Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (31 page)

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 transgression 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.

“Please don’t say anything!”

“Oh, I won’t, your secret is safe with me.” Her hands were folded and resting in the lap of her red linen pants. She looked hungry, most certainly ready to take lunch.

“No, I mean don’t say anything to
me
.”

“Oh, whoops. I guess it’s too late for that. That little
wow
just slipped out.”

“Please!”

“How about this. Since we’re in confession mode, how about I make a confession?” She scanned the room. For better or worse, we were alone.

“Okay.” What else could I say? One of the perils of confessing is that one runs the risk of inviting one’s confidante to confess.

She leaned forward and put one hand on either side of her mouth as if mimicking one who is soon to yell and then whispered, “I don’t really like children all that much!” (Did she honestly think she’d been keeping that a secret?) “And if I have to wear that Corduroy costume one more time I’m going to slit my wrists!”

I confess I laughed then for the first time since the young man’s death. Perhaps that’s what she had been intending, I couldn’t tell. Was I self-pitying to have expected silent sympathy, if not a little grief counseling? (I had, after all, demanded her silence. And I had kept her from her lunch.)

While her confession lightened my mood for the moment, my transaction with the seasonal Japanese restaurant worker later that afternoon deepened my despair. I retained a first-person memory of how attractive he had been in years past, and I could, even in the present moment, see that he was an attractive man (his thick hair impossibly lustrous, his eyes so black as to be blue), but I felt nothing in my body. My pulse was faint, my heart sluggish, my thin blood had slowed to a trickle. One did not express one’s loss of feeling outright—one continued to play the role of concerned and interested librarian—but the message
I have died a thousand deaths since last we met. I am dead and without desire.
was clumsily conveyed.

Soon after, the children’s librarian resigned from her post in order to run a Guatemalan orphanage, making it both difficult for me to confide in her further and tempting to wonder if my confession had sent her running for the border. In truth, she was probably just glad to bequeath the furry, sweat-soaked costume to the next child-loving librarian. Though I imagine she must have, if only for a moment, said a prayer to God, asking that it please not be Mayumi Saito.

* * *

“You know you never say his name,” Siobhan remarked one September evening while we were lingering on the front steps of the library. “Why don’t you ever say his name? Is it a habit left over from your secret-keeping days? You can relax with me, I know everything now, remember?”

“To name is to kill,” I said, though I longed to hear his name uttered. I studied the flecks in the concrete, the nearby soil of the flowerbeds, Siobhan’s sandaled feet; I had adopted his habit of never focusing my gaze on a single object for very long.

“What am I, chopped liver?” she held a hand out and glanced upward as if testing for rain, afraid, I think, I had lost my mind.

“No, definitely bangers and mash. But that’s different, you’re still alive.”

“But he’s already dead! You can’t kill him again, can you?”

“Perhaps not,” I said doubtfully. “But I’d rather not risk it. To be quite honest, I tried never to say his name when he was alive.”

“But why?” I saw her pale green eyes swiftly assess me. Grief must have been cruelly imprinted upon my middle-aged face or in the way I barely held my body upright—my back rounded, my shoulders hunched and drooping, my feet heavier than they had ever been during pregnancy—because she ceased to question me further.

“There’s his memory to consider, you know. It’s a living thing.” It was difficult to convey why I remained so devoted to the memory of a high school student with whom no future for me existed, more difficult still to explain why when he died (and therefore became even less of a prospect) I became more captive still.

“I’m worried about you, your lowness” she blurted out in a shrill voice. When Siobhan was anxious she always grew shrill.

“Pem, that’s not funny anymore,” I sighed.

“Watch it. You’re killin’ me!”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m not joking! If to name is to kill I don’t want to be named either. Funny how all the plants in the world have names but they keep on growin’.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

“You’ve got to get over this.”

“I am. I will. I’ll be all right. It’s just difficult. I was just beginning to cope with his being gone—that was difficult enough—and now I have to cope with him being dead. It’s only been a month or so, for God’s sake. If Nick dropped dead this evening do you think you’d be finished grieving in a month’s time?”

“But Nick’s my husband.”

“Tell me you didn’t just say that.”

“I didn’t just say that. Husband being beside the point, I was referring to time spent with a person.”

“I ought to get going,” I huffed and wiped my brow with my wrist. “God, I loathe this humidity!”

“Did I say the wrong thing?” she asked. “I mean, just sayin’, you only knew him for about six months.”

“Darling, if I could approach my situation with your highly practical sensibility truly I would. Unfortunately the notion of time only worsens matters for me.”

“But have you read the theory about grieving and time? It’s something like, you need a month for every year you were with the person to recover from the loss of them.”

“I believe that was in the context of breakups not corpses, love.” She seemed not to hear me; she was as focused on fixing me as I was on being broken.

“And if you only knew him for six months well that would mean technically you could get over it in two weeks.”

“Pem! You mustn’t continue!”

“Okay, I’ll stop. I’m just worried about you. Maybe because I was in the dark for so long I just don’t get what you’re going through.”

“That is a distinct possibility. In any case, I love you but the
Kokeshi
King beckons.” I pulled out my running shoes and began to put them on.

“Uh-oh, I know I’ve put my size-ten foot in my mouth when the
Kokeshi
King beckons.”

“Indeed.” I stood up to go.

“Wait, I almost forgot! I brought you something.” From her worn madras tote bag, Siobhan produced a large bar of imported chocolate. Valrhona dark, not the sort he ever brought me, but still the sight of it was like a hand around my throat.

I smiled the young man’s pained smile and kissed her sun-burnt cheek. “Thank you,” I whispered and then rushed toward the museum path, not wanting to cry in the presence of one so intent on happiness.

* * *

Walking among the statues of women and birds, I thought of the silent pledge I’d made when the young man announced he was leaving:
I too will leave this island.
If then the idea had been my only solace, now it was what saved me. I decided to honor my pledge. I would put my unmentionable sadness to use. I would board a light aircraft and take to the skies; I would watch the island grow smaller beneath me. I would live in another time zone, sleep in a strange bed, I would stare at indecipherable street signs without straining to read them. I would eat foods I normally only dreamed of in the company of people I loved but rarely saw. I would do what he’d done. I would leave.

Upon arriving at the apartment I locked myself in the bedroom and googled “Japanese language programs.” I clicked on “The Yamada Institute” then “Japanese Language School” then “Clear History.” I was beginning to think I could no longer stay on the island. Yet I had no desire to go to the mainland either. I wanted to go somewhere that felt like home but I was not sure if such a place existed. Japan at least was homey if not home. There were the many aunts and uncles who had fawned over me as a child and whom I knew would be just as eager to lavish affection upon Maria. I wanted to speak Japanese, to hear the sound of others speaking it. I wanted Japanese ways of thinking and being, I wanted Japanese food, cherry trees, the Pacific Ocean. I wanted life on an island other than the one upon which for the first time I felt stranded.