The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  Chapter Six

  Orion Oh

  That Sunday afternoon when Annie lowered the boom? Told me she would always love me but that she was in love with Viveca? After she left—took a cab because I refused to drive her back to the train station—I didn’t call her and she didn’t call me. But after a month or so of silence, I e-mailed her to let her know I was going to be in New York for a three-day psych conference the following week, and that I wanted to see her. Talk to her. Since she was the one who’d left, it was she who was calling the shots. Was reconciliation on the table or should I get a lawyer? We needed to talk because I needed to know.

  She e-mailed back to say she wanted to see me, too. Suggested we meet for dinner at Milos, a Greek restaurant in Midtown. Eight P.M., say? If I’d let her know, she’d make a reservation. I clicked on “reply.” Sounds good. I’ll be there. Love you, Orion. I stared at that “Love you” for several seconds. Replaced it with See you soon and sent it into cyberspace.

  I arrived at the restaurant twenty minutes early and, to calm myself, ordered a Grey Goose and tonic at the bar. Jesus, we’d been married for almost twenty-seven years. Why was I feeling first-date nervous? I was on my second drink when they arrived, twenty minutes late—Annie and Viveca. My anger was visceral, but I tried hard to swallow it back. Apparently, Viveca still didn’t remember having already met me that time at the Whitney because her opening shot was that I looked nothing like what she had pictured. “No?” I’d said. “What had you pictured?”

  “For some reason, I thought you’d be more . . . psychologist-looking.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Balding with an earring and a little ponytail, maybe. Shorter.” She laughed as if what she’d just said was funny, and I felt like saying that she looked nothing like what I had pictured, either: that other Greek monster, Medusa. Annie told Viveca that I was six foot three, which was no longer true. At my most recent physical, my height had been recorded as six one and a half. I’d shrunk.

  We made it through drinks and dolmades with lemon sauce cordially enough, and I managed not to wince whenever Viveca referred to Annie as Anna, twisting the knife a little more by pronouncing it pretentiously: Ahna. But halfway through our entrées—and, for me, a third vodka and tonic—Viveca asked me if she could ask me something.

  “Shoot,” I said.

  She wanted to know if I was accepting of Ahna’s and her relationship.

  I tensed. Sipped my drink. “Define ‘accepting,’ ” I finally said.

  Viveca said she wasn’t trying to be “fractious,” but that for the past hour I had had very little eye contact with her, had directed almost all of my remarks to Annie, and it made her feel invisible. “Maybe I’m just misreading things,” she said. “But it feels like I’m getting a passive-aggressive vibe from you.”

  “Sweetie, please,” Annie said, reaching across the table. She placed her hand on top of Viveca’s hand. Comforted her, not me. She was Sweetie now.

  “Passive-aggressive?” I said. She wanted eye contact? Okay then. I’d give her eye contact. I stared at her in silence until she looked away. Then I downed my drink, stood, and tossed my napkin onto the table. “Gotta go,” I said and started for the door.

  “Orion?” Annie called. “Orion, come back.” Without turning around, I raised my hand and waved her a backward good-bye.

  Annie’s handwritten letter of apology arrived in Monday’s mail. She had thought, mistakenly she realized now, stupidly, that it might be easier for me to meet Viveca if I didn’t have to anticipate it beforehand. “But I can see now that it put you in a really awkward position, Orion. I’m so sorry.”

  I e-mailed her, not to say that I accepted her apology but to tell her I’d made an appointment with a lawyer to see about a legal separation, and that she might want to do the same. And that if she hadn’t already done so, she should let Ariane, Andrew, and Marissa know about her decision to end our marriage in favor of her new lesbian lifestyle. “I think it should come from you, not me. Just don’t expect them to be thrilled.”

  I pass the signs for Eastham, North Eastham. The T-shirt and lawn ornament shops. Both the Blue Dolphin Inn and the Four Points Motel have their NO VACANCY sign up, probably because it’s Labor Day weekend, the last hurrah of summer. But the traffic’s much better, finally; I’m going forty now, pretty much. I’m gaining on it. I just hope I get to that rental office in time to pick up the key. . . .

  All three kids checked in with me soon after she told them, which she did when they came home for Christmas, but not until just before each of them was about to leave. Marissa, who lives in New York and had met Viveca, was totally accepting of her mother’s decision. Ariane wasn’t happy with Annie, but she was sweetly sympathetic to me. “Daddy, why don’t you take some time off and come out here for a visit? I’ll show you around San Francisco.” Andrew was furious. He’d leapt to my defense when Annie told him, he said—had yelled at her, stormed out of the house. I was the one who drove him back to the airport. His mother had wanted to come, too, but he told her he didn’t want her to.

  “I mean, Dad, how long have you guys been married?” Andrew said, outraged on my behalf. “Twenty-something years, right?”

  “Going on twenty-seven,” I said.

  “And she just wakes up one day and decides she’s gay?”

  I told him I thought it was a little more complicated than that. That two people were responsible for a marriage’s survival, not just one. He didn’t seem to be listening. . . .

  My second meeting with Annie and Viveca occurred just about a year ago. By then, our divorce was in the works but had yet to be finalized.

  “The San Gennaro festival starts this weekend,” Annie told me over the phone. “We were wondering if you’d like to come into the city and join us. Walk down there together. The weather’s supposed to be beautiful.” We? I remember thinking. Really?

  I’d become resigned to the dissolution of our marriage by then, but I wasn’t exactly relishing the idea of seeing Viveca again. I did want to see Annie. “I won’t have to dance the tarantella with Lady Bountiful, will I?” I joked.

  Annie laughed a little. “Be nice,” she said. “What do you say?”

  “Yeah, okay. Why not?”

  From Penn Station, I took a cab down to Elizabeth Street. Viveca’s apartment building had a doorman. He buzzed them for me. “She said to go on up,” he said. I shook my head. Asked him to tell them I’d wait down there in the lobby. I’d been there once before, back when I was still in the dark about their affair, and I wasn’t eager to see Viveca’s place with fresh eyes now that I knew the full extent of their “cohabitation.” Didn’t want to have to go home and picture it. So while I waited, the doorman and I talked baseball. Yankees versus Red Sox, that kind of thing. It might not have been New York’s year, he said, but if Boston thought they were going to kick Tampa Bay’s ass in the playoffs, they were dreaming.

  When they came downstairs, I took both of Annie’s hands in mine and kissed her on the cheek. Viveca, too, leaned in for a kiss—or, specifically, a pair of those New Yorky air kisses that don’t quite land on either cheek. “It’s good to see you again,” she said. All I could manage in response was a nod, a smile.

  We headed over to the festival, Viveca noting while we walked that as Chinatown had expanded, it had taken over Little Italy, which had pretty much shrunk to a couple of streets, Mulberry and Mott. Taken over, I remember thinking: interesting choice of words.

  But at the street fair, sharing a bottle of chianti at an outdoor café and watching the crowds stroll past the calzone and cannoli stands, we three were on our best behavior. Annie and I were telling Viveca stories about the kids when they were small. How, the longer Ariane, our type A, had lasted in the third grade spelling bee, the farther south her tights kept drifting and how, when she won, she jumped up and down and they fell to her ankles. How, on a dare from his cousin, Andrew had swallowed a dime that, luckily, he’d pooped out the
next day. “But the twins were a piece of cake compared to their little sister,” I said. Annie nodded in agreement but added that Andrew had had his moments, too.

  Telling the stories was fun and, on my part, satisfying. A little facetious, I guess. It reminded Viveca that Annie and I had shared a life. Had raised a son and two daughters together. Whatever she had with Annie now, she would never have that. But when Viveca said she was looking forward to getting to know her other two “future step-children,” I felt myself clench. My smile didn’t waver, though. I picked up the wine bottle and replenished our glasses.

  They both looked lovely that afternoon, Viveca’s glossy dark hair and long tanned neck contrasting opulently with her blindingly white blouse, Annie’s porcelain complexion and strawberry blond hair aglow in the early autumn sunshine, the small, delicate fingers of her left hand curved around the bowl of her wineglass. For twenty-seven years, she had worn her wedding and engagement rings on one of those fingers. Now, instead, she was wearing a gold band etched with the Greek key pattern—those interlocking right angles and vertical lines, rendered in Aegean blue. Viveca wore a matching ring.

  Our conversation turned from the kids to our respective ethnicities, and the extent to which family heritage had influenced our lives. Viveca volunteered that, despite having become a successful businesswoman, she had never quite won the approval of her father, an Athens-born banker with ties to Chase Manhattan. “He was very patriarchal. Expected me to get my college degree and then become a good Greek wife like my mother. Raise children, cook and keep house, and limit my outside activities to the Philoptochos.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “A charity. The Friends of the Poor. That’s what good Greek wives did: helped the downtrodden and left the serious stuff—business, politics—to their husbands. My father was none too happy when I opted for a master’s degree in art history instead of what he had planned. He’d even hand-picked a nice Greek husband for me: a cousin of a cousin who owned a chain of drugstores in Long Island and New Jersey. Don’t get me wrong. Papa was proud of my accomplishments. But he was disappointed, too. Abe and I held off getting married until after he died. A career was one thing, but an Arab husband? A town hall ceremony instead of a big Greek Orthodox church wedding? It would have been too much.” Annie had told me in a prior conversation that Abe had been Dr. Abdul Shabbas, a prominent Manhattan oncologist who’d been on Ronald Reagan’s short list for surgeon general. Nixed by Nancy, according to Viveca, for astrological reasons. Viveca had inherited her wealth from both Dr. Shabbas and Papa Christophoulos.

  “Well, at least you’re not Irish,” Annie said. “All that Catholic guilt and good-natured blarney to hide our real feelings.”

  Viveca turned to me. “And how about you? Half Italian and half Chinese, right? Now that must have been interesting.”

  I smiled. “Interesting? Oh, yeah.” I took another sip of my chianti without saying anything else. Maybe Annie had told her about how my father had abandoned me and maybe she hadn’t. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to go into it with her. To shift the subject a little—to spare me, maybe—Annie noted that if we walked south down Mulberry Street and came to Canal, the bustling main artery through Chinatown, we’d be at the intersection of both my mother’s and father’s heritage.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Add a little green beer into the mix and we’ve got our kids’ heritage, too.”

  She and I were looking at each other, sharing a smile, when Viveca said, “Ah, here they come.” My eyes followed hers to the approaching procession. And for the next several minutes, we drank our wine and watched with bemused interest as the faithful rushed and jockeyed to pin dollar bills to Saint Gennaro’s passing effigy in hopes of warding off the misfortunes that God or fate or others might deliver. Bodily harm, say. Or vengeance. Or betrayal. . . .

  I drive past the old, familiar sights: the Wellfleet Drive-In, the Box Lunch, Moby Dick’s. There’s the minigolf place where Ariane once got two holes in one and beat her brother, reducing him to angry tears. There’s Outer Cape Health, where we had to bring Marissa for stitches after she cut her foot on that razor clam shell. Passing the sign for Paine’s Campground, I recall the fun we had there when the kids were young: toasting marshmallows, playing war and slapjack at the picnic table, walking down the pine needle path to that crystal clear pond. I smile, seeing once again, Andrew and Marissa chasing after all those pale green frogs and Annie, sitting at the water’s edge, braiding Ariane’s hair. Ari didn’t make it home for the holidays last December, so I haven’t seen her in almost two years now. If I drive down for the wedding, at least I’ll be able to spend some time with her. Or if I don’t, maybe she can come up here and see me. I miss her. Miss all three of them. Next time I talk to them, I’ll have to ask if they remember that camping trip. Annie had already started turning those junk store finds into art by then, but her work hadn’t yet begun to consume her the way it did later. The way it swallowed her whole.

  My third close encounter with Annie and Viveca was on home turf this past April. I was in the middle of the sexual harassment mess and battling insomnia over Seamus’s suicide when Viveca called me out of the blue. She and Annie were en route to Boston to visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “The Gardner is one of Annie’s favorites,” she said. Did she think I didn’t know that when I’d been the one to take her there that first time? The one who had driven Annie to the Gardner all those other Aprils, when the nasturtium vines hanging from the museum’s indoor courtyard balconies were in full saffron bloom? Since Three Rivers was on the way, Viveca said, she was wondering if they might stop by and say hello. “Anna would love for me to see the house where you all lived when the children were growing up and she was starting out as an artist. And we’d both love to see you, too, of course.”

  Then why hadn’t Annie called? I asked. I had spoken to her just the day before; she’d called concerned about Ariane, whose boyfriend had broken up with her. That poor kid: she’d had so much heartbreak when it came to men. “And how are you doing?” Annie had asked me. I’d told her about Seamus’s suicide but not about the Jasmine mess. I complained about my insomnia. Melatonin and Sleepytime tea, she’d advised. As if that was going to let me off the hook.

  “Oh, you know how unassuming Anna can be,” Viveca said. “She didn’t want to put you on the spot if it wasn’t a good time. We’re stopped at one of those awful turnpike places. I’m out in the car and she’s run in to use the ladies’. If it’s not convenient, Orion, I understand.”

  It had been six or seven months since San Gennaro. I told her it would be nice to see them, by which I meant that it would be nice to see Annie. “Wonderful!” Viveca said. Now I wasn’t to fuss. They would only stop by for half an hour or so. No, no, they wouldn’t stay for lunch. They’d probably be there sometime around eleven.

  By the time they pulled into the driveway in Viveca’s Escalade, it was a little after noon. Between the call and their arrival, I had run the vacuum, run out and bought scones, some pricey coffee, and a dozen daffodils. Daffodils were Annie’s springtime favorite.

  “Orion, your home is charming,” Viveca said, after Annie had walked her through. I told her it was all Annie’s doing; she had done the decorating, chosen the colors for the walls, refinished the antiques she’d picked up on the cheap at auction sales and secondhand shops. I’d changed nothing since she left, telling myself it would be a comfort to the kids when they came home for visits—something which happened a lot less frequently now that Andrew and Ariane had dispersed to different parts of the country. Marissa worked most weekends at that place where she waitresses and tends bar. When she did come home, it was usually a peck on the cheek and a quick conversation before dashing off to some local watering hole to meet up with her hometown friends.

  “Well, it’s just lovely, Anna,” Viveca continued. “I adore the accent pieces, the way you’ve offset the neutral shades with splashes of color. Blended traditional New Engla
nd with ‘shabby chic.’ ” (Until she said that, I’d assumed “shabby chic” was an expression that Annie had coined.) “It’s all very homey, very welcoming. And it’s a perfect complement to the architecture.” She turned from Annie to me. “Now who did you say the builder was, Orion?”

  I hadn’t said. “His name was Angus Skloot. He built a number of homes in this area during the 1920s and 1930s. This is the one he and his family lived in.”

  “Well, you were wise to invest in a builder’s home, I’ll tell you that much. Has your Mr. Skloot ever been written up in any of the architectural magazines?” My Mr. Skloot? I said I doubted it. “Well, he certainly should have been. His use of stone and brick, the inside finish work: it’s masterful! And the upstairs and downstairs fireplaces are to die for! You don’t often see this level of fine craftsmanship from regional builders. It’s a gem—quintessential Colonial New England.”

  Annie and I exchanged bemused smiles. When we’d bought the place from Skloot’s daughter back in 1984, we’d been more attracted to the brook out back and the acreage behind it than we were to the house itself. We’d always liked the house but had never thought of it as a “quintessential gem.”

  “The masonry was done by a couple of guys who worked for Skloot,” I said. “They were—”

  “Let me guess. Southern Italian immigrants, right?”

  I shook my head. “I was going to say brothers. The Jones brothers. They lived right here on the property, in a little house out back. Until their big falling-out, that is.”

  “Over what?” Viveca asked.

  “A woman.” I turned to Annie. “Sweetie, you probably remember the details better than I do. You’re the one who talked to that gal from the historical society who had the scoop.” After the fact, I realized I’d just called her what we had called each other during most of our married life. Sweetie: it had come out of my mouth as if the last three years had never happened.