Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (17 page)

With the British edition of
For Esmé––With Love and Squalor
on my dresser, the room looked different, the frameless bed, the bruised walls bandaged by Maria’s drawings, the windows that gave out onto the silent, snow-covered garden. The American island upon which I had felt such desolation, such resignation, became the place where locked windows were opened and lost vistas found. I was an enviable woman, a bewildered, perimenopausal, libido-high librarian suddenly in love with my life.

* * *

Thursdays I invariably found myself in a heightened state of agitation, brooding upon my future. If Fridays were the grand vista, the bright expanse of the sea in every direction, and Saturdays were the hard push down the rocky backside of the mountain, then Thursdays were the final ascent. I felt the exhaustion and light-headed anticipation that results from a week of strenuous climbing.

One such morning, warming myself in the cold, tomb-like basement with thoughts of the young man, I looked up from the old British novel I was weeding to find Violet standing before me. Much (too much) had happened since our tea date. Chances were, either her son had confessed or she’d pieced things together herself. Convinced she knew my secret, I prepared myself for reprisal.

Although she was about my height, she seemed to be looking down at me, her suffering, rifle brown eyes cocked, accusing. She was wearing the same rifle brown sweater whose cowl neck crept close to her mouth. It was a thin-lipped and delicate, reddish-colored mouth, very different from her son’s. His pale and sensual pouting lips must have come from the drifting father. The skin of her face was lighter than my own mother’s and smooth as a fresh oval of chèvre. The young man’s dark beauty mark was missing from it.

Perhaps I should have been startled to see her. I suppose my physiological response—my quickening pulse, a rapid yet thudding heartbeat, the vertical lines of sweat that were traveling at an alarming rate from each of my armpits down my sides (yes I was literally sweating with fear)—matched that of one who is having a startling encounter. But my thinking self, the one that read books and composed questions, drew clever analogies and made dire predictions, that self was not at all surprised to see her at last stalking me in the basement. I was surprised she had not come sooner. I expected punishment of some kind, possibly violence.

I picked up the book—it was Evelyn Waugh’s
A
Handful of Dust
—and held it to my chest, protecting my most vital organ. I felt incapable of arguing with her. She had every right to feel betrayed. There was a cold silence that could easily be perceived even in the library.

“Hello, Violet.”

“Hi. You okay?”

“Yes. May I help you with something?” At last resorting to the language of servitude, my inner housekeeper meekly took charge.

“Yes, thanks. I was hoping you might have another recommendation. I loved those books you gave me.” She hadn’t come to hunt me, she had come to hunt books. I could hear it in her voice.

“I’m so glad.” I was safe. “What did you love about them?” I dived into Conscientious Librarian protocol.

“They were intense. Bold and transgressive and strange. I read them in one sitting.”

“Me too! Oh, Violet, I have the perfect book for you.” Following CL protocol tended to empower me. No sooner had I passed through the first circle of suffering than I felt primed to enter another.

I walked guilelessly to the N’s, pulled down a book, and handed it to her. What was it about Mother and Son that made me want to leap wildly in their direction?! High upon my lonely cliff, staring down at the lazuline blue of them, I was suicidal.

“Have you read
Lolita
?” I asked.

“No, I’ve always avoided it.” Her eyelashes fluttered every so slightly. She was internal, understated, yet curiously expressive, with the silent potency of a church altar. “Isn’t it about a pedophile who kills someone?”

“Well, technically yes, though I think of it more as a story about forbidden love.” Sinking rapidly into a sea of my own making, I cast about for a viable defense of Nabokov’s masterpiece. The famous
Vanity Fair
line (which leapt into my brain like a man trying and failing to save me from drowning) “the only convincing love story of the 20th century,” seemed, in Violet’s presence, phony and inappropriate.

“Why do you like it?”

“It’s queer. It tells the story from the queer person’s point of view.”

“Are you saying that being queer and being a pedophile are somehow similar?”

“No! Of course not. I just mean he captures what it’s like to be in the queer person’s position, the person whose desires are criminalized.”

She stepped closer to me and whispered, “You’re not gay, are you?” If only I could have answered honestly in the affirmative my problems would have been solved (only to be instantly replaced by a barrelful of others).

“No! What I mean to say is…”

“May, you don’t have to explain. If you think it’s a good book, I’ll read it. I trust you.”

Violet hugged
Lolita
to her chest, she buried the sulky nymphette in her sweater. “Do you have time for tea next week?” she asked cozily.

“Of course. Which day would be best?”

“How about Friday? We can discuss forbidden love over Earl Grey.” She gave me a sultry Rachel Ward half smile.

“Oh,” I said. “Actually Fridays are difficult.” Actually Fridays were easy, actually Fridays were the best thing about my life because actually every Friday if I wasn’t reading a book in translation I was bedding her son.

I hesitated.

“Here.” She scribbled her number redundantly on a piece of scrap paper and handed it to me. “Give me a call if you have time. I’d love to catch up.”

* * *

I have always been someone for whom winter never lasts long enough and that winter was far from an exception. Cold has never bothered me, it is darkness I hate. Winter is a season that improves with every passing day; it is when it is at its best that it ends. Far worse than winter’s cold or fall’s darkness is spring’s incessant buzz of activity, its sense—even on the quietest days—of fanfare and commotion, which one feels more acutely on an island known to travelers for its beauty. Meanwhile, there are those around me who rely on the idea of spring’s inevitable return to carry them through the cold months. Conversations turn to the natural world: birds being seen and heard for the first time in months, bulbs rising from their dark beds, the smell of blossoms.
Don’t worry, spring’s almost here!
patrons and co-workers alike say with smiles that, like light clothing, they had almost forgotten they had. Their happiness is as palpable as my dread.

That winter, more than any other, I was snowbound. I was Eskimo. Love was an igloo built with the most obscure blocks of blue-tinted ice; it existed in a polar region invisible to the rest of the world. The same cold that made it necessary was also what sustained it. When at times the harsh winds of Reality threatened to blow me in a more practical direction, I threw on a bearskin rug and dove back into the igloo, determined to spend my winter with the young man, lighting our love from within. I no longer feared being discovered, I only feared the proliferation of water droplets running down the inner walls of the pleasure dome, I feared the very heat of us would melt the house down.

Indeed, I felt a terrible sense of urgency when I thought of the coming of spring. The slow drumbeat that would lead us closer to the onslaught of summer, the blossoms, all those exotic emblems of youth and sexuality that would alter the very air we breathed, and worst of all—I had once been an academic, I knew the spring calendar well—the many acceptance letters typed on university letterhead that would arrive in the mailboxes of high school students everywhere, notifying them of their fate and by extension the fates of those close to them. The young man had not mentioned applying to schools but I remembered clearly the time he had spent typing at the library computer and was sure that this had been the task that he had so swiftly and steadily accomplished, sure that I had aided him in moving closer to that which would bring him further away from me.

But while it lasted, when one boiled it down, winter was everything. I say
boiled
, for in no other season will you find such extreme heat: gas, electricity, wood fires, the steam of hot soup and tea, the electric neon green of the moss underfoot after a heavy rain. The white sea of winter surrounded us with a silence I had waited months to hear. The gray sky of it cast a shadow I never wanted to get out from under. Winter lasted three months and winter was endless. Every winter to follow—every season—was touched by it. Winter announced the heat of every living being: the tiny red hearts of birds who had not yet flown north, pumping triumphantly their fluttering eyedroppers of blood; the hands of children, busy and dumb in their mittens: the sweaty groins of gardeners under their stiff, muddy layers; the clean hands of chefs as they sliced and stirred; even within the decaying mouths of the oldest islanders, their pink tongues were warm in comparison. And if the others were warm, we in our loft were tropical, our isle afloat, on fire, ephemeral, and yet, an absurdly sensible destination in a world so cold.

A
nd so the winter melted away. Try as I may, I could not stop it. Yellow-green buds, those bright eyes of youth, appeared in the trees, in the bushes, on the ground—I could not look anywhere without meeting their gaze. Maria mastered the alphabet, she was fond of taking dictation letter by letter, Var ceased carving animals and began carving gnomes. I had never been happier and lived in fear of losing my happiness; it seemed to be made of a substance similar to winter itself, one that chilled and dazzled but, in accordance with the laws of nature, would not last. I recalled with increasing frequency the time the young man had spent quietly striking the keys of the public computer, the then-unfamiliar headphones touching him, bringing him music or messages I could not hear. I could have asked him about that day directly and perhaps put my fears to rest, but knowledge of the future often aggravates me, so I didn’t dare. If he was going to leave I wanted his leaving to come upon me suddenly, without warning, in the way of a natural disaster; I wanted a blow dealt to me not by him but by fate.

Spring is always a bit of a miser’s bargain—apple blossoms rain down from the trees even as lilacs open, falling to bits beneath irises fast on their way to becoming desiccated scrolls. That spring I had the sense of the bargain being a losing one, the young man nothing more than a loan that I would soon have to make good on.

As the weather grew milder, the high school girls, instead of walking from the bus to the library, returned to their places at the long wooden bench on the porch of the general store. Maria and I sat on the glider and watched them as they strode off the bus, threw their bags roughly down on the bench, and disappeared into the store. When they returned a few minutes later with their Starbursts and their miniature Reese’s, their salt and vinegar potato chips and their Almond Joys, we studied them, each with her own purpose in mind. Maria eyed their junk food and their gestures as she eyed everything in the world, as things she might possibly try, and I, how closely I studied them now, his potential suitors; my left eye a loving mother’s, admiring their long, tumbling hair, their fresh cheeks, my right eye a watchful rival’s, assessing various sorts of compatibility.

As these and countless blossoms continued thoughtlessly to display themselves, the apartment grew cozily warm then unbearably hot. Not even I could be persuaded that the attic inferno was preferable to the heavenly outdoors. Despite my professed dread of the season, like the Sophias and the Rosamonds of the world, I too felt compelled to go out and join with the soft, fragrant air.

The thought of a girl his own age one day materializing never frightened me as much as the thought of the world at large—the mainland, other countries, other continents, other languages and customs—possessing him. I could live with, perhaps even learn to love, watching him grow into a man alongside a Sophia or a Rosamond, glimpsing them in shops on occasion, issuing library cards to their young children with my liver-spotted hands, but I could not abide the idea of his total disappearance. And when I turned to my own steadfastness for comfort, my longstanding ability to work and to wait years for something I wanted (it was a well-known fact that a large percentage of islanders who left eventually returned) it only accentuated my problem. Time was becoming a currency I could no longer deal in. In twenty years he would be middle-aged, but I would be in my sixties—the phrase “my sixties” already frighteningly intimate. Indeed in fifty years he would be almost seventy and I would likely be mingling with the sandy loam of an island cemetery.

The young man—if he can be called a man—was closer to Maria’s age than my own. At the time she was four and I was forty-one. On those rare occasions when I doubted his capacity to meet me as an equal, or when I doubted my choice to commune with a mind so young, I thought of Keats. I would open
The Poems
, read a line or two, and then, unable to focus long enough to read a poem in its entirety, I would turn to the timeline at the front. On a piece of scrap paper I had taken from the library, I would solve the equation 1821 minus 1795, taking into account the month of his birth and the month of his death.
Twenty-five
, I would say to myself.
See what youth can accomplish. See how capable the young.

While I made my useless calculations, he was learning to make Portuguese kale and sausage soup alongside sushi and cheese-stuffed canapés for parties of ten or more in the catering unit of his twelfth-grade cooking class. He was beating other boys at Frolf, yes Frolf, which he’d taught me was an energetic, pastoral hybrid of golf and Frisbee. He was learning to tie a tie, he had gone with Violet (whose phone number lay like an ember next to its twin in my wooden letter drawer, the pair of them threatening to set Var and his trim moustache ablaze) to a mall in Rhode Island and had driven on a highway for the first time. She must have marveled at his latest increase in size when she bought him the new high-tops and black jeans; she must have feared for his life at the sight of him, manlike, steering the wheel of her car.