 
The Bridge of Dreams and Predators

Two Short Novels

By Alex Shishin

Published by Smashwords

Copyright 2010, 2017 Alex Shishin

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These two novellas are works of fiction. Similarities to actual people, places (except landmarks) and events encountered in either of these novellas are entirely coincidental.

Predators

A Tale of Paris

The digital calendar on my desk told me that exactly two years had passed since Masami Ogawa had come to Paris and changed Yolanda's and my life forever. I was alone in our high-rise apartment in Passy on this abnormally cold August day--an oppressive day with a sky the color of slate, neither promising rain nor allowing a beam of sunlight to pass. I was watching my wife being interviewed live on French national television about our work against land mines. The interviewers were decent. They stuck to the topic. No questions about Miss Ogawa, or Yolanda's first marriage, or her being married to an American white guy, or about her being an ex-super model once celebrated as "The Black Venus of Martinique." Nothing, in short, like what she experienced with the American media.

Relieved, I turned the TV off. I had a pressing book review deadline. I also had writer's block. I tried to force myself to write; then I shut down the computer and went shopping.

I took the Metro to Montparnasse and walked to a noisy little street filled with garish sex video joints to a small shop selling foie gras from the central Pyrenees that Yolanda especially liked. Next I wandered to Gallery Lafayette, buying an expensive wallet I didn't need, and then to the Montparnasse cemetery.

As I meandered past Sartre and Beauvoir, Marguérite Duras, Saint Saëns, my mood lightened--it inevitably does in Parisian cemeteries--though today death sat on my nerves.

Sitting opposite Guy de Maupassant's grave was a young blond man, probably in his late twenties, with an opened bottle of white Medoc wine. He wore blue jeans and a checkered shirt that was too thin for this chilly day. His long hair was combed severely back, revealing a pale forehead with a fading violet bruise. His face was so pale it seemed frostbitten. His lips were tight and colorless; his eyes were set in dark, weary craters. His white sneakers, which seemed freshly washed, were nearly worn through at heels.

"You're an American," he said to me. The voice was distant but not unfriendly. "I can tell by your mannerisms."

"Greek-American," I said.

"I like Americans. I like Greeks too," he said. He gave me a second look and said, "You are married to Yolanda St. Cloud! I've seen your photographs in Le Monde. I've read her book."

Yolanda had written a compassionate memoir about her difficult life with the Guatemalan director Dario Salinas, whom she had married at twenty-six. Before coming to Hollywood he had produced brilliant documentaries on working people and poverty in the Caribbean. Hollywood had co-opted him--enriching him and emasculating him as a political artist. Yolanda had written that he had loved her though he philandered. He was having problems with alcohol and cocaine when he crashed his Cessna into the San Gabriel Mountains, leaving his young widow with little else but debts as a legacy.

"You found me out," I said. "Mind if I join you?"

The young man made room for me on the weathered marble. I sat down. He handed me the bottle. I drank.

"Not a bad vintage," I said.

"May I ask you something?" he said, "Is it remotely possible that you and Madam St. Cloud were once childhood sweethearts?"

"I wish," I said. "That's a unique question, you know. No one has ever asked me a question like that. You have a story to tell. So tell it."

"Tell me yours first," he said, looking at Guy de Maupassant. "It's important to me how couples meet."

"Yes, it's--crucial," I said, thinking of Miss Ogawa.

"Six years ago," I told him, "Yolanda was on a book promotion tour of Japan. My English language newspaper had set up an interview for the day after her arrival in Tokyo. The paper's star multi-lingual Japanese columnist was supposed to interview Yolanda, but he caught food poisoning in a Shinjuku bar the night before. I was sent in his place to the New Otani Hotel. The chief reason they sent me was that I was available and also because I spoke a little French. When I called from the lobby, Yolanda told me in impeccable English to come up to her suite. I went up and fell in love."

"It happens like that," the young man said and sighed.

"The crazy thing," I said, "was that she fell in love with me! Me--a dumpy guy two inches shorter and ten years older than her! You explain it--"

He stared at Guy de Maupassant's grave and said nothing.

"A week later we were married. So here I am, a journalist dabbler, a once a week lecturer at the Sorbonne, a de facto housewife."

He passed me the bottle.

"I had to shut off that damn tape recorder in the middle of our interview-- Excuse me. I'm a little drunk. I'm an unreliable narrator," I said.

"People in love always are," he said. "For me love has gone irrevocably bad."

"Not irrevocably--"

"Yes, irrevocably! Irrevocably, irrevocably!"

"Tell me--"

"No, you tell me--are all happy families alike as Tolstoy says?"

"These days I often feel guilty about my happiness," I said.

"I understand," he said softly, "I read about your troubles. How could you let it happen to you?"

"Perhaps because we were too content with each other's company."

The young man did not speak. He was not gazing at Guy de Maupassant but at me.

"Maybe not," I said and unburdened myself, telling him the story I tell here.

•••••

It started with a phone call from Tokyo on a brilliant June evening. My ex-editor from the English language daily, an American guy, was on the line with a favor to ask me.

"A major stockholder has this daughter who idolizes your wife, Rick. She'd like to home stay with you in Paris for a few months."

"A few months! We're working stiffs," I said.

"Rick, they're on my neck here. Really on my neck. Couldn't you at least go through the tatamae motions of considering it?"

"I'll talk to Yolanda," I said.

"About what, darling?" said Yolanda.

We were in the kitchen cooking Beef Stroganoff after a particularly passionate afternoon lovemaking session. We were in the mood for largesse.

Yolanda took the portable telephone from my hand. She listened. A wide smile broke out across her face. She laughed once, twice. Nodding her head. "I'll talk to him," she said.

Putting her long fingers over the mouthpiece, she said, "Rick, Masami sounds like a lovely girl. Let's have her!"

"Did he tell you how many months?"

"Only about two months. Really, Rick, remember how kind your old newspaper was when we got married? And I really liked all the Japanese people I met when I visited."

"I have other memories of the newspaper and Japan," I said.

She knew about discrimination in Japan and Japan's unrepentant war crimes. Yet her limited experience had been pleasant. The people she'd met were preprogrammed to be on their best behavior, and this had given her a respite from the ambiguous daily brushes with racism she had to deal with as a Black French woman, even in liberal Paris.

"Don't forget we never would've met were it not for your paper," she said. "Come on, Rick."

"All right," I said. "Let's have this rich girl for a while. Life has been too perfect."

A week later we received a package with an expensive stoneware plate along with Miss Ogawa's photograph and a letter of introduction. "Dear Mr. Rick and Mrs. Yolanda St. Cloud," it began.

"I really ought to change my family name to yours, Yoyo," I said. "It's easier to pronounce."

"This is cute," Yolanda said and read:

"Hello! My Name is Masami. I am 21 years old. My hobbies are watching a movie, listening to a song, cooking and shopping. By the way, I love Mrs. Yolanda St. Cloud very much! I am admiring her! Because she is Super Model and Media Personality. I want to be too. It is my dream. I think Mrs. St. Cloud is Very Great! I have been Paris five times. I can speak English a little. See you again! Yours Truly, Miss Ogawa Masami" (by the way, this is how we Japanese write our names!)

I pictured a pampered o-jo-san, not unlike some of the young women I had taught at the junior college in Saitama before escaping to the fickle world of journalism. She would be quite helpless, requiring a lot of attention, I figured, but also quite harmless.

How wrong I was.

The photograph Miss Ogawa had sent us had been retouched. We realized this upon meeting her toward the end of August at Charles de Gaulle International Airport. The small, skinny and flat-chested young woman, pushing the cart with her four matching orange suitcases, possessed a face honeycombed with zits. Yellow zits. Pink zits. Black zits. White zits on the verge of bursting. Her pale makeup only made the zits look worse.

We approached her. Yolanda opened her arms and said, "Welcome, Masami!"

With a squeal of delight, Miss Ogawa, flew into Yolanda's embrace. Courageous Yolanda kissed her on both cheeks. When Yolanda introduced me as her husband an expression of disdain passed over Miss Ogawa's face. I had seen that look before when I was with Yolanda. I imagined Miss Ogawa had often seen the look I could not help give her.

I knew Miss Ogawa preferred me gone, but her English was limited and she needed me as a translator. In the taxi to Passy Miss Ogawa and Yolanda talked about a shopping spree on the Champs Élysées. Miss Ogawa fell asleep, her ravaged face pressed against Yolanda's bare arm.

Miss Ogawa had been stuffed in First Class and wasn't hungry. She retired immediately to the guest room we had prepared for her.

"The poor girl," Yolanda said as we had our afternoon coffee on the balcony. "There is a dermatologist I know who might help her. I wonder what her parents have done for her?"

"The retouched photo says her appearance hasn't exactly gone unnoticed," I said. "Say, Yoyo, that girl doesn't like me."

"She's only jealous for my attention right now. It will pass."

I tried hard to like Miss Ogawa. Over the next few days I made a mental list of the things I liked about her. First and foremost, I liked that she had apparently no prejudices against Black people. Another good thing about her was that she didn't inquire about Yolanda's first marriage and did not call her "The Black Venus of Martinique"--an appellation Yolanda privately despised but publically accepted. (In her book Yolanda had written: "That is how I compromised myself for fame. Dairo understood.") Then I liked that Miss Ogawa did not insist on miso soup and a bowl of rice for breakfast as a number of my ex-junior college students did when home-staying in the U.S. She also did not leave incredible messes of hair and tissues in the bathroom sink. She made her bed. She didn't blast the windows out with rock music on the stereo in her room. Miss Ogawa was basically okay, I told myself.

Since I was busy meeting deadlines for several book reviews and an article on a Post-Impressionist Japanese painter who had lived in Paris, another good thing about Miss Ogawa was that I seldom saw her. When Yolanda went out Miss Ogawa followed her like an obedient poodle. When Yolanda had time, she would take her to places of interest. If she had an appointment, she would leave her somewhere she could shop and gave her simple instructions about where and what time to meet so they could take the Metro home together.

One Friday I had to cover a book fair in Rouen and interview an author who lived there.

"I'll be home tonight around eight, Yoyo," I said. "Can we all somehow have dinner together?"

"I have a brilliant idea," she said. "I'll cook my famous Coq de Martinique. Masami will help me. We'll get to know each other even better."

I returned earlier than I had expected, just after seven. The apartment smelled of something burned and a char-like mist hung in the air.

"Holy cripes! Yolanda!" I cried. "Are you all right?"

Yolanda came out of the kitchen in her jeans and halter-top. Smudged with grease, she was sweating and her lovely hair, which she usually tied in a braid in back, was all over her face and shoulders.

"Darling, I'm glad you have turned up early. We must go out to a café and I must drink a very tall glass of beer. I am not even going to change. Come."

"You don't drink beer," I said as my tall wife pulled me toward the elevator. "What going on?"

"The chicken was quite burned beyond recognition."

"You never burn anything,"

"Wait. I'll explain."

In the café, after she did indeed order and drink the tall glass of beer, Yolanda told me what had happened.

"I was frying the chicken when I got a very important telephone call. It was about my book. I had to take it in the study. So I said to Masami, who was being a perfect helper, 'Please, watch the chicken, mon petite.' While reading a fax I smelled smoke. I rushed into living room and saw this horrid smoke coming from the kitchen. And there was Masami standing next to the flaming pan, a blank expression on her face. I was quite angry. 'I told you to watch the chicken!' I said. 'I'm watching, I'm watching,' she replied."

"This is the home stay story from hell," I said. "You know there are gaijin who are absolutely convinced that fashionable young Japanese women are the silliest creatures ever to walk the face of the earth. But that's wrong. They only act that way. They act that way because acting silly is considered cute and they take advantage of it. But this one--this one is absolutely and truly stupid."

"We had a failure in communication. She did not understand what 'to watch' meant."

"Where was the creature's common sense? She said her hobby was cooking."

"I asked about that. She meant she enjoys food. She has never cooked in her life. 'Who cooks in your house?' I asked. 'The cook,' she answered."

"The cook. Of course. So much for the supposed superiority of the rich. In fact they are utterly stupid," I said. "You said so yourself in your book."

"Yes, my darling. It is only a matter of time before the red flags are flying over the Bourse--with the plutocrats passively watching bourgeois society burn as our little Masami watched the incineration of the chicken! Oh the poor girl cried and cried when she realized this wasn't the way to cook Coq de Martinique. I hugged her and we had a good cry for our martyred chicken. She was helping me clean up when you arrived."

"Where is she now?"

"Hiding in her room. She is absolutely terrified you will scold her! You won't, will you, Rick? You'll speak to her gently and sweetly. The poor girl."

"She could have burned the place down! All right. Let's go and get it over with. Then let's reserve a table somewhere. I'm starved."

I knocked on the guestroom door and spoke in the nicest Japanese I could. Rick-san wasn't the least angry, I said. Rick-san was worried about Masami-san's feelings. (For all I knew she was at that moment committing ritual suicide, spilling her blood all over our linen.) "Please let me see you."

"The door is not locked," a high-pitched voice answered.

I expected to see a terrified, cringing little Japanese girl. Instead I found Miss Ogawa sitting in a lotus position on the bed and going through some sort of album. She looked up at me. Again the expression of contempt passed over her face.

"Is Yolanda-san angry with me?" she asked in Japanese.

"She's lived through worse. No."

"I'm happy. I really did not know how to prepare chicken. And I do admire Yolanda-san so much! Oh, Rick-san, please come here and look at my scrape book. It's a scrapbook of Yolanda-san's career!"

I pulled over a chair and peered at Miss Ogawa's scrapbook.

"See here, she is modeling clothes in Paris and London and New York. Have you been to New York?"

"I'm from New York," I said. "I own an apartment in Manhattan which we use when we visit."

"Oh!" An expression I had not seen before now appeared and lingered on her ugly face--something akin to admiration.

"I inherited it from my mother," I said. "Goodness! Yolanda cannot be more than eighteen in this picture. Where did you get all these photos?"

"Weekly magazines mostly. Look at this! Here are the photos where she posed completely naked!"

"Ah yes! She was a popular nude model once," I said. "I'm sure she's still tacked up in many a garage and barber shop."

"Do you think I am a lesbian?" she asked, then answered the question herself: "I don't think I am. I think I want to be her and this is different from wanting to possess her. Don't you think so?'

How could words of such relative intelligence come from a ninny who had just passively watched my wife's chicken go up in smoke? I thought.

"Maybe you are 'star-struck' as we say in English. What attracted you to my wife's career?"

"I believe she is the most beautiful woman in the world."

"So do I," I said.

She smiled at me and I at her.

Before we went off to dinner Miss Ogawa and Yolanda hugged some more.

"The chicken did not die entirely in vain," I said. "Where shall we go?"

The Museé de Vin, which served excellent food, was about ten minutes away on foot. I suggested it but Yolanda wanted a totally different atmosphere.

"A Japanese restaurant?" Yolanda suggested. "There is a veritable Japan town between the Louvre and Opera."

A flash of panic appeared on Miss Ogawa's face.

"How about Montmartre?" I said.

We ended up taking a taxi there to a restaurant specializing in Mediterranean cuisine.

As we considered the menu, sitting in a secluded alcove, Miss Ogawa stared at the murals of Mediterranean landscapes and seascapes, the chandeliers and the waiters bustling around us. She declared that she loved Paris and wanted to remain here forever.

I had made the reservation, not Yolanda, because we wanted anonymity. The best dressed among us was Miss Ogawa, who insisted on wearing her new black chiffon mini-dress. My wife and I wore blue jeans. I sensed the owner and staff knew who Yolanda was. When we had walked in, a ripple of quiet delight had rippled among them. They were, thankfully, discreet, making no ostentatious fusses over Yolanda. Yet the servers lavished an almost maternal attention on Miss Ogawa, as did the owner who came by but once to quietly welcome us.

Miss Ogawa was overwhelmed. Realizing her wineglass would be refilled almost as soon as she drained it, she drank like--well--a Japanese guy. And this tiny, sickly looking girl could hold her liquor!

Out of the blue, Miss Ogawa said in English, "Yolanda-san, do you like a child? I am so happy no child noisy in this restaurant. In Japan always so noisy. Very bad manner."

I explained to Yolanda that children were given considerable license to misbehave in public places in Japan. Screaming children running about restaurants, trains and supermarkets while their parents affected a catatonic indifference was a pet peeve of foreigners.

"In Japan many people ask you why you no baby. But I not ask," said Miss Ogawa.

"But you did ask, mon petite," Yolanda laughed. "We have no secrets. It's simple."

Miss Ogawa could not follow Yolanda's English so I took over in Japanese.

"You see, Masami-san, from the time Yolanda-san was not even ten until she left home as scholarship student for the École National des Beaux Arts at seventeen she nannied an army of little brothers and sisters. She wanted no more of child rearing. Before letting me slip the engagement ring on her finger she made it clear that if I wanted children she wasn't the woman for me. Does that shock you, Masami-san? Well, this will shock you more. I was delighted! I have no patience with children! Even as a child I preferred the company of adults." Fearing I'd said too much, I concluded: "Yolanda-san was a great big sister. Her siblings are all happy souls."

"I do not like a child," Miss Ogawa said in English. "My mother says I must have some baby some day but I don't want. I had the little brother one time but he was dead."

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" Yolanda said touching her arm.

"He eat something bad and he was dead."

"I feel for you and your family," I said in Japanese.

"Shikata ga nai"--It cannot be helped--Miss Ogawa said and dipped her spoon into her soubrette.

She said nothing more about this and we tried to talk of more cheerful things.

"Come, mon petite, let us show you something nice," Yolanda said as we went out. "Let us show you Montmartre! The Butte is wonderful!"

Our walk through Montmartre's cobblestone streets eventually took us to the steps of Basilique du Sacré-Cœur. As we looked down on the city's amicable lights, Miss Ogawa again said she wanted to remain in Paris forever.

Yolanda said to her: "Rick and I like to go to the South of France around the second week of September. We take the TGV directly to Montpelier and then take a local train to Sette on the Mediterranean. Would you like to go with us?"

I translated and Miss Ogawa cried, "Yes!" in English and clapped her hands.

"Do you like swimming, Masami?" Yolanda asked.

"Oh yes, it is my hobby," she answered.

"She'll drown," I muttered to Yolanda in French.

My wife poked me in the ribs and asked Miss Ogawa, "Do you have a bathing suit?"

"Oh yes. Of course!" She hugged Yolanda. "I am very happy! Thank you, thank you! I am very happy," Tears slid down her ravaged cheeks.

The day before our departure, Yolanda said to me: "Our Masami might not be used to seeing women swimming topless. Could you possibly tell her about the ambiance of the Mediterranean?"

When I went to her room I tried explaining all this gingerly in terms of cultural differences.

"I know all this," Miss Ogawa said. "Will Yolanda-san swim topless?"

"I think so--if you're not offended."

"If she does, would you be offended if I do too?"

Before I could allow myself to imagine what her acne covered body might look like, I said, "You have as much right as anyone to swim topless or appear fully clothed on the beach. There is no pressure."

"I'll think about it," Miss Ogawa said. "You do understand I'm paying my own way and taking my own hotel room. Only I have to ask you to reserve a room for me at your hotel."

"Another thing," I said. "Sette's charm for us is its simplicity. It's a working class place, a fishing town. I mean it is not St. Tropez." I nearly mentioned that it was to Sette that Yolanda had gone to heal herself after her husband's death and to write her book. "I hope you won't be disappointed," I said.

"I only want to swim," Miss Ogawa said.

We got Miss Ogawa a room next to us at our usual hotel overlooking the Mediterranean. On the morning of our first day in Sette we walked down to the little rocky beach, ten minutes from the hotel. We were all wearing our bathing suits and T-shirts. Yolanda was topless under hers. I glanced at Miss Ogawa and was relieved to see the outline of her bikini top.

The beach was in a cove below a cliff. You got to it by descending a circular metal staircase. Miss Ogawa giggled as we went down.

The summer crowds were gone and the people there were mostly locals. Half the women baring their breasts were old. A fair number were fat. Among the odd shaped people, women with pendulous breasts and men with big bellies protruding from tight little swim suits, even I could feel like an Adonis in my baggy swimming trunks. I realized that Miss Ogawa had giggled not out of embarrassment but relief.

Her T-shirt off, Miss Ogawa did not look as bad as I had imagined. The worst crop of zits stopped around the top of her neck. Her body was not the sickly mess I had anticipated it but wiry like a healthy twelve year old boy's.

After we had spread our blankets, Yolanda took off her T-shirt, ran to the sea, splashed herself, shivered, and dove in. She swam out a good fifteen meters before turning around and calling to us to join her.

"This top is uncomfortable; it is cutting into my back," Miss Ogawa said.

"If that's an excuse to remove it, don't mind me," I said.

"You won't tell my parents, will you?" she said. "Not that they'd care."

"My lips are sealed. I'll avert my gaze if you like."

"That would be a little strange," she laughed, and before I could say anything further her top was on the blanket and Miss Ogawa was covering her tiny breasts with her arms.

"I'm going in," she said.

"I fear Yolanda is out too far," I said. "I'll call to her to come in closer."

"It's not too far for me."

Still covering her breasts she ran to the water's edge and stopped. Facing the sea she suddenly waved both arms to Yolanda. Yolanda waved her arms back and began to swim toward the shore. Miss Ogawa splashed herself and gracefully dove into the water.

I shook my head with delight. She was a better swimmer than a cook.

Before lunch she and Yolanda had swum the length of the beach and back.

Miss Ogawa came out of the water her arms swinging at her sides like my wife. Yolanda has the sort of body that stops conversations and invites stares one generally doesn't see among the discreet beach-goers on the Mediterranean. Walking beside Yolanda she beamed, sticking out her chest with its almost invisible breasts.

"This one is quite a mermaid," Yolanda said panting. "I could barely keep up with her. Mon petite, you must be a swimming champion back in Japan."

"Oh, no, no!" Miss Ogawa said.

"But dear Masami, you must put on fresh sunscreen immediately. Especially the first day on the beach you must take extra care of your skin. And you too Rick. You burn easily, my darling. Oh, blast! It's not in my bag! I left it at home!"

"I'll go buy some," I said getting up.

"No darling, I'll go. I know exactly what kind we need."

She put on her T-shirt and sandals and sprinted up the spiral stairs.

"Energy unlimited," I said watching her.

"Rick-san can I ask you something personal," Miss Ogawa said as she sat bare-chested on the blanket next to me. "Won't Yolanda-san be jealous about you being alone with me?"

"Yoyo? No. She isn't the jealous type. Anyway, we're a pretty tight couple."

"She trusts you that much? Oh how she must love you! I could never trust my man to be alone with another woman. I would be so jealous I don't know what I'd do--"

Miss Ogawa pressed lips together and clutched her breasts as if they were going to fall off. As she stared out at the blue Mediterranean, I nearly asked what was passing through her mind. Instead, I said, "You really are a superb swimmer."

"Can I tell you something," Miss Ogawa said fiercely turning to me. "In high school I won a medal for butterfly. I could have gone on. Only people laughed at my appearance. Sometimes people said my skin problem would pollute the pool. So I stopped competing. I only swam in the indoor Olympic-size pool my parents made especially for me at home."

"That was nice of them," I said.

"I wish I had breasts and legs like Yolanda-san! Then I would show them-- Oh, I'm sorry. I am saying too much. Thank you for not laughing at me."

"How could I? You're a great swimmer, Masami-san," I said, "No amount of fools can take that away from you!"

Miss Ogawa did not answer. She turned her face toward the sea again as if she had not heard me.

"Yolanda-san is right about the Mediterranean sun," I said quietly. "It is much stronger than it seems. We'd better put on our T-shits until Yolanda comes back with the sunscreen."

She put on her T-shirt, as did I.

"Rick-san, can I ask your opinion," Miss Ogawa said as she wrapped her arms around her knees. "Before we left, I bought a Japanese weekly magazine that said the Mediterranean sunlight is good for sick skin like mine. What do you think?"

"I'm the last person to ask," I said. "I can only advise you to take the sun in moderation."

"What if I became as dark as Yolanda-san?"

"That would be nice," I said, not knowing what better to say.

"How do you think my breasts would look, Rick-san?"

This uncomfortable moment was interrupted by Yolanda's voice.

"I'm back, sun worshippers!" She bounded down the metal stairs "Off your lendings! I have sunscreen! And I bought sandwiches and a bottle of wine so we can have lunch on the beach."

Yolanda and Miss Ogawa did another lap and I had spent some quiet moments floating in the Mediterranean's relatively gentle waters. During lunch Miss Ogawa brought her arm against Yolanda's.

"I am a tanning girl," she said proudly.

"Well you know, Masami, mon petite, I turn purple when I tan."

"Eh! Really?" Miss Ogawa exclaimed.

"I'm sorry, I'm joking," Yolanda laughed. "But seriously, even with sunscreen we should call it a day soon. Only Masami and I absolutely must do one more lap after we've rested."

Miss Ogawa looked at me.

"Enjoy," I said. "I'm better as an audience."

Every day we came down to the beach Miss Ogawa would, like Yolanda, wear a her T-shirt over her bare breasts and then swim topless. It became enough of a routine that I no longer felt awkward about seeing Miss Ogawa's breasts. The funny thing is she really did begin to darken quickly--and without the sunburn I always got if I wasn't careful.

I was out on our balcony at eight one morning and happened to look into Miss Ogawa's balcony. She was lounging completely naked, rubbing sun tan lotion over herself. I quickly withdrew.

"How long could she have been out there?" I said to Yolanda.

"The strange thing is her skin seems a little better," Yolanda said. "But what's important is she thinks she is looking better. I'll tell you a secret about women, Rick. Half of being beautiful is thinking you are beautiful. I've seen models fall apart and actually start to look like hags when something went wrong in their lives. And I'm talking about people whose survival depended on the catwalk. Ah, the Mediterranean has been good to our Masami."

On the day we were packing to depart, Miss Ogawa came into our room and cried. "Thank you! Merci! I am freedom here!"

The TGV to Paris carried a darker and more carefree Miss Ogawa. She laughed more easily and her limbs were looser. She was so dark now that a few people did double takes when they saw us, perhaps thinking she was Yolanda's and my daughter. I wish I could say Miss Ogawa was more beautiful, but it would not be true. Her tan did, I suppose, obscure the darker zits but only made the white ones more pronounced. But Yolanda was right. How we see ourselves is invariably transferred to those who look at us. For the first time I began to think Miss Ogawa could become attractive if not beautiful some day.

It was right after our return that a number of changes occurred in the pattern of Miss Ogawa's life. She now became quite independent, no longer trotting after my wife like a well-trained poodle. She often left in the morning and would come back either in the afternoon or in the evening, somehow managing to time her returns during our lovemaking sessions. I often felt she was at our door, her ear pressed to it. Then Miss Ogawa began giving my wife small but expensive presents--always wrapped in beautiful Japanese paper. At first it was a long orange silk scarf. Next she gave Yolanda a thin gold bracelet. Another day it was a beautiful antique ivory brooch.

"You must not spend your money like this," Yolanda said. "It's lovely, this brooch--only please keep it, dear. It will look much better on you than on me."

"It too big for me," Miss Ogawa said. "Perfect for you. Please try on."

"She buys these things and then wraps them herself in the most beautiful Japanese paper I have ever seen," Yolanda said. "I cannot throw it away. What's going on? Is she in love with me? I had women chasing me in Hollywood but this is-- I don't know."

"If anything, she's trying to love herself through you," I said. "But I have misgivings about that wrapping paper. These presents no doubt come from fancy shops. It seems to me a normal inclination to want to use the shop's own wrapping."

"You're not saying our Masami is a shoplifter, are you? It would be absurd! As a woman I might consider my own wrapping paper if it was a lovely as hers."

"Call it my old journalist's cynicism," I said. "Something just doesn't feel right."

Then Miss Ogawa brought Yolanda a small leather-bound edition of The Rubayat of Omar Khayyam wrapped in exquisite thick rice paper embossed with gold. The book was an 1879 edition--not cheap, I assumed.

"I have a good idea where this book came from," I said.

"Barger's Books in the Quartier Latin," Yolanda said.

"I'm going over."

Mr. David Barger was an American who had lived in Paris since the 1960s. His was a small bookstore specializing in rare English publications. The store itself was famous among book collectors as was the personality of Mr. Barger. He had studied Classics at Harvard and had been planning a career in law when he went with his aunt on what was to be a brief summer holiday in France. He stayed on, a man hopelessly in love with Paris. Unlike too many expatriates in love with Paris, he lived a sober and fiscally disciplined life. He was not rich but neither was he poor. A bohemian at heart who had never married--a man who would have preferred to spend his days sitting in cafés arguing about literature and art--he was devoted to his bookstore as an artist might be to perfecting a masterpiece. He ran Barger's Books--officially named "David M. Barger, Antiquarian Bookseller: Fine Editions and Periodicals in English"--like it was the Library of Congress. He knew where everything was, down to the most obscure eighteenth century political pamphlet. He dressed every day in a blue business suit and tie. He was generous with young impecunious would-be artists--all too frequently to his disadvantage--giving them a place to stay and work. Sometimes you would find an unkempt young man or woman in blue jeans at the register. Many of these unkempt young people went on to become great names and returned to give readings or have shows in the tiny parlor on the store's second floor, between Mr. Barger's tiny apartment and the guestroom. Many others became aging bums, more enamored with Paris's bohemia than the hard work it takes to create art, and bothered Mr. Barger with personal problems of all sorts. David Barger took it in stride. He loved bohemia but kept a polite distance from it.

Mr. Barger, now in his late sixties, was bald like a Buddhist priest yet still slender and handsome--a man who had largely kept the athletic physique of his youth.

When I came to him with the book, Mr. Barger said: "I was expecting you or Madam St. Cloud to come around with that. I thought either today or tomorrow. I have your favorite tarts and tea on hold. You are staying for afternoon tea."

He always closed the shop between three and five for afternoon tea.

"The book went missing the day after your Japanese guest visited," he said.

I noticed the young man at the register looking in our direction. He had short reddish hair, was somewhere in his mid-twenties, and dressed in a gray suit and tie.

"I'm certainly not accusing her of anything," Mr. Barger said.

The young man looked down.

"It's only two-thirty, but hang it," Mr. Barger said, "Let's have our tea." He called to the young man, "Brian, mind the store for a while, will you?"

"Yes sir," the young man said.

"A good lad and a very promising poet," Mr. Barger said as we walked up the narrow dark staircase to his neat parlor. (He rose, I knew, at three in the morning to clean.) "Your next question is about how I happened to know about your Japanese house guest."

"Well, yes," I said. "We've kept a lid on it but I think I know--"

"I heard from Madame Le Comte, my dear Thérese. We are going to tie the knot next spring, by the way."

"Congratulations!"

"It's time I got away from this unkind mistress, this claustrophobic book depository, and settled down."

Madame Le Comte was not rich, despite her lineage; but she was more than comfortably well off. Importantly, she shared Mr. Barger's love of good books. An acquaintance from Mr. Barger's reading circle, we had met her by chance when we had taken Miss Ogawa to an early Sunday morning marché in Montparnasse. Miss Ogawa had been impressed with the smartly dressed sixty-year-old woman's aristocratic ancestry. Madam LeComte knew about the wealth of the Ogawa family.

"Frankly, I think your Japanese princess walked off with the book by accident," Mr. Barger said. "She bought a very fine Peter Rabbit, and I think she must have somehow accidentally taken Omar with her. I mean a girl that rich certainly could afford a not particularly good Rubayat--it was rebound in the 1920's, you realize."

"I haven't!"

"I am also sure the poor girl was beside herself with embarrassment when she discovered the book. Probably too shy to return here herself."

"Probably; yeah," I said.

That evening I said to Yolanda: "Masami is a kleptomaniac. What're we going to do with the other stuff if it's stolen?"

"I'll make discreet inquiries. We'll return what we can. Have you found anything missing, Rick?"

"No. And you?"

"No. Absolutely not. She's clever. She only steals in stores. And she has come prepared with expensive paper. What do you recommend, Rick?"

"If we weren't soft-hearted fools I'd say toss her out. Let me talk to her."

"I must have taken the book by mistake," Miss Ogawa told me in Japanese. "I was surprised to see it in the package. I just assumed I was charged for it. Then I thought Yolanda-san would like it. I'm so sorry for the trouble I've caused you."

"Did you really buy all those other presents you gave Yolanda-san?" I demanded.

"Yes, of course! They were not expensive for someone like me. I wrapped them in my own paper because I hate department store wrapping. I do have the sales slips somewhere. But I'll be embarrassed if you ask me for them. I have my pride."

She said this with a blank face. The words seemed rehearsed.

"I understand," I said quickly. "Good night."

"I had a little talk with our guest," Yolanda said the next day. "I told her no more presents, under any circumstances. I've decided to make the inquiries after she leaves. It is only two more weeks. Oh, Rick, I do wonder about that girl. She showed me her Japanese-English dictionary and pointed to "masturbation." Then she asked me with a worried face if doing it every day was bad? I told her it was perfectly normal. Then she giggled and went out the door saying she had to go shopping. I don't know, Rick. Was the Mediterranean really such a good idea?"

"She's sexually confused," I said. "No doubt a highly repressive family. I don't think she could ever talk with anyone else about intimate things."

"They can't be that repressive if they let her stay with the likes of us," Yolanda said. "You know, lately I too have had this feeling she's been listening to us make love."

"Only a few more weeks. I think we can bear up."

The next day Miss Ogawa announced in English: "I have the boyfriend."

"You mean a male friend, not a lover, right?" Yolanda said.

"Not lover yet," she said. "Yolanda-san, may I bring Brian to dinner with us?"

Brian Greenpool turned out to be the young man who was working for Mr. Barger. He arrived in his suit. He never smiled and spoke little. When he did speak he chose his words guardedly. He said he was from southern California, still finishing up a college degree. He had been traveling with his cousin, whose name was Angelica Phairre, but she had business in London and so they had split up. Needing money he had taken the job at Barger's. Mr. Barger was giving him the tiny guestroom next to the parlor and feeding him besides paying him.

"Brian is poet," Miss Ogawa said.

Brian looked down at his plate.

"Do you have any of your work with you?" I asked.

"No. Not now," he said. "Do you wish to see some of it?"

"Yes," I said. "Yes, absolutely. Do you know that on Sundays twice a month Mr. Barger has readings? You ought to read."

"Maybe," Brian said. He paused and looked down at his plate again. "May I show them to you first?" he said in a low voice.

I telephoned Mr. Barger the next day.

"A fine young poet, Brian Greenpool," he said. "Not a poetic name, but he has great promise. I don't know much about him. No more than you know. He's quiet. He's diligent. He has a head for figures. Not like most of the other poets I've known. Didn't realize he's seeing your guest. I'm sure they're only friends if you're worried."

"How did they meet?" Yolanda asked. "Did Masami tell you?"

Brian was apparently visiting the Balzac Museum, a few minutes from our apartment, and ran into Miss Ogawa. Somehow they got to like each other.

"Paris does strange things," I said.

"Not usually so strange," Yolanda said. "They didn't talk. They didn't even hold hands under the table. Still, shouldn't we discuss birth control with her? We cannot take a chance of sending her home pregnant."

Yolanda tried to talk to Miss Ogawa in her room but couldn't communicate.

"When I tried to talk about birth control, Masami covered her mouth and giggled," she said.

The next evening Brian came over for dinner and after dessert he announced he would read his poetry for us.

Miss Ogawa clapped her hands. During his reading she smiled and smiled, squeezing her arms together. She seemed almost beautiful to me.

At the end of Brian's reading, we applauded and Miss Ogawa cried, "Bravo!"

Brian took out a new Mont Blanc pen from his pocket and made a correction, then closed the folder and put it back into his new leather briefcase. These were Miss Ogawa's presents no doubt.

"I hope you weren't too bored," Brian said, his head down.

"Wonderful!" Yolanda declared. "You remind me a little bit of Rimbaud."

"I'm a journalist not a literary critic," I said, "but I honestly think you're terrific. You made me think a little of Yeats, actually. Maybe Roethke. Have you published?"

"Not much."

"I did not expect this," I said. "Paris is full of poets writing in English and ninety-nine percent are frauds. But you have talent. No, let me say you have mature talent. Frankly, I've never been face to face with anyone with your virtuosity before."

"Thank you, sir," Brian said.

"I know a small press publisher in New York," I said. "A personal friend from way back. He does fine editions. You probably saw his work at Barger's. But he also does chapbooks and paperbacks. A dozen major poets first published with him. He lives in Port Washington. I'm going to recommend you to him. You might have heard of Stan Milano and The Green Light Press."

"Yes," Brian said. "It's a great press. Thank you. Really. Thank you." He was looking down. "Sorry, I have a hard time expressing feelings. But I'm really grateful for your help."

"Leave some poems with me," I said. "I'll scan them into my computer and e-mail them to Stan Milano."

I called Mr. Barger the next day.

"I've got to confess something in all honesty," he said. "I inadvertently mentioned to Brian your connection to Stan Milano."

"I hope he isn't using Masami to get to me," I said sharply. "He wouldn't have to do that."

"Oh no, he's quite serious about your Japanese princess. He's not a talkative fellow and says nothing about her to me, but I know he's dedicating his book to her. He also said something about including a poem for her. They are quite devoted to each other. She now comes for him at lunchtime with a bag of sandwiches from Bonmarché. I've seen them walking along the Seine in the evenings. They're very private people. If they are making love they aren't doing it in the guestroom here."

"I don't understand the relationship," I said. "Forgive me for saying it, Mr. Barger, but the girl's face--"

"I am inclined to conclude that in this case love is blind."

"Love is never blind," Yolanda said. "There is always some ulterior motive when a young man like Brian goes after someone like our Masami. I think he is after her money. I know he is a good poet but there is something insincere about him."

"Well, Masami will be gone in a few days," I said. "If Brian wants her he'll have to make a few fast choices."

Two days before her intended departure, we got a telegram from Tokyo. In flowery English the Ogawa family asked if their Masami could be allowed to stay with us for another six months. The message said Miss Ogawa adored us both, that she wanted to learn French and that the family would reward us for our troubles. As we were reading the telegram my former editor telephoned.

"Nice timing," I said.

"Look, Rick, can you do it? Please say yes. The Ogawas are delighted their daughter is happy in Paris. They're going to be generous--I mean really generous--if you say yes."

"This isn't my house," I said. "You'll have to talk to Yoyo. It's really unusual, you know, for a Japanese family to want to extend their daughter's stay abroad. Usually they want their daughters back in the nest as soon as possible."

"The Ogawas are a very special family, Rick. Mrs. Ogawa is pregnant and she is over forty-five. Frankly, I think they want Masami out until her mother has given birth. Their only other child died in infancy. Masami was traumatized. This is all hush-hush, by the way."

"I'll put Yolanda on."

"Oh hello again," Yolanda said when she got on the phone. "Yes, we've enjoyed Masami very much. Yes, yes, I do understand. Six months? Well--she has become quite independent but-- Oh I see-- Yes, she did mention the baby-- Oh, the poor thing! I did not know-- Oh the poor thing-- They don't think she would be better off at home? Oh I see-- Well, all right."

"You don't mind, do you Rick?" Yolanda said after hanging up. "Your friend explained the situation. Did you hear the whole story, Rick? How poor little Masami had a severe breakdown after her little brother's death. Masami's psychiatrist told the Ogawa family the birth of this new baby would be very difficult for her. I couldn't refuse. Is it really all right, darling?"

"Listen, Yoyo," I said. "Think back to that night in Montmartre. In so many words she said she was glad her brother died."

"But darling, grief speaks in so many different ways! Poor Masami! Almost six years and she still suffers from post traumatic stress."

"You got over your post traumatic stress," I said.

"Ah, but Rick, that was different. I was an adult and she was a child. And I knew Dario was a doomed man. It was different with Masami. One moment her little brother is there, the next moment he is gone for no reason."

"You win," I said. "I guess I'm becoming fond of her too."

Within an hour a Japanese man, the Ogawa family's representative, arrived at the door. He handed us a large flat box and a large ornamental Japanese envelope. He bowed deeply to us and then thanked us in almost perfect British English, adding: "We must beg you not to say a single word to Miss Masami about her mother's pregnancy."

The box contained an expensive silver tray from one of the most exclusive shops on the Champs Élysées. The envelope was full of money--one hundred thousand euros.

"They really want that girl out of the way," I said.

"Yes--poor thing."

Half an hour later a deliveryman brought a box containing twelve bottles of vintage wine. Attached was a note in French profusely thanking us for extending our hospitality to Miss Ogawa. We promptly opened a bottle and drank to Miss Ogawa's family's good health.

"I better check our e-mail before we get too carried away," I said.

Stan Milano had responded. He enthusiastically praised Brian's poetry.

"Good things come in threes," I said to Yolanda, "Green Light Press wants to do a book of Brian's poems."

I called Barger's immediately and got Mr. Barger.

"Is Brian there?" I asked.

"Both Brian and Masami are here," Mr. Barger said. "We're all in the parlor discussing Catullus."

This meant he was lecturing them on Catullus and they were probably going stir crazy. Even Mr. Barger had his faults.

"I got news for both of them. Give me Brian first."

Brian came on the line.

"Stan Milano can have a chapbook out between three and six months," I told him. "He's limiting you to fifteen poems and, mind, it won't be anything fancy."

Brian was silent for a moment then he said quietly, "Gee, that's great. I mean, wow. I guess I owe you a lot. Excuse me."

I heard applause and Miss Ogawa's delighted cry in the background.

When Brian was back on the line, I said, "We'll talk about putting your book together. How about tonight? Come over for dinner. Let me talk to Masami."

I explained in Japanese what she had already understood with her limited English. She thanked me formally with a studied enthusiasm--"Domo arigato gozai masu.

Miss Ogawa came back with Brian at seven that evening. She had bought both Yolanda and me expensive gifts: a gold necklace with diamonds and sapphires for Yolanda, a superb wristwatch for me. I noted they were wrapped in the store's paper.

After dinner Brian and I went into the den to work on his book. I had sent Stan Milano ten poems. We picked five more. I scanned them into the computer and then e-mailed them.

"That's modern desk top publishing, I said. "We'll still need to go through the proofs. Stan Milano has a backlog, but he's giving you priority. I think he can have your book out around the first of the year. By the way, is that a new suit? It's nice."

"Yeah, Masami bought it for me. I've asked her not to spend money on me but--well--you know. It's hard to argue with generosity. Is this book going to get around a lot?"

"Small circulation. It'll be in a few major bookstores and a lot of small press specialty bookstores. Who writes you up and how is anyone's guess."

"I really don't want a large circulation," Brian said. "Not when I still have so much to learn."

"You might be asked to do pubic readings. Would you like that?"

"I guess so," said Brian looking away from me.

I realized he had never looked me in the eye. I looked at him now and somehow the thin white face did not reveal a poet. But I could not deny the poetry.

After Brian had left and Miss Ogawa was in bed, Yolanda said to me, "Masami and I had a little talk. She said she gave Brian a hand job under a bridge on the Seine. I told her they could have gotten arrested."

"Did our romantic young lady understand?"

"I should hope so, Rick. I also said that if she wants to make love I'd prefer she did it here in our flat. And I tried talking about birth control again. She only giggled."

"I think I understand the attraction," I said. "They are both sexual idiots."

"Giggles or no giggles, I'm going to make sure she gets birth control. I won't have her getting pregnant."

Miss Ogawa did not resist when my wife suggested going off to her doctor for birth control information. She obediently allowed herself to be fitted for a diaphragm.

Presently she began to imitate Yolanda in ways I had never seen before. She mimicked the way my wife walked, her gestures when she talked, the way she dressed. When Yolanda appeared in blue jeans so did Miss Ogawa. When Yolanda donned a miniskirt, Miss Ogawa also wore a miniskirt. She tried to imitate Yolanda's hairstyle but could not manage the braids and so asked my wife for help.

"It's you, not Brian, she is in love with," I said to Yolanda.

"No, darling. Brian is definitely the erotic love of her life. But, there is something else. Don't you see it, darling?"

"No."

"She is also trying to impress you by imitating me."

"Come on, Yoyo!"

"She likes you so much."

"News to me."

"Oh, when we are together she is always saying how much she likes you! Erotic love has wakened her needs for paternal love. You are the father she has always wanted! You don't complain about her appearance. Her family does. When I suggested we see a dermatologist, her eyes filled with tears. She explained in her labored English that she had spent a lifetime going from one dermatologist to the next. She does not want to see another dermatologist again. She says her family is ashamed of her. She loves Brian, but somehow I think she loves you more."

"What does Brian see in Masami anyway?" I blurted. "Money? He better not take advantage of that girl!"

"You really have become a daddy, haven't you?" Yolanda said. "Let's wait and see."

A few days later Yolanda told me that Miss Ogawa had asked her if there were "love hotels" in Paris.

"I've never heard of 'love hotels.' She couldn't--or wouldn't--explain. Are these love hotel for what I think they're for?"

"You bet! My wayward youth was spent in love hotels," I said. "They are one of the few places in Japan lovers can have privacy. You can drive your car into their garages and have it hidden from the street. Couples pay by the hour. Most are cheap. A few are quite fancy and relatively expensive. You'll find lots of those on the outskirts of cities. Some of them look like castles or cabin cruisers or the Statue of Liberty."

"Marvelous! If we go to Japan please take me to one!"

"Miss Ogawa didn't indicate anything about sleeping with Brian, did she?" I asked.

"She went into a giggling fit when I asked. I hope she can use the diaphragm."

"I'll talk to her," I said.

That night after dinner I knocked on Miss Ogawa's door. She let me in and settled herself in a lotus position on the bed. Her scrapbook was on the pillow.

"I need to talk to you about something serious; may I?" I asked in the gentlest Japanese I knew.

"Hai, hai," she said playfully.

I sat down in a chair at some distance from the bed and said, "I need to talk to you about Brian." I said this in a soft but serious tone of voice, the way a boss might speak to a senior secretary.

"Hai," she said humbly.

"Yolanda-san has tried to talk to you but there was a communication problem. So I am going to talk about it. It's about you're relationship with Brian."

"Hai," she said as if receiving a military order. "He is my lover."

"May I ask if you have slept with him yet?"

"I haven't yet. But I hope to very soon."

"And you're prepared to use your diaphragm?"

"Yolanda-san's doctor showed me how to use it. It's easy."

"You had better have your relationship here in the apartment. We will say nothing to your parents, of course."

"They wouldn't care," she said. "I've had sex at home before. Are you surprised?"

I did not know what to say, except, "Are you the same giggly girl who burned the chicken?" But I did not say that. I said something like, "I haven't thought about it."

"I went to host clubs in Tokyo and paid handsome boys to have sex with me."

"Oh?"

"They used condoms. Doing it with a diaphragm might be more interesting."

"You giggled a great deal when Yolanda-san asked you about Brian."

"I couldn't explain it to her in English. I'm so ashamed of my English. And I admire Yolanda-san so much. I lost my head! I hope Yolanda-san wasn't offended. If I have to speak of something very important I get embarrassed and I giggle. I cannot help it. It's a mental disorder, I think. I tried speaking about something serious with her many times and became confused. It all came out wrong. I am so bad at English." She starred into my face. "I am afraid I shocked Yolanda-san. I had to tell her about masturbating Brian and this need I have to masturbate myself these days. I did not masturbate so much until I came to Paris. Am I shocking you?"

"Paris is a remarkable city," I said.

"I don't think that's funny," she said.

"Sorry," I said.

"If you are worried about me and Brian, don't be. When the time comes, I'll inform you. He's a poet and he appreciates me for myself."

"He'd better--"

"Since we are being frank with each other, could I tell you what Yolanda-san means to me?" Miss Ogawa said. "At first I worshipped her beauty, especially the smoothness of her skin. Then, I came to admire her as a writer and a TV personality. Now I admire her the most as a lover. She was betrayed and yet she could love again. She loves her husband for himself."

"However homely he is," I said.

"Yolanda-san has a happy marriage," Miss Ogawa said. "My parents hate each other. My father has a mistress. The reason I have this skin disease is because my mother took what she thought was an abortion drug--anyway it's what one of my aunts told me."

"I cannot believe you are the same girl who burned the chicken," I said abruptly.

"Neither can I," she rejoined. "I'd never been in a kitchen before. I'd seen TV cooking programs where they fried chicken and there was lots of smoke."

She inched closer to me.

"Could I ask you a favor?" she said, looking in my face. "Could you and Yolanda-san adopt me?"

"Really?" I laughed.

"I'm not joking. Couldn't you? My parents hate me. They cannot stand the sight of me. And I hate them. They would be happy to be rid of me. I know my mother is pregnant--it's her boyfriend's, not my father's. My father will get even by making his mistress pregnant. They won't need me any more, don't you see?" She stared at me. "I love you and Yolanda-san. I love Paris."

"Masami-san, I'm moved but it's out of the question," I said.

"I'll give up all of my bad habits if you adopt me."

"Like petty theft?"

She covered her mouth and giggled. "Yes," she said.

The confession had come so effortlessly that I had to pursue it.

"Tell me about it," I said quietly. "I promise not to make judgments."

"I have been a master thief since I was twelve!" Miss Ogawa exclaimed. "I steal from the best department stores and give presents to the people I love."

"People who love you only need you, Masami-san."

"No one ever loved me before I came to Paris! Some psychiatrist told my parents my thieving was part of my mental disorder. He said I took risks to prove my sincerity to people who I wanted to like me. So do you know what my parents did, Rick-san? They made deals with every department store in Japan to pay double for anything I stole if I got caught. They make the same deals everywhere I go. Even in Paris. But you know what, Rick-san? I've never been caught. I'm too clever. By the way, I took the book from Mr. Barger by mistake. I would never steal from someone like him. I was planning to return and pay for it but I was so embarrassed!"

"So you gave it to Yolanda-san."

"I couldn't help it! I love her so!"

"Masami-san, you don't have to take risks for us or for Brian," I said.

"I know! And you know what, Rick-san? I no longer feel like stealing! So please adopt me!"

"Masami-san," I said. "You're no longer a child. You're an adult. You're too old to be adopted."

"It was only an idea," Miss Ogawa said. "I'll just be like an abandoned kitty cat always looking for a home."

When I told Yolanda about this interview she said, "When I lived in Beverly Hills I knew of lots of parents who paid big money to cover up their children's misdeeds. But our Masami isn't at all like those destructive rich brats. The poor girl!"

Miss Ogawa did not talk about adoption again. But for the next few weeks we acted as if we were a family. We went to restaurants, museums, art galleries. We shopped together. We went on weekend excursions. We spent evenings in our living room just chatting. I must say that when we went out together--a Black woman, a young Japanese woman and a Caucasian guy--we did raise a few eyebrows, albeit discrete eyebrows. There were those times when Yolanda was recognized and autographs were asked for. Miss Ogawa loved those moments for some of the attention lavished on Yolanda would go to her. She learned enough French to proudly call us her host parents.

I forgot to mention that during those two or so weeks Brian was in London. He left unexpectedly, claiming urgent business and was given leave by Mr. Barger. When he returned it was with a woman of about thirty whom he claimed was his cousin.

Angel Phairre was blonde and spoke with flat Southern Californian English through her nose. She was someone who at first glance seems attractive but who at second glance looks homely. Her teeth were crooked and her face was long. She had a Wagnerian nose and jaw. Because of this, her eyes and lips seemed disproportionately small. Her manner was brisk and self-consciously assertive. There was something colonial in her manner--something condescending, something flippant. She had two masters' degrees, she informed us when we had her and Brain over for dinner. Back home she owned an off road vehicle of some sort and also climbed mountains other people were afraid of. She was considering doing business in Europe. She thought Brain's poetry was "cool," Barger's was "okay," and, "Oh yeah," she'd heard of Yolanda St. Cloud.

"So where are you staying in Paris, Angie?" I asked.

"Angelica," she corrected me, and then named a cheap hotel in Nation. If she was a businesswoman she was not a particularly rich one.

"I'm into computers," she said. "Software, not hardware. I'm designing a computerized weight loss program. I'm a sports therapist. I've designed this program and I've got people in London who are very interested."

I glanced at my wife and our houseguest. Yolanda met my glance and rolled her eyes up. Miss Ogawa was livid. She said not a word at the table. But when Brain and Angelica Phairre were leaving she kissed him on the mouth and then retreated to her room.

I had wanted to talk about the book with Brain, taciturn all evening. I mentioned it on his way out.

"Can we talk about it tomorrow?" he said.

His hand was clammy when I shook it.

"One thing I can tell you about that woman," Yolanda said in bed. "She hates Black people."

Yolanda was not one to make snap judgments. I had sensed it too. Angel's reluctance to shake Yolanda's hand was one thing. Also her nasty habit of directing answers to Yolanda's questions to me.

"Masami hated her," I said. "Do you suppose Angelica and Brian are kissing cousins?"

"Possibly," she said. "You know, Rick, I saw no family resemblance."

"Distant cousins?"

"Distant enough to be intimate. Should I go to our girl?"

"Best leave her alone," I said. "If anything has to come out, let it come out on its own."

If fact, nothing came out. The next day Brian called for Miss Ogawa and mentioned Angelica Phairre had gone back to London in the morning.

"Your publisher wants me to write an introduction to your book," I said. "Are you amenable?"

"I guess so. Hey, thanks."

When I was writing the introduction and found myself dwelling on an elaborate takeoff on Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," "Life is the Mother of Beauty," the terrible unease I should have listened to struck me. The personality in the poems and the personality of Brian Greenpool were strangers to each other.

My old journalist's cynicism, I thought. It was seldom wrong but this time there was one thing that made me turn its volume down. The poem "For You." It was the best of the lot and, I was convinced, it could only have been written by him for Miss Ogawa. In it, in a delicate and quiet way, he dealt with her skin disease: "Your fleshly cover, uneasy sea / festers the Whale of Love beneath its wake."

One afternoon I came home to a seemingly empty apartment that felt filled somehow. Miss Ogawa's door was closed. Presently I heard hushed, nervous voices. I discretely got the copy of my introduction and went to a nearby café. I returned in the evening.

Brian was gone and my wife and Miss Ogawa were cooking beefsteak together. Yolanda was singing a French folk song and Miss Ogawa was trying to sing along with her.

"They made love here this afternoon," I said to Yolanda in bed that night. "Anyway, I think they did."

"I know," Yolanda said. "She told me. She said it in pretty good English and she didn't giggle. I think she rehearsed it. She said, 'Brian and I did sex today.' I asked her very carefully if she used the diaphragm and she nodded and said yes. Yes, she did."

"Well jolly good, I guess," I said. "So are we good host parents or rotten host parents? I can't help feeling we are going to catch hell from the real parents."

"She's paid young men for sex in Japan. At least this is love. On her part anyway."

"That's what we might catch hell for. If she brings home a gaijin boyfriend and says she wants to marry him the Ogawas will probably blow up."

"But maybe they'll be happy."

"If they are typical Japanese parents I doubt it."

"Anyway, don't worry. I think this romance is a passing phenomenon. I just don't feel anything between them. She buys him things--at least I hope she buys them. I think that's all that's keeping Brian connected to her. I think she knows it."

On the following Sunday Brian gave a reading at the bookstore. We were there with Miss Ogawa. Mr. Barger's fiancée was there. A few of the local literati were there. Brian read quietly but with what I can only describe as a feeling of ownership over every word in every poem. His pauses, his emphases seemed to come out of a complex consciousness the young man kept hidden from the world. When he had finished and Mr. Barger's guests asked about his influences, writing habits and aesthetic philosophy, Brian answered guardedly but intelligently. He spoke of how Whitman had initially influenced him and how he found solace in the conceits of John Donne. He said he often reread Wordsworth's Prelude. He knew his stuff. Still, for no rational reason, something about him nagged at me.

Miss Ogawa had applauded when everyone else applauded, though she did not, I was sure, understand anything he wrote, least of all the poem "For You." After the reading, she and Brian disappeared down the stairs hand in hand.

A significant silence followed. I knew what everyone wanted to say, but, thankfully, didn't: What did that young man see in an ugly girl who did not understand a word he wrote?

We discretely delayed coming home until late evening. Miss Ogawa was alone and in a cheerful mood.

"I'm tired," she announced.

"I'll bet," I said.

My wife gave me a nudge in the ribs.

Miss Ogawa smiled at me and went to her room.

By late November Brian's chapbook, indeed dedicated to Miss Ogawa, was out. It was entitled (by the publisher) Life is the Mother of Beauty, and it collected good reviews from a few small literary journals and, surprise, the New York Times.

"Brian must go to New York and give readings from his book," Miss Ogawa said. "I am buying us a plane ticket. Can I ask you a favor? I know you have an apartment in Manhattan. This is asking too much, but could we possibly use it? It will only be for a few weeks."

"I haven't renovated the apartment since my mother's death. It's not terribly neat. The water pipes make weird noises."

"I can afford the best hotels, Rick-san. But an apartment will feel like a home."

"Let me talk to Yolanda," I said, giving my usual dodge when I did not want to make a decision.

"It's up to you," Yolanda said. "It's your apartment."

"But what do you think?"

"How do you feel? Honesty."

"Well, Brian and our Masami are almost like an old married couple now. I suppose I should ask her parents or something."

"My parents don't care what I do," Miss Ogawa told me when I spoke to her again. "They really don't care. Call them collect."

I did call Tokyo and got the Ogawa's answering service. I left a message saying Masami-san could stay in my apartment if they approved. In response a Japanese man showed up at the door with another expensive gift and a envelope full of euros and an effusive thank you note in French.

Were her family's people in Paris watching Miss Ogawa? Did they know about Brian? Did they quietly approve of the relationship? We never learned. Only now I felt obligated to hand over the keys to our charge and her lover.

I assembled the young lovers in our living room the next evening and gave them a lecture on the apartment in English and Japanese as Yolanda looked on.

It was in a building with tight security so I needed to tell the manager they were coming and staying there awhile. The neighbor on the floor above, Mrs. Stein, my mother's old friend, had a spare key and often looked in on the apartment. It was in an old working class neighborhood that was becoming upscale. I mentioned I was planning to sell the apartment as Yolanda and I seldom stayed in New York.

"Brian, as an American you're responsible for Miss Ogawa's well being," I said.

"I've been to New York many times," Miss Ogawa said in Japanese. "I know my way around."

"Not on your own," I said.

"Yes, on my own," she answered. "Twice last year. My parents want me to be independent. Actually they want me out of the way."

I told them where the apartment was and gave each of them a key. No need to mention the apartment's location. I know the current owners would prefer their anonymity.

"Merci, Yolanda-san, Rick-san. Adieu," Miss Ogawa said as the taxi stood waiting outside our apartment building to take Miss Ogawa to the airport, where she would meet Brian.

"Not adieu but au revoir!

You are coming back, aren't you?" Yolanda said

"Yes. I think so," she answered.

The driver finished packing all of Miss Ogawa's trunks and looked impatiently at us.

Yolanda kissed Miss Ogawa on both of her pimply cheeks. Then Miss Ogawa shook my hand and said, "Domo arigato."

Yolanda cried after the taxi was gone.

"I don't see why I am so emotional," she said in the elevator. "I didn't think I had any motherly feelings toward Masami. I was looking forward to being able to walk around naked in the apartment again. But I miss her."

"I have a weird feeling about all this," I said and said no more.

A week later a post card arrived from Miss Ogawa saying she was enjoying New York. Mrs. Stein wrote a letter saying how pleasant Brian and Masami were. Then enthusiastic e-mail from Brian's publisher came about his readings and the interview he gave to a major literary journal.

As all seemed well and we had work to do, we put Brian and Miss Ogawa aside. A week before Christmas we took the TGV to Provence and did not return until after the New Year's mob rush back to Paris. Rested and happy, we were unprepared for what greeted us.

In my emails I found one from Stan Milano titled "Urgent Lew Price." I vaguely knew Price as a minor poet. Stan wrote: "Read this first." He had copied Price's email to him. "The bastard plagiarized me," Price wrote. "I'm not accusing you of conspiracy, Mr. Milano. I can't imagine you knowingly aiding and abetting this guy. I'm surprised you didn't know my poetry well enough to see through Brain Greenpool. He changed stuff around--for the worse of course. Yet my genius is still there. And who is that nobody who wrote the Introduction?"

Lew Price had attached copies of his poems matching all those in Brian's book. All had been published in various quarterlies. None had been collected into books. This did not come so much as surprise but as the recognition that my old journalist's cynicism had struck again.

The poem, which Brian had rewritten as "For You", was entitled "On Oliva's Blindness." Lew Price's original version of the line I had admired went: "Your night, uneasy sky / nestles the Great Eagle of Love." Brian's rewrite had improved on the supposed genius of the poet with the inflated ego but also with a legitimate grievance. Brian had improved the other poems as well. Though a plagiarist, Brian Greenpool had creative talent after all.

Stan Milano wrote: "We've been hoodwinked. Happy ending, though. Thank whatever Lew Price is decent enough not sue me. I promised to publish a book for him. Publishers have been turning him down. The guy's lucky break. Can't find that jerk Brian. No answer at your apartment. I'm not blaming you for this."

"Poor Masami," Yolanda said when I told her what happened. "We are not really going to be hurt by this. Embarrassed but not hurt. But poor Masami. She loves him."

I telephoned the apartment in New York. No answer.

"Damn it! Where are those two?" I said. "They've disappeared."

"No, look, I found this with our Christmas mail." Yolanda handed me Miss Ogawa's post card from Washington DC.

It said she was spending a few weeks there with family friends while Brian was back in Los Angeles seeing his family. It was sent just after Christmas.

"We must get to New York," Yolanda said. "They'll probably be coming back to the apartment. We need to protect Masami."

An hour later the telephone rang. It was Miss Ogawa.

"We have big trouble," she said in English.

"What's going on there?" I said in Japanese. "Are you all right?"

"I don't understand anything any more."

"Masami-san, please tell me what's happening to you!"

"I don't know," she sobbed. "Help me father and mother!"

"We are taking the next plane to New York," I said as calmly as I could. "Give us a day. Please hang on. Don't do anything rash. Promise me you'll be all right until we get there."

"Hai," she said and hung up.

"The poor girl," Yolanda said. "Brian has abandoned her. I'm sure he has."

We managed to reserve tickets for an afternoon flight from Orly. I telephoned the apartment before we left and got no answer.

"Maybe she was only upstairs talking to Mrs. Stein," Yolanda said on the plane. "Didn't she write they had become close friends?"

"She never wrote anything of the sort," I said.

"She's afraid to answer the phone. She's afraid to speak English on the phone. That's all."

"Yeah," I said. "That's all."

I called the apartment from Kennedy Airport. No answer. Snow fell as we taxied into Manhattan.

"Prepare for the worst, Yoyo," I said as we approached the apartment building.

We exchanged greetings with the security guard and took the elevator up.

At the door of the apartment I paused, wondering whether to knock first or unlock the door and walk in. I did the latter.

The apartment was freezing. Miss Ogawa, wrapped in a heavy coat and a muffler, was sitting on the coach in the living room. She was shivering. Her face was blanched. Not a trace of her Mediterranean tan remained. She had probably been clawing her zits--her face was covered with blotches and open sores.

"Masami!" Yolanda cried. "You're all right! What a relief! Come back to Paris with us!"

Miss Ogawa just started at us with a glazed look as if she did not recognize us.

"Why don't you have the heat on?" I asked in Japanese.

"Big trouble," Miss Ogawa said in English.

"Please tell me," I said in Japanese.

Miss Ogawa pointed toward the dining room, separated from the living room by a closed door. I opened it.

Brian and Angelica Phairre were sprawled over my mother's old oak table amid broken glasses and splattered, graying food.

"Yolanda, don't come in here," I said.

But she had seen it. Her first impulse was to take my arm and hold on to it.

"Steady, darling," she said.

In moments like this one is apt to say something absurd. I turned to Miss Ogawa and said in Japanese, "At least you refrigerated them."

Miss Ogawa began to giggle. She continued to giggle as I called the police. She giggled as the police took her away.

After the police had found an interpreter, who told her she was under arrest for the murder of Brian Greenpool and Angelica Phairre, Miss Ogawa stopped giggling, confessed, and told what had happened.

Simply put, when Brian had seen that Miss Ogawa was apparently a skilled kleptomaniac he decided to use her to steal for him. Angelica Phairre, his girlfriend, not his cousin, had entered into the conspiracy. Satisfied with her Paris thievery, Brian had put her to work in New York. At Christmas time, when Miss Ogawa said she had to visit her family's friends, Brian had claimed he would fly to Los Angeles to see his family. They agreed to meet in the apartment a week after New Year's. Brian had stayed in the apartment, however, and was joined by Angelica. Then Miss Ogawa returned unexpectedly.

Brian and Angelica pretended to only be relatives. Angelica slept on the couch while Brian slept with Miss Ogawa and made love to her. But Miss Ogawa had, somehow, seen through their game. One day she announced she wanted to cook a dish she had learned from Yolanda--Coq de Martinique, which she marinated with red Burgundy wine. She poured the rest of the Burgundy into my mother's prized crystal decanter and spiked it with cyanide.

For good measure, she also spiked the vegetables and the desert, a chocolate pudding. At dinner she declined wine, citing doctor's orders, and didn't eat her vegetables. Brain and Angelica were dead with in minutes after the three had wished one another bon appetite.

Throughout her interrogations and subsequent press interviews, Miss Ogawa never divulged where she got the cyanide. She claimed to have forgotten. Perhaps she had. The cyanide was never traced.

Miss Ogawa also confessed to killing her baby brother by smoothing him with a pillow as he slept in his crib.

The media told the story of Brian and Angelica. They had met in Los Angeles. Brian, whose family sold real estate, had dropped out of college to work as a waiter in a posh Hollywood restaurant, where Angelica was working as a waitress. Angelica, a policeman's daughter, had introduced Brian to petty theft. Angelica was sleeping with a rich married man at the time. She stole his wallet when they spent their last night in a remote motel. He dared not call the police out of fear of exposure and even waited a few days before canceling his credit cards, apparently thinking that if Angelica wanted to take off he would let her have enough time to go far away. She and Brian flew as tourists to England where Angelica tried to sell pirated software. Running low on money, they separated. She found a rich married lover; he found the bookstore in Paris.

Brian's interest in Lew Price's poetry also came to light. Mr. Price had been a visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at Brian's college and Brian had studied with him. Brian's interest in poetry had been sincere. Inspired, perhaps by Angelica, he decided to plagiarize his former teacher's work. Then Miss Ogawa came along.

Brian hocked the jewelry Miss Ogawa had stolen for him before leaving Paris with her. In New York he directed Miss Ogawa where and what to steal. Angelica robbed her married English lover and escaped to the US.

The police found $50,000 worth of jewels and small antiques in my late mother's apartment--all of it paid for--with interest--by the Ogawas. They had forewarned New York's department stores that their daughter was coming and offered to pay them off if she wanted to play master thief. They also--as usual--requested the stores not to apprehend her but only to take inventory.

However clever a thief she might have been, with her galloping acne Miss Ogawa was not difficult to spot. She had never told Brian about her parents' deals with stores.

The policeman who questioned Yolanda and me said Brain and Angelica were not bright criminals. Brian's minor fame and then inevitable infamy would have eventually exposed them even if Miss Ogawa had not done them in. Like most petty criminals they did not know what they wanted--or, rather, they wanted too much.

"Just plain stupid," the policeman said. "I don't mean to be disrespectful of the dead, but they were just plain and absolutely stupid."

And so were we in being tricked by them, I thought.

The Ogawa family hired a team of the best lawyers and psychiatrists that money could buy. The team successfully argued that Miss Ogawa was mentally unfit to stand trial.

Miss Ogawa was deported. Once in Japan, she was transferred to a mental hospital. Within two months, Miss Ogawa declared herself sane and checked out of the hospital. She then became a minor TV celebrity, appearing on a few afternoon cooking shows where she prepared some of Yolanda's recipes. So Miss Ogawa did achieve a part of her dream.

My friend at the Japanese English language paper whipped out a sensational book exposing the Ogawa family's dirty laundry. He not only wrote about how they had financed the freeing of their daughter from trial in the U.S. but also about their bribery of politicians, their ties to criminal gangs, and their many sexual intrigues. He discretely left Japan before the book was published. It sold well enough for him to get a job teaching journalism at a college in his native Wisconsin.

Lew Price's book of poetry went ignored except by a few unsympathetic small literary journals. He proposed a book to Stan Milano about being plagiarized. Stan talked him out of it, saying another poet had already written a book like that.

Mr. Barger's fiancée left him, not wanting to be tainted by scandal.

"Best I learned about her now rather than later," he lectured Yolanda and me when we visited the bookstore to console him.

While Yolanda and I were in New York, helping with the inquest, cameras were always pointing at us whenever we left the hotel (we could not stay in the apartment needless to say) and various reporters telephoned demanding interviews. The American media dwelt on "tragedy stalking" Yolanda. The tabloids, the "insider" television shows and various Internet websites not only put a lurid slant on Brian and Miss Ogawa carrying on their affair under our noses (our apartments in Paris and New York were photographed) but also Yolanda's marriage to Dario, her career as a fashion model and--of course--her brief career in nude modeling. (The tabloids and websites published some of Yolanda's old nude photographs.) The then nescient social media was overwhelmingly sympathetic with us. For reasons unknown to us, the powers-that-be spared us from the legal problems that our lawyer warned we might face.

Yolanda got a movie offer, a number of centerfold offers, and an offer to write a book about her experiences with the criminal poet and mad little rich Japanese girl.

In that terrible moment when Yolanda had taken hold of my arm, it was a message that she would be the one guiding us through this crisis. To everyone who called or accosted us, no matter how obnoxious they were, she quietly and politely said she was not granting interviews. She also made known that she was turning down all movie, book and photographic offers because she did not want to profit from the horror.

We could not make love the whole time we were in New York. Back in Paris we were asked to help promote the campaign to ban land mines and threw ourselves into this volunteer job. And we, who had never had a serious argument before, began to bicker about little domestic inconveniences that escalated, one Sunday morning, into a screaming match. We were so surprised that we were suddenly and simultaneously silent. We stared at each other like strangers.

"After I sell the apartment in New York, let's buy a modest bungalow in Sette," I suggested to Yolanda one day. "Do something good for ourselves,"

Yolanda shook her head. "We cannot think of pleasing ourselves now," she said.

We turned down several prominent French journals that wanted articles from us. Yolanda refused to narrate a TV series dealing with crime and psychology for major French network. Then one day a Japanese man appeared at our door with a gift box and two envelopes from the Ogawas. One envelope was, we knew, thick with money. When we insisted we could not accept these gifts, the bearer pleaded with us to take them, finally saying he would be fired if we would not.

The gift box contained a wine bottle-sized gold-on-wood statue of Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy. The envelope was stuffed with more money than I could make in a year of part time teaching and writing. The handwritten letter on thick Japanese rice paper apologized for the trouble Masami had caused us and thanked us for helping to convince the American authorities to be lenient with her (which we hadn't).

"This is obscene," I said. "The money goes to the anti-landmine cause."

Yolanda wept.

"I miss that miserable girl. I don't know why," she said.

"She was a damned murderer," I said. "She killed three people, including an innocent baby! She could have murdered us!"

But I had to confess I too missed her. I said I missed her so much I couldn't bear referring to her as Masami any more but only as Miss Ogawa.

"Swimming together at Sette endeared her to me," Yolanda said.

"I honestly don't know what endeared her to me," I said. "Maybe the implicit madness in her."

•••••

When I returned in the evening from Montparnasse, having left the young man by de Maupassant's grave--and not gotten his story--Yolanda was at home and in a pleasant mood. The interview had gone well.

"You look sad and you smell of wine. My poor Rick!" she said.

I mentioned the young man.

"Oh that young man," she said. "He's famous around Montparnasse. He's been coming to de Maupassant's grave for the last ten years and drinking from a bottle of wine. He is quite a mystery. You may be the first person he's ever talked to. Did he tell you his story?"

"I told him ours."

"You know, Rick," Yolanda said. "If he talked to you he might talk to me, that poor boy. We might be able to do something good."

"Right, Yoyo--"

"I meant, Rick, we might write an article about him. That's all I meant."

"Sorry," I said.

"You're my rudder, Rick," Yolanda said suddenly. "You're my compass."

"Yoyo--"

"No listen, darling. Please. I've only loved two men. Dario dazzled me with his genius; you broke my resolve to never fall in love again. In you I saw--how can I say it--? Something complete; something beautifully symmetrical that was lacking in me."

"Let's go to Montparnasse," I said as we were embracing. "He might still be there--"

We didn't find the young blond man at the cemetery. He was never there when happened to be in Montparnasse. This was not unusual, local people said. He often disappeared for months. Then one windy spring day we did find him. And he did talk to Yolanda.

In fact he poured out all his sorrows to her. He told her that ten years before, when he was eighteen, his childhood sweetheart had left him for someone else and he had never gotten over the shock. He had quit university and now worked odd jobs. He would have committed suicide had he not found solace in the stories of Guy de Maupassant. Then he said he had written a book about losing his first and only love; did we want to see it?

"No more young authors, Yoyo," I said in English.

"It won't hurt to see," she said. "Why not? Oui," she told him.

He took us to his boarding house in Bellville, Paris's Chinatown. An old Vietnamese couple owned the dark and dilapidated building. The young man said that they treated him like a son. The couple smiled at Yolanda and me from their small lobby office as their boarder took us up one flight of stairs to his little room.

Both of us were prepared for something crummy. We stayed five hours, as Yolanda read through the handwritten manuscript and told him his Confessions had no equal in French literature.

The upshot was that she got Jean Landeau's book published and it became a bestseller in France. Jean thanked us in his introduction for discovering him.

Jean Landeau healed us. To this day Yolanda and I call him "Saint Jean"--as do our children, which is another story.

Not long after he had become famous, we met Jean at a reception. His new suit was rumpled and his tie was crooked. He wore the same white and haggard face I had first seen in Montparnasse's cemetery.

"I hate fame," he said. "Everyone wants something from you. Everywhere there are predators! Now that I am famous, the woman I loved for so long wants to come back to me! She is married with two kids! She took a train to Paris and flung herself at me!"

"And what did you do?" Yolanda said.

"I told her adieu and to go back to her family. Life was more genuine when I was poor and unknown!"

"Find someone," Yolanda said as she straightened Jean's tie. "There is no fortification as resilient against predators as a couple in love."

"Sometimes," I said.

"Most of the time," Yolanda said and touched my hand.

What if Miss Ogawa had met Jean Landeau instead of Brian Greenpool? I wondered. Then an odd thought struck me--Brian had really loved Miss Ogawa, not Angelica Phairre!

"Might either of you have a sister by any chance?" Jean said.

"I have all the sisters you want," Yolanda said.

\-----

The Bridge of Dreams

A Tale of Modern Japan

The 20th of April 2009

Motoshima Saburo, the fifty-eight year old homeless man who sells The Big Issue magazine on Ebisu Bridge, the main pedestrian thoroughfare across Osaka's Dotonbori River, has seen the rise and fall of Japan's Golden Age. He is just old enough to remember Japan's poverty after the war. He grew into manhood during the economic boom of the 1960s and 70s, matured during the bubble of the 1980s and saw it burst in the 1990s, when he was coming to terms with middle age. The Great Recession has had little effect on him as he was poor and homeless long before the stock market crashed in September 2008 and created an army of younger people as poor as himself but without his long-accumulated resources.

Saburo profited little from that Golden Age. He never went beyond junior high school in his native Aomori Prefecture in the north of Japan's main island of Honshu. He came to Osaka as a temporary worker and stayed. Eventually he lost touch with his family of poor farm laborers--to whom he had always been a financial liability: a youth with a crippled arm unable to sustain himself by picking apples or harvesting rice. Never suited for the construction jobs that made good money for day laborers, he settled into doing janitorial work in Osaka. When service companies began to recruit contractual janitors they did not want him because of his disability. He found himself unemployed and unemployable years before the Great Recession. Being unable to afford even a two tatami mat room in a cheap lodging house, he made a shelter from cardboard boxes beneath an overpass and collected and sold aluminum cans for food money. After someone destroyed his makeshift home, he lived on the streets. After what little money he had ran out, he begged.

He was close to starving when The Big Issue magazine came to Osaka. Only homeless people and those with unstable residences are allowed to sell this magazine by The Big Issue foundation. Saburo was quick to apply. After a short training session he became a vendor. He now earns around 3500 yen per day, being able to take in a profit of 110 yen on each issue that he sells for 200 yen. This allows him to have three simple meals per day and to sleep at an inn for day laborers.

Though he has gotten no gold from Japan's Golden Age, Saburo thinks he is lucky, as he displays the latest edition of The Big Issue with his one good hand to the indifferent tourists who pass in front and in back of him or pause to photograph each other. Unlike many of his friends, he is not susceptible to illnesses, which is especially good, as he has no health insurance. (For health insurance you need an address and money and he has neither.) He is grateful that Japan has not been at war during his lifetime. He prides himself on his strong good arm and his muscular legs. At fifty-eight he is a fast walker. He knows men who are bound to their immediate locations by weak legs, not being able to afford Osaka's abundant public transport. Not only is The Big Issue bringing him money, but also Big Issue volunteers are helping him get access to social services.

As an official vendor, he wears a card showing that his work is legal. Every few days the police make sweeps on Ebisu Bridge to evict the illegal vendors of trinkets and the musicians playing for money. But thanks to the ID card around his neck they leave him alone. In fact they helped him when a group of young toughs extorted money from him. A volunteer took him to the local koban where the policemen dully but patiently recorded the information. He has not been bothered since.

A side benefit of his becoming a Big Issue vendor is that he has made friends with a group of homeless men who love literature. He has been reading earnestly for the first time in many years. Lately he has begun writing poetry, though he is still too shy to show it to anyone except immediate friends. Many of the poems are about Ebisu Bridge, which was recently torn down and rebuilt. In these poems, written in the manner of Alexander Pushkin, whom he reads avidly in translation, he tries to express his affection for the old bridge's neoclassical railings, yellow and orange brick walkway and wrought iron streetlights and the new bridge's grey stone sleekness. He expresses his wonder at the shopping arcades the bridge connects and the streets with restaurants and amusement centers he cannot afford. In one poem he expresses his desire to see a Kabuki performance in the theater near the bridge. Another poem is about a restaurant on to which is attached a giant mechanical crab whose legs move. Other poems are political. They are against war, the Liberal Democratic Party, ultra-nationalism, discrimination, and the hierarchical nature of Japanese society. He will put all of his poems, except the most subversive ones, into a book some day and call it The Bridge of Dreams, a title inspired by the Tale of Genji that he bought with money he would have used on a room for the night. (It was summer then and sleeping outside was not so hard.) He will publish the most subversive poems anonymously. He has shown them to no one, not even his closest friends. Those poems could get him killed by rightist thugs. He knows all too well the temptations poor people face to join ultra-nationalists, gangsters in reality, who harass dissidents for a price. Experience has taught him to trust no one completely in regard to politics. The bitter homeless man complaining about capitalism today could be the driver of a right-wing sound truck tomorrow. He has seen it happen, though not often.

The Golden Age is breathing its last just as his own star seems to be rising, Saburo reflects. It is dying not just because of the recession. The corrupt old men at the top are killing it. So are the frivolous young people that he sees about him every day. It is not tattoos, dyed hair, boys with earrings and girls with micro-miniskirts that bother him. However old fashioned in his tastes, he always has had tolerance for people who are different. It is not that. As ostentatious as they are in dress they are dull--listless. With the bad economy, with the ruling party hell-bent on destroying Japan's peace Constitution, the young people should be politically active--demanding answers, protesting against injustices--as young people, like himself, did in the 60s and 70s. Yet he sees most of them turning away from reality. On Ebisu Bridge they parade up and down or hang about in small groups. Otherwise, they do nothing. They believe in nothing. They love nothing. Observing the activities on the bridge, he thinks that, ironically, the only people involved in life are the hustlers, the so-called scouts, who try to snag young women for Osaka's host dating clubs. These "clubs," run by gangsters, fleece young women and turn some into part-time prostitutes. He dislikes these people. Thanks to them the bridge has developed a nickname: "Hikkakebashi," or "Pickup Bridge."

There is one young woman he has been watching lately because she seems so pathetic to him. He has nicknamed her the Waif. She has long black hair that hangs about her shoulders and which she separates in the middle of her forehead. She neither smiles, nor frowns. Her face is always blank. Every day she is in the same long green strapless striped dress that exposes her bony white shoulders when she is not wearing the green wrap over them. She appeared on the bridge two weeks ago. She spent her days moving from one group of people to the next, always hovering at a distance from them, never joining them. Then a few weeks ago he saw her hanging around one of the dating club "scouts," a young man with hair dyed blond and a smooth round face. He always wears a striped black suit. Perhaps, Saburo muses, they were attracted by each other's stripes. Today she is alone, standing on the side of the bridge opposite his, and staring into space.

The Waif, whose real name no one on the bridge knows, not even the boy she has surrendered herself to, has noticed Saburo and nicknamed him Charlie Chaplin because he is so small and thin and has a scruffy mustache. She has also noticed his withered right arm hanging at his side, and the rigid useless fingers turned away from the body. She has taken account of his baggy gray trousers, his checkered red shirt, tucked nearly into the trousers, his gray windbreaker and his baseball cap. He is looking at her again, she realizes, and turns away to face the river. She opens her small black waist bag and takes out a white 35mm film canister. From it she takes two small red pills and swallows them. She closes her eyes, enjoying the lingering pharmaceutical taste in her mouth.

Her boyfriend, who calls himself Ken, appears. Usually she trails after him as he tries to hustle pretty girls walking by. Today he takes her arm and pulls her away from the crowd. They walk down the narrow side street that follows the river. "We have to talk," he says. She says nothing. He says, "We have to be completely alone. Let's go to your room."

She lives in a cheap rooming house inconspicuously situated over a coffee shop. After she unlocks the front door with her key card, they go up the narrow staircase to a corridor. They take off their shoes and pad down the shiny dark brown floor to her room. The Waif unlocks the door and they go into the four tatami mat room. Inside is a futon covered with a red bedcover. The only other thing in the room is her small four-wheeled red carry-on airline suitcase.

"Do you have my trankos?" she asks.

He supplies her with tranquilizers. He gets them from his sometimes lover, a nurse in Kyoto. He takes a white packet out of his coat pocket and hands it to her.

"Don't eat them like candy," he says. "It's hard keeping up with you. And don't take any now!"

She takes off her shawl, wriggles her bare shoulders and lays down obediently on the futon.

"I don't want to make out," the scout says irritably and tries to pace. But it is hard to pace in a four tatami room. He sits next to the Waif. She arranges herself in a perfect lotus position, tilts her head to one side and gives him a sympathetic look. Her long silences annoy him, but he hides his displeasure.

"I need money," he says. "I need money in a hurry. In a hurry; do you understand?"

She nods.

"You have to help me. Do you understand what I am saying?"

"Yes."

"All right then, listen. I owe money. I owe money to a gangster. A big gangster who will have me beaten up and put on a black list. Do you follow?"

The Waif wraps her thin arms around his arm and put her face on his shoulder.

He tries to speak calmly. "I am more afraid of the black list. I cannot do my job if I'm on a black list. That means I could end up homeless like that little bum who sells The Big Issue. You don't want that, do you?"

"No," she says, face still pressed to his shoulder.

"Then you have to help me get money. Okay?"

She gets up and goes over to the suitcase and begins to work the combination lock.

"What are you doing?"

"I have money. I'll give you money."

"I need big money. More than you have. I owe this gangster two hundred thousand yen. He wants half of it by tomorrow. Look, I have a plan and you have to follow it if you want to help me. You want to help me, don't you, Sunflower?"

"I have some money."

"I know, I know. I have some money too. But it won't be enough. Do you understand me?"

"Yes."

"All right then, listen to me, Sunflower-- Hey, when are you going to tell me your real name. I'm sick of giving you a new nickname every few days."

"I hate my name."

"All right! All right!"

She draws back into a corner, pushing her back against the crumbling whitish wallpaper, and covers her face with her hands.

"Shit," the scout says under his breath. "Sorry, Sunflower, Moon Child, Cherry Blossom. I love you. You know that. Don't run away from me. Be a good girl."

She removes her hands from her face.

"Are you all right?" he asks.

She nods.

"Okay. Listen to the end before you react. There is this businessman who likes very young chicks. Very young. Don't give me that face--hear me out. This is perfectly safe. Okay? Good. Now listen. There is this businessman who likes young chicks. I've told him you are sixteen. You could pass for sixteen."

She has told him that she is twenty; she is actually seventeen.

"He's already paid me twenty thousand yen to set him up. He is supposed to pay you thirty thousand after you meet him at the karaoke club. Listen, to me!"

She has gone back to covering her face with her hands.

All right, stay that way. Fifty thousand is not enough. But he'll have his wallet with him. You have to steal it. The way you are going to steal it is to give him an injection with the hypodermic I have with me. It's filled with stuff that will put him to sleep for a few hours. Perfectly safe. You take his wallet and bring it to me. That's all. You won't have to do anything dirty with him. Okay? Please say it's okay."

She uncovers her face and stares at him.

"Please, Sunflower."

"Okay."

"Good girl, Sunflower! I knew I could count on you! Now listen. This is what you do. When you are undressed with him, say you need your medicine. Say you are a diabetic. You take out the hypo and stick it in him. Say you're sorry, that you made a mistake. Something like that. He'll be out of it in a minute. Take his wallet and go. But don't look panicked. Be calm. There are lots of kids hanging about that you can blend in with. He'll never call the cops because he's a perv and what he is doing is illegal. You'll be okay, won't you?"

"I won't let you get beaten up," she said. "The businessman is rich. He can always get more money any time he wants, can't he?"

"You bet he can. Now pay attention. We are going to run through this again. Then we are going to buy you some nice clothes at Daimaru."

"I don't want any nice clothes, Ken. "

"Sure you do. Of course you do."

•••••

Saburo's day has been good. It is late afternoon and he has sold all his copies of The Big Issue. A particularly generous group of tourists from Miyazaki Prefecture in Kyushu each bought a copy. Miyazaki people are somehow always nice. He has never been there; he wonders if it would be a good place to live.

Saburo sees the Waif with the scout. They are crossing the narrow road that separates the bridge from the Shinsaibashi shopping arcade. Something is up with them. What? It is none of his business.

He has errands to attend to. He needs to buy a fresh supply of Big Issues for tomorrow. He earned enough for a meal at an inexpensive noodle stand and temporary lodgings for the night. To break even, however, he must forsake beer or sake with his meal. The temptation is strong but he will forgo the pleasure. He gave up drinking alcohol, except on special occasions, many years ago. He has never smoked a cigarette in his life. He figures this is why he is the healthy person that he is in spite of his poverty. He takes a last loving look at Ebisu Bridge. Then with his good hand he picks up his old olive-green duffel bag, lifts it over his shoulder and heads out. Walking at his usual fast pace, he is aware that his shoes are badly worn.

At this moment Ken is buying the Waif a white blouse and a black miniskirt.

"Ten thousand yen is too much," the Waif protests. "Think of your debts."

"Hush. I want you to look nice."

"No, it is too much...." When he doesn't answer and pays the saleswoman, she says nothing. She follows him to the shoe section. He makes her try on shoes. She says nothing when he buys her shoes that are on sale for five thousand yen. Then he buys her a black handbag that is on sale for three thousand yen. After that they walk to the side street where he always parks his big shiny black motorcycle in front of his friend's coffee shop.

He unlocks the chain lock that also secures their two helmets. "Put your helmet on," he says. She does so quietly though she does not want to because she likes the feeling of the wind blowing through her hair when they ride together. He gets on and starts the engine. She gets on sidesaddle, wraps her arms around his waist and presses her cheek against his back.

He drives her to his rooming house. In his four tatami mat room he tells her to change into the blouse and miniskirt that he bought for her. After she had done so, he says, "We're going to be late if we don't hurry. We'll have to skip dinner. But I'm not hungry. Are you?"

She shakes her head.

In the hallway she puts on her new high-heeled shoes.

They ride to Nipponbashi. He parks the motorcycle in an alley near a subway entrance. They walk down the street. The Waif barely keeps up, tottering after him in her high heels.

The karaoke building had a big neon sign that flashes "Karaoke" in alternating red, blue and orange hues. Otherwise it is a nondescript concrete building like the others on the block. They stop.

"The man is in one of the karaoke rooms," he says. "I've written the number down." He takes a piece of paper from his shirt pocket. "Don't lose this. This guy is rich enough to take you to the best hotel in the city but he gets off on doing it in karaoke places with under-aged girls." He takes a small black oval case from his shoulder bad. "Put this into your handbag. This is the syringe. Whatever you do, do not stick yourself."

"Okay."

"You're not afraid?"

She shakes her head.

"I love you," he says. "Remember that."

She hugs him. He pries himself out of her embrace.

"I'll be in that coffee shop across the street, he says. "I'll see you coming out. Go to the bike. We'll meet there."

Ken goes into the noisy and smoke-filled coffee shop. He orders hot coffee, gets himself a manga, takes a seat by the window, lights a cigarette and begins to read. The manga concerns the adventures of Rapeman.

Rapeman is a normally a mild-mannered high school teacher who in his secret life rapes for hire, usually preying on abusive and sinister professional women. The Rapeman manga was discontinued some time in the early 1990s. This is an old, dog-eared copy whose cover is held together by tape. Ken reads the manga to the end and thinks it is stupid—something written for men who cannot score with women by an over-educated aging male virgin.

Ken ended his education in his second year of high school. He did not do badly and could have had a chance at a university education. The temptation of an easily earned high income in his mid-teens changed the course of his life. He was not only handsome but also blessed with a baby face that older women adored. At sixteen he was illegally working in host clubs and having sex for money with aging single women and unhappy housewives. Women were always giving him presents and taking him to nice restaurants. He learned a trick from other toy boy hosts: have a different birthday for every woman you are going out with. That way you can have birthday parties and get presents all the year round. "I did the math," he bragged to friends.

His father, his brothers and his sister were all officer workers in medium-sized companies. They put in long hours and had little money to show for it. His brothers were married to dull women who became fat after having babies. His sister lived at home and gave half of her income to his mother, who worked part time as a clerk in a supermarket. Ken lied to his family by telling them he was working nights in an convenience store and gave them a small portion of what he actually made. When they finally realized that he was not simply a lucky boy with generous girlfriends but a male prostitute his father told him to get out of the house and never come back. Ken, then twenty, pleaded with his mother. She wept and turned her back on him.

He had a mother substitute by then, a nurse in Kyoto who loved him with despair. He went to live with her for a time. Since then he has always turned to her for help.

Ken looks at his reflection in the window. He admits that at nearly thirty his features have hardened. Women no longer come to him as easily as before, and his income has fallen as a result. At twenty-five he was already finding it hard to compete with younger hosts. Now it is impossible. Instead of being a star toy boy, he is an aging street scout competing with younger street scouts on Ebisu Bridge. The part of his job that he hates most is showing the young women he hustles a pack of photographs of handsome young men. These are the young men they are supposed to meet if they go to his dating clubs--a lie of course. It galls him to think there are now young men more attractive than himself. The other scouts show the cards and so he must too.

He knows that he could have saved money and done something better with his life. But as the honored guest at a perpetual party for over a decade, spoiled by countless women, he did not consider his future. At twenty he was living in a comfortable apartment partially paid for by a businessman's wife who believed she had exclusive access to his physical affections. Now he lives in a tiny room off an alley in Namba. He makes good commissions from the clubs to which he brings girls. But he spends as freely as in his prosperous days when processions of generous older women took care of him.

He has not sent the Waif on her mission because he is afraid of gangsters. Ken needs the money to pay off the loan he took out to buy his motorcycle. He has only a few days left to provide the money. If he fails, his motorcycle will be repossessed. He has owned motorcycles from the time he could legally ride them: he cannot imagine life without one.

He spies his lover's vague form scurrying through the darkness. He pays for his coffee and crosses the street.

She stands by the motorcycle trembling. When he approaches her she holds out a wallet. He quickly slips it into his coat pocket.

"He's dead," the Waif says.

"Nonsense, he's just knocked out. Put on your helmet."

"No, he's dead. He said he was dying before he fell over."

"Nonsense. Put the helmet on, Sunflower."

They ride until they come to a deserted park next to the Osaka River.

Ken takes the wallet out of his pocket and counts the money inside. One hundred and twenty thousand yen! No problem about paying his debt now.

"By the way, how far did you let that man go with you?" he says.

"He didn't touch me," she says. "He just wanted me to sing a song with him. I took out the needle and did as you said. I got him in the leg. Then he said he was dying and died. I'm sorry."

She hangs her head and sobs.

"Did you check his breathing?"

"He was on his back. He wasn't breathing."

The night suddenly looks bleak to Ken. The syringe was a stupid idea! He was inspired to use it by his friend Ishihara who said he and his girlfriend did it a couple of times when they needed money badly. Ishihara said a syringe with a tranquilizer works faster than pills slipped into a whiskey glass. Ken got the syringe and the tranquilizer from his friend the nurse. She said it was safe and told him the name of the tranquilizer, which he has forgotten. He must disappear.

"How can we live with ourselves?" the Waif asks.

"The man is all right! The drug is safe!"

The girl cries. He'll have to abandon her--in spite of his affection for her.

"I'll take you home," he says. "Don't talk about this to anyone. I have to see this gangster I owe money to tonight."

"You need more money."

"No-- I'm fine--"

The Waif cries quietly.

"Give me the syringe. I'll get rid of it."

"We must run away!" she says. "I'll pack and meet you on the bridge at midnight."

"That's crazy!"

"Please, please, please!"

"All right. Yes. Get on!"

All the way to her rooming house she presses herself to him and sobs.

Before letting her off, he says, "Change those clothes! Get rid of them! You don't want people to see you in those clothes."

He rides off before she can explain that she has no change of clothes in her carry-on suitcase and her green dress is back at his apartment.

After leaving her, he rides to the coffee shop where he always parks his motorcycle. The coffee shop is still open. He goes in and greets his friend the owner, Kuniyasu, a skinhead who is in his late thirties. Ken occasionally sets Kuniyasu up with girls. For this Kuniyasu gives him a parking space and free coffee.

"You look glum," Kuniyasu says.

"Me--? Everything's great."

"Have a coffee."

"Thanks. But I want to be by myself. I have something on my mind."

He sits at the end of the counter and lights a cigarette. He thinks about how stupid he has been and how stupid everyone else is. The nurse, who still loves him after his repeated betrayals, gave him the syringe and the tranquilizer, no questions asked. His Sunflower did the job like a robot. If the man in the Karaoke place is dead they are all implicated. Ishihara too, for giving him the idea.

He lights another cigarette. He must disappear. He hates to leave the girl behind. He likes her because she is the first woman he has known he has had to take care of. He has enjoyed her dependency.

She followed him one day as he was leaving Ebisu Bridge. When he demanded what she wanted she said, "I love you." When he looked into her glazed eyes he realized that she was beautiful. She is the only truly beautiful woman he has been intimate with.

She won't be completely helpless alone, he tells himself. She has a room of her own; somehow she has money when she needs it.

He can abandon her, but not his motorcycle. Money is due on it. Should he leave one hundred and fifty thousand yen with Kuniyasu to give to the finance company? No, he doesn't trust him that much.

His head swims. He's never been out of the Osaka-Kyoto area before. He doesn't know where to escape. Ishihara said he should above all carry on his life normally after committing a crime. A potential murderer, he cannot do that. And the motorcycle? Nothing is workable. He still has the syringe.

He leaves the coffee shop and rides through the dark narrow and twisting streets that take him to a dark bridge over the Dotonbori River. He parks his motorcycle. After throwing the syringe into the Dotonbori's filthy water, he realizes he had done another stupid thing. Someone could have seen him. The police could easily drag the river for the syringe. He remembers that the girl is waiting.

He'll stay with the nurse in Kyoto. She'll have him, no questions asked.

•••••

At half-past two in the morning, Saburo is walking toward Ebisu Bridge. He is slightly drunk and without lodgings. He went to a noodle shop not far from the bridge. He planned on having only noodles and a cup of green tea before looking for somewhere to stay. Instead, he spent hours talking to a window washer, saying nothing about himself except that he was once a janitor. The window washer had a string of stories about his dangerous job and shared his beer with him. Saburo felt obligated to pay for the next bottle of beer. When they parted Saburo had no money.

He went to a park, prepared to sleep on a wooden bench. When he got there he saw a group of boys in high school uniforms. Sitting on the wooden benches, they were smoking and drinking beer--all no doubt bought from vending machines. Saburo quickly re-crossed the street. Junior and senior high school pupils often assault homeless people. Saburo himself knew a man who slept under a bridge and died because some boys set him on fire. He is certain that children destroyed his makeshift home beneath the overpass.

The last of Dotonbori's night revelers are going home, brushing past him as if he were invisible. He no longer feels drunk, thank goodness. He will admire the lights reflecting on the dark surface of the Dotonbori River for another hour or so. Then he will go back to the park and see if the high school boys have left.

Arriving on the bridge, he sees the Waif leaning against the grey stone barrier and staring into the river. A small red suitcase is next to her. At first he does not recognize her because she is not wearing her usual clothes. When he realizes she is crying he approaches her. She does not look at him. She seems to belong to another world. He feels intimidated. Finally he asks, "What's the matter?"

Continuing to stare into the river she answers: "I don't have my boyfriend any more."

He wants to say that she is better off without him. No, it wouldn't be good. Then he wants to tell her about his lost love. It will not do either. He says, "You'll get over it," and realizes this too is the wrong thing to say.

"Should I jump in the river or turn myself over to the police?" she says.

"Eh? Why?"

She shakes her head and looks away. Then she says, "The trankos aren't working."

"Trankos?"

She lifts the hand holding the film canister, rattles it, and lets her hand drop.

"I cannot just leave you here," he says.

"Come to my room," she says.

He sighs. The Waif is obviously crazy.

"How old are you?" he asks.

"Twenty."

"No you're not. You're no older than fifteen."

"Seventeen."

"I can't have anything to do with you."

She says nothing. Then she starts crying again.

"I won't leave you here like this," he says quietly. "I'll stay here. You can talk to me when you feel like it."

For a few minutes she looks out at the river and sobs. He leans on the railing and looks at the neon reflections in the water.

"I'm tired," she says. "I'm very tired."

"I'll walk you to home but I won't go in."

Without a word the girl takes her red suitcase by its extended handle and walks to the center of the bridge. He turns, wondering if he should follow. She stops and looks at him. He goes to her. She moves, rolling the suitcase. He follows.

When they come to her rooming house he says, "You look better. I'll say good night now." When she does not respond, he says, "I'll see you on our bridge of dreams tomorrow."

"It's going to rain," she says. "I heard the weather report. You're homeless. You sell The Big Issue. You'll get wet if you don't come in."

Saburo looks at the sky. There are no stars. But there are never any stars. A drop of rain hits his eye. He remembers that the rainy season will start soon. He will have to contend with his worst enemy almost every day. He feels another drop of rain.

"Thank you," he says. "I'll come up. I won't do anything shameful with you."

"Good," she says. "I don't want you doing anything shameful with me." She puts her plastic key card in the door's slot and opens it. They go in and walk up a flight of stairs that are dimly lit with a flickering florescent lamp. By the dusty smell of the place, Saburo knows it is seldom cleaned. He will later learn that a bald man about his age, who wanders through the building twice a day, is the custodian and also the collector of the daily and weekly rents.

Inside the little room he puts himself down on the mat next to the bed and falls asleep almost immediately. The Waif takes another tranquilizer, but it is a long time before she sleeps.

The 21st of April 2009

He wakes up to the light of the dim florescent lamp overhead. The only window's blinds are drawn. He cannot imagine what time of day it is. His legs and back hurt. It is not from the tatami mat but from fatigue. The tatami feels good. Should he sleep a little longer? No. Sloth only brings evil.

The Waif is sitting on her futon in a lotus position. Her hair is loose over her shoulders. She is wearing the same clothes as the night before. Her eyes are tired and glazed.

"You're dirty. You smell bad," she says in a tranquilized monotone.

"My heart and life are clean," he says angrily. "Thank you for the floor space. I'm going. It's improper for me to be here."

"Know where I can get trankos?"

"No. Excuse me."

"Don't go."

"What do you want, you miserable girl?"

"Don't go."

"I should not be here," he says.

"Here is ten thousand yen. Get us some food."

"You empty-headed girl! How do you know I won't rob you?

She shrugs. "You sell The Big Issue. Big Issue vendors have a code of ethics."

"You're not empty-headed! You're smart, even when you are doped up. Yes, you're right. I wouldn't dare rob you even if I wanted to. It isn't good for a homeless man to be known as a thief. Ten thousand yen runs out in a week. A bad reputation stays forever. That's for sure."

"That's for sure," she repeats dully.

"Let me wash my face and shave. I assume there is a wash room and toilet in this place."

"End of the hall."

"I have soap and a towel with me. I will wash myself at the sink. I have extra clothes and I'll wash these in the sink later and hang then in this room to dry if I may."

She nods.

"I shall also give you money for any food that I eat after I have sold enough magazines.

"You mustn't."

"I must," he says and goes out.

The dark and dingy men's washroom toilets stink. He encounters the custodian, wiping the basins with a dirty rag. He is dressed in a yellow T-shirt and faded blue trousers. He starts to chat about something that Saburo does not understand. Saburo assumes he has mistaken him for someone else.

He cleans himself as best he can, then he goes back to the Waif's room. She gives him her key.

He goes to Ebisu Bridge, where the clock says it is five minutes past noon. The Waif's boyfriend is not there. Searching for a place to buy food, he finds himself frightened. He is a homeless man with a ten thousand yen bank note. People will suspect him.

He passes the giant crab with the perpetually moving legs. He muses that for the first time he has enough money to eat in this place. He walks up and down the restaurant street again, jostled by the lunchtime crowd. The plastic food in the windows and the smell of real food emanating from the restaurants do not make him hungry. He has disciplined himself not to feel hungry at times like these. Some homeless people he knows eat out of garbage cans. He never has, even when he was fainting from hunger and food smells were all around him.

Where can he use the ten thousand yen and not draw attention to himself?

On the Shinsaibashi side of Ebisu Bridge the arcade is filled with posh shops. On the other side of the bridge the Ebisu arcade that leads to Namba the shops are cheap. At this hour the little shokudo eateries are selling bento lunches for a few hundred yen. They will be mobbed now. It will be easier for him to blend in with the crowd and buy lunch.

In the Ebisu arcade he finds a small sushi shop selling makizushi bentos in clear plastic containers with rubber bands wound around them. The rubber bands will be useful he thinks as he jostles himself before the cheerful seller and hands her the ten thousand yen note. "Chotto mate," just a moment, she says to him as she would to any other customer from whom she has received a ten thousand yen note. She counts the change twice and smartly hands it to him, cupping her hand over his so he won't spill the change.

As he buys milk from a machine he wonders how many years have passed since a woman has touched his hand. He then takes the liberty of buying a local newspaper. The electricity of the woman's hand lingers as he returns to the Waif's rooming house.

He knocks on her door. She opens it.

"You must be hungry," he says. "I tried not to be gone too long."

She nods, not looking at him. When they are eating he sees that her eyes are red.

"You've been crying," he says.

"I need a tranko."

"You need to talk."

"I can't."

"Listen to me. Don't let that boy ruin your life."

The Waif, sitting in a lotus position on the futon, looks down.

"I loved a woman once," he says. "When I was a janitor. She was also a janitor. We had a lot of fun together. That was my Golden Age for love. Then I had to give her up so she could marry a truck driver."

"That's sad," the Waif says without looking up.

"It had to be. The truck driver earned a good living. He could take care of her. I knew that the company was going to hire a janitorial service like all the other companies and that my job would be finished. So I wanted her to marry him. He was my friend--"

Without meaning to, he weeps. He didn't weep when he and the lady said farewell to each other and he shook the truck driver's hand. He cannot recall having cried over his lost love in the decade since they last saw each other. She has never figured in his poems. He should not be crying now. But he is.

The Waif puts her hand on his shoulder.

"This is no way for a man to behave," he says. "Besides, I'm supposed to comfort you."

The Waif withdraws her hand.

"I must go buy some more Big Issues," he says. "May I borrow five thousand yen? I will pay you back over the next few days. I'll meet you on the bridge."

"Don't leave me!" The Waif grasps his good arm as he stands. "Please don't go away from me!"

"I have to. I'm not anyone for you."

"Please listen, listen! I think I killed a man last night! They'll be coming for me! Don't let them take me away!"

Saburo sits. She tells him what happened.

"I didn't hear anything about it on the bridge. News like this goes around fast. Let us look in the newspaper. A man found dead in a karaoke place would be big news."

There is nothing in the paper.

"You didn't kill the man," he says. "But you did rob him. That was a bad thing to do."

"He might still be there in that room," the Waif says.

"They clean those rooms every day," he said. "If there is one thing I know in this world it is that. There was no dead man when they cleaned the room this morning."

"He said he was dying. He wasn't breathing."

"This is your guilty conscience playing tricks on you. How could you let your so-called boyfriend force you into do this awful thing?"

She shakes her head slowly.

"You unfortunate girl," he says. "You have a family that loves you, no doubt. You need to go back to them."

"No! It would be like dying if I went back there! You don't know. You don't know. Please, don't leave me! I love you, Saburo-san! I'll do anything you want!"

"I don't take advantage of teenage girls."

"Then adopt me! Be my father. I don't have a real father any more. He's dead. Be my father and we'll live in the country and raise vegetables."

He laughs involuntarily.

She retreats to the far end of the futon. "I need a tranko," she says. She finds her black bag with the film canister. He says nothing as she swallows pills. The familiar dull look presently overtakes her face.

"What happens when you run out of trankos?"

"I have a suitcase full of trankos. I made my boyfriend get me trankos all the time and I put them in the suitcase."

Saburo shakes his head. Without meaning to he has become involved in the Waif's life.

"I won't leave you," he says. "I won't be your lover and I cannot be your father. But I'll take care of you as best I can."

This was the first time he has seen the Waif smile. He imagines the happy girl she once might have been.

Selling The Big Issue on the bridge that afternoon, Saburo reflects that the day before he had nothing to live for except his poetry. Today he has all the burdens of a father or a lover though he is neither. A mad girl who has committed a crime has entered his life. Yet he is happy without understanding why. Then it occurs to him that loneliness is like a prison where you are both the prisoner and the jailer. He has set himself free for the first time in years.

He sells all his copies of The Big Issue by late afternoon and buys another bundle. He works until sundown. Then he buys bentos for himself and the Waif at the same place in the Ebisu arcade. When he returns to her room she has a surprise for him. She bought a futon that afternoon. It is spread out next to hers.

"You don't expect me to live with you," he says.

"I haven't taken a tranko since you left."

The 15th of May 2009

The nurse, finally tired of his freeloading, tells Ken to get out of her apartment and never come back. She has done this before, so without arguing he asks her for thirty thousand yen because, he says, he is flat broke, which he is not. She digs into her purse, shoves the money into his hands and shoves him out the door. Then she slams the metal door in his face. She has done this before too.

The dull gray apartment building in this industrial suburb of Kyoto has come to irritate him--more so than the solicitudes of the nurse, who has gained wrinkles and weight. It is time to move on.

A few days ago he discretely called his friends in Osaka when he was sensing that his sojourn with the nurse was about to end. One friend told him that his girlfriend was now with the crippled homeless man selling The Big Issue on Ebisu Bridge. As he rides his motorcycle back to Osaka he is sure he'll have no problem getting his girl back.

Another friend told him what he had sensed for weeks to be true--that the rich man in the karaoke bar didn't die.

In fact, the man emerged drowsy and barely able to stand just as the karaoke building was closing at two in the morning. He has remained silent about what happened to him.

Ken knows where to go to get temporary lodgings in Osaka. As his worldly possessions consist mainly of clothes, which he keeps neatly folded in the saddlebags of his motorcycle he is able to set up house a few hours after paying a week in advance for his room in the cheap rooming house near America Mura. He then borrows ten thousand yen from his friend the coffee shop owner. Next he calls a married woman whom he has known since his teenage toy boy days. The woman, surprised to hear his voice, chides him for neglecting her, and asks if he is free that evening, saying her husband is away on one of his frequent business trips.

"Let me take you out to dinner," he says. "It's my birthday."

"Liar," the woman laughs. "Your birthday is on the fifth of September. Think I've forgotten? Naughty! I'll take you to a restaurant you can never afford."

He calculates that this married woman is now in her mid-fifties. Maybe he can get money out of her without having to have sex.

Leaving his motorcycle in front of his friend's coffee shop, he takes a stroll. He is sure he will run into one of his fellow scouts from the bridge. He does so in a McDonald's near Naniwa Camera.

The scout, a guy with long hair dyed blond and big crooked teeth, tells him he has seen the girl with the crippled homeless man every day on the bridge for the last month. They are inseparable. She follows him to the place where he gets his copies of The Big Issue. The scout saw them having dinner once at a noodle stand. Another time he saw them late at night on the bridge. They were alone looking at the reflection of the neon lights on the Dotonbori River. He overheard the cripple talking about a Golden Age and the girl saying something about poetry or whatever. There were a few times he saw them together carrying groceries to a cheap rooming house.

Ken knows the rooming house.

The scout says that no one on the bridge believes they are doing it. He grins, baring his teeth to the gums. They never even touch each other. The man who often tells fortunes on the bridge said that he knows they are living together.

Does that girl still take tranquilizers? Ken asks.

He doesn't think so. Her face no longer has that dopey expression.

For the first time Ken feels jealousy. She never stopped taking tranquilizers when she was with him though he told her many times that he didn't like it.

Ken leaves the scout and rides his motorcycle down to the rooming house where the Waif lives. The problem with this place is that to give a message to someone inside you must ring the custodian, who is seldom available. This time he is. Ken asks if the cripple is living with his Sunflower.

The custodian looks past him and says, "Oh Saburo is a great man. He used to be a janitor and taught me things about janitoring I didn't know. He's a great janitor. He'd get my job if the boss knew about him. You know--"

"Is he living with the girl?"

"Eh?"

"Does he go into the girl's room at night and come out in the morning?"

"I think maybe he does."

Ken walks down toward Ebisu Bridge, goes into a building facing the bridge on the Shinsaibashi side and climbs to the third floor. He finds a window and surveys the bridge. He sees The Big Issue seller and the girl. He notes she is wearing the same white blouse and black miniskirt that he bought her.

Saburo spots Ken going out of the building. The girl, always by his side, has seen him too. They exchange looks.

In a dream of a few nights ago he and the Waif became lovers, overcome by their intense loneliness and their affection for each other. His dream self recalled how he had despised older men who chased young women. Finding himself one of them, his moral universe imploded. Yet he was stupidly happy. Going out for their nightly walk to Ebisu Bridge he looked up at the normally starless Osaka sky and saw galaxies spinning out of giant glowing, multi-colored nebulae. He saw that the universe was ruled by a love that violated taboos and smashed barriers. Then he woke up. It was dark and the Waif was mumbling in her sleep.

Sleeping in the same room with the Waif makes him morally uncomfortable. But the prospects of sleeping elsewhere make him return to her room and his little corner every night. He knows he can be arrested as a common child molester, though he has never been intimate with her. She convinced him that it was essential for them to save money by living together when he insisted that he made enough to stay in day labors' inns. When he insisted that it did not look right she countered with: "The people who are looking at us are not interested in feeding us." He gave in. He has not told the Waif about his dream.

Once she wept when he was about to get their breakfast and blurted out her confused affection for him. Walking down to the Ebisu arcade he thought about how nature had miscast them as potential eternal companions.

I will not surrender the girl, he says to himself as the scout approaches. She is now taking only one tranquilizer in the morning and one at night. She has started to become interested in the books that he borrows from friends. She no longer weeps when they reunite after a long separation, as when he goes to meet his creative friends in the park. (It is for men only he told her and admitted to being old-fashioned when she complained.) They have only started to talk. Still saying nothing about herself, she has indicated that she will soon open up. No, the scout will not take her.

"You know why he is here," Saburo says.

"I don't want him," she says. "He deserted me."

"I know."

"People always desert me."

"Not me."

"I love you," she says.

"I love you," he says and sighs nervously.

She grasps his crippled hand as he holds up The Big Issue.

This is how Ken finds them as he strides down the middle of the bridge to tell the Waif that the motorcycle is waiting and he has bags of tranquilizers. In his mind's eye the cripple and the girl form a ludicrous picture.

The Waif moves behind Saburo. Saburo carefully puts his copies of The Big Issue into his bag and stands up straight--rigid--as the scout approaches.

"Let's go," he says to the Waif.

The Waif shakes her head.

"I've got your stuff. Let's go."

The Waif clings to Saburo's crippled arm with both hands.

He seizes her elbow.

"Leave her alone," Saburo says.

He pulls at her, ignoring Saburo.

"I told you to leave her alone!"

A crowd has formed around them.

"Get lost, tramp!" Ken gives Saburo a dismissive shove.

Saburo delivered a well-placed punch that cracks the scout's upper lip, knocks out a tooth and fractures his nose. Blood covers the front of his white shirt.

Holding the tooth in his hand, still not quite feeling the pain he will feel in a few minutes, Ken stands bewildered before the crowd that is cheering for the Saburo. A grown man has never hit him before. He escapes the crowd, blindly running toward America Mura.

On the main street, a policeman on a bicycle stops him. "Who did this?" he wants to know.

"The damned homeless cripple on Ebisu Bridge!" He leans against a wall and wails, "It hurts! It hurts."

The policeman calls his local headquarters on his cell phone and then he calls an ambulance. He stays with Ken until the ambulance comes. He quietly and patiently takes a statement from the sniveling young man who he sees isn't so badly injured for all the blood. When the ambulance arrives he blows his whistle at the gathering crowd to let the ambulance crew pass with their stretcher. Ken is strapped on to it and lifted into the ambulance. He cries, "It hurts! It hurts!"

The policeman calls headquarters again to see if he is needed on Ebisu Bridge. It is being taken care of he is informed. The policeman gets on his bicycle and continues cycling toward the center of Shinsaibashi.

The 14th of October 2009

The first autumn chill has arrived. Saburo wears his new Nylon windbreaker as he stands on Ebisu Bridge and sells copies of his poetry chapbook. He no longer sells The Big Issue. He is unqualified to do so now that he has a permanent address. Someone he met through his Big Issue circle spoke well of him to the owner of a dormitory where a lot of trade school students live. One day a few weeks ago he approached Saburo and bought a Big Issue from him. They talked and got on. The owner told him he needed a caretaker who could also do janitorial work. Saburo would get five thousand yen a day plus a room. Later, his friends from The Big Issue helped him put together a collection of poems. A student in the dormitory, who was studying graphic design, copied the poems on to a computer. They used a copy machine at The Big Issue office to print the chapbook, and Saburo was well off enough to pay for the paper.

The chapbook does not contain his poems about the Waif--the poems he never showed her when she was reading the others, including the secret subversive ones. He never learned her real name. Hardly a moment passes when he does not think of her.

On that day in May, after he punched the scout in the face, he told the Waif to disappear because a policeman would come. He could best handle the policeman alone. She said he needed a witness to say he was acting in self-defense.

A policeman, one Saburo didn't know, did come. He said to Saburo: "Did you really smash that punk's face?"

"I did," Saburo said.

The policeman laughed. "Who'd believe you pack such a punch. Why did you hit him? Was he harassing you?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Can I let it pass?"

"Better not."

"He was harassing me," the Waif said. "I asked this gentleman to protect me."

"I see. So you were protecting her. Did he physically assault you first?"

"Yes." He briefly explained how.

"Do you want to press charges against that punk?"

Saburo shook his head. "I think we're settled."

"By the way, young lady, how old are you?" the policeman said to the Waif.

"Twenty."

"Have an ID?"

She shook her head.

"You look very young. Better come with me."

The Waif bolted. The policeman started after her but Saburo tripped him and he went skidding across the bridge's beautiful grey tiles.

Saburo apologized profusely to the policeman as he extended his good hand to help him up. The policeman did not take his hand and did not arrest him, not wishing to admit that a disabled man could have gotten the better of him. He stood up and ran in the direction he thought the girl had gone.

Saburo returned to Ebisu Bridge every day and waited. Weeks passed.

Lurking amid the crowds another person also waited, watching Saburo: Ken, down on his luck, his motorcycle repossessed and he himself on a black list.

No dating club wants Ken as a scout anymore. Thanks to Saburo, his nose is now slightly crooked. This, together with his lost tooth, makes him look clownish. His constant women no longer want him. He no longer looks in the mirror to try to convince himself that his baby-faced good looks have not faded. These days you will find him in the Arin district where, like the rest of the residents, he is often out of work and without a place to live. Ken works in construction, when jobs are available--not often because of the recession. Otherwise, he does odd jobs like passing out handbills. Lately he has been doing janitorial work at outdoor rock concerts. He still thinks of his Sunflower. As often he thinks about seeing his mother and father. He wants to tell them that whatever he is now, he is no longer the person they were ashamed of.

By summer Saburo gave up hope that the Waif would return. He now prays that she is safe and not under the power of someone like her former boyfriend or the predator that she drugged and robbed--who, according to the Dotonbori grapevine, is now fit as ever and still on the prowl for teenage girls. He admits again that he is in love with the Waif.

The sudden chill reminds Saburo that autumn will soon grow colder. He will need to buy a heater. He will buy a new heater, a good electric heater.

As he is thinking about heaters, Saburo does a double take. He believes he sees the Waif. No, it is a woman of about thirty-five who is coming his way. He stares at her and she quickens her pace toward him. She smiles. It is the face of an overworked but happy woman.

"Motoshima-san?" she asks. "I am Megumi Hino, Junko's older sister."

"Junko? That's her name?"

There is a pause. Then they hastily bow to each other. Saburo feels as if he is drunk. His head is flying. Megumi Hino is speaking to him but he is so caught by his emotions that he barely listens.

"I forgot that she never tells anyone her name," Megumi says. I recognized you immediately. Junko is always speaking about you, how you write poetry and sell The Big Issue."

"Sold," Saburo says proudly.

"Junko memorized your poems. I like the dangerous ones best! Oh, Motoshima-san, you are weeping! I am sorry!"

"Never mind. Here take two books--please. One for yourself and one for Junko."

"I insist on paying for them."

"I insist they are a gift," he says and dries his eyes with his sleeve.

"I am honored."

He wishes to speak but his tongue is dry.

"There is a poem Junko especially liked," Megumi says quietly. "It was about the restaurant with the giant crab. Let me treat you to lunch there."

"I insist on paying for myself."

"I insist that you be my guest."

They both laugh.

"Thank you. Forgive my male pride."

They walk slowly toward the restaurant, which is on the corner. They take their time because Megumi is brimming with things to tell him.

Megumi says, "Things were that terrible after our father died. My mother married the worst of men. He made all our lives miserable but Junko took it the hardest. I do not blame her for getting out. My husband and I are now making enough money to be able to afford having her live with us. She has started to take classes at a night high school. It's for adults and she isn't bullied there. She doesn't use those pills any more."

"I am glad."

"There is so much to tell. She wanted to come back to you. She became horribly ill with a fever soon after she parted from you. She slept under a bridge for several days. The hospital contacted me. I live in Nagoya. That's where Junko is now."

Saburo cannot speak. He remembers their days together.

"She loves you, Motoshima-san. She swears that if she ever marries, it will be to someone like you."

Saburo looks down at his feet.

"I'm sorry. I may have said something hurtful," Megumi says.

They are at the entrance to the restaurant with the giant crab.

"I am not easily hurt," Saburo says.

They go in.

\---

