Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

by Jennifer Tseng

  Transgression has a scent. One wears it like a perfume and there are those who smell it immediately. During the course of my affair with the young man, countless patrons confessed to me their crimes. Thierry Lambert’s wife was the nanny for whom he had left his first wife, Joe Fischer had been banished from the priesthood for his love affair with an altar boy, and Linda Cardo continued to meet with her childhood sweetheart in an off-island hotel where they drank Chianti and floated in the indoor pool. Why tell me? Why not any of the other librarians? I’m convinced I wore the perfume of transgression and that transgressors were drawn to it, perhaps even comforted by it. I was their kind.

  I kept my secret well; there was no one but Maria to notice my change of mood, no one to question me but Violet and she had thus far remained silent on the subject. I exerted an inordinate amount of effort to conceal from every person I encountered the reason for my joy. Perhaps if someone had asked me, my cork would have flown skyward and I would have bubbled over in a celebratory confession, but no one did.

  There were days when I could not stand having nothing to show for our efforts. A secret has the power to nullify its own reality. But the opposite is true as well. A secret reality can override all other realities; indeed there were days when secrecy was its own reward, days it became its own vital organ of pleasure.

  As for the one person with whom I could have spoken freely—the young man—I imagine his experience of secrecy was quite different from mine, that the stifling of his joy—if in fact he too felt joy—came naturally and caused in him no inner conflict. I rather think he enjoyed harboring our erotic secret, not only because he was taciturn by nature but because the presence of regular and abundant sex with a stranger means something quite different for a seventeen-year-old boy than for a forty-one-year-old married librarian. Then too, secrecy breeds secrecy. That we shared a secret perhaps inspired us to keep other secrets from one another. Had he told his friends indiscriminately about us, I don’t think I could have borne knowing and perhaps he would not have been able to bear the fact that I told no one. He might have mistook my secrecy for a lack of passion or commitment and I his lack of secrecy for the very same.

  My silence on the subject of the young man was a nunlike feat of discipline which may seem to run counter to my otherwise undisciplined choice to love him; it is true that every coin has two sides. Before her housekeeping days, my mother was of the Cistercian order, but once released she spoke effusively as a priest in a pulpit to absolutely anyone who came her way: bus drivers, petrol station attendants, people in waiting rooms or on tube platforms, whether they listened or not did not seem to concern her. In its ceaselessness, her chatter was a kind of silence, just as my secret turned inward was an expression of information—utterances; his voice, continuous, tympanic; his face at certain moments; his dark eyes biding their time; his soft mouth crushing itself against mine—that never ceased within me. My silence became one with my ability to remember; each one made the other possible.

  * * *

  It was the young man who began our tradition of bringing books to the gray house. One Friday he asked, “What did you used to do on your day off?” It touched me that he should have the slightest concept of my Fridays having been different before, the notion that there was perhaps something I had given up in order to see him. A man twice his age might not have grasped this and if he had, he might not have cared.

  “Read,” I answered. And the following Friday he brought with him two book lights and two books, a cloth edition of Moby-Dick for himself (show-off!), and a British paperback edition of For Esmé––With Love and Squalor and Other Stories for me, which, despite my years of library experience and my British roots, I did not know was the title in most countries of J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories. Oh, my pubescent professor, my juvenile reader, my paternal, patronal joy!

  “I thought you might like the title story,” he said, easy as you please. Indeed! Was I Esmé or the soldier and who was he? I could have asked, but I only placed the foreign copy on the mattress and began to read. He lay on his back next to me and followed suit, holding Moby-Dick directly above his face like a hand mirror.

  I read For Esmé as if it were the young man’s own collection of nine significant dreams he had recorded and then entrusted to me for a few hours. I, with my thirsty cup, began with the first story and drank deeply of the details. An amateur Jungian, I inserted him in the place of each character and then analyzed the implications. When I had exhausted these possibilities I did the same for myself and for the two of us together.

  What if, contrary to all appearances, the young man was Seymour and I was the girl in the water? What if he was the jaded self-hater and I was innocence personified? Or was I Seymour and he, Muriel? Did he too spend hours chatting with his mother about my shortcomings? Or was he the voice on the phone outside the story, listening in, while I was naked in the hole and trapped there? Was he the mother and I the bananafish, etc.? I read entirely too much into everything and wondered obsessively about the rest.

  Did he love the double meaning of “see more glass” or had he found it too heavy-handed? Had he noticed? If he were to invent a creature that summed up his condition, what would it be? Did he love the sea? (I could not help thinking also of the story that was being held in the air next to me.) Did he love fish and whales? Did he, as Maria did, as most children do, love animals?

  Midway through “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” my frenzy of Jungian suppositions abated and I became keenly aware of my reading companion. Distracted, I switched off my book light. I turned onto my side and observed him under his tiny spray of light. His eyebrows touched as he frowned. The intensity with which he read was one of his most adult qualities. When I thought, with trepidation, of our respective ages, I would remember this and feel reassured. He appeared to be nearly three-quarters of the way through his thick book, a heavyweight next to my feather. Surely his arms were getting tired of holding it up. Then again, he was an athlete and very young; what little I knew of exertion I had learned from him.

  “Where are you?” I asked. My question reverberated out of context in the dim loft. He understood it.

  In that slow and jagged voice that both aroused and terrified me, he read, “But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent, and as human infants will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence; —even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were a bit of Gulfweed in their newborn sight.”

  We were quiet. One could feel the enormous mammalian presence of the whales and their young in the loft with us, the knotty, coarse-grained rafters, now ship-like.

  “Do you remember nursing?” I asked, not intending to insinuate his relative proximity to infancy but doing so nonetheless.

  He confessed with a scarlet, Hawthornian face, “No. Mom only nursed me for three months. Her friend Chuck read somewhere that nursing makes kids stupid so…”

  “He was concerned about your intelligence?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “How long did you nurse Maria?”

  “She’s four.”

  He paused thoughtfully for a few moments, he waited politely for me to finish, and when I said nothing more he started. “You still nurse her?!” He turned to face me, his eyes incredulous, innocent, a little thirsty perhaps.

  “I thought you knew.”

  “How would I know? I’ve never even met her!”

  “Well,” I said gesturing. “Did you think all breasts looked and felt like this?!”
I laughed, a bit incredulous myself now. Certainly mine had never been this large, their nipples never so dark and obvious.

  “That’s not funny,” he said. I was quick to repair the damage.

  “Darling, did you know you’re perfect? Honestly. All this time I’ve felt self-conscious about them and now I can feel at ease.”

  He got up and sat astride me. I thought perhaps all this talk of swollen breasts had aroused him, but he only bent forward and laid his cheek on my chest the way Maria did when she had finished drinking. I can hear your heart, she would say. I used to live there. My heart a familiar bell whose sound she had heard on her small island across the sea of me. Though the young man felt heavy, I lay still, sipping in air when I could, allowing him to crush me, letting him listen to the bell of my heart as it rang out.

  * * *

  Despite (or perhaps because of) feeling burdened by my knowledge of Violet, I would have happily pretended to be his mother if he had made such a desire known to me. As it was, we were not the kind of lovers who indulged in such games. He was not plagued by the unrequited longing for the mother so common in such game players though he liked to play father on occasion. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say he liked to play mother—for he knew very little firsthand about what fathers did, having been raised by his mother alone. He would not have wanted me to count Chuck (Was he still in the picture? Violet had never mentioned him) as a father, calling Charles as he did by that name for a low cut of meat. He would pack a lunch for us and arrange it on the floor atop a red and white cloth he had no doubt taken from Violet’s linen closet (which I imagined was full of Florentine napkins, imported tablecloths, thick bath towels, and rose-print sheets), the phrase “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” at once lovely and sinister, never far from my mind.

  After we had eaten he would put everything away and sweep the floor with a broom that looked as if it had, years ago, been made by hand of sorghum, and which gave him the look of an early American settler, the sort one sees in library books—white blouse, shaggy brown hair, gentle yet adventurous eyes, never any acne.

  Through another’s eyes, his gestures might have looked like those of a child caring for his mother. I admit there were times when I felt I was the arbitrary recipient of a deep, untrammeled affection the expression of which his mother’s temperament perhaps wouldn’t allow. And I confess his brown leather belt with its steel buckle and tooth bore an erotic resemblance to my father’s. In its plain functionality and potential for violence, it was a father’s belt, and the sight of him removing it aroused me. I often thought that if we’d been granted more time, we might have veered into that forbidden territory, a father younger than oneself perhaps easy and thrilling to submit to. But we were remarkably naturalistic in our dealings with one another for our actual roles provided more than enough excitement without any need for us to pretend. Had we both been seventeen or both forty-one we might have played at other roles. As it was we were busy enough being ourselves. We were like foreigners in Japan so consumed by learning Japanese, there was, for us, no possibility of learning other languages.

  I can tell you very little about what was happening on the mainland that winter, much less in the world at large. News came to me via the insular British expatriates patron network that a red neon sign had been installed in Number 10 Downing Street by some artist or other (a middle-aged woman no less) that glowed: More Passion. There was a miraculous, island-wide proliferation of red bumper stickers that bore the message: The Real Revolution Will Be Love. Kay Ryan won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; it was the year of the woman who loves whom she pleases. A new translation of Doctor Zhivago—one of my father’s favorites—was released and read avidly by the public, further evidence that love transcended generation. Finally, there was a flurry of then newly popular, still mind-boggling oxymoronic “raw food cookbooks” which I read as an indicator that people had little time to spare for activities as unnecessary as the cooking of food, so occupied were they by endeavors such as the making of love. I, for one, had lost almost all patience with cooking (It was so time-consuming! How had I ever found a way?), though I suspect the young man had never cooked more.

  Every Friday we were ravenous and it was he who tended to our appetites. Sometimes he brought cold chicken legs (cut from a chicken he had slaughtered and plucked himself before roasting it in butter and herbs) or one-half of a chocolate root beer bundt cake he had baked using skills likely taught to him by his talented mother or by a teacher at school, always a cake that was better than anything I had ever baked and I was not a shabby baker. It was the young man who taught me about the affectionate relationship between root beer and chocolate as well as the power of root beer to help rise a cake. Though I could follow a recipe precisely without difficulty, I knew little about food pairings, especially sweet ones, and less still about fizzy water and chemistry. Mostly he brought soups, which, after sweet things, were his specialty; sometimes one-half of a spinach quiche, sometimes a small chicken pot pie or a round of bread accompanied by a wedge of pale cheese or a jar of pickles. Once he brought a tall green thermos full of pork ramen made from scratch, and I laughed and then cried as I gulped it down. It had been one of the many dishes my mother had learned to cook for my father and the taste of it—both the savory flavor of the broth and the familiar feel of the curly noodles on my tongue—sent me floating back to that first island.

  From the same worn blue backpack that held his homework and schoolbooks, he brought out his weekly offerings. There were tins full of the English nutritive biscuits I had eaten as a child, solemn letters engraved on their smooth faces like epigraphs that said nothing of consequence, and paper-wrapped cookies with crushed almonds for hearts, the blue floral cursive printed in Italian, the familiar letters strung together in a foreign way, so that eating them in his presence I felt at once a sweet sense of at-homeness that I rarely felt anywhere and the delicious terror of inhabiting a country without knowing its food or its language, daily confronted with delicacies I did not understand.

  There were bars of German chocolate that must have cost as much as tickets to the cinema, their outer wrappers painted with delicate landscapes of places I had never been, their inner gold foil concealing dark twin bars lying side by side within. He was like a traveler bringing me souvenirs in that backpack of his, hoping with a taste of sugar or salt to transport me to a world he had known, even if he too had known it only secondhand. I could not help but feel Violet’s presence when he made his offerings. She had almost certainly purchased the items and with other purposes in mind. I felt some measure of guilt for inadvertently depleting her inventory and at the same time I felt happy to be cared for, not only by him but also in some unintentional, meandering way by her.

  During these afternoon teas—with my impassive, ticking wristwatch as our constant companion—we talked about nearly everything, but never about the fact that I had made a vow to love someone else, and never about the future. I told him odd bits about my housekeeper mother and my economist father—her funny habit of sleeping with a pillow over her face, his tendency to treat every surface as if it were a mahogany podium before which he had been invited to stand and deliver an important lecture. I explained my love of the British Library in winter, in particular its collection of illuminated manuscripts, my longstanding affection for the cherry blossom’s many developmental phases.

  He brought an MP3 player and two sets of headphones (including the alarmingly plush black leather set from his early days at the library) and we listened to his favorite songs. He confessed that he dreaded sleep, that when he lay next to me with his eyes closed he was not sleeping but composing music. For him, the words nightmare and dream were interchangeable. Once, after I’d described a dream of mine to him, he said: I like the place of your dreams. I think I could live there.

  He told me his mother had studied English literature for a year at Oxford, that she had left university to study cheese making in France
and had shortly after bought land in South America. She had given birth to him at home; there was a small orchard of Liberty apples beside the two-hundred-year-old house that contained the enormous library that she had inherited from her father who had inherited it from his. The young man bore a whale-tooth-shaped appendix scar eerily identical to my father’s. His mother had taught him to swim in a pond called Ice House whose waters were not always as cold as its name. During the high season he worked for her at P.I.P. (both his nickname for the shop and the name of his favorite literary character). I have a good Mom, he said. Not everyone has that.

  During the off-season he earned money babysitting a neighbor’s child. He dreamed of traveling to California, Antigua, the Riviera, places that were seaside and warm. He had left the island only twice, once to visit relatives in upstate New York and once to attend a Celtics game in Boston. He listened religiously to reggae on Sundays. He was learning to play the guitar, a fact that had the rare effect of bridging momentarily our difference in age. (As a teenager, I had known boys who had done the very same!) All of this was news to me, every bit of it breaking. The more he reported, the more I wanted to know.

  Despite the fact that we never ventured beyond the gray house, his kindness was everywhere evident. I could see it in his eyes and mouth when he spoke of others, in the way he bit his nails when I spoke of anything even mildly difficult. Though I had never seen him bend down to hand money to a beggar or carry an elderly woman’s bags or guide a blind man to safety, I was convinced such acts would be second nature to him. There were times when, in my conviction, I wished I could protect him from the future, from the wider world whose endless suffering would one day assault him. He was unusually attuned to the suffering of others, so much so that I could not help but wonder if his interest in me had been driven by pity, by some pathological impulse to repair suffering and fulfill needs. My needs after all were fairly plain and when my needs were fulfilled I ceased to suffer. Perhaps he sensed the simplicity of my case, how easy I would be to accomplish.