Three Junes

by Julia Glass

  One of the men is dark, with black hair and vehemently bushy eyebrows. Stavros, she thinks with a twinge of guilt and longing. Not the kind of man to whom she had ever been attracted in the past, but she had proved her own convictions wrong. Or she had changed. She did not know which.

  “Hello, darlings. Isn’t the morning just sublime?”

  Fern pulls the binoculars from her eyes. The voice belongs to a woman who crosses the lawn with a picnic hamper over her arm. It’s the neighbor who waved from her seaside porch yesterday afternoon. She wears green rubber clogs and pink gardening gloves that flare out toward her elbows like medieval gauntlets and match the lipstick on her sun-crinkled lips.

  “Gorgeous!” Tony answers, standing. He goes to the steps and offers an arm to help the woman up the stairs, though she hardly needs his assistance.

  “Aren’t you the rare courtly fellow,” she rasps. She has one of those bawdy upper-crust voices that makes her sound as if she’s swallowed a handful of gravel. “Speaking of courts, you must play with us again, you gave these old girls quite the workout! And please”—she casts a disapproving look toward the tennis players they were so recently ogling—“please excuse my grandson and his entourage. They play with the manners of Attila. I’m resigned to meeting my end in decapitation by Frisbee.”

  She looks down at Fern and slips off a gauntlet to shake her hand. “Hello there, lady friend. Let’s not bother with intros. I’m just delivering a few goodies—my June harvest’s a windfall this year.”

  Tony takes the basket and lifts the lid. “My, my. We don’t deserve such bounty.”

  “Neither Andrew nor his boorish grandfather will abide rhubarb, though I do make a superb galette.”

  “Oh but we love it, don’t we?” says Tony, grinning at Fern.

  She agrees and peers into the hamper. Alongside the rhubarb, there are strawberries, asparagus, and a small bouquet of marigolds tied with a red silk ribbon.

  “Will Fenno be coming out?” the neighbor asks, looking hopeful.

  Tony shrugs. “Can’t say.”

  “Oh but how thoughtless of me, the place is yours for the moment.”

  “Not a-tall, not a-tall,” Tony drawls. Fern all but stares at him now.

  The neighbor raises her hands, as if she’s being arrested. “Well that’s it then! I never, never overstay! Enjoy the day, my dears.” She trots down the stairs and back across the lawn. Once on her side of the hedge, she calls toward the tennis court, “Decibels, young men, decibels!”

  Fern turns to Tony. “‘Gorgeous’? ‘Bounty’? Are you morphing into Nathan Lane or what?”

  “When on Gold Coast, poor man speak with gilded tongue.”

  “What was that about ‘giving the girls a workout’?”

  Tony laughs into a hand. “My third morning here, right here, just sittin’ and drinkin’ my coffee, I hear someone yodeling, ‘Yoohoo, yoohoo there, young sir!’ I look around, and there’s milady in her matching little tennis dress and visor, waving her racquet through the hedge. She honks out in her best Bacall, ‘Do you by any chahnce pullay? Our fawth’s apparently ay-wohl.’ I tell her I do, but not very well, and she goes, ‘Well pullease, pullease, come fill our hole!’”

  “You don’t play tennis,” says Fern.

  Tony pretends indignation. “Well, sort of, sort of—how would you know? Anyhow, who would say no? I felt like an anthropologist invited by headhunters to lend a hand at the actual shrinking.”

  Tony tells her how he pulled a T-shirt over his bathing suit and put on his tattered old sneakers; in the mudroom, he found a racquet. Once on the court, he felt like the savage. Three pewter-haired women in pleated white skirts greeted him with panicky delight. “Pretty good players, the old girls, but I spread a little testosterone on my serve and gave ’em a few passing shots. Ooh, but they squealed like rock-star groupies. It was a riot. And then, as they’re wiping their grips with their plush little towels, they insist I join them to ‘be refreshed.’ But for the mention of iced tea, I might have tucked tail and run.”

  Fern pictures Tony, bright with exertion, hair damp with sweat. A rare sight, as Tony (or the Tony she knows) avoids all extreme behaviors, emotional or physical. But he looks fit, and for all she knows, he could be an ace at tennis or baseball or hockey or anything traditionally male.

  “I kept expecting a taxidermist to show up and mount me on a wall. These women are the type who have an orgasm putting on panty hose. ‘Dahling, that backhand of yaws is a pip!’” Theatrically, he shudders.

  “You shouldn’t be so cruel. She clearly likes you.”

  Tony laughs. “Who says I don’t like her?”

  Fern looks into the hamper again. “I’ll make a pie,” she says.

  “I’m for that.” Tony heads for the door and holds it open for the dog. “Impress our third,” she hears him say before the door shuts behind them.

  “Third what?” Fern calls into the house as she follows.

  “Dinner guest,” he calls back. In the kitchen, he sits at the table. “Here, guy!” Eagerly, the dog pushes himself between Tony’s legs.

  Tony will have met someone, last night, last week, on one of his nocturnal roamings. The beach, a club, a parking lot; so she imagines. The someone will be in his twenties, good-looking, funny or intelligent or charming. Something besides seductive. Fern will meet him tonight and then, she’d bet the moon, never again.

  “Who’s Fenno?” she says. “Funny name.”

  “Just one of the hangers-on to this little estate. Believe me, the professor has about ten best friends once the birds start heading north again. I had to give up and let the machine take calls for my first week here.”

  Fern looks through the cupboards for things she’ll need to make a pie. She finds them all with surprising ease. There’s even a large marble board for rolling pastry, which she slides into the freezer. “Lard,” she says, pulling out a bricklike package. “God. I haven’t used lard since Paris.”

  At her own mention of their past, she turns to look at Tony. He is bent over the dog, whispering; it takes her a moment to realize he is fingering those long shaggy ears in search of ticks. The dog’s face is turned up, smiling, as if he’s a guest at a spa. Fern watches Tony pull out a beige tick the size of a shirt button—the dog hardly flinches—and drop it into a jar of soapy liquid on the table.

  He strokes the dog’s head firmly several times and coaxes him off toward his bed. When Tony finally turns his attention back to Fern, he says, “So, is superdaddy back? Did you tell him the news?”

  Fern sets the lard on the counter. “I wish you’d stop making that lame joke. He’s not the super. He’s my landlord’s son. My landlord is a very clever guy, as is Stavros, and they only happen to own about a third of the West Village, so don’t act so uppity.”

  “But did you? Isn’t it getting a little late in the game not to spread the joy, get him to make you an honest woman? Just think: real estate this time around. Oh reevoir, Old Masters. Salloo, Trump Tower. No fretting over rent control for you.”

  Besides Anna, only Tony would make a joke alluding to her life with Jonah. This is a relief, even if the jokes are annoying. At the funeral, nearly everyone began their condolence with “Such a tragedy!” But the real tragedy is that Jonah’s death was not a tragedy. It was a farce. And this, secretly, is what now makes discussion of Jonah taboo in most people’s minds. If we do not speak ill of the dead, we do not so much as mention the absurdly dead. Sometimes Fern wishes they had gone through a messy, weepy divorce; then she could talk freely about her ambivalent memories, about the things she did love about him as well as the things she stopped loving and the things that drove her nuts. But now the entire topic of her misshapen marriage, along with Jonah himself, seems consigned to oblivion. Poor Jonah: a decent man with rotten luck.

  “Your French sounds as offensive as ever, and I never said I wanted to marry the guy,” she says to Tony.

  “Zeus Junior sweeps down from Olympus with a holster
full of thunderbolts and what, Miss Veritas refuses his attentions?”

  “I haven’t exactly refused them, have I?”

  “Well you’ve refused to let them go public.”

  “That’s not true,” she says, though perhaps it is. She might make excuses about how busy she and Stavros have been in their respective lives, how the rest of their time they spend alone in each other’s company, but they would still be excuses. With her fingertips, she mills flour, sugar, butter, and lard into a golden loam.

  After a moment Tony says, sounding subdued, “You do love the boy?”

  “Oh yes. But then I’m not sure I can remember what love is. Or I can remember what I’ve always thought it was, but now I’m constantly suspicious.”

  Tony comes up beside her with a carton of milk. He knows her pastry routine. After he sets the milk on the counter and she thanks him, he touches her belly from the side, a fleeting pat. “Love is about to become something else entirely,” he says.

  Fern looks at him, surprised. He smiles, but seriously.

  “Well, yes.” She leaves it at that.

  He watches her press the dough into a ball and wrap it in waxed paper. “Come to the beach while it’s chilling,” he says.

  “You go. I’ll find you later. I have to sleep, or I won’t have much energy tonight.”

  “Disco nap for Binky.”

  Fern laughs. “Precisely.”

  JONAH HAD BEEN DEAD FOR HOURS, but Fern did not know it. No one did. She was making dinner in their kitchen, expecting him back any minute. Back from where, she had no idea and did not care, but he liked to eat dinner at seven and always called if he would be late. Courteous and dependable: that was Jonah. But she was angry at him as she chopped onions and garlic, peeled tendons from chicken breasts. As she turned the rice down to simmer, she imagined leaving him: finding a place back in Brooklyn, buying florid thrift-shop curtains, taking her paints out of storage. Because if Jonah could deceive himself that joblessness was a force which kept their marriage a strained, platonic alliance, Fern could deceive herself that passionlessness was a force which kept her from painting.

  Her brooding fantasy that evening included Aaron Byrd, the childhood friend who had fixed her up with Jonah (and gloated at their wedding). Recently, he had made partner at his architecture firm; because of the new demands this made on his life, Fern and Jonah had not seen Aaron in months. Suddenly, two days before, Fern had been stunned to walk out the door of their building and see his name in blue Brooks Brothers cursive, directly across the street where a small but fancy faux-antique building was starting to rise. Lovejoy, Rushing, Stein & Byrd: The fleet of names dismayed her. Why hadn’t Aaron called to tell her about this project? How many times had he been to dinner here, looked out the window, and eyed that vacant lot with lust? That night, and the next night, she had dreamed of Aaron: Both times he asked her to marry him, both times she accepted with joy, and she awoke with a stirring of erotic nostalgia, which quickly turned to sadness and then to irritation.

  It was his fault, in part, that she was married to Jonah. Once, she had thought it charming that they were fixed up and liked each other right away. But in truth, wasn’t it pathetic, as if neither of them had been capable of doing this one, colossally important thing without guidance? Fern thought of her parents, who ran an immensely successful nursery, having joined her mother’s love of nature with her father’s business sense. Joseph and Helen Olitsky loved to repeat the story of their meeting: sole bidders for an orchid plant at an auction raising money for Helen’s sorority’s scholarship fund. Now if that wasn’t destiny, what the heck was?

  The wine Fern was drinking revived the wishfulness of her dreams. As she heated oil in a skillet, she saw herself newly settled, alone but relieved, inviting Aaron to dinner, just as she had invited him to countless dinners before and after he introduced her to Jonah, before and after they married.

  As she imagined the details of such an evening—what she would wear, what she would cook—her kitchen timer rang to remind her of this actual meal: that the rice was done, the chicken stewed with the tomato, tarragon, and cream. It was ten past seven when she mixed the salad dressing in a jar, and Jonah had not called. Feeling too spiteful to wait, Fern served herself and sat down to eat. That morning, wak-ing from Aaron’s second proposal, she had confronted Jonah while he dressed. She told him yet again how lonely she was, how much she wanted things to work out, how much she wanted them to get to a place where they were happy enough, content enough, to think about having a child. Jonah gazed at her from across the room, looking concerned. He said that once he had a job—he was sure this would happen soon, he just had a feeling—everything would improve. He would relax. They would move somewhere they could have a house, a house they could fill with her paintings. He would be dying for a baby. No, they did not need counseling. No, he did not need therapy. Fern needed a little patience, he said, and that was when she lost it. How dare he turn the tables and say that she was the one wanting! She was not the one who had no work, not the one who had idle hours to fill, not the one who was frigid in bed!

  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.