Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (18 page)

How I envied Violet’s natural right to watch him grow all the rest of her days, her right to grow old before him. I had no natural right to him except that afforded one in love, and such a right was not typically granted to one in my degraded position. As for my love, there was no earthly proof of it. My right, if I had a right, was ethereal. Compared to that of a mothers (concrete as breast milk or large, dark eyes) mine was vapor or fog. Then again, surely I romanticized Violet’s position; surely she too lived in fear of the day he would leave. When one departs an island one departs a world, one puts a sea between oneself and one’s loved ones. Those who are left (and those who are leaving) feel it more acutely. She must have shared some of my dread and when the day came—somehow I knew it would—perhaps it wouldn’t be easy for him either.

Since the young man was ten and had read
Treasure Island
, he had wanted to “get off the rock.” His vision of the world was a touching embroidery of scenes from Stevenson, Melville, and celebrity cooking shows, and a Mother Earth at once pregnant with beauty and at risk of being destroyed. He wanted to discover all that was alluring about the world and repair all that was broken about her. He wanted to save trees from being cut down, animals from impending extinction, he wanted to save the very air from the fumes of factories and cars.

I too had once been young, I too had found reasons to leave my first island, but my reasons, like those of my parents before me, had not been so noble. My mother left Stockingford in search of work and my father emigrated from Tokyo to study at Oxford. He hired her to clean his modest apartment when he was an assistant professor; she moved with him from apartment to house to manor until at last, when he was no longer required to teach, he married her, mop and all. In every way, she was his housekeeper and he her employer. It was a dynamic that persisted throughout their marriage and followed them to their graves.

My father’s being an economist was not analogous to my being a librarian. He was in love with numbers and systems, addicted to the solving of equations and the isolating of patterns and perfectly suited to it. (While I was in love with books and forbidden to read on the job. Indeed I spent my days abstaining from books so that others might more easily read them.) His blue-black eyes sparked like lightning when he was on the verge of a solution or had just been struck by a new idea. His thinking process was totalizing. The sky of his being changed completely when he was deep in thought; customary modes of communication ceased to function between us. He was his own weather system, a storm moving about the room.

How I envied the natural forces that shone from within him and what seemed to be his natural right (yet another natural right I had not been endowed with) to succumb to them—my mother like a Red Cross worker forever at the ready with a tray of food for him to hurriedly devour or a pressed suit and a polished pair of shoes for him to absently put on while reviewing aloud his forthcoming lecture. When I was old enough I too was expected to carry the tray and deliver the clothes and shoes but I was never allowed in the kitchen, not even to learn to cook. (This I taught myself later using library books.) It was as if my mother was cooking for a god and would not—even if I pleaded—relinquish her sacred duty.

As one outside their natural disaster, there was little left for me to do but praise her efforts and so I left, as soon as I was able. My parents, in their aversion to all things American, were, as in most other matters, a united front and I, in my decision to study here, was a deserting rebel. I never quite knew whether I was the child of the employer or the child of the help or schizophrenically both. This was another reason why I ventured to America for my education. I imagined it to be a place where equality was functioning at its height, a place where I might be less of a walking contradiction. Imagine my confusion when I was called a chink while on special scholarship for Japanese Americans.

During my second year at university, my parents died in quick succession. First my father, setting the schedule until the end, and then my mother, eternally happy to comply with his itinerary. Once they had gone off together without me for good, I was left alone in America and resolved to stay. How selfish my choices seemed when I considered them against the young man’s desire to leave an island of happiness to tend a sea of despair. He wished to make others happy whereas I wished only to avoid despair.

* * *

It was an unusually mild spring. This made summer seem nearer still and caused one to wonder if the rapidly warming globe was not yet another bomb busy ticking. Maria celebrated her fifth birthday in the back garden with four friends. In years past it had always been too chilly. I sat at the round glass table with its white cloth, its chocolate cake and pink candles, watching the children as each one in turn, in a manner reflecting her temperament, swung the bamboo stick at the rabbit-shaped piñata. Charlotte fairly stroked the rabbit’s hindquarter while Sophia (my heart quickening each time a child shouted her name) clutched the stick in terror and did not so much as tap it. Ella swung happily but ineffectively at it several times. Josie, in her zeal, let go of the stick and it went flying into the air behind her and had to be chased down by the party’s hostess. It was Maria who gored the rabbit’s neck; then its stomach burst open and all the peppermints gushed out onto the grass. The little girls looked like rabbits scampering to retrieve them.

After her fifth birthday, I began to suffer from the fear that not only would I die before Maria, I would die without her.

Nightly, I began to hope, more ardently than I had ever hoped for anything, that when I was on my deathbed I would be able to recall perfectly the many hours I’d spent alternating between reading a novel in translation by book light and watching her sleep. Under the minute light, I studied her—the way she turned her right wrist in sleep, the way her lips pursed to a point and her eyebrows lifted slightly as if in amazement—for proof that she was the same child who’d been brought to me five years prior in the narrow hospital room whose only lit feature was a steel stink, the same child who’d known me in the dark, without features, and without a name.

Only the prospect of memory relieved my fear of dying without her. If not Maria, then the memory of Maria. Nothing and no one were equal to that. If one’s beloved can’t be at one’s side, it must be easier to die in the presence of a benevolent stranger, easier to weaken in the face of one who has never known your strength, to relinquish while pressing the palm of one whom you’ve never held onto. To accept someone as they die requires either deep love or immense distance.

Conversely, I felt an aversion to the thought of the young man attending my death, which caused me to further doubt my already dubious motivations. Perhaps I was no different than the filthy old men of the world who chased after young girls as after fountains of youth, that red-cheeked nubility so incompatible with deathbeds. Being reminded that he was not my child nor could he take her place disturbed me. I did not like staring into the chasm that stood between my affection for them; it diminished him, which diminished me, and at a time when I had thought I could not be further diminished. She was she and he was he and if I were dying it would be Maria who I’d want in the bed with me. And if somehow if she were terrifyingly missing from the scene, better a kind nurse or a lonely passerby than my seventeen-year-old lover watching raptly my flame extinguish. Yes, let him remember me as flame, as fire, as the heat that kept him warm in the un-winterized house.

* * *

“If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and could only bring one book, what would it be?” he posed the question one day over an irresistibly
wabi
lunch of rosemary beans and olive bread, accompanied by a wedge of Manchego. I had never tasted anything so delicious in my life.

I burst out laughing, astonished that he should care to know the slightest thing about me.

“What’s so funny?” he demanded softly.

“You,” I said and looked at him while trying to imagine what he would look like when he was a grown man. It was a dangerous habit of mine. “I like knowing in advance that I’ll be stranded. There’s something funny about that. I mean the whole notion of being stranded typically implies something unforeseen. I’ve always thought your question was designed for one not already stranded on an island. Your use of the conditional is funny.”

“But you’re not stranded, you have a library. And you have your collection at home and you can go to the bookstore and buy new books anytime. I’m talking about one book for life. That’s it. One.”

“Like ‘One Book, One Island’,” I said, referring to the island-wide community reading program of which neither of us was a member, “except it’s till death.”

“You
would
look at it like that,” he said cuttingly but not, I thought, without affection.

“Is it because you’re young that you don’t consider yourself to be already stranded on an island?”

“No. Neither of us is stranded. No one is.”

“No one?”

“Well, almost no one. Maybe there are a few people who are physically incapable of moving but they would be stranded anywhere.” He was cocksure as he said it, his logic fairly overwhelmed me.

“You’re going to be such a handsome man,” I said, slipping my hand under his curls to stroke the fine hairs on the back of his neck.

He looked away, as if insulted, and in the process disengaged my hand. I had indirectly violated our unspoken agreement never to speak of the future and implied as well that he was not yet a man.

He ran the calloused tips of his fingers along the blue ticking of the mattress and turned toward me again. “If you don’t choose a book in the next five minutes, you won’t be allowed to bring one.”

“A difficult question for anyone,” I said, “but especially for me.”

“Why? Because you work at a library?” With that bewildered, immigrant gaze of his, he seemed intent on mastering my world, its customs and mannerisms, its ethics and currency.

“No, I should think that would make it easier—so many titles fresh in my mind all the time. It’s because I’ve recently and rather drastically changed. I’m not the person I was before I met you. Before I might have said
Wings of the Dove
or
Ethan Frome
or some such nonsense but now the thought of reading those books for eternity is a nightmare.” I too had traveled a great distance.

“Why?” he asked, perhaps not understanding the literary references or perhaps not wanting to assume anything about them or about me, yes, likely more open to others and to the world than I ever was even when young.

“It’s one thing to read about tragic love affairs when one is happily living outside such circumstances, it’s another thing entirely to…”

“Three more minutes,” he said. “Choose a book now or you’ll be doomed to live the rest of your days without one.”

I paged nimbly through my inner card catalog. None of my old favorites made sense anymore. After what seemed like more than three minutes (time must have passed more quickly for me than it did for him), I announced my choice, “Saint-Saëns Concerto in G minor for the piano.”

“No musical instruments allowed on the island.”

“God, I really will be stranded.”

“Yep, thirty seconds,” he said and began raising the palm of one hand to meet the fingertips of the other.

“Keats’s
Collected
!” I fired just as his two hands touched to make a T.

“I thought you’d had your fill of tragedy,” he said, surprising me with the insinuation that he had read Keats. I replaced my hands upon his neck.

“Poetry is different,” I said at once. But he was right. I was not ready to give tragedy up just yet. I clasped his neck more tightly. I studied his face until I saw the man I thought he would someday become and felt him rise to meet me.

Ritual accomplished, candles snuffed, chalice generously filled, I lay on the ascetic’s slim mattress content as a nun (save for the young man lying next to me) who has said her prayers and can now rest. I began dreaming of us renting the little gray house, painting the inside walls a pale yellow, sewing eyelet curtains, baking cakes, roasting chickens, adding a window to the loft and a real bed, lying together under a red coverlet watching the cardinal fly and the snow fall and the sun rise until the young man rolled off the mattress and put on his jeans.

“I have to leave early today.” I watched him pull on his socks. He had never left early; he had never left first. “I have to take a test.”

“What sort of test?” I imagined, absurdly, a test of character in which he would be faced with a series of ethical dilemmas.

“Advanced Math.”

“How very advanced of you,” I said, genuinely impressed. “I only got as far as Algebra II. You’ve already surpassed me! How terrifying!” The inevitable began innocently enough with high school mathematics.

“Assuming I pass the class,” he said darkly, alluding to the possibility that his previously pristine record was under threat.

“Is there a girl at school you like a lot?” I had begun to want a girl his own age to love him, and even for him to love her, though I also dreaded such an outcome.

“No, not really.” This was not the correct answer. Though I suppose the “not really” appended to the “no” might be taken less as a warning than a sign of one intent on honesty.

“Surely there has to be a Sophia or a Rosamond who’s caught your eye, someone with long hair and a pretty name?”

He looked at me, all at once very quiet and handsome and irritated, then said in a soft, punishing voice, “Why don’t you visit the school if you’re so curious? Take a look for yourself. Meet all the girls. Meet the guys while you’re at it. I’m sure you’d like a lot of them. You could meet my friends. We could all go out for pizza afterward.” His voice grew quieter and quieter.

“Will you think of me while you take your exam?” I asked contritely.

“Of course,” he crackled as he laced his boots. “I always think of you when trying to solve difficult problems.”