It's Not About Thailand

This is a post I began just after I came to Thailand. It's not about Thailand. It's about the affair I had with the Handsome Businessman before I left Tokyo. Again, you can read it or not, your choice. But just as with the one-night stand, don't read it if you are offended by such things.

Dating

A few months after I came to Japan, I began to keep track of my activities in a datebook. I bought the datebook last October. I had been in Tokyo almost five months and I was suffering from this feeling that I wasn’t doing anything outside of the dull routine of sleeping and work. I had an overwhelming feeling that life was passing me by.

It was getting close to the end of the year and all the stores were advertising their datebooks. New Year is big in Japan--very big--and everyone prepares for it as though their lives are somehow going to change when the clock strikes twelve on December 31st.

I went to Muji and I bought the plainest, cheapest datebook I could find (it cost less than two hundred yen and I added a cover to it that I made from a map of Tokyo’s subway system and some clear packing tape) and I began to record each day’s activities in it. The result surprised me. tt turned out that though The Brain had been keeping up a steady whine about our lack of a social life, our lack of friends, we were actually doing a lot. Ben and Seth were still in Tokyo and I was occasionally going out with them. I had met the Ex-Student and we were circling each other carefully. I was having dinner with friends, and going sightseeing on the weekends. It turns out that we, The Brain and I, actually had a life that seemed to be living itself while we wondered where the life we should be living was.

So I began to try to connect with that life.

I fell in love. I went to parties with people who wanted to know me. I went dancing and drinking. I celebrated New Years Eve in one of the most sacred places in Japan. I continued to write in my datebook, trying to convince The Brain that these events make up a life, that we had friends and family who love us, that we were doing okay and that we didn’t have to give up on anything.

And then Scotty died. I made a note in my datebook on the day I received the news and after that note, there is nothing. I went home for his funeral and I came home from his funeral and I went back to my job and back to my alien life. And in my datebook there is row after row of blank days. It isn’t that I wasn’t doing anything. I was doing a lot. I came home and I worked and I went to the gym and I traveled and I went drinking and...

There in my datebook is blank week after blank week, blank month after blank month of blank days.

Mostly what I was doing was surviving.

I began the long crawl to the end of my twelve-month contract. At eight months I wondered if I should run. At ten months, the feeling was insistent. I told myself that there was some character to be built from not running away. Instead I drank more. I ate more. I gained weight. I stopped going to the gym. I began to spend hours surfing the ‘net. David sent me four season’s worth of Northern Exposure episodes and Kelly sent books and I managed to hang on through Tokyo’s gray eraser of a winter.The cherry blossoms came and went and that was spring. One day the businessmen broke out their fans and I knew it was summer. I drank in Yoyogi park and I picked up strange men in bars and I survived. I could feel myself changing, but I didn’t seek out the cause or the nature of those changes. Instead, I tried to let the feelings go.

Let it go.

Let go.

Handsome

Three days after the school announced that I was leaving, the Handsome Businessman showed up for his lesson on Friday night. That was eight days ago (when I began writing this, now it’s longer). He was sitting in the lobby and I went over to say hello to him.

“I hear you are leaving,” he said. I nodded. We covered the dates. It was Friday night. My last day was Wednesday. I had five days left at The Kaisha, only three of them work days. He asked what I would do after leaving The Kaisha and I told him I would go to Thailand and then return home.

He nodded.

When I came out of my evening lesson, he was standing there. He wanted to know if I wanted to go drinking. Usually, a group of students would go, but tonight it was only me and him. I agreed.

We went upstairs to Kachikachi-yama, the bar on the seventh floor and I began to get drunk. After a couple of drinks, he said, “I’ll miss you,” and for the first time since Scotty’s death, I cried. He gave me his handkerchief, apologizing for its being wrinkled, and I thanked him and he looked at me for a moment with dark and unhappy eyes. Then he looked away and said, “I don’t understand my own mind,” and he got up from the table.

When he came back, I had stopped crying. I handed him back his handkerchief, thanking him. It was getting late and we talked a bit more and then he asked if i was going to try to make last train. “No,” I said, “I want to spend time with you.” He offered me another drink and I asked if he wanted to go somewhere else for that drink and he agreed.

We left the bar. It was late and we walked against the crowds rushing for the station, trying to make their last trains. In Ginza, in many parts of Tokyo, the bars will stay open all night for the people who miss their last trains. Taxis and hotels are so expensive that sometimes it cheaper to stay out all night drinking. The bar we went to was nearly full. We took a secluded booth, and though I was already drunk, I ordered another gin-tonic and he ordered another beer. We ordered food, a Caesar’s salad, renkon chips, engawa nigiri sushi. I forget what else. We started to talk but I don’t remember what about.

We’d been circling each other since day one, the Handsome Businessman and I. I wouldn’t ever touch him because he’s married, but we’d stayed out all night drinking with other students and just the two of us. We’d gone to sing karaoke. He’d sat through lesson after lesson and we’d talked for hours in The Kaisha lobby and in many different bars and restaurants.

I ordered another gin-tonic and while I waited for it to come, I finished his gin-tonic and I had had five or six gin-tonics and even fueled with that much liquid courage, I still looked away from him as I asked if I could kiss him.

Of course, he said.

We leaned across the table and kissed and it was the best kiss of my life. I asked him to do it again and he did it again. After a third time, I asked if he would take me to a hotel and he agreed. We left our half-eaten dinners and walked out into Ginza and got into a cab and A____ gave the driver directions in Japanese and all I understood was that he had asked the driver to take us to a love hotel in Ueno. The hotel was cheap and he paid and we went upstairs and went to bed and it was very, very good.

We parted in the morning with plans to meet the following Thursday, the day after my last day at The Kaisha. We were going to go to Tsukishima, the part of Tokyo famous for monjya-yaki and okonomiyaki restaurants. We would meet after work--his work, I mean, as my job would be finished the day before. That was the plan. But on Wednesday night, he showed up in my last class and we went to the two parties that the students had planned for me. He and I were the only people to go to both parties as there had been some argument between the students about the plan. What was going on between us was very clear to everyone, but everyone was too polite to say it. When we left the last party, we had missed our last trains. He told me he’d drive me home, so we took a taxi to his office to pick up his car. After picking up his car, we parked like teenagers on a deserted road near some warehouses.

All the time we were together, he was talking to me. I don’t just mean while we were parked, I mean all the time. “I want you to understand me,” he said. “I like you because you talk to me,” he said. “I’ve always been attracted to shy women before,” he said. “You’re the first strong woman I’ve been attracted to.” I asked him why this was and he said again that he didn’t understand this sudden need to be with a woman who had such a strong personality, who was so opinionated.

I asked about his wife. He’d told me a bit about her family history, which was very unusual for Japan. Her father and mother had been teenagers, her mother left her to be raised by her grandparents, her father had gone to jail. (“Why did he go to jail?” I asked. “I don’t know,” h replied. “Come on, A____,” I said. “You’ve been married to her for the last eighteen years and you don’t know why her father went to jail?” He considered, then said, “Maybe...there was a traffic accident.” I said that people don’t go to jail for traffic accidents. He nodded. “Maybe...” he said, “someone died.” I asked if her father had been drunk and as a response, he looked away from me. Yes.)

We talked. And in between talking we had meals together and we went to love hotels together and it was short and intense and then it was over. It ended this way:

We met in Yurakucho, near the Tokyo Kokukaikan, at the bookstore on the first floor. We took the train to Shinjuku, which was a strange choice. It turns out that he used to go to Shinjuku to meet girls when he was in his teens and twenties. It was a bit natsukashii, a bit of nostalgia for him. We walked around Kabukicho, the area where all the young men and women go to pick each other up, and I’m not a teenager--not even a woman in her twenties, so I finally suggested that we find a restaurant, have a drink and some dinner, and chat.

We went to a robata, a kind of yakitori place, and had dinner and a couple of drinks. After we left the restaurant, he walked me over to a row of love hotels and picked one--called WAKO--out. The “rest” was 90 minutes. The stay was all night. I asked him which he wanted and he said he wanted a rest. I said I wasn’t interested in that, and told him I had to go meet my friend. (I had been emailing Muji about another matter, but was suddenly aware that I could use this as the pretext for leaving the Handsome Businessman.)

He walked me back to the station and we parted there. I thanked him and I told him I loved him. It was true at the time.

He cried.

He cried but I didn’t. We said goodbye and I walked down to the station platform where my heart broke. I waited for the train and when the train came I got on and I went back to my hotel in Ningyocho and I packed.