Light Years

In the autumn of 1958, Viri and Nedra Berland live with their two young daughters, Franca and Danny, in a large, aging Victorian house along the Hudson River north of New York City. Viri is a small, elegant architect of 32 who commutes to Manhattan and dreams of creating a building that will make him famous. Nedra, 28, is tall, confident, and extravagant, the magnetic center of the household who manages their domestic world with an air of effortless authority. Their life together appears idyllic: candlelit dinners with interesting friends, a pony named Ursula, a new puppy called Hadji, evenings when Viri reads stories to his daughters by the fire.

Their social circle is small but vivid. Peter Daro, a gallery owner and Viri's oldest friend, and his wife Catherine are frequent dinner guests. Arnaud Roth, a cigar-smoking book dealer and bachelor, adores the Berland family. Eve, Arnaud's lover, is tall, funny, and chaotic, her life always in disarray. The narrator observes that from a distance the Berlands' life appears unified, but up close it dissolves into deceiving detail.

Beneath the surface, both Viri and Nedra seek fulfillment elsewhere. At a party, Viri becomes infatuated with a slim young woman named Kaya Doutreau, who later becomes his secretary. He begins an affair with her in a borrowed apartment, and the relationship makes him feel, for the first time, equal to Nedra. Meanwhile, Nedra begins seeing Jivan, a Lebanese man who owns a small moving company and lives in a converted storefront. Jivan becomes a regular at the Berland dinner table, playing games with the children and bringing gifts, while meeting Nedra at noon twice a week. Franca, still a child, senses something between her mother and Jivan but cannot articulate it.

Nedra's dissatisfaction with marriage deepens. She compares it to a tattoo: permanent and no longer noticed. She wishes she had married someone with money, recognizing Viri will never have any, yet she admires his devotion as a father. Viri's relationship with Kaya collapses when he arrives at her apartment one morning to find the door chained and another man inside. Devastated, he cuts the heart from her most beautiful dress in a gesture of anguished rage.

The years pass through summers at Amagansett on Long Island, birthday parties, and dinner parties where conversations turn to greatness and fame. Nedra's father, a traveling salesman from small-town Pennsylvania, is diagnosed with cancer. She drives through the night to his hospital and sits for days as he dies. She sells his house, erasing all traces of the origins she escaped. His death deepens her resolve to live on her own terms, free from obligations she has outgrown.

The brutal beating of Arnaud on a New York street late at night costs him an eye and marks a turning point for Nedra. She sees malevolence everywhere and enters what she calls a new era. She ends her affair with Jivan, telling him that love is movement, and begins seeing André Orlosky, a quiet poet she meets at Jivan's house. Meanwhile, Franca at 16 briefly rebels against her mother's insistence on being different, then settles into growing independence. Danny, at 19, falls for Juan Prisant, a bearded sculptor, and is consumed by the relationship, changing her name to Karen at his direction.

On a long-anticipated trip to England, the Berlands stay with Thomas and Claire Alba, a calm, cultivated English couple in Kent. At dinner in Marlow, Nedra tells Viri casually that she does not want to go back to their old life. He is terrified, but she refuses to elaborate, saying the time will come to talk about it. From London, she writes a love letter to André.

They divorce in the fall. Nedra is 41. On their last night together, they listen to Mendelssohn. The next day she drives away, and passing a meadow where a neighbor once rode, she begins to weep. Viri is left in the house with Danny and the aging Hadji. Every object seems to share his loss.

Nedra travels to Europe, spending time in Davos, Switzerland. She returns to New York and falls in love with Richard Brom, a magnetic actor in Philip Kasine's experimental theater company. She auditions for the company but is rejected because of her age. Brom tells her she will find her way, and they begin an intense affair.

Danny marries Theo Prisant, Juan's younger brother, at a small country wedding. Viri toasts them, calling marriage the greatest happiness one ever knows. Peter Daro, meanwhile, develops scleroderma, a disease that hardens his skin and tissue. He dies in November, his body having become a prison for the man trapped inside.

Viri sells the house and sails to Europe on the ocean liner France. He settles in Rome, 47 years old and alone. At the office of two Italian architects, he meets their secretary, Lia Cavalieri, a small, dark-haired woman of 33 who has never married. They fall in love, and Lia shows him Rome. They marry, but Viri struggles with the narrow apartment, the foreign language, and Lia's consuming devotion. He weeps for his children and longs for home. A letter arrives from Nedra asking to borrow $10,000. Lia forbids Viri to send the money. He reluctantly agrees, but alone afterwards, his thoughts turn irresistibly to Nedra; he acknowledges he has always traveled in her wake.

Nedra settles into a small apartment near the Metropolitan Museum in New York, its glass wall opening to a dead garden. She begins writing children's stories and befriends Nichi, a Japanese woman with whom she develops an intense friendship. She falls ill and retreats to Amagansett, taking a small converted shed near apple trees past bearing. She is 47. Franca comes for a final summer visit. They read in the dunes and share long lunches. Nedra tells Franca, "How I love you" (300), and reflects that love for a child is the deepest, only joy.

Nedra dies suddenly in the fall, like her father. At the funeral, Franca stands alone, her face the very face of the dead woman but more beautiful. Danny has two small daughters. On the drive home, the sisters pass a roadside store shaped like a duck that they loved as children. Danny says that this time their grief is not pretending.

Viri returns to the Hudson Valley in spring. He walks through the greening woods near his former house and discovers the family's old tortoise, still alive, the children's initials faintly scratched on its shell. He walks to the river's edge, to the unused dock with its flaking paint and rotten boards. Standing at the bank, he thinks: "I am ready, I have always been ready, I am ready at last" (308).