Once she’d committed Alan’s face and name to her fickle memory, Saga had decided he was a man who looked worried too much of the time. For a psychologist, maybe that was normal. He must listen to worrying all day long; he must absorb it. Now, however, he did look relieved. “Thank you both,” he said.
“We will spoil her,” said Saga. Perhaps she’d offer to take Treehorn for Sunday, Fenno’s day off; perhaps Fenno would invite her to spend the day with him. Or she could take Treehorn to Stan’s, to play with the other dogs, the ones that had been wormed and had their shots. They could run in Prospect Park.
Alan thanked them again and said good-bye, shaking Saga’s hand, shaking Fenno’s again, and waving awkwardly at Oneeka as she emerged from the basement, sleeping baby in her arms. She sang softly as she carried Topaz back to the playpen and wrapped her in a tiny blanket.
“I got to run out for diapers,” Oneeka said in a low voice. She took an umbrella from the barrel and opened the door with exaggerated stealth, but still the bells jingled when it swung shut behind her.
Fenno knelt on the floor to scratch Treehorn under her chin. “Now we have two wee’uns to care for,” he whispered. “We’ve nearly a nursery here.”
Saga had never been so close to Fenno. She could see the silver hairs above his right ear, the cornsilk lines on his eyelid, a glint of gold in his mouth. He smelled wonderfully of nothing much: ordinary soap, the cotton of a nice clean shirt. For the moment there was no one else in the store.
The Realm of you.
Fenno sat cross-legged, stroking Treehorn with both hands, massaging the base of her tall pointed ears. Saga stood. “You are such a prince.” She hadn’t planned to say this out loud, but to hear it made her glad that she had. She stood still, hands clasped in front of her waist so she wouldn’t reach out to touch his head. When Fenno looked up at her, she made herself hold his gaze. She would have told him that she had fallen in love, she had lost her heart, but she knew it would be too much.
And then came his reaction, his terrible reaction.
“Me, a prince? Not I.” He started to laugh, but he stopped. He must have read her emotions too late. Now he looked almost fearful. “Oh lass,” he said, “I am not the man you envision me. Oh Emily.”
How was it, thought Saga as she stood there, making every effort not to cry, which meant not blinking or uttering a sound or even moving the tiniest bit, that life could give you so much experience, so much pain, yet leave you just as able as you’d ever been to make a fool of yourself?
It seemed to take him forever to get to his feet. He put a hand on her shoulder, just the way he’d have put a hand on Oneeka’s shoulder, but somehow it wasn’t the same. Saga knew apology even by touch. “Emily,” he said, “come over here and sit down.”
She wanted to run out the door, but instead she sat in the armchair. He sat not behind his desk but on it, close to Saga. He leaned forward, looking serious, like a doctor about to deliver a bad diagnosis. Saga knew the posture well. “I hope it’s not selfish to say that I’m flattered.”
“Of course not,” said Saga. She couldn’t help sounding angry.
“Listen. Could you stay and have supper? Tonight?” he asked. “Up in my not very princely digs? I will tell you my story if you agree to tell me yours. Yours, I’d wager, is the interesting one. Though mine may be a bit longer.”
Still she wanted to run, or simply to let go and cry, but she did neither. She spoke as calmly as she could. “I can do that.”
“Good,” he said. “I have some frozen prawns. Do you like seafood? I can make a plain curry with yogurt.”
To keep her voice steady, she took a deep breath. “I haven’t had curry in a long time.”
“Then it’s fate,” he said. And that was that.
“Thank you for the poems—the book,” she said. She wanted to ask why he had given her a book of love poems—that’s what they seemed to be—if he did not share a bit of her feeling for him. For a moment, she was afraid to meet his eyes, for fear she’d see the poisonous beginnings of pity. But when he said, “I want you to tell me what you think of them,” she could hear that nothing, for him, had changed.
It took some effort to remember the task she had left off doing before lunch, before the poems, before this mortification, but she did. She started toward the basement just as Oneeka walked in the door. Treehorn, startled, let out one sharp bark. Topaz, awakened too soon from her nap, began to cry.
“Damn, girl, can you ever give a person a break, like maybe your mom?” said Oneeka as she wiped her feet on the doormat.
“I’ll take her,” said Fenno. He bent down and swung the baby up to his chest as if he’d been a father for years. Topaz continued to cry, but he rocked and shushed and paced, undaunted.
“Crazy dude,” Oneeka said to Saga. “Crazy fairy godfather dude.”
Fairy godfather, thought Saga as she made her way to the basement. That’s what he was, to her as well as to Oneeka. Godfather: Red as a ruby, a bottomless vibrant purplish red, a big word, impressive but airy, the silk dragon in a Chinese parade. Just as Saga reached the bottom of the stairs, Oneeka’s baby stopped crying.
What, she wondered, would she remember of this day, and what would she forget? What, in a few hours’ time, would she tell the first man she had fallen in love with, really in love with, since a tree limb, a plain old piece of wood, had spun her topsy-turvy? And why, she wondered—when she knew the man couldn’t or wouldn’t love her back—didn’t she feel unhappy, miserably sad?
TWELVE
THE STREET RAN UPHILL, curving and tilting at once, as if to ensure that every house would have a magnificent view of the bay. Every house had been built on a slope, those to the left condescending from aloft, those to the right set far lower, giving the appearance of faces peeking over a windowsill. But if you looked between the low houses, you would see that they were the larger ones, four and five stories high at the back. There would be tier upon tier of rooms facing the cloud-swept horizon, the bridges and ships, the city’s distant pinnacles.
Marion’s was on the left and, like all the others, old and asymmetrically gracious. How could she afford this neighborhood? thought Alan. Wrong question, he scolded himself.
A long flight of steps led the way to her front door, which was sheltered by an arch of twining wisteria vine. The topography of this address made it both a frustration and a relief. A frustration because there would be no spying—no peering into the house, since it stood aloof from the street, its windows but a series of reflections, panels of sky. A relief for the very same reason. Alan had not come to spy (or had he?). A little research couldn’t hurt, he’d told himself on the way out of the city, riding the BART.
His plane had arrived the night before. Joya treated him to dinner at a fancy vegetarian restaurant with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. She knew the menu well, and he let her order everything. At the moment, he wished that all decisions could be taken out of his hands; never mind that he had resisted Joya’s most strident advice in recent months.
While they ate, he had been happy to discuss Joya’s woes instead of his. She had broken up with the guy she’d been seeing since spring. He really did not want to have more children. Two—his teenage daughters—were plenty. Ironically, the teenage girls had never been a problem for Joya. As Alan had predicted, they adored her. She had liked them, too, and their adoration had made her feel young. She’d stayed with the father longer than she should have, knowing in her gut that nothing would change his mind. Or hers.
There was no right thing to say to a woman in this situation, nothing that would not make her angry or sad, especially if the person doing the saying was a man. Thank heaven Joya did not ask for his opinion, delivering her story as she might have reported to him yet another tale of disgruntled city workers, then promptly changing the subject to their mother, who had grown painfully slow in recent months. Alone with her at Thanksgiving, Alan had convinced her to have the hip replacement her doctor advised—
only to realize that this would certainly delay his move out west. As if to compensate, he’d resolved to end, finally, what he had come to think of as the Mystery of Marion.
He had decided to make this trip quickly and in secret—three days, four nights—to find out once and for all whether the news he had heard from his sister was true. Even Joya, who was about as gullible as an aircraft carrier, had to be capable of mistaking rumor for fact. At the same time, Alan knew that he could never lie convincingly to Greenie about such an extravagant trip.
It was eleven in the morning; the only sign of human life on this Berkeley street was a man planting a row of trees on the slope that rose to the house next door to Marion’s: clearly a gardener, undisturbed by Alan’s loitering.
This was idiotic. Enough indecision.
Climbing all those stairs was torture, not physical but sentient; what if she was in the house, watching his approach? Alan thought of a medieval castle: soldiers in chain mail hiding behind the ramparts, watching from on high, waiting for the enemy to get just close enough before…He stopped and looked up at the house. Would Marion hate him enough to fire a catapult, dump scalding oil, let loose a rain of barbed arrows? (Whatever made Alan think she could hate him at all? One lousy, cowardly letter?)
He stood up straight and struck the knocker three times against the door. No dog barked. No voice called out that he should wait or identify himself.
When he turned to leave, he noticed that the stairs continued, after a jog beneath a trellis of thorny white roses. He started up these stairs. They led to a higher back entrance, a circle of garden enclosing a table and chairs, a red tricycle, a scattering of beach toys: a plastic shovel and rake, a Thomas the Tank Engine bucket, tiny shark-patterned flip-flops. He did not venture farther.
“JESUS CHRIST!” SAID JOYA. “Have you become a Peeping Tom or what?”
“You think I should have left a note?”
“What I think you should have done, you should have done ages ago.” Alan could picture her face exactly, her lips tight, the furrows between her eyebrows deep. “What I think you should do now, if you even care, is call like a civilized person, on the phone, tell her you’re here and need to see her.”
“What if she says no?”
Joya sighed. “Alan, I don’t know. You’ve let so damn much time go by. You’re like…Gerard Depardieu in that movie about the guy who…no, no, maybe he gets the girl.”
“Joya!”
“Sorry.”
Alan stood in front of a hip grocery store on a shady street a few blocks from Marion’s house. He’d eaten a sandwich in a café and drunk too much strong coffee. “I’m going to stay till she gets home. Don’t wait up.”
“And if she doesn’t show up, you’re going to sleep in a bush? Oh. Brilliant.”
“I’ll call you later, Joy.”
“I’m sorry, Alan. I’m just—I’m…stymied by this. And not much stymies me. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever used that word before! Look. It’s nearly four. Come back now and I’ll make you an early dinner. We will really talk about this. I have a big meeting tomorrow, so you won’t see much of me then. Tomorrow you can camp out there and sleep in a bush.” She waited. “Please, Alan?”
He agreed to her plan, but after he put his phone away, he walked back toward Marion’s street. When he stopped on the opposite sidewalk, he saw that a light was on. A woman, not Marion, passed behind the front window. A roommate? A maid? What kind of a life did Marion have in this handsome aerie of a house? Not the simple life of an earthy idealist.
Now he noticed the plantings that formed a rolling carpet down the slope before the house: tiny dark green leaves with yellow stripes; a frothy vine that might be honeysuckle; artistically spaced eruptions of purple flowers that looked like exclamation points. The air was distinctly, expensively floral.
Strangely, he had found the nerve to come here because of Stephen—because he realized that he did not want to become Stephen. They had reached the point where Stephen, still as remorseful as he was angry, had begun to rehash the twists and turns of his relationship with Gordie that he believed had led them first to their impasse and then to their senseless breakup. He blamed himself as often as he blamed Gordie. For Alan, it was like listening to the survivor of a car wreck go over every turn and stoplight on a journey that, taken just a shade more slowly or by a slightly different route, would have evaded catastrophe. If the phone hadn’t rung; if he’d found the keys faster; if that boy on the bike hadn’t crossed so slowly; if he’d only gone through the yellow light three blocks before….
Alan had sat very still and listened to every detail. He knew that all the fury and regret simply had to come out, like fluid from an infected wound, whether it happened in the sheltered space of Alan’s office or out in a less controlled, less benevolent world. In therapy, there were revelations, there were explorations, there were breakdowns and breakthroughs, and there were rituals. This was a ritual, not unlike a dance. And then, a few weeks ago, Alan had a sudden flash-forward of himself in Stephen’s place, only he was on Jerry’s couch, and the anguish flowing out of him was all about Greenie: Greenie having left him because she’d found out about Marion. With or without that mystery child, there was still Marion, the fact of her, a fact that any wife had a right to regard as betrayal. Alan knew that he had not acted out of careless lust, that what he had succumbed to was a mixture of longing for the past and disdain for the future, of affection and anger, of permission and pity—each pairing perilous in its chemistry—but Greenie would have told him that once again he was mincing words. In far simpler words, he had fucked another woman.
So as he stood on this alien sidewalk, aimless yet urgent with purpose, trying to feel neither envy nor contempt (wasn’t sheer misery enough?), growing colder as the sun sank away, a car pulled up and parked right below the stairs. Marion stepped out. He had time to notice that the car was modest compared with the house, that she wore a plain gray raincoat and plain flat shoes, that her hair had grown long again—all this in the instant it took her to see and recognize him.
She came straight across the empty street and faced him, up close, with an intense but indefinite expression on her face. She hugged him, and he held her tight, not wanting to see her face until he could know what she felt.
She stepped away just as abruptly as she had embraced him. “Alan, what in the world are you doing here?”
“I’m visiting Joya. She said you were living here now. I thought…”
She was watching him closely. She looked worried, or skeptical. She also looked so…tame compared with the Marion he had last seen.
“I’m here because of what I heard—that you have a little boy.”
She seemed to smile and frown at once. “Alan, what are you talking about?”
Oh good, he thought. There is no little boy. He laughed. “Sorry. You know Joya. Full of stories…”
“Alan.”
“You don’t have a little boy.”
“Yes, Alan, I have a little boy. His name is Jacob.” Now she was, unmistakably, frowning.
Alan felt like a fool. A man walking a dog passed them, pulling on the leash as it sniffed at Marion’s ankles. The sky was turning a rich pale purple.
“I know we never spoke after that reunion, and I think we should have.”
Marion shook her head. “Because you felt guilty? I didn’t. I hope you didn’t tell your wife…. Is she all right? Did you go and have that babylike I told you to, little brother?” Her smile was tense.
“Don’t call me that,” he said. “Marion, is your son—was he my baby?”
Marion gasped. She looked up at her house. “Wow.”
“Is he?”
“Alan, I don’t know what’s gotten into you. Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right!” He thought briefly of a tasteless joke he could make about what had gotten into her. He said, “I hear you have a baby just about nine months after we…after we’re together, and after you
tell me you can’t have babies—”
“I told you that my doctors said I probably couldn’t have babies.”
“Oh. So you do remember telling me that. Interesting.”
She opened her mouth. She closed it. She twisted her keys in her right hand; was she contemplating a getaway?
Ah, he thought, I’ve caught her. “Just tell me the truth, Marion.”
“Alan, did you have this crazy suspicion when you wrote me that weird, cold letter—how long ago now?”
He softened his voice. “Just answer my question, Marion. Please? Can you understand how I felt when I heard about the baby? Never mind how I felt after we’d had that…that time together and you just vanished.”
“Did you look for me?”
Before he could think of what to say, she said, “Well, not that you should have.” Marion sighed and looked around, as if waiting for someone else to arrive, someone to get her off the hook or simply haul Alan away. Another man with a dog steered wide of them, across a grassy lawn. Had they been shouting? Perhaps the whole neighborhood was listening. Well, let them. That’s when Alan noticed her ring. “You’re married,” he said.
“Yes, I am.” She sounded defiant.
“Congratulations.”
“Alan! What kind of a conversation is this? Why couldn’t you have called me, for God’s sake? This is no way—”
“This is a conversation I should have tried to have with you years ago. That’s my fault,” said Alan. “I screwed it up, and I’m sorry. All I want now is an answer. Wouldn’t you?”
“Alan, my son is mine, and he is my husband’s. He is not yours. I’m sorry if this has been a concern of yours all this time. You’re right: you should have asked me your question long ago. If at all. Alan, we had a one-night stand. We were friends from a long time ago. It’s okay.”
“It is most certainly not okay if you got pregnant and had a kid!”