Nathaniel ended a search begun thirty-five years before, although outwardly nothing altered in his life: he continued to be the model of bourgeois male respectability, without a soul guessing what had happened, or noticing that his office hours and addiction to sports were drastically reduced. On his side, Lenny was transformed by his lover’s influence. For the first time in his turbulent life he paused, and dared substitute the contemplation of his newfound happiness for all the previous noise and insane activity. If he wasn’t with Nathaniel, he was thinking about him. He never went back to the gay baths or clubs, and his friends rarely succeeded in tempting him to parties, since he had lost interest in getting to meet new people. Nathaniel was more than enough; he was the sun around which his days revolved. He basked in the calm of this love with a puritan’s devotion. He adopted Nathaniel’s taste in music, food, and drink, then his cashmere sweaters, camel-hair coat, and aftershave lotion. Nathaniel had a private phone line installed in his office for Lenny’s exclusive use, and they were constantly in touch; they went out sailing together, made trips, and met up in distant cities where no one knew them.
* * *
At first, Nathaniel’s incomprehensible illness did not cloud his relationship with Lenny: the symptoms were so random and sporadic, they came and went apparently without cause or connection. But as Nathaniel began to fade, reduced to a specter of the man he once was, when he had to accept his limitations and ask for help, the fun came to an end. He lost his zest for life, felt that everything around him was pale and faint, and abandoned himself to nostalgia for the past like an old man, regretting some things he had done and the many more he had not managed to achieve. He knew his life would soon be over, and was scared. Lenny did not let him slump into depression; he kept him going with feigned good humor and the constancy of his love, which continued to grow even in such trying circumstances. They met in their little apartment to console one another. Nathaniel lacked the strength and desire to make love, and Lenny did not demand it; he was happy with the moments of intimacy when he could calm Nathaniel if he was shaking with fever, feed him teaspoonfuls of yogurt like a baby, lie by his side listening to music, rub his lesions with balm, hold him upright on the toilet. Toward the end, when Nathaniel could no longer leave home and Alma took over the role of nurse with the same tender persistence as Lenny, her role remained that of his friend and wife, while Lenny was the great love of his life. Or so Alma came to see it during their night of exchanged secrets.
At dawn, when at last Nathaniel fell asleep, she looked Lenny Beal’s phone number up in the directory and called to beg him to come and help her. She told him they could better endure the agony of those days if they were shared. Lenny arrived in less than thirty minutes. Alma, still wearing pajamas and a dressing gown, opened the door. He found himself confronted by a woman exhausted from fatigue and suffering; she saw a handsome young man, hair still damp from the shower, with the bluest eyes in the world, now rimmed with red.
“I’m L-Lenny Beal,” he stammered, clearly moved.
“Please call me Alma. This is your home,” she responded.
He held out his hand but failed to complete the handshake before they fell into each other’s arms.
Lenny began visiting the Sea Cliff mansion on a daily basis, after his working hours at the dental clinic. They told Larry and Doris and the household staff that Lenny was a nurse. Nobody asked anything further. Alma called a carpenter to fix the jammed door between the bedrooms and left the two men alone. She felt a huge sense of relief when her husband’s face lit up at seeing Lenny come in. As dusk fell, the three of them took tea and English muffins and, if Nathaniel was up to it, played cards. By then they had a diagnosis, the worst possible: it was AIDS. The illness had only been given a name a couple of years earlier, but by now everyone knew it was a death sentence; sufferers died sooner or later, it was merely a matter of time. Alma did not want to know why Nathaniel and not Lenny was infected, but even if she had asked, no one could have given her a clear answer. Cases were multiplying at such a rate that there was already talk of a worldwide epidemic and of God’s punishment on the infamy of homosexuality. AIDS was a word only mentioned in a whisper, not to be uttered in a family or community, as it was tantamount to declaring unforgivable perversions. The official explanation, even to the family, was that Nathaniel had cancer. As conventional medicine had nothing to offer, Lenny went to Mexico to look for mysterious drug treatments, which ended up having no effect, while Alma ran around seeking out whatever alternative therapies could offer, from oils, herbs, and acupuncture in Chinatown to mud baths with magical properties at Calistoga Spa. This led her to appreciate the crazy efforts Lillian had resorted to in her attempt to cure Isaac; she even regretted having thrown Baron Samedi’s statuette into the garbage.
Nine months later, Nathaniel’s body was wasted to a skeleton by the ravages of the illness, while air could scarcely enter the blocked labyrinths of his lungs. He suffered from insatiable thirst and skin ulcers, he had lost his voice, and his mind was wandering deliriously. And so one sleepy Sunday when they were alone in the house, Alma and Lenny took each other’s hand in the dark, airless room and begged Nathaniel to give up the struggle and go peacefully. They could no longer bear to witness his torment. In a miraculous moment of lucidity, Nathaniel opened eyes clouded by pain and his lips formed a thank-you. They took this for what it actually was: a command. Lenny kissed him on the lips before injecting him with a massive dose of morphine via the intravenous drip bag. On her knees on the far side of the bed, Alma softly reminded her husband how much she and Lenny loved him and how much he had given them and many others, that he would always be remembered, that nothing could ever separate them.
* * *
Over a cup of mango tea and reminiscences at Lark House, Alma and Lenny wondered how they could have let three decades go by without making any attempt to contact each other again. After closing Nathaniel’s eyes and helping Alma to lay out the body to present it to Larry and Doris, and to remove any telltale traces of what had happened, Lenny said good-bye to Alma and left. They had spent months in the total intimacy created by suffering and flickering hope. They had never seen each other in the light of day, only in a bedroom that smelled of menthol and of death well before it came to bear Nathaniel away. They had shared sleepless nights, drinking watered-down whisky or smoking marijuana to relieve the anguish, while they told each other the story of their lives, unearthed longings and secrets, and came to know each other intimately. In the face of such prolonged agony there was no room for any kind of pretense; they revealed what they truly were when they were alone with themselves, stripped naked. Despite or perhaps because of this, they had come to love one another with a transparent, desperate tenderness that called for a separation, as it would not have resisted the inevitable attrition of the everyday.
“We had a strange friendship,” said Alma.
“Nathaniel was so grateful that the two of us were with him that he once asked me to marry you when you were widowed. He didn’t want to leave you unprotected.”
“What a wonderful idea! Why didn’t you suggest it, Lenny? We’d have made a fine couple. We’d have been companions and watched each other’s backs, like Nathaniel and I did!”
“I’m gay, Alma.”
“So was Nathaniel. We would have had a sexless marriage, without a marital bed, you with your own love life, and me with Ichimei. Very convenient, given that we could neither of us show our love in public.”
“There’s still time. Will you marry me, Alma Belasco?”
“But didn’t you tell me you were going to die soon? I don’t want to be widowed a second time.”
At this they burst out laughing, and their laughter spurred them to go to the dining room and see if there was anything tempting on the menu. Lenny offered Alma his arm, and they walked along the glassed-in corridor to the main house, the chocolate magnate’s former mansion, feeling their age but contented, wondering why people talk so much a
bout sadness and illness and not about happiness.
“What can we do with this happiness that appears for no obvious reason, the joy that needs no cause to exist?” asked Alma.
They took short, shaky steps, leaning on one another and feeling the late-autumn cold, dazed by the rush of stubborn memories that gripped them, memories of love, flooded by a mutual happiness. Alma pointed out to Lenny a fleeting glimpse of pink veils in the park, but it was growing dark, and possibly it wasn’t Emily heralding disaster, but a mirage like so many others at Lark House.
THE JAPANESE LOVER
On Friday Irina Bazili arrived early at Lark House to look in on Alma before starting her day. Alma no longer needed her assistance to get dressed, but she was grateful to the young woman for coming to her apartment to share the day’s first cup of tea.
“Marry my grandson, Irina; you’d be doing all the Belascos a favor,” she often said to her.
Irina ought to have explained that she hadn’t yet succeeded in overcoming the terrors of the past, but could not mention it without dying of shame. How could she tell Seth’s grandmother that the monsters of her memory poked their lizard heads out of their lairs whenever she thought of making love with him? He understood that she wasn’t ready to talk and stopped pressing her to see a psychiatrist; for the time being it was enough for him to be her confidant. They could wait. Irina had proposed a drastic solution: to watch together the videos filmed by her stepfather, which were still circulating around the world and which would go on tormenting her to the end of her days. But Seth was afraid that once unleashed, these deformed creatures would become uncontrollable. His prescription consisted in taking things little by little, with love and good humor, advancing in a dance of two steps forward and one step back. They now slept in the same bed, and occasionally awoke in each other’s arms.
On this particular morning, Irina did not find Alma in her apartment or see any trace of the overnight bag she took on her secret outings, or her silk nightgowns. For the first time, however, Ichimei’s portrait had also gone. She already knew the car wasn’t going to be in its parking place but Irina was not alarmed, because Alma had grown steadier on her legs and she assumed Ichimei would be waiting for her. She wasn’t going to be alone.
Since it was Saturday, Irina did not have a shift at Lark House and had snoozed until nine, a luxury she could afford on weekends now that she was living with Seth and had given up washing dogs. He woke her with a big cup of milky coffee and sat beside her on the bed to plan their day. He had come in from the gym, freshly showered, his skin moist and still pumped up from the exercise, never imagining there would be no plans with Irina that day: it was to be a day for farewells. At that moment the phone rang. It was Larry Belasco calling to tell his son that his grandmother’s car had slid off a rural track and rolled fifty feet down a ravine.
“She is in the intensive care unit at Marin General Hospital,” he told him.
“Is it serious?” Seth asked, terrified.
“Yes. Her car was completely wrecked. I’ve no idea what my mother was doing driving out there.”
“Was she on her own, Papa?”
“Yes.”
At the hospital, they found Alma conscious and lucid, despite the drugs being dripped into her vein, which, according to the doctor, would have knocked out a horse. She had received the full impact of the accident. In a more solid car, the disaster would possibly not have been so great, but the tiny lime-green Smart car was smashed to pieces and Alma, strapped in by her safety belt, was crushed. While the rest of the Belasco family were grief stricken in the waiting room, Larry explained to Seth that one extreme course of action remained: to slit Alma open, reposition the displaced inner organs in their proper places, and keep her body split open for several days until the swelling subsided and they could intervene. After that they could consider operating on the broken bones. The risk, already huge for a young person, was much greater for someone in her eighties like Alma; the surgeon who saw her at the hospital did not dare attempt it. Catherine Hope, who came at once with Lenny Beal, maintained that such a major operation would be cruel and pointless; all they should do was to keep Alma as comfortable as possible and await her end, which would not be long in coming. Irina left the family discussing with Cathy the proposal to move her to San Francisco, where there would be better facilities, and slipped silently into Alma’s room.
“Are you in pain?” she whispered. “Do you want me to call Ichimei?”
Alma was on oxygen but breathing independently and made a slight sign for her to approach. Irina didn’t want to think about the wounded body under the sheet-covered frame; instead she focused on her face, which remained intact and looked more beautiful than ever.
“Kirsten,” stammered Alma.
“You want me to find Kirsten?” Irina asked in surprise.
“And tell them not to touch me,” added Alma in a clear voice, before closing her eyes in exhaustion.
Seth phoned Kirsten’s brother and that afternoon he brought her to the hospital. She sat on the only chair in Alma’s room, waiting patiently for instructions as she had done during the previous months in the workshop, before she began working with Catherine Hope at the pain clinic. At some point when the last rays of daylight were filtering in through the window, Alma came around from her drug-induced lethargy. She ran her eyes over those around her, trying to recognize them: her family, Irina, Lenny, Cathy; she seemed to revive when her gaze rested on Kirsten. Kirsten got up and approached the bed, took the hand not hooked up to the drip, and began placing wet kisses on it from fingers to elbow, asking Alma anxiously if she was ill, if she was going to get better, and repeating how much she loved her. Larry tried to pull her away, but Alma feebly signed that he should leave them alone.
Larry, Doris, and Seth took the first two nights of the vigil in turn, but by the third Irina understood that the family was at the end of their tether and offered to sit with Alma, who had not spoken since Kirsten’s visit and lay dozing, panting lightly like a weary dog, freeing herself from life. It’s not easy either to live or to die, thought Irina. The doctor assured her that Alma was not in pain; she was sedated to the hilt.
At a certain time of night, the sounds on the hospital floor died away. In Alma’s room a peaceful twilight reigned, but the corridors were always lit with powerful lights, and there was the reflection from the blue computer screens in the nurses’ hub. The murmur of the air-conditioning, Alma’s painful breathing, and the occasional sound of footsteps or discreet voices on the far side of the door were the only noises reaching Irina. She had been given a blanket and a cushion to make herself as comfortable as possible, but it was stuffy and she found it impossible to sleep on the chair. She sat on the floor propped against the wall and thought of Alma, who three days earlier was still a passionate woman who had rushed to meet her lover and was now on her deathbed. During a brief moment awake before she once more lapsed into a drug-induced stupor of hallucinations, Alma asked her to put some lipstick on her because Ichimei would be coming. Irina felt a terrible sense of grief, a wave of love for this wonderful old woman, the tenderness of a granddaughter, daughter, sister, friend, while the tears poured down her cheeks, soaking her neck and blouse. She longed for Alma to be gone once and for all to put an end to her suffering, but also wanted her never to leave, wishing that thanks to divine intervention all her displaced organs and broken bones could be mended, that she would be restored to life and they could go back to Lark House and continue living as before. She would devote more time to her, be more at her side, entice her secrets from their hiding place, find a new cat just like Neko, and arrange things so that she could have fresh gardenias every week, without telling her who was sending them.
Images of those she had lost teemed forth, augmenting Irina’s sorrow: her grandparents, now the color of earth; Jacques Devine and his topaz scarab; the old people who had died at Lark House over the three years she had worked there; Neko with the kink in his tail and his
contented purr; even her mother, Radmila, whom she had forgiven but had heard nothing of for many years. She wished Seth were beside her at that moment, to present him to the characters he did not know in this cast and to be able to rest, clutching his hand. She fell asleep immersed in nostalgia and sadness, curled up in her corner. She didn’t hear the nurse enter at regular intervals to check on Alma, adjust the drip and needle, take her temperature and blood pressure, administer sedatives.
In the darkest hour of the night, that mysterious hour when time thins and often the veil between this world and that of the spirits is drawn back, the guest Alma was waiting for arrived at long last. He came in noiselessly, on rubber-soled slippers, so slender that Irina would not have woken but for Alma’s low moan when she sensed him near her. Ichi! He was by the bedside leaning over Alma, but Irina, who could only see him in profile, would have recognized him anywhere, anytime, for she too had been waiting for him. He was just as she had imagined him when she studied his portrait in its silver frame: of average height with strong shoulders, his hair thick and gray, skin almost greenish in the monitor light, his features noble and serene. Ichimei! It seemed as though Alma opened her eyes and repeated his name, but Irina wasn’t sure, and understood they should be left alone for this final farewell. She rose quietly so as not to disturb them and slipped out of the room, closing the door behind her. She waited in the corridor, pacing up and down to bring the circulation back into her legs; drank two glasses of water from the drinking fountain by the elevator; then took up her post again outside Alma’s door.