The First Warm Evening of the Year (11 page)

“Even before Google. When they'd release a new CD he'd buy it. He knew the trio was based in Europe and they came to the States at least once a year, but he never got to see them after San Francisco. That was back in '92.

“Then he read that Steve had died, the trio had disbanded, and Laura had moved back to America. Then nothing more, not about the trio, or Laura. The next time he heard about his sister was from one of his old friends who he'd been keeping in touch with, at least as much as Simon kept up with anyone. His friend told him Laura had died. That's how Simon heard about it. And that Remsen was handling her affairs. From a friend. An
acquaintance
.”

I was listening while I tried to imagine the two of them, Simon taking Alex into his confidence, Alex taking Simon into his; and I had to think whatever motivated Simon to open up as he did with Alex was the result of Alex opening up with Simon. Which was what I told him.

I said, “Simon must want you to know who he is.”

Alex said, “He wants
you
to know. That's why he came to see you. He was profoundly hurt when he found out what you did. You and Laura.”

“How did he find out?”

“Ask him sometime.”

I got up and walked out of the office. I felt like I was tumbling down a flight of stairs. I went into the waiting room. The windows were closed and the room was hot and airless. I leaned back against the wall and felt myself sweat.

Alex came out. He put his hand on my shoulder.

“You did what you did,” he said.

“And all of a sudden it's supposed to
mean
something?”

“Only what you want it to.”

“And what about you? What are you doing in the middle of all this?”

He pushed me down onto a chair and stood next to me, keeping his hand on my shoulder.

“You think Simon's the person who'll be glad to see you at the end of the day? Is that what this is about?” I asked.

“I don't know about that. But I wanted you to know, in Simon's words, what you're dealing with.”

“You're saying you have a crush on the guy?”

“Crush is a little priggish, don't you think?”

“And I should be nice to him?”

“I'm too panicked to give a name to what I'm feeling, or what I want from you. Let's just say I've enjoyed my few days with him.” He took his hand off my shoulder now. “Simon should never have lied to you about why he didn't go to Laura's funeral. The truth is, he didn't have enough money for a plane ticket. So after missing the funeral, he ran out on his roommate and used the rent money to buy a ticket to come see you. All he wants is to go back to Shady Grove, say good-bye to his sister, and try to come to terms with all of this. What he really wants, if only for a day or two, is to go home. Look, Geoffrey, all this guy's been doing most of his life is asking people for help, and yet he's bad at it and miserable about it.”

“And he needs my help?” I said.

“Let's get out of here.”

“I wasn't very fair to him.”

“That's a long line,” Alex said, “and there are a lot of people ahead of you.”

I
called Remsen the following morning. He was less than enthusiastic about Simon coming up there. He said as Laura's executor, I should be there while Simon was in the house. As Laura's attorney, he would prefer that I respect that condition. When I told this to Alex, he said, “So much the better. Now you have your excuse for seeing Marian again. But, I'm sure, you've already thought of that.”

Ten

W
e were in my car and heading north on the Drive. I felt that I was at a disadvantage, having to watch the road and not Simon's face when he spoke.

“Alex says I should be on my best behavior with you,” he said.

I told him to stop behaving like a child.

He said, “I see we're going to have a wonderful trip.”

I said, “I agreed to help you. All you have to do is be real with me.”

“I've always found that a difficult thing to do with you.”

“
Al
ways? Until about a month ago, the grand total of how long we've been acquaintances came to never.”

“I've always resented you for what you did.”

“I'm sorry about that. But if it's any consolation, I've never liked myself for doing it.”

“And Marian? You must have seen her when you went to my sister's place. Tell me she didn't show up when you were there and warn you about me?”

“Do you
really
think that anyone's giving you that much thought?”

“I hardly find that reassuring.”

We were just over the Willis Avenue Bridge and in the Bronx, before Simon asked, “Did it bother you when Alex told you about me? You probably didn't like it.”

“Why wouldn't I like it?”

“You don't have to worry about him. Your brother has a gift. He can see through walls.” He said this with so much affection that I had to look at him twice: once because there was none of that acerbity in his voice, and a second time, to make sure this wasn't another part of his
routine
. It was Simon unguarded, and I was thinking how much work he must have put into his resentments and postures, the pretense.

We drove a half an hour longer and were out of the city and on the Parkway. We had music on the CD player.

Simon asked me, “Did he tell you to go easy on me?”

“
You
should go easy on you. You must be exhausted,” I said. “You must exhaust yourself. After all these years.” I was watching the road again, and couldn't see Simon's face when I said this.

A few minutes passed before he said, “Money and food, and how to get it. That's all I used to think about. I still do. It bothered me at first, then it became part of my life.”

Another minute or so passed: “You do enough thinking about
any
thing and it stands to reason you'll draw a conclusion or two.” He turned down the music. “I've come to realize this country doesn't like its poor. It makes everyone feel like a failure. I mean, like the country failed in providing for all its people and can't cop to it, so we blame poor people for being poor. There are people out there who'd criminalize the poor if they could get away with it. Like it's something they choose.”

“You made the choice.”

“Mine was a self-inflicted injury.”

“You've been at it most of your life.”

“I've tried to change that. I tell myself I've tried, anyway. A few college courses here and there. And just when it looks like I might actually pick myself up and turn my life around, I lose interest or drop out or run away. I doubt that it's something you can understand, but what I've felt all these years, in absolutely the truest sense of the word, is worthless. Unworthy, if you like. Am I being direct enough for you? Enough self-awareness?”

“Why do you have to ask questions like that?”

“I did a terrible thing letting my family down like that. My sister, most of all. So why should I get a pass? Whatever else happened, or will happen, I have it coming to me.”

“How will seeing your sister's house make any difference?”

“You can't
really
be this impenetrable.”

“I'm sincerely curious.”

Simon sat low in the seat, his eyes were closed.

He said, “Being around the things she lived with, will close it all out,” as though he were talking to a simpleton. “If I can just say good-bye to her, in my way, pay my respects, maybe I'll feel like I've made amends. Maybe I just have to see for myself that my sister is dead.”

“I don't understand this obsession with the past.”

“Obsession is a pretty strong word.”

“Then attachment. What happened, happened. And really, what you did was not so terrible.”

Simon didn't answer right away. When he did, he turned his face away from me.

“There's this one time in your life, or one place, when you were the best you are ever going to be, with people whose love for you and yours for them was so absolute, that it's all you wanted. And then it's gone, and all you want is to be reunited with what it used to feel like, because you know that you'll never be able to love any other people or any other place like you do those people and that place. Laura couldn't replace the love she had for Steve. I can't replace my love for her and how it felt to be her younger brother back when we were kids. But how can I not go looking for it?”

I didn't say anything. I started thinking about Marian staying in her house after Buddy died. The scrapbook Laura saved and left behind. I was thinking what it must be like to feel that the best part of yourself is in the past. What it must be like to remember the day before it was gone. Now I understood what Marian had been telling me that afternoon when I'd driven up to see her. She wasn't talking about a time when all she was was happier than she was now, or less lonely, but a time when she felt complete— When you lose that, you wake in the morning and at night in your bed, your first thought, your last thought isn't about the irretrievable past, but the irretrievable you.

When I looked over at Simon, he was still staring out the window. We were less than an hour away from Shady Grove, the scenery must have looked familiar to him.

“This was a bad idea,” he said and asked me to stop the car. “I need a cigarette.”

“Just roll down the window.”

“I can't stand all the wind in my face. Pull over somewhere. Please.”

I pulled over. Simon got out of the car and started pacing along the side of the road while he puffed on his cigarette, walked past the car, turned, and walked back.

“I don't want to see Remsen,” he said, “when we get there.”

“I have to stop at his office. He's got the house key. You can wait in the car.”

“I don't want to see anyone.”

“Who do you have in mind?”

“I just want—I'm just going to stay in the house and not go out.”

“That's fine.”

“Wait . . . Forget it . . . Turn around.”

“I'm not going to do that.”

“Take me back to the city.”

“No way.”

“Why should you care whether or not I go? This was a bad idea.”

“Finish your cigarette and get back in the car.”

Simon dropped onto the front seat and tucked his hands under his armpits; his chin rested on his chest. His mouth was turned down, not so much in a frown and not in a pout. It wasn't petulance that I was looking at. It was the look of grim defeat. The wanderer, the drifter who is neither heroic nor mythic, but just what Alex said: A man who wanted, if only for a day or two, to go home.

About a mile later Simon told me, “I don't know what I was thinking.” And a mile or two later, “If anyone asks, don't tell them who I am.”

“Most of the people you knew have probably moved away,” I said. “And the ones who stayed won't recognize you.”

“You think?”

“You'll be anonymous.”

“That I'm used to.”

Another mile passed. He said, “Thanks. Thanks for saying that.”

I
t was early afternoon when I pulled up in front of Remsen's office, went in and got the key to Laura's house, and when I came out stood for a moment under the gentle springtime sun.

It was a warm day even for the last week of April, with signs of life in the town square, crocuses and daffodils, people sitting on benches, walking down the sidewalks wearing their spring colors. One of those people was Marian, wearing an orange sweatshirt and blue jeans.

She was standing on the other side of the street, staring at me over the roof of a car, just staring with her head cocked to one side, and smiling in a way that made me think she was waiting for me to walk over to her.

I told Simon, “Wait here,” crossed the street while I waved at her, cognizant of nothing but Marian standing at the corner.

“I wish I'd known you were coming back,” she said.

“You would have liked if I'd called ahead?”

“I don't know what I'd like, actually.”

“I think you do.”

“What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I came with Simon.”

“Simon? Welles?”

“He wanted to see Laura's house.”

“I wish you hadn't.”

“I'm glad I did.”

“Please don't say things like that to me.”

“I
like
saying things like that to you.”

“How long are you—does Simon think he'll be here?”

I said, “I want you to know that I get it. I get it now,” and maybe I should have told her that I understood the longings and fears in the lyrics in old love songs, and her emotional paralysis after Buddy died, and Laura's. And the crazy thrill of standing on this particular sidewalk talking to her about anything, even Simon Welles. But I would have felt foolish telling her that, so when she said, “I don't know what you mean,” all I answered was, “I'm going to be here only for a couple days. I'd like to talk to you sometime.”

“You'll only mess up my life. I don't think that's a good idea.”

“Do you really believe that?”

She looked over her shoulder at the row of stores behind her, and at the few people walking by.

“We can't talk out here.”

“Where do you have in mind?”

“I asked you not to try to see me again.”

I smiled at her. “That's one of the things I get.”

She turned around and walked away from me. I watched her until I was sure she wouldn't turn back to look, then I crossed the street to my car.

After I pulled away from the curb, Simon asked me who I'd been talking to, and when I told him, he said, “
That
was Marian? She was very happy to see you.”

“How could you tell?”

“The way she was watching you, before you looked up, and the way she was grinning when you were talking to her. Weren't you
there
? Like someone had turned on a light.”

“Not the most original description, but I'll take it.”

On the front lawn of Laura's house was a
FOR SALE
sign which hadn't been there when I'd left town. Inside nothing had changed. It was just dustier.

We stood in the center of the living room. Simon looked around as though he were measuring for a new carpet, walked across to the kitchen entrance and back again, at the same time telling me, “Go sit down somewhere and take it easy. I'll clean the place up a little. Really. It's no big deal. I used to clean houses for a living.”

I went upstairs and put my overnight bag in the smaller bedroom, with the twin beds, ran my hand over the soft quilted bedspread, gave the lace curtains a glance, kicked off my shoes, and lay down on the bed. I thought about Marian, seeing her on the street, hearing her voice. And was Simon right? Was she really happy to see me?

I experienced a sense of exhilaration because I knew that this was not the infatuation Alex had talked of, or the distraction. I'd seen Marian on the street, and I'd felt exactly as I'd once imagined; exactly what I wanted to feel, seeing her again. And here I was in Shady Grove, where it was now possible to see her walking down the street again. Maybe tomorrow. That was, at least for now, enough.

I started to laugh, a loud, full-bodied laugh, and kept on laughing for a moment or two longer, when the phone rang.

It was Marian calling.

She said, “I want to explain my behavior before.”

“I'd say you did all right the first time.”

“No. You showed up at my house, then you just drove off. Now you show up again, this time with Simon Welles of all— Where did you find him, anyway?”

“He found
me
.”

“You can't do that. Coming and going like that. You've really complicated things.”

“I didn't mean to.”

“I don't know if I can believe that.”

I wanted her to be calling from her car, parked just down the street, and if I got up and pushed back the curtain, I'd see her sitting there; in another minute, I'd be down there, leaning through the open window, asking her, “What's so awful about making each other crazy?” Which was what I told her.

“You can't just show up when you feel like it and say these things to me,” she said. “You'll go back to New York in a few days, or whenever.” Her words came spilling out one on top of the other without any space between them—“And then when you feel like coming back”—until she ran out of breath, paused a moment and then went on: “I asked you not to try to see me again, and here you are, trying to see me again. That makes me
so
angry. I asked you not to come back here and you did. And there's Eliot to consider.”

“I'm well aware of Eliot.”

“If you see me on the street, just pass me by. If we should happen to be in the same— Oh God, do you even mean half the things you say?” There was silence after that, and she clicked off.

My feelings of exhilaration had not abated.

All I wanted now was to give Simon as much time as he needed in Laura's house, or whatever else he thought he wanted from Shady Grove.

Later, when I went downstairs, stepping over the vacuum cleaner, I saw Simon standing in the kitchen door with a mop in his hand; he'd just finished washing the floor. I told him I was going out for something to eat. He said we should go shopping, and he'd cook us supper.