The First Warm Evening of the Year: A Novel

by Jamie M. Saul

  Eliot sat for quite a while and wondered what it was he wanted from Marian. He had never asked himself that question before, and he didn’t know why he was asking himself now.

  After ten years with Marian he was wondering why they never talked of love?

  But what bothered Eliot most was why, all of a sudden, was he even thinking this? Why, when he thought of being with Marian tonight or tomorrow or next week, didn’t it seem as satisfying as it had just the other day, and when had satisfaction become important?

  When had it become true that it was no longer enough just to be with her?

  Eliot sat at his desk, head down, until he heard movements outside his door and realized it was getting near closing time. The phone rang. It wasn’t Marian’s voice he heard, but one of the guys. Was he up for some basketball tonight?

  Later that evening, he was out at the high school shooting hoops with his friends, the six partners of the Bradford House.

  Pounding the ball on the hardwood floor. The physicality of playing a game, uncomplicated, absolute and clear. Move. React. He felt like he was flying.

  After the game, when he and his friends went over to the pub at the Bradford, they sat around the big table in the corner—the usual crowd was there at the bar watching a hockey game on the TV. The talk was about nothing of any consequence, the way it always was, what Eliot looked forward to, what he depended on had he given it any further thought, except he wasn’t there to give further thought to anything more complex than the beer they drank and the jokes they told. As uncomplicated as sports radio and no more profound.

  He was feeling lightheaded and it wasn’t the beer, but this sense of escape, and if he didn’t know from what he was escaping, well that was the point. As long as he sat there, Eliot felt as though he’d come back home and was unconnected to and unconcerned with all the considerations that puzzled him.

  The respite, the spell, lasted until they all walked outside and Eliot got into his car. He didn’t drive off, only watched his friends as they pulled away, going to their wives, their girlfriends. Eliot did not want the night to end, he did not want to be alone.

  He wanted to call up Marian, and without any explanation tell her, “I don’t feel like being by myself . . .” But he’d never called her spontaneously, or made an unannounced visit. Maybe he could change that tonight. Marian would meet him at the pub, or come to his house or invite him to hers. She would understand what he was asking.

  He sat looking out at the empty sidewalk, and when he got out of the car, he left his coat on the front seat and started to walk. He didn’t notice the chilly air, the quick breeze, only that he needed to move, the solitary man, hands in his pockets, staring at the tops of his shoes.

  Eliot couldn’t express, even to himself, what he was thinking. He once told Marian—apropos of something she’d forgotten—that he didn’t understand why people thought it so important to learn foreign languages; but now he felt as though Marian and I had been speaking a language foreign to him, and that he needed another language to understand what was happening to him, or else what did all the talk come to?

  He wondered what this feeling of loneliness was about. Why tonight?

  These were paralyzing questions, without resolution, and Eliot was unable, not unwilling, to push them aside. He had to stop walking and brace himself against a tree. He felt the entire day cascading over him. All those words. He could feel their weight, their volume, pressing down on him, and what he felt was so ridiculous, what he was thinking so improbable, that he started to laugh, not with amusement, nor pleasure. He was laughing at the absurdity of what he was thinking. That he and Marian never made plans.

  He and his ex-wife used to make plans, he thought. They took vacations together—Marian could have told him that you can’t make plans with the past. There is no future to a memory—but Marian and Eliot never left Shady Grove.

  Eliot wanted to take back that day when he saw Marian standing with me. He wanted to take back that afternoon. But what did he want to have back? What was he so afraid of losing?

  It had never been clear to him before, and he had never given it any consideration, not beyond its chronology, but he and Marian had just one year to themselves, that first year after Buddy died. Then Laura came back. It was Laura, he thought, who was able to distract Marian from her sadness. Who understood Marian’s sorrow and her mind. It was Laura, Eliot realized, who compensated for what he lacked. He was just the boyfriend.

  Twenty

  On the morning that I left town, Marian called Eliot and told him just enough to bring him to her house. A few hours later, looking weary and rumpled and dark under the eyes, Eliot told her, “I think we should go away. Isn’t that what couples do when they have to work things out? Go away?” He’d started talking as soon as he walked into the living room.

  Marian wasn’t sure if she was surprised that Eliot had joined the term work things out with the word couple, or distressed by it. It gave her an anxious feeling. She wanted to talk him down, talk him away from the idea that there was something worth working out, or that for the past ten years they’d behaved anything like a couple.

  Eliot still hadn’t sat down. He leaned the back of his legs against the side of a chair, pushed his hair away from his face.

  “I don’t mean we have to go off to some faraway place and talk things out,” he made little quote marks in the air. “I mean so we can be alone together and see what’s what.” He said this in one quick breath, as though he was anxious to get it out of the way. “I think it’s important that we find things we can do together. You never needed me to tell your troubles to, anyway.” He lowered his voice. “I know that. And I know I can’t replace Laura in that way. And I don’t want to.” He took a breath and sat down. “But it doesn’t mean that we can’t—we can— There’s a feeling you get just by being out on the courts. Doing. It’s liberating. Playing tennis . . . Golf . . . I know it doesn’t sound like much.”

  She smiled at him. “What do you want to liberate me from?”

  “A year wasn’t much time. If you know what I’m—I mean, Laura, well, she did so much to help you, but it was always the two of you and the three of us. We never really had a chance.”

  A chance at what, Marian wondered. Sports? Running five miles together every morning? Entering intramurals?

  “Maybe we get to have a do-over,” Eliot told her. “Do things together. And other stuff,” he said. “If Laura hadn’t come back, I don’t know if I could have ever been the person you wanted to confide in. Or did what she did for you. I don’t think I can do it. I’m not sure I want to.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But I don’t have to do that now, do I.”

  Eliot stood up. He walked over to the window, a stream of light, ocher-colored and rippling, appeared to struggle for purchase on the wall. He stood where the color faded into the corner.

  “There’s nothing to stop us from finding the things we can share and—well share them.”

  “It’s what you’ve been offering all along,” Marian said. She did not sound ungrateful.

  “Don’t you ever think that we were—that there was an interruption? I just wanted to get you out of your—I thought in time, we’d have taken up—gone bike—”

  “Joined a club? Played golf?”

  “And gotten away from all this second-guessing. That’s all it’s ever been. Second-guessing everything. And now, we have a second chance.” He walked back to the chair and sat down. “But hey, you’re the one who called me.”

  “I want to know what you think about what Geoffrey told you.”

  Eliot didn’t tell Marian what he thought. He told her what he’d done, the evening of basketball and beer. What he called “uncomplicated living.”

  Then Eliot told her what he’d been thinking about last Sunday in his office when I was there and after I’d gone; and what he’d been thinking when he was home by
himself; and how unsatisfying that time alone had been.

  Eliot was on his second cup of coffee when he’d finished talking.

  Marian could see that he was trying to get at something, trying to show her that his ruminations these past two days had led him to his conclusion, as skewed as she might think it was.

  She couldn’t pin down when or how often, but it was early on after Eliot started coming by that he talked to her this same way. She was in no shape at the time to focus on what he said, and what attention she did show him was a pose; but the sound of his voice had been so rich with joy that she would pull herself toward whatever he was saying, a ball game, a place he wanted to go with her, talking about what he now called things they could share.

  “We never had a chance,” she said. “Because I never gave you a chance.”

  “There was too much happening, that’s all.” He looked over at her. “With Laura—not just her—and everything else.” There was a stiffness around his mouth, his lips were pressed together. It was an expression not unfamiliar to Marian. It was the look of constraint when Eliot had gone as far as he cared to go.

  She was not surprised to hear him say, “I don’t know why we have to get bogged down in all this soul-searching,” or how impatient he now sounded. “What’s important— All I know is there’s something really exciting when you’re out there smacking a ball around, working up a sweat. It’s like the outside world doesn’t matter. Doesn’t exist.”

  “You mean the inside world.”

  “Inside. Outside. What’s the difference? When I said we should play tennis together, or any sport, it’s because I think you’d like it. I think you’d like—well there’s a purity about it. And what’s wrong with wanting to experience that with you?”

  Marian pressed her hands flat against the arms of her chair, as though she might have been able to tamp down her words, at least long enough to give herself an extra beat to think, an added measure to stop herself from saying what she needed to say. It was Eliot who spoke instead.

  “It’s like all the things that brought you down all day just disappear. All the bad thoughts.”

  If there had ever been a collaboration between the two of them, if they had ever acted like the couple Eliot now wanted them be, it was all the times Marian allowed their conversation to follow Eliot’s lead, when the conclusion was imminent, not because there had been resolution, but only because Eliot had reached the limits of his emotional vocabulary. Marian had permitted it—perhaps they were less collaborators than conspirators. She’d been no more eager for deconstruction than Eliot—she’d accepted the contours, the parameters, of his temperament. There was nothing revelatory about this or her motives. She’d needed Eliot’s uncomplicated living. She’d acquiesced to it.

  “If I tell you that you’re remembering Buddy’s girl when you talk of bicycles and baseballs, would you know what I mean? It’s that girl who you’re speaking to when you tell me these things.” She was careful to keep her voice soft. “Who you’ve been speaking to all the time.” If they’d had the kind of relationship that allowed it, Marian would have taken Eliot’s face in her hands As it was, she leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees and let her hands hang at her sides.

  “You’re asking me to be that girl with you,” she said. “To be a kid. It’s what you think I want.” She frowned at him. “It’s what you think I need, and what I think you mean by purity.”

  “You’re not this woman, the one you are right now, when you’re with Geoffrey, are you? You’re not like this.” Eliot looked down at her hand. “I’ve never wanted you to be anyone but who you are.”

  “Who do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know how to answer that.”

  It wasn’t disappointment that Marian felt. Her expectations of Eliot had always been so slight that he never had a chance to let her down. It was sympathy for Eliot and the limitations of the relationship he seemed prepared to accept. At first, Marian felt a chill at the back of her neck, as though she’d just swallowed a mouthful of cold water, and then resentment for his simplicity of thought.

  “It’s like in a fable, a myth.” Marian got up, walked a small circle, and stood behind her chair. She watched Eliot’s face, knowing that she wanted to see more than he could show, and she wanted to be angry at him, but she was never angry at Eliot, she never disapproved of him. Her feelings were just as flat-line as they always were. And what she had to do was lead Eliot to his unavoidable conclusion.

  It was her unavoidable conclusion as well. What was the fable she told herself, the myth? That love can stay alive in photographs hanging on a kitchen wall, behind the wheel of an old truck, in its faded logo?

  When she looked over at Eliot, she did not see his high school face, although if she’d ever thought to identify what his expression contained it was their adolescence, an expression she was so accustomed to seeing in his face—the face that appeared all those years ago outside her door.

  “It’s an awful lot like being children who won’t take responsibility for themselves,” Marian was now saying. “That’s what Laura and I were like, holding on to all our memories, our pasts.”

  “That’s not what I ever asked you to do.”

  “You didn’t have to ask. It’s what we did. The three of us.”

  Eliot leaned his head back, looked up at the ceiling, and said nothing.

  All those times, staring out of a window at the end of another day, driving alone, it came upon her, so recognizable that she didn’t need a name for it. When she wanted to make an accounting to herself. Long after Buddy had died. The nights when she was unable to make it all the way home. She’d pull off the road and weep; call Eliot from her car and ask him to meet her at the pub, or could she come by his place. He asked no questions and gave no counsel. He would tell her, “Just don’t think about it.” Not a balm but an anesthetic. It’s what she depended on.

  “I think all I’ve ever been good at is being a kid with someone.” Eliot managed to say this without sounding disapproving of her. “I wasn’t very good at being a husband. I wanted to do better at being your boyfriend.”

  “If you’re looking to redeem yourself—”

  “Do you think—”

  “You’ve been very good at being a boyfriend,” she said. “It isn’t easy for two people to do what they want to do. You and I did. It’s how we wanted it. But it was also about compliance. At times.”

  Eliot lowered his head. “There are lots of times I feel like I’m still trying to convince you of—I don’t know, of me, I guess. My good qualities. It’s hard work.”

  “You mean I’m hard work.”

  Eliot didn’t reply. He got up and went outside. Marian could see him from the window, arms across his chest. She poured herself a cup of coffee, and when she looked again, Eliot had turned his back to the house, and she did not mind sitting alone. She would have liked to stop thinking about the things she was going to say, all those elastic thoughts, the elaborated sentences pushing the conversation, bringing Eliot to the resolve that would liberate them from each other.

  “I don’t know how to do this, what we’re doing now.” Eliot was standing in the doorway. “I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean. But it could be—” He walked inside and closed the door; sweet, warm air rushed into the room. “It could be that people have expected you to do certain things a certain way.” He shook his head at this. “I mean like people in town, your friends, they all expected you to be like a specific kind of person, and maybe no one took into consideration what you wanted to be.”

  “Just where did this insight come from?”

  When Eliot smiled at her, Marian thought about the density of personality that one life weighs against another, and she wasn’t thinking only about Buddy. When Eliot said, “I think that’s what you were talking about before? What you meant about doing what we want?” Marian
thought, there’s still time for the right words. A sentence or two and we can go back to how it used to be.

  “If what we’ve been doing,” Eliot said, “the way we’ve been going along isn’t for us anymore, then we’ll just have to come up with something else.”

  Marian said, “Tell me again what you want us to do together.”

  Eliot said, “I don’t want to tell you anything right now. I just want us to go ahead and do it.” He shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. I want us to be one of those couples that just goes out and has fun when they’re together. Because they’re together.”

  “No,” Marian said. “Tell me.”

  Eliot told her again about all the fun they would have.

  Repetition enhanced Eliot’s narration until the simple act of pedaling a bike, rising early and walking a trail possessed of its own majesty—not dissimilar to the morning walks around Buddy’s lake—no more exertive than stepping from one smooth stone to another in a narrow stream, compelling Marian by the strength of her own concession, taking her neither forward nor back but around, to the top of the circle, the ten-year circuit; and perhaps this had been what she needed.

  What if she’d been wrong about Eliot? What if everything else had been noise and clutter, and what he offered was the thing that had been missing? If Eliot had stopped talking that might have been enough. Marian knew how to dull her heart. But Eliot would not stop talking, his gestures became more expansive, his voice grew louder; and the more expansive and loud, the more constrictive it felt to Marian, as though she’d stepped inside a diorama.

  Marian had waited. She’d been fair. She no longer believed this was about choosing one man over another. It had become a matter of how she chose to conduct her life.

  Eliot had stopped speaking, and was grinning at her. Marian felt as though she were wading through that grin, trying to reach what she wanted to say.