The First Warm Evening of the Year (2 page)

Marian had just said, “The crocuses will be coming up, and the daffodils and tulips,” and told me that she had all sorts of gardens around her house. “You should see them in summer. The birds, and the flowers. It's like an explosion.”

I told her I'd like to.

She looked at me as though she might have misunderstood
my
intentions
.

“I have a boyfriend,” she said.

I said, “That's nice.”

“No. I mean, if you think I was flirting with you. I have a boyfriend.” There was a slight stammer when she said this as though she was uncertain, either of the boyfriend, or the necessity of telling me about him. While I felt a tug of disappointment.

But I recovered quickly enough to tell her, “I was
hoping
you were flirting with me, and unless your boyfriend is hiding in the bushes with my girlfriend, I think we're safe.”

Her laughter sounded like water in a dream.

I thought of Laura and Marian spending their summers together, and maybe they laughed that same way. I was going to ask her that, and tell her that she surely must be used to men flirting with her, which was just a way to keep on flirting, only now I was thinking about how she and Laura must have felt all those years after their husbands had died, and what they must have felt when Laura got sick, and the reason for my coming up there, and maybe what they talked about on those summer days wasn't so funny.

For the second time since we'd met I wanted to apologize, but Marian was smiling at me again, and there was that welcoming look on her face. She had her hand on my arm again and I felt the warmth of her fingers through my sleeve and I moved my hand to cover hers, but she stepped back and asked, “So what happened to the girlfriend at Colby, anyway?”

“She broke up with me,” I said.

“Did she meet someone else, or did you?”

I didn't answer right away, and when I did, I told her the truth. “I didn't love her enough.”

Marian tilted her head, squinted her eyes, just a little bit when she looked at me. There was brittleness in her voice when she said, “I've been keeping you out here too long.” She stood up and offered to help me get the carton with the photographs and scrapbook, and Laura's violins.

I asked if she was sure she wanted to be inside Laura's house.

She said, “I'll be fine,” and we walked in together.

We went to the corner of the living room and before I picked up the carton, Marian said, “I always liked that picture of the two of you.”

“You've seen that picture?” I asked.

“Oh sure.”

I looked over at the two violins. “She was a hell of a musician,” I said.

“They both were. My husband and I visited them in Paris a few times.” She looked around the room. “It's like it never happened. I mean standing here with all her things around, it's like—I still expect her to come walking down the stairs.”

I heard the wind outside and felt it blow through the house, as though it were already taking possession of the rooms. I turned toward Marian. She seemed to have sunk into her coat and looked small.

I might have asked, “What is it?” Or else I was thinking that and it showed, because Marian said, “This is the first time I've been here without her.” She looked around, her eyes stopping on the blank spaces on the walls. “We spent many nights sitting here talking about—” Marian walked over to the window and looked outside.

“Tell me something about Laura,” she said, with her back to me. “I don't mean something you two did together, but something else you remember about her. That you liked about her.”

I thought for a moment, then told her one of my favorite things about Laura: “She held people accountable for their behavior,” I said. “More than accountable. Responsible. Her friends, especially. She thought what you did, the way you acted day-to-day
mattered
, and she let you know, she was straightforward about it. You always knew just where you stood with her. It made it easy being her friend. And she was game. She was up for just about anything. I
really
—”

Marian was crying.

I didn't know the protocol for watching a person you hardly know cry, so I walked over to her and refrained from making any of those insipid, sympathetic sounds people make in these situations.

She cupped her hands over her face and whispered, “I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.”

“There's no reason to be sorry.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. She turned, moving a little closer and pressing the palm of her hand against the front of my coat. I didn't know if she wanted to keep me away or wanted to touch me, maybe she didn't either, but before she could make up her mind, I took out a fairly respectable handkerchief and closed her hand around it. As she wiped her eyes I pushed a few damp strands of hair away from her cheek, and walked her outside.

“Let's get away from here,” I said. “This can all wait. I'll buy you a cup of coffee or something.”

Marian shook her head. “Someone's coming by to help me with this stuff. I have to be here. But you don't.”

We were walking out the front door while she said this, and she kept on walking and sat on the running board of the pickup. I sat next to her. She did not slide away.

“Well,” Marian said, “you've seen me laugh and seen me cry. My entire repertoire in under an hour.”

“I doubt that's your entire repertoire,” I told her.

She shifted around to face me, reached over, and brushed the back of her hand against my shoulder.

“Dust,” she said.

I'd turned to face her without thinking about it, without reservation about how close we were sitting. I might have been smiling at her. Marian looked like she was about to smile at me. Then the look on her face changed, the corners of her mouth turned down, and her lips grew tight. She looked past my shoulders and moved away from me.

A car had stopped at the curb, a few feet behind the pickup, and a man got out.

He was about our age, tall; a big man, with a broad, square chest, and wide shoulders.

He said, “Looks like I got here just in time,” nodded his head at Marian, while at the same time he said to me, “You must be Geoffrey.”

Marian said, “I'm sorry. Eliot Wooten, Geoffrey Tremont.”

Eliot shook my hand, and quickly turned back to Marian. “I was afraid you wouldn't need me.”

“Oh. No,” she said. “The stuff's still inside,” just before she blew her nose and put my handkerchief in her coat pocket.

Eliot unlatched the back of the pickup, looked at Marian again. He must have just noticed that she had been crying, for there was now an expression of sympathy on his face that was so total that for a moment I thought he suspected himself of causing her tears, then it changed, and there was another expression, one which I was incapable of identifying. As we walked to the house, Eliot looked as though he were in a great hurry to be done with this.

It was when he opened one of the violin cases and picked up the instrument that I noticed Eliot's hands. They were lean, with long, elegant fingers, the kind of hands that made me think he was a musician, which is what I told him.

He said, “The best I can do is ‘Chopsticks' on a piano, and barely that. I just wanted to have a look. Marian's the only person Laura trusted to care for it.”

“You knew Laura?”

“Sure.”

“From before or after she came back?”

“Both,” he said. “We all—people around here kept up as best we could with her career. It was kind of surprising that she came back. But you know how it is. You think you're doing something for the short term, and next thing you know it's nine years later and you're still doing it. But hey—” He looked at the boxes of records that Laura had left for me, and the stereo, and offered to help me fit them into my car.

When we were outside, after we'd loaded up my car, and put the violins and the carton with the photographs and scrapbook in the back of the truck, Eliot turned to Marian, and again I couldn't read his expression. He hopped onto the back of the truck bed, pushed the box into a corner, talking while he worked, although I wasn't listening to what he was saying, only to the way that he said it.

There was a noticeable timidity in his voice when he spoke to Marian. A stiff-necked sound, a formality. He reminded me of someone who was watching his step, a man afraid of losing his balance.

It was only after he invited me to be his and Marian's guest for dinner, and Marian said yes, I really should join them, that I realized Eliot was the boyfriend. I managed to grin and say, “Why don't
you
be
my
guests? I'm staying at the Bradford House. Their restaurant looks pretty decent.”

“The Bradford?” Eliot said. “Then you have to be our guest.” He patted me on the shoulder.

Marian looked pleased by the offer. “Of
course
. You
have
to. Eliot's a part owner of the place.”

She gave his arm a squeeze, and it was I who felt like the man a little off balance.

Three

T
he dining room at the Bradford House was not very large, with a separate pub just beyond a small alcove, about twenty tables, most of which were occupied, soft green tablecloths, votive candles. As unassuming as the rest of Shady Grove.

The menu was better than the standard grilled meats and fish, and lacked the pretensions of a lot of small town restaurants when they try to mimic big city menus. The service was quiet and attentive, perhaps because of Eliot's presence, although there seemed to be a sincere attempt to please.

Most of what we talked about was how difficult Laura's last year had been. But I was surprised how impersonal Marian sounded now. She seemed anxious not to say too much. Nothing more about the life Laura lived in Shady Grove when she wasn't teaching music. Nothing about Paris or Laura's marriage. Or about the illness that killed her. Even when Marian said, “Laura called it ironic payback from sitting in those smoky clubs,” she seemed anxious to get that out of the way, interrupted Eliot before he got to speak, and managed to change the subject, telling me that Eliot owned a hardware store in town and, only after I asked, that she and Eliot had been seeing each other for nearly ten years.

Eliot ordered the wine. He told me that their wine list was quite exceptional. By Shady Grove standards, anyway.

After our waiter came back and poured, Eliot raised his glass, watched Marian and me raise ours, and said, “Shady Grove may look like a dull little town, but don't be fooled. It
is
a dull little town.”

I was aware that Marian's laugh was not at all as vibrant as it had been when I'd heard it outside Laura's house. And that same caution that I'd heard earlier in Eliot's voice was now in the expression on his face. Even when he made his joke. Had I not known otherwise, I would have thought he and Marian hadn't known each other very long, or very well.

Maybe it was just the way the two of them behaved in front of other people, the way a lot of couples behave when they're with a stranger. There was none of the playfulness and when Marian stroked the top of Eliot's hand and said, “He's a very good magician, you know. For the children at the hospital.” She sounded patronizing. It made me uncomfortable to be there. I wanted the Marian I'd been alone with to come back, and for Eliot to go away.

Later, while we were eating, Marian said, “Laura told us you'd been a child star.”

“Hardly a star,” I said.

“But you
were
an actor.”

“That's right.”

“That's pretty glamorous stuff,” Eliot said.

“Not that glamorous.”

“Not glamorous enough,” Marian said, “if you left it.”

“Or maybe I'm not about glamorous things.”

“Is
that
what you're not about.”

If we'd been alone, I would have thought that Marian was flirting with me, or at least being more adventurous than I would have expected, unless I misread what I was hearing. I'm apt to do that.

“Sometimes it's just time to quit,” I said. “My voice was starting to change. The theater was certainly changing. Nineteen seventy-six was not a vintage year for child actors, and unless I wanted to go out to Hollywood, which my parents were set against, it was time to get out and get educated.”

“Didn't you miss it?” Eliot wanted to know.

“Not really.”

“And now?”

“I still don't miss it.”

“I mean, what do you do now?”

“Voice-overs.”

“Like commercials?”

“And cartoons, I mean,
animated features
, and teasers, you know, lead-ins for television. Sometimes movie trailers.”

“Have I heard you?”

“Probably.”

Eliot asked me to tell him some of the work I'd done, I named some of the accounts. He seemed satisfied with that.

I wanted to buy them after-dinner drinks, so we got up and went into the pub room.

The place was crowded, three deep at the bar, the rich hum of voices, people moving about with drinks in their hands from one circle of talk to another. Eliot started looking around for an empty table, but Marian wanted me to meet a couple of Laura's friends, who were sitting on the opposite side of the room, and Eliot was left there by himself.

The two of us slipped through the crowd to a table in the corner. Marian introduced me to Jennifer Morrison and Kate Callahan, who thanked me for helping Laura. They must have said more than that, but I never heard it. Marian's hand was brushing against my wrist, not quite settling on it, more like warm breath than flesh, and that was all I was aware of. Until Jennifer's voice, or maybe it was Kate's, broke the spell, talking to Marian about spring gardening, Marian asking me if I'd tell Eliot that she'd only be a minute more, and I was walking across the room without her.

Eliot was standing near the bar with four other men, laughing at a joke, coming back with one of his own. He seemed calmer than he'd been when Marian was around. His voice was solid, steady, as though he'd finally found his footing. He introduced me, but all I wanted was time to think about what had just happened between Marian and me, if, in fact, anything had happened at all.

I needed to take inventory of the past few minutes, but Eliot was now walking me to a table by the window, telling me what a great place this was, more like a club than the local bar, really. That it gave people the feeling of belonging.

“It's important to feel part of something,” he said. “Don't you think?”

I pressed the tips of my fingers against the spot that Marian had touched, as though I were taking my own pulse.

Yes,” I said—I didn't know what I was saying—“that's important.”

Once we sat down, Eliot lifted his hand for the waiter, and asked me what I wanted to drink. I asked shouldn't we wait for Marian. Eliot said there was no telling how long she'd be, besides, he knew what she liked, and ordered her a Grand Marnier.

Maybe that was his way of letting me know who was who in the cast. Anyway, it was enough to stop me from thinking about her.

The television above the bar was dark. There was music playing, but not so loud that we had to talk above it. Eliot said they had live music here on Saturday nights, jazz usually. He used to hope Laura would come in and play, but she never did.

Marian was still talking with her friends when the waiter brought our drinks. Eliot left his drink alone, and I didn't touch mine, either.

“She didn't always do this, you know.” He raised his eyes and stared past my shoulder. “Her gardening business. That's what she's probably talking to Jennifer and Kate about. She takes care of their gardens. Theirs and a lot of other people's. She used to do landscaping with her husband.” He took a sip of his brandy, waited for me to take a sip of mine. “But she gave that up. She just does gardening now. It must be what she likes doing or she wouldn't be doing it, don't you think?”

I heard Marian's voice before I saw her, and I turned around with a bit more eagerness than her appearance required. She was still approaching us, already apologizing for taking so long, offering a thin smile, looking at neither Eliot nor me. She was about to sit down when a woman a few tables away stood and shouted Marian's name. Marian told us she
really
did have to talk to her about her spring schedule and was very, very sorry, in a way that made it clear that this was not the first evening that had been interrupted like this, and walked away.

“She was crying before, wasn't she?” Eliot asked. “She's very sad about Laura, and I think Laura's death brought back the sad memories about her husband.”

“Did you know him?”

Eliot turned his head and nodded toward the front window. “Out there is one of the most beautiful town squares you'll ever see. It was in magazines. Won awards. Buddy designed it. Everyone knew Buddy. He was a hell of a guy.” Eliot didn't say this with acrimony, nor like a jealous lover, only with a tone of failure.

O
n the way out of town the following morning, I realized what it was that I'd been hearing in Eliot's voice that past evening. It was the voice of a man alone in love.