The Long Highway Pt. 36

Hiroko translated

The police visited our apartment while I was out on Saturday. They were looking into a crime committed in the neighborhood. Mitchell said that though I wasn't there, the police walking around the apartment while talking could feel my presence. My photo is on the wall.And that he felt their surprise at seeing he, an American, was married to a woman like me- Japanese, that is.

Saturday night Mitchell's brother Thomas and his wife Josephine stayed over. They went out early to get pastries for breakfast. Mitchell and I were still in bed when they left and we made love, thinking they would be gone long enough. But in the middle they returned. The front door of the apartment was opened. Mitchell's brother could see us through the partially open bedroom door- we hadn't closed it, thinking we had time. I was on top of Mitchell. He said he'd liked looking at my body, "relishing" it and heard his brother say to his wife, "They're up." He hadn't realized yet what we were doing in the bedroom. I didn't realize as quickly as Mitchell that we were in sight of Thomas and I didn't stop what we were doing, rising and falling on him. Mitchell ended it, quickly stilled me and scooted me off. Then he and his brother went out to pick up something he and Josephine had forgotten. They talked, Mitchell told me later, about our marriage. He also said that while we were making love or just before when he was enjoying looking at my body he looked forward to taking more photographs. Maybe the police seeing the one on the wall in the living room had given him the idea. In that picture I'm wearing a blue lightweight jacket, a windbreaker and my hair is swept to one side. Half the image is steeped in shadow, which make the colors darker, lend a mysterious note, a resonance, so that the moment it records seems to extend beyond that time and place.

Thomas is older than Mitchell and talked to him on his walk about his marriage, how on a clothes shopping trip he had watched his wife Josephine lean toward a clothes rack and he had seen that though she'd had a child (from her husband before him) her body was still in good shape, her sides slim, curved. He told Mitchell he'd felt like rejoicing. They were talking about the women in their lives and Mitchell described a time he'd gone with me to a Korean clothing store, how the bright colors of Korea (brighter than those used by Japanese- we prefer more subtle tones) and sheer fabrics had delighted him. They talked about the surprises they found in their relations with women.

Having Mitchell's brother Thomas and Josephine stay here, sleeping on our living room sofa, reminded me of an experience from my past that I've never told you about.

I was nineteen and spending a weekend at the design college where I'd just begun studying. A group of us were invited to sleep over two nights while attending orientation workshops.

I slept on a futon in a common area. No one else was there. Early in the morning one of the teachers came and joined me. Jun-san was tall, dark, slim, with a body like a board and longish hair that gave him an artistic look- artistic but very virile, sensitive but not soft. He had a long jaw, narrow face, slightly beady eyes that seemed to look down on you. Anyway, they were narrow, a light brown that seemed suffused with light of outdoors in nature, like moonlight on a lake. I'd met him during the first day of the seminar, only exchanged introductions.

He was available as a mentor, student advisor but I was in a different department. He taught drawing.

He must have been thirty-five. I checked later. He was thirty-eight.

He told me he'd recently run a marathon on a wet summer day and that he was good at fixing computers, if I ever needed help.

He said even if he couldn't be my student advisor and I wasn't in one of his classes, he'd like to see my artwork sometime.

"I mean when you're famous," he said.

I appreciated his joking tone, saw he was trying not to be pushy.

"That would be too long a wait," I said. Maybe I flirted.

I remember his hard beard stubble and smell of sleep.

He'd joked with another member of the faculty there that I seemed to him the coolest, most composed of students, even though I was new.

I didn't have any special feelings about him then, positive or negative.

He seemed kindly. I didn't know what was roiling inside him.

I didn't have much experience of men. You could say he took advantage. I never expected someone in his position to do what he did. I trusted that teachers only thought of students as students, didn't imagine they had other feelings.

He laughed in his rumbling deep voice as he asked me to cede him space on the futon. He said it was too early to get up. He had already but seeing that futon couldn't resist the impulse to rest a while longer.

"Just five minutes," he said.

"How much time is left?" I asked. We had all been advised to get up by seven twenty to be ready for the first event of the morning.

"An hour," Jun said. "A little less."

I moved over and he lay beside me. Getting comfortable, he draped an arm over my back. I was facing away from him. His hand rested in free space but the bottom of his thumb touched my breast, just lightly, as if by accident, but I could feel it and so of course could he.

Thumb bumped.

His hand, like the rest of him, was long and strong and wiry but was very gentle at first.

We turned toward each other, not sleeping only resting, as we knew we couldn't stay there long.

It just happened.

He moved his hand to my lower back and scratched gently with his fingernails, round and round. It felt good. To him too, I know, because he next reached to my hand and put it on his pants front. He placed his own hand over mine and we just lay like that a while.

Soon he removed his hand, leaving mine where it was, on him, and returned his to my back to scratch some more. I wasn't moving my hand so he used his muscles to move his penis under it, that way bringing motion he wanted.

He brought his other hand back near my breasts as before but this time didn't make the same effort to control himself. He reached his hand to my breast down the front of the white cotton undershirt I was wearing. He slid his fingers in the cleft between my breasts, space deepened by my position, lying on my side, and explored the shape of my bust. I felt his penis become really hard then.

"It's after time," I said. I saw a clock on the far side of the room, which had been difficult to see in the dim dawn light earlier.

"Yes," Jun said, his big tall, long body stiff beside me. He had an especially long torso and the dark blue shirt he wore showed it. The shirt color wasn't navy blue, a greenish blue, of outdoors, nature. His long hair also made him look natural, free like an artist.

"Did you know?" I asked.

We were meant to have gotten up ten minutes before.

"Yes," he said. He was the authority, in charge, I the student, yet rising late didn't concern him. That surprised me but only a little, considering the circumstances. He was reacting as a person not a teacher.

"Let's go to my bedroom," he said.

I didn't show my surprise. And we went. His apartment was in an ivy-covered building just across the way.

"I have to use the bathroom first."

I'm sure he touched himself while waiting for me.

"Just five minutes," he said as he had when he came to the futon before.

He pulled his underpants off when I came into his bed, and I touched his penis directly. He scratched my back with his fingernails again, this time exploring more widely and lower, past the waist of my pajama trousers.

"Your back's going to be red," he said, with his rumbling low-volume laugh. From his fingernails scoring, he meant.

He brought his hand to my breasts, but unlike before from the outside, through the white undershirt, gripped the soft fabric between his fingertips and pulled it against my skin, caressing indirectly. He was both sensitive and forceful, I felt again.

We kissed and he bit my ear as I caressed him intently, holding not just his shaft but beneath them, the place where the semen is made. I moved all of it with my hand.

He extended his arm down my belly to my bush.

"What?" I asked, with humor.

He gripped my pubic mound and moved it in a circle and dropped his fingers inside me, where I was wet.

I thought the smell would embarrass me but it didn't with him.

My pajama pants came off.

I gave a moan and that encouraged him.

He said he wanted to use his mouth, but saw I was so excited and didn't want to break that.

He worked me up to a fever.

When I finally pulled his hand out of the way he wanted to continue.

"I orgasmed," I said.

It had happened faster than he expected.

"So you do have sexual desire," he said.

"Of course!" I was moaning, panting, feeling peace. He was still gently caressing me.

Remember he'd joked about how cool, dispassionate I'd seemed. He laughed now as if that was a facade he'd broken.

We lay on our backs.

"Five more minutes," he said, for the third time, each not really meaning it.

"Can you just use your hand?" he asked directly.

"Of course!"

It had seemed we were about to get up but he wanted more and I understood.

My using my hand was really enough for him. He didn't push for anything else.

And I did it, building speed, up and down, until he spouted. I looked at how much.

"I come a lot these days," he said.

And we got up and went about our days separately and never talked of that morning again.