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remember Nozaki in snapshots now: Nozaki in faded Levi’s, an old sweatshirt. His hair greasy. I’m thinking he looks handsome this night, that it’s just this greasy hair that men before have lacked. He has had car trouble earlier. Changed a tire all by himself. Never got a chance to go to the baths. He goes to the sentō; his apartment does not have a bath. And now, tonight, the laces on his running shoes are coming undone and his hair is greasy and we’re out and I’m so happy to be with him, to be out and on our way to a restaurant, and when he comes around the corner of the car, after he’s parked, he starts to trip, then catches himself. Are you OK? I ask, then in a split second see he’s embarrassed I saw him, not hurt. So here is the man I love in two parts: adorably messed up and boyish, about to trip over his own two clumsy feet; and a man deeply ashamed to make a small mistake. One night, driving in his car, I think of what I know of him. That he lived in Tokyo for ten years before returning here. That he and his sister cared for their dying father. That he and his sister get along well. That his mother died many years ago. So you’re an orphan now, I tell him. The thought of him parentless and childless makes me sad, as if he were wedded to world of loss. No, he says, as if scolding me. An orphan is a child. Once, on a Sunday afternoon, he comes to pick me up at the ABC School. I have fallen asleep on the pink couch and when he comes in, I wake up, horrified that he has seen me, mid-day, asleep. I ................................................................................ 108 Years later, I continue to dream about him. Here’s one from not so long ago: We are sleeping on a large wrought-iron bed. The bed sits center stage in a large, empty room, the kind with hardwood floors and high ceilings and elegant, old-fashioned moldings out of another century, some time other than now. In the dream room there are no furnishings at all, no chintz couches or polished armoires, no fluffy chairs, no small black couch. It is large and largely empty, monastic in an aesthetically pleasing way, with nothing but the bed in the middle, positioned like a single vase of flowers in the alcove of a Japanese hall. Spare and lean. Also, the kind of contradiction I love: complete and full. In the dream room, we wake from under plain white cotton sheets. His cleaning lady raps on the door, then quietly lets herself in. She gasps in horror and I understand that the source is the sight of me, a woman, a foreign woman right here in plain sight and in bed. I pull the sheets to cover myself and listen as he defends me in language I recognize but fail to comprehend. The words are mysterious but the point perfectly clear: she stays, he says, and you can go, he tells the lady, and with that the cleaning lady — poof! — disappears. What happens next is what interests me most. He farts — one small, delicate pop — and we laugh and then curl back up in that big, beautiful white bed. Or is it me in the dream who farts? I cannot remember now. All I know is that when I wake, I realize the surprise is a surprise. It isn’t his loyalty that touches me now but the ease with which we respond to that small bodily sound. In waking hours all those many years ago, we were too embarrassed by our bodies to ever laugh. And I remember how it was, in what ways we were the same: how we built fragile houses made of words; how we lived our real lives in our heads; how our bodies, sadly, caught us off guard. ...
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