The Round People - a Novel - 4. V. Twelve o'clock

V. Twelve o'clock

The atmosphere of The Round People seemed to loosen up once Pearl had left, or perhaps her going was just coincidental with the departing of the patrons' immunity to drink, and the constraints of a sound mind.

By midnight this particular club settled down into a leisurely zenith. The patrons had found a place for themselves among their established friends, or potential new ones, and all hummed along to the rhythms the D.J. picked. Around this middle hour of both night and day there started to build a feeling of family. Whether with the help of alcohol or not, the customers sensed an affinity beyond the limits of words or culture; they saw they were in this life together, if only for the rest of the dark hours, and they knew they belonged with the people living and feeling the same place and time as they did.

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Benedict held one earphone pressed against his head. He was setting a record to replace the one that currently played on a partner table, adjusting turn with counterturn, till he heard the spot he knew would be perfect. He set both records going, and for a moment the two existed in a counterpoint of harmony, one coming up in volume, the other descending in a balancing wane.

Benedict thoughtlessly set the headset down on its hook, his hands taking up the used record on the way back. He held it waiting while he pressed a jacket and its sleeve against his chest to force it open. As the disc sank into it, his eyes wandered over to the table Emmy had gone to. She was chatting brightly with the people there, as if they were 'her' people. He recognized Jonathan sitting between two girls he had never met, but had seen many times before. Benedict envied those three whom Emmy favored with her warmth, and wished he could leave his work and join her to forget his responsibilities, and be one of them.

For a moment his mind raced with thoughts on how he could accomplish this. He even thought about turning around and offering the work to the first boy on the steps who seemed most desirous to do it, but he admitted he'd be giving up his job at the same time. And then another notion came to him, a scheme both simple and doable. His hands worked finding and setting a new record while his mind planned the next. It would be a slow dance, one he knew the girl in question loved, and once it started playing, he'd go over and pull Emmy to himself, telling her the song was for her.

˚˚˚˚˚

"It's really sad that nobody cares anymore about what's beautiful in the traditional Japanese arts," Emmy said with show erudition.

Nobuko squinted coolly through her cigarette smoke. "You're right." She nodded her head slowly, confirming the fact with herself, "The young generations don’t know or care about their own culture – "

"But Japan," interrupted Patricia, all eyes suddenly on her. "And the Japanese take amazing steps to save all their 'Old Ways.' Look at sumo." Her manner immediately changed from one of knowledge to one of question. She asked the Japanese ladies, "Did you know sumo is Chinese?"

"But every culture has its own kind of wrestling," Jonathan offered.

"No, no. Not 'a kind of wrestling.' I mean Nihon no Ozumo – Japanese Grand Sumo."

Nobuko put her cigarette down. "Sumo doesn't matter, it's just a sport."

"But it has a cultural history much older than Noh or Kyogen. But my question is: is sumo Japanese, or not?"

"It's Japanese," huffed Emmy.

"That's what everyone thought until a few years ago when, in China, they uncovered a series of Tang Dynasty tombs with wrestlers painted on the walls. Even the Chinese officials were flabbergasted, because the images showed o sumo-san, complete with mawashi..." She explained the term to Jon, "You know, the little jockstrap diaper thingy." Then she returned to the larger subject, "And, they were posed doing sumo maneuvers, and most amazingly, was a painting showing a solitary wrestler doing the dance-like ceremony that closes every day of a tournament."

"The what?" questioned Jonathan.

"The procedure where one wrestler goes through a series of gestures with a longbow, you know, like a bow-and-arrow bow, and then the day's bouts are officially over.

"So anyway, my point is, sumo came to Japan in the fifth or sixth century and today, just like then, the same tradition is followed. A tradition that's been dead in China for a thousand-and-a-half years – so dead in fact – nobody remembered it even existed! I don't think you have much to worry about in trying to keep traditions alive in this country."

"But sumo is just a sport. It's entertainment and nothing more. The tradition is just maintaining the way it's played," Nobuko said.

"What about kabuki?" Pat pressed. "That was entertainment pure and simple two hundred years ago. The only reason young people don’t go to see it today is because it doesn't entertain them. And if they do go, it's for the wrong reason, just their dose of 'culture' to be taken in kimono once a year on 'culture day.' So at least one day out of the year, people can say I 'feel' Japanese."

"But," Nobuko calmly, but passionately explained. "Kabuki has a soul, like most Japanese arts, that can die. Noh and Kabuki strive to be beautiful, that is what they hold as their goal, not just to 'feel' beautiful, but to become Beauty itself. This is the heart of the old art, even I suppose the heart of sumo, and what's in danger of death. It's too bad," Nobuko shook her head, "that so few Japanese know the beauty possible from Noh, or other Japanese theater. We have to keep it alive for the future, that's why I study shamisen."

"Do you play that?" Emmy asked dismissively.

"Yes. I'm taking lessons for three years." Nobuko snuffed out her cigarette, while Emmy strongly agreed.

"I strongly agree. That's what's in danger about Japanese arts."

Nobuko looked through the last whiff of her exhaled smoke. "And, what do you study?"

To her hostile challenge, Emmy said, "Well, nothing at this time." Then she popped at Jonathan, "too busy." Back to the crowd she confided, "But I really want to learn more about Noh…" Emmy noticed Nobuko's eyes looking at something over Emmy's shoulder. She turned around.

"Hi." Benedict was standing behind her. He bent down to speak softly in her ear, "Let's dance," and he pulled her hand off the tabletop. She resisted. A moment of indecision gleamed as she looked over the people at the table, but then she was standing, and soon sinking in Benedict's arms to rest her head on his strong upper chest. She was hoping Jonathan was getting a good look.

The music's tempo was slow and as inwardly pensive as a heartbeat. Benedict led Emmy deliberately away from the table to another part of the dance floor. Then she pulled back a little from his embrace, and he noticed the drift from the center of her attention.

"Do you like the music?" he softly asked her. "I played it just for you."

A thoroughly distracted Emmy muttered, "It's pretty good." Her glance lingered a moment on Nobuko, and the easy friendship she cultivated effortlessly with Jonathan. She regarded Nobuko as a bit of a culture snob, then instead of tossing off that feeling as beneath her, she was forced to embrace it. Being bi-cultural as she was, she told herself that to be an American was as easy as slipping on a shirt, or adjusting an attitude to match the one you wished to impress, but she felt she was never accepted by Japanese individuals as truly being Japanese. More often than not, the deep resentment she felt by suffering shunning of this kind came out as a flip comment, when she flashed a rare moment of passion in regards to her mother culture. She felt like the boy who cried wolf, never taken at her word.

Benedict gently tightened his hold on her swaying form, and slowly snapped her back into the moment, and the sweet presence of the boy and his white corduroy shirt. The formality of her responding touch relaxed, and motion-by-motion her hand inched farther around his waist, her head coming closer, and then touching the raised ribs riding the outside of his heart. Benedict was thrilled, and his utterances grew mellower as if to play rival to the sentiments of the song he had chosen, just for her.

"I wish I didn't have to work tonight."

She didn't reply.

Benedict tenderly explained, "So I could join you."

She taunted, "And why would you want to do that?"

"Don't tease me."

Her eyes were turned by his moving form, and her glance lighted heavily on Jon. "No," she said. "Tell me why."

Because the voice he heard spoke in sweet surrender, he hesitated to fall into a cruel trick of hers, yet his heart spoke in stay of his better mind, "I want to be with you; I thought I had already said that."

"Did you?" she said sheepishly. "I must have been thinking of something else."

"Thinking of something, or…" he lingered a moment, swallowing down a tight lump. "Or maybe, thinking of someone else."

She pushed her hands back from his beltline. She looked into his eyes like an important thing yearned expression, but those pushing hands relented a moment later, aborting whatever their honest intention was. Emmy breathed out slowly: "Dancing with you, and thinking of another? I don’t know how that could be possible." She gently laid the full weight of her head on his chest.

For a time they didn't speak, becoming only the movements of the music, but eventually Benedict had to ask, "Do you like that guy?"

"Who?"

He had to pretend he didn't remember his name. "That guy, you know, the one you introduced me to at the bar. What's his name again, Tom?"

She raised her head with a partial laugh through her nose. "You mean Jon? Well…" she languidly flirted. "He's kind of cute, and a real good person, kind of like you – I think you should get to know him. I bet you two have a lot in common. Yes, I like Jonathan." Again her head found a way to rest on his chest. The fragrance of her hair and of some half-perceptible promise drifted up to him. He felt her jaw move against his heart as she said, "But, no more than I like you."

He stopped dancing. Benedict's index finger slipped under her chin, and the next moment, his head bent down to her level, and he was kissing her. For a time she let him; let herself enjoy it, but then she decided it would be better to push him away, just a little bit.

He took both as good signs: standing there, his hands about her waist, his smile was reflected back to him up from her distracted eyes.

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The balcony of The Round People could either feel intimate or cloistered depending on an individual's intentions. The black velour booths sat pressed against two walls like a string of broken C's melded together at their curvy ends. There were only two walls of booths, for one of the two remaining walls had the stairs against it, and the last had only air and a three-foot high banister before it opened on the other side to more air and the dance floor ten feet below. In between each semicircle of couch-like luxury was a small round table and two or three chairs that turned their backs to the balustrade. Between them and the wrought iron handrail was just enough room for two people to squeeze by.

For the seating walls of this area, the painter had resorted to symmetry; the smaller the place, the greater the order, he thought to himself. On the longer of the two walls he painted the figures of women, one each appearing to stand against the wall where the ends of the booths fused together. The women were naked, their legs together, their arms outstretched, while interjacent between them, and swirling all around their placid composure, was a matrix from which countless numbers of other forms sprang. The value of these changing with the composition from light to dark, from humorous to grotesque; hues from greens to blues, from purples and reds back again to faces and limbs becoming and receding legible and obscure. Every time a person saw the mural, he was convinced he was seeing something different yet again.

The use of color from which a myriad of stories seemed to be struggling, spilled and flooded the shorter wall too, only here the standing figures were of men. Their gestures were the same, and their contours were painted with cartoonish reality. In the corner, where by rights one or the other should have dominated, the artist rendered a solitary figure to straddle both walls with the features of both sexes. Here was the turning point of the bar, and an area that Dean would never dream of painting over.

˚˚˚˚˚

He picked up an empty bottle, a lime wedge looking pale and sickly stuck in the neck.

"Do you want another?" Dean offered.

He collected the empties and took new orders, the bottles and glasses getting set on the big round tray resting on his arm, the orders he recorded in his head. The customers on the balcony were noisy, chatting of things he didn't care about. Instead of wanting to join them, he wanted to get out his paints and redo them.

Coming down the stairs, Dean glanced admiringly to the spot of wall above the front door that carried his work of the afternoon. 'The balcony,' he thought 'is the best place to view it from.' He also sadly recalled that nobody had noticed it at all.

Slowing down his descent, he thought about last night, and the gravity of his visit with Nobuko. She had told him Jonathan was Gay, and that he was concerned about coming out to Dean. When he asked "Why?" she deflected the question with an unwieldy glance that said everything her voice could not. But, Dean liked Jonathan, really liked him, and discovering that the other young man potentially felt for him in a tender way was highly complimentary to Dean. That feeling of liking him was unaltered from the moment before he 'knew' to the moment after. If anything, his fondness for Jon grew because it confirmed the unstated depth of sadness that accompanied every one of the American's jokes with him, and because he felt sympathy that a good person like him suffered rebuff from anyone else over something as non-critical as his hat size, or eye color – and all over something equally as innate.

On the second step from the bottom, he had to halt himself, for just then the front door flew open with a violet start, and in flowed a stream of rowdy college boys shoved by the cold air from behind. If he had been another step down, the arriving crew would have sent tray and glasses crashing over Dean's shoulder.

"Irasshai Mase!" he bellowed.

As they clotted near the dance floor to take off coats, scan for girls, adjust cap brims lower, etc., Dean had to maneuver around them, which brought him right past Jonathan's table. Dean sailing by, had to smile at the American because a more than slightly tipsy Emmy had plopped herself down on his lap, and looked like she intended to roost there. Dean saw the glancing smile Jon returned to him, a pleading look for sympathy, and rescue. Jonathan wore an ironic 'what can I do?' grin.

Back at the bar, he dumped the bottles in the bin, and piled the dirty glasses by the sink. At Mark he said, "Good luck washing them."

"Oh no," Mark said coming forward, his hands raised like double stop signs. "Pearl said to share, so here's the key to the register." His bunchy black sweater sleeves rode up his forearm as he sunk his hands deep past the silver lizard skin belt and into the pockets of his slacks. "And, I'll go do the floor till Seth comes back." His elbow bent, pulling the hand up, and his shoulders turned as he deftly tossed the square silver clavis into Dean's tee-shirt, there to be caught by the boy's bemused hands.

"OK, but first tables 5 and 7 need two Coronas each, and table 8 needs a Kirin."

While Mark was pulling the glasses of beer, Dean started washing, the brush machine coming to life in his ears, then receding again as he thought.

Absentmindedly, with fingers still slick with soap, he pictured Jonathan's misery with the slutty Emmy riding his lap. Sharply he felt, and allowed himself, a pang of jealousy. The boy thought about it subjectively. Why was a man-loving man an issue? In Japan, the only time it mattered was when a family obligation was not met because of it. But, after such obligations – marriage, children – were satisfied, he was free to form discreet relationships, usually out in the open. Sometimes partners, lovers, or boyfriends, became a part of the open family, and respected as such. Somehow that seemed natural to him, and humane too. The Western way was unapproachable. There, Gays were hated simply because they existed, and dared to be open about it; but in that culture they were also taught to believe God had made everyone and everything, so what was the issue? If Gays exist, it's because there is a reason, and who's to second-guess a higher order?

Now he came to the heart of the matter. He asked himself totally unafraid of any answer he might discover: 'Is Dean like Jonathan?' He had had a string of girlfriends since high school. He liked taking them to Love Hotels, where they could have time to explore one another. But on the other hand, he rarely liked to listen to them bicker, complain, act cutesie cutesie, or bore him with tales of shopping adventures – but he didn't think that any boy did. And yet, the sex; thinking about their writhing faces and hands pulsing with grips and alternating pushes against him, caused an erection every time. But, did he feel connected to any of them, even then, at the most literal joining of himself to their bodies?

He swallowed hard. An odd memory intruded. His buddies and he liked to go to a fishing pond. In Nakano – his hometown – in the heart of Tokyo, a half-acre business existed. It was a series of waterways and paths that, for the price of admittance, and a given pole, bait, and catch-bucket, allowed one to fish in leisure for well-fed carp. One day when Dean was about fourteen or fifteen, a regular outing turned odd. His pal Chan and he were off in one area alone, and Chan was relaying how sad he was; how girls didn't like him. Out of the blue, Dean announced he liked him; that they'd always be friends, and maybe one day more. What did he mean? He thought of Chan's sad, lost puppy dog eyes – his ways so lost in a world Dean felt master of – and he wanted to comfort Chan; enfold him in his arms. He loved Chan and did not want him to suffer.

That boy's face was quietly replaced by Jonathan's. Now Dean got it – the same lost puppy eyes, the same desire within him to help; but now there was something more. As blood flow and imagination and memory works on a guy's nether regions, a different flow works on his brain. Was Dean Gay? He had to consider what was growing in his tight jeans right that second as he thought about Jon. It was not an erection born of memory, but of anticipation; an emotional swelling that anticipated connecting with someone on a deeper that physical element. Was Dean Gay? He subjectively realized, no female had ever given him a tubby when he thought of simply talking and being with her. Maybe there was a reason he had never fallen in love with any of his past girlfriends, a reason he always cut them loose after a few encounters.

With thoughts of Jonathan came a comfort, a sort of ease in the notion of equals coming together – of no more bullshit. And maybe, he was a little jealous of Emmy, but he smiled to himself wickedly, knowing something she did not.

He glanced up from his sink, the whirl of the apparatus loud in his ears again. Dean beamed at Ichiko, who nodded back. He thought Andrew sitting next to her looked more than a little bored.

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The club was in its grand time, a long powerfully cresting wave running along with the full might of a sustained climax; a fine tension prolonged between impassioned rigidity and sighing repose. This zenith of the night is a time of pulling and pushing; a longing to join and separate, to be one with the others, and a deeper more profound desire that the others long to be completed by your presence with them.

In the back part, the clusters of nipplely grapes presided over the patrons gathered at the bar. They watched but did not judge the various 'types' they saw: the young and careless, the slightly older and inevitably more guarded ones, whose glances were obviously envious but controlled. The ones who lived one month to the next just to get their salaries, who were only forced to turn around just as fast to pay their obligations. But the walls made no judgments, no distinctions between Japanese and foreigners, between those who sought, and those who were wanted. They only saw the trappings; the clothes, the affected little laughter, the looks of painful hunger as one person convinced himself he could not live without another, and all the filling and draining and washing of glasses in a constant sea of drinks.

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Nobuko's eyes narrowed as she inhaled a deep and cleansing hit of nicotine. The tip of her cigarette glowed in angry compliance with the vehemence of her intake, and smoke soon formed a lazy and jagged column off its top. As she exhaled, her focus stayed on the flip and sham-looking Emmy balancing herself on 'her brother's' lap. Jonathan looked trapped, and she felt for him, but she also feared the American's temper was soon to be roused, and felt bad for Emmy too.

Emmy teased Jon, "Do you like sex?"

"How much have you had to drink?"

"Don't evade the question." She wiggled down her fleshy backside deeper into his thighs.

"Are you kidding? I love sex."

"Had much of it?"

"Yes, Emmy. My fair share."

"Your first time?" She felt something.

Jonathan grew pettish. He shot a mean-eyed look for Nobuko to do something; then to Pat with an apologetic glance. "When I was seventeen."

"I was older." Emmy sang out as if that painted a thousand-word picture. She squiggled down harder; a lewd and privately meant exchange happened between her and Jon as she lifted her arm and gripped his far shoulder.

"I don't want to scandalize you Jon, but do you know what a 'strap-on' is?"

Jon dared to venture, "Yes, I do. Why do you ask?" He felt Emmy shrug down deep in his lap again, annoying him to the point that he had to shift in his seat.

"Because," she started slowly, scanning Nobuko and Pat for their support. "I like them. I enjoy the 'power' of fucking a guy. Ladies, you know what I mean right? Sometimes I resent that I as a woman have to 'surrender' to a lover just because he has the penis."

Suddenly Pat was all ears, but she kept her peace.

Jonathan laughed once through his nose and stretched to pick up his beer. He drained it, holding the glass in the air as if toasting, while he wryly hinted, "I highly recommend it!"

Emmy's features were agape. Her eyes darted over his puckish grin, and interpreted it as solid confirmation of how much he enjoyed his power trip over women.

From Nobuko's side of this conversation, she went back to the series of discussions she and Jonathan had had over the course of the week past, but also to more intimate matters.

Nobuko had her first sex with a forty-year-old man when she was seventeen. He kept hoarsely screeching in her ear, his alcohol breath stinging her eyes, "Kimochi daro" or "You know it feels good" – but she kept feeling only searing pain.

The act of sex was a rebellion against Nobuko's domineering mother. She started clubbing young, sneaking out of the house, but making sure her mother knew she was gone. A bar is where the handsome forty-year-old approached her. She shrugged her shoulders at her friends and went with him.

As he took his pleasure, Nobuko started crying. He became more passionate and forceful, as if the pleasure he took from her was inextricably wound up in the pain he inflicted on her.

For her, in that moment when she was seventeen, sex was a total disconnect. She regretted approaching it from a vengeance-on-her-mother attitude, for ultimately it did not destroy her matron, but in the process, it had hurt the girl she had been.

In college she met and decided to woo a nerdy boy with a strong physique. He studied cartography, and it was his intellect that was his most attractive feature to the still girlish Nobuko.

She bed him; took his virginity, and cruelly enjoyed the evidence of pain she told herself she saw on his face.

She married him, but both soon had their suspicions of 'mistake' confirmed. For five years they stuck it out, and day-by-day resented another day of their youth lost to a masquerade. During this period, Nobuko tried and became pregnant three times, but each time ended in spontaneous termination, and the last, a boy, was stillborn. The marriage was over; equitably they split as friends, and quickly became true friends and loyal caring partners in a divorce that better suited their lives than the marriage ever had.

Nobuko started a string of jobs as a club hostess, waitress, a stirrer of businessmen's mizuwari – or Whiskey on the Rock – and an instigator of sparkling conversations built upon many commonplaces. She knew where the money was, and 'dated' several clients.

A week ago Jon had asked about a display on the windowsill of her apartment. Here Nobuko had set up four small incense burners with four miniature vases behind them. In each vase was a small flower of differing features and hues. "Why?" he had asked. The life-experience dully glinted from her tired eyes as she explained, "Three for my children not strong enough to join me in this life, and one for the aborted child I was not strong enough to bring into the world."

"Do you regret it?"

"Regret..?" She seriously considered it. "Regret means that now I would tell myself then not to do it. But, I would tell myself, 'you made the right decision for us.' So, no regrets."

Nobuko asked Jonathan when he first had sex.

"With my girlfriend in high school. But she dumped me; I guess it was as uninvolved for her as it was for me."

"And with a guy?"

"A couple of years ago."

"Was it good?"

Jon went slack jaw: "Was it good? It was like taking your first breath of life." Then he smiled, "It was more than good. Everything before was some shade of deceit; everything after, was natural and pure and good and innocent. Yes. It was very good."

Nobuko grinned when she heard this with a pained realization. "Good for you," she said. But she wished she could go back in time and advise the seventeen-year-old Nobuko to wait for an experience of the type Jonathan had just described.

˚˚˚˚˚

Andrew was listless. Beyond thoughts of being polite, he was not impressed with this shy and awkward girl. He shifted a glance down at the coat now across her lap, the bar becoming too busy for it to have its own seat. He considered the ridiculously cute gloves; he wanted to get away from her.

"Andrew-san wa nani kei?"

Hearing the familiar question, Andrew drifted into English, "I'm Norwegian – grandfather was…" He knew he'd be asked, Japanese were always curious about ethnicity, 'but what did it matter,' he thought.

"Oh, Norwegian, that's interesting." Ichiko nodded.

Andrew was silent. He didn't want to think about his father, but he was. How the man with his muscles and flannel, set against the cruel Minnesota logging season, would always repel with his enjoined scent of sweat and Ben-Gay. His dad was tough, and though Andrew was several inches taller, the father's head with its flat-top buzz cut always loomed a fair-haired head-and-shoulders above the son's concept of himself; of what he thought a man should be – something to be feared and loved as best a person might to a God unknown.

"So one day," Ichiko chatted in Japanese. "This really rude doctor asked me if I liked to take temperatures. I told him it didn't bother me very much, then he pulled down his pants and told me to do him. I thought he was joking…" She looked wide-eyed at Andrew, asking if he could believe it. "But he was serious, because the other nurses told me later all the new arrivals got the same question from him."

Andrew offered lackluster comfort, "That's too bad."

"But that's not the worst of it. He was so angry when I told him to stick it up there himself, he started shouting about me being new at the hospital, and if I wanted to get along, I'd have to know who's the boss…" Ichiko continued, but Andrew no longer heard.

He stood up. He told Ichiko, "I have go to the bathroom." And pointed loosely in that direction. "I'll be back soon."

˚˚˚˚˚

A couple of minutes later Andrew's hand pressed down on the brass door lever. A knocking sound was issued from the inside, telling him it was occupied, so he patiently waited, forming the head of a line of one. A moment later and Jonathan joined him with good cheer.

"Hey, Drew. How's it going with you and Ichiko?" Jon had been doing some heavier drinking, and his tone was soft and overly friendly.

"Well, to tell the truth," Andrew glanced around to make sure the wrong ears couldn't hear. "She's just a typical Japanese girl: shy, brainless, too timid to be enjoyable. And she's driving me crazy with stories of ungrateful doctors. Oh well, at least she's good Nihongo practice. But…" He suddenly turned to the tables, his fair sideburns riding the crest of his grin. "I saw Emmy sitting on you. Looks like everything's going well on your end of things."

"She's been drinking," Jonathan admitted. "And annoying me all night." Inspiration just hit him. "Hey, why don't you come over and join us? We can rescue one another!"

The bathroom door clicked and opened with a short Office Lady behind it. Andrew exchanged places with her, telling Jon, "OK. I'll be right over."

"Great!" he said to the closing door, and smiled at the girl as she hung her head and scurried by. He continued to follow her with his eyes and wound up peeking into the cash register area. Dean stood there, he had just finished scouring the last of the waiting beer glasses, and his fingers were still sopping wet. Jonathan paused, looking at the way the chain arched back from the hidden terminus at the front of his jeans to rise along the swell of Dean's back pocket. The heavy links hung like a biker's watch fob from the big metal loop strapped to the recessed bulge of a wallet.

Jonathan took a step under the slashed curtain and told him, "Don’t work yourself to death."

Jon turned to go out again, but stopped. "Oh, I almost forgot."

Dean puzzled a squint at the American.

"Come out here. I want to show you something."

Dean grabbed a towel, and dabbed ineffectually at his fingers for a moment. He was still holding it when Jonathan put his arm around his shoulder and led him out to the area before the restroom door. From here the whole front section of the club could be seen.

"What?" Dean asked.

"Good job."

"What..." he had to ask again, looking Jonathan in his mirthful eye.

The American pointed with a sweeping gesture to the mural above the main door. "Good job," he said. "It's beautiful."

For only the second time since the bar opened, Dean had a chance to stand still and contemplate his work. Feeling a lump in his throat rise and fall, and the slick soap drying out the skin on his hands, he wondered for the first time if what Nobuko had told him last night led him to paint the image he did tonight. He held Jonathan in one glance with The Round People portrait behind that young man's look of warmth, and thought they were aligning into one expression, a very personal one.

"Thank you." Dean said, and meant it.

˚˚˚˚˚

Individuals perform the same kinds of acts thinking they alone are unique in the world. What they don’t know is that just around the corner someone is probably doing the same thing.

The young are particularly susceptible to the danger of believing in the 'there's no one but me' syndrome, but they grow up and learn to scoff at the youths who have taken their place. In The Round People the dance floor was awash with college kids dancing to whatever the D.J. picked for them. The boys brought the girls out, and like strutting cranes, led them around the dance floor with their Adam's apples. They looked like this because the super wide brims of their baseball caps, meant to block out strong sunlight, only succeeded in practically blinding them in the dimly lit club; they had to dance with their head cocked back simply to be able to see anything at all. Not one of them suggested to another, that to remove the cap during the night might make some kind of sense; no one did this because they respected the individual's 'fashion.' Other 'style madness' included one slender boy dressed in a very tight-fitting knit sweater and matching pants, whose daring 'look' practically all the young native population relished, and practically all the foreign element laughed at. It wasn't so much the clothes on his body, which turned his thin frame into a thing positively emaciated, that caught everyone's attention – no, it was rather the garter belt that he wore on his head that drew the most intense scrutiny. Or more precisely, the front half of a garter belt with the two triangular supports coming down from his crown as earflaps, the little metal clasps jingling by his Adam's apple. For a time this boy could be assured that he alone was unique, and would be until someone arrived next week with his own rival garter.

And yet people are still the same, they are too humorous to make believable fiction, for no one reading would believe what real people do, and that many 'different' people will 'do' exactly the same thing in very similar circumstances.

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Mark roamed the nooks and crannies of the bar. He took what empty glasses and bottles he could find and asked owners how the idea of replacements sounded.

As opposed to the way Dean moved, Mark had an ever-so-slightly arrogant manner, with the bulk of his chest always clearing the way first. It didn't exactly strike the same note of sun-beloved naturalness that the Japanese young man carried without effort. And yet it wasn't an arrogance that was unapproachable; Mark smiled at the customers, and especially at the lovelier young ladies, and his voice invited comfort if not confidence. It was only his intense eyes that Japanese people often shied away from, somehow afraid of reading a carelessly left open thought in them, something that most natives of Japanese culture never left unguarded on their own features; they avoided it in Mark because they didn’t know how to deal with anyone who wore their hearts readily legible in their eyes.

Mark came up to the slashed curtain separating the till from the restroom hall. Nobuko was waiting in a solo queue.

"Well, g'day there Miss Nobuko. How's tricks?" His attitude was one of talking haughtily to an intimate friend. "How come you haven't said much to me tonight? Too busy?"

She said smiling, but apparently tired, "Don't be mean. You know I would, if I could – "

"Oh I see, too busy with those blokes at your table. You like that blond Yank, don’t you?" Mark was flirting in a hard, yet playful way.

"Mark," she said. "Stop it. We agreed that in the bar we're just customer and bartender – "

"Assistant Manager," he corrected.

"Assistant Manager and customer." She peeked under the curtain. Dean wasn't there. She peeked over Mark's shoulder; there was nobody around. She put her hands on his ample chest to boost herself up. She kissed him loudly on the lips. "That will have to last you for a while. OK?"

Mark put his hand over the spot she had bussed in a half mocking, half genuinely tender motion. He grinned, and his eyebrows flashed up twice. He whispered, "It will last – until later." Then he disappeared behind the curtain.

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Ichiko sat alone looking at her glass. Her fingers played with the base of her Gin Tonic, for she was drinking hard now. Somehow she was perfectly aware that her English improved the less her mind was involved in the conversation. She wanted to improve for Andrew's sake. Although he spoke her language, she wanted to reach out and show him the effort of making him comfortable around her. For she was thinking about how much she liked Andrew's sincerity, and his seriousness. When she was telling her stories, he seemed truly disturbed by her plight.

When Andrew had returned from the restroom she was very glad, but when she realized he was saying he was going to visit with Jonathan, she returned to solitary contemplation. She had neatly folded her coat over Andrew's vacant seat; he said he'd only be gone a few minutes, so she knew she had to save it.

Ichiko had another thought creep upon her; this one was dull, rumbling deeply and quietly through her. She acknowledged at that moment with an unfaltering trust of self-awareness that she wanted Andrew, and began to dream up ways of getting him. What she wanted from him though, she wasn't quite as sure of.

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As Dean moved around the floor with a tray of empty glasses and new ashtrays, he spotted Nobuko coming from the restroom.

She latched onto his arm, and hung from it in warm confidence, "Have you had much chance to speak to Jon?"

Dean replied with a winning grin belying his youth: "Jonathan said he wanted to talk to me later. We plan on spending my lunch break together."

Nobuko said, "Good – Dean, take care of him, encourage him to be honest. He needs to know you as a friend on both sides of his scary moment of truth. Help him."

Dean nodded with a mouth growing slack. He so wanted to confess the active process of his own questions that it silenced his tongue. As he inched along, he knew that in a single word or two spoken in honesty to this sage woman, he could grow by several miles. For a moment he half-considered Nobuko as a go-between for Jon and he – to smooth out what they could not say to one another – he wanted to confide in her. But, then he considered how Nobuko broke Jonathan's confidence. After all, that breech was the source of his developing feelings that couched a longing for the truth to be aired; and of his possible release from the fear of it. Dean lifted his open mouth up into a mercurial grin: "OK, mama. I'll do what I can." He patted her shoulder and went off towards the back bar, feeling more unaided than ever.

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Benedict saw Emmy's table grow in population, while a feeling of anxiety began to settle in him. Maybe he had read her signs wrongly, maybe it was Jonathan she wanted; maybe she was glad she was there, and Benedict was in his booth, working.

He selected a long record. After starting it, he went over to the bar to get another beer. While he was walking he wondered what he should do about Emmy; what he should do to show her his love.

At the bar he came around back and asked Dean to draw him a Kirin. Benedict began to wash his old glass when he glanced up at Ichiko. She cast eyes over to him that were as absent and distracted as his own.

He smiled, asking, "What are you thinking about?"