Alcock’s Autobiography 3.3

20 May 2011

After our first Japan trip the distinction between work and play blurred. Kumiko spent workdays and evenings and nights with me. The first order from Forestry and Agriculture arrived bringing with it a relentless series of tasks leading up to shipping the container and meeting the deadline. I had to spend as much time at the plant as in my office in Missoula and Kumiko accompanied me on many of those 200 mile round trips and stayed with me at night in the sleeping nook of my plant office. 

I remember the first time I came inside her. It was at her little apartment in graduate student housing with a view of the University golf course and the mountains to the south. In the several weeks since our Japan trip, we had either used a rubber, or I had with super-human determination and a little luck practiced coitus reservatus. But that afternoon, compelled by her pleasure as much as my own, feeling great tenderness and wanting to dissolve every difference and come together fully, I was unable to achieve in that handful of final seconds the minimum disinterest necessary to pull away from her. Like our first sexual encounter in Tokyo, it was another milestone in a journey into the depths of ordinary love.

But the warm and friendly afterglow of good sex that flooded us inside and out was destined to remain only a few minutes before the possibility of pregnancy simultaneously arose in our thoughts and rudely jerked us out of our trance and shoved us back into what the dim-witted like me erroneously call ‘the real world’. This dreaded possibility washed like ocean waves over our minds several times before we could fully appreciate its import. Once we got it, Kumiko jumped up, and I was to see for the first time a careful administration of a coca-cola douche. I watched in awe and with no small measure of erotic desire, as Kumiko shook the bottle and sprayed the dark liquid into her vaginal crevice as she squatted in the bathtub. The problem was of course that we were at that stage in a love affair where every intimate thing that occurred, be it good or bad, served but to bind us more tightly together.

In the idealized picture of business nothing could be more pernicious. In our case, however, the affair worked to the benefit of the business, mostly, I suppose, because Kumiko wanted so much to help, to prove her worth, that she went well beyond the call of duty in covering the bases, in getting done what had to be done, and always encouraged me to do the same. In fact, she had fallen in love. And if I were a normal human being, I would have too. But aside from the love-making and its post-coital repast of light, I was a trickster at best and a sadist.

I began, often as not, to regard her ready offerings of assistance as intrusions, and her keen interest in every aspect of my current life as constricting.

One trick I played was disappearing. I had ceased to rent the downtown office and instead had purchased a large two-story house in the University area and converted half of the downstairs into an office and lived in the other half upstairs. The house was old and had undergone several remodeling projects over the decades. I was using a room next to my office to house the copy machine and printers. A closet had been built  there, the back of which opened into a large crawl space that provided access to the plumbing in the bathroom. The crawlspace was hidden by a flimsy plywood door which itself was hidden behind the boxes, bags, and clothing that filled the closet. In a few seconds I could quickly leave my main office in the adjoining room, close the bathroom door so it sounded like I was going there, enter the copy room, slip into the closet and finally retreat into the crawl space where I could sit down. So when Kumiko came charging in either the front or back door of the house, I was gone by the time she got to my office. Since she never saw me leave the house, she had to assume that I had left before she arrived or was still inside the house. My secretary (which she had hired for me) would simply tell her the truth— that I was right here a minute ago. If I weren’t in the bathroom, she didn’t know where I was.

I don’t know why exactly, and somehow I don’t think most American women would have done it, but Kumiko would then proceed to frantically search the house, upstairs and down, calling my name throughout. When my secretary, an honest and straightforward country girl, described this, while perhaps mildly amused, it was clear her sympathies lay with Kumiko, a sign that I failed to properly assess at the time.

I guess Kumiko was border-line crazy during those months, and my mean game of disappearing only made it worse for her. But the more she wanted to have access to every aspect of me, the more I resisted and toyed with her passion, using cheap devices like the disappearing trick to torment her. On the other hand, her cloying compulsion to be with me or to know where I was at all times became unbearable and I needed some form of comic relief.

Little did I realize then how much the tables would later turn.

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