Nine

Hot water cascades down Stephen’s head, running in rivulets down the sides of his face. His scalp tingles, not unpleasantly, from some strange shampoo of June’s. Organic argan oil, he read on the bottle. Tea tree oil. Eucalyptus extract. He can feel the layer of tissue just beneath his hair awakening, his cranial membrane aflame. Hello there, it pulses, singing, a thousand little birds chirping. He wonders if June uses the shampoo instead of coffee, her scalp jolting her awake for a different kind of cerebral buzz.

“Ooh, you have to use the new shower,” she had enthused in the kitchen when he strolled in, covering the mouthpiece of the phone.

“Isn’t Dad napping up there?”

“He’s in his office.” She rolled her eyes. “Go on, you’ll love it.”

Stephen perceived the strange demand in her enthusiasm, that abyss of need. He could tell that she wanted him to admire the new fixtures and delight in the showerhead, a bright round disk with a thousand holes like a decapitated sunflower.

He needed a shower after the train anyway. “Okay,” he said, shrugging, and his mother emitted a thrilled little bleat.

The same dynamic followed whenever she gave him one of her gifts: the shaving set in December; the cashmere scarf at the start of the term. “Go on,” she always urged. Her hands pushed forward boxes from Barneys, Bergdorf, Bloomingdale’s. Then she sat back in anticipation, watching his face.

Truthfully, he didn’t mind the gifts themselves. The scarf had come in handy all winter, impossibly soft and light and warm. June had exquisite taste. He never groaned, “Mom,” while holding a tacky reindeer sweater. He was always quite sure, accepting her beribboned parcels, that he would like whatever was inside.

But there was an undercurrent, too, some dynamic he could not name—as though by accepting these gifts, he was agreeing to a contract he didn’t understand. Something passed between them, a moment so subtle he would later think he had imagined it. A court stenographer would be unable to capture it, the transaction occurring outside of words:

JUNE PORTMAN: Darling, I saw these Brunello Cucinelli’s at Nordstrom and thought of you.

STEPHEN PORTMAN: Oh. Thanks.

JUNE PORTMAN: They match your briefcase so well, don’t you think? Cordovan, but not too much red in the undertone. More of a warm butterscotch.

COURT REPORTER: Could you spell cordovan?

JUNE PORTMAN: Are they supposed to interrupt?

STEPHEN PORTMAN: C-O-R-D-O-V-A-N.

COURT REPORTER: Thank you.

JUNE PORTMAN: Anyway, I find that particular shade incredibly difficult. But this will match exactly, and what could be more professorial than wing tips? You will be a vision!

Here, June would wrap one of her hands around his and give it a squeeze. Sometimes she clapped her hands together as though the two of them were in on a delicious secret. “I knew you’d love them, I just knew!” she would trill, and Stephen would look away, embarrassed, stuffing the box out of sight.

Maybe it’s loneliness, Stephen reflects, soaping his arms. June has acquaintances. She has people to air-kiss at parties, elbows to hold floating up and down stairs. People speak of her, speak to her, but no one is a trusted confidant. There was no one to listen sympathetically as she went on about the renovation. “I went with the Carrara,” she told him the day the demo started. It took him a minute to remember that this was a kind of marble, veined like cheese. “Your father has his Porsche. Now I have my bath.”

He could tell she had rehearsed the line. She will try it out later on Sissy or Catherine. “You chose tile?” Sissy will say lazily, glancing around the gleaming bath. “I prefer slab.” Sissy and Catherine aren’t friends, after all, but more like competitors in an ongoing game of one-upmanship. June will smile thinly and prepare a zinger to deal Sissy later.

Stephen isn’t sure he likes the renovation. The result feels more like a showroom than a bathroom. It isn’t entirely comfortable under the shower’s assault, the water falling straight from the ceiling. He can find no angle, no jet stream for his back. No pulse of water to lean into, turn, lean into again. His usual movements have been rendered useless, his shower waltz impossible with such a static and upright partner. A “rain head,” his mother had called it, but who wants rain inside? There is no place to look but down.

The bathroom before had been perfectly fine. “Serviceable,” June had conceded, “but not ideal.” The renovation was supposed to be cosmetic. “Nothing major,” she breezed. “Just a little accessorizing. What’s the word they’re using these days? Zhuzhing? I am zhuzhing!”

But the promised afternoon of construction had turned into ten days, sending Michael off to mope—and, it seemed, nap—in the far recesses of the house. “None of it could be anticipated,” June said. The plastic sheeting came down the day Hannah Portman’s sheet was pulled up.

Now that her jewel box of a bath is complete, she wanted her son to witness it. Like the proverbial tree falling in a forest, June requires a listening ear—someone to admire her taste and accept her offerings, as though without him, none of it would exist.

June’s life is a revolving door of renovations and shopping sprees. Before the bathroom, her big project had been the formal living room. “What do you think, darling?” she had said, cornering him after dinner one night. She held the paint swatches out in a fan. Farrow & Ball, the logo read, which Stephen knew was the good stuff. (“Ninety dollars a gallon!” Michael exclaimed. “It’s paint!”)

Stephen considered her outstretched hand. She was asking for so little, yet it sometimes felt like so much. “Gray is gray, Mother.”

God forbid she just come out and ask. Stephen holds out a leg to be rinsed, the hair matted down by the water. He sympathizes with his mother for wanting a friend. But at times her inquiries feel invasive. Tell me what you are, that outstretched hand seems to say.

June has surely noticed his lack of interest in dating. He imagines the puzzle of his situation troubles her. The last thing she wants, after all that renovating, is one last closet.

The gifts and paint swatches became litmus tests. He felt her scrutiny, as though his response to a scarf might tell her everything.

Then there are her comments, scattered here and there. “Of course, we’d love our sons no matter what,” she might say offhandedly at a dinner party, her eyes lingering on him. Which, strictly speaking, is untrue. Leo risked losing their love whenever he cracked open a beer or tried discussing the war. Leo, in their house, is the equivalent of a gay son in a right-wing family. He is the black sheep, wanting nothing of their artsy show.

What bothers June isn’t the prospect of Stephen’s being gay; it’s that she doesn’t know whether he is or isn’t. She would never ask. That would be far too vulgar. June lives in a perfumed cloud of associations and hints. She deals in allusions, pleasantries, subtly exchanged looks.

June’s parents never talk openly either, shaking ice-cold martinis in the evening, chatting around each other from their club chairs, gazing out at the Rhode Island bay. Happiness for them entails a serene pleasantness, which in turn necessitates gin. Nothing in excess, just a chilled measure to lubricate them through, a piece of thread getting licked so that it might pass through the eye of the needle.

And so it goes with all the Whittakers. Stephen’s uncle, Thaddeus William Whittaker, wears madras plaid and Lilly Pulitzer ties, shorts with embroidered lobsters and crabs scuttling across khaki seas. He stands tall, with his Ken-doll hair and too-white teeth, when June throws her arms around him for their annual embrace. “Thad!” she shrieks, kissing his cheek, and from the way they laugh with manufactured warmth, no one would know they only speak once a year.

So June never comes out and asks. She doesn’t realize that her unasked questions accumulate in their own closet. And rather than do the mature thing and point this out to her, Stephen toys with her. Because on the days it isn’t irritating, it can be amusing.

“It looks pewter,” he might say, contemplating the paint swatch while touching his earring. June would nod encouragingly, hopeful for more.

Stephen’s romantic life, or lack of it, has become one of those Great Unnamed Things in the Portman household, there but never to be examined. And how they accumulate! The GUTS, Stephen reflects, pleased by the acronym. Those distressing innards, pulsing with life.

The Portmans never allude to June’s lack of purpose, what she does with all that free time. They pretend Stephen doesn’t attend Saturday service. They leave Aunt Sharon’s side of the family unacknowledged, too deep a source of embarrassment. And then there was Grandma Portman.

She was the bridge between the old and new. She came from cabbage and Yiddish, dressed like a peasant. June had tried buying her new cardigans, but Grandma Portman politely declined them.

She reminded them of Michael’s true roots, how easily he might have turned out like his unremarkable sister in Delaware. Grandma Portman was troublesome, not in her behavior or because of anything she did, but because her presence served as a reminder of the past, one that Michael had worked so hard to escape. So they stuffed her away at Pine Grove.

His parents preached a life of liberal acceptance. They sought the life they read about in the New Yorker and the Times, where tolerance and higher education and art are virtues. But they wanted it on their terms. They never anticipated Leo, who had no interest in books or travel, who—unspeakably—had voted for Bush. They never envisioned a son like Stephen, who embraced the religion Michael wanted to forget. So they smiled and pretended such wrinkles didn’t exist. Because if they attended enough galas and wrote enough checks and spoke with their elitist friends about their charmed life, they could believe they had achieved it. Michael could convince himself he’d engineered the life he always wanted—that those years spent working and not seeing his family hadn’t come at a cost.

Michael and June didn’t want to see the emptiness around them. They didn’t want to hear the rumblings of those GUTS. They wanted—needed—to think that theirs was the great success story, the modern American family, gorgeously rendered: one son who had attended Yale, the other now engaged. Theirs was a lovely life, artfully lived.

June, meanwhile, lets out her fishing line into the bubbling pools, paint swatches and scarves bobbing like bait. She strings along her gifts, hoping Stephen will bite. Not only because she wishes to know—without wanting to ask—whether he is gay, but because some part of her probably hopes he is. Sitting there on her rock, watching the dark waters rush past, June hopes her fish will come in, wriggling and pink.

A gay son would be the perfect development for her. He could be the longed-for companion she secretly sought. In truth, he goes along with her act not merely because he wishes to toy with her but because it is a relief to be what she wants.

Also she has been on the hunt for a social cause. “The way Sissy goes on about autism!” she fumed. Sissy’s nephew had been diagnosed with it, and Sissy overflowed with statistics on mercury and vaccines. “We’re fortunate that he’s high functioning,” she remarked. “He’s exceptionally gifted, actually.”

Catherine was always walking for pink, donning T-shirts and hats. “Just a lumpectomy!” June complained. “She never even had cancer.”

His mother wants her own cause. “We could have a coming-out party,” she will say. “We’ll trim the cocktail napkins in pink!”

“I am interested in neither cock nor tail, Mother,” he should tell her. But where would that leave her?

His parents don’t want the truth of who he is. A gay son would be more convenient. June could begin planning fund-raisers and benefits. “Well, you know, my son Stephen,” she would say into the phone, eyeing her manicure, her hand held out at an angle. She would be so pleased to be dealt that card, a jack of spades. It would give her a full house, a royal flush. A way to trump her friends.

It isn’t right of him. He lets the water from the shower berate him. Not only because it is disingenuous to encourage her, but also because he plays the fool. The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.

People look where you tell them not to; they don’t focus on what you think they should. He stays mute on the subject of romance, and that is where June circles back in her fluttering way, revisiting the subject with only the most delicate inquiries.

In the parking lot they hadn’t bothered replying to his remarks. But he meant them, could only voice his thoughts through sarcasm, because how else was he supposed to say it? It’s not like his parents have ever modeled healthy forms of communication.

It’s the same with Nora, he realizes as he reaches to turn the water off. The lever is sleek, German—a work of art in his hand.

He hadn’t known how to talk with her about Leo. He didn’t understand what the two of them shared and was foolish enough to tell her so. That talk had gone disastrously.

It was winter break, soon after she and Leo had started dating. Snow was on the ground, slushy and gray, accumulating at intersections. Nora and Stephen had a few days together at Delancey before Leo came home from Boston and Nora headed to New Jersey for the holidays.

“So how far are you taking this Fred Flintstone fling?” he asked as they walked, arms linked.

“What makes you think it’s a fling?” she returned, frowning.

They walked a few paces more, the broad sidewalk empty. They’d had a glorious day together: brunch, followed by a long walk through the city, followed by a bottle of red wine at a bar on Pine that didn’t card. Stephen tried to keep his voice light, bringing the buzz back between them from the bar, but he recognized the change in his tone when he said, “Because it should be. He’s beneath you, Nora.”

She stopped abruptly. Their arms fell apart like a magician’s rings.

“Is that how you picture us?” she said sweetly. “Or did you assume he likes to be on top?”

“Nora—”

“Don’t,” she warned.

So this is it, he thought, standing on the sidewalk. It was the moment they had skirted ever since Leo had entered the scene.

Stephen didn’t feel jealous, exactly. It was more that he didn’t understand how the two of them clicked. They were two circles on a Venn diagram that were never supposed to overlap.

“You’re awful to him,” Nora said. “You treat him like he’s the village idiot. He makes me happy. And isn’t that what matters? More than your approval?”

They spent the next day avoiding each other. Nora left the house early to go to the museum. Nora hated museums. Stephen dejectedly headed to the library to do some research on Hamlet for a paper. When Leo got home from Boston that night, bounding through the front door, stopping to pet the dog and kiss Nora and slap Stephen on the shoulder, Stephen felt relieved for the circus of activity. He was glad to have the tension break. The three of them went to dinner without a word about it.

It’ll pass, Stephen told himself. He figured Leo and Nora wouldn’t make it to spring. But then Nora’s mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Stephen watched as she started to lean on Leo. And Stephen understood that he had grossly underestimated their relationship.

He tried making it up to her.

“Could one of you guys check on her?” Nora asked over the phone from Milan. It was the following fall. The phone line was filled with background noise—Stephen imagined her at a booth on the street—but the panic in her voice was clear. “I know it’s a lot to ask, I just—I need to know that she’s okay.”

“Of course,” Stephen told her. “Of course, Nora.”

Leo could change a tire or plunge a toilet, but he blanched at the thought of seeing Nora’s mom. “I wouldn’t know what to say,” he stammered. “I’ll go,” Stephen offered. He didn’t seek points for it. He didn’t say, “You owe me,” the way Leo would have.

He drove out to New Jersey in his parents’ sedan. It amazed him how a small state like that, a pinkie toe, could contain so much—the sprawling lawns of Princeton; the ghettos of Newark. There were lovely suburbs on the way to Nora’s house, but the green soon gave way to gray. He passed strip malls, shopping centers. Union was a wasteland.

He knocked on the door with its white metal frame. A tear in the screen, and the top step was loose. Nora’s mom yanked open the door and stood in her bathrobe, appraising him. “Not the one I expected,” she said, turning so he could follow her.

They crept up the carpeted stairs. Nora’s dad was watching golf on TV. “Other room,” she said. He nodded and clicked off the set, heading past them down the hall. A minute later, Stephen heard the muted Ahhhs of the golf crowd, their strange stage whisper.

“So,” she said. “Get you anything? Soda? Coffee?” She pronounced coffee as if it had a w. Cawfee.

“No, thank you, Mrs. Reed. I just—”

“Iris. Please.” She gestured for him to sit on the couch while she took the recliner. “An easy visitor. My favorite kind.” She tossed him a smile.

Stephen glanced around the room. The television set, an old model with wood paneling, sat beside a glass-tower stereo system with a record player, trinkets displayed on top: framed pictures, snow globes, souvenirs. If only June could see.

“So you’re here to get the report, huh?” Iris nodded from the chair. Her robe was secured over flannel pajamas. She wore big, fluffy slippers in the shape of cats.

“Nora’s worried about you. She can’t help it. Leo says one day we’ll be able to do phone calls with video feed—” Stephen stopped himself. He was babbling. Nora’s mom seemed to be taking him in, watching how this Yale kid, this alleged best friend, was doing. He took a breath, steadied himself. “It’s hard for her, being away. I think it makes her feel better to have a friend come see you.”

“To make sure I’m not croaking and not telling her about it. Which, let’s face it, I would do.” Iris reached over to the side table and drew forth a glass filled with breadsticks. “It helps,” she said, encouraging him.

With what? he thought, mystified, taking one. The nausea? Or did she mean that it helped in such moments to have a prop? Something to point with, something to munch on? Something to break the awful silence?

“What’s there to say?” She shrugged and snapped her breadstick in half. “The radiation is like punching in at a job. You go, you sit, you leave. There’s nothing to tell, really.”

“They weren’t supposed to do radiation,” Nora had said on the phone. “I’m worried it means she’s worse.”

“Scars, sure. Different machines, different side effects. But otherwise it’s the same. I tried telling Nora, it’s just to shrink the tumor. Then they’ll go back to the chemo again. I’ll tell you, though, the change is refreshing. Just to be doing something different.”

Iris munched on her breadstick and nodded as though discussing current events. “They’re the generals, you know. The docs give you the plan. Your job is to show up. You try not to complain too much. If you complain, it affects things. They think you can’t take it. The radiation is just a different weapon. Same war, different weapon.”

Stephen had the sensation of having wandered into a stranger’s house, of having to kill time until someone would fetch him. As though he were a boy, and at any minute the sound of his mother’s heels would signal that he could leave.

He sat up straighter. He had to do better than this for Nora. “I imagine it does feel like battle. Your body’s waging a war against an invader. How strange that when the doctors look at you, you’re the patient but also the enemy.”

Iris regarded him. She inclined the breadstick toward him, a pointer. “I see why she raves about you. And, you know, those damn doctors, they do exactly that.”

He ended up staying for two hours. Some thin line of comfort established itself, then grew. Iris had things she wanted to say. Not so much for Nora’s sake, but perhaps for her own. She was like a stand-up comic with months’ worth of saved material. “There’s this one nurse,” she said, squinting, “with these damn fingernails. They curl! I’m not kidding. The nails curl on themselves! How can that be legal?”

It wasn’t that she wanted a laugh. She just wanted someone who would listen without pitying her, without bringing the burden of their nerves into her living room. The breadsticks, he realized, had helped.

By the second hour, she let him get up to make coffee. “I think you mean coffee,” he teased. “Oh ho, Mr. Classy over here,” she said. When he poked his head out of the kitchen, she was smiling.

International Suisse Mocha, read the rectangular tin. The fragrance of cinnamon wafted up to his nose. Maybe she had bought it imagining Nora in Milan. Maybe that was as close to Europe as she could get.

Iris was the sort of woman who bought her pantyhose at the drugstore, the same place she probably picked up the coffee and the breadsticks. Her handbag, on the kitchen table, was old and faded, a patchwork of leather, and it probably held everything from an umbrella to Band-Aids, anything a person might need. Iris was grounded, no-nonsense. She was the opposite of his mother. She was, in short, a real mother.

When Stephen brought out the coffee, Iris had nodded off in her chair, her head turned to the side. He set the mugs down and walked over to the pictures on top of the stereo. There were no family shots of the three of them. No professional portraits in black and white that looked staged, even the dog regal.

Instead, there was Nora. Nora with her high school friends. Nora at prom. Nora onstage, a playbill from one of her shows.

You didn’t marry for you, Stephen thought to himself. You didn’t marry for money or romance. You married because it was what you were supposed to do. Then Nora came along and made it worthwhile.

When he leaned down to turn off the light by her chair before leaving, her hand flew up and trapped his wrist. He couldn’t see her expression. It was evening by then, the room dim. “Tell her I looked good,” she said. “Tell her I made the coffee.”

“Of course,” Stephen said uncertainly. “Of course, Iris. I will.”

Stephen had done exactly that. He called Nora in Milan the next morning and assured her that her mom seemed well. “Two hours!” Nora mused. “She must have really liked you. Did she give you the fancy coffee?”

Stephen steps out of the shower onto the white bath mat, its velvety surface plush. He has often thought since then that maybe Nora was enamored not with Leo but with Delancey, the fairy tale of the place. There were no ripped screen doors or loose brick steps. “I can’t believe you live here,” she’d murmured when she first visited. When Leo came down the stairs that day, maybe he carried some of Delancey’s glow with him. Maybe in the light from the skylight above, the frog appeared to be a prince.

Then there was Leo himself. Unassuming Leo, with his blueprints for a settled, suburban life, felt perhaps like a remedy to Nora. Maybe he answered her hope, her restless hope, for normalcy. Be careful what you wish for, he should tell her. It gets granted in middle age.

Nora didn’t see the GUTS of the place. She didn’t see all that got swept aside by the Portmans—all they ignored and avoided. But maybe she didn’t need to. Maybe our choices are too complicated to dissect. We choose without knowing why. We choose because, we choose despite. The heart does not make it easy.

“I regret nothing,” Grandma Portman had told him. “Not a thing! Because of you, bubeleh.”

When he confronted Nora that day on the sidewalk, some part of him knew it was a losing battle. What was he expecting? He couldn’t convince her to dump Leo. He couldn’t sink his hooks into her and drag her back to their old friendship. Life didn’t work that way. He could be the best friend in the world, driving out to New Jersey to sit with her sick mom, but it was Leo she would lean on. She made her choice.

And so Stephen receded. His grandmother became a substitute for his best friend. Because—and it strikes him now as so naïve—he had thought she was the one person who wasn’t going anywhere.

After all this time—he’ll be thirty soon, Grandma Portman had reminded him—life and death still come as a shock.

Nora doesn’t want to know the truth about her fairy tale. And maybe she’ll find happiness. Who is he to say? Maybe contentment will be waiting for her at the end. Stephen has been convinced that Leo is trying to trap her, but isn’t he doing the same? Fantasizing about escaping with her to the city when she has plans of her own?

The lines of an old nursery rhyme come to him. Peter, Peter pumpkin eater, / Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.

He tries to recall the rest of it. He pauses before the mirror, white with steam. “The chandelier makes all the difference,” he will tell his mother. “The heated towels are superb.”

He remembers the lines as he reaches for the door. He put her in a pumpkin shell, / And there he kept her very well.