"The One"

Readers wondering what all this is may gain some clarity from a story with the title "Bridge." It gives context and more, not just orientation but a deeper glimpse into the main and supporting characters.

Sorry for any typos and other errors here. Look for revised versions of some stories.

Once when Akemi and I had just started going out we had lunch/late breakfast to a Chinese restaurant, one of those big ones, cavernous like a ballroom, with big round tables you shared with others.

By coincidence a former student of mine was at ours. Bright young woman with a sense of humor, though fundamentally serious. She looked at Akemi and me, and when she realized we were together (though across the table from each other) did a kind of double-take because of the difference between us (had she taken Akemi for Chinese?)

And she didn't hide her surprise, though she was by and large reserved, not the sort who needed to say everything on her mind. Friendly (genuinely) and deferential because I was a teacher, even if no longer hers, she said, "Another one?"

"Yes. I have about fifty of them."

"One here, one there.." She pretended to point around the crowded lunchtime dining room (to which she'd gone alone for a quick snack before more study; seemed she was killing time before a test or something that afternoon; I don't fully remember; other stuff happening).

She'd just recently run into me with another student, an Asian woman. I guess she detected a pattern.

"She's a student," I said (as if that changed anything), bringing the conversation down to earth and to avoid embarrassing Akemi, who, after all, had to sit through it.

"They're all students," I continued, avoiding a silences as well lest heavy meanings creep through them. "But it's true they're all young women. Young compared to yours truly. Ha ha."

"Compared to you?" The student's quiet voice unnerved me. When I describe her as intelligent, I also mean perceptive, the kind who picks up on stuff, enjoys finding things others might not and analyzing them. No mean intention. She didn't need to put down others, had her own stuff.

"Yeah, everyone's looking young these days." Not yet forty, I saw before me the hill I would soon be over.

My former student laughed with me, wondering, I guess, who I really was, what she had missed until now. Just days before she'd seen a different woman at my side and must have taken her for my love interest. And now here I was with someone else.

I was having trouble meeting her eyes but forced myself, wanting to know if her gaze had turned any less deferential because of her discovering, unmasking me- that is, looking to see whether she had. Did she still see me as the esteemed teacher or instead my true colors, those of just a guy who liked to fuck around. In truth, that wasn't all I was! Believe me!

I kept the tone light. Could she sense my unease? Could Akemi? We knew each other better than the student and I did- of course; we'd become lovers- but the student was American and could see me from another side.

"And all beautiful," I said.

The students I went out with, I meant.

No mention was made of the fact that they were also all Asian. That was the big thing not to talk about. What could you say, that I had a thing for the race?

My student's smile, a gleam in it, said she knew (or was I just imagining this?) and was smart enough not to ask.

"How are you?" I asked her finally, asserting rank, moving the discussion along as I might in a classroom. I wanted to change the subject so much I'd started sweating under my arms.

Was she buying it?

"How am I?" She had a quizzical sense of humor. We could see her searching her thoughts. To assist the process, she poked one finger into her cheek, making a dimple.

We talked about food. I noted her meal was a big one, considering she'd just come for a snack between responsibilities at the college. Breaded pork over rice. Looked good spread out on the table before us but more like a dinner than a lunch.

She returned to my question, had an answer now.

"How am I?.. Well, I have a big crush on..."

"Oh, you do? Tell me."

I hadn't heard the last word, then it hit me. I did a double-take of my own. "Cockroach" was what she'd said.

"The big kind or the little?" I asked, not skipping a beat.

She made a sign with two fingers against the wall beside her, pinching them, as if to bring home the concept of smallness and possibly indicating that a wall was where she'd seen her cockroach, likely in her kitchen. A light blue wall the thing zigzagged up. In fact, I'd seen one that color at Akemi's, though she kept her place scrupulously clean.

"They're pretty cute," I said, still playing along.

"Hm." The student nodded mysteriously.

"The ingenious ways they find to escape. They're pretty inventive. Even creative."

I looked at Akemi, the artist, across from me, her bright face, yes young, beautiful.

It was hot on the street outside the restaurant. I tried to talk to Akemi about other things to make up what she'd been through, listening to me banter with that student. She'd kept mostly silent, just watched and listened. Part of the reason was her English, but there was more. She might have been shocked. She didn't know that I'd gone out with other students, saw other women ("Fifty." She must have understood I was exaggerating), that I was still seeing my longtime girlfriend Pam then.

And the thing about cockroaches might have disgusted her. I hoped she got my student's impish sense of humor. But it's hard to tell what's not serious in a second language.

And the banter really hadn't been funny at its core.

I wondered if the talk about me being a teacher who fooled around with students (at least tried to) had come through to Akemi at all. The subject was broached pretty indirectly ("Another?") But Akemi wasn't stupid. Some things you can read regardless of the idiom. "All beautiful. All young." How hard was that to understand?

Akemi was the one I was serious about, wanted to give up my past for at whatever sacrifice, and I told her so when we were alone.

We made love that day as we did almost every time we met, but I wondered if it would be the last time, if later Akemi would think things over and change her mind about me.

And god how I wanted her. The way we kissed. The feeling when our tongues met. She was the real thing, all right, the one, not just "another."

I told her that with my words and my hard prick so full of feeling for her, but did she believe me?

I went home that day (we weren't living together then, of course) with her wet, our wet, our smells all over me, and I wanted them there forever.

Her uniqueness, qualities of character and physiognomy, cut deep. You knew you could never find anyone like her and that if you lost her you'd spend the rest of your life lost, looking for her.

"Forever," she'd once said to me about her notion of existence, its ravishing beauty and crushing sadness. We'd been talking about love, those same forces beyond human comprehension that brought people together and forced them apart- and the way she said it, her voice drove me nearly mad with love, with longing, with lust. Her strong whisper, driving the meaning home with her breath.

Her words and her sex were a combination that devastated me, like her hips when she was on top, light, buoyant, inventive- her imagination, her feeling, her love seemingly unlimited. It went on and on, with the thwacking sounds of our bodies colliding in space, until I spattered and shouted my feeling, bellowed in a way I never had with any woman before or would with any after.

"This is the voice of my life," I said. And she caressed me, understanding deeply, my soul in her hands no less.

But I knew Akemi's beauty "in and out" had a strong effect on other men too. And I wanted to be "the one."

-- --

Akemi came back with Hiroko from a late afternoon and said she had been with Jeff to see the studio of a painting teacher he knew. She was well-known and Akemi was interested. She talked about the visit, on which Hiroko accompanied them.

Hiroko, who is more outspoken than Akemi, started, "Before we left the college we were waiting for someone to bring Jeff something and in the student lounge a group was talking about politics. They called a politician they hated 'Fuck' and they repeated it, chanting 'Fuck!Fuck! Fuck!' and it really sounded like they wanted to fuck him."

Hiroko has a great bold sense of humor that sometimes shocks me as well as Akemi. I think that's a reason she likes her.

The studio was at the painter's home she shared with her teenage daughter, whom she was raising on her own.

Apparently, while the artist had stepped away, leaving Akemi, Hiroko and Jeff alone for a moment to get ready a last painting to show them before they left, Akemi commented on the daughter, who had impressed her.

"It looks like she's doing a good job." The mother, she meant, raising her. "She seems fine," she said about the high school girl.

Here Jeff stepped in, apparently. He seemed to know more about the personal life of the painter, who'd been through a rough divorce, and interrupted Akemi's explication of the parent-child relationship they were witnessing. He was annoyed, according to her.

"You're wrong," he said about the daughter and explained, "In order to love her father, she'd have to stop loving her mother, who never misses an opportunity to bad-mouth him. The poor kid doesn't know what to feel."

Listening to that, I said to Akemi, "It sounds like my brother and me. Our father never stood a chance. And I learned he wasn't really a bad guy at all- this was after thinking all through my childhood that he was a villain."

My parents were divorced and Thomas and I lived with our mother, and the scene sometimes reminded me of the Greek tragedy "Medea" in which the spurned woman pays back the unfaithful husband through their children.

Akemi went on about Jeff. "He said a woman raised like that often ends up confused about sex, either a lesbian or fucking any man she meets."

"He said that to you?"

"Yes. And I wondered why he told me those things."

"He probably wants to fuck you."

Taking my cue from Hiroko, I brought blunt humor into play.

Speaking of a man who seems bad but really isn't. Jeff's all right. I don't hate him for liking Akemi, just so long as he keeps his hands off her.

And here's a funny thing- and I don't know how this happens, but hearing about another guy's interest makes me want to fuck her more, and we did, shortly after Hiroko left, on the floor, as if our apartment were an art studio- Akemi has one of her own in a cooperative. It was raw and bohemian, I mean. All out. She was painting me with her oil and with the watercolor of her mouth.

Yeah, whatever else, I guess I was trying to get Jeff off her mind. But it might have driven him further in.

How we pushed each other all over that floor.