The Japanese Lover (30 page)

“They must be barbiturates,” said Cathy.

“Or rat poison,” added Lupita.

The director wanted to know how on earth Helen Dempsey had ordered this without anybody's finding out. The staff were supposed to be on the lookout, since it wouldn't do for word to get around that people committed suicide at Lark House; it would be disastrous for its reputation. In the case of suspicious deaths such as Jacques Devine's they were careful not to carry out too thorough an investigation; it was better not to know the details. The staff blamed the ghosts of Emily and her son: they took the most desperate clients away with them, because whenever someone died, from natural or illegal causes, the Haitian aide Jean Daniel swore he saw the young woman in her pink veils and her unfortunate son. The sight made his hair stand on end. He had asked them to hire a compatriot of his, a woman who was a hairdresser out of necessity but by vocation a voodoo priestess, so that she could dispatch them to the kingdom of the other world, but Hans ­Voigt's budget did not stretch to that kind of thing; he had to juggle enough as it was to keep the community afloat.

The topic was particularly difficult for Irina, who was still upset because a few days earlier she had held Neko in her arms while he was given a merciful injection that put an end to the ailments of old age. Alma and Seth had not been with the cat for the event, the former because she was too sad, the latter out of cowardice. They left Irina on her own in the apartment to receive the vet. This was not Dr. Kallet, who at the last moment had a family problem, but a nearsighted and nervous young woman with the air of a recent graduate. However, she turned out to be competent and sympathetic; the cat passed away purring, unaware of what was happening. Seth was meant to take the body to the animal crematorium, but for the moment Neko was in a plastic bag in Alma's freezer. Lupita knew a Mexican taxidermist who could leave him looking alive, stuffed with burlap and adorned with glass eyes, or who could clean and polish his skull and mount it on a small pedestal for use as an ornament. She suggested to Irina and Seth that they give Alma this surprise, but they thought the gesture might not be appreciated.

“At Lark House we have to discourage any attempt at elective death, is that clear?” Hans Voigt stressed for the third or fourth time, glaring at Catherine Hope in particular, because it was to her that the most vulnerable patients, the ones in chronic pain, turned. He suspected quite rightly that these women knew more than they were prepared to tell him.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Voigt, it's an emergency,” Irina interrupted him when she saw Seth's message on her phone.

That gave all five of them the chance to escape, leaving the director in midsentence.

She found Alma sitting with her shawl across her legs on her bed, where her grandson had installed her after seeing her trembling so badly. Pale and wearing no lipstick, she looked like a shrunken old woman.

“Open the window. This thin Bolivian air is killing me,” she pleaded. Irina explained to Seth that his grandmother wasn't delirious, but was referring to the feeling of breathlessness, the buzzing in the ears and weakness in the body that was similar to the altitude sickness she had experienced many years earlier in La Paz at some thirteen thousand feet above sea level. Seth suspected the symptoms were not due to any Bolivian air but to the cat in the freezer.

Alma began by making the two of them promise they would keep her secrets until after her death and repeating what she had already told them, because she decided it was better to weave the tapestry of her life from the very beginning. She recalled saying farewell to her parents on the quayside at Danzig, her arrival at San Francisco and how she had clutched Nathaniel's hand, intuiting perhaps that she would never let it go; she went on to tell them about the precise moment she met Ichimei Fukuda, the most persistent of all the images stored in her memory, and then advanced along the path of her past with such clarity that it was as though she were reading aloud. Seth's worries about his grandmother's mental state evaporated. Over the previous three years when he had wormed material out of her for his novel, Alma had demonstrated her great skill as a narrator, her sense of rhythm and ability to keep up suspense, her way of contrasting luminous events with the most tragic ones, light and shade as in ­Nathaniel's photographs, but it wasn't until that afternoon that he had the chance to admire her in such a marathon of sustained effort. With a few pauses for tea and to nibble at some cookies, Alma talked for hours. Night fell without any of them realizing, as Seth's grandmother told them all about her life and they listened attentively. She told them about how she met Ichimei again at the age of twenty-two after twelve years without seeing him, and how the dormant love they had felt in childhood now knocked them both out with irresistible force, even though they knew it was doomed and it did in fact last less than a year.

Passion is universal and eternal throughout the centuries, she said, but circumstances and customs are constantly changing; sixty years on, it was hard to understand the insurmountable obstacles they had to face back then. If she could be young again, knowing what she now knew about herself, she would do what she did all over again, because she would never have dared reject convention and commit herself fully to Ichimei; she had never been courageous and had basically abided by the norms. Her only act of rebellion had been when she was seventy-eight and had abandoned the house at Sea Cliff to come and live at Lark House. At the age of twenty-two, suspecting their time was limited, Ichimei and she had gorged on love to enjoy it to the full, but the more they tried to exhaust it, the wilder their desire became, and whoever says that every flame must sooner or later be extinguished is wrong, because there are passions that blaze on until destiny destroys them with a swipe of its paw, and even then hot embers remain that need only a breath of oxygen to be rekindled. She told them about Tijuana and her marriage to Nathaniel, and of how it was to be another seven years before she saw Ichimei once more, at her father-in-law's funeral, years she spent thinking of him tranquilly since she never expected to meet him again, and another seven years before they could finally consummate the love they still felt for one another.

“So, Grandma, my father isn't Nathaniel's son? In that case I'm Ichimei's grandson! Tell me whether I'm a Fukuda or a Belasco!” exclaimed Seth.

“If you were a Fukuda, you'd have Japanese features, wouldn't you? You're a Belasco.”

D
uring the first months of married life, Alma was so caught up in her pregnancy that her anger at having renounced her love for Ichimei became a bearable inconvenience, like having a stone in her shoe. She settled into a placid, ruminant existence, secure in Nathaniel's tender care and the shelter the family provided. Although Martha and Sarah had already given them grandchildren, Lillian and Isaac were expecting this baby as if it were royalty, because it would bear the name Belasco. They set aside a sunny room decorated with children's furniture and Walt Disney characters painted on the walls by an artist brought specially from Los Angeles. They devoted themselves to looking after Alma and satisfied her every whim. By the sixth month she had put on too much weight; her blood pressure was high, her face blotchy, her legs swollen, and she lived with a perpetual headache; she could not fit into her shoes and was forced to wear beach slippers, and yet from the very first signs of life in her belly she fell in love with the creature she was bringing into the world. It was not Nathaniel or Ichimei's, but entirely hers. She wanted a boy, to call him Isaac and offer her father-in-law the grandson who would continue the name of Belasco. She had promised Nathaniel that nobody would ever know they did not share the same blood. She remembered, with stabs of guilt, that if Nathaniel had not prevented her, the child would have ended up in some Tijuana sewer.

As she became increasingly besotted with the baby, so she was more and more horrified at the changes to her body, even though Nathaniel assured her that she was radiant, more beautiful than ever, and increased her weight problems by bringing her orange-filled chocolates and other treats. Their happy relationship as brother and sister continued. Elegant and neat, he always used the bathroom near his study at the far end of the house and never undressed in front of her. Alma however lost all sense of shame with him and gave in to her misshapen state, sharing the prosaic details, her ailments, the nervous crises of maternity in a fulsome manner she had never demonstrated before. In these months she broke the fundamental rules her father had instilled in her of never complaining, never asking for favors, and never trusting anyone.

Nathaniel became the center of her existence; beneath his wing she felt happy, safe, and accepted. This created a lopsided intimacy between them that seemed natural as it fitted both their characters. If they ever spoke of this imbalance, it was to agree that once the baby was born and Alma had recovered they would try to live as a normal couple, although neither of them seemed in any great hurry to do so. Alma meanwhile had discovered the perfect place on his shoulder, just below the chin, where she could lay her head and doze.

“You're free to go with other women, Nat. All I ask is that you're discreet, I don't want to be humiliated,” Alma often said.

He responded each time with a kiss and a joke. Even though she found it impossible to free herself from the impression Ichimei had made on her mind and body, she was jealous of Nathaniel; half a dozen women were pursuing him, and she guessed that seeing him married might not be a drawback, but for several of them could even be an incentive.

They were at the family house on Lake Tahoe, where the Belasco family went to ski, drinking hot cider at eleven in the morning while they waited for a snowstorm to subside so that they could go outside, when Alma came stumbling barefoot into the living room in her nightgown. Lillian rushed over to steady her, but Alma pushed her away, trying to focus.

“Tell my brother, Samuel, my head is exploding,” she murmured.

Isaac tried to lead her over to a sofa and called out to Nathaniel, but Alma seemed rooted to the spot, as heavy as a piece of furniture, clutching her head in her hands and muttering some nonsense about Samuel, Poland, and diamonds in the lining of a coat. Nathaniel arrived in time to see his wife collapse with convulsions.

This attack of eclampsia occurred in the twenty-second week of her pregnancy and lasted one minute fifteen seconds. None of the three other people in the room understood what it was: they all thought it was epilepsy. Nathaniel only managed to lay her on her side, hold her to stop her harming herself, and keep her mouth open with a spoon. The terrible shuddering soon calmed, leaving Alma exhausted and disoriented. She had no idea where she was or who was with her; she was groaning from her headache and the stomach spasms. They put her in the car wrapped in blankets and skidded along the icy track down to the local clinic, where the duty doctor, a specialist in skiers' broken bones and bruises, could do little more than bring her blood pressure down. The ambulance took seven hours to get from Tahoe to San Francisco, battling the storm and obstacles along the highway. When at last an obstetrician examined Alma, he warned the family of the imminent risk of fresh convulsions or a brain seizure. At five and a half months, the child had no hope of surviving; they would have to wait six weeks before inducing the birth, but during that period both mother and child ran the risk of dying. As if hearing this, a few minutes later the baby's heartbeat ceased in the womb, thus saving Nathaniel from a tragic decision. Alma was quickly wheeled to the surgical ward.

Nathaniel was the only one who saw the child. Shaking with exhaustion and sadness, he took him in his hands, pushed apart the folds of the toweling, and saw a tiny being, all shriveled and blue, the skin as fine and translucent as an onion, completely formed and with half-open eyes. He bent down and gave his head a long kiss. The cold shocked his lips, and he could feel the deep rumble of silent sobs rising from the soles of his feet, shaking his whole body and emerging as tears. He wept, thinking he was doing so for the dead child and for Alma, but in fact he was doing so for himself, for his constrained, conventional life, the weight of the responsibilities he could never free himself from, the loneliness that had oppressed him since birth, the love he longed for but would never know, the marked cards he had been dealt, all the underhanded tricks destiny had played on him.

Seven months after the miscarriage, Nathaniel took Alma on a trip to Europe to help her forget the overwhelming melancholy that was paralyzing her. She had started talking about her brother, Samuel, at the time they lived together in Poland; a governess who haunted her nightmares; a blue velvet coat; Vera Neumann and her owl spectacles; a pair of horrible classmates from school; books she had read whose titles she couldn't remember but whose characters she felt sorry for; and other nonsensical memories. Nathaniel thought that a cultural tour might reawaken Alma's inspiration and her enthusiasm for her silk screens, and if that happened, he intended to suggest she study for a while at the Royal Academy of Arts, the United Kingdom's oldest art school. He considered the best therapy for Alma would be to get away from San Francisco, from the Belascos in general and from him in particular. They had not mentioned Ichimei again, and Nathaniel assumed she had kept her word and was not in contact with him. He intended to spend more time with his wife, cut down on the hours he worked, and whenever possible took cases and studied his pleas at home. They continued to sleep in separate rooms but gave up the pretense that they spent the night together. Nathaniel's bed was installed once and for all in his former bedroom, surrounded by walls covered in hunting scenes, with horses, dogs, and foxes. Neither of them could sleep, but any sensual temptation had dried up between them. They stayed up reading until past midnight in one of the living rooms, both on the same sofa and covered in the same blanket. On those Sundays when the weather was too poor to go sailing, Nathaniel persuaded Alma to accompany him to the movies, or they took a nap side by side on their insomnia sofa, which took the place of the marriage bed they did not have.