My Year of Meats Read Online Free PDF Page B

glasses of champagne. They had put the kids to bed early, the narrator murmured, and it was time for that special Valentine’s Day moment, time to forgive and forget. They leaned slowly in and kissed, and when their lips met, Oda had laid in a cartoon heart, emanating from the point of contact and throbbing to fill the screen. It was a cheap computer graphics effect, like a TV ad for phone sex.
    “It’s sweet,” Kenji said.
    “It’s dumb.”
    “It’s television.” He rewound it and played the scene again. “Nice graphics. How’d you shoot that kiss, if the husband had left her?”
    “Out of sequence. We shot it the first day we got there.”
    “Smart girl.”
    “Yeah, I guess.”
    “Listen, it’s great. Makes it look like they had this minor tiff but everything turned out all right in the end.”
    “But it didn’t. It’s a lie. Kenji, I should be directing these. I could do a much better job. I could make it real....”
    Kenji took out a carefully pressed handkerchief and dusted his fingertips and then the corners of his mouth. He was only in his early thirties, but his tastes—pressed handkerchiefs, fussy wines, antique cameras, and high-end audio equipment—had stiffened into those of a confirmed bachelor. Pachelbel and Delibes composed the sound track to his life, and listening to these melancholy strains, he would gaze eastward, out the window ,of his TriBeCa loft, past Liberty in New York Harbor, past London, and all the way back to Tokyo. He saw himself as a courtier, banished by his lord to a rude provincial capital.
    “Yes, well, bring it up with Kato,” he concluded. “But essentially you do direct them now, you know. You choose all the content. The only thing you don’t do is cut.”
    “But that’s big, Kenji. Editing is what counts. I mean, look what Oda did....”
    “Well, listen,” he said, punching Rewind and cutting me off. “At least you got good meat and the kids are cute and there’s enough side-bar activity to keep things lively.” He swung his feet to the floor and stood to leave. At the door, he turned back.
    “What do you want me to do about sending her the tape?”
    “Can we cut out the boinnggg?”
    “No. Anyway, that’s dishonest too.”
    “Well, then we can’t send it. If she calls, tell her the show got canceled.”
    The rewinding image on the monitor caught his eye and he smiled. I turned just as the large Coca-Cola bottle sucked the last of its contents upward, off the bubbling meat.
    “Mmm,” said Kenji. “Great product shot.”
    I shook my head. “It’s Pepsi, Kenji. Not the real thing at all....”

3.
    The Ever-Growing Month
    SHŌNAGON
    Shameful Things
    A thief has crept into a house and is now hiding in some wellchosen nook where he can secretly observe what is going on. Someone else comes into the dark room and, taking an object that lies there, slips it into his sleeve. It must be amusing for the thief to see a person who shares his own nature.

JANE
    I imagine Shōnagon, the master thief, hiding in her nook of history, watching me slip in and out of darkened rooms and steal from people’s lives. I hope she is laughing from behind her long silk sleeves.
    One requisite of a good documentarian: you must shamelessly take what is available.
    It was March, the “Ever-Growing Month,” 1 and we’d been shooting since the beginning of the year. Suzuki was the cameraman, one of the best videographers in the business. He had an enormous face, like a big round moon, that sweat like a Gouda when he got drunk. His hair was long, and while he worked he wore it tied back tightly in a ponytail like a Heian courtier, but after work, at the bar, he would untie it and let it flow like molten obsidian down his back. His eyes were Heian too, mere slits, as though someone had taken a razor blade and drawn bloodless incisions into the swollen skin. You could never tell if they were open or shut, or if he was watching you. “He has a great eye,” I liked to say to