The First Warm Evening of the Year (19 page)

“It must be very lonely for you,” was what I said.

Eliot stared at me. “I don't know what you mean.”

“I guess I meant that as a question.”

“I'm not any lonelier than, well, you for instance. Aren't there times when you feel like not being by yourself.”

“Is that what you think I mean by lonely?”

Eliot stood up, brushed off his pants, and walked away.

I went back into the house. I wasn't there for long when Eliot walked into the living room and sat on the arm of a chair.

“I've always liked this room,” he said.

“You didn't come back to tell me that,” I answered.

“I saw your car parked outside Marian's office yesterday and her car was gone. I don't mean to sound like a jackass, but is there something going on that I should know about?”

“I'm as confused as you,” I said, which was not the answer he deserved, but I was thinking about the afternoon when Marian said she was sure I wouldn't tell anyone about our conversation if she asked me not to. Well, maybe she hadn't asked me, but I wanted to remember it that way. I told Eliot, “You're going to have to talk to Marian. And whatever you're thinking, that's
not
it.”

“We used to have some nice evenings here, Marian and Laura and me,” he said. “We went way back, the three of us. Nice talk. Old friends.”

Did he go all the way back to Saturday mornings skating the pond in the park? Did he happen to look up one Saturday morning and see Marian skating those tight circles? Did Eliot watch Marian fall in love with Buddy?

“Were you one of the kids who skated at Peery Park?” I asked.

Eliot just stared at me for a moment, then walked to the door, with his head down, as though he needed to watch each step.

Seventeen

T
he backyard outside Laura's kitchen door was not so much in disrepair as in need of a spring cleanup. The wood trellis was overgrown with wisteria. Weeds had crawled up between the bricks in the patio. The three metal rocking chairs had been tilted over and small pockets of puddles from the recent rain filled the indents and crevices, adding to the rust. There were four empty birdfeeders—two hanging from trees, two others on thin metal poles—and a small collection of terra-cotta flowerpots that held only moist soil were lined up under a tree like poor relations. I turned one of the chairs upright, cleaned it with a damp towel, and sat out there in reasonable comfort.

There are times when the thing you least want to do is the thing that most needs doing. I needed to wait. Wait for Marian to make a decision, wait for Eliot to act, and all I could do was choose where to do my waiting: here in Shady Grove or back in Manhattan and the pleasures of being home. Or was my waiting for Eliot and Marian nothing more than the convenience of my own passivity? When was I going to declare what I was feeling? When was I going to tell Eliot—
what
was I going to tell him? What was I supposed to say? That Laura had bequeathed me to Marian?

It was a tight triangle, Marian, Eliot, and me; and Marian and Eliot and Buddy; and Marian, Buddy, and me. There seemed to be a need for a specific kind of arithmetic to arrive at the sum of all this.

I don't think of myself as having much insight into the human heart and psyche, but I knew that the dispassion that Marian and I had been living with were the same things, although mine was cultivated and hers was studied. Buddy had sought to escape the obligations of the heart, at least temporarily, and perhaps he'd found it: Going to the cabin was his way of taking his heart slumming because of that high maintenance Marian spoke about. The confidence that allowed him to leave was the confidence of knowing what he was coming home to, that it was constant. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been slumming, but a way of life that was careless and pointless, with nothing to give it substance and shape.

However long it took me to reach this conclusion was just as long as it took Eliot to realize he wasn't finished with me. I was still sitting in the backyard when he walked out the kitchen door, straightened one of the chairs, and told me, “When I got back to the store I felt— restless I guess best describes it, like I'd forgotten something. Like I'd left something behind. I couldn't concentrate on a damn thing. And this is Saturday.”

“Saturday
?”

“My busiest day this time of year. You know, all the weekenders . . . I've got to be on my toes.” Eliot wasn't shouting, but there was agitation in his voice.

He walked over to one of the birdfeeders. Looked into it, walked to the other birdfeeder, looked into that one while he flicked his finger against the side, watched the dried seeds fall to the ground, and said, “I haven't thought about Peery Park—I didn't go there all that much back then. I'm not much of a winter person, skating and all that. This is my time of year, or just about. I play a little tennis, a little basketball after work. Pretty soon the evenings get warm enough so you can start sitting outside again. I start looking forward to that. Winter's not for me.” He shook his head. “The best skater out there was Simon. Did anyone tell you that? I don't mean just
ice-
skating. He was an excellent hockey player. Can you believe it? Buddy wasn't much of an athlete, though. At least he didn't go out much for sports.” Eliot looked over toward the kitchen door. “This has turned into a sad little place. I'll be glad when they sell it.” He sounded so bitter I thought he was going to spit on the ground. He walked across the patio, and sat down again. “Someone should buy this place, clean it up, paint it.” He rocked back in the chair. “Laura once asked me, it seems not too long ago, she asked if I was happy. I said, ‘What's happy?' That kind of thing was more important to her than to me. I don't have any complaints. Isn't that happy enough? She wanted to know if I ever thought about leaving Marian. She didn't say
leave
, I forget the exact word, but didn't I want to meet someone who just knocked me out? Didn't I think I
deserved
to be crazy in love with someone, just once in my life?” He laughed a soft, breathy laugh. “Maybe because she knew she was dying she was thinking about these things.” He let out that laugh again. “She said I should sell my store and use the money to go somewhere that I've always wanted to see. That I should put some distance between myself and Shady Grove. I said I'd never given much thought to moving away from Shady Grove. That this is my hometown, and I felt attached to it. Isn't that why she came back? To be home, right? And why Marian stayed after Buddy—I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It gives a person a solid feeling when he stays in his hometown. Her hometown.”

My cell phone rang just then. It was Alex. I took the call inside.

Alex said he was calling to tell me not to worry.

“Okay. I won't worry.”

“If you call and get my voice mail or bounce-back on my e-mail. Don't be alarmed.”

“I won't worry,” I assured him.

“I'll be out of town for a few days—more like a week. That's why. I'm going to the Bahamas. Tonight.”

I assumed this had to do with Simon.

“Twin beds?”

“Don't be vulgar.”

“How about ecstatic?”

“Don't read too much into it.”

“Only volumes.”

He told me I was very funny, and oh, yeah, how were things going and was I ever coming back to the city?

“I've got Eliot with me right now.”

“The boyfriend? What's he want?”

“It's been verbal sleight of hand for the most part.”

“How's that?”

“Misdirection.”

“Call him on it.”

“He's performing it on himself.”

“Then keep your mouth shut is my best advice.”

When I went outside, Eliot was still sitting in the metal chair, looking up at the sky.

Before I sat down, he started talking.

“It was great that Laura could ask you to be her executor.”

“She was my friend, she asked for my help, and I helped her.”

Eliot stood up. “I don't think it matters what the reasons are, we care about the people we care about and when they need our help . . .” He walked over to me, patted me on the back, went up the steps and into the house. A moment later I heard the front door close.

I could only wonder what fresh thoughts might disturb his concentration on his busy day.

It wasn't as calming back there or as comfortable since Eliot had come and gone; although I did enjoy thinking that Alex was on his way to the Bahamas, and if I was surprised that he was going with Simon, it was more because my brother was taking off an entire week so soon after his previous vacation, but it wasn't very long before I was back to thinking of all the things that were not at the moment giving me much enjoyment. I was wondering what I wanted from Marian. From myself. And why this was so important to me. Or was it only the feeling that mattered? Was that the attraction?

Or was it the peril? Of being consumed by the strength of your own emotions? Or empowered by someone else's? Was that what Buddy was escaping when he went off to fish? Was that what compelled Eliot to appear outside Marian's door when she refused to see anyone else? Was that the message in the music Laura left behind? Or was it, as Alex told me, nothing more than interlocking neuroses? Could I reduce my attraction to Marian and the drama of her life to a neurotic reaction?

Whatever Marian thought we needed to talk about must not have been too important. She didn't call that afternoon or that night.

The following morning I took myself for a walk. I just wanted to get out of the house, I didn't care where I walked. Since that damn letter from Remsen arrived I felt as though I'd been trying to crack the code of unarticulated intentions, circumspection, and it was a nuisance and frustrating. Except for the Ballantines, no one had yet offered me a definitive conclusion about what they thought, what they wanted from me.

I walked down the sidewalk, staring at the dreary, dun-colored street, the same dreary light hanging in the sky, obscuring the horizon, like the conversations I'd had with Eliot, with Marian, full of reticence, hesitant and halting, determination indistinguishable from desire. It wasn't only Marian and Eliot; I was just as complicit.

When I reached the corner, I turned around, walked in the direction of town, and across the town square to Eliot's hardware store.

Eighteen

I
t was a bright, clean store, with wide aisles, smelling of cleansers and paints. There were quite a few customers, some looking lost in the aisles of pumps and piping, others looking content with their boxes of lawn and leaf bags.

I didn't see Eliot, but there were several salesmen in bright red vests and crisp white shirts, most of them talking to customers. One was stocking a shelf of lightbulbs, and when he looked up I asked him if Eliot was around. He pointed to the office door at the back of the store.

Eliot was sitting at his desk reading a spreadsheet. He didn't wear a red vest or white shirt, but he was now wearing a striped tie with his oxford blue shirt. When he saw me, he didn't glare, but he didn't have a congenial expression on his face, either. I closed the door, and sat in the chair across from him.

“I don't think you were finished talking to me,” I said.

He rested his elbows on the desk, and rubbed his eyes with the tips of two fingers. When he looked at me again, the expression on his face wasn't any more congenial than before. He folded the spreadsheet, lining up the corners, pressing it flat, and placing it inside the top drawer. “Inventory,” he said.

“I think you came by yesterday to talk about Marian,” I told him.

“I have nothing to say about Marian.”

“And I think you also wanted to talk about yourself.”

Eliot got up and walked around the desk, sat on the front corner farthest from me.

He said, “You know what equilibrium is?”

“Equilibrium.”

He leaned back, inverted his hands, and braced himself with his palms, getting still farther away from me. “You came to Shady Grove and you didn't know anyone, of course you couldn't. You didn't even know why you were here, I bet. But hell, Geoffrey.” He moved his weight to the right, then to the left, resting on his hip, but only for a moment before he sat forward and, apparently unable to get comfortable, stood up and walked back behind his desk. He didn't sit down, he just stood behind his chair, and having, it now appeared, found the proper buffer, told me, “I made her tomato soup. When I went to see Marian. From a can. It wasn't quite a month after Buddy died. She looked like someone from a shipwreck. Her
life
was like a shipwreck. She was . . . How could you know that? You couldn't know that. Or what she was like back then.” His voice was flat. It granted no absolution. “I didn't make her talk to me. I didn't ask her questions. Whenever I saw her she said whatever she wanted, or nothing at all.” He smiled an anemic smile. “I certainly didn't ask about her
feelings
. I think they're very private things, feelings. I respect that. It's the same thing now. With Laura. It's just the way I am, the way Marian is.” He said this as though the information were just a matter of the facts before us, found, perhaps, on the spreadsheet he'd just put away.

“It's how you keep your equilibrium.”

“Ten years.”

I wanted to walk out. Walk out on why I'd come to see Eliot. Walk out on telling what I wanted him to know; leave him unchallenged and unenlightened about my five days in Shady Grove. If Marian had more to say to him, then that was between the two of them. If she kept quiet, well, didn't Eliot just tell me that's how they are? It would have been convenient to leave Eliot alone with his myth intact, and mine intact as well: my myth of trust, the trust in my silence. But that would have been no different than what I'd done to Simon when I'd kept him away from Laura's wedding, the secrecy of that day was not unlike my secrecy now, my reluctance to tell Eliot what I wanted him to know.

I'd never doubted the integrity of Laura's confidence in me; but what we had done to her brother was nothing but an ungenerous act, a conspiracy in deception and cruelty.

Was I keeping silent because I thought Marian expected me to? An extension of Laura's confidence in me? Just another act of cruelty? An adherence to an adolescent's ethic? Was this my attachment to the past? Where I thought I'd find the best part of myself? Tricking an eighteen-year-old kid out of his sister's wedding? Treating Eliot to my own sleight of hand? My act of misdirection?

What would have happened if I'd broken Laura's confidence that afternoon? Who would have been harmed, except Simon, who was harmed already? And now, if I broke Marian's confidence, what would I be doing except urging a conversation she'd been avoiding for ten years?

I came there thinking that Eliot and I were in love with the same woman. But we weren't. She wasn't the same woman. And I would have to tell him who I was in love with.

I told him, without inflection, making sure the narrative sounded as objective and impersonal as possible, about the things Marian and I had said the day I'd come to empty Laura's house, and the afternoon when I drove up, and Marian described her gardens to me and we talked until it grew dark about her loneliness and sadness. And the time Marian took me to the overlook and we sat together on the stone wall and talked about the madness of love and its dangers. And when I came to Marian's nursery and she told me all about Buddy and their gardens and how the two of them had lived together and how he died, and how empty she felt without him. And about our impromptu lunch on the wooden bridge by the waterfall.

Eliot never interrupted. By the time I finished, I was standing across the room, my back to him, looking at the alley outside the window. I didn't want to look at him or see the expression on his face. But I heard the sound of his breathing.

I was watching a little girl trying to teach her puppy to sit on command. Every time she pushed down on the puppy's rump, he leapt forward and licked her nose. I watched her for another minute until she gave up and carried her puppy out to the sidewalk.

When I turned around, I saw a tightening around Eliot's jaw, other than that, he showed nothing. I'd said as much as I was going to say. He had the facts now. What was he going to do with them?

Eliot was holding a ballpoint pen in his hand, clicking the top over and over again. His throat made a sound, like the inversion of Marian's laugh, and for a moment I wished I hadn't said anything. I felt as though I'd just stolen what purpose he'd claimed; and why didn't he grab me by the shirt and clock me, which I wasn't too sure I didn't want him to do, or would have done in his place. I could have even argued it was what I deserved.

“Well, you certainly gave me something to think about, didn't you?” Eliot let go of the pen, and watched it drop on top of his desk. “I guess she needed to tell you these things.” He did not sound unhappy when he said this. “It's not like—” He picked up that ballpoint and started clicking the top again, over and over. He said, “I think it's a good thing that she can talk to you the way she does. I mean, it's like with Laura—now that she doesn't have her to talk to and you being Laura's old friend . . .” There was a discomfort that appeared in his expression that was equally discomforting to witness.

I might have told Eliot that it was my intention to make him uncomfortable; that I knew I was being manipulative, and that I wanted to coax him toward the conclusion of his relationship with Marian, and this was the way I thought I could do that. Alex would have recognized at once what I was doing. He would have said that I was practicing without a license.

A few more clicks and Eliot dropped the pen on the desk and this time pushed it out of his way.

“Necessity isn't need,” I told him.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It's something I just thought of.”

“You do the things that need to be done.” He unbuttoned his collar and relaxed his tie, leaned his elbow on the desk, rested his chin in the cup of his hand, and lowered his eyes. “But you can't look at things— You can't— I don't know where this is going or what you want.” Eliot had not looked up while he said this, or when he said, “So just drop it.” Now he lifted his head, pushed his chair back from the desk, and when he started to stand I thought he was getting ready to kick me out, but he sat back down and said, “She just came out and started talking to you about Buddy.”

“I told you, we talked about a lot of things.”

“Hell, skating at the park? That was a long time ago.”

“It was
all
a long time ago.”

“I don't know where you get these things.”

I was watching him, but I was thinking about Buddy's down-from-the-mountain look, as Marian had called it. And how Buddy would have found clarity in quoting Tennyson, right then, or Wordsworth or Frost. Then I recoiled from that and for having thought it, for I was doing what most everyone else did, watching Eliot through Buddy's eyes. It always came back to Buddy. Like the town you have to drive through to get to wherever you're going.

“I don't think anyone ever considered what it must have been like for her to be in that house by herself.” There was no expression of revelation when Eliot said this, but something had changed. There was a tone of animus when he said, “They took her at her word, I guess. She was going to die alone, just like Buddy. I didn't want to let that happen.”

The room felt hot and airless with the masculine smell of sweat and stress. Eliot got up to open the window, and asked me if I'd mind hitting the switch for the ceiling fan. “It isn't like ten years is—like there's a shelf life to all of this.” He walked the length of the room, opened the door, and looked into the store for a moment. It was still busy out there, and he kept watching for another moment or two longer before he closed the door, leaned against it, and crossed his arms over his chest. “Marian told you they were going to leave Shady Grove and not come back? She and Buddy?”

I lowered my eyes in affirmation.

Eliot unfolded his arms, raised himself up, his body heaving forward just a little bit.

“She's not going to let herself die like Buddy,” I told him.

“Is that what you think?”

He moved away from the door and came forward until he was standing in front of me, staring down.“Let me ask you something. How do I know that this isn't just for your own amusement, or to build up your self-esteem? How do I know that's not what you do?”

I didn't bother with an answer. I only looked back at him.

“I won't lie and say I never wanted her to talk to me like that,” Eliot said, “or how she talked to Laura.” He took a few steps away and sat on the edge of his desk. “Marian wanted you to know. And it occurs to me, just now, that she must have given a lot of thought to talking to you.”

Eliot didn't say anything else for a moment—pausing the way a musician might, holding a beat longer than you expect. You might think it's an affectation, or the preparation for the diminished note to follow, but sometimes it's the moment preceding the crescendo. He started to speak and stopped. Started again and again stopped, and put out his hands, palms up.

“And now that I'm over my initial reaction to what you've been saying, I have the impression that you're just trying to help. But, to be honest, I have nothing to say to you.” There was no longer the timidity, the man afraid of losing his balance, in his voice. I wanted to think our conversation was supposed to bring us both to this moment. Eliot was standing up and telling me, “I'd like you to leave.”

He put his hand on my shoulder and showed me the door.

I
walked along Main Street, where the shops were emptying and business had slowed, and down narrow sidewalks, past quiet lawns at afternoon, on my way to Laura's house.

I began to consider what Eliot and I had talked about today, what we'd been talking about all along, actually, when I remembered the question I'd left behind with the Ballantines: Why had Marian let Eliot in?

T
he following morning, I was downstairs making coffee, thinking about the automatic espresso machine in the kitchen in my apartment, the patisserie around the corner with the warm chocolate brioches, and how simple my life used to be, when Marian called. Maybe I thought about this just before her phone call, maybe right after.

Marian didn't bother with hello: “What did you tell Eliot?” Her voice was soft with sleep, and silky. I hoped she was still in bed. “Did you tell him what we've talked about?”

“Is that what he said?”

“Something very weird. As soon as the weather gets warm, he wants us to play tennis together.”

“That's not so weird.”

“I don't play tennis.”

“Can we continue this face-to-face?” I said. “And not in Laura's house.”

M
arian was waiting on the back deck, the kitchen door was open behind her. She was grinning at me and as I came closer, she put her hands inside the pouch of her sweatshirt and said, “Well, we're face-to-face.” She sounded amused.

“Eliot's not intimidated,” I told her.

She nodded toward the kitchen, and we walked inside.

“Do I know what you're talking about?” she asked.

“The reason he was able to help you when no one else could is because he's not intimidated by Buddy. And everyone else is, Charlie, his parents, you. But not Eliot.”

“Eliot told you that?” She pulled a chair away from the kitchen table.

“There's this assumption everyone has,” I said, “that Eliot wants to be like Buddy.”

She went over to the counter, started to bring the coffeepot to the table, and stopped.

“Whose assumption is that?” she asked.

“That he
should
want to be like him? You don't need me to tell you. But it's not only incorrect, it's wrong and unfair.”

Marian put the pot of coffee on the table and told me to help myself.

“You're explaining Eliot to
me
?”

“If you think about it, everyone's still seeking Buddy's approval. And that doesn't mean anything to Eliot.”