Three Junes (34 page)

We sit quietly for a moment. “I had a friend who died,” I say, “and we, his friends, we put him in a beautiful lake. It’s a place where he liked to play when he was a small boy. In the summer, he used to go to a house beside that lake and swim, and sail in boats, and catch fish. He loved that lake. So we thought he would like to go back to that lake.”

“Was he a small boy when he died?” Laurie asks.

“No,” I say. “Much, much, much older.”

“Why couldn’t they keep him in the house, or bury him in the garden?”

“He liked the house and the garden, but he loved the lake. He loved swimming in the water.” I do not even know if this was true; Mal never spoke to me about the cabin on Lake Champlain, but Lucinda showed me albums of pictures: summer after summer of Mal on the dock with his father and brother and sister, Mal diving, Mal in a canoe. Mal, arms and legs akimbo, midair between a tire swing and his own impending splash.

I remember those pictures well, if I want to, but when I think of Mal, I think of Mal in a tuxedo, Mal on his green chaise, Mal bent over an oven to inspect a flan, Mal with Felicity prodding his neck as he reaches up to poke her back and say, respectfully, “That’s enough, sweets.”

Laurie’s hair against my chin reminds me of Felicity’s softness. Suddenly, I miss her terribly. I wish for her wing on my cheek, her nonsense in my ear. Here is a longing I can safely admit.

Once Mal’s ashes were in that lake, I began to miss him, to grieve for him, in earnest. These rites do somehow make a difference, take you round a corner. With Lucinda’s permission (even blessing), I took three things that belonged to Mal: the quilt made from dresses Lucinda had danced in, their surfaces slippery and rich; Mal’s passport, a patchwork of the world he had known; the Guatemalan birthing chair. The picture of “La Sultane Bleue” still hangs on my kitchen wall.

In Vermont, among the hundreds of faces in that flowered meadow beside the lake, I searched in vain for Mal’s secret son, those ice-blue eyes, listened for someone to call out the name Christopher, so that I might have another kind of keepsake. I could not believe I would never meet the boy, but why should I deserve such a grand stroke of fate? What did I think my life was—an opera?

If I look out my front windows, straight across the street, I sometimes see a young woman. I think she works long hours, as she is rarely there, coming home after dark in conservative, mannish suits. When she turns on her lights, I see a poster of orchids where Mal put his Chinese carpet. That carpet through that window, on that night of sleeplessness we shared before we even met, was my first glimpse of an entire life I might have shared, a love I managed to lose without knowing it was mine.

Laurie is asking me if her grandfather loved the ocean the way my friend loved his lake, and someone is calling my name, in a loud whisper, from the hall outside the room below. I tell Laurie we have to go down; I let her go first. When I recognize the voice as Véronique’s, I decide to leave Dad up in the foxhole for now.

By the time I reach the bottom of the ladder, she is standing in the middle of the room holding Laurie in her arms, quietly scolding her. She smiles at me. She whispers, “Well! What schemes are you creating? We came to believe you had fled!” She does not sound the least bit cross.

“We were playing, Maman,” whispers Laurie. She looks at me desperately. I give her a reassuring nod.

“But you are to be sleeping,
chérie
.” Véronique lays Laurie down on her mattress, next to Théa, straightening sheets and blankets, making everything smooth and secure. She kisses her two older daughters; Théa sleeps on.

I kiss Laurie and wink. I tell her I will be leaving too early to say good-bye, that I will see her at Christmas. She smiles up at me, then reaches out to hug me tight before she closes her eyes.

In the hall, Véronique says, “Are you meaning to escape?”

“No,” I say. We start downstairs to the kitchen. “I was wandering about, and I was waylaid—by memories and then by your daughter.”

“Denis is this way, too, when we are here—what you say about memories.” She sighs, resigned to the tidal pull of our family.

At the bottom of the stairs, I squint at the brightness, even though the light is cast mostly by candles. I am met with a fond, tipsy explosion of voices.

“
There
he is!” David and Dennis, in unison.

“Thought you could go to ground?” David again.

“We’d begun to think you’d slipped out for a tryst,” says Lil.

Dennis laughs theatrically. “In the bloody monsoon!”

I raise my eyebrows, trying for coy. “Well I did, in a way.”

Kind-hearted jeers, even from Véronique. Someone pulls out the chair where I sat for dinner. Someone fills my wineglass, which no one removed. I prepare myself, but happily, for more memories, more drink—too many, too much—and think of the moment when I will open the door to my true, my chosen home, to that laughably daring red room, throw down my baggage, greet my bird and my dog, and unplug my phone. Not because I won’t be glad to hear my friends’ voices but because I will need to sleep for hours and hours before waking to look again at the life I am learning, just learning to live.

Boys

1999

FOURTEEN

“B
ATS,” TONY SAYS
when mosquitoes drive them inside from the porch. “What we need here is bats.” He crowds their dishes and glasses onto a tray, refusing to let her carry so much as the peppermill.

Fern holds the door open. “You could install one of those bat condominiums, a thank-you gift to your host.”

Tony looks indignant. “Let’s keep straight who’s doing who the favor.”

“That’s right; you never owe anyone anything, do you?”

Pointedly ignoring her jab, he muses, “Though bats might be too rude. Bet they’d offend the face-lift brigade down below. Bet those old-money types repel mosquitoes all on their own. Blood too blue for sucking, veins too leathery to puncture.”

In the kitchen, he realigns their dinner plates and lights a pair of candles. He even refolds their napkins. Tony has grilled salmon fillet and plum tomatoes, serving them with rice into which he stirred lemon juice and a handful of herbs chosen haphazardly from the garden behind the house. Fern detects lavender, which she’s sure he wouldn’t know from thyme or sage: it’s odd but compelling and happens to work out fine—like a lot of things in Tony’s mostly fortunate life.

This house—a shingle cottage on a mapled lane in Amagansett, the latest coup of Tony’s ruthless charm—is nearly on the water. The “face-lift brigade” are the neighbors who own the larger, grander house that stands downhill between this one and the ocean, an older couple whom Tony seems to have befriended in less than two weeks. That afternoon, they waved from their porch as Tony led Fern around their tennis court and down the steps from their magnanimous, well-nurtured lawn onto the sand.

Fern has known Tony for more than ten years. In that time she’s seen him in twice as many temporary settings, houses borrowed from professors on sabbatical, divorcees on consolation leave, grown children recently orphaned and waiting for a spike in the Manhattan real-estate market. An apartment on West End Avenue with four colossal bedrooms and wedding-cake ceilings, an elfin clapboard house in the Village, a Gropius glass box in Litchfield—those were her favorites. This one is almost too pretty for comfort, as spotlessly lavish, as bright and docile, as a house in a magazine. It comes with an aged Volvo, an aged spaniel (now snoring beside Tony’s chair), and a well-established gardener’s garden, the kind that demands as much work as it gives beauty. But such responsibilities are perfect for Tony, who has a knack for plants and pets alike. Especially dogs; Tony loves dogs with a tender, democratic affection he rarely if ever shows people. Whenever he meets a new dog, he kneels, opens his arms, and eagerly whispers, “Hi puppy hi puppy hiya puppy.” Fern has witnessed this greeting on countless occasions—with, depending on the occasion, amusement, sorrow, or furtive rage.

She refills his wineglass. “So who
is
your host—your grateful, eternally indebted host?”

“English professor, semiretired. Owns a couple of bookstores.”

“And you know him because . . .?”

“Friend of a friend.”

“A friend I know?”

“Nope.”

Tony is always cryptic about the owners of his homes, but Fern likes to needle his miserly nature. She used to think he guarded his connections because he did not want to share them, but over many years she’s realized that this isn’t his primary motive. What he wants to guard is the identity of people who might give you, if you met them by happenstance out of his presence, some piece of intelligence that, however insignificant to you, would feel to Tony like a violation of privacy. Something as trivial as his hometown (Milwaukee), the name of his childhood dog, the name of his dentist (he is vain about his teeth), his shoe size, or his age (which no one’s supposed to know, though once, while he slept, Fern sneaked a look at his driver’s license; he is forty-nine). Beneath his open Dairyland accent, Tony is a privacy junkie.

Equally ironic is the work he depends on for regular income between erratic sales of the photographs he takes and sometimes shows. He teaches Braille to children whose parents want them to have this access to the world around them. Like most details of his life outside his art, it’s something Tony rarely talks about, and Fern has no idea if he likes or hates the work. He couldn’t love it, she figures, or something would have to escape from him, some whiff of passion. He has known Braille for most of his life because his mother was blind—one of the rare personal facts he will disclose.

Someone would have a theory, she’s sure, that this is why Tony makes pictures that look so uncomfortably close at things (and maybe this is why he’s so private, too—because blindness means never knowing if someone is staring at you). But Fern rejects such simple-minded analysis. Art grows from much more than family drama.

“Show me what you’re working on,” she says as they finish their meal.

“Sure,” he says, because this is one thing he is open about—at least with people he likes. Admirably, thinks Fern, he never spins anxieties around his life as an artist. Ask him how his work is going and he does not recoil. He might say, “Very well, very well,” in a carefree tone, or “There’s one I’m pretty pleased with at the moment.” At worst, “In a rough spot, a rough spot right now.” No hand-wringing, no complaints of not enough time, not enough discipline, not enough recognition. In fact, Fern thinks as she watches him head upstairs with a slight serene smile on his face, Tony’s attitude toward his pictures is much like the attitude of young parents she knows toward their children: always proud, always willing to look for the good; disappointed and vexed only with justification.

While he is gone, she wanders the downstairs rooms. The first floor is a virtual library: every room, even half the kitchen, lined with books—literature, history, art, cuisine. In the living room there is, strikingly, no couch; five armchairs convene at a low round table. Ample and white as cumulus clouds, they are banked with lace pillows and pale soft shawls. The one wall deprived of books is papered with blue morning glories.

Framed photographs shine on every level surface, all populated by men. The man who appears most often is short and self-consciously groomed, with an unconcealable belly (in his sixties, Fern judges from the pictures in which he looks oldest). Infallibly, he has a dark reckless tan, fine background to a silver mustache, and his dog leans fondly against his legs. In pictures where he looks a bit younger, there is a second dog as well, a twin to the one now asleep on the kitchen floor. Next to one of these pictures lies a round slab of polished pink marble, like an oversize coaster, bearing the engraved impression of a paw and the name
MAVIS,
along with her life span, 1984–1996, nearly epic in canine time.

As she passes a window, Fern is caught by her own reflection. Even in the timid lamp glow, it’s obvious now: the extrusion that startled her a month ago, that makes her fold inward with a solitary thrill, that she cannot stop marveling at in every light and from every conceivable angle. Other people have started to look as well.

Though she hasn’t said so to Tony, she’s here because of this baby. She’s fled the city because she cannot face the baby’s father, who returns from a long trip tonight. Right about now, his plane could be passing over this very house, the pilots descending carefully toward New York, toward its nightly jewelbox splendor.

For three months Stavros has been in Greece, where he helped his mother care for her dying mother, then saw the old woman into her grave. A dutiful oldest son, he stayed in his grandmother’s village, in a house without a phone or a shower on some minuscule island Fern had never heard of, all this time without complaint. Fern knows this because he sent her ten cheerful postcards, which are taped in a long straight row on her kitchen wall. She sent back four letters, all loving but shallow, each time intending to tell him the news, each time failing. Because of this glaring omission, she found that she could not tell him anything significant, could not express how much she missed him because it would seem deceitful to tell him one thing but not the other. By muting her feelings for so long, she has almost succeeded in erasing them altogether. At the very least, she has confused them, so that now, though she cannot wait to see him, she has run away, buying herself two or three days of . . . what? Prolonging the cover-up? Indulging her irrational sense of dread? She justifies her cowardice by telling herself that you could know a man far better than she knows Stavros and still fail to predict his reaction—his reaction, before she can even explain, just to the altered sight of her.

But if she knows one thing, she knows that Stavros will not be angry; he might even welcome this particular surprise. So what could she fear? That he might think she trapped him? (If he did, he would never let on; unlike Fern, he does not fret about the past.) That he will insist they marry at once? (She has been married before and no longer yearns toward a wedding as if toward transcendance or beatitude.) That he will bind her heart too tightly? (Won’t this child, all by itself, do that?) This much is sure: there are too many questions.

Above her, she hears Tony’s laugh, a murmur of conversation. He must be on the phone. In a moment he calls out, “Be down soon!” She calls back, “Take your time!”

Cautiously, she unlocks the French doors leading outside, but she triggers no alarms: just silence, or the kind of silence shaped by the sea. Her footsteps on the hollow floor of the porch sound impolite. The backyard, as concise as the house, is enclosed by a scrim of privet hedge and monopolized by flowerbeds: peonies in late, tempestuous bloom, trellised veils of clematis and rugosa roses, gladiolas hinting at the colors sheathed in their spearlike buds. Well beyond the hedge stands the larger house, shingled like this one but far more ambitious and astute in its angles—the only interruption to a broad horizon of sea. The mosquitoes seem to have retired, but the air is cold. Even perfection is never perfect, she thinks, and she goes back inside.

Now she hears the upstairs shower. Sighing (she knows what this means), Fern glances again at the snapshots in the living room. The man who clearly owns this house looks kind but also pretentious, and she hopes he is not Tony’s lover, then wonders why she should care. Because, she answers herself, it’s important to her image of Tony that he can do better, much better than this. She rarely knows with any certainty if Tony is sleeping with someone, but she can imagine, and anytime she meets him with another man, she does—now with hardly a trace of envy or pain.

“There you are!” says Tony, as if he were the one kept waiting. He’s changed from shorts and T-shirt to jeans and a conservative white shirt (long sleeves, tiny buttons) that makes his newly shaven face look burnished, distracts from the gray in his wet dark hair.

He makes her stand aside at the edge of the room as he clears the round table and places four photographs there. He pulls back the chairs, turns lights on and off till he likes their effect. “Okay, okay!” he announces.

At first, they look like test patterns of some sort, little more than fields of texture. “You’ve gone abstract,” she says.

“Me, abstract?” he says. “Now you know me better than that!”

Sand. Sand as a seagull might see it, walking along in search of washed-up crabs and mussels. Wet sand, sparkling sand, marbled sand, sand as smooth as sky. “Sand,” she says.

“Yes, yes. But what do you think?”

“Honestly? They’re a little remote for me. I guess you’d call them . . . sensual. But me . . .”

“Sensual,” he says. “Hmm. Sensual’s not for you?”

“I didn’t say that,” she says, before he can toss out a sexual quip about her pregnancy. “I mean I think of your work as more formal.”

“Ah, the F word.”

“Tony, this exhausts me, when you make a joke of it all. I have to think out loud.”

He apologizes. “I need to try them bigger. I have to rent an outside darkroom to do it, but I’m thinking, I want them on the scale of windows.”

“Glass-bottom boats,” she says.

“Yes.” He nods, looking pleased. “Just so, Miss Veritas.”

“There you go again.” She starts for the kitchen. “I’ll do dishes.”

“No you won’t,” he says. “You’ll put your feet up. Go upstairs and smell the air. There’s a balcony outside my room. That air, just that air, makes you wish you were rich. Forget fancy cars and the Orient Express.”

As she expected, he tells her he’s going out, no invitation implied. Fern thanks him for dinner.

“Sweet dreams.” He glances down. “Sleep late for Binky. I’ll make French toast.” Unlike some of the men Fern encounters these days (including some she’s barely met), Tony never touches the growing planet her belly has become, and she tries to stop wishing he would.

Upstairs, there are three bedrooms. Tony has the master bedroom, with the back view of the garden and, secondhand, the ocean. In the center stands a four-poster bed draped in florid gauze; unmade, it looks offended by its surroundings. Tossed about on the floor are jeans, shorts, T-shirts, a tripod, a light meter, magazines. On the antique washstand sit two coffee mugs and a beer bottle; on the windowseat, a half-eaten bagel on the edge of a plate. Despite open windows, there is the faint feral smell of sneakers worn barefoot all summer long. This is how Tony lives once he’s burrowed into the homes he borrows, but even so, Fern would put him in charge of a castle filled with treasures, because he always leaves a place neater, crisper, more loved than it was when he moved in. He makes a point of it. The owners return to find flowers on the table, champagne in the fridge, pressed sheets on every bed.

He seems to live quite happily with other people’s furniture and pictures, other people’s closets full of other people’s clothes. He has an apartment in the city, but it’s little more than a darkroom and a bed. He stores photographic paper in the disconnected oven; the tiny refrigerator holds film, beer, and milk for cornflakes. Dreary as a bunker, Fern thinks when she sees it—never more than fleetingly, just to meet Tony and go somewhere else.

She makes her way through the clutter, past a lace curtain to a balcony just large enough to hold a single chair. The sky is starry, the topmost tendrils of the privet still. She smells the clean smell of open sea and, for an instant, the scent of Scotch broom. The surf sounds contentedly tame.