The Japanese Lover (19 page)

At home, Alma had announced she was taking evening classes at the University of Berkeley. Isaac, who prided himself on having progressive ideas and who could do business with or be a friend to his gardener, would have been unable to accept the idea that someone from his family had intimate relations with one of the Fukudas. As for Lillian, she took it for granted that Alma would marry a mensch from the Jewish community, just as Martha and Sarah had done. The only one who knew Alma's secret was Nathaniel, and he did not approve either. Alma had not told him about the motel, and he had not asked, because he preferred not to know the details. He could no longer dismiss Ichimei as a childish whim of his cousin's that she would get over as soon as she saw him again, but he still hoped that at some point Alma would understand they had nothing in common. He no longer remembered his boyhood friendship with Ichimei, except for the martial arts classes at Pine Street. Once Nathaniel had gone to secondary school and the theatrical performances in the attic were over, he had seen little of Ichimei, even though Ichimei often came to Sea Cliff to play with Alma.

When the Fukuda family returned to San Francisco, Nathaniel met him briefly once or twice, sent by his father to give him money for the plant nursery. He could not understand what on earth his cousin saw in him: he was an insubstantial figure who floated by without leaving a trace, the opposite of the kind of strong, self-confident man needed to handle a woman as complex as Alma. Nathaniel was sure his opinion of Ichimei would be the same even if he weren't Japanese; it was a question of character, not of race. Ichimei was lacking that quota of ambition and aggression all men need, and which he himself had developed through sheer willpower. He recalled very clearly his years of fear, the torment at school, and the superhuman effort he had made to study a profession that required an evil streak completely missing in him. He was grateful to his father for making him follow in his footsteps, because working as a lawyer had toughened him; he had acquired an alligator's hide that allowed him to manage on his own and to succeed.

“That's what you think, Nat, but you don't know Ichimei, and you don't know yourself,” Alma told him when he explained his theory of masculinity to her.

The memory of those blessed months when she and Ichimei met at the motel, where they couldn't switch off the light because of the cockroaches that emerged at night from the corners of the room, was able to sustain Alma in later years, when she sternly tried to drive out love and desire and replace them with the penance of fidelity. With Ichimei she discovered the multiple subtleties of love and pleasure, from frantic, urgent passion to those sacred moments when they were lifted by emotion and lay still in bed side by side, staring endlessly into each other's eyes, content and sated, abashed at having touched their souls' deepest levels, purified from having stripped away all pretense and lying together totally vulnerable, in such a state of ecstasy they could no longer distinguish between joy and sadness, the elation of life or the sweet temptation of dying there and then so that they would never be apart. Isolated from the world through the magic of love, Alma could ignore the voices inside her head calling her back, crying out for her to be careful, warning her of the consequences. They lived only for the day's encounter; there was no tomorrow or yesterday. All that mattered was the grimy room with its jammed window; the smell of damp, worn-out sheets; and the endless wheezing of the air-conditioning. Only the two of them existed, from the first longing kiss as they crossed the threshold and before they even locked the door; their caresses standing up; flinging off their clothing, which lay where it fell; their naked, quivering bodies; each drinking in the heat, savor, and smell of the other; the texture of skin and hair; the marvel of losing themselves in desire until they were exhausted, of dozing in one another's arms for a moment, only to renew their pleasure; the jokes, laughter, and whispered secrets; the wonderful universe of intimacy. Ichimei's fingers, capable of returning a dying plant to life or repairing a watch without looking, revealed to Alma her own rebellious, hungry nature. She enjoyed shocking him, challenging him, seeing him blush with embarrassment and delight. She was daring, he was restrained; she was noisy during her orgasms, he covered her mouth. She dreamed up a rosary of romantic, passionate, flattering, and filthy phrases to whisper in his ear or write to him in urgent missives; he maintained the reserve typical of his character and culture.

Alma gave herself to the unconscious joy of love. She wondered how nobody noticed the bloom on her skin, the bottomless dark of her eyes, the lightness of her footsteps, the languor in her voice, the burning energy she could not and would not control. She wrote in her diary that she was floating and felt bubbles of mineral water on her skin, making the down on her body bristle with pleasure; that her heart had blown up like a balloon and was sure to burst, although there was no room for anyone but Ichimei in that huge, inflated heart because the rest of the world had become distant and hazy; that she studied herself in the mirror, imagining it was Ichimei observing her from the far side of the glass, admiring her long legs, her strong hands, her firm breasts with their dark nipples, her flat stomach with its faint line of black hair from navel to pubis, her lipstick-red lips, and her bedouin skin; that she slept with her face buried in one of his T-shirts soaked with his gardener's smell of earth and sweat; that she covered her ears to imagine Ichimei's slow, gentle voice, his hesitant laugh that was the opposite of her own exaggerated guffaws, his warnings to take care, his explanations about plants, the words of love he whispered in Japanese because in English they seemed unreal, his astonished exclamations at the designs she showed him and at her plans to imitate Vera Neumann, without pausing even for an instant to bemoan the fact that he himself, who had real talent, had only been able to paint when he could find a couple of hours after his incessant work on the land, before she came into his life, took up all his free time, and sucked out all the air. The need for her to know she was loved was insatiable.

A
t first, Alma Belasco and Lenny Beal, the friend who had recently arrived at Lark House, planned to enjoy San Francisco's cultural life: they went to the cinema, the theater, to concerts and exhibitions. They experimented with exotic restaurants and took the dog for walks. For the first time in three years, Alma returned to the family box at the opera, but her friend got confused by the complications of the first act and fell asleep in the second, before Tosca managed to plunge a kitchen knife into Scarpia's heart. They gave up on opera. Lenny had a more comfortable car than Alma, so they took to going to Napa to enjoy the bucolic landscape of vineyards and to taste wines, or to Bolinas to breathe in the salty air and eat oysters, but in the end they grew tired of making all these efforts to stay young and active, and gave in to the temptation of simply resting. Instead of going out on excursions, which involved traveling, looking for somewhere to park, and having to be on their feet, they watched films on television, listened to music in their apartments, or visited Cathy with a bottle of pink champagne to go with the gray caviar that Cathy's daughter, a Lufthansa flight attendant, brought back from her trips. Lenny helped in the pain clinic by teaching the patients to make masks for Alma's theater from papier-mâché and dental glue. They spent the afternoons reading in the library, the only shared area that was more or less silent: noise was one of the disadvantages of living in a community. If there was no alternative, they ate in the Lark House dining room, scrutinized by other women who were envious of Alma's luck. Irina felt neglected; she was no longer indispensable to Alma.

“You're imagining it, Irina. Lenny's not competing with you in any way,” Seth consoled her. But he too was worried, because if his grandmother cut Irina's hours, he would have fewer opportunities to see her.

That afternoon Alma and Lenny were sitting in the garden recalling the past as they often did, while a short distance away Irina was washing Sophia with the garden hose. On the Internet a couple of years before, Lenny had seen an organization dedicated to rescuing dogs from Romania, where they roamed the streets in wretched-looking packs, and bringing them to San Francisco for adoption by sensitive souls prone to that kind of charity. He was immediately taken with Sophia's face, with its black patch over one eye, and without thinking filled out the online form, sent the required five dollars, and the following day went to fetch her. In the description they had omitted mentioning that the little dog had a leg missing. She managed a normal life on the other three; the only consequence of the accident seemed to be that she destroyed the tips of anything that had four legs, like chairs and tables. Lenny solved the problem by keeping an endless supply of plastic dolls; as soon as the dog left one of them without an arm or leg, Lenny threw her another, and that was that. Sophia's only weakness was her disloyalty to her master. She was smitten with Catherine Hope and at the slightest excuse shot after her and jumped on her lap. She adored traveling in a wheelchair.

Sophia remained motionless under the stream of water as Irina spoke to her in Romanian to conceal her intentions as she listened in on Alma and Lenny's conversation in order to convey it to Seth. She felt bad about spying on them, but investigating the mystery surrounding Alma had become an obsession for her and Seth. Alma had already told her that her friendship with Lenny began in 1984, the year Nathaniel Belasco died, and had lasted only a few months, but the circumstances had lent it such intensity that when they met up again at Lark House they could resume it again as if they had never been apart. At that moment, Alma was explaining to Lenny that at the age of seventy-eight she had renounced her role as matriarch of the Belascos, weary of fulfilling her obligations to people and keeping up appearances, as she had done ever since she was a child. She had been at Lark House for three years now, and was increasingly enjoying it. She said she had imposed the move on herself as a penance, a way of paying for her life of privilege, for her vanity and materialism. The ideal would have been to spend the rest of her days in a Zen monastery, but she was not a vegetarian, and meditation gave her a backache, so she settled for Lark House, to the horror of her son and daughter-in-law, who would have preferred to see her with a shaven head in Dharamsala. She was comfortable at Lark House; she had not given up anything essential and if need be she was only thirty minutes from Sea Cliff, although she had never yielded to the temptation of returning to the family home, which anyway she had never considered hers: first it belonged to her in-laws, and then to her son and daughter-in-law. At first she spoke to no one, and it was like being in a second-rate hotel, but as time went by she made a few friends, and since Lenny had arrived, she felt real companionship.

“You could have chosen something better than this, Alma.”

“I don't need anything more. The only thing I miss is an open fire in winter. I love to watch a fire burning, it's like the endless swell of the sea.”

“I know a widow who has spent the last six years on cruises. As soon as the ship docks at its final destination, her family presents her with the ticket for the next round-the-world trip.”

“I wonder why my son and daughter-in-law have never thought of that?” laughed Alma.

“The advantage is that if you die at sea, the captain throws your body overboard and your family doesn't have to pay for the funeral,” Lenny added.

“I'm fine here, Lenny. I'm discovering who I am without all my ornaments and accessories. It's quite a slow process, but a very useful one. Everybody ought to do the same at the end of their life. If I had any self-discipline I would beat my grandson to it and write my own memoirs. I have time, freedom, and silence, the three things I never had amidst all the noise of my earlier life. I'm preparing to die.”

“That won't be for a long while yet, Alma. You look splendid.”

“Thank you. It must be love.”

“Love?”

“Let's just say there is someone. You know who I'm talking about: Ichimei.”

“Incredible! How many years have you been together?”

“Let's see, I'll count it up . . . I've loved him since we were both about eight years old, but we've been lovers for fifty-eight years, since 1955, although there have been long gaps.”

“Why did you marry Nathaniel?”

“Because he wanted to protect me, and at that moment I needed his protection. Remember how noble he was. Nat helped me accept the fact that there are some things that are more powerful than my own will, things that are even stronger than love.”

“I'd like to meet Ichimei, Alma. Tell me when he comes to visit you.”

“Our relationship is still a secret,” she replied, blushing.

“Why? Your family would understand.”

“It's not because of the Belascos, but Ichimei's family. Out of respect for his wife, children, and grandchildren.”

“After so many years, his wife must know, Alma.”

“She's never given any indication of it. I don't want to hurt her; Ichimei would never forgive me. Besides, it has its advantages.”

“Which are?”

“For a start, we've never had to struggle with domestic problems like children, money, and all the other things couples have to deal with. We get together to make love. Besides, Lenny, a clandestine relationship has to be defended: it's fragile and precious. You should know that better than anyone.”

“We were both born half a century too late, Alma. We're experts in forbidden love.”

“Ichimei and I had a chance when we were young, but I didn't have the courage. I was unable to give up on my security, and so I was trapped in convention. That was back in the fifties, when the world was very different. Do you remember?”