Wasabi

• Feet of Lead (2/?)
• The Second Kiss

Thomm Quackenbush

Arthur slips through the mesh and faded gray wood of the garden gates, a bag of sushi in one hand and a Styrofoam cup of miso soup in the other. Bianca had abandoned her sweatshirt for the coolness of her purple tank top. Her bare shoulders shine golden with the six o'clock sun.

In greeting, he says, "the woman at the restaurant had said this would take forty-five minutes. I don't know why room temperature fish and rice should take that long; it was a longer wait than I anticipated." He looks at her, the purple nitrile gloves on her hands well dirtied. Purple, he notes, not a contrasting shade from the tank top. She is not, and will never be, the sort of woman who intentionally matches, so he doesn't comment about this accident. "I thought we were here to have dinner, not work."

She pulls off the gloves with no fanfare. "I figured that I would get some work in while I waited for you," she says, squinting against the sunlight, shielding them with her hand as though sighting for dry land. Her ring glitzes into his eyes, and she doesn't know. She gestures to her community garden section, which looks like a bare patch of earth that orderly rows of weeds had claimed. "Those are my broccolis. Aren't they cute?"

He scans in the direction she waves. "The little stalks?"

"No, the leafy bits."

He looks at the maroon and green leaves, unable to fit into his schema for the same plant that resembles soggy trees on the dinner plate. "They're great," he says with evident enthusiasm, "but I would like to have dinner now."

"On the ground or...?" She leaves the conjunction hanging as though he might fill in a viable option.

They settle two feet outside her plot, in a patch of grass that the community had yet to claim and cultivate. People weren't as interested since it became plain that the students from the local private college felt entitled to midnight produce raids. Bianca had sprinkled sacrifices of blood and the shells of microscopic creatures in hopes of dissuading more natural pests. There existed no simple means of frightening away strangers who harvested her labor unseen.

He digs into the salad in the plastic clamshell, covering a few leaves of lettuce with a ginger carrot dressing that he would reject in any other circumstance but which he enjoys as an aspect of the experience. She opens the cup of miso soup and, without inquiring after a spoon, sips it.

Her Philadelphia and cucumber rolls depress him with their sparseness. He can't understand ordering cucumber surrounded only by rice and seaweed. The draw of sushi for him was the whole sensual experience, the yielding salt of the fish, the bland mush of the rice, the wet paperiness of the seaweed, bookended by the savory sting of the pickled ginger and the sinus-clearing pain of good wasabi. Not that he would know good wasabi, just the hospital green-tinted mustard most restaurants served.

"Did you know," he says, "that one-third of your tastebuds up and die on you by the time you get old?"

"How old?"

He pops a spicy California roll, lightly touched by wasabi and soy sauce, in his mouth and chews in consideration of this point. He had been attempting to linger over his food lately, to savor rather than consume, a vow easier to undertake when absent the sting of the wasabi. Had he killed off a few more? "Older than us, I expect. The process has no doubt begun--on me more so than you--but we likely haven't a moment to lose. If you have any serious tasting to do, don't wait."

She kisses him, as he knew she would. He practically begged for it, though this was not his original intention. He wanted to tell her something he knew. A kiss, one of the thousands of their relationship, but still its own act, somehow resulted.

She jerks her head back, nose scrunched, eyes squeezed shut. He raises his eyebrow, surprised at the intensity of this reaction, then recalls his sushi.

"You may have a few more tastebuds than I do. The lack of tastebuds makes spicy foods easier to take," Arthur says. "Astronauts crave hot sauce because it is the only thing with which they can manage to flavor their food in space."

They eat in amicable near silence for a minute as she admires this garden on the edge of an automotive sea.

"I wonder which of your rolls is the best," she says.

"California, salmon, and tuna. You won't like them."

She looks them over. "Do you want one of my rolls?"

"No." He waits for her to ask, but it is a moment wasted. "Have a California roll."

She seizes a piece in her chopsticks, eating it in two bites. She cringes. "Oh, it's spicy."

"I like spicy."

She shakes her head in displeasure.

"I told you that you wouldn't like it."

She puts a Philadelphia roll next to the fake grass sushi restaurants always put on the plates. He did not ask for it and doubts he wants it. He applies a tiny dollop of wasabi over the cream cheese and allows it a passing acquaintanceship with his small, takeout cup of soy sauce. His look of displeasure, while far from the pre-tantrum pout of hers, matches for emphasis. "Dairy has no place in sushi."

"I disagree," she says, sampling a cucumber roll from her plate.

"This is why you are so wrong." He watches her chew and swallow. Her shaggy hair covers her eyebrows, melding and receding from her eyelashes with each blink. She washes it down with the remains of the tepid miso soup, her smile in triple parentheses. God, he thinks, she is a beauty.

"Would you want to marry me?"

She snorts indecently, taking a napkin from his lap. "I am marrying you in a couple of months."

She holds the ring toward him, almost threatening.

He shakes his head. "No, if you saw me right now for the first time and God or whatever said, 'This is the one,' would you?"

She rolls her eyes at this tortured hypothetical. "You are eating sushi in a garden on May first to bless the crop because this is what we do on May firsts. Chances are good."

They'd know one another for three May firsts and eaten sushi in the garden for two of them. As good a formation of a tradition as any.

"Would you marry me?" she asks. "Same thing. Holy declaration, first sight."

To think it over, he eats more wasabi, its dependable pain. He knows what to expect enough to crave the heat and hurt.

With his chopstick, he picks a pinky-nail amount of the fake wasabi and points it her way. "Eat that glob, and I'll marry you right now."

She pinches it between her fingers with mock reluctance.

"Don't you dare!" he shouts, but he knows that she never would. She wants to marry him, but she wouldn't subject herself to unnecessary suffering to do it.

They relax into the dirt again, this part in the play over and another not yet cued.

"Would you though? Marry me?" she asks. "I answered, so it is only fair that you do."

"I proposed, didn't I?"

She frowns. "You asked the Bianca whom you had known for years. You didn't ask the Bianca whom you have just now met."

Arthur leans back onto his elbows, taking her in afresh. Her hair was far longer when he had met her, one day lopped off because she felt she needed a change. It had begun to get to the point where it again suited her oval face. It would bear the veil well, that's for sure. Around the time when she changed her hair, she lost interest in elaborate dresses and makeup. He supposed he might have thought this was a trick, to entice him with one face and swap in this one. That isn't how it felt to him. It was all at once, but it was building forever; she looked different, but more herself. Who was he, come to it, to tell her what to look like?

But that wasn't the question either, not really. If he met this woman now, in the garden, would he marry her on the spot?

She wrinkles her nose, and he knows that a bug had distracted her attention from the answer to a question that he had had only meant for an easy conversation this evening and which he was, in customary fashion, taking too seriously.

She is beautiful. That is not in question. He had been with beautiful women before, beautiful in different ways than her. Women that were not beautiful in any classical sense, too, but came to be beautiful for the duration of the affair. He thought that you couldn't love anyone on sight--or even for a long time after you said that you loved them because you couldn't know what shape the love would take. He remembered the moment he admitted to Bianca that he loved her. The word slipped out when they were in bed, half-clothed. He was trying his damnedest not to make love to her because he hadn't before. He had wanted to for weeks. He could have taken her to bed for most of that, but he wanted it to be right with her. For the whole affair, he'd wanted it to be right, so he wasn't sorry that day and wasn't dissatisfied to hear her say it back, but he knew then that it wasn't the right sort of love yet. It was the mustard seed of it, a speck of what it could become, nourished and watered.

It wasn't the sort of love that could have made her beautiful to him if she weren't--though she was. It might have been easier if she were a touch harder on the eyes. Then he would know. He would look at her, and his heart would overrule his eyes. No, that wasn't it. It was that he would see what it was in her that made her so beautiful. It wouldn't have mattered to him what the world might have thought about it.

But she was beautiful. he might have married her at first sight because of that. Even with these years under their belts, looking at her still gave him that charge, like when he stood before enormous marble figures in museums and couldn't fathom how all that beauty managed to flow into this one thing. It wasn't right, marrying someone because you thought she was beautiful, because that sort of beauty was temporary. Even if it were bolstered up by the love that would build from it, you didn't marry for beauty. You slept with beautiful women, you worshipped them until dawn, but that wasn't any reason to marry.

But she isn't just beautiful. She began too beautiful for him to get his head around, but there was more to her beneath that, even if he couldn't see it at first. That was the thing. He would show his friends a picture of her then, and they'd treat it like that was all the answer they could need. "Yep, she sure is a beauty," like she was something he had made and was showing off. Or something he had caught. Back then, he had to justify why he was with her, and he couldn't rightly then say why.

He'd gotten out of a relationship that had soured (with a woman who was beautiful, too, and who had changed into something also beautiful, but differently and no longer his). He had meant to stay a bachelor a while, though he was not closing himself off to dalliances, exactly. Just not commitment. Just not someone lingering in his bed, but he kept inviting Bianca back. He lost all taste for other women, for the sight of them. Bianca stayed beautiful, as beautiful as she was when he'd met her, but the beauty of other women couldn't help but dim in contrast.

Arthur couldn't be confident that he knew she was well-spoken until three months in. Their communication was all in touch and curious shyness. It made him laugh now to think of her shyness because he'd see so much of her body, touched all he could, felt her, tasted her. The moment it was over, or when he would give her a look of appreciation, she would all but hide behind her hands, as if not seeing him had hidden her.

Then, one night, forgetting her shyness over dinner, she started talking. It was like hearing a sunset talk about its day or a deer offering up a secret. He didn't want to spook her, but it startled him that he had somehow overlooked this. It made him feel shallow that he could.

But he didn't have the right love there, either. It almost annoyed him when she would call him and tell him how much she loved him. He thought then that she couldn't possibly. It made him feel guilty and skeptical. It made him think less of her that she could say these things, as though admitting that she loved him had to have been a lie.

He was not a handsome man, he knew. Presentable, certainly. He wouldn't strike anyone peculiar in either direction, malformed or perfect. He did all right for himself. He didn't begrudge that he wasn't more attractive, as he had been attractive enough for what he wanted.

He believed that she found him attractive. That wasn't in doubt. Then, it seemed like a character flaw, he supposed, that she could think he was worthy.

Other beautiful women, he didn't feel this way about, and maybe that was an answer on its own. He could be with them, and there wasn't this pressure. When they lasted long enough, they would attain that extra beauty. Until then, they enjoyed one another's company for however long they were going to. They found him nice enough to keep around, and he didn't much wonder why. It seemed like that was their business. He had no right to interfere in it.

"It's strange to think there was a first time I had sushi," she says, seemingly out of nowhere, though that was the sensible thing to say now, having this meal in this garden on this evening. She is miles away from the question whose answer he persists in twisting out. "It was at a buffet, so I didn't have to risk my meal. It can't have been good, but it was good enough that I kept trying until I found good sushi."

This remark didn't require or ask for a response, and he was too preoccupied to give one. She had said it to say it and nothing more.

Maybe that was it, though, about the buffet. He had had little samplings of a dozen dishes, but none filled his plate. Some were tastier than others. That was the nature of these things and the point of a buffet. You sampled, you thought you were full, but, in recollecting, you couldn't say what the food was that had done the filling.

She wasn't a buffet, and certainly not the feminine equivalent of buffet sushi. If set before him--not as she had been, but strictly and on first blush how she appeared--would his instinct be to satisfaction with the "gifts he was about to receive from the bounty of Christ, our Lord, Amen," or would he instead be wondering if there might not be a dumpling or other savory morsel warming a few yards away?

He wasn't hungry anymore, not in a figurative sense or, given that he had reduced his meal to a piece of sushi and a surfeit of wasabi, a literal one. With her, he hadn't had that hunger for years, that "looking over the shoulder of the women in his arms" wanderlust. It was subtle and small, the loss of it. He wasn't sure if it was a fullness that persuaded him away from this habit or that he had lost his taste for it.

He wouldn't know all this, meeting her now in this garden. But seeing this nymph puzzling over her sushi and cooling soup in a lot by the road, in a plot more dirt than plant, would intrigue him. He would stop and make an excuse to talk with her, with or without divine intervention, so that was maybe enough. He would get to fall in love with her all over again. He felt a pang of jealousy for his hypothetical self who would get this chance.

Talk with her, get to know her, try to seduce her into coming home with him, but not marry on sight. But he had never believed in arranged marriages anyway.

But, meeting her now, she would be a stranger. They had grown together. Without him, she wouldn't be in this garden. She would be leading some other life with, more than likely, some other man. She would be different. She would not be the Bianca she had become in their years together. Neither would he be this iteration. He was the man who had come to love her this much, a better man by far. Who he had been when they met had been weaker than this. Her love had granted him the opportunity and safety to become a man who would be brave enough to approach her in a garden.

So, they might not have met, still. It was branching possibilities but following any of them only made him find more factors in need of balancing.

He lived now in the world where he loved her--well and truly did and trusted that he would continue loving her more as the days and years accumulated. How could he know what some half-finished version of himself, someone whose jagged edges were left sharp or smoothed against other women, would have done? All he could know was that he would marry her in a few months. He didn't have to question, even if his proposal had bordered on the symbolic rather than actual. She had made the wedding manifest. He had only contributed a piece of jewelry to the inevitability.

He chews the last piece of sushi contemplatively but realizes when he swallows that he had neglected to taste it. In penance, he eats the rest of the wasabi--or the neon green imposter--in one bite. That he tastes, having no way to avoid it.

"I'm not sure that I would marry you."

She quirks an eyebrow, having drifted from the conversation to considering what she would grow in this plot. She then relaxes with a laugh, having remembered the antecedent. "If God or whoever popped down from the heavens and told you I was the one. Of course you would."

"I'm not much of a theist, and I don't take orders well."

"You don't need to believe in God, just in me. And I am charming. Of course you would." She leaned forward to kiss him again, no doubt tasting but not wincing from the sting of the wasabi. "You get in your head too much."

He looks at her again. He looks at her, in a sense, for the first time.

Of course he would.