Three Junes (37 page)

Jonah merely stared at her, his expression typically, infuriatingly retentive but also defeated. She apologized, hating the echo of her cruel words. She hugged Jonah and wished him luck (he was seeing some dean in Queens about adjunct work). But as soon as he left, she found his wet towel on the couch and was angry all over again. She spent the day at the magazine where she freelanced, and then she went to Gay Men’s Health Crisis, where she volunteered on Tuesday nights (phoning strangers and brightly pleading for money, which always left her drained of cheer), and then she shopped at the local market (overpriced, which did not improve her mood), and then she came home, and then she made dinner, cooking for Jonah but dreaming of somebody else.

At eight o’clock, she picked up a novel. Jonah would have been watching TV (a new habit, a symptom of depression—though Jonah said that was hogwash), and she was glad for once not to have her attention compelled by the noise. So much for Jonah’s dependability; now that was eroding, too. She felt self-righteous, not worried.

Sometime after nine, the doorbell rang. Standing at her door was Stavros, behind him two policemen.

Fern saw Stavros once a month, when she dropped off the rent at his father’s office. They spoke about weather, politics, neighborhood buzz. Now and then, she would see him on a nearby street; they would smile and nod.

Looking up at these three grim faces, her first, illogical fear was of eviction. Next, evacuation (a gas leak or fire, an impending explosion). Her third fear (because the halls were too silent for a public catastrophe) was that a felon on the run must be hiding out in their building.

All these thoughts crossed her mind in the time it took her to say yes, of course they could come in. They went no farther than the cramped kitchen, where the sallow light made the three men look even more despondent.

“Fern,” said Stavros in his deep, mossy voice, “something tragic has happened.” Without pausing for merciless effect, without touching her—though she could see his hand begin to rise toward her shoulder, then fall—he told her that Jonah was dead, that his body had been found by the super in the narrow courtyard out back, that it looked like an accident, that he appeared to have fallen from their apartment. This very apartment, where Fern had spent the past few hours acting as if he was still alive to enrage her.

She said, “But he’s in Queens. And I’ve been here all evening.”

The three men stared at her like a trio of worried fathers, giving her time to catch up. Standing by the kitchen window, she became aware of voices in the courtyard. All right, she felt herself reason, let’s just say this is true. Let’s not be contrary here. “Can I . . . should I go down and . . .?”

This time his hand did meet her shoulder, tentatively. She willed it to stay there, hold her in place. “You don’t need to see him, I think.” Stavros looked to one of the officers, who said, “You can if you want, ma’am, but I wouldn’t. Not right now I wouldn’t.”

“But we’ll need you to come to the station,” his partner said. “You might call somebody to come in with you, I’d do that if I were you.”

The first person Fern thought of was Aaron. This made her burst into tears, tears at the treachery even of her imagination, grief at having effectively wished Jonah dead.

Stavros put both of his arms around her. She leaned her head on his shoulder; he seemed to be just the right stature for comfort. His shirt was light blue, a fine cotton, and her tears instantly darkened the fabric. The hair at the side of his neck, which was damp, touched her cheek. He smelled lovely and clean, like rich expensive soap, linden or vetiver. Fern had a flash memory of Stavros in a neighborhood playground, playing handball on a stretch of tarmac. (She had slowed, transfixed for a moment by his ardor for the game.) He must have played this evening, then showered, and then, somehow, received a call about a body in the courtyard of one of his family’s buildings. Did he carry a pager? Who had called him—the super?

Fern needed to stop this wasteful train of thought. She needed to stop crying. Though Stavros did not seem to mind; patiently, he continued to hold her. One of the officers gave short answers to incomprehensible questions that crackled out of his radio. Perhaps they had nothing to do with Jonah. The other officer was writing on a pad of paper.

She pulled away from Stavros’s fragrant blue shoulder. She noticed that below his neat, short haircut, more dark curly hair grew down the back of his neck past his collar. The hairs were finer, no longer pure black but a reddish brown. She had never liked so much hair on a man, but that was where her cheek had been and would gladly have settled again.

Stavros was frowning at her, somehow both gravely and sweetly. “I’ll go with you, if you like. Or I could call someone for you.”

“Thank you,” she said simply. “Thank you.” He would be the one to go with her; she could think no further. A near stranger had never seemed so significant in her life.

“Ma’am, can we have a look at your back windows?” asked the officer with the pad.

Fern stepped away from the kitchen window; there were also two in the living room. All three were open, as they had been when she came home. It was early September, still summer by day, but the air cooled fast after dark. This was about the hour she would have closed those windows, happy to feel the sly chill. Stavros saw her shiver.

“You need to sit down.” As he steered her into the living room, he said, “I’m a useful guy by training, so let me be useful however I can.” He guided her, as you might guide a tiny elderly woman with porcelain bones, to the couch. She told him he could make himself useful by sitting there with her, anywhere was fine, while she made the phone calls she had to make.

As she listened to the futile ring of Jonah’s mother’s phone (it was bridge night; even Fern knew that by now), she examined the green damask on the cushions beneath her and remembered how she’d admired this sofa in Jonah’s mother’s house and how, to her surprise, it had become abruptly hers, a disconcerting gift—just as Jonah had become on a night when she drank one too many margaritas and joked that they were both so hopelessly square they ought to be married.

SLEEP ELUDES HER,
but she likes having the silent house to herself, lying naked under crisp expensive sheets in this pretty bedroom, watching clouds blow listlessly, one by one, across six panes of blue. She spreads her hands on either side of her taut stomach, waiting for movement. There, and there again. When she lies down, the baby goes to work, limbering up, rehearsing for life. She is like a greenroom.

Fern had known that, given the chance, she would find out the sex of the fetus (in her life, there were plenty of mysteries already), but when the sonographer asked, her yes came out like a panicked yelp, a surge of superstitious doubt. The sonographer said, “Ordinarily, I don’t like to say unless we’re doing an amnio, but seeing what I’m seeing, I’d say there’s very little chance it’s not a boy.” He pointed to something inscrutable on the screen.

It took her several seconds to understand. Then all she heard was
boy,
a formerly short unremarkable word that seemed to burst above her body like a volley of fireworks, that suddenly seemed as bright and complex as a pomegranate or a coral reef. When she left the hospital, she looked at her male counterparts walking the streets as you might consider a swarm of migrating butterflies, one eye empirically curious, the other plainly awed. My
son,
my
son,
she kept thinking, unable to move her hands away from her center. She hailed a cab; inside, she began to laugh. How in the world would she do this thing—not give birth to a baby but raise a boy? A boy. Seedling of a man.

Carrying that otherness inside her, everywhere and all the time, she thinks of Stavros and his features, so different from hers. Will her baby be dark, outwardly defying her genes? Could he inherit that small appealing mole on his father’s left eyelid? Before she even slept next to Stavros, when she would examine it at leisure, Fern asked him to close his eyes for a moment so she could see what caused that strange flash of color whenever he blinked. The mole was honestly blue—cerulean, she thought. “It’s so beautiful,” she said, and was immediately embarrassed. They had not even kissed.

Stavros spared her by laughing quietly. “My father thinks I should have it removed. He says it looks like cancer.”

“What a terrible thing to say.”

Stavros shrugged. “He’s my father. Fathers say what they like.”

“You approve of that?”

“Of course not,” he said. “But I accept it. It isn’t something I’d waste the energy trying to change. Not in my own father.”

His last postcard from Greece came enclosed in a small package. On the card, he told her that his grandmother had finally died, in her sleep as everyone had prayed she would, and that all sorts of ancient ceremonies were unfolding. There would be the dividing of her few possessions, he said, and he and his mother would spend a few days in Athens, where she liked to shop. He told her when they would return. He ended by saying how much he missed her and signing off with his usual thousand kisses. But along with the card was a small flat present wrapped in Greek newsprint and tied with black yarn. Inside was a beaded change purse with a zippered closure. The primitive image made by the beads was the figure of a naked woman. Her body wrapped around the purse so that she appeared waist-up on one side, waist-down on the other. Because of the limited medium, she had owlish black-and-white eyes and large pink breasts that stood out left and right, a single red bead for each nipple. Her ample yellow hair hung down her back; on the flat black ground, it looked as if she were lying on a beach towel on volcanic sand. Fern knew enough Greek letters to be able to read the word that ran, like a banner, beside the body:
 on the side with her torso,
 alongside her legs. Aphrodite.

The object reminded Fern of crafts she had practiced in camp (gimp necklaces, macaroni bracelets, paperweights made with tiny pinecones and plastic goop in an ice cube tray). Yet it was wonderful, too—crude yet classical, made with earnest labor and a respect for tradition. It would be empty, of course, but she opened it by reflex. Inside was a slip of paper on which Stavros had written three words in Greek. And then, in parentheses,
For my goddess
.

SHE WAKES TO THE SAME SKY,
so ardently blue, but to a different set of sounds: voices, outside but nearby, and a steadier, rhythmic sound, not tennis this time but . . . digging. A shovel assaulting the earth. Two voices—men’s voices, subdued and private. She cannot hear the words, but she can tell that neither one is Tony’s. The conversation stops. Soon after, the digging stops.

Fern rises onto her knees and looks out the window beside the bed. Clasping the sheet to her chest, she unhooks the screen. With her head outside, she hears more distant sounds: lawn mowers, seagulls, children shrieking on the beach. She scans the entire lawn. There: at a back corner, in an elbow of privet, a hole in the ground, a spade on the grass. Just as she spots it, she hears the door to her room open behind her.

“Oh I’m—God I’m sorry.” The door closes again, but she saw the man briefly. His arms, face, and clothing were streaked with dirt, but he looked genteel despite the grime. Irrationally—defenseless, naked in a bedsheet, alone in a stranger’s house—she isn’t afraid. Embarrassed, but not afraid. She assumes this must be Tony’s “third,” however peculiar his entrance.

From outside the door, he explains himself. “I know Tony’s here, I saw the car, I didn’t stop to think there’d be anyone else. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right, just wait a sec, Tony’s at the beach,” says Fern as she pulls on her dress. She opens the door. “Hi.”

He continues to apologize: for walking in without knocking, for frightening her, for failing to call ahead. Fern takes in the details she missed: He is dressed, impractically for digging, in khaki pants and a white button-down shirt, sleeves rolled back. He is slender, well-kept but unmuscled, neither short nor tall. His hair, a reddish blond, is fading to the color of desert sand, refusing to gray. Tony’s age, but without the insistence on youth—and certainly without the sylvan boyishness of Tony’s usual consorts. His face is intelligent, even attractively lined. Etched in the gray film on his cheeks are threads of pink skin, pathways left by tears. Only his bare feet are clean.