Gaijin Cowgirl (2): A Dark Business
The whole business – Tokyo, the Painter, the map, Thailand, everything – had begun six months back.
The whole business – Tokyo, the Painter, the map, Thailand, everything – had begun six months back, in September 2000, when Val arrived at Narita airport carrying all her possessions in this world: a suitcase of clothes and a year-old love letter that still wore the scars of having been crinkled up and tossed into a trashcan. Something had made her decide to salvage the letter, probably that Tokyo-area telephone number on it. She knew she ought to feel ashamed as she slotted a 100-yen coin into the payphone, but things hadn’t worked out, again.
If this letter were anything to go by, Charlie wouldn’t say no – so she had calculated.
After three rings, he picked up. “Hello?”
His voice sent a jolt through her. She had imagined the course of this conversation endlessly while on the plane, but hearing his voice made her hesitate.
“Hello?” repeated the voice. “Moshi moshi?”
“Hi, Charlie. It’s me, Val. I’m at Narita airport and I’ve got exactly five hundred and…sixty-two bucks’ worth of yen.”
After a moment of silence, she wedged past his disbelief, and he told her to take the train to Tokyo Station. The ride was long; night fell by the time she reached the city center. She couldn’t get an angle on the place. The reference point she craved, that something to hold onto, was not to be found amid the endless crush of buildings and overpasses. If she had been looking for soothing answers, she had picked the wrong town.
He met her at the station. He hadn’t changed since they had lived together in California: luxurious black hair and thick eyebrows, courtesy of his Irish mother, matched by his Chinese father’s bronze skin and crescent eyes. He wore round horn-rimmed glasses and a suit, his shirt’s sleeves ending in French cuffs. Charles Kwok, esquire, had always dressed to impress.
The first physical contact was awkward. She supposed he had only recently learned to forget her. Should they embrace? Kiss? Shake hands? Val took the lead and pecked him on the cheek.
“It’s good to see you,” she said.
“I don’t quite believe it. Are you in trouble?”
“Trouble…not trouble…maybe just…”
“Was it your father?”
She nodded. “I was in Berlin. He found out. He always finds out. And these men show up.”
“C’mon,” he said, taking her arm. “Is that all you’ve got? Okay, let’s get a cab.”
When they were in the taxi, paused at a red light beneath a canyon of fulminating neon signs, she apologized and meant it. “I know I should have called you earlier, or written, or e-mailed, or something. But I didn’t know where to go. I spent everything I had on a plane ticket. I’m not going to stay long. I’ll get a job, my own place, everything. But I just need a few days…”
He insisted she stay as long as she wanted, as she had gambled. He had a small guest room at his apartment in Hiroō. By Tokyo standards it was spacious, but felt spare and empty. What furniture he had seemed mainly dedicated to propping up his piles of paperwork.
She looked around the functional apartment as he put sheets on the guest bed, probably for the first time. The scene reduced her to bromides. “So, work keeps you busy?”
“Morning, noon and night.”
She wanted a cigarette but knew he wouldn’t tolerate smoking here. He kept up his busy demeanor, arranging things for her, because there was too much to say. Charlie should have been outraged by her appearance, and maybe he was, but she had counted on his insecurities, on whether she had really gone back to him, or at least his gentlemanly ethics, to wedge herself back into his apartment.
“I know I’m horrible,” she said, moving his briefcase off the couch to clear a space to sit. He was still fumbling around the guest room. “You have to believe me, I didn’t know anyone else. Going back to America just wasn’t an option.”
“I understand,” he said from the other room.
“I should have kept in touch…”
The light reflected off his glasses. “Yeah, Val. You should have.”
She raised his rumpled letter. “I kept this.”
He came over and took it from her hand, glancing at his lonely words, penned in his severe handwriting, letting her know where to find him after he left San Francisco in the slim hope that she’d wonder. It had been the last of several letters beseeching her to come back to him.
The letter reminded him that he was a fool. He let it spiral into her lap.
* * *
They didn’t see much of each other. Charlie really did work throughout most of his waking hours. Or, she thought, maybe he was just avoiding her. Val spent the next week alone, going through classified ads in the local English-language dailies. Teaching English was one option, although she loathed the idea. She didn’t have much of a resume. A degree in literature from the University of Southern California, eighteen months at a Manhattan publishing firm, another two years of dull marketing work for the San Francisco Philharmonic while living with Charlie, finally about twenty months in Berlin where she promised herself to launch a literary career that never moved beyond letters to the arts editor of the International Herald Tribune.
Berlin had been fresh and exciting, but she had still been living off daddy’s trust fund. Europe wasn’t far enough away, and when her father had tracked her down, she had remembered Charlie’s letter saying how he had finally gotten his dream job in Tokyo. Maybe Japan was far enough.
But she quickly realized during her first week there that getting a job without a work visa or experience teaching English would be tough. The days when an American could simply show up and start earning lots of money were over, if they had ever existed.
Charlie’s silent treatment wore on her. The guy didn’t yell at her, or ask her questions, or even try to get her naked. No midnight creeps to her on the sofa. Not that she sought that kind of attention, unless it was necessary to ensure her protection here, but couldn’t he be a little more human and a little less considerate?
She left him a note suggesting she cook him dinner Friday night. To her delight – and she hadn’t expected to be delighted – he agreed and came home around eight o’clock.
She boiled a giant pot of pasta and uncorked a bottle of Chianti that had consumed most of her remaining money. Charlie kept several bottles that were considerably more expensive but this was a meal from her. She felt uncomfortable touching his things.
He was tense and edgy from the office, oblivious to his habit of biting his nails, and they were both nervous about dinner. They killed the bottle quickly, and then he opened one of his own.
He worked for a small American law firm leading a difficult, probably hopeless case against the Japanese government on behalf of World War Two-era Asian women who had been enslaved in military brothels, so-called ‘comfort women’. For Charlie, though, it wasn’t a job. It was an obsession.
“I feel like there are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people that I’ve just got to help,” he told her as he swished fine Bordeaux in his glass. “Entire families. Koreans, Chinese, others. But especially the Chinese ones. My father’s family. He told me a lot of stories, my old man, about his parents, his aunts in the camps. My grandmother died in one of those places.”
Without thinking, she touched his hand. “Maybe you’re too close to this thing.”
“What? My grandmother, my aunts—”
“I know, but you said it yourself, you’re not getting anywhere.”
He yanked his hand free. “Not everyone goes to law school to get rich.”
“Sure, but…”
“Don’t you believe in justice?”
She finished her glass of wine. “Yeah, but Charlie, you’re so, I don’t know, miserable? These things that happened, it was like sixty years ago. I haven’t seen you smile once since I arrived at Narita.”
He looked at her, hard and serious. “That’s right,” he finally said.
“It’s Friday night. What you need is a little fun.”
“A little fun.”
She grinned. “Whaddaya say?”
He reluctantly took her down to Roppongi, a frenetic crossroads of bars, restaurants and clubs, and the main entertainment district that welcomed foreigners. The streets of this party Mecca teemed with sybarites from everywhere: West African pimps cajoling Western businessmen into strip clubs; rich Japanese men strutting down the street holding hands with willowy whores from Siberia; American GIs in Hawaiian shirts slapping high-fives while Japanese girls in heels and tight skirts, utterly bored with life, plotted how to bed them.
As Val and Charlie pressed through the crowds, she said, “Your problem is that you don’t have friends here to relax with.”
“No time.”
“Come on, Charlie. What about the guys at the office?”
“Stephen is married, and the others are Japanese.”
“So hang out with the Japanese guys. Isn’t that the way things work here? Bonding in the office and all that?”
“That’s for big corporate lawyers, not us. Besides, we spend so much time together in the office, we kind of get sick of each other.” He hesitated. He had something he wanted to say. “And they don’t like me anyway.”
“That’s strange, because you’re such a fun guy, Charles Kwok.”
He pulled her out of the traffic of bar goers. “You try living here with a face and a name like mine. I’m not like you. They don’t see the Western half of me, just the Chinese half.”
“I think,” she said quietly, “that you only show your angry half.”
“I think I’ll mind my own business.”
She tugged at his sleeve. “Come on, Charlie. Let’s get a drink in here.”
The red-lit bar was mellow for Roppongi, only half full, with a few couples dancing to house music in one corner. Val ordered two vodka and limes.
Charlie slid off to the men’s room. Val sipped her drink. There was a rustle by her side. “Excuse me,” a Frenchman said, “but could I interest you in a job?”
He was pale, almost sickly, with a tousle of thin brown hair and a smile of bad teeth. He wore a plaid sports coat over a turtleneck. His fingertips were stained yellow. He lit an acrid cigarette and offered her one. She shook her head.
“You see,” he said, “I am very well known around here. I am René. Ask anybody.” He made an expansive motion. “Say to anyone in Roppongi, do you know this René? And they will say yes. Why? Why am I so famous, you ask? Because I know all the girls. I find them jobs.”
“Oh really.”
“It is true. And good jobs. Lots of cash, lots of fun, la la la, and no taxes and no hassle. Easy.”
“What kind of jobs?”
“Hostess jobs, of course.” His accent made the word come out as oh-stess. “The only job in all of Japan for a beautiful woman. The pay is very good. And it is so easy, I wish I were a girl. But of course I am not, ha ha, I am just René. But the work is no touchie-touchie, so please do not be afraid.”
She smiled as she pulled out her own pack of cigarettes. “Who said I was afraid?”
René struck a match and lit one for her. “Ah-ha, not me. I was just being hypothetical. You are lucky, you know that?”
“Lucky, hunh?”
“But of course, very lucky. It is not like the old days when a blonde could go anywhere in Tokyo and make a thousand dollars just for sitting there. Ah no. Japan is in recession. It is not like the eighties anymore. Hostess jobs are hard to get. But René knows who is still hiring, and René knows what they want. And René is certain that this is you.”
“Me.”
“Certainly. You have poise.”
Charlie sidled up to her. “Who’s this?”
Val smiled. “Charlie, this is René. He’s an employment agent. René, this is my friend, Charlie.”
“A pleasure,” René said, shaking Charlie’s hand. “And what might your name be, mademoiselle?”
“Valerie. Val.”
“Enchanté. If you are interested, you go have a look now? Tonight?”
“What kind of job interview is this?” Charlie demanded.
Val patted his arm. “It’s okay, Charlie. Would you be terribly upset if I did hostess work?”
He seemed angry, but she had misinterpreted his contorted expression, because he burst out laughing. “Hell no.”
“Of course not,” René said, “there is no problem for your boyfriend. He must know this is an innocent profession.”
* * *
Her first job was at a jammed club in Roppongi frequented mainly by foreigners, where she did little else than accept tips for dancing on the bar in a miniskirt. The music was deafening, the conversation minimal, the work dull. It killed her feet.
Rene assured her she just had to wait, and good to his word, he brought her news of something more upscale two weeks later: “I know another place. It is different, yes, for Japanese men only, but it is not at all boring. You do not have to speak Japanese, I don’t think. It is not the best, but almost. Meet me at Ikebukuro Station tomorrow night, yes?”
“That’s kind of far, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. “Yes, it is not Akasaka or Ginza, but it is good, well, getting better.”
That night she walked back to the apartment in Hiroō. Despite the late hour, Charlie was still wearing his tie, drinking coffee in the living room as he tapped away on a laptop. White sheets of paper coated the floor.
“You’re up,” she said, kicking off her heels.“The World Court petition. I only have another week before I leave for the Hague.”
She nodded, barely awake. She flopped down beside him and massaged her feet.
He put his arm around her. “You look beat.”
She gave a mini snort. “You don’t look so fresh yourself.” She was very aware of the feel of his fingertips grooving into her back, knowing their way to the aching places without searching. This was the first time he had touched her like this. She didn’t move. She didn’t tell him to stop.
“Have fun tonight?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No. But René’s showing me a better place tomorrow. Higher class, purely local. More money.”
His hand retreated to rub the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. “That’s good.”
“That felt nice,” she said, her skin still warm where his fingertips had pressed down. “Charlie, do you really not care if I work at these kinds of clubs?”
He shook his head. “If rich middle-aged men with an Oedipal complex want to pay you for singing karaoke with them, then I can’t see why I should object.”
“You have to be something of a romantic, I think, to enjoy it.”
“And you, Val, certainly love your illusions.”
He gives her a massage, then hits her with this? “Well, the cash is certainly real. And it’s, I don’t know, an experience.”
“I don’t mean that,” he said, placing his hand on her crown and gently massaging her head. Despite the pleasure it brought her, she couldn’t help but tense. Until tonight he hadn’t touched her since that awkward kiss at Tokyo Station. That felt like such a long time ago. His fingers on her scalp, rustling through her hair…it felt good.
“I mean you are very good at creating your world, aren’t you?” he said, his lips beside her ear. “First in New York, and then in California, and Germany, and now here. And when it doesn’t work out, you leave.”
She slid away from him. “Okay, enough of the passive-aggressive crap.”
“You’re the one racking up the air miles running away from your problems.”
“That – is so unfair!”
“I think you should talk to your father.”
She tensed, stood up, threw her hands in the air. “The last thing I want to do.”
“Val,” he sighed, “what are you doing here?”
“Just making some money before I figure out what’s next. That’s all.”
“That’s what you said in San Francisco when you came from New York. That’s what you said when you left for Berlin.”
“Okay, okay!”
“No, it’s not okay. Val, seeing you again, having you here…it’s been such a surprise. I’ve been…so happy to see you. But I don’t think it can be this way. It can’t be this way. I wish I knew you were here to be with me, but at some point you’ll just run away again. There’s always something, and if there isn’t, there’s always your father.”
“Leave him out of this.”
“For Chrissakes, Val, if you spend the man’s money you should at least see him once in a while.”
“He lost that privilege a long time ago. You think you’re the only one with a family grudge, Charlie? Like it’s different for you just because you can be this crusader? Please.”
He folded his arms, giving her a stony look. She tried another line of attack. “It’s the hostessing, right? Bar girl? Guys paying to have five minutes of chitchat with me. You hate that, right?”
“You’re free to pursue any line of work.”
“Oh right. Nicely put, Mr. Lawyer.”
“Mr. Lawyer? All right, Val, I’ll be a goddamned lawyer. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the accused—”
“Accused?”
“—Valerie Benson is charged with cowardice—”
“I’m a what?”
“—in the face of an errant father and I don’t want to know how many jilted lovers, whose only goal in life is narcissistic ephemery.”
She stormed into the bedroom and slammed the door.
Eventually he knocked.
“Val, you’ve got to stop running. Stop running just long enough to talk to me.”
“If I open the door,” she said, her voice trembling, “will you promise to not mention my father again?”
“Yes.”
She opened the door and did her best to look unbowed. “I suppose you want a formal apology for my leaving you. Well you can have it, Charlie. I’m sorry. I was rotten and selfish but I was scared and I felt trapped. Not because of you, you know that. It never had anything to do with you.”
“Does…anything have to do with me?”
The opening was obvious, so she took it and kissed him, and that shut him up.
* * *
Working at Cowboy allowed Val to contribute to Charlie’s rent. She bought him little gifts, or something cheerful to brighten the apartment. She told him about the girlfriends she was making. She sometimes mentioned a particular customer who spent tens of thousands of yen in one sitting.
Those stories elicited little more than bemused grunts from Charlie. He had a visceral dislike for the Japanese. It was his ugly side, a feature of his personality that Val could understand but not accept. Blind bitterness drove him in his work, and he enjoyed the idea that his girlfriend profited so handsomely from these old men, these corporate warriors who, to his jaundiced eye, represented the same system that his lawsuits flailed against, uselessly. It was a lousy type of revenge but any amount of payback was fine by him.
Val, on the other hand, was delighted by the growing stacks of cash she was earning. One or two customers began popping by specifically to see her, which pleased Mama-san enormously. Val had started off making around 80,000 yen a week, barely enough to survive in Tokyo. But now, in her third month, she was making as much as 250,000 yen a week, in cash – and before letting special customers buy her expensive dinners or give her gifts of jewelry.
But she never told Charlie about how much she looked forward to stepping into Cowboy in her long black cocktail dress, hair in a chignon, long thin cigarette poised in her hand. How she enjoyed reviewing smitten men like a drill sergeant eyeing her platoon.
Belting out Nat King Cole numbers on the karaoke machine in her lousy warble of a voice brought endless amusement to her customers. She was such a bad singer that they found it cute. And she was such a good dancer that they were easily enchanted. And with increasing frequency, so was she. These men were great role players, and she was turning into a wonderful actress.
The other thing she didn’t speak about with him anymore was his work. She didn’t like to see his bigotry, and any suggestions from her in defense of Japanese culture just exasperated him. “I have no problem with Japanese culture,” he invariably said. “But the system is rotten, it’s run by cynical men who have gotten away with an awful crime.”
Maybe, but it didn’t sound any different than the States. She had come to like several of her regulars and resented Charlie’s insular thinking. They had sex but neither of them were paying attention. Val could only guess what was passing through his mind, but she knew exactly what was in hers: calculations of the number of weeks before she could afford her own apartment.
* * *
A week or two before she was ready to announce her exit, Charlie’s boss invited them to dinner. Charlie made it seem like a big deal so she told Mama-san she’d come in late that evening.
They met at a restaurant in Yokohama’s Chinatown. It was, in fact, the first time Val and Charlie had gone out at night since she had started work at Cowboy. She wore a black cocktail dress – Cowboy attire – beneath her coat. Charlie’s clothes were always meticulous, elegant suits and slicked hair. They looked good together, but she knew that looks could be deceiving.
The restaurant was at the end of a narrow, red lantern-lit street. Stacks of bamboo steamers filled with dumplings hissed clouds. They passed through the steam to see a gangly white man at a table, chatting in Chinese with the crinkled waitress. Stephen Gould’s suit was too boxy, his hair disheveled, more a professor type than the slick lawyer that Charlie wanted to be.
“So this must be Valerie,” he said, shaking her hand. “Charlie didn’t tell me how pretty you are.”
“Thank you,” she said, deciding from his voice that he was a nice man.
“Hope it wasn’t any trouble getting here,” Stephen said. “It’s just that Charlie and I have a common passion for good Chinese food. That’s why I hired him.”
“Stephen was a student in Beijing,” Charlie explained.
“I was a Chinese studies major at college,” Stephen continued.
“How long have you been in Japan?” she asked.
The lawyer picked at some peanuts with his chopsticks. “Eleven years. It was supposed to be one, but my wife, she’s Japanese. She calls the shots. What do you do?”
She was past the point of worrying what Charlie thought. “I’m a hostess at an expensive men’s club.”
“Beautiful lady like you, tips must be great,” Stephen said. “Let’s order, I’m starving.”
Val told them a little about Cowboy and its patrons, using the chance to let Charlie know her clients were funny, regular guys, but only Stephen laughed. The food came and the conversation drifted to talk of home, sharing stories about where they had been for the millennium, what the fireworks had been like. Over Peking Duck, talk turned to their work.
“Charlie and I have a tough job,” Stephen said. “It’s like we’re trying to turn the clock of history backwards, replay things again.”
“What we’re really asking for – what our clients are asking for – is accountability,” Charlie added. “Official recognition by the government about what happened during the war. When the Americans first occupied Japan, there seemed to be a movement in that direction, like what happened with the Nazis.”
“Nah, I doubt there really was,” Stephen mused, waving his chopsticks dismissively. “MacArthur ran this place like his own kingdom. His buddies were Wall Street types, right-wingers like Hoover. First they put all the zaibatsu, you know, these big corporations, back together, so they wouldn’t default on their loans to the American banks. Then when the Korean War broke out, they dropped the pretense of cleaning up Japan altogether. The LDP politicians may have been war criminals, but they hated the Commies. That was good enough for us.”
Charlie added, “When we represent the comfort women, we’re challenging the system itself, all the way to Washington. But times are changing. International law and human rights are becoming more influential, and a handful of the victims are pressing their cases.”
“That’s what we keep telling ourselves,” Stephen said, washing his meal down with a beer.
Val asked, “Can you actually do it, I mean, win a case?”
Stephen emptied his glass and looked at her. The mirth that had creased his eyes was gone. “These things take time, a lot of time. And these old women, well, that’s the one thing they don’t have.”
“Speaking of time,” she said, glancing at her watch, “I better go soon. The club knows I’m coming late, but I did promise I’d show.”
“No problem,” Stephen said, signaling for the bill. “It’s been lovely to meet you, Val. You got a good girl here, Charlie.”
“Yes,” he said, looking glum.
Stephen offered to give them a lift back to Tokyo. Val curled up in the back of the car and closed her eyes, half-listening as the two men talked about the traffic, or sports, or nothing at all. She would have preferred to take a train by herself but couldn’t refuse the ride. She managed to insist she be dropped off near Shinjuku Station so she could take the subway to work.
Shinjuku never failed to amaze her. At night, it became a series of vast neon-lit canyons of restaurants and clubs throbbing with pleasure-seekers, the lusty and the lost. Off to one side were the sleazy streets of the red-light district, Kabukicho, and she was grateful she didn’t have to work there. So much light for such a dark business. But she couldn’t escape the sensation of power that pulsated from the city.
Like the bright lights of the streets at night, power here was palpable but diffuse.
She strode through Shinjuku toward the train station, past signs advertising restaurants where the floors were mirrored and the waitresses didn’t wear panties…past the news kiosk proclaiming today’s headline about a CEO shedding tears during the shareholder’s meeting…past the young thugs in metallic suits murmuring greedily into cell phones…and past the police box, where two officers quietly sipped tea, waiting without great expectation for something to happen.
Back to the night, back to Cowboy. Mama-san beckoned to her. The old lady had noticed how Val’s beauty and humor drew clients. Tonight she had someone she wanted Val to meet – one of her most prized customers, notorious for indulging his favorite girls with big tips. He was an old man who spoke fluent English and especially enjoyed good conversation with foreign women.
The men who invariably accompanied him addressed him as ‘Colonel’ or ‘President’ or just sensei, a term of considerable deference which meant ‘teacher’. The hostesses’ private nickname for him was the Painter, after his hobby. If a woman took his fancy, he would offer her a handsome fee for the honor of sitting for a portrait.
Val was tired from the long journey from Yokohama. She considered asking Ute if she had any coke. One line, every so often, was like a super jolt of caffeine, enough to keep Val going until dawn. But she didn’t have time to partake, and Mama-san made clear this was not a customer to keep waiting.
She followed Mama-san into a VIP room where a handful of men made a commotion untangling themselves from coats and scarves. Sitting in their midst was a skinny old gent with wisps of white hair, a trim mustache and pointy goatee. Skeletal hands rested on a cane. From behind round rimless glasses, his eyes gleamed with an unexpected edge.
One of the other men asked him, “Your coat, sensei?”
The old man stood up and allowed his coat to be eased away. His body defied its years.
Val bowed. “Kombanwa. My name is Val. Would sensei care for a drink?”
“That’d be a treat,” said the Painter in an easy American accent. “And please, sweetheart, call me Taka.”
(Next chapter.)