“I hope you’re right. At least, I think I do,” said Stephen. “Though it makes me mad to think he might come back in a week and then think that this…scare will warn me off the whole child issue. Because it won’t.”
Alan nodded. “I’ll walk you out.” He led Stephen down the dim hall; through the frosted glass on the front door of the building, he could see that someone was seated at the top of the steps. A woman, he could see from the curly sunlit hair, and for a moment he felt an irrational leap of hope, a thrill. How naïve his emotional reflexes, how wishful his battered heart.
He opened the door and was about to say good-bye to Stephen when the woman on the stoop turned around and smiled at him.
“Saga?” He stepped out beside Stephen. The men stood side by side as Saga rose and turned. She held a stack of papers. “I’m glad to see you again.”
Saga reached out to shake Stephen’s hand and introduced herself.
Stephen reciprocated, but he was blushing. Alan realized that Stephen must think she was another patient. “Saga rescues animals,” Alan said. “We met when she was walking around with a box of puppies.”
“And here they are.” Saga held out one of her papers; it was a notice with a photograph, the puppies on the floor in someone’s kitchen. The notice declared boldly, NEEDED: GOOD HOMES WITH GOOD, DEPENDABLE PEOPLE.
“Well, perhaps that’s what I need. A puppy,” said Stephen. “Am I dependable? I used to think so.”
“Here, take a few,” said Saga. “Put them up somewhere. Like your office?”
Stephen took several sheets and said, “Keep up the good work. Who knows, I just might give you a call. Seems I have an unexpected vacancy.”
After Stephen was gone, Alan and Saga stood facing each other on the stoop. “I brought something for you. To thank you.” She bent over and picked up a potted plant with dry-cleaning plastic wrapped in a quirky turban around its top. “I hope you can grow these somewhere.”
Alan couldn’t help examining Saga. Her jacket was wrinkled, but her hair looked clean, her jeans and sneakers almost new. He should probably invite her into his apartment—though now, so early in the morning, being with her felt more awkward than it had the first time, when there was an urgent purpose.
He accepted the plant and held the door. “Would you like some coffee?”
“Tea would be nice,” she said, “if that’s not too much trouble.”
“None at all,” he said. “Why didn’t you ring the bell?”
“When I got here, I thought it was maybe too early,” she said.
“My work starts early and ends late,” said Alan, “often with too much free time in the middle.” He carried the flowerpot into his living room and set it down on the table in front of the sofa. In the kitchen, he filled a kettle. When he returned to the living room, Saga had unwrapped the flowerpot. From the dirt protruded a dozen tall green spears. They resembled asparagus stalks.
“Peonies,” said Saga. “My favorite. I brought them from my uncle’s garden; he doesn’t mind, he has lots.” She looked around the room. “Though I realize now, maybe you don’t have a garden. I didn’t remember that. Sorry. Where I live, everyone’s got a yard.”
Alan smiled at her. “I thought you told me you live downtown.”
Saga blushed. “Just sometimes,” she said.
Alan waited a moment, hoping she would explain. When she didn’t, he said, “Well, I do have a fire escape that gets a couple hours of sun.” He carried the plant through George’s little room and opened the window. Saga followed.
“You have a fish!”
“My son’s fish,” said Alan. Sunny was doing his jackknife laps, hopeful. Alan hadn’t fed him yet. He reached for the food shaker.
“How old is he? Is he in school?”
“Excuse me?” said Alan.
“Your son.”
“No. Away on a trip with his mother. He’s four.” Alan remembered that he had told her all about George before.
“Maybe he’d like a puppy,” said Saga. “You’d be the one who’d have to take care of it. But you could surprise him. If you wanted. Stan thinks these are part corgi. Corgis are nice, like little dogs with big-dog personalities.”
Alan laughed. “Oh, he’d like that all right. But it’s the old dog-in-the-city dilemma. When you grow up with dogs in the great outdoors—even the suburbs—the city seems too cruel.” The kettle began to whistle.
Saga was clearly startled. She frowned. “Oh no,” she said.
“What?” asked Alan.
“The clothes, the ones I borrowed. I forgot them. Till just this minute. I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter. There’s no need to return them.”
She looked at him fiercely, as if he’d insulted her. “Oh, but I will,” she said. “I absolutely will.”
So Saga would visit again, thought Alan. However much she might keep him off balance, he didn’t mind the prospect of seeing her again. “So,” he said as he poured the tea, “tell me more about those puppies.”
FOR SO LONG, ALAN LIKED TO SAY that he knew Greenie was the one he should marry long before she knew the same of him. Among friends, Alan’s scripted tale was one that had always flattered them both, in each other’s eyes as well as in the eyes of those around them. A decade into their marriage it was set in stone, and Alan would typically tell it like this:
“There I was, doing my white-glove psychoanalytic training at this mausoleum on the Upper East Side, and there’s Greenie, working behind the counter at this equally uppity French patisserie just down the street, where all my teachers buy their café au lait and pain au chocolat every morning before they sit down to become these quasi-Freudian deities from nine to five. Well, thank heaven I’m a good student and follow their every example, down to that pain au chocolat, because who gets up while it’s still dark and makes these sinful confections?” A laugh, a look across the room, because the story was told this way only if Greenie was present.
“Cut to the chase, to our very first date—a drink at a local bar, because I wasn’t a guy with much in the way of guts or imagination. Or money.
“We’re going over the usual ground, and of course I ask her about what she does for a living—this pastry business, how you fall into something like that—and she looks me straight in the eye and says, ‘I’m one of the lucky ones. I knew what I wanted to do with my life from the time I was five years old. I’ve had it easy.’ And me, I’m a little speechless, because here I am leading this double life of full-time psychic excavation—in therapy and analysis myself, while seeing my first patients. Their doubts and regrets and agonies, along with mine, would make quite a fruitcake, I tell my date, and she says, ‘Just because I’ve had it easy doesn’t mean I don’t wish sometimes that I got to this place by a road that winds a little more.’ And I am smitten. I am down for the count. Certainty. Clarity. Packaged up with modesty. Oh dear God, I thought. Don’t tell me this is it. I practically fled right then and there.”
After a few sessions of silent listening, then a few of devil’s advocate quibbling, Alan’s therapist, Jerry, had to agree: from any angle—but certainly from the angle Alan had, lying on a couch—this girl was a catch. For as long as Alan could remember, his mother had been chronically if never dramatically depressed, and his father had apparently chosen to coddle her yet also to ignore her despair—a paradox obvious to Alan and Joya surprisingly early on. It was not a colorful despair, of tempers and sobbing and accusations, but a blue resignation, a despair of drawn shades, slippers worn at dinner, laundry left out on the line for days.
By the time he was off at college, safely removed from the prevailing winds of hometown rumor, Alan found himself wishing that his mother would do Something Big—not suicidal but crazy, like burn furniture on the lawn or have a weeping fit in the grocery store—something that would force his father not just to see the depth of her sadness but to act on it properly. But nothing like that ever happened, and then Alan’s father died of a heart
attack after mowing the lawn in the August sun, leaving Alan’s mother well provided for. And even this did not change her weary but tolerant demeanor, her habit of always saying she was perfectly fine when she knew you knew she wasn’t. She did not partake in arguments of any kind.
But Greenie, oh Greenie knew how to argue. And after an argument, she did not sulk. If she was anxious or sad or angry, she said so. If he was anxious or sad or angry, she called him on it—not always with the greatest of tact; but clarity, he could remember thinking, is not obliged to be tactful.
After they came to the place in their new life where they began to spend idle evenings together after dinners at each other’s apartments—Alan almost always reading, Greenie paging through cookbooks and taking notes or watching something funny on TV—she said, out of a long silence, “Do you know how much you sigh?” Alan looked up from his book; she was smiling.
“I sigh?”
“Oh, quite a lot sometimes.”
“Huh.” And then he heard himself sigh, and they laughed.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be,” she said. “I just wondered if you knew.”
“It’s something I’d better attend to, considering what I do,” said Alan. “I can’t believe no one’s mentioned it before.”
“Maybe it’s just because you’re in this very intense time of your life,” she offered. “Or maybe it’s just me who’s noticed. My mother’s like that; she notices things that other people don’t. Sometimes that’s good, and sometimes it isn’t.”
Alan set down his book. He realized something. “You’ve never talked about your mother.” He, meanwhile, had told Greenie plenty about his.
“Oh,” said Greenie, “my mother is wonderful. I’m very lucky. You’ll meet her, and you’ll see for yourself.”
Two months later, when they had been seeing each other for almost exactly half a year, Greenie invited him up to Maine, to the “camp” where she had spent part of every summer since she was born. She laughed when Alan asked, trying not to hide his dread, if they would be staying in tents. The last camping Alan had done was in Boy Scouts, in a state park somewhere off the New Jersey Turnpike (he could remember the all-night whoosh of the not-so-distant traffic, along with the whine of the mosquitoes). Greenie explained that there would be no electricity, no plumbing—yes, you did have to use an outhouse—but there were walls and a roof and screens, batteries for lamps, bug spray, an oven and a stove on a generator, and real, quite comfortable beds with sheets and pillows. Here, she leaned into his ear and whispered, “Though the walls are thin, I should warn you.”
They drove a rented car to a boatyard, where they were met by Greenie’s father, the George after whom they would one day name their son. Greenie had said he would pick them up in a “whaler”; Alan imagined some sort of schoonerlike craft, a scaled-down version of the Pequot. So the noisy, gleaming white boat that turned out to be their conveyance unnerved him a little—as did the tenacious handshake and gaze of the original George. “Alan Glazier!” he exclaimed when he turned from his daughter’s embrace. “My girl is crazy about you—that because you’re a shrink? Ha ha!”
Before Alan could grope for a clever reply, Greenie’s father had grabbed up their duffel bags and thrown them into the boat. Alan had barely seated himself before the man called out, “Time and tide!” and revved up the motor.
Swiftly, without seeming to notice the rise and smack of the boat as it bounced from wave to wave, he guided them through a cluster of tiny rock-rimmed islands—many of them occupied, even monopolized, by toylike houses that appeared far too trusting of the elements. All the while, shouting over the roar of the engine, he delivered a tour guide’s monologue, pointing broadly to left and right. Alan tried not to look nervous, clinging as discreetly as possible to the bench on which he was sitting. Greenie stood next to her father, leaning over the windshield, her face lifted gratefully into the wind and the stinging spray of cold ocean water.
“String of Pearls!” shouted George Duquette as they passed an island with an ornately trimmed cottage and an oriental bridge leading to a second, even tinier island with a guesthouse not much larger than a toolshed. “Island bought by a sea captain back in the days of the China trade! Present for his wife! Rumor was, she told her friends she’d rather’ve gotten a string of pearls, ha ha!…That one over yonder—Tetcheval, shaped like the head of a horse! Off to port, Little Oslo! Now there’s a pile of new money—the first with juice wired straight from the mainland! Tacked on a third story and put in a pair of those compost toilets! Ask me, more trouble than they’re worth! Don’t know what you’re doing, they stink to high heaven!” Every few minutes, Greenie looked back at Alan and smiled.
The island they were fast approaching was a good deal larger than these little knobs of land, and it was covered nearly end to end with thick pine forest, the trees so uniform in height that the island looked as if it were sporting a mammoth crewcut. “Circe’s dead ahead!” George called out, pointing at a trio of weathered cabins, a long gray pier reaching toward them like a beckoning arm. “Charlotte, stand by!”
Greenie’s true name startled Alan as much as the oddly Odyssean reference—but not nearly so much as the sudden swerve of the boat when George cut the motor and steered them sharply to the side just before they would have struck the pier and literally lost their heads. (Or so it looked to Alan.) Just as quickly, Greenie vaulted from the side of the boat to the pier, a long rope in one hand. Now she bent over the edge, performing some sort of cat’s cradle with her father, lashing the boat in place. Alan’s ears still buzzed from the din of the motor. His legs felt gelatinous. “Here,” said Greenie, who must have read his expression. “Grab my hand.” She pulled him to the dock. Already, George had seized their bags and strode ahead, sure-legged, up a wooden gangway laid across a sloping apron of smooth gray rock.
“My God, does he drive like that on land?” Alan said as he accepted her help, without which he was sure he would have keeled over into the water.
“He likes speed, all right,” said Greenie. “It’s sort of funny, because everybody sees him as the absentminded professor. I think behind the wheel is where he tries to prove them all wrong. My dad, the Italian roadster in disguise.” After Scotland, this remark would come back to Alan, but he never mentioned it to Greenie.
There on the dock, regaining his balance, Alan remembered that these cabins were the shared property of Greenie’s mother, two uncles, a great-aunt, and several cousins. “Oh, we are so far from rich,” Greenie had said when Alan reacted to her mention of a house in Maine. “They sort of used to be, I think—Mom’s great-grandparents—and she has the manners to go with money. But now if any of us are, rich I mean, it’s a matter of who they married. Mom married a professor. An English professor. In the age of easy tenure, thank God.” Greenie explained that their part of Smith’s Rock (the name of the island itself) was a “compound,” though hardly Kennebunkport or the Kennedys’ Hyannis. It had been named by Greenie’s classics-loving great-great-grandfather, who had tried but failed to rename the island Ithaka. The arrangements of who stayed where and when had grown complicated now that there were so many cousins, but Greenie’s parents still took the same cabin for the same three weeks every July.
From way ahead, George called back, “Get your fellow a bunk, get him a drink—or, hey now, reverse that sequence!—then help him get his bearings. Your mom’s on her constitutional, hoping to find a few berries as well. Never a single bird, that woman, never a single bird!”
“I feel like such an oaf,” said Alan, trying not to cling to Greenie as he searched for his equilibrium. He glared back across the water, which looked perplexingly calm.
Greenie put her arms around him and kissed him on the neck. “Between sailors and oafs, I choose oafs. We’re on land now, and no one’ll force you back on the water until we have to go. Did that drink sound like a good idea or not?”
So there was a martini—something he hadn’t tas
ted since college—and there was wine, and there was a dinner most remarkable for a meal produced at a “camp”: smoked mussels (gathered and smoked right there on the island, he learned), ratatouille, a salad with pears and blue cheese, and a three-layer chocolate cake with whipped cream and cherries, all of it made by Greenie’s mother, who would not accept a bit of help. But all that came later. First and foremost, there was Greenie’s mother and the entrance she made.
As instructed, Greenie assigned him a bunk, of the genuine boyhood variety, in a spartan creaky-floored room with pine plank walls that looked like they were crawling with eyes. Not that the room was creepy; far from it. The largest of two windows looked toward the mainland, a view many tourists would have shelled out hundreds of bucks to enjoy. Glad to be alone for a time, Alan set his martini on the small plain dresser and circled the room, touching everything, opening everything, from the three paperback books on the side table to the closet and the drawers. Atlas Shrugged, Kon-Tiki, and Is Paris Burning? were speckled and swollen from years of damp. The closet, too shallow for hangers, was simply a cupboard with hooks. And most of the dresser drawers, which squeaked loudly, were empty. The top drawer held a bar of Dove soap, a flashlight, a bottle of aspirin, and a pair of ruffled tiebacks to phantom curtains (both bedroom windows were naked, perhaps to make the most of their views).
He heard children’s voices nearby; leaning out the side window, he saw another house through a row of pines. He could make out a screened porch, where a family was already sitting down to dinner. A bed of coals smoked in the small yard, and Alan smelled steak. He was ravenous.
Following orders, he put on his swimming trunks and went downstairs. Here was Greenie, by a window, looking through binoculars at the smaller islands and the harbor from which they had come. Her father sat at the table, a picnic table with fixed benches, polishing a number of small brass objects that looked to Alan like parts of an antique harness. Greenie’s room was down here—right next to her parents’ room, which Alan realized was directly below his. He couldn’t help wondering if this was on purpose.