A Woman's Nails by Aonghas Crowe Read Free Book Online Page A

monjayaki , which is actually quite good, we drink a couple more draughts and by the end of lunch we’re like too old lovers. She touches me playfully to make a point, leans against my body when she tells me something she doesn’t want the staff to hear, rests her head on my shoulder, places her hand on my thigh and says she’s tired. I’m thinking I may actually get laid today. She orders another beer moves her hand to the bulge in my pants that has been impatiently demanding attention ever since she removed her jacket.
    “Wow!” she says. “It’s true.”
    “What’s true?”
    “You know.”
    “No, I don’t know.”
    “What they say.”
    “What do they say?”
    “You know.”
    “I don’t.”
    “T hat Americans, you know . . .”
    A waiter places two draughts on the counter before us. Risa keeps her right hand on my friend, drinks with her left. She blushed with the first beer, grew red with the third, but now that she is on her sixth beer, she has lost her color altogether. I ask her if she’s all right. She strokes my crotch, making my cock bob up against her hand, and replies me that I’m the one we should be worried about.
    “Does it hurt?” she asks.
    Hurt ? Is this what Japanese men tell women here? That it hurts ? Is that how the men get laid, by preying on women’s kindness? When in Rome . . . I tell her it does, that I can’t stand the pain .
    “Do you want me to help you with it?”
    “I do.”
    “Let’s go.”
     
    Risa nearly falls over as she tries to stand up. I have to put one arm around her waist, place her arm around my shoulder and sort of drag her out of the restaurant the way a soldier would pull a wounded man out of a combat zone. As we pass the restroom, her body stiffens and she says she’s going to be sick. She pushes me aside and staggers into the women’s restroom, leaving me outside with her handbag and the silver down jacket to stand vigil as the sound of retching resonates against tiled walls.
    When she emerges several minutes later, her face is ashen. I give her some gum and she thanks me with a heavy nod then walks quietly towards the elevator. I follow stupidly still carrying her belongings, which she takes from me once we get on the elevator. She struggles with the jacket. I help her get her arm through the sleeve. I put the purse under her arm, the strap over her shoulder. As soon as we leave the building, she places her hand on my chest to stop me from following her. She walks a few uneasy steps forward, turns slightly to wave good-bye and then collapses into the backseat of a cab.
     
     
     
     
    4
    AYA
     
    1
     
    Aya and I sit in the upper floor atrium in the IMS building, a giant golden phallus of a building in the center of Tenjin, and look out over the city which stretches with gray monotony from the bay in the north to the point in the south where suburban obscurity butts into a low range of mountains.
    I used to stare out of Mie's eighth floor apartment in the eastern suburbs of the city and watch planes fly over that bleakly uniform cityscape wondering why there weren't any skyscrapers. I asked Mie, but she didn't know. I ask Aya now, and she says there are plenty of tall buildings in Tenjin, the golden phallus to name one. She doesn't call IMS that, of course. I tell her that fifteen stories do not a skyscraper make, adding that I haven’t found any buildings in town that are over fifteen stories tall. She says, really? I say, yes really. When she tells me she has never thought about it, I tell her, this is why I am here, Aya: to make you think about these kinds of things. She says, oh. I say, oh, indeed.
    Aya is in high school, by the way. An American girl might hide her young age when talking to a man older than herself, but in Japan the girls seem to wear their youth like a badge of honor. A few months ago, I asked a group of high school girls that I had been teaching if they were happy to be graduating. A few were, but most weren't. Personally, I