Kisetsuka

Kisetsuka Marilyn Abildskov A woman by herself can always get by. —Yasunari Kawabata Once, after the long winter of my first year in Japan, a winter when a persistent cough had taken up residence in my lungs and refused for months to be ordered out, I celebrated spring by watching everything—the river running through the center of town, the gloss of ice encasing rice fields, and my own unpredictable set of inhibitions—thaw aU at once, just melt away and then blossom in a single season of a gorgeous green rush. By March, the river began to flow fast again, and the soil in the rice fields turned dark brown, and then the rice began to sprout up green, and the flowers began to flower on trees that looked Uke wedding bouquets made for gigantic brides, and in that season, that amazingly abundant and overdue season, something happened that reminded me that there are seasons to a woman's Ufe, and try as you may to avoid those seasons, the seasons wül come; connections wiU be made. And then, just as predictably, change wfll come again; connections wfll come undone. What happened is this: I woke up one morning to find a Chilean violinist with dark brown eyes and the most beautiful long eyelashes I've seen before or since asleep on my futon, his long, lean arm stretched above his head like a perfectly constructed bow. The vioUnist and I had met three months before at Scotty's, our small city's famous expatriate bar, famous because it was the only expatriate bar in our small city a bar as sleazy as Rick's cafe in Casablanca was elegant. We had, at that time, talked, then flirted, then ignored each other uneventfully for weeks, then, in a way that surprised us both, gone home together one night just 132 Marilyn Abildskov133 before dawn, the violinist saying he wanted the two to become one and me thinking that was a lovely a way ofputting things, a perfect way to celebrate spring. Right before we drifted off to sleep, he said, "Wake me up in an original way," then he quickly ruled out water to the face. And so, a few hours later, when I lumbered out ofbed, I made a pot of coffee and opened up a book by Pablo Neruda and happened happily onto a passage that began, "I don't believe in originaUty," which I read to the sleepy-eyed man in my futon after nudging him awake. The violinist was, Uke so many expatriates in so many places, including this one, bound for home soon and adamant about wanting to go it alone. He said he wanted to avoid entanglements of any serious kind. AU ofwhich was fine by me. For, though I liked him a great deal and dreamed ofone day going to Chile, a country I had only read about but imagined as a skinny coastal place where you might see the ocean from the windows of one side ofyour house and mountains from the other, a few weeks after the violinist and I feU into those futons, our time together began to feel tedious, our conversations something that got very much on my nerves. Instead of talking about music or books or our experiences in Japan, instead of talking about our famflies or friends or awything spirited at all, we feU into a whirlpool of mundane logistics comprised, it seemed, of nonsense, of repeating ways of getting from here to there. "Where you were?" he asked, caUing from Scotty's late one Saturday night. "Why you not here?" "I was busy," I said. "Where you were?" I tried to explain that I had been on gaijin duty, showing up to a party like a human tape recorder, accomplishing a favor for the friend of a friend of a friend. This was the kind ofthing expected offoreigners all overJapan. In this case the favor involved reciting the words to "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" slowly, and I was supposed to do it with dramatic effect, as a woman in a bright blue taffeta dress and loads oflipstick played a harp in the background . I...