Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (16 page)

From the same worn blue backpack that held his homework and schoolbooks, he brought out his weekly offerings. There were tins full of the English nutritive biscuits I had eaten as a child, solemn letters engraved on their smooth faces like epigraphs that said nothing of consequence, and paper-wrapped cookies with crushed almonds for hearts, the blue floral cursive printed in Italian, the familiar letters strung together in a foreign way, so that eating them in his presence I felt at once a sweet sense of at-homeness that I rarely felt anywhere and the delicious terror of inhabiting a country without knowing its food or its language, daily confronted with delicacies I did not understand.

There were bars of German chocolate that must have cost as much as tickets to the cinema, their outer wrappers painted with delicate landscapes of places I had never been, their inner gold foil concealing dark twin bars lying side by side within. He was like a traveler bringing me souvenirs in that backpack of his, hoping with a taste of sugar or salt to transport me to a world he had known, even if he too had known it only secondhand. I could not help but feel Violet’s presence when he made his offerings. She had almost certainly purchased the items and with other purposes in mind. I felt some measure of guilt for inadvertently depleting her inventory and at the same time I felt happy to be cared for, not only by him but also in some unintentional, meandering way by her.

During these afternoon teas—with my impassive, ticking wristwatch as our constant companion—we talked about nearly everything, but never about the fact that I had made a vow to love someone else, and never about the future. I told him odd bits about my housekeeper mother and my economist father—her funny habit of sleeping with a pillow over her face, his tendency to treat every surface as if it were a mahogany podium before which he had been invited to stand and deliver an important lecture. I explained my love of the British Library in winter, in particular its collection of illuminated manuscripts, my longstanding affection for the cherry blossom’s many developmental phases.

He brought an MP3 player and two sets of headphones (including the alarmingly plush black leather set from his early days at the library) and we listened to his favorite songs. He confessed that he dreaded sleep, that when he lay next to me with his eyes closed he was not sleeping but composing music. For him, the words
nightmare
and
dream
were interchangeable. Once, after I’d described a dream of mine to him, he said:
I like the place of your dreams. I think I could live there.
 

He told me his mother had studied English literature for a year at Oxford, that she had left university to study cheese making in France and had shortly after bought land in South America. She had given birth to him at home; there was a small orchard of Liberty apples beside the two-hundred-year-old house that contained the enormous library that she had inherited from her father who had inherited it from his. The young man bore a whale-tooth-shaped appendix scar eerily identical to my father’s. His mother had taught him to swim in a pond called Ice House whose waters were not always as cold as its name. During the high season he worked for her at P.I.P. (both his nickname for the shop and the name of his favorite literary character).
I have a good Mom,
he said.
Not everyone has that.

During the off-season he earned money babysitting a neighbor’s child. He dreamed of traveling to California, Antigua, the Riviera, places that were seaside and warm. He had left the island only twice, once to visit relatives in upstate New York and once to attend a Celtics game in Boston. He listened religiously to reggae on Sundays. He was learning to play the guitar, a fact that had the rare effect of bridging momentarily our difference in age. (As a teenager, I had known boys who had done the very same!) All of this was news to me, every bit of it breaking. The more he reported, the more I wanted to know.

Despite the fact that we never ventured beyond the gray house, his kindness was everywhere evident. I could see it in his eyes and mouth when he spoke of others, in the way he bit his nails when I spoke of anything even mildly difficult. Though I had never seen him bend down to hand money to a beggar or carry an elderly woman’s bags or guide a blind man to safety, I was convinced such acts would be second nature to him. There were times when, in my conviction, I wished I could protect him from the future, from the wider world whose endless suffering would one day assault him. He was unusually attuned to the suffering of others, so much so that I could not help but wonder if his interest in me had been driven by pity, by some pathological impulse to repair suffering and fulfill needs. My needs after all were fairly plain and when my needs were fulfilled I ceased to suffer. Perhaps he sensed the simplicity of my case, how easy I would be to accomplish.

Not far beneath the grassy slope of his gentle, well-mannered exterior lived a well of pure rage. Its origins were unknown to me; whether they were present in him at birth or had found and surrounded him as he grew, a gang of external forces that wouldn’t relent, I didn’t know. Had he been older, I might have been frightened by it. As it was, I felt only compassion and, at times, a twinkle of amusement. I liked his rage, it excited me. It lived in his eyes, and helped equalize us. His humor was very tied up with it. Like his eyes, his rage was cutting and dark. I would not have wanted to be on the wrong side of it. I pitied the poor person who was, if there was such a person. Likely he was his own primary target. He was not a malicious person but I’m convinced that someone, at least one, had wronged him and that he expected to be wronged again at any moment. I had never known anyone more defensive than myself so I had a special sympathy for him. His bitterness was like black tea. It didn’t deter me. On the contrary I wanted to pour into it heaps of milk and sugar and then drink.

Our confessions, our picnics, everything took place in the loft. It was a place of suspension and yet time always intervened. Time resided in the silver face of my Omega which was the size and color of ten pence and which I set under my half of the pillow while we made love. I muffled time’s voice with linen, I gagged it with down, I hushed time with the plush black hairs on my head, the weight of my encyclopedic brain, until the sunlight snowing upon the floorboards downstairs told me that it was time to let the ticking be heard and the numbered face seen. But before then, while we loved, I rid myself of all thoughts of it. For what could I possibly gain by remembering the face on which the future was so clearly drawn, the voice whose insistent sameness was both eternal and forever threatening to cease? I wanted only to remember the face of the young man and glimpse for a moment the double reflection of my own panting visage in the dark inlets of his eyes.

The loft was a place of surrender, abandonment. The only struggle there was moral. We laid our bodies down the way some lay down arms or ideas. In the physical act our only struggle was the struggle to repeat. The slats of the inverted triangle were ingeniously designed to allow a small amount of light to enter without allowing our eyes to see out. We were blind to the woods, blinder still to the world outside them. Our nearest audible neighbor was a male cardinal whose bright red body we glimpsed outside now and then, a fist of fire burning in the air as we came and went. I loved to see him alight, apple-like, on a tree that was covered in snow. He was like us: his heartbeat swift, his visits fleeting, his face flushed and festive in the cold. Although there were human indicators (car motors, the smell of wood smoke, the blast of a shotgun, the buzz of a chainsaw, the faint and solemn dong of the distant town clock) not once from our suspended isle did we hear the sound of another human voice.

By midwinter we had begun fearlessly lighting the wood-stove downstairs. The young man arrived early to chop wood and I, upon arriving, immediately set about building the fire. As a child he had played alone in the orchard next to his house and the woods, in which he had spent countless solitary hours, were home to him. Any labor that brought him outside he seemed to view as a respite from confinement, a chance to commune with beauty, and so he was perfectly content to chop the firewood though it was physically demanding.

I, with my kindling and moxie, was somewhere between a Wampanoag sending celebratory smoke signals to an uncomprehending world and the kind of small-time criminal who neglects to wear gloves when opening a safe. But in truth I thought none of this until much later. I confess that the obvious fact of stoves leading to chimneys that transport and then expel smoke visible to the human eye virtually escaped me. Gone was Miss Marple checking for footprints in the snow, gone the discreet librarian who lived in fear of being found out.

Here were ill-sorted lovers for whom time was a sensitive matter and for whom pleasure had become an urgent priority. Here was an adventuresome boy who would soon finish high school and a celibate mother who had marked five years of estrangement from the same lacquered, moustachioed man. We, who had once been so tentative when expressing our desires, so shy about nudity, so willing to suffer for the sake of discretion, now refused the physical discomfort that had thus far been a hallmark of our lovemaking. We surrendered to warmth, to comfort, to imagination, to the satisfaction of building our own fire in our own stove in our own home. By which I mean we began to pretend that the house and everything in it belonged to us.

We took possession of the house gradually; we began by adding our own small objects to it. The young man brought a blue ceramic bird whose back was a receptacle and he set it like a family heirloom on the windowsill next to the table downstairs. I brought a secondhand, leaf green tablecloth, cross-stitched with pink and red roses, trimmed with white lace, and smoothed it over the table. He set an orange and white canister of amaretti upon the tablecloth. I filled it with Flower’s Kiss candy. For our slim pillow, I sewed a case out of the gray linen that I had bought in Japan and had been saving for more than a decade for a “special occasion.” He laid down a flax-colored flannel sheet that I covered with a white down comforter.

Every Friday, toward 2:00, by some feat of intuition or fear, I would feel compelled to unmuffle the watch, as if it would otherwise suffocate. Then the ticking would become audible again, like a bomb recently discovered, and I would strap it to myself once more and prepare to meet the world without him. Though in truth, the unwanted face of the watch became an emblem of him that accompanied me, so that even in my most morbid states—thinking of death, thinking of separation—he was part of the fabric of this thinking and so thinking such thoughts was a strange pleasure. I was, as it were, duly wrapped in them as I walked the snowy streets of the town.

* * *

Meanwhile (even now I despise the notion of a
meanwhile
in the context of the young man; it is with a sadness that I compel myself to utter it), in the actual apartment whose walls were uninsulated and many of whose windows were cracked and let winter air in even when we closed them, Maria and I bundled ourselves in freshly laundered quilts (painstakingly made and relinquished only in death by my mother) and watched Charlie Chaplin films while Var kept himself in his room. He sat whittling away before his desk of apple crates, the portable heater hissing just centimeters away so that I could not relax and watch a film without at least once imagining his entire menagerie, along with the desk, going up in flames, bringing an end to us all.

Maria and I could not agree on a favorite so we alternated between her favorite,
The Kid
and my favorite,
City Lights
. When it came to
The Kid
, we both identified with Chaplin, the lone person who comes upon a baby and feels obligated to care for it, the any person who quite absurdly falls into parenthood. When it came to
City Lights
, our identifications diverged. She wanted to be the blind flower seller and I could not help but be the tramp who woos her without being seen; I use her blindness to my advantage for I fear that if she were to see me she could never love me as I really am.

In my relationship with the young man, he too was the flower seller and I, again, was the tramp. His blindness was youth and I feared that when the day came that he was no longer young, he would see me as I really was and turn away. Like the flower seller he wouldn’t recognize me at first, like the flower seller he would be kind. But he would see me as through a plate glass window from inside a heated, well-lit shop that looked out onto a cold, gloomy street where I would be lumbering along on my way to the bus stop, a book in translation in my gloved, arthritic hand.

Then again, I too was blind. He could have been a murderer and I might not have seen. He could have easily pulled the wool over my eyes if he’d wished. These fears coursed through me as I held Maria and laughed at the films. We laughed together as I thought of him. It was as close as I came to confiding in someone, as close as I came to sharing with another my fear of and love for the young man.

We made popcorn and hot chocolate, gingerbread and oatcakes, all the quickest and most satisfying things. Thursday evenings, I reserved a small portion of whatever we had made and discreetly tucked it into my cloth bag while Maria was brushing her teeth, though my baked goods were never as good as his. Our oven was unreliable and I was less patient. These were my excuses in any case. Perhaps he had simply surpassed me. I sometimes felt I had another child hidden away to whom I brought food in secret. Other times the young man was more akin to the child who lives in the closet so that the town can have its happiness. Our happiness—mine, Maria’s, and even Var’s—now depended on him.

It was his love that allowed me to tolerate living in the apartment and my contentment with him that prevented me from leaving. There was, in that wintry apartment, a deadlock between us, one it seemed only I could break, for Var was not the sort to break things. I was the sort who did though I tired of it, I was tired of being the one taking an axe to the frozen sea of our love. The axe was heavy and the sea endless. I was tired and sometimes, I confess, I wanted him to suffer. I didn’t care if I did too. I turned my back on our frozen sea and let it grow colder still.