very, very strong, the physical opposite of the short, stocky, silver-haired professor. A healthy bamboo shoot. He also looks very, very young, a face full of not-quite-grown-into chiseled features. Not a hint of vanity, it seems. On this afternoon, he’s wearing bright white Levi’s with a bright neon green parka over a bright orange sweater underneath, which gives him the appearance of a child, since only children in Japan wear colors as bright as this. He looks like a pimp, my friend Rachel will say one day when winter is done and spring has finally sprung. She will be watching Amir walk away, after the three of us have spent the afternoon hanging out, first in a movie theater, next in a noodle shop, and then in a dark bar where Amir’s presence strikes us both as all lightness and relief, so different from the other men we meet, the expatriates from Australia and America who complain so bitterly about all things Japanese. You mean that as a compliment, right? Oh, yes, she says. He’s a very handsome man. A very pleasant pimp. Though you might want to get him to tone those colors down just a bit. Rachel is an English teacher at a school near mine. She’s Australian, used to be a jill-a-roo, and she tells me stories sometimes about her former job, castrating bulls. In those days, she packed a shotgun in the trunk of her car, a fact she says tells you everything about the ranch hands surrounding her at the time. They’d rape you in a second if given a chance, she says. Other than that, they were fairly nice guys. She takes a purely pragmatic approach to men, asks simply: Is he a decent fuck? That’s the bottom line. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not. Around his neck Amir wears a thick gold chain that says GOD in capital letters, which on this, our first meeting, I think is too gaudy to [18.116.36.192] Project MUSE (2024-04...
OR
