The First Warm Evening of the Year: A Novel

by Jamie M. Saul

  “Unsatisfying, really.”

  “It made me angry. That’s mostly what I was feeling after I walked away from her. Not angry at Rita, definitely not Rita. I liked Rita. But I was angry at those three years. It was a waste of time.”

  “Only if there was something else you thought you should have been doing.”

  “Then it was even more of a waste of time because I never gave it that much thought.”

  “Then you were in the right relationship. For that time.”

  “Just like you and Eliot.” I stood close to her and spoke in my most professional voice, the one that made things sound so damned inviting: “Skimming the emotional surface is fun only if you both want the same thing.”

  “Ahh, the perfect world,” she said. “And you’re welcome to it.”

  Marian might not have been able to keep me on my heels, but she did have the ability to make me have a clearer read on what she was telling me. At that moment I felt, and not for the first time with her, that slight shifts were taking place between us, between what I thought was happening and what she was going to tell me was happening.

  “I wouldn’t mind being sad about something besides Laura and Buddy,” she said, and gave the waterfall a passing glance. “And now I have to get back to work.” She did not sound enthusiastic. “But I want to see you again before you leave town.”

  Marian drove us back to the nursery. Cars crowded the parking lot, all the place could tolerate; customers were scurrying past the large wooden tables of perennials and annuals; some were pulling little wagons loaded with pots and soil; others walked in slow, contained strides, as though they were in a botanical garden on this early afternoon. A couple of men were in serious discussion with one of Marian’s people as they approached the arbor. Two women wearing red bandannas were struggling with a spruce that was too big for them. The constant and busy hum of locomotion was everywhere. While a few more cars pulled in and jockeyed for space, I couldn’t help but think of the awakening of bees from dormant hives and butterflies from cocoons, early and eager to join the season.

  We walked to my car at the front of the lot. Marian put her hands in her pockets and kicked at the gravel with the tip of her shoe.

  She said, “Listen, Geoffrey: I love living in that house. I love seeing photographs of Buddy on the walls and the gardens we built. I love that it reminds me of him, who he was and how he thought. His confidence, his arrogance. For a long time I thought it was his arrogance that killed him, and mine that allowed it. I wish I could have sat out there with him and waited for the fish to bite and heard the poetry of randomness. Most of all, I wish I hadn’t been so stubborn about going up to the damn place.” She took a breath and let out a shallow sigh. “Now I’m in a relationship with someone who is so goddamned reliable and predictable that I can look at my watch and tell you where he is and where he’ll be two hours from now and the day after tomorrow. I like that. No surprises. Nothing unexpected. This is what I want. Wanted. Want. I’ve had enough of all that other stuff. I know a little about passion, and you aren’t missing anything.” She tilted her head and frowned at me. “And that’s so much B.S., how can you stand it?” She straightened up and walked away. “I’ll call you,” she said over her shoulder. “We’ll talk. Okay?” A throwaway line, cuing her exit.

  The following afternoon, I was sitting outside on Laura’s front steps wondering how long ago it had been since I’d broken up with Rita. How long since I’d come to Shady Grove, or read a newspaper, or heard any news about the world.

  Time had lost its application, and that was all right with me. I enjoyed this lack of context, and might have continued enjoying it for the rest of the afternoon, except for Eliot walking up the sidewalk, baseball cap on his head, a button-down oxford blue shirt open at the collar, hands in his pockets. He was smiling at me, taking a moment before he approached the house.

  I said hello and smiled back at him.

  He said he was just taking a break from work, and thought he’d stop by and say hello to Simon. When I told him Simon had gone back to New York, Eliot said, “Oh,” his voice soft and hollow. He sat on the bottom step, took off his cap, and scratched the top of his head. He didn’t say anything, but I recognized the look on his face; it was the same one I’d been seeing every time we met, on the street after I first got to town when he came here the other day and stood on this same porch, an umbrella in his hand. I might have been willing to assure him, again, that I’d be gone in another day, and didn’t plan on coming back, if I hadn’t been listening for Marian’s phone call, wanting her to give me a reason not to go. I turned my head to look into the house, when I turned back, I was thinking, what else can I say, what can I tell him that’s more to the point than words of assurance? Only, I didn’t want to tell Eliot anything.

  Eliot was staring behind my head like one of those dolls made of balsa wood and rice paper—the cut of his clothes, the angle of his body. If I’d tapped his shoulder he’d have crumbled backward, if a wind came up he’d have blown away. I was thinking that the right words from me, or the wrong ones, and he would break apart and scatter, but I was protecting him, monitoring what I said whenever I was with him, never unaware that I was a threat to him and his happiness. And I hesitated before I spoke, girding myself, taking a slow ten count to consider what I was going to say, hoping that Eliot would hear it for what it was, for what I wanted it to be.

  “It must be very lonely for you,” was what I said.

  Eliot stared at me. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I guess I meant that as a question.”

  “I’m not any lonelier than, well, you for instance. Aren’t there times when you feel like not being by yourself.”

  “Is that what you think I mean by lonely?”

  Eliot stood up, brushed off his pants, and walked away.

  I went back into the house. I wasn’t there for long when Eliot walked into the living room and sat on the arm of a chair.

  “I’ve always liked this room,” he said.

  “You didn’t come back to tell me that,” I answered.

  “I saw your car parked outside Marian’s office yesterday and her car was gone. I don’t mean to sound like a jackass, but is there something going on that I should know about?”

  “I’m as confused as you,” I said, which was not the answer he deserved, but I was thinking about the afternoon when Marian said she was sure I wouldn’t tell anyone about our conversation if she asked me not to. Well, maybe she hadn’t asked me, but I wanted to remember it that way. I told Eliot, “You’re going to have to talk to Marian. And whatever you’re thinking, that’s not it.”

  “We used to have some nice evenings here, Marian and Laura and me,” he said. “We went way back, the three of us. Nice talk. Old friends.”

  Did he go all the way back to Saturday mornings skating the pond in the park? Did he happen to look up one Saturday morning and see Marian skating those tight circles? Did Eliot watch Marian fall in love with Buddy?

  “Were you one of the kids who skated at Peery Park?” I asked.

  Eliot just stared at me for a moment, then walked to the door, with his head down, as though he needed to watch each step.

  Seventeen

  The backyard outside Laura’s kitchen door was not so much in disrepair as in need of a spring cleanup. The wood trellis was overgrown with wisteria. Weeds had crawled up between the bricks in the patio. The three metal rocking chairs had been tilted over and small pockets of puddles from the recent rain filled the indents and crevices, adding to the rust. There were four empty birdfeeders—two hanging from trees, two others on thin metal poles—and a small collection of terra-cotta flowerpots that held only moist soil were lined up under a tree like poor relations. I turned one of the chairs upright, cleaned it with a damp towel, and sat out there in reasonable comfort.

  There are times when the thing you le
ast want to do is the thing that most needs doing. I needed to wait. Wait for Marian to make a decision, wait for Eliot to act, and all I could do was choose where to do my waiting: here in Shady Grove or back in Manhattan and the pleasures of being home. Or was my waiting for Eliot and Marian nothing more than the convenience of my own passivity? When was I going to declare what I was feeling? When was I going to tell Eliot—what was I going to tell him? What was I supposed to say? That Laura had bequeathed me to Marian?

  It was a tight triangle, Marian, Eliot, and me; and Marian and Eliot and Buddy; and Marian, Buddy, and me. There seemed to be a need for a specific kind of arithmetic to arrive at the sum of all this.

  I don’t think of myself as having much insight into the human heart and psyche, but I knew that the dispassion that Marian and I had been living with were the same things, although mine was cultivated and hers was studied. Buddy had sought to escape the obligations of the heart, at least temporarily, and perhaps he’d found it: Going to the cabin was his way of taking his heart slumming because of that high maintenance Marian spoke about. The confidence that allowed him to leave was the confidence of knowing what he was coming home to, that it was constant. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been slumming, but a way of life that was careless and pointless, with nothing to give it substance and shape.

  However long it took me to reach this conclusion was just as long as it took Eliot to realize he wasn’t finished with me. I was still sitting in the backyard when he walked out the kitchen door, straightened one of the chairs, and told me, “When I got back to the store I felt— restless I guess best describes it, like I’d forgotten something. Like I’d left something behind. I couldn’t concentrate on a damn thing. And this is Saturday.”

  “Saturday?”

  “My busiest day this time of year. You know, all the weekenders . . . I’ve got to be on my toes.” Eliot wasn’t shouting, but there was agitation in his voice.

  He walked over to one of the birdfeeders. Looked into it, walked to the other birdfeeder, looked into that one while he flicked his finger against the side, watched the dried seeds fall to the ground, and said, “I haven’t thought about Peery Park—I didn’t go there all that much back then. I’m not much of a winter person, skating and all that. This is my time of year, or just about. I play a little tennis, a little basketball after work. Pretty soon the evenings get warm enough so you can start sitting outside again. I start looking forward to that. Winter’s not for me.” He shook his head. “The best skater out there was Simon. Did anyone tell you that? I don’t mean just ice-skating. He was an excellent hockey player. Can you believe it? Buddy wasn’t much of an athlete, though. At least he didn’t go out much for sports.” Eliot looked over toward the kitchen door. “This has turned into a sad little place. I’ll be glad when they sell it.” He sounded so bitter I thought he was going to spit on the ground. He walked across the patio, and sat down again. “Someone should buy this place, clean it up, paint it.” He rocked back in the chair. “Laura once asked me, it seems not too long ago, she asked if I was happy. I said, ‘What’s happy?’ That kind of thing was more important to her than to me. I don’t have any complaints. Isn’t that happy enough? She wanted to know if I ever thought about leaving Marian. She didn’t say leave, I forget the exact word, but didn’t I want to meet someone who just knocked me out? Didn’t I think I deserved to be crazy in love with someone, just once in my life?” He laughed a soft, breathy laugh. “Maybe because she knew she was dying she was thinking about these things.” He let out that laugh again. “She said I should sell my store and use the money to go somewhere that I’ve always wanted to see. That I should put some distance between myself and Shady Grove. I said I’d never given much thought to moving away from Shady Grove. That this is my hometown, and I felt attached to it. Isn’t that why she came back? To be home, right? And why Marian stayed after Buddy—I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It gives a person a solid feeling when he stays in his hometown. Her hometown.”

  My cell phone rang just then. It was Alex. I took the call inside.

  Alex said he was calling to tell me not to worry.

  “Okay. I won’t worry.”

  “If you call and get my voice mail or bounce-back on my e-mail. Don’t be alarmed.”

  “I won’t worry,” I assured him.

  “I’ll be out of town for a few days—more like a week. That’s why. I’m going to the Bahamas. Tonight.”

  I assumed this had to do with Simon.

  “Twin beds?”

  “Don’t be vulgar.”

  “How about ecstatic?”

  “Don’t read too much into it.”

  “Only volumes.”

  He told me I was very funny, and oh, yeah, how were things going and was I ever coming back to the city?

  “I’ve got Eliot with me right now.”

  “The boyfriend? What’s he want?”

  “It’s been verbal sleight of hand for the most part.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Misdirection.”

  “Call him on it.”

  “He’s performing it on himself.”

  “Then keep your mouth shut is my best advice.”

  When I went outside, Eliot was still sitting in the metal chair, looking up at the sky.

  Before I sat down, he started talking.

  “It was great that Laura could ask you to be her executor.”

  “She was my friend, she asked for my help, and I helped her.”

  Eliot stood up. “I don’t think it matters what the reasons are, we care about the people we care about and when they need our help . . .” He walked over to me, patted me on the back, went up the steps and into the house. A moment later I heard the front door close.

  I could only wonder what fresh thoughts might disturb his concentration on his busy day.

  It wasn’t as calming back there or as comfortable since Eliot had come and gone; although I did enjoy thinking that Alex was on his way to the Bahamas, and if I was surprised that he was going with Simon, it was more because my brother was taking off an entire week so soon after his previous vacation, but it wasn’t very long before I was back to thinking of all the things that were not at the moment giving me much enjoyment. I was wondering what I wanted from Marian. From myself. And why this was so important to me. Or was it only the feeling that mattered? Was that the attraction?

  Or was it the peril? Of being consumed by the strength of your own emotions? Or empowered by someone else’s? Was that what Buddy was escaping when he went off to fish? Was that what compelled Eliot to appear outside Marian’s door when she refused to see anyone else? Was that the message in the music Laura left behind? Or was it, as Alex told me, nothing more than interlocking neuroses? Could I reduce my attraction to Marian and the drama of her life to a neurotic reaction?

  Whatever Marian thought we needed to talk about must not have been too important. She didn’t call that afternoon or that night.

  The following morning I took myself for a walk. I just wanted to get out of the house, I didn’t care where I walked. Since that damn letter from Remsen arrived I felt as though I’d been trying to crack the code of unarticulated intentions, circumspection, and it was a nuisance and frustrating. Except for the Ballantines, no one had yet offered me a definitive conclusion about what they thought, what they wanted from me.

  I walked down the sidewalk, staring at the dreary, dun-colored street, the same dreary light hanging in the sky, obscuring the horizon, like the conversations I’d had with Eliot, with Marian, full of reticence, hesitant and halting, determination indistinguishable from desire. It wasn’t only Marian and Eliot; I was just as complicit.

  When I reached the corner, I turned around, walked in the direction of town, and across the town square to Eliot’s hardware store.

  Eighteen

  It was a bright, clean store, w
ith wide aisles, smelling of cleansers and paints. There were quite a few customers, some looking lost in the aisles of pumps and piping, others looking content with their boxes of lawn and leaf bags.

  I didn’t see Eliot, but there were several salesmen in bright red vests and crisp white shirts, most of them talking to customers. One was stocking a shelf of lightbulbs, and when he looked up I asked him if Eliot was around. He pointed to the office door at the back of the store.

  Eliot was sitting at his desk reading a spreadsheet. He didn’t wear a red vest or white shirt, but he was now wearing a striped tie with his oxford blue shirt. When he saw me, he didn’t glare, but he didn’t have a congenial expression on his face, either. I closed the door, and sat in the chair across from him.

  “I don’t think you were finished talking to me,” I said.

  He rested his elbows on the desk, and rubbed his eyes with the tips of two fingers. When he looked at me again, the expression on his face wasn’t any more congenial than before. He folded the spreadsheet, lining up the corners, pressing it flat, and placing it inside the top drawer. “Inventory,” he said.

  “I think you came by yesterday to talk about Marian,” I told him.

  “I have nothing to say about Marian.”

  “And I think you also wanted to talk about yourself.”

  Eliot got up and walked around the desk, sat on the front corner farthest from me.

  He said, “You know what equilibrium is?”

  “Equilibrium.”

  He leaned back, inverted his hands, and braced himself with his palms, getting still farther away from me. “You came to Shady Grove and you didn’t know anyone, of course you couldn’t. You didn’t even know why you were here, I bet. But hell, Geoffrey.” He moved his weight to the right, then to the left, resting on his hip, but only for a moment before he sat forward and, apparently unable to get comfortable, stood up and walked back behind his desk. He didn’t sit down, he just stood behind his chair, and having, it now appeared, found the proper buffer, told me, “I made her tomato soup. When I went to see Marian. From a can. It wasn’t quite a month after Buddy died. She looked like someone from a shipwreck. Her life was like a shipwreck. She was . . . How could you know that? You couldn’t know that. Or what she was like back then.” His voice was flat. It granted no absolution. “I didn’t make her talk to me. I didn’t ask her questions. Whenever I saw her she said whatever she wanted, or nothing at all.” He smiled an anemic smile. “I certainly didn’t ask about her feelings. I think they’re very private things, feelings. I respect that. It’s the same thing now. With Laura. It’s just the way I am, the way Marian is.” He said this as though the information were just a matter of the facts before us, found, perhaps, on the spreadsheet he’d just put away.