Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (33 page)

I hadn’t dared open the small box Violet had given me, having felt terror at the mere thought. I put it off till the last. I removed my sandals and waded in up to my knees for I had a fear of my own weak flinging, a fear of him falling short of the sea. When I withdrew the clear plastic bag from the box I felt assaulted by closeness. It seemed that I had, by keeping him hidden in the depths of my suitcase, squandered my time, that I should have slept with him nightly while I’d had the chance. Was it depraved of me to first smudge a bit onto my tongue and try to taste him? Once I had flung him away from me, I thought how anticlimactic it was that I should travel so many miles across foreign soil only to place him in the same sea I had looked upon as a child from the ferry. Perhaps someday he would reach Alcatraz. Who knew where the wild currents would carry him.

* * *

Var met our boat, ignoring my request that he permit us to ride the bus. I claimed it would be easier and less costly for him to wait at the apartment though truly I did not wish to encounter him anywhere near the dock. I did not want him there, like water diluting my strong drink. If I was going to be drunk with grief, smelling the sea air, hearing the boat’s blasts, I wanted to drink alone. I looked, bleary-eyed, for Violet in the crowd, but she would have had no way of knowing our return time and what on earth would I have done had she appeared?

“Papa!” Maria screamed at the sight of Var. He rushed forward to take our cases—he normally never takes my case—but Maria intercepted and insisted he pick her up. So he picked her up along with her case while I took my own. He looked fairly relieved to see us, or perhaps he was only relieved to see her. Like a sailor charged with counting heads, he touched my hair lightly. It had grown, a few short waves curled across my forehead. My hair was more like the young man’s now. As we walked to the car I looked down at the street. I watched the silver foil from a chocolate bar dart brightly across the black lot.

The apartment smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. Like a dog who, when left alone for too long, reverts to bad habits, Var had resumed smoking. How could I blame him? Isolated from the truth, he was a creature attuned to suffering without knowledge of its particulars, a stray roaming loose upon the frozen sea. Each puff of smoke that issued from his bristly muzzle resembled the vapors one sees issue from the mouth of anyone crossing an ice field. Eventually the apartment did grow colder. Before long we could all see our breath, which made us look like a family of smokers. Var found a smart black space heater at the dump and repaired it using a chopstick and a broccoli elastic. He had the matchless resourcefulness of a castaway. In this way we were oddly compatible. If I had once felt like an island explorer, I now felt shipwrecked.

I was struck dumb by the familiar orange and white package of rolling papers he often left on the dinner table, which he had, in our absence, taken the liberty of painting blue. (When I asked him why, he replied, “It was for the gnomes.”) His tobacco, of course, was different from the young man’s, but its scent when he first took it out of the pouch was darkly reminiscent of that other. The sight of Maria breathing in second-hand smoke enraged me. I yelled at Var about it. Likely he yelled back, but I heard all his criticisms as if from a great distance, across a tundra of sound, the pale conch of my ear still submerged in the rough black sea of the young man’s voice.

There were nights I lay watching Maria sleep, listening to the migrating geese. Maria beneath her eyelids, alone in a world of dreams, a fleet of ships sailing across the dark sky. The warmth made by each part of my body that touched hers brought me a little happiness. It was difficult to pry myself away from her and yet I did so regularly. Drunkenly, I wandered the apartment at all hours in search of something that might remind me of the young man, a memory to wet my parched throat. More than once I sat in the dark at the blue table to find Var’s gnomes and
kokeshi
arranged as if for a child’s play. I felt strongly he had arranged the figures so that I might see them, that each scene held a meaning intended for me. But I couldn’t decipher them. Instead I moved the figures around in response or, in the case of the most puzzling scenes, I left them as they were.

Once we settled back into a routine, Violet was the first person I made plans to see. The disappearance of the young man from my life strengthened rather than erased my affection for her. It was wonderful to see her. Difficult and wonderful at once.

We met in the cemetery at Dead Man’s Curve, which is perhaps a place less morbid than it sounds. There are few places outside the library for two people to meet. Of these, the cemetery is the most private and the most beautiful. Its autumn blooming cherry trees flower once in the fall and again in the spring, first pink blossoms then white. One can walk down the tree-lined lane and pretend to be in the Aritaki Arboretum. Maria and I sometimes brought our lunches there. I wished I could visit the young man’s grave but he had gone to the sea. My own stone was on the west side waiting for me.

We sat at the end of the lane with our backs to the stones, looking out at a tilled field and a few gray shingled houses. A flock of geese cried unseen, overhead. The blossoms were pink as a sky above us. We sipped tea I had brought in a thermos. Violet, perhaps unthinkingly, brought a carton of Petit Écolier and I had neither the nerve nor the heart to touch one. She didn’t say much, she was hauntingly like him. She listened, she let slip the occasional sharp comment or half smile. It was almost like being in his presence, the same eyes, different skin.

“We’ll be closing the shop soon,” she said. I flinched at her use of the word
we
. He was no longer part of it.
We
now meant Violet and the bars of chocolate, the crackers, the tins of foreign paste.

“When?” I asked, though I knew the date precisely, he always looked forward to P.I.P.’s closing day. He would write in chalk on the sign outside:
The End. Everything 50% off!

“In a couple of weeks.” With a trembling hand she poured the last of her tea into the dirt. “But we’ll open again in the spring.” She and the foodstuff would persist. The schoolboys in their brown and red sleeves, the pink blossoms, the black tea.

“Where’s his father?” I asked, the question tumbled out, I couldn’t stop it.

“Down-island,” she said, the words two hard fists to my heart. I had always catalogued his father safely in one of the vowel states—Idaho, Indiana, Ohio, Utah—never in a consonant state and certainly not on island.

“But,” my mouth protested even as my mind dashed to imagine the young man alive as a middle-aged man, the ideal age for a husband. I prayed I would never commit that sin.

Ineptly, I thrust a gift toward her, a
maneki neko
filled with flower kiss, elaborately wrapped. “It’s nothing,” I said. “Something for P.I.P.”

She nodded. In Japan I had thought of her daily, each time Aunt Tomoko nodded her head.

I didn’t understand how she was coping, how it was she could keep up the shop. Our griefs were dissimilar. In time he would become a boy I once loved in secret but he would always be her lost son.

As much in an effort to distract myself as to fulfill my cherry-red dream, I asked Siobhan to teach me to knit. She was aghast. “You don’t know how to knit?!”

“Oh, please,” I protested. “You would never say that to Nick!”

Our sessions were harrowing and humorous if a tad humiliating, but in the end she made a woman of me. I was not, I confess, an apt pupil. My insistence upon perfection paired with my horrendous fine motor skills was vexing. Equally so was Siobhan’s notion that I should immediately apply my newly acquired skill to knitting a sweater for Var. Though I kept mum about my plans for the cherry-red yarn, I was not above mentioning Violet during our lessons and Siobhan was generous with her commentary.

“Do you think she’s angry with you? I mean on some level she’s got to be angry, right?”

“You don’t know Violet,” I said.

“I don’t need to, I have a son. If you think she’s not angry you’ve got a screw loose.”

“She isn’t like you,” I said. “She isn’t a typical woman.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re a nosey parker and not every woman is as same as the next.”

If, I sometimes thought, boldly assenting momentarily to Siobhan’s theory,
if
Violet had ever been angry (there was her unspent venom at the café to consider) then her anger, like iron, had been transmuted. If her anger and my guilt were the iron, death was the process, and we—did I dare think it?—were the gold. It sounded medieval and mysterious and not a little presumptuous but I believed in it. When it came to our friendship, there was something alchemical at work.

“Denial is more like it,” reasoned Siobhan.

I was frightened of setting foot in the library again, as if, like no-man’s-land, it might contain unexploded ordnance. I was frightened of meeting his ghost. When finally I met it there at the counter, I didn’t ever want to leave. The library became for me a kind of holy place. I suspect Siobhan whispered discreetly, without incriminating me, my news to the staff, for they all handled me with care that year.

When at last I saw Nella for my long-awaited confession, I was like a young man who, one moment flushed and single-minded, the next moment shrinks at the prospect of ejaculation in the presence of another. When I asked for details of her resignation, she was evasive. We discussed instead the difference between those who frequent bookshops and those who frequent libraries (there are of course those who frequent both, who were we to make such arbitrary and uninformed distinctions, it was pure entertainment if not agitation on our part) for she had left the library for a bookshop whose back door faced the Steamship Authority. Any confessional impulse I might have revived was further quashed by her comment that she had seen Var several times entering the ferry terminal. She did not press me for an explanation and I was grateful, lacking as I was even a single fact pertaining to Var’s mysterious comings and goings. More mysterious still, she said she had seen the young man in the bookstore just a few days before. Were it not for his mother I might have clung like a lunatic to that tale.

The following summer I took up bookmaking, a hobby that I must admit is quite common among librarians. When I have time, I print English translations of
tanka
on mulberry paper, though over the years I’ve become increasingly busy. Violet asked me if I would help out in the shop on weekends and I agreed. I enjoy the work, I enjoy arranging fresh flowers, harvesting vegetables, handling the many imports that remind me of her son, but likely I would have done anything she asked. We keep ourselves fairly occupied, especially during the summer months.

Liam, that once-young lover of all words equal or pertaining to marijuana, precocious connoisseur of smoke rings, visits the shop on occasion, always under the auspices of buying food for a party, but I’m convinced his true mission is to check on Violet. At first I felt his cloudy gray eyes rest too heavily upon me as if he knew my secret and would soon drench it with some horrifying truth, but I think I imagined this. He’s become a fisherman who drinks too much during the winter, married to a rose-colored milkmaid who stops in for brown bread and cold cuts when her husband’s at sea. What does he think of when he’s alone on a boat, I wonder.

Angry or not, I am infinitely glad that Violet did not abandon me. She could have so easily abandoned me and for good reason. I would have had no recourse, no defense. It would have been a loss, perhaps even for her, and certainly a terrible blow for me. I’ve grown attached to our silent walks through the woods, accustomed to seeing her on the trail just ahead of me. She wears her poorly made sweater well, a bit of red in the trees for all seasons, bright for the world to see.

In the midst of my new productivity I came, at last, to appreciate passivity, to view it as its own kind of audacity. I admired the boldness with which Var stood idly by and allowed the corpse of a deer to sink slowly into the earth of the garden instead of sweating to dig a hole in which to hide its stinking flesh. To endure nature’s onslaught without intervening requires a certain resolve. Passivity is also the cousin of patience, which is, I think, a distant relative of faith. Doesn’t the act of waiting imply faith in the arrival?

In the years after the young man’s death I spent many afternoons sitting under a tree in front of the apartment waiting for Maria’s school bus to arrive. By then the level at which I was able to distinguish between the sounds of various engines rumbling down the state road was nothing short of professional. Though now I saw all vehicles as the same vehicle. The trucks hauling gravel, the buses hauling tots, the buses hauling tourists and townspeople—I saw all of them as small islands en route to the big island. If not today then tomorrow.

Waiting for the proper engine to deliver my child to me was a thoroughly frightening experience. Reckless driving, tropical storms, hurricanes, blizzards, all these were daily possibilities. I understood statistics; I understood that someone somewhere in the world would dive into water only to strike rock; I understood that someone’s child would die before she reached home. I could not see a yellow school bus without thinking of him. Always when Maria’s bus careened to a stop (for the driver in his garish Hawaiian shirts did rather speed) and its doors burst open I felt a wildly disproportionate sense of relief and gratitude that she had survived the perilous ten-minute ride. Always I held her a bit too tightly because always behind her in one of the bus windows looking out was his handsome seventeen-year-old ghost, my eternal reminder of the worst that could possibly happen to one’s child.

Apollonaire’s phrase “You will weep for this time in which you weep…” held true in my case, if only temporarily. Immediately after the young man’s death I could go to the woods and find him. I had only to set foot on the path to the waterfall and I would drown in thoughts of him. As the years passed this changed. As the years passed, when I walked there in search of him I might remember something or I might not. What was more common was that my mind would be flooded instead with minutiae—what to serve with the soup I had made for dinner, when Maria would next be home for a visit, whether or not I remembered to turn the heat off at the library when last I closed. I would stroll along not noticing at first that the torrent of details from my daily life had blotted him out. Far from drowning in thoughts of him, my thoughts drowned him. Then I would wish for the sharp memory that had come with my early grief. I mourned the loss of it.
Shikata ga nai
, I thought.
It can’t be helped.