Anatomy of a Novel, Part Three, Episode 16

Potato Head Blues

When he got the news that Etsuko would not go to Germany with him - presumably delivered by the woman who didn’t know how to tell him - Fritz came into my room to get his doll stand, after which he left town.  I wasn’t there when he took it, but discovered the doll on the floor when I got home from a day trip to Nara.

“Only Fritz would remember a stupid doll stand in the middle of getting his heart broken,” said Melinda, who’d gone to Nara with me.

She was flying out of Osaka again that night, this time permanently.  At Nara’s famous Deer Park she told me she was happy with her decision to leave Japan, and was applying to various law schools.  She’d not only bought Emi the sweatpants I asked her for, but sweatpants for every member of the Sugiyama family, which they wore around the street in front of their house now, like a sports team constantly coming and going from a competition.

“‘Make-up’ sweat pants,” Melinda said, when I told her of the family’s near demise.  She also noted that my doll looked as forlorn as Etsuko probably felt after she dumped Fritz.

“Better the high view than the low view for dolls as well as people,” she said, “so come on, Cornelius, let’s go shopping.  I know just the place.  I’m buying you a new stand.”

I hadn’t gotten to know Melinda very well during my few short weeks at the school, and I hadn’t seen her at all during firefly weekend, but I’d enjoyed our trip to Nara and was sorry she was leaving.  I returned to the ideas represented by those two equal forest paths often, but it also occurred to me that we can blink and see something right in front of us, then blink again and find it gone.  And for me that included Melinda.

She had talked about Bill during our hike, saying it was clear that he had been a port in a storm for her, not the destination she thought he was before her grandfather died.  She even asked, on the bus ride back from Nara, “How could I have been so filled with false hope?” and now we were in my room and my doll stand was gone.

There was a letter on my table, too, no doubt a final “Yodelayheehoo” from Fritz, but before I could open it she pulled me back down to the street, where she hailed a taxi and told the driver in very fluent Japanese where she wanted him to take us.

“How long have you been here that you can speak so well?” I asked.

My own recent decision was to learn to speak as well as she did, and to learn to read, also.  Just as Kaori was heading back into Japanese and Junichiro back to America, I needed a world to head into that wouldn’t circle back around.                                                   

“Seven years, if you can believe it,” she said.  “Seven years and three boyfriends.  Junichiro before Bill - I bet you didn’t know that - and before him another hippie.  I thought Bill was my ticket out of such fetishes, but he was worse than the other two combined.  I’ll tell you, Cornelius, I was such a fool.”

She smiled as if to say that she was free of the fool she had been, the idea of law school her fetish now.  She also said that her grandfather’s funeral had liberated her to be political again, that with Deep Throat and all, she wanted to find work that would help make her own country better.

It took me a minute to realize that she was talking about the Watergate scandal, not the recent porn film.  But Junichiro had been her boyfriend?  Why was I so continually surprised by what I heard?  Did she know he hadn’t divorced his American wife, or that he was going back to her soon?   

There wasn’t much traffic and we weren’t going far, just to an antique store that everyone knew about but me.  When the taxi turned into an alley and stopped, its curbside door opening automatically, Melinda got out while I paid the driver, as if that would make the gift she was about to buy me seem less large.

The alley was empty of other cars and nearly empty of pedestrians, but the building we walked into reminded me of the one where I’d first seen Kikuya, in Pontocho.  Kikuya alone, I now supposed, not Kikuya with someone else.  That was something I still hadn’t come to terms with.                                                                    

“I love this store,” Melinda said.  “In fact, there’s a Daruma scroll in here that I am going to buy for myself if it hasn’t been sold yet.  Daruma was the founder of Zen, I’m sure you know, which was what originally drew me to Kyoto.  Zen and tea ceremony and ikebana…  I was your typical bored American girl, Cornelius, on the lookout for something exotic to sustain her.”

When she laughed, I nearly said that her decision to rid herself of those influences and go home was what Kaori was doing, too, by ridding herself of English.  But I remembered that Melinda had once been Kaori’s nemesis, so I said, instead, that I hadn’t known about her and Junichiro, and asked what went wrong.   

She put a hand to her chin, to show that she was giving my question serious thought.

“On the plus side, he was easy to be with and he knew about a lot of things,” she said.  “If you wanted to know who played the clarinet solo on Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues”, or why the Kawasaki 500 was the best bike ever, for example, he was your man.  But that was it.  He had no idea how to talk to me in a deeper way.  If he wasn’t taking me somewhere, lecturing me on something, or trying to pull my pants down, he was silent, pretending to think these great thoughts.  But I pretty quickly understood that he was missing in action on the inside.  I used to think that when he was alone he was like a puppet slumped in a corner, waiting to be picked up.”

She hadn’t spoken in anger, so I guessed Junichiro was a lot farther behind her than Natasha was behind me.   But Junichiro wasn’t missing in action… he was down a Las Vegas bar street, early on a Sunday morning, trying to keep both his father and his wife out of his mind.   

—

The antique store was musty and cluttered.  A dozen bins with rolled-up scrolls stuffed into them formed a path toward its back, while other scrolls hung along the walls, most with highly stylized poems on them, or with black ink drawings of men sitting at desks, perhaps engaged in writing the stylized poems.  There wasn’t a doll stand in sight, nor, apparently, the Daruma that Melinda wanted, for she pointed to where it once hung.

At the back of the store stood two long and dusty glass cases with netsuke in them, next to the official seals of long-dead lords, and small sheathed daggers for the lords to use to slit the throats of wayward geisha and their untitled paramours.  I leaned over one of the cases so I could see them better while Melinda called out “Tadaima!” like she owned the place.

“I see you, Melinda,” said a man that neither of us had noticed.

He sat down low behind the cases, and was nearly as old as his merchandise.  When he stood he hardly gained any height.  He had wisps of hair on a perfectly round head.  He also had a liver-spotted face.

“Watanabe-san, I brought a friend.  He needs to buy a doll stand,” said Melinda.

Watanabe-san said he was fresh out of doll stands, except for a broken one in the back.

“How broken is it?” asked Melinda.  “Maybe you could give me a farewell deal, and repair it for us in the bargain.”

The old man laughed, but grew serious when she made it clear that she was leaving Kyoto, asking what he would do without her coming in occasionally to cajole him.  He led us through a doorway hung with strands of ceramic beads, into a room the clutter of which made his main room seem pristine.  Here there were no pathways for us to walk down, only jungles of junk to climb over.

“It’s in here somewhere, but you have to help me look,” he said.  “And if you must move something, put it back where it was.”

I glanced around a little bit, but the stale air made it hard for me to breathe, so I found a spot where I could feel a breeze coming through the outside wall and surveyed the place from there.  I couldn’t find the stand, but hanging beside me with what seemed a singular absence of care was a portrait of Kikuya, no doubt about it.  The portrait employed a near-photographic realism on the right side of her face, and a Picasso level of abstraction on the left.  The abstract side was free of makeup, while a white geisha powder covered the realistic side from the top of her forehead to the tip of her chin, her musculature somehow visible through it, as one might see bridge supports through fathoms of water.  A thick black line ran down the center of her forehead, along the ridge of her nose and over her lips and chin.  On the realistic side of her face wrinkles were beginning to push through her make-up.  Both her eyes were open, but only the one on her abstract side seemed lively.  She was the lover of fun gone on for too long on the realistic side - a woman running out of time - but a repository of eons of knowledge on the other, with both eyes looking directly at whomever might be viewing the portrait, which, today of course, was me.

“I want this,” I said, “I know her.”

While I’d been standing there, Melinda found the broken stand and carried it like a shepherd’s staff when she and Watanabe-san came over to me.

“Oh, yes, everyone knows her,” said Mr. Watanabe.  “It’s Kikuya, Japan’s first geisha.”

I meant that I knew her personally, on both sides of her face.

“This stand is only a little bit broken, up here where the doll would sit,” said Melinda.  “We could even glue the thing later, take it with us now.”

When she spoke I saw a crack down the middle of the stand's top, much like the bifurcation that split Kikuya’s face.  “Yes, we could glue it,” I said.  “But this painting, Mr. Watanabe. How much do you want for it?”

Twenty-four thousand two hundred yen,” he said.  “But I can make it ¥24,000, and if you buy it I’ll throw in the doll stand and fix it for you, too - you can’t just glue it - but not today.  I was  about to close when you got here.  I have to go to my niece’s wedding.”

Twenty-four thousand yen was about seventy dollars, which I didn’t have.  I laughed, for I’d spent five times that much buying drinks for one of the versions of the woman in the painting.

Watanabe-san thought I was laughing at the price.

“Okay, ¥20,000 even,” he said.  “Last price."   

Before I could speak, Melinda pulled out two ¥10,000 notes and gave them to him.

“We’ll take the painting now, but when can he come back for the stand?” she asked.  “I won’t be here after tonight.”

When Mr. Watanabe said, “The day after tomorrow,” I knew enough to thank him and not speak again until Melinda and I were back out on the street.  He’d wrapped the painting in plain brown paper and tied it with twine so I had it under my arm, one edge of its frame up against my armpit, the other in the palm of my hand.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Melinda,” I said.  “I appreciate it, but I won’t be able to pay you back until after you’re gone.”

“I don’t want to be paid back.  I refuse to be paid back,” she said.  “I want the feeling of having done something nice for you, Cornelius.  Maybe when you look at it you’ll think of me.”

She had said that about the stand, too, but I didn’t remind her of it.  Rather, I told myself that when I got a little ahead I would buy her something equally beautiful and send it to her wherever she ended up.

During our cab ride back to Sunny Hive she was so clearly happy about what she’d done that when we got there she jumped out and paid the driver, too, as a little extra bonus to herself.

“A drink at Mountain Cabin tonight?” she asked, before turning and running down the street.

I didn’t know what the hurry was, unless she’d decided, on the spur of this moment, to buy a parting gift for Bill.

Endnotes…

1. “Potato Head Blues” is a Louis Armstrong composition regarded as one of the finest of his recordings.  It’s by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven, recorded in Chicago, in 1927.  Johnny Dodds plays the clarinet solo on it.  If you’d like to hear it, here it is.

2. Back in 1972 the Kawasaki 500 was considered to be the fastest motorcycle in the world, from 0 to 60 miles an hour.  I had a friend in Kyoto who owned one.  It was scarier than hell to ride.

3. Here is a photo of the “Daruma” scroll that Melinda wanted to buy in Mr. Watanabe’s store.  I like to think that she couldn’t buy it because I got there just ahead of her and bought it myself.  I can’t supply a photo of the “Kikuya” painting she bought for Cornelius, because there is no painting.  I just made it up.