Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (13 page)

He seemed to have found another way in through the woods, a route more compatible with his mysterious starting point. I never asked him to show me the path; I assumed it was one of the ancient ways. That each of us should travel separately and alone to converge upon the house pleased me. The illicit nature of our affair made it impossible for me to walk with him in public or in the woods with its secret maze of paths, for on a small island, such paths are akin to backstreets and to be seen with him there would have been scandalous. I was accustomed to walking alone in nature; it had a ravishing effect on me whereas in the presence of others the natural world made me jumpy. To this day I hardly know how I withstood the pleasure of those Fridays—first the walk alone in the woods, then my tryst with the young man—week after week that swift and double ravishment.

He was a quick study. Quiet. Modest. Watchful. Though he never took the liberty of making eye contact for the duration, the way some lovers unnervingly do, plucking that easy intensity like an unripe fruit for the fun of it, simply to feel the force of nature, or perhaps to see minute images of themselves in the eyes of another. He paid close attention to my responses, to my eyelids and fingernails, to the pulse in the skin of my neck, the bridge of my back arching over the rough mattress as he held it, his trembling hands impressive as any truss. He paid the sort of attention a child devotes to an instrument he intends to master; he touched me as if I were an expensive and breakable instrument. After a few lessons, he was able to produce the desired effect. I became, as instruments often do in the hands of children, an extension of his own body. I imagine he knew how to please me as well as he knew how to please himself.

Once he overcame his initial shyness, he did everything I asked with unsettling degrees of intelligence and athleticism. At times that potent mix in such a young man frightened me. I felt it was inevitable that he should surpass me. I was a mother who imparted everything I knew about how to love, believing that in the end her child would use his carefully learned skills to love the World and not the Original, not the Mother, that First in a sequence who, like the match that lights the fire, soon reaches the end of her short stick. And why not? Not even the thought of death could stop me from loving him, from wanting to impart to him all that existed within me pertaining to love. Aren’t all mother-child relationships made with that same bittersweet substance: the old earth mixed with the new, held together by that necessary, heartbreaking element of send-off? Ultimately, I wanted him to love the World, to start fires with the others, to burn brightly in the distance long after I was cold ash. Those who think one takes a young lover to escape thoughts of death are mistaken.

His lips were shaped like Maria’s. Yes, rather ironically, they too were reminiscent of the Gerber baby of yesteryear: their slight pucker, their slight pout, the open mouth, irresistible to feed. How intently he would drag them across my stomach, then up to the sternum that covered, but could not conceal, my beating heart. I imagine his youthful ears were acute enough to hear its perilous pounding. He would rest his lips there lightly, as if speaking to me through a closed door, before rushing to my breasts, to my dark nipples that had by that time long since risen up to meet him, his lips, his teeth, his tongue. It was another joy of winter, the desire—so persistent and actual—to be devoured by warmth. Two hands, a body, a mouth. The sudden warmth of human touch was so surprising. That it was in winter, that the touch was his, only increased my delight.

At risk of sounding crude as a white-haired empress with her black-haired houseboy, I could hardly believe my luck. And I was luckier still, for I had no riches to offer him and he no orders to obey my commands. I had not bought him off the auction block with a sack of gold or inherited him at last from the ancestors; there had been no contract between warring nations condemning him to my company. He had come to me of his own accord. He had been given to me—he had given himself to me—and I did not know why.

Never before had I gazed so raptly at a lover’s beauty. Being the woman, I had always been gazed at. I was never so admiring of men as they were of me. But perhaps it was more than that. If I had perceived beauty would I not have gazed at it or at least wanted to? I have no memory of either. Had age made youth more beautiful to me, the way one’s childhood acquires a brighter light as the mind dims, or was the young man simply the most beautiful specimen I had ever encountered?

His stomach was flat as a new school desk and as bare. No scribbles, no scars, only the faintest line of black hair that began at the base of his concave belly button then disappeared into his trousers as if into a hidden future. A great scar from the past nestled just below the belt, as if everything of significance—past, present, and future—lay concealed beneath his American jeans.

He smelled deliciously of freshly laundered clothes and the English toffee that was in fact his chewing tobacco. His skin took on the scent of clean cotton and the vanilla scent of one who bakes cakes often; the smell of woodsmoke was always in his hair. His gentle manner and his shyness gave him the appearance of being docile though I soon found that he also possessed within himself, like the delicate but certain stone within some fruits, an obdurate core. I rather loved that stone of his, the way I loved all pits I had extracted from fruit with my tongue. At his core he was obdurate yet shaggy with sweetness. One could pry the hardness open and find within it unexpected fragrances and pleasing shapes, the way one discovers the scent of almond inside a plum’s heart. The stone inside him protected us. It prevented him from disappearing into nothingness and it prevented me from devouring him whole.

So the voluptuous pouring of pleasure continued. What was absurdly quenching and satisfying that first morning became a natural state of affairs on the Friday mornings that followed. It was as I had sensed it would be: like some lavishly ornate fountain, my cup was overflowing. My blindness was complete, my attention span Proustian, the taste of said madeleine endlessly delicious. I wanted nothing more than to return to it, go over it, taste it, and remember.

* * *

And then one afternoon, as if she’d had a glass of good wine before leaving the house (her face warm, her eyes tranquil), as she dropped her books in, Violet said hello to me. For a moment all my sins were forgotten. I stared in disbelief at my tooth-sized nugget.
Hello
. It fairly gleamed in the pan. Greedy for more, I plunged my pan back into the river.

“Hello,” I said, “how are you?” She did not reply but nodded at me in Japanese fashion before turning toward the stairs.

I pounced at once upon her returned items. It was a grim selection. One was the Dostoevsky on CD that the young man had borrowed for her. They must have renewed it several times with another librarian—each renewal, to my fanatical mind, a brute infidelity. The item was terrifying and titillating at once, an object each of us had held in turn, a material witness to the current that ran between the three of us. The other was a cloth edition of
The
House of Mirth
whose somewhat flaky gold title produced in me a pang of concern for Violet’s (and by extension the young man’s) financial standing. Lily Bart’s sad story would have been sadder still if she’d had a child.

My mind turned to Violet in the basement below. What would she borrow? What, if anything, did she know? Being alone at the desk made it more difficult to endure the brief wait for her return. There were no other patrons to distract me. I could have used a good glass myself. In a most biddy-ish manner, I began to fidget. I sharpened several pencils, cut squares of scrap paper with the metal paper cutter, affixed stickers to a cart of new cookbooks. (The director never ceased to impress me with her ongoing ability to anticipate what was to come, whether it was a great influx of summer patrons or a surge of interest in cookbooks in the dead of winter. If I could have seen the future that clearly and without flinching, I too might have been in a position of power.)

“Hello, Angel,” I said, extremely grateful to Alberta Angelone, for I had run out of cookbooks and she was a favorite. She drove public buses for a living, I was a bus rider, and we had both been raised Catholic—that was enough for us. She let me call her Angel. “How are you?”

“Hi, honey. I couldn’t be happier. She’s got a new one out,” she said, grinning at the Danielle Steel she had placed on the counter.

Violet stepped up behind her like a girl alone, waiting in line for a film, the young man there in her eyes, watching me.

As Angel turned to leave, I reddened. Violet breasted her book. There was an awkward pause in which she stepped forward but did not place it on the counter.

“Would you like to have tea sometime?” she asked.

Once more I felt sharply my inability to predict the future. Thinking I couldn’t possibly have heard her correctly I answered breezily, “Oh yes. I drink tea all day in fact. It reminds me of,” and here I nearly said “home” but that wasn’t true so I revised, “it reminds me of days gone by.”

Her cheeks looked as though someone in the basement had been pinching them. Perhaps she
had
had a glass before coming. She looked on the verge of laughter, her eyes swimming in a new wash of impishness. I was baffled, happy, and not a little concerned.

“Oh! Do you mean we would drink the tea together?” I asked. What an imbecile! Why was this happening to me now? Why not the year previous? Our timing couldn’t have been more wrong.

“I thought we might, some people do you know. But if tea is a solitary act for you I understand.”

“No! I mean it is (I couldn’t lie) and yet I’d like nothing more than to share it with you.” Idiot! Tea with the Mother of One’s Seventeen-Year-Old Lover was ideally suited for a nightmare. Tea?! Oh God, better make it wine.

“Good,” she said, still embracing her book. It was not until we had agreed to meet at Plum Island Provisions at 8:30
 
on the following Wednesday that she placed it on the counter.

It was
Ethan Frome
. Why was it every book she checked out provoked pity or concern in me?

“This is a marvelous book,” I said too loudly, feeling a bit flushed, yes, a bit warm and tipsy myself now.

“I’ve been reading a lot more now that we’ve closed up shop. (The
we
of her sentence lodged in my throat and nearly asphyxiated me.) I’d love to talk with you about books over tea if you don’t mind. I don’t mean to assume that you read just because you’re a…”

“Oh but I do! I’m ashamed to say it’s nearly all I do in my spare time. It would be a great adventure for me to talk about books instead of just reading them.” And yet I’d already embarked on one great adventure, did I really have room in my life for two? Despite the flashing red lights I saw up ahead, the sirens I heard in the distance, I was eager to go forth.

“To adventure,” she said, holding
Ethan Frome
up in a toast.

* * *

Once I had taken my friend’s son as a lover, I had to cope with the problem of secrecy. As long as I did not become pregnant (perhaps I deluded myself about such an outcome, thinking I was still fertile, going at once to the doctor for pills), it was the kind of behavior one could in theory conceal for a lifetime, a secret someone less effusive than myself could easily have taken to the grave, and yet I saw immediately that I might not be up to the task. I was skilled at keeping secrets but what I had previously kept so well were the secrets of others. I didn’t know how to keep my own secrets and it seemed paramount that I should learn.

Various techniques presented themselves to me, the primary being verbal sublimation, which I had already begun to experiment with and which I now set out to perfect. When I felt the need to speak about him at the library, I spoke of his mother or of her shop or of teenage boys in general, casting as wide a net as possible with the hope that when a co-worker or patron opened her mouth to speak, a minnow (if not a marlin) of pertinent information would swim out toward me as I lay in wait.

Alternately, I toyed with the notion that I might safely satisfy this need by selecting one trustworthy person to hear my confession. Siobhan would have been the most natural choice (with the exception of Violet, who would have been perfect had not her son been the one regularly manhandling me) but before I could prime myself for such a release, Siobhan beat me to the confessional punch with an admission of her own: She had
fallen in love
with her husband again.

“Is that humanly possible?” I asked skeptically.

“Yes!” she shouted with tears in her eyes.

Like a butterfly who sheds her wings and returns to her chrysalis, Siobhan became pupal in her viewpoint, ravenous as a larva for opportunities to fix my marriage. I feared one day I would come to work to find she had returned to an egg state, unable to think or speak, much less advise me. Between composing e-mails to other libraries requesting interlibrary loans and filling out her green cards (most librarian tasks present little challenge even to a pupa), she piped in with romantic suggestions of things that had worked for her and Nick that might possibly work for Var and me, everything from taking a couples’ yoga class to exchanging positive anecdotes before bedtime to books on tantric sex to spending the night in a B & B.

Var despised B & Bs for their lack of privacy, I despised yoga as I despised most (not all, mind you) forms of exercise, and one would be hard pressed to choose between us who had a less positive outlook especially at bedtime. Indeed, tantric sex is of little use to those who have no sex at all. For the sake of my friendship with Siobhan I sometimes wished I could conform to her suggestions, the way I had once acceded, at her urging, to visiting Var’s room late one night. But my attempt to seduce Var had been a dismal failure and my affair with the young man was a smashing success so I had little motivation.

The director, busy as she was, was likewise unavailable for comment. This may have been all for the best, considering CORI forms and whatnot, not to mention the matter of the Friday shift which she had recently suggested I work on a regular basis and which I naturally refused.