The Japanese Lover(14)

Furious, Lillian rushed off to her husband’s office on Montgomery Street but got no support there either.

“Don’t get involved in this, Lillian. All boys have to go through these initiation rites, and almost all of them survive,” Isaac told her.

“Did you get roughed up as well?”

“Of course. And as you can see, it didn’t turn out so bad.”

The four years of secondary school would have been endless torment for Nathaniel without help from a wholly unexpected quarter. The weekend following the beating, when he saw Nathaniel covered in scratches and bruises, Ichimei took him to the garden pergola and gave him a useful demonstration of the martial arts, which he had practiced since he could stand upright. He handed Nathaniel a spade and told him to come at him as if he wanted to slice his head in two. Nathaniel assumed he was joking and raised the spade in the air like an umbrella. Ichimei had to insist before he finally understood and made to attack him for real. Nathaniel never knew how he lost control of the spade, flew through the air, and landed on his back on the pergola’s Italian tiles, all of this witnessed by an astonished Alma, who was looking on closely. This was how Nathaniel found out that the imperturbable Takao Fukuda taught a combination of judo and karate to his children as well as other youngsters from the Japanese community, in a rented garage on Pine Street. Nathaniel told his father, who had vaguely heard of these sports, which were gaining popularity in California at the time. And so Isaac visited Pine Street. He did not really think Fukuda could help his son, but the gardener explained that the beauty of the martial arts was that they did not require physical strength as much as concentration and the ability to use the adversary’s weight and thrust to topple him. Nathaniel began the classes. The chauffeur drove him to the garage three times a week, and there he first took on Ichimei and the younger boys, and later Charles, James, and other older opponents. For several months it felt as if his body were being crushed to pieces, until he finally learned to fall without hurting himself. He lost his fear of getting into a fight. He never got beyond the beginners’ level, but that was more than the school bullies knew. They soon stopped picking on him because if any of them came looking for a fight he would put them off with four guttural cries and an exaggerated choreography of martial poses. Just as he had never admitted he was aware of his son’s beatings, Isaac never inquired about the outcome of the classes, and yet he must have checked up, because one day he arrived at Pine Street in a truck with four workmen to lay a wooden floor in the garage. Takao Fukuda gave several formal bows but made no comment either.

Nathaniel’s entry into the boys’ school put an end to the performances in the attic theater. Together with his studies and the sustained effort to defend himself, his time was devoted to metaphysical anguish and a studied gloominess that his mother sought to remedy with spoonfuls of cod liver oil. There was barely time for a few games of Scrabble or chess, if Alma managed to catch him before he shut himself in his bedroom to hammer away at his guitar. He was discovering jazz and the blues but looked down on fashionable dances: he would have been paralyzed with embarrassment on a dance floor, where his inability to follow a rhythm, a long--standing Belasco family trait, would have immediately become evident. He looked on with a mixture of sarcasm and envy when Alma and Ichimei demonstrated the Lindy Hop to arouse his interest. The two of them had practiced with two scratched records and a broken phonograph Lillian had thrown away but Alma had rescued from the garbage. Ichimei had then used his nimble fingers and patient intuition to dismantle it and restore it to working order.



* * *



Secondary school, which began so badly for Nathaniel, continued to be an ordeal for him throughout the following years. Although his classmates grew tired of ambushing him to beat him up, they subjected him to four years of taunts and ostracism; they couldn’t forgive his intellectual curiosity, his good grades, and his physical awkwardness. He never overcame the feeling that he had been born in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had to participate in sports, because they were a central part of this English-style education, and so he suffered the repeated humiliation of coming in last and not being wanted on anyone’s team. At fifteen he shot up in size: his mother had to buy him new pairs of shoes and to get his trousers lengthened every couple of months. After starting out as the smallest in his class, he finally reached a normal height. His legs, arms, and nose all grew; the outline of his ribs was visible beneath his shirt, and the Adam’s apple in his scrawny neck became so prominent that he took to wearing a scarf even in summer. He knew his profile made him look like a plucked buzzard, and so he tended to sit in corners, where people had to look at him face on. He was spared the acne that plagued his enemies, but not the typical teenage complexes. He could never have imagined that in less than three years his body would be well proportioned, his features would have settled down, and he would become as handsome as a movie star. He felt ugly, unhappy, and alone; he began to toy with the idea of suicide, something he admitted to Alma in one of his harshest moments of self-criticism. “That would be a waste, Nat. Better complete your schooling, study medicine, and then go out to India and take care of lepers. I’ll go with you,” she replied without much sympathy, because compared to her family’s situation, her cousin’s existential crises seemed laughable.

The age difference between the two of them was barely noticeable, because Alma had developed early, and her tendency toward solitude had made her very mature for her age. Whereas Nathaniel swam in what seemed like an insurmountable adolescence, the seriousness and strength that her father had instilled in Alma and that she saw as essential virtues only became more pronounced. She felt abandoned by her cousin and by life. She could imagine the intense self-loathing Nathaniel had experienced when he entered high school, because she felt something similar, if less acutely, but she did not allow herself the luxury of studying herself in the mirror to spot her defects, or of complaining about her fate. She had other worries.