"'Could you take a picture of me, please?' was what I said," said Eric. His buddy, Garry, smiled, while splitting the hundred dollar bills into two piles. "That's how you said it? That's a really good Chinese accent you had," commended Garry. "Here," he said, giving one of the piles to Eric. The Asian man nodded, and said, "Thanks. But it wasn't supposed to be Chinese. I was going for the Japanese theme. I even slightly bowed. I had my fat, ugly glasses on, too." He casually counted the bills and stuffed it in his pocket.
"Want some tea? I got Japanese ones, too!" asked Garry.
"Sure."
They sat down in Garry's small but cozy living room, decorated in the minimalist approach, barely anything but what there is is obviously expensive and well thought through. The table is a thin slab of oak wood painted in black, with thin silver edge circumscribing it. The chairs, all four of them, are also of the black and silver theme.
"You completely redid your living room," commented Eric as he sat himself down.
"Yeah, I could finally afford to do it, after all this time."
While Garry prepared the tea in the even tinier kitchen, Eric kept quiet; he was looking at the box of matches in his hands. There's a strike mark on it. He didn't smoke; it was one of his tools. Despite the waning number of smokers in the country, he still believed that one way to win over a smoker was offering a light.
He offered the light to that woman, Cindy. His eyes caught her standing behind the barricade overlooking the East River, with full view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the financial district of Manhattan on the other side. There were a lot of people yesterday, Sunday. Normally there would still be a lot of people already. It was a beautiful, late summer day, the sky had not a single bit of cloud, and its blueness was nearly perfectly reflected in the river and on the skyscrapers.
But yesterday was particularly crowded because there was a little concert with a local Brooklyn band, and a lot of young people joined the families that normally frequented this Brooklyn Bridge Park. The band set up their makeshift stage in front of the abandoned red brick factory that, along with most other buildings here, used to power the economy of the borough. Soon it would become some luxury loft for the young and wealthy looking to get out of the chaos of Manhattan, but still have a view of it. Eric had thought about getting one of the lofts once preorder was possible.
But he didn't come here to scout out a future property for himself. He was wearing a white baseball hat with a tiny Japanese flag on it, the red dot that made him unmistakably Japanese, and his Canon Powershot hanging at the very center of his chest over white polo made it ever more obvious to others what he was doing. Two teenagers walked past by him, stared at him from behind and giggled and pointed. By the time he saw Cindy, he was almost done with his job. He was satisfied. He heard some commotions, but the place was so noisy and crowded that he wasn't in trouble.
"Watch out, it's hot," warned Garry. It wasn't necessary, since Eric drank tea all the time.
"So what happened afterward? You said you spent the whole rest of the afternoon with her," asked the tea maker.
"She, of course, agreed. It was really crowded. And she couldn't really take a shot of me with the skyscrapers or the bridge behind me without people coming between us. So I suggested that we walk over to the part closer to the entrance, away from the music that was also getting really loud. She agreed. I could see she was troubled, but not because she was annoyed with me. On the contrary, as soon as I asked her for the favor, I could see that familiar look I always see in people who are lonely, who needs company, at least that moment. So we moved over to where the rocks were, the walk way towards the park. There were fewer people streaming by. She finally took a picture or two."
Eric was interrupted by Garry's announcement that three minutes was up and the tea was done brewing, so that they should remove their respective tea strainers with the steeped leaves inside. Eric agreed. He took a first sip; his mind was more peaceful now. He was feeling a little guilty before, he realized, now that this new found peace appeared so unexpectedly.
And with that, he continued his story, while his host listened attentively, at times a little lost in some thought, as Eric could tell.
He looked at the preview on the screen of his Canon Powershot and smiled that big Asian smile (or Japanese, as he believed). He then commented to Cindy, "Your camera must take better picture than mine."
She blushed, and asked, "Why?", knowing full well the answer.
"It's so big and, uh, awesome looking," said the Asian man in his forties. He asked, while putting his little camera away, "What is it?"
"I am not sure. I just asked my brother to pick one out for me online and I bought it."
Eric took a curious look and said, "Ah, this is a professional grade camera, better than my sister's camera, which is only semi-professional. Must be very expensive."
He, of course, knew exactly how much it was. But let her have her glory. She blushed even more and said, "Oh, it's just money. It's not really my.... Well."
Eric looked up with his eyes above the heavy lenses of the glasses and saw that she was looking into some blank spot between them. Her blush was fading, and so was the proud smile. He waited for her to say something, and she did. She smiled and asked, "Where did you learn to speak such good English?" That question was inevitable. They started slowly walking, both having spotted an empty bench but neither actually proposed sitting in it. But there was a force that brought them there as a laser guides a missile. On their way to sitting down, he explained that he was visiting his sister, a much younger one, who was working just across the river in the financial district.
"Where is she?"
"She is working," said Eric.
"Sorry?"
Eric deliberately made his accent thick to elicit that response from her. He repeated his answer. Then she said, "But today is Sunday." He looked away, smiling that fake Asian smile and said, looking across the river, "She is a very busy woman. We haven't spent much time together these two weeks. She works seven days a week. But we get to have dinner almost every night together."
"I am sorry," said Cindy. There was a moment of silence between them, and the she said, "My name is Cindy Johnson," and she extended her arm to him, but she suddenly blushed, wondering, probably, if that wasn't culturally insensitive to a people that used to bowing. He looked at her hand a little puzzled and then shook it, and said, "My name is Yuko Akimoto."
"Yuko Akimoto?" asked Garry, one of the few times he interrupted. "Does that even mean anything?"
"I have no idea, why does it matter?" And he continued on with the story.
She was from the capital city of South Carolina, Columbia. "The biggest city, however, is Charleston," she added. "I hope you understand me all right; I tend to have a Southern accent, but here I try to limit it."
"I understand you fine, don't worry. My sister's husband is from Tennessee, I can't remember where, exactly, a name too hard to remember."
"Yes, some places in America the names are weird, because they are Indian names, like 'Chattahoochee', name of a park that we share with Tennessee."
"Are people in Tennessee strange?" asked Yuko.
Cindy paused with a confused frown and said, "I don't suppose more than other folks, why?"
"My sister's husband. That's my brother-in-law, in English?"
She nodded with growing curiosity to what he was going to say next. He cleared his throat a little, raising the suspense by a notch and said, "I don't think he's good to her, to my sister. He doesn't spend much time with her. I know she's busy, too busy for her brother visiting from Nagasaki, but I know she misses him, and complains privately to me that she wishes he were around more. But she said he's not around, not only because he's a busy architect, but because he, well."
He paused, with a bitter coldness in his eyes and his expressionless face lost some of the color. He took this opportunity to observe her, who was for a while paying attention to him and now there was some light in her eyes, a light not of hope or joy, but sorrow, as if it were a blue light searching in the darkness, not for life, but for death. She was in her late thirties. Her hair had nice highlights, but at the root he could see there were a lot of white hair. There were some wrinkles around her eyes, but her blue eyes were beautiful, whatever the expression she might have. She was wearing a white blouse, as opposed to T-shirts that most tourists here wore, the blouse had simple, floral decorations around the collar. And instead of a pair of shorts from Old Navy, she was wearing a yellow skirt. She was an attractive woman for her age, and if Eric weren't on business, he would have flirted with her. But perhaps that was what he was doing, too.
"Why is that weird?" asked Cindy.
"I believe a man should always love his wife, no matter what. My grandparents loved each other, but my grandfather was in the war, with America. My grandmother stayed in Nagasaki, waiting for him to return. He never did, and she perished when the atomic bomb dropped on the city. My parents were luckily already sent to the countryside when that happened."
She was visibly moved. Her blue eyes were watery. She looked away. He noticed her left hand, which was rested carelessly on her big camera case. Her hand was slightly tanned, but not in that disgusting way that many out-of-state tourists look, walking lobsters, as he had told his buddy, Garry. There was an air of elegance in her, not only in the way she was dressed, but in the movements she made, whether walking, taking a photo, or just turning her head slightly. Her face was very thin, but not in a sickly way. Her lips a little too pale, and a little too thin.
"I am sorry to hear that."
"No, don't be. That was long ago, before I was born. I only wanted to say that my parents taught us that we must love the special person we decided to have in our lives," declared Yuko. That's something Eric really believed in. He had told Gary one time that no matter how many heartaches he had gone through, how many betrayals, on both sides, once he got married he would be faithful, as his parents had been. Gary didn't say anything, which, Eric knew, meant he didn't believe him.
"That's easier said than done," said Cindy. He noticed she moved her index finger slightly, caressing the lens cap of the camera.
He knew what to ask next, "So are you a photographer?"
She seemed a little startled. She looked at him with some renewed curiosity and answered, "Not really. I have been fooling around for a while, actually almost when they first came out with the pocket size digital cameras. My first one was a Fuji, from nine years ago. But I never dared to buy an SLR until now, especially not a professional grade." She looked down on her camera. He smiled and said, "Nine years. You must be really good. I would love to see some of your photos."
"Oh, I will send you my Flickr site. I think some are really good. My brother, his name is Nate, thinks I could sell some of them. He said I have a good eye."
"You have beautiful eyes," said Yuko, taking a chance that she would think he was just a tactless foreigner.
She blushed and smiled without looking at him. Then that smile disappeared quickly. She sighed and said, "Thank you."
After some easing moment of silence went by during which they both pretended to watch people coming in and out of the park, now mostly leaving, he said, "I see you are married. Does your husband think you have good eyes?"
It was provocative, it was deliberate, though she didn't know it was deliberate. She looked at him with an expression that was ineffable but not unexpected. She was wearing her ring on her other hand, which was obviously how he knew. She looked away, and didn't protest his inquisitiveness.
She said, "My husband doesn't really care. He got me the Fuji, and I was happy. But I realized over the years that he did so to keep me busy so I didn't bother him."
He frowned, looking very perplexed.
"You wanna hear my story?" she asked, in the heaviest accent yet. Her blue eyes were turning gray and her fingers were making more of the little movements, even more rapidly.
"If you want to share, I am happy to hear," said Yuko.
"It ain't a long one. We've been married for fifteen years, and we dated seven years before that. I know it sounds cheesy, but he's been my best friend forever. Now, I want to say first that I don't think he ever cheated on me. But that doesn't matter, it seems. Just five years into the marriage, he said one day to me that he no longer loved me. And that was all he said before walking out. I thought he left. I was devastated. That night in bed, thinking I lost my best friend for reasons I couldn't comprehend, and then I heard the door close. And then the familiar footsteps up the stairs and then the bedroom door. He smelled like alcohol. I pretended I was asleep. I wasn't afraid he would hit me or something, like lots of men from where I am from are known to do. But worse than getting hit, I think, is getting yelled at, and he did that a few times. Only that day he finally told me he didn't love me anymore. So there he was just mumbling while taking off his clothes. He crawled in bed. I was filled with fear and sadness. He didn't touch me, he just fell asleep. And from that day on he didn't look at me much and hardly touched me. That was ten years ago."
She paused, looking into some blank space and the finally said, "That was really long ago. And we are still living together like strangers. I mean, I cook for him after I come back from work and he eats the food in the kitchen alone. I know enough to leave him be. And after a few years I just got used to it. It's funny how you just get used to something no matter how bad it it is. But was it really bad?"
"It was," said Yuko.
She was startled as if woken from a dream. She turned to look at him, imploring an explanation with her eyes. He continued, "Two human beings should not live like this."
She had no reaction. She waited a little more and then continued, "Then he lost his job. That was when he started shouting a lot, in the house. I didn't know what to do. I didn't really have friends I could count on. My Mother was really old and she had more trouble than I did. One time I tried to touch him, to comfort him, and that was the only time he said, 'I despise you.' I froze. I couldn't move, and the hatred in his eyes confirmed it. He was a little drunk, but not too much, not more than other times. He pushed my comforting arm away, stood up and walked out without eating his dinner. I cried. That night I was hoping I would hear the door close and then his footsteps up the stairs and then, in whatever for he was in, taking off his clothes next to the bed. But that never happened. I fell asleep around dawn and woke up just a couple of hours later.
"I found him in the living room watching some documentary on the History Channel later that week, four days later, I counted. He didn't even look at me when I walked in. I said 'Hi' but when he said nothing, I restrained myself from telling him how much he worried me, how much I missed him."
By now she was groping for a pack of tissue in her purse, and after tearing one out and drying her eyes and blowing her nose, she continued, without noticing that Yuko was there, listening and watching her attentively. "That was four years ago. I lived my life this way, with a stranger that I found myself loving more every day. A girlfriend from a long time ago told me that men always like women a lot more in the beginning, and then their love slowly declines while the women's slowly increases, and eventually, the man, who once was so passionate about winning the woman's heart, no longer wants her while she feels so attached to him that she can't imagine her world without him. I thought that was stolen from some country music, in fact, probably lots of country music sung by women. Now I was realizing my life was turning out this way. My husband hated me.
"But I don't understand why he didn't leave me. Why he didn't divorce me. It can't be because he was unemployed. He could find another job. He was a professional. Eventually he could find a job."
Two little kids screamed at each other while frolicking around their parents, who were sharing an ice cream on a cone. Eric thought the ice cream probably belonged to one of the kids who got tired of eating it. He turned to Cindy and said, "How about we get ourselves an ice cream. I saw one around the corner down the street."
She smiled, and nodded, before blotting off the rest of her tears. "How do I look?" she asked. He smiled behind those huge glasses and said, "Most beautiful." She blushed.
She asked if he was married. He smiled and shook his head, and said, "I can't."
She was predictably confused and asked for an explanation. He said, "I don't trust people. I don't trust that at least one of us wouldn't do harm to the other. Married couple is supposed to love each other forever, no matter your culture. Otherwise, why marry? But I know enough stories that I think people can't make that promise for real; people aren't gods."
"So you could only marry a god?" she asked. He giggled, which made her smile.
"I was dating this girl from my company. I work in one of the many divisions of Honda. I was in love with this girl from the beginning, but one day, I realized we were living in such casual ways that I no longer felt any meaning to our common existence. If I am making myself understandable. So I told her I had to be alone, to find myself again, without any promise of a return later," he said, then with a pause, he said to Cindy, "I suppose you think I am a bad person, like your husband."
She turned to look at him. They were now in front of the ice cream shop. Understandably, with the warm weather and just human desire for sugar rush, there was a line. So they waited. She said to him, in an almost stern way, "My husband isn't a bad person. And neither are you."
"But you think at least what I did was bad."
"No. You were being honest. At least you said something, you spoke out your reason."
"Well, she didn't like it. It didn't help. She went crazy. She was angry and devastated. We were together for only four years, but like many good Japanese girl of her background I was her first love. Or lover, at least. I don't even know if she really loved me, maybe at the end, like you said about men and woman."
"Wait, is this Jenny you are referring to?" asked Gary. Interrupting again.
Eric gave him a dirty look, to which Gary reacted with a smile.
"She is understandably angry, but that doesn't change you who are."
The sun's rays were waning. The shadows were noticeably longer than when he first saw her standing there, leaning agains the guardrail alone. The breeze from the sea not too far from here brought in the briny scent of the busy world of shipping. He nodded though not in any convincingly agreeing way. They ordered their ice cream cones and he fought successfully to pay for it. "I hope it's not too chauvinistic," said the Japanese man. She shook her head and said, "It's rare in these Yankee places to see such gentlemanly behavior. My Pa taught me how to be a good Southern Belle, though I never really managed to do everything, I at least know what to expect from a good Southern gentleman, and there ain't any here." He smiled and thanked her.
He convinced her to go in because he said, "In Japan we avoid the sun; most people, including men, carry an umbrella when it's sunny, so I hope you don't mind that we go inside." She smiled and said, "Of course not. But the proper English word is a 'parasol.' I hope you don't mind I tell you something new about our language." He thanked her again.
In the air conditioned interior, he picked the table at the far corner. It was by the window and the sun light was shining in with a soft glow. There was quite a long bit of silence between them, both seeming to be lost in thought. Then she finished her story. "Then a month ago, I came home and found a large, thick envelop. It had my name on it, written in a stylized way, the way he would write it during the first five or six years we were dating before we got married. Inside I found $5,204. And a note."
Then she turned to her purse, opened it and took out a piece of paper with scribbling on it. She looked at him and said, "You can read it, if you want. It's not long." He accepted it with two hands, looking very solemn.
After carefully opening it as if it were some letter of grave importance for him, he read it. Then when he was done, he carefully closed it and handed it back to her in both hands. Looking down on the table he said, in a low voice, "I am sorry. I am sorry you have to hear the same man's story from me earlier."
Her eyes had a film of tears waiting to flow out as she put the letter back in. It was true. How ironic that he offered the same explanation. Except that her husband needed all these years to figure out for himself that he no longer loved someone he became too depended on, that he needed all these years to get up the courage to leave her so they could both have a fresh start. And what pained her the most, and Yuko knew too, was that all this time he knew her more than she imagined he did. At least that he believed she was a good enough photographer, "better than what even your brother would give you credit for" was what he said. And for this reason, he was leaving all his savings in cash with her, so she could start off a life as a photographer without him. Finally, he wrote, "I hope you will forgive me."
"Do you?" asked Yuko, "Forgive him?"
"Of course," she said,"There's nothing to forgive. He finally understood something I just didn't want to admit. I was guilty of inaction." She said, with a forced smile and not daring to look at any face, especially not the one in front of her.
Her eyes were suddenly getting redder. He looked out the window, sighed, engulfed in thoughts, and then said to her, "What I like about you is that you are not like me. I mean, you trust people. You see the good of every person. You are one of the few people who can forgive as easily as you can breathe, and you can see the stars without having to worry about the dark spaces between them."
"That sounds really Japanese," interrupted Gary for the last time.
"Do you understand that, Cindy? You are a good person. A true diamond in the rough."
The redness in her eyes erupted into clear, long teardrops, rolling down her alabaster rosy cheeks, and along with them all the sorrows that had been penned up. She got up with her purse and said, "Excuse me, I need to go to the lady's room. I am sorry, it's very rude." He was already standing up now, being the Western gentleman that he is, and said, "Please, you should never apologize again for your own pain. Please go and do as you need to." She didn't have time to reply with a smile. The pain was too much, and she turned towards the bathroom.
"What do you think she did after that?" asked Gary.
Eric, finishing his cup of tea, said, "I think she must have thought about her mother, her friends, her brother, all the people she couldn't, for some reason, reach out to. That's what I saw in the beginning."
"That helplessness you mentioned?"
"Yeah. That deep-seated desire to have someone to talk to."
Eric grew quiet, hardly noticing that his buddy was clearing up the table for him. And from the kitchen, putting the stuff in the dishwasher, Gary said, "Did you enjoy your experience? I mean, you usually don't spend all this time and to this depth on a job."
He simply said, "Yes." He was lost in thoughts. He wondered about her. He wasn't worried about how she would feel after discovering that her expensive camera and all the accessories inside the camera case were gone, along with the Japanese man. Or if she called the police. She thought about what he said to her. That she was a good person. He wondered if he really believed what he said. He never said this to someone and actually meant it, because he didn't believe anyone was good. This time he had to think a little harder, to come up with some explanation that had nothing to do with the goodness of a human being. He wanted to think that she was simply an imbecile, too naïve, which made her such an easy target. But something baffled him. It was what his friend said.
He took his leave with his buddy in crime, who assured him that they would get a really good price on the merchandise from the South Carolinian woman. Before he left, he asked Gary for one thing. "What?" "The chip in the camera." Gary looked at him for a second, but said nothing before going to his desk from which he fetched the chip for his friend. Eric didn't need to thank him, then he simply left with a wave of goodbye. On his way down the stairs he asked himself again what Gary noted, that he spent so much time in this business transaction, as they call their jobs. If that woman was such an imbecile, why he bothered to listen to her whole story?
Coming out of the apartment in Tribeca, he took a deep breath. The outside light was similar to when he left the ice cream shop the previous day. He looked at the people walking by, the old people, the young people blabbering on phones, the messengers on bikes, people hauling something to the shop across the street. He wondered how many of these people were good.
