The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

shadow of his heavy brows. Something she had never seen in the broad light of day.
    “He’d be smart to forget about it if he is. This is a miserable business if ever there was one,” Tsukazaki said, not bothering to wait for her answer. “Over here, sonny; this is a mounted sextant.” The instrument he slapped looked like a white mushroom on a long stem.
    When they went into the pilothouse, Noboru wanted to touch everything: the speaking tube to the engine room and the automatic-pilot gyro; radar screens; the electronic channel selector. The indicator reading STOP — STAND BY — AHEAD and countless other gauges and dials seemed to summon visions of peril on the open sea. In the chart room next door, he gaped at shelves stacked with maps and tables, and studied an erasure-smudged chart still in the drafting. The chart laced the sea with capricious lines which appeared and reappeared according to some curious un-geometry. Most fascinating of all was the daily log: sunrise and sunset were entered as small half-circles, a pair of golden horns marked the passage of the moon, and the ebb and surge of the tides were shown in gentle, rippling curves.
    While Noboru wandered through private dreams Tsukazaki stood at Fusako’s side, and the heat of his body in the sultry chart room was beginning to oppress her: when the parasol she had leaned against a desk clattered suddenly to the floor, she felt as if she herself, fainting, had fallen.
    She raised a little cry. The parasol had glanced off her foot. The sailor stooped immediately and picked it up. To Fusako he seemed to move as slowly as a diver underwater. He retrieved the parasol and then, from the bottom of this sea of breathless time, his white cap rose slowly toward the surface. . . .
    Shibuya pushed through the louvered office doors and announced: “Yoriko Kasuga has just arrived.”
    “All right! I’ll be right down.”
    The old man had revived her too abruptly; she regretted her tinny, reflex reply.
    She studied her face for a minute in a mirror hanging on the wall. She felt as if she were still standing in the chart room.
    Yoriko was in the patio with one of her ladies-in-waiting. She was wearing a huge sunflower of a hat.
    “I want Mama to do all the choosing. I’m just helpless.”
    Fusako objected to being called “Mama” as though she were the proprietress of a bar. She descended the stairs slowly and walked over to where Yoriko stood chatting.
    “And how are you today? It certainly is hot again.” The actress complained about the devastating heat and the crowds at the pier where they were filming. Fusako pictured Ryuji somewhere in the throng and her spirits flagged.
    “Thirty cuts this morning—can you imagine that? That’s what Mr. Honda calls ‘racing through a picture.’”
    “Will the film be good?”
    “Not a chance. But it’s not the kind of picture that takes prizes anyway.”
    Winning a best-actress award had become an obsession with Yoriko. In fact, the gifts she was buying today constituted one of her inimitable “gestures” toward the awards jury. Her willingness to believe any scandal (except one involving herself) suggested that she would proffer her body to every member of the jury without hesitation if she thought that might help.
    Though she managed with difficulty to support a family of ten, Yoriko was a gullible beauty and, as Fusako well knew, a very lonely woman. Still, except that she was a good customer, Fusako found her fairly intolerable.
    But today Fusako was enveloped in paralyzing gentleness. Yoriko’s flaws and her vulgarity were apparent as always, but they seemed as cool and inoffensive as goldfish swimming in a fishbowl.
    “At first I thought sweaters might be nice, since it’s almost fall, but these are supposed to be things you bought this summer, so I picked out some Caldin ties and some polo shirts and a few Jiff pens. For the wives, I don’t think you can go wrong with perfume. Shall we go upstairs? I