The First Warm Evening of the Year: A Novel

by Jamie M. Saul

  “I don’t know if I can stand still anymore.”

  Eliot’s grin vanished. He said, “I thought I was saying the opposite.” He walked behind Marian, and put his arms around her shoulders. It was the first time he had touched her since he got there. Whatever he was thinking never made it past his mouth. He held her a moment longer before he stepped back.

  Marian did not reach for his hand. She didn’t want Eliot to say another word, she didn’t want him to make an argument for himself, or to argue his way back into her heart. But there was something that needed to be said at this moment, for this moment. Marian was not the one to speak.

  “Do you want to break up?” Eliot’s voice was not loud. Had he been farther away Marian would have thought he was talking to himself.

  “Oh, Eliot . . .” Marian answered.

  “Yeah. That was a stupid question. It’s what we’re doing, isn’t it?” His voice was louder now. “I don’t know if all it is, is being like a child,” he said, “or what’s so wrong with that if it is. I just wish someone wanted what I want.”

  They were standing outside where the back steps met the edge of the stone path.

  Eliot kept his hands at his side, his face was lifted toward the sky as though he were checking for rain. Their duet was at an end, in need of, if not a crescendo, a coda. It was Marian who provided one, after Eliot asked, “What about Geoffrey?”

  “A month from now,” she said, “I could be sitting here all alone.”

  Twenty-one

  As I drove back to the city, I thought about my last conversation with Marian. The following morning, after sleeping in my own bed, on my own pillow, and a joyous morning with coffee and eggs while I stood outside on my terrace looking at the park and the truncated progressions of my fellow humans, I was still thinking about it.

  Marian and I were on our way back to town to get my car. I suppose we were both thinking about the next few days. I anticipated lonely ones for myself.

  Marian said, “I always imagined that one day, I’m talking about after Buddy died, that I’d get used to his being gone and that would be it. I’d be alone and that was how it would be. And even with Eliot, I knew the time would come when being together wouldn’t be what either of us needed, and a part of me was looking forward to not being involved with anyone. A single woman. I liked the idea. I still like the idea. Kind of.”

  “Does this have something to do with trusting you for the next few days?”

  “Don’t you think it’s possible that the time comes when you’ve had enough depth of emotion for one lifetime? That it’s all right to just glide along in a relationship of convenience? I might have been reaching that point. And then I met you. I feel safe with you, Geoffrey. I’m going to break up with Eliot and it’s going to hurt me to do it, and hurt Eliot. And I never thought I could do that. I certainly never wanted to. I wish I could say what will happen next.” She turned her face toward me. “I haven’t had a lot of time to get used to all of this. According to my daybook it’s been all of six days since you’ve been in town.” She turned back to the road. “It’s been about two months since Laura died. To say that my life has been upended of late—I can’t say how I’ll feel a week from now but whatever I do, I have to do it with you back in New York.”

  We drove on for another minute or so.

  “It can wear you out just thinking about being with another person,” she said. “I can’t dismiss the idea of living some Emily Dickinson–like existence. Her house isn’t too far from here. Do you know that? Just me and a couple of neutered cats, in a small cottage all to ourselves somewhere. Actually, Laura and I discussed that. Living solitary lives. It does have its appeal.”

  “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “What would I be trying to tell you?”

  “Neutered cats?”

  “Don’t you like cats?” She turned to me and grinned.

  “There’s enough chastity going around.”

  Marian slowed the car.

  “Is that what we’re talking about?” she said.

  “It’s what we’re talking about now,” I told her.

  “Sex?”

  “There’s more than one kind of chastity. You know that’s what you’re going to think about after I leave.”

  “Having sex with you?”

  “Wondering if the heat’s going to die down once we’re away from each other,” I said, which made her laugh. Not the dreamy laugh, but she sounded committed to it.

  “I like that you can be glib about this,” she said. “And I like that you can take it seriously.”

  “Because you have no idea what’s going to happen next. You can’t say what you’re going to do.”

  “Can you? Can you say what you’re going to do?”

  If Alex had been in town, I would have been on the phone with him by now. I might have coaxed him away from his office, and neither of us would have shut up; but I wasn’t about to call him and interrupt his Bahamian vacation, even if I’d known where he was staying. Instead, a strict silence settled in, and restiveness. All there was left to do was wait for Marian to call. All I could do was choose how I waited, and I couldn’t sit still, I didn’t want to hang around the apartment, and there was nowhere that I wanted to go.

  I would have liked knowing that Marian was feeling the same restlessness, and what she was doing right now, and what she was thinking. And what if I was right about our cooling down once we were apart? What if she changed her mind about me? Or I changed mine about her? There was always that chance and the chance of never knowing what it was like when we kissed, or to wake up in bed and feel the soft warmth our bodies made together. What a shame that would be for both of us. Unlike Marian, I had no problem with applying the first person plural to the two of us; but if we backed away from that and each other, it wasn’t as though our emotions were transferable, that we could carry them over to anyone else. We had altered the part of ourselves that had resisted this, not an unpleasurable admission, and in no minor way were Marian and I dependent on each other; not in the way that she and Buddy had been. This was not about the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, or building gardens—after all, there comes a time when you have to leave the garden. Buddy wasn’t mistaken about that. We were not in our twenties and starting out together, or in our thirties favoring the prospects, or reeling from the wreckage. After forty you’d better be prepared to recognize what your true needs are, and locate the better parts of yourself and who around you can best identify them. If Marian hadn’t come to realize this, there was no way we would be together, and that would leave us each with little more than that solitary life she and Laura had found so damn inviting.

  And there was nothing I preferred doing that morning other than thinking about Marian and all those possibilities. I wanted to spend the day doing just that—quite insane—except the world and New York City have a way of rushing in uninvited.

  Unpacking clothes. Sending out laundry and dry cleaning. Phone calls to answer, not from Marian. E-mails that needed replies. And a week’s worth of mail to sort through. The triumph of the quotidian over the sublime.

  Early in the afternoon I did receive an e-mail from Marian asking me not to send her any e-mails.

  Half an hour later Marian sent another: “H. Bogart to I. Bergman: ‘The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.’ Me to You: ‘I’ve decided the entire world is nothing but bean hills.’ ” With the request not to reply.

  A few minutes later: “Five dozen geraniums just arrived at the nursery today. Even this is more commitment than I’m willing to make at the moment.”

  A few minutes after that: “Not the ubiquitous American geraniums, but the lovely cranesbill, a beautiful, leggy shade plant that brightens even the dark corners.”

  When I checked a little later, after paying some bills
and sorting a lot of junk mail: “I need to mourn for this alone without interference or interruption . . . I don’t quite . . . I don’t want to know what you’re thinking . . . I’m embarrassing myself . . .” Then nothing; and an hour later nothing still.

  I had to get out, walk around, breathe in the city air, pretend that I was back to normal.

  It was a warm May afternoon. The kind of weather that dissuades you from believing in both caprice and misfortune, and permits you to feel the part of yourself that never ages, that adheres to the conceit that all you’ll ever believe in and cherish is everlasting and immutable. Wordsworth’s intimations of immortality; until the intellectual collapses on the psychic, and the street is just the street again.

  The day after Marian asked me to leave Shady Grove, before I went back to the city, I drove over to the nursery to say good-bye. We were standing in the parking lot outside her office. Marian was leaning against my car door.

  “What if you’re the ghost,” she said. “The ghost of Geoffrey Tremont circa nineteen eighty-six?”

  “Have I ever given you the impression that I’m not the person you think I am?”

  “That’s not exactly what I mean.”

  “Afraid that you’ll wake up in the middle of the night screaming, ‘What the hell have I done?’ ”

  “You have to admit there’s the possibility.”

  “I admit all possibilities.”

  Marian looked over her shoulder in the direction of her greenhouses, or beyond them. I couldn’t see her eyes, while she said, “I could never forgive you if you’ve ever tried to deceive me, Geoffrey.” Her voice was pitched deeper than I was accustomed to. “I have no room in my heart for that.”

  I thought I was past the slippery feelings. I’d been certain that Marian no more believed that I had or ever would mislead her than she believed she would deceive me, but I could not dismiss the jangling nerves that always accompanied my being around her, that lack of a splendid confidence.

  Marian was looking at me again. “If you weren’t leaving I’d be the one who’d have to. It’s very tempting to run away from all this.” The smile on her face was tepid. “It’s too much, don’t you think? Too high-alert.”

  “Then it’s not such a bad idea if we do cool down for a few days.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say that.”

  “What word do you prefer?”

  She said, “I wish we stopped turning everything we say inside out. Turning each other inside out. Please. It’s scary and troubling and I don’t like it.” She took a few steps away from the car. “And I don’t care if I sound cranky. I’m really not looking forward to the next couple of days. To anything, right now.” She turned on the balls of her feet and walked away. She didn’t appear to be in a hurry, kicking at the stones in the dirt, stopping for a moment, staring at the ground. When she lifted her head, the wind blew her hair away from her face. She looked around, her eyes not resting on any particular spot, then she stared at me as though she might have been seeing a room for the last time.

  I was thinking: I better remember this.

  If I never saw Marian after today, this was all I’d have and it would have to be enough and it never would replace what I was feeling at the moment—not unlike living alone in an old house with nothing but clippings in a scrapbook.

  I was thinking: She watched her husband drive away for only a few seconds before she made herself busy, she didn’t wait to see him to the top of the driveway, and she’s wondered ever since what was so important that she gave up those few extra seconds.

  Marian came toward me. “Can I go inside now?”

  When I got back from my walk it was already dusk. There were no e-mails, no phone messages, and none the rest of that night. In the morning, when I still hadn’t heard from Marian and couldn’t stand waiting, I went out to run errands that didn’t need my attention, came back in the early afternoon, and there was still nothing from Marian.

  But I did send an e-mail to Alex in the Bahamas, more out of concern than curiosity, and he e-mailed: “I’m sending Simon back to California and if he can get his shit together, then we’ll see. I’m not ready to set up house with anyone but I’m having more fun than I’ve had in a long time and am really quite happy at the moment.” He did get around to asking me how I was doing, and when I replied, he said I should remain hopeful.

  The following morning, after a not-too-restful sleep, and after the delivery of my clean clothes, I started packing my travel bag. I didn’t know why. If there was no turning back and no going forward, perhaps there was just going.

  I thought about the first time I’d visited Shady Grove and the sweet melancholia that had replaced my emotional stasis. That feeling of stasis didn’t seem as troubling as the emotional limbo where I now found myself, and where I might be stranded.

  It had been three days since I’d left Marian with her thoughts and doubts, with time to make her choice, whatever that would be. I was thinking the hell with it, I’ll call her or send her an e-mail, tell her time had expired, and what’s it going to be? Or I could just leave—“You said not to get in touch, so I didn’t get in touch . . .” Welcome to the eighth grade. Pack up and get away.

  I packed for a tropical vacation, unpacked and repacked clothes for somewhere farther north, then Asia, then a European trip. I was in the same room where I’d first read the letter from Laura’s attorney, where I’d listened to all the songs of love that Laura had left for me. It was where I thought about falling in love and going mad.

  When I finished, and had no idea what I’d packed, I sat on the floor, rested my head against the soft, fat part of the bag, and started to laugh. I fell asleep waiting for Marian to call.

  In the middle of a dream, the phone rang and Marian’s voice woke me.

  “I went up to Albany to renew my passport. The man said it could take up to a month.”

  “The man said?”

  “I said I couldn’t wait that long, and told him how we met and what a pain in the ass you are, and how you’ve completely screwed up my life.”

  “And to a total stranger.”

  “He said any man who’s that persistent—”

  “And he uses words like persistent.”

  “ ‘Determined.’ He said a man that determined won’t want to wait for the federal bureaucracy to get around to my passport request, so he promised to put a rush on it.”

  “And in Albany of all places.”

  “So what do you think we should do in the next four weeks? And keep it domestic.”

  “Who is this?”

  “The voice of your impending demise.”

  It didn’t take a month to get the passport, only about ten days, not counting the weekend. In that time, Marian arranged for her staff to run the nursery, and did all the other things a person does before leaving town for an undetermined amount of time.

  I untangled myself from a small web of obligations, rescheduled what I could reschedule, and postponed what I couldn’t. Everyone was most understanding when I explained why; although I doubt I did as good a job as Marian did with her passport.

  Marian and I agreed that we should see Walter and Eleanor before we left. I wasn’t sure how Marian would announce our plans, or if she’d even decided to, but I was looking forward to seeing the Ballantines again.

  As soon as I walked into the house, Walter shook my hand and squeezed my shoulder, said a robust hello, let out a quick laugh, held onto my hand a moment longer, and led me to the enclosed porch. Marian was already there, sitting in one of the soft chairs.

  Eleanor came toward me and we hugged.

  “Marian’s told us,” she said, “at least a little bit. But Walter and I want to know everything.” She and Walter sat next to each other on the sofa, and even before Marian or I said another word, they were leaning toward us—it seemed like the entire room was leanin
g toward us.

  “We’re just going away.” Marian’s face was flushed.

  “Just like that?” Walter asked.

  Eleanor had to ask a second time before Marian began to tell the tale of our past few days.

  It was obvious that Walter and Eleanor were enjoying the story, the way they interrupted every few sentences with a rush of questions, and even interrupted each other. If I hadn’t been so charmed by their exuberance I might have been alert to the tone in Marian’s voice, the absence of enthusiasm when she said, “I mean, don’t you think your excitement is a little over the top?” and the tension.

  “Anything but,” Walter said.

  Marian started to stand, stopped, and sat down again.

  “If nothing else,” she said, “I think this is disrespectful.”

  “To what?” Eleanor asked. “And to whom?”

  “She’s talking about Buddy,” I answered.

  “I should say not,” Walter said.

  “It feels a little like dancing on his grave.” Now Marian did get up and walk away from us. “We’re going away for a few weeks,” she said, looking only at me. “It’s not like we’re . . .”

  “Why not act like you’re . . . ?” Eleanor said.

  “I haven’t even had sufficient time to absorb leaving Eliot,” Marian told her. “I think we’re all just a little too—festive.”

  “He was our son. We love him, too,” Walter said. “And we also love you. We’ve waited a long time for you to—” he looked over at Eleanor.

  “To find someone.”

  Marian turned to me. “Say something. And please don’t be understanding.”

  “Eleanor’s right.”

  “I can’t help it. I know it’s crazy.” Marian started to cry. “It’s like you’re going to forget him. It’s just not fair.”

  “Not fair?” Walter said.

  “I mean, it’s like you’re sending me off, without asking for an explanation, or an apology.”

  “You don’t need to explain anything to us,” Eleanor said. “Or apologize.”