Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (3 page)

Did I detect a bit of defensiveness in his reply? Had I overestimated my own power? I thought for the first time of the sociology of illicit affairs between adults and minors, parents and children, teachers and students, employers and employees. The term
power differential
returned to me from textbooks I had read during my college years. It seemed that I had intimidated him simply by being who I was, the vision of myself as “a middle-aged librarian” suddenly clear to me as the now familiar lump under his lip. (Was I really middle-aged?! If I lived to be one hundred, technically I wouldn’t reach the middle until fifty.) If only he knew I was the last woman on earth who might be impressed by the existence of money in his wallet. Not for a moment had I doubted his capacity to produce such an emblem of maturity. Nor did I doubt his level of literacy or care if he ever checked out a book. If only he knew that I had complete (though completely unfounded) faith in his intelligence. This was an essential part of what drew me to him: my profound sense of the person he was, the person I would certainly discover if only I had the opportunity.

And yet clearly this intuiting was not mutual. On the contrary he perceived me as someone to whom he must say:
I have money. I read books
. Was this the much-writ about power differential
 
at play or was it merely one young man’s insecurities? It was impossible to tell, so I resolved to try to be more sensitive the next time. We hadn’t even touched hands and I was beginning to learn that one of the virtues of having a much younger lover is that one is poised to be patient. One enjoys the kind of loving tolerance one has for one’s child. The awareness that he or she hasn’t lived, and so can’t possibly know, underlies everything. Before we had uttered one another’s names, the power differential bred mercy.

* * *

The young man began visiting the library approximately once a week, a frequency that, it occurred to me later, likely corresponded to the avoidance of fines if it corresponded to anything. At first, to my anxious, inquisitive mind, he seemed to alternate between Mondays and Thursdays, but in truth there was never a perfect pattern. His only fairly reliable habit was that he nearly always arrived five or ten minutes before closing, so that there was never as leisurely a feel to our interactions as I would have liked. Between encounters, I would pine openly for a glimpse of him with certain of my co-workers. When he happened, inauspiciously, to visit the library in my absence, Siobhan would discreetly let me know and bring his record up so that together we might view his current items and comment upon them.

I confess I watched the door, my black head swerving like a tire each time it opened. I avoided being assigned to the children’s room and the basement, for these were sections of the library he never visited. It was difficult enough when I was assigned to the main room to somehow ensure, without drawing attention, that it was I who helped him and not another librarian.

On one occasion, I was on the phone and saw him coming. I worked to extinguish the conversation so that I might be released to greet him. He was still a fair distance from the desk and walking at a moderate pace. There was no reason why I shouldn’t be free in time. I persisted in keeping my answers clipped, my tone final, but there was no end to the maniac’s list of questions. I considered hanging up. It is physically painful to be torn between one’s professional obligation to a disembodied voice and the desire to move closer to one’s approaching Adonis. I felt the pain in my chest. As if a high pitch was being struck; my glass heart threatened to shatter. Heroically, with a smile on my face, I fought to end the conversation and was about to emerge victorious when the library director, stylish, effective (though, unaware as she was of the young man’s special status, tragically ineffective for my purposes), smiling broadly, held out her hand to take his card.

The unrelenting caller chattered on. I gave up, it was too late anyhow, so I surrendered to being a receptacle for his words and used the phone pressed to my ear as a cover, a perch from which I might surreptitiously watch the young man as he waited in fidgety silence for the director to check out his films. In the end, this mishap proved beneficial for I saw that he was tensely aware of me for the duration. His dark eyes glanced sideways in my direction as I held the phone and at last crept up to meet mine. We smiled hello. We were too far away to be in conversation.

The director remarked, referring to the comedies he was borrowing, “I bet you’ll have fun with these!” We were friendly librarians. Whether or not she was being flirtatious, whether or not she found him attractive, I couldn’t be sure, but it was difficult to believe otherwise. That she was happily married to a stone butch by the name of Tony and old enough to be the young man’s grandmother did nothing to alter my blind vision of him as universally irresistible. (Biologically speaking, I too was old enough to have accomplished such a feat, though I would have had to have been a very early bloomer and I had been nothing of the sort. Perhaps this, I thought with satisfaction, had been the reason all along for my retarded development. Of course boarding at the Hatfield School for Girls hadn’t helped.)

This incident provided me with yet another reason to disseminate my secret to the staff. After he’d gone, I lightly informed the director—who was a playfully good sport—of the young man’s special status. She apologized extravagantly and promised in typical mensch fashion that next time she would leave him to me (assuming she would recognize him, which, as it turned out, she would not). The well-meaning director’s oblivion aside, my colleagues (Nella in particular, who could easily have had a second career as an air traffic controller so strict was her visual command of the front walkway) were immensely helpful during this initial phase of the relationship.

Despite my daily vigils I was surprisingly slow to detect his approach. I was a worker who tended toward engrossment regardless of the frivolity of my task. I was easily captivated by the filling out of forms, the slicing of paper into squares, the placing of books in their proper order. And I was so intent upon the thought of his arrival that I often missed the actual moment he arrived. More often than not, it was Nella who alerted me as she glanced out the window over her blue-stemmed glasses, a slight frown on her face, “Your prayers have been answered.”

Imagine my alarm when a week later it was I who saw him approach through the picture window, accompanied by, of all people, his mother (Siobhan had been quick to identify her as such just a few weeks before). I was at once overjoyed to see him and mortified by the prospect of encountering him in the presence of someone who would be a walking, talking reminder of the chronological chasm between us, a woman who would have every right to hate me if she knew my thoughts.

“My God,” I said to Nella under my breath, “he’s with his mother.”

She looked coolly at the winsome pair and then at me without expression. Firmly, she pressed the bridge of her glasses into place as if to say:
Everything’s fine. Don’t panic.

Before I had time to think further, Mother and Son were in the front door. I needn’t have worried about those first few minutes of contact for as they passed the front desk the young man kept his head down like a convict while his mother managed a strained smile and said hello. She was very pretty (one could easily trace the lineage) though discrepantly ill at ease, exuding as she did an odd combination of beauty and unhappiness (shades of Rachel Ward’s bone structure displaying the tentative, agony-shaped sulk of Emily Dickinson—any heterosexual priest with a pulse would have found her appealing). It was the first time I had seen either of them in the company of another. As they made their way toward the DVDs, I stifled an urge to run out of the building. I suppressed my mounting anxiety in an effort to quickly reason out the best way to handle our impending encounter.

They were lovely together. Both dark-haired and dark-eyed. I felt the inappropriate urge to photograph them. She stepped up to the counter and he hung back a bit. I was reminded of the way a mother is tied to her infant in the early days; when the infant cries, the woman’s insides contract. The thread was still there between them, I could see it in the way she led and he followed, the relief with which he allowed himself to be released from the obligation to speak. It surprised me that he was clearly more relaxed in her presence than he had been alone. One hears stories of teenagers estranged from or embarrassed by their parents. In this respect, he was more like a younger child who constantly tracks the mother for comfort and is on edge when she is out of sight. He seemed, if anything, grateful for her protection, for the opportunity to be in proximity to me without the pressure to converse, near me and yet safe from my advances.

They spoke in soft, teasing murmurs.

“You haven’t seen this?” he laughed, pointing to one of the films.

“You know I don’t sit around all day watching stuff.” She seemed to be hinting at the fact that he did, but either he didn’t notice or he didn’t mind.

“I know,” he said, backing away another step, looking at the carpet and smiling. “I just thought you might have seen it,” he trailed off.

They shared the habit of never focusing on one object for very long. Her eyes flitted from the stack of films to the pencil can to my face, as his scanned various points on the carpet. She smiled at me briefly. It was an anguished smile but there was a scintilla in her eyes that lit my affection, which I suppose I’d been quietly holding out to her like a piece of kindling all along. I carefully stamped the films and handed them back to her. I couldn’t help wanting her to love me.

“These are due November 26,” I said too warmly, like one pretending to be a librarian for the purposes of gathering intelligence and currying favor. I was a phony, an interloper, a spy! I was a prurient woman who wanted a mother to love me so that she might entrust her son to me in order that I might undress him, mount him, do with him as I pleased. At the same time I knew she could never agree to such an arrangement, that I could never reveal my true intentions. This gave her the moral high ground (for she was herself while I was an impostor) which made me love her (and want her love) even more.

My only wish at that moment was to be granted a future transaction with the young man sans his loveworthy mother. How modest our desires become in the presence of certain emblems of Reality. Indeed in our case, the emblem of the Mother was the most devastating. He did not look up to say or nod goodbye but kept his restless eyes on the carpet as they went, the two of us already criminals in our way. He the convict with his head down in shame and I the spy, friendly in my disguise, not yet caught, my crime just beginning.

And so it was with us; we met on a more or less weekly basis, sometimes alone at the counter, sometimes surrounded by staff and patrons and phone calls, on occasion in the presence of his mother, always in public and always at the mercy of external forces. Our interactions lasted a few minutes at best and outside the perfunctory words exchanged between any patron and staff member there seemed to be, on the average, room for one additional sentence, a meager tidbit for an appetite such as mine. I began to prepare sentences in advance, thinking hard upon how I might get the most out of each one.

It occurred to me that the most suitable sort of sentence for one whose pangs of curiosity were as sharp as my own was the question. Question composition became my pastime, a meditative practice I undertook while shelving, while affixing labels to the spines of books, while feeding patron records to the steel teeth of the shredder like so many privately swallowed desires. My practice was not confined to idle moments at the library (even as my hands busied themselves, there was an element of idleness to my brain) but continued as I walked along the highway, as I stood at the small stove frying noodles for Maria and Var (I began, perversely, cooking Var’s favorite foods as a form of penance for sins I hadn’t committed), as I lay next to Maria, waiting for sleep to release me from one reality and take me to the next, my eyes, without glasses, straining to see the stars whose magnificent designs might bear for me some message.
What makes you happy? What makes you laugh? What do you wish you could change?
The practice ceased when he appeared and resumed when he was gone. Certainly I must have thought of other things between encounters, but I can’t now remember what.

I quickly ruled out the obvious, questions the answers to which I could not have wanted more, but could not, without violating one or more laws of etiquette, ask. They were the questions that cut with dizzying speed to the chase:
Are you available? May I kiss you? May I make love to you now in the stacks?
I gained new respect for those men who thought little of posing such questions on a regular basis and to complete strangers. The very men I once felt assaulted by now struck me as boldly in touch with Fate and the Implications of Time. If not now, when? The bomb of time was ticking!

In trying to slow my frantic pace, I had done a series of calculations, all of which returned the same discouraging result. There was no time for a leisurely courtship, a long engagement, a four-year college career. Within a year, the trim figure I had managed to maintain would surely sag, my skin’s elasticity would, without warning, snap. Within five, I would be infertile. Within ten, my hair would be white. Within fifteen, I’d be old enough to withdraw money from my retirement account. There was no time for patience or common sense or delayed gratifications of any kind. The time was now and there was much to be discovered.

There were the questions pertaining to his person.
What’s your favorite film and why? Who’s your favorite filmmaker? Are you close to your father?
There were the questions pertaining to his whereabouts.
Where do you live? Do you have a job? Are you in college? Do you have plans to leave the island?
All of which I intended to ask at some point but which seemed too mundane, necessary but not revealing enough. In the beginning I felt I shouldn’t waste my one question (though perhaps I might squeeze in two) on any query that didn’t reveal something intimate about him or that might result in a “yes” or “no” answer.