Bird Strike
In the morning I put my hand on the back of Akemi's knees, at the soft, vulnerable place where they bent.
"This is just the beginning," I said. "We'll see where it goes from here." Talking playfully but excited by the touch, sensation of skin against skin, hers so smooth compared to mine.
She wore light culottes in bed.
My hand on her leg, ordinary, seemingly inadvertent touch, would lead to lovemaking, I meant. Playful, joking, but excited. Akemi laughed and reminded me of a truth I recognized all too well:
In fact our contact wasn't going anywhere just then, at least not until later that morning. We had a food shopping plan in the works. The way we did it in the pandemic was together, as a team, to minimize our time of exposure to others in the enclosed space of the supermarket. I took the danger seriously, more than Akemi had to. She was young. I wasn't in the really vulnerable older group, but in my mid to late forties I had to watch out. I'd even ordered face shields online for extra protection, to be worn on top of masks. I urged Akemi to wear one too, since if she got infected I almost certainly would as well and she agreed.
Face shields. Call it overkill, but the aisles got crowded. If you're going to be careful, why not go all the way?
In the supermarket we each had our agreed-upon duties, worked efficiently. I would go one way to buy some items and she hers for others. Then we'd meet. I'd throw my stuff on the shopping cart and be off again.
The first time we met up this way, though, I looked at Akemi and saw she didn't have her face shield on- and that I didn't either. In our hurry to organize our mission and get out, we'd forgotten them. Neither of us had noticed till then. What was worse, moments before I'd also realized I'd neglected to bring along my all-important shopping list.
We both were wearing masks. That was probably enough, but I made a decision.
"I'm going home to get the shields and the list," I told Akemi. "It makes sense. There's time. You can keep shopping and I'll come back. Without a shopping list, I'd waste time trying to figure out what to buy." I'd go back and forth from aisle to aisle. The list allowed me to shop efficiently. If I didn't have the thing, Akemi and I would spend longer in the fairly congested spaces of the supermarket, rubbing shoulders with others. Bad prospect. To be avoided. I believe in improving my luck to the extent possible.
Our apartment was just across the street and around the corner. I picked up the shields, donned mine- it slipped on like eyeglasses, via clear plastic bars over my ears- and grabbed Akemi's to bring her, found the forgotten shopping list as well, on the dining table where I'd left it earlier.
Surprise. On my return to the supermarket, I found Akemi talking to another shopper, young guy, roughly her age, handsome, blonde. He looked like a graduate student, and that turned out to be the case. Twenty-five he looked. A match for Akemi, who looks even younger. They were engaged enjoyably in conversation. No, he didn't give a damn she wasn't wearing face shield. Of course not. He probably wouldn't have minded if she'd been maskless as well. No wonder. They were both at an age where they had little to worry about from the COVID-19 virus.
Of course I felt resentful, envious, nervous, though objectively speaking there was little to worry about. Akemi and he were just talking. He wasn't going to infect her, and their conversation, though lively, animated- they both seemed to come out of themselves- was not love play or anything. Come on, I told myself. You can't get alarmed like this.
If the guy was flirting with Akemi, it wasn't her doing. Not she but he had likely initiated the exchange, approached to ask a question of some kind and one thing had led to another. Akemi was attractive and guys gravitated to her. Was she to blame for that? And at the time they'd bumped into each other Akemi was alone in the store, after all- I was out fetching the face shields. He hadn't known she was "taken."
He wasn't coming on strong or anything, just avid. I can't blame him for that. He was educated, considerate like me- a reason Akemi responded positively- though as I've said, younger- not a crude type, I mean. He'd keep his thing in his pants.
No, I couldn't object, fault Akemi for talking to a customer at the supermarket, enjoying the fresh feeling of meeting a new person.
That shopper- doing post-graduate work in medical research, it turned out- was a charming, likable type Akemi admired. He had charisma. And his work interested her. He'd chosen a challenging field, one that was muscular like himself.
I couldn't help seeing parallels between their conversation and ours in the morning, when I'd put my hand on the back of Akemi's bare knee as we lay in bed and said, "This seems like just ordinary touch but it's going to lead somewhere. You'll see." Our hadn't, and I hoped theirs wouldn't either.
There were moments in our marriage that felt like being on an airplane midflight of a long trip, dozing, when you suddenly feel the aircraft lurch downward, seem to plummet. You wake up to the startled reaction of passengers around you, exclamations just short of screams. The moment passes, the plane rights itself. Is everything all right? Will that gut-wrenching descent resume? Is there a mechanical problem? There wasn't. Akemi and I had experienced that incident together. She'd been awake beside me, on the aisle side, and I asked her what had happened. She said she didn't know. Time passed, restored calm, assurance. We speculated on the cause of the dip.
"Maybe the pilot was avoiding turbulence," I said.
"I don't think so," Akemi said. The downward move was too abrupt and too far. "I think," she continued, "that he was avoiding a flock of birds." A bird strike could knock out an engine.
I thought of that flight and our marriage as I watched Akemi talking to the pleasant, affable guy in the supermarket, attractive like her. Their contact seeming ordinary, inadvertent. They looked good together, and even if I'd wanted I couldn't get close to break up the conversation because of the risk of COVID infection, the need for social distancing which they didn't share because of their youth. That phrase, "bird strike," went through my mind. But this wasn't about birds, unless a cock counts as one. Mostly I thought of scene earlier that very morning- it seemed a different world, in our bedroom- when I laid my hand on the back of Akemi's knee platonically and said, "This may seem innocuous, but it isn't. It's moving on from here, and we'll see where." The playfulness- mine- and Akemi's reaction, how avid she was- looked the same.
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