The Gazebo: A Novel (14 page)

Martin sat in the gazebo, shocked and recovering. In a while Claire joined him. Her pale hair was cut shorter around her face, and her arms looked long and graceful against the vanilla–colored blouse she wore. There was a string of bright beads around her neck: a gift from her daughter, Alison, she said.

“You still smell exactly the same,” he said into her neck. She drew back and smiled at him. Across the lawn, a man stood staring at the two of them. Occasionally someone did this—gawked briefly at Martin and Claire, the platonic couple who still met every year, but
no one ever interrupted them, or said anything. Claire’s children seemed to know nothing about Martin.

“Do you know how hard it is to find this citrus soap?” Claire said to Martin. “I have to search everywhere in the entire area for it. Spacer’s Drugstore stopped carrying it, and now I have to drive to Albany. But I know how much you like it.”

“I do,” he said. “Thank you for driving to Albany.” As they sat together, she told him of her life over the past year, some of which he already knew about through Hush’s letters but which he pretended he was learning for the first time. “Are you sculpting at all?” he asked her.

“Sometimes,” she said evasively; she was always evasive when he asked about her sculpting. Perhaps it embarrassed her to be reminded of this talent that she had not been able to see to fruition. He feared she wasn’t sculpting at all, but that she didn’t want to tell him that. He didn’t pursue it.

“How’s the Gazebo?” she asked. “The one that serves food, I mean.”

He was about to launch into some stories
from the life of the restaurant, and to tell her about the upcoming cookbook, but he couldn’t bear it. That was just small talk. He saw her so infrequently, and for such a brief period of time, that the idea of making small talk with her was unthinkable. “Claire,” he suddenly said, “let’s not speak to each other like strangers sitting together on a train who are making polite conversation. Please,” he added.

She nodded. “All right,” she said.

He looked hard at her for a long moment. “Do you remember the first time we went to the Lookout?” he asked.

She smiled, both shy and ironic, and said, “You made me impure that day.”

Martin shook his head. “You’re not even impure
now
. I don’t know what the word means.”

Claire looked down at the floor of the gazebo, struggling to say something. “That day,” she said. “It changed my life.”

Even though she had ended up back in the same town where she was born, married to a man from the area and helping to run her father’s business—in essence, leading a life of quiet, even predictability, like the lives of
many other people she knew—she felt that her life had been changed that day. It had not all been for nothing. Sometimes he worried that she thought it had, that what they had briefly lived out together had been pointless. “So you’re not sorry?” he said. “About that day, and what happened after?”

Claire looked at him strangely. “Martin,” she said, “I can’t believe you’d think I was sorry.”

“I’m so glad to hear that,” he said, and he held her hands for a while, until she had to get back home.

In 1975 Claire’s oldest child, Alison Martina Clusker, a champion runner on the Longwood Falls High track team and extremely talented at drawing, was accepted to art school in New York on a substantial scholarship. For Claire, who hadn’t had a chance to study art so intensively herself, this was a thrill. Whenever she came upon Alison standing at an easel she had set up in the cluttered attic of their small house, she would feel moved by all the possibilities that were in store for her daughter. Alison had a boyfriend already, a brooding
boy named Jeff who worked after school at Beckerman’s soda shop, serving soft ice cream that swirled out of a nozzle. Claire tried to stay out of Alison and Jeff’s way, allowing them to sit in the front seat of the family car for hours late at night doing God knows what. But lately Alison seemed unhappy, sometimes bursting into tears at the dinner table for no obvious reason and pushing away her plate of food and flinging herself from the room.

“Teenage girls,” Daniel commented mildly. “I feel for her. But they all go through this, don’t they? Isn’t it a rite of passage?”

“I guess,” said Claire, but she was worried. One night after Alison left the table in tears for the second time that week, Claire knocked on her daughter’s door and asked to come in. At first there was no reply, and then finally Alison opened the door, her face streaky and pink from crying. “What?” she said miserably to her mother. Behind her was her poster–filled room with its clutter of candles, paperback books, paintbrushes, makeup, and hills of clothes. Draped over the back of a chair was Claire’s old apple–green Chanel suit, which she had given her daughter, for it no longer fit
her. Alison liked wearing the suit, calling it “vintage,” and a “throwback,” and usually putting on a pair of Swedish clogs with it, and some interesting jewelry that she made in art class at school out of copper wire and beads.

“I just wanted to make sure you’re okay, honey,” said Claire. “If there’s anything you’d like to talk about, I’d be—”

“Mom,” interrupted Alison, “there’s nothing here that I could talk about with you. I mean, just look at you and Dad. You obviously haven’t experienced anything close to what I’m going through.”

“Oh no?” said Claire.

“No,” said her daughter. “What I’m going through is about … love. About feeling things so much you feel all crazy inside. No offense, but it’s not something you could ever understand.”

It was all Claire could do to keep from coming into the room, shutting the door hard behind her, sitting Alison down on the bed, and saying, “Look, you, I know
exactly
what you’re talking about. Your mom has led a secret life of love and passion that would shock you out of your skin.” Her daughter would have been
incredulous. For how could this middle–aged mother of three—this average, mild, small–town woman—have had such passions? Sometimes Claire herself wondered.

So all she did now was give her daughter a sympathetic look and say, “Well, if you ever want to try me, I’m here.” And then she left the room, knowing that within moments Alison would be on the telephone to Jeff, whispering and crying and laughing and murmuring things that no one else would ever hear.

When Martin’s mother died in 1987 of pancreatitis, a result of chronic alcoholism, Hush called him, and he came back for the funeral, sitting with his back straight in the church. He’d imagined that there would be whispers about his return, but then he realized that most of those people who would have done the whispering were probably dead. Two years later, when Ash Rayfiel died of an aneurysm in his office at the hat factory, Martin did not return. The funeral, it was reported, was only sparsely attended. The house on the Crest was sold, and all the Rayfiel money went
to Princeton University, where a new building of some sort was supposed to be named in Ash Rayfiel’s memory. Martin didn’t care; he hadn’t expected any money. He was a very wealthy man on his own now, someone who had gathered money and great success and worked at a job he truly loved, and had a wide circle of friends in London and throughout the Continent. Every month or so he and Frances invited their friends to the restaurant, and they all had dinner at one round table and stayed up very late laughing, eating big plates of food, leaning back in their chairs and glancing up at the soaring ceiling of the restaurant.

His wife and daughter were flourishing. Frances did volunteer work giving tours at the British Museum, and Louisa, who had attended Cambridge, was now, amazingly, a philosophy don there, as her late father, James, had been. She’d long ago abandoned her paper skirts and raccoon makeup for a more serious though still stylish wardrobe.

Martin’s hair went entirely silver by the time he turned fifty–five. When he showed up at the gazebo that year, Claire’s eyes widened. He hadn’t realized how extreme the change in
his own appearance had been since the year before. “Do I look very old?” he asked her.

“Oh no,” she said. “You just look important. Which you always were, of course. Only now you’ve grown into it.”

“Thank you,” he said. He held her hand and lightly stroked her arm, which bore a spattering of freckles he hadn’t noticed before. Age spots, he thought, but they didn’t bother him; they just provided a map to Claire at fifty–five, this beautiful woman who was human and was aging like everyone else. He loved what was imperfect about her; he loved what was real. “You know,” he said softly, “nothing makes me happier than coming here.”

“Oh, me too,” she said.

“It’s funny,” he said. “We both have these lives, you know? You’ve got your children, and Daniel, and Swift Maintenance. And I’ve got the other Gazebo—capital G—and my wife and Louisa the philosopher, and yet when we come here, it’s as though everything else is of no concern.”

“That’s right,” she said. “It’s exactly like that for me, too.”

They sat and leaned into each other, their
hands entwined, not caring who was watching them. Their story was old news by now. He told Claire a good recipe for cold tomato soup with dill, and she brought his hand to her mouth and kissed the fingertips, one by one.

They both imagined that it would go on like this indefinitely: meeting once a year, sitting and talking and holding hands, letting each other know that the love was still lingering like a scent, and that it would never go away. But on May 27, 1998, when she was sixty–six years old, Claire was very somber as Martin slowly walked up the steps of the gazebo and sat down beside her.

“What is it?” he asked, frightened, but in his heart he must have known.

She too was afraid; she didn’t know how to tell him. She had been dreading it much more than telling Daniel or her children. At least the Cluskers were a family, and a close one; at least they could all cope with it together. But Martin had no one around him in London he could talk to about this, or with whom he could cry freely. “Martin,” she began, “now listen to me.” And she began to tell him what had happened.

Ten weeks earlier, Claire and Daniel had been getting ready for sleep. He sat on his side of the bed pulling on his pajama top, and Claire sat on her side of the bed applying moisturizer to her face and buttoning her nightgown. She and Daniel had an ease to their marriage; it had only increased as the years passed, and she felt devotion toward this shy, hardworking man who still, even at the age of sixty–six, did the occasional handspring, as he had done when he was young. He had been a calm and steady husband and a good father to their three children, who were all grown now and with families of their own. Serious Jonathan lived in Northern California with his wife and daughter and designed computer software; soulful Edward and his wife, both cellists, lived in Boston with their two sons, where they performed with the symphony orchestra. And Alison Martina Clusker, who had kept her maiden name, had married her high school sweetheart, Jeff, and the couple lived in Vermont with their three children—two girls and a boy—where she was an artist and he taught school. Grandchildren were everywhere in Claire and Daniel’s life,
coming to visit for Christmas or summer vacations. She doted on these children and had knitted each one a beautiful scarf last winter, using an entire rainbow of wool.

As Claire sat on the side of the bed that night before sleep, she raised one arm over her head and lightly began touching her breast, as she did every month, checking to make sure nothing was there that shouldn’t be there. Usually she spent just a few casual moments on this task, but tonight something made her pause. It was tiny, no bigger than a pearl; had she imagined it? She palpated the left breast again with a little more urgency.

“Daniel,” she whispered. “I think I found something.”

The surgery was only marginally successful; the doctors said that the cancer had spread to the lymph glands under her arm. When she woke up in the hospital in Albany, she took one look at her husband’s face and knew. She had only one breast now, a fact that saddened her. Daniel said it didn’t matter, all that mattered was that she was okay, but she had the strong sense that she wasn’t okay.

A round of chemotherapy had left her
weakened. She lost weight, and when she looked at herself in the mirror in the morning she barely recognized herself. Oddly, she looked younger than she had in a long time, more like a fragile girl than the old, sick woman of sixty–six that she really was. The cancer was still circulating in her body—the same type of cancer that had caused her mother to die forty–four years earlier. She remembered her mother’s suffering; she thought about it often now, the way Maureen Swift’s eyes had glazed over and she had turned her head away in pain, not wanting Claire to see.

Oh, Mother
, Claire thought,
here I am, a woman in her sixties, someone you’ll never meet, and I’m going through exactly what you went through. Tell me what I should do
. But of course her mother couldn’t reach across time and space to answer. Claire had only herself to figure it out. The chemotherapy was so harsh, and the chances were not good anyway, and so she had decided: enough. She would have no more.

Claire explained her decision to Daniel, and he wept and asked her to reconsider. She held his head as he cried, and she assured him that
it was the right decision, and that though it would be hard, he would be okay without her. He had children and grandchildren and a townful of friends. “We’ve loved each other,” she told him.

“Yes,” Daniel said, “we have. And we do.”

Her illness was a difficult subject to talk about with her husband and her children, yet she had done it. But telling Martin—now this was a different thing entirely. At the gazebo after the surgery and the chemotherapy and the decision not to proceed with treatment, Claire faced Martin and spoke for a while. As she talked, he sat and listened, his face crumpling slightly from time to time. When she Was finished, he didn’t respond for a moment. There was a protracted pause, and then Martin took a deep breath and knelt down before her.

“I want you to know,” he said slowly, “that you’re still my love.” His voice was halting. His hair was entirely silver, and here she was discussing
her
illness,
her
death, but all she could think of was how amazing and how sad it was that he was old now, too—this man whose hair had once been black and whose face and body had been boyish, lean, hopeful.
“You’re still my love,” he continued, “and whatever you do, you’ll know that I’m right there. And even if you’re afraid—” Here Martin’s voice broke off. He put his face in his hands for a moment, and she watched as his shoulders shook. Then he calmed himself and looked up again. “There won’t be one moment where I’m not with you,” he said. He held her hand tightly. “Just think of my hand in yours,” he went on. “And the way it was when we were together. Just you and me, completely in love. Think of all those hotel beds in Europe, and those dinners, and those long walks. Kissing in front of every monument. We couldn’t get enough of each other.”