I joined her, relieved to be released from the table.
“It’s you I have to thank,” I said. “I don’t know how you managed,” I glanced at the remains of our tea. “It was lovely, really lovely, thank you.”
“Oh, it’s nothing. I’m trying to keep busy.”
“Yes, of course, that makes sense.” I too would soon find this necessary.
“And anyway, I wanted to thank you, May.” The sound of my name’s diminutive issuing from her nearly killed me.
“Thank me?” I asked. “Why, whatever for?”
“Well, I don’t know how to put this, but…” She pressed her hands together and held them in front of her mouth. “If it weren’t for you, my son would have died without…” The torch she had been bravely holding out to me flickered out.
Oh, mistress of discretion, oh, purple heart, oh, Violet.
I rather despised myself for what I said next. “I’d better be going,” I lied. “I have asthma and I feel an attack coming on.” No doubt I seemed like someone who would have asthma though inexplicably I did not.
“Will you be okay on your bike?” I despised myself too for winning her concern when she herself must have needed it so badly.
“Yes! Exercise nearly always improves my condition.” It was ludicrous but I simply had to get out and could think of no better excuse. I nearly ran out of the house and through the orchard to retrieve my bicycle. Dwarfed by the enormous doorway, she waved and watched me go.
I whipped rather dangerously around to wave back at her as I pedaled off in a sad fury. It’s a wonder I didn’t slam into a tree or go down in a ditch, so agitated I was on that terrible ride back to the apartment. It was only when I was at last alone with the news Violet had given me that I was able to selfishly consider its implications.
I had never been so relieved to arrive at the apartment. Everything looked the same as I’d left it. The bathroom was filthy, Var was in his room, the kitchen counter was covered in dishes, the floor covered in toys, For Esmé––With Love and Squalor was on the dresser, his letter still underneath a loose floorboard at the bottom of the closet. In the apartment, the young man hadn’t yet died. The AC—whose roar I usually resented for its power to obliterate thought—and I had never been more compatible. While I had craved solitude in the presence of Violet’s grief, once alone I craved distraction.
“I’ll go get Maria!” I called out as I ran down the stairs just a few minutes after I’d run in. Fetching Maria was something I could do.
As I fled the apartment, I slammed the door with such force that one of the panes of glass cracked and had to be mended later that evening with tape. The tape was an atrocious shade of blue, not unlike the tape the painters had used to seal off the gray house. With its jagged traverse of the broken pane, it looked like the only river on a blank map. But at the time I kept hustling. I left the glass in pieces on the ground.
I couldn’t get to the nursery fast enough. I arrived early and didn’t care. I shadowed Maria on the playground. I had endless amounts of patience for her antics; my appetite for diversion was insatiable. I lifted her up to the top of the monkey bars then stood ready to catch her at least fifteen times. I did the same for Sophia and Charlotte. I twirled them on the tire swing, I petted and fed the rabbit, I caught the chickens and put them in their house, I climbed under the play structure and wove bracelets out of reeds, I dug a hole in the sandbox and filled it with rocks, I chased all the remaining children around the perimeter of the yard. I exhausted myself acting like a five-year-old, letting Maria’s chatter fill my brain until bedtime, until at last we both succumbed to that corpse-like stillness of sleep. My only comfort as I felt myself slipping away was the thought of working at the library next morning, the promise of that trusty encyclopedia of diversions not far off.
* * *
It seemed imperative that I tell Siobhan before she heard the news elsewhere. I didn’t think I could withstand her broaching the subject at a time of her choosing, perhaps when I least expected it and was in no position to cope. I had my opportunity during the lunch hour, while the summer patrons were out getting their green salads and sandwiches.
“Do you remember that young man?” Reluctantly I said his name in full to avoid identifying him in any way connected to myself. I stood at the window watching the crowd cross the street. Behind me the computer, beeping each time she scanned a book, sounded like a heart monitor.
“Of course I remember him. How could I forget?”
Fumbling for the words I should use to pronounce his fate, the words that would hurt my ears the least to hear, I felt a sharp needle of pain at the thought of never again feeling his voice drag its dark chain against me. I turned away from the window and stood next to Siobhan at the counter.
“He passed away,” I managed, recalling with some relief the words my father had often employed—dead being too final, the heavy thud of a noun too grim, passed on implying too great a distance, a place beyond me, the word away being beautifully, stubbornly indeterminate, a word that could mean anywhere, the verb passed tolerable, it at least implied an action and therefore a life.
“What?!” she said shrilly.
“I won’t repeat the words,” I said.
“You can’t be serious! But how? He was so young!”
“Outdoor accident.”
“What?”
“Diving, a large rock.”
I sat down and began researching request cards. I wanted to help someone, to meet a need. Siobhan sat down next to me and took a portion of the cards. We worked in silence for several minutes. It was a relief to be granted those minutes.
“Imagine if you had,” she said.
“I did.”
“You didn’t.”
I wrote the two words down on the back of a card for emphasis and slid it next to the card she was working on.
“Oh, May.” Her sigh was that of a mother whose child has failed an exam. “I was afraid of that.” She wrote on the card and passed it back to me. At least no regrets.
I recycled the card and stood at the window again. The parking lot was peculiarly empty. Our patrons were picnicking in a field or had brought their provisions to the beach. They would spend their afternoon eating asparagus sandwiches with wild blueberries, gazing raptly at the sea. The confession I had sought so keenly was now of no interest to me. Siobhan, of course, was not to blame. Though the patrons too would soon exhaust me, in her company I prayed for their return. What I craved were exchanges with strangers, the light stamping of books. Anyone but someone who knew me; anyone but someone who knew.
“We’re going to have to delete his record,” Siobhan said gently, though I knew for a fact this was not entirely true. Four years prior a library staff member had passed away and her record remained untouched. The director had made it clear we were not to delete it and so our colleague’s name remained in the system, at once a false indicator of her continued existence and a true token of her persistent presence among us.
The sight of Viola’s name in the database plucked a chilly string in me as much because I had loved my former supervisor as because she happened to share a name with my father’s reader who, during a certain period of my childhood, would startle my mother and me with telephone calls at home. So the name Viola had held for me the music of three deaths, and now, in a roundabout way, a fourth.
“But,” I began, then thought better of it, striving to leave the impression that although the young man and I had, we were not close. “Yes, of course,” I said, acknowledging obliquely that it would never do for a library database to be cluttered by obsolete records. Such a state of affairs would have been nothing less than a librarian’s nightmare.
“Do you want me to do it or…”
“Yes!” I could never accept such a murderous task. Once, when looking up a patron I had met the phrase PATRON IS DECEASED; I did not f
eel prepared to meet those three words again.
I kept the fact of the young man’s first account, established safely under his father’s name, to myself. He would be my Viola but no one would know. I could, when I felt the need, view the three items on his record and pretend he was not only very much alive, but also very young. It would be as if his second record, the one I had entered myself in what was to be the last year of his life, had never existed, as if our first encounter (and therefore those to follow) had never occurred. It was a comfort to me when I had little else, the idea that he was on-island somewhere, aged six or seven, being driven by his mother to school, to soccer, to P.I.P., just another child with a library card who had not been in lately, simply too busy being a child to stop in.
* * *
It was the library’s busiest summer on record. Checking out books to patrons while trying to smile, answering the phone in as cheerful a voice as I could manage, I thought I would faint from grief and exhaustion. I could not sleep. News of the young man’s death reached the public. Patrons marveled at how unlucky the young man had been, they were bent on illustrating how lucky we, who had not leapt to our deaths, were to be alive. I did not feel lucky but of course I did not express this. I became garrulous as one who wants to speak but has nothing permissible to say. I mirrored their marvelous expressions like a circus monkey so that by the end of each day my facial muscles were as sore as my feet.
At the apartment I was safe from any mention of him. No staff member to inquire sympathetically about whether or not the young man I had pointed out to them was the same young man who had died. No unsuspecting patron to select me at random as the staff member who would become audience for remarks about the injustice of being killed while on holiday or the tragedy of dying young, expressions of horror in the face of Mother Nature’s many hidden perils or the brutally irreversible blows of fate. I wanted none of it, none of the fears and marvels that had turned him into a figure of terror or regret. I loathed their invitations to join them in their figure making.
In the apartment, no one knew he had lived or had stopped living. It was back to the frozen sea. I stood dumbly shivering upon it, hardly believing that the last several months had been real, the woman at the waterfall me, the woman in the gray house me. Though I must have, I don’t remember cooking or cleaning or caring for Maria. I only remember standing upon the black ice empty-handed, yes, axeless, no way to break it, the summer heat strangely useless in this regard. I stood until I could stand no longer.
Each day, when I went into the bedroom, I saw that the donated calendar was still on June. The room seemed empty without him although he had never been in it. I did not bother to shower or clean my glasses or wash my face or even eat. I had no appetite. I only put on fresh clothes to avoid suspicion. I feared scrutiny of any kind and wanted only to be left alone to grieve. I had counted on summer’s onslaught to distract me from missing the young man but I had not counted on him being Missing. Given this sad miscalculation, said torrent of distractions did not console me. Indeed, I was inconsolable. In none of the novels I had read did the young lover die. I had no instruction manual. Buoyed as I had been by love, when love was removed, I collapsed.
* * *
During my illness, which had few symptoms but despair, fatigue, and a high fever, Var and Maria were often absent; it was August after all. They belonged to another sparkling yet faraway world: the busy, moving, healthy world of post offices and grocery stores, summer camps and swim lessons, barbecues and visitors. I lay prone, motionless, dreaming, an island of sorrow surrounded by a sea of happiness. I was not at all easy to rouse, having fallen down roughly and reeled into a pit of sadness. Fate’s logic had defeated me. I, in my filmy glasses and dirty white flannelette, could not comprehend how it was that he, of the Treasure Island vision and the raspberry Tootsie Pops, had beaten me to the grave.
To my knowledge, Var did not so much as peer through a spyglass in my direction though I suppose he may have done so as I slept; I spent much of my time sleeping. What right had I to expect him to care one iota for my comfort or happiness? Siobhan crossed the dark waters to bring me a pot of expertly prepared makhlouta, the smell of which immediately caused me to be sick. Afterward, she sat down on the bed and lingered while I feigned sleep. The director brought me a bouquet of damask roses with a card signed by all the librarians, a reminder that my grief was likely nothing in comparison to Violet’s. Flowers, like so many things, now reminded me of death. Though daily I chastised myself, I didn’t call her.
Maria came ashore on occasion to give me a drawing she had made or to tell me a story about a mother who did nothing but stay in bed all the time. Insofar as anyone could that summer, she was the only one who brightened the somber picture of my world as I saw it. She was not a sun, there was no sun in that melancholy picture, but a fish or a bit of coral, a spot of red or orange in one of the darkest coves of the sea. If she had not slept in my arms each night, I might have died of that double sadness.
When I was awake I felt too tired to read, the muscles in my arms too weak to hold a book upright, my mind alternately too frantic and too frail to follow a line of text. Instead I lay beneath the small constellation of plastic stars that were jaundice-yellow against the snow-white sky of the ceiling, and thought about books I had already read. I remembered books I had read in the loft with the young man and books he had read while lying next to me. I remembered the way he had chewed so intently on his fingernails while reading Moby Dick, as if trying to taste the experience. I thought about the sailors whom he had loved and admired. For them the real was not what happens but what is about to happen. The months I spent with him were my last voyage into that kind of experience. Like a sailor, I lived for what would happen next, trusting completely that whatever it was would be worth the effort, the anxiety, the agonizing wait. Now I had ceased to be one of them. Now the real was not what was going to happen or even what was happening but what had already happened.
As for the young man, he died being one of those sailors. Now instead of envying him his capacity for the future, I pitied him his never being able to recount it. Yet, like Ishmael, he had dreamed of strange bedfellows and harsh seas, tough ropes and blackened pulleys, rusty winches and greasy buckets. Whatever California’s version of such things might be, whatever great whale the Pacific Ocean concealed, surely it was beautiful and perhaps the discovery of such a beast was worthy of a young man’s life.
When I was not trying to recall books or our reading of them, I ruminated, as I suppose most grieving people do, on the ways in which I might have prevented his death. Not once during our last few weeks together did I plead or beg or bargain. Never once did I ask him to stay. So deep was my sense of obligation to what I perceived as his future, so terrifying my guilt at what I had already done, it hardly occurred to me to do so. As it was, I felt I’d gotten away with murder. I was like one of those miscreant patrons who keeps a book for two years—my item was long overdue, I was lucky to have had it at all, others were waiting, the item deserved to circulate. I had been given so much time I couldn’t imagine asking for more. But if I had, he might not have died.
If he hadn’t died, would I strive so to remember him? If instead he had grown into a frightfully attractive priest or an unknown filmmaker, the sensitive husband of a Rosamond, the father of a baby Rose or a junior Pip, might I have been more likely to write our affair off as a mistake best forgotten? Wasn’t the fear for a woman of my age that I was, by loving him, keeping him from living his life? If one knows that there was to be no life but the one being lived, can one feel guilty for having lived it? Indeed one could even argue, as Violet plainly had, that by loving her son when I did that I made richer his short life; had I denied him he would have died without having loved.
Indeed his death tampered with the ethics of our affair. What meaning, right or wrong, had the memory of my pleasure, now that he was dead? What significance had our transgress
ion in the wake of his death? Lying grief-stricken in my bed, it all seemed innocuous, my memories of our time together nostalgic details of a lost world, the fleeting materials of one young man’s only love. Was I a fool? Were these the demented ruminations of a brokenhearted librarian in denial of her worst crime? Or was I right to feel as I did in that fever of mine: His death makes me glad that I loved. His death makes me gasp with relief that we loved when we did.
The fever did pass. After two weeks of convalescence, my body had had enough of immobility and despair. Though I myself was still bereft, my body was ready to get out of bed. It had had enough of idly watching the remaining apples turn from green to red through the spotted windows. It wanted noodles and tea and a shower in the marred, tiled room. I can’t say I concurred but I let myself be moved from one part of the apartment to another; I conceded to my body’s will to live.
* * *
On my first day back at the library, the director requested that I relieve the children’s librarian so that she might take her lunch. I strolled rather unsuspectingly toward the children’s room. Upon entering it, upon seeing the reading rocket, the stencils, the Stevenson, I burst into tears.
“Are you okay?” the children’s librarian asked in an irritated, rhetorical manner, the phrase less a question than a statement designed to shush me. When I failed to cease crying or to answer, she added a bit more kindly, “What’s wrong?”
Oh, how I had waited for someone to say those words! I stopped crying at once.
“I’ll tell you,” I said, “if you promise not to say a word.” By which I did not mean not a word to anyone else but not a word to me for I was entirely too fragile to entertain feedback. In a whisper, still short of breath, I told her my whole woeful, ecstatic story.
After a brief but solemn pause she said, “Wow.” Her blue eyes behind their round silver glasses looked wet and impressed.
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness Page 24