“I suppose we should be allies in grief,” she said. Her pause did not call for an answer. “But there are certain things a woman owes her husband in a time of need, things he can’t get anywhere else. I don’t believe you gave Jonah those things! You left him all alone! And after you told him you wouldn’t consider a move to half the places where he might gladly have worked!”
Fern sighed. She had never forbidden Jonah to apply for jobs in Wisconsin or Nebraska; she merely told him she couldn’t picture herself in such places. He had laughed: Same here. But defending herself now would be unseemly. “I loved Jonah,” she said. “I gave him everything he let me give him.”
“Let you give? He was crying out for compassion! And look at you—you’ve hardly shed a tear.”
It was true that she had hardly cried in front of Jonah’s mother. If this was a crime, so be it. She said, “There’s nothing I can say to make you feel better. I wish you could understand how much I wish I could.”
“No one can make me feel better, no one will ever make me feel better! That’s obvious!” cried Jonah’s mother. “But do you even wish that my son were still alive? I’m not sure you do!”
“Of course I do, of course I do!” And then Stavros knocked on the door, probably because he had heard their raised voices. Did Fern have any shipping tape? Jonah’s sister had used up the roll she brought.
THE BEACH IS ASTONISHINGLY WHITE. At the waterline, the sand glitters like new snow every time a wave retreats. The waves break quietly, filling the air with restful murmuring. It’s close to midnight; in the distance, in each direction, a solitary figure moves along the water.
“I wish you’d go back to the house,” says Fenno.
“I don’t feel like being alone there. Really. You go left, I’ll go right.”
“Better look in the dune grasses, too,” he says with a sigh.
They set off, each turning now and then to check the progress of the other, zigzagging to and from the tideline. Sometimes she rises above the verge of a dune to find herself smack on a forced green lawn; once, she surprises a teenage couple, entwined and naked on a chaise. “Yo, lost your dog?” says the boy, grinning. He is a smooth one. Giggling, the girl hides her face against his chest.
When she next looks back, Fern can see that Fenno has already passed the figure she spotted in that direction. In her direction now, there isn’t a soul in sight; whoever she saw must have turned inland. Finally, she sees Fenno waving his arms and shaking his head.
He waits for her by the big house. The floodlight is off, and most of the great lawn is blackened by the shadow the house casts in the light from the moon and the ocean. Just beyond the shadow, the tennis court seems to phosphoresce. But for this optical deceit, Fern might not have noticed the large dark shape on the pavement. As she points at the shape, it begins to sing:
“And if I were like lightnin’, I wouldn’t need no sneakers,
I would come and go whenever I would pleeeease . . .
Oh I’d scare ’em by the shade trees and I’d scare ’em by the light poles
But I would not scare my pony on my boat upon the seeeea!”
Fenno walks swiftly toward the tennis court saying his brother’s name in a low, stern voice.
Fern follows him but hangs back a bit. Dennis lies splayed face up in the part of the court called no-man’s-land, between service line and baseline. The few times she and Jonah played tennis, he told her repeatedly that this is precisely where you never want to strand yourself. Stand back or advance to the net. Somehow, she couldn’t seem to learn that lesson.
“Get up.” Fenno stands over his brother.
Dennis laughs and waves up at Fenno, as if from a great distance. “Halloo, my Amoorican brother. I’ll bet you’re not keen on Lyle Lovett.”
“Get up now.”
Dennis puts both hands over his mouth but makes no effort to rise. When he takes them away, he says, “I deserve your wrath, I know; just please do not deport me!” He lifts his head from the court and catches sight of Fern. “Oh—hello!” He waves at her, beckoning.
When she stands just behind Fenno, Dennis winks at her. “Am I not in Amoorica? Land of the bravely free? Land of the free-to-be-me?”
Fenno reaches down and grasps his brother’s wrists, trying to pull him up. His silence is the kind that anyone sober would read as ingrown rage, a fear of what he’d say if he did speak, but Dennis is far from sober.
“No—wait. Look! Look up! Oh!” Dennis has pulled his hands free and lies back, pointing toward the sky. Fern and Fenno look up.
“Oh my, it’s the . . . what are they called? The myriads? The neriads? You know—that summer meteor shower. Oh my.” An awed smile shines on his handsome face.
Fern scans the sky but sees nothing, nothing more than the few murky stars that manage to penetrate the afterhaze of the day’s humidity. She sneaks a look at Fenno’s face. He is still scowling.
“Oh my that was brilliant, wasn’t it?” says Dennis after a moment. He rises to a sitting position.
“Hallucinations tend to be brilliant,” says Fenno.
Suddenly they are blinded by the floodlight. The gravelly voice of milady calls out, “Darlings, won’t you please go to bed? Thank you ever so much!” And mercifully, the light expires.
Fenno’s shadow engulfs his brother. “Up. Right now.”
Dennis scrambles to his feet. He seems not the slightest bit off balance as he starts up the slope toward the hedge. Once they are through, Fern sees Fenno glance at the corner of the lawn where he buried his dog. For her part, she glances at the windows of the master bedroom. A light is on, and shadows bruise the lace behind the balcony. Standing back to let Fern into the house before him, Dennis touches her belly. “You are going to have a smashing time. You are going to be a smashing mum.” Fern smiles awkwardly.
Fenno puts a hand on Dennis’s back to steer him in and toward the stairs. “My brother, my warder,” jokes Dennis as they head up, single file.
“My brother, master of the facile compliment,” says Fenno.
Unsure of her place, Fern stands in the doorway of the second guest room. Fenno directs Dennis firmly toward one of the twin beds, but there is no resistance. As he sits, Dennis says to Fern, “My final request before execution is another piece of that luscious tart. Somehow I’m still famished!”
“She’ll fetch you a glass of water, and that’s it,” says Fenno. He glances apologetically at Fern.
By the time she returns from the kitchen, Fenno has removed his brother’s shirt and maneuvered him between the sheets. He’s already sleeping.
She and Fenno meet each other’s eyes and then, automatically, look together at Dennis as if he were their child, a baby who’s had a rough night and is finally out for the count. She lifts the glass of water she brought and drinks it down without stopping.
THE NIGHT AFTER Jonah’s mother packed his belongings, Fern made dinner for Stavros, to show her gratitude for his covert protection. They talked about the mayor’s “cleanup” of Times Square and the prostitutes it had displaced to, of all neighborhoods, theirs. They talked about the water catastrophe sure to be caused by overdevelopment of the southwestern states. They talked about the brain conference in Washington and laughed about the new neurosis it had created for all their friends with children. (“The whole thing funded by a Hollywood director; what does that tell you?” said Stavros. “Of course, wait until we have children,” said Fern.) So when she carried their tea into the living room, she stopped short, alarmed for an instant. She let out a short bitter laugh. “Oh. Right.”
She walked around a cluster of boxes and set the mugs down on the coffee table. Resolutely, she sat on the foreclosed sofa, now shrouded in a sheet. Across from her, the bookcases stood three-quarters empty. Jonah’s mother had thoroughly dusted the empty shelves, so they looked more expectant than abandoned. “Oh God, how will I stay here?” said Fern.
Stavros seemed to inspect her for a few moments before speaking.
“I could find you another place, though it wouldn’t be . . . such a deal. But . . .” He shrugged and sipped his tea.
“But what?”
“But I think you could just as easily rearrange your things and be glad to have your own place. In the long run. I don’t mean to sound callous.”
“My own place. You mean, my own albatross of memories.”
“You’ll be sad wherever you are. But”—Stavros shrugged again—“people overestimate the power of the past.”
“Now there’s callous!”
He smiled apologetically. “I come from a culture of hand wringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote—first child, paternal grandfather; second child, maternal, on and on and on. Drives me nuts. The trouble is, if you convince yourself the past’s more glorious or worthy of attention than the future, your imagination’s sunk.”
Briefly, Fern just stared at Stavros. “So what about the lessons of history?”
“Well that’s obvious. That goes without saying,” he said impatiently.
“And how come you’re so busy learning a dead language?”
“Because I like the stories it has to tell.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Know what I like about real estate? I mean, okay, it’s a business with a sleazy aura, and it’s nouveau, and I’m working for my dad, but it’s all about the present and the future. Keeping people under a roof.”
“For money!” said Fern. “Here, for an obscene amount of money. Don’t tell me real estate’s not about money.” Why was she so indignant? She had no reason to think Stavros and his father were greedy or unkind; she’d even heard they had two buildings where they kept the rents absurdly low.
“You do these practical, constructive things all day, and then,” said Stavros, ignoring her insult, “you go home and you have a shower or a beer and you sit down . . .” His voice softened. “And you read about Penelope and her loom.”
Fern saw him stepping in the door of his apartment, just floors above his parents but unconcerned about the implications, kicking off his sneakers and sitting down to read The Odyssey in the ornately cryptic words of another millennium.
“You can’t be Greek without respecting archaeology, I promise you that,” he said, “but building museums to your culture—institutions that open every morning and close before dinner—is not the same as building a museum to your life, putting all your grievances in glass cases wired with alarms. You know, my mother has this cousin back on her island—he’s not especially bright, this guy, but he makes these funny beaded wallets and sells them down at the one taverna that carries a few pathetic souvenirs. He used to do them with images of nothing but the classical stuff: the Parthenon, the Argo, portraits of the gods—he did this really funky Medusa—but a couple of years ago he became obsessed with the space shuttle, of all things. So now he does these beaded wallets with red, white, and blue space shuttles. It’s absolutely wild. I love it.” He laughed. “How did I get here? Am I being insensitive or what?”
Fern shook her head. “No—and I think I want one of those wallets. Does he export them?” They both laughed then, having recovered from what Fern would come to think of as their first disagreement. Almost together, they glanced at the clock on the wall (Fern’s, and hence spared from packing). As she saw him out the door, Fern said, “So, off to Penelope and her loom.”
He looked pleased. “Yes. And Penelope is nothing if not patient.”
Later that month, she did not go to Connecticut for Thanksgiving but joined Stavros, along with his family, at his uncle’s house in Queens.
For the next year, they saw each other often, if less than they might have liked. Stavros took both his job and his courses seriously, and he played handball three times a week, sometimes even when the temperature fell below freezing. Most Saturdays, he checked up on certain elderly tenants or helped his mother around her apartment; perhaps every other Sunday, he went with his father to the tiny Greek Orthodox Church that sat in the middle of a parking lot downtown, and if the afternoon was sunny, they would play chess in Washington Square. He had a few close friends, all of them canny New Yorkers (not unlike Anna) whom he had known since high school. With or without Fern, he had a full life.
Fern threw herself into work as well. She rearranged her apartment radically, as Stavros had suggested, and she took a few of her paintings out of storage and hung them where Jonah’s Old World landscapes had hung. She found a deep, comfortable antique couch, a bargain because it had been six inches too long to fit into the elevator of the owner’s high-rise building. It was covered in a tasseled red velvet that Stavros said had unavoidably seamy associations; Fern argued that it was a noble prop, the sort of piece you’d see in a royal portrait by Ingres or Géricault. “Oh royal, sure,” said Stavros. “Like, Cleopatra died here—and a good deal else besides.” Ever the landlord, he insisted on pulling away the fabric underneath to check for roaches. “Absolutely vacant,” he proclaimed. “Unheard of in this market.”
When they spent time at her place, they came to live on that couch, as if it were a small room unto itself or a punt drifting on a river. Reading or talking or eating Mexican takeout from tinfoil trays, they could lean against opposite ends, their feet nestled against each other’s thighs. More than once, as Stavros read his law books, Fern sketched him surreptitiously in the pages of the graph paper notebook she used to work out ideas for design and proportion. The couch was so plush with down that when they stood up to go to bed (and sometimes they did not bother), the impression of their two bodies—entangled elbows, knees, heels, and buttocks—might remain there to greet them in the morning.
Last summer, Stavros reintroduced her to badminton—a swift-footed, competitive sport as played with his brothers and their small sons when they turned the entirety of a tiny Astoria backyard into a court. The brothers seemed startled when Fern asked to play—their wives thought the game absurd—but it took her back to Connecticut lawns on summer nights, when you played fast and furious if just to elude the mosquitoes, played till your parents yelled, three or four times, that you would go blind if you didn’t quit (never mind that the birdies glowed in the dark, descending like tiny brave paratroopers only to be smashed aloft again). Fern and Stavros played no more than six or seven times, but the sweaty pleasure of it, the dizzy laughter and the lasting elation after winning, assumed the very texture of that summer in her mind.
At the end of the following January, a year after they had become involved, Fern became pregnant not by accident (not quite) and certainly not by cunning, but by impulse. They had spent nearly the entire weekend in her apartment, it was snowing hard, and he ran out of condoms. Nestled in that couch, neither of them wanted to leave, and they believed themselves too lazy and worn out for passion—until the middle of Sunday night. In the dark, he asked her if it would be all right (not if it would be safe), and she said it would be fine. She had always been so careful that what would this one time . . . But then, as he began to kiss her shoulders, the insides of her arms, she thought about time in a different way and knew there was a chance she would conceive. She thought about a baby she had held on her lap at Christmastime: Stavros’s fourth nephew. (“On my father’s island, they only give birth to boys,” he explained. “Look out at the clotheslines there and you notice at once: in every direction, pants and more pants, nothing but pants! The wives they have to import from my mother’s island, just a short row across a channel. My poor mother, she thought that by coming to America, my father might give her a daughter. No, I am not kidding!”)
She thought about Tony’s picture of the baby’s fist, hanging in her bedroom a block away. She thought, perhaps, too much about herself and not enough about Stavros. And then, carried somewhere quite distant in his arms, she stopped thinking altogether.
A month later, she knew she was pregnant. But Stavros had told her that in March he would be going to Greece to help his mother out. He wasn’t sure how long he would stay—a few weeks, a month at
most. So, thought Fern, now would be a cruel time to tell him this news. He would be back by the end of her first trimester. She had never thought in such terms, but she had heard Heather and Anna use them.
As weeks turned to months, she began to wonder how much this baby really had to do with Stavros at all. One night when she struggled toward sleep (such nights were increasingly frequent), Fern lay in her bed, miserably alert, and asked herself if she had allowed the baby to be conceived because she hoped it would create so vast a love that every other love, every foolish memory of love, even this new love, would be eclipsed. Was she so weary of endings that she was determined to make her own, far less fragile beginning, one she would share with no one so that no one could take it away?
FERN LIES ON HER LEFT SIDE (best for the baby, her books instruct), exhausted but wakeful yet again. The lights of a car move maple branches across the wall, across a painting of boats at sea. It doesn’t help that, through the wall, Dennis snores like a truck idling without a muffler. At least it obliterates any noise from the other bedroom. Tony, she knows, makes love silent as a stone—but Richard she’d take for a man of vocal, jubilant lust.
She goes downstairs for water. Returning from the kitchen, she hears Fenno’s voice: “Midnight cravings?” She looks into the living room, where the voluptuous white chairs, all vacant, cast off a neon blue.
“Out here.” His voice carries through an open window.
She steps onto the porch. He lies on a hammock that wasn’t there before. Well, he knows this place and its hidden possessions; she can guess, from what she’s seen, that the absent Ralph deems a hammock too scruffy or even third-worldly to suit his aesthetic. Probably a gift from a houseguest, it is not even white but as garishly colored as a macaw, even in the moonlight.
“You couldn’t sleep?” says Fern.
“Next to the human chainsaw?” He laughs quietly. “I never knew, before this visit, just what my sister-in-law endures—what she keeps in line.”