The First Warm Evening of the Year: A Novel

by Jamie M. Saul

  Sometimes, Marian woke up in the middle of the night and Buddy would be gone. More than a few times, she heard him walking the floor downstairs. One time, she went looking for him and found him standing outside, naked, staring up at the stars.

  Marian told him he was behaving like a man with a secret. Buddy said he had no secrets from her. He said he didn’t know what was wrong. She didn’t want to live like this, Marian told him. And what were they going to do about it? Buddy said they’d have to live with it, for now. That became the theme of their summer.

  By the end of July, Marian and Buddy had grown so inured to the dismal way they felt that they stopped talking about it. Not that they denied its presence; more that they defied it, or tried to, the way you wait out nasty weather. That there was no longer a thrill to their work, or sneaking away for a day off, was not an aberration but a way of life.

  Then, one morning in the middle of August, while Marian stood alone by a stone wall watching the work in progress at the Lyntons’ place in Millbrook, listening to the soft, sifting sound of shovels breaking the earth, about to get in her car and leave, she saw Buddy coming through the new clearing about fifty feet from her. He was sipping coffee from a paper cup, stopped to speak with one of the workers over by a pile of felled trees, walked farther along, poured what remained in the cup into a stack of dead branches, crushed the cup and put it in his pocket. When he saw Marian he walked toward her. His face had the ripe suntan of late summer, and there was animation in his expression that had been absent for the past two months. Marian should have enjoyed seeing this. All she felt was apprehension.

  Buddy must have seen that and expected her to walk away, because he waved and called out for her to wait a minute, and when he reached her, he put his arm around her waist and held her close. She leaned into him so she could feel the warmth of his body and his breath. She inhaled the familiar scent of his sweat, closed her eyes, and when she felt Buddy’s head move she raised her face to his. He whispered that he didn’t know about her, but he wouldn’t mind if the two of them could find an unspoiled jungle somewhere, rent a tree house, and live on coconuts.

  Marian told him that coconuts can get annoying, could they make it a four-star tree house with room service? That, Buddy said, was precisely what he had in mind. Marian wanted him to please tell her just what the hell was going on.

  Buddy said maybe it had to do with the two of them running dry on their work. Running dry on their lives. The way they were living.

  They sat on the stone wall, in the shade of a maple tree, away from the crew.

  Buddy still had his arm around Marian’s waist. He said he thought he had it figured out. That it wasn’t landscaping that they loved as much as doing landscaping with each other.

  All this time? That’s what he’d been thinking about? Because all Marian had been thinking about, all that she’d been feeling, anyway, was a deep sense of estrangement, like one of those horrid, unhappy couples, and she hated it, so if this was what Buddy thought was the problem, they’d better get busy fixing it.

  Buddy said he wasn’t joking about the tree house, four stars or not. He asked if it would be such a crazy idea to close up shop and go away for a while. Was money an object? Did Marian think next summer would be too soon?

  Marian said they still had a few projects under contract and money was always an object. They could go away the summer after next, then they’d be sure to have more than enough for a year, at least, probably longer. And when their money ran out?

  Buddy said they’d come home and pick up where they left off. Unless a newer, younger genius had taken his place, Shady Grove passed them by, and no one wanted a Buddy Ballantine design anymore.

  In that case, Marian said, they would start over. From scratch. She raised her arms to the sky and let out a shout. She told Buddy it was about time they’d gotten around to saying what they needed. She felt as though she and Buddy were—what’s centrifugal force? As though they were no longer being compelled toward Shady Grove, but spinning away, out of its orbit. It made her feel giddy. She grabbed Buddy’s arm and squeezed it, pressed her cheek against his bicep.

  Buddy said he was thinking they could start out in the Caribbean, the Virgin Islands, and make their way south, all the way to Peru, Brazil, Argentina . . . And when they got tired of that . . .

  Africa.

  Or Asia.

  Or the Mediterranean.

  Anywhere that interested them. After all, Buddy pointed out, Marian was still the girl who couldn’t stop moving, wasn’t she?

  All the places they might see, not as tourists but as travelers. . . . All that time to look forward to . . . All the possibilities . . .

  They would leave Shady Grove behind. There were times when it felt like a surrender; although Marian insisted that they were not giving up or giving in, but giving over because it wasn’t enough to feel discontented and to recognize it, but to reject it. Sometimes it felt like defiance, and sometimes it felt like a confession of faith.

  They talked about feeling a sense of release, not only from the past month, but from what they’d been doing together for the past couple of years. It wasn’t that they’d been working too hard, but they’d been too single-minded for too long. And for what purpose? It wasn’t about making a lot of money. It had never been about the money but about the joy they derived from doing their work. Now it was about its absence. Buddy used the word absence. Marian used the word loss.

  If pleasure from their work had been lost they would have to find it elsewhere and carry it with them, if not back to Shady Grove then to some other place they hadn’t yet considered, that they would discover along the way.

  Marian wanted to know how Buddy felt about never moving back to Shady Grove, about not wanting to pick up where they left off. What if they came back only long enough to sell everything and move away and start over? What if they only came back to see his family?

  That was all right with Buddy. There were other houses, other towns. Other ways to live. He said you can’t travel the world, even a small part of it, and not expect it to change you, and a year away from Shady Grove would no doubt change them. And wouldn’t Shady Grove have also changed, if only their perception of it because of what had changed in them? Isn’t that the way it happens? Is that what they wanted?

  Shady Grove had always meant home, now Marian thought how exciting it was to get away. She told Buddy that she loved the feeling she had when she thought about leaving. She said she wasn’t afraid to start over. She said it felt like floating. Floating words. Floating plans. One more summer floating in the future. Because life is the act of motion. Of moving. That was what Marian told Buddy the summer morning when they sat on the stone wall in the shade of the maple tree, Buddy’s arm around her waist. She didn’t tell him if life is an act of motion, stasis is its antithesis; although it would occur to her long after this conversation that she’d been telling him just that every time she told him how much she hated the cabin; that Buddy sitting alone out there in winter was Buddy sitting with death, or defying it, defying his mortality, and denying it—Marian didn’t believe in premonitions or her own prescience, neither did she doubt her feelings—but these were not the things she and Buddy talked about that last summer. These were not the things either of them thought about while they made their plans.

  Marian woke early and went cross-country skiing that morning by herself, something she liked to do when Buddy was gone. In the afternoon, she met Pamela and a couple of her friends for lunch in Great Barrington. All through the day, she was aware of the remaining time, the uninterrupted hours before the sound of Buddy’s truck came down the driveway, the snap of the door hinges, her awareness of giving back this piece of her day, her sense of relinquishing herself, when Buddy came back needing a shave and a shower. The inside of his yellow pickup would smell like a man who’d been alone in the Adirondacks for three days, but that would fade awa
y in a short time. Marian neither anticipated any of this nor took it for granted. It was what she knew.

  Buddy’s return was also her return to Buddy. They started calling it their reentry. It was Marian who named it, one evening, the second or third time Buddy had been to the lake. She asked if he ever felt that he needed time to regroup after he got back; that he might not want her to be there, because there were a few times when she felt that way after she returned. There were times when she felt this way when Buddy returned.

  Buddy said that his three-hour drive allowed him that time, and didn’t Marian have enough time to decompress? A little while later, Buddy said yes, when he first walked in the house, he felt as though he was being pulled out of his—reverie was a silly word for it, but some sort of privacy was being breached.

  Marian wanted to know if it felt like a jolt. A shock to the system? Buddy thought those were strong words for it, but there was a distinct moment of adjustment, or readjustment. She said sometimes she liked it when Buddy wasn’t home when she came back, she liked coming back to an empty house. For a slow reentry. And would he prefer that she not be home?

  Not ever. He said he wanted Marian to be there always; but after that night, whenever they took time off from each other, they called from the road on their way back home.

  On the fourth day when Buddy hadn’t phoned, Marian called Charlie. They drove up to the cabin early that same morning.

  Sixteen

  Marian stood in front of the office window. Her head was down, the tip of her chin touched the top of her collar. She raised her eyes toward the photograph of Buddy and her leaning against a backhoe and laughing.

  “Sometime I’ll tell what we thought was so funny,” she said, in a way that made me look forward to that time.

  She was still looking at the photograph while she said, “I’m not sure how I feel about your going up to his cabin. Not that I have any hold on the place, but I would have liked if you’d asked me, or if Walt and Ellie had. Or told me.”

  “If I’d told you, what would you have said?”

  “I don’t know. What did you expect to find?”

  “I just wanted to see the place for myself.”

  Marian came around to the front of her desk. I’d been sitting in that uncomfortable wooden chair since I’d arrived, and only now did I get up. I was close enough to take her in my arms, which I was finding difficult not to do, and tell her that I understood what it meant to be married to Buddy.

  Marian said, “And now if you don’t mind . . .”

  “Let’s get away from here,” I told her. “Find some place where no one will recognize us. I’ll buy you lunch, and we’ll speak of nothing of any relevance.”

  “Aren’t you bored with me by now?” She was smiling when she said this.

  We took Marian’s car and drove away from town, on one of the county roads I was now familiar with.

  We stopped at a store that sold prepared food. I bought a couple of sandwiches, two small bags of potato chips, and sodas. Marian drove another few miles until we came to a dirt road and followed it to a narrow wooden bridge by a waterfall. She stopped the car, lowered the windows, and cut the engine; although there was a cool breeze blowing, we kept the windows down so we could hear the sound of water rushing against the rocks.

  I watched Marian as she looked out the car window.

  I said, “Every time I’m with you you appear different to me. Not like you’re a different person, or because of the clothes you’re wearing or anything like that. It’s looking into your face and recognizing your different expressions. I won’t say I understand them, but I know them, and the changes in your voice when you speak. The way you sit straight up when you’re unhappy with what we’re talking about, sit low when there’s more that you want to say.”

  “I don’t like when you say things like that.” She shook her head. “I do like it. And I have no idea what you think you’re doing, and if you told me, I wouldn’t believe you.” She turned to me. “Why won’t you go away, please.” A moment later she said, “Only I’d probably miss you if you did, and if you came back, I’d only want you to go away again. So please don’t say things like that to me.”

  “So much for irrelevance.”

  “You didn’t really expect that, did you? Anyway, I wanted to show you this place. Buddy and I used to come here to get away from everything. This is where we convinced ourselves that”—she let out a soft breath—“that we could have whatever we wanted. Down there, sitting on those stones.” She looked over at me and said, “God, but we took our marriage seriously. Ourselves. So seriously. Very intense. Very high maintenance. That’s what we wanted to get away from, really. We were too young to state it like that. But that’s what it was about.”

  “When you care about something and someone,” I said, “the way you two did—”

  “It was work. We were hard work, and incredibly self-involved. I mean the both of us, as a couple. I was beginning to understand that, our last year together, and my opinion hasn’t changed. It was the nature of our marriage. Maybe we’d have grown out of it, I don’t know.” She turned to me. “I don’t miss that part of it. I should say, I’ve stopped missing it. With all the other things I’ve felt since Buddy died and all the things I’ve missed, I’ve also felt released from the intensity. His intensity. Maybe that’s why I’m—I’m afraid if we got involved, you and I, it would be the same thing. And I really don’t know if I want to do that again.”

  The sun was shining directly into our eyes, so we tilted the seats back, our faces parallel to each other, as though we were lying together on a couch, or in bed.

  “When you described your relationship with your girlfriend, remember? After you left, I thought about how easy you made it sound. How light and easy it was for the both of you. I envied that. I wanted that. To skim across the emotional surface without all that monitoring, without the fear, I suppose it’s fear, that you’re cheating on the depth of it. Not feeling it deeply enough.”

  “Also the fear of losing the person you love.”

  “You made it sound very inviting. Inviting,” she said, “and fun.”

  “That wasn’t my intention.”

  “You can’t help it. It’s what you do for a living, isn’t it. Making things sound inviting and fun.”

  I thought she was making a joke.

  “I’m quite serious,” she said. “You make it sound very appealing. I wouldn’t mind a relationship like that.”

  “You already have one.”

  “Then why isn’t it fun?” Marian rested her hand on top of mine. “Do you miss her? Do you miss your girlfriend?”

  I said I didn’t.

  “Didn’t it make you sad? To break up with her?”

  “I didn’t feel anything. It was like it never happened. After three years and I don’t think either of us felt much remorse. But I was terrified and exhilarated, and I felt like I was upside down. What I’d done was contrary to most everything I’ve ever done leading up to that day, and yet it felt right. Incontrovertible. And, at the same time, I had no clue as to what was going to happen to me or what I expected to happen. All I thought was: What the hell have you done? And all I felt was liberated.”

  Our heads were close enough for me to smell Marian’s hair, feel the warmth of her body.

  “I was on my way to my apartment to tell my brother, but I never got the chance. Instead, I get to tell you, which only seems right, since my breaking up with Rita had little to do with her, and everything to do with you.”

  “Don’t.”

  “After I left Shady Grove,” I said, “the first time, all the things that had been important to me felt superficial and unsatisfying. I knew what was lacking—what I lacked. It wasn’t a relationship I was leaving when Rita and I broke up. There was no relationship to leave. We were just two people who happened to get along a little more t
han just well enough, and spent time together with absolutely nothing at risk, nothing to regret. In the end, there was no heartbreak. It wasn’t even Rita who I’d broken up with. You might say I’d broken up with the way I was going about my life and all the things that had held my little world together. I could no longer tolerate what you say you find so appealing.”

  She sat up, took our sandwiches out of the bag, and told me to stop talking and eat.

  We ate in the car, and listened to the rush of water, and by the time we finished, the inside of the car was hot from the sun and our bodies. Marian opened the door, brushed stray bread crumbs off her lap, stepped outside, and walked over to the side of the bridge, She stood with her back against the railing and called to me: “It’s really nice over here.” I was already out of the car.

  “We both knew that we were attracted to each other that first time,” I told her. “And we both knew how inconvenient that was. But I liked the idea of being attracted to you. Now it’s more than just the idea.”

  “And it’s still inconvenient,” she said.

  “It’s the feeling that matters.”

  “There’s a lot about me you wouldn’t like.”

  “That’s not going to work. Saying things to try and keep me back on my heels.”

  “So what?”

  I enjoyed hearing the sound of resignation in her voice, and I laughed, not only because of that, but because all the things we’d ever started out talking about always led back to this conversation and it never seemed inappropriate; just as nothing else between us ever seemed inappropriate. I turned to look at her. I just wanted to see her standing next me.

  She unbuttoned her coat and let it fall open.

  “You must have felt something for her,” she said. “For Rita.”

  “Or else my telling you it’s the feeling that matters can’t be trusted?”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “I liked Rita very much, but there wasn’t any passion. We never argued, never disagreed, not about anything important. In fact, there was nothing of any real importance to anything. Don’t you think that’s odd?”