Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (14 page)

Now that Siobhan had gone the way of the happy wife, Nella was the only one who might have cast her fonts and cheese puffs aside in favor of hearing a sister librarian’s true confession, but she continued to wrangle by drawing parallels between the young man and Var. She barraged me with questions like “He has kind of a Var vibe don’t you think?” and “They have a similar look right?” which I received as rhetorical. She continued as well, inexplicably, to take longer and more frequent lunch breaks. More and more she seemed to be abandoning us but for what I wasn’t certain.

When I felt the need to be counseled, which was often, I gently interrogated the librarians about their high school exploits and listened with care for nostalgic bits of adolescent lore that might enlighten me. Daily my co-workers confessed to me while I confessed to no one. These interviews did little to help my situation; nonetheless, I enjoyed them. My co-workers spoke of things they had never spoken of to me before; their faces became animated, seeming to indicate the capacity of love to alter reality long after a love affair is over. Even scurrying, unreachable Kitty abandoned for a full two minutes the DVD cleaner in order to gaze at the Elsewhere of Love, a sight both poignant and distressing to behold. It was all too easy for me to fling myself twenty years into the future, to the moment when this day too would be part of such a captivating elsewhere.

* * *

On the eve of my first date with Violet—for it was a date, a meeting in a public place, something the young man and I would never have—I picked up the phone and considered calling the number on the scrap. My desires had exhausted me. I would let Mother and Son decide. If the young man answered I would hang up, if Violet answered, I would cancel. Either scenario afforded a like anxiety. I had gone so far as to retrieve the scrap from my blazer when I thought of English classes at Hatfield and of Siobhan, who would have made an ideal classmate. Had we been students whose only obligations were writing essays about the books we had discussed, we’d have had such lively discussions! Though perhaps lonely herself, Siobhan was too busy administering to her husband and teens to meet me in my loneliness, something for which I could not properly blame her. You see, the Hatfield girl won out in the end, she surpassed or ignored the transgressor.
Grant me this! Don’t rob me of this!
she begged. She reduced me to ruefulness and I, though not without anxiety, gave in.

Prior to my rustic little episodes with her son, I’d thought tea with Violet would be like winning the lottery. I could ask anything! My prize would be knowledge! I never dreamed I’d already be swimming in it. As it was, I went to bed frightened. The minute Maria had fallen asleep I took on the attitude of a fortune-teller whose only crystal ball is the dazzling opal of her own brain. What would we talk about? What would she say? The subject of men, or women for that matter, the subject of other people, seemed inevitable and terrifying. As we scaled that small pyramid, the stone of Var would lead to the stone of Maria would lead to the stone of her lover if such a person existed, would lead to the stone of the father/ex etc. No matter where on the pyramid we began our ascent, no matter how slowly we climbed, we would never be far from its apex—her son—and that all-knowing eye, able to see into the squalor of my heart and condemn it. Contrary to what I’d thought at the start, I was in no hurry to reach it.

I was at a loss as to what to bring. (I had corked my urge to bring a bottle of wine—it was a morning encounter after all. Just a few Fridays ago it might have been champagne but now it was wine, a good strong red one.) There were no flowers in the garden; the blue hydrangeas had been the color of parchment for weeks, the unidentifiable late-blooming indigo blossoms had vanished. I resolved to retrieve my Japan box from the attic, which required me to gain entry to Var’s room. I didn’t bother to knock for I knew he wouldn’t hear me. I padded softly through in socks, averting my eyes at the sight of the carcasslike lump beneath his bedclothes.

In a hurry or not, it was always unwise to sift through my Japan box and that morning I was cutting it very fine. On any given day, I ran the risk of falling into the box, its foreign objects like so many pages of a book I never grew tired of reading. To guard against such perilous sentimentality, I repeated to myself:
Be quick about it, May, your friend Violet is waiting. Yes, be quick about it, May, your friend Violet is
… and so on. It’s a wonder the incantation did not paralyze me. Twice I sifted through the box, twice I decided against going. It was a mark of my loneliness that I allowed myself to proceed. For no matter how often I berated myself for my greed (
Why isn’t the son enough?! Why must you also have the mother?!
) there was something the mother possessed that her son couldn’t possibly offer me and that, I suppose, was adult friendship, something I scarcely knew I needed before Violet extended her invitation. I settled on a tea set that was painted a deep green with a white wave motif, and a gold canister of green tea. Somehow I knew they would please her.

While I was riding my bicycle, a peculiar Hatfieldian sensation came over me. I felt as though I were pedaling across campus on that blustery morning in the direction of another girl’s dormitory, the white gift box in my front basket a package of snacks we would soon devour together over schoolwork. What a gale fate was at my back! How sadistically it whipped at my face then sent me rolling in Violet’s direction! Perhaps I should have been filled with dread but when I caught sight of the shop’s handmade sign I stood up and began pedaling faster.

I leaned my bicycle against a wooden fence that looked as if it might soon topple over. In the absence of summer crowds, the shop looked smaller and in need of a good wash. Items in the yard—the rusty bicycles, the splintered Adirondacks, the antique cider press—that lent the shop a quaint, old-fashioned feel during the high season looked a bit like junk now.

I felt rather conspicuous standing in broad daylight during the off-season on property belonging to the mother of the teenager with whom I’d been having vigorous sex on Fridays. A stack of Scharffen Berger crates blocked the front steps to the shop, forcing me to scrabble onto the porch like a weasel. I’m certain my face wore the expression of a thief: greedy in the eyes and mouth, guilty. There was a brass padlock on the door, a page of dust upon the window. I knocked but received no answer. My watch, an expensive and reliable Omega given to me by my father, read 8:30. Perhaps I had dreamed everything prior to this moment. Perhaps I was dreaming now.

“I’m here,” a voice called.

I followed it to a double gate, one half of which stood open. Violet was standing in the garden pulling mud-stained gloves from her hands, wearing the brown cowl-neck sweater, her hair tied away from her face. She smiled as if she were having her picture taken against her will.

“You look terribly underdressed,” I said.

“No, I don’t get cold. You’re one to talk, your face is red as wine!”

I did feel on the verge of drunkenness. Fear, excitement, a bout of frantic winter cycling—red was entirely possible.

She led me into a room made of cloudy windows that was attached to the rear of the shop. The air was humid as a jungle and smelled miraculously of blossoms and fruit, at once slightly bitter and deliciously sweet.

“Oh Violet,” I breathed, embarrassed at having said her name aloud, ashamed of the strength of my own feelings. Everywhere I looked there were young orange and lemon trees heavy with fruit and camellia trees in full bloom. I inhaled deeply.

“What an Eden you’ve made!”

“It needs a lot of work. I keep meaning to wash the windows and sweep the floor.” She pressed her lips together and I began to think her closemouthed smile was designed to conceal the gap I had glimpsed in the basement.

We sat at a tiny wooden table whose legs looked like they had spent many years in the rain and sun, with muddy little animal claws for feet. The trees were all around us, the orange and yellow fruits, the red and pink blooms festive as lanterns, scented, near enough to touch. Violet had covered the table with a red cloth (which brought to my lascivious mind the bed-sheets of Rimbaud’s newlyweds, hung out for all the town to see) and upon that a jar of pale pink camellias. There was tea in mugs and a pale orange loaf that I imagined Violet had made from garden squash stored in a root cellar, a cloth-lined basket filled with cheddar cheese biscuits.

I handed her the white box and she shook her head vehemently. “You shouldn’t be giving me anything!” Like a woman hiding her handbag at a city café, she slipped it discreetly under the table.

“I feel as if I’m in another season, another world,
une autre vie
!” I exclaimed, delighted.

“
Oui
,” she said, nodding ever so slightly in her Aunt Tomokoian way, “
c’est ma vie.
”

We sat for a few minutes in the fragrant silence. If she was happy it was difficult to tell.

“Mayumi,” she began, “are you hiding something?” And when I didn’t answer at once (thinking, here is the moment, the moment has come) she amended, “or are you hiding
from
something?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Most people who come to this island are hiding on some level.” I must have had a pained look on my face for she added hurriedly, “I didn’t mean it as a criticism. I’m as guilty as the next.”

“Oh? What exactly do you mean?”

“If I’d been living a nice life on the mainland I wouldn’t have needed to come back.”

I was at once alarmed to imagine what her not so nice life might have been and relieved that we seemed not to be, as I had originally feared, in the realm of personal secrets, at least not those of an on-island nature. “I’m sorry,” she went on, “I didn’t mean to pry. I just wonder about washashores and why they come here.”

“You needn’t apologize. Our reasons were fairly mundane. My husband…” I trembled at my own mention of him, “inherited a patch of land and we thought it would be a better place to raise our child. And yourself?” We had arrived at the pyramid.

“Like I said, I didn’t have a nice life.”

“I see.” I braced myself for our ascent but she didn’t pose a single question pertaining to husband or child. Quite handily, she didn’t seem interested in the subject of other people unless they were characters in a book.

“I finished it,” she said.

“
Ethan Frome
?”

“Yes.” Personal secrets seemed to be a theme to which we would forever return.

“And would you still raise it in a toast to adventure?”

Violet blushed and thought. “I think so. Wouldn’t you?”

“No.” I helped myself to a biscuit. “Well, yes and no. I wouldn’t want to be any of those people but I would be lying if I said I’ve never been drunk on tragedy.” The biscuit was superb, my God, the woman could cook.

“I wouldn’t mind being Mattie.”

“You’ve got to be joking! Her life was such drudgery!”

“No! Housework is something we all have, it’s not that terrible. She’s so in love, maybe her love feels even better because of the drudgery. And she dies in bliss!”

“I’m a greedier person than you,” I said. “I don’t want love to end in a crash at the bottom of the hill. I want to sled on forever.”

“It’s not greedy to want that. It may be a lot of things but it’s not greedy.”

“What is it then?”

“Hope, naïveté, optimism, ambition? I don’t know. You tell me.”

Violet reached back and touched her bun in one swift librarian movement. How easily we might have changed places, she with a pencil through her loose knot, gossiping with patrons about Wharton characters; I bound in a canvas apron, cutting camellias from the greenhouse, zinnias from the garden, wrapping them in white paper for people to bring to dinner parties. The image of a boy playing in the garden cast an incestuous pall upon my vision.

Through a nearby glass door I saw into the shop and suppressed panic at the thought that he might be lurking within.

“Are you okay?”

“I thought I heard a rustling in the shop.”

“It’s probably just Fyodor.”

“Fyodor?” I saw a sallow bearded Russian, tormented, humane, her lover perhaps, solemnly repairing a shelf.

“Our Siamese. Don’t worry. There’s no one else here. We won’t have any workers until spring and my son’s at school.”

I smiled faintly at the thought of her son on the other side of the island, carrying books from class to class, sitting down to write sentences on lined paper, running through crowded halls to catch up with friends. Being with his mother made him more real to me. It was difficult to distinguish between the happiness of this discovery and the happiness of being in her company.

We chatted the hour away easily, though I dare say I did more of the chatting. Like Aunt Tomoko, Violet was prone to asking long questions and giving short answers (except when it came to literary discussions, during which she rather unleashed) and I was determined to find out all that we had in common aside from the obvious. I began by expressing every thought that was on my mind except for the crime that was at the front of it. But it wasn’t long before the crime drifted like a sail out of sight and if I felt a periodic twinge of discomfort at keeping my secret from her, it was fleeting. I soon forgot whose mother she was.

* * *

Alone with my secret, I indicted and rehabilitated, analyzed and haggled. I accused myself of rape, molestation, and willful negligence. Alternately, I defended my right to feel pleasure and love, my right to refuse loneliness. The accusing self and the accused self, though not identical, were like two images seen through binoculars. My vision was double. As I strained to make sense of the world I saw, to make sense of my own vision, the two selves moved closer to one another. They touched hands, their hips overlapped, their hearts lay astride one another like the folded wings of a red butterfly until at last the two merged into a single image, the single self that became the self I saw myself as.

In the end, I didn’t mind being a rapist so much as I expected. Transgression is less of an affront when it is draped in love and beauty. I had always felt an abstract sympathy for those whose lives had amounted to little more than a series of transgressions, those who had committed acts viewed by most as unacceptable. I did not begrudge Emma Bovary her childish fantasies and fruitless interludes. If I could have, I would have saved Anna Karenina from the wheels of the train. I had always reserved for others some measure of moral leeway but I had never myself been stripped of any honor. Now my own virtue was in tatters and I found it weirdly fascinating. It was not entirely clear how much sympathy one ought to extend to oneself.