Briefly, Fern just stared at Stavros. “So what about the lessons of history?”
“Well that’s obvious. That goes without saying,” he said impatiently.
“And how come you’re so busy learning a dead language?”
“Because I like the stories it has to tell.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Know what I like about real estate? I mean, okay, it’s a business with a sleazy aura, and it’s nouveau, and I’m working for my dad, but it’s all about the present and the future. Keeping people under a roof.”
“For money!” said Fern. “Here, for an
obscene
amount of money. Don’t tell me real estate’s not about money.” Why was she so indignant? She had no reason to think Stavros and his father were greedy or unkind; she’d even heard they had two buildings where they kept the rents absurdly low.
“You do these practical, constructive things all day, and then,” said Stavros, ignoring her insult, “you go home and you have a shower or a beer and you sit down . . .” His voice softened. “And you read about Penelope and her loom.”
Fern saw him stepping in the door of his apartment, just floors above his parents but unconcerned about the implications, kicking off his sneakers and sitting down to read
The Odyssey
in the ornately cryptic words of another millennium.
“You can’t be Greek without respecting archaeology, I promise you that,” he said, “but building museums to your culture—institutions that open every morning and close before dinner—is not the same as building a museum to your life, putting all your grievances in glass cases wired with alarms. You know, my mother has this cousin back on her island—he’s not especially bright, this guy, but he makes these funny beaded wallets and sells them down at the one taverna that carries a few pathetic souvenirs. He used to do them with images of nothing but the classical stuff: the Parthenon, the Argo, portraits of the gods—he did this really funky Medusa—but a couple of years ago he became obsessed with the space shuttle, of all things. So now he does these beaded wallets with red, white, and blue space shuttles. It’s absolutely wild. I love it.” He laughed. “How did I get here? Am I being insensitive or what?”
Fern shook her head. “No—and I think I want one of those wallets. Does he export them?” They both laughed then, having recovered from what Fern would come to think of as their first disagreement. Almost together, they glanced at the clock on the wall (Fern’s, and hence spared from packing). As she saw him out the door, Fern said, “So, off to Penelope and her loom.”
He looked pleased. “Yes. And Penelope is nothing if not patient.”
Later that month, she did not go to Connecticut for Thanksgiving but joined Stavros, along with his family, at his uncle’s house in Queens.
For the next year, they saw each other often, if less than they might have liked. Stavros took both his job and his courses seriously, and he played handball three times a week, sometimes even when the temperature fell below freezing. Most Saturdays, he checked up on certain elderly tenants or helped his mother around her apartment; perhaps every other Sunday, he went with his father to the tiny Greek Orthodox Church that sat in the middle of a parking lot downtown, and if the afternoon was sunny, they would play chess in Washington Square. He had a few close friends, all of them canny New Yorkers (not unlike Anna) whom he had known since high school. With or without Fern, he had a full life.
Fern threw herself into work as well. She rearranged her apartment radically, as Stavros had suggested, and she took a few of her paintings out of storage and hung them where Jonah’s Old World landscapes had hung. She found a deep, comfortable antique couch, a bargain because it had been six inches too long to fit into the elevator of the owner’s high-rise building. It was covered in a tasseled red velvet that Stavros said had unavoidably seamy associations; Fern argued that it was a noble prop, the sort of piece you’d see in a royal portrait by Ingres or Géricault. “Oh royal, sure,” said Stavros. “Like, Cleopatra died here—and a good deal else besides.” Ever the landlord, he insisted on pulling away the fabric underneath to check for roaches. “Absolutely vacant,” he proclaimed. “Unheard of in this market.”
When they spent time at her place, they came to live on that couch, as if it were a small room unto itself or a punt drifting on a river. Reading or talking or eating Mexican takeout from tinfoil trays, they could lean against opposite ends, their feet nestled against each other’s thighs. More than once, as Stavros read his law books, Fern sketched him surreptitiously in the pages of the graph paper notebook she used to work out ideas for design and proportion. The couch was so plush with down that when they stood up to go to bed (and sometimes they did not bother), the impression of their two bodies—entangled elbows, knees, heels, and buttocks—might remain there to greet them in the morning.
Last summer, Stavros reintroduced her to badminton—a swift-footed, competitive sport as played with his brothers and their small sons when they turned the entirety of a tiny Astoria backyard into a court. The brothers seemed startled when Fern asked to play—their wives thought the game absurd—but it took her back to Connecticut lawns on summer nights, when you played fast and furious if just to elude the mosquitoes, played till your parents yelled, three or four times, that you would go blind if you didn’t quit (never mind that the birdies glowed in the dark, descending like tiny brave paratroopers only to be smashed aloft again). Fern and Stavros played no more than six or seven times, but the sweaty pleasure of it, the dizzy laughter and the lasting elation after winning, assumed the very texture of that summer in her mind.
At the end of the following January, a year after they had become involved, Fern became pregnant not by accident (not quite) and certainly not by cunning, but by impulse. They had spent nearly the entire weekend in her apartment, it was snowing hard, and he ran out of condoms. Nestled in that couch, neither of them wanted to leave, and they believed themselves too lazy and worn out for passion—until the middle of Sunday night. In the dark, he asked her if it would be all right (not if it would be safe), and she said it would be fine. She had always been so careful that what would this one time . . . But then, as he began to kiss her shoulders, the insides of her arms, she thought about time in a different way and knew there was a chance she would conceive. She thought about a baby she had held on her lap at Christmastime: Stavros’s fourth nephew. (“On my father’s island, they only give birth to boys,” he explained. “Look out at the clotheslines there and you notice at once: in every direction, pants and more pants, nothing but pants! The wives they have to import from my mother’s island, just a short row across a channel. My poor mother, she thought that by coming to America, my father might give her a daughter. No, I am not kidding!”)
She thought about Tony’s picture of the baby’s fist, hanging in her bedroom a block away. She thought, perhaps, too much about herself and not enough about Stavros. And then, carried somewhere quite distant in his arms, she stopped thinking altogether.
A month later, she knew she was pregnant. But Stavros had told her that in March he would be going to Greece to help his mother out. He wasn’t sure how long he would stay—a few weeks, a month at most. So, thought Fern, now would be a cruel time to tell him this news. He would be back by the end of her first trimester. She had never thought in such terms, but she had heard Heather and Anna use them.
As weeks turned to months, she began to wonder how much this baby really had to do with Stavros at all. One night when she struggled toward sleep (such nights were increasingly frequent), Fern lay in her bed, miserably alert, and asked herself if she had allowed the baby to be conceived because she hoped it would create so vast a love that every other love, every foolish memory of love, even this new love, would be eclipsed. Was she so weary of endings that she was determined to make her own, far less fragile beginning, one she would share with no one so that no one could take it away?
FERN LIES ON HER LEFT SIDE
(best for the baby, her books instruct), exhausted but wakeful yet again. The lights of a car move maple branches across the wall, across a painting of boats at sea. It doesn’t help that, through the wall, Dennis snores like a truck idling without a muffler. At least it obliterates any noise from the other bedroom. Tony, she knows, makes love silent as a stone—but Richard she’d take for a man of vocal, jubilant lust.
She goes downstairs for water. Returning from the kitchen, she hears Fenno’s voice: “Midnight cravings?” She looks into the living room, where the voluptuous white chairs, all vacant, cast off a neon blue.
“Out here.” His voice carries through an open window.
She steps onto the porch. He lies on a hammock that wasn’t there before. Well, he knows this place and its hidden possessions; she can guess, from what she’s seen, that the absent Ralph deems a hammock too scruffy or even third-worldly to suit his aesthetic. Probably a gift from a houseguest, it is not even white but as garishly colored as a macaw, even in the moonlight.
“You couldn’t sleep?” says Fern.
“Next to the human chainsaw?” He laughs quietly. “I never knew, before this visit, just what my sister-in-law endures—what she keeps in line.”
“Is he like that often?”
“I doubt it. I think he’s inebriated with his temporary freedom—not that he doesn’t love his life, God knows—and he’s regressed to the benignly delinquent habits he had before he met his wife.” Fenno must notice that she is shivering. He holds out a blanket. “Join me for a moment?”
Fern looks around at the uninviting Adirondack chairs, collecting dew on their slick veneer.
“Here.” Fenno folds up his legs, and Fern pulls herself into the opposite end of the hammock. He’s smiling at her kindly. He says, “So, can I ask where your husband is this weekend?”
“Husband?” Caught off balance, she answers, “My husband—the husband I had—is dead.”
“Oh Lord,” says Fenno. He sits forward, and the hammock sways, threatening to spill them both.
She seizes the ropy mesh. “No no. I’m sorry. That happened nearly two years ago. You mean the father of the baby, and he . . . well, we’re together but we’re not married, and I haven’t told him yet, and I”—she stops and shakes her head—“well this sounds like a version of what you hear every day, isn’t it? From those girls you work with.”
“Less than two years a widow, five months pregnant with a man you love—though wait, you didn’t say that, did you?—and you haven’t told him. That’s not a story I hear.”
She hears the word
widow
and holds back laughter. From the first time, at the funeral, someone used that word to mean
her,
the notion has struck Fern, callously, as funny, not sad. For months she had lain awake at night beside Jonah wondering what it would mean, what it would feel like, to become a
divorcée,
and then, joke of fate, she became a
widow
. But she does not tell this to Fenno. She tells him how Stavros has been away for months, how there’s no phone, how it doesn’t seem fair to spring such a surprise on a person in writing. And yes, a person she loves.
“When does he return?”
She hesitates, ashamed. “Anytime.”
“Will you marry?”
“I don’t know.”
“Now why should I ask you such a question?” says Fenno. “We hardly live in our parents’ world.”
“Hardly,” she agrees. Their feet collide as they shift to stay comfortable. They look at each other and murmur apologies. “The thing is,” she says, “I keep having doubts. And you are not supposed to have doubts, not about this. But then, I have doubts about everything now.”
“You miss your husband. It hasn’t been two years.”
“Well it’s . . . complicated. A cliché, but true.” Though she isn’t sure why, she feels oddly relaxed. She recalls her years of therapy, after Paris and before Jonah, how surprised she was to feel her stories flow so easily forth, like a long straight stream in a smooth granite bed. Almost that easily now, she tells Fenno about her marriage. His eyes never stray from hers, as if this tale of a commonplace marital breakdown is positively riveting.
Some way through, Fern remembers what the brother told her: that Fenno had a lover who died of AIDS. She hasn’t witnessed such a death up close, but she thinks of the ailing men at the office where she once worked (and, sheepishly, how this is part of why she was glad to start working at home, because what could you ever say to these men as they literally dwindled away yet worked fiercely on?). Perhaps it’s this detail—knowing something tragic about Fenno—that spurs Fern to tell him a small secret of her own, a detail about her last morning with Jonah that she has told no one.
After she had leveled her accusations (the most cruel, that he was frigid in bed), her fury had seemed to rise, not abate. She had crossed the room to where he stood by the closet and clapped her hands sharply three times in front of his face, the way you might summon a disobedient dog. She shouted, “Wake up! Wake up! You are in an emotional coma, you’re like a mummy in a tomb!”
Jonah’s eyes filled, and in his defeated silence she heard the echo of her hands more than her words. She could not imagine which of them felt more humiliated; she might as well have slapped him. Only then did her rage dissolve and did she, pathetically and too late, apologize.
When she saw his body that night, the police explained that he had fallen on his back. On the steel table, he did look strangely flat, as if he were floating, the back of his skull underwater; but there was the face she knew, if paler, the only signs of death the darkness of his lips and the black clotting in his nostrils. His eyes were closed no differently than in sleep. Her first thought, both trivial and selfish, was that she hoped someone, anyone, had been very kind to him that afternoon, because no one could have been meaner than she was that morning. That was when she’d cried the hardest.
Fenno says, “That’s a terrible story.”
“I never knew I could be so cruel,” she says.
“Oh no. Oh my
dear,
” he says, “what an ingenue you are in the cosmos of cruelty.”