Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (15 page)

My transgression revealed to me a few surprising facts of which I had previously been ignorant. One must sometimes commit an act against one’s own goodness in order to see clearly its existence though by then it is a tarnished vision. That is, I had never known how very good I was until I became very bad. When one transgresses one does not so much inhabit a different body as wear a different coat. One remains oneself for the duration—the conscientious, law-abiding librarian slips into the criminal’s leather coat and the two magically coexist. And yet one cannot remove the coat without implications. It is no ordinary coat. One is changed by wearing it, even if, in the end, one takes it off.

Transgression has a scent. One wears it like a perfume and there are those who smell it immediately. During the course of my affair with the young man, countless patrons confessed to me their crimes. Thierry Lambert’s wife was the nanny for whom he had left his first wife, Joe Fischer had been banished from the priesthood for his love affair with an altar boy, and Linda Cardo continued to meet with her childhood sweetheart in an off-island hotel where they drank Chianti and floated in the indoor pool. Why tell me? Why not any of the other librarians? I’m convinced I wore the perfume of transgression and that transgressors were drawn to it, perhaps even comforted by it. I was their kind.

I kept my secret well; there was no one but Maria to notice my change of mood, no one to question me but Violet and she had thus far remained silent on the subject. I exerted an inordinate amount of effort to conceal from every person I encountered the reason for my joy. Perhaps if someone had asked me, my cork would have flown skyward and I would have bubbled over in a celebratory confession, but no one did.

There were days when I could not stand having nothing to show for our efforts. A secret has the power to nullify its own reality. But the opposite is true as well. A secret reality can override all other realities; indeed there were days when secrecy was its own reward, days it became its own vital organ of pleasure.

As for the one person with whom I could have spoken freely—the young man—I imagine his experience of secrecy was quite different from mine, that the stifling of his joy—if in fact he too felt joy—came naturally and caused in him no inner conflict. I rather think he enjoyed harboring our erotic secret, not only because he was taciturn by nature but because the presence of regular and abundant sex with a stranger means something quite different for a seventeen-year-old boy than for a forty-one-year-old married librarian. Then too, secrecy breeds secrecy. That we shared a secret perhaps inspired us to keep other secrets from one another. Had he told his friends indiscriminately about us, I don’t think I could have borne knowing and perhaps he would not have been able to bear the fact that I told no one. He might have mistook my secrecy for a lack of passion or commitment and I his lack of secrecy for the very same.

My silence on the subject of the young man was a nunlike feat of discipline which may seem to run counter to my otherwise undisciplined choice to love him; it is true that every coin has two sides. Before her housekeeping days, my mother was of the Cistercian order, but once released she spoke effusively as a priest in a pulpit to absolutely anyone who came her way: bus drivers, petrol station attendants, people in waiting rooms or on tube platforms, whether they listened or not did not seem to concern her. In its ceaselessness, her chatter was a kind of silence, just as my secret turned inward was an expression of information—utterances; his voice, continuous, tympanic; his face at certain moments; his dark eyes biding their time; his soft mouth crushing itself against mine—that never ceased within me. My silence became one with my ability to remember; each one made the other possible.

* * *

It was the young man who began our tradition of bringing books to the gray house. One Friday he asked, “What did you used to do on your day off?” It touched me that he should have the slightest concept of my Fridays having been different before, the notion that there was perhaps something I had given up in order to see him. A man twice his age might not have grasped this and if he had, he might not have cared.

“Read,” I answered. And the following Friday he brought with him two book lights and two books, a cloth edition of
Moby-Dick
for himself (show-off!), and a British paperback edition of
For Esmé––With Love and Squalor and Other Stories
for me, which, despite my years of library experience and my British roots, I did not know was the title in most countries of J.D. Salinger’s
Nine Stories.
Oh, my pubescent professor, my juvenile reader, my paternal, patronal joy!

“I thought you might like the title story,” he said, easy as you please. Indeed! Was I Esmé or the soldier and who was he? I could have asked, but I only placed the foreign copy on the mattress and began to read. He lay on his back next to me and followed suit, holding
Moby-Dick
directly above his face like a hand mirror.

I read
For Esmé
as if it were the young man’s own collection of nine significant dreams he had recorded and then entrusted to me for a few hours. I, with my thirsty cup, began with the first story and drank deeply of the details. An amateur Jungian, I inserted him in the place of each character and then analyzed the implications. When I had exhausted these possibilities I did the same for myself and for the two of us together.

What if, contrary to all appearances, the young man was Seymour and I was the girl in the water? What if he was the jaded self-hater and I was innocence personified? Or was I Seymour and he, Muriel? Did he too spend hours chatting with his mother about my shortcomings? Or was he the voice on the phone outside the story, listening in, while I was naked in the hole and trapped there? Was he the mother and I the bananafish, etc.? I read entirely too much into everything and wondered obsessively about the rest.

Did he love the double meaning of “see more glass” or had he found it too heavy-handed? Had he noticed? If he were to invent a creature that summed up his condition, what would it be? Did he love the sea? (I could not help thinking also of the story that was being held in the air next to me.) Did he love fish and whales? Did he, as Maria did, as most children do, love animals?

Midway through “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” my frenzy of Jungian suppositions abated and I became keenly aware of my reading companion. Distracted, I switched off my book light. I turned onto my side and observed him under his tiny spray of light. His eyebrows touched as he frowned. The intensity with which he read was one of his most adult qualities. When I thought, with trepidation, of our respective ages, I would remember this and feel reassured. He appeared to be nearly three-quarters of the way through his thick book, a heavyweight next to my feather. Surely his arms were getting tired of holding it up. Then again, he was an athlete and very young; what little I knew of exertion I had learned from him.

“Where are you?” I asked. My question reverberated out of context in the dim loft. He understood it.

In that slow and jagged voice that both aroused and terrified me, he read, “But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent, and as human infants will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence; —even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were a bit of Gulfweed in their newborn sight.”

We were quiet. One could feel the enormous mammalian presence of the whales and their young in the loft with us, the knotty, coarse-grained rafters, now ship-like.

“Do you remember nursing?” I asked, not intending to insinuate his relative proximity to infancy but doing so nonetheless.

He confessed with a scarlet, Hawthornian face, “No. Mom only nursed me for three months. Her friend Chuck read somewhere that nursing makes kids stupid so…”

“He was concerned about your intelligence?”

“Yeah,” he said. “How long did you nurse Maria?”

“She’s four.”

He paused thoughtfully for a few moments, he waited politely for me to finish, and when I said nothing more he started. “You still nurse her?!” He turned to face me, his eyes incredulous, innocent, a little thirsty perhaps.

“I thought you knew.”

“How would I know? I’ve never even met her!”

“Well,” I said gesturing. “Did you think all breasts looked and felt like this?!” I laughed, a bit incredulous myself now. Certainly mine had never been this large, their nipples never so dark and obvious.

“That’s not funny,” he said. I was quick to repair the damage.

“Darling, did you know you’re perfect? Honestly. All this time I’ve felt self-conscious about them and now I can feel at ease.”

He got up and sat astride me. I thought perhaps all this talk of swollen breasts had aroused him, but he only bent forward and laid his cheek on my chest the way Maria did when she had finished drinking.
I can hear your heart
, she would say.
I used to live there
. My heart a familiar bell whose sound she had heard on her small island across the sea of me. Though the young man felt heavy, I lay still, sipping in air when I could, allowing him to crush me, letting him listen to the bell of my heart as it rang out.

* * *

Despite (or perhaps because of) feeling burdened by my knowledge of Violet, I would have happily pretended to be his mother if he had made such a desire known to me. As it was, we were not the kind of lovers who indulged in such games. He was not plagued by the unrequited longing for the mother so common in such game players though he liked to play father on occasion. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say he liked to play mother—for he knew very little firsthand about what fathers did, having been raised by his mother alone. He would not have wanted me to count Chuck (Was he still in the picture? Violet had never mentioned him) as a father, calling Charles as he did by that name for a low cut of meat. He would pack a lunch for us and arrange it on the floor atop a red and white cloth he had no doubt taken from Violet’s linen closet (which I imagined was full of Florentine napkins, imported tablecloths, thick bath towels, and rose-print sheets), the phrase “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” at once lovely and sinister, never far from my mind.

After we had eaten he would put everything away and sweep the floor with a broom that looked as if it had, years ago, been made by hand of sorghum, and which gave him the look of an early American settler, the sort one sees in library books—white blouse, shaggy brown hair, gentle yet adventurous eyes, never any acne.

Through another’s eyes, his gestures might have looked like those of a child caring for his mother. I admit there were times when I felt I was the arbitrary recipient of a deep, untrammeled affection the expression of which his mother’s temperament perhaps wouldn’t allow. And I confess his brown leather belt with its steel buckle and tooth bore an erotic resemblance to my father’s. In its plain functionality and potential for violence, it was a father’s belt, and the sight of him removing it aroused me. I often thought that if we’d been granted more time, we might have veered into that forbidden territory, a father younger than oneself perhaps easy and thrilling to submit to. But we were remarkably naturalistic in our dealings with one another for our actual roles provided more than enough excitement without any need for us to pretend. Had we both been seventeen or both forty-one we might have played at other roles. As it was we were busy enough being ourselves. We were like foreigners in Japan so consumed by learning Japanese, there was, for us, no possibility of learning other languages.

I can tell you very little about what was happening on the mainland that winter, much less in the world at large. News came to me via the insular British expatriates patron network that a red neon sign had been installed in Number 10 Downing Street by some artist or other (a middle-aged woman no less) that glowed:
More Passion.
There was a miraculous, island-wide proliferation of red bumper stickers that bore the message:
The Real Revolution Will Be Love
. Kay Ryan won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; it was the year of the woman who loves whom she pleases. A new translation of
Doctor Zhivago
—one of my father’s favorites—was released and read avidly by the public, further evidence that love transcended generation. Finally, there was a flurry of then newly popular, still mind-boggling oxymoronic “raw food cookbooks” which I read as an indicator that people had little time to spare for activities as unnecessary as the cooking of food, so occupied were they by endeavors such as the making of love. I, for one, had lost almost all patience with cooking (It was so time-consuming! How had I ever found a way?), though I suspect the young man had never cooked more.

Every Friday we were ravenous and it was he who tended to our appetites. Sometimes he brought cold chicken legs (cut from a chicken he had slaughtered and plucked himself before roasting it in butter and herbs) or one-half of a chocolate root beer bundt cake he had baked using skills likely taught to him by his talented mother or by a teacher at school, always a cake that was better than anything I had ever baked and I was not a shabby baker. It was the young man who taught me about the affectionate relationship between root beer and chocolate as well as the power of root beer to help rise a cake. Though I could follow a recipe precisely without difficulty, I knew little about food pairings, especially sweet ones, and less still about fizzy water and chemistry. Mostly he brought soups, which, after sweet things, were his specialty; sometimes one-half of a spinach quiche, sometimes a small chicken pot pie or a round of bread accompanied by a wedge of pale cheese or a jar of pickles. Once he brought a tall green thermos full of pork ramen made from scratch, and I laughed and then cried as I gulped it down. It had been one of the many dishes my mother had learned to cook for my father and the taste of it—both the savory flavor of the broth and the familiar feel of the curly noodles on my tongue—sent me floating back to that first island.