The Japanese Lover(18)

Irina’s salary would barely have been enough for a normal person to live on, but her ambitions were so humble and her needs so modest that sometimes she could even save money. Her income from her dog-grooming business and as an assistant to Alma, who always looked for reasons to pay her more than they had agreed, made her feel rich. Lark House had become her home, and the residents, whose lives she shared every day, replaced her grandparents. She was touched by these slow, pallid old people with all their ailments. Faced with their problems she was infinitely good--humored; she didn’t mind repeating the same answer to the same question a thousand times, and she enjoyed pushing their wheelchairs, encouraging, aiding, consoling them. She learned to deflect the violent impulses that occasionally swept over them like fleeting storms and wasn’t frightened by the avarice or persecution complexes some of them suffered from out of loneliness. She tried to understand what it meant to carry winter on your back, to hesitate over every step, to confuse words you don’t hear properly, to have the impression that the rest of the world is going about in a great rush; the emptiness, frailty, fatigue, and indifference toward everything not directly related to you, even children and grandchildren, whose absence was not felt as it once had been, and whose names you had to struggle to remember. She felt tender toward their wrinkles, arthritic fingers, and poor sight. She imagined how she herself would be as an elderly and then ancient woman.

But Alma Belasco never fit into that category; she didn’t need looking after. On the contrary, Irina felt taken care of by her and enjoyed the role of helpless niece that had been allotted to her. Alma, who was pragmatic, agnostic, and fundamentally skeptical, wanted nothing to do with crystals, zodiacs, or talking trees; keeping her company, Irina found relief from her own uncertainties. She wanted to be like Alma and live in a manageable reality, where problems had definite causes and solutions, where there were no dreadful creatures lurking in her dreams, no lecherous enemies spying from every street corner. Hours with her were precious and Irina would willingly have worked for free. Once she had gone so far as to suggest it.

“I have more than enough money, and you don’t have enough. Don’t ever mention it again,” said Alma in that imperious tone she almost never used with her.





SETH BELASCO


Alma Belasco enjoyed a leisurely breakfast, watched the news on TV, and then went to her yoga class or for an hour’s walk. On her return, she showered, got dressed, and at the time when she calculated a cleaner sent by Lupita was due to arrive, she would escape to the clinic to help her friend Cathy. The best treatment for pain was to keep the patients busy and mobile. Cathy always needed volunteers in the clinic and had asked Alma to give silk-screen classes, but that required space and materials that no one there could afford. Cathy refused to have Alma pay for everything, because as she said, it would not be good for the participants’ morale, as nobody wants to be the object of charity. As a result, Alma reached back to her former experience in the Sea Cliff attic with Nathaniel and Ichimei and improvised theatrical skits that were not only free but provoked gales of laughter. She went to her workshop three times a week to paint with Kirsten. She rarely frequented the Lark House dining room, preferring to eat out at local restaurants where the owners knew her, or in her apartment, when her daughter-in-law sent the chauffeur around with one of her favorite dishes. Irina kept only basic necessities in her kitchen: fresh fruit, oatmeal, whole-grain bread, honey.

Alma and Seth often invited Irina to their ritual Sunday lunch at Sea Cliff, where the family paid the matriarch homage. To Seth, who had previously used any pretext not to arrive before dessert—for even he was unable to consider not putting in an appearance at all—Irina’s presence made the occasion infinitely more appealing. He was still stubbornly pursuing her, but since he was meeting with little success he also went out with previous girlfriends willing to put up with his fickleness. He was bored with them and did not succeed in making Irina jealous. As his grandmother often said and the family often repeated, why waste ammunition on vultures? It was yet another enigmatic saying often used by the Belascos. To Alma, these family reunions began with a pleasant sense of anticipation at seeing her loved ones, particularly her granddaughter, Pauline (she saw Seth frequently enough), but often ended up being a bore, since every topic of conversation became a pretext for getting angry, not from any lack of affection, but out of the bad habit of arguing over trivialities. Seth always looked for ways to challenge or scandalize his parents; Pauline brought to the table yet another cause she had embraced, which she explained in great detail, from genital mutilation to animal slaughterhouses; Doris took great pains to offer her most exquisite culinary experiments, which were veritable banquets, yet regularly ended up weeping in her room because nobody appreciated them; good old Larry meanwhile performed a constant balancing act to avoid quarrels. The grandmother took advantage of Irina to dissipate tension, because the Belascos always behaved in a civilized fashion in front of strangers, even if it was only a humble employee from Lark House. To Irina, the Sea Cliff mansion seemed an extravagant luxury, with its six bedrooms, two living rooms, book-lined library, twin marble staircase, and garden fit for a palace. She was oblivious to the slow deterioration that almost a century’s existence had wrought, which Doris’s determined vigilance barely managed to keep at bay: the rust on the ornamental railings, the uneven floors and walls as a result of two earthquakes, the cracks in the floor tiles, and the termites’ trails in the woodwork. The house stood in a privileged position on top of a promontory between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay. At first light, the thick mist rolling in from the sea like an avalanche of cotton wool often obscured the Golden Gate Bridge altogether, but in the course of the morning it would lift and the elegant red iron structure would gradually emerge against a sky dotted with gulls, so close to the Belascos’ garden that it seemed possible to reach out and touch it.