“Thinking of locking Marian and me in a closet?” I asked back.
Eleanor said, “As if.”
“I’m sure we’ll think of something.” Walter was speaking to Eleanor. Then he raised his coffee cup and said, “Here’s to the time when we have more in common than the death of our friend.”
When I got back to Laura’s house, Simon was sitting on the sofa. The scrapbook was next to him. He looked up at me with an expression I’d grown used to.
“I think I’ve seen enough,” he said. “I’m ready to leave.”
“I’ll put you on a bus,” I told him. “I’m ready to stay.”
Thirteen
The following morning, I put Simon on the early morning bus out of Lenox, Massachusetts, but not before I slipped a hundred dollars into his hand.
“The fifty you asked for the last time,” I told him. “And fifty more because I feel like it.”
When the bus pulled away, I got back in my car and drove northwest, heading to the town of Minnota, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains, where Buddy had his cabin.
Walter had offered to come with me, but all I wanted were directions. I preferred seeing the place all alone, on my own. A little more than two hours after I left Simon, I found the gravel driveway. It was at least half a mile long, bisecting the deep woods, then opening to a large field where a yellow clapboard house was nestled just off-center, with a long, wide lake at the end of a small clearing, and several yards away an inviting little guesthouse of cedar shakes. There was no sign of the ramshackle cabin Buddy had left behind, or one that even resembled it.
If Walter’s directions hadn’t been so exact, I might have thought I’d made a wrong turn along the way. And then I thought about the ten years that had passed, with only Marian standing still.
I left my car at the side of the driveway, called out “hello” a couple of times, but no one appeared from inside the house or out.
Although it was late April, there was a chill in the air, the sky was overcast and pale, the wind was quick against my face.
I called out again, again no one appeared, and I walked up a narrow dirt path, passing the lake where Buddy loved to fish. A wooden dock extended about fifteen feet over the water, and farther out, three or four hundred feet from where I stood, was a small island with a gazebo.
I tried imagining Buddy walking to the frozen lake on a frigid morning and back to his cabin when the sun set on the winter afternoon. What he might have seen in the woods. What he heard within the heave of the ice and on the wind. Or did he see, did he hear, only his isolation? If this was Buddy’s respite from being Buddy, was Marian part of what he was escaping? Did Marian ever wonder if she was?
I was walking back to the driveway when I saw the car pull up; then a man was coming toward me. He might have been forty or even younger, his hair was thin on top, his face suntanned, at least what was visible behind his dark red beard. He wore overalls and a gray rain slicker. He looked like a seasoned boatswain.
“Insurance salesman or Jehovah’s Witness?” he asked as he approached.
“Tough choice,” I answered.
“Then I’ll assume you’re lost.”
“Not the way you mean.”
“Lost is lost, isn’t it?” he said.
“I’m falling in love with the widow of the man who used to own this place. I wanted to see it for myself.” I was as surprised by my honesty as he seemed to be. He smiled and made a “hmm” sound without moving his lips, kept showing me the smile while he said, “Well, take your time,” pushed his hands into his pockets, and told me, “I’m Aubrey Stein, by the way. This is my place now.”
I introduced myself, and Aubrey asked, “Did you just get here, or have you already had your look around?”
“Just pulled up. You’ve made a lot of changes, haven’t you?”
“You sound disappointed.”
“This place is fixed so firmly in the minds of the people who told me about it, it’s been fixed the same way in mine. That’s all.”
“Sorry, but I had to do something with it.”
“I’m sure this is a big improvement. The house, the gazebo. All of it.”
“Do you mind if I ask what you thought you’d find?”
“The woman I mentioned? Her husband died up here, alone, in the cabin that was here. I guess you tore it down.”
He looked in the direction of the guesthouse. “It was over there. I kept the original floors. Beautiful pine. Not that that’s any help or consolation.”
“What did you do with the stove?”
“You came with an inventory?”
“Another person’s memories.”
“I had it repaired and gave it away. All the old lumber, too. Does that matter to her?”
“She doesn’t know I’m here.”
The expression on his face made me think that this amused him.
“Look around,” he said. “Take your time.”
“I won’t be long. I think I have the general idea.”
The sun was out now. Aubrey said it was feeling downright tropical, opened his coat, and walked toward the lake.
“I’m sure you’ve driven a long way,” he said over his shoulder, “and I don’t have that many visitors this time of year, so why don’t you stay a while. It’s nice enough, we can sit out by the water.”
We grabbed a couple of folding chairs, set them up on the dock, took off our coats, and sat low to get the full warmth of the sun.
I said, “Buddy, the man who used to own this place, liked to come up here to ice fish.”
“This is a dreadful place in winter.”
“I’m beginning to think that’s why he liked it.”
Aubrey made a low sound with his voice before he said, “I close it up at the end of October and don’t come back till spring. Even now it’s almost too early.”
I considered his suntan. “You obviously head south.”
“Africa.”
“Africa?”
“Go to South America and turn east?” He was grinning, and I grinned back at him. “I teach school in Namibia.”
“That’s a long way to go to teach school.”
“They need teachers. I volunteer.”
I looked over the property again and said, “This is not where I’d expect a volunteer to live in his off-time.”
“Back in the nineties, I was riding high on the Bubble.”
“And you read the entrails and cashed out.”
“In retrospect, it looks like prescience, doesn’t it? Although the people I worked with thought that I lacked vision and ambition. But I think a person has to ask himself: How much is enough? I had enough and I walked away.”
“I think it’s also a question of how much do you need.”
“Not such an easy thing to answer.”
“So I’ve only recently discovered,” I said.
The sunlight settled on the surface of the lake. Two hawks circled above us, their shadows following along the ground. Somewhere in the woods the cawing of crows came like the rush of disaster, and the mad hammering of a woodpecker, then silence all around us and the empty sky.
Aubrey got up and walked to the end of the dock. He sat on the edge, his feet hanging over the side.
“A few months after I left my job, I found this place. Or it found me, if that doesn’t sound too precious.”
“Then Africa found you.”
He looked over his shoulder at me, as though he wasn’t sure if I was being snide or serious, pulled his knees up, and leaned back on his elbows.
“I researched various foundations that were about helping people, found one that did volunteer work in Namibia, and I signed on. I’ve been doing it for the past seven years. But, if I’m not being too nosy,” he said, “what else do you do besides look for the broken heart o
f the woman you’re falling in love with?”
“Right now that’s a full-time job.”
I assumed that Aubrey knew an equivocation when he heard one, and even if I’d had any idea what the past few days came to, even if I’d been able to come to any conclusion, I doubted that I could have expressed what I was thinking, and if I could, the only person I would have talked to was Alex, but I was sure he’d soon be occupied with Simon and what Simon had to tell him, and that was all right with me.
Aubrey had no other questions, and I had nothing more to say. If I’d closed my eyes, I would have seen Marian sitting in that small office at her nursery, Buddy’s photograph behind her, because Buddy was always close by, looking over her shoulder. I would have told her about this day and offered her my explanation and she would tell me what she thought, and once more, time could not move slowly enough.
Aubrey said, “I don’t think you found what you came for.”
“I’ll just have to look somewhere else.”
I spent the night alone in Laura’s house. I dreamt that I was trying to rescue a sinking sailboat from Buddy’s lake.
Fourteen
Not too early the next the morning, I sat in Laura’s living room with a cup of coffee. Outside a light rain misted the windows. I was thinking that it wasn’t only other people’s lives I was interfering with, but my own, and I was not in the least comfortable with this, or settled about what I might do. I was thinking that I’d go back to Manhattan and leave Marian behind. I was thinking that was what Alex meant when we talked that night in the cab and he told me that I’d chosen a woman so unavailable it allowed me not to act, that both she, and my feelings for her, were disposable. Then I was thinking about going upstairs, making this a lazy, desultory morning and doing nothing at all.
A little after twelve noon, long after my coffee cup was empty, I was still hanging around the house, and it was still raining. The doorbell rang. It was Eliot, wearing a baseball cap, holding an open umbrella, looking like the high school kid with the crush on Marian Thayer, but when I looked at his face there was only a man with deep lines around his mouth and tightness in his eyes.
He didn’t wait for me to ask him to come in, he leaned his umbrella against the hallway closet, and said the last time he was here I’d asked him if he was a musician, and did I remember.
I told him, no, I didn’t.
“I wonder why you asked me that?”
I invited him to sit down.
“It was an odd thing to ask someone.” He walked into the living room, sat in one of the chairs, and said, “I never thought I’d see the inside of this place again,” in a low, vacant tone.
“I bet you never thought you’d see me again, either.”
Eliot didn’t acknowledge this. He leaned forward, rested his arms on his knees, and clasped his hands together. “If I talk to you about Marian,” he said, “will I be making a jackass of myself?”
“What do you think we need to talk about?”
Eliot looked away from me, then he looked past me and around the room as though he were in the wrong house. He looked back at me, but now his cheeks were pale and his mouth open. The expressions on his face did not come to rest until I said, “I think you should know that I drove up to Buddy’s cabin yesterday, and I’ve been wondering if Marian thought he went there to get away from her. If she ever talked to you about that.”
Now the color returned and his lips began to move.
“That’s way too deep for me,” he said. “But why is it so important to know the reason why? What’s that accomplish?” His voice was high-pitched now. “Whatever she’s done is probably the way she wants it.”
“I don’t think that’s what I’m asking.”
“Why would you want to go up to the cabin, anyway?”
“I went to see the Ballantines,” I said. “And they thought I should go up and see the place for myself.”
“You do get around.” There was nothing unpleasant in the way he said this.
“There was an entire year before Laura,” he said. “After Buddy died. After the funeral. After everyone went home.” He walked over to the window. Slow rivulets of water lined the outside of the windowpane. “I’d heard she wasn’t doing very well. She wouldn’t let anyone see her.” Eliot still hadn’t turned around. “You know, when I ran into her friends. So I went out there. She was having a bad time of it. Not taking care of herself, not eating. Nothing you’d call a meal, anyway. You could see that as far as she was concerned, her life—I made a point of getting out there after work to fix her supper, sit with her to make sure she’d eat, also it didn’t hurt for her to have some company. For her to have someone there with her. She didn’t seem to mind. After, I don’t know, a couple of months maybe, she was ready to pay some attention to the nursery, which got her away from the house for a few hours. We started meeting for lunch in town. I was still going out to the house to make sure she was all right. We’d talk. That’s the way things stayed for the rest of the year.”
“You kept her alive,” I said.
“That’s not how I see it.” He walked over to the stairs, and sat on the middle step.
“And the next year,” I said, “Laura moved back to Shady Grove.”
“She had nowhere else to go, so she came back to her hometown. It was her own idea. Marian may have agreed with it, but it was only till Laura got herself—you can—anyone can understand, losing their husbands like they did, that they comforted each other in ways no one else could. If anyone kept anyone alive, it was the two of them.”
“You’re not just the caretaker.”
“Oh, I know. But with someone like Marian . . .”
It was the way he said this that reminded me of how his voice sounded when he was around Marian, the caution and constriction. And what did that feel like, ten years of catch-throat when he spoke to her, when he spoke about her?
As I sat there watching Eliot, I was remembering Marian’s face, the lilt in her voice when she said: “You need to know what you’ve done to me.” I was no longer paying attention to Eliot, until he stood up, walked over to the door, and picked up his umbrella. “She’s doing what she wants,” he said. There was a plaintive quality to his voice now. He stepped outside and looked over his shoulder. “Or she wouldn’t be doing it.” While I listened to the soft madness of the rain.
I drove over to see Eleanor and Walter later that afternoon. I knew they were expecting to hear me talk about my day at Buddy’s cabin, but I needed to talk to them about Eliot.
We sat in the den, the fire in the fireplace taking the chill out of this damp day; tea and a plate of gingerbread on the coffee table, music playing. I was pretty sure it was Chopin.
While Eleanor poured the tea and Walter put another log on the fire, I told them, “Eliot just gave me a brief tour of the unexamined life. I think there are things to recommend it.”
Walter asked, “Do you feel like telling us about it?”
I said there really wasn’t much to tell, except that it made me wonder what I was doing in the middle of all this.
“As well you should,” Eleanor said.
“Eliot has a point: Marian’s an adult, who’s made an adult decision, and just because there may be an attraction between the two of us, and the three of us here might think she should be doing things differently, doesn’t mean she needs to be wrenched away from her life. Or for that matter, me from mine.” I managed not to sound strident when I said this, but I could feel the muscles in my throat tighten. “Eliot knows a hell of a lot more about Marian than I do. Maybe it’s better to leave the two of them alone.”
“As I recall,” Walter said, “you asked Marian what she wants. And she told you she lacked the courage to fall in love again.”
“That was before I talked to Eliot. He told me to back off, in his way. I don’t think it would be fair to him not to.”
“No,” Eleanor agreed, “it wouldn’t be fair.”
“He’s not the heavy in this,” I said.
“More the innocent bystander,” Eleanor said. “If Buddy hadn’t . . .” She pulled her sweater around her shoulders. “It determined their relationship. Marian’s and Eliot’s. It defined it.”
“Which explains why nothing gets examined too closely,” I said.
Eleanor shook her head. “Of course, that doesn’t make Eliot a passive player in this.”
“I’d say he took the initiative. He went out there and took care of her. That was a gutsy thing to do.”
“Marian stayed out at the house,” Walter said, “because she chose to. We wanted her to stay with us here in town, and she wouldn’t. And she wouldn’t let us stay with her out there.”
Eleanor reached over and put her hand on top of Walter’s. “We went out to the house and tried to see her. Several times. And Charlie and Pamela went out. Marian wouldn’t even come to the door. Didn’t answer her phone. She cut herself off from everyone in the family.”
“And her friends,” Walter said.
“She thought everyone held her responsible.” Eleanor turned to Walter. “That somehow, she hadn’t taken care of Buddy.”
“She said she couldn’t face anyone,” Walter said. “Eventually we talked this all out, but my God, that was a miserable time.”
“Eliot didn’t tell me about that part of it,” I said.
“He probably doesn’t know about it. As you’ve observed, Eliot doesn’t look any further than he can see.”
“Is that what you meant by Buddy’s death defining their relationship?”
“It’s all that she and Eliot have in common. Her loss and Eliot’s ability not to interfere with how she chooses to cope with it,” Eleanor answered. “Not cope, sustain it, is the better word.”
It wasn’t impatience that I saw after she said this, that would have shown a rudeness I was certain Eleanor didn’t possess. It seemed that she wanted something from me.
I leaned over, poured tea into our cups, giving myself more time for a better read of Eleanor’s expression; it may have been that they were expecting more insight from me than I could give, more depth. Eleanor didn’t say anything, neither did Walter, they only sipped the tea I’d just poured. Walter sliced a corner of gingerbread. The music played in the background.
The First Warm Evening of the Year: A Novel Page 16