24

You promised to meet Xiuying next week for your “lesson” not at your home, but in front of Yakuin Station. Both of you knew what to expect.

There was a love hotel, an unremarkable one, a few blocks from the station called the Personal Hotel Ōmiya. I had never been, but used to walk by it once a week on my way to a teaching gig. It was simple in design, no gaudy exterior or flashing neon lights like so many love hotels have. If you didn’t catch the sign at the entrance saying the rate for a “rest” was only 4,500 yen,[1] you wouldn’t know that it was a “rabuho”, that is, a love hotel.

Your hearts beating wildly, nervously, Xiuying and you hurried off the street and ducked under a curtain concealing the parking garage.

And there was that delicious terror again . . .

After choosing a room from a lighted panel, illuminated arrows showed the way, directing you upstairs and down a hall to the den of adultery. And once inside the room, the two of you threw yourselves at one another, kissing and biting each other’s skin as if you had been starved for flesh.

We were. Xiuying hadn’t had sex with her husband for over a year—imagine that! All that beauty and sexual energy going to waste, a magnum opus left un-played. And, as for Haruka and me, well, we hadn’t exactly been setting our futon on fire with passionate love every night either. It had been months since we’d had sex.

Naked below you on the bed, Xiuying spread her legs.

I eased myself in, gently, slowly, and sounds like nothing I’d ever heard from a woman erupted from that pretty little mouth of hers. I was so turned on; it was all I could do to not come right then and there. Less than five minutes into sex, though, the orgasm boiled within me . . . I pulled out and came with such force that the ejaculate shot through the air and struck the wall a good four or five feet above the headboard. For all I know, it may still remain today with a plaque next to, stating: Another Satisfied Customer.

Thank you for that, Peadar.

I had now committed adultery, something I had hoped with all sincerity that I would never ever do. A line had been crossed and it was very frightening. How do you undo something like that?

By promising never to do it again, of course. But you did it again anyways, didn’t you? Only a week later, the two of you were at it once more. And the week after that, and the week after that . . . every Thursday afternoon. Your “private language exchange”. And it got a little less frightening each time, the fling developing into a full-fledged affair . . .

And Xiuying starts to fall in love with me, and starts talking about leaving her husband, starts saying things like, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were both single?”

And lying naked beside her, I reply flatly, “Yes, yes, it would.”

And she asks if I love her, and without emotion I say, “I do. Madly.”

She wants me to say it, so I say it four languages: “Xiuying, I love you. Aishiteiru. Je t’aime. Ich liebe dich. Wǒ zuì téng ài nǐ.”

And she holds on to me tightly, body quaking, tears flowing from her eyes.

Meanwhile, your own dry eyes were fixed on the door to the hotel room as you wondered how you might be able to put a little distance between yourself and Xiuying.

She left me with little choice. Xiuying’s relationship with her husband had started to unravel. Listen: Xiuying found out that the reason he had “resigned” from his company was because he had been caught embezzling. As for his plans of starting an importing firm, well, those never really panned out, and, because bad luck comes in threes, a tumor was found somewhere in his body. Now that he was unemployed, the poor bastard didn’t have the insurance or the cash to get it removed. Xiuying asked me if she could borrow some money, but I could never have given her the kind of money she needed without Haruka finding out. In the end, I couldn’t help him and I couldn’t help her.

Talk about fair-weather friends.

That’s just another word for arsehole.

I know.

There was more to it, though. I started to get the feeling that the woman was cursed.

Cursed?

Yes, cursed. As beautiful, talented, and intelligent as she was, Xiuying was Bad Luck Incarnate, and, go ahead, call me superstitious, but bad luck is as contagious as the flu.

Peadar?

What?

You are superstitious.

[1] ¥4,500 was equivalent to about thirty-eight dollars in 1997. 

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The first installment/chapter of A Woman's Hand can be found here.

A Woman's Hand and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

23

A year had passed since Xiuying and you had last met and as she stood at the entry of your apartment, looking more gorgeous than ever, you could barely hide your excitement.

I had always been attracted to her, always wondered what would happen if we were ever alone together, and now here we were, just the two of us. I was tempted to pull her right in and start tearing away at her clothes.

My mouth dry, I wheeze for Xiuying to come on in.

As she steps in, she locks the door behind herself. I disappear into the kitchen and make some tea, if anything to hide that divining rod of an erection of mine.

Taking a seat at my dining room table, Xiuying asks how married life is treating me.

“Never better,” I say. It is a lie—Haruka and I just had another epic fight that morning. “And, you?”

She replies that her husband resigned from his company and is going to start an importing business. She sounds excited about it.

By the time the tea is ready, my friend “Paddy” has calmed down enough for me to safely venture out of the kitchen. I sit down across from Xiuying and ask how I can help her.

“I want to study in America . . .”

“America?”

“What does your husband think about that?”

“I haven’t told him yet,” she says with a titter.

Xiuying goes on, saying she needs to improve her English first so that she can get a good score on the TOEFL and GRE. The usual spiel. I have already helped so many people with similar goals that I have considered starting a consulting business.

She pulls a textbook out of her bag to show me what she has been studying. She is already half way through the thick text and it is obvious that she has been poring over it: pages are dog-eared and highlighted, memos in Chinese and Japanese are written throughout. She says she is going to take the tests in the autumn, so she only has about half a year left to prepare.

“If you keep up the good work, I don’t think there is any reason why you won’t get the score you want.”

“I’m so relieved to hear that,” she says in well-rehearsed, yet faltering English. “But, I need help with my pronunciation.”

It’s true: she won’t be winning any diction contests.

“Tell you what: why don’t we teach each other?” I suggest.

“What do you mean?”

I had been studying Chinese for a few years and needed more practice. I couldn’t think of a more enjoyable way to learn how to get my tongue around Chinese words than over tea with Xiuying.

And so, it was agreed: you would meet every Thursday afternoon, spend forty-five minutes speaking in English, forty-five in Chinese.

Only, it didn’t quite work out as I expected.

To put it mildly.

Once we had taken care of business, I told Xiuying about some CADD[1] software I had bought and asked if she wanted to see it.

Xiuying, though, was more interested in seeing something else first.

Well, Xiuying had never used the Internet before—few people had at the time, come to think of it—and asked to see the Internet, instead. As I was showing her some of the fun stuff you could do online—Mind you, this was a decade before Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, even before Google . . .

“Can you see . . .,” Xiuying says with a tinge of embarrassment, “pornography?”

“Porn? Why the Internet is virtually powered by porn,” I exclaim.

And with a clickety-click-click, a picture of a naked woman reveals itself, scrolling down one painfully slow line at a time. When the woman’s nipples finally appear, Xiuying squeals with childish delight and squeezes my arm.

“What else can you see,” she asks, barely able to control her excitement.

I open up a new window and, clickety-click-click, a photo of a woman fellating a man starts scrolling down.

More titillated screams explode from Xiuying. She is now clutching onto my arms and squirming beside me. We look at a few more pictures and the next thing I know we are rolling on the floor, kissing like we’re the first couple to discover it. And I’m thinking, “I shouldn’t be doing this, I shouldn’t be doing this, I am a married man, I am a married man, I am a . . .”

But I can’t stop myself. I pull the sweater over her head, undo the bra and bury my face in her gorgeous breasts.

If it weren’t for the doorbell, announcing the arrival of my next student, the two of us would probably have had sex right then and there on my dining room floor.

[1] CADD stands for Computer-Aided Design and Drafting.

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The first installment/chapter of A Woman's Hand can be found here.

A Woman's Hand and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

22

Xiuying wanted you to help her with her English.

I was still teaching English back then. But, now that I had a shūshi-go, a Master’s degree, from Geikōdai, I was “qualified” to teach at university, albeit mainly part-time as an adjunct. The work paid considerably more than the English conversation schools ever did, but was terribly unstable. It was always feast or famine—lots of money when school was in session, zip when it was out—so, I still had to teach some lessons at home and elsewhere to pay the rent and keep my new wife happy.

Was she?

Haruka happy? I don’t know. Our marriage got off to a rocky start and never quite recovered.

Why so?

I didn’t have much money when we got married. That surprised her. No. I should say that horrified her.

But, you were a student. How much money could you have had?

Well, it was more than that. I was “in debt” when we got married. By debt I mean I was still trying to pay off the student loans from my undergraduate studies. When Haruka found out about it, she went through the roof. Never mind that most students in America graduate with some debt. She wasn’t having any of it. I had “deceived” her. I had “lied” to her!

Had you?

No. Haruka had never asked to see a financial report before we got married. Perhaps, she should have. Perhaps then we wouldn’t have gotten married and would have saved ourselves a lot of grief in the long run . . . At any rate, once I was done with grad school and working full-time again, I was making quite a bit of money, so her concerns were allayed somewhat. But, whenever we fought, and we fight we did, the issue of that “debt” and my “lies” always came up. Our Symphony D Minor played on a continuous loop.

Why do you think it upset her so?

Because her father had died suddenly, prematurely, when she was young, and her family, while not poor, never had a lot of money after that. She wanted to live in the lap of luxury. She wanted to be coddled.

And you?

I wanted to pursue my interests, interests in design and architecture, to do something with that education of mine. Making a lot of money was never the aim—money would come later if I had any talent—and yet, to make Haruka happy, I ended up pursuing money, putting my dreams on the back burner, and a sense of discontent was starting to gnaw at me.

And then Xiuying came back into your life.

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The first installment/chapter of A Woman's Hand can be found here.

A Woman's Hand and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.

21

Half a year later, you and Haruka were married.

Legally, yes. We submitted the paperwork.

Your wedding, however, wouldn’t be held until ten months later in the summer of ‘98. Just long enough for the doubts to start niggling at the back of your mind. And then Xiuying would re-enter your life.

Xiuying . . . Must all my regrets have the name of a woman attached to them?

Beautiful, talented, and coquettish, Xiuying was the thing which men’s fantasies were made of, wasn’t she, Peadar?

Was she ever!

Xiuying sat down next to you in one of your classes at the university and asked if you minded sharing your text with her.

Minded? I couldn’t have been happier to have the best-looking woman on campus choose me of all people to sit next to.

Throughout class your legs and arms touched, her breath was like warm kisses on your neck . . .

Gabriel García Márquez once described the feeling as “un terror delicioso”, a delicious terror. I was still single at the time, but engaged to Haruka. I had broken up once and for all with Akané, had resolved to lead an honest, upstanding life. And then, this gorgeous Chinese woman sits next to me in class, filling my heart with so much desire I thought it would explode.

The two of you would get on like a house on fire.

We most certainly would.

And you’re still smoldering today.

Yeah, well . . . The Japanese have a saying: ten wa ni butsu-o ataezu.[1] It implies that an intelligent girl will often be homely; and a beautiful girl, dimwitted. But as far as I could tell, Xiuying had it all going for her: looks, brains, wits, a talent for languages and the arts. Heaven had lavished blessings upon her.

She also had the ambition to do something with all that talent.

Xiuying was only twenty-three or so but already married to a much older man, a Japanese salaryman she had met when she was an undergrad. She had been working evenings as a hostess in some cabaret in Nakasu at the time. He was a regular customer, the kind of idiot that pays a hundred dollars a pop just to drink watered-down Japanese whiskey and chat with beautiful women for a few hours. The man proposed to her on their first date and she said no. He asked her again and she said no. He continued to ask her over the next several months and it was only after promising her, among other things, that he would permit her to continue with her studies that she agreed to marry him.

And they lived happily ever after.

When I first met her, she did seem happy. It was another one of the reasons why I never contemplated doing anything more with that lust of mine than give into “the ol’ lascivious hand”.[2] But, we did become friends of a sort and would chat over coffee after school or have lunch together every now and then. It wasn’t too surprising, then, that she would phone me one day out of the blue.

She called and said, “This is Xiuying. Do you remember me?” And you replied, “Xiuying! How could I ever forget you?” When she told you she had a favor to ask, you were all ears.

My ears weren’t the only things to prick up.

Droll, Peadar, very droll.

[1] 天は二物を与えず (Ten-wa ni butsu-o ataezu) Lit. “Heaven does not bestow two blessings.”

[2] See A Woman’s Nails.

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The first installment/chapter of A Woman's Hand can be found here.

A Woman's Hand and other works are available in e-book form and paperback at Amazon.