at the Mayflower Motel in another two hours. The surprises weren't over yet. Age was a sad fiction, a story for the weak.
His life with Mary receded, and he found that he could live more freely. Something softened. Something that had lived with him inside his skin, a prickly current of anger and disappointment, began to relax and in its place were only the hours, one and then another, work and a good hard fuck and more work and dinner and sleep. Mary lived her life alongside his. She tried new recipes (cheese fondue, quiche Lorraine), bought what she needed. As their battles and their love subsided, Constantine began to see a simplicity that had always been there, flowing under the daily strife. He began to see that it was enough to fuck and earn money, to talk on the phone to your beautiful daughter whenever she happened to call and to weed the garden with your youngest girl, to exclaim with her over the first radish. Try not to think too much about the boy. Constantine's lunch-hour sessions with Magda, who expected nothing of him beyond what he wanted to give her, seemed to have rescued him in some deep way he could not possibly have anticipated. He felt as if he were living a new and easier life, and all that remained of his old life, the single stubborn convention, was his habit of driving out to his houses at night to watch the inhabitants go about their ordinary business. He did it less often now, just once every couple of months. But still he went. Still he parked his car and listened, with a terrible yearning, as these mysterious men and women went about their nocturnal feedings and arguments, their lovemaking, their endless worrying about the fate they had made for their children. Still he sat in the silence of his Buick, smoking one cigarette after another, listening to the little neighborhood noises with the furious attention of a priest in the confessional, straining to hear the machinery of real good and evil humming under his parishoners' clumsy anecdotes about the failings of their flesh.
1974/ Mary dressed in cream for the ceremony. She wore a cream-colored straw hat and a simple cream dress under a beige linen jacket. As she walked through the campus with her gloved hand on Constantine's elbow, as leaf shadows shifted on the grass around them, she knew she'd arrived at a moment that would hold for her, whatever else happened. Whatever mistakes she'd made, whatever humiliations suffered, she would always have this: herself walking beside her husband at Harvard as strange music drifted out of dormitory windows and children on their way to promising futures mugged for the cameras in cap and gown. She knew how her gold earrings gave back the light. From one of the windows, a pure tenor voice sang something about a wild world. Or a wide world.
“Quite a place,” Constantine said.
“Mm-hm,” she said, with a tick of annoyance. She didn't want to be appreciative. She wanted only to be with and of this place, to be exactly who she was right now, an attractive woman in a smart outfit come to see her son graduate from Harvard. Come to sit between her husband in a navy-blue suit and her daughter, the wife of a promising young Yale law student.
“I made the reservations for lunch,” Constantine said. “At that place the Florios are so crazy about.”
“Fine,” she said. She didn't want a conversation. She didn't want to dwell on her fear that Paul and Liz Florio's idea of a good restaurant would be expensive but wrong, a flashy place with elaborate, bad food; a place other families told jokes about as they drove past on their way to restaurants Mary and Constantine couldn't know about. She'd asked Billy where they should go for lunch after the ceremony but Billy was acting strange these days. All he'd been willing to say was, “Please, let's not make a big deal out of this. Let's just get a hamburger someplace. I don't want a Hallmark card scenario, not with everything that's going down in the world.” She hadn't known what to tell him, beyond the obvious: “You know, you're the first one in my family or your father's family to graduate from college. Ever.”
“I know, Ma. I know.”
Billy would be the only one. Susan was married and Zoe was Zoe. Constantine's people were still farmers in Greece, as far as anybody