by Julia Glass
But Fenno was incapable of such adaptations. So the mourning process began within a few stunned minutes of hanging up the phone once the landlord informed him that no, the new rent in the e-mail was not the mere slip of a digit.
For one week, he said nothing to his two full-time employees: Dru, a stocky poet whose Technicolor tattoos of teeth-baring, sword-swinging samurai clashed with his gentle, courteous nature, and Oneeka, a tall, flirtatiously cheeky young woman whose afro was dyed the same reddish brown as her amply exposed skin (no tattoos needed). A dozen years before, Oneeka had been a woefully pregnant teenager just canny enough to find Lucinda’s haven in the East Village. Through a series of circumstances that baffle him still, Fenno signed on as Oneeka’s birth coach—or, rather, as the uptight middle-aged poofter whose quietly panicked presence confused but charmed the entire maternity staff of a major hospital. He cannot remember doing any actual “coaching.” What he remembers best is how masterfully he resisted fainting.
Furtively, Fenno devoted all his spare time that week to investigating how he might help Dru and Oneeka find alternative jobs. He made calls; he sent e-mails. He wandered the neighborhood in search of new shops that were not a part of the sartoriocracy which threatened to turn the West Village into one big Barneys window display.
But bearing down on Fenno more heavily than the death sentence on his shop or the prospect of turning out his employees was his innate resistance to telling Walter. His dodgy excuse was that Walter would feel overwhelmed. Already, there had been the letter from Kit—upheaval enough—and then, following Fenno’s reply, Kit’s call (which Walter had been there to answer).
Rubbish. It was, no mystery, Fenno who felt overwhelmed, Fenno for whom change and risk were terrifying prospects.
The problem with keeping the news from Oneeka and Dru was that the landlord began to request appointments for prospective tenants with far deeper pockets: an indignity Fenno had failed to anticipate. So when a Swedish woman representing a chain of spas offering sea-salt therapies showed up with her entourage one morning, Dru and Oneeka stood by together, alert and still as a pair of deer scenting nearby hunters, while she exclaimed with delight over the wee garden and then clucked in dismay at the substandard plumbing. Her visit lasted all of ten minutes, but the jig was decidedly up.
“Dude?” said Oneeka to Fenno when the woman left. “No chance that bitch runs a book club.”
Fenno had long ago given up on mitigating Oneeka’s language. Too often, her bluntness was apt.
He told them.
“Oh man,” said Dru. “Man, that is a royal bummer.”
“Well, fuck that shit,” said Oneeka. “Excuse me, but that just supersucks. For you most of all.” She meant Fenno. “You, Dru, you’ll float.”
“Oneeka, I promise to help you find something else,” said Fenno.
“So guess what, dude? You got no exclusive on the news around here.” She told him that her mother, with whom she shared a flat in Inwood, had decided to move down south—not south as in Bay Ridge or Bed-Stuy, but south as in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was a hotbed of relatives; Oneeka and her daughter would be smart to tag along.
“You want to go?” Fenno asked. “To Raleigh?”
“Hell, yeah. Not because it’s with Mom—I could lose her attitude—but I am done with what it costs to live here.” No hard feelings, she said, but if she ever wanted to move out of her mother’s place, the wages she made at the shop would never permit that. And she wanted Topaz in a decent public school.
Despondently, Dru listened to their exchange. “Can you go to, like, housing court? Appeal this thing? It’s robbery.”
Fenno stared at Dru, silenced. He didn’t want to think about himself, what he would do next. Far easier to think about Dru and Oneeka. He was ashamed, for a moment, that he had imagined himself in charge of their destinies.
“You really just planning to lie down and take it?” said Oneeka.
Hands on their hips, Fenno’s young employees regarded him as if he’d gone round the bend. He’d never felt so pathetically old.
“As I understand it, I have no recourse.”
Oneeka laughed and shook her head. “ ‘No recourse.’ Dude, you know lawyers. Lawyers walk in this place every day, buy their John Grishams, their Scott Turows. Work it!”
He told Walter that night, pretending he had received the news that day.
“Liar,” Walter said calmly. “You big fat liar.” It was after nine, and they stood together in the kitchen, waiting for the pot roast that Walter had brought from the restaurant to finish warming in the oven.
“Pardon me?”
“Oh yes, as a matter of fact, I will pardon you. If you’d held out much longer, I’m not so sure. What is with you? Did you honestly think I wouldn’t hear about that evil overlord’s plan to jack up the rent so we can have another trust-fund hair salon or gourmet olive oil purveyor? Do you think there’s any shelter news within ten blocks that I don’t hear before anyone else? Ben—hello? He’s the one, I promise you, who dug up the skinny on where bin Laden was hiding.” Ben was the longtime bartender at Walter’s Place; he might have been the city’s top psychotherapist if he didn’t make twice that money in tips.
“Why didn’t you tell me you knew?”
“Why? Because I know you. Because I wanted to see how long it would take you to ’fess up. I wanted to catch you red-handed. This, buster, this is why we need therapy. We begin next week, no caveats or codicils.”
But softhearted Walter had also spoken to several lawyers who were addicted to his chef’s Tournedos Toledo and Osso Buco Chicago. “No way to get around this one,” said Walter. “Unless you want to sit tight till they evict you. Which doesn’t suit your standards of dignity. For which I love you.”
Walter was certain that they’d find another location for Plume. For once, he was wrong: or, to be truthful, when Fenno looked at his options, he couldn’t bear the thought of what he would lose—or of spending the money to relocate only to see the shop’s revenues continue to shrink.
When they moved some of the final inventory onto sale tables on the pavement, people would stop and say, “Are you moving? Please say you’re not closing. Why are you closing?”
Fenno managed not to say, “Because people like you don’t bother to buy books anymore—not for yourself, not even as gifts, not even to pile up on coffee tables or stand on in order to reach a high shelf.” Sometimes he would go through the tedious tale about the rent, giving rise to much empathic outrage, but when he was too tired to face the scripted exchange on capitalist pigs, he would say, “I’m retiring to Brazil” or “I’m thinking of opening a yoga studio in Fort Greene” or any number of remarks that would move people swiftly along.
The books that wouldn’t sell, not even for a dollar, were dumped for pennies at a stalwart used-bookstore on Carmine Street. Fenno sold the bookcases and homely furnishings to NYU students, the vitrines to a woman opening a craft store on Perry. She offered part-time work to Dru, but he had already landed a job as a barista at an independent ethically supplied coffee parlor called Fairgrounds.
Oneeka helped Fenno sweep and vacuum the emptied store. Across the wooden floor, long rectangular swaths of varnish eulogized row after row of vanished books. After a last look at the garden, she said, “You forgot the planters. Real stone. They gotta be worth something.”
“They were here when I came,” he said. They had belonged to a handsome baker named Armand, who had died during the plague years: one of those lost young men whom it had become so exhausting to remember. Suddenly, Fenno remembered the pavement sale of Armand’s equipment, the café tables and chairs. Yes indeed, he thought, what goes around comes around—and tends to wallop you in the face when it does so.
“Dude, you are so friggin’ honest, it gives me a migraine, know that?”
Yes, he might have answered, but honesty comes in so many different shades.
The rain fades away an hour or so after dinner. Without the m
uffling effect of all that water, the wind sounds as if it’s been amplified, though Walter’s favorite weather site assures them that it’s slowed a good deal. The half-fallen tree continues to mock gravity.
Not long before dark, Walter puts on a pair of Wellies and announces that he’s heading across the street to have a look at the harbor. “Just to see if the Cape’s changed its shape. Or if there are major shipwrecks.”
Kit has found a book called Tall Tales of the Deep South, which he is reading aloud to his children by a rekindled fire. Lucinda is listening, too. Daphne and Fenno are in the kitchen, washing up, Garrison Keillor their sound track. Fenno gives Felicity a shaved corncob to pick at. Even the children seem talked out, gamed out, benumbed by the anxious inertia of waiting for the storm to end.
Walter returns, stamping his feet on the doormat. “Brrrrr-acuda!” he exclaims. “The sky may not be raining, but the trees still are! The waves are monstrous. A few dinghies tossed up on the beach, but no oil tankers, no pirate ships, no luxury yachts to plunder.” He stands in the doorway to the kitchen.
“What’ll it be like tomorrow?” says Daphne. “I want to get home before dark.”
“Sunny but still windy, that’s the current notion.”
From the living room, Kit says, “Mom, you can’t stay till Monday?”
“Sweetheart, I have to practice. I have a rehearsal on Monday.”
Lucinda joins Walter. “What are you playing?”
“Oh, it’s a smorgasbord of baroque. The usual suspects. Designed to please the masses.”
Then Kit is standing behind Lucinda. “Mom, I thought …”
“Kitten,” she says, “plans get complicated.”
If one of them must leave, thinks Fenno, Daphne is the one he’d vote for. He wants to believe she would be more congenial under different circumstances, though he doubts he’ll ever know. After Walter, Kit, and Lucinda retreat to the living room, she says to Fenno, “So you’re the one who knew Malachy best. When he was older.”
“I wasn’t his best friend, if that’s what you mean.”
“Did he have one?”
“I don’t really know.” And that’s half true; Fenno wasn’t a part of Mal’s broader social life—or what remained of it in his last few years. But at the New York memorial service, and again in Vermont, when the closest friends joined Mal’s family to scatter his ashes on the lake, Fenno noticed one woman who seemed especially stricken. She had been a fellow writer at the Times, and Mal’s brother, Jonathan, sat with her at both ceremonies. He would hold her hand or put an arm around her shoulders whenever she succumbed to weeping.
Fenno remembers her name—Judith—but something tells him Daphne would be hurt to learn that Mal’s best friend might have been a woman.
“Before I knew him, he liked to entertain,” Fenno says. “Big dinner parties in his small flat. I’m not sure anyone got to know him terribly well. Intimately.”
“Not to be blunt, but it’s obvious he had an intimate life of some kind.”
Fenno dries the pot that held the chowder, saying nothing.
“I’m sorry. That came out wrong. I didn’t mean to sound cruel.”
“But you’re right,” he says. “I came along rather late to know the details.” Though that, too, borders on a lie. There had been the beautiful Armand, whose bakery, vacated after his death, turned into Fenno’s bookshop.
“I wish I’d met him just once, as an adult. Just to know whether he was someone I’d still have fallen for. We thought we were so grown-up when we knew each other. Or I did. But that’s how you become a grown-up, right? By acting it out first, trying it on. Practice makes perfect. Except when it doesn’t.”
“Some of us feel as if we’re still just acting it out,” says Fenno. Immediately, he wishes he hadn’t said something so trite.
“He composed limericks,” says Daphne, ignoring his jest.
“Limericks?”
“I guess it was an affectation. A kind of seduction, maybe.”
“I doubt that,” says Fenno. “He always struck me as the kind of man who wanted to be the one seduced. Not the seducer.”
“Did he,” she says, decidedly not a question. “Some things stay the same about a person, and some change.” She turns toward the radio. “But listen. It’s Guy Noir. I love how he pronounces it Na-wahr.” She turns up the volume. “The sound effects are my favorite part.”
By nine o’clock everyone has gone to bed except for Kit, who said he wanted to catch up on his e-mail and talk to Sandra. Fenno and Walter sit in bed, side by side. Fenno reads a book of Stanley Kunitz poems; Walter, laptop balanced on his thighs, monitors the latest meteorological developments and browses a blog about cheeses from Vermont. Even Walter is talked out.
When they turn off their lamps, Walter falls asleep fast. Fenno envies him his knack for nodding off at will nearly anywhere; he takes cat naps on buses, beaches, even the subway. Most nights, Fenno lies awake for half an hour or more, his mind, hawklike, circling and recircling his life from above. Tonight the incessant wind adds to his customary restlessness—and from the living room below, lamplight leaks faintly through the floorboards of the darkened bedroom.
Walter is snoring gently when Fenno hears someone go downstairs.
“Mom?” Kit, who must be seated on the couch, directly below the bed.
“Sweetheart. I thought I’d make a cup of tea. Or just … find the paper.”
“Can’t sleep?”
“I never sleep well away from home anymore. I’m getting too old for other people’s pillows.” She must be sitting now, by the fireplace.
“I wish you wouldn’t leave so soon. You don’t really have a rehearsal, do you?”
“Things come up, sweetheart. Coming here …”
“Was a mistake? Well, you told me that before.”
“No. I was going to say the timing wasn’t good.”
A long pause. “She wishes, you know, that she could somehow, I don’t know …”
“What, make it up to me? Be my friend? Do grandmotherly things with my grandchildren?”
Another pause. “Why do you have to be so possessive about them?”
“Kit, this whole … discovery … it’s yours. I know you wish it could be mine, too, but it’s not. My conscience is clear about the things I didn’t tell you. I’ve told you before, I hate the way privacy is so underrated these days.”
“I don’t want to have this argument again.”
“Well, sweetheart, I certainly didn’t come down here to have it.”
Daphne’s mention of conscience (never mind privacy) makes Fenno feel queasy. Should he drop his book on the floor? Clear his throat? He could find an excuse to go downstairs himself, make it clear that others are still awake, too.
“Can I ask you one thing, Mom?”
“You’ll ask me anyway, won’t you?”
“Did you honestly know he was dead, or did you just say that so I wouldn’t think he’d abandoned me, to spare my feelings?”
Fenno surrenders to eavesdropping full on. Is there anything here he shouldn’t know? Walter lets out a peal of a snore; that should alert mother and son to the intimate nature of the quarters they’re sharing. But no.
“I wish I were angry enough about all this not to answer you,” Daphne says. “But I’m more worn out than anything else. So the answer is that by the time I told you he was dead, it was true. And I did know it. Would I have told you that anyway?” She laughs quietly. “Well, maybe.”
“How did you know?”
“Oh, you can thank your stepfather, I guess. You know how resistant I am to everything high-tech, but back when the school got Internet access, he convinced me that we had to have it at home, too. He told me I’d learn to love it as a ‘research tool’ for my classes—that it would even let me buy cheaper sheet music for chorus and band. He showed me how I could find handy-dandy bios of all the composers, print them out instead of making photocopies at the library.… And now your sister is getti
ng me hooked on Facebook. It’s the only way I get to see photos of the baby.”
“But my father—”
“Yes, Kit,” she says drily. “Yes, I’m getting to that. Because, you know, from about the time I married Jasper … about then, I learned that Malachy wrote for the New York Times. I saw his byline. Someone always left the big, fat Sunday Times in the teachers’ lounge. It got so I’d look for his articles. After a while, I didn’t find them anymore. I was relieved to stop looking.
“Anyway, there I am, years later, Bart showing me how I can find out about anyone and anything on the computer in our own house. It felt like having my own personal satellite for spying on the world.”
Or a personal insomniac listening through the floorboards.
Another pause, until Kit says, “You Googled him.”
“Of course I did. I even saw a picture of him at a party somewhere. A society party at Lincoln Center, somewhere like that. Which was spooky. Because a minute later I read his obituary. It was old by then. So the answer is yes, Kit, I told you the truth.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Aren’t we all sorry? Isn’t that what everybody keeps saying all the time, now that we’re a newly united family?”
“Mom.”
“Well, now I really am tired, Kit.” Her voice moves slightly. She must have stood. “Listen, sweetheart, I respect you for doing what you had to do. I really do. And I tried to be a part of it, this reunion. Maybe if I were a more selfless mother, I’d embrace it all—Lucinda, her family, Malachy’s siblings. But can I imagine meeting these people? Being looked over as the girl who might have trapped him into a shotgun marriage?”
“But you didn’t! And nobody’d be looking at you like that! I’ve met Christina and Jonathan and their families, and Mom, you’d like them.… And they’d like you. They would.”