She was first attracted to Jonah by what she perceived to be his serene decisiveness, his fidelity of focus. Here was a man who ate only one type of cereal, watched one newscaster, owned just one pair of shoes and one jacket to fit each of four social occasions (Fern thought of them as Workaday, Saturday, Glenn Miller, and Sporty). All winter long he wore the same hat, a gray Sherlockian cap with retractable earflaps.
“His closet is a poem,” Fern told Anna the first time she stayed over. Fern had known Anna since college; Anna was never short on opinions and, consciously or not, Fern often needed to hear them.
“Well and good,” said Anna, “but who’s the poet? Gregory Corso? Robert Frost? I hate to say it, but Alfred, Lord Tennyson, that’s my hunch.” Lord Tenny, Anna called him behind his back, or Mr. Singularity. Fern would laugh, but something else had dawned on her: Mr. Singularity would take one wife and one wife only, till death (one apiece) did they part.
Fern had always been determined to marry an artist, and Jonah, a newly minted art historian, allowed her to have the art without the incurable adolescence she had suffered in the men she had loved before: real or counterfeit iconoclasts, proudly allergic to neckties, loafers, and alarm clocks, to allegiance of any stripe.
And then there were Jonah’s surprising loves. When she gave his eulogy, in Jonah’s mother’s church in Far Hills, from a lofty Episcopal dais, she catalogued them: Rubens, Spanish food, John Belushi, Hawaiian shirts, and vintage comics (he owned the first nine of the original Superman series)—ribald antonyms to his cool, parsimonious nature. What Fern did not say was that though she shared none of these leanings, she had once been certain they were proof of stored-up passions, promises that one day she would wake to find herself beside a hot-blooded ukelele-playing muscleman bent on saving the world through laughter. Gone would be the man who winced at the sound of his tie sliding through its knot, wore dark shin-high socks even with shorts, ate (slightly open-mouthed) the same small bowl of peanuts each night when he gazed into the eyes of Tom Brokaw. Gone the man who answered her keen “I love you” with a whispered utterance that sounded like “A few.”
When she’d met him, he’d looked angular, slim, even bold (he wore a red Hawaiian shirt; she didn’t see the socks because the party was so crowded), and he had been full of celebratory relief at having finished his thesis (on Rubens). When he spoke about paintings, he was lively; their first conversation was an argument about Balthus, and Fern liked how good-natured he seemed even in the midst of disagreement (he thought Balthus a poseur with little feel for paint or anything human, but he was careful not to make his contempt an attack on Fern). And she liked, back then, that they had been so pointedly introduced, deliberately matched by their host.
Like any delicate creature, love depends upon an ecosystem, a context. Hemmed in at that party by a crush of thirty-year-old frat boys with charm-bracelet wives, there they stood, Fern and Jonah, storks among chimps. She remembers the kinship she felt with him when, over his shoulder, she watched four men climb up on a couch and, waving beer cans and rolling their eyes, perform a tasteless vaudeville of Stevie Wonder singing about his newborn daughter Aisha. Of course, she now knows, this was why their host saw them as soul mates: their otherness among his friends.
“I met the guy playing tennis last week, and listen, you were made for each other,” said Aaron when he called to invite her. “You both love art and you both have all these arty friends, and you’ve both got this great conservative streak—like the best of our parents without their Republican intolerance. I bet you both know how to foxtrot. And listen—I think there’s a little money there. You could quit your waitressing job!”
Fern had known Aaron Byrd since grade school; their mothers, together, ran a garden club. All her life, Aaron had seemed to alternate between charming and exasperating Fern. He was the one man outside her family who’d known her forever; the one for whom she was never quite right; the one who would have been her prearranged spouse had they lived in another place or time. So when he told her he’d found her the perfect match, for a moment she was hurt. Here was the man who’d known her longest, known her best in certain ways, and this was how casually, how eagerly he’d hand her off to someone else. But then she thought, He’s known me so long, so well, he has to be right.
Jonah’s friends expressed delight and amazement: “We never thought Jonah would marry!” Flush with premarital hubris, Fern mistook this remark as a personal compliment (“We never thought he’d find so remarkable a woman!”), not the commentary it clearly was on his die-hard bachelor ways (“We never thought he’d live anything but monkishly alone!”).
She moved to Jonah’s apartment in the Village and put her painting supplies in a basement locker, telling herself that after the nuptial festivities ended, she would look for studio space. She never did; she found herself, instead, mooning over Jonah’s exhaustive collection of art books. When, within a year of their wedding, he stopped wanting sex, Fern would take a different book to bed each night and scrutinize its pages until he had fallen asleep. A habit born of pride, but it led to her fascination with fonts and layouts and margins. She didn’t like looking too long at the art, because art was what she ought to be doing but wasn’t. (She would choose, increasingly, books about dead artists so that she did not have to agonize over the possibility that they were, at that very moment, doggedly producing more work.)
Then she took to choosing from Jonah’s shelves the artists’ biographies, because they had fewer pictures to envy. Sometimes, at the end of one of these books, she would read—at first with skeptical curiosity, then with creeping eagerness—the postscript titled “A Note About the Type.” Here she became familiar with names like William Goudy, Pierre Simon Fournier, Rudolph Ruzicka, and above all, Claude Garamond, the sixteenth-century type cutter who came to resemble in Fern’s imagination a celebrity with the public stature, simultaneously, of a Bill Gates and a Richard Gere. According to one book, Garamond won the patronage of a king for something as droningly obscure as the “elegance and lively sense of movement” in fifty-two letters, ten numerals, and a scattering of punctuation marks.
These tiny texts were filled with fanlike praise for such attributes as “a daring homage to all things ancient”; “a trim grace and vigor”; “a rare beauty and muscular balance”—in alphabets! And there were snippets of history that would tug at her mind—like the unjust obscurity of one Jean Jannon, a Protestant designer, because he happened to live in a time of Catholic oppression. A man in the wrong place at the wrong time, whose tragedy of circumstance would be commemorated most publicly through an endnote, centuries later, to a biography of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
Over a period of months, compulsively distracting herself from work, from love, and from the tension of Jonah’s fruitless, increasingly lethargic search for a job, Fern came to discern type the way she had once discerned color: she knew Granjon from Fairfield, Bembo from Janson, Electra from Caledonia. Finally, and in the nick of time as events played out, Jonah’s trust fund helped her buy the degree she needed to refine her fascination. For that, she would always be grateful, but by the end of those two years, her marriage, like her painting, was a thing of the past.
Now, nearly another two years gone by, she lives in the apartment she shared with her husband, but without the man, his books, or the resolutely solitary ways she mistook in him for prudence and stability. Her life in fact contains, thanks to his bitterly grieving mother and sister, not one significant memento of Jonah. They even insisted she give back her ring, which held a stone from a family brooch. In a moment of irrational shame, she acquiesced, for in the year before he died she had sometimes fantasized Jonah dead, not so much out of anger but because she was lonely and exhausted. She did not imagine him dead by violent or torturous means; she simply imagined him suddenly, vaguely gone—as it turned out he
was
to die, in an accident so freakish she found it embarrassing to recount, even to her friends.
IT’S TIME TO TELL HER PARENTS.
She fears not their censure but their perfectly realistic concern if she is to raise a child alone. Besides Tony and Anna, Fern has told Heather, her older sister. Others have certainly guessed.
“Oh my dear, what a pickle,” said Heather, though Fern had not presented the news as bad. “Who in the world is the father?”
“Well you are in for an adventure!” were Anna’s first words. When Fern told her Stavros was the father, Anna said, “Now there’s the first real
man
of all the boys you’ve been with.” Though Fern has been seeing Stavros for over a year, few of her friends have met him; she tells herself that this is simply because of the anemic social life she’s had since Jonah’s death, not because of any reticence about Stavros himself or his place in her heart. Anna managed to meet him, however, when she was visiting from Texas for just a few days. She met him because, not five minutes after walking into Fern’s apartment, she found a note on the kitchen table (“And who, pray tell, is ‘A thousand kisses’?”). She met him because she insisted.
Fern laughed. “You mean he has the most body hair.”
“I mean, he has the most mature occupation, the most mature attitude.”
“Well, mature . . . you couldn’t get much more ‘mature’ than Jonah.”
“Oh no,” scoffed Anna. “Sure, his cerebral cortex went gray when he turned twelve, but that was the man, you remember, who collected comic books and ate Lucky Charms for breakfast every day.”
“Cap’n Crunch.”
“As we used to say, same diff.” Anna sighed. “I met your Stavros just once, but I could tell this: He seemed accessible. No crooked angles. And he was paying attention to you. To
you
.”
Anna’s positive judgment was a relief, but then, when it came to love, she was hardly in a position to be critical of anything impulsive or haphazard. In the midst of getting her Ph.D. in archaeology at Columbia, she had fallen for a professor she met on a dig in Turkey. He left his wife, married Anna, and moved her into a hacienda on the San Antonio River, where she promptly conceived twins. In Fern’s memory, these events took place in about six months. When Anna knew something was right, it happened. She expressed not a qualm about leaving her beloved New York for Texas (a place she had always loudly deplored) or suspending her studies. The twins were now four, and Anna was writing a novel, a thriller melding Biblical archaeology with Arab politics and human rights activism. Fern had no doubt it would sell like highbrow hotcakes.
“I hate it when people talk about twists of fate,” Anna liked to say. “When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.”
FIFTEEN
F
ERN WAKES TO THE COMPETING SOUNDS
of birdsong and tennis. The play is prolonged and aggressive, interspersed with male gasps and curses. “Andrew you dickhead!” she hears as the rally halts—a seventeen-year-old boy, she’d guess, condemning himself for his faltering skill. A world of absolutes.
She puts on her bathing suit and a loose yellow dress. Tony will make some crack about Little Mary Sunshine, sing a few bars from “Good Day Sunshine” or “Here Comes the Sun.”
But when she finds him, Tony does not immediately see her. He sits on the back porch, leaning over the railing, binoculars to his eyes.
“Birdwatching?”
He jumps, looks at her and smiles, then returns to his surveillance. “Taking in a bit of the local wildlife, yes.”
Fern stands behind him, squinting to see the tennis court through the hedge. Four men—barely men, all in white, two shirtless—are playing vigorously. Tony hands her the binoculars. “See for yourself.”
Yes, all worth looking at, each for his own physical assets. All in perfect shape, all on the cusp of their prime.
Tony sighs. “Boys, boys, you are breaking my heart.”
Fern continues to look but says nothing. This isn’t what she had in mind, boy-watching with Tony. She wonders if he sees her new state as an invitation to a kind of closeness she doesn’t want, the way her becoming a married woman made her mother begin to offer up details about her sex life with Fern’s father (Fern put a stop to this at once).
One of the men is dark, with black hair and vehemently bushy eyebrows. Stavros, she thinks with a twinge of guilt and longing. Not the kind of man to whom she had ever been attracted in the past, but she had proved her own convictions wrong. Or she had changed. She did not know which.
“Hello, darlings. Isn’t the morning just sublime?”
Fern pulls the binoculars from her eyes. The voice belongs to a woman who crosses the lawn with a picnic hamper over her arm. It’s the neighbor who waved from her seaside porch yesterday afternoon. She wears green rubber clogs and pink gardening gloves that flare out toward her elbows like medieval gauntlets and match the lipstick on her sun-crinkled lips.
“Gorgeous!” Tony answers, standing. He goes to the steps and offers an arm to help the woman up the stairs, though she hardly needs his assistance.
“Aren’t you the rare courtly fellow,” she rasps. She has one of those bawdy upper-crust voices that makes her sound as if she’s swallowed a handful of gravel. “Speaking of courts, you must play with us again, you gave these old girls quite the workout! And please”—she casts a disapproving look toward the tennis players they were so recently ogling—“please excuse my grandson and his entourage. They play with the manners of Attila. I’m resigned to meeting my end in decapitation by Frisbee.”
She looks down at Fern and slips off a gauntlet to shake her hand. “Hello there, lady friend. Let’s not bother with intros. I’m just delivering a few goodies—my June harvest’s a windfall this year.”
Tony takes the basket and lifts the lid. “My, my. We don’t deserve such bounty.”
“Neither Andrew nor his boorish grandfather will abide rhubarb, though I do make a superb galette.”
“Oh but we love it, don’t we?” says Tony, grinning at Fern.
She agrees and peers into the hamper. Alongside the rhubarb, there are strawberries, asparagus, and a small bouquet of marigolds tied with a red silk ribbon.
“Will Fenno be coming out?” the neighbor asks, looking hopeful.
Tony shrugs. “Can’t say.”
“Oh but how thoughtless of me, the place is
yours
for the moment.”
“Not a-tall, not a-tall,” Tony drawls. Fern all but stares at him now.
The neighbor raises her hands, as if she’s being arrested. “Well that’s it then! I never, never overstay! Enjoy the day, my dears.” She trots down the stairs and back across the lawn. Once on her side of the hedge, she calls toward the tennis court, “Decibels, young men, decibels!”
Fern turns to Tony. “‘Gorgeous’? ‘Bounty’? Are you morphing into Nathan Lane or what?”
“When on Gold Coast, poor man speak with gilded tongue.”
“What was that about ‘giving the girls a workout’?”
Tony laughs into a hand. “My third morning here, right here, just sittin’ and drinkin’ my coffee, I hear someone yodeling, ‘Yoohoo, yoohoo there, young sir!’ I look around, and there’s milady in her matching little tennis dress and visor, waving her racquet through the hedge. She honks out in her best Bacall, ‘Do you by any chahnce pullay? Our fawth’s apparently ay-wohl.’ I tell her I do, but not very well, and she goes, ‘Well pullease, pullease, come fill our hole!’”
“You don’t play tennis,” says Fern.
Tony pretends indignation. “Well, sort of, sort of—how would you know? Anyhow, who would say no? I felt like an anthropologist invited by headhunters to lend a hand at the actual shrinking.”
Tony tells her how he pulled a T-shirt over his bathing suit and put on his tattered old sneakers; in the mudroom, he found a racquet. Once on the court, he felt like the savage. Three pewter-haired women in pleated white skirts greeted him with panicky delight. “Pretty good players, the old girls, but I spread a little testosterone on my serve and gave ’em a few passing shots. Ooh, but they squealed like rock-star groupies. It was a riot. And then, as they’re wiping their grips with their plush little towels, they insist I join them to ‘be refreshed.’ But for the mention of iced tea, I might have tucked tail and run.”
Fern pictures Tony, bright with exertion, hair damp with sweat. A rare sight, as Tony (or the Tony she knows) avoids all extreme behaviors, emotional or physical. But he looks fit, and for all she knows, he could be an ace at tennis or baseball or hockey or anything traditionally male.
“I kept expecting a taxidermist to show up and mount me on a wall. These women are the type who have an orgasm putting on panty hose. ‘Dahling, that backhand of yaws is a pip!’” Theatrically, he shudders.
“You shouldn’t be so cruel. She clearly likes you.”
Tony laughs. “Who says I don’t like her?”
Fern looks into the hamper again. “I’ll make a pie,” she says.
“I’m for that.” Tony heads for the door and holds it open for the dog. “Impress our third,” she hears him say before the door shuts behind them.
“Third what?” Fern calls into the house as she follows.
“Dinner guest,” he calls back. In the kitchen, he sits at the table. “Here, guy!” Eagerly, the dog pushes himself between Tony’s legs.
Tony will have met someone, last night, last week, on one of his nocturnal roamings. The beach, a club, a parking lot; so she imagines. The someone will be in his twenties, good-looking, funny or intelligent or charming. Something besides seductive. Fern will meet him tonight and then, she’d bet the moon, never again.
“Who’s Fenno?” she says. “Funny name.”
“Just one of the hangers-on to this little estate. Believe me, the professor has about ten best friends once the birds start heading north again. I had to give up and let the machine take calls for my first week here.”
Fern looks through the cupboards for things she’ll need to make a pie. She finds them all with surprising ease. There’s even a large marble board for rolling pastry, which she slides into the freezer. “Lard,” she says, pulling out a bricklike package. “God. I haven’t used lard since Paris.”
At her own mention of their past, she turns to look at Tony. He is bent over the dog, whispering; it takes her a moment to realize he is fingering those long shaggy ears in search of ticks. The dog’s face is turned up, smiling, as if he’s a guest at a spa. Fern watches Tony pull out a beige tick the size of a shirt button—the dog hardly flinches—and drop it into a jar of soapy liquid on the table.
He strokes the dog’s head firmly several times and coaxes him off toward his bed. When Tony finally turns his attention back to Fern, he says, “So, is superdaddy back? Did you tell him the news?”
Fern sets the lard on the counter. “I wish you’d stop making that lame joke. He’s not the super. He’s my landlord’s son. My landlord is a very clever guy, as is Stavros, and they only happen to own about a third of the West Village, so don’t act so uppity.”
“But did you? Isn’t it getting a little late in the game not to spread the joy, get him to make you an honest woman? Just think: real estate this time around. Oh reevoir, Old Masters. Salloo, Trump Tower. No fretting over rent control for you.”
Besides Anna, only Tony would make a joke alluding to her life with Jonah. This is a relief, even if the jokes are annoying. At the funeral, nearly everyone began their condolence with “Such a tragedy!” But the real tragedy is that Jonah’s death was not a tragedy. It was a farce. And this, secretly, is what now makes discussion of Jonah taboo in most people’s minds. If we do not speak ill of the dead, we do not so much as mention the absurdly dead. Sometimes Fern wishes they had gone through a messy, weepy divorce; then she could talk freely about her ambivalent memories, about the things she
did
love about him as well as the things she stopped loving and the things that drove her nuts. But now the entire topic of her misshapen marriage, along with Jonah himself, seems consigned to oblivion. Poor Jonah: a decent man with rotten luck.
“Your French sounds as offensive as ever, and I never said I wanted to marry the guy,” she says to Tony.
“Zeus Junior sweeps down from Olympus with a holster full of thunderbolts and what, Miss Veritas refuses his attentions?”
“I haven’t exactly refused them, have I?”
“Well you’ve refused to let them go public.”
“That’s not true,” she says, though perhaps it is. She might make excuses about how busy she and Stavros have been in their respective lives, how the rest of their time they spend alone in each other’s company, but they would still be excuses. With her fingertips, she mills flour, sugar, butter, and lard into a golden loam.
After a moment Tony says, sounding subdued, “You do
love
the boy?”
“Oh yes. But then I’m not sure I can remember what love is. Or I can remember what I’ve always thought it was, but now I’m constantly suspicious.”
Tony comes up beside her with a carton of milk. He knows her pastry routine. After he sets the milk on the counter and she thanks him, he touches her belly from the side, a fleeting pat. “Love is about to become something else entirely,” he says.
Fern looks at him, surprised. He smiles, but seriously.
“Well, yes.” She leaves it at that.
He watches her press the dough into a ball and wrap it in waxed paper. “Come to the beach while it’s chilling,” he says.
“You go. I’ll find you later. I have to sleep, or I won’t have much energy tonight.”
“Disco nap for Binky.”
Fern laughs. “Precisely.”
JONAH HAD BEEN DEAD FOR HOURS,
but Fern did not know it. No one did. She was making dinner in their kitchen, expecting him back any minute. Back from where, she had no idea and did not care, but he liked to eat dinner at seven and always called if he would be late. Courteous and dependable: that was Jonah. But she was angry at him as she chopped onions and garlic, peeled tendons from chicken breasts. As she turned the rice down to simmer, she imagined leaving him: finding a place back in Brooklyn, buying florid thrift-shop curtains, taking her paints out of storage. Because if Jonah could deceive himself that joblessness was a force which kept their marriage a strained, platonic alliance, Fern could deceive herself that passionlessness was a force which kept her from painting.
Her brooding fantasy that evening included Aaron Byrd, the childhood friend who had fixed her up with Jonah (and gloated at their wedding). Recently, he had made partner at his architecture firm; because of the new demands this made on his life, Fern and Jonah had not seen Aaron in months. Suddenly, two days before, Fern had been stunned to walk out the door of their building and see his name in blue Brooks Brothers cursive, directly across the street where a small but fancy faux-antique building was starting to rise. Lovejoy, Rushing, Stein & Byrd: The fleet of names dismayed her. Why hadn’t Aaron called to tell her about this project? How many times had he been to dinner here, looked out the window, and eyed that vacant lot with lust? That night, and the next night, she had dreamed of Aaron: Both times he asked her to marry him, both times she accepted with joy, and she awoke with a stirring of erotic nostalgia, which quickly turned to sadness and then to irritation.
It was his fault, in part, that she was married to Jonah. Once, she had thought it charming that they were fixed up and liked each other right away. But in truth, wasn’t it pathetic, as if neither of them had been capable of doing this one, colossally important thing without guidance? Fern thought of her parents, who ran an immensely successful nursery, having joined her mother’s love of nature with her father’s business sense. Joseph and Helen Olitsky loved to repeat the story of their meeting: sole bidders for an orchid plant at an auction raising money for Helen’s sorority’s scholarship fund. Now if that wasn’t destiny, what the heck was?
The wine Fern was drinking revived the wishfulness of her dreams. As she heated oil in a skillet, she saw herself newly settled, alone but relieved, inviting Aaron to dinner, just as she had invited him to countless dinners before and after he introduced her to Jonah, before and after they married.
As she imagined the details of such an evening—what she would wear, what she would cook—her kitchen timer rang to remind her of this actual meal: that the rice was done, the chicken stewed with the tomato, tarragon, and cream. It was ten past seven when she mixed the salad dressing in a jar, and Jonah had not called. Feeling too spiteful to wait, Fern served herself and sat down to eat. That morning, wak-ing from Aaron’s second proposal, she had confronted Jonah while he dressed. She told him yet again how lonely she was, how much she wanted things to work out, how much she wanted them to get to a place where they were happy enough, content enough, to think about having a child. Jonah gazed at her from across the room, looking concerned. He said that once he had a job—he was sure this would happen soon, he just had a feeling—everything would improve. He would relax. They would move somewhere they could have a house, a house they could fill with her paintings. He would be dying for a baby. No, they did not need counseling. No, he did not need therapy. Fern needed a little patience, he said, and that was when she lost it. How dare he turn the tables and say that she was the one wanting!
She
was not the one who had no work, not the one who had idle hours to fill, not the one who was frigid in bed!