The Lake Read Online Free PDF Page B

wanted to hug him to me, but I thought that might frighten him, too. So I tried something else.
    “Here,” I said, “let’s hold hands as we sleep.”
    I took his hand in mine. He had been hiding his eyes with the other hand since he started crying. And now he was crying even harder. I kept squeezing his thin, dry hand.
    The heat in his palm made me think that sometimes it’s too late, some things can’t be fixed. I didn’t know anything about his past, but I had the sense that long ago, someone had abused him sexually. He had been completely crushed, pushed to a point where there was no hope he would ever recover—or maybe it was just a matter of giving it time, I thought.
    I felt bad for having spoken so flippantly. It’s so easy to be insensitive about things you have no personal experience of. I couldn’t even guess what it was that had gone wrong inside him.
    No doubt every little thing I did to try and help him feel better, things any woman would do, only drove him further into a corner.
    At the same time, seeing how extremely sweaty his face had become when he made his confession earlier had left me feeling a little frightened myself, like he was telling me more than I needed to know. Right now I was still too exhausted, too wasted to start anything new, but after a little while I hoped I could fall in love, and have more fun, and be young. Go to the movies, argue, meet up somewhere, go out to eat (even though Nakajima didn’t like eating out), do all that, wasting time in a nice way. That’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to deal with weighty matters. That’s what I was hoping for, except that if I were to go out with him it seemed unlikely we could ever go to a hot springs together, and simply having sex would be an ordeal. That would really be a pain. I mean, I want to have fun with my life, I thought. Because I was still able, at that point, to treat it all lightly.
    And then, peering at me with the eyes of a boy in elementary school, his voice stuffy from crying, Nakajima spoke.
    “Is it all right if we try? If we see if I can do it? If I can’t now, I feel like I never will.”
    Okay, if you want, I said. And that was it.
    He said he’d be too scared if we were naked, so we fumbled over each other’s bodies in our pajamas. Nakajima was kind of oddly built, and he didn’t really seem to be enjoying himself. It felt like I was faking sex with a person who thought sex was a bad thing.
    The whole time, I kept thinking that it would take a pretty major shift in perspective for me to start wanting to go on doing this with this guy, and that made it even more bizarre.
    But occasionally something in our movements flashed. There was hope.
    Those are my memories of our first night together.
    After I said goodbye to my mom, my life seemed to turn rapidly in a new direction.
    I no longer had to go back to my hometown all the time and Nakajima had begun coming over, and everything happened so suddenly … day after day, it was like living out some weird fantasy. Like I was inhabiting someone else’s dream, some stranger’s. Did all that really happen? I wondered, dazed, casting my mind back. To her bones, the crematorium.
    And then I got offered a big job.
    I was a fledgling painter, you see, who specialized in murals.
    My palette was unusual, unlike other painters’, so every so often my work got featured on TV programs and stuff, and since I was happy to go anywhere, all on my own—except that I often had to hire a student to take me, since I don’t drive—I had gotten a decent number of jobs, here and there. It’s not like I was famous or anything, but there’s always a demand for that kind of work, more than you’d expect, and so I was constantly going off to do a mural on the side of someone’s house or in a garden, on a crumbling wall outside an aquarium, on the side of a shed owned by a neighborhood association. The main point, as far as I was concerned, was to put my pictures