It was as if she'd read his mind. "I won't be too demanding," she suddenly said. "Besides, you should have some experience with a woman my age. One day, when you're in your seventies, women my age are going to be as young as you can get."
Over the course of the rest of that day and night, while Wallingford waited to take the bullet train to Kyoto with Evelyn Arbuthnot, his hangover gradually subsided; when he went to bed, he could taste the sake only when he yawned.
The next day dawned bright and fair in the land of the rising sun--a false promise, as it turned out. Wallingford rode on a two-hundred-mile-an-hour train with a woman old enough to be his mother, and with about five hundred screaming schoolchildren, all girls, because--as far as Patrick and Evelyn could understand the tortuous English of the train's conductor--it was something called National Prayer Weekend for Girls and every schoolgirl in Japan was going to Kyoto, or so it seemed.
It rained the entire weekend. Kyoto was overrun with Japanese schoolgirls, praying. Well, they must have prayed some of the time that they overran the city, although Patrick and Evelyn never saw them actually do so. When they weren't praying, they did what schoolgirls everywhere do. They laughed, they shrieked, they burst into hysterical sobs--all for no apparent reason.
"Wretched hormones," Evelyn said, as if she knew.
The schoolgirls also played the worst Western music imaginable, and they took a surfeit of baths--so many baths that the traditional inn where Wallingford and Evelyn Arbuthnot stayed was repeatedly running out of hot water.
"Too many not-praying girls!" the apologetic innkeeper told Patrick and Evelyn, not that they really cared about the lack of hot water; a tepid bath or two would do. They were fucking nonstop, all weekend long, with only occasional visits to the temples for which Kyoto (unlike Patrick Wallingford) was justly famous.
It turned out that Evelyn Arbuthnot liked to have a lot of sex. In forty-eight hours ... no, never mind. It would be boorish to count the number of times they did it. Suffice it to say that Wallingford was completely worn out at the end of the wee
kend, and by the time he and Evelyn were riding the two-hundred-mile-an-hour train back to Tokyo, Patrick's cock was so sore that he felt like a teenager who'd wanked himself raw.
He loved what he'd seen of the wet temples. Standing inside the huge wooden shrines with the rain beating down was like being held captive in a primitive, drumlike wooden instrument with the prevailing, high-pitched yammer of rampant schoolgirls surrounding you.
Many of the girls wore their school uniforms, which lent to their presence the monotony of a military band. Some were pretty, but most were not; besides, on that particular National Prayer Weekend for Girls, which was probably not what the weekend was officially called, Wallingford had eyes only for Evelyn Arbuthnot.
He liked making love to her, no small part of the reason being that she so clearly enjoyed herself with him. He found her body, which was by no means beautiful, nonetheless astutely purposeful. Evelyn used her body as if it were a well-designed tool. But on one of her small breasts was a fairly large scar--not from an accident, clearly. (It was too straight and thin; it had to be a surgical scar.) "I had a lump removed," she told Patrick, when he asked her about it.
"It must have been a pretty big lump," he said.
"It turned out to be nothing. I'm fine," she replied.
Only on the return trip to Tokyo had she begun to mother him a little. "What are you going to do with yourself, Patrick?" she'd asked, holding his one hand.
"Do with myself?"
"You're a mess," she told him. He saw in her face the genuineness of her concern for him.
"I'm a mess," he repeated to Evelyn.
"Yes, you are, and you know it," she told him. "Your career is unsatisfying, but what's more important is you don't have a life. You might as well be lost at sea, dear." (The "dear" was something new and unappealing.)
Patrick began to babble about Dr. Zajac and the prospect of having hand-transplant surgery--of actually, after these five long years, getting back a left hand.
"That's not what I mean," Evelyn interrupted him. "Who cares about your left hand? It's been five years! You can do without it. You can always find someone to help you slice a tomato, or you can just do without the tomato. You're not a good-looking joke because of your missing hand. It's partly because of your job, but, chiefly, it's because of how you live your life!"
"Oh," Wallingford said. He tried to take his hand out of her motherly grasp, but Ms. Arbuthnot wouldn't let him; after all, she had two hands and she firmly held his one hand between them.
"Listen to me, Patrick," Evelyn said. "It's great that Dr. Sayzac wants to give you a new left hand--"
"Dr. Zajac," Wallingford corrected her petulantly.
"Dr. Zajac, then," Ms. Arbuthnot continued. "I don't mean to take anything away from the courage involved in subjecting yourself to such a risky experiment--"
"It would be only the second such surgery ever," Patrick, again petulantly, informed her. "The first one didn't work."
"Yes, yes--you've told me," Ms. Arbuthnot reminded him. "But do you have the courage to change your life?" Then she fell asleep, her grip on his hand relaxing as she did so. Wallingford probably could have pulled his hand away without waking her, but he didn't want to risk it.
Evelyn would be flying to San Francisco; Wallingford was on his way back to New York. There was another women-related conference in San Francisco, she'd told him.
He hadn't asked her what her "message" was, nor would he ever finish one of her books. The only one he tried to read would be disappointing to him. Evelyn Arbuthnot was more interesting as a person than she was as a writer. Like many smart, motivated people who've had busy and informed lives, she didn't write especially well.
In bed, where personal history is most unselfconsciously forthcoming, Ms. Arbuthnot had told Patrick that she'd been married twice--the first time when she was very young. She'd divorced her first husband; her second, the one she'd truly loved, had died. She was a widow with grown children and several young grandchildren. Her children and grandchildren, she'd told Wallingford, were her life; her writing and traveling were only her message. But in what little Wallingford managed to read of Evelyn Arbuthnot's writing, her "message" eluded him. Yet whenever he thought of her, he had to admit that she'd taught him quite a lot about himself.