The Gazebo: A Novel (3 page)

Within a month she was gone. Nicole left her job, insisting that it had nothing to do with Martin, only that she missed her family in Lourmarin. He wasn’t sure whether or not to believe her, but she cried when she left and said she would write to him, which she occasionally did. The new cook was a stout, bossy woman from the Swiss Alps who sang marching songs and grated cheese into every dish she made. While Martin picked up occasional cooking pointers from her, they never became friends.

After the experience in the pantry, he was
quieter, more directed. Some sensation had come over him that day, and now, in another kitchen on the other side of town, it had returned. He suddenly wished he could lie down in a small, fragrant room with this girl named Claire. He could imagine his life being shaped around her; he wanted that to happen, though he had no idea why.

It occurred to him that people didn’t need to be exactly like each other in order for a strong current of feeling to pass between them. His parents liked to socialize only with people who were just like them; he had once heard his mother discussing, in a low, meaningful tone to a friend of hers at the club, another woman who was supposedly “not one of us.” Which meant, it turned out, that the woman wasn’t wealthy and was therefore ineligible to join Longwood Golf and Country.

Martin wanted to be with this girl Claire, who was clearly “not one of us.” He liked that she was different, that the things she knew were clearly different from the things he knew. And yet he felt that they were oddly similar. It was time for him to go now, and yet he still couldn’t bring himself to leave. For some reason
he was stalling, lingering, loitering here in her house. Instead of saying good–bye, what he said to her was, “Can I cook the steak for your father?”

Claire stared at him. “You know how to cook?” she said, her voice full of doubt. He nodded. “You do not,” she said.

“Yes I do.”

“You’re kidding, right?” she asked, and he shook his head no. “Okay, be my guest,” she said, shrugging and gesturing that the kitchen was his.

He took over in the narrow space, slicing cloves of garlic and cubes of butter on a cutting board the size of his hand. When he asked Claire if there were any spices handy, she said there were some herbs growing in a patch beside the house. She picked some for him, then brought them back inside. He minced onion grass and wild thyme and made an herb butter for the steak, which he rinsed well, since it had been on his black eye. When the steak was done, Claire regarded it with surprise, for not only was it clearly delicious, it was also artfully arranged on the plate. She brought it silently in to her father, who happily ate it up,
announcing later that it was the best dish she had ever cooked for him.

Afterward, when the kitchen was still fragrant, and the day was almost over, Claire turned to Martin and told him he had to leave.

“This time I mean it,” she said. “My mother will be home soon from the fabric store with my older sister, Margaret. And unlike my father, they’ll ask a million questions.”

“I wish they would,” he said softly. “I’d tell them anything. My shoe size: eleven. My intelligence: fairly high. My—”

“Go,”
she said firmly, and she opened the kitchen door for him.

“Claire,” he said suddenly. “Meet me at the gazebo tomorrow.”

Suddenly she wasn’t smiling anymore. “No,” she said. “There’s no point. We’re totally different.”

“So what?” he said. “Please. Just meet me.”

She looked at her hands, lacing them together, deciding. “Not tomorrow,” she said. “Next week. Same time.”

“Fine. Next week,” said Martin. They stood in silence at the half–open, curtained kitchen door. He didn’t want to ruin this afternoon. It
was like a recipe, he thought; if you stirred too long, you would change the consistency. So without saying another word, he walked out the door of her kitchen and didn’t look back. Next week, he thought to himself as he walked down the path to the little cul–de–sac, whose name, he saw from a sign, was Badger Street. Without realizing it, his step became quicker, until he was practically running. Next week, he thought.
Next week
.

The Rayfiels’ driver, Henry, was waiting by the car several blocks away, smoking and looking very concerned. He dashed the cigarette out under his foot. “Are you all right?” he asked as Martin climbed in beside him. It was not the first black eye he had seen on this boy.

“Yes,” said Martin, and he leaned his head back against the brown leather seat of the Bentley, one eye as big as a plum and swollen shut, as the car began its ascent up the hill toward home.

During the week, Martin was entirely distracted, performing poorly on an English examination and making a crucial error in
chemistry class that almost resulted in a sulfurous explosion. The headmaster, Mr. Croft, invited Martin into his office for “a word.” Croft was a decent man who was close to retirement, and Martin did not want to disappoint him. “I know you’re headed to Princeton in the fall,” said Croft, appraising him from beneath a wall of diplomas, “but still it’s essential that you keep your grades up to the level at which they have been all along.”

Since meeting Claire, Martin had entirely stopped thinking about the fact that he was going away to college in September. He had been accepted to the school his father and grandfather had attended. From the time of Martin’s birth, it was assumed that he would eventually go to Princeton, where he would join the same selective eating club that the Rayfiel men had always belonged to, and that he would do everything that they had done: play varsity football, study economics, and date a certain type of extremely rich, dull girl with strong teeth and a throaty, slightly hysterical laugh.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Croft,” Martin said to the headmaster. “You’re right; I’ve been distracted.
I’ll try to be more attentive.” But he was upset now at the idea of going off to college in the fall and leaving behind this girl Claire, whom he hadn’t yet gotten to know.

When next Friday came around, Martin did not have Henry drive him into town. Instead, after school he changed out of his uniform and into a casual shirt and pants, then headed down from the Crest alone, on foot, telling no one where he was going. He walked lightly across the green, afraid that she wouldn’t be there, that she would have forgotten. Or, worse yet, that she hadn’t forgotten but had just changed her mind and decided not to come. He almost couldn’t bear to look, but now, as he approached, he did.

In the distance stood the gazebo, a simple, octagonal white structure that seemed half made of air. And inside it, she waited for him.

T
HE RICH BOY
with the black eye came into Claire Swift’s life in a way that took her by surprise. It hadn’t occurred to her that she might fall in love while still living in her parents’ home. She had imagined it happening in some distant future, far away from this cramped house and the absolute lack of privacy that was the defining feature of her girlhood. Claire supposed she had known she was in love with Martin from the moment she invited him to her house for a steak to put over his eye. But she kept this knowledge hidden from herself at first, convinced she had only been trying to be “helpful,” the way her parents had raised her to be, and that she would have behaved exactly the same way regardless of who had stepped into that gazebo with a black eye.

Still, when she was about to see him a second time, she was nervous to the point of feeling frantically sick to her stomach.
Butterflies
, the sensation was called, but the word seemed much too frivolous to describe what she felt. They sat for a while in the gazebo, and then they walked half a mile to a meadow, where they sat again. He wanted to know all about her, and she told him about her family, and how, when she was eight years old, she’d almost died of spinal meningitis, and how she wanted to be a sculptor—taking an advanced art class at school, and always winning first prize in the annual student art contest. He in turn told her about his family, and about wanting to be a chef, and about how he was reluctantly going off to Princeton to study economics in September, when what he really wanted was to go to cooking school. They exchanged a round of details and asked each other questions in a big hurry, as if to make up for lost time.

They agreed to meet again the following afternoon, this time at a nearby pond where they could go swimming, even though it wasn’t quite swimming weather yet. When she arrived
the next day at the side of the pond at three–thirty, he was already there, sitting on a rock with his shirt off. She briefly took in his long arms and bare chest with its feathering line of dark hair. Soon they were in the cold water together, touching the slick bottom of the pond with their toes, their skin rippled with gooseflesh, knees lightly bumping.

Finally, after they had stood wading and shivering in the pond for a good five minutes, he came closer, as though crossing the line of the invisible circle that all people inscribed around themselves. But somehow, she didn’t want him to move away.

“Hello,” he said to her.

“Hello,” she said in return.

He was going to kiss her now, she knew, and to her surprise the sickened feeling returned. She wasn’t sure why she felt this apprehension, but it was a part of who she was. Claire’s mother had always been over–protective, chasing after Claire with woollen hats and offering warnings about men. “Don’t trust them,” her mother had said. “You’re a pretty girl, and they will try and sweet–talk you into things you may regret.”

She heard her mother’s words now, although they were the last thing she wanted to think about. Why should she trust Martin? There was really no reason. Claire knew that his father, Ash Rayfiel, had a reputation around town as a ruthless businessman—in fact he had cheated her own father once, something to do with payment for a garden wall. But this moment, here in the still, cold water, had nothing to do with reason. Martin put a wet hand on her shoulder and brought her even closer to him. Claire immediately felt the heat and color of her face climbing until it reached her hairline.

Of course she wanted to kiss him, too, but she was only seventeen years old and was alarmed by this urgent feeling. Boys at school had always shamelessly flirted with her and asked her out and called pleadingly to her from across the athletic field as they ran around tossing balls, and she had gone to the Longwood Cinema with several of them, including Roy Crenshaw, who kissed her in the balcony during the newsreels. Roy was a lazily handsome basketball player at Longwood Falls High with wavy blond hair and sleepy
eyes, but she had felt very little during his kiss, only a bit of anxiety about whether other people in the theater were looking, and a slightly unpleasant awareness of the taste of butter on his lips and tongue, for Roy had been eating handfuls of popcorn.

But when Martin kissed her, standing in the pond, she felt everything. Martin’s mouth touched hers, then he backed away slightly and approached again from a slightly different angle, off by a few degrees. Roy Crenshaw had smelled of some awful pine–scented hair tonic that he had glugged freely onto his hair from the bottle, but Martin wore no scent. He smelled like a handsome boy in sunlight: something sweet from the tail end of childhood mixed with something darker and more adult. Sweet and sour, she thought giddily as they kissed. So this was what it was all about, she realized, all those desperately romantic movies she had watched with her sister at the Longwood Cinema, all those things that characters in movies always claimed they felt for each other. She thought of her own luck in discovering him, in discovering this feeling. It woke up something inside her that had been
asleep her entire life. It shook it awake, as if saying:
It’s time
.

Martin and Claire quickly developed a routine that allowed them to see each other at least three times a week, sometimes four. Any less than that gave Claire a panicky sense of need and withdrawal. Even when she did see him, she was slightly unhinged. I have become a deranged person, she thought to herself one afternoon during sewing class at school as she wildly scattered a zigzag stitch across the pocket of an apron she was making, ruining it. Then high school ended for both of them, and summer began. Claire slept late every day. Sometimes she slept until one in the afternoon, lying in bed and thinking about Martin until her worried mother came to the door and asked if she was okay.

“I’m fine,” said Claire, but still her mother came in and placed the back of her hand against Claire’s forehead.

“Well, your head is cool,” said her mother, eyeing her curiously.

Once, when no one was home, Claire took Martin to her house to show him one of her
small clay sculptures that her parents kept on the mantel. It was of a girl sitting by herself and reading. Martin admired it, knowing right away that the girl was Claire as a child, created from memory. She wanted more than anything to be a sculptor, but her parents couldn’t afford to send her away to art school. She was very talented, and they knew it, but even if they could have sent her, she told him, they probably wouldn’t have. The Swifts were conventional people, and they naturally assumed that their daughters would get jobs in Longwood Falls after high school: perhaps doing some of the lighter maintenance work for their father, or even becoming a receptionist in a local doctor’s or dentist’s office. That was what Claire’s older sister, Margaret, had done since graduation, answering telephones and managing the front desk for the elderly, forgetful Dr. Somers. Margaret didn’t particularly like sitting all day at the desk behind the sliding frosted glass window, listening to the phlegmy coughs of patients in the waiting room, occasionally getting up to replace the array of magazines with newer ones, or to feed the sluggish goldfish that swam in a tank by
the window, but she never complained. Still, the idea of a similar future was very depressing to Claire, especially now that she had met Martin.

“Let me ask you something,” Martin suddenly said to her one afternoon in the meadow. “If you had money, and no restrictions at all, and didn’t have to worry about what people thought of you, what would you do with your life?”

“Oh,” said Claire right away, “I would definitely travel. Go to Europe and take a tour of all the great art there, and study sculpture for real.” She paused. “But it’s so ridiculous to think about this,” she said. “I don’t even have a passport. I’ve hardly ever been out of Long–wood Falls.”

“Europe,” said Martin, who had been there several times with his parents, “is absolutely nothing like Longwood Falls.”

“What would
you
do?” she asked him.

“I’d go with you,” he said without hesitation. They were both silent. During all the afternoons they’d been meeting, they hadn’t really discussed the inevitable, but it lay ahead of them whether they liked it or not. In September
Martin would be going to Princeton, and Claire would be staying behind, finding a local job and living at home, her life remaining static, with nothing much to look forward to. But Martin’s life would keep moving forward, taken up by studying and term papers and spirited football games and wealthy girls. On weekends he would dance with these slender girls who had strings of cultured pearls encircling their slender, white throats. Claire didn’t know which was worse—the idea of sharing him with
them
, or sharing him with anyone.

They didn’t talk much about their upcoming separation in the fall, politely ignoring it as though it would go away on its own. He had no desire to go to Princeton, wishing instead he could go somewhere to learn to be a chef and take Claire with him. She, too, wished she didn’t have to listen to her parents. Her mother in particular was always watchful and frightened, as though convinced that something bad would inevitably happen to her younger daughter.

Claire’s father was less worried. He was preoccupied by his work, which was constant and difficult. Lucas Swift was a maintenance
worker employed by the town to garden, prune, and plant as well as to repair sidewalks and fences and maintain the gazebo in the middle of the square. He had recently enlisted a cousin to help him with his work, and now the two men were calling their business Swift Maintenance, which they had stenciled across the side of a truck. The work was increasingly demanding, and Claire’s father came home at the end of the day in a sweat and feeling like a dog who just wanted to curl up and sleep. The Swifts were a struggling family but not impoverished. Once in a while there was an inexpensive steak in the refrigerator, and though the household wasn’t fueled by laughter and play, at least everyone got along. They were not one of Tolstoy’s happy families, but they managed.

Happiness, in fact, had always seemed like a somewhat false concept to Claire. She’d been a slightly melancholy girl all her life, yet when she was alone with Martin she knew happiness wasn’t false, only elusive. But now she had caught it by its wriggling tail, and here it was in the form of this boy with dark hair and a fading bruise and expressive hands. They
continued to tell each other things, including the most personal stories from their lives; he even told her about his afternoon spent on the floor of the pantry with Nicole the cook.

Claire and Martin didn’t talk about their feelings for each other to any of their friends, and Claire never mentioned it to her older sister, Margaret, but it was inevitable that people would find out in such a small town as Longwood Falls. They had been seen together often enough, and one day the talking simply began, an energetic cicada whirr of it among both the people in the Swifts’ social class as well as up on the Crest.

“What’s this about your daughter and that millionaire boy?” the checkout woman at Stover’s market bluntly asked Claire’s mother, Maureen Swift, one afternoon as she stood on line. “It’s nothing but trouble, if you ask me, not that you have,” the woman went on. “The father’s a bully, and the mother drinks, and everyone knows they’re the worst snobs in the entire county.”

Claire’s mother, who didn’t know anything about it, pretended that she did. “Oh, it’s all just talk,” Maureen said smoothly as she
picked up her grocery sacks and collected her change, but that evening in the kitchen, standing side by side with her daughter as they washed a hill of supper dishes together, she confronted Claire, who first bit her lip, denied the accusation hotly, then immediately broke down and told her mother the whole story. A lifetime of dutifully telling the truth to a demanding mother could not be reversed in one evening.

“I love him, all right?” she said, the words tumbling out.

“Well then, learn to
unlove
him, Claire,” her mother said. “There would be too many problems; it would be awkward. Everyone would be so unhappy about it, and you’d only end up terribly hurt.”

Claire angrily dried a plate with the thin checkered rag in her hand. “Love doesn’t work like that,” she said to her mother.

“I’m well aware of how love works,” said Maureen quietly. “Young people always think they’re the first ones to discover love, but believe me, it’s been around before you and it will be around long after you’re gone from the earth.” She paused. “But when it takes place
between two people who have no business being together, then it will always make their lives miserable.”

“It’s not love that’s doing that,” Claire said. “It’s
you
.” And with that she flung down the dishrag and stormed off to her bedroom.

Meanwhile, up on the Crest that same evening, Martin was told in no uncertain terms that he was never to see “that girl” again, whom his parents had learned about through a vulgar and wealthy widow at Longwood Golf and Country named Velma Cornby—a woman, Martin had always thought, who because she had no life of her own feverishly gossiped about everyone else’s.

“Let me spell it out for you, nice and clear. Your mother and I forbid you to continue seeing that girl,” said Ash Rayfiel after calling Martin into his study.

Martin faced his father across the big desk with its oxblood blotter, surrounded by books Ash Rayfiel had never made the time to read. Books that, by their sheer number, were designed to impress visitors, and that was all. “You
forbid
me to see her?” Martin said, and Ash Rayfiel nodded. “Sorry,” said Martin,
“but I thought we were past the `forbidding’ period of my life. I thought I got to make my own choices by now.”

His father stared at him, unblinking, then poured himself a drink from a cut–glass decanter shaped like a pear. “All right, Martin,” he said. “Then sit down for a moment, and we’ll talk.” He poured his son a big glass of bourbon and handed it to him. Martin had never had a drink with his father before. They sat on the stiff leather couch, and Ash finally said to him, “If you insist on seeing her despite our protests, I suppose I should be relieved, in a way.”