The First Warm Evening of the Year (13 page)

W
e sat next to each other on the low stone wall along the side of the county road, looking out at the expanse of Hudson Valley, not saying anything, just looking at the Berkshire Mountains, dots of yellows and greens that Marian said were the gardens and landscaping she and Buddy had done together.

Marian said, “We're between seasons, really. The end of what we call winter interest, which you can still see small samples of, and the beginning of all the blossoming.” There was a soft wind brushing at our faces, like it does on a quiet sea, tousling our hair, putting pink in our cheeks; and all I could think was: This day cannot move slowly enough.

We were out there for a few minutes before Marian said, “I think you need to know what you've done to me. When you came to see me at my house.” She pushed her hair away from her face. “I liked it, the way you spoke to me, and the things you said. I haven't— Well, I found myself thinking about you—sometimes at the most inappropriate times.” She laughed. “That didn't come out right, did it? Thinking about seeing you again.” The wind picked up and her hair was all over her face; she turned away from it, lifted her head, and I saw her in profile.

She said, “When you drove away, I stood there and wanted you to ignore what I said and come back. And I was so relieved that you didn't, and so disappointed. And you never called or tried to get in touch with me—”

“As I recall, you told me not to.”

“I thought about you all that night, what you said, how you described things.” She got up and started pacing in front of the wall. “And the next morning I thought, what if Geoffrey doesn't listen to me and calls, or I drive into town and there he is, sitting in the diner having breakfast? Wouldn't that be just like Geoffrey? And then I thought, I have no idea what would or wouldn't be like Geoffrey. All that day, I kept thinking, what if I hadn't told you to go? And why did I?”

“Why
did
you?”

“You know how it is when you go somewhere for the first time?” She was pacing a little faster now. “You're following directions, making sure you're on the right road, passing the right road marks? And then suddenly you're sure you've made a wrong turn or passed the place you're looking for and all you feel is disorientated maybe and all alone? That's how it felt after Buddy died. That feeling of being in the wrong place. For a very long time. And I got used to that feeling, and everything was all settled.
Is
all settled. I can miss Buddy for the rest of my life and all the feelings that go with it, and tolerate what I have with Eliot, live peacefully and grow old without caring. Do you know how many times I wanted to call you or send you an e-mail? Does this sound normal? Do
I
sound normal? What do you think I meant when I said you've complicated my life? Does this sound like a normal person speaking? And now you've broken up with your girlfriend.”

When Marian stopped pacing, I stepped toward her and was about to take her hand and hold it against my face. And what would she have done if I'd pressed my lips into the concave cup of her palm and kissed it? Just once.

“Well,” she said, pulling back from me, “have you seen enough?”

“I want to get closer.”

“Closer?”

“I want to see the gardens up close. And you can tell me what you remember about building them.”

“I'm afraid this is as close as you get,” she said, and walked to her car. “It's getting chilly and I'm tired of talking.”

We were in the car, heading down the road, back the way we came, when Marian asked, “What are you going to do now?”

“Go back to New York, as soon as Simon's ready. He's trying to find his sister.”

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye.

“The scrapbook she packed away,” I said. “It's all that's left of her, really. He should be allowed to see it.”

We drove a minute or two longer before Marian stopped the car.

“If I let him look through it,” she said, “will you promise he'll give it back to me before you leave?”

W
e were driving down the bluestone driveway to Marian's house. I could see the smaller gardens, where the lilac trees were showing their buds and green shoots were pushing through the soft earth.

“Laura's things are in there,” Marian said, nodding her head toward the barn. “But I want to talk to you about something, first. In the house.”

She parked at the edge of the path. I followed her to the back door, through the mudroom and into the kitchen.

She asked me if I wanted coffee, walked over to the refrigerator, took out a brown bag and while she measured the grounds into the filter, I filled the well of the coffeemaker with water.

“I want to tell you why Laura asked you to be her executor,” she said. “I mean, why I think she did. It's only fair.”

“I'd like to hear it.”

“She knew she was dying, and we were spending a lot of time together, talking about the past. One day she pulled out some of the old photographs. When I saw that one of you, I said, ‘He looks kind of interesting.' Laura said she wondered whatever happened to you, and did you grow up to be anything like the person she thought you'd be. I told her if she really wanted to know, it wasn't too late to find out. Anyway, it was when she took out the photographs, and I said I thought you were attractive, and was she ever involved with you. And that's when she told me all about you. She said twenty years can change a person and not usually for the better, but she didn't think that would be the case with you. We talked like that for a while. I don't know if you can appreciate how much she remembered about you, and how much she liked you. She knew what a good friend you were. She said she'd tried a few times to get in touch with you when she and Steve came to New York to play. Later on, you know, a month or so after we talked, when Laura told me what she'd decided to do, she wanted—well, if you agreed to be her executor I had to swear that I'd meet you and find out whatever happened to her friend Geoffrey Tremont. Laura said she was
bequeathing
you to me.”

“Or the memory of me,” I said.

“No
.” Marian said this with the adamance of the True Believer. “Laura decided if you said no then it answered her question straight out, because the person she remembered wouldn't have turned her down. If you'd turned out not to be the person she hoped you'd be, there was Remsen to take care of things. Or if you were married with three lovely children, a charming wife, living the American bourgeois life and couldn't be bothered, then the hell with you. But if you were who she hoped you were, wanted you to be . . .” Marian took a deep breath. “That's why I was there that first day. To meet you. For Laura.”

For a moment I thought that there was a subtle manipulation occurring, and not just now but from the time Laura wrote her will, and it was the exact sort of thing that should have sent me rushing back to New York and the life I thought I was finished with. But I knew I couldn't be that far away from Marian.

“The times when I was thinking about you,” she said, “I'd wonder what kinds of places does Geoffrey go to in New York? If he has expense account lunches in those midtown restaurants they write about in magazines. Does he go to the theater, cocktail parties?” She opened the cupboard, took out two coffee cups. I filled them both while Marian got out cream and sugar. We sat facing each other across the table.

“What does his apartment look like? Does he clean it himself or does someone come in? And that was all there would ever be to it. Someone to wonder about. Because I was
positive
nothing was going to happen. It was never going to go anywhere. I liked the idea of having that to carry around with me.”

“Imagining your life isn't living it.”

“Yes,” she said. “I'm well aware of that.” She lifted the cup to her mouth, but raised her eyes and looked at me over the rim, and when I looked back, she did not move her eyes away. “Do you remember standing here with me when I told you all the reasons why I couldn't leave Eliot and I said guilt was the driving force?”

“You told me you were a guilty mess.”

“I also know how easily I can hurt him. That's a terrible thing. An
inhibiting
thing. You said that Eliot seemed to have a better idea of what was going on than you or I do. Why shouldn't he? Don't you think he's noticed that something's changed in me? And that it happened after you and I met?” She pointed her finger at me. “I have an obligation to him, Geoffrey. I can't discard him just on a whim.”

“Is that what's going on here? A whim?”

“I'm sure you—”

“It's an opportunity.”

“How can you be that certain?”

“I'm as scared as you are.”

“Oh,” she said, “now I feel much better.”

“Simon believes that this is all about self-deprivation. Self-denial.”

“What does Simon know about it?”

“I don't disagree with him.”

“For that matter, what do you know?”

She stared at me a little longer than I liked, and said, “It's been ten years since I've been with Buddy. After all this time, it still feels like it happened, not
longer
ago, but further
away
. Far away from what I believed my life was going to be.” She traced the tip of her finger around the rim of her cup. “For a long time, all I did was think about all the things Buddy and I had planned on doing, and how there never seemed to be any hurry to get them done. For about three or four months after he died, I didn't really do much of any—it wasn't as easy as all that.”

I asked what she was talking about.

She paused a moment before she answered. “Buddy.” Another moment passed. “He could be so . . . Intense. Sitting around, lying around. Thinking. All that thinking. Plans and ideas. Never saying a word. Just silence. For hours. And he expected me to—God forbid I should interrupt. It was like walking on eggs. It made me crazy. We had some very loud fights about it. So self-absorbed. And overbearing. I want you to hear me say that. In case you think I have this unrealistic idea of my marriage.”

“Marriage is marriage,” I said.

“A lot you know about it,” Marian answered. “Ever since he died. I feel—” She shrugged her shoulders.

“Incomplete?”

Marian's back went stiff.

“Buddy had his office in the barn. I still go out there sometimes because I have this feeling—I didn't close out his business,” she said, “because I like receiving mail addressed to the company, seeing Buddy's name on the envelopes. The same way I like driving his pickup, and the other things we did together after I had to do them without him.
Have
to do. They used to be reminders of the things I'd lost.

“Then they just became the things that had to get done. Mundane. Then the mundane became a part of my life, and that part became part of another part . . . I've always blamed myself. For not going with him. For a long time I wished I'd died with him. That's probably something you don't want to hear, but why shouldn't you know it.” She tapped her fingernail against the side of her cup. “When I got to Buddy's cabin, I stood there, looking at him lying on that bed, and all I could think was, any second one of us is going to wake up.” There was no expression in her eyes when she said this, nothing in her voice now.

“You seem so sure about everything,” she said. “So sure about what you're doing here and what you want from me.”

“What I'm sure of,” I told her, “is we can't keep kicking this thing back and forth. I'm going to New York as soon as Simon gets Shady Grove out of his system. And you and I aren't about to get involved in some little affair, meeting in towns halfway between here and there. That's not your style nor mine. Once the last bit of business with Laura's house is finished, I'm never coming back to Shady Grove. Unless it's for you.”

“Laura wanted me to like you. I
do
like you. And I don't want to. I do want to.”

I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. “You know, Marian, you wear a person down.”

For an instant, I thought she was going to laugh—that laugh that had started everything—but she was staring at me and there was no amusement in the look on her face or in her tone of voice when she said, “What I told you before about Laura—she wanted me to meet you. For
us
to meet. She said I'd buried my heart when I buried Buddy, and the evidence of that was Eliot. She thought he was a lovely man, but what was the point if what I felt for him didn't fill my heart. She wanted me to fall in love again.” Marian's voice faded at the word
love
. “And what happens—what happens to me if I do fall in love with you and you change your mind? What happens to me if anything
happens
to you?”

“That could be true of Eliot, too, you know. He could get tired of you. Something could happen to him.”

“If anything ever happened to Eliot I would be very sad. But it wouldn't turn my life upside down.”

I started to speak. Marian reached across the table and pressed her fingertips on my lips, but said nothing, while outside the windows, the sky was lighted with the lavender of twilight, the exquisite hour; and together we watched the remainder of our day move a little further away from us.

Twelve

M
arian drove me to the nursery, where I'd left my car. Sometime during the drive, I must have asked her what she was doing that night, or maybe I apologized for needing the ride. I doubt that she volunteered that she was having dinner with Buddy's parents.

“You see,” she said to me, “we're dealing with people's
lives
.”

“Lifetimes, really.”

When we pulled up to my car, Marian handed Laura's scrapbook to me. “If you like, you can leave it with Remsen when you're done. It might make things simpler.”

“Simplicity itself,” I said back to her, and got out.

I drove in the direction of town, but I didn't want to go to Laura's house and have supper with Simon. I was in no mood to see his face on the other side of the dinner table. Instead, I kept on driving. When I saw a small restaurant just off the road, its yellow lights invitation enough, I pulled into a parking space between two other cars, and went inside.

It was a pleasant dining room, not very large, with the calming sound of dinner conversations. One of those restaurants with an eclectic menu and nothing too adventurous. I hadn't yet ordered my supper when a woman came over. She had a round face, framed by short, gray hair, and held a black beret in her hand. She said her name was Kate Callahan, that Marian had introduced us at the Bradford House, and if I was eating alone, I was welcome to join her and some of Marian's friends for supper. One more opportunity to feel close to Marian. And I accepted.

There were two other people at Kate's table, who must have arrived just before I had; they were still settling in. While Kate invited me to sit down she introduced me to Pamela and Charlie Ballantine. Charlie was Buddy's younger brother.

There was a resemblance to Buddy, at least from those photographs I'd seen. It occurred to me that Charlie was probably older now than Buddy had been when he died.

I said I was surprised that Buddy had had a sibling. “I've been thinking of him as a singular person. The way Marian speaks about him.”

“There were five of us,” Charlie said. His voice was a rich, relaxed tenor. “Two older than Buddy, and two younger. But Buddy was singular.” Charlie had a stronger build than Buddy, like someone who'd gone out for crew in college and still did a little sculling on weekends. When he pulled his chair closer to the table, I saw the swell of his chest against his shirt.

Kate asked if my coming back to town had to do with my being Laura's executor.

I said, “Only in an indirect way,” and explained with only the slightest details my mission with Simon.

Charlie said, “It's really very kind of you to do that.” He wanted to know what Simon had been doing all these years, if things had worked out for him.

I said, “You're the first person who's asked me that.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I think I've always understood what it was like to be Laura Welles's brother. Probably because it wasn't much easier being the brother of Buddy Ballantine.”

While Charlie floated that out there, Pamela said, “Both Laura and Buddy had a kind of star quality at a young age. It was hard not to get caught in the undertow.” She looked around the table, making eye contact with everyone while she spoke, and then she sat back in her chair, and looked over at me with an expression that made me identify what I'd been observing about her: She impressed me as one of those women who young men feel comfortable speaking their secrets to, and older men their hearts.

“I'm still having a hard time with the idea of Laura moving back to Shady Grove after living in Paris,” I said.

“A lot had changed for Laura.” It was Pamela who said this. “Shady Grove became the
constant
in her life. Where she found stability.”

“Stability.”

“Laura was quite content to be Laura the high school teacher. She made it work.” It was Kate who answered. “She didn't do too much talking about it, but you could see she'd come to terms with it. That she'd made peace with herself and her life.”

“Not like Marian,” I said.

“What makes you say that?” Pamela asked.

“Just the little I know about her. And what you said before. Did Marian get caught in the undertow of Buddy's personality?”

“It was hard not to.” Pamela was speaking to Charlie when she said this.

“Remember St. John?” Charlie said back to her. And then he turned to me. “In the Caribbean. The four of us used to rent a house there every year. High on a hilltop. Great view. The whole thing. It was always so much fun being with Buddy. With the both of them. They were hilarious together.”

“We didn't like to do the tourist beaches, the places you see on postcards. We explored out-of-the-way places. Not, you know, pure beaches,” Pamela explained, “just little spits of land or small keys that you had to hike to get to. Beautiful places. More difficult to get to than the tourist places.”

“We all liked snorkeling,” Charlie said. “And we were always looking for someplace we might not have gotten to the last time we were down there. But this one time, we went back to a beach, a bay, that we always liked to go to, not that popular—at least it hadn't been in past years when we were there. Small white beach and nice coral reefs at the end of a rock scramble.”

“Lush and thick jungle that came just to the edge where the beach started. Really rustic.” Pamela had taken over the narrative: “So, this one time, coming back, we're walking along the beach, lugging our stuff, with this beautiful water surrounded by this gorgeous scenery, and there are these
people
. From one of the resorts. They bring them over by boat for the day. Maybe twelve of them altogether. With a canopy, right on the beach, and of all things, designer umbrellas. And these four people were up to their waists in the water, surrounding a floating bar. Drinking. Like they were at a cocktail party. We thought it was just ridiculous. Buddy said it was worse than ridiculous, that those people were so
alienated
from all of that beauty. That they actually were numbing themselves to the experience.”

“Buddy thought of himself as a pantheist,” Charlie told me. “And the sight of those people seemed disrespectful to him. And sad.”

“It also made him angry,” Pamela reminded Charlie. “It was all he could talk about the rest of the day. He quoted
Words
worth at us.”

“He was pretty spectacular,” Charlie told me.

“And spectacular people like Buddy aren't supposed to die meaningless deaths,” I said. “That's why he didn't worry about ice fishing alone?”

“Buddy didn't worry about much of anything.” It was Pamela who said this.

I said, “But he must have known it was a careless thing to do.”

“It's where Buddy went to get away from Buddy.” Kate was looking at Charlie.

“We all hated that place,” Charlie said. “Not just Marian. My brothers and sisters, my parents. We couldn't wait for winter to be over and for the ice to finally melt.”

“You're right, though,” Pamela was speaking to me now. “It was pretty careless. And irresponsible.” She looked over at Charlie, not for confirmation, at least she didn't seem like the sort of person who would look for that from her husband, but maybe, even after ten years, you still didn't speak badly about Buddy Ballantine. “
Nothing
stopped Buddy,” she said.

“Not even Marian?” I asked.

“She practically lost her mind when Buddy died,” Charlie said. “Everything was tied up in their—they did
every
thing together. They were the driving forces for each other. It's the difference,” he said, “between doing something and being something. It's what they were. What
Marian
was. And then she wasn't.”

“She had every right to fall apart the way she did. And to be angry at him,” Pamela said. “Which she was.”

“She thinks it was
she
who betrayed
him
,” I said. “For not going up to the cabin.”

This brought the conversation to an end, at least it appeared that way, for no one replied, they only made quick eye contact across the table, and stayed quiet long enough for me to think that I'd said something inappropriate, that I wasn't supposed to comment. Or it may have been that one was expected to keep the talk diagnostic rather than analytic.

“My brother's a shrink,” I said. “It's just how I think about these things.”

“It's not that,” Charlie answered. “It's just that you might have liked the conversation a little lighter than it's been.”

It was then that we ordered our supper and while we ate, the conversation turned to more pleasant subjects.

After we'd paid the check and were walking out, Charlie told me, “If you want to know more about Laura, you should talk to my parents. They were very close with her. If you want, I'll tell them you're going to drop by. I'm sure they'd like to meet you. Tomorrow, say? They're big on the cocktail hour.”

O
n the night of February 22, 1985, Laura sat in with the Mel Stevenson Trio for the first time. It was written inside a circle of what appeared to be faded red wine, on a coaster from the Village Vanguard in New York City, pasted on the front page of Laura's scrapbook, the fastidious chronology of her life after she met Steve. Reviews, concert programs, the first recording contract Laura signed, and the last, the same year Steve died; and a lot of photographs. Everything neatly dated in handwriting not unlike that on those boxes she'd left behind. A photograph of the apartment in the Marais, where Steve and Laura would live for the rest of their marriage, dated “June 15, 1986”—Simon would have approved of the décor. That same year the trio performed at the jazz festival in Montreux, played gigs in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, and other large and not-so-large cities in Europe.

They came to the States in 1990, and again in '92: Chicago and New York, the West Coast, that's when Simon must have seen the trio in San Francisco.

This was not a collection of love letters and birthday cards, no Valentine's Day poems and romantic keepsakes. It was the chronicle of ten years in the lives of two jazz musicians.

Ten years. The words filled my entire mouth, yet they filled fewer than forty pages in a scrapbook.

I was sitting in Laura's living room. Alone in the house. I preferred to be by myself without Simon or anyone else around, while I looked at the record of Laura's life. Content that there was no one there to explain my thoughts or my feelings, looking at Laura's face in photographs, the face I remembered smiling back at me.

The week of her honeymoon when she and Steve played a five-day gig in Chicago. Steve standing behind the piano in a black jacket and white shirt, hair combed back, bowing slightly. Laura at his side, her violin tucked under her arm. Both of them circled in a narrow spotlight. Laura was twenty-two years old and exultant. It was an expression that appeared on both of their faces in all of the photographs, in photo shoots for magazines and CD sleeves, photos with friends, other jazz musicians.

Photographs of Laura when she was twenty-five, when she was thirty. There might have been changes in hairstyles and clothes, changes in venue, but there was no change in what her expression told of the thrill of being Laura Welles and what it must have been like to keep that feeling with her, to present it to an audience, and still be capable of bringing it back with her when the lights went down.

I imagined Laura and Steve rushing away from New York City trailing, not shoes and rice, but sprinklings of clef tones in their wake as they boarded the jet to make that date in Chicago.

I thought about Laura's ten years arranged in that book, like decals on an old steamer trunk pressed with faraway places; and what Charlie had said about the difference between doing something and being something.

When I closed the last page, I left the scrapbook downstairs for Simon, and went outside to walk the quiet streets of Shady Grove. I was still thinking about Laura, why she put together those pages with such meticulousness, who they were intended for. She and Steve had no children, no heirs. Was her idea of posterity the two of them looking back on their careers?

I spent the next day avoiding Simon, and the denizens of Shady Grove, until just after six in the evening, when I arrived at Walter and Eleanor Ballantine's home. I brought two bottles of a pretty good Burgundy I'd found in a local liquor store.

It was a large house on the corner of a street of large houses. Theirs was three stories, painted sage green, with yellow shutters, an enclosed porch, set back from the sidewalk on a wide lawn. Walter—once we shook hands he insisted that all formalities were finished—had thick white hair, wore a pink polo shirt, gray cotton pants, and worn leather moccasins. Eleanor was tall and slim, with dark brown hair tied in a knot and just enough gray to stave off pretense, above a long, straight neck. They must have both been in their seventies.

It was a first impression, I knew, but Eleanor seemed the kind of woman the word
demeanor
was intended for. It was the clothes she wore, a pair of black slacks and tapered white blouse, and the way she walked, back straight as though she might once have been a dancer, or else she still kept to her aerobics.

Walter moved like a slow truck, heavy body, thick arms, speaking as he walked us into the enclosed porch, with high windows, a view of the creek on the other side of the lawn, and chairs that were deep and forgiving—this was also an apt description of Walter and Eleanor, although it wasn't something I immediately realized; that came later in the evening.

Walter waited for me to get settled in my chair before he offered me a cocktail. “We have just about everything,” he said.

“What do you two usually drink?” I asked.