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Chapter 4
I didn’t think I could stay so long without actually speaking to Ari. This had probably happened a couple of times before, we’d surely had a long period of silence while I recovered from my injury too. It was that we were actively not talking now. Our Line chat had frozen in time, “Ah you coming”.
"Still think it's a coincidence,” Mayu said every time I commented.
But how could she really know how angry Ari had really been? I couldn’t really tell the whole story without compromising Miki-san. Omitting that had also made it very hard to communicate, so I’d created this person I’d known for many years, and that we’d been hooking up lately. Still, Ari have a good reason not to talk to me Mayu could never grasp from my fake endeavor. Perhaps, I should have been more sensitive, that Miki-san meant more to Ari.
“You could just send her a message too, you know?” Mayu offered one day, hitting a weak spot.
And I should, since she’d been the last to write. That would make sense to Mayu, who still only had a part of the events.
“We’re not even on the same team, what am I to write?” I asked, even knowing it was just an excuse not to be the first to take a step. I did feel guilty, huh? Officially, Ari had denied wanting to make Miki-san jealous that night. And truthfully, I’d just erased the whole misunderstanding and taken on the offer to have fun with Miki-san. Even now, I had no idea if Ari actually had any special feelings or had just been mad that I hadn’t told her about us. If only I could just sit with her and talk!
“Good luck?” Mayu’s suggestion startled me, then I noticed she’d just meant that as suggestion of message to send Ari. Without waiting for my opinion, she turned her back to me and left the room.
Like I could just type that, “Good luck!” of all things, when Ari was already in the middle of her run. It was the middle of February, I couldn’t even show up at her house and treat her to something. Our days off didn’t match either, so even if I could take the train to Hyogo on mine, I’d probably be in her way. Moreover, there was the new coronavirus pandemic getting worse by day; I wasn’t sure if taking unnecessary trips was the best plan.
I opened again our chat and stared at her last words, “Ah you coming”. But before I could actively not do anything again, a message came from someone else. I knew why I had waited this long to do anything, when we’d been rehearsing almost side by side for a month.
“I’ll be at yours in thirty,” Miki-san’s message read.
I’d been so distracted thinking about our day off, I’d forgotten we’d agreed to meet tonight. And I wasn’t even fully clothed yet after showering, just still holding the phone and complaining about Ari.
Miki-san and I had been seeing each other since January. After taking out on her for the problem with Ari that night, I hadn’t thought she’d still consider this something easy to relieve the stress. Not until I saw her at my doorstep some days later, carrying dinner for two. And we had been going smoothly so far, which had also increased our chemistry on stage. We talked a lot, even about Ari.
“Hey you!” she was already standing outside when I arrived. “You didn’t need to run, I just arrived too.” She giggled at how breathless I was. “And I brought dinner!”
Most of the times, it was Miki-san who initiated our encounters. She’d ask me if I was free later and then show up with something delicious. Rarely, she also invited me to her room, when I’d try to mimic, picking up food along the way, which usually made me late. Even though she was supposed to be busier than I… Those small things always made me wonder whether we were just colleagues with benefits, as I’d originally understood. It sounded inaccurate.
“Mayupon said you still didn’t talk with Ari?” Miki-san was setting the table in my room, while I investigated what she’d brought.
“I was thinking of going there the day after tomorrow.”
I noticed her wriggle her nose. “Aren’t they ending soon? She’ll probably come up here to watch us.”
And Miki-san had been right—Ari did show up as soon as her run in Umeda was over. But just like all other times we’d been rehearsing and even meeting by chance in the hallways, I couldn’t really speak to her once she was standing right there. At this point, she could as well think I was the one ignoring her, so awkward I’d feel each time.
I’d even contacted Aasa, but she was probably too busy with her musical to do much. “Mayupon is right, you’re just making this bigger than it is,” she’d answered me on Line. “Ari’s cold treatments can only last so long,” she’d added to my surmise. So she did think this was some sort of cold treatment? And she didn’t even know about Miki-san to reach that conclusion. “Shouldn’t you be more worried about having your show cancelled?” Aasa sent a little after, making me feel guilty.
The pandemic only got worse and Miki-san had mentioned she’d heard talks about cancelations. And I still hadn’t had any room in my mind to consider that, even though the Line group with my douki members was becoming a wall of lamentations the last few days. “Did you hear anything new?” I asked her, but I had already opened back to reread my last conversation with Ari.
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The following days went by like a succession of bad dreams. We all had already been aware of Miki-san’s retirement the following year, but seeing it stuck on a board, announced on TV, written on the website was something else. And over the next days, the two of us had spent the night together. At least, this kept me busy enough not to think of ways I could contact Ari. And the less I had time, the quicker time was put in between; and the assembly day for the whole troupe would only get closer. We’d be okay then, when I finally told her she’d misunderstood everything; perhaps, I could even hope that I’d also been wrong and she holds no feelings for Miki-san.
“This is looking bad…” Miki-san was still naked on her bed, but had gotten her cell phone while I was taking a bath.
“Did anything happen?” I asked before absent-mindedly turning on the hair drier. It took me some time to notice she’d been answering me through the noise, by which Miki-san was already chuckling.
She came to end of the bed and kneeled to give me a kiss on the cheek. “The virus thing, Usshii,” she said inside my ear, calling me by the name she’d picked from my douki friends.
I turned off the drier and argued, “Maybe in Kansai, but the numbers in Tokyo aren’t so bad.”
“Um…” she didn’t sound convinced at all.
“Did you hear anything?”
She’d slipped before about how she’d get some inside information on the plans for the theater.
“Not from the theater yet, but being a transferee, you’re even more connected to the troupes than I; you know this is not normal.”
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But I really had no idea it could come to this. All shows were cancelled a couple of days later and it was as if March never existed. The month I had been counting on to make peace with Ari never really came. Even though we were again in the same city, no one knew when the rehearsals would finally start. Everything everywhere was one huge mess.
I barely knew the convenience store near my house until The Red and the Black was cancelled and I ended up home with lots of nothing to do. Weeks later, I even knew the people who worked there. Aside from groceries, no one could do anything in the middle of a quarantine, so I caught myself visiting there every three days or less. Most of my life as a takarasienne had been about eating out or at the canteen of the theater, so no wonder I still couldn’t adapt to the new shopping list I had. I actually had a legitimate shopping list! Also, I missed food there, it was boring to cook just for myself.
“The sakura are blooming!” came the message Rei Makoto sent to our douki group along with a photo of the sakura tree. “This spot is great, too bad we can’t sit by the flowers this year,” she sent in another.
“I don’t think we’ve done any hanami together since the Music School,” Sakuragi Minato answered while I still had my phone open. Zun’s name had been stirring up some weird feelings in me, just because she was in the Cosmos Troupe, together with Sora Kazuki. Would Ari go see the sakura with Sora-chan this year?
“Are you going with your troupe this year too?” I stood by my door as I typed but deleted right after. I didn’t want Zun to think I’d been judging her; I just wanted to know whom Sora-chan was going with. “Did anyone in your troupe go,” I started typing and again deleted. Kocchan sounded so excited, it was possible not many had noticed the sakura blooming yet. I hadn’t, for one. So that question would burn my chances of actually knowing it when it did happen later.
I decided to withhold that message for a week or so. Maybe I could even call Zun then and find a more discreet way to ask if Sora-chan has gone out with anyone (or Ari) lately. It would be good to have any news from her, I realized as I finally decided to go inside. So I let the chat roll a bit more in the group before participating.
I put my phone back in my coat’s pocket and went inside my apartment to a bright genkan, almost tripping over a pair of boots lying around. That momentarily brought me back to Ari’s look when she’d spotted Miki-san’s that night, right where these were this evening. I put my bags down and was about to put them in the shoe rack when I realized these weren’t mine.
“Welcome back!”
I raised my eyes and would have screamed if panic hadn’t left me voiceless. And breathless. So much, I couldn’t think for too many seconds until I identified the intruder.
“How… did you get in?” I asked with a throaty voice through my mask, still not breathing regularly. Removing it, I looked again at Ari standing a few steps from me while wearing my black hoodie.
“I’m making stew! I figured you’ve been too lazy to make actual food and I think I was right.” She pointed at my bag and I shrank from being caught with junk food. “It’s almost ready, so go wash your hands and help put the table.”
I was on my way to comply when I noticed she’d never answered. “How did you come inside?”
Ari had already returned to the kitchen, making actual sounds of cooking something. “The door wasn’t locked, and it was too cold to wait outside.”
“You almost killed me.”
“I could see!” I heard her laughter mixed with the sounds from the stove. “I wish I had a picture of that face you made.”
My hands were shaking as I washed them. I couldn’t believe that, after all those months, Ari was simply cooking dinner for me. Then I wondered why. Was that some way of apologizing? For what? I was the one who’d made the mess we were in, even if not on purpose. I could see it all through Ari’s viewpoint, and I looked bad, really bad.
I still wasn’t well when I got the dishes, almost breaking two bowls.
“What happened?” Ari hurried from the kitchen with a pair of cooking hashi in her hand.
“Nothing,” I said, finishing the task still hearing my heart thump over everything else. “Should I heat some water for tea?”
“Yes! The stew is ready too, but the rice still doesn’t seem to be.”
She’d even made rice? For how long had she been here? I didn’t think I’d taken that much at the convenience store, so she must have gone inside the moment she’d arrived, which had maybe been a second after I’d left.
“You could have texted,” I tried saying it lightly, like a non-consequential comment. “You had time to make all this… You would have waited a lot, if the door wasn’t open.”
From the corner of my eyes, I caught her tighten her lips. “It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
“And there’s the quarantine too.”
“I promise I haven’t been seeing everyone like this, don’t worry.” Her smile looked tense, but I pretended not to see it. My tone before had already risked too much. This, her being here, was much more than I could have expected thirty minutes before, so I’d better not risk her going home now.
I smiled back, because I was honestly glad we could be like this, just cooking in my kitchen, surrounded by a delicious smell coming from her vegetables.
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I’d just finished doing the dishes as Ari helped drying and putting them away, when she snapped her fingers. “How about we have some fun now?”
She put on a DVD she’d picked at random from my collection and grabbed one of the bags she’d brought.
“You have your makeup here?” I raised my eyebrows.
“I thought of bringing some games, but I couldn’t resist. It’s been some time, why not play with these a bit?” She raised a lipstick in each hand. “Also, do you have your wigs here? I’d love to try something with them.”
I shrugged. This sounded a lot like a slumber party from some 60’s American movie, but whatever pleased her. I offered to be the first guinea pig.
As the make-up session advanced, I couldn’t hold back any longer. “I’m sorry for everything.”
“What are you apologizing for, Reiko-san? Moving and almost ruining the eyeliner?” She snickered.
“Sorry for that too.” I tried to be more conscious of my movements as I explained: “That night you saw me with Miki-san. I hadn’t told you about it because it was new to me, too. That hadn’t been planned, believe it or not. We’d first talked about tit that same day, I swear. I just wanted to give fun a try, like you do. Not that I’m blaming you…”
“I know.”
“You don’t have to like it.”
“No, Miki-san told me the next day, that she’d started everything.”
“Oh…” That was news to me. Why hadn’t Miki-san ever mentioned talking to Ari?
“It was clear how immature I’d been, so I felt embarrassed and thought a lot about…” She let her voice die, finishing with the eyeliner.
“About?”
“Hey, now it’s your turn! I want something super cool, like people in the Star Troupe would wear.”
“I came from the Snow Troupe, though.”
“Get a picture of Chie-san and try to follow!”
I complied.
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My body felt so heavy the next day I wasn’t sure I would be able to get up before it was already dark. For long minutes, I couldn’t even feel the shoulder I’d slept on. The pain started doing the trick of forcing me to move at least to a less unnatural position, rolling back on bed. That was when I hit something that wasn’t usually there when I woke up.
I looked to my side, a movement that took more than a minute because my neck was stiff. I felt like it had been hung on a wall with a nail through and through, or maybe that was just what the pain made me think of. When I finally managed it, I found Ari lying next to me, in an alarmingly compact space. “What…” I couldn’t formulate whatever I’d meant to ask with my brain still more than half asleep and struggling to be left alone like that.
I had some sort of memory of being the one who’d asked her to stay over, because it had been very late already, but mostly because I’d been too drunk to remember about the quarantine.
“Good morning!” She turned to me, not bothered that my legs had ended up on top of hers after I’d rolled on the bed. I noticed she hadn’t been sleeping, but typing on her phone.
“Are you talking to Sora-chan?” I didn’t realize how stupid it was to touch that matter because I was too worried I had kept Ari overnight instead of letting her go home to whatever Sora-chan was to her. I pulled back my legs self-consciously and made an effort to sit up.
She twisted her face, which was my first clue. “Just passing time before you woke up. Our photos yesterday were mad, though!”
Photos… Yesterday… Ah. I felt the blush come even before I remembered how silly we’d looked after too many glasses of wine, followed by three cans of chuuhai. To think I’d allowed it to be recorded for posterity…
“Look this one!” Ari had probably read my mind and showed yesterday us in a pose for the Rose of Versailles’ Bastille dance, pretending to lift Oscar. “With some editing…” She swapped ahead through a million attempts of famous and not-so-famous poses. “I’d love using this one in my next ochakai!”
September was still far enough that this crazy pandemic might have ended by then. I had to make sure we took a less embarrassing—at least, less drunk—shot than imitating the famous pose from Lover’s Suicide. Or Titanic, which seemed to have been our following theme in Ari’s film roll. The line we’d progressed was increasingly romantic, in a tragic way. I looked away before finding out what had been next. “So, what did Sora-chan say about you spending the night here?”
Damn. I was still sleepy. I’d forgotten she’d already been clear I should not touch that subject. So much for us telling each other everything…
“It wasn’t her.” Ari locked her screen and got out of the bed. Now I could see she’d slept in my hoodie from last night, the sweatpants were also mine.
“I’m sorry, I know I’m not supposed to mention her… But that was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw you on the phone.”
She looked back from my bedroom door pouting a little. “I don’t get why you’re so fixated on a thing I had months ago.”
“So it's over?”
“It wasn’t anything to be over, Reiko-san.” She gave the same smile one would to a child who won’t understand the amusement park is closing so they have to go home. And I was equally disappointed, because that didn’t make it any more clear. Her voice resonated, “…why you’re so fixated”.
I was, wasn't I?
But we were good friends, almost best friends. I cared a lot about her and for years there had been this another side I’d finally made contact with. However, that was it. I was still not allowed inside.
“You want to know about me but I also want to hear about you,” I explained probably too late.
She lowered her head and spoke in a voice so low I may have misheard her say, “I know already.” But she seemed to change her mind. “So it’s a date!” Or had I really misheard it? One thing didn’t add to the other, right?
“A date?”
“Didn’t we talk about how fun it would be to go around town playing some part? We’ll get to know each other better, like one should on dates. I’ll also get a chance to improve my acting. And I promise I won’t go overboard with your make up again, so please?” Her eyes were so big and watery I tried to ignore the dread from those words.
“I’m not walking around in stage makeup!” It had already taken some getting used to with the whole otokoyaku wardrobe. “I live here.”
“How much did you drink last night?” Ari disappeared for a minute and then came back with a long skirt I’d never seen in my life so she’d definitely brought it with her. “We’ll play boyfriend and girlfriend! And you lost the jankenpo.” She presented it to me with solemnity. “Now let me get changed so we can start on our makeup!”
I looked dumbfounded, but it didn’t feel so wrong. “What about the pandemic?” I shouted to the bathroom, where Ari had entered.
“We won’t go anywhere crowded and we’ll keep our masks on the whole time,” she answered from the other side without waiting a beat, making it clear she’d already planned for my resistance. “Also, we do have to buy lunch, so it’s not totally gratuitous.”
I finally got up, still holding the skirt, and went to my closet to find a feminine enough blouse or something that would agree. My head was full of ideas of how to do Ari’s make up, depending only on what type of clothes she’d chose. Her style was most of the times tomboyish and her round face didn’t hide how young she was. My first strategy would have to be to bring out the man from that boy in her. Surely, it would have been simpler to have her be the girlfriend. We’d be the perfect match. I still remembered her hatsumoude poster picture, for it hadn’t been long since I’d last seen it—it popped up during one completely unrelated search on Google—and she’d looked like a pretty and high class president of the student council. She’d make any man jealous as a girlfriend, I was sure. Unfortunately, we were supposed to hope not to run into people outside.
“Hey, that's not cute!” Ari had appeared from the bathroom wearing my robe, with her hair and face dripping from not being properly dried. She smelled like my soap and my conditioner, but I still felt compelled to inhale. “It’s a date, not a business meeting. You have to charm me, Reiko-san.”
“Just pick me something then.”
“Not fun! I want you to choose it thinking of me!” She winked and pulled one of my jackets out. “Borrowing.” Then moved to her bag and got her binder.
My eyes had moved on their own to investigate what she was wearing underneath, so I turned around and faked choosing another blouse. But my breath was uneven, too aware I was of her moving around the room. I exhaled the moment she left to go back to the bathroom, but gasped a second later when she returned.
“Don’t you need to go or something? I can change in here.” She looked satisfied when she noticed I was still choosing my clothes. “So cute!” She pointed at what I had in my hand, though merely by coincidence for my attention had been elsewhere.
I blushed in shame. I’d forgotten what I was supposed to be doing until then.
"Okay, I'll help you. Or we’ll only eat tomorrow…” She quickly took out a white lace blouse I didn’t even remember owing, then picked a baby pink undershirt from her bag. “This is it!”
“Pink? Are you serious?”
She pouted. “For me? Please?”
“That's the last please I'll listen to today, you heard me?” I stated it, though even I wasn’t confident I could follow through.
My hand was on the bathroom door when I heard the doorbell.
Inside my head, a million thoughts occurred and all of them included me forgetting some appointment. I walked slowly to the door, wondering how mad my manager would be at the other side despite me being unable to remember anything I’d have scheduled. In fact, I was 80% sure I was free. That pretty much summarized my days during the pandemic. At the same time, when was the last time I’d checked my messages? I’d seen Ari’s phone when I woke up, but mine? I’d been on tour to lala land all night after dinner, and also before it, so the times I had it with me, I wasn’t paying attention to any reminders my manager might have sent me.
While I couldn’t decide if I should be frank with her or just ask a few minutes to get ready, the doorbell rang angrier. So I opened the door. There I found a huge basket filled with all the delicious things I could have listed for breakfast.
“Usshii! Good morning?” Miki-san smiled at me from behind it, tilting her head when her eyes found the pink undershirt in my hand. Now I noticed, I’d forgotten the skirt before going to change, it was probably still lying on my bed.
Or not. I felt Ari walking toward us just then, and turned to find her in my robe, still wet from her shower. A thought crossed my mind too late, because it had been too sleepy to have it before—she wasn’t really wearing anything underneath, was she? She’d just gotten out of a bath and put on my robe.
Ari had walked to us with nothing but a robe to hand the damned skirt I’d left behind. “Miki-san?” she stared blankly at my new guest.
That tightness in my stomach wasn’t normal, if we were to consider it was just my friend and my casual partner meeting on a random morning.
To be continued…
Anita, 23/09/2020
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