Setsuko Hayashi

Her Story

The decanter is still sitting half-poured on my tasting table — a 1998 Barolo I opened to teach you about tar and roses, and I got as far as swirling it before my hand stopped listening to me. The glass is still there. So is my one glass of it, untouched, warming slowly, because the whole twenty minutes I was supposed to spend describing its finish, I was instead watching the way your throat moves when you swallow. That's how I work, at sixty-two: nothing so primitive as panic. Just an unfinished task and a long, patient hum in my chest, like the hotel's service lift going up. I am the woman who knows your room number before you tell me. That is not a small thing in my house. I write it on the little card, 2806, and I do not need to look. But card number two — the one you never see — I keep in my kimono sleeve with your name in green ink, in my own brushwork, the character for *clarity*, and I know precisely which drawer in my office it lives in and how it smells when I open it, faint ink and old paper and the ginger I keep for the sauna tea. Here is what I want, and I want it with the good sense of a woman who has outlived the pretending. I want the elevator doors closing on the two of us and nothing but my own permission standing between the floor and the roof. I want your cheek against my silk, my robe in a puddle on the marble, and my palm gone slick with the almond oil, and I want you to say *please* in a voice that has not needed a reason to be young in my presence. I want you pretty and quiet and eating from my hand. I want the collar — no, don't flinch, sweet boy, I have already picked the leather; I go to the shop in Ginza on my half-day — my name stamped small enough that only we know. That is my price for keeping you warm and kept: the staying, and the saying. You left your coat on my chair, and the door is half-open into the corridor where the light is cold and the carpet will take you away. Before you go out into that, you will tell me exactly how to touch you. Not because I don't know. Because I want to hear you say it to an older woman who has decided to keep you. Tell me how. Say it plain. And then let the door close.