Please Enjoy Your Happiness Read Online Free Page A

Mama. That was her role, and she was good at it. I never knew her name. I asked once. She shook her head. That’s why I always called her Mama. Her authority was absolute in the White Rose; she treated all of us – hostesses and sailors – with firm and resolute affection, as if we were all toddlers.
    A Japanese bar hostess is not a prostitute, Mama told me when we first met. A hostess pours drinks, cracks jokes, makes conversation, rubs sore backs, and expresses sympathy for things that ail men’s minds. Some guys had also pinned photos of themselves on the door with messages such as, ‘See you next time, Michiko. I love you!’ or ‘Sonny loves Reiko,’ showing asailor with a big lipstick kiss on his face put there by the woman of his dreams. The girls had left small objects around the doorway, like the votive offerings deposited by the Catholic faithful praying for sick relatives and children. There were ribbons and tortoiseshell hair clips. There were handkerchiefs with messages on them in Japanese, which of course I could not read then, but I knew the meaning of the red hearts alongside the kanji characters written in ballpoint pen.
    Mama looked up at me sadly. I thought she was going to tell me that you were dead. She gripped my arm so I could not move and she said, loudly, ‘I’m sorry!’ You once told me in jest, I think, that the Japanese could be ‘distressingly polite’. A half-dozen of the hostesses ran up to us. They wore cocktail dresses as if they were waiting to be taken to the Ritz. Several of them had been crying, and their mascara was running. They clasped handkerchiefs to their faces. They put their arms round me. ‘Thank you so much,’ one of them finally blurted. I guess I knew then that you were alive.
    Reiko, a sturdy, red-cheeked farm girl from Aomori in northern Japan, spoke some English. She was able to tell me that you were in the hospital and had been given blood transfusions and that you had been able to send them a message saying, ‘Anthony Perkins found me.’
    ‘How do you say that?’ Reiko asked earnestly. ‘Should I call that “rescue”? Did you rescue her? You are a good boy! Very good boy! We love you!’ The girls started laughing, and a couple of them ruffled my hair. And then Reiko said, ‘Go to the hospital, please. Quickly! Urgently! You need talk to Yuki-chan.’
    I was beginning to discover that all these women had secrets. Some of these secrets I learned over time. Every time the
Shangri-La
steamed out of port I knew more of them.
    In those days the enemy was ‘Red China’. The
Shangri-La
was, according to US Navy nomenclature, an ‘attack aircraft carrier’; navy publicity about the ship called it a ‘Man o’ War with Men of Peace’. But it was home base to several squadrons of jet and propeller attack aircraft, and in its bowels were nuclear weapons in a locked-down area guarded by the ship’s Marine Corps detachment. We would go charging up and down the Sea of Japan and the South China Sea like a bull chasing
machos
in the narrow streets of Pamplona. Once, somewhere down towards the Philippines, the
Shangri-La
shuddered and blew its whistle furiously as it tried to put on the brakes. I rushed up on deck. A gloriously antique white four-masted schooner straight out of a Joseph Conrad novel was crossing our path. Its decks were loaded with green bananas, breadfruit, and wooden crates. I could read the ship’s name through the patina of rust on its bow:
The Torment
. The crew was straining to get more speed out of the sails.
The Torment
leaned over into the arc of pure white spray it made in the emerald sea. Its safety, its destiny, depended on its skipper, a white-haired man at the wheel wearing a white shirt unbuttoned to the waist. He was laughing – or maybe cursing – as the vast bulk of the
Shangri-La
cast a shadow over him. He did not look back as he steered
The Torment
to safety.
    We seamen, by the way, called our vessel the ‘Shitty