The Gazebo: A Novel (4 page)

“How so?” Martin asked.

“Because it shows me you’re normal,” said Ash. “Your mother and I were a bit worried about your development, what with that cooking you like to do.” He took a long drink of bourbon. “If you keep on seeing this girl, I guess it’s because she has something very … sweet about her, if you follow what I’m saying. And the sweetness of the honey is what counts, isn’t it?” Ash nodded to himself. “It all tastes the same, rich or poor, and what’s the harm so long as you don’t knock her up, although
I’m sure we could do something about that too—”

Martin put down his own glass of bourbon and stood. “You don’t know anything about Claire,” he said. “Or about anything.”

“Oh, I know loads more than you think,” Ash said in a quiet voice. “But you can’t see that right now. Someday, maybe you will. But here’s the truth: if you let her, which you seem bent on doing, that girl is going to ruin your entire life.”

“Thanks for the advice,” said Martin. And he turned and left this cold room with its walls of unread books.

“So I guess you’re planning on letting her!” Ash Rayfiel called to him, but Martin didn’t answer. “Fine! Go right ahead!” he heard his father shouting as he descended the stairs.

Claire and Martin became more discreet over the course of the summer, meeting less frequently and in places where they felt fairly certain they would not be discovered. They no longer met out in the open in the gazebo during the day, or even in the meadow, or by the pond. Instead, they met miles away in the far
woods on the periphery of Longwood Falls, a place visited by the occasional trembling deer and by very few people. The woods were thick here, and there were mosquitoes dotting the air. They usually planted themselves in a tangle of branches and leaves. It was darker in the woods than in the places they were used to, for the sun couldn’t find too many openings to poke into between all the trees. The woods were like a dark, slightly forbidding bedroom. Sometimes Martin posed for Claire here when she asked, taking off his shirt and letting her sculpt him from a few scoops of red clay that she had brought with her in a tin.

Claire was miserable in the woods, and she said so. She was upset that she and Martin had to go so far away to be alone together, that they couldn’t walk hand in hand through town like other swooning couples in love. And it was all because of money. She didn’t want Martin Rayfiel’s wealth or status, though some people in town had suggested she did. She wasn’t looking to marry “above her station,” to leave behind the life of being the daughter of a man who pruned hedges and repaired sidewalks and painted the gazebo for a living,
upgrading to be a rich man’s smug, idle wife. It was said in town by some of the smaller–minded citizens that Claire Swift was trying to buy her way out of what she’d been born into. Only when she and Martin were alone together did the rumors and passing comments fade into a distant, insignificant chatter.

And then summer was almost over; now a new kind of urgency infused their time together. One day at the end of August, as they lay in the woods, Martin turned to her, propping his head on an elbow, and stopped talking. “What is it?” she said.

“You know what I’d like? To be with you for an entire day,” he said. “Someplace that’s not here. Someplace where we can lie together without goddamn stupid pinecones sticking to our clothes.”

“Where?” she said.

“The Lookout.”

Claire sat up and stared at him. “We can’t go there,” she said. The Lookout was one of those two–story motels off Route 9 with peeling aqua paint and an old pool that had remained empty for years, filled with trash and cobwebs.

“It will be okay,” he said. “It’s probably nicer on the inside. I just want to be with you,” he went on. “We don’t need to do anything you don’t want to.”

She turned away from him. The truth was that she wanted to be with him in a place that wasn’t covered in a thicket of branches, too. She wanted to sleep with him. But this went against everything she had been taught, everything that was appropriate for a girl of seventeen to feel in 1949. Her parents—her mother especially—would have been horrified by her desires. Her mother would have wept and begged her to change her mind, and would have chased her all the way to that sleazy motel with a woollen hat in her hand.

But now Claire stopped thinking about her mother. In an uncertain voice, not looking at him, she said to Martin, “It’s okay; I’m not offended. I want to be with you, too, you know.”

“Then you understand what I’m saying,” he said, and after a moment she nodded. “You constantly amaze me,” said Martin.

The following Saturday, they hitchhiked to the motel, and a milk truck picked them up on the side of the road. They sat stiffly in the back
among crates of fresh milk, hearing the bottles rattle and chime lightly all around them. Claire wore a dress her mother had made that was the color of cocoa—a pale brown, powdery shade.

They were posing as a married couple. “Newlyweds,” Martin had told her giddily, slipping one of Claire’s own inexpensive silver bands on her ring finger. “We’re the Harrisons of Saratoga Springs,” he’d improvised. “John and Alice. We were married in Saratoga at the Adelphi Hotel. A fairly small wedding, two hundred people or so.”

“So what are we doing at the horrible Lookout Motel, if anyone asks us?” asked Claire.

“Oh, we’re just exploring upstate New York,” explained Martin. “Wandering around like any two people in love, enjoying being aimless before we get down to the seriousness of our life. We’re staying in little motels—the kinds of places that are missing letters in their neon signs.”

The Lookout was missing its first
o
. Claire shook her head and said, “All right, John. We’ll go to the Lookout.”

“Thank you, Alice,” he said. “You won’t regret it.”

They each had brought a small suitcase for authenticity; surely the Harrisons would have clothing with them. Claire kept her overnight case primly on her lap during the bouncing milk truck ride. Inside there was only a cotton nightgown with a row of rosettes lining the border, although she knew she wouldn’t be wearing it. The driver of the truck let them out right at the gravel entrance of the motel. There were a few cars parked in the lot, and the place didn’t look particularly sinister, but still Claire felt afraid. At the front desk they signed their aliases in the guest register, and the old woman in a hair net on duty didn’t even cock an eyebrow in suspicion. She didn’t care who came through here, as long as they weren’t violent and didn’t destroy the furniture, and as long as they paid for their room..

“Oh, one more thing,” Martin said to the woman at the desk. “Is there a room with a kitchenette?”

She looked suprised; probably nobody ever asked for such a thing. “It’ll cost you seventy–five cents extra,” she said, and he agreed to pay it. The woman slid a room key across the counter, and that was that. In silence, Martin
and Claire walked back outside and climbed the rickety wooden staircase to room 18.

The door was an ugly aqua color, with shredding curlicues of paint. All Claire could think about was that her father could have repainted that door nicely, the way he took care of the gazebo and some of the fences around town. Inside, the room was dim and musty, as though no one had been there for weeks. The bed in the middle of the room sagged, but it seemed clean enough.

Claire wondered how she had gotten herself to this point, and she considered turning around and leaving, not saying a word. Everything here was so unfamiliar. But then Martin came close to her; there was that sweet and sour smell again, and the assured clasp of his arms around her, and she remembered that
he
was familiar. She had already memorized the feel of him, his voice, the things that preoccupied him. He was not a stranger, and so she told herself she didn’t need to feel that everything around her was strange.

She undressed silently in the dim of the motel room, and he watched her, what he could see of her. “You’re just beautiful,” he said, and
then he took off his own clothes and slowly pulled back the blue coverlet of the bed, and they both slipped inside. It was cold in there, like the pond. The room was hushed and shadowed even in the middle of the day. She felt that they were just two swimmers in the water. He kissed the hollow of her clavicle, then moved lower until his mouth was suddenly on her breast She breathed in sharply and felt herself grow tense, every muscle in her body alert and tight, but then she reminded herself:
I am Mrs. John Harrison, a married woman
. His mouth stayed on her breast Claire heard herself groan; was that really her?

Their clothes were gone, had drifted off somewhere into the darkness, and now it was just a collision of warm skin against warm skin, pale surfaces against darker ones. Then there was inevitable pain, a shiver of it, bright and frank, which made her turn her head away for a moment, but then it, too, was gone, and what remained was a sensation like floating in clear water. Martin gazed down at her, his dark hair falling in his face.

“I love you, you know,” he said.

“I love you, too,” she said.

“We’ll always belong to each other,” he said. She knew that there was an implicit second half to his sentence, that he was saying: We’ll always belong to each other
even when we’re apart
.

Later, when they were lying together quietly, Martin got up from the bed, still undressed, and went to his little overnight bag. “What are you doing?” she asked, because she had imagined that they both might nap awhile. But he was taking some objects out of his bag and then carrying them over to the hot plate in the kitchenette, for which he had paid seventy–five cents extra. An onion, a couple of eggs he had swaddled in a handkerchief in his bag so they wouldn’t crack, a stick of butter, a wedge of hard farm cheese, a mouli grater, a pair of silver salt and pepper shakers with an
R
engraved on the side of each one, and, finally, a small skillet.

Claire watched in surprise as this naked man stood and cooked an omelette after love–making, his hands quickly slicing and working. When it was done, he slid it onto a plate and came back to bed. They sat eating and leaning against each other, wishing they could
find a way to be suspended in this moment forever, here under the thin blue blanket, in a room in a seedy motel with the missing
o
in its neon sign.

Martin was driven down to Princeton on a wet Sunday morning. The trunk of the car was packed full of Martin’s suitcases and his steamer trunk, and Martin sat in the backseat beside his mother, who wore a leafy green hat that reminded him of a cabbage head, and who, as the Bentley pulled out of the Rayfiels’ driveway, immediately poured herself some liquor that was stored in the car’s compact bar, His father had declined to accompany his son to his first day of college, insisting that he had previous obligations relating to his hat business, but Martin knew it had to do with the angry conversation they’d had in Ash’s office that summer.

During the ride, Martin looked dully out the window while his mother smoked and complained about the declining quality of membership at Longwood Golf and Country. The long car pulled through the wrought–iron gates of Princeton in the early afternoon as the
college carillon bells were clanging in the distance and young men and their parents explored the campus.

In the solid stone building where he was to live, Martin met his roommate, a bony–faced boy with bad skin who was from Durham, North Carolina, and named Everett P. Hudson Jr. The two of them unpacked their things, and Martin’s mother fussed around the room a little, trying to be helpful, and then she was off, saying something about a dinner dance that night at the club. She kissed her son’s cheek, barely touching it with her lips, and he realized that her love had always been like that: well intentioned but vague, and slightly missing its mark.

Later, when Everett had gone down to the entering students’ sherry hour, having unsuccessfully tried to persuade his roommate to join him, Martin sat alone in his new room on the striped mattress ticking, looking at the elaborate moldings and staring over the campus with its Gothic spires and its ambient sense of self–importance and infinite possibilities. Somewhere on this campus at this very moment, Albert Einstein was sitting and thinking
up earth–shattering equations, or else perhaps just taking a shower. Martin reached into his jacket pocket to fish out his keys and loose change, and as he did, his hand brushed against a piece of paper. Surprised, he withdrew it from his pocket and looked at it.

It was an envelope with nothing written on the outside, but when Martin brought it closer to his face, a scent drifted up:
Claire
. The soap she used, something citric smelling, like both lemons and oranges. He quickly tore it open, and began to read:

He sat and stared at the brief letter, picturing her sitting in her cramped bedroom at home and writing it. Over the next weeks and months she would write many more letters to
him, most of them longer, more detailed, and he would immediately write back. Martin tried hard to throw himself into his studies; classes were lively, and he was taking European History, Introduction to Poetry, Plant Biology, and Latin. But the letters from Claire were much more compelling than any of his schoolwork. All around him swarmed young male voices: in the high–ceilinged classrooms, at his eating club, where platters of food were passed by silent black waiters, and after hours, when the young men gathered in dormitory rooms to play poker and smoke cigars in their underwear, knock back expensive scotch, and talk dirty about women. Martin joined in the card games and was well liked, but he was considered opaque, which suited him fine.

He came home for Christmas and then again for spring break, and although he had a great deal of studying to do during vacation, he spent most of his time with Claire. He knew his grades would suffer, but he didn’t particularly care. She had taken a job working as a receptionist for a local dentist named Dr. Mantell, who was nice enough to her, but the work was dreary. Patients came in with toothaches
and left with their mouths numbed and thick–tongued from anesthetic; it was ho life for Claire, but it would have to do for now.