Three Junes (45 page)
She closes her eyes: she is so tired yet so inflamed—with expectation, anxiety, with an impatient kind of thrill. Unexpectedly, she thinks of her favorite picture of Jonah, taken the day of their wedding: ducking confetti as they leave Helen Olitsky’s exquisite garden, he wears a silky loose Hawaiian shirt (green waves crowded with surfers) and the dimpled boyish smile she never did stop loving. That day, she looked at that smile and meant every word of the promises she made. Despite the disillusionment that followed, she might have kept them for the rest of her life—at least in deed—but she will never know this for certain and cannot help wondering how she could possibly make such vows again without remorse. A clean slate, a fresh start: what erroneous notions. Yet why should they stop her from making other, equally risky pacts?
So here then is Stavros. She envisions him holding the hand of a very small boy as they walk along a modest, crooked lane hemmed in by plain lime-washed houses. Here are the clotheslines, just as he described them (pants, pants, nothing but pants) and the rusting cars and the goats, but all these homely sights are trumped by the primordial whites and piercing blues of Greece, the magnificent sea and sky she remembers from Paros and Delos, Delphi and the temple at Sounion.
That’s when she recalls exactly where she will find him: in Washington Square, at a chess table across from his father. Afterward, he will almost certainly go to his parents’ apartment, perhaps help his mother with her long-neglected garden. It would be harder to show up there. So then, their reunion will be anything but private; that will be an appropriate penance. Stavros may have been the one to travel abroad, but he is also the one who’s been waiting, like his heroine Penelope, for Fern to come into port. Let the passing dog-walkers overhear her confession, let the chess geeks stare as she makes it clear how sorry she is, how ridiculous she was not to be certain. Let the curmudgeonly father look up from his bishop and his queen to appraise her body in disapproving wonder.
The Midtown Tunnel is a funny place, Fern has always thought. Approach the city by any other route—the lofty bridges, even the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels—and you will emerge knowing precisely where you are. But this route takes you in obliquely. You come up not into the city’s tarnished brilliance but onto a road beneath a shabby underpass, gray shadows broken only by weedy trees of heaven and billboards promoting airline shuttles. You emerge onto a nondescript sidestreet—one that, every time, leaves you confused. The needle on your compass spins, because you are no longer able to see the city’s outlines or even to see that you are on an island, a glamorous place in many eyes, but to yours—to Fern’s and, she suspects, to those of the man beside her—a hard yet reassuring place to live.
When they stop at the first traffic light, she looks to either side and is suffused with a sense of comfort when she spots the sunlit avenues, the taller, more permanent trees. As they wait for the light to change, Fern and Fenno look at each other briefly. In this exchange, there is a kind of security, like the settling of an anchor on a harbor floor, and she reads on his face what she imagines to be the same recognition and pleasure she feels:
Here
we are—despite the delays, the confusion, and the shadows en route—at last, or for the moment, where we always intended to be.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOR THEIR SPONSORSHIP
of prizes and grants that helped support and encourage my work, I thank the New York Foundation for the Arts, the
Chicago Tribune,
the
Bellingham Review, Literal Latté,
and the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society (especially Joe DeSalvo, Rosemary James, and H. Paul and Michael X. St. Martin). For giving generously of their time and expertise to answer various research questions, I thank Dr. John Andrilli of Saint Vincents Medical Center in New York City and John and Christine Southern of C&J Medals in Reading, England. And for sharing with me their wee bit of Scotland (which I have embellished), I am happily indebted to my McKerrow cousins across the ocean, most of all Matthew, Gordon, and Allan.
For support of a more intimate kind, I thank my longtime companion, Dennis Cowley, and my parents, as well as Bette Slayton. Thanks must also go to the readers whose thoughtful responses helped me persevere: Lindsay Boyer, Shelley Henderson, Alec Lobrano, Daniel Menaker, Katherine Mosby, Nick Pappas, Tim and Jessalyn Peters, Mark Pothier, Lory Skwerer, Lisa Wederquist, James Wilcox . . . and the late Robert Trent, unforgettable and deeply missed.
Finally, for the enthusiasm, trust, and know-how that turned this story into a book, I am profoundly grateful to Dan Frank and, above all, to three remarkable women: my agent, Gail Hochman; my editor, Deborah Garrison; and Laura Mathews, loyal friend and muse.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JULIA GLASS
was awarded a 2000 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction writing and has won several prizes for her short stories, including three Nelson Algren Awards and the Tobias Wolff Award. “Collies,” the first part of
Three Junes,
won the 1999 Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella. She lives with her family in New York City, where she works as a freelance journalist and editor.
Copyright © 2002 by Julia Glass
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Michael Goldsen, Inc. for permission to reprint song lyrics from “If I Had a Boat” by Lyle Lovett. Copyright © 1987 by Michael Goldsen, Inc./Lyle Lovett (ASCAP). All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Michael Goldsen, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Glass, Julia, 1956–
Three Junes / Julia Glass.
1. Scots—United States—Fiction. 2. Long Island (N.Y.)—Fiction. 3. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 4. Scotland—Fiction. 5. Gay men—Fiction. I. Title.
PS
3607.l37
T
48 2002 813¢.6—dc21 2001055448
eISBN: 978-0-375-42242-3
v3.0