17

LATE IN THE DAY I received a call from a man named David Swancourt, a young man most likely, with an unusually engaging voice, disquieting, restless, intimate. Intrigued, I played his inquiry over a number of times before returning his call. I managed to reach him at once and we made an appointment for the following Friday in the new office.

Then: a shower (the downtown Spells has both a private shower and a restroom for clients, a luxurious restroom like a picture gallery), a nap, and a call to Akiko to discuss where we would meet.

One thing I am compelled to do, because it promotes coherence, is to take Akiko to a restaurant where I have eaten with a lover. Or in a risky part of town where I have engaged, if briefly, with marginalia. To be healthy one needs to bring the disparate parts of one’s puzzle together and in this way defuse prevailing habits, promiscuity’s fevers. At the same time it provides proof for myself and my wife—who labors beneath the weight of the clues I have inadvertently left in her path—that our life, hers and mine, is singular, is the real one, the one that actually matters, so that the clues are disarmed and whatever pain she feels anesthetized. Or so I intend.

I was wanting the Red Dragon, a funky place she dislikes. I like its shadows, its intimacy; I like its dragons; above all I like the fact that I had been there with the Cutter a number of times. I liked the risk of this. She lives nearby and came often; I knew I was pushing things. I said to Akiko,

“I wonder if you would be up for the Red Dragon?”

“O, god!” she said. “You know I never am.”

“Last time you said the dumplings were O.K.—”

“We could go to the Vietnamese,” she countered. “We both like the Vietnamese.” I thought it over. The waitresses there were wonderfully attractive. There was a time when I had been involved with one. I could never decide if it was sex she wanted, or a father, or a green card. She did want money. A beauty with expensive tastes. I recalled a pair of boots she asked me to buy for her. Over a thousand—

“Are you still there?”

“I’m thinking,” I said. “The Dragon’s spareribs are in the Dragon’s favor. They have that soup you like.”

“You are impossible,” Akiko said. But she was laughing.

We pulled into the parking lot at almost the same moment. Akiko looked great; she was wearing silk jeans the color of pewter and silver sandals with what must have been a four-inch heel. She was wearing a white silk sweater. I could see at once that she was a little nervous. She’s no longer the person she was. She’s watchful. She notices now when I look at women. For that matter, she notices pretty women often even before I do. She has developed a flair. It used to be she was secure in her own beauty. I dislike this insecurity of hers; it has made her less lovely. She enters the restaurant looking fretful. Lovely, surely, but fretful. Yet she used to like pretty women. She was one of their tribe. Now she resents them.

The Cutter is very pretty. As we enter the Red Dragon, the Cutter, who has been sitting in the shadows in the back, sees us at once. It’s uncanny. It’s as if she has been waiting there. She walks toward us and she calls out: Doctor! And being the bitch she is, she ignores Akiko and gives me a hug. I can feel Akiko wired, thrumming with anger and fear. When I introduce them, Kat barely glances at her. She knows she holds the heat. The moment lasts ten seconds but it seers Akiko just as if the door of a furnace had suddenly blown open. When we sit down I shake my head and say,

“A client.”

“Now I’ve seen it.” Akiko looks totally lost.

“It’s a long process,” I tell her. “And as much as I’d like to, I can’t control every aspect of this. She’s a rude person. Not a good person. Pretty impossible, in fact. She had no right … I’m sorry,” I say. “This has upset you. Me too. But Akiko. It doesn’t mean anything. The meaning is here. Between us.” I take her hands in mine and put them to my lips. I kiss her hands, her fingers, and then I put them to my forehead. When I feel her little hands against my forehead I think that if I knew how to weep I might have wept at that moment. The oddest thing.

Yet this reassures her. Perhaps this is the thing that keeps us going; Akiko is so easily reassured. So eager to trust me. It doesn’t make any sense. But she relaxes; I feel the tension in her hands melt away. In a moment she is caressing my face. When I open my eyes her own face is open. Her eyes are tired, but their expression has softened.

“You once told me,” she says with real sweetness, real heat, “that I stung your face and hands.”

“And tongue.”

“I want … I want to sting you again.”

“And you shall, my love,” I promise, “once this difficult passage is over.”

When our food arrives, I notice the delicacy with which she lifts her dumplings, one by one, with her chopsticks. The delicacy of her perfect teeth, her mouth; the delicacy of her face. Why does the sight of my wife eating dumplings enrage me?

When the very air within one’s marriage grows thin and dim, there is nothing to do but set out to find a richer, brighter air. When the glass is fractured, a new glass must be procured. These days my wife does not know what to do with her tenderness.

If I were Akiko, I’d be out fucking men.