When I got home, I went straight to the studio, sat down on the ancient wooden stool (the stool Tomohiko Amada must have used when he was working), and studied Killing Commendatore hanging there on the wall. I often did that when I wasn’t sure what to do—in fact, I studied it endlessly. It was a painting I never tired of, no matter how often I looked at it. It should have been displayed in a museum as a prized example of Japanese art, but instead, it graced the wall of this small studio, and I was the only one who could enjoy it. Before me, it had been hidden in the attic, unseen by anyone.
It’s calling out to me, Mariye had said. Like a caged bird crying to be set free.
The more I studied the painting the more I realized Mariye had hit the nail square on the head—something was desperately struggling to escape that enclosed space. It longed for a place less confined, for freedom. It was the strength of that will that gave the painting its impact. Whether we understood the meaning of the bird and the cage or not.
* * *
—
I felt the urge to paint something that day. Powerfully. I could feel it mounting within me. Like the evening tide coming in. It was still too early, though, to work on Mariye’s portrait. That could wait until next Sunday. And I didn’t feel like going back to The Man with the White Subaru Forester either. As Mariye had pointed out, a dangerous force lurked beneath its surface.
A new canvas sat on the easel, ready for Mariye’s portrait. I sat on the stool studying it for a long time. Yet nothing came to me—no image of what to paint. The blank stayed blank. What should be my subject matter? After a while, at last, the answer rose to my mind.
I stepped away from the easel and took out my big sketchbook. Then I sat on the floor, crossed my legs, leaned back against the wall, and began to draw a chamber of stone in pencil. Not my usual soft pencil but a much harder one. It was a sketch of the strange pit we had found under the pile of rocks in the woods. I had just come from there, so it was fresh in my mind, and I rendered it in as much detail as possible. I drew the intricately fitted wall of stones. I drew the ground around the pit, and the beautiful pattern of the wet fallen leaves. The stand of pampas grass that had once hidden the pit lay flattened by the backhoe.
As I sketched, the eerie sensation that I was merging with the pit returned. It wanted me to draw it. Accurately, and in great detail. In response, my hand moved without conscious guidance. It was a pure act of creation, and it brought with it a kind of joy. When I returned to my senses, I realized that a length of time had passed (I had no idea how much), and that the page in my notebook was covered with pencil lines.
I went to the kitchen, gulped down several glasses of cold water, reheated the coffee, and carried a cup back to the studio. I placed the open sketchbook on the easel and sat down to take a second look, this time from farther away. There was the pit in the woods, in realistic detail. It looked somehow alive. Even more alive than the real thing. I got off the stool and examined it up close, then studied it again from a different angle. Only then did it hit me how much it looked like a woman’s genitals. The clump of pampas grass flattened by the backhoe resembled her pubic hair to a T.
I shook my head and smiled a wry smile. I mean, how Freudian can you get? I imagined some egghead critic fulminating on the drawing’s psychological implications: “This black, gaping hole, so reminiscent of a woman’s solitary genitalia, must be understood functionally, as a symbolic representation of the artist’s memories and unconscious desires.” Or something of the sort. Seriously!
Yet try as I might, I couldn’t get the connection between the strange circular pit in the woods and a woman’s sex out of my head. So when the phone rang a short while later, I had a hunch it would be my married girlfriend.
And it was.
“Hi,” she said. “Some free time just opened up, and I was wondering if I might stop by.”
I glanced at my watch. “Sounds good. Let’s have lunch together.”
“I’ll pick up something simple on the way,” she said.
“Great idea. I’ve been working since morning, so I haven’t prepared anything.”
She ended the call. I made the bed, picked my clothes up off the floor, folded them, and returned them to the chest of drawers. I washed the breakfast dishes in the sink and put them away.
Then I went to the living room, placed my usual record—Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, conducted by Georg Solti—on the turntable, and read on the sofa while I waited for her to arrive. What kind of book was Shoko Akikawa reading, I wondered? What could have so captivated her?
My girlfriend showed up at twelve fifteen. Her red Mini pulled up in front of my house and she got out, a paper bag from the grocery store in her arms. Although a quiet rain was still falling, she carried no umbrella. Wearing a yellow vinyl raincoat with a hood, she walked quickly to my door. I met her there, took the bag, and brought it to the kitchen. She removed the raincoat, exposing the brilliant green turtleneck underneath. Beneath the sweater were two very attractive bulges. Her breasts weren’t as large as Shoko’s, but they suited me just fine.
“Have you been at it all morning?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s not a commission. I felt like drawing, so I came up with something on my own, just for fun.”
“Just passing the time, huh?”
“Yeah, a bit like that.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Not all that much.”
“That’s good,” she said. “Why don’t we eat afterward, then?”
“Fine by me,” I said.
* * *
—
“You were awfully passionate today. Is there a special reason?” she asked. It was afterward, and we were lying in bed.
“I wonder,” I said. What I might have said was, maybe it was because I spent the whole morning madly sketching a strange six-foot-wide hole in the ground and, partway through, my mind made a connection between the hole and a woman’s vagina, which must have turned me on…But I couldn’t.
“It was because I haven’t seen you for so long,” I said instead.
“You’re sweet,” she said, tracing a line on my chest with her fingertips. “But be honest—sometimes don’t you want a younger woman?”
“No, I’ve never thought about that.”
“Really?”
“Not once,” I said. I was being truthful. Our sexual relationship was pure pleasure for me, and I had no desire to seek out anyone else. (My desire for Yuzu, of course, was of a wholly different order.)
I decided not to tell her about Mariye Akikawa. If she learned that a beautiful thirteen-year-old girl was modeling for me, it would only spark her jealousy. It seemed a woman at any age—thirteen, forty-one, you name it—felt she was facing a delicate time in her life. This was one thing my modest experience with the opposite sex had taught me.
“Still,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s strange, the way women and men hook up?”
“Strange in what way?”
“I mean, look at us. We haven’t known each other that long, yet here we are lying together naked, making love like this. Completely vulnerable, with no sense of shame. Don’t you think it’s weird?”
“Maybe you’re right,” I murmured.
“Try to think of it as a game. Maybe not only that, but a kind of game all the same. Otherwise what I’m saying won’t make any sense.”
“Okay, I’ll try,” I said.
“A game has to have rules, right?”
“Yeah, you need those.”
“Baseball, soccer, all the sports have a thick rule book, right, where the rules are written down to the tiniest detail, and then umpires and players have to memorize them all. Without that, the game can’t take place. Isn’t that so?”
“You’re absolutely right.”
She paused, waiting for the image to sink in.
“So what I’m trying to say is, have we ever sat down and discussed the rules of this game that we’re playing? Have we?”
I thought for a moment. “Possibly not,” I said finally.
“Yet despite that, we are playing the game by a set of hypothetical rules. Right?”
“When you put it that way, I guess you have a point.”
“So this is what I think,” she said. “I’m playing the game according to my set of rules. And you’re playing according to yours. The two of us instinctively respect each other’s rules. As long as the two sets don’t conflict and mess things up, we can go on like this without a hitch. Don’t you agree?”