The second dividend was that I now had three kinds of evenings (four, if you counted our now weekly readings by the novelists and poets du jour). Two or three times a month, Mal would come to dinner at my flat so that he could spend more time with Felicity than the visits he paid to her in the shop (most days he wasn’t traveling). Pronouncing the first meal I cooked him “anglotypically atrocious,” thereafter Mal brought the food and cooked it. And though my ignorance of opera nearly led to Felicity’s repossession, an occasional pair of tickets to a chamber concert, a recital, or the ballet would show up on my desk. Ralph, often a beneficiary, decided that perhaps Mal wasn’t a bitch after all. (Mavis and Druid, on the other hand, were anything but pleased by Felicity. Whenever they entered the shop, she would squawk loudly—out of pleasure, I insisted, but they could not agree.)
Our evenings together were awkward at first. For one thing, I had seen Mal’s flat, if only once. It wasn’t a great deal larger than mine, but its architectural details were more refined, and the beauty and meticulous placement of everything in it were meant to astonish. Each of the three rooms beyond the kitchen was painted a different shade of leafy green. In the small dining room (a room I did not have), the chairs were upholstered in velvet.
I did not like the covetous urges it stirred, but this was a lovely place to be, a sanctuary of the material sublime. I found myself, like some eager bumpkin, unable to resist asking about each object, from the green-shaded Stickley lamp and the Italian watercolors of costume designs for
The Magic Flute
to the blue deco rug I had spotted months ago from across the street (depicting not dragons or pagodas but handsomely woven domestic animals, my favorite a trotting horse with a flower in its teeth). In one corner of the living room stood a primeval-looking chair, an exception to the consolingly plush upholstery everywhere else you might sit. The scarred wood looked as if it had never been finished, and the curved arms ended in a pair of vertical spindles, worn smooth and pale by some kind of friction. As I felt their oddly silken surface, Mal said, “The clenched hands of women in labor.” He smiled at my confusion. “It’s a birthing chair. I found it in a junkshop in Quezaltenango.” He pulled off the flat seat; below was a large aperture.
Each object promised a tale: an unwise but incendiary affair, a fabulous find in some uncharted bucolic hamlet, a plane detoured by foul weather to a spot even more delightful than the intended destination. I disliked the role of neophyte but had only myself to blame. No, I had not been to the South Pacific; no, not even to Covent Garden. I had never tasted star fruit, never heard of orange roughy (yes, Mal was an excellent cook and effortlessly so).
My flat, though clean, was furnished with carelessly mingled things I’d purchased mostly in charity shops (in Brooklyn, not Quezaltenango). Politely, Mal began his first visit perusing my bookshelves, Felicity touring along on his shoulder. I learned, with minimal gratification, that he was not well read and not at all sorry about it. He turned to the pictures of my brothers and parents which I had placed on the mantel above my nonfunctioning fireplace. Lil was there, too, just having married David; Dennis was yet to meet Véronique.
Through an asphyxiating silence, Mal pored over my relatives; his manner reminded me of the first time he’d come to the shop and scrutinized the bird prints. At last he looked at me and said, “You’re a sentimentalist. I admire that. In others.”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to put an -ist on it. I don’t adhere to any sort of manifesto. They’re just my kin. I happen to like them. I like being reminded of their existence.”
Ignoring my testiness, he said, “I’m sentimental about nothing; I just didn’t get that gene. Except perhaps for one thing: Maria Callas, her voice and her life—two things? Responsible or not, that Jackie O will not be forgiven by me, nor can I understand the fawning fuss made over her every sigh. Such a whisper of a woman under that pilfered Chanel veneer. Such a niente, a zip, a zero. American women set such petty standards in their heroines. So this woman stood by a man who couldn’t keep it zipped! So she has nifty taste and upped the thread count of sheets in the Lincoln Bedroom! So she allegedly saved Grand Central! So she knows how to keep mum!”
He lifted my parents off the mantel. “Well, Grand Central is grand, I’ll give her that,” he murmured. “But
someone
would have thrown the Colony Club in front of that demolition ball.” He set the picture down without a word. Someone braver than I might have defended the exquisite charisma of Mrs. O or asked Mal about his family. It took a few evenings for me to learn how to ride these conversations, how not to be left in the starting gate, my horse bolted out from under me.
Mal never mentioned his health, yet the reason for our artificial friendship was rarely far from my mind. One evening the following spring, I noticed a mark on his forearm, a purple amoeba, when he rolled up his sleeves to begin a risotto. As we ate, he noticed the direction of my gaze. A cunning smile flared across his face (and a prominent blush across mine). “A door, dear Fenno. I literally, honest and truly, bumped into a doorjamb while getting up to piss in the middle of the night at a new hotel in Rome. My favorite was booked.” It did look like a bruise. I apologized.
Mal leaned back in his chair. “Kaposi. Now who do you suppose that fellow was? Isn’t it an odd, exotic name, almost jolly, for this deadly creeping thing of which I must live in terror? I picture some seedy ingratiating Arab type wearing a motheaten fez, some shady extra in
Casablanca
.”
“Actually”—I tried to sound equally cool—“he was a turn-of-the-century Hungarian dermatologist. His first name was Moritz.” It so happened that in a morbid moment, when Luke was ill, I’d looked up Kaposi’s sarcoma.
“I stand enlightened.” Mal laughed and tossed his napkin on the table. “Anyone for a touch of sorbet? Felicity won’t say no.”
Often, if talk of current events, celebrities, or art took us to the edge of this topic, Mal would bring up Felicity, as if to remind me that her companionship was the sole intimacy we shared. Yet even here he could cut me short. One evening, watching the two of them greet each other, I said, “She’s very much your child.”
Mal said coldly, “She is not a child. She’s a bird.” After an awkward space, he added quietly, “Parenthood is a kind of love unto itself. I don’t subscribe to the idea of animals as children. But yes, of course I adore her.”
I knew nothing about Mal’s medical care except, of course, that his doctors (I noted the plural with conflicting alarm and relief) had forbidden him one of his greatest everyday joys. That joy—waking early to Felicity’s warblings, letting her dash across the table to steal a piece of fruit from one’s plate—was now mine, and when I enjoyed it most, I felt like a thief. The day Mal gave her to me, he stroked her luscious feathers and said, “One of the things I’ll miss most—and it’s vain, I know—is waking to a breakfast companion who’s dressed every single morning like Jessye Norman at Carnegie Hall.”
Sometimes he looked perilously thin, his pale brown hair parched and dull in a way no costly styling could conceal. Other times he looked wiry and strong, his freckled skin luminous and supple. He told me once that he’d always avoided the sun, so pallor was a constant. And when he came to dinner, he might drink quite a bit of wine or he might abstain. He might look weary and leave at nine; he might stay past midnight, until I kicked him out. Sometimes I was certain he aimed to be unpredictable.
One night after he left early, I found a plastic pillbox on my bathroom sink. It held several different kinds of pills in separate compartments. Mal had left not ten minutes before, so I simply took the box across the street and rang his bell. As I climbed the stairs, I could see him waiting in the open doorway to his flat. “Fenno?” he called down uncertainly, though I had identified myself on the intercom.
At the door, I held out the box. “Oh yes,” he said quickly, and put the box in his pocket. He hesitated, perhaps about to ask me in, but then he said he was finishing up a review, and it wasn’t kind, and the object of his scorn deserved his full attention. “If I write a rave,” he said, “I can do it stone drunk on a dance floor. But cruelty requires astute respect. In my field at least.”
We said goodnight for a second time, and the next day I searched the paper till I found Mal’s review. It was mournful in its chastisement of James Levine for grossly overplaying the singers in the Met’s latest
Traviata
. When Mal came by the shop, I commented on his diplomacy.
“That was draft five or six,” he said. “Draft one expressed my true and perpetual opinion of that man and his mediocrity: Yoohoo, Jimmy dear, did someone neglect to inform you you’re basically background? Why do you suppose you’re not in the garters of Seiji Ozawa?”
This was when I noticed that, conceited or not, Mal was immune to praise. Like the photographer who can’t stand having his picture taken, Mal had chosen the one profession which spared him his deepest aversion. By now, I had been seeing the man nearly every day for a year, yet simple truths like this could still elude me because I did not, really, know him at all.
Did I want to? On the evenings I was home in my living room, a glance across the street at his darkened windows would tell me he was out. Being out was a large part of his job. If, much later, I happened to see that his lights were on, I imagined him working then as well. Had we still lived in the age of the typewriter, I might have, if I leaned out my window, heard one clacking cattily away. But on two or three other nights that first year, I saw faces behind Mal’s windows: men and women dressed up and laughing. If he had parties at all these days, Mal had said in my kitchen one night, they were small dinner parties for the few people he honestly liked. I was surprised how much his re-mark stung; what made me think I was more to him than a glorified zookeeper or, effectively, a tolerated son-in-law? To literally witness these parties to which I had not been invited—yet at which I could practically hear the conversation—stung even more, leaving me spiteful and sad. Though feeling left out, you will have noticed, is second nature to me.
SEVEN
L
AST NIGHT I REMEMBERED
to set my alarm, so I’m downstairs by six o’clock. For the first time since my arrival, the kitchen is vacant, the table cleared of cooking preparations. I sit down and enjoy my tea and my childhood house in sweet, solitary silence. I feel deliciously smug. At a flash of motion from the garden, however, I realize that I am not the first one up.
Véronique spots me as I spy on her from the window. Without calling my name, she beckons energetically. Left no choice, I head across the grass; within a few mincing steps, I am soaked to the shins with dew. Véronique—a grown-up Continental Girl Guide—is wearing wellies.
She stands among the white peonies exercising a pair of shears; dozens of cut flowers lie in the grass. Her eyes are obscured by stylish wraparound sunglasses, and her yellow hair, usually twisted back, hangs loose across a white cabled jumper which I recognize as Dad’s. It’s kept, free for the loan, on a rack in the scullery, but I feel possessive.
When I’m standing close to her, she says, softly, “Newspapers, Fenno? Would you be so kind enough as to bring me some newspapers?”
“Well,” I say, pointing at my trousers and pretending to pretend indignation, “you might have let me know before I crossed the great swamp.”
“You will be no more the wet for going two times. I do not wish to wake Denis and the children.” She points up at the house. “I will then accomplish
zéro,
” she says tartly, but she thanks me.
I do as I’m told, pulling piles of old papers out from under the scullery sink—copies of the
Yeoman,
two and three months old, which Dad would have read before leaving for Greece. The
Yeoman
is the newspaper my grandfather founded. Dad took it up next, as expected, but sold it after Mum died, after our convening as grown, bereft men made him see at last that none of his sons—least of all this one—planned to take on his work.
Véronique asks me to lay out several sheaves. The instant the paper touches the grass, it darkens thirstily from the edges. I think of how many substances this very newspaper has absorbed over the years: mud from our boots and shoes, blood from newborn puppies whelped by our mother, the stains of leavings from meals which I would carry out back in the evenings to empty over the wall for wildlife to scavenge.
Véronique startles me by saying, “You have lived in New York how long is it now?” She is bent over, rolling the peonies into the paper.
Seventeen years, I tell her.
She asks, again without looking up, if I’m happy there.
“Oh yes,” I say dismissively. I wonder if she’s going to start asking pointed questions about my life, but I have to confess she’s been little other than polite to me during this visit. Have the hormones of childbirth made her fair-minded? Am I vaguely disappointed, itching for a fight?
“So then you will stay there, you believe. Forever?”
“That’s a grandiose word in my lexicon.”
Ignoring the jest, Véronique instructs me to hold out my arms and begins stacking cones of flowers against my chest. They’re for the church arrangements; will I carry them please to Davide’s pickup?
Together, we lay them in the bed of the pickup, securing them in one corner between a spare wheel and a toolbox.
As we start back, she says, “So you think no longer of returning back here, of settling here yourself?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever thought that. Why—is there some fear I’ll try to horn in on the status quo?”
“At the contrary. I think everyone would like to see more of you.”
“Everyone?”
As we enter the kitchen, she says, “Fenno, you are not compellent enough to be a villain. This is perhaps an insult to you?”
Before I can answer, she points to the newspapers on the floor and says, “Now I must bring irises. Could you please?” She marches out the door.
It is, as predicted, a day of alert, exquisite beauty. Oblivious now to my drenched ankles, I stop in the center of the lawn to listen to the escalating birdsong: I can distinguish yellowhammers, chiffchaffs, a collared dove, a mistle thrush—old familiars, friends of my youth. The shadow of the house, which covered the entire lawn just a few minutes ago, has retreated dramatically, making the house look taller, as if it is literally rising to the occasion. Above its steep roof, the sun is rapidly drying the grass on which Dad’s memorial luncheon will take place a few hours hence.
On solar cue, a small lorry pulls up and three young men climb out. They head for the garage and begin ferrying tables and chairs to the lawn, setting them down around me. They acknowledge me with only the briefest nods (ignorant, I suppose, that their gratuities may depend in part on me).
The next three hours are filled with a careful rush to overcome chaos. Dennis puts two large pots on the stove for rice, places the casseroles of meat on the kitchen table, shows two hired girls how to serve the soup. Véronique fills the house with our father’s own flowers, then dresses her daughters in starched and crinolined dresses, three different shades of respectful blue (Véronique wears simple but shapely black). Lil is absent yet again, retrieving an Edinburgh contingent at the Lockerbie rail station; she will meet us at Saint Andrews. David makes the boys who arrived in the lorry rearrange all the tables and chairs. Hewing to his specifications as well, I lay a drinks bar on the terrace behind the kitchen. I find a silver ice bucket that is so deeply tarnished it looks positively archaeological. My grandfather’s initials appear after a third go-round of polish, and somehow this omen delights me. (Following Lil’s advice, we will not be collecting in the churchyard after the service; we plan to fight about our father’s resting place later tonight.)
Véronique drives Dennis and the children in Dad’s car. Behind them, I ride with David in his truck. We say very little, and I watch not the green hills and woods as they lose ground to the reach of the city but my nieces’ bobbing heads. Every time they kneel on the backseat to wave and make faces at us, their mother’s slender arm reaches back and warns them into place. When they pull ahead, I can see Dennis looking at Véronique, talking gaily, hands expressive, probably strategizing a new ragout or fricassee.
The vicar stands outside, already robed, eyes closed and face tilted up to catch a few heavenly rays from his Alleged Maker. He lets us into the church and props open its broad medieval doors. Inside, the cool, grave stillness overwhelms me. The church has such a parental smell: admonitory yet consoling. Church was one of the few places to which my mother wore perfume; magically, I smell that particular sweetness too. To distract myself from these hazardous sensations, I take Laurie’s hand and lead her to the baptismal font. It’s made of a white marble, glacial and ghostly, whose faint markings look like subcutaneous veins. This is where Laurie’s father, David, myself, and the grandfather whose loss she hasn’t yet grasped were christened. She (but not her sisters) was also christened here. When she stands on tiptoe, her nose just clears the rim of the basin. “When babies don’t need it, do they let birds come in for a swim? The size is exactly, perfectly perfect.”
“Perfectly perfect,” I agree with melancholy satisfaction. I dip a finger in the water and touch Laurie’s nose. “No dripping on my dress!” she exclaims with a grimace. As she runs back out toward the sun, I hear David quarreling gently with the vicar over hymns.
A YEAR AND A HALF
after we opened the shop, it was showing a decent profit. Ralph’s money (and ego) allowed us to serve good wine after our readings, and half a dozen mentions in wildlife magazines led visiting naturalists through our door (to which I had affixed a bell, compliments of Malachy Burns). We added to our merchandise one-of-a-kind birdhouses made from the tragic remnants of newly felled national forest in northern Idaho (ten percent of the proceeds went to the Nature Conservancy, another scheme of Ralph’s).
As the air warmed that spring, steeped in the fragrance of crowning hyacinths and budding trees, my morning walks shed their puritanical purpose. I fancied that they had begun to signify the well-trodden path of my life, which I had grown to like. Uncringingly at last, I enjoyed my apparent health and drew from my hierarchy of alliances a superior sense of order (even Mal’s niche seemed clear). Thanks to Felicity’s ruckus at dawn, I rose earlier than most of my neighbors and took my route slowly, with relish, feeling generally thankful rather than sullen. I looked forward to browsing the untouchable wares in the FedEx lorries (reliably trading their trousers for shorts). I stopped to contemplate buildings and plantings I’d never noticed before.
A true curiosity was the tiny white weatherboard house at the corner of Greenwich and Charles. Set back against a mammoth, nondescript apartment building, it had its own little lawn, partitioned from the street by a tall wooden fence; to see the house properly, you had to squint between the slats.
In any other setting, you’d pass this house right by as a runty ramshackle thing, its roofline flat, its windows and doors pathetically crooked, its rooms surely not much larger than cupboards. It reminded me of windbeaten cottages in the poorest seaside towns along the Firth of Forth. But here, in this muscular setting, it was breathtakingly quaint, and its lawn, though minuscule by suburban standards, was magnificent for such a crowded, coveted corner of the world. So while the place looked as if it had sprouted like a carbuncle from the dull cement skin of the building next door, you could well imagine it as the third or fourth pied-à-terre of a film star.
There was a child’s swing set and, parked in the driveway, a blue station wagon. I had never seen any sign of activity until one morning that May—when, for the first time I could remember, the station wagon was gone. A woman with a long dark ponytail was crouched on the grass; for several seconds, her back to me, she remained in this attitude. She appeared to have lost or to be planting something.
When she stood, I saw first that she was holding a camera and, second, that she was a man. He looked straight at me and said, “You with the invisible dog. If you’ve got half an hour, I could use an assistant.”
I froze; my white shirt had given me away through the fence.
The man laughed. “I don’t lure in suckers to bury them in the basement, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He walked to the driveway, opened the gate, and leaned out to look at me more directly. “Well, come on in there. I’ve got coffee and such.”
I started in on some fable about an architectural critic friend who’d told me about this house and I was just having a look and perhaps I’d looked a bit long and—
“Looking’s no crime,” said the man as we came face-to-face. My embarrassment amused him.
He did not take me into the house but offered to bring me a cup of coffee. He came out a moment later, carrying a lawn chair as well. He took it to the place where he had been crouching, unfolded it, and told me to sit. “This is tedious,” he said, “so go ahead and sunbathe till I’m ready.”
A large silver spoon was lying in the grass. My host now began to play with its position, repeatedly standing back to look at it through the camera. Then he knelt down, leaned close to the spoon so that his face was just inches away, held the camera at arm’s length and clicked the shutter.
Other than sipping my coffee (which I did not enjoy but had felt compelled to accept), I sat quite still. I felt awkward but safe, not because of the man’s disavowal of criminal intention but because I knew that innumerable flat dwellers could look down upon us from three sides as they showered, made their breakfasts, and dressed for work.
“Now here’s where you come in,” he said abruptly, holding out the camera. I put down my coffee and took it. He squinted at the sun and held a light meter near the spoon. As he leaned down, his T-shirt rose above his jeans. Beneath the shirt, his skin was pale and smooth. A sparse patch of brown hair grew in the small of his back.
He walked behind me, twisted the lens and adjusted a few small knobs on the camera from over my head. His hands were all knuckles, graceful but well worked.
I felt as if I were underwater, forbidden by the elements from speaking. I leaned forward, clutching the camera, waiting for orders as my nameless director walked beyond the spoon, folded his arms, and stood facing away.
“Center the spoon,” he said from this stance. He had an accent strong enough that even I could recognize it as midwestern; I’d had a classmate back at Cambridge who uttered those prairie-wide vowels. He was from Chicago.
This man was probably in his thirties, but he had a full youthful face, like pink-skinned Italian boys in Caravaggio’s paintings. His eyes were cinnamon-colored, and his hair, pulled back, revealed an off-center widow’s peak that gave his expression a cynical touch, as if one eyebrow were permanently cocked. He wasn’t particularly tall or muscular, but his body had a loose wiliness that gave him a presence as good as brute strength.
When I clicked the shutter as ordered, it became clear what he was doing: photographing his reflection in the spoon (or having me do so). His image was little more than a black sliver in the spoon’s broad convex face. The sky with its roiling white clouds prevailed. After I clicked the shutter, he turned, raised his arms, and told me to shoot again. He changed his position or changed the spoon itself twenty or thirty times, at each pose saying, “Shoot,” as if I were a marksman at an execution. At the end of the roll, he reloaded the camera and handed it back for another round.
After the second roll, he took the camera and said, “You make a decent assistant, no chitchat. Be along here tomorrow?”
I said that I would, though I feared my voice was trembling.
“Great,” he said, smiling. “My assistant have a name?”
I told him. He shook my hand and said, “Tony Best. I’d invite you to hang out, but I have a rendezvous.” He lampooned the French word with a hick’s pronunciation, and I did not know if this meant he had no rendezvous at all or had somehow noticed my appraisal of his accent and wanted me to know he could not be patronized. I thought about that off and on all day.