Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (5 page)

Only once did I catch a glimpse of the young man out in the world and it was not on Main Street but on the state highway. I have always been slow to notice when someone is noticing me and I am becoming increasingly obtuse with age (though there is also increasingly less to notice). I was walking along the side—looking back now I see I made a pitiful spectacle of myself—wearing my long black coat en route from the library to the apartment. He was driving in a little gray car toward me. As the car passed and he saw me, his double take was so dramatic that even I understood he was trying to catch a second glimpse. The absurd swivel of his head recalled that of a battery-powered doll and reassured me of what I had never quite been certain was true. I was ecstatic.

This encounter left me with the false impression that I would soon see him again, the sense that he was nearby, that if I stayed where I was, I would, inevitably, encounter him. Though not an avid traveler, I did, on occasion, go across the water for social and professional purposes. Seeing him outside the confines of the library caused me to regard such excursions as foolish distractions. In its geographic specificity, encountering the young man was akin to encountering certain celestial occurrences. One can’t very well observe the aurora borealis while standing in the southern hemisphere. The island glowed green with a rose-shadowed light that outshone the larger blue world. Indeed my local attendance was required.

I knew I had lost my former grip on Reality when I declined an invitation to present a paper on Japanese and Japanese American Floating World Literature at The New School in New York for the sole reason that I did not want to leave the island. Var, as if sensing disaster, offered to drive me but I refused. I was no longer compelled to do anything that required standing on a piece of earth that was not connected to the piece of the earth on which the young man too was standing. To be off-island would nearly nullify my chances of encountering him. I wanted nothing of networks, of connections to the main. What seemed formerly interesting or important now struck me as an absurd waste of time. I wanted only to be stranded on what I had come to view as an island of possibility.

Chilling to think he did not even know my name (unless he had taken notice of the letters imprinted upon my gold-tone name tag and I hoped that he hadn’t, so mortified I was to be wearing a magnet affixed to my chest) and there I was (un)planning my career around our next encounter. Yet sometimes it bore the clarity of a mathematical equation. Leave the island equals leave the young man. Stay on the island equals stay with the young man. The choice was simple and clear: proximity or distance. I, who had had my fill of distance and had been sickened by it, chose proximity, chose the island, chose him.

Meanwhile, he had not appeared at the library in weeks. My hardy optimism was not blighted in the least by this drought. Every day I prepared to meet him, convinced that I would. My interactions with the library staff suffered. I tried, casually, to speak of him. In his absence my failed attempts were not so much perceived as suspect as hardly perceived at all. Siobhan, on the other hand, who was not to be fooled, was losing patience with my inability to speak of anything else. After all, what exactly was there to talk about? I was alone on my marvelous black track, doomed to drive the same loop repeatedly. I alone felt the thrill.

* * *

“You know,” Siobhan remarked one afternoon, “I have to say I did a double take this morning when I saw Var.” I smiled to myself at the mention of double takes. In its utterly singular preoccupation, my mind had become an islet. No matter how far one wandered, one was never far from one’s starting point.

I was becoming increasingly absentminded. For the third time in as many weeks, I had forgotten my lunch and Var, without coaxing, had agreed to bring it. He was a reader who seemed to pride himself on never setting foot in the library, preferring instead to line the walls of his narrow room with mold-ridden books from the town dump. When, in the early days of my library job, I would ask him if there was anything he’d like me to bring home, he would say:
No. I have my own library.

“What do you mean?” I asked her. It
had
been kind of Var to bring the lunch, so kind that it caused me to feel suspicious. Could he be checking up on me? My heart convulsed slightly at the thought.

“I mean my first thought when I saw your husband walk through the front door was: Well, who’s this cutie?”

“Oh God, don’t say that.” He had given me an odd wink as he’d handed over my cloth bag, as if the two of us shared a secret I had somehow forgotten.

“And then I realized it was Var!” she laughed. “He’s a pretty good lookin’ guy, that’s all!”

“I’m afraid I don’t see your point.” My patience for Siobhan was thinning. I had no desire to fritter away our shift together chatting about my husband’s good qualities.

“Just sayin’,” she slipped into her sunshiney drawl—all the more reason not to take her seriously.

Clearly, the young man’s protracted absence had disturbed Siobhan’s loyalties. Not only had she begun warning me against the perils of seeking pleasure outside the confines of marriage, she was now blatantly rooting for Var.

In recent weeks, she had been inserting Var-related comments here and there, (either reframing an anecdote in such a way that it redeemed him or regaling some positive attribute of his come to light), all of which were based on secondhand information whose source was myself. She let slip bits about the severe consequences of extramarital affairs, also based on the flimsiest of hearsay, shoddy bits that in summary reminded that those who committed such reckless offenses often
lost everything in the end
. She must have felt it was her duty as a friend. Then too there was the irrepressible librarian in her who could not stand by and watch a human being in distress without leaping to her aid, whether that person could not find the coin slot on the copier or was on the brink of domestic destruction. The most conscientious librarians don’t know when to leave well enough alone.

I grunted at Siobhan’s comments like a wild, uncomprehending native who must feign ignorance to gain advantage when her island is being attacked. I heaved sighs of boredom during her sympathetic portrayals of Var and moaned in disgust when she complimented his appearance using an exaggerated drawl. But being the public servant that I was—trained to listen, trained to respond—despite my defensive display of indifference, I could not help but carefully file her pleas and warnings under the heading, “Things I Should Probably Consider But Would Rather Not…To Be Considered at a Later Date.”

Indeed just three days after the third forgotten lunch incident I returned to the file, though that implies it was a voluntary act. It would be more accurate to say that one evening while lying in bed with my eyes closed and my ears tuned to the wind, Siobhan’s gibberish came back like civilizing words to colonize me. She was a very good friend after all (one of my only in fact), one who undoubtedly had my best interests at heart and whose opinion I rated highly. Would it not be folly to ignore her?

I considered what she had said about Var. It was true. He
was
rather handsome.

His most attractive feature was a pencil-thin moustache that drew attention to his sensuous lips, which, despite the fact that they seldom uttered words, kept rather busy nipping the tips of toothpicks, kissing the lips of coffee mugs, nibbling on
brigadeiros
, all the while muttering a steady and audible but unintelligible stream of Portuguese verb conjugations. I kept, in a letter drawer, along with a motley assortment of letters, an old photograph that accentuated his moustache. His lips are parted; he’s in Rio on holiday using a red tripod pay phone, the remaining pods vacant on the crowded street, as if waiting even then for Maria and me to claim them, wearing a black T-shirt and a vintage black baseball cap bearing the insignia of a Japanese team. He has a gorgeous, masculine lacquer of self-containment spread over him, the very same lacquer that caught my solventine eye in the beginning and which later resisted all my efforts to dissolve it. I don’t know why I approved so heartily of his particular moustache for I had never liked a moustache before his, in fact I have a general aversion. My father, whose skin, like my own, was nearly hairless, raised me to believe that moustaches were accessories befitting movie villains and crooks, not proper gentlemen. On those rare occasions when, beyond our safe parlor of honest, smooth-faced men, we encountered a man with a moustache, as soon as the bandit had departed, my father would shake his head and tsk loudly. In a low, husky voice, he would remind me to beware of such men, to remember that moustaches symbolized evil. And when I laughed, he would issue a warning, “Don’t you know? The man with the moustache is the man who will do you harm,” his words years later sounding less like the ravings of a superstitious immigrant and more like those of a lucid prophet.

I concentrated on the photograph in my mind, paying special attention to Var’s moustache and lips for the sake of my own pleasure. Suddenly Siobhan’s ghost appeared to the left of Maria’s outstretched arm, her friendly, clean-haired presence palpable as Maria’s. I jumped. “A photograph?!” she laughed. “You’re kiddin’ me, right?” I sat up and squinted my eyes in the dark. She was gone. Maria’s lips were quivering, as they often did when she dreamed. She pursed her lips to a point, raised her eyebrows, then snickered. I smiled. She had been performing the same comic sequence since infancy.

I slipped out of the bed. More out of some inexplicable loyalty to Siobhan than to Var, I knocked on his door and offered myself to him.

I saw what I read as the faintest hints of astonishment and happiness flicker in his eyes. He moved quickly to accommodate me, lowered the single mattress (which he kept propped against the wall) onto the floor and pushed his desk of apple crates into a corner next to a wooden statue of Jesus he’d recently been commissioned to carve. His space was more like a hallway than a room and the air within it smelled toxically of the musty books he so regularly deposited there. He switched off the overhead light and turned on a lamp that sat like a cat on the carpet. I reached to turn it off but he intervened.

“I want to see you,” he said. I undressed and laid down on the narrow mattress.

“I’m cold.” I reached for a quilt that was stuffed between the Jesus and the wall. I covered myself with it. It too smelled like a musty book. I lifted the quilt and he slid in next to me fully clothed. He undressed himself awkwardly under the covers (he was a man who looked fit as a result of doing nothing and yet was modest as a nun), pausing to fold each article of clothing while lying down. I made note, not without irritation, of how quickly his desire for order superseded his desire for me. I tried to put the thought out of my mind. I thought instead of Siobhan, her sunny expressions and her good intentions, the way her fine, shiny hair bounced to and fro during brushings. Pem’s “heart advice” would have been to take a deep breath and
Welcome Everything
.

It was no use. I could not welcome everything. I was like a house whose most beautiful window (the one next to the jasmine, overlooking the lake), whether due to paint or time or season, would not open. And to his credit, I suppose, Var was not the sort of man who would force open a window. He was the type to wait for the weather to change until he tried again or for another man to open it. So I remained intact and alone. I offered to placate him using other means but he politely declined and so I went to back to bed, wondering if I might not have been better off with the photograph, if not my simple yet stirring memory of the young man’s face.

* * *

As it began to seem less and less likely that he would make an appearance, I turned my attention to the young man’s mother, less in resignation than in search of an outlet for my devotion. Like most obsessive readers, I was no stranger to sublimation. If I could not observe the young man in earnest, I would observe his source. I would sublimate. What was more, I could speak of her freely without the appearance of speaking of him. His mother became my alternate subject. My research, in the form of avid island newspaper reading, seemingly casual yet literally rigorous interviews with patrons, a few relatively barren yet somehow intense googling sessions, and one field trip, yielded the following:

Violet made her living selling luxury foods to the stranded rich. She ran a charmingly ramshackle shop on the highway called Plum Island Provisions whose dusty farmhouse exterior concealed a treasure trove of exotic snacks for millionaires. Like the only bar aboard a great ocean liner, it was a lifeline to a certain way of living.

She sold, in addition to her own cheeses, imported food (French cheeses, Swiss chocolates, English biscuits, Chinese tea, Italian flatbreads, Vietnamese rice wrappers, tamarind, harissa, lime pickle, mango juice); vegetables that grew behind the shop; fresh fruit pies (The strawberry rhubarb was especially good, I had tried it once at a dinner party years prior, likely when the young man was in kindergarten.); artisanal bread baked by a friend off-site; and a smattering of locally-made foods such as honey, sausage, popsicles, and ice cream. When it came to the shop’s inventory, there seemed to be no reigning manifesto but pleasure, which only added to the puzzle of her being and, perhaps by extension, to that of the young man.

Siobhan and I had taken note of Violet in the previous year. She had been one of our “patrons of interest” long before I had discovered the young man. She stood out among library patrons as someone who seemed lovely from a distance but was in fact unfriendly at the counter. She was probably in her late forties, somewhere between Siobhan’s age and mine. We were both drawn to her, but found that our attraction to her was one-sided or at least not reciprocated. Whether because we were perceptive or slighted or both, she struck us as unhappy, even suffering, and in predictable librarian fashion we wanted to help. But she did not seem to want our cheerful greetings, small town chitchat, clothing compliments, and book recommendations. We took our cues respectfully, we withdrew our attention from such misplaced “help” and turned instead to studying her mannerisms and reading habits. The appearance of the young man had further heightened our interest. In his absence, she was the next best thing.