Three Junes

by Julia Glass

  “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.

  A door below her opens. Tony whistles softly to the dog. They head across the lawn. The old dog moves slowly, and Tony is patient. He turns around briefly, walking backward, and waves up at Fern. And then his silhouette—defined not by the moon or stars but by the security floodlight in the neighbors’ driveway—merges with the hedge. The baby rolls gently inside her, like the shifting of wet sand under a wave. She first felt it, or knew it for what it was, a few weeks ago. Quickening, they call the first tangible movements; every time since, her heart does the same.

  THERE IS A CHANCE that Fern will raise this baby on her own; sometimes, perversely, this is the fantasy that gives her the greatest pleasure. Not because she does not want Stavros around but because it feels as if it would be cleaner, less complicated, as if she would not run the risk, once more, of failing at being a wife. Being a mother seems challenge enough. But money: that would be hard.

  Fern works at home as a book designer. Just now, at last, after designing publicity brochures and then plain, text-filled books like novels and self-help sermons, she has begun to work on large glossy books: trophy cookbooks; books on fashion and travel; books with page spreads luxurious as that lawn beyond the hedge, photographs of villas and feasts and nymphets atop the Eiffel Tower. Such books may lack intellectual substance, but design is more than white noise to trundle the reader along. Fern attends meetings where everyone looks to her, where what she does might make or break the appeal of a book as an object to be held, coveted, above all bought. But the work does not make her wealthy, and she knows she must find some kind of upward momentum: at worst, a job in a corporate office. Two-tone graphs of stock performance, footnotes in four-point italic, portraits of bankers at their desks. Annual reports: a very special circle in hell.

  Fern did not set out to be a graphic designer (did anyone?); through childhood and beyond, she painted. In college, she devoured Bronzino and Beckmann, John Singer Sargent and Lucian Freud. Among classmates revering Nam June Paik and Baldessari, she was shamelessly outdated in her tastes. On her best days, she believed she would single-handedly put portrait painting back on the map. When she graduated, she won a fellowship to go to Europe for a year, look at the art in museums and make her own. For all the conventional reasons, she lived in Paris, and that is where she met Tony.

  She was sitting on a bench in the Parc Montsouris, drawing a young woman who lay on a blanket, curled around a baby. It was one of those last warm days, September’s nostalgia for August, and under the spell of the sun, they slept. As Fern drew, she began to notice a man circling the sleepers, closing in. He moved the way she imagined a tiger would move, creeping. That he held a camera rather than a weapon made him no less disturbing. Fern put down her paper and pencils.

  Clever, the man watched his shadow. He was careful not to block the sun from the mother’s face, as the sudden shade might wake her. When he leaned across her body and began to photograph the baby, Fern astonished herself by saying, “What are you—qu’est-ce que vous faîtes?” She spoke quietly but clearly, as if it were still important not to wake the sleepers.

  The man faced her. He walked toward her, smiling. He looked at her drawing. “Apparently, the same as you.”

  If she was irritated at the comparison (she was making a respectful study of innocence; he was invading it), somehow she was even more irritated that he was American. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  To her dismay, he sat down and examined her drawing, which lay on the bench between them. “Not bad,” he said.

  She could find no answer to that. She felt invaded as well.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “Junior year abroad?”

  Instead of walking away, she said sharply, “I’ve graduated from Harvard. I have a grant. And you?”

  He whistled. “Yikes. Sorry if I was rude. I’m Tony. No Harvard boy here, but I’m not the pervert you think I am. I’m just doing my job.”

  His smile, intense in its warmth, made it impossible not to want to know him. How could guile be so attractive? Months later, she would often wish she had gathered up her things, said good-bye (or nothing), and left him behind to do as he wished. But she hadn’t. “Which is?”

  His smile relaxed. “Which is . . . to take the very, very small and make it large. Make it get some attention. Give stature to the details. Where the devil lurks, you know?” Close to eleven years later, she still owns one of the few photographs he took of that baby, before she interrupted him. A tiny fist, enlarged to the size of a melon. At first glance, it resembles an eccentric bulbous mushroom discovered on a tree trunk deep in a forest. Fern has always hung it in a prominent place. These days she stops to look at it often, this literal vision of a baby’s hand, two of which are growing, sprouting digits, beginning to grasp about blindly inside her.

  If Tony seduced her, she met him halfway. If she is truthful, she knows that he was attracted more to a concept she formed in his mind than to Fern herself. It was the same concept she once felt she embodied for her parents: good girl, fine student, earnest thinker, winner of everything parents want their children to win (and disdainer of most things parents wish their children to disdain). Tony, she knew within minutes of their meeting, was her obverse, her negative: insolent dropout, tireless comic, bluff opportunist. Proud pilot of an improvised life. Equation for a true artist, if such a thing existed; this was what she feared and what she envied. He had mentioned the devil, and that’s what any woman, even so recently a girl, ought to have seen. But if he was a devil of one kind, he was an angel of another. As she was to learn, he seems to break hearts without circumspection but also without any true deceit—and then, for reasons she has never plumbed, insists on holding them fast.

  FERN WAKES when Tony comes in. Two-thirty, the green digits tell her in the dark. She listens intently. She hears the locks secured on the three doors downstairs, footsteps in between. The rush of the kitchen faucet: water for the dog, which noisily slurps from its bowl. The metallic jostle of the dog’s tags as it labors up the carpeted stairs and into the master bedroom.

  Tony does not follow. The world is so still that she can hear the hushed thump of the refrigerator door, brief clank of a drawer holding flatware. Vanilla ice cream is Tony’s favorite nightcap. Chair legs scrape the floor, a newspaper rustles.

  She has never understood when Tony really sleeps. In Paris, he lived in a rich woman’s duplex loft, but when Fern was with him, he preferred to share the bed in her rented room. There, he was free to leave when he chose. Dawn, he said, was the best time to use the darkroom he borrowed. But even when t
hey did end up at the loft, he’d abandon her in the woman’s great, soft bed as soon as he thought she’d fallen asleep. He would pace about downstairs and then, often, leave the place altogether. Anxiously, she would hear him cross the expensive rugs: footsteps, then a blank, footsteps, another blank. She would will him to return upstairs (once in a while he would) yet, at the same time, wish he would just open the door and go, so the torture would end. After a while, she no longer believed he went to a darkroom: not because there were no pictures to show (there were plenty) but because, more than once, she ran into him by day with young French men—boys, really—who barely spoke English. Later, neither of them would mention the encounter, but Fern would notice that Tony had cooled a few degrees. In bed, he would turn his back and cocoon himself in the sheet, untouchable.

  If for months she said nothing, if she let her misery bloom in passive silence, it was because of the way he loved her when he did: so intently, so quietly, she felt almost holy. He rarely kissed her mouth, and he never quite looked her in the eye, but he’d examine every inch of her body, wide-eyed, and in the cobalt dark she loved to watch his fingers roam her skin. Romantically, she thought of Tony’s blind mother and imagined that this hardship must make him different from other men, more sensitive. She closed her own eyes and felt he must be reading her, pore by pore.

  But then one day—it was May, a day of true spring—she came around a corner to see him with yet another boy, whispering something, Tony’s lips touching the boy’s sunlit ear. The kind of pleasure on the boy’s face was unmistakable. Fern slipped into a side street rather than let Tony see her, but that night when he entered her room, she said, first thing, “Why don’t you just come right out and tell me you like fucking boys?”

  He reacted with a smile, but he was also blushing. He said, “Out of what blue have we launched this missile?”