The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (7 page)

“Where are you headed now?”

“Home. Why don’t you come too, Mr. Tsukazaki? There’s an air conditioner in the living room and it’s really cool.”

They turned on the air conditioner and Ryuji slumped into a rattan chair. Noboru, after returning from an artfully reluctant trip to the bathroom under orders from the housekeeper to wash his feet, sprawled on the rattan couch near the closed window.

The housekeeper came in with cool drinks and began to scold again: “I’m going to tell your mother just how bad you behave in front of company—flopping all over the place like that.”

Noboru’s eyes sought help from Ryuji.

“It doesn’t bother me a bit. And swimming all day does seem to have tired him out.”

“I suppose so—but he should know better. . . .”

Obviously the housekeeper resented Ryuji and she appeared to be venting her disgruntlement on Noboru. Heaving from side to side buttocks heavy with discontent, she lumbered out of the room.

Ryuji’s defense had united them in a tacit pact. Noboru swilled his drink, dribbling yellow fruit juice on his throat. Then he turned to look at the sailor, and, for the first time, his eyes were smiling. “I know just about everything when it comes to ships.”

“You’d probably put an old pro like me to shame.”

“I don’t like to be flattered.” Noboru raised his head from a cushion his mother had embroidered; for an instant, there was fury in his eyes.

“What time do you stand watch, Mr. Tsukazaki?”

“From noon to four and from midnight to four. That’s why they call it ‘thieves’ watch.’”

“Thieves’ watch! Boy, that sounds great!” This time Noboru laughed outright and arched his back into a bow.

“How many men stand watch together?”

“A duty officer and two helmsmen.”

“Mr. Tsukazaki, how much does a ship list in a squall?”

“Thirty to forty degrees when it gets really bad. Try walking up a forty-degree grade sometimes. It’s like scaling a damn wall—fantastic. There are times when . . .”

Groping for words, Ryuji stared into space. Noboru saw in his eyes the billows of a storm-riled sea and felt mildly seasick. He was ecstatic.

“The
Rakuyo
is a tramp steamer, isn’t she, Mr. Tsukazaki?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Ryuji admitted halfheartedly: his pride was hurt a little.

“I guess most of your routes are between Japan and China and then India, right?”

“You do know what you’re talking about, don’t you? Sometimes we ship wheat from Australia to England too.”

Noboru’s questions were precipitate, his interest leaped from one subject to another. “What was the Philippines’ chief product again?”

“Lauan wood, I guess.”

“How about Malaya?”

“That’d be iron ore. Here’s one for you: what’s Cuba’s chief product?”

“Sugar. What else? Anybody knows that. Say, have you ever been to the West Indies?”

“Yes. Just once, though.”

“Did you get to Haiti?”

“Yes.”

“Boy! How about the trees there?”

“Trees?”

“You know, like shade trees or—”

“Oh, that—palms mostly. And then the mountains are full of what they call flamboyants. And silk trees. I can’t remember whether the flamboyant looks like the silk tree or not. Anyway, when they blossom, they look like they’re on fire. And when the sky gets pitch black just before an evening storm they turn fantastic colors. I’ve never seen blossoms like that again anywhere.”

Ryuji wanted to talk about his mysterious attachment to a grove of wine palms. But he didn’t know how to tell that kind of story to a child, and as he sat and wondered, the doomsday glow of sunset in the Persian Gulf roused in his mind, and the sea wind caressing his cheek as he stood at the anchor davit, and the rankling fall of the barometer that warned of an approaching typhoon: he was sensible again of the sea’s nightmarish power working endlessly on his moods, his passions.

Noboru, just as he had seen storm billows a minute before, beheld one by one in the sailor’s eyes the phantoms he had summoned. Surrounded by visions of distant lands and by white-paint nautical jargon, he was being swept away to the Gulf of Mexico, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf. And the journey was made possible by this authentic Second Mate. Here at last was the medium without which his imagination had been helpless. How long he had waited for it!

Rapturous, Noboru shut his eyes tight.

The two-horsepower motor in the air conditioner whispered to the room. It was perfectly cool now, and Ryuji’s shirt had dried. He clasped his rough hands behind his head: the ridges in the finely laced rattan nestled coolly against his fingers.

His eyes roved the dim room and he marveled at the golden clock enthroned on the mantel, the cut-glass chandelier depending from the ceiling, the graceful jade vases poised precariously on open shelves: all delicate, all absolutely still. He wondered what subtle providence kept the room from rocking. Until a day before, the objects here had meant nothing to him, and in a day he would be gone; yet, for the moment, they were connected. The link was a glance met by a woman’s eyes, a signal emanating from deep in the flesh, the brute power of his own manhood; and to know this filled him with a sense of mystery, as when he sighted an unknown vessel on the open sea. Though his own flesh had fashioned the bond, its enormous unreality with respect to this room made him tremble.

Noboru didn’t realize that Ryuji was sinking into a void. He didn’t even notice that the sailor wasn’t looking in his direction any more. Lack of sleep and a succession of shocks had exhausted him, the bloodshot eyes he had told the housekeeper were from the salt water were beginning to close. He pondered, as he rocked toward sleep, the glistening figures of absolute reality twice glimpsed since the night before during lapses in the unmoving, tedious, barren world. . . .

He saw them as marvelous gold embroideries leaping off a flat black fabric: the naked sailor twisting in the moonlight to confront a horn—the kitten’s death mask, grave and fang-bared—its ruby heart. . . . gorgeous entities all and absolutely authentic: then Ryuji too was an authentic hero . . . all incidents on the sea, in the sea, under the sea—Noboru felt himself drowning in sleep. “Happiness,” he thought. “Happiness that defies description. . . .” He fell asleep.

Ryuji looked at his watch: it was time to go. He knocked lightly on the door leading to the kitchen and called the housekeeper.

“He’s fallen asleep.”

“That’s just like that boy.”

“He might catch a chill. If there’s a blanket or something—”

“I’ll get one from upstairs.”

“Well—I’ll be going now.”

“I suppose we can expect you back tonight?” A smirk appeared around the housekeeper’s eyes and trickled down her face as she glanced once, quickly, ogling up at Ryuji.

S
INCE
dark antiquity the words have been spoken by women of every caste to sailors in every port; words of docile acceptance of the horizon’s authority, of reckless homage to that mysterious azure boundary; words never failing to bestow on even the haughtiest woman the sadness, the hollow hopes, and the freedom of the whore: “You’ll be leaving in the morning, won’t you? . . .”

But Fusako was determined not to submit, though she knew Ryuji would try to make her speak. She understood that he was staking a simple man’s pride on the tears of a woman lamenting the farewell. And what a simple man he was! Their conversation in the park the night before was proof of that. First he had misled her with his pensive look into expecting profound observations or even a passionate declaration, and then he had begun a monologue on shreds of green leaf, and prattled about his personal history, and finally, horribly entangled in his own story, burst into the refrain of a popular song!

Yet she was relieved to know that he was not a dreamer, and his plainness, a quality more durable than imaginative, like a piece of sturdy old furniture, she found reassuring. Fusako needed a guarantee of safety, for she had pampered herself too long, avoided danger in any form, and her unexpected and dangerous actions since the night before had frightened her. Feeling up in the air as she did, it seemed vitally important that the man with whom she was involved be down-to-earth. There were still things to learn of course, but at least she was convinced that Ryuji was not the sort of man to burden her financially.

On their way to a steakhouse at the Bashado, they passed a little café with a fountain in the garden and small red and yellow lights strung along the awning over the entrance, and decided to go in for a drink before dinner.

For some reason, the mint frappé Fusako ordered was garnished with a cherry, stem and all. She deftly tore the fruit away with her teeth and placed the pit in a shallow glass ashtray.

The glow that lingered in the sky was sifting through the lace curtains on the large front window, suffusing the almost empty room. It must have been due to those delicately tinted rays of light: the smooth, warm cherry pit, just perceptibly beginning to dry and ineffably pink, appeared incredibly seductive to Ryuji. He reached for it abruptly and put it into his mouth. A cry of surprise rose to Fusako’s lips, then she began to laugh. She had never known a moment of such peaceful physical intimacy.

They chose a quiet neighborhood for a walk after dinner. Captives of a tenderness that might have bewitched the summer night, they walked in silence, holding hands. Fusako brushed at her hair with her free hand. That afternoon she had watched for a lull in business at the shop, then dashed to the beauty parlor for a quick hairdo. Remembering the puzzlement on the beautician’s face when she had declined the perfumed oil she always had her comb lightly through her hair, Fusako blushed. Now her whole body threatened to unravel into a sloppy heap amid the smells of the city and the summer night.

Tomorrow, the thick fingers twined in her own would plunge over the horizon It was unbelievable, like a ridiculous, spectacular lie. Fusako blurted, as they were passing a nursery that had closed for the day: “I’ve sunk pretty low thanks to you.”

“Why?” Surprised, Ryuji stopped.

Fusako peered through the wire fence at the trees and shrubbery and rose bushes all tightly packed together in the nursery garden. It was pitch dark, the luxuriant foliage was unnaturally tangled and involuted: she felt suddenly as though a terrible eye were looking into her.

“Why?” Ryuji asked again; Fusako didn’t answer. As the mistress of a respectable shore household, she wanted to protest being forced into a pattern of life which began with waving goodbye to a man, a pattern familiar to any harbor whore. But that would have been only one step away from giving utterance to those other words: you’ll be leaving in the morning, won’t you? . . .

A solitary life aboard ship had taught Ryuji not to probe matters he didn’t understand. Fusako’s complaint he interpreted as typical, a woman whining: his second “why” was therefore playful, teasing. The thought of parting with her the next day was painful, but he had a maxim to countermand his pain, an insubstantial refrain which played over and over in his dreams: “The man sets out in quest of the Grand Cause; the woman is left behind.” Yet Ryuji knew better than anyone that no Grand Cause was to be found at sea. At sea were only watches linking night and day, prosaic tedium, the wretched circumstances of a prisoner.

And the admonishing cables: “Recently vessels of this line have been plagued by a succession of collisions in the Irako Channel and at the northern entrance to Kijima Straits stop request extreme caution in narrow channels and harbor entrances stop in view of this line’s current situation request redoubled efforts to eliminate all accidents at sea stop Director of Maritime Shipping.” The cliché “in view of this line’s current situation” had been included in every wordy cable since the beginning of the so-called shipping slump.

And the Quartermaster’s log, a daily record of weather, wind velocity, atmospheric pressure, temperature, relative humidity, speed, distance logged, and revolutions per minute, a diary accurately recording the sea’s caprice in compensation for man’s inability to chart his own moods.

And, in the mess room, traditional dancing dolls, five portholes, a map of the world on the wall. The soysauce bottle was suspended from the ceiling on a leather strap: sometimes round bars of sunlight lanced toward the bottle and slipped back, darted in again as if to lap the lurching, tea-brown liquid, then withdrew again. Posted on the galley wall was an ostentatiously lettered breakfast menu:

Lunch was Western style and always began with soup.

And the green engine, tossing and moaning inside its twisted tubes like the feverish victim of a fatal disease. . . .

In a day, all this would become Ryuji’s world again.

They had stopped in front of a small gate in the nursery fence. Ryuji’s shoulder brushed against the gate and it clicked open, swinging in toward the garden.

“Look, we can go inside.” Fusako’s eyes were sparkling like a child’s.

With a furtive eye on the lighted window in the watchman’s shack, they stole into the dense, man-made forest; there was scarcely room to step. They clasped hands and made their way through the shoulder-high thicket, pushing thorny rose stems aside and stepping over flowers at their feet until they emerged in a corner of the garden occupied by tropical trees and plants, a lush tangle of orchids and banana trees, rubber trees and all varieties of palm.