Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (12 page)

“It was Sophia’s birthday!” Maria announced as we set off. The name Sophia, once more in vogue, with its ultrafeminine and youthful connotations, rang a bell of alarm in me. I remembered that not far from us, large groups of teenage girls, several of whom were likely named Sophia, were also being released from school and that any one of them might be entering the young man’s number into her mobile phone as I stood in the cold shade of the nursery. One Sophia in particular might be pedaling her bicycle in the direction of his house whose location was still unknown to me. This was to say nothing of the actions and intentions of those girls whose names were not Sophia.

“Sophia?!” I said hoarsely, repressing my painful thoughts. “That’s wonderful, you love Sophia!”

“The cake wasn’t wonderful. It was vanilla! It’s always vanilla. Vanilla, vanilla, vanilla. Why isn’t it ever chocolate?!”

Why indeed, I thought, as Maria ran ahead to the pond’s edge and began studying dead leaves.

As we neared the general store she asked, “Can I get a treat?”

“No. You’ve already had cake today.”

“But I didn’t even like it!”

“That
is
unfair. Next time say no thank you.”

I bought her two chocolate kisses. She went wild. At the edge of the grass that surrounded the house, Maria began to run. I ran after her, happy to exert myself. She ran into the garden behind the house and stopped as she often did at the base of the oak tree. She was well-suited to climbing trees; she was a compact, agile, quizzical little girl with big hands that gripped like a monkey’s and wide eyes that like, to peer down from high places and survey.

“Will you put me in the tree?” she asked, jumping to reach for a branch. It was as it had been on the day of the forgotten book. She correctly sensed that I would do almost anything she asked. Once more I quelled the urge to tell her my news. I placed her on a high branch and she gave a squeal, lifted up her arms, threw them around the trunk of the tree, and, in one chimplike movement, kicked her boots down to the ground. In that primitive moment, I loved her endlessly. I felt my desire for the young man and my love for her mingling. The cup marked
pleasure
and the cup marked
love
were spilling over. I didn’t have to tell her. She knew. Not the particulars of course, but I think she understood the essential meaning. Who could have been better equipped to recognize my joy than the one who had most often been the cause of it?

We stayed out in the garden—she sitting high in the tree chattering, I lying on the grass with my eyes closed listening—until we could stand the cold no longer.

“Let’s go in,” I said lightly, expecting resistance.

“Oh yes! Let’s go in now, the monkeys are cold!” To my surprise, she quickly agreed and ran up the stairs ahead of me. I followed her at a leisurely pace and then washed my hands in the filthy bathroom which now looked to my lecherous eye abandoned and sexy. I could easily imagine that lovers had lain furtively upon its cracked tiles or perhaps sat double astride the loose, squeaking seat of the toilet. Indeed I was aroused by the sight of it.

* * *

I approached the library on Sunday with equal parts titillation and dread, like one who has just sinned and feels, upon returning to church, both a shameless thrill and a longing to confess. Most Sundays I was on the schedule with Kitty, the director, and Nella, but today Siobhan would be subbing for the director and I could not help but think cheerfully of this fact as I took my last few steps toward the door. Though I had sworn myself (to myself) to secrecy, I felt my resolve vanishing like incense into the wintry air and I had not yet crossed the threshold into the warm library.

“How’s Baby?” Nella’s familiar interview startled me as I entered. She was lugging the metal bin from beneath the mouth of the book drop back to the front counter. Worried she would throw out her back (as she had several times done over the years), I pushed the bin forward with my foot then reached back and latched the mouth shut.

“Oh, Baby is divine,” I coughed, trying unsuccessfully this time to calm myself with the humor of the secret meaning. “How’s your bright shiny penny?” I asked. Suddenly I would have liked to talk of nothing more than the simple joy of cocker spaniels for the duration of our shift together. I needed something soft and undiscerning to nuzzle up against. I was a jumpy wreck.

“Well, aside from her midnight encounter with a skunk, Penny’s great. I got the tomato juice, everything’s fine!”

“Is Siobhan here?” I asked, for in truth I only wished I could endure the innocence of more canine chitchat. In truth, I was guilty and the guilty want to be unburdened; talk of innocence only weighs us down.

“Mmmm hmmm,” Nella nodded, softly grunting as she heaved a large stack of art books from the bin and set them on the counter. “She’s putting out the newspapers. All the news that’s fit to print.”

I stowed my belongings and carefully attached my magnetic name tag to the rather close-fitting black sweater I had purchased a month prior but had never worn. Nella began checking the art books in, lifting each one with both hands then placing the barcode under the scanner’s red light. Without varying her cadence, she added, “Someone was here to see you the other day.”

“Who?”

“I don’t remember her name. Lily something or other. It was the mother of that boy.”

I suppressed the urge to ask “Which boy?” for I feared Nella’s reproach:
You know very well which boy.

Besieged by pleasure in the company of the young man I had managed to blot Violet from my consciousness but now it was difficult to forget her. It seemed inevitable that we should encounter one another.

Siobhan returned from the bathroom, where every librarian promptly goes after putting out papers in order to wash the newsprint off her hands. I took refuge in the sight of her. Her hair too looked freshly washed and I saw her for an instant as she must have looked at eighteen, with a toss of her clean hair, winking a solitary green eye at whomever pleased her.

“Hey there, sexy librarian lady!”

“Very funny,” I said a bit glumly, for though I was eager to move on from Nella’s softly accusatory comment, I felt once more the awful sensation of being on an island unfathomably far from Siobhan, leagues of ocean separating us and neither of us well-equipped to swim. I lurched forward to receive her embrace (Siobhan was such a lover, I certainly could have fallen for her in another life.) and ventured to change, if only in my own brain, the subject.

“Do you mind if I work in the children’s room today?” I asked. The two of them looked at me patiently as members of an audience.

“What’s goin’ on?” Siobhan asked.

“Just tired,” I said and scuffled away. In truth, I was frightened by the possibility that Mother or Son or both would whirl through the library like moral hurricanes and derange my well-ordered world.

I sat at the desk of the children’s librarian and gazed in wonder and dismay at the juvenile collection. It troubled me to recall that when I applied for the position I was asked to fill out a CORI form (whose name I always horribly imagined was the name of a dead child whose violation had not been prevented) which was then used to verify that I had never been convicted of molesting a child. I had told the truth when I described myself as innocent of such a crime. It was only years after the form was filed and made legal, only two days prior, that, unbeknownst to my employers, I had committed one of the crimes that might have barred me from being offered the position. I was not troubled by what in retrospect seemed a lack of self-knowledge—this I found heartening if anything, heartening with a teaspoon of excitement thrown in, nor was I (though perhaps I should have been) troubled by the fact that according to the law I had committed a crime. What troubled me was that in some roundabout, retroactive way, I had lied or was lying as I continued to work with the clean CORI on file. You see, despite everything, I am an honest person with a conscience, a detail-oriented person (as opposed to a detail-oriented librarian) troubled by such discrepancies.

I picked up an illustrated copy of
The Mysterious Island
from the cart and walked slowly toward the V’s. It occurred to me that the young man had likely read more children’s books than adult books. Which books did he love? Did he adore Jules Verne as I had? Was he a Hardy Boys boy? Had he too loved Paddington? Had he read so-called girls’ classics like
The Little Princess
and
The Secret Garden?
Did he prefer fiction or non? Did he read when he was sad or happy or both? The questions still came to me like mantras I intoned to myself, beads I touched repeatedly in a circular fashion. I would have to submit to him my evergrowing list. Astonishing that I could now ask him anything.

While meditating upon our new proximity, it dawned on me that his phone number was in the library database. How could I have forgotten? I had entered the numbers myself. I turned away from the cart and glanced nervously at the monitor. Why shouldn’t I have his phone number? God knew I had little else. Yet phone numbers seemed the provenance of honest people, those who loved the people they had promised they would love and who had therefore earned the right to contact them directly. There was, after all, something public about a phone number. Most appeared in the phone book and all existed in digital form in some ethereal library and could be, if only by public machines, easily recognized.
Shelve the bloody cart already
.

When I had placed the last book in its proper place, I promptly rewarded myself with a visit to the library database. I swiftly typed in his name, clicked on “Patron” then “Information” then “Phone.” Voilà. Though there were neither children nor adults in the juvenile room to witness my breach of privacy (so minor in comparison to the breach I’d committed in the woods), I trembled as I wrote his number down, my heart racing as I stuffed the scrap of paper into my blazer pocket. You ought to be frightened! I scolded myself as I remembered his number was also Violet’s—I had learned this the first day and forgotten. I searched for
The Days of Abandonment.
AVAILABLE. One of them had returned the book in my absence. I felt a tinge of sadness and an odd sense of reprieve. Untoward as it may sound, I’d been looking forward to chatting with Violet about it. I didn’t know whether to thank God for relieving me of what was becoming a rather complicated duty or to begin pining at once for her return.

At closing time, as was often the case, Kitty slipped out without any of us noticing, followed by Siobhan, myself (for though I moved at a leisurely pace, I hated to be last, to be responsible for locking the door), and finally Nella who had to be informed that the library was now closing, so involved she was in the cutting of gingerbread men out of brown construction paper. As I stood holding the locked door open for her I could not help but pat my pocket for the phone number. It was an unconscious gesture, made as if the hidden scrap were a passport or a large bill, something I was terrified of losing. Nella shoved her cheese puffs into a sailcloth tote and swiped her hands against her cream-colored cords. There was a moment when, with the exception of Kitty, all of us were standing in the door together like a cozy and promising coterie that, as we stepped into the anonymous night, then dispersed like a group of strangers to become part of it. We called our goodbyes over our shoulders.

As my co-workers drifted in separate directions toward their cars, I walked slowly toward the opening in the trees. I had always been the librarian who lingered, the one in no particular hurry to leave. Tonight I felt acutely the need to stay and talk. I pretended to rearrange the contents of my tote and watched them go: willowy, wisecracking, well-brushed Siobhan; woolly-haired Nella with her soft, sheeplike shoulders and opaque blue eyes; and hurried, preoccupied, gum-chewing Kitty in her tattered leopard-skin coat, already entering a number into her mobile phone, a lit cigarillo trembling between her first two fingers.

“I’m in love!” I wanted to shout at them! “We made love in the woods!” I would announce it with glee in the spirit of camaraderie, as if the making of love was, like the making of cookies, something librarians regularly announced to one another. “It was fantastic! He’s seventeen!” I screamed the words in silence at their backs. One by one in quick succession their car doors slammed above the asphalt. I may as well have been standing on the Crimean coast looking out at the Black Sea at three infinitesimal skiffs on the horizon. “It’s true,” I whispered as I turned to go, as much to the snow-touched trees as to the librarians.

* * *

The young man and I met Friday mornings. If a librarian asked me to sub a Friday, I refused without deliberation; they were refusals for which I felt no guilt, only a flash of terror at the possibility that I would be detained. Meeting once weekly required that we withstand six-day intervals of separation. My fear that he would one day fail to appear was so strong that those intervals were agonizing. I think now it was the perfect schedule for two people such as ourselves, though at the time I felt it was never enough. Not once did I tire of him, not once did he impinge upon my daily routine. Fleeting as our pulse-quickening encounters may have been, they were, I see now, dependable as an old Burberry.

During our intervals of separation, I thought of nothing else. I wanted more of him but couldn’t figure out how to get it. Alternately I tried to stop wanting him but couldn’t figure that out either. From Friday to Friday I dreamed of him—long, rapturous, yet unimaginative dreams in which I was highly aroused and in impossibly complex, drawn-out pursuit of him. Always, our lovemaking—sometimes pleasantly, sometimes maddeningly—was being deferred. And always, I would wake with a sunny, floaty feeling of euphoria that was then darkened by the thunderclap complaint:
Why can’t I at least dream of having him?!
I was, as much as a married librarian could be, utterly wedded to the idea of loving him.

Walking to work on other mornings, when I approached Music Street, it took all my remaining willpower not to turn left and at night I fell asleep to thoughts of how I might scale the attic wall and run, wearing camouflage, like a hunter to the dark woods. Morning or night, he wouldn’t have been there, yet I felt vexed to go, as if somewhere beneath the foundation of the gray house lay a volcanic stone that was exerting a magnetic influence upon me, upon us, our very own Hanging Rock. Indeed I had to imagine that he was feeling the pull too, though most of the time, I didn’t dare ask. When, on occasion, I posed some question regarding his feelings about me, he grew so quiet I felt I had trespassed upon his most fundamental right to privacy and in so doing silenced him.