Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (24 page)

* * *

Absurdly undaunted by my late night encounter with Var (in fact more determined than ever to evade detection), the following Friday I managed to safely exit the apartment and run my obstacle course unthwarted.

“I like it when you sweat,” the young man confessed. He dabbed a droplet from my temple with his thumb.

“You’re embarrassing me,” I said. “You’re so clean and dry.”

“Come here.” He drew me toward the hunters and my heart began beating more rapidly. I felt the fabric of us being slightly cut and then his fingers—could it be they were trembling a little less now?—slowly unzipped my skirt, the sound of its metallic teeth, another opening, another snip.

Afterward, we lay on a faded infinity quilt he had smuggled from Violet’s closet. I was still wearing my shoes. They were ballet flats made of washed red leather, each one had a red leather rose at the toe. I looked up at the loft and pondered aloud various points and methods of access. He listened politely as was his habit but the moment I finished my speech he began one of his own.

“I’m going to California,” he said. I couldn’t tell from the way he said it whether there was fear or regret or happiness in his voice. I turned quickly to face him, as much in an attempt to read his expression as to see him again before he vanished. He did not turn to meet my anguished eye but kept his eyes trained on the loft, which now seemed to me an emblem of impossibility.

I answered lightly, to hide my devastation, that I had visited California as a child and that it had been very beautiful, and he, not sensing the enormous effort it had taken me to muster such a nonchalant sentence could not hide his curiosity and asked, “What was it like?” The young man failed to realize the extent of his power over me; he somehow thought me invincible.

I ignored his question. “When are you going?” I asked. He finally turned toward me though continued to avoid my eye.

“July 1st.”

“But that’s my birthday!”

“It is?”

“What, do you think I would lie just to make you stay?!”

He caught my eye and smiled slightly. He winced then cleared his throat. “Sorry. I didn’t know that was your birthday.” I felt a pain when he said it; it was a reminder of all that was unknown—of all that would remain unknown—between us.

“Of course you didn’t, how could you? I’ve done my very best to avoid the subject.”

“It doesn’t have to be July 1st.”

“Lovely,” I said. I was at a loss and yet I feared that if I did not recover myself quickly I would stand to lose more. “Give me the gift of leaving some other day, would you?”

“Of course.”

“Don’t you mean ‘okay’?”

“No.”

He had read an article online exposing the high levels of toxicity in the Russian River while praising the work of a particular nonprofit organization devoted to the river’s restoration. Within a matter of minutes, he had clicked on the organization’s link and registered to volunteer. When this fateful series of clicks had occurred I had no idea. I had no desire to know; I had lost my spirit of inquiry.

He had, with this news, at last subdued me. I said nothing for some time. I felt very cold and heavy there on the floor among the drop cloths and paint cans. My skin grew clammy, chills prickled the backs of my legs. My heart—so predictable and yet so wild—beat like a hummingbird’s inside me. The rest of my stolid body belied that hidden trill.

“I’m tired,” I whispered. “I can’t get up.” He touched my forehead. The skin of his palm felt cool and smooth. Waves of nausea washed over me.

“You’re sweating,” he said.

“Enjoy it while you can.”

“It’s just for six weeks. I’ll be back on August 14th.”

“Okay,” I said, trying out his word.

And then, despite my catatonic state, he pulled from his back pocket an exuberant color brochure promoting the environmental program that had just stolen him from me. He held it out. I saw in his eyes the look of youthful excitement, the child wanting to please, the young man wanting to impress, and I turned my head away. “Not now, darling, please. It’s still June.” I heard him swallow hard and I am certain he blushed then, if not from embarrassment at my refusal then from shame at his own insensitivity. “And what about you? When’s
your
birthday? When will you be legal?” I withheld my newly acquired age of consent tidbit. Let him think me a criminal, let him think I’ve risked everything for love.

“November 4th.”

“Ah, not until the fall. Well, I’m glad I never asked, I couldn’t have waited that long anyway.” I turned onto my back and gazed up at the beams. “So what does Mom think of all this?” I gestured limply with one hand in the direction of the gaudy brochure.

“Mom’s excited for me of course.”

Of course
? What had happened to
okay
? Had he bequeathed it to me, left it here already as a souvenir? Amazing what Mother Earth and her promoters could do for a young man’s self-confidence and speech patterns. I suddenly despised Mother Earth and her beautiful, tainted waters. They only made me feel further estranged from the young man, hopeless in fact, being as I was so far from him on both environmental and philosophical continuums. His sense of the tragic was well-developed and yet his curiosity about the world was naively shot through with hope, as if some part of him suspected that his own tragic circumstances (to which I was not privy but could sense) were defined by his island existence and that once he was on the mainland he would be free of them.
You won’t!
I wanted to protest. I too was passionate about my cause!

His love of nature and his desire to leave the natural splendor of the island existed inefficiently together, they were exasperatingly contradictory, each canceling the other out. There was no way to comprehend his impulses except as part of the larger phenomena of youth, which, from where I stood, was synonymous with inaccessibility if not menace. Like a centaur, even as his human eyes gazed at the beauty that surrounded him, his horse hooves were galloping away.

In order to fend off a fit of sadness I said brightly, “Well, anyway,” went outside, and began pacing the porch. When I came back inside I found him sleeping the deep, impenetrable sleep of well-exercised children. He lay on his back, still shirtless, exuding the perfection all children do when they sleep. I lay quietly on my side facing him. His dreaming eyes were racing but harmless through the smooth shutters of their lids; his usually wary eyes occupied, blind to my gaze; his nose functioning but unable to smell the transparent scent of the tears that had begun to mark my face as soon as I’d seen he was sleeping; his mouth drooping a little in its silence, no abandonment speeches, no proclamations of love on his lips. He stirred a bit as I studied him, summoning all my innate powers of memorization, my learned cataloging skills, and then he draped his arm over his eyes with a sigh as if to undermine my project.

We slept on the floor of the gray house all night. Very early the birds woke me with their warning songs. I sat numbly for a few moments watching him though I could hardly see his face for his arm remained like a rag upon it. As I hurriedly put on my clothes and gathered my things, he slept on. I did not wish to wake him. I did not wish to see that young look of his at that hour or at any hour for that matter. Indeed I feared I might not be able to bear seeing him again for fear of meeting that look.

Quietly I slipped away, afraid he would catch me in the act. I jogged through the woods, past the waterfall, through the lush tunnel of trees. Once I had crossed the land bridge, I slowed to a slouching pace. I cursed myself for being sleep-deprived and matronly, in love with a seventeen-year-old whose allegiance was to Mother Earth, not to me. I had no desire to reach the apartment except to appear in time to prevent Maria from thinking I had abandoned her. If not for her I might not have returned. I didn’t care if I was caught. I cared even less about Var now. I no longer had happiness to spare; I could no longer afford to be tender. The man with the moustache be damned! What did it matter, I could crash through a window and he would never wake, sealed as his ears were with white putty, his entire being absent, deep in its shy, sativic stupor. Damn both men for being unwakeable and passive. Damn myself for always waking early and taking action.

After I left the dirt road and began plodding along Music Street it began to rain. I felt an odd sense of relief, for now it seemed nothing more could go wrong. Drops of rain began dripping from my hair down my face. I kept expecting tears to fall as well but I was as dry-eyed as one caught in a rainstorm can be. I was without feeling. It was as if the bird of my happiness and the bird of my sadness had flown off together and I was left empty-handed.

In the end my desire for him won out. Excuses for pleasure were easy enough to find and my taste for pleasure had become stronger than my fear.

I got over this
of course
—yes, I too tried on the force of those two words, the brisk syllables like consecutive slaps, shoves that kept me awake, kept me moving, but from which I never recovered. I proceeded, I kept the sting to myself and returned to him. I was in no position to abandon him. To abandon him would have been to abandon my own pleasure. Ever the immigrant, I adjusted to the new terms in order to survive. My memories of that suspended country of snow and cardinals and woodsmoke receded; they became like forbidden photographs that I would take out on occasion in secret. The same skill with which I had kept our secret from the world I now used to keep my sadness a secret from him. My only solace was the idea that after the young man left the island, I too would leave. Not to follow him of course. I wouldn’t dare overshadow him; there is nothing more futile than trying to stop youth, nothing more morally repellent than squelching potential. I didn’t know where I would go or what I would do but I decided that somewhere, somehow, I would put my transgressive sadness to use.

He was a tender young man. But for all his tenderness he was a young person who moved through a world inhabited not by people like myself but by other young people, that distant and ruthless race of beings for whom change and happiness are often synonymous. Such was the fact that I brooded upon as, minute by minute, spring bloomed more completely around us.

On the nights to follow his dreadful announcement, he seemed to take great pains to muffle his exuberance, an act for which I did not know whether to feel gratitude or indignation. I could not help but wonder if he had not muffled his exuberance with regard to other matters—girls his own age, the prospect of living off-island, perhaps even his feelings for me. Both my father and mother had been expert mufflers of exuberance, as was Var; it seemed I was a magnet for such personalities.

Back in the apartment I minced about sweeping—my tattered broom an echo of the one in the gray house. I could do nothing without thinking of him, not even sort the house, which was cleaner that spring than it had ever been. I did what my mother would have done. For every word of protest I might have uttered, I made myself sweep another stroke. I was no muffler of exuberance; I was a muffler of pain.

As the date of his departure grew near I became increasingly despondent, alternating between an agitated state of hyperactivity (expressed as housecleaning) and a sluggish paralysis (expressed as heavy sleep). (Yet even when I laid myself down upon the bed, it was my body whose functioning slowed to a near stop while my brain, like some frenetic bean counter locked within a vault, spent the nights counting days, tabulating outcomes, striking bargains, haggling endlessly over each and every bean.) Var’s room became unendurably hot (while the rest of the apartment was only sweltering) and so he ran a loud fan the size and shape of a fraternity boy’s refrigerator around the clock. Day and night the steel box roared on. It sounded as if we were aboard one of the island ferries steaming toward the mainland. In my current state, the noise was torture. If I had never had any tolerance for the thought of leaving the young man, I had less tolerance still for the thought of him leaving me. I could not hear the sound of a boat leaving without wanting to weep.

Even as I stole like a teenage girl out my window then raced through the woods to meet him, back in the apartment the X-marked days on my endangered sea life calendar began to outnumber the clear days; indeed our time together, like the manta ray, was fast becoming extinct. My only hope—which Violet must have shared—was that he would return.

* * *

“I’d like to adopt you,” I proposed.

“That would be incest.”

“Must you put it so crudely?” Alas, the profanity of my solution had not escaped him. He was so clever.

“There’s also the matter of Mom.”

“You’re right. She might not allow it.” I should have shuddered at the thought of Violet signing a written agreement but I laughed. He began to laugh too.

“You’d be surprised. Mom’s a pretty understanding person.”

“If you were my child I’d keep you with me. I’d forbid you to leave.”

“I could run away.”

“Would you?”

“I’m almost eighteen. That only leaves you a few months.”

“A few months longer than I have now.”

“Why talk about it?” he asked. He put his lips upon mine as if to shield me from their power. I felt them move to form words. “You’re upsetting yourself,” he whispered.

“Don’t you dare.”

“Look at me,” he said.

I wouldn’t glance. I stayed lying on my stomach; I inhaled his brought from home pillow (likely belonging to Mom).

“I’m still here.” He stroked my neck as if I were ill. “I’m not gone yet.”

I turned my head. The pillow was wet with my tears. He got up and placed his hands on the backs of my thighs, one hand lightly upon each thigh. He waited for me to raise myself. I didn’t move. I felt something terrible might happen if he kissed me and so I lay still. He was, as always, very patient. He rested his hands there for a long time, he kept his touch light, never varying the pressure, neither going forward nor retreating but making electricity. Like a boy alone in the wild, he built his fire soundlessly, with little movement, adding branches until his part of the woods was lit. The thought of him there alone with his patience moved me. I raised my hips slightly. I could hear him lie down behind me, I could feel the warmth of his face. His mouth was near me but not touching. His patience outdistanced my resolve. I lifted myself fully now, obscenely. He touched first with his hand, slipped it in like a man reaching into his own pocket for warmth, as if I were a coat that belonged to him so that each time he withdrew his hand I had no purpose but to wait for its return. If I could wait long enough, (and I could always wait long enough) his kisses would come next.