Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (26 page)

He was well-mannered yet restless; his eyes studied me as though I were a page in a book. I had the sense of being one among many, of being read intensely but fleetingly by a reader who would soon turn the page.

* * *

Our last evening together he wore sunglasses and a red T-shirt, both of which I asked him to remove. I had never seen him wear red and silently disapproved. I observed changes in his body since the previous Friday (broader in the shoulders, thicker in the flanks, more pronounced cheekbones, an olive cast to his skin) the way I had upon seeing him at the library after his long absence. Sometimes a similar phenomena occurred literally overnight with Maria; swift change is one of the many confounding symptoms of childhood.

It was really quite a pleasant evening considering. I arrived determined to make the best of it. He undressed me slowly beginning with my shoes, as had once been his habit. We made love several times in silence on the floor, revisiting various Fridays in our private history. He seemed to be commemorating the other times, remembering them as I was. When he wiped the sweat on my temples away with his thumbs, it felt as if he were pressing the memories in place. I was touched by his impulse to revisit the past when the future was so close at hand, no doubt glittering and beckoning. Every doubt I had ever had, of his sincerity, of his capacity to match my depth of feeling, was erased, if only for the evening.

After about an hour he produced a red and blue striped climbing rope that he had recently purchased for the purpose of learning to rock climb in California (Was there no end to the bloody adventures?!) and which I mistakenly assumed he had brought for adventurously adult purposes. Instead he showed me several rather clever knots with clever names then tossed one end of the rope up into the loft. I watched while miraculously the loop he had just tied landed precisely on the steel wall hook upon which we had so often hung our clothes. When he tugged swiftly on the rope, the loop closed like a little noose around the hook’s neck. He was very adept at handling it. It gave me an uncanny feeling. I was at once aroused by his agility and cheered by the thought of him gaining a new skill. Unbidden, the words
snow, day, Pocahontas, Swiss, family
, and
Robinson
returned to me. How it pained me to hear my inner voice pronounce them in his presence, each one an emblem of his future life.

“But how will I ever climb that?” I asked, understanding at last his intended purpose.

With the rope in his hands, he stepped backward away from the loft and then in one motion swung and began to climb. When he had reached the halfway mark he paused. “Push me.” Echoes of Maria at the playground. I touched his back with both hands and then pushed. He swung. “Harder,” he said. I obeyed and then watched as he swung near and far, down and up, and then I understood the physics of his plan. The higher he swung, the closer he came to the loft. After a few swings he let go and landed.

“You’ve done a magnificent job but you can’t possibly expect me to follow you. I know it’s not exactly Mount Everest but I’m not a rock climber, for God’s sake, I’m a librarian. I can’t possibly do that.”

He threw down the rope. “Take it,” he said. “You don’t have to do anything. I’ll bring you up.”

“You sound like my father,” I said, wondering how I could withstand the pleasure of this contradiction.

There was a glint of something—happiness? pleasure? arousal?—in his eyes and then it faded. He said it again more gently, “Take it.”

“Okay.” I took the rope in my hands and thanked God I was not yet arthritic. My mother had been and her mother before her; I was part of a long arthritic line.

“Hold on,” he said.

“Okay,” I said yet again. “But I don’t think I can do this. It’s not exactly doing nothing you know.”

“Make a foot loop,” he said. “Tie a knot and make a loop to put your foot in. That’ll make it easier.”

“What kind of knot?” I asked, overwhelmed by my recent introduction to several.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. It only has to hold for a minute or so,”

“And then it will unravel?”

“No. Just tie one. Tie an easy one and step in.”

He was frightfully assertive and I, for my part, unnervingly compliant. I tied a saucer-size noose for my foot and stepped in. I looked up at him the way children glance at their parents before undertaking some new challenge, and, without missing a beat, he winked at me fatherlike. I was disarmed by this Swiss Family Robinson moment. He, Mr. Robinson (if not Rousseau himself), and I, Jenny the English orphan.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“Of course,” I lied, the words becoming easier to use the more I used them.

He began deftly to hoist me up. My fear of the rope unraveling or slipping through the young man’s hands vanished in the face of his swift show of athleticism and strength. Never before had I been besieged by such masculine wiles! My desire to arrive at my destination receded and was replaced by a desire to remain there suspended, looking at him, being held by him as he brought me closer. If I could have chosen to make those moments my eternity I would have. To be forever moving closer to him, floating without effort, without fear.

“Wasn’t that easy?” he asked and pulled me up over the edge of the loft. As he let go of the rope, I crumpled like a sheepdog at his feet. Masterfully, he reeled the rope in and wound it into a figure eight.

The mattress was there where we had left it, the workers had done nothing but destroy our means to ascend. I wondered uselessly whether, if we could have continued to visit the gray house, we might have eventually found the ladder restored, the loft beautifully refurbished. Just as likely we would have found someone in it. Still I was happy to see the slim mattress. I was certain it was thinner than when we first began, which made me feel at once guilty and truly pleased. For the first time, he led me to it. I took this as a sign that he was ready to leave me, that it would not have done for me to keep him here at the gray house on future Fridays.

We lay there quietly marveling over the dark chocolate Violet had recently imported from South America and that he had pulled for the last time like a Boy Scout from his blue backpack. It was infused with orange—a concept I’d always put down—but it was weirdly good, heavenly, like eating sunshine and chocolate at once while surrounded by the fragrance of Valencia oranges. It melted in our hands as we ate it, it made our mouths delicious. I couldn’t get enough of those Valencian kisses. I dabbed my fingers against his face so that it was streaked with chocolate but it did nothing to diminish his late paternal aspect. Finally I succumbed to telling him my wish to pretend—just for this first and final time—that he was mine. Not only did he indulge me, he confessed to being aroused by the idea and so together we pretended possession. We discussed our upcoming travel plans, where we would stay and with whom, which sites we intended to see when we arrived.

And then, when I felt I could bear the game no longer, when instead of cheering me the pretending made me sad, I asked, “How will we ever get down from here?”

“Have you ever rappelled before?” he asked in that shamelessly cheerful tone reserved for fathers teaching their children new things, things typically more exciting to the fathers than to the children. I had no idea what he was talking about. “You’ll have to practice,” he said, handing me the rope. “You’ll be doing this a lot in California. You may as well start now.”

O
n the morning of his departure I lay with Maria in my arms, waiting for her to wake. I thought of him at some near yet unknown location, inside his grandfather’s house, I thought of Violet, perhaps in bed as well, distraught as I was. Then again, perhaps she had been up for hours, wearing some approximation of the green apron with yellow ties that I had imagined for her in the beginning, stepping softly in slippers from counter to counter and drawer to drawer, preparing, with her usual care, the last of his provisions.

When Maria woke she asked, “What does
 
pathetic mean?” And I thought of the way children taunt one another: “In the dictionary the word pathetic has your picture next to it!” I could see the photographic entry clearly in my mind—I’m wearing Aunt Tomoko’s flannelette nightgown and a pair of square, unfashionable glasses—as I answered her, “A pitiful person, a person one feels sorry for. Someone or something woefully inadequate.” One of my many faults as a parent was delivering encyclopedic answers to simple questions.
Someone like me
, I wanted to add but restrained myself. Why point out in advance that which she would someday figure out herself?

She had gone to the window and was looking out. “We’re going to the boat,” I said cheerfully.

“Why?” she whirled around. “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere, we’re just going to take a look.”

She returned her gaze to the window and slumped forward. “That sounds boring.” Perhaps, but boredom beat the void of not seeing him.

“We’ll go to the beach and you can build a sand castle, all right? Quick like a bunny! We don’t want to miss the bus.”

Yet as soon as we’d taken our seats, I wondered if I had made a mistake. I did not have to reread
The Lover
to know that the scene of the ferry’s departure was bound to be very Duras, pathetically Duras in fact, with a few ridiculous revisions. Exchange the randy, prepubescent nymphet for a perimenopausal librarian; replace the black limousine with a public bus; insert a restless five-year-old; replace the South China Sea with the Atlantic; remove the land that attaches the peninsula; make it an island.

We arrived early in part due to my longstanding compulsion, in part due to the bus, whose service, even at the height of the summer season, was not frequent. Maria asked intuitively for an ice cream and I, fragile, without resolve, complied. We spent about ten of the twenty minutes remaining strolling the shore. I avoided looking at the water, yes, I turned from that blue emblem of separation and concentrated instead on what lay in the sand at my feet: little orange shells, smooth white stones, indigo mussel shells, bits of abalone, seaweed labyrinths, the usual seaside rubble. I was attentive to my watch and undecided as to whether or not I should make my presence known, assuming of course that I could find him. I had never had to pick him out of a crowd.

Nine minutes before his departure time I heard the boat arrive. I could not help but turn.

“Let’s make a sand castle!” Maria cheered.

“Sure,” I said, trying to sound unhurried. It seemed perfectly feasible that we could spend the next five minutes building the castle as I contemplated my dilemma. I sat facing the ferry and began digging with my hands. While Maria made a moat, I erected a tower, monitoring the ferry’s progress all the while. Cars and people disembarked for a few minutes and then the flow reversed. My heart tightened; if I was to make my presence known I would need to do it soon, if not immediately. I scanned the perimeter of the terminal, the walkways and parking lots. I watched the ramp for a dark-haired figure wearing a blue backpack, though Violet may very well have bought him a larger pack in a different color. There were very few solitary figures. I had the passing thought that I had made an error in timing but that was impossible—I had followed the calendar far too closely for such a confusion to arise. It was the last day of June, the day of the Mediterranean monk seal, there were fewer than six hundred of them left in the world. I picked up a piece of seaweed and pressed it into the top of my tower. “Voilà!” I proclaimed. “We’d better run along now.”

And only then it occurred to me—I don’t know how I had overlooked it—that in all likelihood Violet would be with him (my inability to picture them together had become a troubling coping mechanism). Squinting at the sun, I looked again, this time for the two of them. “I’m burning up, love!” I complained, wiping my brow for emphasis. “Let’s go see the boat.”

“But I’m not done with my castle!” Maria protested. “I want to finish my castle!”

I got up and began to walk toward the dock then glanced back at Maria. She was digging her hands into the sand. “Come on, love.”

“I’m busy,” she said firmly, shrewdly borrowing the words I so often used with her when she interrupted my reading. I kept walking, gambling upon the fact that once I established enough distance between us she would panic and follow. I shouted over my shoulder as I walked, “You can’t stay by yourself, love. It’s not safe!” I quickened my pace, determined not to look back, determined to spot him. Perhaps she saw me accelerate or heard the white thread of surrender in the red flag of my voice as I shouted, for just as I saw Violet’s head of curls, and next to it, waves of the same color, Maria screamed bloody murder.

“Maaaaamaaaaa!” I made the mistake of turning to look at her. She didn’t move, only kept screaming, increasing her volume all the while.

Mother and Son were standing awkwardly across from one another, talking quietly, shuffling, deferring the moment they would embrace and then have to part. It was their moment; I didn’t dare intrude. Had she been a stranger I still wouldn’t have dared. Across the parking lot, across the shore, the intimacy between them was palpable. Meanwhile, Maria’s screams were drawing attention, I strode towards her; she had called my bluff. I prayed he would not embark while my back was turned.

“Ave Maria!” I sighed and then sat on the sand next to her. She was crying but her hands continued their work, vexed in the way of the young to build, to learn, to go forth. I wrapped her in my arms. At last her crying ceased. She wriggled away and began a new tower. When I looked up, they were gone. I may have seen him disappear into the boat’s side entrance but I wasn’t certain and she, emancipated, against sentiment, had likely driven away.

A few moments later I saw a dark-haired figure leaning Duras-like against the rails of the top deck. He would have had to sprint up the stairs to reach it so quickly. I was too faraway to be sure it was him. Still I kept my eyes fixed on the figure. Though he seemed to be gazing elsewhere, I held up my stricken hand in the event that it was him and that he too was watching. If I had been the sort of woman who carries a mobile phone, we might have confirmed our proximity to one another but alas, I was of another century.