Later he would encircle me like that and I would want to shake him and shout, “Don’t you see?! No one else wants me!” I didn’t feel worthy of his encircling. I was more than twice his age! A liar! A cheat! But on that day I welcomed it. I was in need of reassurance, it was too early then for me to truly think of him. I thought only of myself.
My eyes had not lied. Though slight without clothes, he had a man’s body. It absolved me of a portion of my guilt. Compared to Maria, he felt brawny, enormous, though I suppose a ten-year-old body might have felt the same. My tactile perspective was distorted, estranged as I had been for some time from the body of a grown man. I was accustomed to holding a four-year-old girl in my arms. (And yet I had easily accommodated him! I felt triumphant and not a little relieved, as if I’d just received a clean bill of health from a doctor.) I wondered how I’d become this way, able to betray my husband, more promiscuous than either of my parents.
It was only after we had merged and separated that we seemed to dwell at last on the same island. The house was empty, the woods quiet. I felt the distant presence of the sea.
“It’s so quiet,” he said, speaking the words at precisely the same moment I had thought them.
“Yes, it feels as if no one can reach us.”
He nodded. He did not seem frightened to be thus stranded with me. I too felt perfectly content to exist in his company apart from the rest of the world.
We lay in this silence for a time and then from somewhere beyond the woods we heard the sound of a car in motion and were reminded that we were not alone, that ours was not a deserted island, but one inhabited by mothers driving on roads to pick children up from school, farmers who moved sheep by the truckload, children who waited to be taken to safe places, sheep who waited to be transported to fresh fields. What did the sheep do in deep winter I wondered, when the fields were covered in snow?
“Where were you all that time?” I asked. It was on that morning, after the fleet whirl of the first, that I began at last to administer my long queue of questions.
“When?” he murmured, as if he’d been dreaming and I’d woken him.
“All of December and most of January. I thought you’d never come back.”
“I totaled my car,” he muttered, his eyes still closed.
“What?!” I sat up on my elbows in alarm. “Were you hurt?” Rather ridiculously, I began palpating him, in search of what? Broken bones? Tender joints? Sore muscles? He opened his eyes. “No, not really,” he lifted the palm of his right hand and turned it toward me to display a deep fuchsia gash. “The windshield,” he said.
“God, it looks horrible, just horrible! And the car was ruined?”
“It was a shitbox,” he said and then immediately amended, “sorry, I mean it wasn’t a great car anyway.”
I raked his leafy curls with my fingers and admired his pouting lips, their efforts at politeness.
“Here I was thinking about your absence in terms of myself. How small-minded of me! You could have been killed!” I meant this sincerely though my concern for his well-being was undeniably selfish, for the death of the young man would have meant the death of my pleasure. “So what do you do now? Did you buy another car? Do you ride a bicycle?” Relentlessly single-minded, I was thinking of his mobility in terms of my desire. I wondered how difficult it had been for him to meet me. I felt a pain at the thought of him wandering the island on foot, though this was precisely what I did most days.
“I borrow Mom’s car.” I reveled in the intimacy of the phrase “Mom’s car” until it occurred to me that Mom was also Violet. Lying on a stranger’s mattress next to him, I felt incapable of assimilating her. At least she didn’t drive him to school. “Sometimes,” he mumbled, “I take the bus.”
“Taking the school bus is nothing to be ashamed of,” I said. “I rather like the thought of you passing by my apartment twice a day. A bit of gold through the trees flashing red. It’s titillating don’t you think?”
“It’s hard to get too excited about riding a school bus.”
“I suppose I’m not the one who has to ride it. So tell me, what caused the accident?” I was thinking of the double take. Perhaps I was nothing special, perhaps he drove all over town doing double takes, meeting middle-aged women at waterfalls at myriad, secret locations.
“I was driving down Old County and a woman turned in front of me.”
“A woman?”
“Someone I knew.” He scratched his head as if revving an engine. “Prudy Flanders. She and Mom used to study French together when I was a kid. She felt pretty bad. But we were both fine.”
I gasped. Prudy Flanders was a habitual reader of paperback romance who regularly checked out ten at a time and returned them late, stained with coffee, peppered with grit, smelling of cigarettes. “You could have died together!”
“Not really, Mrs. Flanders was in her car and I was in mine. We would have died separately without ever talking to each other. I only knew it was her because I got out of my car and walked over to hers.”
“How frighteningly intimate, you could have died together,” I repeated, and for a perverse moment I wished I had been behind the wheel of the car that had hit him. I resisted the image of Mrs. Flanders fussing over his bloody hand with a clean cloth in the backseat of her white Ford Explorer.
“I’d like to avoid that kind of intimacy if possible,” he said and closed his eyes, presumably to rest from the topic. Though it was just as probable that, like a boy in a hide-and-seek game, he was lying quietly hoping to be found.
I pressed his fuchsia scar against my cheek. His hand smelled faintly of tobacco, like the hand of a beloved uncle. I felt at once a surge of well-being and a dimming of confidence. Unsure about whether he’d enjoyed it enough to want seconds, I closed my eyes too. I thought about our day, beginning with the waterfall and ending with the questions. All of his answers pleased me. I felt a sense of accomplishment when he answered a question in a way I had predicted and a rush of pleasure when he surprised me.
Satisfied by our own treachery, we drifted in and out of sleep. I spent some of this time watching him. Once I dared to run my hand along the length of his body. When he seemed to have fallen genuinely asleep, I grew bolder. I woke him with my hand and then took the liberty of having him again. He cooperated so fully that I reproached myself for not having done so earlier.
After much cooperation we managed to rise, to dress in the near dark and descend into daylight the unfinished stairs that were only more treacherous on the way down. The third and fourth steps cried out under the weight of my boots and I could not help but think of having him again, his seat on step four, my hands clutching step seven. I laughed aloud at the thought. I would fall to my death as I climaxed. What bliss! I glanced at my watch as if considering it, but it was nearly two o’clock.
We reentered the world’s time zone grudgingly, each of us pausing on the last rung before stepping down. On the main floor, the house was bright with sunlight and snow. The outside world was brighter still, as when one exits a movie theater during the day. Everything was beautifully, blindingly real. We agreed to meet the following Friday.
“How will I get through the week?” I asked.
“You’ll be busy,” he said, oblivious to my inability to think of anything else regardless of what I was “busy” doing, a condition that I could sense would only worsen now that we had made love. I wanted to say that it didn’t matter how busy I was, that I would think of him constantly, but all at once I felt self-conscious, my body riddled with doubt as with a spontaneous and embarrassing rash.
“How will you get through the week?” I ventured. Would he confide in his mother about this?
“I don’t know.”
“Will it be hard for you?” I had half a mind to tell her myself.
“I’ll tell you when the week’s over.”
“I might not
want to know.”
“Yes you will.”
“Touché,” I said, then immediately wondered if I’d misinterpreted him as he had several times misinterpreted me, if he’d indeed been making reference to my inquisitive nature or if he meant that he would surely have something reassuring if not suggestive to report. Or something else entirely.
As I pulled him closer to say goodbye, I was surprised to find him aroused. “When did this happen?” I asked.
“I don’t think it ever stopped happening.” His face reddened and he looked down at the snowy ground.
“Good. Constant desire is good.”
I touched one of the snowflakes on his hat and then ran through the woods, already late to pick up Maria.
The nursery was a fifteen-minute walk, an eight-minute jog from the state road. I had chosen the school expressly for its close proximity to the apartment, not, by any stretch of my former Conscientious Librarian’s imagination, in anticipation of the purpose this short distance would serve that Friday or on the Fridays that followed. I arrived ten minutes late, panting like a wild animal that has just outdistanced a predator in order to protect her young. I had never been late before; I had been early on occasion but never late. Maria, hanging from the crossing bars, glanced with indifference at me as I called out her name too loudly. There were other children in the yard. The scene was not nearly as desolate as my sprinting animal self had imagined. Maria was not sobbing in a corner under the impression that I had abandoned her, nor did she show any sign of relief at my appearance. Her teacher was on the far side of the grass replenishing the caged rabbit’s food and water supply and seemed to have noticed neither my absence nor my arrival.
I sat down on the damp wooden steps next to the tidy line of lunch sacks, as much to cool my trembling skin (upon every inch of which droplets of sweat were now beginning to form) as to devour the remainder of my child’s lunch, something I had seen other mothers do before but had never been hungry enough to do myself. In most cases, had I been, I would have been out of luck, for Maria was not a child who left her lunch uneaten. Today, naturally, was my lucky day. She had left half a tuna sandwich and two carrots to boot. I could have eaten five times that. Such a savage appetite was not in keeping with my sedentary routine. This was the hunger of runners and beasts, the pleasant aftermath of exertion! The sensation was so satisfying I knew there must be those who exert themselves as much for the pleasure of satisfying the hunger that follows exertion as for the pleasure of exertion itself. I had a glimpse of the addictive potential of meeting one’s body’s demands.
“It was Sophia’s birthday!” Maria announced as we set off. The name Sophia, once more in vogue, with its ultrafeminine and youthful connotations, rang a bell of alarm in me. I remembered that not far from us, large groups of teenage girls, several of whom were likely named Sophia, were also being released from school and that any one of them might be entering the young man’s number into her mobile phone as I stood in the cold shade of the nursery. One Sophia in particular might be pedaling her bicycle in the direction of his house whose location was still unknown to me. This was to say nothing of the actions and intentions of those girls whose names were not Sophia.
“Sophia?!” I said hoarsely, repressing my painful thoughts. “That’s wonderful, you love Sophia!”
“The cake wasn’t wonderful. It was vanilla! It’s always vanilla. Vanilla, vanilla, vanilla. Why isn’t it ever chocolate?!”
Why indeed, I thought, as Maria ran ahead to the pond’s edge and began studying dead leaves.
As we neared the general store she asked, “Can I get a treat?”
“No. You’ve already had cake today.”
“But I didn’t even like it!”
“That is unfair. Next time say no thank you.”
I bought her two chocolate kisses. She went wild. At the edge of the grass that surrounded the house, Maria began to run. I ran after her, happy to exert myself. She ran into the garden behind the house and stopped as she often did at the base of the oak tree. She was well-suited to climbing trees; she was a compact, agile, quizzical little girl with big hands that gripped like a monkey’s and wide eyes that like, to peer down from high places and survey.
“Will you put me in the tree?” she asked, jumping to reach for a branch. It was as it had been on the day of the forgotten book. She correctly sensed that I would do almost anything she asked. Once more I quelled the urge to tell her my news. I placed her on a high branch and she gave a squeal, lifted up her arms, threw them around the trunk of the tree, and, in one chimplike movement, kicked her boots down to the ground. In that primitive moment, I loved her endlessly. I felt my desire for the young man and my love for her mingling. The cup marked pleasure and the cup marked love were spilling over. I didn’t have to tell her. She knew. Not the particulars of course, but I think she understood the essential meaning. Who could have been better equipped to recognize my joy than the one who had most often been the cause of it?
We stayed out in the garden—she sitting high in the tree chattering, I lying on the grass with my eyes closed listening—until we could stand the cold no longer.
“Let’s go in,” I said lightly, expecting resistance.
“Oh yes! Let’s go in now, the monkeys are cold!” To my surprise, she quickly agreed and ran up the stairs ahead of me. I followed her at a leisurely pace and then washed my hands in the filthy bathroom which now looked to my lecherous eye abandoned and sexy. I could easily imagine that lovers had lain furtively upon its cracked tiles or perhaps sat double astride the loose, squeaking seat of the toilet. Indeed I was aroused by the sight of it.
* * *
I approached the library on Sunday with equal parts titillation and dread, like one who has just sinned and feels, upon returning to church, both a shameless thrill and a longing to confess. Most Sundays I was on the schedule with Kitty, the director, and Nella, but today Siobhan would be subbing for the director and I could not help but think cheerfully of this fact as I took my last few steps toward the door. Though I had sworn myself (to myself) to secrecy, I felt my resolve vanishing like incense into the wintry air and I had not yet crossed the threshold into the warm library.
“How’s Baby?” Nella’s familiar interview startled me as I entered. She was lugging the metal bin from beneath the mouth of the book drop back to the front counter. Worried she would throw out her back (as she had several times done over the years), I pushed the bin forward with my foot then reached back and latched the mouth shut.
“Oh, Baby is divine,” I coughed, trying unsuccessfully this time to calm myself with the humor of the secret meaning. “How’s your bright shiny penny?” I asked. Suddenly I would have liked to talk of nothing more than the simple joy of cocker spaniels for the duration of our shift together. I needed something soft and undiscerning to nuzzle up against. I was a jumpy wreck.
“Well, aside from her midnight encounter with a skunk, Penny’s great. I got the tomato juice, everything’s fine!”
“Is Siobhan here?” I asked, for in truth I only wished I could endure the innocence of more canine chitchat. In truth, I was guilty and the guilty want to be unburdened; talk of innocence only weighs us down.
“Mmmm hmmm,” Nella nodded, softly grunting as she heaved a large stack of art books from the bin and set them on the counter. “She’s putting out the newspapers. All the news that’s fit to print.”
I stowed my belongings and carefully attached my magnetic name tag to the rather close-fitting black sweater I had purchased a month prior but had never worn. Nella began checking the art books in, lifting each one with both hands then placing the barcode under the scanner’s red light. Without varying her cadence, she added, “Someone was here to see you the other day.”
“Who?”
“I don’t remember her name. Lily something or other. It was the mother of that boy.”
I suppr
essed the urge to ask “Which boy?” for I feared Nella’s reproach: You know very well which boy.
Besieged by pleasure in the company of the young man I had managed to blot Violet from my consciousness but now it was difficult to forget her. It seemed inevitable that we should encounter one another.
Siobhan returned from the bathroom, where every librarian promptly goes after putting out papers in order to wash the newsprint off her hands. I took refuge in the sight of her. Her hair too looked freshly washed and I saw her for an instant as she must have looked at eighteen, with a toss of her clean hair, winking a solitary green eye at whomever pleased her.
“Hey there, sexy librarian lady!”
“Very funny,” I said a bit glumly, for though I was eager to move on from Nella’s softly accusatory comment, I felt once more the awful sensation of being on an island unfathomably far from Siobhan, leagues of ocean separating us and neither of us well-equipped to swim. I lurched forward to receive her embrace (Siobhan was such a lover, I certainly could have fallen for her in another life.) and ventured to change, if only in my own brain, the subject.
“Do you mind if I work in the children’s room today?” I asked. The two of them looked at me patiently as members of an audience.
“What’s goin’ on?” Siobhan asked.
“Just tired,” I said and scuffled away. In truth, I was frightened by the possibility that Mother or Son or both would whirl through the library like moral hurricanes and derange my well-ordered world.
I sat at the desk of the children’s librarian and gazed in wonder and dismay at the juvenile collection. It troubled me to recall that when I applied for the position I was asked to fill out a CORI form (whose name I always horribly imagined was the name of a dead child whose violation had not been prevented) which was then used to verify that I had never been convicted of molesting a child. I had told the truth when I described myself as innocent of such a crime. It was only years after the form was filed and made legal, only two days prior, that, unbeknownst to my employers, I had committed one of the crimes that might have barred me from being offered the position. I was not troubled by what in retrospect seemed a lack of self-knowledge—this I found heartening if anything, heartening with a teaspoon of excitement thrown in, nor was I (though perhaps I should have been) troubled by the fact that according to the law I had committed a crime. What troubled me was that in some roundabout, retroactive way, I had lied or was lying as I continued to work with the clean CORI on file. You see, despite everything, I am an honest person with a conscience, a detail-oriented person (as opposed to a detail-oriented librarian) troubled by such discrepancies.
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness Page 9