Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (11 page)

I was studying the zigzag stitch at the edge of the blanket when the young man cleared his throat. Had he intended to remind me of his existence or had a particle of the trespassed air caught in his throat? I turned toward him to find his head already turned toward mine. His eyes looked well-rested, expectant, like those of a second-string athlete waiting his turn. How long had I left him looking and waiting (his girlishly soft neck perhaps being scratched by the wool)?

Moving toward him was like stepping into a very cold pond. My first reaction was fear, was retraction. I had to speak silently to myself. I had to inhale a large amount of oxygen and then hold it in, in order to proceed, to stun myself into being, into a shivering state of ecstatic cold until the water felt warmer.

When we had kissed for a time that in its duration and intensity can only be compared to an unchaperoned high school encounter (the toffee scent of his tobacco now a taste in my mouth), I paused and began to undress. He glanced at my body, then at the mattress.

“It’s all right to look,” I said, then wondered if I had been foolish to assume he would be aroused by the sight of me (and unaware that he had perfect vision). I prayed he would undress himself as I did not feel prepared to take on such a grave responsibility. He did so but rather slowly and with trembling fingers, as if he were having second thoughts. First he removed his white thermal shirt, which was remarkably clean, then his jeans, the fly of which was a challenge to unzip as he himself was now in the way of it. I admit I intervened the way a mother is wont to do when she sees her child struggling.

“Thank you,” he said and cleared his throat. I found his old-fashioned politeness quite touching.

I confess I’d deliberated about whether or not to remove my glasses but when faced with the spectacle of his unclothed body, its sword so gallantly raised, all deliberations ceased. One did not want to be blind but to feast one’s eyes upon beauty.

It was I who carefully replaced the blanket but then, suddenly boiling (and annoyed by the obstruction of my view), I surprised myself by roughly throwing it off. Without thinking, I knelt on all fours and dispensed a brief instruction with which he quickly complied. “I hope you won’t mind,” I said. “I don’t think I can look at you.” Glasses indeed.

“You don’t have to explain.” He moved skillfully toward me as he spoke and I felt once more the fear I had felt on the footbridge, the fear of violence, the fear of him being, well, a rapist. (An unfair inversion to be sure.) But once he had knelt down behind me, he froze like an icon. It was not entirely evident whether he had encountered such an offering before.

“Well, go on.”

These seemed to be the words he was waiting for. I considered warning him about the stuck window but before I could formulate a sentence, the window opened. It was marvelous. The view of the lake, the jasmine, the breeze, everything was as it had been, and then some.

I looked back over my shoulder, indeed I had never been happier to be wearing corrective lenses. I wanted to see him after all, though I only glanced for the act itself began to require my full attention. As if diving into water, I closed my eyes and lowered my head. I saw him in my mind, the fleeting image of his face, his dark lashes framing his closed eyes, his brow furrowed, his chin tucked defensively, his mouth clenched like one in need of a leather strap, his expression of pleasure ultimately one of pain.

I shall never forget the way in which he afterward very quietly lowered himself down upon the borrowed mattress to rest behind me. Thoroughly exerted, freshly released, and yet he did so with such care. Another man might have collapsed like a dead animal atop me or draped himself like a cloth upon my face but he did not so much as graze me with a fingernail as he moved off and away. And then, just when I thought I would go mad from not touching him anymore, from not being touched by him, he crept closer—I was on my side with my back to him—and encircled me in the way a small child guards her most treasured belonging. She conceals the beloved object from view, she hunches down over it, bends her face close to it, disappears into it, her hair falls upon it like a curtain. It matters little if other children desire the object. The love the child has for it is secret, it comes from her internal culture; no one else need understand it. She has invented its meaning and by extension her love.

Later he would encircle me like that and I would want to shake him and shout, “Don’t you see?! No one else wants me!” I didn’t feel worthy of his encircling. I was more than twice his age! A liar! A cheat! But on that day I welcomed it. I was in need of reassurance, it was too early then for me to truly think of him. I thought only of myself.

My eyes had not lied. Though slight without clothes, he had a man’s body. It absolved me of a portion of my guilt. Compared to Maria, he felt brawny, enormous, though I suppose a ten-year-old body might have felt the same. My tactile perspective was distorted, estranged as I had been for some time from the body of a grown man. I was accustomed to holding a four-year-old girl in my arms. (And yet I had easily accommodated him! I felt triumphant and not a little relieved, as if I’d just received a clean bill of health from a doctor.) I wondered how I’d become this way, able to betray my husband, more promiscuous than either of my parents.

It was only after we had merged and separated that we seemed to dwell at last on the same island. The house was empty, the woods quiet. I felt the distant presence of the sea.

“It’s so quiet,” he said, speaking the words at precisely the same moment I had thought them.

“Yes, it feels as if no one can reach us.”

He nodded. He did not seem frightened to be thus stranded with me. I too felt perfectly content to exist in his company apart from the rest of the world.

We lay in this silence for a time and then from somewhere beyond the woods we heard the sound of a car in motion and were reminded that we were not alone, that ours was not a deserted island, but one inhabited by mothers driving on roads to pick children up from school, farmers who moved sheep by the truckload, children who waited to be taken to safe places, sheep who waited to be transported to fresh fields. What did the sheep do in deep winter I wondered, when the fields were covered in snow?

“Where were you all that time?” I asked. It was on that morning, after the fleet whirl of the first, that I began at last to administer my long queue of questions.

“When?” he murmured, as if he’d been dreaming and I’d woken him.

“All of December and most of January. I thought you’d never come back.”

“I totaled my car,” he muttered, his eyes still closed.

“What?!” I sat up on my elbows in alarm. “Were you hurt?” Rather ridiculously, I began palpating him, in search of what? Broken bones? Tender joints? Sore muscles? He opened his eyes. “No, not really,” he lifted the palm of his right hand and turned it toward me to display a deep fuchsia gash. “The windshield,” he said.

“God, it looks horrible, just horrible! And the car was ruined?”

“It was a shitbox,” he said and then immediately amended, “sorry, I mean it wasn’t a great car anyway.”

I raked his leafy curls with my fingers and admired his pouting lips, their efforts at politeness.

“Here I was thinking about your absence in terms of myself. How small-minded of me! You could have been killed!” I meant this sincerely though my concern for his well-being was undeniably selfish, for the death of the young man would have meant the death of my pleasure. “So what do you do now? Did you buy another car? Do you ride a bicycle?” Relentlessly single-minded, I was thinking of his mobility in terms of my desire. I wondered how difficult it had been for him to meet me. I felt a pain at the thought of him wandering the island on foot, though this was precisely what I did most days.

“I borrow Mom’s car.” I reveled in the intimacy of the phrase “Mom’s car” until it occurred to me that Mom was also Violet. Lying on a stranger’s mattress next to him, I felt incapable of assimilating her. At least she didn’t drive him to school. “Sometimes,” he mumbled, “I take the bus.”

“Taking the school bus is nothing to be ashamed of,” I said. “I rather like the thought of you passing by my apartment twice a day. A bit of gold through the trees flashing red. It’s titillating don’t you think?”

“It’s hard to get too excited about riding a school bus.”

“I suppose I’m not the one who has to ride it. So tell me, what caused the accident?” I was thinking of the double take. Perhaps I was nothing special, perhaps he drove all over town doing double takes, meeting middle-aged women at waterfalls at myriad, secret locations.

“I was driving down Old County and a woman turned in front of me.”

“A woman?”

“Someone I knew.” He scratched his head as if revving an engine. “Prudy Flanders. She and Mom used to study French together when I was a kid. She felt pretty bad. But we were both fine.”

I gasped. Prudy Flanders was a habitual reader of paperback romance who regularly checked out ten at a time and returned them late, stained with coffee, peppered with grit, smelling of cigarettes. “You could have died together!”

“Not really, Mrs. Flanders was in her car and I was in mine. We would have died separately without ever talking to each other. I only knew it was her because I got out of my car and walked over to hers.”

“How frighteningly intimate, you could have died together,” I repeated, and for a perverse moment I wished I had been behind the wheel of the car that had hit him. I resisted the image of Mrs. Flanders fussing over his bloody hand with a clean cloth in the backseat of her white Ford Explorer.

“I’d like to avoid that kind of intimacy if possible,” he said and closed his eyes, presumably to rest from the topic. Though it was just as probable that, like a boy in a hide-and-seek game, he was lying quietly hoping to be found.

I pressed his fuchsia scar against my cheek. His hand smelled faintly of tobacco, like the hand of a beloved uncle. I felt at once a surge of well-being and a dimming of confidence. Unsure about whether he’d enjoyed it enough to want seconds, I closed my eyes too. I thought about our day, beginning with the waterfall and ending with the questions. All of his answers pleased me. I felt a sense of accomplishment when he answered a question in a way I had predicted and a rush of pleasure when he surprised me.

Satisfied by our own treachery, we drifted in and out of sleep. I spent some of this time watching him. Once I dared to run my hand along the length of his body. When he seemed to have fallen genuinely asleep, I grew bolder. I woke him with my hand and then took the liberty of having him again. He cooperated so fully that I reproached myself for not having done so earlier.

After much cooperation we managed to rise, to dress in the near dark and descend into daylight the unfinished stairs that were only more treacherous on the way down. The third and fourth steps cried out under the weight of my boots and I could not help but think of having him again, his seat on step four, my hands clutching step seven. I laughed aloud at the thought. I would fall to my death as I climaxed. What bliss! I glanced at my watch as if considering it, but it was nearly two o’clock.

We reentered the world’s time zone grudgingly, each of us pausing on the last rung before stepping down. On the main floor, the house was bright with sunlight and snow. The outside world was brighter still, as when one exits a movie theater during the day. Everything was beautifully, blindingly real. We agreed to meet the following Friday.

“How will I get through the week?” I asked.

“You’ll be busy,” he said, oblivious to my inability to think of anything else regardless of what I was “busy” doing, a condition that I could sense would only worsen now that we had made love. I wanted to say that it didn’t matter how busy I was, that I would think of him constantly, but all at once I felt self-conscious, my body riddled with doubt as with a spontaneous and embarrassing rash.

“How will
you
get through the week?” I ventured. Would he confide in his mother about this?

“I don’t know.”

“Will it be hard for you?” I had half a mind to tell her myself.

“I’ll tell you when the week’s over.”

“I might not want to know.”

“Yes you will.”

“Touché,” I said, then immediately wondered if I’d misinterpreted him as he had several times misinterpreted me, if he’d indeed been making reference to my inquisitive nature or if he meant that he would surely have something reassuring if not suggestive to report. Or something else entirely.

As I pulled him closer to say goodbye, I was surprised to find him aroused. “When did this happen?” I asked.

“I don’t think it ever stopped happening.” His face reddened and he looked down at the snowy ground.

“Good. Constant desire is good.”

I touched one of the snowflakes on his hat and then ran through the woods, already late to pick up Maria.

The nursery was a fifteen-minute walk, an eight-minute jog from the state road. I had chosen the school expressly for its close proximity to the apartment, not, by any stretch of my former Conscientious Librarian’s imagination, in anticipation of the purpose this short distance would serve that Friday or on the Fridays that followed. I arrived ten minutes late, panting like a wild animal that has just outdistanced a predator in order to protect her young. I had never been late before; I had been early on occasion but never late. Maria, hanging from the crossing bars, glanced with indifference at me as I called out her name too loudly. There were other children in the yard. The scene was not nearly as desolate as my sprinting animal self had imagined. Maria was not sobbing in a corner under the impression that I had abandoned her, nor did she show any sign of relief at my appearance. Her teacher was on the far side of the grass replenishing the caged rabbit’s food and water supply and seemed to have noticed neither my absence nor my arrival.

I sat down on the damp wooden steps next to the tidy line of lunch sacks, as much to cool my trembling skin (upon every inch of which droplets of sweat were now beginning to form) as to devour the remainder of my child’s lunch, something I had seen other mothers do before but had never been hungry enough to do myself. In most cases, had I been, I would have been out of luck, for Maria was not a child who left her lunch uneaten. Today, naturally, was my lucky day. She had left half a tuna sandwich and two carrots to boot. I could have eaten five times that. Such a savage appetite was not in keeping with my sedentary routine. This was the hunger of runners and beasts, the pleasant aftermath of exertion! The sensation was so satisfying I knew there must be those who exert themselves as much for the pleasure of satisfying the hunger that follows exertion as for the pleasure of exertion itself. I had a glimpse of the addictive potential of meeting one’s body’s demands.