I picked up an illustrated copy of The Mysterious Island from the cart and walked slowly toward the V’s. It occurred to me that the young man had likely read more children’s books than adult books. Which books did he love? Did he adore Jules Verne as I had? Was he a Hardy Boys boy? Had he too loved Paddington? Had he read so-called girls’ classics like The Little Princess and The Secret Garden? Did he prefer fiction or non? Did he read when he was sad or happy or both? The questions still came to me like mantras I intoned to myself, beads I touched repeatedly in a circular fashion. I would have to submit to him my evergrowing list. Astonishing that I could now ask him anything.
While meditating upon our new proximity, it dawned on me that his phone number was in the library database. How could I have forgotten? I had entered the numbers myself. I turned away from the cart and glanced nervously at the monitor. Why shouldn’t I have his phone number? God knew I had little else. Yet phone numbers seemed the provenance of honest people, those who loved the people they had promised they would love and who had therefore earned the right to contact them directly. There was, after all, something public about a phone number. Most appeared in the phone book and all existed in digital form in some ethereal library and could be, if only by public machines, easily recognized. Shelve the bloody cart already.
When I had placed the last book in its proper place, I promptly rewarded myself with a visit to the library database. I swiftly typed in his name, clicked on “Patron” then “Information” then “Phone.” Voilà. Though there were neither children nor adults in the juvenile room to witness my breach of privacy (so minor in comparison to the breach I’d committed in the woods), I trembled as I wrote his number down, my heart racing as I stuffed the scrap of paper into my blazer pocket. You ought to be frightened! I scolded myself as I remembered his number was also Violet’s—I had learned this the first day and forgotten. I searched for The Days of Abandonment. AVAILABLE. One of them had returned the book in my absence. I felt a tinge of sadness and an odd sense of reprieve. Untoward as it may sound, I’d been looking forward to chatting with Violet about it. I didn’t know whether to thank God for relieving me of what was becoming a rather complicated duty or to begin pining at once for her return.
At closing time, as was often the case, Kitty slipped out without any of us noticing, followed by Siobhan, myself (for though I moved at a leisurely pace, I hated to be last, to be responsible for locking the door), and finally Nella who had to be informed that the library was now closing, so involved she was in the cutting of gingerbread men out of brown construction paper. As I stood holding the locked door open for her I could not help but pat my pocket for the phone number. It was an unconscious gesture, made as if the hidden scrap were a passport or a large bill, something I was terrified of losing. Nella shoved her cheese puffs into a sailcloth tote and swiped her hands against her cream-colored cords. There was a moment when, with the exception of Kitty, all of us were standing in the door together like a cozy and promising coterie that, as we stepped into the anonymous night, then dispersed like a group of strangers to become part of it. We called our goodbyes over our shoulders.
As my co-workers drifted in separate directions toward their cars, I walked slowly toward the opening in the trees. I had always been the librarian who lingered, the one in no particular hurry to leave. Tonight I felt acutely the need to stay and talk. I pretended to rearrange the contents of my tote and watched them go: willowy, wisecracking, well-brushed Siobhan; woolly-haired Nella with her soft, sheeplike shoulders and opaque blue eyes; and hurried, preoccupied, gum-chewing Kitty in her tattered leopard-skin coat, already entering a number into her mobile phone, a lit cigarillo trembling between her first two fingers.
“I’m in love!” I wanted to shout at them! “We made love in the woods!” I would announce it with glee in the spirit of camaraderie, as if the making of love was, like the making of cookies, something librarians regularly announced to one another. “It was fantastic! He’s seventeen!” I screamed the words in silence at their backs. One by one in quick succession their car doors slammed above the asphalt. I may as well have been standing on the Crimean coast looking out at the Black Sea at three infinitesimal skiffs on the horizon. “It’s true,” I whispered as I turned to go, as much to the snow-touched trees as to the librarians.
* * *
The young man and I met Friday mornings. If a librarian asked me to sub a Friday, I refused without deliberation; they were refusals for which I felt no guilt, only a flash of terror at the possibility that I would be detained. Meeting once weekly required that we withstand six-day intervals of separation. My fear that he would one day fail to appear was so strong that those intervals were agonizing. I think now it was the perfect schedule for two people such as ourselves, though at the time I felt it was never enough. Not once did I tire of him, not once did he impinge upon my daily routine. Fleeting as our pulse-quickening encounters may have been, they were, I see now, dependable as an old Burberry.
During our intervals of separation, I thought of nothing else. I wanted more of him but couldn’t figure out how to get it. Alternately I tried to stop wanting him but couldn’t figure that out either. From Friday to Friday I dreamed of him—long, rapturous, yet unimaginative dreams in which I was highly aroused and in impossibly complex, drawn-out pursuit of him. Always, our lovemaking—sometimes pleasantly, sometimes maddeningly—was being deferred. And always, I would wake with a sunny, floaty feeling of euphoria that was then darkened by the thunderclap complaint: Why can’t I at least dream of having him?! I was, as much as a married librarian could be, utterly wedded to the idea of loving him.
Walking to work on other mornings, when I approached Music Street, it took all my remaining willpower not to turn left and at night I fell asleep to thoughts of how I might scale the attic wall and run, wearing camouflage, like a hunter to the dark woods. Morning or night, he wouldn’t have been there, yet I felt vexed to go, as if somewhere beneath the foundation of the gray house lay a volcanic stone that was exerting a magnetic influence upon me, upon us, our very own Hanging Rock. Indeed I had to imagine that he was feeling the pull too, though most of the time, I didn’t dare ask. When, on occasion, I posed some question regarding his feelings about me, he grew so quiet I felt I had trespassed upon his most fundamental right to privacy and in so doing silenced him.
He seemed to have found another way in through the woods, a route more compatible with his mysterious starting point. I never asked him to show me the path; I assumed it was one of the ancient ways. That each of us should travel separately and alone to converge upon the house pleased me. The illicit nature of our affair made it impossible for me to walk with him in public or in the woods with its secret maze of paths, for on a small island, such paths are akin to backstreets and to be seen with him there would have been scandalous. I was accustomed to walking alone in nature; it had a ravishing effect on me whereas in the presence of others the natural world made me jumpy. To this day I hardly know how I withstood the pleasure of those Fridays—first the walk alone in the woods, then my tryst with the young man—week after week that swift and double ravishment.
He was a quick study. Quiet. Modest. Watchful. Though he never took the liberty of making eye contact for the duration, the way some lovers unnervingly do, plucking that easy intensity like an unripe fruit for the fun of it, simply to feel the force of nature, or perhaps to see minute images of themselves in the eyes of another. He paid close attention to my responses, to my eyelids and fingernails, to the pulse in the skin of my neck, the bridge of my back arching over the rough mattress as he held it, his trembling hands impressive as any truss. He paid the sort of attention a child devotes to an instrument he intends to master; he touched me as if I were an expensive and breakable instrument. After a few lessons, he was able to produce the desired effect. I became, as instruments often do in the hands of children, an extension of his own body. I imagine he knew how to please me as well a
s he knew how to please himself.
Once he overcame his initial shyness, he did everything I asked with unsettling degrees of intelligence and athleticism. At times that potent mix in such a young man frightened me. I felt it was inevitable that he should surpass me. I was a mother who imparted everything I knew about how to love, believing that in the end her child would use his carefully learned skills to love the World and not the Original, not the Mother, that First in a sequence who, like the match that lights the fire, soon reaches the end of her short stick. And why not? Not even the thought of death could stop me from loving him, from wanting to impart to him all that existed within me pertaining to love. Aren’t all mother-child relationships made with that same bittersweet substance: the old earth mixed with the new, held together by that necessary, heartbreaking element of send-off? Ultimately, I wanted him to love the World, to start fires with the others, to burn brightly in the distance long after I was cold ash. Those who think one takes a young lover to escape thoughts of death are mistaken.
His lips were shaped like Maria’s. Yes, rather ironically, they too were reminiscent of the Gerber baby of yesteryear: their slight pucker, their slight pout, the open mouth, irresistible to feed. How intently he would drag them across my stomach, then up to the sternum that covered, but could not conceal, my beating heart. I imagine his youthful ears were acute enough to hear its perilous pounding. He would rest his lips there lightly, as if speaking to me through a closed door, before rushing to my breasts, to my dark nipples that had by that time long since risen up to meet him, his lips, his teeth, his tongue. It was another joy of winter, the desire—so persistent and actual—to be devoured by warmth. Two hands, a body, a mouth. The sudden warmth of human touch was so surprising. That it was in winter, that the touch was his, only increased my delight.
At risk of sounding crude as a white-haired empress with her black-haired houseboy, I could hardly believe my luck. And I was luckier still, for I had no riches to offer him and he no orders to obey my commands. I had not bought him off the auction block with a sack of gold or inherited him at last from the ancestors; there had been no contract between warring nations condemning him to my company. He had come to me of his own accord. He had been given to me—he had given himself to me—and I did not know why.
Never before had I gazed so raptly at a lover’s beauty. Being the woman, I had always been gazed at. I was never so admiring of men as they were of me. But perhaps it was more than that. If I had perceived beauty would I not have gazed at it or at least wanted to? I have no memory of either. Had age made youth more beautiful to me, the way one’s childhood acquires a brighter light as the mind dims, or was the young man simply the most beautiful specimen I had ever encountered?
His stomach was flat as a new school desk and as bare. No scribbles, no scars, only the faintest line of black hair that began at the base of his concave belly button then disappeared into his trousers as if into a hidden future. A great scar from the past nestled just below the belt, as if everything of significance—past, present, and future—lay concealed beneath his American jeans.
He smelled deliciously of freshly laundered clothes and the English toffee that was in fact his chewing tobacco. His skin took on the scent of clean cotton and the vanilla scent of one who bakes cakes often; the smell of woodsmoke was always in his hair. His gentle manner and his shyness gave him the appearance of being docile though I soon found that he also possessed within himself, like the delicate but certain stone within some fruits, an obdurate core. I rather loved that stone of his, the way I loved all pits I had extracted from fruit with my tongue. At his core he was obdurate yet shaggy with sweetness. One could pry the hardness open and find within it unexpected fragrances and pleasing shapes, the way one discovers the scent of almond inside a plum’s heart. The stone inside him protected us. It prevented him from disappearing into nothingness and it prevented me from devouring him whole.
So the voluptuous pouring of pleasure continued. What was absurdly quenching and satisfying that first morning became a natural state of affairs on the Friday mornings that followed. It was as I had sensed it would be: like some lavishly ornate fountain, my cup was overflowing. My blindness was complete, my attention span Proustian, the taste of said madeleine endlessly delicious. I wanted nothing more than to return to it, go over it, taste it, and remember.
* * *
And then one afternoon, as if she’d had a glass of good wine before leaving the house (her face warm, her eyes tranquil), as she dropped her books in, Violet said hello to me. For a moment all my sins were forgotten. I stared in disbelief at my tooth-sized nugget. Hello. It fairly gleamed in the pan. Greedy for more, I plunged my pan back into the river.
“Hello,” I said, “how are you?” She did not reply but nodded at me in Japanese fashion before turning toward the stairs.
I pounced at once upon her returned items. It was a grim selection. One was the Dostoevsky on CD that the young man had borrowed for her. They must have renewed it several times with another librarian—each renewal, to my fanatical mind, a brute infidelity. The item was terrifying and titillating at once, an object each of us had held in turn, a material witness to the current that ran between the three of us. The other was a cloth edition of The House of Mirth whose somewhat flaky gold title produced in me a pang of concern for Violet’s (and by extension the young man’s) financial standing. Lily Bart’s sad story would have been sadder still if she’d had a child.
My mind turned to Violet in the basement below. What would she borrow? What, if anything, did she know? Being alone at the desk made it more difficult to endure the brief wait for her return. There were no other patrons to distract me. I could have used a good glass myself. In a most biddy-ish manner, I began to fidget. I sharpened several pencils, cut squares of scrap paper with the metal paper cutter, affixed stickers to a cart of new cookbooks. (The director never ceased to impress me with her ongoing ability to anticipate what was to come, whether it was a great influx of summer patrons or a surge of interest in cookbooks in the dead of winter. If I could have seen the future that clearly and without flinching, I too might have been in a position of power.)
“Hello, Angel,” I said, extremely grateful to Alberta Angelone, for I had run out of cookbooks and she was a favorite. She drove public buses for a living, I was a bus rider, and we had both been raised Catholic—that was enough for us. She let me call her Angel. “How are you?”
“Hi, honey. I couldn’t be happier. She’s got a new one out,” she said, grinning at the Danielle Steel she had placed on the counter.
Violet stepped up behind her like a girl alone, waiting in line for a film, the young man there in her eyes, watching me.
As Angel turned to leave, I reddened. Violet breasted her book. There was an awkward pause in which she stepped forward but did not place it on the counter.
“Would you like to have tea sometime?” she asked.
Once more I felt sharply my inability to predict the future. Thinking I couldn’t possibly have heard her correctly I answered breezily, “Oh yes. I drink tea all day in fact. It reminds me of,” and here I nearly said “home” but that wasn’t true so I revised, “it reminds me of days gone by.”
Her cheeks looked as though someone in the basement had been pinching them. Perhaps she had had a glass before coming. She looked on the verge of laughter, her eyes swimming in a new wash of impishness. I was baffled, happy, and not a little concerned.
“Oh! Do you mean we would drink the tea together?” I asked. What an imbecile! Why was this happening to me now? Why not the year previous? Our timing couldn’t have been more wrong.
“I thought we might, some people do you know. But if tea is a solitary act for you I understand.”
“No! I mean it is (I couldn’t lie) and yet I’d like nothing more than to share it with you.” Idiot! Tea with the Mother of One’s Seventeen-Year-Old Lover was ideally suited for a
nightmare. Tea?! Oh God, better make it wine.
“Good,” she said, still embracing her book. It was not until we had agreed to meet at Plum Island Provisions at 8:30 on the following Wednesday that she placed it on the counter.
It was Ethan Frome. Why was it every book she checked out provoked pity or concern in me?
“This is a marvelous book,” I said too loudly, feeling a bit flushed, yes, a bit warm and tipsy myself now.
“I’ve been reading a lot more now that we’ve closed up shop. (The we of her sentence lodged in my throat and nearly asphyxiated me.) I’d love to talk with you about books over tea if you don’t mind. I don’t mean to assume that you read just because you’re a…”
“Oh but I do! I’m ashamed to say it’s nearly all I do in my spare time. It would be a great adventure for me to talk about books instead of just reading them.” And yet I’d already embarked on one great adventure, did I really have room in my life for two? Despite the flashing red lights I saw up ahead, the sirens I heard in the distance, I was eager to go forth.
“To adventure,” she said, holding Ethan Frome up in a toast.
* * *
Once I had taken my friend’s son as a lover, I had to cope with the problem of secrecy. As long as I did not become pregnant (perhaps I deluded myself about such an outcome, thinking I was still fertile, going at once to the doctor for pills), it was the kind of behavior one could in theory conceal for a lifetime, a secret someone less effusive than myself could easily have taken to the grave, and yet I saw immediately that I might not be up to the task. I was skilled at keeping secrets but what I had previously kept so well were the secrets of others. I didn’t know how to keep my own secrets and it seemed paramount that I should learn.
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness Page 10