20   It is now Thursday afternoon, September 22. I am back in my room at the Sheraton Keauhou Bay Resort and Spa. A few hours ago I said sayonara to Haruko when I dropped her off at the airport. She will soon be boarding her flight to Honolulu, from where she will fly back to Osaka. I have spent much of the past several days – once the conference was over and when I was not hanging out with Haruko – doing just what I resolved on the eve of my coming here: recording the experiences of the month that began with Peter Hart’s memorial service. I have been amplifying the notes that I had scribbled during the weekend before leaving and frantically entering text, with as much dialogue as I could recall, into the hard drive of the laptop that I bought just for this purpose. I have just finished writing about the purchase. And now, Hawaii. It was about half past eleven when, after arriving at Kona Airport, I was wheeling my small carry-on suitcase in the direction of the car-rental office. After I passed the international arrivals exit, a Japanese woman who was wheeling a much larger suitcase hurryingly tried to pass me, and her suitcase bumped mine. Her shoes were not especially high-heeled, but not designed for racing through airports with luggage. “I’m sorry,” she said, with an embarrassed smile, in fairly good English, with an accent reminiscent of Yoko Ono’s. She was about my age, quite slender, with stylish glasses on her face and with small gray patches in her otherwise black hair, cut very short. She wore a white short-sleeved blouse and gray linen slacks. “Can I help you?” I asked. “I have to get to my group,” she said, pointing toward a compact group of two dozen or so Japanese standing near the terminal exit, about three hundred feet away. “They are waiting for me. My flight was delayed.” I looked at the group again and saw that in its middle someone was holding up a poster with PPLC written on it. “Are you going to the PPLC conference?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, “do you know?” “I’m going there too, and I have a car, so I can give you a lift… a ride,” I said, not sure if the word lift is taught to Japanese students of English. “Let me hold on to your suitcase,” I said when I saw her hesitation, “and you can go and tell them that they don’t need to wait for you.” “Thank you. Thank you very much. I am Haruko,” she said as she reached her hand out to me after letting go of her suitcase. “I am Gary,” I said as we briefly shook hands before she sped off to her group. When she came back she was smiling broadly. “They are from Tokyo,” she said, “and I come from Osaka. We were supposed to meet in Honolulu, but Osaka-Honolulu flight was delayed.” She seemed to have practiced pronouncing her Ls assiduously. “So I had to take later Honolulu-Kona flight.” I let her wheel my suitcase while I held on to hers as we walked on. “Are you the only one from Osaka?” I asked. “Actually I am from Kyoto. I have my own office. All the others are from big firms in Tokyo.” “Then you have more in common with me than with them. I have my own office in San Francisco.” “San Francisco! Beautiful city. I was there many years ago with my husband and children. But now we don’t travel together any more.” “Why not?” “Children – too big. Two daughters grown up, son in university. Husband – too busy with business.” She laughed in a not especially Japanese way. “So now I travel alone. I will stay here a few days after the conference. To do sightseeing.” We reached the car-rental desk and, as I was filling out the contract, I said to Haruko, “I’m also staying here after the conference to do sightseeing. Maybe we can do it together. I’m staying till Friday. How long are you staying?” “Thursday,” she said. “When I get back to Japan it’s already Friday there.” She laughed again, this time sounding quite Japanese. During the half-hour drive to the hotel, passing several golf courses – built, Haruko told me, mainly for Japanese visitors – after turning off the highway, we talked about our respective practices. When I mentioned my case of the retired professor’s second wife and her pension claim, she told me that the Japanese Diet had just passed a law, to take effect in April 2007, that would entitle women to as much as half of their husbands’ pension in a divorce settlement, and many women were now considering divorce proceedings with that goal in mind. But divorce was still not so widespread in Japan as in the West, and a large part of Haruko’s business was drawing up prenuptial agreements for mixed marriages, whose numbers were increasing. “Mixed,” I said, “you mean between Japanese and gaijin?” Haruko laughed at my using a Japanese word, and said yes. For this reason she worked hard on learning the marital regimes of various Western jurisdictions, and this conference was a part of her program. When we arrived, the other Japanese, still in a compact group, were milling around the lobby while the leader was getting them checked in. “They are sent by their firms,” Haruko told, me, “and they are all in double rooms. I have a room by myself.” Her room turned out to be on the same floor as mine, three doors apart and on opposite sides of the hall. Hers had a view of the ocean, mine of the mountains. At the check-in, I was asked if I wanted the high-speed wireless Internet connection, for which there would be a charge. “No, thanks,” I said firmly. It would be nice to be disconnected during this vacation, I thought. It was now about twelve-thirty, but by my clock it was three-thirty and I was very hungry. I mentioned this to Haruko and she said that for her it was breakfast time. We made our way to the poolside bar and grill, where I ordered a grilled-chicken sandwich and she followed my example. After lunch we took a drive along the coast and got back in time to watch the sunset from a spit of land on the hotel grounds. We had dinner with all the conference participants. The organizers requested that the Americans mingle with the Japanese, but since Haruko and I were already together there was no need to separate. We chatted with the others at our table. And it was only then, since we all wore name tags, that I learned that Haruko’s surname was Matsunaga. I asked her if she had heard of the Hawaii Senator with that name. “Yes,” she said, “he was very famous in Japan. When he came to visit Kyoto, Matsunaga family made a party for him in Gion, although probably he was not a relative. Do you know Gion?” “Yes, I read the geisha autobiography. I mean the real one, not the fictional one.” “Fictional one? You mean Memoirs of a Geisha?” Haruko laughed. “Very fictional. I have clients that are geisha.” By the time the dinner and speeches were over it was nine o’clock, midnight my time, and I felt exhausted. Haruko and I walked to our rooms, and just before she opened hers she said, “You are very tired, Gary.” “Very,” I said. “Maybe, when you are not so tired, would you like to make sex with me?” She then giggled in embarrassment, but it was over her misspoken English, not the boldness of her proposition, which had an electrifying effect on me. “That is not correct, make sex?” “It’s either make love or have sex,” I said, paying no mind to Andy’s distinction. “But I am not so tired any more. Yes, I would like to.” “Then come to my room in twenty minutes.” And she went inside. I went to my room, and after swallowing a Viagra tablet I took a quick shower in order to energize myself and to wash off the perspiration from the afternoon’s humidity. I brushed and flossed my teeth, and after a few minutes of stretching I put on a clean shirt and shorts, with a condom in each pocket. It was time to go to Haruko’s room. She opened the door in a simple kimono-styled robe whose front framed a hint of cleavage. As soon as I closed the door behind she slipped it off with no apparent self-consciousness and, wearing nothing but sandals, led me by the hand to the bed. She was, besides Wendy Wang, the only other East Asian woman I had gone to bed with, and her slender, small-breasted and small-hipped body looked and, as it turned out, felt, smelled and tasted altogether different from Wendy’s. Her sounds were different too, being mostly those of silence, except for birdlike squeals at certain moments. After one, fairly short, bout of making sex my fatigue came back. I excused myself and went back to my room, where I slept soundly. The pattern was repeated for the next five nights, except that our bedtime grew progressively later and the periods of time that we spent entwined grew longer. None of the nighttime intimacy carried over into our daytime demeanor, which was that of Platonic friends, even when we were alone together, whether on the hotel grounds, in the pool or on the beach, or while touring the island. When we told each other private details of our lives – my marriage and divorce, her marriage and her husband’s string of young mistresses – there was no connection with our evening activities. Most of our conversation, though, was comparing practices. Needless to say, I did not do any of the strenuous hikes that my fellow hikers had recommended. Haruko never wore any shoes other than medium-heeled pumps or sandals. It was only when I dropped her at the airport that she gave me her card and said, “If you ever come to Japan, please contact me.” But there was no farewell kiss, only a handshake.   My story is now up to date and on the hard drive, at least in rough-draft form. Tomorrow I am flying home, starting with the late-morning Aloha flight from Kona to Honolulu. What if I had changed my plans slightly and taken today’s flight with Haruko, then to spend the night on Oahu before going home tomorrow as scheduled? Whenever I traveled by air with Margo, except during the years when Greg would sit between us, we would raise the armrest as soon as the pilot allowed it, and do some cuddling. This happened in the years before Greg, when we would fly to Los Angeles to meet my father, to New York to meet my other relatives, or to Europe on vacation. In those years we had a passionate sex life, but in the later years, when that part of our life had become subdued and when Greg was old enough to be left with Aunt Cathy or Aunt Jeanne, we would still engage in some kind of affectionate contact while aloft. How, then, would it have been with Haruko? The forty-minute flight would have been our last time together. How would she have responded if I had raised the armrest, put my arm around her, drawn her close to me and kissed her? Haruko exemplified the women who, as Jerry put it, fall into my lap, with no effort on my part. It was her choice to make sex – a literal translation, as she later told me, of sekkusu suru – with me, and to limit our sensual contact to the time that we spent in bed together. At the same time, her constant presence by my side kept me from checking out any of the potentially available thirty-somethings that I usually fall in with at legal conferences. And in all of our talk, we never mentioned what we did together in the later part of every evening. I am now surmising that what I experienced with Haruko was a typically Japanese affair, typical at least of the kind of woman – not uncommon in Japan, I suspect – that she is: a middle-aged professional woman with a philandering husband. And if this affair represented what Chris meant by just sex, then it’s clear to me now that she did not mean only sex and that a friendship, like the one she claimed with the man with whom she talked at Fina Estampa, could be a part of it. It’s also clear to me that this is not what I would have wanted with Chris, but something deeper, a relationship whose various aspects were integrated and not separate, perhaps even something that could be called love, if only I were capable of it. I am aware as I am typing this that, should anyone ever read my memoir, they would find the portrait that I have painted of myself to be an unflattering one. (I am also aware that I am using they with a formally singular referent, a usage in the best literary tradition that I like to follow whenever I am not composing a legal document.) I am not intentionally practicing self-denigration of the ego indignus variety. I am writing this for my own benefit, having found that, as I approach the end of my fifty-first year – well past the mezzo del cammin di nostra vita – I don’t know very well who I am. My intention is that, when the chain of events that I am depicting has sunk into the past, I will print out what I have written and read it under the pretense that it was written by someone else – a court reporter, for example – though whether I can perform such a mental trick is yet to be seen. In the end I might edit it for style, perhaps insert reflections like the one I’m writing now, and so make it mine again. Back to Haruko.   As I was thinking about what to write after Back to Haruko, I felt hunger pangs. I had been typing, nonstop except for occasional short breaks, for some six hours since coming back to my room after stopping for lunch at a taco joint in downtown Kailua Kona on the way back from the airport. It was my first meal alone on the island. For dinner I decided to drive to the Japanese restaurant on the Hawaii Belt Road in Kealakekua, Teshima’s, where Haruko and I ate lunch on Monday, our first meal away from the Sheraton. Whenever we ate at the hotel, though we were always together, our meals were automatically charged to our respective rooms. At Teshima’s Haruko insisted on paying, contending that since the food was Japanese, the treat was hers. I could not follow her logic. I argue with lawyers for a living, and I don’t mind doing it in my private life, but I felt that I would be at an unfair advantage with Haruko if the language of the argument were mine, not hers. But I used Haruko’s line of reasoning when we ate in other restaurants, claiming – somewhat speciously – that any cuisine other than Japanese was American, and therefore the treat was mine. She accepted my claim, except in a Chinese restaurant, where we split the check amid laughter. Alone at Teshima’s, I had a simple dinner of miso soup and chicken teriyaki, quite different from the exotic array of tidbits that Haruko had ordered for us. The people at the restaurant are old-time Japanese-Hawaiians, but they seem to have learned Japanese in order to deal with visitors from Japan, and so Haruko was able to do her ordering in Japanese. Inevitably, being in a restaurant with a woman ordering specialties in her native language brought back the experience at Fina Estampa, and the memory came back again when I ate at Teshima’s this evening. It is still with me as I am typing this, and I am now thinking that I will go back alone to Fina Estampa and ponder how I might have done things differently with Chris. I am feeling her loss more deeply, more painfully even, than I would have expected. Was I beginning to fall in love with Chris, but was too blinded by Libby’s radiance to see it? Am I feeling the loss of love? I am no expert in matters of love, but I know that I don’t subscribe to the Tennysonian notion that ‘tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. No, Lord Alfred, Alfie, old chap: ‘tis not better; ‘tis worse; ‘tis shitty.