Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

by Jennifer Tseng

  At 8:00 I climbed into bed with Maria as usual. I kept my eyes closed while I waited for her to fall sleep. Once she was asleep I waited the twenty minutes it takes for a sleeper to enter deep sleep (a handy fact gleaned years ago from a parenting book). Then I dressed (I could not allow him to see me in Aunt Tomoko’s lace-trimmed flannelette), raised the window (the screen of which I had discreetly removed earlier that day), placed my feet first on the dryer vent, then on the rain gutter, and finally on the frame of the downstairs window before leaping to safety onto the soft grass.

  A moonlit walk was one of the many famously beautiful things about the island that I had never experienced firsthand. Once I had left the state road and was walking down Music Street, I relaxed a little and began to appreciate this stunning novelty. The birth of Maria had meant the death of (among other things) my acquaintance with the night. Granted, I had never been terribly intimate with the hours of darkness, tending as I had since childhood to rise and retire early, but I had known moonlit walks down piers and avenues, I had beheld the reflection of ships’ lights on the surface of the sea, and more than once I had encountered a starry sky upon exiting a late night concert. One summer there was even a boy with whom I would lie on the grass at night, each of us reading a book by the light of our own torch.

  It also happened that Maria’s birth coincided with our settling into a house surrounded by tall, leafy trees. When on occasion I remembered the moon’s presence and wanted to see it, I had difficulty finding a gap in the dense foliage that would allow me a glimpse. I would flit from room to room, press my face to this window and then that one, craning to see a portion of the moon’s face. (I found myself in a similar predicament that year with regard to the school bus, its vanishing gold flashing red through the trees as fleeting as any fall leaf.) Indeed there were likely more trees on the island than there were books in the library.

  To be out walking on a moonlit night was magnificent, seeing the nearly full moon ringed by a bluish-yellow light akin to seeing a world-famous painting whose existence I had never doubted and yet had never confirmed. It didn’t bother me to be strolling in the moonlight alone. The utter darkness of an island night, even with a moon, affords one a snug feeling of anonymity and the silence of a rural town after dark is rather breathtaking. What an extremely pleasant sensation it was to feel alone in a hushed world, all the while moving closer to the young man.

  When I reached the dirt road, I sprinted to the trailhead then walked the remainder of the way in order to regain my composure. The journey from apartment window to gray house doorstep took eleven minutes. He was already inside the house when I arrived. He had opened and laid upon the floor a green sleeping bag whose tan flannel lining was decorated with hunting scenes, as if we were children playing a camping game. The room was lit by a lantern and smelled of the beef jerky he was eating. He undressed me slowly, as had become his habit, beginning with my shoes and stockings then turning to my blouse and bra, saving, as always, the skirt and underwear for last. Then he kissed me until, unaware of my own cries, I felt his hand gently cover my mouth. We made love quickly. I was tired and aware of the possible peril of falling asleep.

  “Do you prefer making love at night?” I asked.

  He shrugged and then ever so slightly nodded. “It’s better,” he mumbled, shaking the hair out of his eyes, “it feels more like you’re mine.”

  “I am,” I said, at once touched and ashamed that I had ever induced him to feel otherwise.

  Then, in a voice in which I heard the desire to know competing with fear of the very same, he asked, “Do you do this with your husband?”

  “No,” I said, relieved to be telling the truth but afraid he would not believe me.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “I can’t explain it. We’re like two puzzle pieces that don’t fit together anymore.”

  “But you used to?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “The puzzle changed?”

  “Yes, I suppose we’re like pieces of some ever-changing puzzle. Like all the outdated globes in the world. One can feel nostalgia, even affection, for an old globe but there’s no disputing the fact that it’s no longer accurate. It doesn’t tell the truth, it doesn’t match up with reality.”

  “So what do you do with two puzzle pieces that don’t fit together?”

  “What does one with an old globe?”

  “Wait for the world to change?”

  “One can wait quite a long time for the world to change or one can…”

  “Go out and buy a new globe?”

  “You sound as if you’re sympathizing with him.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “I’m sorry everything is so imperfect, so morally corrupt. I truly am. You deserve better.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Not really.”

  “The part about the world changing isn’t my fault but the part about buying the new globe is.”

  “Does it show the way things really are?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It was high time I changed the topic. I was fairly certain that if I did he would not resist. One ought to find something convenient about passivity, oughtn’t one?

  “What will you say to your mother when you arrive home?” I imagined them huddled at a table, murmuring over tea.

  “Nothing. She’ll be asleep.” He made it easy for me, it was part of his endless appeal.

  “What if she wakes?”

  “She won’t. She never wakes up. She has pills to help her sleep and they work pretty well.” The inside of my throat hurt at the thought of Violet nightly ingesting a pill.

  “I better be getting back. But you know I hate to, right?”

  He nodded and stayed lying on the sleeping bag while I dressed. “Goodnight,” he said, stretching kittenlike before me.

  “You’ve never said that to me before.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s very appealing.”

  “Yeah.” He rubbed his eyes.

  “Don’t fall asleep there, drowsy drawers.”

  “I won’t. I’ll get up soon. I’m hungry anyway.” For him, the night was just beginning. There were meals yet to be prepared and eaten, roads to be driven upon, dreams still yet to be dreamed.

  Yet even I, sleepy and perimenopausal, was experiencing the woods as if for the first time. The moon and the night made it new. In the distance I saw the slight silhouette of the property owner. She was walking very slowly, either mildly crippled or severely arthritic, up the hill to the pond where Maria and I had once seen a turtle. There was a large dog at her side. I noted with some concern the absence of her second dog. Perhaps the woman preferred the anonymity of an evening walk. Or perhaps being a dog owner required one to take evening walks. I knew very little about evening walks and less still about dogs. The dog barked. Both the woman and I paused. Then she continued on in her slow way up the hill and I, still flushed with pleasure and nervously panting, sprang into action, giddy with the speed and strength of my legs as they carried me.

  * * *

  “What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” I asked. It was one of my earliest questions, something from the fall archives. Administering questions in a jumble on the floor felt a bit haphazard if not downright distressing. It was yet another reminder of the proximity of summer, that the only time left for the posing of questions might possibly be now.

  “I don’t know.” He was lying, as he often did in the after-glow, with his eyes closed, a raspberry Tootsie Pop plugging his mouth.

  “It’s a difficult question isn’t it? I’ll revise it for you: What’s one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen?”

  He was silent for a few moments, perhaps to steal a few more sucks of that cheap candy which he obediently removed, if only
briefly, to submit, “Okay, a moth.”

  “Where did you see it?” I kept on. At this, he removed the pop from his mouth and placed it in the wrapper. I had won. His lips wore a delicious garnet stain. I kissed him and tasted the candy’s chocolate center.

  “At school. Actually it was a photograph of a moth.” His eyes returned to their closed position. I prefer to think he closed them for my benefit, so that I would feel free to gaze upon him.

  “Where?” I asked, intent on prolonging my freedom. He bore an absurdly beautiful mark on his right cheek that looked as if it had been made by the blunt point of a sepia Derwent.

  “In a science book.”

  “How did it look?” Like a hypnotist I pressed him.

  “Red, blue, green, yellow, all different colors.” His lashes were longer than Maria’s, which regularly drew public comment.

  “A rainbow moth?”

  “Yeah.” His eyes opened.

  I didn’t know whether to be touched by his book-related answer or disturbed by the fact that what he had found most beautiful was an image of the beautiful thing and not the thing itself. Somehow it seemed a youthful answer, a perception of beauty filtered by media.

  “What about you?” he asked. He propped himself up on one Eton blue elbow. Now he would look at me and I would refrain from looking. I would allow myself instead to become obscured by the clouds of our conversation. I would go under.

  “Me? Oh God, I don’t know. I’d have to think about it.” Never in the ecstasy of composing questions had I paused to imagine the young man turning my own questions upon me. “I honestly haven’t thought about it. Embarrassing, isn’t it, that I’ve wondered endlessly about your most beautiful thing but never once about my own.”

  “What’s the first thing that comes into your mind?”

  “The first? Well, truly the first thing that comes to mind isn’t a visual—although I did see it—but rather a series of acts I watched being performed in an airport. Isn’t it odd that both of our beautiful things were things we saw indoors? One so often thinks of awe-inspiring beauty as being out in the natural world.”

  “You’re really distracted by ideas,” he said.

  “Am I? I suppose ideas are beautiful to me, better company than most humans.”

  “What did you see in the airport?” Firmly, the young man led me back.

  “Oh yes. I was at Heathrow, waiting to get on a flight to Japan, and I saw a mother—she was Japanese—with three small children, making use of the layover to prepare them for the flight. First she peeled three apples in quick succession using her teeth and then handed one to each child. After they had eaten their apples, the children lined up before her and she administered what must have been herbal essences or vitamin drops to each one’s open mouth, like a mother bird tending to her babies.”

  “What was beautiful about it?”

  “Everything! The mother’s absolute efficiency, her ability to create order in a chaotic environment and yet also the reverse. In that cold and industrial setting, she and her children were like creatures obeying their natural instincts against all odds.”

  “Would it have been as beautiful to you if she hadn’t been Japanese?”

  “I don’t know. Why would you ask me that?”

  “Well, you’re Japanese but you don’t have a Japanese mother. So maybe that made her more beautiful to you. Finding a lost thing can be beautiful.”

  “True, but why would it be a lost thing? You don’t have a German mother but I doubt you experience that as a loss.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Is it?” I asked.

  “I saw a mother bird feed her young once. That was pretty beautiful,” he looked up, as if he could see the birds in the rafters above us.

  “Were they in a nest?”

  “Yeah. When I was a kid I had a tree house and their nest was up in the same tree.” I ventured to look at him again. I kept prompting him, trying to prolong the trance.

  “One of the apple trees?”

  “Yeah.” His Maria-like lashes blinked languorously as he continued his upward gaze.

  “And what about now?” It had been a poor suggestion, an error on the part of the hypnotist. My eyes lingered upon his cheek’s pencil mark.

  “I still go up there sometimes.” A look half sheepish, half fleeced crossed his face. He faltered.

  “What about it was beautiful to you?” I tried once more to coax his gaze toward that twiggy, feathered place in the rafters, but it was no good. He turned to look at me again thirstily, some part of him knowing his own power was there like a well he could drink from.

  “It was like the mom and kids in the airport. They were in their own world within the world. They had everything they needed. They were doing what they were meant to do and I got to see it. No one else saw it but me.”

  We were quiet for a spell. “What about you?” he asked. “What’s the second thing that comes into your head?”

  “I’d have to say the cherry blossoms in Japan. When I was at my aunt’s house I lay on the lawn under an enormous kanzan tree during the yae-zakura season. Everywhere I looked there were pink blossoms and each of them with ten petals! The sky was blue as the sea in summer behind them.” I sighed like an obaasan remembering.

  “Was anyone with you?”

  “No, it was after the blossom-viewing picnic, after everyone had gone home.”

  “That does sound beautiful. You lying there alone under the cherry tree like that. How old were you?”

  “Sixteen. Let’s not talk about it anymore, okay?”

  “Why not? I thought you liked talking about beauty.”

  “I do. It’s an important idea.”

  “You like talking about it as an idea but not as it relates to you personally?”

  “No, that’s not true. I don’t like the topic of youth.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re full of childish questions today, aren’t you?”

  “What’s childish about them?”

  “There you go again! Everyone knows curiosity is the mark of a child!” I was full of contradictions. The thought of losing him always had that effect on me.

  “Not necessarily.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “What’s there to understand? I’m only seventeen.”

  “What is it you want from me?”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  It frightened me to think this might be true, that one’s student in pleasure had grown tired of the lesson, would soon shove his books into his backpack and set off for the woods in search of something newer or more wild.

  That night when I climbed in through the bedroom window, the rope within it snapped. The frame slammed shut. I watched stricken as Maria stirred but did not wake and then I heard the dreaded sound of Var opening the door to his room. I tore off my jumper and stuffed it into the cloth bag, I kicked off my shoes. Desperately I felt around for the book light and clicked it on just as Var was rapping softly on the door. “May?” I grabbed Lolita and pretended to be reading. He opened the door. “Did you hear that loud noise?”

  “Oh, sorry, that was me. I was trying to get a bit of fresh air and the bloody rope snapped in two.”

  “That’s annoying,” he hissed and then sat down next to me. My hair was still cold from walking in the night air, though I suppose one can acquire a similar chill by leaning out a window. I prayed I was not giving off an odor. One would have a more difficult time explaining that.

  He did not move closer, but he put the question to me nevertheless, held it out to me like a gift I didn’t want, a perfectly good meal that I was too full to eat or a warm coat in a color I had tired of. But I took it anyway and in so doing gave myself to him, beaten as I was into submission by the fear that he would otherwise suspect me of infidelity and
prohibit me from seeing the young man in future. The window (that other) opened easily. It was obscene. I felt sickened by my own behavior and yet I would do anything—even sleep with the husband on whom I was cheating—in order to protect my secret.

  Up to now I had been faithful to the young man. Now I had cheated on him too. Through this disturbing new lens, I saw that by staying with Var I was engaging in a far worse deception—for it was one motivated not by love but by fear. In contrast, I began to view my affair with the young man as honest, if not with respect to Var, then with respect to my own desires.

  * * *

  Despite my perennial dread of the tourist season, which begins not in early summer but in late spring, its arrival surprised me. Why was I surprised when, instead of being first or second in a line of one or two, I found myself standing in an obnoxiously long line at the general store, if I had thought of nothing but such perils all winter? How could it be that in my endless brooding frenzy about time I had mysteriously lost track of time entirely?

  My bewilderment—like the rest of it—was temporary. As I stood holding my rolls of lavatory paper and lightbulbs among the others with their crisps and ice lollies, kites and sun lotions, time once more overtook me. While awaiting my turn, I watched the second hand make its minute movements across the face of the shop’s trick clock whose numbers were scrambled and whose hands were perpetually askew and knew, regardless of what time it was, that with each dizzying tick another second was passing in which I was apart from him, in which my physical body continued ever so slightly its decline. Meanwhile, like a tree he was growing taller and stronger, indeed, somewhere not far from me, he was coming to leaf.

  Equally bewildering was what I can only call the mystery of fate. Every week for several years I had cycled to the grocery store on the path that ran the length of the town. It began in front of the library and continued for two miles then ended abruptly in dense foliage and grass (in the way of a wrong turn taken within a maze) just a few steps in advance of Plum Island Provisions. The shop was not visible from the path; one could easily miss it as one followed the signs instructing bicyclists to cross the road to where the path resumed, on what must have felt to most Americans like the deviant side of the road and where I naturally felt quite at ease. What did it mean, this weekly detour that I had followed and so comfortably? Hundreds of times I had raced towards him only to veer off course at precisely the same spot each time. I hadn’t overlooked the shop completely—I had eyed it many times with a panting housewife’s curiosity as I pedaled past (the wild roses and the vegetable garden on its left, the antique bicycles propped against a crooked fence on its right, the prismatic bottle tree and the empty Scharffen Berger crates set in the shade of the ample porch)—but I never paused to go in. I would have had to cross the road a second time to reach it and then a third time to return to the path.