Three Junes (35 page)

A door below her opens. Tony whistles softly to the dog. They head across the lawn. The old dog moves slowly, and Tony is patient. He turns around briefly, walking backward, and waves up at Fern. And then his silhouette—defined not by the moon or stars but by the security floodlight in the neighbors’ driveway—merges with the hedge. The baby rolls gently inside her, like the shifting of wet sand under a wave. She first felt it, or knew it for what it was, a few weeks ago. Quickening, they call the first tangible movements; every time since, her heart does the same.

THERE IS A CHANCE
that Fern will raise this baby on her own; sometimes, perversely, this is the fantasy that gives her the greatest pleasure. Not because she does not want Stavros around but because it feels as if it would be cleaner, less complicated, as if she would not run the risk, once more, of failing at being a wife. Being a mother seems challenge enough. But money: that would be hard.

Fern works at home as a book designer. Just now, at last, after designing publicity brochures and then plain, text-filled books like novels and self-help sermons, she has begun to work on large glossy books: trophy cookbooks; books on fashion and travel; books with page spreads luxurious as that lawn beyond the hedge, photographs of villas and feasts and nymphets atop the Eiffel Tower. Such books may lack intellectual substance, but design is more than white noise to trundle the reader along. Fern attends meetings where everyone looks to her, where what she does might make or break the appeal of a book as an object to be held, coveted, above all
bought
. But the work does not make her wealthy, and she knows she must find some kind of upward momentum: at worst, a job in a corporate office. Two-tone graphs of stock performance, footnotes in four-point italic, portraits of bankers at their desks. Annual reports: a very special circle in hell.

Fern did not set out to be a graphic designer (did anyone?); through childhood and beyond, she painted. In college, she devoured Bronzino and Beckmann, John Singer Sargent and Lucian Freud. Among classmates revering Nam June Paik and Baldessari, she was shamelessly outdated in her tastes. On her best days, she believed she would single-handedly put portrait painting back on the map. When she graduated, she won a fellowship to go to Europe for a year, look at the art in museums and make her own. For all the conventional reasons, she lived in Paris, and that is where she met Tony.

She was sitting on a bench in the Parc Montsouris, drawing a young woman who lay on a blanket, curled around a baby. It was one of those last warm days, September’s nostalgia for August, and under the spell of the sun, they slept. As Fern drew, she began to notice a man circling the sleepers, closing in. He moved the way she imagined a tiger would move, creeping. That he held a camera rather than a weapon made him no less disturbing. Fern put down her paper and pencils.

Clever, the man watched his shadow. He was careful not to block the sun from the mother’s face, as the sudden shade might wake her. When he leaned across her body and began to photograph the baby, Fern astonished herself by saying, “What are you—
qu’est-ce que vous faîtes?”
She spoke quietly but clearly, as if it were still important not to wake the sleepers.

The man faced her. He walked toward her, smiling. He looked at her drawing. “Apparently, the same as you.”

If she was irritated at the comparison (she was making a respectful study of innocence; he was invading it), somehow she was even more irritated that he was American. “I don’t think so,” she said.

To her dismay, he sat down and examined her drawing, which lay on the bench between them. “Not bad,” he said.

She could find no answer to that. She felt invaded as well.

“Let me guess,” he said. “Junior year abroad?”

Instead of walking away, she said sharply, “I’ve graduated from Harvard. I have a grant. And you?”

He whistled. “Yikes. Sorry if I was rude. I’m Tony. No Harvard boy here, but I’m not the pervert you think I am. I’m just doing my job.”

His smile, intense in its warmth, made it impossible not to want to know him. How could guile be so attractive? Months later, she would often wish she had gathered up her things, said good-bye (or nothing), and left him behind to do as he wished. But she hadn’t. “Which is?”

His smile relaxed. “Which is . . . to take the very, very small and make it large. Make it get some attention. Give stature to the details. Where the devil lurks, you know?” Close to eleven years later, she still owns one of the few photographs he took of that baby, before she interrupted him. A tiny fist, enlarged to the size of a melon. At first glance, it resembles an eccentric bulbous mushroom discovered on a tree trunk deep in a forest. Fern has always hung it in a prominent place. These days she stops to look at it often, this literal vision of a baby’s hand, two of which are growing, sprouting digits, beginning to grasp about blindly inside her.

If Tony seduced her, she met him halfway. If she is truthful, she knows that he was attracted more to a concept she formed in his mind than to Fern herself. It was the same concept she once felt she embodied for her parents: good girl, fine student, earnest thinker, winner of everything parents want their children to win (and disdainer of most things parents wish their children to disdain). Tony, she knew within minutes of their meeting, was her obverse, her negative: insolent dropout, tireless comic, bluff opportunist. Proud pilot of an improvised life. Equation for a true artist, if such a thing existed; this was what she feared and what she envied. He had mentioned the devil, and that’s what any woman, even so recently a girl, ought to have seen. But if he was a devil of one kind, he was an angel of another. As she was to learn, he seems to break hearts without circumspection but also without any true deceit—and then, for reasons she has never plumbed, insists on holding them fast.

FERN WAKES
when Tony comes in. Two-thirty, the green digits tell her in the dark. She listens intently. She hears the locks secured on the three doors downstairs, footsteps in between. The rush of the kitchen faucet: water for the dog, which noisily slurps from its bowl. The metallic jostle of the dog’s tags as it labors up the carpeted stairs and into the master bedroom.

Tony does not follow. The world is so still that she can hear the hushed thump of the refrigerator door, brief clank of a drawer holding flatware. Vanilla ice cream is Tony’s favorite nightcap. Chair legs scrape the floor, a newspaper rustles.

She has never understood when Tony really sleeps. In Paris, he lived in a rich woman’s duplex loft, but when Fern was with him, he preferred to share the bed in her rented room. There, he was free to leave when he chose. Dawn, he said, was the best time to use the darkroom he borrowed. But even when they did end up at the loft, he’d abandon her in the woman’s great, soft bed as soon as he thought she’d fallen asleep. He would pace about downstairs and then, often, leave the place altogether. Anxiously, she would hear him cross the expensive rugs: footsteps, then a blank, footsteps, another blank. She would will him to return upstairs (once in a while he would) yet, at the same time, wish he would just open the door and go, so the torture would end. After a while, she no longer believed he went to a darkroom: not because there were no pictures to show (there were plenty) but because, more than once, she ran into him by day with young French men—boys, really—who barely spoke English. Later, neither of them would mention the encounter, but Fern would notice that Tony had cooled a few degrees. In bed, he would turn his back and cocoon himself in the sheet, untouchable.

If for months she said nothing, if she let her misery bloom in passive silence, it was because of the way he loved her when he did: so intently, so quietly, she felt almost holy. He rarely kissed her mouth, and he never quite looked her in the eye, but he’d examine every inch of her body, wide-eyed, and in the cobalt dark she loved to watch his fingers roam her skin. Romantically, she thought of Tony’s blind mother and imagined that this hardship must make him different from other men, more sensitive. She closed her own eyes and felt he must be
reading
her, pore by pore.

But then one day—it was May, a day of true spring—she came around a corner to see him with yet another boy, whispering something, Tony’s lips touching the boy’s sunlit ear. The kind of pleasure on the boy’s face was unmistakable. Fern slipped into a side street rather than let Tony see her, but that night when he entered her room, she said, first thing, “Why don’t you just come right out and
tell
me you like fucking boys?”

He reacted with a smile, but he was also blushing. He said, “Out of what blue have we launched this missile?”

“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 fac
e
. . . 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
larg
e
). 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.