“This story,” she said. “Every time I read it, it’s different. To one person it’s a heroic act, to another it’s villainous, to yet another it’s just foolishness. Why don’t you write a novel like that?”

“I already have,” I said.

“You have?”

“You know the one called Joker. Seen from three different perspectives—these three people tell the story of the same event, and when you get through reading it you hold the three views simultaneously or you don’t know which to hold: the person’s a hero, a villain, or a joke.”

“But you must think joke?”

“Why?”

“Because you name it Joker.”

“No, I don’t think joke; I think hero. I name it Joker because . . .”

“You’re the joker,” she said. “It’s the author who’s the joker!” “Darn right,” I said, lifting an imaginary hat to her, and stirring the lemon in my martini.

29

Speaking of jokers, speaking of the ways we hold different views of people, here’s my meeting with Koshoo Jackson I never gave the full account of. (Those of you who know Japanese will also get the joke inside the joke.) Anyway, here’s the scene or the scenario:

When Catherine went into the kitchen, Koshoo asked, “Do you feel it too?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Mother Eagle hovering, ready to feed us . . .”

“Each other?” I asked.

“You’re a woman after my own heart.”

He took something out of his pocket, placed it across my knees. At first I thought it was one of those fake snakes you get from joke and curio shops. But it was so slender, beautiful, and delicate. A lavender braid.

“Oh, this is marvelous,” I said, fingering it.

“In Japan making braids is a very ancient and respected art form.”

I’d seen them decorating kimonos and statues. I nodded.

But I really hadn’t thought of it as an art form in itself, as a self-contained art.

“When I first started doing it here they treated me like some wayward fellow making doilies.”

“It’s really very beautiful.”

“It’s for you.”

“I really can’t take it,” I said.

I couldn’t take it from a fellow I’d cold-shouldered all evening, and after this island of congeniality, intended to cold-shoulder the rest of the time.

The smell of beef and okra drifted from the kitchen. I tried to identify the spices: pepper, sage, garlic, paprika. You can’t smell salt, can you?

“What’s she making?”

“I don’t know. Something she got from the Islands.”

“It smells like the Islands.”

“Did you notice how they both managed to disappear at just the right moment? This has been orchestrated,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

He had very black hair, straight in parts, nappy in others. Nappy along the edges. He wore a braid down his back, a green corduroy jacket and black trousers. He was a very handsome man, looked expensive, looked well taken care of. His father had studied Japanese in college, he said, at a time when it seemed the strangest thing in the world for a Black man to be doing. But when the war came his knowledge of Japanese came in handy, and he was recruited for army intelligence, translating technical reports and trying to break codes. After the war he went to Japan, to see the horrors of the war, and met a young woman there, and fell in love. After he told me that one, he said that he was just an army brat whose father had been stationed in Japan after the war, helping the Japanese rebuild after the destruction. But the love affair was true. His mother was from a family of Japanese artists—braid makers. He grew up in a regular braid-making factory. (I learned later from Catherine—at least her account of him or his account to her—that his father had been a merchant marine. But whatever his father had been, the love part always surfaced.)