—Wayne P. Lammers
A Dance
a crisis in the home is like the gecko you find clinging to the overhead vent in the kitchen.
You never noticed it creeping up on you, but there it sits, looking ominous and putting you on edge. And it settles there as if it belongs, like any other fixture in the house, until pretty soon you get used to it and stop paying attention. Besides, we all prefer to avert our eyes from unpleasantness.
Take this home, for example.
The husband and wife have been married for five years, and they have one three-year-old daughter. The family of three lives meagerly on what the husband brings home from his job at city hall.
The husband loves his wife, and the wife loves her husband, yet the husband dreams of a carefree life all by himself, while the wife suffers from a nagging but inexplicable sense of loneliness.
For reasons we need not go into, the husband is estranged from his family. As for the wife, she lost her parents when still a child, and the grandmother who raised her in their stead passed away soon after her marriage, leaving her all alone in the world. The husband sometimes wondered what his wife would do if he were to get run over by a streetcar and die. How would she manage without him?
But nothing could be gained from worrying about it, so his dire imaginings never went very far.
One night in early summer, the husband came home from work to find on his desk a single sheet of white stationery. The hand was his wife’s.
In the darkness of night, you fly off into a sky filled with twinkling stars. I gaze after you as your cape grows smaller and smaller, until it disappears. “Take me with you!” I want to shout, but my voice will not come.
Hiroko
The husband read the note, crumpled it into a little ball, and dropped it gently into the wastebasket. When he emerged from his room he gave no hint that he had encountered anything out of the ordinary. But the first line of the note had sent an icy chill up and down his spine. His conscience, he had to admit, was not entirely clear.
The wife had a way with her premonitions: they proved correct with uncanny frequency. It had happened again not long ago, when her best friend from girls’ school showed up unannounced at their front door one afternoon. She had lived in faraway San’in since getting married.
The two women did not correspond regularly, writing only when something chanced to make one of them think of the other, and no word had come of an impending visit. But for some reason that morning the wife had decided to do the laundry and clean the house and take care of an errand at the post office before noon. And all the while she busied herself with these tasks, she repeated in her mind like a refrain:
“This way, if T comes to visit, we can sit down and talk to our hearts’ content without having to worry about anything else.”
When shortly after noon a voice called at the door, she practically flew to the front hall.
“It’s T, right?” she cried out from her side of the door even before she could see who it was. “I’m so glad you came!”
She slid the door open, and there stood her friend, smiling cheerfully.
T, for her part, assumed they had gotten the letter she sent before leaving home. But in fact the letter hadn’t arrived until the next day. Since the husband had seen his wife’s premonitions work this way before, it was no wonder that the note on his desk made his blood run cold.
The husband had a secret: he was in love with a girl of nineteen who worked in his department at city hall. They went to movies together after work, or strolled about town in the evening twilight.
Now his wife had apparently guessed his secret. But how was he to respond? To say the wrong thing would be to stir up a nest of snakes. And besides, what did she expect him to do? He had fallen in love, and he could hardly change how he felt about the girl just because he’d found out that his wife wasn’t happy.
It was a hard thing to fall in love, and harder still to actually win the heart of the one you loved. It happened once in a lifetime. Maybe. If you were lucky. Now a nineteen-year-old girl, so beautiful, so innocent, had given him her heart—even knowing that he had a wife and child. How could he simply abandon a love that brought him such intoxicating joy? And besides, this was only what any wife in any home ought to expect—that sometime in her long married life, perhaps even several times, she would experience the loneliness of realizing that her husband’s heart had wandered away from her. Recognizing this and accepting it as inevitable was what life was all about. He now turned his inward voice directly toward his wife: Look, I know you love me, and you devote your whole life to me. And I love you, too. Just because I’ve fallen in love with another woman doesn’t mean I’m dissatisfied with you or I’ve grown tired of you. It’s simply one of those things that happens. It doesn’t make me never want to see your face again. You are still my good wife, and I still love you as before.
Having delivered this self-serving tirade in his mind, the husband came out to the dining room for his supper, determined to ignore his wife’s desperate plea.
The wife, too, said nothing about her note. She merely chattered on in her usual way about the sundry trifling things that had occurred while he was away. Much relieved, the husband responded with similar benign talk, playing with his daughter on his lap to avoid meeting his wife’s eyes. Supper concluded without incident.
After the husband had fallen asleep that night, the wife wept in silence over the letter that had failed to reach her husband’s heart. Beside her lay her daughter, her face soft with the unguarded innocence of a sleeping child, but the wife felt no different than if she were utterly alone.
She had written the letter like a prayer. After much agonizing and crossing out, after several times nearly giving up, she had finally come up with those few lines. But now, before her eyes, the letter had become a tiny bird shorn of its wings, wavering, then tumbling toward the black surface of the sea.
As she watched her husband coming home each day like a man who’d lost his very soul, the wife’s feelings of affliction advanced from loneliness to painful despair. She’d never seen her husband behave this way before.
True, it was not unusual for him to come home in a state of distraction, lost in some deep and impenetrable contemplation. But you could say that was a longstanding habit with him. Once, in grade school, he got so wrapped up in thinking about fish on his way to the streetcar that he held out his money and said “Fish” when the ticket lady asked him where he was going. And he’d done similar things as an adult, any number of times. In fact, this occasional absentmindedness was one of the things the wife liked about her husband. People who were always on their guard and never missed a beat made her feel creepy.
Her husband’s recent behavior was quite a different matter, though, going well beyond what could be called occasional absentmindedness. He had come to seem as weightless and unreliable as an empty cicada shell, and this was what had sent the wife plunging into the deepest kind of anxiety. Her husband acted like a man who had learned a terrible secret, and whose entire life had been taken over by that secret because he could not tell it to anyone.
She was reminded of an old children’s story called “The King’s Ears.” A young barber is summoned to the palace and commanded to cut the king’s hair. When he enters the king’s chambers and the king removes his crown, he is astonished to find donkey’s ears protruding from among the royal locks. Having learned the king’s shocking secret, the barber must now keep it tightly hidden within his heart for the rest of his life, for he is under the threat of death if he should ever reveal it. In time, the anguish of not being able to tell anyone grows too great for him to bear, and he falls ill. His condition worsens day