The other day while I was busy in the kitchen preparing my favorite mapo tofu dish, my husband approached me with a bag of potato chips in hand and munching. He wanted to tell me a story about the TV show he watched the night before.
Presenting himself in the kitchen without being asked to is a rare gesture of his. Volunteering a story without my tactful interrogation is another unusual case. If these two happened at once together, I knew I’d better be focused so I could quickly figure out what he was up to.
It’s one of the episodes from the “Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories” where a young wife reconnected with her former lover whom she shared a secret professional past — an adult movie play.
The young wife married an older man who rescued her parents’ business from ruins. The marriage started as a trade-off business cliche, but the young wife was much pampered and deeply appreciated by her old man husband. They lived a happy life together for twenty-three years till the husband died, and the young wife reconnected with her former lover, the adult movie alpha male star.
It was until then he found out that she showed up in her only adult movie with him right after she was just engaged. She wanted to do some mental and physical justification before she threw herself in the arranged marriage for her family’s sake.
A few days later, the young wife brought her former lover to a newly surfaced storage room of the deceased husband’s. She wanted to show him something special.
“Guess what she showed him?”
By that time, my mapo tofu was ready. I was shuffling it to a bowl.
“Easy!” After a quick pause, I replied triumphantly, waving the spatula in my hand.
“She found one VHS copy of her adult movie in that storage room!”
How smart I was guessing it right!
“Noooooooo!” My husband smiled even more triumphantly.
“The whole storage room of her old husband was filled with the VHS tapes of her one and only adult movie. He just kept buying them from the market until it was no longer available in public.”
Wow!
I slowed down my shuffling of the mapo tofu and finally stopped.
“Wow! Wow! This is a hell of a supernova love story!”
Being so satisfied with this cliffhanger effect he cast on me, my husband was about to turn around and leave the kitchen.
I could not let him go so easily.
“Wait!”
I walked closer to him, slowly raised the spatula as if it was a pistol. I pointed it right to his heart.
“May I ask you a simple question?”
My husband slowed down his munching of the chips and gave me a apprehended look that had a reflection of my malicious smile in his eyes.
I started speaking as slow as I could with a dramatized low voice.
“Would you love me THAT much to do something as grand as this old man did for his wife?”
Instantaneously, my husband was choked with the potato chips. For the following few minutes, I was busy conducting some half-forgotten CPR on his chest and back and shuffling water between the sink and his mouth.
Finally, I revived him back to the normal stage. He gave me a grateful yet inquiry look and I tiled my head and raised one eyebrow as a reply.
“Well, you are always the one with the most imaginative thoughts in the house. You should have a better answer than mine.” He protested.
“My answer is already there: one single copy of the VHS. And it is almost as bad and with no imagination as if zero tapes, if were compared to the whole room of the tapes version. I am just still curious about yours.”
I started faking some dark clouds gathering in my eyes.
My husband sighed and surrendered, insisting he needed to attend one urgent business matter in his office room and left in a hurry.
I thought I captured a glimpse of his almost smiled face when he turned away.
