by Julia Glass
Not until he stands before her does she look up. She makes it easy by throwing her arms around him and holding him close. She smells like roses. When they separate, he sees that she is tearful.
“Are you all right?” he asks. The pamphlet she’s holding advertises the whale watch tours; what, other than the prices, could have made her cry?
“I’m fine. It’s just—all these young men …”
Fenno smiles sympathetically. “All these gay young men.”
“They look so healthy.” She wipes at her eyes. “Is that a terrible thing to notice? Because it’s so much better than if … I didn’t mean—”
“I know,” says Fenno. “I know exactly what you mean.” Though in truth, the gay community here tends toward amnesia. This place is not about conscience; here, the past belongs to another dimension. In the context of something like Carnival, the AIDS epidemic feels as necessarily distant as the era when polio took its toll. Even in New York, there is a growing if unspoken sentiment that those who’ve survived—many becoming arthritic, contemplating lifted chins—deserve a time to be carefree, to go back to acting like they just might be immortal. All right, so they’re alive! Still, they were cheated. Shouldn’t they be immune to every iteration of cancer, to diabetes and heart attacks, even the freak accident involving the crazy cabdriver who texts while running a light? Don’t they get a do-over on the callow youth they never quite got to enjoy?
Lucinda tells Fenno how glad she is to see him, and clearly she means it. He wants to tell her he’s just as glad, but he asks her how mobile she is, and she says, “March me wherever you like. Walking sharpens my mind.”
He wants to tell her that he’s sorry they let their quarrel estrange them, but he asks if she’d like a bottle of water. At a souvenir shop (condoms next to seashell key rings?) Fenno pays six dollars for two bottles of water whose labeling implies that it comes from the South Pacific. He opens one and hands it to her.
“Nice and cold,” she says. As they sip their water, Fenno takes the suitcase and wheels it along. She does her best to stay beside him as they join the burgeoning fantasia on Commercial.
He asks her about Zeke. His speech has improved a lot, Lucinda says, but he’s had to face retirement—for good. He’s focusing all his ambitions on physical therapy, and she dreads the day when he will have made as much progress as he can. “He can do stairs now, but he can’t even walk to the end of the driveway.”
Fenno remembers the straight pebbled lane leading from the country road to that dowager of a farmhouse, plainspoken in its lack of adornment: its tall unshuttered windows and narrow skirting of porch. He remembers the austere antiques, the vitrines containing dozens of trophies veined with intransigent tarnish. Behind the house, that mammoth barn, vacant but lovingly preserved, and the undulation of flowering fields. Mal once showed him a picture of the farm during his childhood, when the fields were grazed by dairy cows and the barn was one of four. Fenno was there just once, for the so-called celebration of Mal’s life, the dispersal of Mal’s ashes on Lake Champlain. It was ghastly for Fenno, not the least bit celebratory or cathartic. He felt hopeless, woebegone, his heart fissured and thorny, like the stone tossed away to shrivel and crack after the fruit is consumed. And when he looked closely at Lucinda that day, he could tell that behind her mask of gratitude she felt the very same way.
“Zeke doesn’t like slowing down, not one bit,” she says, “but we can still go out with friends, enjoy ourselves in a private way. He just has to make peace with surrendering the public.”
“That must be so hard.” Fenno is probably little more than twenty years younger than Zeke, Walter just a few years behind. He pictures Walter as a much older man in the wake of a stroke: he would sooner die than “surrender the public.”
“I have to confess, this break is welcome,” she says. “Oh, will you—” She lifts her hand to point and then quickly lowers it, laughing.
“Point all you like. They aim to be noticed,” says Fenno. Performing an impromptu tap dance in the street are two men dressed as Bambi and Flower.
He explains Carnival Week to Lucinda, but her interest is polite at best.
“Kit’s here already, right? With the twins?” she asks.
“Fanny and Will are making themselves at home. Which is good,” he adds. “Walter loves entertaining children.”
For a stretch, they have to walk single file. Another five minutes and they reach the leafy neighborhood of compact but coveted houses at the fork where Commercial veers toward the coiled end of the Cape.
Walter and the twins are seated at the picnic table husking corn.
“Just please don’t tell me,” Walter’s saying, “that you are one of those white-food-only vegetarians. Because that is but a subterfuge. Actually, that’s cheating. That’s called being a carb hound.”
Fanny laughs. “What’s a subtafoodge?”
“A strategy to cover up not liking sprouts and beetroots, that’s what he means,” says Fenno as he crosses the lawn. “Corn?” he says to Walter. “We don’t have enough food already?”
“I bought it yesterday and forgot. Can’t let it get any older.”
“I like Brussels sprouts,” Fanny says. “I even like cabbage, the red kind, in coleslaw. Butternut squash. And zucchini if it’s not like all slimy.”
“An ecumenical vegetarian. Excellent,” says Walter. “You know, I have this idea that I ought to open a vegetarian alter ego to my restaurant. Every yin needs a yang. Karma insurance. So, Fanny, maybe you’d like to help me design that menu. I need to warn you that I draw the line at seaweed.”
“Seaweed? Ick.” Fanny shudders dramatically.
“Walter?” Fenno says. “Lucinda’s here.”
Lucinda’s been hanging back in the shade of the privet, just watching the children, savoring the sight of them.
“Ha! Where are my manners? Heck, where are my glasses?” Walter jumps to his feet and moves toward Lucinda, holding out his arms. “Look at you. Unchanged in every way.”
Fenno glances toward the house. Through the screen door, he catches a glimpse of motion back in the kitchen. “Will, could you please go tell your dad that Mrs. Burns is here?”
Fanny shakes Lucinda’s hand. “It’s nice to see you again,” she says in a rehearsed way.
“And a very great pleasure to see you, too. May I help with the corn?” Lucinda takes over for Walter.
From the kitchen, Felicity calls loudly.
Lucinda looks up. “Felicity’s here?”
“Yes, she continues to hold court wherever she goes,” says Fenno. “I think she’s feeling neglected.” As he heads inside, Walter whispers in his ear:
“You ready, Barnum? The show begins”—he looks at his watch—“oh, in about two minutes.”
Malachy Burns lived on Bank Street across from the restaurant and the bookshop, an occasional customer at both. When Fenno met him, twenty-five years ago, he was at the height of his career: chief music critic for the New York Times. Sometimes, as Fenno closed the shop, he would spot Mal, dressed in formal evening wear, rushing to claim a taxi. He was also at the beginning of his physical decline. They began as awkward acquaintances, united by Fenno’s adoption of Felicity, but became, almost grudgingly, respectful if not soul-struck friends. And then one day Fenno found himself agreeing, despite his squeamish fears, to act as Mal’s “health proxy” and (perhaps Mal’s intention all along) the enabler of his death. By then, Fenno had come to know this caustic yet shrewd, moody yet unflinching man all too painfully well.
When Fenno and Walter fell in love, in the calamitous fall of 2001, Mal had been dead for nearly twelve years. To Walter, he was little more than a distant, necessarily vague memory, just one among so many neighbors, colleagues, and friends who had happened into the crosshairs at the intersection of a certain kind of sexual liberation and a cunning, impersonal virus. Walter knew that Fenno’s life had been entwined with Mal’s—but only because of Felicity. Everyone who had known Mal kne
w how his beautiful, temperamental bird had become a mascot for the bookshop. After Mal died, some of his friends continued to visit the shop just to see her. Within a few years, their visits stopped.
Brokering a friendship between Walter and Felicity was no easy feat. Walter saw parrots as kin to poultry and waterfowl, which featured prominently on his menu. Felicity saw Walter, once he encroached on her home turf and then on her beloved’s physical affections, as a rival. She would agree, disdainfully, to perch on Walter’s forearm and then, as soon as he began to relax and turn his attention elsewhere, she’d lean down and, in a flash, nip his hand. Who, me? her look said once she resettled on her cage after Walter shrieked and flung her off. “Foie gras de Felicity, how would that taste? I just might find out!” Walter bellowed the first time it happened. Next time, he threatened to have a tiny Hannibal Lecter mask fashioned to cover her treacherous beak.
A month after Fenno gave Walter the task of cutting up her fruit and feeding her, they achieved a truce. At about the same time, Fenno’s former partner in the bookshop, an older man who owned the brownstone comprising the shop and three flats above it (one of them Fenno’s), decided to cash in. He was done with the peril of icy pavements, done with the grit of city life. He had moved to Sarasota with the lover who he swore would see him to his palm-shaded grave. He promised Fenno to sell the building only with a conditional lease for the bookshop (much bargaining ensued over how long and for how low a rent), but residents of a building containing just three flats could not be protected from a landlord’s greed. So, for a time, the shop was saved—but Fenno knew the rent on his flat would soar.
Less than a week after hearing the news, Walter announced, “So I’m tying up my common sense and locking him in a cellar. Gagging him, too. Why don’t you move into my place? I’ll even take that tarted-out pigeon of yours.”
Fenno’s furnishings—old on the cusp of ancestral—clashed with Walter’s chrome and leather, so he donated most of them to charity. He was content to trade his passive mimicry of the rural house where he grew up (Balmoral Lite, Walter dubbed it) for life in a flat kept spotlessly scrubbed and refreshingly uncluttered. The one piece of furniture he refused to surrender was a primitive antique chair that had belonged to Mal. It featured a removable seat and two fist-worn spindles on its curved, worm-channeled frame: it was, Mal had told him, a chair designed for childbirth. Walter was predictably horrified but allowed it to occupy a corner of their bedroom, where it served as a repository for clothing abandoned at the end of a tiring day, a station en route to the laundry bin.
It never occurred to Fenno that Walter would come to resent Mal more than his parrot or his peculiar chair. They had been living together for two years, even speculating what they would do if New York’s legislators summoned the nerve to let people like them tie the knot, when they attended their friend Erik’s sixtieth birthday party. Erik was one of the men Fenno quietly thought of as the almost-ghosts.
After the worst of the plague years were over, a true end plausibly in sight, many of the so-called survivors (peers of Fenno and Walter who dodged the virus because they were safely paired off, avoided “risky behaviors,” or had T cells apparently coated with Kevlar) let down the guard of their angry grieving, discreetly shredding their ACT UP T-shirts for rags with which to polish the silver they had lived long enough to inherit from their mothers. No longer feeling so threatened, they entered a period resembling a communal honeymoon, cherishing and lauding the ghosts of the men who ought to have remained among them—like Mal. They were, in effect, curators of lost lives. At any occasion entailing sentiment, they might compare their ghosts as they’d have compared favorite books or movies: not merely mentioning their lost compatriots’ names but reconstituting their jokes, talents, and proclivities, eulogizing their truncated promise. More than once, Fenno thought of the poem “In Flanders Fields.” At some indistinct moment, however—perhaps in the shadow of 9/11, which redefined before and after for citizens of Lower Manhattan—it began to seem awkward or passé whenever a spark of memory tempted the survivors to bring their ghosts back into the light. Their habitual guilt felt stale, outmoded, shopworn from its years of confessional ebullience.
People like Erik—those who had dodged death by a whisker, held on long enough to take the right drugs—sometimes amplified that weariness, and the dirty secret was that some of the survivors couldn’t quite forgive them.
Erik’s party, a crowd scene on the roof terrace of a wealthy friend, was splendid. Erik had just prevailed through another health scare; once again, his gaunt face had filled out, his skin regained its burnish. He wore sleek new attire that flaunted his slim but not too slim physique. (You couldn’t help looking him over every time you saw him, alert for signs of relapse.) When the cake emerged, the guests gathered in a semicircle and watched Erik draw a single profound breath with which he heartily dispatched all sixty candles—plus, as he joked, “one to grow on.”
As expected, Erik gave a speech about the miraculous gift of reaching this age: how he relished every new issue of the magazine from AARP, rejoiced at the wrinkles gathering on his face, gleefully compared notes with his mother on hearing loss and osteoporosis. Then he raised his champagne flute and said that he wanted to remember all the friends whom he had been certain, twenty years before, he would shortly follow into what he called “the Lincoln Tunnel that doesn’t end in Jersey.” The guests laughed softly, fondly, waiting for Erik to change the tone to bawdiness or encourage them all to party on. But instead, quite solemnly, he removed a sheet of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and read a list of two or three dozen names. Fenno gasped when he heard Malachy’s name; he hadn’t known they were acquainted.
At the end of the recitation, Erik refolded the list, returned it to his pocket, and thanked everyone for “sticking around—to eat cake, I mean!” And, like a one-man bridal couple, he cut a piece of his cake and raised it to his own mouth for a wolfish, delirious, life-loving bite.
A few guests laughed; a few exchanged brief grimaces. The applause got off to a wobbly start, though it quickly rose to cheering. But no one made any toasts. Fenno wasn’t the toasting type, but he knew that Walter had prepared a tribute, and it was obvious, from rolled papers stuffed back into pockets, that several of Erik’s friends had intended to speak—but changed their minds. They had been silenced, as if scolded, by all those names.
“For Pete’s sake,” said Walter as they walked home that night, “can I state the obvious, however mean it sounds? Can we move on a little here? If I want to visit the Quilt, I’ll get on a plane to San Francisco. Or D.C. Wherever it is.”
“You’ve seen the posters and the tote bags,” Fenno said. “AIDS isn’t over.” He meant to lighten the conversation, but Walter had an agenda.
“Nobody’s saying that! Did I say that? I gave to three of those African funds last year! And to the Trevor Project! What I’m saying is that we have to stop being stuck in the past. Did you see how everybody was paralyzed when he read that list? We know how lucky we are. Does he think we need reminding?”
Fenno said that he admired Erik’s gesture, even if it came across as awkward. After all, it was his birthday, his moment to say what getting old meant to him. Walter said he couldn’t help thinking that Erik wanted to remind everyone that he was still afflicted, knew something dire that most of them didn’t.
“You’re saying,” said Fenno, “that he believes his illness makes him superior? That’s a jolly malicious thought.”
“I am saying no such thing,” Walter said fervently. “How could you even think I would? You really think I’m that small-minded.”
They walked the rest of the way home in silence.
As they undressed, tossing their clothes on the chair, Walter stared pointedly at it for a moment. He sat on the foot of the bed in his underpants and said, “Were you really never lovers? I find that hard to believe.”
His back was to Fenno, who sat beneath the covers, a book in his lap. “Pardon m
e?”
“Don’t play dumb,” said Walter. “I heard your reaction when Erik said Mal’s name tonight. I saw your tears.”
“They were tears of shock. You know that whole story, beginning to end.”
“To the bitter and tragic end, oh I certainly do.” Walter twisted around, sitting cross-legged on the counterpane. He was shirtless, the blond hair on his chest glistening in the lamplight. “But I’m wondering now if I know all of the middle.”
“What is your point?”
“My point is that I sometimes get the creepy sensation I’m living with a widower. That you lost more than a friend. That you lost—okay, I shouldn’t say this, but it’s not going away—like you lost the love of your life. Like you’re wearing one of those Victorian armbands on your impeccably ironed sleeve.”
Fenno’s hands lay together, flat across the face of his book. “You think I’ve hidden something from you. About Mal.”
Walter sighed. “Well, yes, forgive me, but I do. I have for a long time. I know you have those ‘special souvenirs’ in your bottom drawer: the program from his memorial, his passport, that gaudy bedspread—”
“I shouldn’t have keepsakes from a friendship?”
“Oh come on. His passport?” Walter groaned. “And that relationship you have with his mother—”
“I work for her, Walter. Not even very much these days. I hardly ever speak with her. It has nothing to do with Mal.”
“Don’t give me that. I met the dude. I saw the swath he cut—wider than the BQE. The Noël Coward of Bank Street! Feared critic and musical genius! I didn’t know you then, but I can only imagine what a perfect match he made for you. Intellectually.” Walter pronounced the word slowly, almost spitefully.
Fenno decided not to lie. “He might have been. But it doesn’t matter, because I was too much of a coward.” He should have said, But it doesn’t matter, because then I met you.