The First Warm Evening of the Year (20 page)

“And my feelings about Buddy?”

“But all the things that you, that everyone, love about Buddy and admire, don't matter to Eliot. He doesn't want to be like Buddy any more than Buddy would have wanted to be like him.”

“Of course he doesn't.”

“But don't you think people act like they expect him to? Except that deep thinking and introspection don't impress him. All it gets you is a lonely death. Which he believes he's saved you from?”

“He said
saved
?”

“He doesn't want you to die alone like Buddy.”

“I don't believe— That doesn't sound like Eliot speaking, it sounds like you.”

“Eliot also made a point of telling me that Simon was a better ice-skater than Buddy, and Buddy wasn't a very good athlete. ”

“That would explain the tennis.”

“It's his way of saying he wants a more intimate relationship.”

“He told you that? He said he wants a more intimate—”

“My guess is, he thinks it's something he
should
want. Maybe because he can't talk to you about the things you and I talk about.”

“Then you
did
tell him what we talk about.”

“I told him
about
the things we talk about.”

“That's the same as telling him.” She didn't sound angry when she said this, or disapproving. She said, “I'm a little bothered that you— I mean, they're personal.”

“Someone had to tell him what's been happening. And wouldn't you think he'd want to share something with you that you never shared with Buddy, never did together?”

When she said, “Now you see what kind of person he is, and why I told you that I can't hurt him.” Marian sounded exasperated. “And neither can you. I know you won't let that happen.”

“Is that what we're talking about?”

“Isn't that why you're telling me all of this?”

“And so I can understand what's going on between the two of us.”

“You don't need help with that.”

“Is
that
what we're talking about?”

She reached across the table and took my hand. “We have other things to talk about.”

I thought about what I wanted those other things to be, while Marian asked me to go outside with her.

It was warmer now than when I'd arrived. We walked to the woodland gardens that she and Buddy had built, and down the white pebble path that she and Buddy had designed, past the benches and flower beds that she and Buddy had planned and placed, the groves of trees that she and Buddy had selected and planted; not that it had taken me until today to feel how imposing Buddy's presence could be. Hadn't I felt it yesterday with Eliot?

I said, “I can't talk to you here. The gardens, the house. Buddy pervades every conversation, every consideration. It wears me down.”

“Wears you down?”

“I never knew Buddy and he's everywhere.” I shook my head. “It's worse than that. It's the two of you. Marian and Buddy.”

“He was my husband. We were a couple.”

“I know . . . I know . . . And I can't talk with the two of you around, and you're both always around. Like specters. I can't compete with ghosts.”

“Is that what you think I'm asking you to do?”

“You keep the two of them around. Buddy and Marian. In the gardens, the house.”

“But this is where I live.”

“Yes.”

Marian walked away from me, not fast, as though she were doing nothing more than extending our stroll. She turned around and said, “You're saying that you want me to leave?” There was a note of incredulity in her voice. “Leave my home? What if I told you you had to leave New York?”

I came closer to her. “What if you did? I'd have to take it seriously. If it was an impediment.”

“An impediment from what—from doing what?”

“Do I really have to tell you?”

“Yes,” she said. “You do.”

“From being more than a clown on a trick tricycle.”

“How's that?”

“Buddy's a tough act to follow, and I'm not as confident as you seem to think I am.”

“Oh, I think you are.”

I told her, “I can't talk about it here.”

“Then where can you talk about it?”

I hesitated for a moment. I could have told her that whatever she was looking for, whatever she wanted from me, was more than I could deliver. But when I spoke, I was looking only at her eyes: “Somewhere you have never traveled.”

She smiled. “The nearest airport is Albany.”

“And I left my passport in my apartment. I'd settle for some town nearby that you've never been to before.”

“No such place exists.”

“Then Barcelona.”

We stopped next to a dark green bench, but we didn't sit.

“I'll give Eliot this,” I said, “he manages to block it out. Compartmentalize. Separate you from Buddy.”

“He doesn't think about it. And once you stop thinking about things, who know where that leads?”

We started walking again.

“Geoffrey, I won't deny that we're attracted to each other—”

“I'd say we've moved beyond euphemisms. Wouldn't you agree?”

“You're asking me to run off with you?”

“You once said you wouldn't mind being sad about something besides Buddy and Laura. You can either be sad about breaking Eliot's heart, or my leaving for New York without you.”

“Is that an ultimatum?”

“Marian, I really can't talk here.”

When we came to the edge of the path, Marian said, “I think I've figured out what
your
impediment is.”

“I have one?”

“New York City. The ex-girlfriend you hold up to me and say, ‘See? I can let go of someone.' Your apartment, where I suspect you maintain a quite organized, compartmentalized life, and which I suspect you are so very attached to. And if I told you right now, okay, I'll break up with Eliot, close the house, and fly off to Barcelona or wherever with you, but you'll have to give up your place in the city, I bet you'd turn white and head for the nearest exit. This feeling of having to compete, this
euphemism
you mentioned is—I don't have to tell you what it is.” She walked a little farther while she said, “I want to show you something.”

I stayed with her, and when she got to her car, she opened the door and said, “Get in.”

“Where are we going?”

“Since you've got ghosts on the brain, I'm taking you to a haunted house.”

“Aren't you going to blindfold me first?”

“Maybe later.” She started to laugh. “If only this
was
about sex. We could go away for a few days and get it out of our systems.”

I was more than a little impressed with her associative thinking.

“That would depend on the sex, wouldn't it?” I said.

“Great sex, of course.”

“And what's great sex?”

“Sex with a person you enjoy having sex with.”

There wasn't much I could say to that.

After a few more miles, Marian told me, “We're going to Lenox. If you want to know. The Fitzgerald house.”

A moment or two later Marian said: “If it's still there.”

“Haunted?”

“In the late eighteen-nineties, a family named Fitzgerald lived there, father, mother, two children. He was a clockmaker. One day they vanished. The entire family. Gone. The house was still furnished, food in the pantry, but no Fitzgeralds. They were never heard from again. About a year later, the house was sold, and the new owners began to hear strange sounds. Footsteps on the bedroom ceiling late at night, like someone pacing across the attic floor. Once each day, at various times, they could hear a clock chiming, as if from a room in the other part of the house. Four times, once for each member of the Fitzgerald family.”

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls . . .”

Marian looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “People said some nights you could see the shape of a man walking behind a curtained window, other times, when the house was known to be empty, lights going on in the upstairs room. No one ever owned it longer than a year before selling the place. By the time I was in high school, the house was abandoned. A lot of the kids during senior year would dare each other to go inside alone for five minutes. I was never one of them. Not that I believed the stories, not really, but you know, there's always that twinge of ‘what if it really is haunted?' And I did want to see for myself, but I was embarrassed to admit that to anyone, or tell anyone, let alone go there. It seemed like such a silly thing to do. But the place intrigued me. It still does. And I've never gone there. Until today. With
you
, Geoffrey.”

We drove down a paved road. There weren't many houses around, and the ones that were there were set back from the street, large and looking neither prosperous nor in disrepair, just old and settled. Down a few more streets, where prosperity seemed even further removed, and a few minutes more Marian turned onto a cul-de-sac where the road was cracked and the few houses there looked grim and neglected, some with boarded-up windows.

Alone at the far end of the street was an old, broken-down palace of a place. If I'd known anything about architecture I could have identified the style and era, but all I saw was a big house on a patch of land overgrown with weeds.

Marian pulled up to the curb, paused long enough to give me a look of mild trepidation, then we got out of the car and walked up to the front porch, which was crooked, the stairs broken and weather-beaten, the front door, or what remained of it, hanging off rusted hinges. The glass in the four front windows was missing. Marian peeked through an open space into the dark house, went over to the entrance, and whispered to me, “Are you coming in?”

“I'm always up for silly things,” I told her.

She made a shivering gesture while she grinned at me and pushed the door aside with just the tip of her shoe. The floorboards creaked under our feet as we stepped across the threshold.

We stood close together inside the foyer, facing a dark hallway. The air was colder inside and damp. A little bit like a tomb. Like necrosis.

To our right was a staircase leading to the second floor, with all the steps collapsed onto each other, the banister unattached from the few balusters that remained. Shafts of sunlight broke through the holes in the ceiling where the joists were missing, there was mildew along the floor, and the boards were warped. I could see names scrawled and scratched on the walls, with dates next to them—high school seniors, proving their mettle.

Marian said, “Want to look for ghosts?” Her voice echoed as voices do in an empty room. She took a step forward and I followed while our shadows preceded us. As we walked farther along the hallway, quick scurrying sounds, like small animals running across the bare floor, retreated from our footsteps, and there came a flutter of wings.

At the end of the hall were just more empty rooms. A dilapidated living room, a dining room without any ceiling above it, and the kitchen, minus the appliances, old rotted pieces of linoleum and a bird's nest in the corner above the place where there had once been a back door. All indications that people had ever lived here, even the faintest patina of residency, were absent.

I said, “Nice little place you've chosen for our talk.”

Marian frowned at me.

“I don't know,” she said. “I was hoping for something spookier.”

“Like the crazy old caretaker warning us to keep away from the master's bedroom.”

“Or Jack Nicholson chasing us around with an ax.”

“For all we know,” I told her, “the only reason no one wants to live here is high property taxes.”

“I'd prefer the crazy caretaker.”

“Always a crowd pleaser.”

We were in the living room now. Marian looked around the floor for a place to sit. I took out my handkerchief and cleared two large circles for us.

“More comfortable talking here?” I sat on the floor and leaned back against the wall. “Before, when you said you were embarrassed to tell anyone that you wanted to come here, you meant Buddy. He was a lot of things, but silly wasn't one of them?”

“I really hate an empty house.” Marian pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head, and sat next to me. She said, “Sometimes I wonder what you do in the city. And the kind of people you know. Are they all in the media? Do you socialize a lot?”

“You mean the life I'm so attached to.”

“I'm trying to tell you something, Geoffrey.”

“I'm trying to tell
you
something. Remember what I said yesterday, about skimming across the emotional surface not being fun? Well, this is fun.”

“Sitting on the dusty old floor in a cold, empty house.”

“Sitting on a dusty old floor with
you
.”

When I looked over at her, Marian was resting her back against the wall, as though this were the most comfortable place we might ever want. I was thinking, if this was about sex and we were tucked away in a hotel room in a town where no one recognized us, we could not have been any more intimate than we were right now. And for the second time in as many days I felt that time belonged only to the two of us.

“When I told you we had to talk”—Marian was now looking over at me—“it had nothing to do with Eliot. I was thinking that you wanted me to reassess the past ten years, explain them, or that I had to apologize for them.”

“What did I say to make you think that?”

“But it wasn't you that I needed to explain it to. It was Buddy. Since I first met you, I've been wondering, what would Buddy think about the way I talk to you? Would he approve of how I feel about you, and what I tell you? I've never thought about that with Eliot, not that that's news to you. But I do with you.” She got up and walked to the end of the room where the hallway began and the short shadows of noon appeared across the floor.