The Typist Read online

  “That’s my business.”

  “It’s weird is what it is,” he said. “Besides, I know lots of married guys who get a little something now and then. No harm in it. Nobody’ll ever know.”

  I yanked the letter out, balled it up, and tossed it toward the wastebasket. Missed. Clifford picked it up and for an instant I was afraid he’d read what I had written, the usual catalog of weather and routine, but he just dropped it in.

  “What do you do?” he said. “You jerk off? Are you in here jerking off all the time when I’m not looking? You better not be. If my feet start sticking to the floor, we’re gonna have words.”

  He was just messing around. He whopped me with his pillow. Then, suddenly, his expression went serious, almost sad.

  “Well, I’m jealous,” he said. “I truly am.”

  I admired Clifford in certain ways. Not just for his service record. He had a wide gullible face, like a boy swelled too fast to man-size, that belied a knack, even in peacetime, for putting himself in the middle of the action. He knew a guy in the motor pool who’d let him commandeer a jeep sometimes for late night rendezvous. Within weeks, he had worked out an arrangement where he purchased American products—tinned food, powdered milk, nylons, liquor, whatever—from the PX, then doubled his money reselling them to some shadowy connection on the Tokyo black market, called the yami-ichi by the locals. It was Clifford who found a houseboy named Eguchi to clean the barracks on our floor and convinced the rest of us to chip in. When he wanted something from you, this mix of innocence and savvy was difficult to resist.

  We weren’t pals exactly, but after a few months in close quarters we were comfortable enough, familiar enough, that it was possible to mistake us for real friends. I knew, for example, that the letters he wrote to his mother were ironic and affectionate and kind. I knew he was from Baltimore and he had a partisan view of his hometown. After a day trip to Kamakura, he pronounced that the coast of Japan couldn’t hold a candle to the Eastern Shore. And I learned, on one of the rare nights he failed to organize an excursion, that Clifford was embarrassed to have come through the war unscathed. Most of the other members of the Honor Guard could boast of Purple Hearts. He told me this, I suppose, along with the requisite combat horror stories, both to impress me and because he had no one else to tell. If I happened to be around while he was preparing for an evening out, wet-combing his hair, splashing on aftershave, powdering his feet—he swore by the local powder he’d discovered—he always invited me to tag along, though it was understood that the invitation was a courtesy and I was expected to decline.

  That’s why it came as such a surprise when he cornered me in the rec room one evening and insisted that I join him on a double date. The room was low-ceilinged, hazy with smoke. Ping-Pong and pool tables were set up in the back. The sound of the balls filled the air—the quick hollow taps of Ping-Pong, like clucking tongues, and the more substantial crack of pool. I was nursing a cup of coffee and paging through an old copy of Life.

  “I need your help,” he said.

  Turned out he’d met a girl, the houseboy’s cousin. She modeled for a department store in the Ginza shopping district during the day and worked as a hostess in a dance hall at night. Nice girl, Eguchi told him. Very beautiful. Lives with family. Not panpan. Her name was Namiki.

  “She won’t see me alone,” Clifford said.

  He’d been hesitant at first. Eguchi was maybe thirteen, always hustling. His hair had been shaved to stubble for delousing and he kept it like that, accenting an egg-shaped skull. He smoked a pack a day and called everybody Major, regardless of their rank. He did a bang-up job on the barracks but all of us understood his motives: Yankee dollars. He had a crew of younger kids working for him. He’d set them up in jobs like his or turn them loose to panhandle around Little America or send them out into the ruined suburbs to pick through the rubble for anything that might be resold. In every case, he took a cut of what they brought in. Even so, Clifford hadn’t been able to resist following him to the department store where his cousin worked. She was right there in the front window. Hands on her hips. Chin up. One foot forward. A living mannequin—perfectly, magically still. They stood there for a long time watching her. Then she shifted so that her hips were cocked, her left arm raised and bent at the wrist, as if to draw attention to something hovering in the air beside her head. Clifford made up his mind to find her at the dance hall that night.

  He said, “She won’t see me at all unless I bring somebody for her friend.”

  I’d been in the Oasis once or twice. It was tucked down in a basement on the Ginza. The beer was cheap and they usually had a band and it was nice, married or not, to hold a woman in your arms for a few minutes. These were mostly decent girls, poor but proper. The way it worked was you bought tickets for ten cents apiece from a cashier and then traded the tickets in to the hostess of your choice, ten tickets for a dance. Clifford spent twenty dollars dancing with Namiki. He kept her busy most of the night, had to fend off dozens of interested GIs. He asked her to see him outside the dance hall, let him take her on a real date, but she refused. Not even Eguchi’s recommendation could change her mind. Finally, when it looked like a fight might break out between Clifford and a marine who’d been waiting for a turn with Namiki, she agreed to see him. On two conditions: the date had to take place during the day and Clifford had to find a companion for her friend.

  “I guess she wants a chaperone,” he said.

  I closed the magazine, tossed it on the table.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “I’m not asking you to fuck her. All you have to do is keep her busy.”

  “Ask somebody else.”

  “Look,” he said. “I need to bring somebody nice, all right? I need to be sure that whoever I bring doesn’t try anything with Namiki’s friend.”

  He was sitting on the edge of the table, leaning forward over his knees as if he wanted to reach out and grab me and it took all his willpower to hold back.

  We met the girls outside the department store where Namiki worked. This was March and you could still taste winter in the air, but it was warm enough that we didn’t need our heavy coats. The Ginza had been a little beaten up in the air raids but nothing serious. Some of the buildings had burn scars, and here and there a window had yet to be replaced, but already most of the debris had been cleared away. The shops were open and bustling again. The sidewalk was lined with vendors selling bamboo mats and firecrackers and tobacco pipes made from machine gun cartridges. The sky was painted with wisps of cloud, and the street was thick with bicycles and old men pulling rickshaws and those odd coal-burning Japanese cars, belching black smoke. Most of the pedestrians were Japanese, but there were enough white faces that you didn’t feel out of place, officers’ wives with their retainers and GIs in bunches picking out presents for folks back in the States.

  Clifford rubbed his hands together as we approached.

  “Here we go,” he said.

  It was easy to see what he liked about Namiki. Big dimples, little nose. She was wearing a traditional kimono, sash wrapped and wrapped around her waist, silver leaves threaded into the silk, but her hair was held back by a white western-style headband, likely a gift from one the men she’d danced with at the Oasis. The headband exposed a pale forehead and a perfect widow’s peak. My girl was wearing a kimono too, but it was of the more casual variety. Blue cotton, unembellished. The locals had kimonos for all occasions. The hem fell to the middle of her shins and I could see, beneath her gown, what looked like men’s wool socks and clogs. Her name was Fumiko, and when Clifford introduced us she bowed just slightly, keeping her hands tucked into her sleeves.

  For the next two hours, we window-shopped. Clifford linked Namiki’s arm in his and steered her along the sidewalk far enough ahead of us that I couldn’t hear what he was saying. It was clear he wanted privacy, so if he and Namiki paused to look at something, I paused too, always maintaining the same distance as if in obedience to some archai
c custom. Fumiko and I would stare without interest at whatever was before our eyes—porcelain dolls, pots and pans recast from army helmets—then move on when Clifford and Namiki were ready. Fumiko never once took her hands out of her sleeves, and when I asked questions in my phrasebook Japanese, she answered yes or no in English or said nothing at all. Here is what I learned about her: she had been a student before the war, but now she helped her mother run a vegetable stand in the Denechofu neighborhood. Here is what she learned about me: nothing. In two hours, she asked not a single question. I was bored in a hurry and angry at Clifford for dragging me along and angry at myself for being such a pushover. I was so embarrassed I could hardly look at her but I studied her reflection whenever we stopped at a window. At first I’d thought Namiki was the prettier of the two, but as the afternoon wore on I noticed Fumiko’s arching eyebrows and long earlobes. I noticed that the corners of her mouth turned down in a way that made her look pensive. She wasn’t beautiful exactly, but I had the sense that what was attractive about her would not, like mere prettiness, fade with time.

  Ahead of us, Clifford said something to Namiki, then ducked into a store, leaving her on the sidewalk.

  “I’m married,” I told Fumiko. “I have a wife.”

  I wasn’t sure how much she understood or why I picked that moment to tell her. I guess I wanted her to know she didn’t need to be afraid of me—I desired nothing—but I also wanted to bridge the awkwardness between us by revealing something personal about myself. Fumiko looked up at me and seemed about to smile before turning away to join her friend. I watched them talking for a minute. When Namiki glanced in my direction, Fumiko shot her right hand out to grab Namiki’s arm, and I knew they were discussing me. Then Clifford emerged from the store and Fumiko moved to return her right hand to her sleeve, and for an instant her left hand was exposed. I only caught a glimpse, but in that glimpse her skin looked bleached and tight, her fingers curled in upon themselves. In the next instant, her hand vanished and Clifford was calling me over to show me what he had bought, and I couldn’t be sure what, if anything, I had seen.

  “Look here,” he said, brandishing a sword about the length of his forearm. Into its blade was worked a battle scene, tiny men on tiny horses wielding tiny lances, little archers firing minuscule arrows into the air. Except for its size it looked like the samurai swords I’d seen in photographs. “Seppuku,” Clifford said, in a growly voice. He pretended to stab himself in the stomach and worked the blade from side to side, hanging his tongue out of his mouth like a cartoon.

  I was typing a memo on dental hygiene three days later when Captain Embry emerged from his office and took a seat on the corner of my desk. He was somewhere in his forties, closing fast on chubby. He’d been a policy man before the army, selling life insurance to poor people in Moline, Illinois.

  “What’d you do?” he said.

  There were fifteen typists in the office. The sound was constant. It was like working in the belly of some rickety machine.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “I’m serious,” he said. “I wanna know whose dick you sucked.”

  “I haven’t sucked anybody’s dick, sir.”

  “Well then, how do you explain the fact that I just got a call inviting you to Bunny’s residence?”

  My stomach fizzed.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “I think you sucked somebody’s dick.” He reached over and pushed my head. Playfully. He seemed proud but mystified. “You old cocksucker. You’re to report at 1800. He’s showing the Army–Navy game.”

  Everybody knew Bunny screened movies and newsreels at his residence and that sometimes, as a kind of reward, he invited members of the Honor Guard to join him, but I’d never heard of anyone outside their ranks being included. Captain Embry swore he hadn’t done anything to arrange the invitation, said he didn’t have the clout to arrange such a thing even if he’d wanted to. He gave me directions and let me off early so I could get a haircut and a shave.

  That evening, after a quick supper in the mess, I walked the mile to Bunny’s residence. The days were getting longer, and this was the hour when the world looked deep and golden. About halfway, I passed a row of buildings reduced to rubble by our bombs, but even these looked somehow beautiful in the light. A baseball diamond had been set up in the vacant lot across the street. There was no grass but the baselines were chalked and a mound had been built up right where it was supposed to be. I thought of Bunny passing this way every morning on his way to work, every evening on his way home. We all knew his routine. At 0800, he took breakfast with his wife and son, then spent an hour answering his mail. At 1000 hours he boarded his limousine, a coal-black Cadillac liberated from the owner of a sugar plantation in Manila. There were always hundreds of locals hanging around outside the residence hoping for a glimpse of him, hundreds more lining his route. Despite occasional rumors of assassination plots, he refused a protective motorcade. A pair of Honor Guard troops on motorcycles led his car through downtown and around Hibiya Park to the Dai Ichi Sogo building. Upon arrival, he put the duty guards through an elaborate manual of arms, more theater than protocol, before disappearing into his office. The Dai Ichi Sogo building had housed an insurance agency before the war and there were plenty of executive offices, but Bunny had chosen a former storage closet for himself, without windows, located in the exact middle of the floor, while his subordinates had views of the park or the Imperial Palace moat. We didn’t know what went on in there except through the documents that passed across our desks. Bunny was trying to build a democracy; we knew that much, and to me that sounded fine. At 1300, he returned to the residence for lunch with his wife, followed by a half-hour nap. Then back to the Dai Ichi Sogo building, where he often worked late into the night.

  I arrived at the residence fifteen minutes early. I would have killed the time wandering around outside the wall, but there was Clifford standing guard and I didn’t want to look like a gawker. When I approached the gate, he winked, then ordered me to halt. He took my name like we’d never met and another guard checked it against a clipboard. A third guard swung the gate open from the inside, and Clifford escorted me up the gravel drive, our boots crunching in time. He didn’t say a word and his silence made my heart beat faster. The driveway made a loop in front of the house, and inside the loop a reflecting pool beamed a perfect likeness of the residence back at the sky—ancient white stone, weathered and chipped in places but still regal, like something from a book about medieval times.

  At the door, Clifford announced me to yet another guard.

  “Private First Class Francis Vancleave.”

  This new guard rapped on the door and we waited in silence until it swung open from the inside, revealing a Japanese houseboy in a brown kimono. He gestured me inside and I resisted stealing a last look at Clifford before the door closed me into the house. The houseboy led me down a hall and through the kitchen and into a long and narrow room, furnished only with a dozen or so folding chairs and a single cane-bottomed rocker. Red linen curtains were drawn across the windows but there was a gap in one spot and I could see a little boy paddling a little rowboat around a very big swimming pool. The boat had the word Bataan painted on the stern. Maybe a dozen officers were sitting around the room, smoking and talking, and I spotted Bunny himself through the haze. Tall, fit for a man his age, hair slicked across his skull. He was wearing bedroom slippers and a tweed coat over his uniform. The houseboy went over and whispered in his ear, and to my surprise Bunny crossed the room to me.

  “At ease, Private. We’re just here to watch the game.”

  The room went quiet around us.

  “I understand you’re a fine typist,” Bunny said.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “That’s important. I wish it were not so, but half of soldiering is paperwork anymore.”

  “Yessir.”

  “How many words a minute?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. Maybe a hundred.”

/>   He bugged his eyes, impressed.

  “Does that make you the fastest typist in my army?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “You ever seen a Japanese typewriter?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Unwieldy. I don’t imagine there’s a Japanese typist can do better than a hundred words a minute. Not on one of their typewriters. I believe, Private, that makes you the fastest typist in the occupied nation of Japan.”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. I was blushing and sweating. Everybody in the room was watching us.

  “You a football fan?” he said.

  “Yessir.”

  “Who’s your team?”

  “Alabama, sir.”

  “You don’t like Army?”

  “I like Army fine, sir.”

  “But if you had to choose?”

  After a moment, I said, “Roll Tide, sir.”

  He stared down his nose at me for a second then, gradually, let a smile creep over his lips. He turned without another word and took a seat in the rocker. The rest of us scattered among the folding chairs. Bunny stuffed a pipe, lit it with a match, puffed until it was smoking. “All right, Uki,” he said, and suddenly the lights went out and the projector was beaming over our heads. Clifford told me afterward that Bunny had had the footage shipped directly from West Point and that he watched the game at least once a week. It had been played back in November, of course, and all of us knew the outcome—Navy won 17–10—but you would have thought Bunny was seeing it for the first time. He cheered wildly when Army did something well and shouted himself hoarse when they did not. Now and then, he launched into monologues on strategy, how Army might have won if they’d had the sense to play as he instructed.

  Hours later, after I’d retraced my route in the dark and had a beer to settle my nerves and dozed off imagining how I would relate the events of the evening in a letter to my mother, Clifford came in smelling of liquor and shook me awake.