It was only a little pearl stud, one of a pair that was the first present Jonathan gave her. She thought them a bit of a cliché and not really her style, but he had been sweet and shy with her then. She wouldn’t have liked to lose it.
She had asked him to tell her about his home, many times. She wanted to know so that she could know him better, so that she had some world to fit him into, that he came from, so that he had some dimension deeper than being just an Englishman who had come to Japan, who turned up one day at the language school where she worked, and got a job teaching English because he was English and someone else had left, and that was all the qualification or identity that was needed in Tokyo in the 1970s, Englishness. She did not yet understand what a freedom it was to him to be just that, an Englishman who had come to Japan and had no need of other identity. Sometimes a language teacher, sometimes a photographer, whoever he felt like being, with his leather jacket and his hair (that had been cut too short when he first arrived) left to grow a little long, quietly outside of it all. She would come to think that it was that quality that made him a good photographer; what seemed like the freedom in him, that he could be one person or another, the way that he could hold back but at the same time seem to empathise, both close and distant at once, as if he could look from outside and yet reveal things about a person as if he had seen inside them.
She didn’t even know about the photography, to start with. Not until he had been coming and going for some weeks. She had been aware of him only in the background, a slim dark-haired Englishman who appeared as the replacement for a blonde Canadian girl, and who was nice enough, and attractive in a subtle way, and seemed to do everything OK, and came and went at the right times. They did not get talking until there was a problem with a student, a grown man who just disappeared, and she saw how he was concerned about this man. Sometimes it was like that, attraction, as if a person opens a door, and suddenly you look in and they’re interesting to you. The two of them stayed late in the office trying to contact this man and then when they left they went to a nearby tempura restaurant to eat, because it was late and they were hungry. They never did know what happened to the man – maybe something bad but maybe nothing bad at all, maybe he had just moved on without telling the school or paying his bill – but because of him they ate tempura and Jonathan got talking, telling her about his travels. Doors opened onto doors. She thought that he had spoken a lot about himself, and then they said goodbye and she got on the subway train alone, sitting there in the carriage with the evening still alive in her head, as the train ran and stopped and the passengers came in and went out at the stations, and she realised that he had talked almost all about other people’s lives and places, not his own.
What is it that’s so important for you to know? he would say. You know me, all that matters of me. But she wanted to know more. How had he come to be in Japan? Where had he come from? Why? She thought, that’s how it is when you fall in love with someone. Not only the first day, but always. You want to know what it is that makes you love them; if it is only the surface, the dark lashes about his grey eyes, his smile with that reserve in it, that becomes so warm in those moments when the reserve goes, or the feel of his skin, tanned from hot days they spent that summer at the beach in Izu, his body taut as he stretched back on the sand; or if it is more – and she told herself it must be more, mustn’t it, if she and he were anything or to amount to anything – that it must be who he is inside, where he comes from, his story. (Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe there was no more than the moment. Or an accumulation of moments that she or the two of them had strung together, one way or another. The tempura restaurant, Izu, a garden they went to see, the mountains in autumn, so many everyday moments in the city that were different because Jonathan was there and he made her see them differently. Maybe that was what Jonathan, the story of knowing him, taught her. Maybe a man, whoever it is that you love, is no more than what he appears to you to be at some particular moment against some particular surroundings. How he then moves, in those surroundings, at your word or your touch. How he makes
