The Japanese Lover (23 page)

From Irina's very first days in America, her stepfather made her understand what he called his rules. Her mother knew nothing about it, or pretended not to, until two years later, when Wilkins knocked on her door and showed her his FBI badge.

A
fter repeated pleas from Irina and much hesitation on her part, Alma agreed to become the leader of the Letting Go Group. This idea had occurred to Irina when she realized how anxious those Lark House residents who clung to their possessions were compared to those who had less. She had seen Alma get rid of so much she was even afraid she might have to lend her a toothbrush, which was why she thought that Alma would be ideal to help guide the group. The first meeting was due to take place in the library. Five people had signed up, among them Lenny, and they had all arrived punctually, but there was no sign of Alma. They waited for a quarter of an hour before Irina went to call her. She found the apartment empty, exept for a note saying she would be away for a few days and asking her to look after Neko. The cat had been ill and couldn't be left on its own. Irina was forbidden as a tenant from having animals, so she had to smuggle him into her room in a shopping bag.

That night Seth called on her cell phone to ask after his grandmother. He had passed by to see her at suppertime but was unable to find her, and was worried because he thought Alma had not completely recovered from the incident at the cinema. Irina told him Alma had vanished on another of her trysts, having completely forgotten about her prior commitment, and as a result she herself had been left embarrassed at the group meeting. Seth had met with a client in the Port of Oakland, and since he was close to Berkeley he invited Irina to go and eat sushi, which seemed to him the most appropriate cuisine while they discussed the Japanese lover. Irina was in bed with Neko, playing her favorite video game,
The
Elder Scrolls V
, but got dressed and went out to meet him. The restaurant was an oasis of oriental peace, with light wood walls and booths separated by rice-paper partitions, lit by red lanterns whose warm glow induced a great sense of calm.

“Where do you think Alma goes when she disappears?” Seth asked after they ordered.

Irina filled his small ceramic bowl with
sake
. Alma had told her that in Japan the correct thing to do was to serve the other person first and then wait for someone to serve you.

“To a guesthouse in Point Reyes, about an hour and a quarter from San Francisco. It has rustic cabins on the coast and is a pretty out-of-the-way place, with good fish and seafood, a sauna, a great view, and romantic bedrooms. It's chilly at this time of year, but each room has a fireplace.”

“How do you know all this?”

“From the receipts on Alma's credit card. I looked the guesthouse up on the Internet. I guess that's where she meets up with Ichimei. You're not going to bother her there, are you, Seth?”

“How could you think that? She'd never forgive me. But I could send one of my investigators to take a discreet look . . .”

“No!”

“Of course not. But you have to admit this is disturbing, Irina. My grandmother is frail; she could have another attack like the one in the cinema.”

“But she's still in charge of her own life, Seth. Do you know anything else about the Fukudas?”

“Yes. I decided to ask my father, and he remembers Ichimei.”

Larry Belasco was twelve years old in 1970, when his parents renovated the Sea Cliff mansion and bought an adjacent plot to add to their garden, which was already vast but had never completely recovered from the spring frost that had destroyed it when Isaac Belasco died, or its subsequent neglect. According to Larry, one day an Asian-looking man turned up, wearing work clothes and a baseball cap, and refused to enter the house because of his muddy boots. This was Ichimei Fukuda, the owner of the flower and plant nursery that he had once shared with Isaac Belasco but that now belonged to him alone. Larry sensed that his mother and this man knew each other. His father had told Fukuda that he didn't understand the first thing about gardens and so it would be Alma who made the decisions, which seemed odd at the time to Larry, since his father, Nathaniel, was the Belasco Foundation's director and, at least in theory, was very knowledgeable about gardens. Given the extent of the property and Alma's grandiose plans, the project took several months to complete. Ichimei measured the land, and tested the soil quality, the temperature, and the prevailing wind direction; he drew lines and wrote numbers on a sketch pad, closely pursued by an intrigued Larry. Soon afterward he returned with a team of six workmen, all of them of the same race as him, and the first truckload of materials. Ichimei was a calm man with restrained gestures who observed his surroundings carefully and never seemed to be in a hurry. He never spoke much, and when he did his voice was so low that Larry had to get close to hear him. He rarely initiated a conversation or answered questions about himself, but when he noticed the young boy's interest, he talked to him about nature.

“My father told me something very odd, Irina. He assured me that Ichimei has an aura,” Seth added.

“A what?”

“An aura, an invisible halo. It's a circle of light around the head, like the saints have in religious pictures. But Ichimei's is visible. My father said you couldn't always see it, only occasionally, depending on the light.”

“You're joking, Seth . . .”

“My father never jokes, Irina. Ah, and something else: he must be some kind of fakir, because he can control his pulse rate and his temperature. He can heat one hand as if he were burning with fever, and freeze the other one. Ichimei demonstrated this to my father more than once.”

“Your father told you all this, or are you making it up?”

“I promise it's what he said. My father is a skeptic, Irina, he doesn't believe in anything he can't verify for himself.”

Ichimei Fukuda finished the project and as a bonus added a small Japanese garden, which he designed as a gift for Alma, and then left the work to the other gardeners. Larry only saw him at the start of each season when he came to supervise. He noticed that he never talked to Nathaniel, only Alma, with whom he had a formal relationship, at least when Larry was present. Ichimei would arrive at the tradesmen's entrance carrying a bunch of flowers, take his shoes off, and enter with a slight bow of greeting. Alma, who was always waiting for him in the kitchen, would respond in the same way. She would arrange the flowers in a vase, and he would accept a cup of tea. For a while they would share that slow, silent ritual, a pause in both their lives. A few years later, when Ichimei did not reappear at Sea Cliff, his mother explained to Larry he had gone on a trip to Japan.

“Do you think they were lovers back then?” asked Irina.

“I couldn't possibly ask my father that, Irina. Besides, he wouldn't know. We know very little about our own parents. But let's suppose they were lovers in 1955, as my grandmother told Lenny Beal; they separated when Alma married Nathaniel, met again in 1962, and have been together ever since.”

“Why 1962?” asked Irina.

“I'm guessing, Irina, I can't be sure. That was the year my great-grandfather Isaac died.”

He told her about Isaac's two funerals, and how it was only then that the family learned of all the good the patriarch had done in the course of his life, the people he had defended for nothing as a lawyer, the money he gave or lent to anyone having a hard time, the children he helped educate, and the good causes he supported. Seth had discovered that the Fukuda family owed him many favors, and respected and loved him. He deduced that they must have gone to one of the funerals. According to family legend, shortly before Isaac's death the Fukudas dug up an ancient sword they had buried at Sea Cliff. The plaque Isaac had placed to mark the spot was still there. It seemed most likely that this was when Alma and Ichimei met again.

“It's fiftysomething years from 1955 to 2013, more or less what Alma told Lenny,” Irina calculated.

“If my grandfather Nathaniel suspected his wife had a lover, he pretended not to know. In my family, appearances are more important than the truth.”

“For you too?”

“No, I'm the black sheep. Just look at me, I'm in love with a girl who's as pale as a Moldovan vampire.”

“Vampires are from Transylvania, Seth.”

March 3, 2004

Recently I've been thinking a lot about Isaac Belasco, because my son Mike turned forty and I decided to hand him the
katana
of the Fukudas; it is his responsibility to look after it. Your uncle Isaac called me one day early in 1962 to tell me perhaps the moment had come to retrieve the sword that had been buried for twenty years in the Sea Cliff garden. Doubtless he already suspected he was very ill and his end was near. All of those left in our family went: my mother, my sister, and me. We were accompanied by Kemi Morita, Oomoto's spiritual leader. On the day of the ceremony in the garden you were away on a journey with your husband. Perhaps your uncle chose that date to avoid having you and I meet. What did he know about us? Very little, I suppose, but he was very astute.

Ichi

Whereas Irina drank green tea with her sushi, Seth drank more hot
sake
than he could cope with. The contents of the tiny cup disappeared in a sip, while Irina, distracted by their conversation, kept refilling it. Neither of them noticed when the waiter, dressed in a blue kimono with a bandana around his forehead, brought them a second bottle. Over their dessert—caramel ice cream—Irina saw Seth's inebriated, pleading look and decided the moment had come to say good-bye before things became awkward, but realized she couldn't leave him in this state. The waiter offered to call a taxi, but Seth refused. He stumbled out, leaning heavily on Irina. In the street, the cold air revived the effects of the
sake
.

“I don't think I ought to ride my bike . . . C-Can I spend the night with you?” he stammered, tripping over his tongue.

“What will you do with your bike? It could get stolen here.”

“To hell with it.”

They walked the ten blocks to Irina's room. It took them almost an hour because Seth meandered like a crab. She had lived in worse places, but in Seth's company she felt ashamed of this run-down, dirty old house. She shared the house with fourteen other lodgers, crammed into rooms made from particleboard partitions, some of them with no window or ventilation. It was one of those rent-controlled buildings in Berkeley that the owners did not bother to maintain because they could not raise the rent. Only patches of the exterior paint had survived, the shutters had come off their hinges, and the yard was full of useless objects: split tires, bits of bikes, an avocado-colored toilet that had been there for years. Indoors the smell was a mixture of patchouli and rancid cauliflower soup. Nobody cleaned the hallways or the shared bathrooms. Irina took her showers at Lark House.