The Men in My Country

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hen I tell the professor he has, of the three men, given me the least, I wonder what possesses me to say such awful things. He stares at his coffee, then off into space. You’re not in a position, I continue, hoping to soften this undeserved blow, to give me what I need. For this is the problem with married men: They’re married. I sigh in relief to see my words have had the desired effect, to see the professor turn his face back toward me, to see the light come back to his married and middle-aged face. When I tell Amir I’m leaving soon, I repeat the verb to leave once in English, again in Japanese, but he shakes his head back and forth, refusing to hear. No listen, he says, no listen, and I am moved by this, a small act of denial, a refusal to face the truth. I call my best friend, Ellen, again and again. Calling is my way of staying afloat. I call from lime green phone booths outside train stations and pale pink phone booths outside restaurants. I call again and again, always collect. Helen-chan. That’s how the Japanese pronounced her name when she visited here. Melon-chan. Which is what she calls me. Helen-chan listens as Melon-chan cries. She can imagine the scene. The mix of ramen and incense from shops and Shinto shrines; the cars’ exhausted fumes; the sound of trains. She went to a fortune teller on the streets of Matsumoto once on a visit here, a man who said to her You will have trouble with your father. Her father had been dead then for five years. Ellen keeps saying the same thing again and again. W ................................................................................ 126 Just hold on. And get yourself on that plane. And this, of course, is the simplest of acts but the one I can’t imagine . Stepping onto a plane, walking down the ramp, moving through the rounded door — these actions now strike me as a sequence out of a terrible fairy tale, the plane some postmodern version of the gingerbread house, a place that will turn out to be a large oven, not a plane at all, a place where the flight attendants will serve me up in a bentō box for lunch. I had a ticket. I had managed that much. All I had to do was get onto that plane, something I had done a hundred times before. But the mind apparently has a mind of its own. And mine rebelled against this inevitable act. Yes, yes, I will, I say to Ellen’s voice, dreamlike and unreal, separate from the person I used to know, the one with dark curly hair, pale skin, a small scar on her left cheek. I can’t imagine her anymore. I can’t imagine anything. I have to leave. The writing is on the wall, I say. I mean the calligraphy. That’s good, that’s good, Ellen says. You’re making a joke. Remembering is the only way. We are sitting across from one another at a table in his law office so the conversation feels like a legal deal, something business-like, cold. The talk isn’t languid, just painfully awkward and slow. My feelings for Marilyn-san have not changed, he says, but if I deem his expressions of those feelings as changed then my perceptions make that as good as true. Perceptions matter but perceptions are only translations, I say. Feeling is the only thing with any integrity. Integrity? I look it up in my dictionary and hand it to him. Near perfect, he says, reading out loud. Love is an act of will, I say. I do not know if I believe what I am saying or not. But these are the words coming out of my mouth. Will? he says. I do not know this word. I rifle through the dictionary again, push the definitions toward him. I remember a student at the ABC School who had copied her high school homework dutifully, writing one dozen times: I do not know this work, I do not know this work, I do not know this work. 127 The word is work. The dictionary’s open. Will. A noun suggesting conscious determination. Will. A grammatical construction of the future. Will. A sign of hope...