The Angels of Our Better Beasts Read online

  >?

  Yumi got home around midnight, knowing he wasn’t there, either. She flipped on an angled, long-neck black lamp, casting a warm brown glow on the wall. She dialled his cell, wanted to wake him up, but he didn’t answer. She sat on the sofa under the lamp, slipped off her shoes. They thumped on the floor and the silence afterwards bothered her. It bothered her everywhere. “Miss you,” she said brightly into the phone. It wasn’t the first thing she’d thought of, but it would keep the peace.

  Their house had lost colour over the last few years, as Masato’s tastes had changed. He had the living room painted brown, put up framed, bleached bamboo rugs on the walls. She thought they looked more like framed Frosted Mini-Wheats. On the walls, traditional Japanese paintings—a goose landing over reeds, a snow scene—had replaced the smoky pastels of jazz scenes they’d had there for years. She found him adding pieces to the house, slowly replacing “her juvenile tastes.” The only piece left of hers, the only one he’d kept, stood on a table beneath one of the Mini-Wheat rugs. It was a red ceramic bull painted with purple and green flowers, something he’d picked up for her in a shop in Mexico, when she had her head turned looking at a wall of wild, wooden masks. He’d returned later to pay for it. It was home when they arrived. Ten years later, staring at its loud redness, he said, “It goes with nothing we have.”

  “It goes with me,” she said. It stayed underneath a track light like a performer.

  She wanted to drink his wine.

  She took out a lotus glass, smaller than a traditional sake glass, designed for perfect full evocation. She opened the wine cabinet in the dining room. The bottles were clear, the plum wine a golden colour with four or five green plums nestled at the bottom. These were the wines he’d made for her: Borrowing the Chair at the Jazz Café, which recreated their first moment together; and Return to Grandfather’s Home with Yumi, a wine with a specifically long evocation, nearly seven minutes of transport. He didn’t particularly like the second wine anymore, not since he’d come to San Francisco, since he’d discovered his grandfather’s shame after the war.

  Letters from his grandfather in Japan to the American educational authorities in Japan found their way into the hands of a collector of Japanese Occupation ephemera, and now lay bound by twine in a safe. Masato had paid more than he could afford for his grandfather’s shame.

  She remembered the mistake she’d made when she told him that this collaboration wasn’t that significant. “So he rewrote history in some children’s textbooks. It happened,” she said. “You wouldn’t have known about it if you hadn’t read about it in a book. It’s history.”

  “Yumi.” He looked at her gravely. “That is the whole point.”

  After that he never spoke about his grandfather again, and he certainly was never willing to return to his house, not even in a wine. He wanted to destroy the whole batch. She wouldn’t let him because in that wine, Masato told her he loved her. And she hadn’t heard that in person in a long time. When she drank them, he was there beside her, for seven minutes at least—he said the damn words. “And the damn words,” she said, mocking him, “are the whole point.”

  Tonight, she opened Moon Over Tokyo because she wanted to see.

  Taro had pointed out that the judges had missed the flicker.

  “It’s a full-on smudge,” Kichi said. “He’s not finished with the evocation.”

  “The judges said nothing about the soldiers! They totally missed the details.”

  Yumi didn’t care about the American soldiers; what she cared about was the flicker, the image of someone coming over the Togetsukyo Bridge. Probably a woman. He obsessed over that last detail. Only Taro got him to enter the umeshu, the plum wine The Moon Over Tokyo Through Fall Leaves, because they needed something in the competition. He could work on further evocation for himself. The wine was already good. It had a seven-minute transport, fully realized evocation, sound, visuals, smells—what more could one character add? He relented.

  She poured the umeshu into a lotus glass. She looked at the painting on the dining room wall of two figures balanced on separate clouds, the woman reaching down. But you couldn’t see the figures in this light, just her own reflection, that of a young woman in the house of an old man. She drank the wine.

  The judges remarked on many things about Moon Over Tokyo—not the least of which was the body, the bouquet; those subtle notes of hickory, the smell of sweet liqueur—but they bowed down and worshiped the entire transport, from the first moment to the last.

  Yes, yes, the transport was amazing. Around her now was her husband’s best work. Tokyo, 1947: dusk in Rikugien Park, north of the city; the pond reflecting the harvest moon, the drooping pines, their branches in the water. She could walk down to the edge of the lake, hear yama-gare sing tzu . . . tzu . . . tzu, flitting their chestnut bellies and black caps among the branches of the matsu pines—for a full seven minutes. Peace.

  Masato Nakashita was skilled at giving peace, yes, at least to most people. She turned her eyes to the bridge that arched over a lily pond, the moonlight dappling the wooden planks, the trees, the ground beneath. Who was Masato trying to re-create?

  The figure came from behind the taster, so you might not notice it if you didn’t turn. It came across Togetsukyo Bridge, blurry, un-sustained, a flicker on the perfect image of dusk in the park. She could glimpse the figure only for a moment, a smudge—perhaps a woman. The figure moved quickly, sped unnaturally from the edge of the bridge to where every taster would stand in the evocation, as if it were a sketch of something not yet finished. You are a problem, she said to the figure. To the judges, perhaps, it meant nothing; but to her, it was something her husband cared about. It was frightening how fast the image came at her, how it seemed to smear everything else around it.

  >?

  Yumi tried to make the present as important to Masato as the past. But then time had always been between them. At a mere thirty-five, she was twenty-five years younger than Masato. He would turn sixty this year, a birthday he dreaded.

  “Sixty is an unfortunate label. Age is only good for wine.”

  She felt obliged to say he didn’t look sixty, but then felt like she might be seen as covering, and by covering, admitting that he indeed looked sixty. So she said, “We don’t have to remember the day.”

  “Good,” he said quickly. He seemed shocked at himself for saying it. “There were other days,” he told her, “more important things to do than watch a man grow old.”

  He’d only begun to look old recently. Ten years ago, they both looked young, and no one could really tell that he was that much older. You could say that Masato’s eyes and hair started giving him away a few years ago, but she knew that there was no aging like the aging of attitude.

  Overnight, he didn’t want to sing karaoke at the bar, go out to parties with her. He left her watching television by herself. He started scolding her for her behaviour—she laughed too much, too loudly. She was in her thirties and should act more like a lady. He didn’t approve of her short skirts, her white schoolgirl tops. He didn’t want her moving with the fashions. His tone of voice at the mirror in the morning sounded more like her father than her husband.

  “Do you have to spend all night out?” he asked.

  The irony was that he now spent his nights at the winery, though she had tried to curb her own social schedule. Lately, she’d become used to letting her arm extend to the edge of the mattress, her fingers curling around the edge, spreading her body out to cover the whole bed.

  She tried to get him to talk about the wine, especially this wine, Moon Over Tokyo.

  “I’m not sure what will survive the fermentation. We will see.”

  “I’m just interested. I’m not trying to steal a secret.”

  He’d look at her as if she were a child. “I don’t have any secrets.”

  But he was very busy. Orders for Time-Wines,
or Piku Wines, as they were first called, had exploded. Wines that evoked specific thoughts, specific vignettes, were marketable, he said with a smile. “As long as one can find the right moment, something universal and healing.”

  >?

  Yumi had a list drawn up of the kinds of scenes she wished recreated. She wanted the day of their wedding, but he said it was not commercially viable.

  True, The First Time We Made Love at My Apartment in Yokoshima wouldn’t be a wine she’d be willing to share with the staff at the winery. But maybe the Absence of Tourists During the Rain at Inokashira Koen, when he made her run through the fallen cherry blossoms to the lake, when she fell and skidded and he pulled her by her feet to him; or Drinking Chocolate Shake, New York City Under the Saffron Gates in Central Park, where the fabric of the art installation came loose and swung for a day, and people let their bodies become works of art as the saffron draped them in the wind and just their shapes remained. How he thought they were like people fighting to be seen. Couldn’t he fit these in between these more difficult, historical evocations? Why not shoot for 2005 instead of 1947? Who remembered that anyway?

  Tonight, she felt like creating a wine that evoked a crumbling feeling, and the ticking clock, and the traffic sounds outside, and maybe a long list of expletives in her voice. Drink that.

  But Yumi was not skilled in making wines. She was a travel agent. So there’d be none of that shit. She’d have to wait until he was finished with the wine to understand whom it was he was trying to make.

  >?

  Weeks later, Yumi still had the image on her mind, that flickering woman on the bridge. She found herself mulling it over even as she sold vacations to Guadalajara to couples that couldn’t afford anything but love. Masato seemed happier. He did come home two or three times a week.

  He said, “The wine is coming along. I’m very proud of it. I think.” He stopped at the stereo and played Ornette Coleman on low volume, a good sign. “I think it’s important.” He looked at her.

  “It must be important,” she repeated from the empty couch where she curled into the pillows.

  But important was obviously not what he meant. He padded to her in his soft house slippers, from light to light. He sat down across from her. The lamp softened whatever features of his face she thought had hardened, made his blue polo shirt vibrant. She waited for him to go on because it looked like his thinking face—his fingers around his mouth, his eyes squinted.

  She prodded him. “You’ve worked on it too long for it not to be important.”

  He didn’t open his eyes. He was thinking. “I’m not sure—” he started and then stopped. Saxophone and drums in the background, low murmurs of music. She heard the clock ticking again, tried to focus on him, let him see that she was ready for whatever he wanted to share about the wine, about its importance.

  She saw his eyes relax, his fingers relax around his mouth, his brow smooth. Finally, she thought, he was relaxing. Then she saw his lips purse and a bubble of air puffed out. He had fallen asleep in the chair.

  She watched him. Having him asleep in the chair was better than having him somewhere else. She watched his eyes flutter, the same kind of fluttering you might get when you drank umeshu-piku. He looked around somewhere under those lids. Maybe he saw someone there as well. Her hand lay near his on the arm of the chair. She hadn’t touched his yet, and touching it now would wake him, so she kept her hand close enough to feel, like a cup of coffee, his live body radiate heat. The saxophone pulsed behind them. His eyes fluttered and she knew he wouldn’t notice her presence at all.

  >?

  Later that week, on her day off, she made a tofu stir fry for the staff. She took it down to the winery, tried to focus on Taro and Kichi, who were thrilled to see her. She joked with them and tried to stay bright. She didn’t want to reveal that at night the figure on the bridge ran at her, threw itself across her other dreams, too, even erased them.

  They sat around a worktable. Other staff went off for lunch, leaving the four of them together. Masato noted aloud Yumi’s ingenuity, thoughtfulness, and hospitality as she served them. She could see he was proud. She looked around for bottles in preparation. She glanced over their heads as she laughed at their stories. She talked about “new things” in her work or her house or anything that might start them discussing “new things” in the wine.

  They did not talk about the wine, except to say that a new batch of Moon Over Tokyo had been set to ferment. Now, they waited. They had since begun another wine: Sunlight through Cherry Blossoms. Taro thought this would be a hugely popular wine. They took his own memories of walking with his girlfriend in Japan earlier that spring. He was very honoured to supply the base. Yumi almost forgot that Taro had a girlfriend who looked into his flat, blocky face for love. She lived in Japan. Yumi treated Taro as if he were single.

  “Did you sing to her?” Kichi asked, glancing sideways for his response.

  The two women laughed. Some tofu dropped from Yumi’s mouth, which made the three of them laugh harder. She looked at Masato. He continued eating, reading a chart on his lap. Yumi told Taro that she looked forward to seeing his girlfriend, experiencing his beautiful memories.

  “It is nothing like Moon Over Tokyo,” he said, grinning.

  Yumi glanced at Masato. “It’s not as important . . .” she said.

  Masato looked up. He said evenly, “You don’t know what is important.” He wasn’t unkind; just straightforward. He corrected himself. “Very few of us know what is important. Walking along with the girlfriend through cherry blossoms makes a nice scene, a good wine. But sometimes we must strive for more.” He noted each of them in his glance, cleared his throat, and looked back at his papers.

  “Sometimes,” Yumi began, “I think we forget what’s important, though we’ve seen it before.”

  He looked up and, after thinking a moment, nodded. “Still, nothing in your collective experiences has any real weight. You have music and you have laughter and you have fun, but now you are part of something bigger, something you are creating that will be important.” He breathed in, smiled, and slowly let it out. “It is never too late to learn. And to change.”

  Taro and Kichi nodded. “Yes, yes,” they said.

  Yumi smiled and seethed. She began carefully. “Please tell us how the images of Taro’s time with his girlfriend are different, and less important, from the moments in Moon Over Tokyo. I want to know and learn about importance. I’m very interested and intrigued by what you say.” She nodded purely for effect.

  His eyes watched her. She trembled inside, kept humility on her face, tried to erase confrontation. Placate, placate, placate, she thought. It keeps peace. Still, the question might draw out—

  “It will be most apparent when the wines are completed. I think then, young Yumi, that you will understand the weight of difference.” He nodded and stood, bringing his bowl back to her. His face came close to hers as he bowed, but his eyes did not look down at the floor. They stayed locked with hers. “We must continue. Thank you, Yumi.”

  Kichi and Taro stood and brought her their bowls.

  >?

  It was December, and Yumi convinced Taro to let her taste the wine. Umeshu was at the halfway point—the toge—a point where they could check and see how the fermentation process and the piku were combining, how the images were layering, if there was good evocation and transport already. It would be an unfinished wine, though, because harmonics were not sealed into the wine until the fermentation process was complete. And sometimes the wines did not come out the way you planned.

  “Hmmm.” Taro considered. “He doesn’t like anyone outside of the staff to sample the wine before it’s finished.”

  Yumi begged him. She started singing with him over the phone: “Why don’t they/Do what they say/Say what you mean/One thing leads to another . . .” He laughed on his end of the phone. “Oh, Taro,” she
sighed. “You are very funny.”

  He sighed. “I’m very busy, Yumi. I don’t know.”

  “Taro.” She sensed he was moving out of the pink and yellow karaoke memories. “I want to learn about importance.” She sounded as serious as Masato, almost mimicking his cadence.

  She imagined his face thinking on the phone, weighing how much trouble he might get into. “You can’t drink it here,” he said, “but if you come, I’ll have a sample ready for you.”

  She went to the winery, and when she saw Taro, she wondered what it was like to be his girlfriend. Did he truly sing to her? Did he take her out to parties? What did they do for fun? She would have a chance to see at least Akina, his girlfriend, in the wine.

  “Will Sunlight Through Cherry Blossoms have you in it at all?”

  He gave her a small vial that she placed in her new pink purse with anime characters running across the leather.

  “We only used my memories. Nakashita-san thought that one man’s memories would easily be able to pull all men into the evocation, since there was space for each man.”

  “Yes,” Yumi said. She thought, though, how sad it must be for Akina to only see herself in the memory.

  >?

  By now she was convinced that Masato was somehow having an affair with an older, more sophisticated woman, and she believed strongly that this woman would be reflected in the image of the woman on the bridge—if, truly, it were a woman on the bridge.

  At home, the high afternoon sun showed through the skylight in the dining room. San Francisco traffic buzzed and hummed in the distance and a breeze came through the window. A silver bowl of apples on the kitchen island reflected her body in wide strips. She poured the contents of the vial into the lotus glass, looked straight ahead, and lifted the glass and drank.