Andrea Barrett - Ship Fever - Stories

Morning coffee in the sunny kitchen; a quiet browse through the papers and then a shower and some shopping or a walk. No meals to make, no garden to weed or guest room to rearrange. No guests. For nineteen years she had entertained Joel’s friends and business associates; she had been famous for her parties and Joel had been proud of her success. Their closest moments had been spent on the sofa, going over menus and guest lists or rehashing the high points of a party just past, and she had never told him she knew that his friends still compared her unfavorably with his first wife.

Now she spent days alone in her new place and felt no desire to call anyone. She walked to Rittenhouse Square. She haunted the antique shops on Spruce and Lombard and then spent hours moving knicknacks here and pillows there. Silence, idleness, solitude. Where was Joel in all of this? Sometimes she walked the few blocks to the art museum and gazed at the statues or strolled through the hall in which the collection of Joel’s grandfather’s paintings hung.

Joel had taken her here on their fourth or fifth date, but he hadn’t said a word about his family. He had let her admire the paintings and read the polished plaque in the front of the room. “Any relation?” she remembered asking, when she saw the identical last names — thinking of course not, or at most someone distant; laughing, joking. “My grandfather,” he said, and only then had she realized how surely she was in over her head. She thought how her grandmothers might have done laundry for his family, and she dreaded what Joel might think of her father, who shed his clothes after work in the basement and then showered in a grimy stall, washing off layers of dust and mortar before entering the scrubbed and parsimonious upper floors.

But Joel had already told her he loved her by then. She was gentle, he said. And so flexible — she was as happy lying around in his old pajamas, eating muffins and reading the papers, as she was when he took her out to fancy nightclubs. She sang while she cooked. The rich, complicated meals she fixed, based on her grandmothers’ recipes, made his eyes moist with pleasure.

In a bar off Rittenhouse Square, he courted her with recollections of his first visit to Portillo. He told her how, during the summer after he finished college, he’d found a spot on a freighter headed for Chile. He’d made his way to Santiago; then up the Andes and to the hotel, where he’d joined some old acquaintances. Just a handful of skiers, he said, back in those good old days. She could recall doing a quick calculation in her head as he spoke, and realizing that she’d been five at the time.

Endless white snowfields, he’d said, his hands moving in the smoky air. Daring stunts; condors soaring over the rocks. And although he was middle-aged and filled with the hectic despair of the newly divorced, his stories made him seem young. He was young, he said. He had married right after his trip to Portillo and had two children quickly. His wife had dumped him so she could discover herself.

“She wants to paint,” he’d said bitterly, over a meal that Zaga made him: roast veal with fennel and garlic? Pork braised with prunes? “Watercolors,” he’d said. “So she’s got the house in Meadowbrook, which I’m still paying the mortgage on, and the kids are with her, and I’m stuck here.”

‘Here’ was an airy two-bedroom apartment with an enormous kitchen, nicer than anything Zaga could afford. She was nothing like his first wife, Joel said, and she took this as a compliment. She was drawn by his stability, his solidity, the radiant success with which he managed his outward life. She was touched by his inability to cook or clean and by his obvious need for her. He reached across his sofa after their first visit with her family, and he lifted a strand of her hair and said, “Did you get this from some beautiful Lithuanian grandmother?”

She took this to mean that he accepted her background, and her. He bought her new clothes and then, in the galleries where he purchased paintings, introduced her as if he were proud. Two years later, when the huge house in Merion was almost done, she was thrilled when he proposed a delayed honeymoon in Portillo. Joel had been shaped by the Andes, she thought; perhaps the mountain air could transform her into someone from his world.

Then Rob and Alicia, unexpectedly abandoned by Joel’s ex-wife, sailed into their lives like a three-masted ship from a foreign country. Their arrival changed the focus of the trip but made it seem even more important. By the time Zaga discovered she was pregnant, the plans were too far along to change without disappointing everyone.

Those early days came back to her one afternoon, over a lunch of salmon and asparagus salad in the museum café. She realized that she had not seen any of Joel’s paintings anywhere. She went back to the hall where his grandfather’s collection hung, thinking Joel’s bequests might have been mingled in. Then she walked more carefully from room to to room. Nothing. The next day she called the museum and made an appointment to meet the woman in charge of new acquisitions. The woman had an office so softly blue and gray that Zaga felt as if she’d been set inside a cloud.

There were some small financial difficulties, the woman murmured. She crossed her long, narrow legs and regarded her excellent shoes. Of course the museum was enormously grateful for the bequest. But so few people, outside the art world, understood the expenses involved with such a gift: cataloging, cleaning, reframing, lighting — her voice drifted off and so did her gaze, leaving Zaga to fill the empty space.

“You have an endowment, surely?” Zaga said. Joel had taught her a good deal and his friends had taught her more.

“Of course,” the woman said. Her voice hovered between the purr she would have used with Joel and the bite she would have used on Zaga, had Zaga not been married to Joel. “But these are difficult times, and our budget is constantly being trimmed…”

“Would a donation be useful?” Zaga asked. She felt a thrill as she said that. Joel had always made the big donations; of course he had, the money was his. But now Joel was gone and the money was hers.

When the woman smiled her teeth were perfectly white and straight. “Coffee?” she said. Zaga nodded and the woman summoned her assistant.

Three days before they were due to leave the Andes, a blizzard cut them off from the outside world. No traffic arrived or departed and there was nothing to do but wait. Joel and the children still skied, masked in goggles and wrapped in extra clothes, delighted at their extended vacation. Zaga sat, more and more frantic, at a table by the window in the lounge of the Hotel Portillo. Dr. Sepulveda, also trapped by the blizzard and unable to return to his home in Santiago, sometimes joined her. The first time he appeared at her table, he talked about the weather for a while and then fell silent and studied her face.

“You must be Slavic,” he said. “With those cheekbones and that name.” He lit a cigarette and turned from her face to the mountain. “Let me guess,” he said. “Slovenian royalty. Ukrainian landowners. White Russian aristocrats fleeing the Bolsheviks.”

“Lithuanian potato-and-cabbage peasants,” she admitted. Was he teasing her? She had seen faces like his in the paintings of Spanish nobility that hung in the museum at home. “My parents were born in Philadelphia, but only just. I have a brother who’s a bricklayer, like my father; another who’s a cop. The big success is Timothy — he’s an optometrist. My sister works part-time in a bakery, and I was working as a secretary in an art gallery when I met Joel.”

“Really,” the doctor said. “Among the modern languages, Lithuanian is the one most closely related to Sanskrit.”