Ruined Map - Abe Kobo [66]
“It’s true. I really think you ran away.”
My wife nodded in a self-satisfied manner as she covertly watched me. She seemed to think that if she could just get me to agree everything would thus be resolved.
“From what? You?”
“Certainly not from me,” she said, shaking her head vigorously. “From life, from the endless competing and dickering, the tightrope walking, the scramble for a life buoy. It’s true, isn’t it? In the final analysis, I was merely an excuse.”
Suddenly a flaming, white pain shot through my left eye as if I had been struck with a bent nail. My broken molar, of course. I would have to have it looked after before the decay spread to the jaw.
“Isn’t there competition and dickering in the life of an investigator for a detective agency?”
“The rivalry in advertising on the busiest street and a professional peeping Tom of a private detective specializing in back streets—both are competition, but the sense of the word is quite different. It’s absolutely true. You left your last job and you ran away at precisely the same time. That’s the crucial point. Because you could have done either one before the other, couldn’t you?… if competition weren’t the reason … couldn’t you? You were against this shop because you thought that, even though our livelihood was assured here for the time being, it would never be a solution. Your life was such that there would never be a solution unless you won out over the competition in the office.”
“Was I so ambitious?”
“Do you have a pain somewhere?”
“I’ve got a broken molar.”
She grasped the brooch in the shape of a tiny box at her breast and opened the lid. “This is pretty good,” she said, taking out three small pills. “My regular medicine. I’ve had terrible headaches again lately.”
As if she had been waiting, the girl backed into the room, making the curtain billow. Her skin-tight tan miniskirt molded the fold of her buttocks, and her stockings with their woven design shone with a pearly light. Her collar had the rectangular cut of a military uniform, the cuffs bearing pearly buttons. Her great eyes were brimming with a teasing smile. The coffee cup that had been filled too much was about to overflow. She slowly turned around on heels the same tawny color as her skirt, glancing quickly at me, and began to advance cautiously in a sliding step. Each movement of the muscles in her buttocks I could clearly and directly feel in my palms. I could not but be charmed by the knowledge that my wife was able to cut clothes like this.
“Would you like some water?”
“No, the pain seems to have gone.”
Before I had realized it the aching had let up as if it had never existed. The girl bit her lower lip, mixing smile with tenseness. When she placed the cup on the table, she let it spill over as the liquid splashed up. She seated herself, laughing, in the chair immediately in front of me. Perhaps this innocence was a technique she used in selling herself. My wife, as if wanting her approbation, said: “My husband’s room is all ready, isn’t it, so that he can come back any time?”
The girl looked at me boldly and murmured, evidently pleased: “I like men.”
I could not, I thought, come back after all.
THE DRY pavement of the freeway seemed both black and white at the same time. I was doing nearly seventy miles an hour, about five over the limit. The motor sputtered, making a sound like a piece of wire thrust into the blades