that?”
“Why wouldn’t you?” Daidai asked. “I’m sure your father has information, things only he can explain.”
“I could never ask him,” she said.
Seeing Satsuki glance at her Thermos, Daidai reached across the table to pour her a fresh cup of tea just as Hiroshi returned with red bean ice cream scooped into three bowls. “Why not?” Daidai asked, but her question went unanswered and they ate their dessert in silence.
Daidai was reviewing what Satsuki had told her as she brushed her teeth before bed when Hiroshi’s face appeared behind hers in the bathroom mirror. Preoccupied as she’d been, she didn’t notice him immediately, and then didn’t understand why he stood motionless, glowering like some phantom image of her husband.
“I don’t understand you.” His words seemed to confirm her impression of him, the whites of his eyes a stark contrast to his dark skin tone and accentuated by the ridges of his cheekbones.
“I don’t understand you either,” she said. Why had he been so protective of Satsuki, or for that matter felt the need to privilege his student over his wife? She finished with her teeth, allowing his accusation of her to settle as she dried her mouth on a hand towel. Pulling her shirt over her head, exposing the breasts that had drawn him to her, she turned around to face him. “Do you want to understand me?” she asked with a half smile.
“You know I do,” he said, going to her without missing a beat.
She was pleased with the way his body found hers. His eyes closed against the darkness of the bedroom, the bones of his narrow hips thrust against her pelvis as he found his rhythm. She’d needed to feel that he still belonged to her, or to know for sure that he’d gone missing. But the Hiroshi she knew was back. Without the pressure built up by sex that was goal driven and prescribed, she moved her hips and tilted her pelvis to heighten her own pleasure and pulled him deeply inside her when he climaxed.
“That was unexpected,” he said, rolling away, back to his side of the bed.
“Do you still find me brilliant?” Daidai reached a hand out to run her finger down his biceps, testing his claim that his attraction to her had been rooted in her fine mind.
“I’ve never doubted your capacity, intellectual or otherwise.”
“Good,” she said. “Please don’t.”
“But what got into you tonight?” He turned to face her, shortening the space between them.
“Are you talking about Satsuki?” she asked, wanting to be sure.
“She deserves a little respect.”
“I care about her,” Daidai said, hurt by her husband’s remark. “Why would I not be curious about what happened to her mother?”
“You don’t understand,” he said, his earnest tone causing her to bristle. “You could be opening yourself up for things you might not want to know.”
“Nonsense!” She understood how a person could be hurt by what she didn’t know, but never by what she did. “I think she wanted to talk.”
“She probably didn’t feel she could deny you the information you’d asked for,” he said. “But the two of you hardly know each other.”
“What are you talking about?” Did he not know that she’d come to consider Satsuki a friend?
“Japanese draw a sharp distinction between what can be shared and what must remain personal,” he explained. No longer speaking as her husband, he’d become the expert, pontificating first on the subject of friendship and then on race.
“I’m Japanese, too.” She turned her back to him, letting him know he’d crossed a line.
“Technically, you’re half,” he said.
Technically, he was correct, but in the context of their relationship his remark was as hurtful as it was wrongheaded. Daidai should have called him on it, as in who did he think he was? It was simplistic to mete out authenticity according to racial bloodlines, worse still to judge his wife as lacking wholeness. But Daidai couldn’t see Hiroshi as wrong. Tangled in her sympathies, she’d memorized his family’s history early on like the Pledge of Allegiance. How his paternal grandfather had lost his automotive business during the war when his family had been sent by the U.S. government to live in the Colorado desert, how financial losses had set the Suzuki family on a course of self-destruction that ended when Hiroshi’s stoical, hardworking nisei father had taken his own life at the age of fifty-two.
Her work as a curator, which she clung to even more ferociously now that her career was on hold, had begun as an emanation of her love of Hiroshi, and in particular the last installation, which she still viewed as the culmination of her work at the museum: artifacts she’d collected as an homage to Hiroshi’s past.
Turning back to her husband, she could see that his expression remained smug and unchanged, as if he’d forgotten how they’d raised each other up, their careers blossoming as a result of the mutual care they paid to each other’s thinking and work. At least she still remembered. She’d spotted Hiroshi among a hundred other college freshmen in the lecture hall for their economics course. He’d been the quiet, well-groomed boy who always arrived at the same time and sat in the same seat. He’d open his black notebook, pulled from a sleeve in his backpack, to a bookmarked page. She’d thought him a serious student until she’d asked for his notes from a lecture she’d missed and found doodles and drawings that bore no relation to the subject at hand strewn across his tablet. Hiroshi was slyer and more imaginative than he looked, but that semester he’d also been grieving his father, whose death, preceded the year before by the death of his mother to illness, had affected him deeply.
Perhaps news of Satsuki’s mother’s death had stirred his own feelings of loss. Had that been the reason for his irrational response? What he needed was to separate his feelings of loss from Satsuki’s. Daidai said as such, then asked, “Don’t you think it’s strange that Satsuki hadn’t mentioned that her mother was living in L.A.? And now she’s turned up dead. It doesn’t make sense.”
Hiroshi yawned. “It’s a timing issue,” Hiroshi said. “Nothing more.”
He continued, bringing up a relationship he rarely mentioned, “As for my mother, it’s not that she didn’t love me. If anything she loved me too much.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, feeling their hold on each other slipping away.
“You just need to take care with Satsuki,” he said in a cautionary tone.
“Is she that special to you?” Daidai asked, meaning, more precisely, did he value Satsuki’s feelings over hers?
“She’s a gifted scholar. I’d hate to lose her in the program.”
Hiroshi tugged at the sheet, wrapping it tightly around himself while Daidai listened to his breathing lengthen into sleep. Clever man that Hiroshi was, he’d baited her, finishing the conversation the same way he ended class sessions, by leaving a nagging question unanswered. The person Daidai needed to talk to, she concluded the next morning,
