Quiet, Please

Charles Vary came out of nowhere—no easy feat for a man six-two with hair dyed blonde and contact lenses blue. One moment, two gaijin stood shouting threats at each other and the next Charles had pushed his way between them, kneed one in the nuts before throwing the other down the stairs. Rooted to place, the onlookers stared as he disappeared back inside the club’s pulsing gloom.

Back at his table of giggling, brown-skinned kogyaru, he settled into the leather arm chair, as if he’d just been up to take a piss. He rattled off an apology in yama-ben, the local dialect, prompting one of the girls to cover her mouth in delighted surprise. Another girl, her thumb dancing like some methed-up contortionist across her cell’s keys, removed his hand from the knee of her fishnet stockings. Every one of them looked fresh off the stands of this month’s teeny-bopper fashion mags. Charles chuckled as things settled down around him. He raised a glass of beer to his lips and silently cheered normalcy’s return.

Two younger men approached the table. The shortest, a dark sliver of sexy, fairly dripping with Australia surfer-boy kissability and confidence, nodded amicably as he shook Charles’ hand. Several oversized hairdo’s huddled, whispering and stealing glances at him, adding yet one more reason for Charles to hate his coworker.

“G’day, mate. How’s she treating you?” Denny asked.

“Fair enough, fair enough. What’s up?”

“We were just going to ask you the same.”

“Get out of here! Really?”

Denny gestured to the bloke standing to his left. “This here’s Ben,” he said. He’s the bouncer.”

Ben crossed his arms. Biceps flexed like gerbils lost in surgical tubing.

Charles nodded in greeting and then said to Denny, “And?”

“And,” Ben cut in, mimicking Charles, “what do you think you pulling out there?” A’s and R’s bore the unmistakable welts of the American Bible Belt.

“Ben’s trained to take care of that kind of thing.” Denny put his hands up in the universal sign of “karate chop” by way of explanation.

“Really?” Charles said, sounding surprised.

“Yeah.”

Charles bolted up from his chair to stand nose-to-nose with Ben.

“Well, then, Benjamin, why didn’t you?”

Everything became still. Ben’s eyes narrowed. But in the middle of the brittle tableau, Charles grinned mischievously and stuck out his hand to shake.

Denny laughed, trying to break the tension. Charles and Ben ignored him.

“What’re you gonna do?” Ben asked, voice taut with anger, his tough-guy pose shaken but for now just able to keep his face in place.

“Nothing,” said Charles, a man with no face to lose. He dropped his hand. “Neither are you. Either fight or shut up and walk away, right? Those two out there were just posing, and that kind of stuff makes the rest of us look bad. These guys,” and with this he gestured to the girls at his table and then to the larger group of dancers and drinkers surround them, “really like generalizations, because they are so much easier to deal with. They see a couple of us fighting and these nips can then go off and assume we’re all violent bastards. It’s simple, and oh-so-much easier.”

Denny said, “You drunk the bastard, and you’re pissed, mate. You gotta watch yourself.”

“Always do. Ta,” Charles said with a bow. “So, why don’t you two just go and leave me alone, OK? I’m trying to get lucky here, if you don’t mind.”

Ben and Denny stalked away.

“Sayonara,” Charles said in falsetto, drawing giggles from the girls. He sat down and fielded a few of their questions before turning back to the fun at hand.

The next hour passed in a flurry of drinking and dancing, Charles partnering many girls, favoring none. When he got back to the table, he found another gaijin waiting for him.

“Pete-san,” he said, sitting down.

“Hi. You don’t mind if I sit here, do you?”

“No. By all means…”

Pete worked at the same school as Denny and Charles. He was tall and thin and friendly, but an altogether too wound up Brit for Charles’ taste. Above Pete’s head the solemn gaze of Chief Joseph (the Nez Perce chief; the whole wall being decorated with portraits of famous Native Americans) stood in sharp contrast to Pete’s scrunched up, worried one. The London native always seemed on the verge of divulging some important secret.

“Did you hear about that teacher up in Yamaguchi?” Pete asked.

“Nope. Care for a pint?”

“No, thanks. If it’s cool with you, I’ll just stick with the umeshu. Anyway, he got fired for dating a student. Seems the teachers were having a party at one of their apartments and someone invited the staff without checking around first.”

Charles waved the waitress over. She wore chaps and a black and white cowboy hat. Her lips glowed iridescent pink, her bikini neon green, in the black light hanging overhead.

“Umeshu to biiru onegaishimasu. And, if you don’t mind me saying: I just love your breasts.” She smiled in incomprehension.

To Pete he said, “So?” as the waitress walked off.

“Can’t believe you didn’t hear about this,” Pete continued excitedly. “The staff member came to the party and found a bunch of students there, and one of the teachers mashing face with a student in the bedroom. Staff stormed right out and called head office. He got the chop a couple days later.”

Charles, who’d heard many such stories before, asked: “You sure it wasn’t for something else?”

“What else could it have been? I’m going to get fired, aren’t I?”

“Not if you keep your mouth shut.”

“But I’ve heard that they’re looking to cut us old-timers.”

“Pete…you’ve been working here two years, right? How long’ve I been here?”

“I don’t know. Four years, last I heard.”

“Right. I’m a lot more expensive than you, but they haven’t booted me out the door yet. So, don’t worry.”

Pete smirked. “Easy for you to say. Everyone likes Vary-san.”

Charles waved his hand in dismissal. “Not really. I would’ve gotten that pay rise by now if they did.”

“You know,” Pete said after a few sips of his drink, “usually, I’d swear you were turning Japanese, but sometimes, when you say something like ‘pay rise,’ you sound like a Brit. Kanpai,” he said, saluting Charles with his tumbler.

“Kanpai,” Charles returned, raising his own glass.

Charles knew Pete’s baseline paranoia stemmed from the company’s “No Socialization” policy: a clause in their labor contract forbidding teachers from meeting with students outside school. Unfortunately for Pete, he’d been dating a shrinking violet of a student for several months now; a fact he’d confided to Charles just a week before.

“You know, Pete,” Charles had said, “that policy is there for a reason. It’s to keep all these horny bastards like Denny from sleeping around with half the school, spreading crabs and bad vibes.”

Pete hadn’t liked that response, and had explained how the policy was against Japanese labor laws because it infringed on the teachers’ private lives and was racist, to boot, because it applied to the foreign teachers but not the Japanese staff.

To which Charles replied: “You signed the contract. You’re bound to follow it. Maybe you shouldn’t have told me this.” That had ended their conversation.

The waitress returned with their drinks. Pete accepted his with an Arigatou and then said to Charles, “You had Osamu today, right? What was his problem?”

“Other than his usual tendency to hum and haa for ten minutes before answering any question, you mean? or the fact that his halitosis ranked nasty today?”

“Both,” Pete laughed, and then turned serious: “I hate the man. He’s always asking irrelevant questions, interrupting other students, never paying attention to what others are saying.”

The unique thing about Pete, Charles has always figured, was how he, alone among the teachers, genuinely liked the students and the job, no matter how frustrating it became…and teaching ESL was a job that frustrated everyone eventually. And Pete professed that he wanted to live in Japan for the rest of his life. So, for him to confess hatred for a student gave Charles pause, though he resolved not to get involved.

“Well, that’s Osamu for you.”

Movement at the door made him look up. The guy he’d pushed down the stairs and three of his friends were making their way to a table across the room from Charles.

“How’s the missus?” Charles asked, returning his attention to Pete. Pete blushed, his palled cheeks flushing to pink.

“She’s good,” he said. “Hates her job. Nothing new there. She says she wants to move to London with me, but then she turns around and complains how scary everything outside of Japan. We go through this every couple weeks. How about you? Rumor has it that you’ve got a new girlfriend.”

“Me? No, not really. Just a girl. But she’s moving too fast, talking about buying a house and stuff. ‘Not on a teacher’s salary we aren’t,’ I told her.”

“Hey, you there! Old fuck!”

The shout came from across the room. The guy was leaning back in his chair, flipping Charles the bird.

“You know those guys?” Pete asked, worried.

Charles grimaced. “Unfortunately. Just a wanker. Ignore him.”

Ignoring them turned out to be a lot easier than Charles had feared. The press of people grew tighter as midnight came and went unremarked. Tables disappeared; people massed around the bar, ordering drinks. Pete said goodnight. “Gotta work in the morning,” he explained.

And with that, Charles was left alone once again with his girls. One of them did eventually make a move. She whispered how she wanted to get him alone outside, her satiny lips tickling the tip of his ear. He laughed and gave her a warm hug. When he failed to follow her as she stood to leave, she asked, confused, “Aren’t you coming?”

“Yes, yes,” he said, and then asked the girl next to him how her trip to Dubai had been. Ashamed and angry, the other girl hurried away. Charles would hate himself later, but for now it was best to keep his eye on the guy he’d pushed down the stairs. He’d been drinking a lot since coming in, and sometimes everyone at his table would look over and laugh. It was time to go home.

Outside, the crisp night air woke him with the same sobering effect usually reserved for the arrival a letter from the taxman.

“Hey, hold up there a minute, man,” someone behind him called out.

Charles turned. There stood the guys who’d been watching him. The one he’d pushed down the stairs was standing at the back, looking drunk and belligerent.

“What’s up, guys?” Charles stepped forwards.

The eldest among them, a guy with greased-back blond hair and wearing a Pixies t-shirt, walked up to Charles and said, “You know, I’ve never seen you around here before. Where’re you from?”

“Around,” Charles said.

“When no further answer seemed forthcoming, his interrogator continued: “Yea. Whatever. I don’t know what your gig is, but you shoved my friend there down the stairs. Now, we’re willing to bury the hatchet and invite you to come out with us to this club we know where they got this new batch of Filipino strippers. And these chicks’ll do anything, if you know what I mean.”

Charles looked over at the one in the back. His face said there’d be trouble long before they got to the next club.

“So, what do you say?”

“I say: No. But thanks for the invite.”

“You see guys,” said the one in the back. “I told you he was a pufta. Don’t turn around, boys. This one loves eating the chocky starfish.”

Everyone watched to see Charles’ reaction. But Charles had been too surprised to react. He’d been accused of a lot in his day, but this was the first time anyone’d accused him of being gay.

He smiled as if at some private joke, shrugged, and said, “See you guys later.” With that, he walked away.

It was a long walk back to his apartment. On the way, he passed a 7/11, in whose huge window a few late-night revelers stood thumbing through magazines: men through the skin mags at their idea of what a woman should look like, women through fashion mags at their idea of what women should look like. Charles wanted to punch the window, but figured this’d only bring the police down on him, and he couldn’t afford that attention now.

By the blinking light of an old fluorescent bulb, he fumbled the key several times before getting the lock open. Inside, he tripped over a couple of shoes and knocked down the umbrella stand. He righted the umbrella stand, moved the shoes, and plopped down on the entrance step. He stayed like that for a long time, breathing deep, staring absently at the wall, letting the dark and silence close in around him. Suddenly he wrenched off his shoe and flung it at the metal door. It struck with a dull and insignificant thud, and the long pent-up retort hiss through his clenched teeth: “At least I don’t have to pay women to talk to me.”

Charles winced as a faint mewl sounded in the living room. Wordlessly causing his own loss of control, he hurried as quietly as he could through the cluttered kitchen, stepping carefully to avoid the known squeaky spots in the faux-wood linoleum. He opened the sliding door. For once, it opened without a sound. He really had to congratulate himself on having thought to wax the wooden track earlier that day. He ducked in and, with the same care, closed the door again before all the warm air escaped.

There, in the dim, orange light of an overhead lamp on its lowest setting, in the middle of a large spread of Japanese futons and blankets, lay his wife, curled around their eight-month-old son, both in white pajamas, both still and breathing deeply, his son’s tiny fingers brushing the nipple of his mother’s breast.

Charles knelt down and brushed a lock of black hair from his wife’s tired face. She opened an eye and smiled weakly. He could see it had been a difficult night, again: stuffed toys, rattles, towels and diapers lay strewn across the remaining tatami. He motioned for her to go back to sleep, and then went to the bathroom to get ready for bed

How fragile peace. He checked his face in the mirror and then removed his contacts, revealing dark brown eyes.

She’d been the brightest student at the school. They’d dated, gotten married, and had a child—all without a word to anyone except family and closest friends.

He splashed cold water over his face before washing the bristly skin with soap. Fishing a toothbrush and paste out of the cabinet, he scrubbed the stench of beer and cigarettes from his teeth and tongue.

He’d spread disinformation in the gaijin circles, and made sure no one knew where he lived. But the strain was telling. Playing the handsome, single white guy in Japan drained their already limited finances. The company had refused every request for a raise.

He spit, gargled, and changed into pajamas.

After making sure his wife and son were settled, he checked the timer on the heater—it would turn off in another thirty minutes or so, and then back on in five hours for the baby’s morning feed. He would have to get up then, too. He lay down and stared at the ceiling. Why had he attacked those guys? He’d thought he was preventing a scene drawing more attention to the foreigners at the club, but now he cringed at how foolish he’d been. His head spun with exhaustion and alcohol. The only thing he’d any certainty of these days was that the two lives resting next to him needed peace and stability, and it was his duty to provide it. And there lay the source of his fear: a peace that could be shattered by just one crack in the drawn curtains or by just one break in the gaijin façade he’d donned, or, equally as frightening, by one wrong word at one wrong time during a lesson, causing the company to decide it was transfer time. Charles Vary had lived eight months now balanced precariously at the top step, sensing the hand behind him that would push him down those stairs. Sleep could not come quick enough. His mind replayed every possible disaster across the canopy of this warm and gentle light.