functions stemming out of academia. “You don’t have to help me clean up,” she said, wanting to give him a break.
Leonard laughed. “I don’t mind. I’m not a very social person.”
“I’m not either.”
With nothing more to say to each other, they turned their gaze to the cutout window to view what they’d confessed they were not. Satsuki was chatting up a group of students, and then, finding them to be inadequate conversationalists, she turned over her shoulder to interrupt Hiroshi’s conversation with the new assistant professor. Above the party clatter, her gestures rang clear. Choose me. Flipping her hair close to Hiroshi’s ear, she reached out to brush his arm with her fingertips, signaling that something he’d said had pleased her.
Once the countertop had been cleared, Daidai joined her friend behind the bar. “Who do you like?” she asked, conjuring the game they liked to play.
Louise wiped a strand of hair from her face and set her gaze on the crowd. “They’re mostly very young,” she said, noncommittal. “Except for the new assistant professor, and who’s the older student?”
“The one our age?” Daidai laughed. “Foreign?”
“Japanese.” Now it was Louise’s turn to laugh.
“That would be Satsuki Suzuki.” Louise’s choice of whom to single out amused Daidai.
“Watch out for that one!” Louise said, just as she was interrupted by a request for another round.
Folding herself back into the party, Daidai wondered what Louise had seen and was disappointed when Louise refused her invitation of a drink once the guests had gone home. Work, she complained, saying that she needed some sleep.
Left behind with Hiroshi, Daidai kicked off her heels and sipped at a glass of mineral water while her husband assessed the newly configured program. “The new assistant professor’s going to be a nice addition.”
“How about the incoming grad students?”
“We’ll have to see.”
“I think Satsuki Suzuki has a crush on you,” Daidai teased Hiroshi, wanting to gauge his response to the woman’s flirtatiousness.
“Half the first-years have a crush on me,” Hiroshi replied, and smiled. “And having met you, I’m sure the other half now have one on you. Isn’t that how the school year always starts out?”
Daidai winced, wondering when Hiroshi had become so cavalier.
“By October they’ll have moved on.”
“If you say so.” She shrugged, satisfied by this admission.
“I think you’d like Satsuki,” Hiroshi said, and continued without waiting for a response. “Her father’s an art dealer. She seems quite knowledgeable as well.”
“No thanks.” Daidai yawned. Hiroshi had clearly enjoyed the attention, but she didn’t need to hear the remarks of another amateur art collector. Even from a distance, she’d found Satsuki’s interest in the objects lying around their flat overblown.
After refilling his wife’s mineral water, Hiroshi shook up the last of the saketinis, creating for himself a mixed-fruit bomb. “To our Period of Reinvention.” He raised his glass in a toast, then reached across the couch and squeezed his wife’s big toe, signaling an end to Daidai’s stint as a hostess. “Thank you for throwing a great party.”
Done with the praise, Hiroshi wanted sex. Daidai figured he’d have been as enervated from the festivities as she was, but he seemed intent on fucking, thrusting into her with frenzied abandon. Lying beneath him, her eyes open to his bizarre expressions, Daidai wondered whether he was even making love to her. He looked like someone involved in the pursuit of secret pleasures, and she tried to visualize his experience. Something new was happening. Watching the structure of his face shift beneath the creases of his cheekbones and the crinkles of his tightly shut lids, Daidai felt his movements slow. He seemed to be straining to feel inside her, or just to feel, drifting away and then needing to locate her as he shifted his position like an explorer lost somewhere inside her body.
The new students had been introduced, including one in particular who seemed intent on pleasing him. She felt him trying something out, which she rather resented, though she wondered if she judged him too harshly. What if she was the person of interest? What if it had been her all along? Lying beneath Hiroshi, whose body she knew so well, she shut her eyes and tried to relax, to feel the pleasure of his guttural bellows and the quickened pace of his breathing.
Connecting instead with the place inside herself that had lain for so long vacant, she wondered if it would ever be filled. Wasn’t sex, after all, about the creation of a life?
When Daidai awoke the next morning she found Hiroshi next to her, his hand draped across her back while he scanned the newspaper. He was glad to feel her stirring, which meant he could start reading to her about the events that had amused him while she slept. Reaching over her when she failed to adequately respond, he handed her a coffee mug, which she set back on the nightstand, finding its contents distastefully cold.
She was only vaguely aware of when he’d traded the newspaper for student work, and the next thing she knew he was urging her up. Bounding from the bed and returning with a fresh cup of coffee, he clapped his hands with excitement. This was the Hiroshi she loved, ready and waiting for whatever came next, wanting to know whether she’d prefer a walk along the shore or a stroll through the Santa Monica promenade. They could sit outside at their favorite café or catch a matinee. Her brain hadn’t yet begun to function, but his seemed not to have lost its high from the night before, and she doubted he’d accept her being too tired as an excuse.
“How about we drive out to Gardena for dinner?” he said, having apparently noted her failure to move in response to his suggestions. “We’ll pick your mother up and have an early dinner.”
Daidai smiled, holding her arms up and pulling him off his feet when he leaned over her, planting kisses along his hairline and on both his cheeks. Despite her qualms with him, he could be incredibly sweet. It had been her habit since her father’s death the year before to visit her mother on Sundays. Hiroshi went along when he wasn’t too busy prepping for the upcoming week, but he hadn’t gone in months, and Daidai knew how happy it would make Mako to see him. While Mako loved her daughter, Daidai suspected she preferred spending time with her son-in-law, who fit so naturally with her idea of a good man. It was one of the things that had drawn Daidai to him.
Hiroshi went out of his way to indulge Mako, stopping at Marukai without being asked, then pushing the cart down the congested aisles with the old woman hanging on his arm, smiling at her idle chatter over the high price of Japanese imports that could be gotten only at this Marukai, not the other one downtown, which reminded him of meals his mother had made him before she passed. Daidai didn’t believe in fate, but she remembered the evening she’d driven with Hiroshi to meet her parents, how afterward it had seemed her destiny that he should be part of her family. Seeing Mako’s face light up now, she wondered why he’d stayed away so long.
Mako ordered tempura udon, her favorite, and insisted that Hiroshi take the shrimp off the top. To Daidai she gave a Japanese sweet potato, saying how good satsumaimo was for the immune system as well as digestion, and
