1

“What do you think of me?” she asks.

It’s a light question, but it’s been hanging over us the whole evening, as heavy and oppressive as the June humidity, as inevitable as the rain. And, here I am without an umbrella to keep me from getting soaked.

It is amusing, in a sadistic way I suppose, to recall the rapid evolution of my co-worker’s feelings towards me. Within a month of my employment, the house that Yumi’s disgust had built would soon be engulfed in a desperately out-of-control conflagration of unrequited love.

At the beginning, I was happily ignorant of both the powerful forces of nature at work and my influence upon them. Each morning, I would arrive at the office to find Yumi in comparatively high spirits, grinning from ear to ear with those dreadful Chicklet teeth of hers. The tide was high, the sea calm, the harbor bathed in the inviting light of another lovely dawn. But, as morning passed awkwardly and quietly, the tide would start to recede, and by the end of the day all the emotional garbage Yumi brought with her to work was exposed, like rusting bicycles and old appliances in the black silt.

But really, how could I have known the impact I had on Yumi’s frail emotions when I was completely absorbed in the struggle to keep my own insanity in check after the debacle with Mié? I was no Mother Teresa. I didn’t have an infinite well of compassion from which to draw sympathy for my co-worker. No, Yumi, I had decided, was going to have to deal with her own infatuation all by herself.

Like me, Reina, too, had hoped that by turning a blind eye to Yumi’s mood swings, everything would work out in the end. But Yumi, we would soon learn, wasn’t the type to let her misery go unrecognized. She didn’t merely dabble in the art of suffering; she was a ham and demanded an audience for her one-woman Passion Play.

As Yumi suffered upon the cross to which she had nailed herself—no help from me, not even to steady the nails as she drove them in—rather than ask God to forgive those who did not know what they had done, Yumi chose instead to spread the suffering around. And so, driven mad with jealously, she imparted her wholly unsubstantiated, though I must admit correct, suspicions to our boss that Reina and I were having an affair.

In-company romances are nothing new in Japan; they happen all the time. Japanese television dramas wouldn’t get past Episode Two if there wasn’t any romantic intrigue between co-workers in the story. And, if you ask anyone where they think the best place to meet a prospective spouse is, they’ll probably reply, “At work.” But, what might have only raised eyebrows or inspired some snickering in an ordinary office was cause for opprobrium because Reina was still, scandal of scandals, a married woman. And, unlike in large companies where such dalliances ensured that female staff who met heartbreak or their future husband in the office would resign allowing a new cohort of nubile women to fill their shoes, I was the one who was dispensable. Indeed, unbeknownst to me as so precious little was at the time, Abazuré was always on the lookout for any grounds, however trivial, to sack the full-time gaijin teacher and replace him with another gaijin, once his contract was up. This was how the woman operated.

Once the cat was out of the bag, Abazuré wasted little time in setting the Inquisition into motion. Should I have expected any different? Once again, I was asked to follow Abazuré to the small room she used for her weekly interrogations. We sat at the second-hand dining table facing each other.

There was a fascist vein in my boss and Freon flowed through it. She reminded me of a gregarious, yet sadistic POW camp kommodant, who would befriend the prisoners one moment only to put a bullet in their head the next. Abazuré could be charming if it served her to be so. The business she ran was testament to this. But, she was also a sociopath, an alarmingly unpredictable one. A volatile gas, the tiniest spark would set her off. She could go from fair skies to tempest, reasserting her authority over us with the delicacy of thundering jackboots.

I was on pins and needles my first few months at the school, and if the woman hadn’t been AWOL for days at a time, I seriously doubt my employment would have extended beyond June when my contract was up for review.

Not one to mince words when she was furious, Abazuré had little use for the Japanese tendency to hem and haw, to crowd out the message with pleasantries: no sooner had my butt settled into the electric chair than the juice was flicked on.

Rumors were circulating that Reina and I were having an affair, she began with her usual fevered irritation. I had gotten used to seeing her like this, all tensed up, her knuckles white and her hot breath hissing out of flared nostrils. She demanded to know the truth, leaving me with no choice but to give her anything but that. It would have been foolish to appeal to her sense of fairness and reason, because it had become obvious she had none. I looked at the woman I’d grown to despise, at the closely cropped, unnaturally black hair that never ever seemed to grow, at the deep lines etched into her furrowed brow and engraved like parentheses around the scowl. I looked into the steely eyes she had fixed upon me, at the contempt therein, and began to weave a bold tapestry of shameless lies. I had nothing to lose.

It seemed to work. The sun shown again on Abazuré’s fickle mood and I soared upon that flying tapestry of deceit through cloudless skies.

I was in the doghouse with Reina, though. For all her usual cheerfulness and blithe indifference to the office politics, Reina was reduced to a smoldering cauldron of acrimony in her apartment later that evening when I told her what had happened.

“I hate those bitches!” She stormed around the small living room, banging her clinched fists against her thighs and kicking up a cloud of dust and cat fur.

“I hate them! I hate them! I hate them! I hate them! I hate them!”

It surprised me how personally she took it. There was no consoling her; anything I said or tried to do just added fuel to her fire.

“I’m going to quit!” she finally decided before breaking down and crying.

It would take a full week before she’d show any signs of having calmed down. Even still, she was adamant in her refusal to talk to Yumi, except when necessity made it unavoidable. After several days of this, Yumi finally came to me and asked with grave concern if something was the matter with Reina.

Oh, Yumi could be a nasty piece of work herself, all right! The audacity! The callousness! The ruthlessness! I could have wacked her, but then I had to be the rare voice of reason in the office, a remarkable position for someone who has a habit of spouting off unthinkingly.

So, I met Yumi in secret after work.

It was a warm evening in late May. The sun had already set, but the sky was filled with a beautiful soft pinkish-orange twilight that made everything seem more distinct and within reach. We walked the perimeter of the small lake in Ōhori Park talking about what Reina and I had been accused of. Yumi feigned innocence of the matter testing my patience again. I took a deep breath, and told her I knew it was she who had spread the rumor, stopping her in her tracks.

“I’m . . . sorry, Peadar,” she began. All the air had gone out of her; the words having nothing to carry them were all but inaudible. “I, I, just thought that . . .”

With all the reserve I could muster to keep myself from strangling Yumi, I touched her shoulder gently and smiled. “It’s okay. If anyone should apologize, it’s me. I understand how you could have misinterpreted Reina and my friendship. At any rate it’s behind us, and I want to keep it there because I want the three of us to be friends again.”

I damn near vomited, saying this, but, it had the desired effect on Yumi and she promised to make it up to Reina.

The next day, Yumi bounced into work beaming those awful teeth of hers and greeted me with a rare cheerfulness. While I was out in the afternoon, she and Reina mended fences.

My problems with Reina, however, were only just beginning. When Yumi apologized to Reina she also admitted that she had misunderstood me all along. It was a realization, which would only serve to fan the flames of her love for me anew.

It sent Reina through the roof, and, as the two of us were closing the office down for the night Reina accused me of leading Yumi on.

“What the fuck you talking about?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing at all!” she said. “It’s just that, everything you say is like the word of God to that stupid bitch! ‘Peadar’s wonderful! Peadar’s perfect! Peadar said this and Peadar said that . . .’ You like it, don’t you? You’re leading her on because you like it. Well, you can fuck her for all I care.”

“Get outta here! I’m not interested in her at all. God, all I wanted was for a bit of normalcy to return to the office.”

“Jus’, just . . . don’t talk to me ever again!” she said, pushing me away.

I watched her walk away towards the parking lot wondering if she would come back, apologize and make it up to me on top of my futon, but she didn’t. So, I walked back to my apartment alone where I tried to untangle the knot of emotions inside me with a very large bottle of saké.

2

The following week, it was my turn to be ignored by Reina. If I spoke to her, she’d pretend not to hear. If I needed her assistance, she’d suddenly be caught up in frenetic activity. As for communication, the most I could expect from her was a nod, a shrug, or a finger pointed in the general direction of what I was looking for. And that was when she was feeling generous. The rest of the time, all I could do was sit at my desk and silently observe her from behind. The muscles between her shoulders and along her neck were still tense and screaming with anger five days on.

After a week, I couldn’t take it anymore and forced her to break the vow of silence by dogging her with invitations to dinner. Naturally, she refused at first, so I asked again politely. When she snubbed me, I asked again. And again, and again, and again. I pleaded when asking became useless. Begged when pleading didn’t work either. I begged until she relented, relented with conditions: she chooses the restaurant; I pay. With payday still a few days off, my postal savings account was like a wishing well drained of its water, a handful of nickels, pennies and dimes lying in the slime.

We walked to a nearby motsunabe restaurant after work. While a miso-based stew of pork haslets and God only knows what other piggy odds and ends wasn’t quite at the top of my list of things I wanted to eat, let alone flip the bill for, I was happy to have finally plied Reina’s rigid mouth open.

After a few pitchers of beer the words, which she had been so reluctant to part with, finally started to flow. And, the things I would hear!

Reina was jealous. Jealous of Yumi’s feeling for me, jealous of the time we had alone in the office each morning, jealous of how careful I was not to hurt Yumi’s feelings and so on. Jealousy is an ugly disease disfiguring everything in the most grotesque manner and it was my grave misfortune to have two co-workers stricken with it.

It was so absurd, I was about to throw in the towel right then and there and quit. I wanted out, Out, OUT! But, having nowhere else to go and no money to get me there anyway, all I could do was give Reina the same soft sell that I’d given Yumi earlier in the week.

“There’s nothing I can do about Yumi,” I began. “You know as well as I do that she lives in a fantasy world. No matter what I do or say, she’ll use it as just one more reason to fall even deeper in love with me. If I farted, she’d say they smellt of roses!”

“They do not smell like roses!” Reina said laughing. It was the first time in weeks that I’d heard her laugh and it was a relief to have gotten through at last. She was a damn hard nut to crack, that Reina. What in the world could have happened to her in her 29 years of life to make her like that?

Halfway through our third pitcher of beer, she rested her head on my shoulder, wrapped her arm around mine then asked calmly, reasonably, convincingly to do something to make that cunt Yumi stop.

There I was claiming to possess the power necessary to douse the fire in Yumi’s heart and, in the same breath, agreeing to let Reina spend the night where she would dig her nails so deeply into my chest I’d carry the scars like the stigmata long after we broke up for good.

3

Several days later, I yielded to the inevitable and invited Yumi out for dinner. Poor Yumi was tickled pink with the prospect and sent Reina up the wall talking about it. But Reina had no right to speak; she was the one who put me up to it. I was instructed to tell Yumi point blank, no holds barred, that she had better graduate from the junior-high-school-girl crush she had on me because there was no way in hell, none whatsoever, that I would ever, ever, EVER be interested in her.

I took Yumi to an “Itarian” restaurant of her choice, a small unremarkable place downtown that had been featured on TV recently. After an insipid meal with sour red wine, I broke it to her.

“You remember that evening at Ōhori Park when I told you that Reina and I weren’t having an affair?”

“Yes, of course I do. You . . .”

“I never told you why.”

“You said that Reina wasn’t your type.”

I did, didn’t I? Reina wasn’t very happy to hear about that. 

“That wasn’t the reason,” I said.

“Oh?”

Idiot! If the world were populated with men who only screwed their type humankind would have gone extinct millennia ago.

“Reina and I aren’t having an affair was because I’m still in love with my ex-girlfriend. I still miss her too much to think about someone else.” I wanted to continue, but tears started to flow from Yumi’s eyes.

“But, I love you,” she whimpered to the table.

It struck me as odd that she could have so much faith in those three words, as if merely uttering them would make a difference. Did she sincerely expect me to be moved or to take a second inventory of the barren shelves of my heart and find that somewhere in the recesses, in an overlooked section, covered with dust was the realization that I, too, had loved Yumi all along? What did professing my love to Mié bring to me? A cold steel door shut on my face, and my hopes and dreams locked and chained behind it. Now Yumi loved me.

To hell with love! 

Looking at her, at the black mascara streaming down her cheeks, I never felt less attracted to anyone before.

“I love you,” she whimpered once more for effect.

If I were cruel I would have laughed at Yumi, at myself, and at the cynicism and perversity of love. How was it that I could still love Mié whose betrayal had nearly robbed me of the very will to live, who had made me suffer so miserably that I was an emotionally and physically emaciated shadow of my former self, yet couldn’t bring myself to even consider for even a moment loving this miserable girl before me who seemed willing to devote the rest of her life to me on her faith in love alone?

I paid the bill and suggested we leave. There was no use in our trying to talk through the tears. A taxi came, the door opened, and I said good night to her as she struggled wearily into to back seat. Although I could sympathize with how Yumi was feeling, that sympathy wasn’t enough for me to take her into my arms and kiss the sadness away.

4

As the rainy season approached promising unpredictable volatility in the weather, Yumi’s emotions settled somewhat. While the pendulum still swung with broad strokes, the reach and breadth of her emotions were less and less extreme allowing me to deal with her as one might deal with, say, an adult rather than the lovesick, trouble-making bubblehead she’d been. In the meantime, Reina and my affair continued to bump along, not so much on the strength of our commitment to each other than on the unspoken agreement that we not make too many demands other than sex and friendship. From my perspective it was one of the healthiest relationships I’d had in a dear long time. It was exactly what I needed at a time when, feeling bankrupt of emotions, I had little love to invest in a relationship.

But as my twenty-seventh birthday drew near, things started to unravel. Like most things in life, you never really know what’s going on until it’s too goddamn late to do anything about it.

The fewer the days separating me from the day I came kicking and screaming against my will into this godforsaken world, the tighter the noose around my neck grew.

Yumi, who had been painting delicate strokes in subdued tones, was about to start splashing on violently passionate colors onto her canvas and fill our little office once more with a vile miasma of jealousy.

With the days ticking away, and Twenty-Seven stalking me, Yumi went to great pains to plan her assault on my heart. Reina, who was privy to our co-worker’s machinations, would leak what she knew to me. Though she had never held much more than a dim opinion of Yumi, she had come to harbor such animosity towards “Yu-chan” that she started to take sadistic pleasure in telling me the details of our co-worker’s plan, usually while laying naked next to me and trying to arouse another round of heated, angry sex out my cock.

According to Reina, Yumi had prepared a bottle of red wine, glasses and a corkscrew and was now waiting with increasing impatience for the right opportunity to ask me out. It seems Yumi, having failed to impress me earlier with the depth of her feelings, was now ready to booze me into submission.

To Reina’s malevolent delight and Yumi’s repeated frustration, I avoided committing myself for several weeks. An incorrigible procrastinator at heart, I would have continued doing so had Reina not started complaining that Yumi’s recent dip back into the bleak depths of despair was getting on her fucking nerves.

Full diplomatic pressure was imposed: Reina threatened me with an embargo—no sex—unless I did something about Yumi. The thought of not sharing Reina’s bed and the sex, which was starting to get exciting, was an acid that easily ate through the hardest of intransigence. I gave in and accepted Yumi’s invitation to have dinner on the eve of a national holiday celebrating at long last the Crown Prince’s wedding.

5

It was a disaster in the making. Not the Crown Prince’s Wedding, mind you, but my date with Yumi. A date which would go down in the annals of my personal history as one of the very worst, not so much for what occurred that night than for what would come to pass afterwards. It was my own Apocalypse Now, after which I could do nothing but grip my sweating brow and mutter a self-pitying, “The horror, the horror.”

I really should have had more sense than to give into to Reina’s demands and accept Yumi’s invitation. And yes, it was irresponsible of me to have drunk myself under the table. But it was an unforgivable mistake to let Yumi follow me home. And most of all, it was reprehensible of me to try to . . . 

No! The horror, the horror!

My recollection of the night was mercifully cloudy, limited again to an random collection of images: sitting at a bar counter slamming shots of Lord knows what; standing at the gate of my apartment building not sure how I got there, nor knowing why Yumi had followed me all the way like, the Japanese say, shit trailing out of a guppy’s arse; inviting her up for a drink; sitting on the floor of my apartment next to her, our backs against the wall; and kissing. Kissing! Yes! Kissing! And groping, groping, groping! God, help me, I groped! My maladroit hands plunged through the buttons of her blouse! They had a will of their own, those goddamned hands of mine, and climbed up her skirt where they found a girdle! A girdle? Yes, a girdle! Good God, a girdle! And, there the rest of the night is truncated by the deepest, blackest absence of recall.

Early the next morning, the doorbell rang, jolting me awake and sending a bolt of panic up my spine.

My God, did we fuck? No, no, no! God, why did I have to drink so goddamn much? What the fuck was I thinking?

The doorbell rang again, followed by a quick series of knocks. Silence. Knocking again.

Go away, go away, just go a-way!

At that time of the morning and with that kind of determination, it couldn’t have been anyone but Yumi. There was nothing I could do but remain quietly where I lay and hope that she and the spare change of memories jangling in my head would just go away and leave me alone.

After ten minutes lying motionless in bed, and holding my breath, I could hear the click of her pumps as she descended the steps. After the gate downstairs closed with a loud metallic clash, I peeled the sheets slowly off and discovered to my relief that although I was undressed from the waist up my trousers were still on, belt buckled and, as they say in Japanese, “society’s window” was shut. My fly was zipped. I got up, tipped-toed to the door, which was unlocked and looked out the peephole. Finding no one there, I gently turned the bolt and locked the door.

Telling myself, I’ll never make that mistake again, I returned to bed to try to sleep off what was promising to be the mother of all hangovers. I would miss the imperial wedding altogether.

6

A nine-months pregnant silence hung over the office the next few mornings. I should have said something, should have apologized for my deplorable behavior, but then I wasn’t sure what had actually happened. Pathological optimism encouraged me to judge my co-worker’s determined reticence as meaning she would prefer to just forget the whole affair and move on.

The silence didn’t last, of course. Just as I was beginning to enjoy how peaceful the mornings had become without Yumi’s overly rehearsed and pained attempts at conversation, the pregnant silence went into labor. Before long a fat, ugly and screaming baby would enter our lives. But, not quite yet.

Yumi, contrary to my expectations, my hopes, my dreams, and my desires, was not the type to forgive and forget. She had little need for the Lord’s Prayer and its hope that we may forgive the trespasses of others, something which has sustained me through a lifetime of mistakes like an open credit line for a degenerate gambler.

No such luck; Yumi was a Buddhist.

Her imagination had given birth to a fantasy as ridiculous as it was dangerous, and she held it close to her breast, nursing it with a vengeance so that she could get as much mileage out of it as possible. After closing the office up for the weekend, Yumi mentioned to Reina in a casual, off-handed way that she had gone back to my apartment on Tuesday night.

Reina, it goes without saying, wasn’t particularly delighted to hear that. She was even less amused when I waffled that there was a possibility, albeit extremely small—so small that it wasn’t really worth our time—that in the thick, thick, pea soup fog of drunkenness, I may have tried to—the thought, I must say, ha ha, sickens me—may have indeed tried to . . ., em, kiss Yumi. Nevertheless, she took it like a sport: as soon as I’d apologized for my stupidity, she retuned me to a state of grace below her by fucking the penitence out of me.

The doorbell startled us awake early the next morning. It was Yumi again ringing the bell and knocking on the door like a bill collector. How she managed again to get past the locked gate downstairs was a mystery, but one I could ill afford to ponder when I made the distressing realization that I’d failed to lock the door—again. God, what an idiot I could be at times! Reina, sharing the sentiment, mouthed, “Baka!” at me.

When the commotion subsided, I made an elaborate series of military hand signals to Reina, who, butt-naked, tip-toed as quickly and quietly as humanly possible towards the kitchen where she squatted down in the corner, with all of her belongings bundled up in her arms. I then moved with the silent agility of a ninja to the genkan where I picked up Rika’s shoes made my way back to the kitchen where I handed them to her. When one of the shoes fell to the floor echoing like cannon announcing noon and causing Reina to let out a small yelp, the doorbell began ringing again. It left me no choice: I answered the door in my birthday suit.

It is not easy to describe the look on Yumi’s face when I opened the door. It was contorted with both delight and horror, aversion and compulsion: she didn’t quite seem to know whether to plunge in and be willingly ravished or run away screaming. And so, she stood before me, her eyes fixed upon my dingdong, speaking in tongues.

“Sorry, I was sleeping,” I said, scratching my balls.

She turned abruptly and scurried down the stairs in a panic, a string of gomen-nasais[1] trailing behind her like a vapor trail. On the landing she had left a large bag containing my birthday present and several well-choreographed hopes.

“That stupid bitch,” Reina said as she emerged cautiously from the kitchen. After checking that the door was bolted, she kneeled before me and started to blow me.

I had no complaints with Reina’s fellatio skills, but as she was sucking me off, my mind wandered through all the muck I’d been through over the year since my last birthday when Mié and I first made love. As attractive as Reina was, as sexy as she was, as full of energy and life as she was, and as good as she was at polishing my knob, I still missed Mié.

Reina stopped sucking, and motioned for me to sit down, and when I did, she straddled me and slipped my cock into her.

“I want you to say my name when you come,” she said as she began moving her hips.

She was wetter than usual. The anger had become built up sexual energy and before long she was off to wherever it is that women like her go to when overcome by pleasure. Between quick, shallow breaths, she’d call out my name, each time louder and louder, each time with more and more violent thrusts of her hips, as if she were impaling herself on my cock. 

Distracted by the year-old memories that were filling my head, I just couldn’t come, couldn’t have come were a gun pressed against my temple, so I let her continue screwing with blind abandon. Each time my cock slipped in and out of that dripping wet hole of hers, I wondered what I was doing and why I was with her and not someone else. Why was Reina moaning above me, fucking me and asking for me to call out her name when I came? Why did I have to pretend that there was any meaning in what we were doing when in fact, after a month of fucking, there still wasn’t anything to it? We were two people who, thrown arbitrarily together, ended up having sex because it was easier to fuck than to feel.

Moving in and out, as natural as the tide, crashing against her cervix like the waves against a breakwater, just as cold, just as regular, just as insignificant. There was a time when the act had made sense, when for sentimentality’s sake I could say that I was making love, but what was I really doing here? Only one thing: each time I drove myself into Reina, I was putting in another nail in Mié’s coffin, burying someone I loved by fucking another I cared less and less for each day.

“I want you to come into my mouth,” she said after yet another monumental “fuck you, Yumi” orgasm.

“What?”

Gasping for air, but not quite ready to give up the fight, she repeated with some difficulty what she had said and for her sake, I acquiesced.

7

The next day at work Yumi apologized sheepishly for having woken me and promised never to go by my place again uninvited. Not that I would ever invite her, but that was beside the point.

I told her not to worry about it then offered to take her out the following evening. I didn’t want to, but I felt I owed it to her for the way I had behaved the last time we had gone out. Besides, she had left her birthday present at my front door and, no matter how irritating I found her, I didn’t have the heart to open her present without her. She flashed her Chicklet teeth at me, and agreed to wait around in the office until I was done.

For expediency’s sake, we went to an awful Italian restaurant a few blocks away from our office. God only knows how it had managed to keep from going bankrupt.

I brought along Yumi’s present of wine and glasses. There would be no more returning to my apartment blind drunk and horny tonight. No, enough unspoken damage had already taken place. So, I took the bottle out of the bag, looked at it and smiled. It was one that I liked, one I must have mentioned to her though didn’t remember when. She had, no doubt, jotted the name down and gave it a starring role in her scheme to woo me. Returning the bottle to its bag, I thanked her.

“I, I, I thought it would be nice if we might go somewhere and drink it, um, together,” she said.

“Yes, that would be nice, but . . .” But, then I had no intention of letting that happen. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not in a million years. “It’s been a long day . . . I’m tired. It would be a waste to drink it tonight.”

Once she realized her plan was starting to crumble she grew as dark as the heavy black clouds in the evening sky outside. I no longer had the energy nor the desire to try to cheer her up, not when she’d been, as Reina often reminded me, an insufferable bitch.

We finish our dinner in silence, and, after splitting the bill, we walk out into the humid night and head towards the subway station. At the entrance, she pauses before descending the stairs, looks up at me and asks the question that she has been eager to ask since that awful night at my apartment.

“What do you think of me?”

I inhale the thick air. My arms are sticky with sweat, my back soaked through the shirt. The rainy season started a week ago according to the Meteorological Agency, but today is the first day you can really feel it.

I look away from Yumi, out at the soft halos around the streetlamps caused by the humidity. A year ago, I was so deeply in love, now I am so far from it. I don’t like this Yumi, and not just for the bad teeth, the acne, or the girdle. I don’t like her because in a way she reminds me of myself, forlorn and groping for anything to believe in, anything to give her hope that her heart isn’t irreversibly broken. I search the heavy mist for the words that hurt the least, but the trouble is they all hurt if they are at all truthful, and she needs to hear the truth.

“Yu-chan, I’m sorry, but . . . to be honest . . . there’s . . . nothing . . . in here for you.” I touch my chest for effect. There used to be a beat there, but now there’s only a dead, cold hollow calm. “I really appreciate how you feel for me and the kindness you have shown me, but, but . . . I’m not in love with you. And frankly, . . . I don’t think I ever will be.”

Tears collect around her eyes, then start to fall, that all too familiar stream of mascara and foundation trickling slowly down her cheeks. She smiles, but it’s not the kind of smile that you’d ever want to see.

“I’m sorry, Yu-chan.”

She shakes her head, and waves me off as I step towards her. She no longer wants to have anything to do with me, or my sympathy. Without saying goodbye, she turns and descends the stairs. No hug, no friendly kiss on the cheek. She’s gone. Then the tide comes rushing in, washing my ankles and knees and engulfing me with the chill I feel every time the loneliness is palpable.

As I head for my apartment, the heavens open up and the rain falls. It falls so hard that it no longer seemed to be falling, becoming instead a solid wall two hundred yards thick of water that I have to swim through to get back to my apartment. In the two minutes it takes to get home I get so thoroughly wet that there’s not a dry corner on my body. My shoes are soaked through to the socks, the socks soaked through to the skin and undressing is like peeling gauze from a fresh wound. Everything is sopping wet with Yumi’s tears.

[1] Literally, “sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry . . .”