The memory of those blessed months when she and Ichimei met at the motel, where they couldn’t switch off the light because of the cockroaches that emerged at night from the corners of the room, was able to sustain Alma in later years, when she sternly tried to drive out love and desire and replace them with the penance of fidelity. With Ichimei she discovered the multiple subtleties of love and pleasure, from frantic, urgent passion to those sacred moments when they were lifted by emotion and lay still in bed side by side, staring endlessly into each other’s eyes, content and sated, abashed at having touched their souls’ deepest levels, purified from having stripped away all pretense and lying together totally vulnerable, in such a state of ecstasy they could no longer distinguish between joy and sadness, the elation of life or the sweet temptation of dying there and then so that they would never be apart. Isolated from the world through the magic of love, Alma could ignore the voices inside her head calling her back, crying out for her to be careful, warning her of the consequences. They lived only for the day’s encounter; there was no tomorrow or yesterday. All that mattered was the grimy room with its jammed window; the smell of damp, worn-out sheets; and the endless wheezing of the air-conditioning. Only the two of them existed, from the first longing kiss as they crossed the threshold and before they even locked the door; their caresses standing up; flinging off their clothing, which lay where it fell; their naked, quivering bodies; each drinking in the heat, savor, and smell of the other; the texture of skin and hair; the marvel of losing themselves in desire until they were exhausted, of dozing in one another’s arms for a moment, only to renew their pleasure; the jokes, laughter, and whispered secrets; the wonderful universe of intimacy. Ichimei’s fingers, capable of returning a dying plant to life or repairing a watch without looking, revealed to Alma her own rebellious, hungry nature. She enjoyed shocking him, challenging him, seeing him blush with embarrassment and delight. She was daring, he was restrained; she was noisy during her orgasms, he covered her mouth. She dreamed up a rosary of romantic, passionate, flattering, and filthy phrases to whisper in his ear or write to him in urgent missives; he maintained the reserve typical of his character and culture.
Alma gave herself to the unconscious joy of love. She wondered how nobody noticed the bloom on her skin, the bottomless dark of her eyes, the lightness of her footsteps, the languor in her voice, the burning energy she could not and would not control. She wrote in her diary that she was floating and felt bubbles of mineral water on her skin, making the down on her body bristle with pleasure; that her heart had blown up like a balloon and was sure to burst, although there was no room for anyone but Ichimei in that huge, inflated heart because the rest of the world had become distant and hazy; that she studied herself in the mirror, imagining it was Ichimei observing her from the far side of the glass, admiring her long legs, her strong hands, her firm breasts with their dark nipples, her flat stomach with its faint line of black hair from navel to pubis, her lipstick-red lips, and her bedouin skin; that she slept with her face buried in one of his T-shirts soaked with his gardener’s smell of earth and sweat; that she covered her ears to imagine Ichimei’s slow, gentle voice, his hesitant laugh that was the opposite of her own exaggerated guffaws, his warnings to take care, his explanations about plants, the words of love he whispered in Japanese because in English they seemed unreal, his astonished exclamations at the designs she showed him and at her plans to imitate Vera Neumann, without pausing even for an instant to bemoan the fact that he himself, who had real talent, had only been able to paint when he could find a couple of hours after his incessant work on the land, before she came into his life, took up all his free time, and sucked out all the air. The need for her to know she was loved was insatiable.
TRACES OF THE PAST
At first, Alma Belasco and Lenny Beal, the friend who had recently arrived at Lark House, planned to enjoy San Francisco’s cultural life: they went to the cinema, the theater, to concerts and exhibitions. They experimented with exotic restaurants and took the dog for walks. For the first time in three years, Alma returned to the family box at the opera, but her friend got confused by the complications of the first act and fell asleep in the second, before Tosca managed to plunge a kitchen knife into Scarpia’s heart. They gave up on opera. Lenny had a more comfortable car than Alma, so they took to going to Napa to enjoy the bucolic landscape of vineyards and to taste wines, or to Bolinas to breathe in the salty air and eat oysters, but in the end they grew tired of making all these efforts to stay young and active, and gave in to the temptation of simply resting. Instead of going out on excursions, which involved traveling, looking for somewhere to park, and having to be on their feet, they watched films on television, listened to music in their apartments, or visited Cathy with a bottle of pink champagne to go with the gray caviar that Cathy’s daughter, a Lufthansa flight attendant, brought back from her trips. Lenny helped in the pain clinic by teaching the patients to make masks for Alma’s theater from papier-maché and dental glue. They spent the afternoons reading in the library, the only shared area that was more or less silent: noise was one of the disadvantages of living in a community. If there was no alternative, they ate in the Lark House dining room, scrutinized by other women who were envious of Alma’s luck. Irina felt neglected; she was no longer indispensable to Alma.