* * *
I was working the front desk in dreary silence, depressed in the face of Love’s impending extinction, when Nella, as if hearing my pitiful thoughts and finding them funny, began to laugh uncontrollably. I turned back with the hope of seeing some amusing spectacle that might make me laugh too but the cause for her laughter seemed to come from within her. I, for one, saw no sign of it. In her hilarity, she doubled over and then lurched back so that her chair rolled away from the desk and hit the red children’s cart behind her. Underneath her blue-rimmed glasses, there were tears in her eyes. “Care to let me in on the joke?” I asked.
“I think it’s time for lunch,” she said, blithely wiping a tear from her face.
Why, when I had come so far and the end was in sight, did I feel the abrupt urge to confess? After she’d gone, I dwelled upon with whom, if anyone, I could entrust my secret. I decided, using the bold arbitrariness of one who is soon to lose everything, that when Nella returned from her clam chowder and Milky Way, I would tell her everything. It was a suicidal idea to be sure. Not once had Nella indicated the slightest hint of interest in my situation. She might easily have guessed my secret by now and could not have cared less. I was not ignorant of such a possibility but the chance to make real my ephemeral experience, the chance to somehow anchor that floating world to this one by uttering it, outshone all other logic.
I resolved to spend the next thirty minutes pondering how best to summarize my amorous adventures thus far—which events warranted mentioning, which might better be omitted, and which might be especially funny to recount. I prioritized and censored as I worked. Indeed even as I articulated words aloud to the patrons, I was thinking inappropriate thoughts of the young man. Words like Hi there and These are due in a week and You’re welcome, have a lovely day issued like puffs of smoke from the stovepipe of my mouth as my brain burned through image after lurid image. As I scanned each book’s bar code under the red light, what I saw was his jaw clenched in pleasure.
Eventually the lunch crowd disappeared. I checked my watch for the fourth time and looked out the window. Nella was late. This was not surprising. Lately it seemed every break she took was longer than the last. It was as if she was making up for the time she’d been cheated out of by abstaining from breaks all those years. I kept looking back at her desk between transactions only to find it empty. She’d been gone for two hours. Finally I got up and walked over to her desk and saw that the tiny yellow Post-it in the middle of her screen, which I had previously assumed was a note left for Nella, was in fact a note written by Nella herself, just two words: I quit.
Needless to say, I was incapable of reading this announcement in any manner but a selfish one. I could not bring myself to care that all of Nella’s shifts would now need to be covered, that her many full-time responsibilities would have to be swiftly transferred to the hands of another librarian, or that the rapidly approaching summer season would make all of this more pressing and difficult to accomplish. No, what I saw in those two words was a refusal to meet my need to confess. It did not occur to me to telephone her, to reschedule my imagined outpouring. I was in need of a confession that was face-to-face and immediate. I read the two words, like the ladderless loft, as yet another emblem of impossibility, their cutting message foreshadowing to my own impending abandonment. What did I do with my need to confess? I did what I had done so expertly for years prior to the young man’s arrival, what I would soon have to do quite regularly with my desire: I crushed it.
* * *
The next morning—it was just after 8:00, I couldn’t take leave of Maria any earlier—I ran like a dog to P.I.P., my ears listening to footfalls miles away, my nose sniffing for a familiar scent. Violet’s favorite trail was an ancient way, one of the many that had existed, unbeknownst to me, for hundreds of years. When I set off, my animal self sought companionship, I wanted only to confess. I wanted to sit on my haunches before her and howl. But as I reached the crest of the first rise and began to tumble toward the next, I saw her walking ahead of me, light-footed, alone, wearing a pair of sand-colored shorts, a white T-shirt, a braid in her hair. At the sight of her delicate, Hatfieldian shape I bounded forward with concern. I wanted to be her friend, doglike, loyal in the face of any threat. Who better than Violet to remind me that there were others in the world whose troubles were worse than my own? While we would both soon be without the young man, every night of our separation I would sleep with Maria in my arms.
When I reached her she stopped to kiss my cheek and then we resumed walking together. We said very little. As we paused at a marker under a canopy of trees, the trail empty, the woods alive, perfumed, she said, “My son’s leaving in two weeks.”
My first thought was sadness, Violet’s face streaked with tears, but when I stole a glance I saw she was smiling, letting the gap show. It was a charming gap, like an actress’s scar. Each time she let me see it I loved her more. “Is he?” I said, caught between wanting to be a polite listener and not wanting to lie.
“Yes. Unlike his mother he prefers his adventures off the page. I think it’s healthy. I think it’s a good thing.”
“Yes. That makes sense.”
“I always thought it would break my heart when he left the island. But I’m ready.”
How on earth had she prepared herself? I could hardly bear the thought of her child leaving the island much less my own. “You’re very brave,” I said.
“No. It doesn’t take much to stay home and do what I always do.”
“Won’t you miss him?” I dared.
“I’ll miss him. But I’ll also be free. We both will.”
“Yes, of course.”
“And it’s only for a few weeks. He’ll be back mid-August. We’ll still have some summer left to spend together.”
I said nothing. What was I to say? How was I to act? I already knew all of this.
“I suppose you’ll be quite busy as well. Summer will be in full swing.”
“Yes,” she gave me another gap smile and sat down on a stump. I sat down too. We were both a little out of breath.
The thought of his six-week adventure was unendurable; it was a calamity. I wished I felt even a portion of Violet’s excitement on his behalf but I had yet to be emancipated from my orgy of wanting and regret.
“If I were a character in a book, would you like her?” I asked.
“It’s a funny thing to ask.”
“It is and it isn’t.” Had I been asking as the woman she knew firsthand, it would have been an odd question but in truth I was asking as myself, the one who had committed ordinary yet unspeakable crimes and repeatedly. If the real me, the one who just yesterday had crouched like a dog before her son and then growled with pleasure as he entered, were a character in a book, would she like her? This was the impossible question I was trying to ask.
“I would definitely keep reading,” she said.
“Would you?”
“Yep.”
“But why?”
“Oh, lots of reasons.” I wondered for the first time if our friendship had been a way of safeguarding her son, knowing the enemy, so to speak, a way to know intimately the company he kept, a mother’s education.
“Any you care to share?”
She paused as if considering and then said, “I would keep reading to find out what happens to you in the end.”
“Oh dear. It’s a bit frightening when you put it like that.”
“It is, isn’t it?” she said and laughed a rowdy little laugh I’d never heard before.
* * *
My penultimate meeting with the young man was dominated by talk of his imminent journey, one of the few topics of conversation that, rather handily, had a murderous effect on my desire. He lost hold of his ability to muffle exuberance; he became unusually chatty and I, painfully disinterested. At the sound of his enthusiastic sentences, at the thought of
the impact their meaning would have upon my daily existence, I nearly brought my hands to my ears. I was incapable of listening. I fell asleep during his monologue though he seemed not to notice. When I woke a few minutes later he was recounting his mother’s good deeds. I waited impassively for him to finish.
In her preparations for the departure of her son, Violet had surpassed herself. Had I been in her position I would have done the very same. (And yet I was in a very similar position insofar as I too loved him and would soon be without him and I had done nothing to prepare either of us. Not a whit. I had not even managed to check out a book in his honor, lacking as I did the generosity and acceptance to grant him an extended due date. Devastation was the fine one would have to pay, one had dimly known all along but denied it.)
For every leg of his journey, down to the briefest of airplane layovers and the most fleeting of afternoons spent in the company of relatives, she provided him with the most splendid supplies a traveler could hope for. There were abundantly-sized clothes for all weather and occasions (one could well imagine her following him in her mind from one climate zone to the next, growing as he went), nonperishable provisions including several bars of the now familiar chocolate wrapped in painted landscapes, a tin of her own toasted granola, an assortment of dehydrated fruits and spiced nuts, a smartphone that also functioned as a camera, a compass and a light canteen (visions of him getting lost no doubt accosting her), three maps (one of the Boston subway system, one of the United States, and one of the large state of California), and, as if to confirm that there was nothing I could possibly offer the young man that he did not already possess, the book Siddhartha. I was not the only reader in his life after all, not the only middle-aged woman with access to a library. Though I would never have chosen Siddhartha (I did not care for the West’s version of Buddhism nor did I care for the religious writing of Hermann Hesse), I confess it may have been an apt choice for the young man, being as he was on the brink of so many transformations and on his way to rescuing a river.
Loquacity did not suit him. I didn’t want to hear another word. When at last he paused to take a breath, I cut across him, “You know, you’ve ruined me. And I don’t mean that from a moral standpoint.” I was feeling sorry for myself. What else could I possibly do?
“What standpoint do you mean it from?”
“What do you think?”
“I have no idea.”
“None whatsoever?”
“Well, I could list possibilities. Or you could just tell me what you meant, since you’re the one who used those words to begin with.”
“From the standpoint of pleasure, obviously.”
“Why do you sound so annoyed?”
“Do I?”
“Yeah.”
“I suppose I’m annoyed because I’m ruined. One rather hopes to avoid being ruined but then again I’m so old it doesn’t matter. But if I were younger it would be easier to bear.”
“Easier how?”
“I would have a better chance of replacing you.”
“And that would have been easier?”
“I think I’d rather you judge me than quiz me.”
“But how would being younger have bettered your chances? I’m interested in your honest answer, not in changing your mind about anything.”
“You actually want me to spell it out?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t been crude enough?”
“No. I don’t pick up on things quickly. If I were older, I might have understood you. Maybe you’re forgetting. I’m only seventeen.” He was toying with, if not patronizing, me. Glimmers of manhood, perverse glimmers of a future together.
“If only my memory was as much of a failure as the rest of me. Of course I haven’t forgotten you’re seventeen. My father was seventeen when he left Japan. I was seventeen when I left England. And you will be seventeen when you leave this island.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“If you have to ask, I shouldn’t bother. You shall find out when you’re forty-one. I won’t spoil it for you.” I went on. I couldn’t stop myself saying crude things. Being faced with the prospect of relinquishing him to a river brought out the Hyde in me. “You know I didn’t come here to mix with your sort. If anything I came here to escape such excitements.”
What had in it the seed of a compliment came off sounding like a snub. He drew back slightly as if I had just hit him. “What I meant to say,” I persisted, determined to salvage the moment and bolster his confidence, “is that this is a highly unusual circumstance. I’ve lived a very sheltered life, sheltered from good as much as from bad. I’ve minded my own business. I never sought thrills. I’ve been content to avoid the company of youth and beauty. Before you, I had no desire.”
“With all due respect, May, I find it hard to believe,” he finished in iambic pentameter, “that a woman with your brain and your appetite came halfway across the world in search of nothing.”
He was well-mannered yet restless; his eyes studied me as though I were a page in a book. I had the sense of being one among many, of being read intensely but fleetingly by a reader who would soon turn the page.
* * *
Our last evening together he wore sunglasses and a red T-shirt, both of which I asked him to remove. I had never seen him wear red and silently disapproved. I observed changes in his body since the previous Friday (broader in the shoulders, thicker in the flanks, more pronounced cheekbones, an olive cast to his skin) the way I had upon seeing him at the library after his long absence. Sometimes a similar phenomena occurred literally overnight with Maria; swift change is one of the many confounding symptoms of childhood.
It was really quite a pleasant evening considering. I arrived determined to make the best of it. He undressed me slowly beginning with my shoes, as had once been his habit. We made love several times in silence on the floor, revisiting various Fridays in our private history. He seemed to be commemorating the other times, remembering them as I was. When he wiped the sweat on my temples away with his thumbs, it felt as if he were pressing the memories in place. I was touched by his impulse to revisit the past when the future was so close at hand, no doubt glittering and beckoning. Every doubt I had ever had, of his sincerity, of his capacity to match my depth of feeling, was erased, if only for the evening.
After about an hour he produced a red and blue striped climbing rope that he had recently purchased for the purpose of learning to rock climb in California (Was there no end to the bloody adventures?!) and which I mistakenly assumed he had brought for adventurously adult purposes. Instead he showed me several rather clever knots with clever names then tossed one end of the rope up into the loft. I watched while miraculously the loop he had just tied landed precisely on the steel wall hook upon which we had so often hung our clothes. When he tugged swiftly on the rope, the loop closed like a little noose around the hook’s neck. He was very adept at handling it. It gave me an uncanny feeling. I was at once aroused by his agility and cheered by the thought of him gaining a new skill. Unbidden, the words snow, day, Pocahontas, Swiss, family, and Robinson returned to me. How it pained me to hear my inner voice pronounce them in his presence, each one an emblem of his future life.
“But how will I ever climb that?” I asked, understanding at last his intended purpose.
With the rope in his hands, he stepped backward away from the loft and then in one motion swung and began to climb. When he had reached the halfway mark he paused. “Push me.” Echoes of Maria at the playground. I touched his back with both hands and then pushed. He swung. “Harder,” he said. I obeyed and then watched as he swung near and far, down and up, and then I understood the physics of his plan. The higher he swung, the closer he came to the loft. After a few swings he let go and landed.
“You’ve done a magnificent job but you can’t possibly expect me to follow you. I know it’s not exact
ly Mount Everest but I’m not a rock climber, for God’s sake, I’m a librarian. I can’t possibly do that.”
He threw down the rope. “Take it,” he said. “You don’t have to do anything. I’ll bring you up.”
“You sound like my father,” I said, wondering how I could withstand the pleasure of this contradiction.
There was a glint of something—happiness? pleasure? arousal?—in his eyes and then it faded. He said it again more gently, “Take it.”
“Okay.” I took the rope in my hands and thanked God I was not yet arthritic. My mother had been and her mother before her; I was part of a long arthritic line.
“Hold on,” he said.
“Okay,” I said yet again. “But I don’t think I can do this. It’s not exactly doing nothing you know.”
“Make a foot loop,” he said. “Tie a knot and make a loop to put your foot in. That’ll make it easier.”
“What kind of knot?” I asked, overwhelmed by my recent introduction to several.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. It only has to hold for a minute or so,”
“And then it will unravel?”
“No. Just tie one. Tie an easy one and step in.”
He was frightfully assertive and I, for my part, unnervingly compliant. I tied a saucer-size noose for my foot and stepped in. I looked up at him the way children glance at their parents before undertaking some new challenge, and, without missing a beat, he winked at me fatherlike. I was disarmed by this Swiss Family Robinson moment. He, Mr. Robinson (if not Rousseau himself), and I, Jenny the English orphan.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“Of course,” I lied, the words becoming easier to use the more I used them.
He began deftly to hoist me up. My fear of the rope unraveling or slipping through the young man’s hands vanished in the face of his swift show of athleticism and strength. Never before had I been besieged by such masculine wiles! My desire to arrive at my destination receded and was replaced by a desire to remain there suspended, looking at him, being held by him as he brought me closer. If I could have chosen to make those moments my eternity I would have. To be forever moving closer to him, floating without effort, without fear.
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness Page 20
