Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

by Jennifer Tseng

  Not far beneath the grassy slope of his gentle, well-mannered exterior lived a well of pure rage. Its origins were unknown to me; whether they were present in him at birth or had found and surrounded him as he grew, a gang of external forces that wouldn’t relent, I didn’t know. Had he been older, I might have been frightened by it. As it was, I felt only compassion and, at times, a twinkle of amusement. I liked his rage, it excited me. It lived in his eyes, and helped equalize us. His humor was very tied up with it. Like his eyes, his rage was cutting and dark. I would not have wanted to be on the wrong side of it. I pitied the poor person who was, if there was such a person. Likely he was his own primary target. He was not a malicious person but I’m convinced that someone, at least one, had wronged him and that he expected to be wronged again at any moment. I had never known anyone more defensive than myself so I had a special sympathy for him. His bitterness was like black tea. It didn’t deter me. On the contrary I wanted to pour into it heaps of milk and sugar and then drink.

  Our confessions, our picnics, everything took place in the loft. It was a place of suspension and yet time always intervened. Time resided in the silver face of my Omega which was the size and color of ten pence and which I set under my half of the pillow while we made love. I muffled time’s voice with linen, I gagged it with down, I hushed time with the plush black hairs on my head, the weight of my encyclopedic brain, until the sunlight snowing upon the floorboards downstairs told me that it was time to let the ticking be heard and the numbered face seen. But before then, while we loved, I rid myself of all thoughts of it. For what could I possibly gain by remembering the face on which the future was so clearly drawn, the voice whose insistent sameness was both eternal and forever threatening to cease? I wanted only to remember the face of the young man and glimpse for a moment the double reflection of my own panting visage in the dark inlets of his eyes.

  The loft was a place of surrender, abandonment. The only struggle there was moral. We laid our bodies down the way some lay down arms or ideas. In the physical act our only struggle was the struggle to repeat. The slats of the inverted triangle were ingeniously designed to allow a small amount of light to enter without allowing our eyes to see out. We were blind to the woods, blinder still to the world outside them. Our nearest audible neighbor was a male cardinal whose bright red body we glimpsed outside now and then, a fist of fire burning in the air as we came and went. I loved to see him alight, apple-like, on a tree that was covered in snow. He was like us: his heartbeat swift, his visits fleeting, his face flushed and festive in the cold. Although there were human indicators (car motors, the smell of wood smoke, the blast of a shotgun, the buzz of a chainsaw, the faint and solemn dong of the distant town clock) not once from our suspended isle did we hear the sound of another human voice.

  By midwinter we had begun fearlessly lighting the wood-stove downstairs. The young man arrived early to chop wood and I, upon arriving, immediately set about building the fire. As a child he had played alone in the orchard next to his house and the woods, in which he had spent countless solitary hours, were home to him. Any labor that brought him outside he seemed to view as a respite from confinement, a chance to commune with beauty, and so he was perfectly content to chop the firewood though it was physically demanding.

  I, with my kindling and moxie, was somewhere between a Wampanoag sending celebratory smoke signals to an uncomprehending world and the kind of small-time criminal who neglects to wear gloves when opening a safe. But in truth I thought none of this until much later. I confess that the obvious fact of stoves leading to chimneys that transport and then expel smoke visible to the human eye virtually escaped me. Gone was Miss Marple checking for footprints in the snow, gone the discreet librarian who lived in fear of being found out.

  Here were ill-sorted lovers for whom time was a sensitive matter and for whom pleasure had become an urgent priority. Here was an adventuresome boy who would soon finish high school and a celibate mother who had marked five years of estrangement from the same lacquered, moustachioed man. We, who had once been so tentative when expressing our desires, so shy about nudity, so willing to suffer for the sake of discretion, now refused the physical discomfort that had thus far been a hallmark of our lovemaking. We surrendered to warmth, to comfort, to imagination, to the satisfaction of building our own fire in our own stove in our own home. By which I mean we began to pretend that the house and everything in it belonged to us.

  We took possession of the house gradually; we began by adding our own small objects to it. The young man brought a blue ceramic bird whose back was a receptacle and he set it like a family heirloom on the windowsill next to the table downstairs. I brought a secondhand, leaf green tablecloth, cross-stitched with pink and red roses, trimmed with white lace, and smoothed it over the table. He set an orange and white canister of amaretti upon the tablecloth. I filled it with Flower’s Kiss candy. For our slim pillow, I sewed a case out of the gray linen that I had bought in Japan and had been saving for more than a decade for a “special occasion.” He laid down a flax-colored flannel sheet that I covered with a white down comforter.

  Every Friday, toward 2:00, by some feat of intuition or fear, I would feel compelled to unmuffle the watch, as if it would otherwise suffocate. Then the ticking would become audible again, like a bomb recently discovered, and I would strap it to myself once more and prepare to meet the world without him. Though in truth, the unwanted face of the watch became an emblem of him that accompanied me, so that even in my most morbid states—thinking of death, thinking of separation—he was part of the fabric of this thinking and so thinking such thoughts was a strange pleasure. I was, as it were, duly wrapped in them as I walked the snowy streets of the town.

  * * *

  Meanwhile (even now I despise the notion of a meanwhile in the context of the young man; it is with a sadness that I compel myself to utter it), in the actual apartment whose walls were uninsulated and many of whose windows were cracked and let winter air in even when we closed them, Maria and I bundled ourselves in freshly laundered quilts (painstakingly made and relinquished only in death by my mother) and watched Charlie Chaplin films while Var kept himself in his room. He sat whittling away before his desk of apple crates, the portable heater hissing just centimeters away so that I could not relax and watch a film without at least once imagining his entire menagerie, along with the desk, going up in flames, bringing an end to us all.

  Maria and I could not agree on a favorite so we alternated between her favorite, The Kid and my favorite, City Lights. When it came to The Kid, we both identified with Chaplin, the lone person who comes upon a baby and feels obligated to care for it, the any person who quite absurdly falls into parenthood. When it came to City Lights, our identifications diverged. She wanted to be the blind flower seller and I could not help but be the tramp who woos her without being seen; I use her blindness to my advantage for I fear that if she were to see me she could never love me as I really am.

  In my relationship with the young man, he too was the flower seller and I, again, was the tramp. His blindness was youth and I feared that when the day came that he was no longer young, he would see me as I really was and turn away. Like the flower seller he wouldn’t recognize me at first, like the flower seller he would be kind. But he would see me as through a plate glass window from inside a heated, well-lit shop that looked out onto a cold, gloomy street where I would be lumbering along on my way to the bus stop, a book in translation in my gloved, arthritic hand.

  Then again, I too was blind. He could have been a murderer and I might not have seen. He could have easily pulled the wool over my eyes if he’d wished. These fears coursed through me as I held Maria and laughed at the films. We laughed together as I thought of him. It was as close as I came to confiding in someone, as close as I came to sharing with another my fear of and love for the young man.

  We made popcorn and hot chocolate, gingerbread and oatcakes, all the quickes
t and most satisfying things. Thursday evenings, I reserved a small portion of whatever we had made and discreetly tucked it into my cloth bag while Maria was brushing her teeth, though my baked goods were never as good as his. Our oven was unreliable and I was less patient. These were my excuses in any case. Perhaps he had simply surpassed me. I sometimes felt I had another child hidden away to whom I brought food in secret. Other times the young man was more akin to the child who lives in the closet so that the town can have its happiness. Our happiness—mine, Maria’s, and even Var’s—now depended on him.

  It was his love that allowed me to tolerate living in the apartment and my contentment with him that prevented me from leaving. There was, in that wintry apartment, a deadlock between us, one it seemed only I could break, for Var was not the sort to break things. I was the sort who did though I tired of it, I was tired of being the one taking an axe to the frozen sea of our love. The axe was heavy and the sea endless. I was tired and sometimes, I confess, I wanted him to suffer. I didn’t care if I did too. I turned my back on our frozen sea and let it grow colder still.

  With the British edition of For Esmé––With Love and Squalor on my dresser, the room looked different, the frameless bed, the bruised walls bandaged by Maria’s drawings, the windows that gave out onto the silent, snow-covered garden. The American island upon which I had felt such desolation, such resignation, became the place where locked windows were opened and lost vistas found. I was an enviable woman, a bewildered, perimenopausal, libido-high librarian suddenly in love with my life.

  * * *

  Thursdays I invariably found myself in a heightened state of agitation, brooding upon my future. If Fridays were the grand vista, the bright expanse of the sea in every direction, and Saturdays were the hard push down the rocky backside of the mountain, then Thursdays were the final ascent. I felt the exhaustion and light-headed anticipation that results from a week of strenuous climbing.

  One such morning, warming myself in the cold, tomb-like basement with thoughts of the young man, I looked up from the old British novel I was weeding to find Violet standing before me. Much (too much) had happened since our tea date. Chances were, either her son had confessed or she’d pieced things together herself. Convinced she knew my secret, I prepared myself for reprisal.

  Although she was about my height, she seemed to be looking down at me, her suffering, rifle brown eyes cocked, accusing. She was wearing the same rifle brown sweater whose cowl neck crept close to her mouth. It was a thin-lipped and delicate, reddish-colored mouth, very different from her son’s. His pale and sensual pouting lips must have come from the drifting father. The skin of her face was lighter than my own mother’s and smooth as a fresh oval of chèvre. The young man’s dark beauty mark was missing from it.

  Perhaps I should have been startled to see her. I suppose my physiological response—my quickening pulse, a rapid yet thudding heartbeat, the vertical lines of sweat that were traveling at an alarming rate from each of my armpits down my sides (yes I was literally sweating with fear)—matched that of one who is having a startling encounter. But my thinking self, the one that read books and composed questions, drew clever analogies and made dire predictions, that self was not at all surprised to see her at last stalking me in the basement. I was surprised she had not come sooner. I expected punishment of some kind, possibly violence.

  I picked up the book—it was Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust—and held it to my chest, protecting my most vital organ. I felt incapable of arguing with her. She had every right to feel betrayed. There was a cold silence that could easily be perceived even in the library.

  “Hello, Violet.”

  “Hi. You okay?”

  “Yes. May I help you with something?” At last resorting to the language of servitude, my inner housekeeper meekly took charge.

  “Yes, thanks. I was hoping you might have another recommendation. I loved those books you gave me.” She hadn’t come to hunt me, she had come to hunt books. I could hear it in her voice.

  “I’m so glad.” I was safe. “What did you love about them?” I dived into Conscientious Librarian protocol.

  “They were intense. Bold and transgressive and strange. I read them in one sitting.”

  “Me too! Oh, Violet, I have the perfect book for you.” Following CL protocol tended to empower me. No sooner had I passed through the first circle of suffering than I felt primed to enter another.

  I walked guilelessly to the N’s, pulled down a book, and handed it to her. What was it about Mother and Son that made me want to leap wildly in their direction?! High upon my lonely cliff, staring down at the lazuline blue of them, I was suicidal.

  “Have you read Lolita?” I asked.

  “No, I’ve always avoided it.” Her eyelashes fluttered every so slightly. She was internal, understated, yet curiously expressive, with the silent potency of a church altar. “Isn’t it about a pedophile who kills someone?”

  “Well, technically yes, though I think of it more as a story about forbidden love.” Sinking rapidly into a sea of my own making, I cast about for a viable defense of Nabokov’s masterpiece. The famous Vanity Fair line (which leapt into my brain like a man trying and failing to save me from drowning) “the only convincing love story of the 20th century,” seemed, in Violet’s presence, phony and inappropriate.

  “Why do you like it?”

  “It’s queer. It tells the story from the queer person’s point of view.”

  “Are you saying that being queer and being a pedophile are somehow similar?”

  “No! Of course not. I just mean he captures what it’s like to be in the queer person’s position, the person whose desires are criminalized.”

  She stepped closer to me and whispered, “You’re not gay, are you?” If only I could have answered honestly in the affirmative my problems would have been solved (only to be instantly replaced by a barrelful of others).

  “No! What I mean to say is…”

  “May, you don’t have to explain. If you think it’s a good book, I’ll read it. I trust you.”

  Violet hugged Lolita to her chest, she buried the sulky nymphette in her sweater. “Do you have time for tea next week?” she asked cozily.

  “Of course. Which day would be best?”

  “How about Friday? We can discuss forbidden love over Earl Grey.” She gave me a sultry Rachel Ward half smile.

  “Oh,” I said. “Actually Fridays are difficult.” Actually Fridays were easy, actually Fridays were the best thing about my life because actually every Friday if I wasn’t reading a book in translation I was bedding her son.

  I hesitated.

  “Here.” She scribbled her number redundantly on a piece of scrap paper and handed it to me. “Give me a call if you have time. I’d love to catch up.”

  * * *

  I have always been someone for whom winter never lasts long enough and that winter was far from an exception. Cold has never bothered me, it is darkness I hate. Winter is a season that improves with every passing day; it is when it is at its best that it ends. Far worse than winter’s cold or fall’s darkness is spring’s incessant buzz of activity, its sense—even on the quietest days—of fanfare and commotion, which one feels more acutely on an island known to travelers for its beauty. Meanwhile, there are those around me who rely on the idea of spring’s inevitable return to carry them through the cold months. Conversations turn to the natural world: birds being seen and heard for the first time in months, bulbs rising from their dark beds, the smell of blossoms. Don’t worry, spring’s almost here! patrons and co-workers alike say with smiles that, like light clothing, they had almost forgotten they had. Their happiness is as palpable as my dread.

  That winter, more than any other, I was snowbound. I was Eskimo. Love was an igloo built with the most obscure blocks of blue-tinted ice; it existed in a polar region invisible to the rest of the world. The same cold
that made it necessary was also what sustained it. When at times the harsh winds of Reality threatened to blow me in a more practical direction, I threw on a bearskin rug and dove back into the igloo, determined to spend my winter with the young man, lighting our love from within. I no longer feared being discovered, I only feared the proliferation of water droplets running down the inner walls of the pleasure dome, I feared the very heat of us would melt the house down.

  Indeed, I felt a terrible sense of urgency when I thought of the coming of spring. The slow drumbeat that would lead us closer to the onslaught of summer, the blossoms, all those exotic emblems of youth and sexuality that would alter the very air we breathed, and worst of all—I had once been an academic, I knew the spring calendar well—the many acceptance letters typed on university letterhead that would arrive in the mailboxes of high school students everywhere, notifying them of their fate and by extension the fates of those close to them. The young man had not mentioned applying to schools but I remembered clearly the time he had spent typing at the library computer and was sure that this had been the task that he had so swiftly and steadily accomplished, sure that I had aided him in moving closer to that which would bring him further away from me.

  But while it lasted, when one boiled it down, winter was everything. I say boiled, for in no other season will you find such extreme heat: gas, electricity, wood fires, the steam of hot soup and tea, the electric neon green of the moss underfoot after a heavy rain. The white sea of winter surrounded us with a silence I had waited months to hear. The gray sky of it cast a shadow I never wanted to get out from under. Winter lasted three months and winter was endless. Every winter to follow—every season—was touched by it. Winter announced the heat of every living being: the tiny red hearts of birds who had not yet flown north, pumping triumphantly their fluttering eyedroppers of blood; the hands of children, busy and dumb in their mittens: the sweaty groins of gardeners under their stiff, muddy layers; the clean hands of chefs as they sliced and stirred; even within the decaying mouths of the oldest islanders, their pink tongues were warm in comparison. And if the others were warm, we in our loft were tropical, our isle afloat, on fire, ephemeral, and yet, an absurdly sensible destination in a world so cold.