The Japanese Lover (31 page)

The journey was to range from Denmark to Greece, including a cruise on the Danube and another in Turkey. It was to last two months and end in London, where they would separate. In the second week, strolling hand in hand through the narrow back streets of Rome after a memorable meal and two bottles of the best Chianti, Alma came to a halt beneath a streetlamp, grabbed Nathaniel by the shirt, pulled him toward her, and kissed him full on the lips. “I want you to sleep with me,” she ordered. That night, in the decadent palace-cum-hotel where they were staying, they made love intoxicated by the wine and the Roman summer, discovering what they already knew of each other, feeling as though they were committing a forbidden act. All Alma's knowledge of carnal love and her own body was thanks to Ichimei, who compensated for his lack of experience with unfailing intuition, the same he used to revive any drooping plant. In the cockroach motel, Alma had been a musical instrument in Ichimei's loving hands. She experienced nothing of this with Nathaniel. They made love hastily, as awkward and anxious as two schoolkids playing hooky, not giving themselves time to explore each other or smell each other's skin, let alone to laugh or sigh together. Afterward they were overcome by an inexplicable unease that they tried to disguise by smoking in silence covered by the sheet, with the moon's yellow light spying on them from the window.

The next day they exhausted themselves visiting ruins, climbing ancient stone steps, peering inside cathedrals, losing themselves among marble statues and extravagant fountains. After nightfall they again drank too much, staggered back to the decadent hotel, and for a second time made love without any great desire but with the best will in the world. And so, day by day and night after night, they toured the cities and cruised the waters of the trip as planned, gradually establishing the married couple's routine they had so carefully avoided so far, until it became natural to share the bathroom and wake up on the same pillow.

Alma did not stay on in London. She returned to San Francisco with piles of museum leaflets and postcards, art books, and photos of picturesque corners taken by Nathaniel. She was keen to take up her painting again; her head was filled with colors and images from all she had seen: Turkish rugs, Greek urns, Flemish tapestries, paintings from every age, icons overlaid with precious stones, languid Madonnas and starving saints, but also fruit and vegetable markets, fishing boats, laundry hanging from balconies in narrow streets, men playing dominoes in taverns, children on beaches, packs of stray dogs, sad donkeys, and ancient roofs in villages dozing under the weight of centuries of routine and tradition. Everything came alive in broad brushstrokes of vibrant color on her silk screens. By then she occupied a workshop of eight thousand square feet in San Francisco's industrial district, a place that had remained unused for many months and that she aimed to bring back to life. As she submerged herself in work, weeks went by without her thinking of either Ichimei or the child she had lost. On their return from Europe, the intimacy with Nathaniel dwindled away to almost nothing; each of them was very busy, and so the sleepless nights reading together on the sofa came to an end, although they were still united by the tender friendship they had always enjoyed. Alma seldom dozed off with her head in the exact spot between her husband's shoulder and chin where she had once felt so secure. They no longer slept between the same sheets or shared the same bathroom. Nathaniel used the bed in his study, leaving Alma on her own in the blue room. If they occasionally made love it was by coincidence, and always with too much alcohol in their veins.

“I want to free you from your promise to be faithful to me, Alma. It's not fair to you,” Nathaniel said to her one night when they were admiring a shower of shooting stars from the garden pergola, smoking marijuana. “You are young and full of life, you deserve more romance than I can give you.”

“What about you? Is there someone out there who is offering you romance that you want to be free for? I've never stood in your way, Nat.”

“It's not about me, Alma.”

“You're freeing me from my promise at a bad moment, Nat. I'm pregnant, and this time you are the only possible father. I was going to tell you once I was sure.”

Isaac and Lillian Belasco greeted the news of the pregnancy with the same enthusiasm as the first time. They refurbished the room they had ready for the other baby and prepared to pamper it. “If it's a boy and I'm dead by the time he is born, I suppose you'll give him my name; but if I'm still alive you can't do that, because it would bring bad luck. In that case I want him to be called Lawrence Franklin Belasco, after my father and the great president Roosevelt, may they rest in peace,” the patriarch declared. He was fading steadily and was hanging on only because he couldn't leave Lillian; his wife had become his shadow. She was almost deaf, but she didn't need to hear. She had learned to decipher other people's silences with great accuracy: it was impossible to hide anything from her or fool her, and she had developed an incredible ability to guess what people were about to say, and to reply even before they spoke. She had two obsessions: improving her husband's health, and seeing that Nathaniel and Alma loved each other as they should. For both of these she turned to alternative therapies, which went from magnetized mattresses to healing elixirs and aphrodisiacs. At the forefront of naturalist witchcraft, California offered a wide variety of people selling hope and consolation. Isaac resigned himself to hanging crystals around his neck and drinking alfalfa juice and scorpion syrup, while Alma and Nathaniel put up with massages of ylang-ylang essential oil, Chinese shark-fin soups, and other alchemical remedies Lillian turned to in order to boost their lukewarm love.

Lawrence Franklin Belasco was born in the spring with none of the problems the doctors had been anticipating as a result of the eclampsia his mother had previously suffered. From his first day in this world his name seemed too big for him, and everyone called him Larry. He grew healthy, fat, and self-reliant, without any need for special attention. He was so placid and quiet that sometimes he would fall asleep under the furniture and no one would notice for hours. His parents handed him over to the grandparents and a succession of nannies, without worrying too much about him, because at Sea Cliff there were several adults who doted on him. He didn't sleep with his parents, but with Isaac and Lillian, whom he called Papa and Mama; he called his own parents by the more formal Mother and Father.

Nathaniel spent little time in the house; he had become the city's most prominent lawyer, earning a vast amount of money, and in his free time played sports or explored the art of photography. He was waiting for his son to grow a little before initiating him into the pleasures of sailing, without ever dreaming that day would never come. Since her in-laws had taken charge of their grandson, Alma began to travel in search of ideas for her work without feeling guilty about leaving him behind. In Larry's early years she planned more or less short trips in order not to be apart from him for any great length of time, but she soon learned that this didn't matter, as whenever she returned from either a prolonged or shorter absence, her son greeted her with the same polite handshake rather than the passionate embrace she had been longing for. She concluded with regret that Larry loved his cat more than her, and this gave her the freedom to travel to the Far East, South America, and other remote spots.

L
arry Belasco spent the first four years of his life spoiled by his grandparents and the employees at Sea Cliff, cosseted like an orchid, his every whim satisfied. This system, which would have forever ruined the character of a less balanced child, instead made him friendly, helpful, and even-tempered. This did not change with the death in 1962 of his grandfather Isaac, one of the two pillars holding up the fantasy universe he had lived in until then.

Isaac's health had recovered when his favorite grandson was born.

“Inside I feel like a twenty-year-old, Lillian. What on earth happened to my body?”

He had enough energy to take Larry for a walk every day, showing him the garden's botanical secrets, and even crawled around the floor with him. Isaac bought him the pets he himself had wanted as a boy: a boisterous parrot, fish in an aquarium, a rabbit that disappeared forever under the furniture as soon as Larry opened its cage, and a long-eared dog, the first of several generations of cocker spaniels that the family had from then on. While the doctors were at a loss to explain the marked improvement in Isaac's health, Lillian put it down to the healing arts and esoteric sciences in which she had become an expert.

One day Isaac took little Larry to Golden Gate Park, where they spent the afternoon on a rented horse, with the grandfather in the saddle and Larry sitting in front of him, enfolded in his arms. They returned home sunburned, smelling of sweat, and enthused with the idea of buying a horse and a pony so that they could ride together. Lillian was waiting for them at the garden barbecue to cook sausages and marshmallows, the favorite dinner of both grandfather and grandson. Afterward she bathed Larry, put him to bed in her husband's room, and read him a story until he fell asleep. She drank her small glass of sherry with a tincture of opium and went to bed herself.

At seven o'clock the next morning she was awakened by Larry's little hand shaking her shoulder. “Mama, Mama, Papa's had a fall.”

They found Isaac sprawled on the bathroom floor. It took the combined effort of Nathaniel and the chauffeur to move the freezing, stiff body, which had become as heavy as lead, and lay him out on his bed. They tried to keep Lillian from seeing him, but she pushed everyone out of the room, shut the door, and did not open it again until she had finished washing her husband's corpse slowly, rubbing it with lotion and cologne, closely examining every detail of this body that she knew better than her own and loved so much, surprised to see it had not grown old in any way but was exactly as she had always seen it, the same tall, strong young man who could lift her in his arms with a laugh, tanned from his work in the garden, the same shock of black hair as when he was twenty-­five, and the fine hands of a good man. When she reopened the door she was serene. Although the family was afraid that without him Lillian would soon shrivel up with grief, she showed them that death is not an insurmountable obstacle to communication between those who truly love each other.

Years later, during his second therapy session after his wife had threatened to leave him, Larry evoked that image of his grandfather in a heap on the bathroom floor as the most significant moment in his childhood, and the image of his father in his funeral shroud as the end of his youth and his forced landing in adulthood. He was four years old on the first occasion, and twenty-six when the second occurred. The psychologist asked, with a hint of doubt in his voice, whether he had any other memories from when he was four, at which Larry proceeded to reel off the names of all the staff in the house and of his pets, the titles of the books his grandmother used to read to him, and even the color of the dressing gown she was wearing when she suddenly went blind only hours after her husband's death. Those first years protected by his grandparents were the happiest time of his life, and he had stored up all his memories of them.

Lillian was diagnosed as having a temporary hysterical blindness, but neither of these adjectives proved to be true. Larry acted as her guide until he entered kindergarten, and after that she managed on her own, because she didn't want to depend on anyone. She knew Sea Cliff and everything in it by heart; she got around without hesitation and even ventured into the kitchen to bake cookies for her grandson. Besides, Isaac was leading her by the hand, as she said half jokingly and half seriously. To please her invisible husband she began to dress all in lilac, because that was the color she was wearing when she met him in 1914, and because it solved the problem of being blind and having to choose what to wear every day. She did not allow them to treat her as an invalid or give any indication that she felt isolated due to her lack of hearing and sight. Nathaniel reckoned that his mother had a gun dog's sense of smell and a bat's radar to help her find her way and to recognize people. Until Lillian's death in 1973, Larry received her unconditional love, and according to the psychologist who saved his marriage, he could not expect the same from his wife; in marriage nothing is unconditional.

The Fukudas' flower and houseplant nursery was in the phone book, and every so often Alma would check that the address remained the same, but she never gave in to the temptation to call Ichimei. It had cost her a lot to recover from her frustrated love, and she was afraid that if she heard his voice even for an instant she would drown in the same blind passion as before. In the years since then, her senses had gone to sleep; together with overcoming her obsession with Ichimei, she had transferred to her paintbrushes the sensuality she had experienced with him and never had with Nathaniel. This changed at her father-in-law's second funeral, when among the huge crowd she made out Ichimei's unmistakable face. He looked just the same as the young man she remembered. Ichimei followed the cortege accompanied by three women, two of whom Alma vaguely recognized even though she had not seen them in many years, and a young woman who stood out because she was not dressed in strict mourning like everyone else. Their small group stayed apart from the others, but once the ceremony was over and people began to disperse, Alma slipped out of Nathaniel's arm and followed them to the avenue, where the cars were lined up. When she called out to Ichimei, all four of them came back toward her.

“Mrs. Belasco,” Ichimei greeted her, bowing formally.

“Ichimei,” she answered, paralyzed.

“This is my mother, Heideko Fukuda; my sister, Megumi Anderson; and my wife, Delphine,” he said.