“Working?” Unsure what expression would best fit this situation, Sumire made do with her usual dour look. “I’ve never had a real job in my life, and I’m not even sure how to answer a phone the right way. I try to avoid taking the train before 10 a.m. and, as I’m sure you’ve noticed from talking to me, I don’t speak politely.”
“None of that matters,” said Miu simply. “By the way, are you free tomorrow, around noon?”
Sumire nodded reflexively. She didn’t even have to think about it. Free time, after all, was her main asset.
“Well then, why don’t we have lunch together? I’ll reserve a quiet table at a restaurant nearby,” Miu said. She held out the fresh glass of red wine a waiter had poured for her, studied it carefully, inhaled the aroma, then quietly took the first sip. The whole series of movements had the sort of natural elegance of a short cadenza a pianist has refined over the years.
“We’ll talk over the details then. Today I’d rather just enjoy myself. You know, I’m not sure where it’s from, but this Bordeaux isn’t half bad.”
Sumire relaxed her dour look and asked Miu straight out:
“But you just met me, and you hardly know a thing about me.”
“That’s true. Maybe I don’t,” Miu admitted.
“So why do you think I might be of help to you?”
Miu swirled the wine in her glass. “I always judge people by their faces,” she said. “Meaning that I like your face, the way you look.”
Sumire felt the air around her suddenly grow thin. Her nipples tightened under her dress. Mechanically she reached
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for a glass of water and gulped it down. A hawk-faced waiter quickly sidled in behind her and filled her empty glass with ice water. In Sumire’s confused mind, the clatter of the ice cubes sounded just like the groans of a robber hiding out in a cave.
*
I must be in love with this woman, she realized with a start. No mistake about it. Ice is cold; roses are red. I’m in love. And this love is about to carry me off somewhere. The current’s too overpowering; I don’t have any choice. It may very well be a special place, some place I’ve never seen before. Danger may be lurking there, something that may end up wounding me deeply, fatally. I might end up losing everything. But there’s no turning back. I can only go with the flow. Even if it means I’ll be burned up, gone for ever.
*
Now, after the fact, I know her hunch turned out to be correct. One hundred and twenty per cent on the money.
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2
It was about two weeks after the wedding reception when Sumire called me, a Sunday night, just before dawn. Naturally, I was asleep. As dead to the world as an old anvil. The week before I’d been in charge of arranging a meeting and could only snatch a few hours’ sleep as I gathered together all the necessary (read pointless) documents we needed. Come the weekend, I wanted to sleep to my heart’s content. So of course that’s when the phone rang.
*
“Were you asleep?” Sumire asked.
“Um,” I groaned and instinctively glanced at the alarm clock beside my bed. The clock had huge fluorescent hands, but I couldn’t read the time. The image projected on my retina and the part of my brain that processed it were out of sync, like an old lady struggling, unsuccessfully, to thread a needle. What I could understand was that it was dark all around and close to
29
Fitzgerald’s “Dark Night of the Soul”.
“It’ll be dawn pretty soon.” “Um,” I murmured listlessly.
“Right near where I live there’s a man who raises roosters. Must have had them for years and years. In half an hour or so they’ll be crowing up a storm. This is my favourite time of the day. The pitch-black night sky starting to glow in the east, the roosters crowing for all they’re worth like it’s their revenge on somebody. Any roosters near you?”
On this end of the telephone line I shook my head slightly.
“I’m calling from the phone box near the park.”
“Um,” I said. There was a phone box about 200 yards from her apartment. Since Sumire didn’t own a phone, she always had to walk over there to call. Just your average phone box.
