I was so loud, the kids in the stroller began to stir. Deborah smiled, stood up, spoke to the children by name, and picked up one in each arm. She must have really strong arms. I offered to help, so she smiled and passed me the little girl in the cream onesie. The baby pushed my face away with all her tiny power, and Deborah laughed and took her back. It was kind of demoralizing.
“I don’t mean in a romantic sense, necessarily. Put simply, it’s a matter of bonding. We only have so much time on this Earth, you are much younger than Richard or me, and I am sure there are many things you still wish to learn from Richard. He and I, by nature, want to give whatever is asked of us. When there is still so much to learn, how could I steal the teacher away from his pupil? If Richard and I share a higher calling, then it is to give everything we have of ourselves. I would never hurt a dear friend and steal him away when he is using every scrap of power to deliver his everything into your hands.”
I stared at her, stunned.
“Well, enough of that. Do you have any interest in learning German? I would make a better teacher of Deutsch than he would.”
I was speechless. She laughed in amusement and told me a story: One time, she and Richard had watched an old German movie together. Both Richard and Deborah were far more interested in the grammatical structures and the actors’ accents than the film itself. “Some date,” the man sitting at the café table next to them muttered, after the film. “You two were made for each other.”
This Richard, the one in Deborah’s memory, was younger than any Richard I had known. I wondered what he looked like back then. Divinely beautiful, no doubt. Just like now.
I frowned, and Deborah laughed again as she put her children back in the stroller. “No, don’t misunderstand. Whether you were here or not, my answer would have been the same. Luckily, because you are here, I know there’s a silver lining to my decision. Did you hear that? ‘Luckily.’ We’re lucky to have you, Seigi. ‘Luckily’ is such a beautiful phrase in Japanese.”
“…”
“Go out and learn as much as you can, Seigi. Just like Richard, I’m curious to see what kind of young man you grow up to be. I work in communication instead of teaching, but I believe these two fields aren’t so different at heart. Words are the tools that enable us to share what’s in our hearts with one another. Without words, we would never be able to convey the contents of our souls to the world.”
Conveying the contents of our souls. The way Deborah conveyed her soul to me now.
Something about that…well…
“It’s kind of like an open question that we have to spend our whole lives solving.”
“An open question, you say?”
“Yeah, or…a task—no, not that, either. Maybe, like, the one thing you can never give up trying.”
That is, sharing your soul with someone. You could never give up trying to share your soul. It was like trying to understand what elevated a mere rock to a gemstone in someone’s eye. It was that perpetual trying—that was what you could never give up.
Or something like that, I added at the end of my rambling. Deborah nodded.
“You’re correct. We all might carry that open question with us through our whole lives. This world is too large and too lonesome for any of us to spend our lives alone.”
The sound of the children playing in the water quieted, as parents and kids left the pool in small groups. The wind had picked up a chill, slowly but surely.
Deborah remained standing, making no move to sit back down on the bench. She watched me closely.
“I’m glad I was able to meet you. If you ever come to Berlin, let me know. I’d love to show you the sights.”
“…Does that invitation extend to Richard?”
“Oh, Richard doesn’t need a tour guide. He’s perfectly capable of taking care of himself.”
She flashed me a teasing grin. My stomach churned. This felt like the classic story of a woman picking on her ex. The years they spent as a couple, the circumstances that led to everything coming crashing down, and the aftermath—they had all shaped my present relationship with Richard. Just like that one time I joked about sending a box of goodies to the drunkards in Yoyogi Park, I felt truly, truly grateful to have met Richard. And that was precisely what made this hurt so badly.
I stood up and bowed to Deborah. “Thank you.”
“Why, whatever for?”
“…For letting me meet this man we know as Richard. And for not hating him after everything that’s happened.”
“You sound like you’re speaking on his behalf.”
“Sorry.”
Deborah chuckled. “I’ve heard people say the Japanese ‘sorry’ means much the same as ‘thank you.’ Now I see what they mean. It was nothing, Seigi. We’re fine. You, me, him. We’re all fine.”
“…Are you sure?”
“Perfectly. I know because, based on what you’ve told me, this person we know as Richard Ranasinghe de Vulpian—not the Richard Claremont I once knew—is full of life and open smiles, with a generous heart. Best of all, he sounds like he’s happy. So yes, I can say with full confidence that we are fine. Should it appear otherwise, that might have nothing to do with him. The problem, Seigi, might rest with you.”
“…Well, maybe.”
“Cheer up, Seigi. For Richard’s sake. And, I suppose, for mine.”
Then, with those parting words, she pushed the stroller out of the huge garden and vanished into the crowd. It was only then that I realized how short she was. For some reason, the whole time she was next to me, even when she was carrying her two children, she seemed larger than life.
Cheer up, huh? For her sake?
It sounded like lip service, but those were, I realized, words of grave importance. It was like what Catherine said to me in Provence: Tell my boy he’s beautiful forever. That came so naturally to me it would have been a done deal even if she hadn’t told me. Cheering up, though—that felt harder. Especially back in Nuwara Eliya not long ago when I came close to making a very bad decision indeed.
I wandered from the garden into the rest of the museum. I was already here, and if I didn’t pick up a gemstone fact or two, I knew I would struggle to answer Richard’s inevitable question, “So, where did you go and what did you do?” I followed a sign reading Jewelry in English into the heart of the museum. A couple of excited girls dashed past me under the enormous chandelier in the entrance hall, yelling to each other, “The exhibit on rock bands is this way!” Boy, this museum sure had everything. A collection of antique porcelain, a reenactment of a nineteenth-century mansion, a broken electric guitar that a famous rockstar once smashed on stage, the British crown jewels… A little bit of everything. Kind of like life.