Free Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness by Jennifer Tseng

did nothing to help. (I would soon learn that he never spoke first, that the deference of speech was for him a form of politeness, his way of showing that I was to lead. Like a dancer’s pause or a dog’s crumpling to the floor, his silence was an act of submission.) As I tried quickly to take in the latest revisions to his being (the filthy shirt, the broad chest, the manlike flanks, the enormous boots—I learned later he’d been working in his mother’s garden) I also saw the young man I knew (the trembling fingers, the distorting lump, the dark eyes darting from object to object and then at last to meet mine). I wanted to shout with all the joy and fury in my librarian’s heart:
I thought I’d never see you again!
But instead I said in the lowest voice possible, “Have you ever been to the waterfall?”
    He smiled a slightly defensive smile accompanied by a grainy chuckle, as if there might be a trick to my question.
    “I don’t know,” he managed (looking back now I see he had to summon at least as much courage as I did!) and then added craggily, “I’ve been to
a
waterfall. I don’t know if I’ve been to
the
waterfall,” revealing at once uncertainty and a charming predilection for contradiction.
    “Do you like waterfalls?” I asked rather idiotically, my mouth no longer mine but that of some ventriloquist’s dummy.
    Quietly, as if I had shamed him into it, he said, “Yeah,” and hung his head in the familiar convict style of the previous October.
    In the rush of silence that followed, I saw within myself a cup marked
complacency
and a cup marked
disappointment
, the contents of both spilling over. I saw that I had been staring impassively for years at the spectacle of my own pain overflowing, as if at a hideous waterfall. Now I turned my gaze toward the young man. As I spoke to him awkwardly, imperfectly, and yet effectively, saying only what needed to be said and in the hushed tone that was, in truth, rather counterintuitive, if not repellent to me (had I not renounced the library-like setting of my English childhood for the star-spangled vivacity of America?!), I saw that there was within me also an empty cup marked
pleasure
and I resolved at once to fill it. I refused to be thwarted. I heard myself say, “Tomorrow at 9:15.”
    There was a hint of alarm in his eyes and I feared he would ask me the question
why?
but he did not. I waited for him to answer. The alarm receded like sunlight into the dark of his eyes. Later I would learn that he was seldom good at camouflage but when it came to the concealment of fear he was virtuosic. His look of fear was brief but I caught it and was unnerved by it. Perhaps because I was so frightened myself, I had not imagined I would frighten him. When finally he consented, I wasn’t sure if he had conceded as a minor to an adult’s request or if his answer had been driven by free will.
    Having acquiesced, he stood erectly, moved his head back, his chin slightly down, his eyes to the carpet. He took a step back from the counter without taking the films. I pushed them toward him.
    “Your movies are due in one week!” I said, now a pert Sybil, desperate to resume a more perfunctory mode.
    His face looked drained of blood, a physical change which, though unsettling, did nothing to diminish his beauty. (On the contrary it gave him the look of an invalid, one who does nothing all day but lie in bed and desire.) I felt a double dart of guilt, one for having ambushed him in public (possibly within earshot of Nella, who, though she showed no signs of having overheard my proposition, had the ears of a bloodhound), another for wishing that he would now get out of my sight so that I might recover in solitude. He grabbed the DVDs and nodded goodbye, as if any further utterance might induce him (or me) to vomit.
    His departure was a relief. I felt a stringent need to be counseled which became more stringent still when I realized that it would not be wise to speak of my foray