Three Junes (7 page)

“Sappho. One of her curious, lovely fragments. And here you are, snapping out of it; I see a start anyway. But honestly, will you look at those majestic clouds? The quintessential June sky—and such an everyday thing in these parts! I don’t know about yours, but my eyes were jolly famished for a sky like that.” She checks her watch, makes noises of polite alarm, and hastily begins counting coins. Paul stills her hand.

“Gentlemen are too rare,” she says as she stands and hoists her box to her hip. “And no, you may not carry this back to the hotel.” She waves down their waiter. “Taxi,
paricolo
?
”

Paul orders another coffee. He looks around, hoping to find an abandoned newspaper in a language he can read even badly. Sitting up to scan the tables, he sees, under the far side of the awning, Fern and Jack. Jack is eating a souvlaki. He eats greedily, radiant with energy and carnivorous content. Shaded by her hat, Fern sits very close to Jack, touching him often. She is trying hard to look carelessly affectionate, but her face refuses to conceal her panic. She looks bereft already. She has fallen hard for Jack, though of course she doesn’t know him. Paul doesn’t know him either.

Fern lays her head on Jack’s shoulder. Jack is licking his fingers and constantly talking. He kisses the top of her head, but his eyes are on the harbor. He must know, from experience, just how to tell her good-bye: Wasn’t that a lark; enjoy the rest of your travels, love. Give ’em hell back in Paris.

Turning his back to them, Paul stands up and leaves. Fifteen minutes later, reading in the hotel lobby, he sees Jack rush past without noticing him, up the stairs two at a time. Irene, buying postcards at the desk, glares after Jack, then looks at Paul as if he is some kind of playboy accomplice. Come Santorini, he will no longer have the room with the coveted view; what a relief it will be to unburden that debt.

TWO DAYS AFTER
Maureen’s funeral, Paul removed the lipstick from his overcoat pocket. He had carried it there for a week, like a sputtering coal, waiting for the first moment when he would have Tealing all to himself (not counting the collies). Hands trembling, he locked himself in the bedroom.

It was an ovoid tube, expensively made, with four subtle furrows at the base where the kind of woman who could afford it would press her manicured fingertips. The hue of the lipstick itself was gratifyingly bright, the waxy scarlet of tulips, a color someone had christened Ingénue. It had yet to be used. Paul wondered if this had been the “signature color” of the woman who would have worn it—a term he had recently learned from the paper’s new fashion editor (its first), a young woman from London who wore only green. In various loos in various houses he’s visited, Paul has seen baskets or shelves holding six or seven perfumes, half a dozen lipsticks. But Maureen, on the occasions she wore lipstick, wore only one color, that same dark red which in certain light looked nearly purple. She had worn it for as long as he knew her; it had startled him that first night they spoke, the night he had driven her home from the Globe.

Funny, he thought when he turned the pirated lipstick over and saw its name, how he had never known a detail like that: the name of his wife’s lipstick. He had bought her many things, but never cosmetics. Immediately, he went to Maureen’s bureau and opened the top drawer, from which he had seen her, hundreds and hundreds of times, remove her makeup.

The drawer was spotlessly empty. Even the lining paper had been removed. His blood seemed to pause in his veins, he was so stunned: someone had ransacked the house. He started toward the telephone and then stopped. He sat on the foot of the bed. David’s wife, in a too-efficient but well-meaning gesture, had asked him just the day before if he would like her to clear out Maureen’s things while he drove Fenno and Mal to their plane.

He saw himself in Maureen’s mirror; so many conversations had taken place like this. Paul, ready to leave or ready to sleep, would sit on the end of their bed and listen or talk to her reflection as she combed her hair or put away her bracelets. One conversation which would always stand out took place on another night after Fenno had left, the night they returned from sending him off to New York to begin his studies.

Sitting in his pajamas, Paul had said, “I suppose he’ll meet some charming American girl, fall head over heels and marry her. Our luck, she’ll be from California, and she’ll lure him away to San Diego or Rancho Mirage.” He pronounced these place names as if they were colonies on other planets; he’d never been to either. “We’ll see him every third Christmas.”

Maureen was wiping off her lipstick, which she did in one clean, assertive motion. Her mouth was left with a slight magenta stain, and her face looked wholly different. It always took Paul a moment to adjust to her eyes, suddenly so prominent.

That night, she looked at him in the mirror at the exact moment her face seemed to change. At first she said nothing, then “
That
he won’t do.” She busied herself putting things away: a compact, a locket, a dog collar which she had pulled from the pocket of a jumper.

Paul laughed. “You know your son that well.”

“I know he won’t marry. Or, well, won’t settle down with a woman.”

“You mean you can’t picture it.”

“You know it, too, don’t you?” She looked at Paul again. He did not understand the strictness in her glance, the hint of arrogance or impatience. “You do know Fenno doesn’t like women.”

“Doesn’t like women?” Paul wished that Maureen would turn around. She was occupied with nothing now but sat with her arms crossed and continued to address him only in the mirror.

“Oh, he
likes
women,” she said. “Of course he likes women. In a way, I suppose, he may like women better than most blinking men do!”

“Maureen, you’re speaking in riddles.”

“I am not.” She laughed, and at last she turned around. “Paul, you’re being dense. For the benefit of wordsmiths here, I meant
like
as in ‘fancy.’ What did you suppose about that boy he brought here from Cambridge last summer? Did you think they were nothing more than literary pals?”

“Did he tell you something?”

“Of course not. Oh, Paul.” She sat beside him on the bed, but she was still laughing when she put her arms around his neck.

“This isn’t something to laugh about,” he said.

When she said, “Is it something to cry about?” Paul supposed she meant to reassure him, but he felt mocked. She had called him dense; whether or not he was, this was how she saw him: opaque and obstructive as fog. And in a secret rage, he refused to believe that there was one thing, significant or not, she could claim to hold over him when it came to knowing his son.

He thought of the five years that passed after their marriage before she was willing to start having children. Maureen told him how important it was they take the time to enjoy each other alone before children; she said she would know when the time was right. In their third or fourth year together, he began to fear that she had deceived him when she expressed the desire for those four hypothetical boys. By then both his sisters had babies, and though Paul’s father never said anything explicit, there were unmistakable piercing looks across the table at Christmas and other holidays which brought the larger family together. Paul imagined that his father was telling him he had made
two
grave mistakes in his marriage: not just the mistake of marrying down but the mistake (or bad luck) of choosing a barren wife. Paul’s father would never have dreamed that his son, still loving his wife’s very willfulness, its comforting power, would have let the issue of heirs be a
decision,
least of all hers.

And then, of course, just as Paul knew he would have to force the question, Maureen quite happily announced that she was pregnant. The pregnancy, she claimed, had surprised her as much as it did Paul. Not a doubt crossed his mind at the time, but Paul has long since realized how unlikely such a “slip” would be for a planner like Maureen. And back then it would hardly have mattered: All his festering resentment dissolved (as did his father’s, especially once he learned it was a boy). Still, as he saw her attention turn inward, if rightfully so, he had a moment of panic: In those years alone together, how much had they actually stopped to
enjoy
each other, as Maureen had insisted they must? They had laughed a great deal, fought little, made love often and in a fever; but why had Paul felt such a constant undercurrent of worry? He wondered if this tension had always been a part of his nature; the more understandable tensions he had felt in the army stood like a wall against the penetration of memory beyond them. Perhaps those tensions themselves had simply become a habit. Small price to pay for remaining alive.

THE SEA IS CALM,
as if to repent yesterday’s misbehavior. The sky is lavender blue. Paul stands with Jack at the bow, looking toward Naxos, its tall peaked silhouette. It is an exceptionally green island—a burnt, wry green. Jack is telling Paul how Naxos is an island for hikers, not for lazy middle-aged tourists the likes of Solly and Ray. The men have been acting chilly toward Jack. Once on the boat, they made a show of leading their wives to the opposite end of the deck.

“But you, Paul. You have the spirit. You’d like it.”

Paul thinks, Perhaps I will. Perhaps, after Crete, he will not head back to Athens. But he keeps this thought to himself, so the two men stand together silently, watching this island slip away. As it does, another looms ahead, demanding attention.

“That girl,” Jack says suddenly, “those Americans. They watch too many movies, get too many notions.”

“Notions?” says Paul.

“She asked, this morning, if she could come along with us. Can you imagine? I had a devil of a time explaining . . .” He seems to expect Paul to pick up the slack, agree with him. When Paul says nothing, he says, “I suppose she’s too young to know that these things don’t matter so much.”

“I’d say she’s still young enough,” says Paul, “to know that they should.”

Jack looks surprised but not caught out. “Well touché, Bucko. I forgot your horse is white.” Simultaneously, Paul hears Maureen’s teasing voice strike the very same note, calling him an old crosspatch. All along, Jack’s voice has been mirroring hers.

Jack sits by the rail and reaches into his rucksack. “She gave me a couple things to give you. This”—he hands Paul the jumper she borrowed on Delos—“and this, I’m not sure why.”

Paul takes the sketch. “Oh I have a notion. Notions are a weakness of mine as well.” But his scorn, this late, is wasted on Jack, who winks at Paul and heads off to check on the rest of his flock.

It’s the watercolor of the woman and her little boy, carefully torn from Fern’s book. On its obverse is the olive tree, the one where Paul said he could see the wind in the branches. Entanglements of family, solace of nature. Or comforts of family, isolation of nature. In the little boy he sees something of Fenno, the determined hold. It dawns on Paul that Fenno has always been caught in the middle between two pairs: his differently fixated parents (Paul on Maureen, Maureen on her dogs), the happy self-occupied twins. And milling around them all, like lurking base instincts kept under control, the collies; everywhere, always, the flawlessly disciplined collies, both clever and cruel.

Paul thinks of the responsibility with which he would love to saddle his son. He likes to think this is exactly what Fenno would love too, what would gratify him, at least for a while. Paul sees him setting up house with Mal (friend? lover? surrogate twin?). The two of them live however they wish to live: reading and walking the countryside or, who knows, giving clamorous dinner parties and dancing on a lawn gone entirely to brazen purple loosestrife. He likes the small mean thought of Mrs. Ramage—now bedridden after a stroke—still able to spy and feel offended but no longer able to complain. Outraged but speechless as young men and women carouse through the hedgerow after midnight, storming her flowerbeds, singing, kissing, misbehaving in ways she never imagined in her greatest indignation.

Years ago in the Guatemalan jungle, there was that moment when he wished he could put Maureen in Fenno’s place. Replace simplifying silence with elaborating wit. Now here he is wishing, with even more futility, the opposite. After all, Fenno is happy where he is. Paul is as certain of this as a father can be.

He folds the jumper and unzips his bag to put it away. He slips the sketch into the folds of his newspaper, until he can find a safer place. He looks backward, at the boat’s wake, the foam folding crisply down under itself, twisting broad ropes into Marjorie’s gabardine blue. The flanking waves close in behind, smoothing over the surface, leaving the sea just as it was, no trace of the boat’s recent passing. Satisfying, he thinks, the way the sea is stirred up, churned so briskly, then returns to its original calm—though not quite: for a moment, if you look hard, the water sparkles there with a little more brilliance. Ahead and behind, always islands, more islands; one fades away, another draws near. Turning full circle to take them all in, Paul sees each one as a welcome mystery, a choice to be weighed without prophecy or speculation.

Upright

1995

FOUR

M
Y FATHER’S FUNERAL
will be the first one I’ve been to in a long while—the first since my mother’s—where most of the mourners and grief junkies will not be my age or younger. My father died swiftly and in the punctilious order of things: he was seventy-four years old and had a heart attack on Naxos, in a small house on a hillside with a view of tiered olive trees and the Aegean Sea. It was a house he had leased several years running, to which he’d retreat for the hottest months of the year. He was alone and suffered whatever pain there was to suffer without the so-called solace of family or friends. His solitude notwithstanding, most of the people whose funerals I’ve attended in the past several years would have killed to die that way, that late. (A death to die for, is that what I’ve just said?)

David and Lillian meet me at Prestwick. I haven’t seen them in a year and a half, and the first words out of my brother’s mouth are “Excellent timing, Fen. Dad’s just in from Athens; you’ve saved us an extra trip.”

Lil gives me a close hug and one of her sweetly conspiratorial smiles. “Speaking of trips, how was yours?”

“Predictably dreary—or let me amend that: fabulous. No one blew us out of the sky, no engines caught fire, no drunks urinated on the beverage cart.” I put down my bags to hug her back, intentionally harder.

Lillian always smells to me like honeydew melon; I like to imagine it’s not a perfume—perhaps it isn’t—but the irrepressible succulence of a good heart, the fragrance of her innate generosity. I find it slightly exasperating, disorienting, that my favorite sister-in-law is married to my least favorite brother. I’m always secretly wishing they’d swap. Once I stopped to muse what preternaturally sweet offspring, good to their primal reptilian core, would have to result (to be thrown off, my mother the breeder would correct me) were Lil married to Dennis. I should add that I don’t dislike David—we had fun when we were boys—but somehow that final surge of testosterone left him workaday in his sensibilities and strikingly devoid of wit. I probably stiffen him up (figuratively, of course), but if so, isn’t that in itself dislikable?

David looks at his watch (a large, multigadgeted thing that belongs on the wrist of Jacques Cousteau). “We have to take some shuttlebus to some godforsaken freight depot to fetch him. What do you wager there’ll be reams of bureaucratic rubbish to fill out before they’ll let us take him home?”

Lil tucks an arm through mine, though we are still standing just outside customs, yet to head anywhere constructive. “Davey, why put Fenno through it? He’s probably been awake all night; let me help him fetch his bags, stop for tea, and we’ll bring the car round to the freight place and wait.”

“Lillian, in this day and age you can hardly just cruise about an airport as you please,” says David. “You could have a kilo of Semtex in the boot or bazookas sewn into the seats.”

“I did sleep, and these are my bags,” I say, lifting my carry-on and my bagged funeral suit. “And I’m mildly talented at bureaucratic nonsense. So head me toward this bus and I’ll meet you back here.” I hand my bags to David and point to a cocktail lounge (an Americanism I lovingly own, for its aura of odalisques). With any luck, he’ll soften up after a beer.

“But you’re on holiday, a guest!” says Lil.

“What makes him a guest?” says David.

“The distance he’s traveled.”

“He’s right,” I say. “Funerals are business, not pleasure, except for those who arrange the flowers.” Ten to one, the sister-in-law I very much don’t like has that job. (“Ah, so the little skunk does flowers,” Mal whispered to me the afternoon he met her. “Sometimes God
is
in the details, isn’t She?”)

“Well then, long as you’re offering,” says David, and hands me three fifty-pound notes. “In case there are Greeks on this end too.” His wife gives him a fondly disapproving look. He doesn’t notice. They are halfway to the lounge when he turns and calls out to me, over the heads of several strangers, “But hang on—Dad’s addressed to me!”

OFF AND ON FOR YEARS,
you wonder where you’ll be when you learn that your parents have died. You know it’s likely that you will, one day, have to receive this news: once, if they die together; more probably twice. You wonder which would be worse. (And you don’t want to contemplate what it would mean if you never do.) You’re walking home from the market on a sunny day and suddenly, for no reason, you picture yourself going in the front door a few minutes hence. You see the blinking light on your machine and push
PLAY
and hear the mutated voice of one of your siblings or your mum or dad, and though they probably won’t give the bad news itself on tape, you know from the tone of the voice the gist of what you’ll hear when you ring back. Then when you actually do push open your door, struggling with the bags, carrot greens tickling your ear, and the light is indeed blinking, your heart is a fist—my God, it’s true, there
are
premonitions!—but when you push
PLAY
, of course it’s Ralph inviting you upstairs to supper or Tony just wanting to hear your voice (though he’d never put it that way, never give you an affectionate inch) or the super wanting to repipe your loo or, nowadays, some credit card sweepstakes hang-up.

I did not have to hear about my mother’s death long-distance. I was there at her side, along with my father and both of my brothers. According to her doctors, the cancer consumed her rapidly—within five months of her diagnosis—but as far as I could see, she died a prolonged, torturous death. (I have glimpsed a few, lest you doubt my powers of comparison.) Since she smoked as if tobacco were a vocation, the cancer was hardly a surprise, but she was the youngest sixty-nine-year-old I have ever known, and I couldn’t imagine her anything but very much alive, electrically so, for two or three decades to come.

I flew home when she got the news, seven summers ago, and again that December, when she died. She decided to die at home—not easy, with this kind of death. She took oxygen until the day she decided, Enough. By then she spoke only in terrible gasps, and she’d given up even those attempts, probably because they planted such terrified expressions on the faces around her. So she wrote it down, that one decisive, indignant word, in large unquavering capital letters: ENOUGH.

It was my shift, and I was reading to her from a volume of Emily Dickinson I’d brought overseas from my shop, along with another two dozen books. Mum was never much of a reader—only because, I suspect, she hated all the
sitting
it requires—but my father had told me on the telephone that she liked being read to now that she was stuck in bed. So when she rapped on my knee and thrust that piece of paper across the open book, I laughed and said, “I should’ve guessed Emily’s not your cup of tea.” Mum laughed too—a brief hideous cough—and shook her head. She pointed to her chest. Emily Dickinson, everything she was and wrote, seemed so infantile for that instant, so pointlessly frilly against my mother’s granite wish. I began to cry. Mum’s eyes, of course, remained quite dry. She pushed herself upright from the pillows to give me her best approximation of a smile. Her breath sounded like a handsaw fighting through a dense green tree. I left the room to find my father. Within an hour, we were assembled. Except for David (who had the confounding nerve to respond, however briefly, to calls on his pager), none of us left that room for the seven hours it took her to leave us behind.

My father sat closest to her, on the bed, speaking now and then straight into her ear. His voice was quiet and caressing, inaudible as words to the rest of us, largely because of Mum’s ghastly breathing, which grew louder and more urgent, interrupted by patches of gasping silence. She did not want enough morphine to put her under, even though the doctor had given my father instructions on how to “relieve her discomfort.”

Of those endless hours, I remember very little other than the sound of her breathing. I remember feeling sad that her favorite dogs could not be in the room because her state would only have agitated them. They were in the kennel out back, visible from the windows but not from my mother’s bed. And I remember feeling angry at David because his trousers were spattered with blood; he’d been in the midst of a difficult delivery, a breech calf, when he got Dad’s call. (I thought, though I suppose it was petty, that if he could leave the room to return his calls, he could fucking change his trousers.)

It was David who rang about Dad. I was in the shop well before opening time, browsing shelf by shelf through New Fiction, to see which not-so-new fiction I must relegate to the less prominent Novels & Stories shelves. Because of that dreary human predilection for the shiny and new, I always feel when I make this shift as if I’m sending so many bright, hopeful creatures out to pasture before their youth is spent. (Though I would never condemn them, as other shops do, to a section entitled Literature, a word which to my admittedly overschooled mind is ossified and clubby. I picture a mausoleum, filled with sagging armchairs and lamps that cast inadequate, jaundiced light.)

“Fen, it’s David, are you up? I’ve got bad news.”

“David, it’s half nine. I’ve been up for hours.” I can answer my personal phone in the shop because it’s two floors below my flat and I have an extension; David would not know I was at work. He rises at dawn every day but clearly assumes I lead the stereotypically debauched life of a New York City faggot.

Why I did not think of our father, I can’t say. Maybe because David didn’t sound sad enough for someone with news of a death. I thought for some reason of Tealing, our family house, and imagined that it had burnt to the ground. In my mind (though our house is nowhere near that grand), I saw the end of
Rebecca,
Manderley in ruins. I waited.

“I’m afraid it’s Dad. He’s been found dead by the woman who cleans his house.”

In my brother’s expectant silence, I stared out the window and watched a young woman cross the street straight in my direction. “Dead?” I said dumbly. “He was dead?”

“Yes, it’s awful, I don’t know much more than that so far,” David rushed on. “Had a ridiculously muddled conversation with whoever masquerades as a coroner in those parts. I’m paying him through the nose to take care of the remains, get them shipped out by the end of the week.”

Remains: such a Victorian cloak of a word.

“Fenno, are you still on the line? Fenno?”

“Yes, David.” Now the young woman was trying the door. When she caught my eye, I clamped the phone between shoulder and cheek and used both hands to indicate that I would open at ten. (Would I open? I supposed that I would. Running a bookshop—unlike manning a seat on the stock exchange or replacing burnt-out bulbs along the cables of a suspension bridge—is something one can manage even in fairly acute states of mourning. No one is at risk of anything more than the embarrassment of witnessing grief.)

“We’ll want to do a proper funeral. You know, hundreds of people are likely to attend. Dad’s still an éminence grise to the church-elder types.”

This was true. Our father was influential, affluent, and genuinely loved around and beyond the Scottish country town where we grew up. For most of his life, following his father, he was the publisher of the Dumfries-Galloway newspaper. I told David I’d book the earliest flight I could manage.

“Bear in mind that you can get condolence fares; I’m not sure that’s what they’re called, but the rates are reduced and they’ll find you seats on full-up flights if you tell them there’s been a family death.”

How like David to get right to the practical stuff. I wanted to ask him if he had actually realized what the impetus was behind his pragmatic overdrive. That our father was
gone
. I can’t say whether David and Dad were confidants, but David saw more of him than Dennis or I—at least in the winter months, the months my father chose to stay at Tealing these past years, as if what’s the point of a northern home if you don’t immerse yourself in its northness? Six months before, David and Lillian had moved into Tealing, a temporary arrangement. His practice had become so successful that he’d decided to convert their cottage-by-the-clinic into an equine surgery; they’d look for a house of their own once construction was finished. Now, I supposed, they would simply stay on.

I settled on “David, are you all right?”

“In shock, but yes, ‘all right’ I suppose. You think I sound cold, don’t you?”

“Not cold . . .”

“Someone has to get everything organized. If you were here with me now, that would be a different thing. Dennis, of course . . .” Half-heartedly, he laughed.

“You mean Véronique.” On this, we were in complete agreement. There wasn’t much use asking Dennis to help out in a crisis, not because he wouldn’t—instinctively, he’d give you five days for every one he had to spare—but because there’d be hell to pay with his watchdog of a wife. (Dennis would ring me later that night, from France, and cry through most of the short conversation she allowed us.)

“He’ll take care of food, and that’s not trivial. I’m thinking we should do a luncheon.”

“David?” I found myself reaching again and again for my mug of tea, though it had been empty almost since he rang. “David, can we please discuss all this when I arrive?”

By ten o’clock, I had booked a seat on British Air, called Ralph and cajoled him into looking after my animals and watching the shop for a week (he’s my business partner but loves the shop as a place to make appearances, not to linger). When I unlocked the door, I saw the girl who’d peered in the window. To pass the time, she had spread a newspaper on the postbox across the street. As I stepped outside and waved to her, a blast of summer air engulfed me. June in New York, its rudely sudden heat, is something I still can’t get used to. (But then, air-conditioning is one of the American luxuries I love best, the only one with which I’m profligate.)

I held the door for her to enter. Without waiting for me to offer assistance, she said, “My best friend’s over at Saint A’s having a double mastectomy. She loves mysteries, but only with women detectives, and nothing where anything bad happens to animals or children. Oh, and maybe, considering, no knives . . .?”