“Oh yeah, didn’t you get a new girlfriend?” asked one of the guys. Everyone bubbled with excitement. At this, even more people, who had previously not been part of the circle, began to gather around. Amongst the species known as university students, there are a certain subset who become quite uneasy if there’s some excitement going on that they aren’t part of—it would seem we had such people among us today.
“C’mon, enough of that,” Ten said, taking a sip of the chuhai he was holding. It was not lost on me that the smile he had on his face until now was missing. I wondered if he was suddenly feeling the weight of his own infidelity. Perhaps these were not the sort of “friends” who would simply laugh and accept such a revelation without offering reproach.
Or perhaps he simply could not reveal such a thing in front of so many girls.
“Wait, seriously? Congrats! What’s she like?”
“Don’t tell me it’s another businesswoman?”
“We gotta celebrate! Maybe next time?”
It was not unusual in these situations to hear more words of teasing than of congratulations, but I noticed that there was a tone of concern mixed in with some of these utterances. Ten tentatively accepted their congratulations, jutting his lip theatrically, before clacking together the tongs he had been using to wrest back attention from everyone and saying plainly, “I’m not seeing anyone.”
Tousuke and I exchanged glances.
“What the hell? Was that faulty intel? What’s the deal?!”
One bleached blond fellow looked back and forth between the man who had originally brought up the subject and Ten. I kept watch on Ten, keeping the can to my lips so that he would not notice my staring.
“I didn’t really want to talk about it. It’s pretty tacky.” He lowered his eyebrows, giving a self-deprecating smile. That expression must be his power, how he survives day to day in society, I realized.
“I manage the contact registrar for Moai, so naturally, I have to give them my contact info too, but sometimes people I talk to at the events invite me out for dinner.”
“You been hitting on them?”
“I have not! It’s usually more like they want to show appreciation for my hard work. After all, I have a dedicated e-mail address. Mm…though I mean, it’s true that sometimes when the conditions are right, after events they’ll message me, very clearly with the intention of inviting me on a date.”
“You’re shameless!” one of the girls cackled.
“No way!” Ten said, shaking his head. “Listen, it’s not like I’m some kind of player. If any of these guys got an invitation like that, they’d definitely take it.” He pointed down the line at each of us men.
Thankfully, one of the other men, with an almost comically meek smile on his face, agreed, “If a hot older woman asked me out, I’d go!”
“I’d never turn down an invitation from an attractive older person,” the woman who had been acting as a representative for the other girls chimed in turn, perhaps in order to give off a certain impression of herself to someone. Her comment was completely unnecessary to the flow of the conversation, but it did get the girls more fired up, which in turn fueled Ten’s story forward. I wanted to hear more of what he had to say immediately.
So, the women had asked him out?
“Right? So, I mean, it’s not terrible of me to go out on a date if someone asks me out, right? Of course, if things do turn that way once I’ve gone, and we meet up a few more times, well that’s where it starts getting dicey.” Trying to abate some of that diceyness by showing self-awareness of it was not a Ten-exclusive technique. Anyone would do the same.
“As it turns out though, I was the only one who thought we were in a relationship. She apparently did not feel the same way at all. Here, let me take a survey!”
“Ha! That’s a group leader for you!” someone jabbed back, eliciting a laugh. Even the current twisted Moai would never put out such a survey.
“Okay, so which of these scenarios sounds more likely to you: Two people have met up countless times, and even held hands. Are they not dating? Or are they just dating without explicitly saying so?”
Which of those sounded more plausible would depend on one’s own level of experience, so I doubted that Ten would get the response he was seeking here. But he asked for a show of hands, so Tousuke and I raised our hands in the manner that would most tacitly reaffirm our acquaintanceship. In other words, we were on Ten’s side.
With us included, the results were nearly fifty-fifty. However, it was Ten’s personality that concerned more than those results.
“Seriously? You’re telling me that some of you guys could hold hands with a girl you aren’t even dating? You’re even more shameless than me!” Ten turned to the girls who had voted on his side, who offered a kind, equivocal laughter.
I tried my best to give the benefit of the doubt and take his words at face value. Ten was not the sort of man who would hold hands with someone he was not dating. If this claim was to be believed, was there really nothing more than that?
“Well, guess you’re purer than you look, Amano. Guess you’ve still got the heart of a virgin.”
“Who does?!”
Apparently, the topic of virginity was something that got these men particularly fired up. After a bit of pointless rowdiness, someone seemed to decide it was finally time to let up and patted Ten on the shoulder. “Well, just glad that you figured out what kind of person she was before things got too serious. Next one’ll be better.”
“That’s true. I’m glad too. You were way more depressed last time.”
“I just wish I could do something about my love of older women.”
I got the sense that trying to ask Ten, who was probably trying to make people laugh, what had happened in his previous relationship would not be the right thing to do right now—at least not in this situation. However, there are quite a few people in this world who have no sense of tact.
“Did something happen last time?” asked a girl with a fluffy white outfit and sloped eyes. She had been smiling along with the rest in the circle and rather gave the impression that she was only there as someone’s plus-one.
For a moment, the air grew cold. Ten was skilled at bending the atmosphere around him to his will.
“Oh man, oh man, no! It was nothing! It was just at some point she found a better guy than me!” Ten waved his hands ridiculously over his head as if to downplay the truth. The men around him jumped in with “Stop it! You’re gonna make him cry!” and “Don’t beat yourself up, man!” The chill in the air dissipated in an instant, the sly girl looking purposely surprised.
The topic of Ten’s love life gradually petered out from there on and within ten minutes had been replaced with another topic entirely. Tousuke and I lingered by this group, hoping that either Ten or one of the others would divulge some other useful information, but by the time we ate some meat, drank the drinks that were offered to us, and were cajoled into talking about the job offers we had gotten, suddenly it was time to clean up the barbecue.
As we walked, garbage bags in hand, Tousuke paused to make sure no one else was around us, then said to me, “Looks like maybe we were wrong.”
I wondered for a moment if I was supposed to nod at this.
“Hard to tell still. Maybe Ten was just lying.”
“It didn’t seem like he was lying.”
Again, I wondered if I should nod at this, but in the end, we simply disposed of the trash, exchanging no more words. Only our own breathing remained on the voice recorder as a mark of our disappointment.
About three weeks later, something that appeared to be the truth came out from an unexpected source: Kawahara-san.
“That Ten-san guy is really somethin’,” she began during a shift one day, immediately getting my hopes up. “Friend of yours, isn’t he?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t say all that, but why? Something happen?”
“No, well… See, I always just figured he was some kinda pretty playboy, but I went for drinks with him the other day.”
Remembering my own time as a freshman, I couldn’t bring myself to say something boorish like, Shouldn’t you be focusing on your classes?
“He’s kind of a dandy.”
That wasn’t a word you hear very often.
“That, he’s a…uh…what do you mean exactly?”
“When I joined Moai, people told me to watch out for him because he was a big-time player. So, I figured when he was drunk enough, I’d ask him about it.”
That’s a wild thing to ask about…though I didn’t say that. This was incredibly valuable intel for us, anyway.
“Seems like he’s dated a lot of businesswomen, and, well…to put it harshly, he’s been dumped by a lot of them. He doesn’t want to make them seem like the bad guy, so he always tells the folks at Moai that he was the one doing the dumping. Of course, I mean, that wasn’t exactly how he put it, but that’s more or less the gist of it. But, whatever.”
Though her tone did not change, I could tell just by how talkative she was being that Kawahara-san was getting a little worked up. I had thought it surprising that she would be into guys with attitude, but it seemed that was not actually the case.
“He is really into himself!”
“…I said this already, but you sure you’re all right with that?”
She nodded firmly.
“People who are drunk on themselves can intoxicate others too. It seemed like he wasn’t sure if he was actually popular or just a target for more adept older people.”
Putting aside the fact that I could certainly see her falling victim to such a person in the future, I carefully chewed up this information, swallowed it, and found myself disappointed at the bitter taste. Apparently, both we and those girls at the café had gotten a completely wrong impression of Ten.
When I called Tousuke after work to relay this to him, he simply said, “I see.” Though Tousuke had done plenty of poking fun at Ten in his own way, it really did not seem that Ten was the one playing with these older women’s hearts. Additionally, according to Ten, there were still people who worked with those women who had led him on who had ties to Moai. If Ten were entirely at fault, such a thing would be unlikely.
We talked for a bit and finally decided we would not be pursuing that method of disrupting Moai. It did not seem as though we would achieve any particularly useful result.
Our plans had ended in failure.