The Lake Read Online Free PDF Page A

too had been trying, casually, to steer clear of that kind of talk, that mood.
    At the same time, I was afraid it would be worse if I lost him now, over this.
    I was so worn down from taking care of my mother that I doubted I’d feel like sleeping with anyone anytime soon.
    And I’d seen nothing but butts and bedpans and urine bottles, day in and day out; that might have had something to do with it, too. I’d had so much time to myself at the hospital, while my mom was getting tests done, that sometimes I even took care of the old man in the next bed.
    I was kind of tired, I guess, of knowing that people are flesh. Flesh and water.
    When I changed my mom’s pajamas, a smell that you could only describe as the smell of water came wafting up from under her collar. I miss it now, and wish I could smell it again; I wish I could go back to that moment and keep inhaling that smell forever—but at the time it made me think, God, it’s true, people are made of water , and the thought depressed me.
    I hadn’t told Nakajima this, but the real reason I’d broken up with my boyfriend was that he kept pushing me to have sex and I kept refusing.
    He was so busy with work that we could only really spend time together on Saturdays, if then, so he ended up dropping in on weekday nights, or on Sunday evening. And we would end up in bed, of course. But there was no way, just no way I could get myself into it. As it happened, this guy was bursting with energy, raring to go, morning and night, no matter where we were. That’s nice when you’re feeling good, but it’s not nice at all when you’ve got other things on your mind. In other words, I really didn’t like this guy. He was a sort of sex buddy, and when I first met him it just happened that that’s what I wanted. In the excitement of our new relationship, I’d mistaken my eagerness for affection. I thought it was him I wanted.
    All along, I didn’t realize what had happened, and then one day it hit me. I noticed that I never felt like opening the curtains when he was over, and that clued me in.
    I didn’t want Nakajima to see him relaxing in my apartment.
    When it’s like that, no matter who it is, it’s clearly not going to work.
    On the other hand, here I was with Nakajima—a guy I really did like—hanging around all the time, and still I couldn’t do it because I didn’t feel happy enough. Even I found it puzzling. Here I had this young guy I liked in front of me, and I wasn’t holding back, I just didn’t feel turned on. Needless to say, I wasn’t thinking at all about how Nakajima might be feeling.
    At most, I had a vague sense that maybe someday I’d fall for him.
    It’s hard to imagine, I know, but Nakajima had this particular aura about him that made it easy to accept anything, and when I luxuriated in that aura, even the most bizarre things came to seem perfectly ordinary.
    For instance, after I started spending time with Nakajima, I became clearly aware, for the first time in my life, of the way I had always looked at the world, and of how I wanted to see it in the future. It was because he was so steadfast. All the matters in which I’d let myself flip-flop, changing from day to day, all the times I’d tried to make myself into something I wasn’t in order to assuage little stabs of conscience—bitter thoughts about my parents’ relationship, say, or how my mother was living her life … I saw it all so clearly. I’d always felt bad, somewhere in my heart, about my inability to sympathize with my mom, who had tried in her own wishy-washy way to accommodate herself to society, and remained like that until she died. Of course you have to sympathize with her—she was weak, she was only human. Out in the country, people aren’t as tough as they are in the city. Living alone in Tokyo as I do now, I’m starting to forget what it’s like, but in the countryside those social connections still matter, and that’s the world Mom belonged to …  See