Sputnik Sweetheart Read online

  Miu grasped the stem of her wineglass between two fingers and lightly turned it, as if turning a screw on a machine. “What would you think about working at my place for a while?”

  “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 riding the trains before ten a.m., and as I’m sure you can figure out by talking to me, I don’t speak politely.”

  “None of that matters,” Miu said 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 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 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 echoed hollowly, like the groans of a robber hiding in a cave.

  I must be in love with this woman, Sumire 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 forever.

  Now, after the fact, I know that her hunch turned out to be correct. One hundred twenty percent on the money.

  CHAPTER 2

  It was about two weeks after the wedding reception when Sumire called me, a Sunday morning, 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 probingly.

  “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 Fitzgerald’s “Dark Night of the Soul.”

  “It’ll be dawn pretty soon.”

  “Um,” I murmured.

  “Right near where I live there’s a man who raises roosters. Must have had them for years and years. In a half hour or so they’ll be crowing up a storm. This is my favorite 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 booth near the park.”

  “Um,” I said. There was a phone booth about two hundred yards from her apartment. Since Sumire didn’t own a phone, she always had to walk over there to call. Just your average phone booth.

  “I know I shouldn’t be calling you this early. I’m really sorry. The time of day when the roosters haven’t even started crowing. When this pitiful moon is hanging there in a corner of the eastern sky like a used-up kidney. But think of me—I had to trudge out in the pitch dark all the way over here. With this telephone card I got as a present at my cousin’s wedding clutched in my hand. With a photo on it of the happy couple holding hands. Can you imagine how depressing that is? My socks don’t even match, for gosh sake. One has a picture of Mickey Mouse; the other’s plain wool. My room’s a complete disaster area; I can’t find anything. I don’t want to say this too loudly, but you wouldn’t believe how awful my underpants are. I doubt that even one of those panty thieves would touch them. If some pervert killed me, I’d never live it down. I’m not asking for sympathy, but it would be nice if you could give me a bit more in the way of a response. Other than those cold interjections of yours—ohs and ums. How about a conjunction? A conjunction would be nice. A yet or a but.”

  “However,” I said. I was exhausted and felt like I was still in the middle of a dream.

  “ ‘However,’ ” she repeated. “OK, I can live with that. One small step for man. One very small step, however.”

  “So, was there something you wanted?”

  “Right, I wanted you to tell me something. That’s why I called,” Sumire said. She lightly cleared her throat. “What I want to know is, what’s the difference between a sign and a symbol?”

  I felt a weird sensation, like something was silently parading through my head. “Could you repeat the question?”

  She did. “What’s the difference between a sign and a symbol?”

  I sat up in bed, switched the receiver from my left hand to my right. “Let me get this straight—you’re calling me because you want to find out the difference between a sign and a symbol. On Sunday morning, just before dawn. Um . . .”

  “At four-fifteen, to be precise,” she said. “It was bothering me. What could be the difference between a sign and a symbol? Somebody asked me that a couple of weeks ago, and I can’t get it out of my mind. I was getting undressed for bed, and I suddenly remembered. I can’t sleep until I find out. Can you explain it? The difference between a sign and a symbol?”

  “Let me think,” I said, and gazed up at the ceiling. Even when I was fully conscious, explaining things logically to Sumire was never easy. “The emperor is a symbol of Japan. Do you follow that?”

  “Sort of,” she replied.

  “ ‘Sort of’ won’t cut it. That’s what it says in the Japanese constitution,” I said, as calmly as possible. “No room for discussion or doubts. You’ve got to accept that, or we won’t get anywhere.”

  “Gotcha. I’ll accept that.”

  “Thank you. So—the emperor is a symbol of Japan. But this doesn’t mean that the emperor and Japan are equivalent. Do you follow?”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “OK, how about this—the arrow points in one direction. The emperor is a symbol of Japan, but Japan is not the symbol of the emperor. You understand that, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Say, for instance, you write ‘The emperor is a sign of Japan.’ That makes the two equivalent. So when we say ‘Japan,’ it would also mean ‘the emperor,’ and when we speak of the emperor, it would also mean ‘Japan.’ In other words, the two are interchangeable. Same as saying, ‘A equals b, so b equals a.’ That’s what a sign is.”

  “So you’re saying you can switch the emperor and Japan? Can you do that?”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said, shaking my head vigorously on my end of the line. “I’m just trying to explain the best I can. I’m not planning to switch the emperor and Japan. It’s just a way of e
xplaining it.”

  “Hmm,” Sumire said. “I think I get it. As an image. It’s the difference between a one-way street and a two-way street.”

  “For our purposes, that’s close enough.”

  “I’m always amazed how good you are at explaining things.”

  “That’s my job,” I said. My words seemed somehow flat and stale. “You should try being an elementary-school teacher sometime. You’d never imagine the kind of questions I get. ‘Why isn’t the world square?’ ‘Why do squids have ten arms and not eight?’ I’ve learned to come up with an answer to just about everything.”

  “You must be a great teacher.”

  “I wonder,” I said. I really did wonder.

  “By the way, why do squids have ten arms and not eight?”

  “Can I go back to sleep now? I’m beat. Just holding this phone I feel like I’m holding up a crumbling stone wall.”

  “You know . . . ,” Sumire said, letting a delicate pause intervene—like an old gatekeeper closing the railroad crossing gate with a clatter just before the train bound for St. Petersburg passes by. “It’s really silly to say this, but I’m in love.”

  “Um,” I said, switching the receiver back to my left hand. I could hear her breathing through the phone. I had no idea how I should respond. And as often happens when I don’t know what to say, I let slip some out-of-left-field comment. “Not with me, I assume?”

  “Not with you,” Sumire answered. I heard the sound of a cheap lighter lighting a cigarette. “Are you free today? I’d like to talk more.”

  “You mean, about your falling in love with someone other than me?”

  “Right,” she said. “About my falling passionately in love with somebody other than you.”

  I clamped the phone between my head and shoulder and stretched. “I’m free in the evening.”

  “I’ll be over at five,” Sumire said. And then added, as if an afterthought: “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For being nice enough to answer my question in the middle of the night.”

  I gave a vague response, hung up, and turned off the light. It was still pitch black out. Just before I fell asleep, I thought about her final thank you and whether I’d ever heard those words from her before. Maybe I had, once, but I couldn’t recall.

  Sumire arrived at my apartment a little before five. I didn’t recognize her. She’d taken on a complete change of style. Her hair was cut stylishly short, her bangs still showing traces of the scissors’ snips. She wore a light cardigan over a short-sleeve, navy-blue dress, and a pair of black enamel, medium-high heels. She even had on stockings. Stockings? Women’s clothes weren’t exactly my field of expertise, but it was clear that everything she had on was pretty expensive. Dressed like this, Sumire looked polished and lovely. It was quite becoming, to tell the truth. Though I preferred the old, outrageous Sumire. To each his own.

  “Not bad,” I said, giving her the once-over. “But I wonder what good old Jack Kerouac would say.”

  Sumire smiled, an ever-so-slightly more sophisticated smile than usual. “Why don’t we go for a walk?”

  We strolled side by side down University Boulevard toward the station and stopped at our favorite coffee shop. Sumire ordered her usual slice of cake along with her coffee. It was a clear Sunday evening near the end of April. The flower shops were full of crocuses and tulips. A gentle breeze blew, softly rustling the hems of girls’ skirts and carrying with it the leisurely fragrance of young trees.

  I folded my hands behind my head and watched Sumire as she slowly yet eagerly devoured her cake. From the small speakers on the ceiling of the coffee shop, Astrud Gilberto sang an old bossa nova song. “Take me to Aruanda,” she sang. I closed my eyes, and the clatter of the cups and saucers sounded like the roar of a far-off sea. Aruanda—what’s it like there? I wondered.

  “Still sleepy?”

  “Not anymore,” I answered, opening my eyes.

  “You feel OK?”

  “I’m fine. As fine as the Moldau River in spring.”

  Sumire gazed for a while at the empty plate that had held her slice of cake. She looked at me.

  “Don’t you think it’s strange that I’m wearing these clothes?”

  “I guess.”

  “I didn’t buy them. I don’t have that kind of money. There’s a story behind them.”

  “Mind if I try to guess the story?”

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  “There you were in your usual crummy Jack Kerouac outfit, cigarette dangling from your lips, washing your hands in some public restroom, when this five-foot-one-inch woman rushed in, all out of breath, dressed to the nines, and said, ‘Please, you’ve got to help me! No time to explain, but I’m being chased by some awful people. Can I exchange clothes with you? If we swap clothes I can give them the slip. Thank God we’re the same size.’ Just like some Hong Kong action flick.”

  Sumire laughed. “And the other woman happened to wear a size six-and-a-half shoe and a size seven dress. Just by coincidence.”

  “And right then and there you changed clothes, down to your Mickey Mouse underpants.”

  “It’s my socks that are Mickey Mouse, not my panties.”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “Hmm,” Sumire mused. “Actually, you’re not too far off.”

  “How far?”

  She leaned forward across the table. “It’s a long story. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Since you’ve come all the way over here to tell me, I have a distinct feeling it doesn’t matter if I do or not. Anyway, go right ahead. Add a prelude, if you’d like. And a ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits.’ I don’t mind.”

  She began to talk. About her cousin’s wedding reception, and about the lunch she had with Miu in Aoyama. And it was a long tale.

  CHAPTER 3

  The day after the wedding, a Monday, was rainy. The rain began to fall just after midnight and continued without a stop till dawn. A soft, gentle rain that darkly dampened the spring earth and quietly stirred up the nameless creatures living in it.

  The thought of meeting Miu again thrilled Sumire, and she found it hard to concentrate. She felt as if she were standing alone on the summit of a hill, the wind swirling around her. She settled down at her desk as usual, lit a cigarette, and switched on her word processor, but stare as she might at the screen, not a single sentence came to her. For Sumire that was next to impossible. She gave up, turned off the word processor, lay down in her tiny room, and, an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips, gave herself up to aimless musings.

  If just the thought of seeing Miu has me this worked up, she thought, imagine how painful it would be if we’d said goodbye at the party and never saw each other again. Am I just yearning to be like her—a beautiful, refined older woman? No, she decided, that can’t be it. When I’m beside her, I want to touch her. That’s a bit different from a yearning.

  Sumire sighed, gazed up at the ceiling for a while, and lit her cigarette. It’s pretty strange if you think about it, she thought. Here I am, in love for the first time in my life, at age twenty-two. And the other person just happens to be a woman.

  The restaurant Miu had made a reservation at was a ten-minute walk from the Omote Sando subway station. The kind of restaurant that’s hard for first-timers to find, certainly not a place where you just casually drop in for a meal. Even the restaurant’s name was hard to remember unless you heard it a couple of times. At the entrance Sumire told them Miu’s name and was escorted to a small, private dining room on the second floor. Miu was already there, sipping an iced Perrier, deep in conversation with the waiter concerning the menu.

  Over a navy-blue polo shirt Miu had on a cotton sweater of the same color, and she wore a thin, plain silver hairpin. Her pants were white slim-fit jeans. On a corner of the table rested a pair of bright blue sunglasses, and on the chair next to her was a squash racquet and a Missoni designer sports bag. It looked like she was on her way home after a couple of
noontime games of squash. Miu’s cheeks were still flushed a faint pink. Sumire imagined her in the shower at the gym, scrubbing her body with an exotic-smelling bar of soap.

  As Sumire entered the room, dressed in her usual herringbone jacket and khaki pants, her hair all messed up like some orphan’s, Miu looked up from the menu and gave her a dazzling smile. “You told me the other day that you can eat anything, right? I hope you don’t mind if I go ahead and order for us.”

  Of course not, Sumire replied.

  Miu ordered the same thing for both of them. The entrée was a light grilled fish with a touch of green sauce with mushrooms. The slices of fish were done to perfection—browned in an almost artistic way that you knew was just right. Pumpkin gnocchi and a delicate endive salad rounded out the meal. For dessert they had the crème brûlée, which only Sumire ate. Miu didn’t touch it. Finally, they had espresso. Sumire observed that Miu took great care about what she ate. Miu’s neck was as slender as the stalk of a plant, her body without an ounce of detectable fat. She didn’t seem to have to diet. Even so, it would appear she was superstrict about food. Like some Spartan holed up in a mountain fortress.

  As they ate they chatted about nothing in particular. Miu wanted to know more about Sumire’s background, and she obliged, answering the questions as honestly as she could. She told Miu about her father, her mother, the schools she attended (all of which she’d loathed), the prizes she won in a composition contest—a bicycle and a set of encyclopedias—how she came to quit college, the way she spent her days now. Not a particularly thrilling life. Even so, Miu listened, enthralled, as if listening to the enchanting customs of a far-off land.

  Sumire wanted to know so much more about Miu. But Miu hesitated to talk about herself. “That’s not important,” she deferred with a bright smile. “I’d rather hear more about you.”

  By the time they finished eating, Sumire still hadn’t learned much. About the only thing she found out was this: that Miu’s father had donated a lot of money to the small town in the north part of Korea where he had been born, and had built several public buildings for the townspeople—to which they’d responded by erecting a bronze statue of him in the town square.