Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [65]
“You should have phoned in advance.”
“Oh, no. I wanted a spontaneous answer. I’m fed up with prepared answers.”
The girl tensed her lips, shaking her head left and right. As she withdrew behind the curtain, she glanced at me coquettishly.
“She’s something of a problem for me, that girl,” said my wife, lowering her voice, although speaking laughingly, like an accomplice, half conscious of being overheard. “Isn’t she cute? She’s a genius with her coquettish poses.”
“You’re ripe for that, aren’t you? But just what was the real reason we had to separate?”
“Is that what you came to ask me?” she questioned in amazement, peering into my face. “Right here in the store … in broad daylight?”
“Don’t think too much. Tell me just what occurs to you.”
“I agreed to separate because I thought I knew what you were thinking, I guess. At this point, when you try to turn the blame for your mistakes back on me …”
“My thoughts came first, you mean?”
“Of course.”
“Because I was definitely against your opening this shop.”
“Are you still?”
“I admit I was the loser.”
“It’s not a question of who won or who lost.”
“I’ve often been asked why I ever became an investigator for a detective agency. What do you think I answer?”
“I imagine you don’t tell the truth.”
“I answer like this: my wife employs a detective to check on what I do. However, this detective changes sides in the middle of the case and demands that I pay him to say nothing. I have my weaknesses, it’s true, but to have my trust trifled with like that makes me feel it’s nonsense to pretend being honest.”
“Even when you think up your fabrications you’re not satisfied unless you make me out to be the wrongdoer, are you?”
My wife’s smile slowly vanished as if deflated. Then a white loneliness, like an ebb tide flowing to the distant sea, enclosed her.
“I don’t say you’re an evildoer, I’m only deriding the detective.”
“You can’t talk like that.”
“Did you make out with that architect?”
“My weaknesses hurt your self-respect without my intending them to, don’t they? But even you have your problems. You’re abnormally jealous.”
“Jealous? I’ve never even thought of it.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t have to say that. But you’re at fault too—you treat me so as to make me say such things. We’re always going around in a vicious circle like this. We don’t know what starts it all. But something does, and we just go on with our endless quarreling.”
“We still don’t have to sign the final divorce proceedings, do we?”
“Have I ever once asked that?”
“But you did, because I was absolutely against opening this shop.”
“But that’s all past.”
“It’s over because you ignored my opposition and had your own high-handed way. I’m not saying it to be unpleasant. As far as the outcome is concerned, the fact remains indisputable that you were right and I was wrong. I wonder if I am jealous … No, it’s a little different … similar, yes, but different, I think. The problem is this: Why was I alone wrong while you were not?”
“You put me in a quandary when you suddenly shift like that from posing as the victim.”
“But even you must recognize there’s no reason for my being here, don’t you?”
“Well, then if …” My wife uncrossed her legs and joined her two hands on them as she leaned forward. “Supposing our positions were reversed, what would you do then? I wonder. Let’s suppose for the moment that you have made a big success out of some business that I was opposed to, and let’s suppose that, using that as my reason, I started talking about a separation.”
“Of course, I’d be at a loss to understand.”
“You’re impossibly self-centered.”
“You should find it hard to understand too.”
“I do!”
“But you said before that you understood.”
“It was a bluff.”
“I see. Well then, I’ve been going round in circles trying to explain what even I could not explain, is that it?”
Suddenly my wife sat up, clapping her two hands together. Her eyes sparkled as they peered at me.
“I’ve got it! You left home! You ran away.”
“Ran away?”
It was obvious, wasn’t it? That was my intent. I understood that without being told.