Chapter 6 It’s MeYour Work Chocolates #4
Will I be alone for the rest of my life?
Thoughts like these echoed in my mind every time I saw my friends in their big white dresses. Is it so wrong to want to strike off that “task” as soon as possible? I couldn’t say that it was.
“But he wasn’t like that. He wanted to have a proper relationship. The kind where we would go out to places together and gradually build a connection with each other before getting married. It must have been hard for him.”
Leaning on the edge of the window, Kikuno stared at her wrist, which was wet from the rain.
“There was a period where we couldn’t see each other because I was so busy with work.
I knew that he was growing more and more unhappy, but cutting back on my hours was just not an option for me.
I’d just been promoted. I was finally doing what I’d aspired to do since I first joined the company.
I’d worked so hard for that opportunity and couldn’t stand the idea of losing that. ”
It takes a long time before you get to do the work you want to do.
You have to build credibility for yourself.
You need to prepare yourself with the right “weapons” to face the battle.
But by the time we’re armed with all the weapons needed to be allowed on the front line, we also reach the stage in life when we desperately want to get married.
“We rarely had the same days off. I kept having to turn him down when he tried to make plans. There were so many occasions where we’d make reservations at a nice restaurant, but I had to cancel at the last minute because I got held up at work.
So when we did see each other, it was mostly at our homes. ”
“Did you cook for him at home?” Hozumi asked.
Kikuno straightened her back and retrieved her phone from her bag. She held the screen out to us. It was a picture of a beautifully plated stewed hamburger steak. A rich demi-glace sauce dotted on a floral-patterned plate, garnished with lettuce and cherry tomatoes.
“Yes, I did. I was even taking cooking lessons for a while.”
“Seriously?” I asked.
Kikuno mentioned the name of a famous culinary school chain.
When I was around twenty-five, I had once attended a trial lesson at the same school.
They offered a “konkatsu course,” classes specifically designed to prep people looking to get married with the necessary cooking skills. I told Kikuno this.
“That’s the one! That’s the course I took!” Kikuno exclaimed.
No wonder her cooking was presented in such a photogenic way. Kikuno showed us more pictures of the dishes she had made for him. Stew, nikujaga, omurice. The plating was beautiful, and the colors worked well together. Every dish looked as though it belonged on the cover of a cookbook.
“Come to think of it, I only ever made him dishes I learned in those cooking classes,” Kikuno muttered under her breath as she scrolled listlessly on her phone.
“I didn’t want to risk making something that he didn’t like, so I never cooked him any of my own recipes.
I stuck to making dishes that men apparently go wild for, and followed the recipes that my teacher said would ‘make your man happy.’ ”
Kikuno touched her now-empty glass. Iori responded silently by pouring her more brandy.
“The first dish I made him was this hamburger steak stewed in demi-glace sauce. He loved it, just as I’d hoped.
My teacher was spot-on. So I kept serving him easy, foolproof recipes.
But now that I think about it, they weren’t really my kind of flavors.
I was just applying the ‘good wife template’ to myself, because all I wanted was to get married. ”
She drained her glass, and Iori refilled it again.
“Did you really not make him a single dish that you liked?” I asked.
After deliberating for a moment, Kikuno shook her head.
“I didn’t get to it in the end. I’m from Nagano, so when I cook for myself, I often make dishes using vegetables from back home. When I make shogayaki, for example, I add some grated apple to the soy sauce and mirin, and massage the marinade into the pork before frying it.”
“That sounds so good, though!”
“But when I made shogayaki for him, I always followed the exact recipe I learned in class. The sugar content in apples makes it easy to burn, you see. Burnt meat doesn’t look great.
It was safer to use a classic recipe that everyone was familiar with.
I was too scared to serve him flavors from home. But if I had…”
Maybe things would be different, I finished the thought for her.
She sipped her brandy as though she was trying to wash down the words that had made it to the tip of her tongue.
There are things in this world that are “right” according to everyone else. Then there are things that are “right” only to you. Sure, we all know that we should follow what feels right to you. But how many people can really say, “I’m right,” when everyone else is shouting out a different answer?
Not me. I don’t have that kind of courage.
I realized that my feet had turned completely cold. The heat on my face had also cooled off. And we were quite off track.
“So…” I said.
“Hmm?”
“About the recipe that you’d like to lay to rest…”
“Oh, right. The chocolate.” Kikuno tapped her long, gel-manicured nails on the table.
“The day we broke up was Valentine’s Day.
We met up in Akasaka and had dinner at a classy bistro.
But I messed up. After we finished eating, the question of how we should spend the rest of the night came up. And I said…”
“Uh-oh…”
“I said, ‘It’s not too late, so I’m gonna go back to work.’ ”
I gazed at the glass in Kikuno’s hand. That night, the two of them must have enjoyed a drink together like this. He must have been hopeful that they could spend the whole night together.
“That’s when he asked me, ‘Which is more important to you, me or work?’ ” Kikuno said. “He didn’t look angry at all. He just looked very despondent and lonely. When I saw the expression on his face, I finally realized that my behavior had forced him to say such a thing.”
Kikuno rubbed her nose with her index finger.
“But I couldn’t bring myself to say, ‘You’re more important. I won’t go to work.’ I mean, I really did have to work! My team was on a deadline, and the project was impossible to complete without me.”
I could picture the scene so vividly, it was almost as if an image of the bistro six years ago had appeared behind Kikuno, who sat staring into the stem of the glass in her hand.
“The moment he said those words, a million thoughts spiraled in my head. I did think of saying, ‘I’m sorry I made you say something like that, let’s spend more time together.’ But in the end…”
“Why couldn’t you say that, do you think?” Iori asked softly.
Kikuno scratched under her right eyelid with her index finger.
“These were my initial thoughts: If I told him that work was more important, it would be the end of everything. Even I knew that—if I gave an honest answer, our relationship would be over. I needed to choose the right words to reassure him, at least for that moment. But then I had another thought, which was: Maybe he’s asked me this because he wants to end things. ”
My heart thumped.
What’s more important—me or your work? I know that feeling. That feeling of wanting someone to make that impossible choice. One’s work and one’s partner are two incommensurable things. I was fully aware of that. Even still, I found myself asking such a difficult question of the person I loved.
When Kyohei told me that he was trying to get me to break up with him, I was pained by the fact that he was being so dead honest with me. I thought, This isn’t the time to speak so candidly.
Even though I longed for sincerity, there was also a part of me that wished he was better at lying.
Why can’t you pretend to be a better guy? Why can’t you try harder to be a good boyfriend and say something romantic to me, at least on my birthday?
Sometimes we just want to be inside a little romantic bubble. But maybe when two people are able to go in and out of that bubble with ease, that’s what compatibility looks like.
“What happened after that?”
“So then…” Kikuno let out a small sigh and paused for a moment.
“He said, ‘We’re not quite right for each other, are we? I don’t think we should keep seeing each other.’ He told me that we should break up, and I said yes. The end.”
An intense pain and sadness came over me, like a giant poison-tipped spear twisting inside my stomach.
Kikuno was tapping her nails on the table.
“Did you love him?” Iori asked.
“To be honest, I don’t know. I still think about what it was that I felt.
But…” Kikuno broke off then. As though she was trying to convince herself, she said, “One thing I know for sure is that I love working. I love myself when I’m working hard.
This fact will never change. I think that I couldn’t open my heart to him because he wished that I was capable of a textbook romance, and I just wasn’t that person. I was so horrible to him.”
“I don’t think that you were horrible…” I said.
“I mean, it was me who kept pretending to be a woman capable of a textbook romance! I was the one who deliberately served him typical ‘good wife’ recipes that I learned in class, to try to get him to like my cooking.”
Kikuno laughed bitterly, stroking her neck.
“But that’s not me at all. I had set a dating criteria based on what I’d been told was ‘right.’ Like, he should have a certain type of job, and that he should be the youngest son, and so on.
Maybe I couldn’t be sure about my feelings because I had looked for someone that was ‘husband material,’ then tried to fall in love with him, in that order.
Despite being well aware that I was out of step with everyone around me, for some reason I had made it a necessary condition for my partner to be regarded as ‘desirable’ by everyone else. It’s strange, isn’t it?”
I could relate to that.