I don’t remember how I got the job, really. A lot of things are like that. I suppose it could be said that I was in a slump. Things didn’t seem to have any color in them. A lot of it had to do with this constant, soft pressure in my windpipe, not dissimilar to the buildup after smoking a whole pack of cigarettes. I remember it being there all the time and the doctor saying that I was under a lot of stress. I felt waist-deep in water most of the time. It was rather discouraging.
My boyfriend at the time was this unemployed philosophy graduate called Rob, and the only thing I remember about him was that he smelt of sweat a lot. I can’t recall what I ever saw in him.
Nevertheless, I suppose I must have seen something in Rob because when he invited me to move with him to Santa Barbara that spring I found myself giddy with startling images of summer dresses and palm trees. Both my mother and Maggie thought this was a respectable change. Over the winter they had made quite an enterprise of redecorating my childhood room with soothing pictures of oceanic landscapes and it was bound to seep in, one way or another. It had been an uneasy sort of winter, on the whole. Most of my time was spent either volunteering at special education services downtown or averting my eyes whenever my mother entered the room, trying hide the five sedentary pounds I had gained over Christmas under a series of blankets. To little avail, overall—one January evening my mother abruptly changed my evening snack from sliced apples to sliced cucumbers, and that more than anything frustrated me enough to jog through the heavy chest instead of trying to medicate it away.
All this I can remember, along with the feeling of being very worried at things which seem quite irrelevant in retrospect—lengthy discussions on the declining Californian economy and a general zeitgeist of financial misanthropy, talk of 401(k)s and heatwaves, spreading my clothes out on the bed and deciding which ones were ‘west-appropriate.’ The mood in my house was one of mourning. There was a finality to the partings; Macy Thomas made a lengthy show of throwing a farewell party which involved a teary offering of bracelets. You would think that this year of living at home would have been a footnote compared to the eighteen I’d spent before rushing off to New York for college, but that farewell had had a strong undercurrent of triumph. It was not unlike being a zoo animal. I was more baffled than anything.
My own mood was one of nonchalance. A few weeks before my departure I had come to the realization that I was moving to a place where the number of times Disneyland popped up in conversation was categorically lower, and that cheered me up a fair bit. I had a lot of ice cream and bought myself a nice wide smile. It was all the more funny because in the end I was back in New Jersey before Christmas.
I was in California in May, a smart-looking young woman with an all-new wardrobe and an all-new demeanor, the West Coast freshness, so to say, with all the liveliness and pop music that comes with it. Rob lasted about two weeks. I have this affliction where the thought of calling my parents fills me with a vague shyness that I can only associate with guilt, and despite everything the newfound sunshine was proving to be very therapeutic indeed, so I bottled my reservations and found myself as a housemaid in a small winery town up the county. I had few considerations and even fewer hesitations. What sealed it for me was that they were offering room and board: the pay was low even for servitude, but in my head this was a temporary fixture that preceded the inevitable discovery that I was both the lost daughter and the impending matriarch to a large art deco household. I was young and ditzy, and there was an infinity of newly acquired California evenings—I could do far worse than spend them sipping wine in the countryside.
I don’t remember having met with my employer before securing the appointment, but I must have, because I can’t recall anything in the way of a formal introduction when I picture him. In fact I have little recollection of the period between landing in Santa Barbara and setting up house in the little cottage right next to the Spanish-style villa. I can’t even really remember how I got up there in the first place, because I did not ever own a car when I lived in California, and it was rather lucky that the town was so small that I could walk whatever distances I had to in the interim. The few times I drove that summer it usually had something to do with running errands for my employer in a large Mercedes with a remarkable sunroof that gave me a view into the planes flying overhead, and I was always surprised by how many of them there were even in this patch of land far from anything that could be mistaken for showbiz. He was a stern-looking man called Mr. Imamura, and he was presumably an upper-level executive for some transnational electronics company, Panasonic or the like—I forget the details. His face had the dull quality that came from a lifetime of business meetings but he was all smiles when he saw me. Sometimes he would leer, and ordinarily that was the kind of thing that should offend me, but the way he did it was kind of bemusing, really, and I eventually came to realize that he was not being lecherous so much as disoriented by my startling lack of oriental features. His English, too, was quite poor, and he relied on his son to do the translation.
The rest of the family was so stereotypical that I had to occasionally pinch myself to ensure that there weren’t surreptitious cameras nearby and the whole setup wasn’t one of those reality shows my mother would idly browse while chopping vegetables—this was California, after all. The wife was the standard hoity-toity type with a narcissistic streak who wouldn’t go to sleep so much as consume sedatives till she passed out at night. I usually just referred to her as Imamura-san, or maybe it was -kun, one of those honorifics; her diet seemed to consist solely of painkillers, and though I can’t really recall her showing any sudden spurts of affection she definitely was trying to be nice, in her own strained way. Her most distinctive feature was probably her fingernails, and she gave me these skincare product recommendations that were developed for a far crueler Japanese audience and were hence more effective than any of their American counterparts. I mentioned these to Maggie, later, and we had a lovely time hunting for them in esoteric Brooklyn neighborhoods over the winter. The son was called Kenji but insisted on being called Charlie, instead—somewhat mousy with his Japanese character was limited only to his appearance, having spent all his childhood in posh New England prep schools. He was a good-natured boy with talents mostly in the way of badminton. Unlike with Mr. Imamura I distinctly recall my first impression of Kenji. He was wearing the kind of band T-Shirt and flared jeans that looked very disconcerting outside of strip malls and house parties. I guessed he was a high-school senior, but he turned out to be merely a junior.
There was also a baby daughter, about a year or so of age, and it was partly her for whom I was hired—I was occasionally asked to be her caretaker because the main nanny kept having erratic bouts of sickness and didn’t do particularly well with the sun. The daughter was obviously something of a mistake considering that Mrs. Imamura was ill-equipped to take care of her. I think her name was Mei, or it could have been Himari. I cannot recall much about the baby except for the fact that she activated my maternal instincts and I used to kiss her to sleep, sometimes, and Mrs. Imamura would not know how to react to that exactly. Like her husband, every time she encountered something she didn’t understand she would chalk it up to American social norms. She was a bit careless as a mother but was the kind of person who would respond to imperfections by trying even harder. She really did give herself a hard time, I think. I like to believe sometimes that I admired this quality about her, but mostly I was indifferent to her. I do also remember that she was fond of having more women in the house. Perhaps I am being too cruel to her. She was quite a nice woman on the whole.
It never occurred to me during that time to ask what exactly they were doing there, but after a while it became clear anyway that this whole bit of business was a kind of summer retreat Mr. Imamura had organized to allow his wife to experience some fairer weather and spend some time with their son. I used to sit in my cottage and wonder what exactly were the set of circumstances that would lead to such an enigmatic set of Japanese people to purchase an old Californian dwelling. But I guess California is never far from anyone’s mind. Mr. and Mrs. Imamura would spend most of their time down in the city proper doing some kind of beach-related activity or even just strolling downtown: she had grown a taste for Mexican food and would want any opportunity to get out of the house, and she seemed to think that the baby should be out and about as much as possible. Sometimes they would take me along, too, and encourage me to befriend the other townsfolk, perhaps the ones at the university, but it all seemed too fleeting to me to really register and in the end I never ended up making friends in Santa Barbara. Eventually I began to decline these visits into civilization and would instead spent most of my time by the house with Kenji. But all that came later.
It was about two weeks into my stay that I first saw her. I was up on the terrace smoking a cigarette—the view was sharp and distant, stretching all across the valley and overlooking the Catholic church while also providing a direct line of sight across the fencing into the neighbor’s garden. It was a beautiful, Japanese-style garden with stone bridges and moss rolling over boulders: a carefully curated image of serenity complete with rolled gravel. I would later find out that the Imamuras had helped their neighbor design and construct it, helping procure the stone lanterns and the tiny tea room at the corner.
But at that moment my eyes were occupied. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen had emerged from the tea room, completely naked; she placed her phone face-down on the floor and leapt onto the sunlounger, closing her eyes and relaxing her body with an effortless grace, facing straight up towards the sky.
Surely if ever there was a person for whom the beaches had been rolled out, for whom the wars had been fought it would be this woman with her poise and her sheer frankness, indifference to the world around her. She was almost like an eighth color. My face went red with a curious series of emotions: first the flush of shock, then the green of jealousy, then finally the blush of desire. I had never seen anything like her. I’d like to tell you what she looked like, but I can only say that she was distinctly older, perhaps mid-40s, and she had this command about her which gave the impression that the moon only happened to revolve around the Earth because she was on it. It was not even a choice of mine to be there, onlooking—was it my choice to breathe the air I was standing in? Nevertheless, after a few minutes of staring I felt faint, and retreated to my cottage.
By night the woman had made no attempt to exit my mind, and I passively brought up the question of the Japanese garden to the Imamuras while having dinner. Mr. Imamura lit up at this line of inquiry, and began chattering quickly to Kenji, who had turned quite red and was idly swimming his fork around in his soup.
‘He’s asking you if you’ve heard of the concept of shakkei,’ he said.
‘No. What is that?’
‘I guess it would translate as “borrowed scenery.” It’s this principle of garden design, which involves incorporating elements of the surrounding landscape into the garden. The greatest gardens are all about this borrowed scenery. If you’ll notice, then the stones are more spread out than high, intended to mimic the structure of the Santa Ynez valley. Apparently it was designed by some woman called Fumiko Yamada. She’s a celebrity or something, I don’t know. Dad is obsessed with these gardens.’
‘I see. Are the neighbors Japanese, too?’
‘Dutch,’ said Mrs. Imamura. ‘They are Dutch. From Europe. Mister Katz-u, is it Kenji?’ Her accent made the name seem foreign and unfamiliar.
‘Katz,’ he corrected.
‘Hai,’ she said. ‘Do you like the soup, Rosanna? It is udon soup. Made specially for you to try.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, with a little curtsy. ‘It’s really very good.’
Dutch. That explained it—the woman seemed almost impossibly tall. I could imagine her in a dress out by brick row-houses that looked as if they were made of candy, deep in Amsterdam. The image was a riveting one. I had never thought of it that way before, but my own scrawny body seemed quite shameful and limiting, all wrong; I suddenly wished to be out by the ocean, away from prying eyes. ‘It’s interesting,’ I said. ‘That they chose to construct this Japanese-style garden. It must be very expensive to maintain in California.’
After a long bit of back-and-forth Mr. Imamura gave a hearty laugh.
‘He says that he works in oil,’ said Kenji.
‘That’s it?’
‘No.’ He hesitated. I raised an eyebrow, and he continued. ‘He bought it for his wife. She’s a writer, and as it is she’s somewhat eccentric. She needs totally still environments to write.’
‘Oh. What does she write?’
‘Crime thrillers, I think.’
I nodded, then turned back to Mrs. Imamura. ‘It really is wonderful soup.’
The woman gave a wide, genuine smile, and said something to Kenji, again. He turned towards me. ‘She’s asking if you mind tending to our own garden tomorrow.’
‘Tending? We don’t have a garden.’
He snickered. ‘She’s asking you to mow the lawn.’
Once I was enveloped in the safety of my little cottage I let myself look up more about this mysterious crime author who was so ravishing in form. It turned out that her name was Elaine and that she had quite a following, including several bestsellers. Her most famous book was called Through the Attic and dealt with the captivity of a young woman in a serial killer’s attic for three straight years: I felt that was quite ironic, somehow, though there was no easy map from that situation to my own. In any case, I was disappointed to find that her official publicity photos portrayed her as something more in the vein of admirable rather than the glamorous mage I had seen in the afternoon. It was a lonely feeling, lying out there in my bed. Things were eerily quiet. I lay there for a long while dreading that at any moment the phone might ring and it would end up being my mother, perhaps, or even my father, wondering about my health and breaking this glorious spell of the evening, a reminder of the fact that I used to be someone and would be someone again, once all this was said and done. That is how I used to fall asleep in those days.
I mowed the grounds early in the morning the next day and consequently got most of the afternoon off while the Imamuras and their nanny, an elderly Japanese women whose name eludes me, went to the city as per usual. Rarely if ever were they joined in these forays by Kenji. He seemed to be going through some kind of rebellious phase, as teenagers often do, and much of the discussion around him involved his grades and general lack of ambition. I would have felt quite bad for him if he wasn’t such a non-character. He spent most of his time cooped up in his room, the door of which was fitted with a poster of some heavy metal band or the other and a do not disturb sign he had lifted off a Vermont hotel.
In the afternoon I landed back on the terrace for another smoke, eyes pried in hopes of seeing Elaine in her Japanese garden again. It had been about 4, yesterday, and I was pleased to find that she emerged from inside her villa at about the same time before undressing in the tea room. The event had not been a one-off. As per how light worked I assumed that if I could see her then she would be able to view me, too, but if there was any indication from her side that she was being watched it manifested as obliviousness. I stood there for about an hour, sweating under all the heat while she sunbathed. I could see every inch of her body. When she finally returned inside the surroundings lost most of their color and I lurched back into indifference, performing my chores and musing about how pretty and agreeable the summer was turning out to be. I spent my free time reading the book about the young girl’s captivity; it was available online for a small fee. I mentioned it to the Imamuras—they were thrilled by this development and asked me what I thought of it, and I replied that it was about as good as books were, all things considered.
The rest of that first month fades into routine for me. The days were all the same, and if I try to recall the specifics they appear to me only as snapshots in the mist. More than the details I remember imbibing some of the haughtiness of the household and the haunting, melancholic quality of Elaine Katz and her body. I was torn between wanting to know everything about her and yet remain uncertain as to the faculties of her true behavior. Never once did I discover if she was inhabiting the estate all by herself, for instance, though in hindsight she must have assumed the support of a variety of staff to keep things running; in my mind she was there all alone, pacing the empty, minimally furnished corridors with nude abandon, conjuring dark images of death and decay each time she came across a crevice or spiderweb. Her writing was quite analytical and journalistic, with long passages of factual description. It was only natural that the feelings she wished to convey could not be well-captured through something as blocky as prose. As June proceeded into July my responsibilities towards the baby increased—it seems that she was settling into a sleep cycle—and another source of annoyance came from the fact that she kept appearing and disappearing; it was frustrating to reach the crib only to realize that the mother had taken her out without informing me, requiring me to tend to her in a different room. All this was routine. My off-hours were characterized by spirals of thought and bids to discover more about Elaine’s regimen. After a few weeks, however, I was forced to concede that the only view into the household was through the narrow view into the garden from the terrace, and that the windows themselves were often left with curtains drawn. I remember spending a long time wondering if I actually even wanted to see her in an environment outside the sunbathing ritual even as I was compelled to partake in the attempt. At night I popped some mirtazapine I had borrowed from Mrs. Imamura—it made me dizzy and allowed me the leisure of vast, lucid dreams inhabited by the woman next door, usually in some kind of sexual scenario. I drowsily invented chance encounters in which she would brush against my leg before finally giving in and kissing me full on the mouth, gradually descending downwards. All this was in my head, of course. I did not recall ever having such intense feelings for another woman before, but I was quite surprised to find that it did not cause me any serious discomfort: it was only a consistent extension to my nature. Occasionally I would go down to the beach and tire myself out by swimming for long periods, sometimes even several hours. And there was a nice bar on the promenade which was as good a use of my money as any. I grew particularly fond of margaritas, and it is indeed still my favorite drink. It was a cheap, feminine drink with little taste and none of the stinging that usually came with heavier liquor, and the salt made my lips pucker in a funny way. I remember feeling quite glad that I had lost the weight I had gained during my sedentary era prior to that summer, and would call my mom and tell her I was doing quite well, quite well indeed, looking for a full time position as a bartender. I had decided that that was a perfectly acceptable next career step for me, though privately I harbored a new fantasy of being adopted by Elaine Katz. As the evening would fade to night in my cottage I would draw myself up against the drywall and warm it up with my body until it was no longer cold and indifferent, then press my mouth against it, eyes solidly closed and imagining Elaine’s waist. All these are fond memories, and as you can see have a propensity of mixing into each other. And throughout this time Kenji’s door remained as affixed as ever—I only ever saw him at mealtimes, and even then he seemed about as lost as I was.
Evidently I was not the only one who had observed this reclusion, as when I mentioned to Mrs. Imamura one day in July that I had been unable to dust his room for several weeks now she grew quite angry and started muttering in Japanese before collapsing on a sofa and regaining her composure.
‘He is very bad boy,’ she said.
‘Why do you say so?’
She shook her head. ‘We get letter from school.’
‘Really? What did it say?’
‘Fighting with other boys. Skipping classes. He stay in room. Don’t leave. Teacher angry, concerned. They don’t know what he do every day. He spend all his time playing badminton.’
‘He’s just a teenager,’ I offered. ‘They grow out of it. Has he always been like this?’
‘He use to be studious. Hard work. Now he become lazy. American. Bad American, not like you, Rosanna. He say he want independence! He bring dishonor to family. He get bad marks on purpose. Says his choice.’
I tried to be soft, but really nothing about this struck me as particularly alarming. She went on to describe that he spent a great deal of time watching a mixture of football and TV shows, and going out and smoking with his friends. In any case, none of it was helpful when it came to the matter of his unclean room.
‘He always keeps his room closed,’ I said.
She sighed. ‘Just go in. Ignore sign. His room need to be cleaned.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. You have my permission. If he get angry, tell to my husband. He will discipline him. He can have his independence, but he must stay clean.’
I found the overall sentiment quite amusing, but downplayed it to a very worried Mrs. Imamura. She and the baby both had a habit of taking an afternoon nap, and I assumed that it must be a propensity shared by Kenji—he had a small room with an attached bathroom and generally ate meals later than the rest of the family, which meant that he would probably be asleep at around my Elaine-watching time; besides, I was quite certain the room was locked, anyway, and would rather that Mr. Imamura deal with the whole mess, so I marched up at about quarter to four intending to perform a quick check before returning to the terrace. Instead the door swiftly clicked open to reveal the boy sitting intently focused at his desk which was placed under a window, orange curtains drawn except for a little crevice. It was quite dark inside for noon, and the moment he heard me he jumped off his chair and started erratically shoving things aside.
‘What’s that you’re doing there?’ I said. I wasn’t in the mood to disturb him, but I decided that I might as well carry out this interaction to its natural conclusion.
‘No-nothing,’ he stammered. ‘You’re not allowed in here, Rosanna.’
‘I know. Your mother gave me permission to barge in because you’re always cooped up in here, I never get the opportunity.’ I held up the water bucket and the washcloth—I was quite certain that a mound of dust would’ve built up considering that it had been left standing for about a month. Suddenly a glint of metal on the desk caught my eye.
‘No way,’ I said, immediately elated. ‘Tell me that’s not what I think it is.’
The fear on his face heightened to alarm. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, getting in front of the window.
‘Step aside.’
‘You’re not allowed to—’
‘Step aside,’ I repeated, and he immediately deferred. It was a thick pair of binoculars, pointed out the window. It dawned on me that the window on Kenji’s room faced the same direction as the terrace: straight into the neighbor’s garden. ‘No way,’ I said.
‘It wasn’t—’
‘The neighbor?’ I said. ‘Pretty, isn’t she?’
‘Please don’t tell my parents.’
The whole practice was vulgar, but Kenji was too nonthreatening for me to feel any strong desire for admonishment. Certainly I had no desire at all to inform his parents of anything. I instead closed the door behind me and gestured at him to move aside, which he did, once again, and I sat down on his desk, picking up the binoculars. They were old and heavy and carried all the marks of being primarily for birding, but they magnified the view well enough. I looked over the hedge and focused on the back entrance into the garden, and, like clockwork, Elaine stepped through the doorway into the garden. It was a game-changer. The canvassed quality of her skin, the flowing, dark hair, the curve of her breasts—it was all cast under illumination, when she undressed and laid down onto her sunlounger I found that even the thicket between her legs could be penetrated quite effectively. I had to hand it to the boy.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘You’ve really outdone yourself.’
I turned around to see that he was having a crisis of sorts on the bed, trembling and crying with hands over his eyes. It was an unpleasant sight, and I turned back to look at Elaine before speaking. ‘How long has this been going on?’
‘What does it matter?’ His voice was teary. ‘I’m fucked.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘I’m fucked. They’re going to take me back to Japan, they’re going to—’
‘Nobody’s going to do anything,’ I said. ‘Just answer the question.’
‘I don’t know, maybe a month. What does it matter?’
I gulped, turning back to him. He was still panting. ‘Look. We can keep this between us.’
‘Really? I swear—I’ll never do it again—’
I laughed, which hit him like a whip. ‘You’re putting words in my mouth. Let me finish.’
He didn’t say anything, and I offered him the wash-cloth which he used to wipe his face. I brushed his hair aside, smiling at him. He was a perfectly good-looking boy, really—a shame that he was reduced to spying on his neighbor, but then who could blame him? ‘It’s alright, I continued. I don’t want to tell anyone anything. This is really good material, honestly.’
‘What—what do you mean by that?’
‘What, you think you’re the only person who’s noticed our wonderful neighbor?’
He blew his nose. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘C’mon, don’t pretend. You know what I’m talking about. It’s a pretty good sight, isn’t it?’
‘I guess.’
‘Are you proud of yourself? Does this make you feel good? Intruding on a woman’s privacy?’
‘I—Look, I know it’s bad. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not me you should apologize to. What’s that going to accomplish?’
‘I—I don’t know—’
‘This is very disrespectful, you know that?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry.’
‘Okay. What else do you do?’
‘Wha—what?’
‘Well, do you just look?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You just look.’
‘Yes, that’s it, I swear.’
‘Okay,’ I said, nodding. ‘I believe you.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Me?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Well, now that that’s out of the way, I’m not sure. And, disgusting as the whole thing is, I can’t fully blame you.’
‘What?’
‘As I said, it’s a great sight.’
‘You mean you’ve seen her, too?’
‘Like, you don’t have to be sixteen to admire the view, you know.’
‘You mean… but why? Why are you watching her?’
‘All I’m saying is—’
‘What, you’re a lesbian?’
‘Again, you’re putting words in my mouth.’
He gulped, but remained silent. I looked at him for quite a while, and it took all my effort to deliberately let the time tick by in the background. Elaine would be there tomorrow. It was a pretty large room, but he had decorated it garishly with the usual posters; tasteless, but to be expected. In fact more than anything I was struck by how routine it all was. Once he had calmed down I offered him a glass of water, and he sat upright on the bed while I continued to think. He had a nice, sweaty scent about him.
‘Okay,’ I said, finally. ‘Here’s what I’m proposing. I don’t mind if you, like, sit here and stare at the neighbor. Do whatever you want, it’s your room. I don’t have a problem with it. But here’s how it’s going to work: I want to use the binoculars, too. And I don’t know how that’s supposed to work. I’m assuming you have some kind of alarm clock, or something.’
He simply nodded.
‘Well, give me a ring, alright?’
‘Are you sure you’re not going to tell my parents?’
‘Obviously not,’ I said. ‘And besides, I get it.’
He stared at me for a while, then decided that he believed me, after all, and let me dust the room before I went to bed.
The next day I got a text from Kenji at around 3:30. In retrospect the only feelings which emerge when reminiscing about the whole business involve some amount of humor—I mean, a text? There were all these different kinds of foolishness, as well, like what I would wear to this appointment, and in the end I settled on an emerald-green corset top and a push-up bra as if it were some sort of date. You think strange things when you are involved in strange endeavors. Even the brief time apart had allowed me to settle Kenji into a more romantic fantasy than the unsuspecting teenager niche he had used to occupy in my mind—I winked to him at breakfast, much to his chagrin, and when I finally arrived at his room in the afternoon I found the door already ajar, owing to the fact that the rest of the family had gone down to the beach again; his mother had a desire to shop. I had brought along a cheap wine bottle. Kenji, too, seemed to have been prepared—his T-shirt had been ironed, and his hair had been swept aside instead of falling flat over his forehead. He gestured to the binoculars as soon as I came in, indicating that Mrs. Elaine had begun her ritual early today. For a while we said nothing, and I observed the woman through the window, breathing heavily.
‘Are you just going to keep looking?’ he said.
‘What else do you want me to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
I sized him up with my eyes. Even at sixteen or whatever, he was several inches taller than me. This was convenient, but I didn’t know anything about him, so I decided to make conversation. ‘We can talk,’ I suggested. It occurred to me that he was wanting to look through the binoculars as well, but there was no natural way through which he could bring it into the conversation, so he made it a point to avoid mentioning it altogether.
‘Okay,’ he replied. ‘Say something then.’
‘How’s school?’ I offered.
‘It’s okay.’
‘You can ask me what’s on your mind, you know.’
‘Okay. Are you a lesbian?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. Are you gay?’
‘No.’
‘Then why do you have a Tom Brady poster on the wall?’
‘Okay, you know that’s not the same thing.’
‘You want to suck Tom Brady’s cock?’
He gave a half-chuckle, half-scoff. ‘I—what the fuck?’
‘Never heard a girl talk that way before?’
‘No, that’s not—’
‘Bullshit.’
‘You didn’t answer my question. Are you a lesbian?’
‘I’ve said what I wanted to say about the matter. How about you answer my question? I hear you’ve been playing hooky. Cutting class. What’s that all about?’
‘Did my mom tell you that? God, fuck that. None of you people know what it’s like up at school. She’s going around telling everyone all kinds of shit.’
‘What school do you go to, anyway?’
‘Ellison. It’s up in Vermont, some fucking prep school.’
‘Oh yeah? You know where I went?’
‘Where?’
‘West Side High.’
‘Public school?’
‘Uh-huh. We don’t have to wear uniforms, at least. You got girls up at that school?’
‘Not at Ellison. But there’s this other school a short walk away—Pruitt. We have events with them, sometimes. Like homecoming dance, and they can watch the football games.’
‘Uh-huh. So what’s with all the phoning home? Who’s the lucky lady?’
‘Look, I don’t know—’
‘Use your brain for a second, Kenji. Look around you. You think I’m going to tell your mom about your little girlfriend?’
I heard him shifting in the background, my eyes still gulping down the view of Elaine. My responses were largely automatic, and the chair was somewhat uncomfortable, but I had underestimated how entertaining Kenji could prove to be: it was the kind of crude interaction I hadn’t had since high school, and his nervous frustration was cute. Despite the fact that I had little desire to inhabit his headspace I reasoned that it must be a thrilling one, now that the object of his fantasy had now been displaced. What a whirl!
‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ he said at length.
‘Is your relationship more charged than the one with your neighbor, at least?’
He said nothing.
‘Tell me about her. Have you read her books?’
‘No. Have you?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I see.’ He sounded impressed. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’
‘I used to have a boyfriend.’
‘What?’
I chuckled. He really was young. ‘What’s your favorite part of her?’
‘What?’
‘Of your neighbor. What’s your favorite part?’
‘Like—of her body?’
‘Sure.’
‘Do you have one?’
‘I like the waist,’ I said. ‘The tightness of it. It’s so supple.’
‘I—okay.’
‘What about yours? The boobs?’
‘I guess.’
‘You want a look?’
‘Yeah.’
I let him take the seat, but he shifted nervously and did not pick up the binoculars. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘This is weird.’
‘Tough luck,’ I replied.
‘What are we doing?’
‘Like—you and I?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What do you think?’
‘Like—what’s your plan? Are you just going to go back to work after this?’
‘Probably. Do you want to do something else?’
‘I—’ he stopped midway. I had misjudged him—he was more accomplished, but I supposed his interest in Elaine had largely been fleeting. I had expected for this to land like a betrayal; I mean, he had misled me, that was true—calling me up under the pretense of the binoculars when his sights were far more lofty! But ultimately he was young, and could be forgiven.
‘Have you ever been with a girl before?’ I said.
‘What do you mean, “been”?’
‘Like, what do you do when you look through the binoculars? Is it true that you just stare?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Somehow I think you’re lying.’
‘What do you mean?’
I sighed. I had to go about it the hard way. ‘Okay. Have you ever kissed a girl?’
‘No.’
I nodded. ‘Do you want to kiss me?’
‘What—like right now?’
‘Sure.’
‘I—can we?’
‘You don’t think I’m pretty?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘So you do think I’m pretty.’
‘Yeah. Of course.’
‘You can kiss me if you want.’
‘Really?’
‘Do you want me to come closer?’ He was being quite slow; I was getting impatient. I had stopped trying to read his facial cues—his expression was rather awestruck, and his face had been stripped of all color. This whole thing had been his idea, anyway. What was he expecting? That I would simply look through the glasses and go home? If I wanted the glasses I could have had them. I was getting tired of babying him, really.
‘I guess that would help,’ he said.
I stood up and sat right next to him, until we were only inches apart. From up close his face looked quite eager. I gestured him to come closer, and he planted a long kiss on my mouth. He was doing a stunningly poor job of it—teeth against teeth, allowing no opening through which I could pass tongue. He was the one who had wanted to kiss me, after all. Presumably he could have shown a bit more initiative. But eventually he got into the rhythm of it, and I when I closed my eyes the image of Elaine reappeared. I found myself locked into the nervous beauty of the whole thing—somehow the essence was being transferred to the woman sunbathing outside, locking the three of us into a solemn ring of fire.
When we broke apart the sunlight had darkened the room into a burnt orange haze, Kenji having shifted the binoculars to the side—his head was up in the clouds somewhere, staring at me with a mixture of shock and awe. I giggled with the familiarity that the woman in the garden, the ultimate, conducive object that tied us together in the first place had been driven completely away from his mind, but in that moment I felt the crawling realization that attempts to rehabilitate him to what was actually occurring in that bedroom would falter, so I pressed ahead.
‘Did you like that?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, nodding. He jerked back in, and I gave him another long kiss. He was improving by the second—the hallmark of a great teacher. There was a tensing on his side that made it clear he was resisting the urge to go back in another time. Instead I nibbled his ear.
‘Do you want to see my breasts?’
‘Uh, yeah—we can do that?’
I laughed.
Kenji, like all guys his age, reacted to this new development with a renewed sense of confidence and entitlement. He developed a strut and it took him about a week to begin toying with the boundaries of our new relationship. He made overt references to our 4PM meetings right in front of his parents, fully aware that they had a difficult time following our conversations, and he would assume bursts of affection at odd moments—while I was handling the baby, for instance. He started waking up in the morning and going for runs, and his parents were delighted that he had finally found himself some companionship that appeared to be having a positive impact on his psyche. He had also developed a tragic nobility around him, and proved quite evasive at opportune moments—he would use his pull over me to get me to admit to him several details about my personal life, and he found me quite a fascinating character. I forget the specifics, but the general gist had something to do with my time in New Jersey and a series of decisions that he perceived as quite impulsive, on the whole, not to mention my tendency to fixate on Elaine when we were having sex. I had tried to explain to him that we were not in any kind of relationship, but this was a failing act: when summer came to an end he was going to be in for a rude awakening. The tiresome nature of these relationships is always so damning—attraction, entitlement, feigned misunderstandings and forced confrontations. In retrospect it is clear that I never really enjoyed talking to Kenji very much, just as I had never enjoyed talking to Rob. He was under the impression that he possessed some sparking character which would give him power over me, while I never really thought of him as anything but sufficient. Certainly he liked to make bland declarations of affection which I reciprocated to please him, though it was mostly trite. ‘I really like you,’ whatever. Just words, really. In fact by the time that August rolled around I had already begun to think of him as somewhat of a nuisance, and my being whisked away by his furtive advances a sign of profound weakness on my part. Eventually I forgave myself with the admission that the whole summer was a time of much isolation and turpitude, and I would have not made such mistakes if I wasn’t so starved of connection—in my normal environment, so to say, that I would assume once this brief stint as a housemaid was over. But all that is besides the point.
Once more my memory fails me, and much my time with Kenji is only present as fractured images. I guess there must have been times that we enjoyed together, because he often comes back to me as sporting a wide grin—not that I can blame him; he was having the summer of his life, as far as his communications with his friends went. He took several pictures of me that I was glad to offer up. His humor was the inadvertent sort, where he would stumble across peculiar phrases that were difficult to grasp unless you had shared memories, and we developed a number of inside jokes during our time together that are meaningless if conveyed directly—what could a ‘coy dream’ even be if not for a shared summer fling? I taught him how to smoke, which he took an instant liking to, and on his birthday mid-July—I can’t remember the exact number, perhaps it was 18?—we drove down to the beach and made quite a sport of playing in the water; he had been taking surfing lessons and had become quite good, and we fell over in the water many, many times, drinking cocktails to end the day off on the beach. I suspect he was in love, but then such things are only natural.
What I can remember arrived suddenly around mid-August, when it turned out that Elaine had ceased to sunbathe for an entire week. There had been lapses, prior, but nothing so drastic, and I began to feel the gnawing suspicion that she might never return to her usual routine. The pull was not unlike the stinging lust for nicotine, though functionally I could continue with a series of pictures that I had taken by carefully affixing my phone on the binoculars; maybe it was a desire to determine what exactly had changed, I don’t know, but this was also around the time that I was getting quite bored of Kenji as a companion and growing increasingly frustrated—furthermore, he proved a poor sexual partner in the absence of Elaine, not in the least because his appetite was unmatched. I complied out of boredom. Indeed, most of my Elaine-related urges were satisfied through this mechanism that I had discovered online: by inverting the picture’s colors and staring at it for some time the image would imprint itself upon the back of my eyelids, which rendered sexual fantasies more palatable than staring at my phone like some kind of grotesque voyeur. I had a certain amount of dignity, after all. Eventually I was happy to discover that the answer announced itself in the form of me requesting Kenji to make a visit to Mrs-Next-Door to determine what was going on.
‘And what’s the point of that?’ he asked, eyes narrowed.
‘I was thinking we can spice things up a little,’ I replied.
‘Which is?’
‘Well, use your brain. Perhaps we could get her involved, who knows? You know what the Dutch are like.’
He stared. ‘You’re batshit insane. No, really, you’re crazy.’
I laughed, tapping his chest with my nails. ‘Did you expect that you’d be where you are right now at the beginning of the summer?’
But Kenji’s fear of failure far outstripped anything that he could hope to gain from the whole business, and he gave me a firm refusal. I felt quite defeated, and it did not do much to better his reputation in my head, although at the time I had given little indication to him that anything was amiss and even if I had it would have fallen on deaf ears. His original fascination with Elaine was all but gone now that he had a younger and more accessible specimen lying right next to him. I would like to think him stupid, and for a while I did, but I don’t want to be cruel to him. He was only a boy, after all. On the other hand, my desire for Elaine was raging greater than ever, and it had begun to be tinged with something more vulnerable than erotic transfixion. I was shocked to discover that what I had been harboring was envy. The signs were all there—butterflies, the simultaneous desire for both observation and retreat, and so on, and when I pieced it together it deepened the latent discomfort in my chest into something more like sadness. I felt like I was going to cry in her absence, and that I would be reduced, somehow, to being merely a sad old girl who had tried to make it in California, and that was disagreeable to the point of being almost unpalatable. I cannot even really recall those two weeks with any kind of precision, apart from an overwhelming cloud of despair. I must have persisted in my chores, nevertheless, though I cannot for the life of me make out what they were, and indeed I was living in this dreamlike limbo which existed solely in the wee hours of dawn before I woke up.
Then Kenji picked up on some of this energy and decided to strike a deal with me—he wouldn’t approach the neighbor by door, but he would clear the fence to determine why she had abandoned her ritual.
Throughout this period of Elaine’s absence I continued spending time observing the minutiae of the garden itself. I had a long, mediated conversation with Mr. Imamura about the aesthetics of these gardens, though try as I might I could never find in myself any nascent feelings of appreciation for the object itself, now that it had been stripped of its soul. In fact I found it rather ugly in isolation—very unclean, desert-like, inhabited by mosses and ferns; a liminal space that was meaningless in the absence of Elaine. It would be quite appropriate if it ceased to exist outside her routine. All these and several other thoughts I kept bottled up in my person, and I used them to direct hate to the Imamura’s creation—indeed it did not take well to the rising California heat, and began to falter as the days refused to shorten and the cloudlessness began to take on a suffocating quality. The oceanic dream turned into scorchland, and I began to go on walks to the far side of town whose ranch homes and shag carpets gave me the distinct impression of being pulled back into an era where my restlessness was only the norm and where endless night drives in an Impala or a Challenger were just the kind of things one did. They were eerie places with names that had words like ‘Del’ or ‘San’ in them, and compared to them the preciseness of the Japanese Garden was nothing less than an outright sham. It was the originator of whatever drove me to cry in those nights, and on the dull Wednesday evening that Kenji decided to make a rush of it I tried to pass to him whatever morbidity it had inflicted on my own psyche through a kiss.
It was sometime in the evening and the parents had gone golfing by the beach leaving the two of us isolated since the morning. We had spent most of our time going through the motions of lovemaking. Kenji was in a tired and somewhat lovey-dovey mood, and I had found a ladder that allowed him to scale the stone boundary; he tried to kiss me before I assumed my lookout on the terrace. It was all clear, and I gave him the thumbs up. His chuckling figure dropped into the garden just as the lights went up inside the villa, still dressed in his band tee but sporting a pair of cargo shorts I had procured for him over the weekend. I primed my binoculars and saw that the look on his face was rather strained, and he appeared jumpy as he approached an outward window. What happened next is the clearest recollection I have of all my time in California. First his expression changed to one of sheer panic, almost animalistic in nature, and he immediately began to flail around the entire garden looking for a way out before discovering that the far side, which we could not see from this angle, housed only a stone brick wall—he had dropped several feet while scaling the wall and could not reach the edge, which meant that the only way out was through the villa. And, right then, the object of both our fantasies was emerging right through it.
That was my last glimpse of Elaine. She was as tall as he was and pulled him right in through the door, fully dressed in some kind of nightgown. For the next two hours there was silence.
What I remember is a cascading series of emotions, one after the other—fright the most prominent one, but also a sick sense of triumph. The seconds ticked by at snail’s pace. I could not comprehend what was happening. All I could think was that Kenji was inside the house with Elaine and I knew not what manner of things they were doing—on some level I understood that she was perhaps rebuking him, attempting to determine why he had scaled the fence into her garden, but ultimately he was a child and he would be forgiven; it was trespassing on the order of play. But there was another, more neurotic side of me that was conjuring vivid images of Kenji and Elaine embraced in some ghoulish ritual, and here I was, all alone, crying my eyes out. How could this have happened? It was the garden—that was the cause, that was it all along. It was the garden which had done it. And it deserved a divine punishment for the pain it was afflicting on me; if it had never existed I would have had the beautiful summer I desired, and a few short minutes after the thoughts had struck me I was out on the ladder with a long, burning branch of wood harvested from any number of drying remains of trees out there in that desert landscape, thinking very much that the shakkei would finally be fully accomplished—and with that final thought I reached far and set it right by the wooden tea room. It took only a few minutes to be fully set ablaze.
I returned to the house. A thin trail of smoke was ascending upward. By the time I was back on the terrace the entire roof of the tea room was afire, and I was beginning to hear the cackling sounds of an open flame. I had been spinning phrases in my head, expecting the sight to be beautiful and terrible, but even as it spread it did not seem like much. Yes, the flames were tall and blazing, yes there was a grandiosity to them, but it was a startling lack—ultimately it was just a fire, devoid of meaning, as flat as the garden that had stood in its wake. I can remember the image as if it were etched on a postcard; still and faint, a pale imitation of a higher mode of being. It had all been a foolish endeavor, though I did not regret it. I may have stood there for about fifteen or so minutes, then I turned around and assumed my duties in the kitchen.
At some point the firemen were called, and their truck arrived mere minutes before the Imamuras Mercedes parked out the garage. The fire had not spread to our side of the property, but they were nevertheless alarmed and demanded to know immediately where Kenji was, to which I naturally said that I had assumed he was in his room. It did not take too long for the fire to put out. The firemen in Southern California are well-equipped. Somehow it had remained constrained to the garden, and had not even successfully spread out to the house—when all was said and done it was the tea room which had been left burned to nothing, along with the mosses, bamboos and azaleas which had already been failing due to drought. It was the first time I learnt that even stone could support char marks. Kenji and a tall blonde man had been witnessing the entire business and directing the firemen, but I saw no sign of Elaine. Mrs. Imamura made a grand show of hugging him when he inevitably returned to our side of the wall despite his expression remaining mildly amused—or stoked, as he later put it—at best. The blonde man had a long conversation with Mr. Imamura. He, too, spoke Japanese.
Kenji found me leaning against the terrace railing. ‘Some day, huh?’ he said.
‘I guess.’ I wanted to say something to him, but I did not know what.
‘Did you notice the fire from the terrace?’
‘I smelled it.’
‘That’s how Elaine found out, too.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘I don’t know.’ He was looking at the garden, and he slipped his arm around my waist. Somehow it felt good, and I let it stay. ‘I’ve still got the fire on my mind. What a weird thing.’
‘You didn’t talk to her?’
‘Not much. I didn’t feel like it. She didn’t seem like the same person, you know what I mean—from her sunbathing. I mean, I’d never heard her voice before. It was kind of raspy.’
‘Kiss me,’ I said, suddenly.
He obliged. His lips were very warm, far more than the fire had been.
Here are the facts, as per how I remember them: Kenji had been spotted instantly; the windows allowed far more of a view of the garden that could be ascertained from the other side. The neighbors had assumed that a Japanese boy would of course want to view the garden his father had helped design from the inside, and after telling him off for a short while they had given him some ice cream and deigned it prudent for him to stay at theirs’ until the family returned and they could inform them about his misbehavior; they felt it was only ordinary that a boy left to his own devices for long periods of time innovate via such transgressions. He had protested that the housemaid was there, too, but they did not take this very seriously. After all that, I had turned out a rather silly girl.
Despite this, the Imamuras took Kenji’s behavior to be a matter of grave dishonor, and ended their vacation a few weeks earlier than expected. They offered to continue paying me for the rest of my stipulated time, but I refused. It was all over very quickly; they flew out within the week, sentencing Kenji to return to Japan until the school year began. I felt little pity for him—quite clearly he deserved it, spying on a grown woman like that, trying to break into her room. An appropriate punishment for a boy his age. I cannot recall my last meeting with Kenji. It must have been teary and tiresome. For those few days I was not feeling very much if at all. It was as if I was in a wet blanket.
The fire had been passed over as an element of nature. I considered seeking employment as a bartender, like I had originally planned. Then one day while turning over in my bed I had the remarkable realization that I had no further desire to remain in California.
There is not much that happened after that—Kenji attempted to keep in touch but I refused, which he somehow perceived as a fitting conclusion to our fling. I guess it was meaningful to him—I really can’t bring myself to care; he was only a mistake, and I cannot afford to spend much time on mistakes. Mrs. Imamura gave me a tea set which I delivered to my mother the moment I arrived home; I mean, a tea set? What could I possibly do with such a thing? Elaine was driven from my mind entirely with the collapse of the garden. She was diminished—the spell was broken. It was all mindlessness. But there is one notable event that stands out to me still, and it occurred on my plane back to New Jersey—an illustration of how even one’s own psychology can betray oneself.
I was far in the sky, looking out over the clouds, and I suddenly felt a bug in my throat, a deep sinking. I began to cry, though I did not know what for. Everything around me felt strange and alien. It was almost as if I were being choked, as if I were compelled to weep, and to my horror the image of Elaine swam in front of my mind: the pristine, glorious image of Elaine sunbathing in the terrible Japanese Garden, and I felt a deep melancholy about how that ritual was never to be performed again, about how transient the whole thing was—now that Kenji and I had left the last traces of it had been abandoned, and any future iterations would remain senseless and void, a God without a disciple. I felt an intense burst of affection towards the Japanese boy. How cruel! The attendant asked me why I was crying and I could not tell her. All I felt was a deep sickness, not very different from the unspeakable times in Newark I had spent all stressed in my bed. Then she brought me some coffee and I regained my composure. It took me only a few seconds to come to the conclusion—all this had been a result of my remarkable passivity. I had flown to the West without much of a plan and had attempted to make it as a drifter, falling prey to the woman next door, to Kenji’s pathetic lovemaking. Some people are born delicate, and those are the very people the world enjoys making tremble. I had finally learned that lesson the hard way. In reality the summer had been quite trivial. I had to become more active, take a greater hand in my future in order to prevent such spirals from happening again—of course my silliness wasn’t all incomprehensible, in the end, considering that I had been in unfamiliar environments under a lot of stress, working a job that was quite beneath me, but if I had to pull myself up and take on further responsibility then so be it. It had been a good dream, but it was all over now. In Newark I would be a transformed woman, without the casual fixations of that Santa Barbara estate. But then that is what California does to you.