Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness Read Online Free PDF Page B

I confided, my thoughts roaming lustily in several directions at once.
    “He better not!” Siobhan herself quivered now the way the red needle of a fine moral compass tends to quiver in the presence of moral drift. She gathered her cards into a tidy stack and smacked the desk for emphasis.
    “Why not?!” I was in no mood for deprivation.
    She set her cards down, reached for a scrap piece of paper and wrote the following message in pencil:
Because you are married and he is the same age as my son!
Siobhan had discovered that the young man was a “friend” of her son’s on Facebook and that he too was a senior in high school, age seventeen. Prior to this discovery, our difference in age did nothing to deter me for I had conveniently, grossly underestimated it, my most delusional estimate being twenty-nine. Now I turned away from his actual age the way one turns away from an overly graphic image. Why contemplate statutory rape laws and prison terms when no crime had yet been committed?
    She returned her glasses to her face and picked up the green cards. “Aw, you’re not fun!” I said, borrowing a phrase coined by Maria.
    “Just sayin’,” she said, tapping me on the wrist with the pink eraser end of her Ticonderoga, “probably better keep this one at the visual level. You know what happens when the other senses get involved.”
    My problem precisely. I didn’t know any longer! And which was worse, that I had forgotten my other senses or that they were beginning, all too quickly, to come back to me?
     
    * * *
     
    The many hours I spent in bed I spent with Maria. We slept entwined or draped upon one another in the form of an x, ear to ear or head to foot or as spoons in a farmhouse drawer. She never slept alone as surely as Var and I never slept together. He was too light a sleeper to sleep with another.
    Maria was no solitary sleeper, no relinquisher of my flesh. No matter what the positions of our bodies were in sleep, she managed to hook a part of herself—a foot, an ankle, an elbow, a knee—over me so that I couldn’t move, so that I would remain near enough for her to hear my heart beating for the duration of the night. Our closeness did not prevent us from dreaming we had lost one another. I would dream for hours of wandering a city in search of her, only to wake to find her atop me. She had nightmares of being kidnapped while lying in my arms. Our closeness never made us complacent. We understood each other’s value; we understood that even the one closest to us must be sought.
    In the beginning my greatest resentment toward Var was his refusal to free me of Maria’s company. But after a few years of that fruitless bargaining, I began to prefer her company to that of most others, including his. There was still the matter of solitude, which I craved, but the very idea of trying to obtain it by way of Var was as questionable to me as asking one’s warden for a cake on one’s birthday. Even if, against all reasonable expectation, the fellow appeared at the door of one’s cell with Black Forest cake on a white china plate, one might not feel inspired to eat it. There might be trickery involved, manipulation, the possibility of poison, and of course, the matter of one’s pride. And so Var lay in his solitary room while Maria and I held each other till morning.
    After the appearance of the young man, I no longer fell asleep in tandem with Maria nor did I creep out of bed to read once she was sleeping. When I was sure she wouldn’t wake, I allowed myself the pleasure of thinking about him. The nervous darting of his eyes, the toffee taste of the smell of his tobacco, the sound of his rough-throated voice reporting on the many books in his house. I could easily imagine him alone in a room. Once he existed there, I could join him. We could do as we liked. Without having laid a fifth finger upon me and in only a few weeks’ time, he had given me more pleasure than Var had in years. There was something