Three Junes

by Julia Glass

  I close the book and hold it to my chest, glad to have it.

  This leaves the drawing and the letter.

  The drawing shows a tree with intricate branches. When I turn it over to look for an inscription or signature, I find instead a watercolor sketch of a mother and child (the mother’s face a little smudged). The artist’s line is practiced and fluid: beyond the work of a student but short of masterly. I lay it on the bed next to the lipstick. Two artifacts of enigma.

  The letter is dated 4 July 1989.

  Dear Fenno,

  I may or may not send you this letter. If I do, it will betray a certain weakness. If I do not, blame it on another. I have a goodly share.

  I am back from Greece, still painfully sunburnt, molting like a snake, and in my cups. (The pain is my excuse.) This house has been empty before, but never so thoroughly as it is tonight. Your mother’s absence has many meanings. I confess that it is now not entirely unwelcome.

  Today, I have realized upon dating this letter, is your newly embraced Independence Day. Independent you certainly are. In that and other respects, I thought of you often while I was away. I thought of your perfectly reasonable impertinence last winter (though quite unlike you), and I thought childishly of ways to give you a taste of the responsibilities you assume I should continue to shoulder. I thought of how I ought to visit you over there but of how I might prefer not to see your life up close. My particular cowardice: yet another weakness. Still, I should like to see your shop. I am half envious, you know. And admiring. I must not leave that out.

  The last six months have been filled with irrational acts, beginning with a petty theft, ending with a petty betrayal. (I am constantly told that erratic or inexplicable behavior is “normal” in the wake of a “loss.”) At the Lockerbie air crash site, I stole a small object: a lipstick. Can I say that it is “insignificant”? (Might it not carry the trace of a signature explosive brew?) In the months since, I have fetishized this object, carrying it with me in a pocket or standing it up on my dressing table, like a work of art. Perhaps it gives me a pathetically dim taste of criminal thrill. Perhaps it speaks to me of death, personally, as your mother’s death should have but could not.

  Another fixation I have developed is an appetite for the same unvarying dinner at the same unvarying pub, one I had never been to but discovered in Lochmaben on a return trip from a funeral. (I go to so many these days.) I drive there three or four nights a week and order the trout and peas. Plain, but cooked well. I like knowing no one, though the barman has become too familiar and tries to chat me up. I dread what he will expect by way of conversation upon seeing my sunburnt self after a three-week hiatus. I am not in a mood to be teased.

  Greece was like the most irrestistible of women: a beauty and a trial. The tour itself was a mistake. That was a large part of the trial. I befriended a young man your age, or so I believed, yet when I returned here, I used my connections to terminate his employment. I dislike how satisfying this unkind deed continues to feel.

  I am selling the paper. I will be parceling out some of my profits to the three of you in the coming year, for obvious tax benefits. You will hear more from me on this matter (when I am sober).

  Thank you for taking Rodgie. I hope he is faring as well as can be reasonably expected with such a change of setting. The dogs that remain—Gem, Jasper, Bat—I am sending to the farm at Conkers, for good, though I have heard the farm may soon be split up and sold. The businessman who bought Conkers has no agricultural bent. He liked the idea of a tenant farm but, in practice, cannot abide the stench of manure that wafts his way each evening to taint the rapture of sunset. (This is all extrapolation from rumors exchanged at the petrol pumps.) Nevertheless, the foreman assures me that the dogs will have a good place regardless of land dealings. He would take them to an excellent farm up near Kilmarnock. This way, they will be worked. They need to be worked. (You may have trouble from Rodgie on this front, but perhaps he is young enough to adapt to indolence—not yours but that of the city dog!)

  Before you call me a traitor, let me say that the dogs would be neglected as I undertake a new project in my latter life. I have always wanted to know one thing well (as your mother did, and here by the way is the closest thing she kept to a journal, which I believe you might treasure more than your brothers would). As a journalist, I have studied many things, but not one of them well and with the circumspection of prolonged study. So I have decided to know one place, a new place. Next month I plan to return to Greece, to Naxos, an island I have seen but on which I have not set foot. From what I have read, I believe it will suit me. I will look for a house, something simple. You may conclude I have gone slightly daft. I could hardly prove you wrong!

  Please be in touch with your brothers. As a favor to me if necessary, please compensate for the geographical distance you have chosen by, at the very least, wholeheartedly observing the right occasions. (Am I sounding too much the “Brit” you have called me out for in the past?) On the subject of occasions, have you received word from Dennis about his wedding? A French bride! I shall have to bury my prejudice from the war, and I am too old-fashioned not to be unsettled that I have yet to meet the girl, but about Dennis I have always had the feeling that some cosmic force protects him from all the foolish and illogical things he’s chosen to do. So if the girl is dross, then gold she will become. But that sounds cruel. What I mean to say is

  There the letter ends, as if he wrote himself over a cliff.

  What prevented Dad from finishing the letter and sending it? I can see nothing earthshaking about his confessions, yet they would have touched me. Or would they, back then? I try to remember where, as they say, my head was at that summer, and I do recall that I was still cross at my father for little more than acting like himself—always composed, rarely tearful, impersonally giving—through the dark hole of time surrounding Mum’s death.

  I put the letter down, alongside the rest of my booty, and I push my face into the peonies beside my bed. They are still regal and fresh, but to my hungover nose, they smell faintly like mold. When I recoil, my thoughts veer elsewhere: Why hadn’t David given me this package? Had he pawed through it himself and been jealous? I imagine confronting him—until I realize that I am just as much the offender here, having poached the package from his desk. More likely, he hasn’t gone through the drawers containing Dad’s things. It’s been, remarkably, less than a week since there would be reason to do so.

  I replace my bequests in their envelope. Twilight has drifted, sneaky as a tide, over my view of the meadow. I reach for the lamp chain but stop short. I am tired, and if I make myself fully awake, I will work up a miserly sulk.

  In my boyhood bed, I sleep the sleep of the overindulged, waking twice but briefly: once, to Véronique’s melodiously autocratic voice—“Regardez l’heure, enfants, au lit!”—and then to David and Lil’s murmurings beyond our common wall. Their voices are soft, their words a blur, yet I have the fleeting impression that it is far too late at night for a married couple to be discussing anything but matters dismal or thorny.

  TONY GREW UP IN MILWAUKEE. His mother still lives there. She is blind and always has been. His father died a few years ago.

  Tony was sent to a military academy at age sixteen after burning down his parents’ garage on purpose.

  The summer his peers were in Woodstock and Berkeley, he drove a combine for a Mormon farmer in Missouri. He slept in the hayloft, where the strong smell of silage masked the fumes from the quantities of dope with which he smoked away most of his wages.

  He started taking pictures after working, the following summer, in a commercial darkroom in Seattle and despising everything that passed through his hands.

  He never finished college. He lived in France for a few years but never really learned the language. (He is too vain, it’s clear, to run the requisite risk of making an ass of himself.)

  These were the raw, disjointed facts I gleaned about Tony’s life that long, exhausting, duplicitous
summer. Why do I say duplicitous? I was never, after all, deceiving anyone . . . except, as it turned out, myself. At some level I must have known this, because I felt heavy with secrets whose secrecy had no rational justification.

  It was, as I said before, not a good summer for Mal. If I happened to spend a morning with Tony and then the same evening with Mal, I would sleep ten or more hours that night, dragging myself out of bed only minutes before I was due to open the shop. I would sleep through Felicity’s celebration of dawn and her greetings to the birds in the trees out front. She would scold me as I slammed my way through a breakneck version of my routine (tongue-scalding tea, untoasted bread, a one-handed mirrorless shave while filling Felicity’s cups with seeds and fruit).

  Two or three times a week, I would go over to Mal’s. Felicity was banned from his apartment, so it was clear that our friendship had taken on another dimension: not socializing, but a tentative form of caretaking. It was as if my assuming Felicity’s care had been a dry run for my taking on, more gradually, Mal’s. To speak of this explicitly would have been too awkward for either of us, but one task at a time—carting out laundry, shopping, making photocopies, renting the occasional film—I quietly assumed the more banal aspects of his upkeep. To see Felicity, he still came by the shop, but dinner at my flat was rare now; Mal’s two flights of stairs were labor enough without mine.

  One day in July, I was unpacking a shipment of books after-hours when Ralph came into the shop. In the last week, I had refused two dinner invitations, and I knew he felt slighted. But that day, without so much as a greeting, he said, “So, are you fucking him?”

  Wondering what spy could have reported on my mornings with Tony, I felt my face redden and kept it aimed down at a carton of guides to the birds of North America.

  “Are you fucking our little critic? Is this why your glands are so patently aglow?” he said. “I ask because your welfare concerns me.” This he said more gently, like the ideal father I no longer wanted him to be.

  I straightened up and looked at him coldly. “What if I were in love with him?”

  Ralph’s face flinched in surprise. “You’re in love with the man?”

  I laughed. “If I were in love with anyone, you would be the first to know.” A lie, but one I believed harmless. “No, I am not fucking Malachy Burns, if that’s who you mean. And I’ve never thought of him as ‘little.’”

  “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “Yes you did.” I was smiling, my secret still a secret.

  “I never see you except in here,” said Ralph. “You seem to spend more time with that bird than anyone else.”

  “I have a life outside your charming house. Barely, but I do.”

  He apologized, but as he paced, fussing with books, he seemed sullen. “Are you still happy with our arrangement?” he asked when he was hidden by a barricade of shelving.

  “Of course.” I took out a rag and glass cleaner to wash the day’s fingerprints from the vitrine of birdwatching gadgets.

  “I mean, you don’t feel it’s altered our friendship.”

  “No.” Tools of espionage, I mused as I gazed down at all the devices of magnification we offered for sale.

  Mavis and Druid brushed the backs of my legs as they pushed past me toward the garden.

  “Well that’s good. Business shouldn’t become a wedge between comrades,” said Ralph, still out of sight. I laughed quietly at his frumpy reference to the two of us as comrades—as if we had shared a war or an expedition through uncharted jungle. I was accustomed to Ralph’s primness (a side effect of daily immersion in nineteenth-century prose), but after a morning of Tony’s cryptically blunt passions, it began to seem positively doilyesque, much like Ralph’s taste in decor.

  A certain primness, too, had crept into my relations with Mal. The more intimate I became with his precarious physical state, the more distance he put between me and the rest of his life. And like a number of men I’d known who’d fallen ill, he had taken up a new, monastic diet—for which I often shopped. Twice weekly, I would emerge from the Integral Yoga market with string grocery bags (a gift from Mal’s ecofriendly mother) ballooning with kale, collards, locally pressed tofu, daikon root, and rolls of dried seaweed.

  Mal embraced his new cuisine with sardonic ardor. He’d hold out a fistful of freshly rinsed broccoli sprouts and say, “Crème brûlée, anyone?” We’d share the laugh, and I’d stick around for a meal that smelled alarmingly barnlike during the cooking. I tried not to remember how the very same diet had done nothing to revitalize Frederick or Luke—though they were farther gone than Mal (I could not suppress the thought of “goneness” as if it were a process already under way).

  But when I tried to get Mal to tell me more about his family or his childhood or his years as a musical prodigy, he would change the subject. He would talk more than he ever had about performances he was reviewing, foreign events he hoped his body would cooperate in letting him cover. One night he railed on and on about a Sleeping Beauty he had thought “beyond tacky” in its production values. At the end of his verbal scourge, we were silent.

  Mal said, “Nureyev may be dying.”

  I said, “Do you know him?”

  “No,” he snapped, “I’m not dropping names. It’s just that I don’t take such news with equanimity.”

  Mal sat on his beautiful green chaise longue, stroking the velvet like the pelt of a cat. The windows were open, and the air was infused with the humid perfume of flowering Callery pear trees. “You think about my dying, and you hate yourself for being so morbid,” he said. Knowing him as I did now, I could see that from the first mention of Sleeping Beauty, he’d been steering our conversation toward this, and I hated him for the manipulation. When I refused to reply, he did it for me.

  “This is where you protest, because it’s only polite, and then after I tell you it’s all right to confess your worst fantasies—you’ve been too kind and generous for me to refuse you that, and it would be true—you ask me if I’ve made any plans, if I have a will, if I want my family with me—”

  “Or, if I’m cruel, I tell you that everyone dies alone, no matter how many people there are in the room.”

  Mal’s watch beeped. As he walked to the kitchen to take a pill, he said, “My family will have all sorts of plans about what to do with me after I’m dead, but I care more about my dying than my deadness. With that, I don’t want them to interfere.”

  “Interfere?” Sucked in after all, my resistance in shambles.

  “Like any good fag, I adore and idolize my mother,” Mal said when he sat down again. “But she is the most perilous kind of liberal: a devout Catholic liberal. Saints’ bones are sacred, embryos are sacred, death throes that last an eon are sacred. My father must adore her, too, because her activism—though never the least bit angry!—has kept him from national office. I’m sure of it. And me”—he laughed—“me she did a job on, too, in her own way. And I won’t let her do another.”

  His speech confused me, and I blurted out, “I didn’t think you were dying quite . . .” I stopped myself.

  “Quite yet.” Mal laughed again, and this time it made him cough. When he had recovered, he said, “I’m doing this on the advice of my theoretically optimistic favorite doctor, who said that everyone would be wise to make these plans. She’s promised me new drugs this fall—back-to-school special—and says I’ll be right as rain again. For however long.”

  “But what plans—”

  “Oh Fenno, your education has left your brain too full to be smart. I am asking you to be the—I think it’s called, ironically, ‘health’ proxy—on my living—ironies everywhere—my living will. The job is, basically, to keep me from getting stuck full of tubes.” He walked to a window. “You needn’t answer now. In fact, please don’t. I’ve chosen you not because you’re my oldest or most trusted friend, don’t get me wrong, but because you’re around more than anyone else I know.”

  “Too dull to be invited anywhere, is that what you
mean? How flattering.”

  He sighed. “And I find you dependable, and I like you, and you have a cold enough eye not to go all rubbery if and when you have to pull the plug.” He laughed again, and coughed again. He leaned out the window until the coughing had passed. When he turned back to me, he said, “I wish the pear trees would bloom all summer long.”

  A month later, I found out that my mother had been diagnosed with cancer. While I went to see her, Ralph would take over the shop; the boy in Mal’s building would take Felicity. Mal was scheduled to go to London about the same time, to write a profile of Jessye Norman at home. On an inexplicable whim, I asked if he wanted to fly to Scotland with me, spend a few days, head south from there.

  What was I doing? Was I somehow frightened of being alone with my parents under such ominous circumstances, or had I begun to feel protective of Mal? His fragility did appear to wax and wane from one day to the next, and by now I had accepted his request and signed a document which would allow me to insist that doctors stand aside and let him die if matters became too dire. Solemnly, Mal sealed my own copy of the document in a clean envelope and handed it to me. “I suppose you should meet my mother,” he said. “Because if the worst ever happens, she’s the one you’ll have to overrule. Legalities be damned.”

  Now, having sprung my impulsive invitation, I saw Mal, for the first time ever, express surprise. He gasped slightly and set his glass of water down by the sink. “I have never had the desire,” he said carefully, “to visit a country that has such a brutal past.”

  “What country doesn’t?” I said lightly. I was relieved he’d be turning me down.

  “‘O cold is the snow that sweeps Glencoe—’” he began to recite. A ballad I hadn’t heard since I was a child.