The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [24]
He holds the phone away from his ear. He says, “That’s better. Yes, I can hear you now.”
“Kirby, I cannot come. I cannot go through with my plan. My father has lung cancer, we learned this morning.”
He has never met the father, has seen the mother and the sister only from a distance, at a department store.
“Can you hear me, Kirby?”
“Yes, Mieko. I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything. I have said to my mother that I am happy to stay with her. She is considerably relieved.”
“Can you come later, in the spring?”
“My lie was that this Melville seminar I was supposed to attend would be offered just this one time, which was why I had to go now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know that I am only giving up pleasure. I know that my father might die.”
As she says this, Kirby is looking out his front window at the snowy roof of the house across the street, and he understands at once from the hopeless tone of her voice that to give up the pleasure that Mieko has promised herself is harder than to die. He understands that in his whole life he has never given up a pleasure that he cherished as much as Mieko cherished this one. He understands that in a just universe the father would rather die alone than steal such a pleasure from his daughter. All these thoughts occur simultaneously and are accompanied by a lifting of the anxiety he felt in the shower. She isn’t coming. She is never coming. He is off the hook. He says, “But it’s hard for you to give it up, Mieko. It is for me, too. I’m sorry.”
The sympathetic tones in his voice wreck her self-control, and she begins to weep. In the five months that Kirby knew Mieko in Japan, and in the calls between them since, she has never shed a tear, hardly ever let herself be caught in a low moment, but now she weeps with absolute abandon, in long, heaving sobs, saying, “Oh, oh, oh,” every so often. Once, the sounds fade, as if she has put down the phone, but he does not dare hang up, does not even dare move the phone from one ear to the other. This attentive listening is what he owes to her grief, isn’t it? If she had come and he had disappointed her, as he would have, this is how she would have wept in solitude after swallowing her disappointment in front of him. But this is her father’s doing, not his. He can give her a little company after all. He presses the phone so hard to his ear that it hurts. The weeping goes on for a long time and he is afraid to speak and interfere with what will certainly be her only opportunity to give way to her feelings. She gives one final wailing “Ohhh” and then begins to cough and choke. Finally she quiets, and then sighs. After a moment of silence, she says, “Kirby, you should not have listened.”
“How could I hang up?”
“A Japanese man would have.”
“You sound better, if you are back to comparing me with Japanese men.”
“I am going to hang up now, Kirby. I am sorry not to come. Good-bye.”
“Don’t hang up.”
“Good-bye.”
“Mieko?”
“Good-bye, Kirby.”
“Call me! Call me again!” He is not sure that she hears him. He looks at the phone and then puts it on the cradle.
Two hours later he is on the highway. This is, after all, two days before Christmas, and he is on his way to spend the holidays with his two brothers and their wives and children, whom he hasn’t seen in years. He has thought little about this visit, beyond buying a few presents. Mieko’s coming loomed, imposing and problematic. They had planned to drive out west together—she paid an extra fare so that she could land in Minneapolis and return from San Francisco—and he had looked forward to seeing the mountains again. They had made reservations on a bus that carries tourists into Yellowstone National Park in the winter, to look at the smoky geysers and the wildlife and the snow. The trip would have seemed very American to her. Buffalo and men in cowboy boots and hats. But