Mrs. Ernestine McCoy was wearing an ankle-length elaborately embroidered black silk kimono.
She bowed, in the Japanese manner.
“Welcome home, most honorable husband,” she said.
I am so goddamned dirty it would be obscene to get close to, much less hug, something that beautiful.
“Hey, baby,” he said. His voice sounded strange.
Ernie turned and reached through the open door and came back with what looked very much as if it was a double scotch.
“I hope my humble offering of something to drink pleases my honorable husband,” Ernie said and, bowing again, handed him the drink.
“What’s with the Japanese-woman routine?” McCoy asked, taking the drink.
“I hoped that my honorable husband would be pleased,” Ernie said.
“Your honorable husband is delighted,” McCoy said. “Have you got one of those for Zimmerman?”
“For Zimmerman-san and Hart-san, honorable husband, ” Ernie said, and signaled through the door.
A Japanese woman came out with two drinks on a tray. Ernie took them one at a time and, bowing to Zimmerman and Hart, gave them to them.
“Hey, Ernie,” Zimmerman said. “Could you get Mae-Su to think along these lines?”
“You’ll have to do that yourself, Honorable Zimmerman-san,” Ernie said.
“Baby, I really need a bath,” McCoy said. “You don’t want to know where Ernie and I have been.”
“I can make a good guess from the way you smell, honorable husband,” Ernie said.
“The only difference between a Korean outhouse and a Korean rice field,” Zimmerman said, “is that some of the outhouses have roofs.”
Ernestine Sage McCoy, still playing the Japanese wife, put her hands in front of her chest, palms together, stood to one side, bowed, and indicated that her husband was supposed to go into the house.
The living room, too, was unchanged from the last time he’d been in the house. McCoy had presumed their furniture was in a shipping crate somewhere, but he didn’t know. Ernie took care of the house and everything connected with it.
He walked through the living room into the bedroom, also unchanged. The sheets on the bed were even turned down. He stuck his head in the bathroom, saw towels on the racks, and went inside and started to undress. He really wanted to put his arms around Ernie, and he couldn’t do that reeking of the mud of human feces-fertilized Korean rice fields.
When he was naked, he turned the shower on, stepped into the glass walled stall, and let the water run over him for a full minute before even trying to soap himself.
He closed his eyes when he soaped his head and hair and was startled after a moment when he felt Ernie’s arms around him, her breasts pressing against his back.
He raised his face to the showerhead, and after a moment opened his eyes and turned in his wife’s arms and held her to him. She raised her face to his, and they kissed.
She caught his hand and directed it to her stomach.
“It’s starting to show,” she said, softly. He caressed her stomach for a moment, and then, with a groan, picked her up and carried her out of the shower to the bed.
“You want to tell me what’s going on?” Ken McCoy asked.
Ernie was lying with her head on his chest, her legs thrown over his.
“Going on about what?”
“About everything,” he said. “The house, the Japanese-wife routine. Everything.”
“Well, they’re sort of tied together,” Ernie said.
“Start with the house,” he said. “How did we get it back? General Pickering?”
“Actually, it’s ours,” Ernie said.
“What do you mean, ‘ours’?”
“We own it,” she said.
“How come we own it?”
“Well, when I went to the housing office when we first came to Japan, what they were going to give us was a captain’s apartment—a captain/no children’s apartment. They give out quarters on the size of the family. A captain/no children gets one bedroom and a bedroom/study. I didn’t like what they showed me, and I knew you wouldn’t, so I went house-hunting. . . .”
“And bought this, and didn’t tell me?”
“I didn’t tell you because you thought our having money was going to hurt your Marine Corps career,” she said. “I was willing to go along with that, but the quarters were different. I didn’t want to live in that lousy little apartment. You really want to hear all of this?”
“All of it,” he said.
“Okay. If you don’t like what they offer you, you can ‘go on the economy,’ and if you can find something to rent that your housing allowance will pay for, they’ll rent it for you.”