Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (2 page)

One by one, the shops and restaurants close down. Gardens are put to sleep. A portion of the population flies south. There is virtually nowhere to go (unless you count the woods, within the woods the possibilities are endless). If you don’t mind being preached to, there’s the corner church on Sundays. If you don’t mind sitting out in the gloom, there’s the general store where people go to mail letters, buy coffee and food. On the porch they read papers, watch passersby and the street, sometimes a tractor or a bicycle, a gang of motorcycles, a presidential motorcade. The store opens at 7:00 and shuts at 6:00
.
The porch is lit all night. The town restaurant is open on weekends and will soon shut completely. It is a dry town. The closest thing to a public house is the library, which is open seven days a week and till 9:00 on Mondays. Our “winter hours” begin in the fall. Like the Mishima novel about a boy who spies on his mother’s lovemaking, the island has two seasons. Summer swallows spring and winter obliterates fall.

For the first time in months the library is quiet.
It’s so quiet
, people say. Some wrap their coats about themselves more tightly and are frightened by the sudden emptiness, while others smile Mona Lisa smiles, exuding happiness and secret knowledge. In the great absence of all the departed visitors, we become acutely aware of one another. When I say
we
I’m referring to strangers. The reverse is true of familiars. At least it was for us. As the island grew quiet, so did the shack. On Fridays when Maria was away and we were alone, Var and I retreated more deeply into our own thoughts. In the silence we forgot one another more completely. But strangers and acquaintances—librarians and borrowers, shoppers and clerks, those milling about town or sitting in cafés—sense one another for the first time.

I was no exception. I was as common as the weather, as was he, as were we. Show me a middle-aged woman who lacks desire and I will show you a liar. Show me an unusual young man and I will strip him down to commonness. I have no intention of making public excuses. I do find myself looking within for reasons I might give, if only to myself, for my own behavior. I obsessively recount the past in search of my missteps. At the outset I was able to tolerate his proximity with relative ease.

I insist I would have proceeded along my ethically-sound trajectory had it not been for two things. You may say it is arbitrary to reduce it to two. That there were a slew of factors—my temperament (sensual but prone to fits of sadness), my history (born and raised in England of a Midlands housekeeper and a Japanese expatriate economist, an immigrant at eighteen, an orphan at twenty), my circumstances, (deep isolation, an inactive marriage)—goes without saying. When I say two things I mean two thorns that, when I least expected it, pierced me.

* * *

The next time he seemed to be in a hurry, which irritated me slightly. There are times when I resent being drawn into the vortex of a stranger’s stressful day, I resent being an ameliorative figure with whose efficient help another item on her to-do list might be triumphantly crossed out. His manner, newly brisk, had lost its former softness. He spoke in a rush. These were, I learned later, symptoms of his nervousness, but at the time I read them as signs of someone making demands. He had the look of one who has been protected from manual labor. His black hooded sweatshirt with its white soccer emblem, his black jeans as crisp and clean as my father’s gray suits.

Pressing too far forward against the counter, with a note of insistence in his voice he said, “I was told if there’s a movie I want you could get it for me in a week.” I felt a flare of irritation. It surprised me, my capacity to feel such annoyance with someone I knew so little and had up to then only admired. All at once, as if the lenses in my glasses had changed, I saw him as a teenager. I saw the protruding lump of skin that held his chewing tobacco and gave him the look of someone suffering from a sublabial tumor.

“That depends,” I said curtly, “on whether we have it in our collection or will have to borrow it from another library.” I felt supremely detached from that distorted face of self-seeking youth. It was a moment I would often revisit, a moment whose power I would try and fail to retrieve, the moment I saw him as simply another patron to attend to.

As the moments passed and he became less nervous, his soft manner returned. He said the title of the film, one I recognized (with a maternal spurt of pride in his youthful refinement) as being a classic, the actors of which preceded even my generation, and in the same instant I realized the young man’s voice was utterly familiar to me but I couldn’t place it. The smell of his tobacco, which to my mind tasted faintly of toffee, suddenly reached me. I had handed him a request card to fill out and he was already handing it back to me. I was conscious of how little time was left for him to speak before our transaction would end, but he must have managed to say a few more words and I to hear them for I heard the voice again and this time identical to the gravelly, rough-throated voice of my favorite film star. At the sound, my lenses changed again; I could no longer see him as ordinary. Like a thorn in a fairy tale that bewitches the one who is pricked, his voice pierced me.

The second thorn was more difficult to isolate. Perhaps it was his dark eye darting up to meet mine or its swift flight down to the card; perhaps I had taken subconscious note of his anxiety or had harbored the recognition all along. Regardless, what pierced me was knowledge: I had gained his attention. His hand trembled slightly as he held it out to take the new card. With that, I went flying off track like a boy’s slot car, only to find myself being lifted up and placed onto another track. Though I could sense the dangerous curves and revolutions looming ahead, I drove on, cleaving like a magnet to the new track, powered by a hidden electricity that I can only describe in retrospect as joy.

As soon as the door shut behind him, shamelessly, in a fever, I related the incident to my co-worker Nella, whose untidy desk was nearby. She had been the only other librarian to see him. I appealed to her in much the same way that a mourner, once her loved one has departed, appeals to the living for anecdotal information, anything that might keep the memory of her loved one alive. Though unlike such mourners I was ecstatic. For my beloved—far from being dead—had just been born. When at first I asked Nella for her opinion of him she yielded nothing. It was only when I pressed her further that she finally surrendered in a disinterested voice that he reminded her of Var—a disappointing remark that was of no use to me.

While Nella was on break, I accosted my supervisor Siobhan (the quiet, sardonic head of circulation with whom I was quite close) and described, in painfully hushed tones, the scene afresh for her. I pulled the young man’s record up so that she might see his lovely, hyphenated name in full and so that I might receive the thrill of seeing his name being seen by another. Such were my dessert-like pleasures in the beginning.

Siobhan’s first reaction to my news that I had developed a “patron crush” was a dubious question: “Is that legal?,” her face flushed a little by the possibility. I answered promptly in the affirmative and carefully framed my narrative so as to underscore its element of pure fantasy. Mine was a fantasy I wouldn’t dare pursue and what I told then was the truth.

Here I must add that Siobhan had always been a moral compass on the staff. Though far from hindering me, this fact somehow heightened my sense of excitement in telling her. Virtuous as she was, Siobhan was no miser with affection; there was in that upright heart of hers a tendency toward openness, her heart so dense with compassion that I nicknamed her Pema. (She later retaliated by calling me The Lowly Lady Nabokov, never guessing how very lowly I had become.) When I came to the bit about the young man’s voice, she let out a little gasp. We shared an appreciation of the same film star! Her open heart opened further still.

The procuring of a sympathetic audience was perhaps my first misstep. Though at the time my logic ran counter to that: Wouldn’t I, by revealing myself to others, be ensuring my own accountability? Surely I wouldn’t dare approach a young man in broad daylight under my co-workers’ knowing, watchful eyes! Such logic dictated the more co-workers I told, the better. There were only three out of eight librarians to whom I failed to confess. One was a man whose sad eyes, in the presence of children, shone with a pedophilic twinkle and who wore, but did not activate, a hearing aid that resembled a doll’s liver; he was a man who might have understood all too well my predicament but with whom it was difficult if not impossible to discreetly share secrets. Another librarian had a schedule whose shifts rarely overlapped with mine, though if our shifts had coincided I might still never have confessed, for my feelings towards her were cool and it was always with heat and affection that I spoke of the young man. The last was someone I was quite fond of, someone to whom I often considered confessing but whose sense of propriety won out in the end. She became, for me, an emblem of Reality (Moral Implications, Possible Jail Time etc.) incompatible with my Fantasy, whether lived out or not. All the rest knew and I rather think they enjoyed themselves as I brought them along for a ride on my shiny black track.

A week passed. Every morning I left the apartment at 9:00 under the pretense that my shift began at 9:15 when in fact it began at 10:00. The senior librarians prepared the library for the public and I was merely expected to arrive before the doors opened. During Maria’s infancy this omission had seemed the easiest way to procure time for myself and once I had built the time in, it was difficult to give up. Not once did Var question me about it. (What a pleasant change it was from our usual battles over time! What freedom my small deception afforded me!)

I walked in my cross-trainers down the state road. (I had become the kind of woman who walks to work in hideous yet comfortable shoes and changes into another slightly less hideous, considerably less comfortable pair when she arrives, the kind of woman who ensures that she has something, however trifling—a stroll in comfortable shoes while reading a novel by twilight—to look forward to at the end of every day.) Most mornings, instead of going to the library, I turned left on Music Street then left again on a small dirt road that led to the woods.

The trail in was tunnellike; the trees on either side arched to meet one another. It was a private trail leading to private land. As soon as I set my foot upon it two large dogs barked distantly yet viciously in response, giving the torpid ox of my pulse its daily whipping. The NO TRESPASSING sign nailed to one of the trees gave me a start as well, though I had once been warmly invited by the owner to walk there for the purpose of showing Maria the “magical fairyland.” Still, I felt I was violating an unspoken agreement. The owner had never said outright that I could visit it alone. I speculated hopefully that if the woman had a sliver of a heart (surely people who used the phrase “magical fairyland” were endowed with at least that), if she had known the extent to which her forbidden preserve daily drew the iron weight of my body out of bed like a restorative magnet, she would have forgiven my trespasses.

The last bit of tunnel was downhill and at the bottom the trees gave way to a large rushy pond upon whose surface there was often, gliding serenely, a glossy profusion of ducks that then fled in a frantic green and black flapping. A wooden bridge carried one over the pond’s edge, over the top of a waterfall. One could follow the trail down to a stone bench at the base of the falls or follow it deeper into the forest and cross over a series of modest bridges—most of them single planks of wood or flat stones, all of which crossed the small river that traversed, like a black artery, the body of the forest, bringing fresh blood to some remote, unseen heart.

The owner had set out candles and wind chimes along the way, presumably for the enjoyment of children and/or romantics. The long series of bridges ended with one very long plank that led to a wooden deck complete with wooden bench, large candle, and stone statue of the Buddha, a place where such visitors could give thanks for their good fortune.

When I visited the fairyland alone, I rarely got as far as the Buddha or even the planks and the stones. I walked from the top of the waterfall down to the stone bench where I sat, (suddenly Buddha-like myself), and watched the water flow. What bliss! What
aananda
! I could have stared at the waterfall for hours though I typically had seven minutes before it was time for me to report to the library, my fear always that, while I sat bathing in oblivion, my watch would stop and I would unwittingly be late.

* * *

By the time the young man came in again he had incurred fines totaling $12.00. I had the sorry job of informing him that he had exceeded the $10.00 limit and would not be permitted to check out materials until he paid. He was attempting to check out
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
, which struck me simultaneously as trash and (for a boy his age) a cult classic. (Queer how trash that endures comes to be regarded as classic.)

As gently as I could I said, “The limit on fines is $10.00. You could pay $2.00 and bring food in for the food pantry for the rest next time.” Eager to give him a way out, I realized too late I had offended him.

“I have money,” he announced and quickly withdrew from his pant pocket a black leather billfold, the sort that fathers carry. His nail-bitten fingers shook as he slid the crisp ten and two ones from the wallet and handed them to me. The bills looked as if they’d earlier been removed from the inside of a child’s birthday card.

“Thank you,” I said, feeling already a pang of guilt. “You know we don’t charge fines for books,” I teased. “So if you ever check out a book, you won’t need to worry about fines.”

He half smiled and said slowly—he almost always spoke slowly—in a voice that brought to mind a chain being dragged through a gravel pit on a dark night, “We have so many books in our house, I can’t imagine ever needing to borrow one from a library.” He looked down at the green book request cards and a wave of hair fell like a small curtain over his eyes.