The Last Romantics

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“What? Joe?” Noni was coming out the front door carrying another box. “Joe, why are you lying down? Why is everyone on the grass? Aren’t we still packing?”

“I’m taking a break,” said Joe. “Fiona looked sad.”

“I am not sad,” I said quickly. It was a lie, of course, but I objected to the idea that I was so easy to read. The truth was that I didn’t want this, us here sprawled on the lawn, to end. I wanted this miserable, hot day to go on forever. I wanted Joe beside me, Caroline and Renee within earshot. All of us close enough to touch.

“Noni,” said Joe from his prone position, “I just want you to know that I plan to be home a lot, so don’t forget the Dr Pepper and the sour-cream-and-onion Lay’s potato chips, not that Pringles bullshit, and those peanut butter M&M’s and mint-chocolate-chip ice cream—any brand is okay, but it must be green.”

Noni stood above Joe, hands on her hips.

“Are you taking notes?” he asked. “Mental notes?”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing. Now, would you get up and help me finish here?”

“Fiona needs me more,” Joe said, but he pushed himself up just enough to throw his arms around me and kiss me on the cheek, and then he was up, running back into the house.

“Yuck.” I rubbed Joe’s spit off my face. Nathan smiled, but there was tension and distraction in his face.

“Caro,” Nathan whispered to Caroline. Her eyes were closed. “Now?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered without opening her eyes.

“Now what?” I said. I’d heard a tremor in Nathan’s voice, an unmistakable wobble of excitement.

“I think we should get your mom,” Nathan said. Caroline’s eyes fluttered open.

Soon all of us stood in a loose circle in the shade thrown by the towering locust I had never been able to climb, all of us looking at Caroline and Nathan.

“Caroline, what is it?” asked Noni.

Nathan looked to Caroline, who smiled and nodded. Nathan cleared his throat, but it was Caroline who spoke. “We’re married!” she said, and clapped her hands quickly like a child.

The words dropped quiet as a cloud into our circle, and for a moment we all stood muzzled, stunned. A crow called across the empty street. Somewhere, a lawn mower started up with a bewildered buzz. Caroline was nineteen years old.

“Oh, Caroline,” Noni said, her voice thick, her face fallen.

“We did it last week, at the courthouse,” Caroline said, ignoring Noni. “Here’s the ring.” She held out her hand, and yes, there it was, a thin silver band with a stone so small it seemed merely a nick in the metal.

“And I thought I would be the last,” Noni said.

“The last what?” asked Caroline.

“The last to … to decide something like this. For a man.”

Caroline said nothing. Nathan shifted, his discomfort clear. We all waited as our mother considered the news of Caroline’s marriage. She shook her head and looked up at the sky, which was flat and heavy and absolutely blue. I thought she might yell or begin to cry, and for a moment all four of us stood poised to receive that, ready in that far-off, distant way we would always be ready to lose our mother again to turbulent, unbearable emotion.

Noni exhaled. She shook her head and grimaced and wiped her eyes. “Well, at least you’re not pregnant,” she said with a laugh. And then, anxiously: “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

Caroline giggled and shook her head no. “Well, congratulations, then,” Noni said. “This is … exciting!” And with that we all breathed once again.

“Congratulations!” I said. “What a surprise!” I hugged Caroline and stepped back to examine her. She didn’t look any different. I almost expected the weight of this event to show on her face, alter the light in her eyes. But no, the same limpid blue, the same pale smattering of freckles. Only Nathan seemed physically altered: he stood straighter, it seemed to me, shoulders more square. The responsibility perhaps weighed on him, or maybe it simply made him proud. Husband. Wife. Despite our mother’s lessons, or maybe because of them, I believed secretly and fervently in the heady promises of love. I believed it would mark us all in some irreversible, wonderful way. Even me someday.

And then, before I knew it, Renee and Joe were in the car, the sun falling in long lines through the low branches, Noni calling out last-minute driving directions, and Renee nodding and yelling out the window, “Don’t worry!”

“We’ll see you next week!” Noni called. In a few days, when Noni could take time off work, she and I would drive to Boston for the end of Joe’s orientation week. Then I would see his drafty dorm room, Alden’s emerald quad and sparkling baseball field, and meet a few of the boys who would become his teammates and fraternity brothers, his best friends. They all seemed cut from a mold: strong-boned, clear-eyed, with shockingly good posture. Joe looked like them. He fit in, I thought then; he had found his natural place. We would meet Joe’s coach—a tall blond man with dazzling teeth who spoke very fast and made me long for Coach Marty—and eat tepid pasta in the cavernous freshman dining hall. Throughout, Joe would usher us from one event to the next, building to building, with a sort of good-natured bafflement, as though he were as surprised as anyone to find himself here, amid the ivy-covered walls and straight-A students.

As Renee carefully released the parking brake and eased away from the house, I saw Joe freeze: a thin smile, a hand in mid-wave, a length of tan, strong arm.

“Good luck!” I called. This seemed the right thing to say, although I considered Joe already the luckiest, the most charmed. It seemed inevitable that all he wanted would line up before him like the balls that long ago Ace would pitch, pulling them one by one from his bulging pockets as we watched breathless from the stands.

Crack, crack, crack, crack!

Each hit was followed by a startling, whole silence as we watched the ball travel up into air and then breathlessly down, down, down, until it would land with a final dull thump in the grassy field.

PART II (#ulink_58ed6b7a-d35d-527f-9806-92c4c76e38b2)

Year 2079 (#ulink_8f5d4399-b12d-5714-bb0e-0fafd0d6f872)

THE LIGHTS IN the auditorium flickered once, then again. The microphone cut out and I stopped speaking. Henry, dear Henry, stood up from the front row and made his way onstage. He was only eighty-four, but his knees were bad from riding horses all those years, and so he limped a bit, winced as he climbed the steps. There was an empty chair beside me, vacated hastily by the venue organizer, and Henry took it and then took hold of my hand and brought it to his lips. In the second row, a young man and woman watched us. She had vivid red hair, the color of a flag, and the man’s arm circled her shoulders. Her hair fell across his chest. They, too, were holding hands. Entwined, I thought. Knotted, woven, linked.

And that was the moment the room plunged into darkness. I felt the pressure of Henry’s palm. There was one short, sharp scream from the balcony, but otherwise the crowd remained calm. No rush for the exits, no hysteria. This kind of thing happened too frequently now for it to rouse much of a panic. Still, I felt the heightened tension in the room. The shallow breathing, hands squeezing hands, sweat rising on palms, eyes staring into nothing. Whispers of confusion and comfort.

We waited in darkness for one minute, three, five. My thoughts turned to Luna, the young Luna here in the room and the other Luna out there somewhere. Was that Luna still alive? Did she ever wonder about me, too? Did she wear a diamond ring on her finger? On a chain around her neck? Or was it hidden away in a drawer, unworn and forgotten?

My eyes adjusted. A few exit signs glowed orange. The greenish hue of screens flickered like fireflies on a summer night. I remembered the security check: DEVICES STRICTLY FORBIDDEN INSIDE THE AUDITORIUM! But of course there are always people who will find a way to break the rules.

“The whole city is out!” one woman declared, reading from a bright light.

This information provoked more agitation, groans, and some hurried, hushed conversations. Who cares if the city is out? I thought. Perhaps it was one of those megastorms, or a tremor deep underground, or a hurricane off the coast of Borneo. The news exhausted me. The news bored me. What did it matter? Here we sat, the proverbial ducks. We might as well just reach for the chocolate candy in our pockets, hold the hand of the one we love best, and smile.

Backstage I heard the rustle and hurried footfalls of venue staff doing their best to turn the lights on again.

“We’ve got it,” a voice called, “the generator.” There was the thump of a heavy lever being pulled and dim yellow lights emerged along the base of the walls and along the rows between seats.

Suddenly the space was transformed. It was no longer dark and menacing, nor was it a grand auditorium divided between stage and audience. It was now simply a room, a large, cozy room with an arched ceiling and many, many chairs. Oh, this is something, I thought. Now we can have a proper chat. Now we can get down to the things that matter.

The young woman Luna had been perched on a folding chair. Now she again stood. She tapped the microphone gently, but it was dead, of course, and so she called out, “Ms. Skinner?”

I felt a surge of great affection for her, irrational in its intensity. That mole, high on her right cheek. I struggled to recall the other Luna, the Luna from a lifetime ago.

“Yes, dear,” I said. “Please go ahead.” I wanted to scoop her up and protect her, to ferry her out of here and back to my house in the woods with its fence and bunker and generator and fresh-spring well. There I might convince myself that we were safe.

“When did the unraveling begin?” Luna asked.

“The unraveling?” I repeated.

“You said this was a story about the failures of love,” said Luna, her tone accusatory. “That’s what you said.”

“Yes. I did say that.”

“You repeat the word unraveling several times in The Love Poem. You said there was happiness in your family, and then—” Luna did not finish the sentence. She left the question hanging over me, over us all.

“And then,” I repeated. I cleared my throat. I glanced at Henry, and he winked, nodded for me to continue. If there is one thing I have succeeded at in life, I thought then, it’s choosing husbands.

When did Joe’s unraveling begin? I considered how to answer Luna’s question. When he met Sandrine? Or took the job at Morgan Capital? Or was it when his baseball career ended with one slide into home? Maybe it began even earlier, when he was still a child who looked like a man, tall and golden, watched and worshipped in Bexley like the local god of any small village. Later, when I asked my sisters, Caroline believed that it began during the Pause, when the ways in which love might disappear first became known to us. We were too young, Caroline said, for that kind of wisdom.

Renee said no, the Pause didn’t do that to Joe. Look at the day of our father’s funeral when he raged and howled. Renee believed that the unraveling began then, in the yellow house, Joe with the fireplace poker, surrounded by all those who loved him and no one, not one of us, able to help. From that moment, she believed, it was written across his skin, embedded within the veins.

To unravel is to unknit, disconnect, untangle, separate. To fall apart.

“I will tell you this,” I replied. “The love of your life is always the one you have betrayed the most. The love that defines you is the one upon whom you once turned your back.” I was speaking directly to Luna now, not to the woman with the red hair and her partner, not to Henry, not to the faceless masses here in the hall who had paid money to see me speak. Only to Luna. “The unraveling began—” I said, but then stopped myself, tilted my head. “I don’t know when it began, I’m afraid. But I do remember when I first became aware that it was happening.”

Chapter 5 (#ulink_7e1f9060-1490-51c6-a872-a0789c312f77)

IT WAS AUTUMN 2004. An election year, long enough after 9/11 that we no longer spoke of it every day but close enough that the Manhattan skyline still looked broken. I had agreed to help Caroline clean out her new rental house in the small town of Hamden, Connecticut. I’d seen Caroline and her family infrequently since she and Nathan had left Bexley. In twelve years they’d moved four times, from one university town to the next in search of Nathan’s Ph.D. in biology and a permanent teaching position. The Skinner-Duffys now numbered five: Nathan, Caroline, ten-year-old Louis, and the twins, six-year-old Lily and Beatrix. Their most recent moves had been to cities where one of Nathan’s siblings lived—his brother Terry in Columbus, his sister Maddy in Austin. We’d assumed they’d settle there in Texas, the kids growing up with drawls and a fondness for BBQ, but last month Nathan had received a tenure-track offer from Hamden College, a cozy liberal-arts school located thirty minutes from Noni in Bexley and an hour’s train ride from me, Renee, and Joe in New York City.

Caroline was finally coming home.

“I’m happy to help with the move,” I told Caroline. “Whatever you need me to do.”

“Oh, Fi, thank you,” said Caroline. We were on the phone, Caroline in Austin, me in my apartment in Queens that I shared with Jenji and Beth, two friends from Vassar and a third, Umani, we’d found on Craigslist. I was twenty-seven years old and worked as an editorial assistant at an environmental NGO called ClimateSenseNow! My job sounded good at dinner parties, but it required little more than correcting the maddening typos of my boss, Homer Goshen, Ph.D., and writing the occasional high-minded press release. Because of this, and because I was paid less per hour than an adolescent babysitter, I felt justified in taking regular sick days. Inexplicably, Homer allowed it. Hope that ankle heals up, he’d say over the phone, or That must be a nasty bug. A guilty pang always followed these calls, but rarely was it strong enough to make me go to work.

“The Goats are useless,” Caroline continued. “No one can come, even for a few hours. They’re all so busy getting married or finishing their dissertations or whatever. Emily showed at New York Fashion Week, did Noni tell you?”

Emily was Nathan’s second sister, a recent graduate of FIT, prone to wearing foodstuff as clothing.

“She hasn’t mentioned it,” I said, although of course Noni had. “It’s hard to keep up with the achievements of those Duffys.” In the background I heard one of the twins singing a nonsense song and Louis calling, “Mom, where’s my oboe?”

“I’m glad you’re moving back east, Caroline,” I said.

“God, so am I.” There was a muffled pause as she spoke to Louis, and then she returned. “And, Fiona,” she said, “we need to talk about Joe.”

“Sure.” I was hungover, eating potato chips out of the bag, and I paused to lick salt from my fingers. “Joe, sure,” I said, and then we spoke a bit longer about flight arrivals and train times, and then I hung up the phone.

I didn’t think much about why Caroline had mentioned our brother. It was one week before Joe’s engagement party, and I assumed she wanted to discuss the wedding. He was set to marry Sandrine Cahill, a popcorn blonde who worked as an accessories buyer at Barneys. Sandrine grew up outside Chicago, the only child of an industrious midwestern family that presided over the manufacture of something ubiquitous but boring, like computer paper or parts of a car. Sandrine was not objectionable in any obvious way. She came from sensible money, and she worked hard to build on it, yet there was something ruthless in her pursuit of the good life. New York did that, I think, to some people. Sandrine wanted prestige and fancy things. She wanted recognition, and she wanted you to know exactly what she possessed: a front-row seat at Marc Jacobs, perfect abdominals, a position in the Junior League, a dinner reservation at Nobu. I couldn’t stand her, nor could Renee, but Caroline the eternal optimist insisted we were being unfair. Surprisingly, Noni tolerated her, too. I think our mother secretly admired Sandrine, even after the engagement fell apart, for her collection of achievements. I couldn’t help but feel Noni’s comparison and judgment: If only Fiona were such a go-getter! Think what she might accomplish.

On Tuesday morning I took the train from Grand Central Station through the city bustle and vacant lots and gray, low urban sprawl, out past the suburbs proper, and into the wider expanses of green until we reached the small middle- and working-class towns like Danbury and Woodbury and Hamden.

Caroline, in a red coat, waved at me from the platform. “You’re so skinny,” she said as we hugged, and it was neither a compliment nor a complaint. I’d lost another twenty pounds since she’d seen me last Christmas. It was now October.

“Just wait until you see the house,” Caroline said. “It looks exactly like a castle. I think this will be it. Our forever home!” She winked. The forever home had been her black swan for years now. After the third move, from Mississippi to Ohio, Caroline began talking about the forever home the way first-graders talked about the tooth fairy. Could it possibly exist? Would she ever see it?

We drove alongside the Metro-North train tracks and rows of beaten-down bungalows, through Hamden’s low-lying downtown, then past the green college quad and sports fields and into the residential neighborhood where professors lived in rambling old homes with poster boards of KERRY-EDWARDS ’04 perched on every lawn. Caroline accelerated and slowed as she squinted at house numbers. It was late morning, sunny and crisp, trees capped with bright orange leaves. Hamden reminded me so much of Bexley: the same splintery homes, pavement surging with tree roots, the same pumpkins with the same toothy faces. Along the sidewalk, a girl kicked sullenly at leaves, her body thick beneath a pink parka, her legs stout and round as logs. As we passed her in the car, I felt an ache not of nostalgia or grief but something in between the two.

“Here it is,” Caroline said at last, and pulled in to a short, gravelly drive.

The front yard of Caroline’s forever home was covered with damp, unraked leaves and flanked by a row of overgrown shrubs. A fallen tree branch long as the car. A side bed of brittle, brown daisies. A white plastic bag stuck on a bush that flapped in the breeze. Caroline’s eyes swept over the mess, but she didn’t comment on it, just tilted her head back to take stock.

The house was a pale lavender with yellow trim, the paint faded and flaking. Green clumps of moss clung to the steeply pitched roof, and the front steps were grayed and sagging with age. But the place was large, a true Victorian, with tall windows, gabled molding, and, best of all, a rounded towerlike structure with its own pointed roof rising from the second story.

“It’s just like a castle,” Caroline said, turning to me, eager as a puppy for affirmation. It was a look I’d never seen before. I was so young when Caroline left Bexley, and then she’d always lived so far away. And all those blond, clever Goats took possession of Caroline in a way that I understood and resented only years later. They helped her through pregnancies and childbirths. They advised on what kind of minivan to buy, would Montessori be a good fit for Louis, do the twins really need that DTaP vaccine? She let herself be folded into the Duffys, and who could blame her? Two bright, chirpy parents, cousins and family football games at Thanksgiving. The Skinners were too few and too complicated to compete with all that photogenic togetherness.

But now here she was. Her hair hung lank from airplane air, her red coat was too thin for this chilly day. She’d arrived into JFK at five fifteen that morning, traveling all this way for a house she’d seen only in photographs.

“You’re right, Caroline,” I said, and smiled. “A castle.”

We opened the front door and stepped into a damp and penetrating cold. I shivered. We stood at the foot of a wide staircase that led up into darkness. To our left, the large living room was bare, with a sooty fireplace on the far wall that gaped dark and menacing as a wound. There was dust everywhere and a dry brown substance crusting the shadowy corners of the room. The place smelled of mold and something else. Something closed-in, musty, animal.

Caroline dropped the bag of cleaning supplies to the floor.

“I think we might need some help,” I said. “What about Renee or Joe?”

“Renee’s taking on extra ER shifts,” Caroline answered in a monotone. “As if the surgical fellowship isn’t enough. And Joe … I don’t know. I didn’t ask him.” The last she said vaguely, walking away from me into the dim interior of the house.

We went room to room, the only sound our dull footsteps and Caroline’s occasional sharp intake of breath as another mess or sign of age came into view. In the kitchen there was a squat white refrigerator with a long silver handle and a walk-in pantry, its shelves lined with scraps of greasy paper, smelling of old bacon and ammonia. In the hall we found one half bath with an unspeakable toilet. In the dining room, cobwebs intricate as chandeliers hung from the ceiling.

We finished our circle and arrived back in the living room.

“Caroline, can the college find you another house?” I asked gently. The kids and Nathan were set to arrive from Austin in two days.

“Oh, no, this is the only one,” she replied. “It’s rent-to-buy. It’s all we can afford.” Her eyes were bright. “But I love it. It’s perfect. That big front window? These original floors?” She rubbed a toe along a floorboard to reveal a grainy, dark wood beneath the dirt. “Let’s get started.”

And so we began to clean with spray bottles and brushes and paper towels, wearing unwieldy yellow gloves and those small paper masks I associated with Asian flus and hypochondriacs. As we worked side by side, I realized how good it felt to have her back. I’d missed Caroline for herself, but what I’d missed more was the idea of us, the four Skinner siblings, together. She was the missing piece of the puzzle of adulthood that I’d been trying for years to put together here in New York with Joe and Renee. Now I could be the quirky aunt to Caroline’s kids, taking them to gallery shows and poetry readings in the city, teaching them to swear, and buying them candy. Renee would be the role model who showed them how to work hard and succeed, who examined their cut knees with professional concern. And Uncle Joe would tell them fart jokes, give them extravagant electronics for their birthdays, teach them to catch and throw. Joe still loved baseball, even if he no longer played, and who knew? Maybe Louis would be a natural. And here in Hamden, Caroline would host family dinners where we’d all gather and make toasts and drink and eat cake and play Scrabble. At last we would be siblings who were no longer children.