East is East by T. C. Boyle

Author:T. C. Boyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1996-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

The Dogs are Barking, Woof-Woof

When ruth came to him out of the night, he was dreaming of his mother, his haha, his okāsan, the soft-smiling girl in the miniskirt who’d brought him into the world and suckled him and looked deep into his eyes. It was a dream of the cradle, an oneiric memory, idealized and distilled from the stack of photographs his grandmother kept in the bottom drawer of her dresser. The photos flapped through his dream like a riffled deck of cards and he saw his mother standing outside a cram school with her guitar and the strong heavy legs and handsome wide face he’d inherited from her; saw her on the futon, thinner now, eyes fixed on the kicking infant framed by the crook of her arm; saw her alone in a crowded bar, bottles winking like stars behind her. And then her face pulled back and rose like the moon into the sky above him and she was Chieko, the wide-hipped girl he’d met in a dive in the Yoshiwara District, her arms around him, lips tugging at his own like sentient things. …

Then the door rattled and he knew the police had come for him with their Negroes and their dogs.

But no: it was Ruth’s voice coming to him out of the shadows. Ruth’s voice. Fumbling for his shorts, the latch, was something wrong? No. Did she want him to turn on the light? No. She was wearing some sort of musk, a scent that came from a bottle and brought him back to his dream, to Chieko and the scintillating lights of the Yoshiwara.

Ruth kissed him, her lips cool on his own, and he felt her tongue in his mouth. Her dress was chiffon, electric against his skin. He didn’t understand—they were friends, she’d told him, only friends, and the big butter-stinker with the hair like rice paper and the leaping pale eyes, he was her lover. But her dress fell to the floor as if tugged down by invisible hands and she held him, her flesh pressed to his, the pure white long-legged puzzle of her involved in him now, and he didn’t try to understand, didn’t want to, didn’t care.

In the morning, in the fullness of the light, she raised her head from his chest and looked into his eyes. He felt her there, poised against him, and he listened to the soft murmur of life awakening in the trees and held on to that cool gray gaze with a prick of emotion that must have showed in every line of his face. She seemed to be deciding something, sizing him up, reviewing the night and the moment and the sudden flurry of her options. “Only friends,” he murmured, and it was the right thing to say. She smiled, opening up, blossoming, and then she kissed him and everything fell into place.

She went back to her other house, the big house, before the sun was out of the trees, and later she brought him rolls and fruit and meat cut in strips.

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