The Long Highway Pt. 15

"I don't know if you liked the thing I sent and my message. I think you did. Anyway, I look forward to our conversation tonight."

"Who was that?" Akemi said, rushing to her phone to switch it off.

It made the room seem to take on an amber color, the color of that voice.

You know how one note, one voice, one message can change everything? Everything stays the same but is changed. My living room- our living room- was then. I told myself it was nothing, like trying to wipe a film away from my eyes.

When I confronted her, gently, Akemi admitted Nelson and she carried on a flirtation by text. She confessed. There was no other way out. She'd probably have preferred to say nothing, but she said more in order to say less. To forestall questions and give herself time to think of a defense strategy, she talked a lot, as she usually doesn't.

She told me that she'd written him jokingly that his penis reminded her of the Empire State Building. "So beautiful at the top."

Jokingly?

She said they didn't make buildings now with the artfulness they did then.

She was paying her respects to Nelson's status as an elder statesman in the art world, she said.

She said she'd heard the workers used to sign their names to the constructions, around the building's carved Art Deco spire, she said, and showed me a photo she'd found that had inspired her comments, of the thing thrusting through the clouds. I looked at her laptop screen she'd tilted open. The shot must have been taken on a misty day or even in the rain, and it did look impressive. Such power.

An extraordinary image, shot though a crevice between buildings so you could see almost the entire structure, the dense base and the long striated shaft, carved hard top, upper reaches where the exuberant beauty and durable strength reach their apotheosis.

I felt jealousy for Akemi raging through my loins and wanted to thrust in her wet- rainy- weather, up through the clouds and over the mists.

She said the idea had come to her, she'd looked up the Empire State Building, because she'd been in a midtown high-rise during the day, another elegant building from the same era. There'd been a wait for the elevator and when people got on they were friendly, sociable as passengers usually aren't for a lift ride. It was excitement about the place, being in that building rich in aesthetics and history, that had brought them out of themselves, she thought. They wanted to celebrate or at least acknowledge their feelings with others who shared them.

Yeah, Akemi was nothing if not talkative then, deliberately or not, putting Nelson's words into the past, out of the picture, with each she spoke.

A woman got on the elevator last with an elderly man and she kissed him.

"I hope this is the right elevator," she said, addressing the crowd behind her with a smile, seeing they'd been watching. The pair's late entrance had occasioned a momentary delay no one seemed to mind.

"I hope he's the right man," someone said in return.

"He is. He's my father."

"Oh. I guess you do look alike."

Both blond, the man sandy-haired, tousle-haired.

"Actually, he's my father in a play," the woman said. She was an actor and they were working together.

The man was in his forties and had a handsome look, only not of a leading man but of a character actor, a type from the era, the one when the Empire State Building and others like it went up, the thirties or forties. An urbane look.

That's the impression I took from Akemi's description. You know the type? What's a name? Charles Laughton?

I still think missing her father was part of why she liked Nelson, and maybe me too.

Akemi repeated she felt the excitement of the city, of all the citizens who came here to create their dreams. The freshness emanated from the group of strangers in the elevator. Like dogs who've come in from a spring rain and shiver and spray moisture.

"You have charisma," someone said to the actor when she heard her expressing doubts about her ability to the male counterpart. Their conversation was audible to all.

"You really do," said the third party.

The actress thanked her and began talking at length about her approach to her field and herself, personal qualities she considered assets and others she felt she had to work on.

"Okay. Stop there," said the passenger whose ear was being bent. She meant that she had reached her floor and had to get off. "Enough charisma," she added, friendly, and the actress responded in kind, not offended in the least, still sociable like everyone on the lift, took the point, made a gesture of zipping her lips and prepared to step aside as the door opened. It was sleek, incised brass plating, like silk, Akemi said. She notices things.

The moment was a funny and good one, she concluded. She said she'd liked the people, felt included.

Akemi was in a strange mood, ebullient, from Nelson's phone message, from my overhearing it? Talking so much to cover it?

She spoke of when she'd just arrived in the city, her first day. She knows I'm writing about the period before we married. She'd gone with two friends to the beach and they'd played a game and she'd dozed off and when she woke the friends were still playing. It was competitive, a fight for space (very Japanese in that way- if you think, for example of "go" or sumo) and were wrestling.

"You're still doing it?" Akemi asked.

"Yes."

"Maybe it's time to stop." The pair seemed to have reached a stalemate, were locked together leaning into each other, their feet planted in the sand. Neither would win.

"I think you're right," one of the friends said and they relaxed.

"How long were you doing it?" Akemi asked. Having fallen asleep, she'd lost track of time, and looking at the sky hadn't helped in the country she'd just come to where it was twelve or thirteen hours earlier than at home.

"About twenty minutes."

"That's pretty long," Akemi said. She told me her friends' faces were red from the exertion. They weren't all the way red, just had red patches at their cheeks.

Twenty minutes of that is a lot of exercise," she said as they wiped themselves off. "And you're still friendly with each other. If I fought for twenty minutes, I think I'd be angry. Even if it's just a game."

New York seemed to her an environment that begat good relations between people. I told her she wasn't necessarily right. She acknowledged her opinion had changed over time but the essential first impression remained fairly intact.

I've always thought of the city as a place that foments anger, contention. But what do I know? I've always lived here, have little basis for comparison.

She checked the time as they left the beach and saw it was still only nine a.m. She had the rest of the day to get through on jet lag. All those hours seemed a big challenge, monumental one. Like the Empire State Building? Like Nelson's penis? She said she still wasn't sure she was going to like it here. Would every day feel so long. She wondered about the hard buildings without relief, that too-clear sunlight.

They'd come back to the apartment where one of the friends lived and she took a shower and thought of leaving, though both friends expected her to stay with them through the day. She'd wanted freedom, to break out of what she was feeling, both there yet not there.

The building was a high rise. The friend who called the place home was talking on the phone when Akemi arrived in the lobby. She saw he was well-ensconced in the life here as she wasn't, heard him talking with a work companion about the meaning of a word. He smiled at Akemi passing on her way to the elevator.

She wasn't done with the account of the day. She said at the beach she'd seen a parrot, a green one, and someone playing with it at intervals, coming as she dozed to the side of a beach entrance where the tropical bird stood by a partly tumbled over wooden-post fence loosely held together with wire, the wood dried and colorless (I've told you she's observant, and no wonder- she paints).

That person went away and other birds (ordinary seagulls, I suppose), came around and Akemi worried whether the parrot would be all right. The birds approaching were bigger and might bother it. So she went through the sandy cement path opening to the beach to look for someone to ask. In the ocean on her right appeared a military boat moored just past the surf, a big thing (like the Empire State Building? lol), and on the sand to her left at a slight distance stood a woman in a white sailor's uniform, and when asked she confirmed that the green bird was hers.

"And it lives on the boat?"

"It does."

Akemi thought that was great. She had a good feeling, she said, about the woman in her military outfit with gold braids, her dark hair tucked under her cap, how it trailed down her neck, just a little. The tightness of her look impressed her.

"Looked Japanese," she agreed after I'd raised the idea. That might have been part of why she liked her.

Were they two lesbians liking each other at that moment in the sun?

"I saw you before, sleeping," the sailor said. "And I hoped we didn't bother you." Playing with the parrot, she might have meant.

"You did?" Akemi asked.

"Yes, I knew you were sleeping because you made a sound."

Akemi said she felt embarrassed, though the Navy or Coast Guard woman clearly was friendly in turn (I could imagine that).

Akemi spoke at last about going to a gynecologist- in this country- and how he'd talked to her with his hand in her- his hand back in a second time, as if to illustrate what he'd been saying; he'd already finished but came again, saying, "Well, let me show you what I'm talking about," and she'd said, "You're a good doctor," and the moment was sexual, she told me, and "it felt good," she added, covering her mouth with a blush at her frank remark.

Back at the time Akemi was recounting, I wasn't even helping her yet with writing assignments for her college courses as I would later. We didn't meet until months after that. I know almost nothing about her life in New York then. It's a hole in my experience where she's concerned and not by far the only.

I could imagine her voice when she'd said, "You're a good doctor." Husky, a purr, soft. What else had she said?

Yes, she was in a strange mood and so was I by the time she calmed down. Horny? She wanted to make up to me for the phone message and what was behind it.