Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (20 page)

* * *

Soon after her marriage to my father, at his urging, my mother took up Japanese. For years she attended night classes and my father home-schooled her. One of her favorite phrases was
shikata ga nai
or “it can’t be helped.” She employed it loosely, whenever it suited her.
You don’t even know what it means, Mum!
I complained. Or she was deliberately misusing it. I suppose I would have preferred the former, better ignorance than arrogance. Although I wondered if there wasn’t something profoundly similar about the two modes. To my mind, “it can’t be helped” was a phrase one used sparingly in the silence that follows the sharp slap of fate—it was a phrase belonging to the
hibakusha
. It meant:
This has been done. What can we do?
It was not a phrase one used to relinquish responsibility.

My mother used it as an excuse for missing appointments or burning cakes or when she did not understand something my father or I had been trying to communicate to her. The phrase, instead of inspiring acceptance and action, induced in her complacence and passivity. It was, in many ways, her tacit motto, and, rather fittingly, borrowed and translated, its original meaning lost.

That spring I adopted my mother’s usage of
shikata ga nai
. I ate my own words. I caught myself muttering the phrase, unsure of whether I was imitating her or saying it myself. It became my response to every ethical question I had thus far been unable to answer. How can you do this to your family?
Shikata ga nai.
How can you deprive him of a lover his own age?
Shikata ga nai
. How can you go on deceiving every person you know, not least of all Violet?
Shikata ga nai
. How can you refuse to work Fridays when the library is understaffed and your family needs the income?
Shikata ga nai
.
Shikata ga nai. Shikata ga nai.
The phrase became addictive. When I thought of where Fate had placed me in relation to the young man, at once on the very same island and yet estranged from him in years, I felt the allure of the phrase’s fluidity. One day it meant our estrangement couldn’t be helped, one day it meant our love.

In my highly confidential state, I turned, if only in my mind, to loved ones for support. Alive or dead, they did not respond as they truly would have, but as I imagined them to. I fancied myself a good judge of character, able to predict with startling accuracy their responses. When at last I was too enthralled to disengage from the young man, it was my father—twenty-one years in the grave—who dispensed, like a life-saving drug, the most illuminating if loosely interpreted bit of advice:
The man with the moustache is the man who will do you harm.
I took this to mean:
Don’t bother with that bandit of a husband!
I took the liberty of inferring the inverse to be true as well:
The (young) man with the smooth, hairless face will bring you happiness and pleasure
. Parenthetical mine.

* * *

I looked down at the paperback copy of
The Lover
that he had placed sideways on my side of the mattress. It was the edition with young Duras’s face on the cover. “I’d rather not read this,” I said.

He did not retort with a sharp “why not?” as I immediately would have but waited, like a musician accustomed to collaborating, several beats for me to elaborate. I waited too, testing the endurance of his patience and passivity but being no match for him I soon explained, “I told you I’ve had my fill of tragedy.”

“I remember you telling me you hadn’t.”

“Must you remember everything so precisely?”

“Yes.”

“Really? And do you remember because you’re young or because you’re so madly in love with me that you’re utterly devoted to your memories of our time together?”

“I don’t know.” He sat propped upon his elbows with his hair in his eyes, like a dog who can’t possibly comprehend why he is being scolded. And yet he had not a single hair on his chest. I stroked it to affirm its existence. His was the clean slate of torsos, the smoothest, most untraveled of pectoral regions. And he had read Duras! A delicious combination to be sure, a bit like cold vanilla ice cream with warm chocolate cake, that manically exciting sensation from childhood.

“Do you really think stories of doomed love affairs are in order?”

“Why not?” Ah, at last the sharp retort driven by the black engine of his voice.

I felt a pronounced affection for the moments in which he finally agreed to argue.

Perhaps because my parents rarely disagreed, I found argument to be one of the most compelling forms of passion. But when I reflected on this particular assent, I was filled with doubt. Was this the flip “why not” of a noncommittal lover or the earnest “why not” of one devoted to knowing my inmost thoughts? Why not indeed? Was he not, as I was, sufficiently frightened by the constant threat of separation? Did he not care enough to be frightened by it?

“It can be a relief to read about other people’s problems.”

“That’s true, but have you read this?”

“Yeah, it’s great. You’d like it if you gave it a chance.”

“I’m not averse to it based on hearsay, for God’s sake, I’ve already read it!” I picked the book up and pointed to young Duras, feeling conspicuously like my father. “Do you know who this is?” I asked.

And when of course he didn’t answer immediately, I raved on, paternally waving the book for emphasis. “This is me. I’m the one doomed to return to the place where I came from and I don’t mean bloody England! Someday you’ll go tromping off on some Melvillian adventure and I’ll return to the island of middle-aged librarians with five-year-olds whose noses need wiping and husbands who stay up late carving gnomes. The island where books provide the only excitement.

“As for you, you’re the rich Chinese guy. Your youth is your wealth. You have it to spend and no one, but no one, expects you to spend it on me. Your youth waits for you the way his money did. It’s what separates us, it’s what makes me ridiculous. I’m the trashy visitor. In truth you would never dream of marrying me.”

“You’re already married,” he said softly as if afraid to upset me further but quietly determined to rein me in.

“That really isn’t the point now is it?” I didn’t know what to make of the fact that we were having an argument. It rather excited me. I felt as if we had left the realm of the fleeting and entered the real. Wasn’t there an Old World saying, something to the effect of: “Trying to love someone without hurting them is like trying to walk in the snow without leaving marks”? We were leaving our marks in the snow.

“What
is
the point?”

“The simple point I’m trying to make is that I can’t bear to read this particular book at the moment.” I felt a rush of remorse for my fretful outburst. Contrary to appearances, aversion had not been my first response—that had been arousal—but I had swiftly, defensively bypassed it in favor of self-protection, a move for which I now felt ashamed. “Thank you,” I said, moving closer to him, “I like very much that you’ve brought me this to read. It’s one of my favorites, it’s endlessly sexy I just…”

As I opened my mouth to explain, he kissed me, and I, at last abandoning all explanation, kissed him in return.

“Don’t watch me,” he muttered. I was astride him; I had a spectacular view.

“Have to,” I managed. I kept my eyes trained on his face as he clenched his mouth and let out an anguished, primordial sound. “Why come here if not to witness your pleasure and trace its origins? You can’t ask me to forego that. It would make our time meaningless.”

“Wow, meaningless?” He spoke with his eyes closed.

“Well, not meaningless but you know what I mean.” Did he?

How was I to fend off the image of his pleasure when it was just centimeters away? Why would I possibly want to turn away from it? The viewing of his fulfillment, the experience of my own, these were indistinguishable. More important still, I was storing up images for a future from which he would likely be absent.

* * *

One Saturday morning Var announced that he would be taking Maria to the dump. Such impromptu expeditions were rare and typically lasted twenty-five minutes. I had learned to seize such opportunities. I hurried alongside them out of the apartment and immediately began walking to the woods. Saturday was the young man’s busiest day at P.I.P. so there was no chance of a last-minute meeting. Still, I wanted to go to the house and sit a while. I considered staying in the apartment to phone him or to phone Violet, but I faltered. The truth was I didn’t like speaking to people on their mobile phones while they were prowling around doing other things. I preferred to have conversations with people while they were seated at home. Using a landline was for me quite literally akin to being on land while using a mobile phone was like being at sea or, worse, up in an airplane. I preferred a seated, stable connection. Just the thought of the scraps of paper in my drawer made my palms sweat.

The walk to the waterfall always brought me some measure of happiness. All walking does something to lift my spirits. Striding the length of the library to retrieve a book for a patron revives me, walking in slow, wide circles in the garden puts me at ease. I walked briskly, free to travel at my own pace (Maria’s legs were considerably shorter than mine and her attention drifted free as a leaf on a river). Even without the prospect of seeing him, I was happy to be released from my motherly duties and walking.

As I neared the trailhead I began to have nervous thoughts about the property owner. It seemed inevitable that I should encounter her; she must have used the trail but thus far we had never met. The white NO TRESPASSING sign gave me a sinister jolt as always, the late afternoon sun shone on it as if to point it out. I curbed my anxiety with thoughts of the young man and entered the woods.

Almost immediately I heard the rush of the waterfall and felt the Pavlovian flush of arousal that so often accompanied it, my ears the ears of a captive rat attuned to indicators of pleasure. I crossed the bridge, then scrambled lightly down the bank to the stone bench, where I sat for a few moments and watched the water. But like a stray metal filing, I felt magnetically drawn to the site of fulfillment.

Once in the tunnel I noticed how very green the trees were from the recent rain, the birds singing all around me; I recalled with unladylike satisfaction our meeting the day before (the young man’s fingers extending and then twisting before curling into a fist; his fist turning, each of his knuckles touching me in slow succession as the notch of a dying Rota Fortunae touches many possibilities before entering one) until my autoerotic reverie was interrupted by the sound of uproarious laughter. I stopped walking and listened intently. It was the sound of people at play and yet the voices were male and that frightened me. I was a woman alone in the woods after all. Teasing, yelling, bellows, more laughter. Such happiness! I couldn’t resist following it.

I broke into a run and nearly tripped over an enormous tree that had fallen during the storm onto the trail. For a moment I was poleaxed by the sight of it, panicked in the face of an obstacle. I knelt down before it. Gruntingly I tried to push it forward but the tree wouldn’t budge; it was heavy, riddled with thorns and sharp twigs. I stood up and kicked it with the blunt toe of my boot to no avail. Finally, in the way of an unskilled hurdler who leads with her hands, I cleared it inelegantly, scratching my face in the process. The savage mark seemed a small price to pay for my freedom.

I had almost reached the gray house when I heard a male voice shouting the young man’s name. My heart folded in on itself like an antique camera. Black box shut. The voices were coming from the gray house. He was being teased by another young man and then another. They were shouting suggestive things to each other and laughing. I inched nearer and crouched behind an oak tree to watch.

They had opened the windows, something we never dared to do. Puffs of smoke were coming out of the window on the left, the very window I had often looked out of while sitting at the small table eating candy. His name was shouted again. How it pained me to hear it! The name insisted upon the existence of another reality to which he belonged apart from me. Again the boy yelled it, the name that I had never so much as whispered to another. The boy stuck his head out of the left-hand window and blew several smoke rings. I feared he would yell the name again but it was the young man himself who yelled next, his gravelly voice somehow smoother and less mature at that decibel.
I told you not to smoke in here, dog!
But he was laughing, he wasn’t really angry. (Did he ever really get angry? Another question for the queue.) They all appeared to be quite stoned—everything was funny to them, it was difficult for them to utter clear sentences without laughing. Var and his friends at university got this way sometimes, I recognized the behavior.

For a few minutes I listened to them yell expletives rather affectionately at one another. From what I could decipher there was Liam the ring blower who seemed to love any word or code word having to do with marijuana and Will the extremely giggly one who kept saying
shit
and
ass
when he wasn’t expressing himself in preliterate whoops and finally the young man, whose fixation was sex. What issued out of his Gerber baby mouth was
horny, hot, in the mood to fuck
and a string of other sex-related obscenities for which I felt partly if not solely responsible. What had I done? And had he told them? Did they know this was our love nest they were trampling upon? A sudden fear of the law accompanied by my longstanding fear of being humiliated by young men welled up in me.

Smoke continued to rise from the left-hand window, the right-hand window flew open with a screech. A boy I assumed was Will hung himself out like a dog on a joyride and giggled. He looked ugly and wild, the extreme paleness of his skin accentuating the redness of his acne, his mouth lolling open as he laughed, his teeth covered in muzzle-ish braces. I wished, in vain, for a third window through which the young man—
my
young man, not these others—might appear. For despite the fact that soon Maria and Var would be back from the dump if they weren’t already, despite the fact the young man and his friends might leave at any moment, I wanted, naively, recklessly, to catch a glimpse of him. I wanted, like some candy-eating, hand-waving groupie, to see what my rockstar was wearing! (Was it the white T-shirt, pristine and detergent-scented, or the same shirt covered in mud from the storm, saturated with the smoke of an illegal substance?) Simultaneously, contrary to my history of endless inquiries, I didn’t want to see him in this other mode, this world so painfully identical to our world and yet so different from it. I felt myself stepping backward in the way of someone bidding a difficult farewell; one exits the station slowly while keeping one’s eyes on the train. In the end, my fear of seeing who he was without me was stronger than my desire to see him as he was and I turned from that new world and fled.