A Lonely Resurrection

clinging.
    She came over as I was lacing my shoes. She had combed her hair back and was wearing a dark flannel robe. She looked at me for a long moment.
    “I’ll try to help you,” she said.
    I told her the truth. “I don’t know how much you can really do.”
    “I don’t either. But I want to try. I don’t want. . . I don’t want to wind up someplace where I can’t find my way back.”
    I nodded. “That’s a good reason.”
    She reached into a pocket of the robe and pulled out a piece of paper. She extended her arm to hand it to me, and I noticed the diamond bracelet again. I reached out and took her wrist, softly.
    “A gift?” I asked, curious.
    She shook her head slowly. “It was my mother’s,” she said.
    I took the paper and saw she had written a phone number on it. I put it in my pocket.
    I gave her my pager number. I wanted her to have a way to contact me if something came up at the club.
    I didn’t say, “I’ll call you.” I didn’t hug her because of the wet clothes. Just a quick kiss. Then I turned and left.
    I made my way quietly down the hallway to the stairwell. I could tell she thought she wasn’t going to see me again. I had to admit she might be right. The knowledge was as damp and dispiriting as my sodden clothes.
    I came to the first floor and looked out at the entranceway of the building. For a second I pictured the way she had hugged me here. It already seemed like a long time ago. I felt an unpleasant mixture of gratitude and longing, streaked with guilt and regret.
    And in a flash of insight, cutting with cold clarity through the fog of my fatigue, I realized what I hadn’t been able to articulate earlier, not even to myself, when she’d asked me what I was afraid of.
    It had been this, the moment after, when I would come face to face with knowing that it would all end badly, if not this morning, then the next one. Or the one after that.
    I used the rear entrance, where there was no camera. It was still raining when I got outside. The day’s first light was gray and feeble. I walked in my wet shoes until I found a cab, then made my way back to the hotel.

CHAPTER 12
    T he next day I contacted Tatsu via pager and our secure site, and arranged to meet him at noon at the Ginza-yu
sento,
or public bath. The
sento
is a Japanese institution, albeit one that has been in decline since not long after the war, when new apartments began to feature their own tubs and the
sento
became less a hygienic necessity and more a periodic indulgence. But, like all indulgences that are valued not just for their product but for their process, the
sento
will never entirely disappear. For in the unhurried rituals of scrubbing and soaking, and in the perspective of profound relaxation that can only be derived from immersion in water the meek might describe as scalding, there are qualities of devotion, and celebration, and meditation, qualities that are necessary concomitants to a life worth living.
    Ginza-yu exists at both geographical and psychological remove from the nearby shopping glitz for which its namesake is best known, hiding almost slyly in the shadow of the Takaracho expressway overpass, and making its presence known only with a faded, hand-painted sign. I waited in a doorway across the street until I saw Tatsu pull up in an unmarked car. He parked at the curb and got out. I watched him turn the corner into the bathhouse’s side entrance, then followed him in.
    He saw me as I came up behind him. He had already taken off his shoes, and was about to place them in one of the small lockers just inside the entrance.
    “Tell me what you have,” he said.
    I retracted a bit as though hurt. He looked at me for a long moment, then sighed and asked, “How are you?”
    I bent and took off my shoes. “Fine, thanks for asking. You?”
    “Very well.”
    “Your wife? Your daughters?”
    He couldn’t help smiling at the mention of his family. He nodded and said, “Everyone is fine. Thank you.”
    I grinned. “I’ll tell you more inside.”
    We put our shoes away. I had already purchased the necessary accouterments at the convenience store across the street—shampoo, soap, scrubbing cloth, and towels—and handed Tatsu what he needed as we went in. We paid the proprietor the government-mandated and subsidized four hundred yen apiece, walked up the wide wooden stairs to the changing area, undressed in the unadorned locker room, then went through the sliding glass door to the bath beyond.