Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (4 page)

Everything was different in real time. I had finally settled on a question, one I hoped would extract the maximum amount of meaning while necessitating a minimum amount of effort on his part:
Would you rather be: a) a filmmaker, b) a film critic, or c) a film star?
With the utterance of a single letter I stood to learn something essential about his self-concept and his conception of the world, not to mention something about the nature of his relationship to film. (I had become convinced that he was no ordinary viewer of films but watched films with purpose, with a certain destiny in mind. That is, I fancied him a filmmaker. Not one who currently makes films but one who will grow up to do so. Part of the appeal of youth is its immense sense of possibility.)

My theory was corroborated when, during his next visit, he borrowed neither a film nor a book but
The Odyssey
and
Crime and Punishment
on CD. As I watched him set the plastic cases sheepishly (as if I would be judging his selection) on the counter, my sincere and totalizing surprise erased any memory I had of my well-rehearsed question.

Unable to stop myself from smiling, I picked up
Crime and Punishment
. “What brought this on?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said, smiling in return his mother’s pained and pretty smile. “That one’s for Mom.” His omission of “my” preceding the word “Mom” tugged at my wildly beating heart. It seemed to me people who omitted possessive pronouns were capable of great intimacies, those that defied context and transcended possession. I opened the
Odyssey
case and scanned the barcode. He nodded slightly toward it and as he did so that small curtain of hair fell before his eyes again as if to indicate that any impending disclosures would be accompanied in equal parts by concealment. “Have you seen the movie
O Brother, Where Art Thou
?”

“I have,” I said, racking my brain to remember the plot. “A long time ago. I saw it when it first came out,” I added, wanting to sound like part of his circle, someone who would see the film immediately upon its release, instead sounding the bell of alarm that I was going to movie theaters before he could read.

“I read that
The Odyssey
was their inspiration for making the movie. So I want to check it out.” He had the look of a Romani who has been sent to prep school, well-scrubbed but out of place, eyes loaded down by memories of a childhood spent in Transylvania dreaming of films.

“Very nice,” I said. Kindly, staid librarian thinking bold, prophetic thoughts:
You will be a filmmaker. You will fall in love. I see artistic accomplishment and forbidden love in your future
. “You’ll have to tell me how it is. It’s been even longer since I’ve read
The Odyssey,
” I said, withholding the phrase,
It was before you were born
. “These are due December 3,” I said, less to inform him of our policy than to elicit his customary rough-throated
thank you
, the aural pleasure of which I felt I should thank him for.

It was our most protracted exchange. He had asked me a question. He had confided an interest. My inner rib cage was trembling, hands, trembling. Every centimeter of my face was flushed, my hairline and earlobes ablaze. I was so short of breath, I wondered if I had not become an instant asthmatic. Nella, working circumspectly at her desk, gave no indication of having heard anything. I suspected she’d heard everything. Like the only witness to a heinous crime, I felt the need to flee the crime scene.

“I’ll be right back,” I said. She looked up from her papers just long enough to raise one eyebrow conspiratorially. I walked briskly to the children’s room where Siobhan was processing ILLs and stood rose-faced and trembling in front of her desk.

“Help me to calm myself!” I commanded in a whisper, afraid that I would involuntarily cry out or erupt into uncontrollable laughter or break into enthusiastic song if someone did not bridle me at once.

Siobhan took her tortoiseshell glasses off and let them hang on their woven cord.

“What’s goin’ on?” she said, parodying her Midwestern drawl for my benefit. I blurted out the gist of what had happened, the effect of which was not unlike finding that one’s deeply transformative and endlessly complicated dream may be summarized in a single sentence.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I saw your friend. You like that big, dark eyes, dark, wavy hair thing, huh?”

At least she had recognized him. It was more than I could say for the director, who, it occurred to me, might do well to get her eyes checked. “He’s a cute kid,” Siobhan conceded and then opened her stack of green cards into a fan and began to fan me. “You better cool off, lady! I can feel your heat from here!” Easy for her to say, she at least had the occasional “afternoon delight” while her teenage kids were at school. (
Honey, if I didn’t have that, I wouldn’t have a marriage!)

“I think he fancies me,” I confided, my thoughts roaming lustily in several directions at once.

“He better not!” Siobhan herself quivered now the way the red needle of a fine moral compass tends to quiver in the presence of moral drift. She gathered her cards into a tidy stack and smacked the desk for emphasis.

“Why not?!” I was in no mood for deprivation.

She set her cards down, reached for a scrap piece of paper and wrote the following message in pencil:
Because you are married and he is the same age as my son!
Siobhan had discovered that the young man was a “friend” of her son’s on Facebook and that he too was a senior in high school, age seventeen. Prior to this discovery, our difference in age did nothing to deter me for I had conveniently, grossly underestimated it, my most delusional estimate being twenty-nine. Now I turned away from his actual age the way one turns away from an overly graphic image. Why contemplate statutory rape laws and prison terms when no crime had yet been committed?

She returned her glasses to her face and picked up the green cards. “Aw, you’re not fun!” I said, borrowing a phrase coined by Maria.

“Just sayin’,” she said, tapping me on the wrist with the pink eraser end of her Ticonderoga, “probably better keep this one at the visual level. You know what happens when the other senses get involved.”

My problem precisely. I didn’t know any longer! And which was worse, that I had forgotten my other senses or that they were beginning, all too quickly, to come back to me?

* * *

The many hours I spent in bed I spent with Maria. We slept entwined or draped upon one another in the form of an x, ear to ear or head to foot or as spoons in a farmhouse drawer. She never slept alone as surely as Var and I never slept together. He was too light a sleeper to sleep with another.

Maria was no solitary sleeper, no relinquisher of my flesh. No matter what the positions of our bodies were in sleep, she managed to hook a part of herself—a foot, an ankle, an elbow, a knee—over me so that I couldn’t move, so that I would remain near enough for her to hear my heart beating for the duration of the night. Our closeness did not prevent us from dreaming we had lost one another. I would dream for hours of wandering a city in search of her, only to wake to find her atop me. She had nightmares of being kidnapped while lying in my arms. Our closeness never made us complacent. We understood each other’s value; we understood that even the one closest to us must be sought.

In the beginning my greatest resentment toward Var was his refusal to free me of Maria’s company. But after a few years of that fruitless bargaining, I began to prefer her company to that of most others, including his. There was still the matter of solitude, which I craved, but the very idea of trying to obtain it by way of Var was as questionable to me as asking one’s warden for a cake on one’s birthday. Even if, against all reasonable expectation, the fellow appeared at the door of one’s cell with Black Forest cake on a white china plate, one might not feel inspired to eat it. There might be trickery involved, manipulation, the possibility of poison, and of course, the matter of one’s pride. And so Var lay in his solitary room while Maria and I held each other till morning.

After the appearance of the young man, I no longer fell asleep in tandem with Maria nor did I creep out of bed to read once she was sleeping. When I was sure she wouldn’t wake, I allowed myself the pleasure of thinking about him. The nervous darting of his eyes, the toffee taste of the smell of his tobacco, the sound of his rough-throated voice reporting on the many books in his house. I could easily imagine him alone in a room. Once he existed there, I could join him. We could do as we liked. Without having laid a fifth finger upon me and in only a few weeks’ time, he had given me more pleasure than Var had in years. There was something obscene and unjust about this. For the two of them were equally passive in these matters, but the young man pleased me simply by being himself. As I lay in the dark enjoying my body’s pulsations, this injustice was not lost to me and I became accustomed to the small volume of tears that would run out of me as soon as my body was still again.

Yet in the morning my sadness would be forgotten. I would wake with a fresh sense of purpose as I prepared myself for another day at the library, another day on which I might encounter him. Although I had failed to pose a single question from my ridiculous queue, I was pleased with, even a bit alarmed by, our progress. The sensation of being on a dangerous and terrifying track, racing toward a joyful collision, persisted. I felt alternately like a daredevil piece of the finest machinery and a child’s toy being controlled by an unseen operator. I had come a long way since my days of self-assigned obsolescence. Indeed I was speeding along with a new sense of satisfaction, feeling unusually primped, alert to beauty, and exhilarated by the pursuit. But the truth was, I wanted more.

I could see that not far up ahead, a piece of the track was missing. I could not reach the infuriatingly lovely black loops and twisting figure eights I saw in the distance without first finding or building the missing pieces of track. There was a gap to be filled, a chasm to be crossed. How I went about it seemed of the utmost importance. If I hurled myself across the void too recklessly, I might shatter into bits when I landed. If I went too slowly, I might drop into the chasm without making it safely across. How could I reach my hand across the library counter and touch him? How does one do something inappropriate in as appropriate a manner as possible?

* * *

Inspired by Nella’s comment that she had seen the young man there one Saturday, I, rather inanely and with the fervor of a religious devotee on pilgrimage, began to visit Main Street as often as I could, with the hope that I too might be so blessed. As soon as Maria had finished her afternoon snack I would ask, with as much story time animation as I could muster, “Would you like to go to the city?” Having once visited New York, she knew there were no cities to be found on our island, that the city to which I referred was nothing but a quaint street with a few shops and cafés, a city only in comparison to the hush of our rural world. “Oh yes!” she would say, fluttering her eyelashes and swatting the air with one hand, in imitation of any number of animated heroines she had encountered. “I just love the city!”

I would take on the aspect of a gallant prince, bow deeply and offer her my hand. We would walk thus, down the highway to the bus stop where we would wait for the #2 bus to take us down-island. Our favorite bakery, Colette’s, whose almond croissants rivaled New York’s (someday, I promised, I would take her to Paris, though I did not know how), was the only bakery on the island that stayed open year-round.

During these “city” excursions I pampered her. We split the mountainous croissant down the middle and I allowed her a glass of steamed milk. As we sat facing each other at a table next to the window, I tried continually to take her in (her large brown eyes that were shaped much like the almonds on our pastry, her soft Gerber mouth, the well-spaced little row of teeth that had the look of a toy picket fence, the cheeks that retained the plump exuberance of a nursing infant’s). I looked at her directly and listened intently to her stories, barely looking down as I poured yet more milk into my tea, but all the while I was keeping an eye on the street. Yes, all the time she was talking about the lonely dinosaur family that had secretly survived extinction and the cat named Castle-Diamond whose daughter Shukana could talk, I was watching for the young man.

Once the croissant had disappeared, we would turn our gazes to the street (we also shared a love of people-watching, of gazing raptly out windows) and for a few minutes I was free to search openly for him under the guise of watching the sparse parade of humanity. But she would soon grow tired of this passive receptive mode, eager to go out and I, intent on prolonging the outing, would succumb.

As fate would have it, the shop with the largest windows to the street was The Toy House. Attached to a bluebird-blue gingerbread cottage, the storefront was an indoor porch made almost entirely of glass, conveniently fortified with every type of toy you could imagine. One could stand inside the shop and discreetly look out at the street, shielded by a mottled mob of dollhouses, stuffed panthers, red-handled jump ropes, silver harmonicas, clown-shaped punching bags, Tinkertoys, croquet sets, rubber balls, kaleidoscopes, badminton sets, and the like.

What would I have done if he had paused in front of said window? (But how unlikely! He was, after all, too old for toys!) If, by some erratic stroke of fate’s otherwise steady hand (pushing me firmly as it were, into the store with Maria, the street barren behind us), I were to find myself inside the shop looking at a dollhouse, myself on one side of the glass, the young man on the other, our eyes suddenly meeting through a tiny curtained window, would I will myself, chameleonlike to blend with the toys? Would my Liberty print blouse become, to the untrained eye, simply another busy pattern in the window? Or would I signal to him? Press a finger to my lips and a note to the now lightly steamed window? Or would I step toward the door, Maria’s hand in mine, to expose myself for what I really was: a mother with a tote over her shoulder, shopping for the toy that would stand as payment to her child for another excursion to the “city” endured?