The Men in My Country

11

hen I call the professor, he apologizes again and again. I am very sorry. You must excuse me my faults. You surprised me, that’s all. I wasn’t sure what to do. Please agree to see me soon. I don’t know, I say. Just once, he says. I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s a good idea. The professor pushes and his pushing interests me. Like a dish of raw horse meat at a party—sheer novelty. All relationships come out of some misunderstanding, he says. But you seemed indifferent to me at that play the other day. And anyway, I’m leaving the country soon. Did you know? No. A pocket of silence. A lull. These are the moments where two people sink or swim. As for indifferent, he says, I am not. We decide to swim. I agree to dinner. I invite the professor to my house. It will be very simple, I say. I’m not knocking myself out. Knocking? I’m not going to any trouble, I say. For you. For anyone. And our conversation ends with me instructing him to bring two bottles of wine. An American custom, I say. The professor draws a leaf of spinach from the plate and holds it up to the candlelight. What is it? he asks. W ................................................................................ 38 I smile. I have expected this. What is ordinary in America becomes exotic here. Raw spinach, I say. Sometimes Americans like to eat their spinach raw instead of cooked. We are in my kitchen, sitting at a small crowded table. The professor eats a single leaf and says, Yes, I see why. This is very good. But we Japanese do not know about this. He finishes the vegetable soup I have prepared; I finish off the first bottle of wine. Then we sit back and watch the candles shrink and the night open up and the professor asks why I came to Japan. I want to tell him about how my life used to be, not its facts exactly but its temperature, how the temperature went up and down in the United States, how I used to drive all over a desert state listening to songs by Patsy Cline and Patty Loveless and Willie Nelson and Darden Smith, and how every state seemed like a state of longing to me. I want to tell him how I liked my job writing newspaper stories at that time, liked it because it gave me something marginally purposeful to do, but I also hated it because I knew I was only reporting on other people’s lives because I didn’t know how to inhabit my own. I want to tell him how, when I left for Japan, I told my American co-workers, I’m leaving the country, I’m making a clean split, and those who were married with children sighed and shook their heads and said how lucky I was to be leaving just like that, lickety-split, and I knew what they meant and I’d smile and say, yes, I’m so lucky to go to live in Japan, and part of me felt lucky, it really did, but there was this other part, the part I’d leave out, another way of describing all that freedom I felt: that I was crushed by what others considered good luck, paralyzed by the dizzying choices ahead. That I wasn’t going for any high-minded reason —to learn a new language, to study the culture, to experience adventure—or any reason, really, at all, except that time-honored reason so often behind travel: that desperate desire to escape my own solitary, unsatisfying, singular skin. I want to tell the professor all of this, that all I ever wanted was a guy and a garden and some babies and some books. That I didn’t understand how it happened, this ending up alone over and over again. I want to tell him about the man I used to love, how I went to see him one night after signing the contract to teach in Japan. 39 We made dinner in his small kitchen that night, and spoke easily as we always had. We finished our meal and washed the dishes and left them to dry on a rack. And after that, I found myself telling this man what I knew about this job...