“You know what I mean.”
“Well let’s see. No, in fact I don’t, so help me out,” he cajoled.
She shouted, documenting every one of the five times she had seen him with boys she never saw again, recalling all the street names and times of day. She shouted that this was why he never introduced her to friends, because everyone but her must know he was gay! Perhaps she was naive to expect fidelity, but was he using her? Was he trying her on like a new pair of pants, to see if this—if girls—might somehow fit after all? Was she a lab rat with tits and a cunt? In a flash, she saw his tactile exploration of her body as experiment rather than adoration.
Tony’s smile had vanished, but he let the silence seep around them before he said, “So let’s get logical here: if I should see you on the street with some other girl, that makes you a dyke?”
“You know what I mean! You can’t keep on lying!”
“I’m lost,” he said calmly. “I’ve lied . . . about what?”
Of course, he never had lied, not literally, but she couldn’t believe he would feign such innocence. Then she wondered if there were other women as well as men, if she was just one of a small but literal crowd. “Leave,” she said quietly.
“Just like that. Because you saw me on the street with a friend.”
“Leave.” She held the door open. “Get out of my life.”
She cried through the next afternoon. Perhaps two thirds of that crying was over her broken heart; another third raged at her own stupidity.
A day later she boarded a train and traveled through Italy and Greece for a month. She’d been told it was lunacy to travel alone through these countries, especially because she was fair and would stand out in all the wrong ways. But to be noticed like that—whistled at, praised, even followed through crowds—was what she wanted right then.
The dense sunlight turned her hair the pure crocus yellow it had been when she was a child; everywhere she went, she felt like a firefly. In the Boboli Gardens, she was approached with extreme courtesy by a plain young man who spoke a charmingly imperious English, fluent but with a strong Italian accent. She let him show her around the palace and take her to lunch. He was visiting from Lucca, he told her, and had to return on the next train, but would she come see him there on her way to Greece? He wrote his address in her sketchbook and, as he handed it back to her, beamed with such ardor that she felt compelled to say, “You’re so kind, but I don’t know if I can.” His face darkened, and he took back the sketchbook. He scribbled so fiercely over his address that the ink bled through five pages.
His wrath unsettled Fern. “But I might—”
“No, no!” he said, shaking his fists in front of his face, “I must know with veritabulla certainty. I cannota bear to sit by my house and think, Willa she come? Willa she not come? Willa she come? Willa she not come?” After he stalked away, Fern was sorry to have hurt him, yet she felt as well an insidious pleasure. For though you could hardly break a heart on such little acquaintance, you could have a taste of that power.
At the postcard stand in Delphi, a dark man with eyes both soulful and wolfish told her that he had rushed to this very site when told by the oracle that he would find there “the woman of my destitute.” Fern laughed, knowing it would not daunt him; how nice, if vaguely perilous, it felt to be the object of such comic intensity. She let several such flirtations unfold, but only to a safe degree.
On Paros, toward the end of her trip, Fern let a flirtation unfold into something else. The man was not a parodically passionate Greek but a cocky Englishman, with whom she spent a single sleepless night. The night itself became a memory that she still enjoys, but when it was over and the man made his glib departure, he left her with the very sorrow she had been trying to shed. She went back to Paris with a sense of defeat. Tony had returned to New York but wrote her long letters—as if he had never wronged her, as if she had never expelled him from her life. He did not apologize or voice regrets. He simply told her everything about his life (or everything but), describing the tin aesthetic eye of New York next to Paris, the new turn his work had taken, the extraordinary heat . . . His letters teetered on the brink of romance but never quite fell; he might end by saying, I miss your Miss Veritas wisdoms, your crispy roast chicken, your refined oboe of a voice, your fresh-from-the-garden face . . . as if he’d forgotten which of their hearts had broken. She did not reply, but she did not throw his letters away.
Fern returned to the States after a summer’s worth of these letters, all unanswered, and she called him. They never slept together again and never mentioned that they had. Some people, she knows, are destined to get off scot-free.
She moved to Brooklyn. For five more years, she turned out vividly expressive pictures, thick with impasto and energy, each one filling a wall of the room she used as a studio in her apartment. She painted everyone she knew. Two of these paintings appeared in splashy group shows, but the dealers who came to her studio would say, at some point, the same thing: “They’re so . . . large.” They said this with the same bewilderment Fern felt at hearing it, because by the standards of most work in galleries back then, the paintings were almost diminutive. She could only conclude that she was somehow outpainting herself, exaggerating her stature; apparently, the pictures were too large for her, and though she tried to dismiss the implications (did she have a small spirit? was she simply not destined for largeness herself?), she switched abruptly to painting small. She dragged a big sheet of masonite back from the lumberyard, sawed it into squares the size of dinner plates, and painted her friends all over again, each face defiantly filling its frame (I’ll show you large). The expressions on these faces were always fiercer than Fern intended, and though she placed half a dozen in shows, even sold a few to strangers, she felt weary, as if she were working by rote. She was a waitress, and she had turned thirty. That was when she married.
She was first attracted to Jonah by what she perceived to be his serene decisiveness, his fidelity of focus. Here was a man who ate only one type of cereal, watched one newscaster, owned just one pair of shoes and one jacket to fit each of four social occasions (Fern thought of them as Workaday, Saturday, Glenn Miller, and Sporty). All winter long he wore the same hat, a gray Sherlockian cap with retractable earflaps.
“His closet is a poem,” Fern told Anna the first time she stayed over. Fern had known Anna since college; Anna was never short on opinions and, consciously or not, Fern often needed to hear them.
“Well and good,” said Anna, “but who’s the poet? Gregory Corso? Robert Frost? I hate to say it, but Alfred, Lord Tennyson, that’s my hunch.” Lord Tenny, Anna called him behind his back, or Mr. Singularity. Fern would laugh, but something else had dawned on her: Mr. Singularity would take one wife and one wife only, till death (one apiece) did they part.
Fern had always been determined to marry an artist, and Jonah, a newly minted art historian, allowed her to have the art without the incurable adolescence she had suffered in the men she had loved before: real or counterfeit iconoclasts, proudly allergic to neckties, loafers, and alarm clocks, to allegiance of any stripe.
And then there were Jonah’s surprising loves. When she gave his eulogy, in Jonah’s mother’s church in Far Hills, from a lofty Episcopal dais, she catalogued them: Rubens, Spanish food, John Belushi, Hawaiian shirts, and vintage comics (he owned the first nine of the original Superman series)—ribald antonyms to his cool, parsimonious nature. What Fern did not say was that though she shared none of these leanings, she had once been certain they were proof of stored-up passions, promises that one day she would wake to find herself beside a hot-blooded ukelele-playing muscleman bent on saving the world through laughter. Gone would be the man who winced at the sound of his tie sliding through its knot, wore dark shin-high socks even with shorts, ate (slightly open-mouthed) the same small bowl of peanuts each night when he gazed into the eyes of Tom Brokaw. Gone the man who answered her keen “I love you” with a whispered utterance that sounded like “A f
ew.”
When she’d met him, he’d looked angular, slim, even bold (he wore a red Hawaiian shirt; she didn’t see the socks because the party was so crowded), and he had been full of celebratory relief at having finished his thesis (on Rubens). When he spoke about paintings, he was lively; their first conversation was an argument about Balthus, and Fern liked how good-natured he seemed even in the midst of disagreement (he thought Balthus a poseur with little feel for paint or anything human, but he was careful not to make his contempt an attack on Fern). And she liked, back then, that they had been so pointedly introduced, deliberately matched by their host.
Like any delicate creature, love depends upon an ecosystem, a context. Hemmed in at that party by a crush of thirty-year-old frat boys with charm-bracelet wives, there they stood, Fern and Jonah, storks among chimps. She remembers the kinship she felt with him when, over his shoulder, she watched four men climb up on a couch and, waving beer cans and rolling their eyes, perform a tasteless vaudeville of Stevie Wonder singing about his newborn daughter Aisha. Of course, she now knows, this was why their host saw them as soul mates: their otherness among his friends.
“I met the guy playing tennis last week, and listen, you were made for each other,” said Aaron when he called to invite her. “You both love art and you both have all these arty friends, and you’ve both got this great conservative streak—like the best of our parents without their Republican intolerance. I bet you both know how to foxtrot. And listen—I think there’s a little money there. You could quit your waitressing job!”
Fern had known Aaron Byrd since grade school; their mothers, together, ran a garden club. All her life, Aaron had seemed to alternate between charming and exasperating Fern. He was the one man outside her family who’d known her forever; the one for whom she was never quite right; the one who would have been her prearranged spouse had they lived in another place or time. So when he told her he’d found her the perfect match, for a moment she was hurt. Here was the man who’d known her longest, known her best in certain ways, and this was how casually, how eagerly he’d hand her off to someone else. But then she thought, He’s known me so long, so well, he has to be right.
Jonah’s friends expressed delight and amazement: “We never thought Jonah would marry!” Flush with premarital hubris, Fern mistook this remark as a personal compliment (“We never thought he’d find so remarkable a woman!”), not the commentary it clearly was on his die-hard bachelor ways (“We never thought he’d live anything but monkishly alone!”).
She moved to Jonah’s apartment in the Village and put her painting supplies in a basement locker, telling herself that after the nuptial festivities ended, she would look for studio space. She never did; she found herself, instead, mooning over Jonah’s exhaustive collection of art books. When, within a year of their wedding, he stopped wanting sex, Fern would take a different book to bed each night and scrutinize its pages until he had fallen asleep. A habit born of pride, but it led to her fascination with fonts and layouts and margins. She didn’t like looking too long at the art, because art was what she ought to be doing but wasn’t. (She would choose, increasingly, books about dead artists so that she did not have to agonize over the possibility that they were, at that very moment, doggedly producing more work.)
Then she took to choosing from Jonah’s shelves the artists’ biographies, because they had fewer pictures to envy. Sometimes, at the end of one of these books, she would read—at first with skeptical curiosity, then with creeping eagerness—the postscript titled “A Note About the Type.” Here she became familiar with names like William Goudy, Pierre Simon Fournier, Rudolph Ruzicka, and above all, Claude Garamond, the sixteenth-century type cutter who came to resemble in Fern’s imagination a celebrity with the public stature, simultaneously, of a Bill Gates and a Richard Gere. According to one book, Garamond won the patronage of a king for something as droningly obscure as the “elegance and lively sense of movement” in fifty-two letters, ten numerals, and a scattering of punctuation marks.
These tiny texts were filled with fanlike praise for such attributes as “a daring homage to all things ancient”; “a trim grace and vigor”; “a rare beauty and muscular balance”—in alphabets! And there were snippets of history that would tug at her mind—like the unjust obscurity of one Jean Jannon, a Protestant designer, because he happened to live in a time of Catholic oppression. A man in the wrong place at the wrong time, whose tragedy of circumstance would be commemorated most publicly through an endnote, centuries later, to a biography of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
Over a period of months, compulsively distracting herself from work, from love, and from the tension of Jonah’s fruitless, increasingly lethargic search for a job, Fern came to discern type the way she had once discerned color: she knew Granjon from Fairfield, Bembo from Janson, Electra from Caledonia. Finally, and in the nick of time as events played out, Jonah’s trust fund helped her buy the degree she needed to refine her fascination. For that, she would always be grateful, but by the end of those two years, her marriage, like her painting, was a thing of the past.
Now, nearly another two years gone by, she lives in the apartment she shared with her husband, but without the man, his books, or the resolutely solitary ways she mistook in him for prudence and stability. Her life in fact contains, thanks to his bitterly grieving mother and sister, not one significant memento of Jonah. They even insisted she give back her ring, which held a stone from a family brooch. In a moment of irrational shame, she acquiesced, for in the year before he died she had sometimes fantasized Jonah dead, not so much out of anger but because she was lonely and exhausted. She did not imagine him dead by violent or torturous means; she simply imagined him suddenly, vaguely gone—as it turned out he was to die, in an accident so freakish she found it embarrassing to recount, even to her friends.
IT’S TIME TO TELL HER PARENTS. She fears not their censure but their perfectly realistic concern if she is to raise a child alone. Besides Tony and Anna, Fern has told Heather, her older sister. Others have certainly guessed.
“Oh my dear, what a pickle,” said Heather, though Fern had not presented the news as bad. “Who in the world is the father?”
“Well you are in for an adventure!” were Anna’s first words. When Fern told her Stavros was the father, Anna said, “Now there’s the first real man of all the boys you’ve been with.” Though Fern has been seeing Stavros for over a year, few of her friends have met him; she tells herself that this is simply because of the anemic social life she’s had since Jonah’s death, not because of any reticence about Stavros himself or his place in her heart. Anna managed to meet him, however, when she was visiting from Texas for just a few days. She met him because, not five minutes after walking into Fern’s apartment, she found a note on the kitchen table (“And who, pray tell, is ‘A thousand kisses’?”). She met him because she insisted.
Fern laughed. “You mean he has the most body hair.”
“I mean, he has the most mature occupation, the most mature attitude.”
“Well, mature . . . you couldn’t get much more ‘mature’ than Jonah.”
“Oh no,” scoffed Anna. “Sure, his cerebral cortex went gray when he turned twelve, but that was the man, you remember, who collected comic books and ate Lucky Charms for breakfast every day.”
“Cap’n Crunch.”
“As we used to say, same diff.” Anna sighed. “I met your Stavros just once, but I could tell this: He seemed accessible. No crooked angles. And he was paying attention to you. To you.”
Anna’s positive judgment was a relief, but then, when it came to love, she was hardly in a position to be critical of anything impulsive or haphazard. In the midst of getting her Ph.D. in archaeology at Columbia, she had fallen for a professor she met on a dig in Turkey. He left his wife, married Anna, and moved her into a hacienda on the San Antonio River, where she promptly conceived twins. In Fern’s memory, these events took place in about six months. When Anna knew something w
as right, it happened. She expressed not a qualm about leaving her beloved New York for Texas (a place she had always loudly deplored) or suspending her studies. The twins were now four, and Anna was writing a novel, a thriller melding Biblical archaeology with Arab politics and human rights activism. Fern had no doubt it would sell like highbrow hotcakes.
“I hate it when people talk about twists of fate,” Anna liked to say. “When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.”
FIFTEEN
FERN WAKES TO THE COMPETING SOUNDS of birdsong and tennis. The play is prolonged and aggressive, interspersed with male gasps and curses. “Andrew you dickhead!” she hears as the rally halts—a seventeen-year-old boy, she’d guess, condemning himself for his faltering skill. A world of absolutes.
She puts on her bathing suit and a loose yellow dress. Tony will make some crack about Little Mary Sunshine, sing a few bars from “Good Day Sunshine” or “Here Comes the Sun.”
But when she finds him, Tony does not immediately see her. He sits on the back porch, leaning over the railing, binoculars to his eyes.
“Birdwatching?”
He jumps, looks at her and smiles, then returns to his surveillance. “Taking in a bit of the local wildlife, yes.”
Fern stands behind him, squinting to see the tennis court through the hedge. Four men—barely men, all in white, two shirtless—are playing vigorously. Tony hands her the binoculars. “See for yourself.”
Yes, all worth looking at, each for his own physical assets. All in perfect shape, all on the cusp of their prime.
Tony sighs. “Boys, boys, you are breaking my heart.”
Fern continues to look but says nothing. This isn’t what she had in mind, boy-watching with Tony. She wonders if he sees her new state as an invitation to a kind of closeness she doesn’t want, the way her becoming a married woman made her mother begin to offer up details about her sex life with Fern’s father (Fern put a stop to this at once).