The First Warm Evening of the Year: A Novel

by Jamie M. Saul

  I thought about my last afternoon with Rita and the certainty I’d felt that day and about how compelling Marian was.

  What I said was, “If Marian loved Eliot, nothing we say would matter.” I got up and walked over to the fire. “Buddy’s cabin is gone. That’s why you wanted me to go there.”

  “If we’d simply told you,” Walter answered, “it wouldn’t have been the same.” He didn’t say anything else, neither did Eleanor.

  It took me a moment. “It’s all in the past,” I said. “It’s all about the past. They’re all about the past. Eliot’s in love with a girl he hasn’t known since high school. The boy Marian fell in love with and married was her childhood sweetheart, and he’s been dead longer than they’d been married.” I may have been shouting. I knew I was speaking louder than I preferred. “It has to come down to not only who you love, but who loves you in return.” I lowered my voice now. “Marian deserves another chance. They both do.”

  “And so do you, Geoffrey.” It was Eleanor who said this. “You like to stand back and look at things from a safe distance, examine them, analyze them, don’t you? I think the time has come for you to move in closer.” When I didn’t answer, she turned first to Walter, then to me. “You’re going to have to take us at our word. We’ve been living this a long time.”

  “I’ve been living what I’m living a long time, too.”

  Eleanor said, “I can’t believe you’ve never been in love.”

  “Not the way we’ve been talking about it.”

  “Then, Geoffrey,” she said, “I’d say your time has come.”

  “I’d say that idea scares the hell out of me.” I stepped away from the fire. “What if I’m wrong?”

  “About Marian?” Walter asked.

  “You have to understand, I’ve never been one for permanent relationships.”

  “You make it sound like you’ve never been involved with anyone,” Walter said.

  “Of course I have. They always end up feeling clingy and stifling. And I’m always a little more than relieved when things end. I can’t remember not being this way and I’ve been completely at ease with it, or was. And I don’t want to go back to that. What I’m afraid of is, we’ll pursue this, Marian and I, and I’ll get that old feeling and be scared away. I can’t do that to her.”

  “I doubt that you’ll be scared off,” Walter said.

  I was about to tell him that I didn’t share his optimism, but now I was thinking about what he’d said earlier, about Marian rejecting her friends and family. I didn’t know which startled me more, the question I wanted to ask or what I expected the answer to be.

  I took another step back. “Why did she let Eliot come in?”

  The following morning, I drove over to Marian’s nursery. It was Saturday and there were more than few customers walking the aisles of flowers and plants, loading their vans and hatchbacks.

  Marian was sitting in her office, and when she saw me her mouth opened, her lips started to move, but I didn’t give her a chance.

  “We have to talk,” I told her.

  PART II

  Geoffrey

  Fifteen

  Marian liked when Buddy went up to the cabin. Deep in winter, last summer’s work finished, next spring’s assignments far away. Late on a weekday afternoon, early on a Friday morning, Marian looked forward to these few days by herself. She was never troubled by this, or by the thought of Buddy staying out on that icy lake all day, sleeping in the cold; although why he or anyone else could find pleasure in that . . . but this had nothing to do with Buddy wanting to go away, and all to do with her antipathy for those ten acres Buddy had been so determined to own, and the days there doing nothing but being cold, sitting with Buddy, fishing and freezing—or skating with Pamela and Charlie, or the three of them skiing through the woods while Buddy fished, making the best of her time up there.

  The icy nights of winter, wrapped in a sleeping bag inside their tent, were the worst. Cooking their meals on an open campfire. Reading by Coleman lanterns. Sleeping on those awful mattresses before they built the cabin, and the same horrid mattresses after the cabin was built.

  There are certain places you take a dislike to, the way it is with certain people. They were there on a Friday morning in October, sitting close to the campfire, drinking hot coffee, the sun rising through the trees, Marian wrapping her sleeping bag around herself like a serape, Buddy dressed in jeans and hooded sweatshirt, sitting cross-legged on the ground, staring straight ahead with an expression that Marian described as his just-come-down-from-the-mountain-look.

  He asked her how she would feel about his making an offer on the place. Marian wanted to know what was wrong with the arrangement the way it was. Buddy said the owner, Ike Barlow, was going to sell it, and Buddy didn’t want to lose it. He hadn’t told this to Barlow but he was pretty sure Barlow already knew how he felt. Assuming he’d ask a fair price, how would Marian feel about buying it?

  Marian told Buddy she didn’t mean to be an underminer but she hated this place. She moved closer, put her arms around him, rested her chin on top of his shoulder, and asked why he couldn’t just buy a red sports cars like other men having a midlife crisis.

  Buddy said because he was years away from a midlife crisis. And Marian told him not as many as he’d like to believe.

  They sat side by side until they finished their coffee, then Marian got up to take her morning hike. Buddy stayed sitting, his legs crossed, smiling up at the sky.

  On the other side of the undergrowth of bushes and trees, between the edge of the woods and the edge of the water, a narrow path circled the entire perimeter of the lake. Marian walked that path, as she did most mornings when she was up there.

  Kicking through the dried leaves, listening to the crinkle-crunch beneath her feet, she wasn’t thinking about her conversation with Buddy, she wasn’t concerned about it, or surprised—she would have been if he’d wanted to buy a red sports car—and the only thing that was surprising about his wanting to make an offer was that he hadn’t talked to her about it before.

  Marian wasn’t concerned about a thing.

  Halfway around the lake, she veered off and walked deeper into the woods, where the leaves were damp with dew and glistened gold in the sunlight, and the sunlight brightened shy grass shoots and turned the mosses on the rocks pale and fragile shades of green. She watched the light change the colors in the ground and in the trees, and the way these colors changed the light; but it was the sweet mulch scent of leaf mold—an awful name for such a beautiful aroma—that made her pause. She knelt and lifted a handful to her nose, as though she might breathe in the living parts that grow gardens and strengthen the soil. She started to laugh, not at what she was doing, but at what she was feeling. To have arrived at this day in early October, after the past seven months, the endless spring rains, the worries that she and Buddy would never get started on their work. The demands of a ridiculous summer. The worries that once work started they would never catch up.

  There are no problems, Marian, only opportunities. That’s what Buddy had told her, last April, when the month seemed to be washing away.

  They were upstairs in the office Buddy had built in the barn. It was raining, as it always seemed to be. They were sitting next to each other at Buddy’s drafting table, studying their latest design, or what there was of it. It might have been the Tyrells’ estate because Marian said she wanted to use lots of blues and yellows; the Tyrells impressed her as blue and yellow sort of people. Hydrangea and coreopsis, and later in the season, delphinium. Buddy wanted to use boxwoods to break up the garden rooms. Marian thought beeches would create a more dramatic entrance. And where, Marian wanted to know, would they build the pond—why had the Tyrells insisted on that pond?

  Sometimes, it was Marian who made the first draft, sketching out a stand of trees, shaping a path; placement and shape. Sometimes, Buddy chose
the flora, which colors and where, density and size; and always it was the two of them, like time and season, color and shape. Blank spaces washed with light and shadow. Buddy and Marian, side by side at the drafting table.

  That rainy afternoon, when Marian got up and paced across the wood floor, her boots making a loud and rapid clicking sound, Buddy stayed in the old swivel chair they’d found when they bought their house, wearing a yellow rain slicker. Marian told him she was worried. Would they have enough time to meet their spring schedule? Were two crews enough, or did they need a third? They should have already been breaking ground over at the Dodson place, and what about the Millers’? It was making her crazy, this do-nothing.

  Buddy told her nothing lasts forever, not even the rain, and spread a fresh piece of paper across the drafting table, tapping his pencil against it, to assure her there was plenty to do, and did she want to get back to work or wear out a hole in the floor, which wasn’t good enough for Marian. Why couldn’t he just say she was right, that there was nothing to be gained sitting around like this, that the weather really sucked and doing nothing day after day was a waste of time, and money lost? Why did it always have to be his take, his attitude?

  But he was right, Buddy told her. It said so right here in the paper. The rain will end on . . .

  Marian walked as far away from Buddy as she could in that small office. She said these people weren’t going to wait around just for the privilege of having Buddy Ballantine landscape their property. She wished he would at least pretend to feel a sense of urgency. Buddy said now she was asking too much, and laughed at her, before he bent his head over the paper and his pencil began to work—you start with a line, he liked to say.

  Marian went back to her desk, sat at her computer, bringing up one model then another, building gardens, tearing them down. Manipulating colors and shades, shapes and shadows.

  The rain passed. The annoyances dissolved with apologies and a hug. Buddy spun around in his chair, and when it came full circle, he got up, walked over to Marian, pushed his hands through her hair, and kissed her neck. Marian told Buddy he’d never be truly happy until he learned to worry.

  If it wasn’t the Tyrells, it was the Millers, who were in love with lilacs and clematis, and where did Marian suggest they plant the barberry? Or the Rothmans, over in Hillsdale, with their five acres and all that morning sunlight.

  When a curious client asked, and many often did, who thought of what, Marian or Buddy? the answer in truth was: We did. Marian was never surprised at how much she enjoyed saying this.

  But now it was October. Sweet autumn. Their time to make plans for the rest of the year. Marian loved the anticipation, loved looking forward to the expanse of weeks and months coming at them without haste or hurry, the way the new season approached when the change was startling because it had been happening all along. This was what she was thinking about walking through the woods.

  A little farther along, the earth was soft beneath her, the land opened, and the contours of the ground seemed to sweep her forward like a soft hand in the small of her back.

  How many things can you be sure of? That’s what Buddy used to ask her, sometimes when they held each other at night, sometimes when they were doing nothing more than sitting around the campfire. Buddy wanted to know what they both could rely on. What they both could trust. Marian never asked Buddy what prompted the question. Buddy did not say these things simply to fill the silence. There was nothing rhetorical about it. She didn’t always answer. Sometimes all she answered was: each other. Or maybe she just thought it and hadn’t said anything at all—that was how she remembered it walking through the woods, following the shoreline; because that’s what Buddy had been speaking of earlier that October morning.

  Marian could be sure of Buddy striking the campsite while she was gone. The tent would be folded and the sleeping bags rolled up, placed in the back of the pickup. The fire would be doused, and Buddy would be sitting just where Marian had left him, as though he’d never moved, as though he’d packed the gear by an act of levitation.

  Marian would ask what he was doing. Buddy would answer that he was thinking. If she asked what he was thinking about, Buddy might say he’d been thinking about the work left on the Harrington place, and show her a design he’d made in a bare spot on the ground; or maybe it was about one of the places they were going to start on next year. He might tell her he was wondering what she was thinking about while she was walking, and Marian would tell him. Or Buddy might shrug his shoulders and say he was was thinking of nothing of any importance. Nothing at all.

  Sometimes they’d pick up the conversation they’d left more than an hour before, without dropping the thought. It was no different that morning, when Marian came back from her hike.

  Buddy told her, patting the ground so Marian would sit next to him, that what it was really all about was not pushing back. Pushing back against nature, which was what they did at their house, in their work. So why not have a place where nature pushes against them? No clearing away the trees, or planting or designing. He asked her to think of a kite moving about without resistance. It was a wonderful feeling. Sometimes.

  All Marian could say was that it was always winter up here. So what’s to push back against? Besides snow?

  Buddy told her he had it from reliable sources that the Adirondacks actually experienced the standard four seasons.

  Not that Marian ever noticed. All it ever was to her was cold and colder, and perhaps he’d explain to her sometime, Mr. Ballantine, just how sitting on the ice all day doing nothing, and sleeping in a tent in subzero weather was nature pushing back? He said he would tell her some snowy night by the fire, and anyway, Barlow was only thinking about it, so there was nothing to decide until there was something to decide. And if that time came and Marian was still against it, Buddy would let it go.

  Just because she didn’t like it here? No, Marian told him, she’d never do that to him.

  The last time Buddy went up to the cabin wasn’t much different from any of the other times. This just happened to be early on a Wednesday morning, driving the yellow pickup away from the house. And he decided to go alone.

  He told Marian it was hard to round up a posse in the middle of the week, and when she said he could always wait for the weekend, Buddy told her, no, he preferred it this way.

  He was smiling when he said it, and when he hugged her, Marian could feel the smile on his face. When they kissed good-bye, Buddy said her lower lip should be reclassified as contraband. That was the last thing Marian would hear Buddy say.

  Marian was still alert to that quick apprehension when Buddy left. There was always the anticipation three days after, four days, when he was due back. It was never tinged with anxiety or fear. She even enjoyed the fatigue she’d feel at the end of the day, being able to indulge in it, which she could not always do with Buddy around.

  You don’t worry about someone who knows how to read the ice. That’s what Buddy had told Marian, and why shouldn’t she believe him? Even when he was snowed-in for a day and late coming home, Marian would remind herself that he’d been doing this for most of his life.

  She used to see him lots of times, ice fishing, when they were teenagers. That was when she fell in love with him.

  Marian would watch Buddy out at the pond in Peery Park, where she used to go ice-skating with Laura and their friends on Saturday mornings. She’d see Buddy out there fishing through the ice with his friend Alan; sometimes Alan’s father was there, sometimes three or four other boys. Marian knew who Buddy was, everyone knew Buddy Ballantine. He was only fifteen and already a senior in high school. He always seemed to be in the center of a crowd, joking and laughing in the hallway and cafeteria. Light brown hair hanging an inch or two over his forehead. Lean body, firm, narrow face, favoring his mother more than his father. Always having a good time.

  But the day Marian fell in love with Buddy was
the day she saw him sitting all alone out there on a small folding chair in the middle of the frozen pond wearing a black cap and a fleece jacket. Marian and her friends skated past him, Buddy didn’t look at them, he just kept staring at the hole in the ice, solemn expression on his face like a lost boy, which may have been why Marian decided to speak, just loud enough for him to hear.

  She asked if he was ever afraid the ice would crack and he’d fall in. He said a person just has to know how to read the ice, and wasn’t that what she did before she started skating? She asked him if he ever got bored sitting out in the cold, and then she started to skate away. Buddy said whenever that happened he would think about the randomness of fishing. The way sometimes the fish took the bait and sometimes they swam away. It was more than accidental, there was causation to consider, because anything can happen at anytime. Like Marian stopping to talk to him that day, after all the other times she’d been out there.

  When Marian pointed out that Buddy could have talked to her instead, Buddy looked amused, it was in his eyes. He said but it didn’t happen that way, did it? That’s why it was random.

  Marian may not have understood or fully appreciated what Buddy was telling her, but she’d never heard anyone her age speak this way, and while Buddy looked down to check his fishing line, and Marian’s friends were yelling for her to come on and skate with them, Marian didn’t want to leave. She told her friends to go on without her, as she skated nervous ellipses behind Buddy and told him that, whether or not he knew it, people said he was the smartest boy in school, and now she saw why. And Marian, Buddy said, was the girl who never stopped moving. Anytime he saw her she was on the move. Rushing through the halls to class, or out the door after school. He’d even seen her a few times running on the outside track.