Chapter One

Annie Oh

V iveca’s wedding dress has a name: Gaia. It’s lovely. Layers of

sea green silk chiffon, cap sleeves, an empire waist, an asym-
metrical A-­line skirt with the suggestion of a train. I forget
the designer’s name; Ianni something. He’s someone Viveca knows
from the Hellenic Fashion Designers Association. It arrived at the
apartment from Athens yesterday, and Minnie has pressed it and
hung it on the door of Viveca’s closet.
Gaia: I Googled it yesterday after Viveca’s dress arrived and wrote
down what it said on an index card. It’s on the bureau. I pick it up
and read.

After Chaos arose broad-­breasted Gaia, the primordial goddess

of the Earth and the everlasting foundation of the Olympian
gods. She was first the mother of Uranus, the ancient Greek
embodiment of heaven, and later his sexual mate. Among their
children were the mountains, the seas, the Cyclopes, and the
Hundred-­Handed giants who aided Zeus in his successful battle
against the Titans, whom Gaia had also birthed.

Chaos, incest, monsters, warring siblings: it’s a strange name for a

wedding dress.
The three Vera Wang dresses Viveca had sent over for me to con-
sider were delivered yesterday, too. (Vera is one of Viveca’s clients at
the gallery.) There’s an ivory-­colored dress, another that has a tinge of
pink, a third that’s pearl gray. Minnie spread them across the bed in
the guest bedroom, but after she went home, I carried them into our

WeAreWater_i_viii_1_568.indd 27 1/16/13 11:03 AM

 28 WA L LY L A M B

bedroom and hung them to the left of the Gaia. This morning when I
woke up, they scared me. I thought for a split second that four women
were standing over by the closet. Four brides—­one in gorgeous green,
three in off-­white.
Viveca is abroad still. She went to Athens a week ago for a fitting
but then decided to stay several more days to visit with an elderly aunt
(her father’s surviving sister) and to finalize the details for our wed-
ding trip to Mykonos. She called me from there last night. “Sweet-
heart, it’s the land of enchantment here. Have you looked at the pic-
tures I e-­mailed you?” I said I hadn’t—­that I’d been more in the studio
than at the apartment for the last several days, which was a lie. “Well,
do,” she said. “Not that photographs can really capture it. In daylight,
the Aegean is just dazzling, and at sunset it turns a beautiful cobalt
blue. And the villa I’ve rented? Anna, it’s to die for! It sits high on a
hill above town and there’s a panoramic view of the harbor and some
of the other islands in the archipelago. The floors are white marble
from a quarry in Paros, and there’s an oval pool, an indoor fountain,
a terrace that looks out on a grape arbor that’s unbelievably lush and
lovely.” Why a pool if the sea is right there? I wonder. “The houses
here are sun bleached to the most pristine white, Anna, and there are
hibiscus growing along the south side of the villa that, against that
whiteness, are the most intense red you could ever imagine. I just can’t
wait to share it all with you. You’ll see. This place is an artist’s dream.”
“I’ll bet it is,” I said. “For an artist who’s interested in capturing
what’s pretty and picturesque. I’m not.”
“I know that, Anna. It’s what drew me to your work from the start.”
“It?” I said. “What’s ‘it’?”
There was a long pause before she answered me. “Well, it’s like I
was telling that ­couple that bought those two pieces from your Pando-
ra series. Your work looks p­ eople in the eye. It comforts the disturbed
and disturbs the comfortable. But this will be a vacation, sweetheart.
You work so hard. Mykonos is my gift to you, Anna. My gift to us.
Four weeks surrounded by what’s lovely and life affirming at the start
of our married life. Don’t we deserve that?”
The room went blurry with my tears. “I miss you,” I said.

WeAreWater_i_viii_1_568.indd 28 1/16/13 11:03 AM

 W E A R E WAT E R 29

“I miss you, too, Anna. I miss you, too.”

It’s not that I don’t want to be with her in Mykonos. But four
whole weeks? In all the years I’ve been at it, I’ve never been away from
my work that long. Well, to be fair, she’ll be away from her work, too.
“It’s not a very savvy business decision,” she said when she told me
she’d rented the villa for the entire month of October. ­“People will
have awakened from their Hamptons comas by then, reengaged with
the city, and be ready to buy. But I said to myself, ‘Viveca, the hell
with commerce for once! Seize the day!” I smiled and nodded when
she said that, swallowing back my ambivalence instead of voicing it.
You do that for someone you love, right? Keep your mouth shut
instead of opening it. Bend on the things that are bendable. This wed-
ding, for instance. It’s Viveca who wants to make our union “official.”
And where we’ll be married: I’ve had to bend on that, too. Okay, fine.
I get it. Connecticut has legalized gay marriage and New York hasn’t.
But why not book a place in some pretty little Gold Coast town closer
to the city? Cos Cob or Darien? Why the town where Orion and I
raised our kids? She’d wanted to surprise me, she said. Well, she’d
achieved her objective, but it’s . . . awkward. It’s uncomfortable.
Okay then, Annie. If you have misgivings, why go through with
it? Why not tell her you’ve had second thoughts? . . . I look up, look
around our well-­appointed apartment, and I see a part of the answer
hanging on the wall in the hallway: the framed poster announcing
the opening of my first show at viveca c. The headline, annie oh: a
shock to the system!, and beneath it, the full-­color photo of my
sculpture Birthings: the row of headless mannequins, their bloody legs
spread wide, their wombs expelling serial killers. Speck, Bundy, Gacy.
Monsters all.
My art comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable: she’d
put it better than I ever could have. It’s one of the reasons why I love
Viveca. The fact that she not only promotes my work and sells it at
prices I couldn’t have imagined, but that she also gets it. And yes, her
apartment is as lovely as she is, and our lovemaking feels satisfying and
safe. But for me that may be the foundation of our intimacy: the fact
that she understands what my work attempts to do.

WeAreWater_i_viii_1_568.indd 29 1/16/13 11:03 AM

 30 WA L LY L A M B

Orion never did. But then again, why would he have? I’d been so
guarded all those years. A twenty-­seven-­year marriage of guardedness,
based on nothing more than the fact that he was a man and, therefore,
not to be trusted with the worst of my secrets.
But come on, Annie. You haven’t told Viveca your secrets either.
Why is that? Because you’re afraid she might change her mind? Stop
taking care of you? Be honest. Your own mother dies in the flood that
night. Then your father drinks himself out of your life. And your fos-
ter parents were just stop-­gaps. They fed you, clothed you, but never
loved you. You wanted the real thing. Do you think it’s a coincidence
that Orion and Viveca are the same age? That both your ex-­husband
and your wife-­to-­be are seven years older than you?
No, that’s irrelevant. . . . Or is it? Is that the real reason why you
married him? Why you’re marrying her? Because Little Orphan An-
nie still needs someone to take care of her?
I need to stop this. Stop being so hard on myself. I love Viveca. And
I loved Orion, too. . . . But why? Because he had taken me under his
wing? Because for the first time in my life, intimacy with a man was
enjoyable? Safe? Maybe not as safe as it feels with Viveca, or as wild as
it had been with Priscilla. But pleasurable enough. And very pleasur-
able for him. It made me a little envious, sometimes. The intensity of
his . . .
No. I wanted to give him pleasure. But his pleasure had a price.
No, that’s not fair. It had been a joint decision. I had stopped using
my diaphragm because we both wanted a child. But when my preg-
nancy became a fact instead of a desire, I was suddenly seized with
fear. What if I wasn’t up to the job of motherhood? What if I miscar-
ried again like I had that time when I was seventeen? I had never told
Orion about my first pregnancy, and I held off for a week or more be-
fore I told him about this one. The night I finally did tell him, Orion
promised me that he was going to be the best father he could—­the
opposite of his own absentee father. We cried together, and I let him
assume that mine were happy tears, the same as his. They weren’t. But
little by little my fear subsided, and I began to feel happy. Excited.
Until I had that ultrasound. When I learned we were having twins,

WeAreWater_i_viii_1_568.indd 30 1/16/13 11:03 AM

 W E A R E WAT E R 31

I got scared all over again. And when, in the delivery room, it looked
like we might lose Andrew, I was terrified.  . . .
Still, I loved being a mother. Loved them both as soon as I laid eyes
on them, and more and more in the weeks that followed. Until then,
I hadn’t understood how profound love could be.
Not that having two of them wasn’t challenging. Demanding of
everything I had to give and then some. While Orion was away at
work all day, I was home changing diapers, feeding them, grabbing
ten-­
minute naps whenever—­ miraculously, rarely—­ their sleeping
schedules coincided. And true to his word, Orion was a devoted fa-
ther. When he’d get home from the college and see them, his face
would light up. He’d bathe them, walk with one of them in each of
his arms, rock them until they’d both gone down for the night. Part of
the night, anyway. Andrew was a colicky baby, and it would drive me
crazy when he’d cry and wake up his sister. And then Ariane would
start crying, too. Our marriage suffered for that first year or so. Orion
would come home tired from dealing with his patients and give what-
ever energy he had left to the twins. I resented that he didn’t have
much left for me. But I didn’t have much left for him, either. Double
the work, double the mess. Carting both of them to the pediatrician’s
when one of them was sick. And then going back there the follow-
ing week when Andrew came down with what Ariane was just get-
ting over. Sitting in that waiting room with those other mothers—­the
ones with singletons who were always making lunch dates. Playdates.
They’d ooh and ah over my two but never invite me to join them. Not
that I even wanted to, but why hadn’t they ever asked? They always
acted so confident, those moms. It was as if everyone but me had read
some book about how to be a good mother.  . . .
But I had read the books. Consulted Dr. Spock so often that the
binding cracked in half and the pages started falling out. But I had no
mother of my own to rely on the way those other women did. Those
grandmothers who could spell their daughters. Babysit for them, ad-
vise them.  . . .
But I could have had that kind of help. How many times had Ori-
on’s mother volunteered to drive up from Pennsylvania and help out?

WeAreWater_i_viii_1_568.indd 31 1/16/13 11:03 AM