“Nope,” I said.
“I tested my idea on several other women. Took head shots and created left-and right-side composites on the computer. That made it even clearer. That women literally have two faces. Once I knew that, I found I couldn’t figure out women at all. For example, if I was with a woman and we were having sex, I didn’t know if it was her right side or her left that I was embracing. If it was the right side, then where had the left side gone—what was it doing, and what was it thinking?—and if it was the left side, then what was the right side thinking? Once I reached that point, things got really messy. Get what I’m saying?”
“Not completely, but I can see that it must be messy.”
“You bet. Really messy.”
“Did you try it on men’s faces?”
“Yeah, I did. But it didn’t work the same way. The only drastic changes were with women’s faces.”
“Maybe you should go see a psychologist or therapist about this,” I said.
Masahiko sighed. “You know, I’ve always believed myself to be a totally normal sort of guy.”
“That could be a dangerous belief.”
“To believe that I’m normal?”
“I think it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote that one should never trust people who claim they’re normal. It’s in one of his novels.”
Masahiko thought about that for a moment. “So even a commonplace man is irreplaceable?”
“I guess that’s another way of putting it.”
Masahiko thought for a while, his hands on the steering wheel.
“At any rate,” he said, “could you try it just once and see?”
“You know I’ve been a portrait painter for a long time. So I think I’m more skilled than most when it comes to examining faces. You could even say I’m an expert at it. But I’ve never thought that the difference between the right and left sides reflected a disparity in personality. Not once.”
“But almost all the subjects you painted were men, correct?”
Masahiko had a point. I’d never been commissioned to paint a woman. For whatever reason, my portraits were all of men. The only exception was Mariye Akikawa, and she was more child than woman. And I hadn’t finished her portrait, either.
“Men and women are different,” Masahiko insisted. “Completely.”
“So then let me ask you,” I said. “Are you claiming this personality difference on the right and left sides applies to almost all women?”
“Yeah, that’s my conclusion.”
“So then do you find yourself attracted to one side or the other? Or do you find you like both sides less?”
Masahiko pondered this question for a moment. “No,” he said at last. “That’s not how it works. It’s not that I prefer one side to the other. That I find one side cheerful and the other gloomy, or that one side is prettier. The problem is at another level: it’s simply that the two sides are different. It’s that sheer fact that shakes me up. Sometimes it scares me.”
“It sounds to me like a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder,” I said.
“It sounds like that to me too,” Masahiko said. “Just listening to myself. But it’s the truth. I ask you, just check it out for yourself.”
I promised him I would. But I had no intention of following through. That could only add to my troubles. My life was messy enough as it was.
* * *
—
Then we talked about Tomohiko Amada. About Tomohiko Amada in Vienna.
“My father said he heard Richard Strauss conduct one of Beethoven’s symphonies,” Masahiko said. “With the Vienna Philharmonic, of course. He said it was out of this world. That’s one of the few stories he told me about his days in Vienna.”
“What else did he say about his time there?”
“Nothing at all remarkable. He mentioned the food, the drink, the music. Stuff like that. He really loved music, you know. That was all he talked about. He never mentioned painting or politics or things of that sort. Or women either.”
Masahiko paused before continuing.
“Maybe someone should write my father’s biography. It could be a really interesting book. But the reality is, no one will ever take a shot at it. Why? Because there’s hardly any personal information out there. My father had no friends, his family members were virtual strangers—he just spent his time shut away by himself on a mountain, painting. His only acquaintances, if you could call them that, were a handful of art dealers. He hardly spoke to anyone. He wrote no letters. So if someone did try to write his biography, they’d have almost nothing to work with. It’s not just that there are a few holes in his life story, it’s that his life is riddled with them. Think of Swiss cheese with more holes than cheese.”
“All he’s leaving behind is his work.”
“You’re right, his paintings and almost nothing else. That’s probably the way he wanted it.”
“And you. You’re a part of his legacy too,” I said.
“Me?” Masahiko looked at me in surprise. Then he turned back to the road. “You’re right there. If I stop to think of it, I’m part of his legacy too. Not a particularly shining part, though.”
“But irreplaceable.”
“True enough. Run of the mill, but nonetheless irreplaceable,” Masahiko said. “You know what I think sometimes? That you should have been Tomohiko Amada’s son. If that were the case, things would have gone so much more smoothly.”
“Give me a break!” I said with a laugh. “No one was fit for that role!”
“Maybe not,” Masahiko said. “But you might have been his spiritual successor, if you can call it that. You’re a lot more qualified in that area than I am—that’s my gut feeling anyway.”
Killing Commendatore popped into my mind. Was that painting something I had “inherited” from Tomohiko Amada? Had he led me to that attic room to discover it? Was he using it to demand something of me?
Deborah Harry was singing “French Kissin’ in the USA” on the car stereo. It was hard to think of less appropriate background music for our conversation.
“I guess it must have been tough having a father like Tomohiko Amada,” I said bluntly.
“I reached a point years ago where I had to make a clean break and move on with my life,” Masahiko said. “Once I had done that, it wasn’t as hard on me as everyone thought. I make a living from art as well, but the scale of my father’s talent and the scale of mine are so dramatically different. When the gap is that huge, it stops being a problem. My father’s fame as an artist doesn’t hurt anymore. What hurts is the kind of human being he was, the fact that until the very end, he never opened up to me, his own son. That he didn’t pass a single bit of information about himself on to me.”
“So he showed nothing of his inner world, even to you?”
“Not a glimpse. His attitude was: ‘I gave you half my DNA, so what more do you want? The rest is up to you.’ But a relationship is based on more than DNA. Right? I never asked him to act as my guide through life. I didn’t demand that. But it still should have been possible to have something like a father-son conversation once in a while. He could have filled me in just a little on what he had experienced, what he thought. Even bits and pieces would have helped.”
I listened quietly to what he had to say.
When we stopped at a long red light, Masahiko took off his dark Ray-Ban sunglasses and wiped them with his handkerchief.
“My guess,” he said, turning in my direction, “is that my father is hiding heavy secrets of some kind, personal secrets he has borne entirely alone and intends to take with him when he drifts from this world. It’s like there’s this metal safe in his heart where he stored them. He locked them all in there, and then he either threw the key away or hid it somewhere. Now he can’t remember where he stashed it.”