Three Junes

by Julia Glass

  Marjorie comes up from below. When she sits beside them, she is breathing heavily from climbing the ladder. “Go down there,” she says, pointing at her feet, “instant scurvy.” She leans across Paul. “Hello, dear. Did I see you yesterday, in the taverna, sketching the local color?”

  Fern smiles at Paul. “Small island,” she says to Marjorie, and introduces herself.

  Marjorie pats the bulky rucksack in her lap. “Paul dear, I packed extra biscuits and cheese for you boys. About an hour from now, we’ll be awfully glad to have them. Salt air makes you ravenous.” She pats her rucksack again. “Though what kind of cheese this is, I have to confess I’m not sure.”

  The motor starts up with a grinding roar and chokes forth a cloud of black smoke. Marjorie frowns and waves an arm, shooing at the exhaust as if it were a swarm of mosquitoes. “Not auspicious. A lovely day, but looks are deceiving!”

  Paul and Fern smile and nod in unison. Paul turns his head slightly toward Fern and winks. Her smile tightens and trembles. Paul feels quite unlike himself: boyishly cruel and happier than he has been in months.

  Jack comes up to them and holds out a plastic sack. “Be a sport, Marj, and hand these round below, will you?”

  Marjorie looks inside the sack. “What did I say?” She holds it open toward Paul. Inside are brown wax-paper bags, a cheap version of the sickbags on airplanes. After Marjorie climbs below, Jack takes her place. Fern laughs. Jack says, “What’s so funny, girl?”

  “You,” she says. “The way you run people around. I mean, you know, these people pay you.”

  “Paul,” says Jack, “how do I take that?”

  “As flattery.”

  Jack lifts his sunglasses and stares at Fern. “So. Where’s Madama Butterfly?”

  “In the trenches. She’s here to work. I’m here to play.”

  “Archaeology?” Jack says. “Christ, a lot of sunbathing. Mucking about in the dust. I don’t call that work.”

  “Trailing a lot of happy tourists around, swilling beer every chance, wolfing moussaka . . . well, I don’t call that work.”

  Jack laughs. “Touché, girl.”

  The trip takes an arduous two hours, the boat pitching through the high waves and deep troughs between them. Some of the other two dozen passengers emerge from below, grip the rail and lean out, looking mournful and blanched. Fern and Paul—along with Jack, Marjorie, and a few others—know how to roll with the boat, to keep their stomachs from seizing. It’s something you can’t explain, they agree. Your body knows or it doesn’t. “Like lust,” says Jack. Marjorie giggles, pretending shock.

  Jack spends most of the time below, trying to distract the more nervous members of the group with his jokes. Marjorie takes photographs of the open sea with its canted horizon, the distant islands, the crew, the boat. Fern tells Paul about studying art, about her paintings, about her hometown—Cornwall, Connecticut. He persuades her to let him look through her sketchbook.

  There are watercolors and pencil drawings. Most are pictures of people, but there is a handful of landscapes. When Paul reaches the first one, a twisted olive tree, she says, “I’m no good at nature, but it’s sort of required when you’re traveling. I mean, people expect you to paint the scenery, like they expect you to carry a camera, put together a slide show. As if your memory doesn’t count or can’t be trusted, right?” Paul has begun to notice a habit Fern has of asking for reassurance she shouldn’t need. She isn’t much like Maureen after all.

  The tree is drawn gracefully yet somewhat timidly. “I feel as if I can see the wind,” says Paul. “In the tension of the branches.” But already she’s turned the page; on the overleaf is a young woman in a bathing suit, with a little boy asleep in her lap. Fern has captured well the little boy’s hands around his mother’s neck, holding fast even in sleep. The mother’s gaze is fixed elsewhere, perhaps on a beautiful sunset. “That’s marvellous. I love how you’ve painted her hair.”

  “I like to draw people on the ferries. Portraits—that’s what I like doing best. I refuse to believe the portrait’s finished as something vital, something, I don’t know . . . provocative. I think there must be new ways of getting inside a person and sort of . . . eviscerating the self. Artwise, I mean.” She looks up. “Listen to me: ‘artwise.’ Like I’m still in school.”

  Fern’s portraits are sure, not timid. Many are self-portraits. At one place, she reaches over and turns the page before Paul can look at it fully. “I forgot about that one,” she says. It was, he saw briefly, a picture of Fern sitting naked on a bed, reflected in a mirror beside a window with a view of hills. Hibiscus pinks, cobalt blues, pungent coppery greens. On the next page, Paul sees himself. He gasps.

  “You did this in, what, ten minutes?”

  “It’s not finished. We were interrupted,” she says. But there he is, in three-quarter profile, recognizable at once: shaggy hair blown over one ear, big jaw, bristled eyebrows. The near eye is dark, a white liquid glint in a scribble of shadow. “What were you thinking? You looked so . . . I don’t know, tragic.”

  “I was thinking how little time I have here, on this trip. I’d like just to roam around for years, live on every island,” he invents. “Or choose just one and make it an actual home. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t—” He falters at his eagerness. He feels as if he’s issued an invitation.

  “If only life were so generous,” says Fern. She ducks her head and pulls back her hair, coiling it nervously around one hand. She points out to sea. “Look—is that it? Where we’re going?”

  MAUREEN WAS IN THE KITCHEN, putting together their tea. From the living room, Paul heard what sounded like hooves. He heard the kitchen door close, followed by indecipherable chatter, then Maureen’s voice, raised: “How does Juno take hers? Or does she fancy a sherry?”

  A man’s vibrant laugh. “A cup of plain sugar would suit her. Bust her girth, too.”

  Then Paul heard Maureen calling his name, footsteps heading rapidly through the dining room toward the front of the house.

  “You don’t mind, I hope?” said Colin Swift as he entered the room after Maureen. “My dropping by so boldly? My interrupting your tea?” He extended his hand. When Paul stood, a book fell from his lap. Paul had met Colin Swift, but only in passing: at a retirement party for Paul’s deputy publisher; at a political reception. He was a man whom everyone watched but few people seemed to know.

  After tea, they walked the borders of the meadow. He would sell the meadow—the mall, he called it—but only with a right of way during hunt season, across the back half. “You see, riders jump the wall here, then they’re away through the glen. Not likely, though, we’d barge through more than twice a season—if that.” He wore, Paul noticed, a white stock tie—absurdly formal for a solitary hack in the woods, but it had the dignifying effect of a ruff in an old Dutch portrait.

  Maureen stood in the center of the meadow. The kennel would still be within easy sight of the house if she built it in front, she said, pacing out the length. She could plant a screen of shrubbery to hide the back (or fence it; would he mind?) and, behind it, shelter and graze the sheep.

  Colin Swift was the master of Swallow Run, the foxhunt. He was also the owner of Conkers, of the adjoining farm, and of a thousand handsome acres—hills, hayfields, forests, streams. He was a newcomer, a transplanted Englishman who’d bought the estate only the year before. It was well known, because he made it no secret, that he had left behind in Cornwall another estate and a hostile wife. People in the village called him The Major, with a mixture of worship and chiding. In his late fifties, he was tall and fit—handsome, with a storklike grace—and would appear at formal events in dress uniform, his medals bright as confetti. At Tobruk, he had lost his left hand and most of the arm to the elbow.

  Before leaving, he asked Maureen for a pail of water. While the horse drank, he inquired about the collies, who had lined up along their fence to watch him. “I’m buying a flock of Shrops in the autumn. Just twenty head to begin,” he said. �
�Would you have pups then? I like to do things the old-fashioned way.” Maureen took him back to the kennel. Paul made his excuses and returned indoors, to his book.

  When Maureen came in, she was laughing and shaking her head. “The ‘mall.’ The ‘glen.’ The ‘linden wood.’ La-dee-da.”

  “Will you sell him a dog?”

  “Of course. He’ll let me work his new flock—the ‘Shrops,’” she drawled in shrewd imitation. “As if he’s so fluent in sheep that Shropshires, Cheviots, and Oxfords are just other currencies to him. . . . But laugh too hard and I’ll jinx this bit of luck.”

  “But that’s you, Maureen—lucky. Charmed,” Paul said. He reached out to touch her waist. “And charming.” She put a hand on his, but the affection seemed to surprise her.

  “I do get just about everything I wish for,” she said as she stacked cups and saucers. She had left the room by the time Paul thought to ask what wish she hadn’t got.

  TONIGHT, WHEN THEY RETURN, he will ask her to dinner. They will go to the opposite side of the island, to Naoussa, the smaller village. (Jack will know exactly where he should take her, where to find a car.)

  He keeps his distance for the moment but watches her. She disappears behind a wall, reappears next to a decapitated column. She meanders deliberately, enjoying whatever she looks at or touches. The day is still bright, but windier and slightly cool. Paul offered her the wool jumper he brought along; she wears it now as she sits on the ground, opens her book, and begins to draw. Paul’s stomach feels like it’s made of glass. His hands sting, as if they were dipped in ice.

  They have two hours in which to explore the ruins, and then they will head for Mykonos. Paul lets Marjorie and the two wives lead him to and fro, Marjorie reading aloud from her guidebook about the birth of Apollo and Artemis. Delos is a place of rooms without ceilings, rooms that let the sun stream over everything: cratered mosaics, fallen lintels, crumbling walls. In one room, Paul stares down at the image in the broken tiles beneath his feet: an octopus. He listens contentedly to Marjorie’s didactic singsong.

  Out in the open again, the wives find their husbands conferring. Ray squints and holds his arms in front of him at odd stiff angles. An engineer, Ray will have found a way to measure the place. Perhaps that’s how he remembers the sights he’s seen, by their dimensions.

  Looking in one direction, Paul sees the quadruplets at the postcard kiosk. In another, he sees Fern, absorbed in a drawing; behind her, Jack sneaks up and tilts her hat over her face. She turns accusingly; Jack says something that makes her laugh. She stands and dusts off the back of her legs, puts her book away. Jack points toward the room with the octopus floor.

  “Now does that sea look wine-dark to you? I’d call it peacock, or indigo, or navy gabardine, but that is resoundingly blue, and no wine I know is blue.” Marjorie, still beside him, scans the water with a hand tenting her eyes.

  “I don’t believe this is the sea in question,” says Paul. “Homer was writing about the Ionian Sea, I think. The sea around Ithaka.”

  “No, there you’re wrong. Shame on you. That renowned metaphor is from the Iliad. The allusion speaks of the soldiers’ sacrifice, of course, wine as a stand-in for blood. I do get quite literal about these things, I confess, but good art is never flabby.”

  Paul smiles. Marjorie’s conviction would have swayed even Homer.

  Without taking her eyes off the sea, as if willing it to become less blue, she says, “So are you liking it here? Are you finding your sea legs again—ha, so to speak?”

  “My sea legs?” Paul laughs. “Today, hard ground seems quite secure.”

  “Oh, I mean back in the saddle, living life, all that.”

  “I’m having a good time.”

  “I’m glad,” says Marjorie. “A friend forced me to take a trip like this after I had a loss of my own. Spain. I was just in my thirties then, but I became an addict. Personally, I credit El Greco. Hard to stay maudlin in a place like Toledo. Since then, I’ve never stopped.”

  “Taking trips?” Paul says.

  “Collecting worlds, that’s how I think of it. Different views, each representing a new window. Take stock—architecturally, so to speak—and I’ve built myself quite the mansion.”

  Before Paul can answer, she’s looking away again and waving. “Halloo, fellow wanderers, isn’t this place magnificent?” she calls. The rest of the group, approaching them, wave back almost collectively. No one, in the end, can resist Marjorie’s bullying charms.

  “HELLO, HELLO! Did we make a rousing sight?” Colin Swift noticed Paul and Maureen among the spectators as he walked past leading his mare, the reins looped around his left elbow, the arm with the sleeve doubled back. The horse was striped in a lather of sweat, and his hounds, muddied but still lively, trotted in tight formation close to his legs and the mare’s. With his one hand, he’d wave to someone, then reach down to stroke a hound. His royal air—the way he wore that clownish red coat like just another layer of skin—irritated Paul, but you couldn’t help envying the nimble satisfaction in everything he did.

  When Colin reached the house at the end of the field, he passed his horse and hat to a waiting boy and knelt on the grass. The hounds engulfed him like a mob of zealous disciples. They licked his ears, shoved one another to reach his asymmetrical embrace. There was yipping and whining—some of it, Paul would have sworn, from the man. When he stood, he called out, “Enough gossip, ladies and gents! Git, git, board up,” and urged the hounds toward a van, where the kennelman herded them in.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. There must be fifty,” Maureen said to Paul. “Rivals anything I could do.” Her face was bright from the cold air.

  Colin came up and shook Paul’s hand, then Maureen’s. “See you later, over at the house?”

  Paul had hoped they could skip the party, but Maureen was thrilled by the invitation to a hunt breakfast at Conkers. At least there had not been a blooding; the hounds had lost the line in a marsh. This meant there would be no “trophies,” no bits and pieces of the torn-apart quarry to award over watercress and crumpets.

  On the way to his car, Colin turned. “Like a look at my kennels? I can give you a lift back.” Maureen let go of Paul’s hand and ran ahead.

  The kennel was a refashioned armory, a small fortress complete with ramparts. Outside, the hounds roamed a grassy enclosure. As the car drove alongside, they leaped at the fence in a wave, howling and barking. Colin leaned out his window and howled right back. Maureen giggled. “Got to speak their language,” he said.

  “I know about that,” she answered. Sitting behind her, Paul saw a tendon distend at the side of her neck: pride and irritation.

  “Oh, you and your renowned collies. I could probably learn a thing or two,” said Colin as he opened her door.

  He gave them each a white coat, like a doctor’s smock, to protect their clothing. “Wait here,” he said. He left them alone in a great stone room with a wooden berth along one side and a gate, a sort of portcullis, on the other. “Medieval,” Paul whispered. “The whole thing’s barbaric.”

  “You’re such an old crosspatch,” Maureen whispered back.

  The door behind them opened. Instantly, hounds swarmed around them. Paul cringed, but Maureen stood straight, laughing as they ran circles around their guests. The hounds did not jump up or growl but greeted Maureen and Paul with an amicable din of yipping and whining. On all fours, they stood nearly as high as Paul’s hip.

  “All right you devils!” Colin called out. He clapped the back of the door with his hand. Right away, the animals were silent, noses pointed toward him. Only when they were all still did he walk among them, handing out treats from his pocket—scraps of meat, not the biscuits Maureen gave—and praising each one by name. Nimrod, Aria, Faultless and Faithful; Piccolo, Gallant, Delilah, Intrepid. Hannibal. Harmony. Diva. Orion. Their names ran off his tongue like a poem, a stream of mythical consciousness.

  “Permit me a bit of showing off,” he said. “Bench, g
entlemen!” Half the hounds, thirty or more, scrambled onto the wooden berth. They sat in a row, tense but quiet, facing the door in the opposite wall. The rest sat in front of them, lined up along the floor.

  “Tom!” Colin shouted, and the kennelman, standing on the other side, hauled the door up on its winch. In the next room was a long trough. Still patient, the two rows of hounds looked back and forth from the trough to their master. Colin waited a long moment. “Ladies,” he said at last. The hounds in front, the bitches, bolted through the door. Those on the bench continued to wait, the only motion their quivering tails. Colin watched them for several seconds; they watched him back. “Gentlemen,” he said, and they leaped off the bench in unison, as if released by a latch.

  Maureen applauded; Colin bowed slightly. “Utterly frivolous,” he said. “You see how I long for the army. Order for its own sake.”

  He showed them the feed room, the heat pens, the whelping stall, the butcher’s table where the kennelman prepared the hounds’ meals. With his one hand, he helped Maureen and Paul out of the white coats and hung them neatly in a closet. He did everything, thought Paul, as perfectly as a dancer. On the lane back to the house, an incoming lorry pulled into a lay-by to make room; its driver waved to Colin. Paul looked back and saw its cargo—two dead cows. Meat from Colin’s own farm, he supposed, and he waited (unkindly, he knew) for their host to praise the economy of his little fiefdom.

  Conkers was a square stone house, softened by thickets of yellow roses clambering to its eaves. Six full chestnut trees stood out front, and the sun through their changing leaves amplified the glow of the roses. Mobbing the downstairs rooms were boisterous riders who’d already drunk too much, unchecked small children pilfering cakes, and half a dozen barking terriers careening over the furniture. Colin led Paul and Maureen through the throngs—more at home, Paul suspected, than he would have been in a house without guests. He stood on one of his dining-room chairs and blew his hunting horn. Confined, the sound was uncomfortably shrill. It silenced even the terriers. “Hunters and civilians!” Colin announced. “We are here to inaugurate a splendid season of sport!” He raised a glass. Everyone cheered.