Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (19 page)

“Won’t you stay a bit longer?” I tried to sound cavalier, but cavalier and contrite were a difficult pairing.

“Okay,” he said.

“Never mind, I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it isn’t. Go on, ace your exam.”

“Okay.” That word again, I thought, and reached for his singlet. How was I ever to know if he was consenting to me or if he felt cowed by my adult requests? He put his arms through the holes and I tugged on the neck until it had passed over him. I took his face in my hands. His cheeks were faintly toffee-scented.

“Don’t ever listen to me,” I warned. “I’ll only corrupt you.” There was still not the slightest hint of any facial hair upon him, just the nearly invisible down that covers the faces of children. “Quick!” I said, “Before I change my mind and decide to hold you hostage for eternity.”

He laughed but was looking down at the floor as if at the room below; it was a Violetine moment. He turned to go. “Don’t you think I’m capable of it?” I persisted, at last feeling cast-off and impotent.

“Of course you’re capable,” he said as he lowered himself down the ladder. But you wouldn’t,” he said. “You’re too nice.”

“Is that good?” I called down after a minute or so. But he had already very quietly gone, if only because I had instructed him to.

* * *

With or without the threat of a husband nearby, the young man was not the sort who would ever conceive of taking me away. Even if he had somehow managed to formulate such a plan, he would not have carried it out. Herein lay, like two strands of wire twisted endlessly together, both the deeply appealing safety of the relationship and its dangerously strict limits. The onus, if there was to be an onus, was upon me and I preferred it that way. I did not want a man with money and power and ideas who might threaten to wrest me away from my present circumstances. This would only have caused problems for me. I was trapped in an age-old paradox, like the woman who falls in love with a “family man” precisely because of his devotion to family. She remakes him. The moment he begins to love her he ceases to be her original object of desire. The very inexperience I loved in him I unwittingly proceeded to destroy. My logic was terribly flawed. I went searching for innocence using corrupt means.

As soon as I began to love him I began to see our love as a prison and myself as the warden. I could not love him without wanting also to set him free. I wanted him to ace his math test. I wanted him at the top of his class! Meanwhile, the more regularly and intensely he related to me as a source of love and pleasure, the more devoted he became, the more at home he became in said prison. The prison of our love was not unlike the Alcatraz of my childhood, an island whose shores no outsiders tread upon. We were alone there, consigned to one another’s company insofar as we had agreed to protect our secret. The prescriptive remoteness of our relationship was at once a prison requirement and a feature of most beautiful places in the world. We had never been seen walking hand in hand along the road by our fellow citizens (in fact we had never walked hand in hand anywhere), we had never sat at a table in a restaurant or asked for food from anyone other than ourselves, he had never studied more because of me, when he passed a test it was despite us.

And yet I could no longer drink from the cups of complacency and disappointment nor could I fathom a return to the empty pleasure cup. In the end, my objective was not to be good in the way that nuns are good, but to make something useful of the remainder of my life. That was how I rationalized my choice to love. Of what use would a miserable mother be to a child? Of what use would an unhappy librarian be to a library, an unhappy woman to her friends? (Here I included Violet if not placed her at the top of my list.) I had to believe that my happiness counted for something beyond my own personal satisfaction.

Perhaps in an attempt to normalize my questionable undertaking, I developed an appetite for stories of deviant love:
Lolita, The Price of Salt, The
Cement Garden, King Kong, Beauty and the Beast
, even
The Thorn Birds
, which was, though not particularly well-written, with its blasphemy and incest, doubly satisfying. That spring I read more queer novels than I had read in my entire adult life. (Queer was a term I was borrowing with increasing looseness and frequency. Indeed if this was queer society, I too was a member.) I both relished their transgressive hotness and tortured myself with the fact that many a homosexual would find me morally repulsive. Heavily peppered with scenes of socially unacceptable sex, descriptions of guilt, fear, and forced secrecy, fascination with beauty and frustration with an uncomprehending world, such novels were like compact mirrors that I carried in my cloth bag. One could always pop one open, look in, and see oneself reflected there.

And yet I could no longer read deviant novels without also thinking of Violet. Which would be her favorites? How much tolerance did she have? Would she find lesbian sex gruesome? Incest a crime? Could she find it in her heart to love a predator? Humbert Humbert, Father de Bricassart, I, the worst of all? If she knew the truth about what I had done, would she still want me?

One evening, in the heart-racing aftermath of a
Lolita
reread, terrified and yet incapable of waiting any longer, I at last brought the scraps out of the drawer. Like a Hatfield girl on a dormitory phone, I fiddled with them until they were ragged with the sweat of my palms. I could have sworn I smelled the lemon wax from that dim, wooden booth. Briskly I punched the numbers into the phone.

It did not grant me even a single ring but sent me, like a troublemaker, directly to voice mail. “Hi, you’ve reached Violet. If it’s important call me at the shop.” She had omitted P.I.P.’s number as if to point out that if one didn’t already possess it there was no need to call. (I knew the number by heart, I had found it in the Island Book and memorized it.)

She was too busy to see me. If I’d had any sense I’d have received this as spring’s consolation, its one bittersweet gift. But alas, I was senseless.

* * *

Only once during our time together did the young man visit the library while I was on duty. Predictably enough, seeing him in public caused in me an intense, albeit fugitive, moral confusion. When at first my secret was brought out of the woods and placed in full view of the town, I was paralyzed.

It was a Friday. Maria had gone home with a friend and I had come directly from the gray house to work the afternoon shift for the director. I was seated at her desk, rather hypocritically hand-addressing envelopes to delinquent patrons and then stuffing the envelopes with warning letters when I heard the slow, unmistakable crackling of his throat being very politely cleared. Instantly the button within me was pressed, which alarmed me, for it had already been urgently, repeatedly pressed earlier that morning. His politeness had a particularly indelible effect on me that day. There he stood, the way he had the first day, an anonymous patron quietly waiting to be acknowledged.

His unentitled attitude toward me made me want to bestow upon him any and all titles he might have wished for, but it also frightened me. A young man with such a strict sense of propriety, I thought, would certainly grow into a man who disapproved of our current relationship. The very respectability that attracted me to him seemed a constant threat to our unrespectable arrangement. Perhaps he had come to end things. These thoughts assailed me even before I had time to raise my head and meet his eye. Knowing he would not speak first, I paused. I bought time. I tried to imagine the precise words he would use and how I would feel afterward. Then I tried to speak but could not, my throat had closed. It was only as a librarian, a public servant, a paid town employee that I was able to recover myself.

“May I help you?” I asked coldly though I was hot as a pyre of burning books.

“Uh, no,” he started to chuckle. “Sorry to bother you,” he managed and then backed away. He seemed aggrieved by my professional treatment of him.

“Don’t be silly,” I whispered, half-expecting Violet to appear beside him with a knife or a revolver. “What are you doing here?” I demanded with some irritation, for it was impossible not to recall the slow, proficient way in which he had, just two hours prior, set his fist like a key inside me and turned it.

“I’m looking for a book,” he said. (What a relief to hear that he had a legitimate reason for visiting the library and had not come to deliver my death sentence.)

“So there are books you don’t have after all,” I said. I was beginning to warm to the sudden appearance of beauty there in the otherwise chilly, forgotten basement.

“It’s for school,” he admitted and I was forced once more to recall our respective places in the world’s chronology.

“Do you need help finding it?” I asked, feeling a bit teacherly, if not like a children’s librarian.

“No, no thanks,” he shook his head and then smiled briefly. “I just thought I’d stop by before I looked.”

I wanted nothing more than to stand up, walk round to the front of the desk, and kiss him hard on the mouth as I had so many times imagined I would if given the opportunity. Instead I sat like a prisoner during visiting hours, one ankle shackled to the director’s desk.

He browsed the fiction section while I longed to touch him. A more reckless woman would have approached him without hesitation, but I felt incapable of rising. And yet once I had renounced all thoughts of disengaging from the desk, I was able to thoroughly enjoy observing him. To watch him walk, to watch him stand impatiently in front of a book shelf and take down a book, leaf rapidly through its pages with his nail-bitten fingers, these were rare pleasures for me. I was, I realized, starved for such ordinary moments. He moved through the stacks with a confidence I was not accustomed to seeing in him. Greedily, I took in his buoyant, absurdly youthful stride. What a thrill it was to see him encounter another patron, to see the way in which he sensed her approach and then moved politely to the left to allow her to pass. For a moment I saw him as she might have—a polite, studious seventeen-year-old—and then I allowed the memory of our morning together to overtake that. On his way out he glanced at me and I glanced back—indeed I never once allowed my eyes to leave him—but I played, with some gratification, the role of lady stranger and he understood. He brought the book (the title of which I strained and failed to see, hidden as it was by the navy blue crook of his arm) upstairs to be checked out by another librarian.

As soon as he had disappeared into the stairwell, I rolled my chair to the wall and climbed upon it, nearly toppling over in the process, so that I might look out through the high window and watch him leave. From my unsteady perch I saw him striding across the parking lot with the book in his hand. There was something perpetually preoccupied about him, even from the back this was evident. I was never able to determine whether he was hurrying toward something that held him or away from something that did not, whether he pulled a leash behind him or was pulled by one.

Once, when we had gone dangerously over the time allotted us by the nursery, I had ridden with him in a car, which, the shitbox having been totaled, was not his but Violet’s toffee-colored minivan and which I could see was now parked in the library lot. As I watched him climb into it, I remembered how sweet it was to be driven by him, his thin hands a younger, more masculine version of hers, his lost-father eyes scanning the road as furiously as if the remainder of our time together depended on it. I had been overtaken at once by the thought of a crash in which one or both of us died a gruesome death or deaths, ultimately resulting in what somehow seemed a fate worse than death: the exposure of our relationship. The young man did not find this amusing nor did he seem frightened by my suggestion of the possibility; he simply attempted unsuccessfully to reassure me. “Don’t worry. I’m a good driver. I’ve been practicing a lot.”

I watched him set his book on the dash and put the van in gear. He checked the mirror and then turned his head to look over his shoulder before backing out. From where I stood on tiptoe, peering through the powerful yet foggy lenses of my glasses (I was, not surprisingly, overheating, as much from the fact of his nearness as from my awkward ascent of the office chair), he looked to be an excellent driver but then I was a fine one to judge. When he and his skillful maneuvering had disappeared from sight, I went immediately upstairs and informed Nella of my need to refresh myself. I left her paging, amused yet captivated, through the current issue of
Peopl
e while I escaped to the lavatory, ostensibly to relieve my bladder but in fact to satisfy an even baser need.

The most remarkable feature of the staff restroom is its sorry lack of reading material. One more easily understands such a situation in a public facility. No one, least of all me, wants to encourage any undue loitering on the part of our patron population. But an absence of books and even periodicals in a
librarians’ restroom
seems an affront to the phrase. Granted, it is not often that I relieve myself in any significant way during my shift. I do not mean to imply that I should like to read a chapter by Tolstoy whilst otherwise engaged but there is something to be said for
The New Yorker
or
The
New York Review of Books
(actually I would have preferred the
London Review of Books
but alas, it was not part of our distinctly American collection) within the confines of a restroom. Such periodicals are sufficiently distracting and would keep one’s eyes from wandering nervously to the often open window which, though high enough to shield one from a small to average-height Peeping Tom, seemed low enough to easily accommodate a tall one.

One’s only chance at rest in such a room is to read the labels of the many office and toilet supplies that are stored there. Indeed a floor to ceiling shelf chock-full of toilet paper, paper towels, copy paper, reserve/request cards, scotch tape, book tape, and number two pencils is the view one commands, which in the end prevents one from forgetting about work entirely. Though on this visit I confess none of this mattered. I brazenly closed my eyes for the duration. I washed my hands most thoroughly afterward, spritzed myself jauntily with the all-natural hand sanitizer and noted the undeniable flush of pleasure on my cheeks reflected on the communal mirror as I exited.