The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea Read online

  The cloud-dappled sky was partitioned by an intricate crisscross of hawsers; and lifting up at it in reverence like a slender chin was the Rakuyo’s prow, limitlessly high, the green banner of the fleet fluttering at its crest. The anchor clung to the hawsehole like a large metal-black crab.

  “This is going to be great,” Noboru said, brimming over with boyish excitement. “I guess we’ll be able to look her over fore and aft.”

  “Let’s not expect too much, dear, until we’re certain this letter is what we need.”

  Thinking about it later, Fusako realized that she had felt her heart begin to dance even as they had stood looking up at the ship. That’s funny: I’m just as excited as Noboru.

  The feeling beset her at the height of her languor—just lifting her head was a hot and wearisome chore—suddenly and for no reason.

  “She’s a flush deck, Mom—looks like a pretty good ship all right.” Unable to contain the knowledge that crowded his brain, Noboru held forth to his disinterested mother; as they drew closer, the Rakuyo swelled before them like great music. Noboru sprinted ahead and raced up the glittering, silvery gangplank.

  But Fusako had to wander down the corridor in front of the officers’ quarters, helplessly clutching her letter to the Captain. The decks, where unloading was in progress, were bustling and noisy, but the stuffy corridor was unpleasantly hushed.

  Then a cabin door marked “Second Officer” opened and Tsukazaki appeared.

  “Can you tell me where I might find the Captain?”

  “He’s not here now. Can I help you?”

  Fusako showed him the letter; Noboru, eyes shining, gaped up at the sailor.

  “I see—a kind of study trip. I suppose I can show you around.” His manner was brusque, his gaze never left her face as he spoke.

  That was their first encounter. She would never forget his eyes as he confronted her in the corridor. Deep-set in the disgruntled, swarthy face, they sought her out as though she were a tiny spot on the horizon, the first sign of a distant ship. That, at least, was the feeling she had. Eyes viewing an object so near had no business piercing that way, focusing so sharply—without leagues of sea between them, it was unnatural. She wondered if all eyes that endlessly scanned the horizon were that way. Unlooked-for signs of a ship descried—misgivings and delight, wariness and expectation . . . the sighted vessel just barely able to forgive the affront because of the vast reach of sea between them: a ravaging gaze. The sailor’s eyes made her shudder.

  Tsukazaki took them to the bridge first. The ladder they climbed to the main deck was obliquely runged with bars of summer sunlight. Indicating the freighters anchored offshore, Noboru repeated his knowing observation: “I guess all those ships are waiting their turn for a berth—”

  “Right you are, sonny. Some of them may have to wait out there four or five days.”

  “Do they notify you on the wireless when a berth opens?”

  “Right again. You get a cable from the company. There’s a committee that meets every day to decide berth priorities.”

  Sweat was dappling Tsukazaki’s white shirt with little spots which revealed the flesh of his powerful back; Fusako was disconcerted. She was grateful to the man for taking Noboru seriously but he made her uncomfortable when he turned to her and asked direct questions: “The boy knows what he’s talking about. Does he want to be a sailor?” His eyes probed her again.

  He seemed a rugged, simple man, yet there was also about him an air of indifference and Fusako couldn’t determine whether he felt any professional pride. When, opening her parasol against the sun and peering narrowly up at his face, she tried to decide, she thought she discovered something unexpected in the shadow of his heavy brows. Something she had never seen in the broad light of day.

  “He’d be smart to forget about it if he is. This is a miserable business if ever there was one,” Tsukazaki said, not bothering to wait for her answer. “Over here, sonny; this is a mounted sextant.” The instrument he slapped looked like a white mushroom on a long stem.

  When they went into the pilothouse, Noboru wanted to touch everything: the speaking tube to the engine room and the automatic-pilot gyro; radar screens; the electronic channel selector. The indicator reading STOP—STAND BY—AHEAD and countless other gauges and dials seemed to summon visions of peril on the open sea. In the chart room next door, he gaped at shelves stacked with maps and tables, and studied an erasure-smudged chart still in the drafting. The chart laced the sea with capricious lines which appeared and reappeared according to some curious un-geometry. Most fascinating of all was the daily log: sunrise and sunset were entered as small half-circles, a pair of golden horns marked the passage of the moon, and the ebb and surge of the tides were shown in gentle, rippling curves.

  While Noboru wandered through private dreams Tsukazaki stood at Fusako’s side, and the heat of his body in the sultry chart room was beginning to oppress her: when the parasol she had leaned against a desk clattered suddenly to the floor, she felt as if she herself, fainting, had fallen.

  She raised a little cry. The parasol had glanced off her foot. The sailor stooped immediately and picked it up. To Fusako he seemed to move as slowly as a diver underwater. He retrieved the parasol and then, from the bottom of this sea of breathless time, his white cap rose slowly toward the surface. . . .

  Shibuya pushed through the louvered office doors and announced: “Yoriko Kasuga has just arrived.”

  “All right! I’ll be right down.”

  The old man had revived her too abruptly; she regretted her tinny, reflex reply.

  She studied her face for a minute in a mirror hanging on the wall. She felt as if she were still standing in the chart room.

  Yoriko was in the patio with one of her ladies-in-waiting. She was wearing a huge sunflower of a hat.

  “I want Mama to do all the choosing. I’m just helpless.”

  Fusako objected to being called “Mama” as though she were the proprietress of a bar. She descended the stairs slowly and walked over to where Yoriko stood chatting.

  “And how are you today? It certainly is hot again.” The actress complained about the devastating heat and the crowds at the pier where they were filming. Fusako pictured Ryuji somewhere in the throng and her spirits flagged.

  “Thirty cuts this morning—can you imagine that? That’s what Mr. Honda calls ‘racing through a picture.’”

  “Will the film be good?”

  “Not a chance. But it’s not the kind of picture that takes prizes anyway.”

  Winning a best-actress award had become an obsession with Yoriko. In fact, the gifts she was buying today constituted one of her inimitable “gestures” toward the awards jury. Her willingness to believe any scandal (except one involving herself) suggested that she would proffer her body to every member of the jury without hesitation if she thought that might help.

  Though she managed with difficulty to support a family of ten, Yoriko was a gullible beauty and, as Fusako well knew, a very lonely woman. Still, except that she was a good customer, Fusako found her fairly intolerable.

  But today Fusako was enveloped in paralyzing gentleness. Yoriko’s flaws and her vulgarity were apparent as always, but they seemed as cool and inoffensive as goldfish swimming in a fishbowl.

  “At first I thought sweaters might be nice, since it’s almost fall, but these are supposed to be things you bought this summer, so I picked out some Caldin ties and some polo shirts and a few Jiff pens. For the wives, I don’t think you can go wrong with perfume. Shall we go upstairs? I have everything together in the office.”

  “I’d love to but I just don’t have time. I’ll just barely be able to work in a bite of lunch as it is now. Can I leave everything up to you? The important things are the boxes and wrapping—they’re the reality of a gift, don’t you think?”

  “We’ll package everything beautifully.”

  The secretary from Yokohama Importers arrived just as Yoriko was leaving, and she was the last regula
r customer for the day. Fusako had the sandwich and cup of tea she ordered every day from a coffee shop across the street brought up to her office and sat down in front of the tray alone again. Arranging herself comfortably in the chair like a sleeper burrowing under the covers in an attempt to recapture an interrupted dream, she closed her eyes and returned effortlessly to the bridge of the Rakuyo. . . .

  Tsukazaki led them down flights of stairs to the boat deck, from where they could watch cargo being raised from the No. 4 hold. The hatch was a large, dark fissure in the steel plates of the deck at their feet. A man in a yellow steel helmet standing on a narrow ledge just below them was directing the crane with hand signals.

  The half-naked bodies of stevedores glistened dully in the dusk at the bottom of the hold. The cargo first took the sun when it was hoisted wobbling up from the bottom high into the mouth of the hatch. Slats of sunlight slipped nimbly over the crates as they wheeled through the air, but faster even than the shattered light the cargo sped, and was hovering above the waiting barge.

  The terrifyingly deliberate prelude and the sudden, reckless flight; the dangerous glitter of silver in a twist of fraying cable—standing under her open parasol, Fusako watched it all. She felt load after heavy load of freight being lifted from her and whisked away on the powerful arm of a crane—suddenly, but after long and careful preparation. She thrilled to the sight of cargo no man could move winging lightly into the sky, and she could have watched forever. This may have been a fitting destiny for cargo but the marvel was also an indignity. “It keeps getting emptier and emptier,” she thought. The advance was relentless, yet there was time for hesitation and languor, time so hot and long it made you faint, sluggish, congested time.

  She must have spoken then: “It’s been so kind of you to show us around when I know you must be very busy. I was wondering, if you’re free tomorrow evening, perhaps we could have dinner together?”

  It was a sociable invitation and no doubt Fusako spoke the words coolly; to Tsukazaki’s ear, it sounded like the babbling of a woman stricken with the heat. He looked at her with perfectly honest, puzzled eyes. . . .

  The night before, they had gone to the New Grand Hotel for dinner. I was still just trying to thank him then. He ate so properly, just like an officer. That long walk after dinner. He said he’d walk me home, but we got to the new park on the hill and didn’t feel like saying good night yet, so we sat down on a park bench. Then we had a long talk. Just rambled on about all kinds of things. I’ve never talked so much with a man before, not since my husband died. . . .

  CHAPTER FOUR

  AFTER leaving Fusako on her way to work, Ryuji returned briefly to the Rakuyo and then taxied back through empty, simmering streets to the park where they had stopped the night before. He couldn’t think of anywhere else to go until late afternoon, when they had arranged to meet.

  It was noon and the park was empty. The drinking fountain was overflowing, dyeing the stone walk a watery black; locusts were shrilling in the cypress trees. The harbor, sprawling toward the sea from the foot of the hill, rumbled thickly. But Ryuji painted out the noontime scene with reminiscences of night.

  He relived the evening, paused to savor a moment, traced and traced again the night’s course. Not bothering to wipe the sweat from his face, he picked absently at a piece of cigarette paper that clung to his lip while again and again his mind moaned: how could I have talked so goddam badly!

  He hadn’t been able to explain his ideas of glory and death, or the longing and the melancholy pent up in his chest, or the other dark passions choking in the ocean’s swell. Whenever he tried to talk about those things, he failed. If there were times when he felt he was worthless, there were others when something like the magnificence of the sunset over Manila Bay sent its radiant fire through him and he knew that he had been chosen to tower above other men. But he hadn’t been able to tell the woman his conviction. He remembered her asking: “Why haven’t you ever married?” And he remembered his simpering answer: “It’s not easy to find a woman who is willing to be a sailor’s wife.”

  What he had wanted to say was: “All the other officers have two or three children by now and they read letters from home over and over again, and look at pictures their kids have drawn of houses and the sun and flowers. Those men have thrown opportunity away—there’s no hope for them any more. I’ve never done much, but I’ve lived my whole life thinking of myself as the only real man. And if I’m right, then a limpid, lonely horn is going to trumpet through the dawn someday, and a turgid cloud laced with light will sweep down, and the poignant voice of glory will call for me from the distance—and I’ll have to jump out of bed and set out alone. That’s why I’ve never married. I’ve waited, and waited, and here I am past thirty.”

  But he hadn’t said anything like that; partly because he doubted a woman would understand. Nor had he mentioned his concept of ideal love: a man encounters the perfect woman only once in a lifetime and in every case death interposes—an unseen Pandarus—and lures them into the preordained embrace. This fantasy was probably a product of the hyperbole of popular songs. But over the years it had taken on substance in some recess of his mind and merged there with other things: the shrieking of a tidal wave, the ineluctable force of high tide, the avalanching break of surf upon a shoal. . . .

  And he had been certain that the woman before him was the woman in the dream. If only he had found the words to say it.

  In the grand dream Ryuji had treasured secretly for so long, he was a paragon of manliness and she the consummate woman; and from the opposite corners of the earth they came together in a chance encounter, and death wed them. Outdistancing tawdry farewells then, with streamers waving and strains of “Auld Lang Syne,” and far from sailors’ fickle loves, they were to descend to the bottom of the heart’s great deep where no man has ever been. . . .

  But he hadn’t been able to share even a fragment of his mad dream. Instead, he had talked of greens: “Every once in a while when you’re on a long cruise and you pass the galley you catch just a glimpse of radish or maybe turnip leaves. And you know, those little splashes of green make you tingle all over. You feel like getting down on your knees and worshipping them.”

  “I can imagine. I think I know just how you must feel.” Fusako agreed eagerly. Her voice oozed the joy a woman takes in consoling a man.

  Ryuji asked for her fan and shooed the mosquitoes away. Lamps on distant masts twinkled like ocher stars; bulbs in the eaves of the warehouses directly below stretched in regular, bright rows.

  He wanted to talk about the strange passion that catches hold of a man by the scruff of his neck and transports him to a realm beyond the fear of death. But far from finding words for that, he volunteered an account of the hardships he had known, and clucked his tongue.

  His father, a civil servant, had raised him and his sister singlehanded after their mother’s death; the sickly old man had worked overtime in order to send Ryuji to school; despite everything, Ryuji had grown up into a strong, healthy man; late in the war his home had been destroyed in an air raid and his sister had died of typhus shortly after; he had graduated from the merchant-marine high school and was just starting on his career when his father died too; his only memories of life on shore were of poverty and sickness and death, of endless devastation; by becoming a sailor, he had detached himself from the land forever. . . . It was the first time he had talked of these things at such length to a woman.

  Exaltation swelled Ryuji’s voice when he touched on the misery in his life, and while he was recalling the total in his bankbook he couldn’t help digressing from the sea’s power and benevolence, which was the story he had longed to tell, in order to boast about his own prowess like a very ordinary man indeed. It was just another particular aspect of his vanity.

  He wanted to talk about the sea—he might have said something like this: “It was the sea that made me begin thinking secretly about love more than anything else; you know, a love worth dying for,
or a love that consumes you. To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman. Things like her lulls and storms, or her caprice, or the beauty of her breast reflecting the setting sun, are all obvious. More than that, you’re in a ship that mounts the sea and rides her and yet is constantly denied her. It’s the old saw about miles and miles of lovely water and you can’t quench your thirst. Nature surrounds a sailor with all these elements so like a woman and yet he is kept as far as a man can be from her warm, living body. That’s where the problem begins, right there—I’m sure of it.”

  But he could only mouth a few lines of his song: Now the sea’s my home, I decided that. But even I must shed a tear . . . “I guess that’s pretty funny. It’s my favorite song.”

  “I think it’s a wonderful song,” she said. But she was only shielding his pride, he knew. Obviously this was the first time she had ever heard the song, though she pretended to know it well. She can’t penetrate to the feelings deep down in a song like this; or see through the murk of my manhood to the longing that sometimes makes me weep; fair enough: then as far as I’m concerned, she’s just another body.

  He saw at a glance how delicate and how fragrant a body it was.

  Fusako was wearing a black-lace kimono over a crimson under-robe, and her obi was white brocade. Her milky face floated coolly in the dusk. Crimson peeped seductively through the black lace. She was a presence suffusing the air around them with the softness of being a woman; an extravagant, elegant woman—Ryuji had never seen anything like her.

  The robe shifted fantastically from crimson through shades of purple as every subtle movement of her body altered the play of light from the distant lamps; and he detected within the shadowed folds of cloth the hushed breathing of the woman’s own folds. Her sweat and perfume fragrance reaching him on the breeze seemed to clamor for his death. “DIE! DIE! DIE!” it screamed; and he imagined the time when her delicate fingertips, stealthy now and reluctant, would quicken into tongues of flame.