The First Warm Evening of the Year (17 page)

She told Buddy the place was awful. Not just awful,
ugly
. There had to be other lakes where Buddy could go to get away, if not in Shady Grove, at least closer to the comforts of home. Buddy said conveniences had nothing to do with it, and neither did aesthetics. It was because of its inconvenience. It was about the rusticity. He went there
because
it was so unappealing.

Buddy said it was possible to have too many precious things in your life, and people and places that you love so much it was necessary to go somewhere that you didn't have to maintain, that you didn't care so much about.

Marian told him he had a perversity of thinking that was maddening.

M
arian stopped going to the cabin the winter after it was built. She'd been telling Buddy all along that she would stop once he didn't need her help with it. Buddy asked her to go up there a few times after that, but she never went, he never insisted, or was hurt by her refusal. Besides, it was he who said there was no reason to discuss it again, that it was not a big deal. For the next seven years, which was as long as Buddy owned the place, they never felt the need to justify this decision. It was important to Marian that she remember this. Seven years and nothing ever happened to him. It was important that she remind herself of that, and that Buddy knew how she felt. It was important for her to remember the mornings when she watched the yellow truck go up the driveway and felt herself lighten with the absence of Buddy's lassitude.

And it was important to remember that it wasn't always winter and it wasn't always about sitting out in the cold, or flying down to Bermuda. There was summer.

It was summer that Marian loved most. Waiting through three seasons. Then she and Buddy were outside with their crews until dark, checking that the completion of older projects was not being rushed, that the new ones were starting on time. Cutting down trees, digging the soil, sculpting the land, watching their work taking shape. What Buddy called pushing against nature. Marian was moving again.

Summer, the shortest season. The one they savored in spite of all the work, and because of it.

There were weekend parties, music playing, loud, playful chatter rising from their back deck and the front porch with the verdant, spicy fragrances. Killer croquet matches and volleyball games that were not to be trifled with. Marian in the middle of the action, Buddy working the grill, filling plates with one hand, lifting a beer to his lips with the other. And dancing—Marian needed to remember how much Buddy loved to dance, slow, holding her in his arms, and fast, head thrown back, legs stomping, hands clapping.

There were the melt-away Sunday mornings when they came up for air, spread their blanket on their lawn, just the two of them naked under the hot sun. Listening to the hum of the earth. Listening to nothing at all. Buddy's hands on her body, hers on his. Feeling the certainty of their flesh.

That last summer, they needed three crews to keep up with the work. All idleness was gone. It should have been the time of irrevocable pleasure. It was less than that. What in past years had been their season of excitement, of restoration, was now their summer of discontent.

Their impatience with each other, with their crew, was like a fingernail scraping against glass. The flora looked shabbier than last year's and Marian sent back more than she accepted—she began looking forward to the times when she drove out to her supplier to complain, just for an excuse to yell at someone.

Couldn't Buddy see, she would ask, how poorly the jobs were going? The men were working too slowly, their attitude seemed listless. Couldn't they get anything right, damn it? And why was it always
him
, he would answer back, who had to speak to them? Why was it her, Marian wanted to know, who had to
tell
him? Was she the only one who
noticed
?

There were the long silences. In the morning. Across the table at supper. When she tried to tell her concerns to Buddy, Marian could not speak to the expression on his face.

Something was lacking, Marian thought. Something was being overlooked. By Buddy, by her.

When Buddy did speak to her, Marian sensed it was not what he was really thinking. What she was thinking, she was not able to say.

She would look at Buddy in the sunlight, his thin face thinner, his eyes set deeper. She was not sure if what she saw was weariness or indifference.

At night when they were in bed, holding each other, moonlight coming through the window, it seemed like old times. Almost. Or when they made love, it would begin to feel as though they were getting back to the way things were, back to themselves. Then Marian would feel that tug, the shapeless sense of emotional lethargy, and just like that they were out of synch with each other. Buddy felt it, too. He said he'd never felt this separate from Marian before. He said maybe they were simply preoccupied.

Marian said it frightened her.

This was the way June ended. Nothing changed in early July.

Sometimes, Marian woke up in the middle of the night and Buddy would be gone. More than a few times, she heard him walking the floor downstairs. One time, she went looking for him and found him standing outside, naked, staring up at the stars.

Marian told him he was behaving like a man with a secret. Buddy said he had no secrets from her. He said he didn't know what was wrong. She didn't want to live like this, Marian told him. And what were they going to do about it? Buddy said they'd have to live with it, for now. That became the theme of their summer.

By the end of July, Marian and Buddy had grown so inured to the dismal way they felt that they stopped talking about it. Not that they denied its presence; more that they defied it, or tried to, the way you wait out nasty weather. That there was no longer a thrill to their work, or sneaking away for a day off, was not an aberration but a way of life.

Then, one morning in the middle of August, while Marian stood alone by a stone wall watching the work in progress at the Lyntons' place in Millbrook, listening to the soft, sifting sound of shovels breaking the earth, about to get in her car and leave, she saw Buddy coming through the new clearing about fifty feet from her. He was sipping coffee from a paper cup, stopped to speak with one of the workers over by a pile of felled trees, walked farther along, poured what remained in the cup into a stack of dead branches, crushed the cup and put it in his pocket. When he saw Marian he walked toward her. His face had the ripe suntan of late summer, and there was animation in his expression that had been absent for the past two months. Marian should have enjoyed seeing this. All she felt was apprehension.

Buddy must have seen that and expected her to walk away, because he waved and called out for her to wait a minute, and when he reached her, he put his arm around her waist and held her close. She leaned into him so she could feel the warmth of his body and his breath. She inhaled the familiar scent of his sweat, closed her eyes, and when she felt Buddy's head move she raised her face to his. He whispered that he didn't know about her, but
he
wouldn't mind if the two of them could find an unspoiled jungle somewhere, rent a tree house, and live on coconuts.

Marian told him that coconuts can get annoying, could they make it a four-star tree house with room service? That, Buddy said, was precisely what he had in mind. Marian wanted him to please tell her just what the
hell
was going on.

Buddy said maybe it had to do with the two of them running dry on their work. Running dry on their lives. The way they were living.

They sat on the stone wall, in the shade of a maple tree, away from the crew.

Buddy still had his arm around Marian's waist. He said he thought he had it figured out. That it wasn't landscaping that they loved as much as doing landscaping with each other.

All this time? That's what he'd been thinking about? Because all Marian had been thinking about, all that she'd been feeling, anyway, was a deep sense of estrangement, like one of those horrid, unhappy couples, and she hated it, so if this was what Buddy thought was the problem, they'd better get busy fixing it.

Buddy said he wasn't joking about the tree house, four stars or not. He asked if it would be such a crazy idea to close up shop and go away for a while. Was money an object? Did Marian think next summer would be too soon?

Marian said they still had a few projects under contract and money was always an object. They could go away the summer after next, then they'd be sure to have more than enough for a year, at least, probably longer. And when their money ran out?

Buddy said they'd come home and pick up where they left off. Unless a newer, younger genius had taken his place, Shady Grove passed them by, and no one wanted a Buddy Ballantine design anymore.

In that case, Marian said, they would start over. From scratch. She raised her arms to the sky and let out a shout. She told Buddy it was about time they'd gotten around to saying what they needed. She felt as though she and Buddy were—what's centrifugal force? As though they were no longer being compelled toward Shady Grove, but spinning away, out of its orbit. It made her feel giddy. She grabbed Buddy's arm and squeezed it, pressed her cheek against his bicep.

Buddy said he was thinking they could start out in the Caribbean, the Virgin Islands, and make their way south, all the way to Peru, Brazil, Argentina . . . And when they got tired of that . . .

Africa.

Or Asia.

Or the Mediterranean.

Anywhere that interested them. After all, Buddy pointed out, Marian was still the girl who couldn't stop moving, wasn't she?

All the places they might see, not as tourists but as travelers. . . . All that time to look forward to . . . All the possibilities . . .

T
hey would leave Shady Grove behind. There were times when it felt like a surrender; although Marian insisted that they were not giving up or giving in, but giving over because it wasn't enough to feel discontented and to recognize it, but to reject it. Sometimes it felt like defiance, and sometimes it felt like a confession of faith.

They talked about feeling a sense of release, not only from the past month, but from what they'd been doing together for the past couple of years. It wasn't that they'd been working too hard, but they'd been too single-minded for too long. And for what purpose? It wasn't about making a lot of money. It had never been about the money but about the joy they derived from doing their work. Now it was about its absence. Buddy used the word
absence
. Marian used the word
loss
.

If pleasure from their work had been lost they would have to find it elsewhere and carry it with them, if not back to Shady Grove then to some other place they hadn't yet considered, that they would discover along the way.

Marian wanted to know how Buddy felt about never moving back to Shady Grove, about not
wanting
to pick up where they left off. What if they came back only long enough to sell everything and move away and start over? What if they only came back to see his family?

That was all right with Buddy. There were other houses, other towns. Other ways to live. He said you can't travel the world, even a small part of it, and not expect it to change you, and a year away from Shady Grove would no doubt change them. And wouldn't Shady Grove have also changed, if only their perception of it because of what had changed in them? Isn't that the way it happens? Is that what they wanted?

Shady Grove had always meant home, now Marian thought how exciting it was to get away. She told Buddy that she loved the feeling she had when she thought about leaving. She said she wasn't afraid to start over. She said it felt like floating. Floating words. Floating plans. One more summer floating in the future. Because life is the act of motion. Of moving. That was what Marian told Buddy the summer morning when they sat on the stone wall in the shade of the maple tree, Buddy's arm around her waist. She didn't tell him if life is an act of motion, stasis is its antithesis; although it would occur to her long after this conversation that she'd been telling him just that every time she told him how much she hated the cabin; that Buddy sitting alone out there in winter was Buddy sitting with death, or defying it, defying his mortality, and denying it—Marian didn't believe in premonitions or her own prescience, neither did she doubt her feelings—but these were not the things she and Buddy talked about that last summer. These were not the things either of them thought about while they made their plans.

M
arian woke early and went cross-country skiing that morning by herself, something she liked to do when Buddy was gone. In the afternoon, she met Pamela and a couple of her friends for lunch in Great Barrington. All through the day, she was aware of the remaining time, the uninterrupted hours before the sound of Buddy's truck came down the driveway, the snap of the door hinges, her awareness of giving back this piece of her day, her sense of relinquishing herself, when Buddy came back needing a shave and a shower. The inside of his yellow pickup would smell like a man who'd been alone in the Adirondacks for three days, but that would fade away in a short time. Marian neither anticipated any of this nor took it for granted. It was what she knew.

Buddy's return was also her return to Buddy. They started calling it their reentry. It was Marian who named it, one evening, the second or third time Buddy had been to the lake. She asked if he ever felt that he needed time to regroup after he got back; that he might not want her to be there, because there were a few times when she felt that way after she returned. There were times when she felt this way when Buddy returned.

Buddy said that his three-hour drive allowed him that time, and didn't Marian have enough time to decompress? A little while later, Buddy said yes, when he first walked in the house, he felt as though he was being pulled out of his—reverie was a silly word for it, but some sort of privacy was being breached.