moved in with him. All this was within the realm of possibility. Such things happened often enough, so how could I think her leaving me was anything out of the ordinary? The long and the short of it was, it was up to her.
“The long and short of it is, it’s up to you,” I said.
It was a Sunday afternoon, as I dawdled with a pull-ring from a beer can, that she came out with it. Said she wanted a divorce.
“Either way is fine with you then?” she asked, releasing her words slowly.
“No, either way is not fine with me,” I said. “I’m only saying it’s up to you.”
“If you want to know the truth, I don’t want to leave you,” she said after a moment.
“All right, then don’t leave me,” I said.
“But I’m going nowhere staying with you.”
She wouldn’t say any more, but I knew what she meant. I would be thirty in a few months; she would be twenty-six. And if you considered the vastness of the rest of our lives, the foundations we’d laid barely scraped zero. All we’d done our four years together was to eat through our savings.
Mostly my fault, I guess. Probably I never should have gotten married. At least never to her.
In the beginning, she thought she was the one unfit for society and made me out to be the socially functioning one. In our respective roles, we got along relatively well. Yet no sooner had we thought we’d reached a lasting arrangement than something crumbled. The tiniest hint of something, but it was never to be recovered. We had been walking ever so peacefully down a long blind alley. That was our end.
To her, I was already lost. Even if she still loved me, it didn’t matter. We’d gotten too used to each other’s role. She understood it instinctively; I knew it from experience. There was no hope.
So it was that she and her slip vanished forever. Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die. But all in all, this was hardly what you could call a tragedy.
July 24, 8:25 A.M.
I checked the numerals of the digital clock, closed my eyes, and fell asleep.
September, Two Months Later
The Whale’s Penis and the Woman with Three Occupations
To sleep with a woman: it can seem of the utmost importance in your mind, or then again it can seem like nothing much at all. Which only goes to say that there’s sex as therapy (self-therapy, that is) and there’s sex as pastime.
There’s sex for self-improvement start to finish and there’s sex for killing time straight through; sex that is therapeutic at first only to end up as nothing-better-to-do, and vice versa. Our human sex life—how shall I put it? —differs fundamentally from the sex life of the whale.
We are not whales—and this constitutes one great theme underscoring our sex life.
When I was a kid, there was an aquarium thirty minutes by bicycle from where I lived. A chill aquarium-like silence always pervaded the place, with only an occasional splash to be heard. I could almost feel the Creature from the Black Lagoon breathing in some dim corner.
Schools of tuna circled ’round and ’round the enormous pool. Sturgeon plied their own narrow watercourse, piranha set their razor-sharp teeth into chunks of meat, and electric eels sputtered and sparked like shorted-out lightbulbs.
The aquarium was filled with countless other fish as well, all with different names and scales and fins. I couldn’t figure out why on earth there had to be so many kinds of fish.
There were, of course, no whales in the aquarium. One whale would have been too big, even if you knocked out all the walls and made the entire aquarium into one tank. Instead, the aquarium kept a whale penis on display. As a token, if you will.
So it was that my most impressionable years of boyhood were spent gazing at not a whale but a whale’s penis. Whenever I tired of strolling through the chill aisles of the aquarium, I’d steal off to my place on the bench in the hushed, high-ceilinged stillness of the exhibition room and spend hours on end there contemplating this whale’s penis.
At times it would remind me of a tiny shriveled palm tree; at other times, a giant ear of corn. In fact, if not for the plaque—WHALE GENITAL: MALE—no one would have taken it to be a whale’s penis. More likely an artifact unearthed from the Central Asian desert than a product of the Antarctic Ocean. It bore no resemblance to my penis, nor to any penis I’d ever seen. What was worse, the severed penis exuded a singular, somehow unspeakable aura of sadness.
It came back to me, that giant whale’s penis, after having intercourse with a girl for the very first time. What twists of fate, what tortuous circumnavigations, had brought it to that cavernous exhibition room? My heart ached, thinking about it. I felt as if I didn’t have a hope in the world. But I was only seventeen and clearly too young to give up on everything. It was then and there I came to the realization I have borne in mind ever since.
Which is, that I am not a whale.
In bed now with my new girlfriend, running my fingers through her hair, I thought about whales for the longest time.
In the aquarium of my memory, it is always late autumn. The glass of the tanks is cold. I’m wearing a heavy sweater. Through the large picture window of the exhibition room, the sea is dark as lead, the countless whitecaps reminiscent of lace collars on girls’ dresses.
“What’re you thinking about?” she asked.
“Something long ago,” I said.
She was twenty-one, with an attractive slender body and a pair of the most bewitching, perfectly formed ears. She was a part-time proofreader for a small publishing house, a commercial model specializing in ear shots, and a call girl in a discreet intimate-friends-only club. Which of the three she considered her main occupation, I had no idea. Neither did she.
Nonetheless, sizing up her essential attributes, I would have to say her natural gifts ran to ear modeling. She agreed. Which was well and good until you considered how extremely limited are the opportunities for a commercial ear model, how abysmal the status and pay. To your typical P.R. man or makeup artist or cameraman, she was just an “earholder,” someone with ears. Her mind and body, apart from the ears, were completely out of the picture, disregarded, nonexistent.
“But you know, that’s not the real me,” she’d say. “I am my ears, my ears are me.”
Neither her proofreader self nor her call girl self ever, not for one second, showed her ears to others.
“That’s because they’re not really me,” she explained.
The office of her call girl club, registered as a “talent club” for appearances, was located in Akasaka and run by a gray-haired Englishwoman whom everyone called Mrs. X. She’d been living in Japan for thirty years, spoke fluent Japanese, and read most of the basic Chinese characters.
Mrs. X had opened an English-language tutorial school for women not five hundred yards from the call girl office and used the place to scout promising faces for the latter. Conversely, several of the call girls were also going
