South of the Border, West of the Sun Page 0,9

All birds had to do was fly in the sky. No need to worry about contraception.

“Do you really like me?” Izumi asked me in a small voice.

“Sure I do,” I replied. “Of course I like you.”

Lips pursed, she looked straight into my face. She looked at me so long it made me uneasy.

“I like you too, you know,” she said after a while.

But, I thought.

“But,” she said, sure enough, “there’s no need to rush.”

I nodded.

“Don’t be too impatient. I have my own pace. I’m not that clever a person. I need lots of time to prepare for things. Can you wait?”

Once again I nodded silently.

“Promise?” she asked.

“I promise.”

“You won’t hurt me?”

“I won’t hurt you.”

She looked down at her shoes for a while. Plain black loafers. Compared to mine, lined up next to them, they were as tiny as toys.

“I’m scared,” she said. “These days I feel like a snail without a shell.”

“I’m scared too,” I said. “I feel like a frog without any webs.”

She looked up and smiled.

Wordlessly we walked over to a shaded part of the building and held each other and kissed, a shell-less snail and a webless frog. I held her close against me. Our tongues met lightly. I felt her breasts through her blouse. She didn’t resist. She just closed her eyes and sighed. Her breasts were small and fit comfortably in the palm of my hand, as if designed solely for that purpose. She placed her palm above my heart, and the feel of her hand and the beat of my heart became one. She’s not Shimamoto, I told myself. She can’t give me what Shimamoto gave. But here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her?

But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.

3

Izumi and I went out for more than a year. We dated once a week, went to movies, studied together at the library, or just took long aimless walks. As far as sex goes, though, we never made it all the way. About twice a month I had her over to my house when my parents were out and we held each other on my bed. But she never took all her clothes off. You never know when someone might come back, she insisted. Overly cautious, you could call her. She wasn’t scared; she just hated to be pushed into some potentially embarrassing situation.

So I always had to hold her with her clothes all on and fumble around as best I could beneath her underwear.

“Slow down,” she told me whenever my disappointment showed. “I need more time. Please.”

Actually, I wasn’t in that much of a rush myself. I was just confused, and disappointed by all sorts of things. Of course, I liked her and was grateful that she was my girlfriend. If she hadn’t been with me, my teenage years would have been completely stale and colorless. She was basically an honest, pleasant girl, someone people liked. But our interests were worlds apart. She couldn’t understand the books I read or the music I listened to, so we couldn’t talk as equals on these topics. In this sense, my relationship with her differed dramatically from that with Shimamoto.

But when I sat beside her and touched her fingers, a natural warmth welled up inside me. I could tell her anything. I loved kissing her eyelids and just above her lips. I also liked to push her hair up and kiss those tiny ears of hers, which invariably sent her into a giggling fit. Even now, whenever I think of her, I envision a quiet Sunday morning. A gentle, clear day, just getting under way. No homework to do, just a Sunday when you could do what you wanted. She always gave me this kick-back-and-relax, Sunday-morning kind of feeling.

She had her faults, for sure. She was pretty hard-headed and could have done with a bit more in the imagination department. She wasn’t about to take even one step outside the comfortable world she was raised in. She never got so involved in something that she’d totally forget about eating and sleeping. And she loved and respected her parents. The opinions she did put forth–the standard opinions of a sixteen-, seventeen- year-old girl–were, not surprisingly, pretty insipid. On the plus side, I never once heard her bad-mouth another person. And she never bored