“Be that as it may, but isn’t the fact that you and I meet like this spreading through your jungle grapevine?”
“I doubt it,” she said in a quiet voice. “First of all, I’m very careful that it doesn’t. And second, you’re a little different from Mr. Menshiki.”
“Meaning…,” I said, translating this into words that were easy to understand, “…that there are things about him that lend themselves to rumor, but not with me.”
“We should be thankful for that,” she said cheerily.
* * *
—
After my little sister died all kinds of things started to go wrong. The metalworking company my father operated went downhill, and he was so busy dealing with that he hardly ever came home. The atmosphere at home became strained. Long, heavy silences reigned over the house. It hadn’t been that way when my sister was still alive. I wanted to get away from it all, and got even more absorbed in painting as a way to escape. Eventually I decided to attend art school and major in painting. My father was dead set against it. You can’t earn a decent living painting, he argued. And I don’t have the money to help raise an artist. The two of us argued about it. My mother intervened to smooth things over, and though somehow I was able to attend art school, my father and I never did reconcile.
If only my sister hadn’t died, I sometimes thought. If she’d lived, my family would have been so much happier. Her sudden disappearance made our family fall apart. Our home became a site where people lashed out and hurt each other. I felt helpless, knowing I could never fill in the hole my sister had left behind.
I stopped drawing pictures of her. After I entered art school the things I wanted to paint were phenomena and objects that didn’t have intrinsic meaning. Abstract paintings, in other words. Things in which all sorts of meanings were encoded, where new semantic meaning arose from the interweaving of one sign and another. I plunged into a world that aimed at that type of completeness, and was able to breathe normally for the first time in forever.
Creating those kinds of paintings, though, didn’t lead to any decent jobs. I graduated, but as long as I stuck to abstract painting my father was right—I had no hope of earning any money. So in order to make a living (I’d already left my parents’ home and needed to earn money for rent and food) I was compelled to take on portrait work. By doing a conventional job, painting those utilitarian paintings, I was somehow able to survive as an artist.
And now I was about to paint a portrait of Wataru Menshiki. The Wataru Menshiki who lived in the white mansion on top of the mountain across the way. The white-haired man the neighbors had heard all sorts of rumors about, this clearly intriguing person. He had picked me out, hired me for a huge fee to paint his portrait. But what I discovered was that at this point I wasn’t even able to paint a portrait. Even that kind of conventional, utilitarian art was beyond me. I’d truly become hollow, an empty shell.
We should wordlessly go to visit her, pushing our way through the lush green grass. This random thought struck me. If we could, how truly wonderful that would be.
11
THE MOONLIGHT SHONE BEAUTIFULLY ON EVERYTHING
The silence woke me. That happens sometimes. A sudden sound will cut the silence, waking a person, and sometimes a sudden silence will cut through sounds, waking you.
I shot awake and glanced over at my bedside clock. The digital display read 1:45. After a moment I remembered that it was 1:45 a.m. on Saturday night, or rather early Sunday morning. Earlier that afternoon I had spent time with my married lover in this bed. She went home before evening, I’d had a simple dinner, read for a while, and gone to sleep after ten. I’m generally a sound sleeper, and don’t wake up until the morning light wakes me. So having my sleep interrupted like that in the middle of the night was unusual.
I lay there in the darkness wondering why I’d awakened at this hour. It was a typical, quiet night. The nearly full moon was a huge round mirror floating in the sky. The scenery on earth was whitish, as if washed with lime. But nothing else seemed out of the ordinary. I half sat up and listened carefully. And finally realized something was different from usual. It was too quiet. The silence was too deep. It was a fall night, yet no insects were chirping. Since the house was built in the mountains, after sunset the insects invariably started their ear-splitting chirping, a chorus that went on until late at night. (It really surprised me to learn this, since until I lived here I always thought they only chirped early in the evening.) The sound was so piercing it made me think that insects had conquered the world. But this night, when I woke up, there was not a single screech or chirp. It was disconcerting.
Once awake, I found it hard to get back to sleep. I reluctantly crawled out of bed, and threw a light cardigan over my pajama top. I went to the kitchen, poured myself some Scotch, added a few ice cubes from the ice maker, and drank it. I went onto the terrace and gazed at the lights of the houses through the woods. Everyone seemed to be asleep, no lights on anywhere in any houses. All I saw was a scattering of tiny security lights. The area around Menshiki’s house across the valley, too, was surrounded by darkness. And like before, there were no insects chirping. Had something happened to them?
After a while I heard a sound I wasn’t used to. Or perhaps felt like I heard it. A very faint sound. If the insects had been chirping as loudly as usual I probably never would have caught it. But the profound silence that reigned allowed it to reach me, though barely. I held my breath and strained my ears. It wasn’t the chirp of any insects. Not a naturally occurring sound. It was the sound some implement or tool might make, a kind of jingling sound. The sound a bell, or something close to it, might make.
There would be a pause, then the sound. A deep silence, then that sound ringing out a few times, then deep silence once more. As if someone were patiently sending out an encoded message. But it wasn’t repeated at regular intervals. Sometimes the silence in between rings was longer, sometimes shorter. And it didn’t ring the same number of times. I couldn’t tell if their regularity was intentional or capricious. At any rate, it was such a faint sound that if I hadn’t focused and listened hard I wouldn’t have caught it. But once aware of it, in the deep silence of the middle of the night, with the moonlight so unnaturally bright, that unidentified sound irretrievably ate its way into my awareness.
I was flustered, wondering what it could be, then decided to just go outside and see. I wanted to trace the source of that mysterious sound. Someone, somewhere, was ringing something or other. I’m not bold. But going out into the dark night alone then didn’t frighten me. Curiosity won out over my fears. And the weirdly bright moonlight might have encouraged me, too.
With an oversized flashlight in my hand, I unlocked the front door and stepped outside. A single light above the entrance threw out a yellowish tint. A swarm of flying insects was drawn to that light. I stood there, ears perked up, trying to see what direction that sound was coming from. It really did sound like a bell, but not an ordinary one. It had a deeper, dull, uneven ring. Maybe it was some special percussion instrument. But what was it, and why would someone be ringing it in the middle of the night? The only residence in the vicinity was the house I was living in. If indeed someone nearby was ringing that bell, it meant they were trespassing.