The First Warm Evening of the Year: A Novel

by Jamie M. Saul

  I stayed with her, and when she got to her car, she opened the door and said, “Get in.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Since you’ve got ghosts on the brain, I’m taking you to a haunted house.”

  “Aren’t you going to blindfold me first?”

  “Maybe later.” She started to laugh. “If only this was about sex. We could go away for a few days and get it out of our systems.”

  I was more than a little impressed with her associative thinking.

  “That would depend on the sex, wouldn’t it?” I said.

  “Great sex, of course.”

  “And what’s great sex?”

  “Sex with a person you enjoy having sex with.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that.

  After a few more miles, Marian told me, “We’re going to Lenox. If you want to know. The Fitzgerald house.”

  A moment or two later Marian said: “If it’s still there.”

  “Haunted?”

  “In the late eighteen-nineties, a family named Fitzgerald lived there, father, mother, two children. He was a clockmaker. One day they vanished. The entire family. Gone. The house was still furnished, food in the pantry, but no Fitzgeralds. They were never heard from again. About a year later, the house was sold, and the new owners began to hear strange sounds. Footsteps on the bedroom ceiling late at night, like someone pacing across the attic floor. Once each day, at various times, they could hear a clock chiming, as if from a room in the other part of the house. Four times, once for each member of the Fitzgerald family.”

  “Ask not for whom the bell tolls . . .”

  Marian looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “People said some nights you could see the shape of a man walking behind a curtained window, other times, when the house was known to be empty, lights going on in the upstairs room. No one ever owned it longer than a year before selling the place. By the time I was in high school, the house was abandoned. A lot of the kids during senior year would dare each other to go inside alone for five minutes. I was never one of them. Not that I believed the stories, not really, but you know, there’s always that twinge of ‘what if it really is haunted?’ And I did want to see for myself, but I was embarrassed to admit that to anyone, or tell anyone, let alone go there. It seemed like such a silly thing to do. But the place intrigued me. It still does. And I’ve never gone there. Until today. With you, Geoffrey.”

  We drove down a paved road. There weren’t many houses around, and the ones that were there were set back from the street, large and looking neither prosperous nor in disrepair, just old and settled. Down a few more streets, where prosperity seemed even further removed, and a few minutes more Marian turned onto a cul-de-sac where the road was cracked and the few houses there looked grim and neglected, some with boarded-up windows.

  Alone at the far end of the street was an old, broken-down palace of a place. If I’d known anything about architecture I could have identified the style and era, but all I saw was a big house on a patch of land overgrown with weeds.

  Marian pulled up to the curb, paused long enough to give me a look of mild trepidation, then we got out of the car and walked up to the front porch, which was crooked, the stairs broken and weather-beaten, the front door, or what remained of it, hanging off rusted hinges. The glass in the four front windows was missing. Marian peeked through an open space into the dark house, went over to the entrance, and whispered to me, “Are you coming in?”

  “I’m always up for silly things,” I told her.

  She made a shivering gesture while she grinned at me and pushed the door aside with just the tip of her shoe. The floorboards creaked under our feet as we stepped across the threshold.

  We stood close together inside the foyer, facing a dark hallway. The air was colder inside and damp. A little bit like a tomb. Like necrosis.

  To our right was a staircase leading to the second floor, with all the steps collapsed onto each other, the banister unattached from the few balusters that remained. Shafts of sunlight broke through the holes in the ceiling where the joists were missing, there was mildew along the floor, and the boards were warped. I could see names scrawled and scratched on the walls, with dates next to them—high school seniors, proving their mettle.

  Marian said, “Want to look for ghosts?” Her voice echoed as voices do in an empty room. She took a step forward and I followed while our shadows preceded us. As we walked farther along the hallway, quick scurrying sounds, like small animals running across the bare floor, retreated from our footsteps, and there came a flutter of wings.

  At the end of the hall were just more empty rooms. A dilapidated living room, a dining room without any ceiling above it, and the kitchen, minus the appliances, old rotted pieces of linoleum and a bird’s nest in the corner above the place where there had once been a back door. All indications that people had ever lived here, even the faintest patina of residency, were absent.

  I said, “Nice little place you’ve chosen for our talk.”

  Marian frowned at me.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I was hoping for something spookier.”

  “Like the crazy old caretaker warning us to keep away from the master’s bedroom.”

  “Or Jack Nicholson chasing us around with an ax.”

  “For all we know,” I told her, “the only reason no one wants to live here is high property taxes.”

  “I’d prefer the crazy caretaker.”

  “Always a crowd pleaser.”

  We were in the living room now. Marian looked around the floor for a place to sit. I took out my handkerchief and cleared two large circles for us.

  “More comfortable talking here?” I sat on the floor and leaned back against the wall. “Before, when you said you were embarrassed to tell anyone that you wanted to come here, you meant Buddy. He was a lot of things, but silly wasn’t one of them?”

  “I really hate an empty house.” Marian pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head, and sat next to me. She said, “Sometimes I wonder what you do in the city. And the kind of people you know. Are they all in the media? Do you socialize a lot?”

  “You mean the life I’m so attached to.”

  “I’m trying to tell you something, Geoffrey.”

  “I’m trying to tell you something. Remember what I said yesterday, about skimming across the emotional surface not being fun? Well, this is fun.”

  “Sitting on the dusty old floor in a cold, empty house.”

  “Sitting on a dusty old floor with you.”

  When I looked over at her, Marian was resting her back against the wall, as though this were the most comfortable place we might ever want. I was thinking, if this was about sex and we were tucked away in a hotel room in a town where no one recognized us, we could not have been any more intimate than we were right now. And for the second time in as many days I felt that time belonged only to the two of us.

  “When I told you we had to talk”—Marian was now looking over at me—“it had nothing to do with Eliot. I was thinking that you wanted me to reassess the past ten years, explain them, or that I had to apologize for them.”

  “What did I say to make you think that?”

  “But it wasn’t you that I needed to explain it to. It was Buddy. Since I first met you, I’ve been wondering, what would Buddy think about the way I talk to you? Would he approve of how I feel about you, and what I tell you? I’ve never thought about that with Eliot, not that that’s news to you. But I do with you.” She got up and walked to the end of the room where the hallway began and the short shadows of noon appeared across the floor.

  “I care about what Buddy would think,” she said. “That’s why I’m—” She walked out of the room.

  As I sat there alone, I was remembering when Marian sent back my handkerchief, and the aroma of her laundry soap. That same arom
a was in the air now, in the wake of her leaving. It made me want to touch the back of her neck with my lips, breathe in the scent on her skin, feel her body press against me. Because any act of intimacy between us made sense and had everything to do with what she was talking about.

  A moment later, I heard the click-clack of Marian’s shoes as she walked down the hall, farther away the sound of a door closing, then her slow approach back to where I was sitting.

  “I can tell you this,” she said, and walked over to me. “I have to ask myself what does it mean that we can talk to each other like this about all the things we talk about? What does it mean that we can be here like this today, and act silly in front of each other?”

  “I want to spend the rest of the day with you,” I said. “Here in this house, or anywhere you choose. I want to dream about you tonight. What would Buddy think of that?”

  “You know what? I don’t know if, after all this time, Buddy would even know me. Who I am. He’d still be thirty-two years old. What would we have in common except the past?” She tilted her head back until it was resting against the wall, raised her face, and stared at the ceiling. “When you said that you felt Buddy and Marian all around you? Buddy and Marian are dead. I’ve been afraid to accept that. Even think it. And I hear your voice in my doubts.” She closed her eyes when she said, “I blamed you for putting the thought in my head. But you didn’t put it there.” She took a deep breath and let out a sigh, while a breeze heaved across the room, joists creaked and beams stretched. As though the entire house had sighed. “I was just thinking. When I was walking down the hall before, there were once people living here, hanging up their clothes, girls’ sweaters and boys’ shoes. New and shining. It made me think about what they tell you, the things you find in other people’s closets, or don’t tell you, about who lived here. Or the things people discard and forget about. Not pictures and things like that, but just the things they keep and use every day.”

  Like fishing tackle and a faulty gas stove.

  “And what they leave behind when they go.” Her eyes were still closed. “What do you leave behind when you go? Or do you ever leave anything behind?”

  I told Marian about those early mornings when Rita would steal away, or when I would, taking only what we came with. And the night when Rita threatened to start leaving her clothes in the dark corners of my closet, and wouldn’t that make me feel the worst kind of claustrophobia. I told Marian that I would feel a terrible absence if she were to steal away, that now, if I were to anticipate driving back to the city alone at the end of this day, if she were to tell me that what she wanted was for me to leave so she could go back to her house and her memories, that feeling her absence would be a permanent way of life, and that would be impossible to accept.

  She moved her shoulders, just a slight shrug, as though it had nothing to do with what she was thinking, opened her eyes, and stared straight ahead at the mottled wall.

  She told me, “I’m sitting here wanting to make a case for—for not changing anything about how I live, or about myself, because of all the things we’ve said, of all the ways I’ve told you— Geoffrey, there’s a part of me that firmly believes if I were to really fall in love, it would negate the love I have for Buddy, make it less legitimate. That’s always been my worry. One of them. I don’t know if I’m courageous enough to take that chance.” She moved her shoulders again. “And at the same time, all I want right now is to have the rest of the day to ourselves.” She turned to me. “Because, as you can see, there are no ghosts.”

  It was no longer important to find places Marian had never been to, only that we spend time together, in the car for a while until we stopped along the way and walked close together in whatever little town we came to.

  We sat at the counter in a tiny shop and ate sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, strolled down narrow sidewalks eating chocolate cake out of a paper bag. There was nothing hurried about the day. The afternoon had the feel of a holiday. In a moment the music of a calliope would swell, the aromas of cotton candy and French fries would sweeten the air.

  I was thinking about all the other times I’d waited to feel the touch of Marian’s hand, or the feel of her hair against my face, on the cold floor of an abandoned house, in a brisk wind by a stone wall when I stopped myself from pressing my lips into the palm of her hand.

  What was stopping me now? Stopping us? What had always stopped us? The restraint of a self-styled decorum? This was not about decorum, and not about restraint. It was about constraint, deeper than a semantical distinction. If there was a specter around us, it wasn’t Buddy alone, but Eliot, who carried his own pocketful of constraints, and the drag of those constraints was the string tugging at Marian and me. Not that I thought this was Eliot’s intent. More the consequence of personality, and psyche.

  There was no calliope playing. The air held only the stale smells of small town exhaust. The only thing waiting for us was our imminent return to Shady Grove. The afternoon had lost its feeling of a holiday.

  I might have slowed down and walked a few steps behind. Maybe all I did was pull my shoulder away from hers.

  Marian turned her head and glared at me.

  “What just happened?”

  “What just happened?”

  “In your eyes. Around your mouth.”

  “What just happened?”

  “Geoffrey.”

  If I’d been more reckless, I would have assumed that Marian’s question was an expression of an insight into each other that informed our attraction. I would have believed that such a thing was possible. That what she’d just asked me was as much an act of empathy as perception; not at all a matter of chance, or caprice. A declaration. If I’d been willing to believe this, I would not have answered her with my silence. I would not have hedged. But my silence held.

  Whatever Marian had sensed, the change in my footsteps, the expression on my face, she grabbed me by the lapels of my sports coat, pulled me to a stop and said, “Tell me what just happened.”

  For a moment, I wanted to tell her to forget all about it. Only there was just the right kind of sunlight on her face, I could smell the chocolate on her breath, and there was her laugh, which I’d somehow prompted and which could never be denied—not that I felt steady enough to determine what I was seeing in her face, or hearing. I couldn’t rely on myself to know what I heard in her step.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m tired of imagining the things I want to do with you. It isn’t enough just to want you.”

  “Then tell me,” she said, “what you imagine.”

  We were leaning against Marian’s car. She said, “I know I can trust you, Geoffrey. Now I want you to trust me.” She smoothed the front of my coat with the palm of her hand. “I want you to go back to New York, and I’ll call you in a few days. You can wait a few days, can’t you?”

  Nineteen

  This was the way Marian told it. The way it was told to her:

  Whatever else Eliot was feeling when I walked out of his office, it wasn’t envy for my talking with Marian the way I had. All that talking was too much talking for Eliot.

  What Eliot was thinking about was Buddy and Marian planning on leaving Shady Grove. Moving away from home.

  He didn’t know why he was thinking about this. Maybe it was because I knew about it and he didn’t, although he was sure his feelings had nothing to do with me and nothing to do with Buddy, either. It had to do with Marian and him. They never made plans. They’d never gone away on a vacation together. Why was that?

  Alone in his office, Eliot thought about the first time he got Marian to leave her house and meet him in town. It was for breakfast at the diner. He remembered the solemnity of that morning, the intensity of her sorrow. He didn’t mind it. He was glad to be in her company, watching the way she sat, the way the expressions changed on her face, the hand gestures when she spoke. It was just as h
e’d remembered from years ago. It was like sitting with a memory. He never told her how much he liked that, or how much he liked being in her presence.

  He thought about the afternoon when he came by to move the boxes out of Laura’s house and say a quick hello to her old college friend who had come up from the city. He remembered thinking that this was all he needed to know going into that March afternoon. Then he pulled up to the curb and saw that Marian had been crying. It was the sight of her crying, the return of tears he’d tried to wish away that disturbed him. It was troubling to see it and it didn’t matter to him what she’d been talking about that made her cry. What mattered was hurrying to change the subject. Make the coin disappear. He realized it was a mistake letting Marian go to Laura’s by herself that day; that he should have gotten there before I arrived. He believed that at the time and he was certain of it now.

  He didn’t remember when it had occurred to him that Marian had been crying in front of someone she’d met only a few minutes before. It must have been after I came back to Shady Grove and he saw me sitting in the town square and came over to ask me— He couldn’t remember what he wanted to ask me, and whatever I’d said did not satisfy him.

  Was Marian going to leave him? That’s what he wanted to know.

  His face was hot. The office seemed small and airless. It was about time he expanded, knocked a few walls down, raised the ceiling.

  When he tried to work, all he managed to do was pick up the phone and start to call Marian at the nursery, put down the phone, start to call her house, put down the phone again. He didn’t know what he would say to her. He wondered if he was supposed to want something more than their relationship. He couldn’t think what that might be. Hadn’t he behaved the way she wanted him to behave? Given her what he assumed she wanted from him?