The diving pool: three novellas (3 page)

The tiny legs protruding from the elastic hems of her pants looked like pats of smooth, white butter. Whether they are dark and blotchy, covered in a rash, or rippling with rings of fat, I am always fascinated by a baby's thighs. There is something almost erotic about their defenselessness, and yet they seem fresh and vivid, like separate living creatures.

Rie was scooping up dirt with the shovel she held in one hand and dumping it into the bucket she held in the other. She had been doing this for some time, but when she missed the bucket and spilled the dirt on her hand, she came staggering toward me on unsteady little legs, crossing the boundary between bright sunlight and quiet shade. She made little pleading noises as she held out her soiled hand. It seemed clean enough to me, but I blew on her palm anyway.

Children Rie's age have a peculiar odor: the dustiness of disposable diapers mixed with the pulpy smell of baby food. But in Rie's case, there was an added scent, like fresh butter at the moment you peel away the foil wrapper.

She went back to her game, yet every few minutes she would stop and come over to have me dust off her hands. The simple regularity with which she did this gradually put me in a cruel mood. However, I didn't find the feeling particularly unpleasant; in fact, there was something agreeable about it. This cruel impulse had been coming over me quite often then. It seemed to be concealed somewhere in the spaces between my ribs, and the strange baby smell brought it out, almost as though plucking it from my body. The pain of its emergence comforted me as I stood watching Rie.

Then, while she had her back turned, I slipped behind the kitchen door. After a few moments, the dirt on her hands began to bother her again and she dropped the shovel and bucket at her feet and stood staring at her palms. Finally, she turned for help toward the spot where I should have been sitting. As it dawned on her that I wasn't there, that she'd been left alone, she began crying in earnest. Her sobs were violent, seemingly about to rupture something inside her, and they were satisfying my cruel urge. I wanted her to cry even harder, and everything seemed perfectly arranged: no one would come to pick her up, I would be able to listen to my heart's content, and she was too young to tell anyone afterward.

When we grow up, we find ways to hide our anxieties, our loneliness, our fear and sorrow. But children hide nothing, putting everything into their tears, which they spread liberally about for the whole world to see. I wanted to savor every one of Rie's tears, to run my tongue over the damp, festering, vulnerable places in her heart and open the wounds even wider.

A dry breeze tugged at her straggly hair. The sun was still high in the sky, as if it were no longer setting, as if time had stopped. She continued to sob violently, barely able to catch her breath.

When I finally appeared from behind the door, she wailed even louder and came running to throw herself in my arms, her buttery little thighs churning all the way. As I lifted her up and held her, the sobs subsided into pitiful whimpers that barely hinted at her vanished anger. Damp with tears and snot, the little cheeks pressed against my chest, and with them came that strange child smell. The arrogance of Rie's self-assurance restored my cruel thoughts.

My eyes wandered to the large urn abandoned at the edge of the woods in back. Once a decoration in a hall at the Light House, it was a Bizen pot, nearly as tall as a man's chest. I carried Rie to it, rubbing her back to quiet her ragged breathing. Then I removed its lid of rotting boards and slowly lowered her inside.

I wanted to hear her cry louder. I wanted to hear every kind of howl or sob she could produce. Her legs contracted in terror, as if she were going into convulsions, and she clung to my arms.

"It's all right," I said, shaking off her tiny fingers. "Don't be afraid."

Inside, the urn was cool and damp. She flailed about, screaming at the top of her lungs. Her cries came pouring up and into me like a stream of molten steel. I gripped the mouth of the urn with both hands to keep it from toppling over and stared down at Rie's futile struggles.

Every day of my life I had heard someone crying at the Light House. In the brief pauses between roughhousing and fights, between laughter and screaming, there had always been tears. And I had tried my best to love every one of them because I was the orphan no family wanted to adopt, the only one who could never leave the Light House. Still, Rie's terrified tears were particularly satisfying, like hands caressing me in exactly the right places—not vague, imaginary hands but his hands, the ones I was sure would know just how to please me.

"Just a little more," I said, the words disappearing into the urn. As I watched her reach imploringly for me, my chin resting on the rim, I felt a giggle welling up inside.

I had been asleep for some time that night when suddenly I woke. The room wasn't hot, nor had I had a bad dream. Still, I was immediately awake and alert, as if I'd never slept, as if I were shining brightly in the darkness.

It was so quiet I thought I could hear the children breathing next door. Reiko seemed to be sleeping peacefully, and the springs groaned as she turned heavily in bed. I took the alarm clock from the bedside table and held it close to my face: 2:00 a.m. I'd slept just two hours, but I felt refreshed. It seemed impossible that morning was still far off.

Then, in the darkness and silence, I heard the faint sound of running water—so faint I suspected it might disappear altogether if I stopped listening. As I lay in bed picturing this stream, my mind became calm and clear.

I got up and looked out the window. The world was still; everything seemed to be asleep—the ginkgo tree, the Thought for the Week, the rusted chain on the gate—except for the water in the distance. I slipped quietly out of the room, following the sound.

The upstairs hall was dark, lit only by the bare bulb on the landing. The doors to the children's rooms were tightly shut. The floor was cool against my feet.

As I descended the stairs, the sound grew more distinct. I stood at the end of the longest hall in the Light House, the one that led to the underground dining room, and spied Jun at the sink across from the bathroom, washing his swimsuits under one of the four faucets.

"What are you doing up so late?" I said, staring at his wet, soapy hands.

"Sorry, did the noise wake you?" Even here in the dark, in the middle of the night, his voice was clean and sharp. "For some reason, when I'm washing my suits and the house is still, I can think about diving."

"About diving?"

"I go over the dives in my head—the approach, the timing of the bounce, the entrance." His hands went on with their work as he talked. "If you picture a perfect dive over and over in your head, then when you get up on the board you feel as though you can actually do it." He washed the suits carefully, turning them inside out and rubbing them against the tiles in the sink. I loved the look of his fingers, moving so vigorously. When I was with him, I found myself wondering how he could be so pure and innocent.

"You love to dive, don't you?" I couldn't think of anything else to say.

"I do," he said. Two words, but they echoed inside me. If I could have just those two words all to myself, I felt I would be at peace. "When I'm diving I get completely absorbed in the moment—at least for those few tenths of a second." There was no doubt that Jun suspended in midair, from the time he left the board to the time he entered the water, was the most exquisite embodiment of him, as if all his good words and deeds were wrapped around his beautiful body and left to fall free through the air.

We stood in our pajamas, our images reflected in the line of mirrors above the sink. The house was utterly still, as if only the air around us were alive. The light, too, seemed to have collected on us; everything else beyond the windowpane and down the hall was pitch black. We inhabited some separate, extraordinary moment in time.

Jun had splashed water on his pajamas, and I could see the muscles of his chest even through the loose material. I felt like a weepy child, longing to be enfolded in his arms.

"Let me help you," I said, forcing myself to sound cheerful, afraid that unless I spoke I would be crushed by desire.

"Thanks," he said. I turned on the faucet next to him and rinsed the soap from one of the suits. I let the water trickle in a thin stream, cautious not to make noise and wake someone else, ending this moment with Jun. There were three suits, and I knew the pattern on each: the one he got when he first joined the diving team, the one from a big meet the previous year, the one the children had given him for his birthday. I knew them all by heart.

As I stood with my hands submerged in the water, feeling Jun next to me, I had a deep sense of peace. Perhaps it was the pleasure of holding something that had been so close to him. I thought back to a time when we were younger and could play together innocently, a time when Jun's body held no particular significance for me.

"Do you remember the day we had snow here in the hallway?" I asked, staring at the soap bubbles as they slid down the tiles.

"Snow? Here in the hall?" He turned to look at me.

"It was about ten years ago. I'd had a wonderful dream, and I woke up early. When I looked outside, everything was covered with snow, more than I'd ever seen. The children were still asleep. I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs, and the hall was completely buried in snow from one end to the other."

"Really? But why would there have been snow in the house?"

"It blew in through the cracks in the roof. The repairman came after the snow melted to nail boards over the holes. You really don't remember?"

Jun looked thoughtful for a moment. "I suppose it does sound vaguely familiar."

"Try to remember," I said. "It would be a shame to forget something so beautiful. The best part was seeing the hall before anyone came along to make footprints."

I finished rinsing the suit and set it on the ledge above the sink. Then Jun handed me the next one.

"It was amazing. I just stood there feeling like I was the only one awake in the whole world. But I wasn't; someone else was looking at the snow."

"Who?" I could feel his eyes on me.

"You. At some point I realized you were standing behind me, and I had the feeling you'd been there all along. You were wearing those blue pajamas with bees and bear cubs."

Jun's hands stopped moving for a moment. "And yours were polka dots," he said.

"That's right. We stood there, just the two of us— like we are now." I put the second suit next to the first one.

The memory of the soft snow—another extraordinary moment we had shared long before—came back to me through the soles of my feet. It had seemed like a dream, far removed from reality, and yet there had been something amazingly vivid about the snow and being there with Jun. I remember being delighted to be alone in that special place, just the two of us; but I'm sure it must have been even more wonderful then, when we were young and knew nothing about the pain of growing up.

"You said we should dive into it," I continued. "I was afraid, but you said it was safe, that it would be wonderful—and then you spread out your arms and fell in. You left a perfect print of yourself in the snow—we couldn't stop laughing, but we were quiet, so no one else would know. Then you pushed me in and I got snow all in my eyes."

"It was fun, wasn't it?" He sounded as though he would never know that sort of pleasure again. And perhaps he was right. It was hard to know what was coming, where our lives would lead, and it made me sad to think about the future.

I doubted that we would ever have a quiet chat about the night we washed out his swimsuits. One after the other, the children at the Light House all went away, leaving me behind. I had no idea how many of them I had watched go, standing alone at the window of my room; and there was no reason to believe that Jun wouldn't leave like the rest. One day he would go, dressed in his new clothes, accompanied by his new family, disappearing around the corner where the Thought for the Week was posted. And that was why I wanted to remember the happiness we'd had together while we still could.

I washed the suits with great care, as if by doing so I could wash away my cruelty to Rie that afternoon. I needed to pretend to be myself at a younger, more innocent age, when we had stood marveling at the snow in the hall. I was sure that Jun would dive into only pure water, and I wanted his dive into me to be perfect; I wanted him to enter with no splash at all.

Once we'd finished talking about that morning so many years before, we couldn't think of anything else to say. The sound of time flowing between us became the sound of the water trickling quietly from the faucet until dawn.

Spring passed, and soon it was raining every day. A fine mist, like fluttering insect wings, dampened the trees and bushes that grew around the Light House. The days dragged by; the rain seemed always on the point of stopping but never did. I felt as though I was sleepwalking at school, waking only when I spotted Jun at the library or by the vending machines. As soon as classes ended, I headed for the sports center and the diving pool, and it was there alone, seated in the stands, that I felt myself come to life.