“Daphne, you’re my favorite person here,” he said. “My only friend. Though I guess I blew the friendship, didn’t I? I care so much for you, and the minute I say those words, I know I’m hurting you, and you can call me cruel, because objectively it’s true. But it’s true by accident, Daphne.”
“Accident?” she said. She saw Craig and the two Davids heading toward them on the path. She picked up her case and turned around, stumbling as she tried to run, aiming for the quickest way back to the dorm.
He stopped her at the studio and steered her inside. He turned the lights on again. They blinked in the raw fluorescent glare. Daphne covered her eyes.
“We’re an accident? That’s what we are?” she cried out.
“No,” he said. “That came out wrong. We’re … a collision. Like a physics collision, not a car crash.”
“What are you talking about?” she said, though she had to feel hope at the sight of his crooked smile.
“Atoms, I mean.” He sat at the harpsichord, on Michael’s bench. He was looking at the keyboard as he said, “Someday, Daphne, I’ll be at your wedding, and I’ll say, ‘See? See how it all turned out the way it was supposed to be?’ ”
There was room for her on the bench, but she stood resolutely behind him. “And what about your wedding, Malachy? I won’t be at your wedding. I promise you that.”
Malachy touched the harpsichord’s gold and red keys, his fingers only brushing their scuffed finish, making not a single sound. “Everybody says you can’t predict the future, but I won’t be having a wedding, believe me.”
Suddenly Daphne felt limp, boneless with exhaustion, worn down by the futility of their talk. He was always vacillating, always taking back something he had given—wasn’t he? She had to stop pretending that would change; but how could she, feeling the way she did? She gave up on her resolve not to cry, but her tears were invisible to him.
“Did you really want a limerick?” he said.
When she failed to answer, he played a few tinny random notes on the harpsichord and then, as if addressing the instrument, said:
Behold the rich farm boy Malachy Burns
Who plays his pipe among the churns.
He’s a coward, he’s benighted,
He makes everyone feel slighted,
And all things but music he spurns.
When Daphne sobbed, he turned around on the bench.
“That isn’t funny,” she said. “And it’s stupid and mean. You are cruel. You are a coward. Making it rhyme doesn’t excuse you.”
“You’re right. I only wish I could make you see how sorry I am.”
“Apologies are cheap and easy.” She told him to go to hell. She hoisted her case and left him there. She went to her room and pushed her instrument roughly into the closet.
Mei Mei was sitting on the floor, the Debussy spread open before her. “Hey,” she said quietly, and the look she gave Daphne said not only that she understood what had probably happened but that she knew better than to ask.
Daphne was just in time for a late swim, Mei Mei told her. Exactly what the doctor ordered, Daphne answered. Along with her three roommates, Craig, Trombone David, Oboe David, and several campers from Chamber Two whom she hadn’t spoken with much before then—how stupid she was; how nice they all were—Daphne went to the lake beach to drink beer, strip, and dive into the water, shocked by the plunge in temperature brought about by all that rain.
4
The Bright Blessed Day
THE BEAUTIFUL STONES, they shall be collected,” says Walter in what he calls his lady-of-the-manor voice. He sits cross-legged beneath a striped umbrella, wearing a curtained panama hat that makes him look like Lawrence of Arabia as Monty Python might have portrayed him.
While Kit swims laps parallel to the shore, Fenno and Walter are watching his children play by the ruffled edge of the surf—not that Herring Cove offers any genuine “surf.” It’s a placid haven for tanners, readers, and retirees. (Walter, who ought to be a father and sometimes wishes he were, insists that he doesn’t feel safe taking children to the ocean beaches, where the waves are roisterous and the undertow cunning.)
The boy, Will, trudges in and out of the water, dragging one of those foam boards on a leash. Without real waves, he can’t get any momentum, but he seems determined to make it work. His sister meanders along the rubble of the tide line, selecting favored stones and dropping them into a plastic cup from Wired Puppy that Walter fished from the depths of his beach bag. She’s amassed a small pile, like an offering, on the edge of Walter’s towel. She is drawn not to the smooth quartz orbs or the rough dotted pebbles but to the waferlike specimens that come in a range of chalky colors from white to charcoal gray.
“The beautiful stones,” Fenno says to Walter, “are technically illegal to remove from many beaches nowadays. Possibly including this one.”
“Oh, nonsense.”
“The hot-stone-massage practitioners are apparently endangering parts of the coastline where beach stones play an essential role in thwarting erosion.”
“Thanks, Archimedes, but that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” says Walter, who comes up with random classical names whenever he finds Fenno too eloquent or high-minded. “After all, if the ocean level is rising thanks to all those melting glaciers, then if enough stones are removed from the water, it will compensate. I don’t have a college degree for nothing!”
“I wasn’t aware you took geology.”
“I took advanced placement Common Sense while you were studying the poems of those poor guys killed in the trenches of World War One.”
After too much arguing about the subject—first at home and then in a therapist’s office—Fenno and Walter agreed to a “vacation moratorium” on discussing the circumstances surrounding this weekend until it’s behind them. Which means that for the past week they’ve found themselves making elaborate small talk on everything from the current cut in men’s swim attire to the wearisome craze among Walter’s fellow restaurateurs for putting pork belly in every course from gazpacho to artisanal sorbet. And now: the role of beach stones in the fate of the human race?
Kit drove from New Jersey with his children, arriving late last night; Kit’s mother and Mal’s mother will arrive, separately, this evening. Though six months have passed since Kit’s first letter, Fenno still finds it extremely hard to think of this man as Mal’s son—or of Lucinda, whose presence he longs for yet also dreads, as Kit’s grandmother. But he has only just met Kit, only just begun to convince himself that this is the flesh-and-blood grown-up version of the boy in the pictures that Fenno discovered under Mal’s bed on the day he died.
It’s as if this part of Fenno’s past—the part that sometimes threatens the life he shares with Walter—had been, for so long, a perfect origami construction (perhaps one of those cranes that Fenno associates, queasily and unavoidably, with the bomb dropped on Hiroshima), and then some blithe stranger came along and decided to unfold it and spread it out flat. But the folds are indelible, so now it’s a crazed square of colored paper, its formerly hidden planes jarringly bright, revealing the color of the paper when it was new. And will it ever be folded back into that elegant expression of flight? Doubtful. Unlikely.
Obviously not.
And it’s this—the future lying in wait beyond the long-planned gathering of virtual strangers united by inscrutable genes—that worries Fenno more than how the weekend itself will play out. He’s sure they will all behave politely, lovingly, telling stories about Mal that summon grateful tears to one another’s eyes, his among them.
But here it is, finally, after all the tense quarreling and all the negotiations. Here is Walter, wearing not just his Saharan headgear but oversize sunglasses, a long-sleeved shirt, and a pair of white cotton trousers. Fenno is amused by Walter’s love of the beach despite his perpetual fear of the sun. (“Melanoma is a dark and greedy goddess,” he recites when browsing the sunscreen aisle at Duane Reade.) Fenno can take or le
ave the beach, but having spent his childhood summers in sun-sparse Scotland, he cannot resist basking in the exuberant light of an all-American August day. He sits, therefore, just outside the umbrella’s elliptical shadow, sections of Friday’s Times splayed across his sandy legs. It’s impossible to read a newspaper at the beach, yet in his own form of illogical behavior, he persists in bringing it along.
Fenno realizes that he and Walter, indolent on their towels, surrounded by a surfeit of paraphernalia, must look to passersby like the prototypical pair of old Provincetown queens, rusty barges among the sleek, high-hulled yachts—except that they are not regulars here.
Walter and Fenno have lived together in New York for almost a decade, though they knew each other in passing (literal passing) for years before that. On the same side of the same city block—a shady stretch of Jamesian row houses on Bank Street—they maintained its only two commercial ventures. Walter’s Place was (and still is) a counterintuitively hip meat-and-potatoes restaurant that has spawned a satellite bistro across town and, for the past year, a pair of roving food trucks. The Bull peddles three versions of a ten-dollar roast-beef sandwich (“grass fed, drug free, gently weaned, yada yada yada,” as Walter puts it), while The Dog specializes in a trendsetting throwback, the pig-in-a-blanket: pure-beef hot dogs offered in three types of pastry. The Dog is frantically followed, generally via smartphone app, by droves of readers who saw the Times review praising the pig-in-a-brioche as “positively Proustian.” (“Just what the dickens does that mean?” Walter said. “It makes you want to go back to bed for the rest of your life and reminisce about Milanos?”)
Fenno’s shop, Plume, was a bookstore. Was. Walter’s business, now a modest empire, is thriving. Fenno’s, as of April, is not—its failure less a matter of shriveling commerce (though commerce did shrivel) than of avaricious landlords. When Fenno’s lease came to an end, the new rent proposed—demanded—was the old one multiplied by four. (For a delusional fifteen minutes, Fenno assumed there was a typo in the e-mail.) With insulting alacrity, in his old domain sprouted the fifth Marc Jacobs boutique within a four-block radius, compounding the sense of real-estate déjà vu in a neighborhood where stretches of once-quite-idiosyncratic merchants have been replaced by a prolific redundancy of glossy, mirrored spaces and miniskirted mannequins, each new establishment about as distinctive as a slab of brie from Trader Joe’s.
Fenno knows he is over the hill according to the customs and aesthetics of the place where he continues to live, never mind that he’s always been a bit of a codger, even back in his twenties. Now that he’s approaching sixty, he has already warned Walter (for whom entertaining is another form of breathing) that he must resist all urges to throw a party. Not because Fenno will mind turning sixty—the gay men they know would hardly dare admit that they see such an age as anything other than a glorious gift—but simply because he likes his celebrations small. Were they ever to contemplate marriage, they’d be divorced before the engagement party that Walter would have taken such meticulous delight in planning.
Unlikely a match as they are, Fenno and Walter have been called, to their faces, exemplars of post-queer culture: committed companions and citizens who, between them, have seen and been a part of it all—the protests, the epidemic, the pride parades, the uproar against the persecution of gay teens, the fight for equal marriage rights—yet persevere in leading unembittered, fully integrated lives.
“We won’t make the gay Mount Rushmore,” Walter says, “but, honey, we are the wind beneath those wings.”
Whether they are indeed post-, pre-, proto-, or peri-anything, they are spending the second half of their tenth shared summer at the very theme park of Queer, where queer is a language, a dress code, an etiquette, an inescapably florid pungence: in short, the norm. Provincetown was Walter’s idea. He believes in fresh air of the metaphorical kind, so every year they travel somewhere new, whether for Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, or a week to break the long stranglehold of winter. To take a whole month is unprecedented, and Fenno knows that Walter is trying hard to distract him from his accidental retirement.
“A month in Gomorrah?” Fenno balked when Walter mentioned the plan back in April—for apparently it was a plan, not merely a notion.
“Here’s the deal,” said Walter. “And let me tell you, we get the hands-down bargain.” One of his regular clients wanted Walter’s Place, the entire restaurant, for his son’s rehearsal dinner on a Saturday in June. In exchange, he offered the use of his Ptown house for the month of August; he and his wife would be traveling through Europe. “Signed, sealed, delivered,” Walter quoted himself as replying. He showed Fenno the pictures online: a white antique clapboard house in the West End, inland side of Commercial, behind a privet hedge. “Are you fool enough to say no?” Walter dared him.
“After-dinner mints, why thank you!” Walter says to Fanny. “I’ll take this greenish one if you don’t mind.” He promptly inserts the stone in his mouth and pretends to chew.
“Noooo!” cries Fanny in a spasm of laughter. “You’ll break your teeth, silly!”
“That is so totally gross,” says Will as Walter spits the stone delicately into his palm.
“But it tasted like avocado. I swear!”
Through his sunglasses, Fenno watches Kit watching his children watch this man they’ve only just met. Kit looks tired—he and Fenno stayed up till three in the morning—but he is smiling as if relieved, as if he has finished an exhausting task. Right now Fenno is grateful to Walter, who’s in his element wherever people need help feeling at home in their skin.
Among the countless attractive young people who move to New York in hopes of becoming an actor, Walter is one of the lucky ones. He didn’t make it much past dog-food commercials and bit parts in World War II movies with five-line roles for tall, blond, big-jawed men with credible German accents—“graduates of the ‘Schnell, Schnell!’ Acting Academy,” says Walter—but he found a way to make a living as the director and ringleader of a colorful, multisensual production designed to send people home feeling sated, happy, and fortunate. Unlike many others in his profession, Walter loves being conspicuously present at his restaurants. (He has even threatened to ride around on those trendy trucks.) He isn’t a master chef; he’s a master host.
How differently Fenno conducted the work he chose. His customary station was a desk in a back corner, where he tended happily to the monkish chores of stocking and selling the ineluctably desirable objects known as books (which might also, like a good meal, make people feel sated, happy, and fortunate—even wise). Most of the time, he spoke with his customers only when spoken to. He had employees who answered the phone, roamed the aisles to offer assistance, and ran the readings. Once or twice a year, he endured the intense camaraderie—and, of late, commiserating—at booksellers’ conventions.
Walter may be right that Fenno was too passive, even defeatist, but no amount of glad-handing would have kept his rent affordable, and moving was inconceivable; Fenno is someone who believes that souls cannot migrate from one solid entity to another. Plume, with its bonny back garden, its buckled plank floors, its tree-tinted light, was indisputably a place with a soul.
“Can I pick up some food at that supermarket we passed on the way out?” asks Kit. “I’d like to contribute to the weekend somehow. I can also cook.”
“You can cook?” interrupts Walter. “Honey, you are on. And don’t call me cheeky,” he says to Fenno. “I’ve had enough of your bee-bee-cue chicken with the sesame seeds.”
“I ordered posh salads from that make-believe farm stand you love so much,” says Fenno. “Since we’re not sure who’ll get here when.”
“I love family reunions,” Walter says to Kit, lying through his teeth. “I guess because mine wasn’t much of a union to begin with. Forget the re.” When Fenno told him the plan—to offer this borrowed house as a place for Fenno to meet Kit and bring together his newly extended family (all of them connected only through Mal)—he gave Walter no mor
e choice than Walter had given him about taking the house. Walter said, “You are packing a keg of dynamite, sweetheart.” Aye, and don’t I know it, Fenno thought. But it was, undeniably, the right thing to do.
Malachy Burns has been a source of resentment and retrospective jealousy for years, even though (or perhaps because) he was never Fenno’s lover and even though he was long dead before Walter so much as shook Fenno’s hand. (They had nodded to each other for months on the short stretch of sidewalk between restaurant and bookshop. It took the casual kinship of their dogs—now long dead as well—to force an introduction.)
Walter turns to Fanny and Will. “Ready to head back? I bought a sack of lemons for real lemonade. And grenadine to make it pink.” The twins brighten. “Speaking of pink? Time for the sunburn test.” He presses a forefinger into Fanny’s cheekbone. “You’re done. Maybe a little rare, but that’s how we like our roasted human.” He looks at Will and says, “I know. Totally gross.”
Fenno and Kit shake out the mats and towels. Walter closes the umbrella, retrieves stray flip-flops, corrals the scattered newspaper sections that Fenno will never get around to reading. Fenno checks his mobile—how he hates yet depends on the thing—to make sure neither of the women have left messages about their arrival. He is always relieved when the miserly screen (“No one could ever call that phone smart,” says Walter) shows him nothing more than the same snapshot of Felicity sunning herself, in all her avian splendor, on the back of a chair in the garden behind the shop where customers now casually spend on a single handbag the same sum of money they apparently thought unreasonable to spend on a dozen brand-new hardcover books.