The Japanese Lover(53)
“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.
“Why do you live in this pigsty?” asked Seth, scandalized.
“Because it’s cheap.”
“Well you must be much poorer than I ever imagined, Irina.”
“I don’t know what you imagined, Seth. Almost everyone in the world is poorer than the Belascos.”
She helped him remove his shoes and pushed him down onto the mattress on the floor that she used as a bed. Like everything else in the room, the sheets were clean, because her grandparents had taught Irina that poverty is no excuse for grime.
“What’s that?” asked Seth, pointing to a small bell on the wall attached to a cord that went through the wall to the next room.
“Nothing, don’t worry about it.”
“What do you mean, nothing? Who lives on the other side?”
“Tim, my friend from the café, the one who washes dogs with me. I sometimes have nightmares, and if I start crying out, he pulls the cord, the bell rings, and I wake up. It’s an arrangement we’ve made.”
“Do you suffer from nightmares, Irina?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
“No, but I do have erotic dreams. Would you like me to tell you one?”
“Go to sleep, Seth.”
In less than two minutes, Seth had obeyed her. Irina gave Neko his medicine, washed up with the pitcher of water and basin she kept in a corner of the room, took off her jeans and blouse, put on a worn T-shirt, and curled up by the wall, with the cat between her and Seth. It took her a long while to get to sleep, as she was too aware of the man’s presence, the noises in the rest of the house, and the stink of cauliflower. The one tiny window onto the outside world was so high up that all that could be seen through it was a small rectangle of sky. Sometimes the moon would give a brief greeting as it crossed the sky, but this was not one of those blessed nights.
The faint light of day seeping into her room woke Irina the next morning. She discovered Seth was no longer there. It was nine o’clock and she ought to have left for work an hour and a half earlier. Her head and all her bones were aching, as if she were suffering from the sake hangover by osmosis.
THE CONFESSION
Alma had not yet returned to Lark House, nor had she called to ask how Neko was. The cat had not eaten in three days and was barely able to swallow the water Irina squirted into his mouth with a syringe. Since the medicine had not had any effect, she was about to ask Lenny to take her to the vet, when Seth turned up. He looked refreshed, and was wearing clean clothes and a contrite expression, evidently ashamed of his conduct the previous night.