Van Morrison is done spreading the Word, and the wake of silence feels morose. In it, Fern becomes aware of her reluctant clarity, of remaining sober while others do not, of watching temperaments shift in ways she would not otherwise perceive.
Richard stands. “My turn! Where’s the music stashed?” He sprints into the living room before he gets an answer.
In his gaping absence, Fern says, “Shall I cut the pie?”
“What a fine idea,” says Tony, sounding genuinely grateful. “Miss Fern here makes the world’s most outrageous pies,” he says to Fenno.
Fenno nods. He looks ten years older than the man Fern met upstairs that afternoon. “I’ll clear,” he says.
From the kitchen, as she searches for a broad-bladed knife, Fern recognizes the opening notes of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Should it surprise her that Richard would choose something so old-fashioned? No. Gigolo or not (and wouldn’t the money go toward his vet-tech tuition?), the boy has a long, likable streak of cornball sweetness.
Pausing to appreciate the pie before she cuts it, Fern lets the music—joy distilled—invade her. Long ago, before Jonah, she had wished that a neat fragment of this symphony’s ecstatic panorama could be extracted for a wedding procession. When she hears it now, its joy is painful. She is listening to a recording of her lost, outmoded certainty of what love would be: how uplifting, even in its storms.
TWO MONTHS AFTER JONAH’S DEATH,
she ran into Stavros at a neighborhood toy store. They were shopping for nephews with adjacent birthdays. Fern walked in at the exact moment Stavros was startled by a velvet devil exploding from a jack-in-the-box. The instant of irrational terror on his face—on the face of such a conventionally masculine man—made her laugh. He looked happy to see her.
The manager of the toy store said, “And it’s a collector’s item, too.”
Stavros regarded him as if he were nuts. “After being played with by a three-year-old?” Fern laughed again.
They looked at trucks, trains, gyroscopes, rubbery bath toys. They didn’t buy a thing. As they left the store, Stavros said, “A drink, a cup of tea?”
“Tea,” she said, charmed by so quaint an offer. She expected him to choose a coffee shop, but he led her to a large sooty building one block from hers, to the ground floor rear apartment. When he turned on the light, she must have betrayed her amazement, because he laughed and said, “My parents’ place. I have to water my mother’s plants. She’s in Greece, and Dad doesn’t do domestic things. If I had sisters, he wouldn’t let me do them, either.”
The living room was large but claustrophobically filled with dark weighty furniture, brocades and velvet in colors and muted patterns that reminded Fern of minerals: agate, granite, bloodstone. Icons hung on the wall, but they were equally dark and poorly lit. The air smelled heavy as well, of meat and spices. She sat on a voluminous blood-colored couch and watched Stavros make himself at home in a kitchen not much larger than hers. After putting a kettle on the stove, he walked through the living room and pulled back brown velvet drapes. “Come have a look,” he called to Fern as he opened a pair of French doors and stepped outside.
Someone with talent and patience tended the garden before her. At the center was a tiled fountain (now dry), at the back a geometrically plotted planting bed. On three sides, the brick walls were nearly obscured by tall, well-established poplars and yews, beneath them sturdy bushes of box, hydrangea, mock orange, and lilac. From her childhood, Fern knew all these plants in an instant, even without their flowers. Stavros made the rounds with a hose. “Not much to look at now, but you should see this place in June.” She admired the moss on the stones, a rose still in bloom, chrysanthemums of a bluish purple she had never seen before. Herbs grew in the mazelike bed at the back. Most were shriveled or cut back, but sage and rosemary, waist-high, still flourished in the sharp November air. She bent to smell them.
“Here.” Stavros plucked leaves from three different plants. “All oregano. Varieties my mother swears you cannot find here anywhere.” One by one, he rubbed them between his fingers and held them under Fern’s nose.
She sighed, shocked at how their distinct but harmonious scents called up the Greece she had seen, nearly ten years ago, for only two weeks.
“I’ll cut you some to carry home,” he said.
As he surveyed the garden, his breath rose in prominent plumes. “My mother’s left me complicated directions for mulching, in case she has to stay away much longer. You can’t imagine
what
she’d do to me if anything died.”
“Oh but I can.” Fern told him about Arcadia, her summers of horticultural labor, the price of trial and error (your pay docked by the price of any plant you’d clearly killed—which only exacerbated finger-pointing among the Olitsky siblings).
In the living room, under a gaudy chandelier, they both drank tea, something dark and strong with a hint of cinnamon. Stavros told her about the courses he was taking when he wasn’t helping his father run the neighborhood empire: real estate law and Homeric Greek.
“Your father must be pleased—about the Greek.”
“Oh no. He thinks it’s pointless and sentimental. His parents are dead, his brothers all came to this country, and he hasn’t been back to the island where he grew up for ages. He left for good reason, he says! So Mom takes one or two of us over each summer, for a few weeks. She jokes that he won’t let her take all three of her sons because then she might never return.”
“She’s not happy here?”
Stavros shrugged. “You know, I’ve asked her that. She never answers directly. I don’t think she thinks in those terms.”
Fern looked around at the saints, the pottery displayed on trays, a large black cross hanging like a list of commandments beside the kitchen door.
“This is where I grew up,” said Stavros. “I know what you’re thinking. My father owns this building; why not the penthouse? Well, my mother would never leave that garden. That—that I know makes her happy.”
“But this is a huge place . . .”
“Two bedrooms. My brothers and I shared one.”
Three boys in one room. Fern recalled her childhood gripes about shared bedrooms and bathrooms. But she had had yards and orchards and fields, a basement playroom. “How did you get any privacy?”
Stavros smiled at her for a moment before he said, “In Greek, you know, there’s no word for privacy.”
She laughed.
“I’m serious.” He crossed the room and sat next to her on the couch, uncomfortably close. She stopped laughing.
He said, “Where you are sitting, that’s where the only telephone was when we were growing up. Whenever I talked on the phone, my mother would come and sit right here. She was almost never out of the apartment, and she might be knitting or sewing on buttons or peeling potatoes, but whatever she was doing, she would come and sit this close while I talked to my friends. I especially hated it when she brought onions to cut up beside me. And when I hung up, she would say, ‘So who flunked that history test? So who broke up with this girl Mary? So it is what movie you are going to see?’” Stavros put on a thick accent and held his face aggressively close to Fern’s. Nervously, she laughed again. She could smell that same rich soap she had smelled two months ago, when she had cried on his shoulder.
He stood up, taking their cups to the kitchen. “She’d even stand outside the bathroom and wait while we took our showers.”
“I’d have killed her,” said Fern.
“Well yes, we could see our friends didn’t live like that, but there was no complaining without consequences from our father. So when I was thirteen, I decided I could live like this by imagining that I was a very famous child, like what’s-his-name, Grace Kelly’s son the junior prince of Monaco, and had to have a bodyguard no matter where I went.”
Fern stood in the doorway of the kitchen while Stavros washed their cups and laid them in a rack to dry. “Only problem was, I developed a celebrity complex and had to be brought back to earth.”
“How did that happen?”
“That,” he said, “is much too private to tell.”
They laughed together. He told her his Greek class started in half an hour, but before they left the apartment, he took a pair of scissors and a ball of string from a drawer and went back into the garden. When he returned, he handed her three small bouquets of his mother’s oregano. “If you like,” he said, “hang them upside down for two weeks to dry them. But keep them in separate jars, so their flavors stay separate too.” (In a dark place, in glass, away from the stove. From her own mother, Fern knew the routine.)
As Stavros locked the apartment door behind them, she asked, “Where do you live?”—half dreading he still lived here.
“I’m almost embarrassed to tell you.” He looked at the ceiling. “Six floors up. But my mother doesn’t have keys. When I go out of town, the super waters my plants.”
“You’re a gardener, too?”
“I am not,” he said, though he sounded regretful. “I have a cutting of my mother’s philodendron that all the mythical heroes I’m reading about couldn’t begin to kill, and I made the mistake of starting an avocado pit last year. It won’t stand up anymore without the support of an exercise bike I never ride, but somehow I can’t bear to put it out of its misery.”
On the sidewalk, she was about to say good-bye when Stavros said, “I haven’t asked how you’re doing. How are you doing?”
“I’m doing fine,” she said. “Except . . .”
He waited. She sighed. “Except that my mother-in-law is coming this weekend to take away half the furniture.”
Stavros frowned. “Because . . .?”
“She thinks Jonah’s death is my fault.”
“Excuse me?” he said loudly.
“I can’t explain, it’s too complicated. The worst of it is, she used to like me, so the thought of seeing her this way . . .”
He said, “Would you like me to meet her and let her in?”
She thought about this for a moment. “You know, if you could just . . . be around. It’s a huge favor, but she’s so angry and I’m afraid she might . . .”
He looked at his watch. He touched Fern’s shoulder. “I’m late for my class. I’ll call you tomorrow and figure it out.”
That was exactly what she needed: someone to figure things out. Even just the superficial things. And that was how it began.
“I’M NO DOCTOR,
but this is what I prescribe.” A glass of white wine and a stack of antique dessert plates seem to glide in from nowhere, landing on the counter beside her pie. A silver pie spade, its handle engraved with pansies.
Fern looks at the wine with longing. “Maybe three ears of corn will cancel it out.” She hasn’t touched alcohol in months and wonders if this one dose will send her, like a slingshot, into a state of abrupt, extreme inebriation. She takes a sip and turns around to smile at Fenno.
He is looking straight at her belly. “Five months?”
“You’d be an expert, wouldn’t you.”
“Unwitting amateur.”
She cuts the pie in quarters, the quarters in half.
“That looks lovely,” says Fenno.
“I like hearing men use that word. It sounds so sweet.”
“Well sweetness, that’s not a virtue of mine.”
Fern looks at him. “I don’t know. Look at what you’ve agreed to do for this girl . . . what’s her name?”
“Oneeka.” His expression betrays that it’s taken him time to say this name without risking laughter.
“You could easily have refused her; it sounds like ‘labor coach’ wasn’t a part of your job description.”
“No, but I have to admit to a prurient interest—though I’m touched by her trust, and I like her. Childbirth is hardly something I’d otherwise witness. And then of course, I’ll have no responsibility for the baby.”
Fern pries the first slice free and cradles it onto a plate. “I wouldn’t count on that. I bet she makes you godfather. Or names it Fenno, if it’s a boy.”
“God, I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I hope you like children,” she teases.
“In fact I do. It shocks me sometimes.”
“Are you one of those men whom everyone clamors to have as a godfather for their kids? I’ve noticed it’s sort of the rage nowadays: the bachelor goddaddy who gives the most money and the most imaginative presents.”
“The godfaggot, you mean. The fairy godfather.” He laughs. “Well, nieces, I have plenty of those—as you may have gathered from my extremely stoned brother. I do love his daughters, all four of them. He likes to joke that he doesn’t have to feel politically guilty because he and his wife simply co-opted my reproductive allotment. I told him that would be
one
baby, not two, and he told me that though it might be hard for me to face, my abstinence was depriving some poor woman somewhere of having
her
baby.”
Fern spoons whipped cream onto five neat slices of pie, then leans against the counter and sips her wine. The sensation is extraordinary, like testing the ocean in May, feeling the icy cold rush up your legs and thrill its way into your bloodstream. She feels as if she’s just waking up, glad to be in this kitchen with this man—and not looking forward to joining the others again. “But how often do you get to France?”
“I see them in Scotland, at Christmas, sometimes in the summer. And my brother back home, he and his wife have twins. A boy and a girl.”
Fern is amused and touched by his obvious pride in these other people’s children. Would she look this way if she mentioned Heather’s sons? “How old?” she asks.
“Wonderful ages—three, six, seven, and nine. Or maybe, when they’re not yours, all the ages are wonderful. I have this idiotic fantasy that some of them, someday, might come over and stay with me, maybe to study.” He picks up three plates. “Let’s taste your creation, shall we?”
As they enter the dining room, Richard is saying, “The great news is that viral counts are down, but Y2K fears are through the roof. On the beach, it’s like, all these people who last summer thought they were going to die are now just worried their stockbroker’s system is going to crash. Like suddenly everyone’s getting so healthy and paranoid all at once. It’s sort of funny.”
“Hardly everyone,” says Fenno as he sets a plate in front of Richard.