Her appearance, however, caught his attention the most. She was even skinnier than before. Her chin was more pointed, and her eyes looked bigger. Her hair was still cut in a bob, but it had lost its sheen, something Tsuneo attributed to malnutrition. He was never under any obligation to periodically check in on Josee, but he nonetheless found himself racked with guilt.
“Sorry. I’ve been really busy lately,” he said. “Had so much on my plate that I couldn’t find time to stop by. Forgive me. I heard your grandmother died?”
“Yeah,” Josee replied. She didn’t seem as depressed as he thought she would be, and he could tell from her eyes that she wasn’t about to scold him. Josee had a very sharp tongue, so Tsuneo thought she was going to yell at him and blame him or at least complain about her grandmother’s death, but she was surprisingly calm and expressionless.
“People from the city gave her a funeral,” she explained. “Getting an apartment was a bigger pain in the ass, though. Hard to find a place that has cheap rent and no stairs.”
“Are you really living on your own?”
“This volunteer lady comes by once a month, does all my shopping for me.”
“…Are your neighbors at least nice?”
“Nah, they don’t even give me the time of day. Probably just trying not to cause me any trouble. Doesn’t help that there’s this really creepy old man who lives on the second floor, though. Said he’d do anything for me if I let him touch my tits. You should’ve seen the nasty grin on his face. I’m too freaked out to go anywhere at night, so I just stay home. Daytime’s fine, though, since he’s usually out watching speedboat racing or bike racing then.”
It was the first time Tsuneo got to talk to Josee in what seemed like forever, but she sounded very detached. That was when he realized that Josee had been down and out ever since she lost her grandmother. Seeing her like this was so depressing that Tsuneo pretended to look around her apartment just to hide the pain he was in. Josee had apparently sold her grandmother’s chest, dresser, and alcove shelves, among other things, to be able to make rent.
“All I’ve got is whatever’s in these boxes, but it’s fine, since I can move everything around by myself. I’ve been snatching up any clean cardboard boxes I find in town.”
Josee had swiped some fashion magazines from a dentist’s waiting room, then cut out the colorful illustrations and glued them onto the cardboard boxes she had piled on top of one another. She’d even fashioned the boxes into drawers that opened when she pulled on the ends. For all she lacked in the way of belongings, these boxes upon multicolored boxes filled her tiny apartment to capacity.
“Have you been eating? You look like you’ve lost a lot of weight. Your face is thinner and kind of shriveled up.”
“Don’t you dare pity me. Yeah, I’m eating. I’m doing just fine!” she barked while turning her head away and scowling.
Tsuneo wasn’t thinking before he spoke, and he seemed to have offended her and her big ego as a result. It wasn’t until he’d known Josee for a while that Tsuneo noticed how she liked her smooth, snow-white skin and her small yet well-proportioned doll-like features. She truly considered herself drop-dead gorgeous, so it upset her when Tsuneo said her face looked “shriveled up.”
He got to his feet as if he’d had enough of Josee’s ranting.
“I’ll stop by again sometime,” he said.
“Don’t bother! I don’t want you comin’ here anymore!” Josee shouted.
“…All right. Bye.”
He didn’t have any other choice but to leave. He started putting on his sneakers at the front door, when…
“Where do you think you’re going?! You plan on leaving after upsetting me like this?!”
Josee was out of breath.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know!”
“…Bye, then.”
All of a sudden, the snowshoe-shaped crutch hit him in the back. Tsuneo turned around to find tears welling in Josee’s big eyes.
“Kumi,” he said.
“Hurry up and go. Get out of here… And never come back!” Josee hollered, still teary-eyed. She was hysterical, desperately trying to breathe. Tsuneo couldn’t leave her like this. He cautiously approached her.
“I don’t want you to go,” Josee wailed before clinging to him. “Please don’t go. At least stay for another thirty minutes. I sold the TV, and the radio’s broken, and I’m just…so lonely…”
“Wait. So I’m just a replacement for your TV and radio?”
“Yep. I like you better than my last radio, though, since you can talk back.” Josee laughed through her tears, and that instantly reminded Tsuneo how cute she was. Those unbelievably tiny, beautiful lips of hers were right in front of him, so he went ahead and kissed her. After he’d held her tensed lips in his for a few moments, her mouth gradually opened, and he immediately trapped her warm, small tongue before it could escape.
The only noise outside the quiet apartment was the revving of a motorcycle.
“You can do anything you want to me, Tsuneo. Anything,” Josee said once she eventually took her lips off his. Her breath was ragged.
“Like what?”
“‘Like what’? I know you wanna do me.”
“No, I don’t. I’m not like that creep on the second floor.”
“Do you hate me or something?”
“…I don’t hate you,” he was forced to say.
“Then let’s do it. C’mon, what kind of man are you?”
“…That’s not why I came all the way here.”
“Oh, shut up. It’s not like I was planning on doing any of this today, either, but now I want to. Plus, I like you. I would never say something like this to anyone else. I don’t know where this is gonna go, but I’ve never felt this way before.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“Is the door locked?”
“No, it’s not.”
She immediately made Tsuneo lock it. Just like always, Josee was forcing him into things. This wasn’t going to be his first time with a woman, either. He’d slept with a few classmates in the past, but never anyone so seemingly fragile.
It wasn’t until that day that he’d ever seen Josee’s slim legs up close; they reminded him of a doll’s. And though her body was as exquisite as one would expect from a doll, as far as he could tell, her feminine functions seemed quite healthy and robust. Josee had learned about sex from TV and magazines to an extent, but somewhere in the process, she appeared to stop pretending to know what she was doing. She was at a loss for words and in a daze, even when Tsuneo finished.
“Are you mad…?” he whispered into Josee’s ear as he sat up and held her in his arms.
“I’m not mad,” she replied quietly yet matter-of-factly. “It was just totally different than how I imagined it’d be.”
“In a bad way?”
“In a good way.”
“…Glad to hear it.”
Tsuneo thought back to the flings he’d had with the women he met at school, many of whom he had no interest in seeing again once they’d slept together. But here Josee (he’d still called her Kumi back in college) was pressed up against him, and he never wanted this moment to end.
“I like you. And I like what you do, too,” said Josee, which Tsuneo found adorable. “Stay the night.”
“Okay.”
“And tomorrow. All day, all night.”
“I have a job, so I gotta go to work. You know how that creep on the second floor is out at the boat races during the day? Well, all men are like that. We all have to work during the day.”
“If you don’t do what I say, I’m gonna tell everyone you forced yourself on a disabled little girl. I’ll call the newspaper and the city and tell them, too.”
“Oh, shut up.”
And just like that, they quietly held each other until they fell asleep. Eventually, the light peeking in through the curtainless glass door turned from orange into deep blue. Right by the bedside was a cardboard box that rustled when Tsuneo’s hand hit it.
“What in the world?” he muttered as he opened it to reveal something wrapped in a white bag.
“Those are my grandma’s ashes,” Josee mentioned amusedly. Her father had said he was going to come pick them up, but he still hadn’t stopped by. Half the cardboard box was plastered with pictures of foreign cities.
Tsuneo didn’t want to leave, so he stayed the night and was welcomed the next morning by wonderful early spring weather. He decided to take Josee outside for the first time in a few months. After calling as many friends as he could, he was eventually able to borrow someone’s car that could fit both Josee and her wheelchair. Josee, however, was sulking.
“What’s wrong?” Tsuneo asked her. “We don’t have to go anywhere if you don’t want to. We can stay inside today.”
“Nuh-uh. I’m just in a bad mood right now ’cause I’m so happy. That’s all.”