Bel Canto(94)

She would have accompanied him upstairs every night. She told that to Gen. But it was better that he know how to go on his own. Nothing made people as clumsy as fear, and she could show him how not to be afraid.

“She is an extraordinary girl,” Mr. Hosokawa said to Gen.

“She seems to be,” Gen said.

Mr. Hosokawa gave him a small, avuncular smile and pretended that there was nothing else to say. That was part of it, too. The private life. Mr. Hosokawa had a private life now. He had always thought of himself as a private man, but now he saw that there was nothing in his life before that had been private. It didn’t mean that he had no secrets then and now he did. It was that now there was something that was strictly between himself and one other person, that it was so completely their own that it would have been pointless to even try to speak of it to someone else. He wondered now if everyone had a private life. He wondered if his wife had one. It was possible that all those years he had been alone, never knowing that a complete world existed and no one spoke of it.

During their entire captivity he had slept through the night, but now he knew how to sleep and how to wake up in the pitch-black darkness without the aid of a clock. Often when he woke up Gen was gone. Then he would stand and walk, so peacefully, so above suspicion, that if someone were to wake and see him they would have only thought he was going to get a drink of water. He stepped over his neighbors, his compatriots, and made his way to the back stairs behind the kitchen. Once he saw a light on beneath a closet door and thought he heard whispering, but he didn’t stop to see what it might be. It didn’t concern him, which was part of being invisible. He floated up the back steps. He had never been so easy inside his own skin. He thought at once he had never been so alive and so much a ghost. It would have been fine if he were to climb these steps forever, always the lover going to meet his beloved. He was happy then, and every step he climbed he was happier. He wished he could stop time. As much as Mr. Hosokawa was overwhelmed by love, he could never completely shake what he knew to be the truth: that every night they were together could be seen as a miracle for a hundred different reasons, not the least of which was that at some point these days would end, would be ended for them. He tried not to give himself over to fantasies: he would get a divorce; he would follow her from city to city, sitting in the front row of every opera house in the world. Happily, he would have done this, given up everything for her. But he understood that these were extraordinary times, and if their old life was ever restored to them, nothing would be the same.

When he opened the door to her room there were tears in his eyes more often than not, and he was grateful for the darkness. He didn’t want her to think that anything had gone wrong. She came to him and he pressed his damp face into the fall of lemon-scented hair. He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person. Never had he received such kindness. Maybe the private life wasn’t forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.

In the china closet, Carmen and Gen made a decision: two full hours of studying before they made love. Carmen was still every bit as serious about learning to read and write in Spanish, look at all the progress she’d made! Haltingly, she could read an entire paragraph without asking for help. She was completely committed to learning English. She could fully conjugate ten verbs and knew at least a hundred nouns and other parts of speech. She held out hopes for Japanese so she could speak to Gen in his own language when all of this was over and they would be in bed together at night. Gen was equally firm on their resolve to continue Carmen’s lessons. It would be pointless to have come so far and then just abandon everything because they were in love. Wasn’t this exactly what love was? To want what was best for someone, to help them along as Carmen and Gen helped each other? No, they would study and practice for two hours, no less than they had done before. After that, yes, their time was their own and they could do whatever they wanted. Carmen stole the egg timer from the kitchen. They settled in to work.

Spanish first. Carmen had found a satchel of schoolbooks stuffed in the closet of the Vice President’s daughter, skinny books with pictures of rolling puppies on the front, a fatter book of paper with solid lines and dotted lines to practice penmanship. The girl had only used five pages. She had written the alphabet and her numbers. She had written her name, Imelda Iglesias, over and over again in sweetly curved letters. Carmen wrote her name beneath that. She wrote out the words Gen told her: pescado, calcetín, sopa. Fish, sock, soup. All he wanted was to press his lips against the side of her neck. He would not stop the lesson. She was leaning over her notebook, working so hard to make her letters as nice as those of the Vice President’s eight-year-old daughter. Two thick strands of hair fell forward onto the notebook. Carmen ignored them and folded her lower lip into her mouth to concentrate. He wondered if it was possible to die from wanting someone so much. In this narrow hall of plates all he could smell was her, lemons and the dusty, sun-bleached smell of her uniform, the softer, more complicated smell of Carmen’s skin. Thirty seconds to kiss her neck, that wasn’t asking so much. He would not even mind if she kept on writing. He would kiss her that gently, her pencil need never leave the page.

When she looked up his face was very close to hers and she could no longer remember the word he said and if he was to say it again she would not know how to spell it or how to bend a single letter out of a straight line. All she needed was a kiss, a single kiss to clear her head and then she would be all business again, right back to work. She could not make herself swallow or blink. She was sure that with one kiss she could study all night. It would not make her less of a student. She had no mind for letters anyway, all she could think of was the grass, the grass and trees and dark night sky, the smell of the jasmine the first time he slid her shirt over her head and fell to his knees to kiss her stomach, her breasts.