The First Warm Evening of the Year: A Novel

by Jamie M. Saul

  Marian stopped short and whipped around. What Buddy said made her feel self-conscious and she might have left then, but he held up his thermos and invited her to sit with him on one of the benches and have some hot chocolate.

  The next time Marian saw Buddy, they talked about miracles.

  It was about a week later, after school. Marian saw Buddy walking home alone. When she caught up with him, she said she’d been thinking about what he’d told her about randomness and all the possibilities of things happening, and maybe that’s why people believed in miracles. Buddy told her that was one of the most intelligent things he’d ever heard, and for the second time Marian felt self-conscious around him; but she lifted her chin, looked directly at him, and asked why he sounded so surprised. Did he think she was just some girl jock or something? He said of course not, and then he asked if she believed in God, because to believe in miracles you’d have to believe in people’s conception of God, and he just didn’t believe that.

  They were walking down Marian’s street, and when they stopped at her house, Buddy asked if she’d ever read Tennyson’s “Flower in the Crannied Wall.”

  Marian said she wasn’t sure if she believed in God or miracles, and no she’d never read the poem.

  That Friday night, Marian and Buddy sat in the enclosed porch in the Ballantines’ house and read Tennyson.

  They talked about most of the things two teenagers talk about and Marian noticed how eager Buddy was to listen to her. It made her feel that the things she said were important. Had she been a little older, she might have realized that contained in Buddy’s eagerness to talk with her was his loneliness.

  It was that same night when Buddy told her, confided in her, why the Tennyson poem was so important to him. He said if there was a God, that whatever it was, because you certainly couldn’t ascribe a male or female pronoun to it, it was something so complex and magnificent that humans couldn’t possibly be able to comprehend it; and to try to codify it was just to diminish that magnificence. What Tennyson was saying—and it was something Buddy believed—that magnificence and complexity was possessed by a tiny flower in a wall, and to understand that was to understand the meaning and purpose of God and humans and Nature. There had to be something a person could do to bring him or herself closer to that phenomenon.

  Marian didn’t, or couldn’t, fully appreciate what Buddy was talking about, not with any more depth than that possessed by a fifteen-year-old. When Marian was an adult and remembered what Buddy had said to her that Friday night, she was more impressed, but by then she was no longer surprised by anything Buddy said.

  The year before they got married, Buddy already had his master’s degree and was starting his landscaping business. Marian had just graduated from college. Buddy told her that most of his life he’d felt like a freak, not just when he was in high school being the youngest kid in the class all the time, but always. When he was a little kid, and in college and graduate school, he felt as though he were standing on the inside of a window, seeing and hearing what was going on outside but not being a part of anything other than what was happening inside his mind and his imagination. He told Marian that he’d become proficient at hiding this from everyone, and hiding all of the things that he knew and thought from his teachers and his friends and even his family, and the boy Marian used to see standing with the crowd, having such a good time, was just a pose to make him appear less of an outsider, to cover for his feelings of being, not so much an impostor but a stranger. For a time, he wanted to believe this was just one of the consequences of his intelligence; but what he felt most often was fear. He was afraid that if he talked about this, people would think he was crazy. He was afraid that what he was experiencing was a type of psychosis and he doubted his sanity. But what he never doubted was how he felt about Marian. Marian made him feel normal, integrated in the community and in life. He said she kept him grounded. That she emboldened him, and it started that night when they read Tennyson, and did she remember their conversation?

  Marian wanted to laugh because she found it such a relief to hear Buddy say this. She may have kept him grounded, she said, but he emboldened her to leave the ground.

  Neither of them was unaware of the burden and the promise of that responsibility; of what they were confiding to and conferring on each other. A collaboration that would have felt daunting but for their excitement and certainty.

  When Buddy went fishing, it was Marian’s own time without annotation: “Just going out to the barn . . .” She pushed Buddy’s voice out of her head, at times like an old song that won’t go away, at times the reminder of all the things they were, when the whole is greater than the sum of the parts—something else Buddy would say. A time without mediation or Buddy’s commentary, anticipated solely because of its impermanence, and enjoyed because of the privacy it allowed.

  In the middle of a January morning there are intimations of summer. Inside catalogs, on Web sites. You only have to know where to look.

  Spirea.

  Bee balm.

  Astilbe.

  Phlox.

  The names read like an evocation of summer.

  Evocation. Another word Buddy would use.

  In the middle of a January afternoon, sipping her coffee, sitting with a book, the days coming a little earlier, staying a little longer. The sunlight shining over her shoulder, Marian was home.

  Place a vase just so on the table and create vignettes of contrasts and complements, and it is no longer a room, it’s a home. The way you space the heliopsis and the tall grasses, the lady’s mantle and the hosta. Then it’s no longer a clearing or a backyard, it’s a garden.

  A few months after Buddy closed on the property, he started to build the cabin, when he had the time. Sometimes Marian went up there and helped him. It wasn’t much of an improvement over the tent, except for the solid walls and floor. There were mice everywhere. The first time Pamela and Charlie stayed there, they suggested that Buddy do something before the mice got into the food or built nests in one of the mattresses. Buddy said unless people were up, there was really no food around for mice to get into, and the cabin was too cold for them to want to nest inside; besides, mice couldn’t do that much damage. It was the idea of them, Pamela said, and Buddy should put out some poison.

  Buddy looked uncomfortable when she said this. He said he’d thought about that but then remembered a poem about a man who wakes up early one morning and sees a poisoned mouse lying on the floor, not quite dead, and he imagines the mouse asking him, “What have I done that you wouldn’t have?” Pamela reminded Buddy that he didn’t show this sort of sentimentality toward fish, and Buddy reminded her that he drew the line at cold-blooded animals.

  Whenever Buddy went away, the first nights were the loneliest. By herself in their bed, Marian was keen to the sounds of the house, to the cold part of the sheets. She missed Buddy’s body heat, the way he moved in his sleep, the way he was slow to wake up, always seeming a little surprised at where he was, as though he were still inside a dream, what he referred to as the “Morphean crease.”

  Marian was still a junior in high school when Buddy was a freshman at UMass in Amherst, far enough away from Shady Grove for dormitory living, close enough to come home any weekend and for Marian to visit him. It was Buddy’s idea that they should date other people while they were separated. How else would they ever be sure of each other, and who wanted to be married for five years and realize it was the mistake of a lifetime? There was a caveat: They never had to say when they went on a first date, or with whom; only if there was a second date with the same person did they have to tell the other one—Marian remembered the long and serious discussions they had all that summer, and how dangerous it felt, which might have been one of Buddy’s reasons for doing it. They did not come to a quick agreement, and while Marian went along with it, she found it disturbing and unnecessary, almost like a game Buddy had devised, a challen
ge they each had to master.

  Marian never heard about any second dates. Buddy heard about seven.

  On the morning of the second day, Marian was still not ready for Buddy to come home. It was her day. Her time. She’d walk out to the front of the house, and along the five acres where she and Buddy had finished the most recent gardens, making sure the burlap was secure around the boxwoods and evergreens, that the deer hadn’t broken through the fencing or leaped over it. At the end of those gardens was the woodland park she and Buddy had just begun work on and was at least two years from completion; but for the moment, she stayed inside with nothing to think about, nothing to concern her.

  You build a garden from the ground up and the top down. You render designs and plant for the future. There were places Marian and Buddy designed and built and never saw in full growth, except in photographs and magazines. You build a garden and wait.

  The difference between talent and brilliance is the difference between sight and vision.

  This wasn’t something Marian considered until she and Buddy had been married and working together for a year. She told Buddy that she could feel him thinking sometimes, feel him struggling with his thoughts. The deliberation. She said it made her feel excluded from his life.

  This was what prompted Buddy to tell her that she made him feel normal, what they meant when they talked about the promise of their responsibility to each other. The way they would sit together in the spring scheduling their work, it didn’t have to be in the barn, they could be outside walking their property, or on their way home from a party. Marian would tell Buddy that she knew what he was thinking. Buddy would say he could sense Marian’s thoughts.

  If they had a problem with an inconvenient slope at the end of a property, or difficult access for a pond, Marian would say she had a good idea where Buddy’s plan had gone wrong and how to get it right. Then they were talking at once, as one.

  Coming back from dinner, and it would be the same talk about some other place, or different talk about the same place.

  There were a few times when they talked about how they each completed the other, not only in their work, but in their lives—it distinguishes doing something from being something, as Charlie would say. Marian did not say, perhaps she wasn’t aware, that it was the intensity of who she and Buddy were that she often found terrifying.

  They had their best conversations in the car.

  One night, driving back from a dinner, or maybe it was from a movie, Marian asked Buddy if there were ever times when he felt as though the two of them were sharing the same burden.

  Buddy didn’t ask her what burden she was talking about, all he asked was if Marian worried about it.

  Marian said at times it was overwhelming, and she cherished that feeling.

  It wasn’t Marian’s idea that they spend time away from each other, or Buddy’s. They talked about it a few times; kept coming back to it. Just another collaboration.

  Marian was the first to go away, there was nothing forced or contrived about it.

  Three years into their marriage, toward the end of February. She and two friends spent a week in Bermuda, sailing, swimming, riding bicycles. She was happy to be with other women after spending most of the year in the company of men.

  She didn’t like sleeping without Buddy in an unfamiliar bed, waking up to no other sound than her own breathing. Yet, she liked this kind of loneliness, it was reassuring and did not make her feel like the wife-in-exile, the way her friends said they felt. Marian wasn’t escaping from children, or trying to block out a job she didn’t love, but she was leaving something behind: The slow narration inside her head, telling Buddy—no, hearing herself talking to him. Listening for his . . . opinions? His approval? Did she need his affirmation, his bearing witness to her experience? Or was there more to it? Was it the integration of their personalities? Like astrological twins.

  There was always something missing and something to be missed when they were apart. As though there were nothing substantive to what either of them did without the other being there; the tree falling with no one there to hear it. Marian felt nothing oppressive about this, or subordinating. She didn’t resent it and didn’t resist it. She was twenty-five years old and not afraid of her life.

  When she returned from Bermuda, lying together upstairs, her head on Buddy’s shoulder, she spoke in a low voice, in the low light, telling Buddy about her vacation, listening to him tell her all about the things he’d done and seen while she was gone.

  They told their stories, made deeper for the sharing, and always a little more real.

  Ice fishing in the Adirondacks followed the next year. Fishing on Barlow’s property came two years after that, not without Marian’s argument. She remembered driving up the rutted logging road, before the snows came. Bouncing in the truck, past the junk trees, the rotted-out trunks and stumps. The clearing and the lake looking scrubby and rank. The lake itself nothing more than unremarkable. Even the birds sounded harsh and shrill.

  She told Buddy the place was awful. Not just awful, ugly. There had to be other lakes where Buddy could go to get away, if not in Shady Grove, at least closer to the comforts of home. Buddy said conveniences had nothing to do with it, and neither did aesthetics. It was because of its inconvenience. It was about the rusticity. He went there because it was so unappealing.

  Buddy said it was possible to have too many precious things in your life, and people and places that you love so much it was necessary to go somewhere that you didn’t have to maintain, that you didn’t care so much about.

  Marian told him he had a perversity of thinking that was maddening.

  Marian stopped going to the cabin the winter after it was built. She’d been telling Buddy all along that she would stop once he didn’t need her help with it. Buddy asked her to go up there a few times after that, but she never went, he never insisted, or was hurt by her refusal. Besides, it was he who said there was no reason to discuss it again, that it was not a big deal. For the next seven years, which was as long as Buddy owned the place, they never felt the need to justify this decision. It was important to Marian that she remember this. Seven years and nothing ever happened to him. It was important that she remind herself of that, and that Buddy knew how she felt. It was important for her to remember the mornings when she watched the yellow truck go up the driveway and felt herself lighten with the absence of Buddy’s lassitude.

  And it was important to remember that it wasn’t always winter and it wasn’t always about sitting out in the cold, or flying down to Bermuda. There was summer.

  It was summer that Marian loved most. Waiting through three seasons. Then she and Buddy were outside with their crews until dark, checking that the completion of older projects was not being rushed, that the new ones were starting on time. Cutting down trees, digging the soil, sculpting the land, watching their work taking shape. What Buddy called pushing against nature. Marian was moving again.

  Summer, the shortest season. The one they savored in spite of all the work, and because of it.

  There were weekend parties, music playing, loud, playful chatter rising from their back deck and the front porch with the verdant, spicy fragrances. Killer croquet matches and volleyball games that were not to be trifled with. Marian in the middle of the action, Buddy working the grill, filling plates with one hand, lifting a beer to his lips with the other. And dancing—Marian needed to remember how much Buddy loved to dance, slow, holding her in his arms, and fast, head thrown back, legs stomping, hands clapping.

  There were the melt-away Sunday mornings when they came up for air, spread their blanket on their lawn, just the two of them naked under the hot sun. Listening to the hum of the earth. Listening to nothing at all. Buddy’s hands on her body, hers on his. Feeling the certainty of their flesh.

  That last summer, they needed three crews to keep up with the work. All idleness was gone. It should
have been the time of irrevocable pleasure. It was less than that. What in past years had been their season of excitement, of restoration, was now their summer of discontent.

  Their impatience with each other, with their crew, was like a fingernail scraping against glass. The flora looked shabbier than last year’s and Marian sent back more than she accepted—she began looking forward to the times when she drove out to her supplier to complain, just for an excuse to yell at someone.

  Couldn’t Buddy see, she would ask, how poorly the jobs were going? The men were working too slowly, their attitude seemed listless. Couldn’t they get anything right, damn it? And why was it always him, he would answer back, who had to speak to them? Why was it her, Marian wanted to know, who had to tell him? Was she the only one who noticed?

  There were the long silences. In the morning. Across the table at supper. When she tried to tell her concerns to Buddy, Marian could not speak to the expression on his face.

  Something was lacking, Marian thought. Something was being overlooked. By Buddy, by her.

  When Buddy did speak to her, Marian sensed it was not what he was really thinking. What she was thinking, she was not able to say.

  She would look at Buddy in the sunlight, his thin face thinner, his eyes set deeper. She was not sure if what she saw was weariness or indifference.

  At night when they were in bed, holding each other, moonlight coming through the window, it seemed like old times. Almost. Or when they made love, it would begin to feel as though they were getting back to the way things were, back to themselves. Then Marian would feel that tug, the shapeless sense of emotional lethargy, and just like that they were out of synch with each other. Buddy felt it, too. He said he’d never felt this separate from Marian before. He said maybe they were simply preoccupied.

  Marian said it frightened her.

  This was the way June ended. Nothing changed in early July.