“Ever since Agent Wilkins saved me from my stepfather, no one has touched me . . . You know what I mean. I’ve been alone, and prefer it that way.”
“Well, Irina, that’s going to have to change, but let’s take it slowly. What happened had nothing to do with love and will never happen to you again. It’s got nothing to do with the two of us either. You once told me that old folk take their time making love. That’s not a bad idea. We’ll make love like a pair of grandparents, okay?”
“I don’t think I can manage it, Seth.”
“Then we’ll have to go to therapy. Come on, stop crying. Are you hungry? Comb your hair and we’ll go out for something to eat. We can talk about my grandmother’s sinful life, that always cheers us up.”
TIJUANA
During those heavenly months in 1955 when Alma and Ichimei were able to love each other freely at the sad motel in Martinez, she told him she was sterile. This was not so much a lie as a wish, a hope. She said this to preserve spontaneity between the sheets, because she trusted in a diaphragm to avoid surprises, and because her menstruation had always been so irregular that the gynecologist her aunt Lillian had taken her to see diagnosed ovarian cysts that would affect her fertility. As with so many other things, Alma postponed the operation, since motherhood was the last of her priorities. She thought that somehow magically she would not suffer the misfortune of falling pregnant at this young age: accidents like that happened to women from another class without education or resources. Because she did not follow her cycles, she did not realize she was pregnant until the tenth week, and when she did, she trusted to luck for a further two weeks. She thought she might have got the calculation wrong, but if the worst came to the worst, it could be resolved by violent exercise: she started biking everywhere, pedaling furiously. She regularly examined her underwear to see if there was any blood, her anxiety increasing with each passing day, and yet she continued meeting Ichimei and making love with the same frantic concern with which she pedaled up and down hills. Finally, when she could no longer ignore her swollen breasts, morning sickness, and sudden anxiety attacks, it was not Ichimei she turned to but Nathaniel, as she had done ever since they were children. To lessen the risk that her aunt and uncle would find out, she went to see him at the Belasco and Belasco Law Firm, opened in 1920, in the same office on Montgomery Street as during the days of the patriarch, with its solemn furniture and bookshelves filled with legal volumes bound in dark green leather, a mausoleum to the law, where Persian rugs muffled footsteps and everyone talked in confidential whispers.
Nathaniel was at his desk, in shirtsleeves, his tie loosened and hair a mess, surrounded by piles of open documents and legal tomes, but as soon as he saw her he came over to greet her. Alma buried her face in his chest, deeply relieved to be able to pour out her drama to this man who had never failed her.
“I’m pregnant,” was all she managed to utter.
Still holding on to her, Nathaniel led her over to the sofa, where they sat side by side. Alma told him about her love, the motel, and how the pregnancy was not Ichimei’s fault but hers, and that if Ichimei found out he would doubtless insist on marrying her and taking responsibility for the child, but that she had thought it through carefully and wasn’t brave enough to give up all she had always enjoyed by becoming Ichimei’s wife. She adored him but knew that the disadvantages of poverty drove out love, because faced with the choice between a life of economic hardship within a Japanese community she had nothing in common with, or of continuing to be protected in her own environment, her fear of the unknown won out; she was ashamed of her own weakness, Ichimei deserved unconditional love, he was a wonderful man, a sage, a saint, a pure soul, a delicate, considerate lover in whose arms she felt blessed.