The Japanese Lover(61)

“Forever is a long time, Alma. I think we’ll meet again in happier circumstances, or other lives,” said Ichimei. He tried hard to remain calm, but an icy sadness was filling his heart and strangled his voice.

They embraced desolately, the orphans of love. Alma’s knees buckled, and she was on the verge of collapsing against her lover’s strong chest and confessing everything, even the darkest corners of her shame, begging that they get married and live in a shack, bring up mixed-race children, promising him she would be a submissive wife and would give up her silk-screening and her comfortable life at Sea Cliff and the splendid future that was her birthright, abandon this and much more just for him and the extraordinary love that bound them together. Ichimei might have had an inkling of all this, and was considerate enough to prevent her humiliating herself in this way by closing her mouth with a chaste, fleeting kiss. Still holding her close, he led her to the door and from there to her car. Kissing her on the forehead one last time, he walked to his gardening van without so much as a backward glance.





July 11, 1969

Our love is inevitable, Alma. I always knew it, although for years I struggled against it and tried to tear you from my mind, knowing I could not do so from my heart. When you left me without giving any reason I could not understand it. I felt cheated, but during my first trip to Japan I had time to calm down and eventually accepted I had lost you in this life. I stopped making pointless conjectures as to what had happened between us. I had no hope that destiny would reunite us. Now, after fourteen years apart, every day of which I have thought of you, I understand we will never be husband and wife, but also that we cannot renounce everything we feel so intensely. I invite you to live our love in a bubble, protected from the thorns of life and preserved intact for the rest of our lives, and beyond death. It is up to us to preserve our love forever.

Ichi





BEST FRIENDS


Alma Mendel and Nathaniel Belasco were married in a private ceremony on the terrace at Sea Cliff, on a day that started out warm and sunny but that turned colder and darker, with unexpected storm clouds that reflected the bride and groom’s state of mind. Alma had purple shadows under her eyes from spending a sleepless night tossing and turning on a sea of doubts. As soon as she saw the rabbi she ran to the bathroom, stomach heaving, but Nathaniel shut himself in with her, made her splash herself with cold water, and urged her to control herself and put a brave face on it.

“You’re not alone in this, Alma. I’m with you, and always will be,” he promised.

The rabbi, who had at first been against the marriage because they were cousins, had to accept the situation once Isaac Belasco, the most prominent member of his congregation, explained that in view of Alma’s condition there was no choice but to marry them. Isaac told him that the young couple had loved each other since childhood, and their affection had turned to passion upon Alma’s return from Boston; that these accidents happen; that it was the way of the world, and faced with the facts all that remained was to give them their blessing.

Martha and Sarah had the idea that they could spread a story to silence any gossip—for example, that Alma had been adopted in Poland by the Mendel family and therefore was not a blood relative—but Isaac was against it. There was no point adding such an obvious lie to a mistake already made. Deep down, he was happy to see the union of the two people he loved most in the world apart from his wife. He preferred a thousand times that Alma marry Nathaniel and stay closely tied to his family than for her to wed a stranger and leave him. Lillian reminded him that incestuous relations produced mentally deficient offspring, but he assured her this was nothing but a popular superstition that only had scientific grounding in enclosed communities, where the inbreeding had taken place over several generations. That was not the case for Nathaniel and Alma.

Following the ceremony, attended only by the immediate family, the law firm’s accountant, and the household staff, a formal dinner was served for them all in the mansion’s great dining room, reserved for grand occasions. The cook, her assistant, the maids, and the chauffeur took to the table shyly with their employers; they were served by two waiters from Ernie’s, the city’s most refined restaurant, which provided the food. This idea had occurred to Isaac in order to officially establish that from this day on Alma and Nathaniel were man and wife. The domestic staff, who knew them as members of the same family, would not find it easy to become accustomed to the change; in fact, one of the maids who had been working for the Belasco family for four years still thought they were brother and sister, because no one had ever told her before that they were cousins. The meal began in a funereal silence, with everyone staring down at their plates in embarrassment, but things livened up as the wine started to flow and Isaac obliged his guests to toast the couple. Happy, talkative, filling his own and everyone else’s glasses, Isaac was like the healthy, youthful version of the old man he had turned into in recent years. Fearful he might have a heart attack, a worried Lillian kept tugging at his trousers under the table to calm him down. Finally, the bride and groom cut a marzipan and cream cake with the same silver knife Isaac had used at his own wedding many years before. They left the house in a taxi, as the family chauffeur had drunk so much he was sobbing tearfully in his seat while muttering in Gaelic, his mother tongue.

They spent their first night as a married couple in the bridal suite at the Palace Hotel, where Alma had once had to suffer the debutantes’ balls, surrounded by champagne, sweets, and flowers. The next day they flew to New York, and from there to Europe for a two-week honeymoon that Isaac had insisted they take even though neither of them wanted it. Nathaniel was busy with several legal cases and did not want to leave the office, but his father bought the tickets, stuffed them in his pocket, and convinced him to go with the argument that a honeymoon was a traditional obligation; there were enough rumors going around already about this hasty marriage between cousins to want to avoid any further speculation. Alma undressed in the bathroom and returned wearing the silk and lace nightgown Lillian had bought hurriedly as part of an improvised trousseau. She twirled around in front of Nathaniel, who was waiting for her fully dressed, sitting on a stool at the foot of the bed.