The Men in My Country

13

hen Rachel and I meet for coffee I tell her nothing of the professor or my lingering crush on Nozaki of the Japanese businessmen. I tell her only of Amir. How Amir’s a good kisser. And more than that. How competent he is at everything. He cut my hair the other day, I say. Have I told you this? That he used to be a hair stylist in Tokyo? Amir’s good for you, Rachel says. By which she means Amir might loosen me up. Do you think you might be—god, I hate to even use the word —in love? Maybe, I say. I’m just testing the idea out. But I doubt it. I do. Our time together is passionate but its temperature—or its type, perhaps—is not enough. No, not not enough. But not quite right. I think maybe we won’t cause the other trouble enough. Rachel nods. Understands. Agrees. Trouble is everything. She is of the opinion that sex and love can’t be bedfellows, anyway, so this particular split seems fine to her. The ideal situation: a decent bloke, an above-average fuck. She knows, too, that woman does not live on fantasy alone, that it’s not enough to lust after the boys at school, which we do. The boys, the boys —are the boys the blueprint to all this desire in Japan? Is it all the boys here or just a few? I asked Rachel once. All of them, she said. No, just a few. I don’t know. A few are dangerous. Dangerous, how? I ask. You know . . . dangerous because you know they know you like them and who knows what could happen then. W ................................................................................ 48 The boys are ten years younger than Rachel, fifteen years behind me. She is old enough to be their sister. I am closer to a mother’s age. We speculate, wondering out loud about the attraction we feel and what it means. We know it’s because we’re alone here and often lonely. And because we’re in a foreign country, everything, including the mundane, takes on an erotic gloss. Sometimes I think it’s maternal, this feeling I have for the boys at school, this desire to protect them, this urge to claim them as my own. Sometimes I think it’s more complicated than that, a desire I know but can’t name. Only a few I can identify by name. Most I know only by physical detail. The boy with a limp who loves Picasso. The boy who carries my books to class, unasked. The boy who slouches during English class and doodles in a notebook , but watches me to see if I’m watching him, which I am. All the time. He plays basketball and I watch him play, his thighs so muscular , so familiar, I could pick them out in a lineup of legs in two seconds flat. There’s the boy with a pock-marked face who yawned once in class at the same moment I did. We’ve exchanged looks in the hallways ever since, conspiratorial half-smiles, then we both get embarrassed and look away. There’s the boy who hands me something after lunch, Presento, he says, then races off, waving and shouting out good-naturedly, Have a NICE day!, a phrase made popular on Japanese TV. I thank him twice, once in English and again in Japanese. Then I look at what he has handed me: two packets of mayonnaise. There are the boys in seventh grade, some so small that they float in bunched-up paper bag pants, the boys that make you put your hand to your grown-up teacherly heart. These are the boys who hold hands walking down the hall, who sit in each other’s laps, and after a time, you don’t see anything strange about all that touching at all. By eighth grade, the acne begins and so does the acting out and you wonder how anyone survives eighth grade anywhere. By ninth grade they begin to divide themselves up, forming cliques and camps that will continue the rest of their lives. 49 In one group, the good boys, sweet as sunflowers, soothing as soba tea—the boys who do their homework every night, study hard in class, and run for student council and go on to universities. In the other camp...