"Are you always working in this store all by yourself?"

"There's another girl. She's out to lunch right now."

"And you?"

"When she comes back, we switch off."

I took a cigarette from the pack in my pocket and lit it, watching her work.

"Say, if it's okay, how about we go out to lunch together?"

She shook her head without looking away from her receipts.

"I like to eat lunch alone."

"Me too."

"Really?"

She deprioritized her receipts, looking annoyed, and lowered the needle onto a new record from Harper's Bizarre.

"So...why'd you invite me, then?"

"Just wanna shake things up once in a while."

"Shake 'em up by yourself."

She went back to working on the receipts at hand.

"Forget about me, already."

I nodded.

"I think I said it once already, but I think you're a complete sleazeball," having said that, with her lips still pursed, she flipped the receipts through her four fingers.

16

When I entered J's Bar, the Rat had his shoulders on the bar and his face grimaced while reading a telephone book-sized, incredibly long Henry James novel.

"Is that a good read?"

The Rat looked up from his book and shook his head from side to side. "Still, I've been reading it very carefully, ever since our talk the other day. 'I love splendid deception more than the drab reality,' you know it?"

"Nope."

"Roger Vadim. A French Director. And this one, too: 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.'"

"Who said that one?"

"I forget. You think it's true?"

"It's a lie."

"Why?"

"You wake up at 3am, you're hungry. You open the fridge and it's empty. What do you do?"

The Rat thought it over, then laughed in a loud voice. I called J over and ordered beer and French fries, then pulled out a wrapped record and handed it to the Rat.

"What's all this?"

"It's a birthday present."

"But my birthday's not 'til next month."

"I won't be here next month, so I'm giving it to you now."

With the record in his hand, he was still thinking.

"Yeah, well, I'll be lonely once you're gone," he said as he opened the paper, pulled out the record and looked it over.

"Beethoven, Piano Concerto Number 3, Glenn Gould, Leonard Bernstein. Hmm...I've never heard this. Have you?"

"Never."

"Anyway, thank you. I'll just come right out and say it, I'm really happy."

17

For three days, I kept trying to find the girl's phone number. The girl who lent me the Beach Boys record, that is.

I went to the office at our high school and looked up the register for our graduating cla.s.s, and I found it. However, when I tried calling it I got a recorded message telling me the number was no longer in service. When I called Information and gave them the girl's name, the operator searched for me, and at the end of five minutes, she told me there was no number listed in their directory under that name. That was the good thing about the girl's name, it was unique. I thanked the operator and hung up. The next day, I called up a bunch of our former cla.s.smates and asked if they knew anything about her, but n.o.body knew anything about her, and most of them only vaguely recalled her existence from our school days. The last person I asked, for some reason I didn't understand, said, 'I don't have a d.a.m.n thing to say to you,' and hung up on me.

On the third day, I went back to the high school and got the name of the college she'd gone on to attend. It was the English department of a second rate girl's school. I called their office and told them I was a quality control manager from McCormick's Salad Dressing and had to ask her something from a survey she'd filled out and that I needed her current address and phone number. I apologized and told them it was very important that I speak to her. They asked if I wouldn't call back in fifteen minutes after they'd had time to look it up. After drinking a bottle of beer, I called them back and the person in the office told me that she'd dropped out of school in March. The reason she'd quit was to recover from an illness, but they didn't have the slightest idea why a girl who was well enough to eat salad wasn't back enrolled in cla.s.ses again.

When I asked if they had a contact address for her, telling them even an old one would be okay, he checked for me. It was a lodging house near the school. When I called there, a matronly-sounding lady said she didn't know where the girl went after moving out, then hung up on me, as if to say, 'you don't want to know anyway.'

That was the end of the last line thread connecting us.

I went home and drank beer by myself, listening to California Girls all the while.

18

The phone rang.

I was lying atop a wicker chair, half-asleep while gazing at a book I'd left open. The sudden evening rainstorm was comprised of big drops of water that wet the leaves of the trees in the yard before it pa.s.sed. After the rainstorm was gone, the sea-smelling southerly wind began to blow, shaking the leaves of the potted plants on the veranda just a little, then went on to shake the curtains.

"h.e.l.lo," she said. Her voice was dark and controlled; she spoke as if her words were settling on a thin gla.s.s table. "You remember me?"

I pretended to think about it for a minute.

"How's the record business?"

"Not so good...it's like there's a recession or something. n.o.body's listening to records."

"Uh huh."

She tap-taped her nail on the receiver.

"It was really hard work getting your phone number."

"Yeah?"

"I asked around at J's Bar. I had the bartender ask your friend for me. A real tall, weird guy. He was reading Moliere."

"Doesn't surprise me."

Silence.

"Everyone looked sad. You didn't show up there for a week, so they were saying you must be sick or something."

"I never knew I was so popular."

"Are you....mad at me?"

"For what?"

"For saying all those terrible things to you. I wanted to apologize for that."

"Hey, you don't have to worry about me. You care about me, you might as well be feeding beans to pigeons."

She sighed, and I could hear the flicker from her cigarette lighter coming through the receiver. After that, I could hear Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline. She must've been calling from the record store.

"I'm not really worried about your feelings. I just feel like I shouldn't have talked to you like that," she said quickly.

"You're pretty hard on yourself."

"Yeah, I'm always thinking about the kind of person I'm trying to be."

She was silent for a moment.

"You wanna meet up tonight?"

"Sure."

"How about 8 o' clock at J's Bar. That okay?"

"Got it."

"...um, I've been having a rough time lately."

"I understand."

"Thank you."

She hung up.

19

It's a long story, it happened when I was twentyone. Still a lot of youth left, but not as young as I once was. If I wasn't happy with that, the only choice I had was to jump off the roof of the Empire State Building on a Sunday morning.

I heard this joke in an old movie about the Great Depression: 'You know why I always have my umbrella open when I walk by the Empire State Building? 'Cause people are always falling like raindrops!'

When I was twenty-one, at least at this point I wasn't planning to die. At that point I'd slept with three girls.

The first girl was my high school cla.s.smate, and when we were seventeen we got to believing that we loved each other. Bathed in the lush twilight, she took off her slip-on shoes, her cotton socks, her thin seersucker dress, her weird underwear she obviously knew didn't fit her, and then after getting a little fl.u.s.tered, took off her wrist.w.a.tch. After that, we embraced each other atop the Sunday edition of the Asahi Shimbun.

Just a few months after we graduated from high school, we suddenly broke up for some forgettable reason. After that, I never saw her again. I think of her every now and then, during those nights when I can't sleep. That's it.

The second girl I slept with, I met her at the Shinjuku station on the subway. She was sixteen, flat broke, and had nowhere to sleep, and as an added bonus she was almost nothing but a pair of b.r.e.a.s.t.s, but she had smart, pretty eyes. One night, when there were violent demonstrations sweeping over Shinjuku, the trains, the busses, everything shut down completely.

"You hang around here and you'll get hauled off," I told her. She was crouched in the middle of the shutdown ticket-taker, reading a sports section she'd taken from the garbage.

"But the police'll feed me."

"That's a terrible way to live."

"I'm used to it."

I lit a cigarette and gave one to her. Thanks to the tear gas, my eyes were p.r.i.c.kling.

"Have you eaten?"