Three Junes

by Julia Glass

  And then I thought of the lie I had told about one of my own brothers, to cover up a folly of my own.

  Kneeling beside the bed, I rested my cheek in the small of Mal’s back. I stayed that way a long time. Then I moved to the living room, where I sat facing the street for another two hours, composed and silent, until the phone rang.

  “Hello there, you.” Lucinda, hungover and footsore but thrilled to hear my voice. She’d had such a wonderful time that she felt as if she’d been a faithless wife. “But never mind; do you think we could do it again?” was the last happy thing I heard her say until, in May, she called me from Vermont and asked me to help with a memorial party.

  I told her right away what I had found, as if I had just dropped by, just to check in. By the time she arrived, she had guessed at my collusion. She said coldly, before her emotions took over, “He wasn’t yours to let go.”

  She wouldn’t let me touch her. Through the comings and goings (police, medical examiner, neighbors from below and above), she did not look at me once, but I made myself stay. In the late afternoon, when the light was the same shade of gray it had been when I came over, I tucked Felicity into my coat and crossed the street. Poor, neglected Rodgie had wet the bedroom carpet; he looked at me with shame, not reproach. I cried, for only the second time that day, as I hugged him and put on his leash.

  When we returned from a long walk, I played the two messages on my answering machine. One was from Ralph, asking where the devil I’d been all day, why hadn’t I opened the shop, and the other was from Dennis, the first part muffled by clinking coins and laughter. “. . . You’ve got to forgive me I didn’t ring the minute she came out, I’ve been just insane, dashing every which way, living this incredible dream! She’s like this tiny . . . God, this tiny angel, I mean literally, everything but the wings! And Vee’s in super shape—she was a force of nature! I’m sending pictures by overseas express. Ring and tell me if she doesn’t look just like Dad, I swear. But wait, don’t try to reach me, I’ll ring you later. I’m the happiest madman who ever lived! I’m going to need weights in my shoes!” Two days before, on the first of March, Laurie had been born.

  Within weeks, Ralph broke off with the architect. We resumed our spinsterish dinners, and I listened to him rant about the cruel vanity of our gender (from which Ralph claimed exemption). The architect had harped on him constantly to work out, play tennis, run, do anything to rid himself of his middle-aged gut. This was about his health, for heaven’s sake, and how, in this day and age, could you turn your back on that?

  “Well just let him try to captivate some studly young washboard. Good luck to him,” seethed Ralph. As a consolation prize, I gave in on souvenir totebags, as I had given in on T-shirts. We had now hired two full-time workers, and Ralph’s latest notion was that we should open a branch in the Hamptons (“Brookhaven’s yet to do in the birdlife!”). As further succor to his maimed ego, Ralph began shopping for a house in Amagansett or Montauk, already fantasizing about retirement. When I told him that another shop would stretch us too thin, he said teasingly, “And there’d always be a room for you, my dear.” I would wait to give in on this one.

  Tony returned to New York in June, not long after I returned from Vermont. He surprised me uncomfortably, of course, showing up at the shop right before a reading, and when I saw him—the sheen of his tanned skin and his hair, now trimmed to a sort of Brideshead Revisited swing—my knee-jerk desire was dampened by a mixture of anguish and boredom. Boredom at the thought of our certain routines, our certain distance. During the reading, we kissed furtively in the garden, but I made excuses and did not invite him upstairs. For two weeks, I kept him at arm’s length, until I felt sure enough to say that I wasn’t in the mood anymore. I wanted something else, or maybe nothing, for a while. He was angry but (yes, Ralph) too vain to reveal it. A few months later he called, and we began to meet again, just once in a while, at our Thai restaurant. We make each other laugh, share the bill, then go our separate ways. Sometimes I feel an itch, but I remind myself that I like him better this way. He still gives memorable gifts, if only on conventional occasions, and his pictures still sit unframed in my cupboard. He doesn’t ask.

  By Christmas, I had let two men lure me out of my cave. They didn’t stick, but they did not leave me hopeless. I began to accept, even seek, invitations to leave the city; I let the assistants run the shop for entire weekends. I bought a new couch, a new table and chairs, hired the boy across the street to paint my living room persimmon red. When I saw the room finished and empty, I wanted to weep—“Don’t they call this color ‘bordello’?” said Ralph—but then I got the idea of repossessing Audubon’s flamingo from the shop. Around this great picture, which commandeered a wall, the color found a purpose. And at night, like lipstick, it flattered my occasional guests and made them feel festive.

  As I made these changes, Felicity watched with consternation and yodeled an alarm at the arrival of each new object in her domain. I soothed her with papaya, fresh coconut, and frequent visits to the birdbath in the garden. Rodgie was happy; the new couch was deeper and softer. Such plain pleasures, I thought as my animals adjusted.

  These are the events I replay, five years later, as I crouch in the attic of the wonderful house which I can never quite believe is no longer my home. Just as I can never quite believe, though now I think I must, that to love me, my family does not need to understand me. There, Mal was wrong.

  Perhaps I have been talking to myself, or perhaps the laughter downstairs has become even louder; something, over the rain, must have woken Laurie, because suddenly this small ghostly creature stands at the top of the ladder. “Onco? Onco, tu es triste?” she whispers. She climbs up and sits down beside me. She touches my damp cheek.

  I put an arm around her. “No, sweetheart, not sad. Not exactly. But . . . mon coeur est fatigué.” It is the simplest explanation I can find; how could I tell her that my heart is in fact imploding?

  Laurie looks into my face, her eyes wide. “I will get Davi’s écouteur!” she exclaims.

  I smile at her sweet logic. “No, no,” I say, patting my chest, “my heart is going to be perfectly fine, it just needs a little rest.”

  She looks at my lap, at the box, and I know from her expression that her mother asked her about it, if she’d seen it anywhere. I lay a hand on top of the box. “You know what this is?”

  She nods. “Grand-père,” she says quickly, then sets her jaw.

  “You know that we’ve been looking for Grand-père.”

  She nods again. Now she is the tearful one.

  I stroke her hair. “I promise you won’t be in trouble.” A brave promise. “Not in big trouble,” I amend.

  “Please don’t throw Grand-père in the ocean,” she pleads. “I heard that! I heard they want to throw him in the ocean. But not you!”

  I set the box aside and pull Laurie into my lap. “Oh lass, is that why you’ve brought him up here?”

  Another fast nod.

  I look out into the night and ponder how to explain this to a five-year-old. I rock her a little as I think; strange how the motion comes so naturally to my arms. “You miss Grand-père.”

  “Oui,” she breathes, in this one word a sliver of a glimpse of the Frenchwoman she will become, voice as much a seduction as hips or legs. “He said he was going to take me to a castle, he said there’s a big huge castle on a hill, with soldiers and cannons, and he was going to show me.”

  Out of all our castles (barbaric Scotland mercifully in ruins), I wonder which one Dad promised and realize, of course: Edinburgh Castle, quite unlike any in France, so thoroughly male (even if the soldiers do wear skirts). I will take her at Christmas, but now is not the time to say so. I say, “He would have loved that.”

  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

  “BATS,” 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.