“Pardon me?” Richard says brightly.
“Not everyone is getting so suddenly healthy.”
“But everyone’s on that new cocktail now . . .”
Fern has always been appalled by that infelicitous term; before AIDS, didn’t drugs come in protocols and regimens, with appropriately military connotations? Fern the ex-waitress sees that old bar tray of twists and wedges, olives and onions, cherries more livid than neon. A tray of frivolous options, which these men don’t have.
“Everyone isn’t. And on it or not, people are still dying all over the place. Perhaps fewer people we know, but they are.” Fenno says this wearily and not unkindly, as if it’s something he’s obligated to say.
“Tell you what,” says Tony. “Let’s talk about Y2K. Now
there’s
a fresh subject.” He digs his fork into his pie and takes a large bite, closes his eyes and murmurs loudly, “Mm, mm,
yes
.”
Richard laughs, relieved. “Well the really scary thing I’ve heard is that, you know those rusty old missile silos in Russia? They’re going to blow because they’ve been totally neglected. Like,
because
the cold war’s over we’re going to be nuked by those guys.”
Dennis says, “Oh I seriously doubt that.”
“Why? All the genius geeks are too busy fixing stuff on Wall Street. I’m telling you, that’s all my clients talk about: like what if their stocks go poof?”
“Poof!” Tony echoes mischieveously.
“You should take this stuff more seriously,” says Richard.
Tony touches him for the first time that Fern has noticed, clamping a hand on his shoulder. “Well I am glad you do. But if
we’re
all going to go poof, what’s the point of preparing for the future, taking all your courses?”
“Well the truth is, you never know, do you?”
“Now that
is
the truth,” says Tony.
Dennis looks down the table at Fern. “Lass, this is a heavenly tart you’ve made us. Just brilliant.” As Fern thanks him, he peers across at Richard and points at his plate. “But you, you’ve hardly touched yours!”
Richard looks at Fern and makes a despairing face. “I’m sorry, I know it must be scrumptious, but did I taste lard in here?”
“God,
I’m
sorry,” says Fern, though she knows she shouldn’t feel bad. No one told her she’d be feeding a vegetarian. No one told her a thing about what to expect of this evening; no one could have.
“A dab of pig fat won’t make or break your karma,” says Dennis. “And if it will,
I’ll
jolly well eat your portion.”
“Stop behaving like an ass,” Fenno says, so quietly he might almost be addressing himself. But it’s clear to Fern that he regards Dennis and his giddy indiscretions through the eyes of a father, not a brother. She thinks for a moment of her own brother Forest and his incessant judgments.
Richard has just slid his plate across the table to Dennis. Dennis freezes for a moment, the plate between his hands. “Sorry,” he says, but defiantly. He stands and carries the pie into the living room, closing the door behind him.
Fern excuses herself to go to the bathroom. When she comes out, she hears her name, whispered loudly several times. Dennis sits in the dark of the living room, half-submerged in one of Ralph’s plush white chairs. “I feel just rotten,” he says.
Fern isn’t sure how to reply.
His face is unclear in the gloom. “You know, all that insensitive AIDS talk—my brother’s lover died of that. And he was one of those chaps who held on for years, way before these new drugs . . . I ought to have stood up there somehow. . . . Ohhhhh.” With a mawkish sigh, Dennis rubs his face. “Oh dear but I
am
out of practice at this state of being.” He giggles abruptly, reminding her how stoned he is. “Better get a little sea air. Ventilate my wonky brain.” He isn’t quite looking at her, and she wouldn’t be surprised if he’d forgotten her presence as he stands unsteadily and goes out to the porch.
The dining room has emptied. On the table remain the bowl of roses, already beginning to droop, and four discarded napkins. A fifth lies on the floor. Crumbs wait to be brushed up, a tendril of smoke drifts from an extinguished candle. The front door bangs shut.
Fenno is at the sink, rinsing dishes. Without a word, Fern opens the dishwasher and reaches to take the first glass.
“Here we are again,” he says. “Like survivors of a shipwreck.”
“Did Richard leave in a huff? I would have.”
“Richard? That boy gets the gold medal for imperturbability. Or simple obtuseness. No, they went for a walk; Richard said it’s essential to ‘fully metabolize the food, jazz up those antioxidants!’ And you know Tony.”
“Habitual prowler.”
They smile at each other, relaying dessert plates; the dinner plates, with their gold rims, will have to be washed by hand.
“When I’m with Tony, sometimes I feel like part of a collection,” says Fern.
Fenno nods.
“He holds onto everyone he’s ever loved. Or who ever loved him. He never lets you go.”
“No he doesn’t,” Fenno admits. “Tenacious—in a backhanded way.”
It occurs to Fern that Tony cares for lovers the way he cares for other people’s bedrooms: undependably while he is there but then, once he leaves, making sure to tidy up, polish the dresser and press the linens. She remembers what Dennis told her about Fenno and wonders if Tony’s ever watched a lover die. No; that would never befall the fortunate Tony.
Fern and Fenno are quiet now as they work. She sponges down the counter and the stove. He washes the fancy plates, the massive corn pot, the wooden-handled knives. She pours soap into the little boxes in the dishwasher door. He takes the wine bottles to the mudroom, to their appointed recycling bin. She locks and turns on the dishwasher, regretting the way its rumble drowns out the soothing whispers of night. The symphony ended some time ago; once the kitchen was clean, the house fell silent.
“Where’s my brother got to?” says Fenno when he returns.
“He went to the beach. To clear his head. He’s a little mortified.”
“Bloody hell,” says Fenno. He walks quickly back out through the mudroom. Fern follows. The moon is bright, and a glint of gold attracts her eye to the abandoned plate, not a crumb left on it, balanced on the porch rail. Fenno stands amid the white chairs, frowning out at the view. “Bloody, bloody hell.”
“He won’t drown,” she says. “He’s too alert for that.”
“That’s not what worries me,” says Fenno. “I haven’t seen him like this—like some teenage pothead—for years, but he’s been acting absurdly juvenile ever since he got here last week. Twenty years ago when he acted like this, he’d go out and make a very public fool of himself.”
Down across the lawn, through the hedge, along the emerald tennis court, she can still hear that damned dishwasher grinding away, louder than the ocean, like a conscience that refuses to quit.
SEVENTEEN
F
ERN IS CERTAIN THAT JONAH
did not kill himself. First among those who are certain that he did is his mother, who finally came right out and accused Fern of driving him to it by ignoring all the warning signs. How could any wife be so blind to such perilous despair, such hopelessness?
And how could any mother accept that her son might die by such a ludicrous mishap? This was how Fern excused Jonah’s mother’s behavior.
It did not help that the police reached no clear conclusion. Or that Jonah had no life insurance to force a conclusion. His keys were on his dresser in the apartment. His wallet, with money and cards, was in a pocket on his pulverized body. Leaning out their kitchen window the day after the fall, Fern showed the police a fairly broad ledge (structurally pointless, she thought, except to the birds) that ran at floor level along the courtyard wall. By their living room windows, it met the back fire escape.
Soon after moving in, Fern had accidentally locked herself out of the apartment in her nightgown. Their newspaper had been left on a neighbor’s mat, and as she went to retrieve it, their door blew shut. Two hours later, Jonah found her sitting there, perusing, out of desperate boredom, the Automobiles section. He annoyed her by laughing, but he told her that, aside from never leaving without her keys, she might want to know about a backup scheme the previous tenant had used: Climb out the hall window, take the ledge past their kitchen to the fire escape, open a living room window. Fern looked at the ledge. “Are you nuts? Have you done this?”
“No,” said Jonah. “But it’s good to know about.”
“Right,” she said. “I think I’d rather read car classifieds.”
Jonah was not daring by nature, but in their last months together, Fern thought his judgment seemed poor or inattentive. She no longer let him shop, because more than once he came home with bruised or wilting produce. He gave money to the infamous beggar who claimed, year after year, all around town, that he needed busfare to make it upstate to his big break in repertory theater. And he lost an essay he’d been working on for two months when a thunderstorm stunned his computer. He hadn’t made a backup. “Are you nuts?” Fern heard herself say too often, too meanly. Perhaps this was what Jonah’s mother meant when she said Fern was heartless, but this did not drive him to suicide. Jonah might have been dismayed, and dismay might have made him absentminded, but he wasn’t hopeless, not yet.
Stavros sat quietly on her couch that night while she talked to Jonah’s sister, then to Heather, Anna, and her parents. He went with her to the police station and sat quietly on benches in two dreary hallways while she looked at Jonah’s body and then answered questions. He did not read or talk on the phone or pace. He simply sat. How respectful, Fern thought when he rose to take her home.
Unlike the police and Jonah’s mother and her friends and siblings and parents, Stavros asked no questions—except, more than once, whether she would be all right. She asked him to come by and look at the ledge. Yes, he had heard about the previous tenant’s balancing act (the man had a wife who sometimes bolted him out). “The guy was a lunatic.” Stavros made Fern lean out the window beside him. He laid a hand on her back, as if she might need to be anchored. “See all that pigeon shit? Slick as oil, I promise you that.” Starting the next day, of course, the window was nailed shut; often now, the hall smells stale, of garbage and the neighbors’ cooking.
When Jonah’s mother came to take his things, she came with Jonah’s sister. Fern had always liked Jonah’s mother, mainly for her strong, outspoken persona; she wasn’t a woman you’d want to offend. The mother, once so fond of Fern, now embraced her with clear reluctance; the sister—whom Fern had never liked—barely said hello. She carried a stack of flattened cardboard boxes and a bag of moving supplies. As he had promised, Stavros came over; when the women arrived, an hour late because of Saturday traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, Stavros was reading the newspaper on Fern’s kitchen counter. As it was morning, Fern realized this gave the wrong impression entirely, but there was no room for explaining. Stavros said how sorry he was. He said he’d thought they might like some assistance. Jonah’s sister gave him a long steely look, but Jonah’s mother put on a conspicuously brave smile and thanked him. Fern remembered Jonah’s perfect manners and felt a shiver of sorrow. She did not miss him, but she felt the loss of something irreplaceable in her life, even in her heart.
Stavros packed Jonah’s clothes in a suitcase (they fit into one), and he helped Jonah’s mother pack the books and the contents of his desk. Frequently, she excused herself and went into the bathroom; in vain, Fern tried not to hear her modulated weeping. Jonah’s sister, who spoke perhaps seven words to Fern in the three hours she was there, wrapped pieces of furniture for the movers. Fern said nothing when she wrapped the green damask sofa.
The four of them worked mostly in silence; Stavros, the outsider, spoke the most often because he needed instruction. Fern was terrified when he offered to go out for sandwiches; relieved when Jonah’s mother wondered aloud how anyone could think of eating at a time like this. Nevertheless, when Fern was in the bedroom alone, having remembered the drawers in Jonah’s nightstand, his mother came in and closed the door. Dramatically, she even stood against it.
“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.”