The First Warm Evening of the Year: A Novel

by Jamie M. Saul

  “Whatever’s going to happen, I know I can’t fold myself back into my life.”

  “I only wish I had your kind of problem.”

  I said, “I wish you did, too. I’d love to hear you tell me about some guy you were shacked up with for three days at the Plaza, and now you’re going crazy because he hasn’t returned your calls. Or because he has, and what are you going to do?”

  “When I was younger, maybe that would have been appealing. But that’s not the case. So, let’s not even talk about it.” He said this in that tweed-on-skin way, but I spoke past it.

  “Instead of filling your time with clinics and committees—”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “It’s not that complicated.”

  He lay down on one of the sofas.

  “Do you remember the first time I told you I was gay?”

  “We were going somewhere, weren’t we?” I said. “In a car, I think.”

  “My old Karmann Ghia. You were sixteen. It was Christmas break and I was driving you home from school. When I told you, you said it was no big deal, and besides you’d already figured it out. Do you remember what I said to you after you said that?”

  “Word for word?”

  “I told you that if it ever became a big deal, if you ever were bothered by it, or ashamed, you should tell me.” He was speaking to me the way I imagined he spoke to his patients, the way he probably sounded that day in the car. “I also told you to remember that it had less to do with sex than you think. I told you that because I didn’t want you to worry that I’d get AIDS, but what I wanted you to understand was, what it all comes down to is having the capacity to love another person. I’d say that’s what I’m dealing with now. What you and I have always been trying to deal with.”

  “Katlin Mallory. I was telling Marian about her. My girlfriend, sophomore year in college. Marian asked me why we broke up. I said because I didn’t love her enough.”

  Alex sat up and looked over at me. The expression on his face made me think of a man who’d just received an unexpected package in the mail.

  “You told her a lot in under an hour,” he said.

  “I only just figured it out—and realized that it mattered to me—I’ve never loved anyone the way Marian loved her husband or Laura, Steve. No one mattered to me like that. Not Rita. None of my girlfriends. No one except you.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “I want to.”

  “I mean, I already know it.”

  “And I mean, I want to tell you.”

  He nodded his head, and puckered his lips, and there was a look of amusement on his face. “It seems Marian’s unleashed a well of emotions in you.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice.” I sat up a little straighter.

  His expression grew a bit more somber now. “But that’s about you,” he said, “not me. Your experiences are not mine.”

  “It’s what you just did that I’m talking about.”

  He said, “Come again?” with more than a slight tone of indignation.

  “Keeping people at arm’s length. Keeping me at arm’s length. You do it all the time. We both do, and not only to each other.”

  Alex took off his glasses, placed them on the end table, and rubbed his eyes.

  “Wouldn’t you say you already know why we’re like that?” I said. “Or do you think we’re both too blocked to have any real insight and just accept it as the way we live our lives?”

  “You want an answer, or an explanation?”

  “I think you and I have been after the same thing, and the only difference is, you reached your point of frustration a lot earlier in life than I have. Why do you think we’ve never talked about that? I don’t mean clinically, I mean—”

  “Just what do you think it is that we’re both after?”

  “Passion,” I said. “When I was talking about wanting you to go crazy over an unreturned phone call, I was also talking about myself. I like this feeling, feeling a little bit crazy.”

  “Back at the Plaza, are we?”

  “I think you already have passion in your life,” I told him, “for your practice, your patients, really, and when you feel an attraction to someone—when you start to really care for someone, the other relationships are threatened. It creates, to use your word, conflict.”

  “Which creates an emotional impotence?”

  “So, it seems I’ve always known I wanted relationships with women who I’m dispassionate about,” I said, “or who are inaccessible, because anyone who tries to get close feels intrusive to me.”

  Alex said, “Which is one of the things you and Rita have in common.”

  “But you want to feel close to someone,” I answered, “or so you say, except then you find it conflicting, so you distract yourself with your practice, which is the very thing that makes having what you want conflicting.”

  “Do you ever think that I’m content with that? So what if I commit myself to my profession? It’s still a vital aspect of life. I have my patients, and my friends when I have time for them.”

  “If I said that to you, you’d say it’s just misdirected feelings,” I told him. “Substitutes for more substantial relationships. What some people do with their pets, or their mistresses. How’s that for an explanation?”

  Alex leaned on his side. “You at least always manage to have a girlfriend.”

  “Variations on Rita, that’s all,” I said.

  “That’s nothing to dismiss.”

  “Choosing the wrong people?”

  “They’re exactly the right people. For the kind of relationship you want.”

  “While you choose not to choose anyone at all. Why is that?”

  “My reasons are my reasons,” he said, “just as yours are yours.”

  “Well, all of that’s changed as of a few days ago.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “When I was younger,” I told him, “I was happy to be happy. When I got older, I was content to be content. But all of that changed when I was with Marian. Being content just isn’t satisfying anymore. It’s what I’ve been feeling for—you know, stagnating, stuck in the horse latitudes? That feeling’s been percolating for a while now, but I like thinking Marian’s made me realize that I want to go back there and be with her again.”

  “A woman who wants nothing to do with you.”

  “She’s been living in perpetual mourning since her husband died,” I said. “And now she’s stuck in a dead-end, repressed relationship with her boyfriend.”

  “You find that attractive?”

  “I find pulling her out of her emotional rut attractive.”

  “Maybe I should create my own myth of a broken heart,” he said.

  “The man who got away?”

  “The man who never was.” Alex got up to straighten a lampshade on the other side of the room, came back, and sat on the sofa. “It would seem,” he said, “that we’re talking about something a little more significant than former girlfriends and current ones.”

  I lay down on the floor, propped a pillow between my head and the bottom of the sofa.

  I said, “Maybe we should blame our parents.” And we both laughed.

  “Yes. For being negligent enough to wait until we were both adults before leaving the city.”

  “What about early childhood influences?”

  “Convenient, but cowardly.”

  Alex asked if he could get me a beer or something, and walked out of the room. He came back with a glass of club soda in his hand, went over to the window, looked downstairs, and down on the sofa again.

  I was thinking about, trying to remember, actually, when Alex and I had started having these conversations, all the evenings and all the talks, the two of us, in this room. I was thinking about how close it made me feel to
him, how important it was to feel that. But I said nothing, and I had to wonder what inhibited me from telling Alex how much I loved talking with him, and if I shared his aversion to the emotional trespass.

  I sat up and looked over at my brother. He was turning the ice cubes around his glass with his index finger and staring at me.

  “The truth is, I’m stuck with the life I have,” he said.

  “Stuck, but not trapped. The solution,” I told him, “would be for you to get past thinking you need to find someone who doesn’t threaten the relationships you have with your patients, or make demands on your practice. I’m thinking you want a deeper relationship than that.”

  “From explanations to solutions, all in one night?”

  “With a bit of resistance thrown in from my big brother.”

  “What do you want from me? You’re the one who thinks he’s in love, not me.”

  “I’m thinking about you falling in love. Really in love. Not that it would hurt if you shacked up with some guy at the Plaza for a few days in the meantime.”

  “If you’re going to have fantasies about my sex life, I’d appreciate it if you made it the Carlyle. It’s so much classier than the Plaza.”

  “The Carlyle it is.”

  “And you still have to tell Rita about your sudden change of heart.”

  Eight

  In a corner of my bedroom ceiling there was a small oval just a little bit brighter than the rest of the paint. Maybe it was bleached from the sun, maybe it was just one of those mysteries of apartment life in Manhattan. I spent most of the day lying on my bed staring at that spot, thinking about the things that Alex and I had talked about the night before, thinking that later in the afternoon I’d take a cab crosstown to Lincoln Center, to Juilliard, where Laura and I used to meet when her classes were over. I would have even gone uptown to the West End—only it had closed down years ago. I’d never gone out of my way to see these places again, and I didn’t know why I wanted to see them now. Maybe it was an attempt at changing something about the way I’d been living; not a bold-stroke change but something small, something slight, like that oval of bright paint in the corner of my ceiling.

  That night, I met a few friends for supper in Chinatown, friends who didn’t know about Laura and Shady Grove, whose company was fun, whose conversation was easy, with about as much depth as my coat pocket. I enjoyed being with them. I always did.

  Telephones that don’t ring were never my concern, but when I got back to my apartment, I wanted my phone to ring with Marian’s voice on the other end. She’d say it was coming up on the middle of April, time for her to start working in other people’s gardens, or just about that time. She’d describe what she was planting and what it would look like. We would speak to each other the way we did that first afternoon at Laura’s. I would feel a lightness within me, and hear that same lightness in Marian’s voice, playful and flirtatious. Did Marian ever think, just for a moment, that she wanted her phone to ring with me at the other end?

  I thought about her and Eliot, and what they would be doing this spring. Did they make plans the way a lot of couples do? And I thought about Rita and what we might want to do together a month from now, or even next week. But what I really wanted was that phone call from Marian. I fell asleep thinking about that call and how good it would feel to hear Marian’s voice.

  In the morning, when the phone did ring, most of it was business: copy to review for a voice-over I was doing for a charity benefit, studio time, but not too much, breaking up the rest of the month, a handful of days in midtown. Lunches with accounts, with my friends. Drinks, dinners into the weekend, people who didn’t know about my being Laura’s executor, and a few dates with those who did. I was surprised by how much I wanted to talk about Shady Grove. Not about Marian and what I was feeling for her—some of these same people knew Rita or knew people who did—nor any of the things that Alex and I discussed, and certainly not Laura’s death. I wanted to talk about the day I spent in Shady Grove. I liked remembering that, even the night when Marian and Eliot and I went out to dinner, in spite of the awkwardness. But there was no one to tell these things to.

  I was experiencing feelings that until recently I’d been unfamiliar with. The nestling anticipation, the restiveness and indecision. It wasn’t at all unpleasant, not all of it, anyway. I enjoyed the uncertainty.

  Sunday afternoon, while it rained outside, I was alone inside my apartment, in the room I used as an office, and decided to assemble the stereo system Laura had left to me. It was quite impressive, top-of-the-line twelve-inch steel turntable, a tone arm that rode across the records at a gram and a quarter, a powerful amplifier, two speakers that must have been custom-made and were huge by today’s standards. It all looked much too expensive for something Laura would have owned when she was a student, and too outdated to be available when she was older. I assumed that it had belonged to Steve.

  And then there were the record albums. Two dozen of them. In their original sleeves. Collections of American standards by legendary songwriters, sung by legendary stylists, spinning at a civilized 33 1/3 rpm.

  It was music I had always liked and had always listened to, and while I had no great rush of where or when I might have listened to these particular songs, I assumed it was somewhere in New York City with Laura.

  I decided to play one of the cuts. An hour later I was sitting on the floor, sipping a whiskey and water, and still listening to the music Laura had wanted me to hear, and when I finished my drink, I turned up the volume and continued listening while I cooked my dinner, then listened to more music while I ate.

  Songs of and about love. Love at first. Love at last. Love again. Conquering love. Surrendering to love. Brazen about love. Secret about love. Happy, beguiled, and through with love. The wit, the clever rhymes, the tight melodies and harmonies, and not a verse or lyric that was new to me; but until this night I’d never considered all of the anguish and enjoyment, conflict and delight contained in their scores. When the music stopped, I wondered why Laura had wanted me to hear them.

  I wondered if Marian knew why, and would this be the excuse I needed to call her—or just send her an e-mail.

  Would I have sounded foolish? And why should I care what I sounded like?

  I’d have said, “I was sitting around thinking about you and thought I’d listen to the love songs Laura sent me. I thought you might know why?”

  And Marian would ask: “Why you’re thinking about me?”

  “Why Laura left me all these love songs.”

  While Ella Fitzgerald sang “In the still of the night” and gazed from her window at the slumbering moon, I gazed from my own window, and felt like someone in love.

  While the stereo kept playing that warm, honey-butter sound on vinyl, and the tone arm floated across the steel platter like a memory, I wondered if that was all Laura had intended to leave me, the solitude of reminiscence.

  It was dark outside by the time I’d turned off the music, washed my supper dishes, and poured myself a second drink. I sat in my office, no longer trying to figure out hidden meanings and intents, just listening to the rain splashing against the windowsill and the small sounds rising from the street below.

  The phone rang. I felt the flurry of anticipation, as though Laura’s music had taken up residence inside my head and anything was possible. Even Marian was possible.

  I let the phone to ring a second time and a third, while I prepared myself for the sound of Marian’s voice, prepared my own voice, before I lifted the receiver.

  “I really am sorry for not calling you sooner.”

  The voice was quite familiar, it took me only a second to recover and to wish that I could have found some comfort in that familiarity, as I had other times when Rita called, but all I felt now was deflation and the urgency to remove that from my voice when I replied that it was quite all right.

  “I’v
e just been so incredibly busy,” she said.

  “As a matter of fact, I’ve been incredibly busy, too. You know, late nights at the studio, mediocre takeout.”

  “That’s unacceptable, Geoffrey. Next time call me. I’ll see to it that you get a great meal.”

  That was what Rita had always been able to offer, the charms of the excellent meal, prepared by the excellent chef, and never second rate. I was not averse to those charms that night; but there was the twinge of sadness while I listened to her tell me in one breath why she’d been so busy and why she hadn’t been able to call me and why she was so sorry and why she was never too busy to make sure I had better than mediocre meals when I was working late. Which made me feel only regret for all the things I’d been thinking before she called, and the disappointment and the disenchantment I’d been feeling while she talked to me, which was why I told her, “I’d like to see you when things slow down.”

  “Things have already slowed down,” she answered.

  “Then how about tomorrow?”

  I didn’t want to have dinner with her. I didn’t want to be alone with her in a restaurant, or in either her apartment or mine. I was not about to navigate my way around an evening that ended with us in bed together.

  “Let’s meet around lunchtime, in the park.”

  “The park?”

  “Central Park is beautiful the day after a rain.”

  “I’m all for beauty.”

  The following afternoon, I met Rita at the park entrance on Sixtieth Street. She kissed me on the lips and put her arm through mine as we stepped around the street vendors and the tourists they attract, and walked down to the pond.

  It was a cool day, even with the sun shining. Rita was wearing a light green jacket over a black skirt and high heels. Urban and sophisticated, two of the things I’d found attractive about her.

  The rain had left behind a smattering of puddles, but we were able to find a dry bench with a view of the Gapstow Bridge. After we sat down, Rita started telling me about the work that had been keeping her busy, and the new author she’d just signed. A celebrity chef from Charleston, South Carolina.