The Gazebo: A Novel (5 page)

During Martin’s vacations, the two of them went back to the Lookout Motel a few times. Sometimes they sat in the gazebo, or skated on the now–frozen pond. Claire was exactly as she had been when he had left. Princeton had a great deal to offer, but it couldn’t provide Martin with the two things he knew he wanted: to be with Claire, and to become a chef. Still, he resigned himself to passing each year of college with the thought that he could be with Claire all summer. In this manner, Martin managed to get through three years at Princeton.

On the day before final examinations in his junior year, Martin and his roommate for the past three years, Everett P. Hudson Jr., were getting dressed, when Everett suddenly turned and said in his thoughtful drawl, “You’ve never really been here, have you?”

Martin regarded him. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“You’re somewhere else, I think,” said Everett, knotting his tie with the tiny orange
Princeton tigers on it. “Somewhere better.”

Martin nodded. Today was May 27, 1952, three years to the day that he and Claire had met at the gazebo. They ought to be together today, he knew, as they had managed to be every year on the anniversary of their first encounter. They ought to be together today and every day. They ought to travel to Europe, to see it all. For three long years he’d slogged through school, resenting the separation, and now he knew it was time to change things. He didn’t want another year to go by during which they would be apart.

In two hours he was supposed to begin a round of examinations, writing his long answers in the blue books that all students were given. There was no point to this, for he would not become a scholar in his life, or advance to law school or business school. “I’ll see you later,” he said to his roommate, and then he walked out of his room and onto the campus.

The place was oddly quiet; everyone was inside studying. Martin walked and walked down to the playing fields, where a long time ago his young father had once kicked a football, and where, an even longer time ago, his
grandfather had done the same thing. Martin sat down on the grass, and that was when he saw the man. He was walking along with his hands behind his back—a rumpled old man in a navy cardigan with wildly sprouting white hair and a mustache. He appeared to be lost in thought.
Albert Einstein
, Martin realized.

He imagined going up to this brilliant, world–famous physicist and pouring out his heart to him. Perhaps Einstein would have something consoling to say, something philosophical and transcendent that would put Martin’s problems in perspective. But Professor Einstein was walking away, his hands shoved in his pockets, already lost in some spiral of thought that Martin couldn’t even begin to imagine.

Martin gazed after him. Then he suddenly stood and broke into a run, heading away from Einstein, away from the college entirely, across the expansive green playing fields and directly over to the Western Union Office in town, where, his hand shaking slightly, he stood and wrote out the following telegram to Claire Swift:

That evening, May 27, 1952, a soft, windless night in upstate New York, Martin stepped off a train onto the platform at the Longwood Falls station and walked across the town square to the gazebo, where Claire sat in a sleeveless dress the color of butter. He buried his face against her shoulder. “For
good
?” she asked quietly, and all he could do was nod.

A
BBY PUSHED THE
pause button on the cassette player, stopping Martin Rayfiel and his story in the middle of a sentence. She had been sitting at her desk, legs up, not moving, for the better part of an hour now, and as she shifted in her chair she felt light–headed—whether from the wine or the lulling effects of Martin’s voice, she couldn’t say.

Abby sat straight in her chair and pulled herself closer to the desk for a better look at the photos that lay at the top of the stack of things inside Martin Rayfiel’s open briefcase. First she saw an old, faded black and white photograph of a shyly pretty girl; on the back Abby read, written in a careful hand, “Claire 7/12/49.” Next she found a picture of a handsome boy, someone right on the precipice of adulthood. It was Martin, she knew, and he
was as striking when he was young as she’d imagined. In the picture he was standing against the sloping silver side of a car, his arms crossed, tall, lean, black–haired, and transparently, soulfully unhappy. And no wonder: when Abby turned the photograph over, she saw the words, “Martin on his first day at Princeton, 1949.”

Abby looked further, found a few other photos: Martin in front of his parents’ house, Claire with her sister, Margaret, in their little yard, but none, in this top layer of things in the briefcase, of Claire and Martin together. Of course not, Abby thought; they had no one who approved of their relationship, no one they could speak to about it, no close friend to whom they could casually hand a camera and say, “Would you please take our picture?”

Abby kept searching through the top layer of objects and papers. She found the letter that Claire had written to him his first day at college. The handwriting was just as she’d imagined it: careful, curved, identifiably feminine. Abby lifted the piece of paper to her nose, and she could have sworn that, after all this time, she still smelled the very last traces of the citrus
soap that had scented everything Claire touched. She set the paper aside, with the photos, and next lifted out of the briefcase several ancient pink carbon–copy slips: receipts for motel rooms at the Lookout, signed in 1949, 1950, 1951, and 1952 by a Mr. and Mrs. John and Alice Harrison of Saratoga Springs, New York. The motel was gone now. Abby remembered when it had been razed some years ago and replaced by condominiums. Then Abby found the telegram from Martin to Claire, dated May 27, 1952, its edges frayed, the paper as delicate as an old doily.

And there, right beneath the telegram, she found two faded gray tickets—halves of tickets, really. Stubs. The printing on the stubs was very faint, and Abby had to squint to make out some of the words.
Idlewild
she saw, and
Orly
, and
May 28, 1952
. So they’d gotten to Europe after all. And only then did Abby realize how much she’d been hoping they had. They’d boarded an airplane and gone to Europe, eager, thrilled, terrified.

Abby remembered this same mix of sensations, this feeling of starting something entirely new. It had happened to her once, and
she hadn’t had to travel to another continent to experience it. Nine years earlier at a jammed art opening in New York City, she had seen a tall man leaning against a wall, perilously close to an ugly painting of a screaming monkey. He held a plastic cup of the type of bad wine you find at art openings, and he was talking easily to a cluster of people. She noticed him—his deep brown hair and eyes, the way he was making the others laugh—and then he noticed her noticing him, and soon he was slipping through the crowd to Abby’s side of the room. For a few seconds they stood in silence, pretending to look at the paintings.

“So,” he finally said, “do you like screaming monkeys?”

He was an art dealer in from Los Angeles, she was an editorial assistant on the rise, and Abby had thought, quite reasonably,
This is it
. And Sam Bachman
was
it, for a while anyway. They had never had to struggle with the idea of “love.” It had come early, and easily, and often. They said it giddily to each other several times a day on the phone, and then they said it in person almost every evening they were in the same city together, and even when they
couldn’t say it, they said it anyway. “I love you” said the note in the candy bowl, “I love you” said the note in the soap dish, “I love you” said the note in her change purse, and when Abby looked back on their two years together and strained to figure out what had gone wrong—why she’d believed everything she’d believed—she wondered what else she could have done, in the face of so much evidence.

But that’s just what it was in the end: so much evidence, a paper trail that would have been persuasive if all she needed to appeal to was reason. For one mad moment, sitting on the couch with Sam in the living room of her one–bedroom apartment on the fourteenth floor of an anonymous building on the West Side of an anxious city, she actually had thought of producing the notes—of disappearing into the next room and grabbing the seemingly bottomless shoe box full of all the testaments to his love for her that she’d saved and overturning it in a snowfall of folded white paper as if to say,
See? See? See?
As if the sheer volume of the evidence was all it would take to change his mind, to make him
want to stay with Abby and raise the baby she was going to have in eight months.

Instead, she sat in silence and let him have his say. “If you choose to do this, then that’s it between us,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I won’t have any more to do with you.” Sam was like a different person, sitting rigidly and unmoving on her couch. Gone, in one breathtaking instant, was the easy grace of the tall man leaning against a gallery wall, making everyone laugh; in his place sat a stiff man, cold and unbending. “I’m not ready to be a father. If you think you’re ready to be a mother, fine. That’s your choice. But,” he added, “I won’t have anything to do with the child.”

The child. Sam had elevated the potential baby right out of adorable babyhood and into the slightly less innocent waters known as childhood, and in that moment, the fight went out of Abby.
See? See? See?
she could say as much as she wanted, and now she knew his answer wasn’t going to budge:
No
. Sam stood, said “Think it over,” and turned and left her apartment. Abby sat for a few more minutes, unable to stand, or call a friend on the phone, or cry, or do much of anything. She was
newly, accidentally pregnant, but she already felt changes deep inside her.
Think it over
, Sam had said, and she did. She would have this baby, this child who would eventually turn out to be Miranda Rose Reston. But Sam, somehow, was lost to her forever, a fact that, in many ways, Abby still couldn’t quite comprehend more than six years later. She had loved him, had allowed herself to be consumed by him, and then he was gone, just like that.

Abby stared now at the photo of the young, sad Martin, missing Claire on his first day at college, and she thought of the man who had appeared in her office the previous day. They were the same man, of course; yet how was that possible? She thought of her own father, too: back then, a slightly remote young man in a soft flannel shirt; now, gone for good. Then Abby picked up the photo of Claire from that faraway summer, and she looked into the eyes of a girl who had long ago grown into a woman, and then eventually into a woman who, like Martin Rayfiel standing in her office doorway the previous day, must now be nearly old.

But still in love. And that was the difference between the love story that had been unfolding before her all evening and anything Abby might ever encounter in her own life: she knew how it was going to end. She could stare into the faces of the man and the woman in the photographs, side by side on her desk, and know what she couldn’t know gazing into the eyes of a man at an art opening in New York City: Fifty years from now, you’re still going to be in love.

“Mrs. Frayne?” Abby said on the phone, a moment later. “Listen, something’s come up here at the office.”

“Don’t tell me,” the housekeeper answered. “I should make up the guest room and get myself comfortable.”

“Would you mind?”

“All night?”

Abby regarded the stack of audiotapes on her desk, the pile of photos still in the briefcase. “Could be,” she said, her voice apologetic.

When she hung up, Abby began the tape again, and as Martin’s voice resumed the story, she played with the photographs of
Martin and Claire on her desk, moving them closer together, until they touched.

Martin and Claire weren’t eloping exactly. They were doing something far more daring, for Longwood Falls in 1952 anyway: they were traveling to Europe together, a man and a woman, unmarried—no longer Mr. and Mrs. Harrison, but not yet Mr. and Mrs. Rayfiel, either.

The plan, when it was hatched, was simple and apparently faultless. The next day, Martin would collect an object from his family’s safe—something that belonged to him and which he could easily sell in Europe and live well off for several months. Claire would bring her birth certificate and the passport forms Martin had gotten for her to the bank, in order to get the forms notarized there, so she could get a passport in New York City, then fly to Europe at night. The money he already had in his bank account would cover their airfare. When Martin turned twenty–one in the fall, he would collect his entire inheritance, and he and Claire would be able to live off that money for as long as they wanted. In Europe, Martin could
learn to be a chef, tasting everything, peering into the kitchens of restaurants in city after city, and Claire could study sculpting. Their life, as they imagined it, would have no clearly defined limits.

“There’s one thing,” she said to him as they sat at the gazebo and made their plans. “What about getting married? We haven’t really talked about it very much.”

Martin looked at her, clearly startled. In a soft voice he said that he knew they would be married eventually, but he saw no hurry for it right now. He liked the idea of not getting married immediately, of living a life that seemed, by the standards of the day, unconventional. “We’ll get married when we’ve decided to settle down somewhere,” he said to her. “How does that sound?”

She said it sounded fine, but she was very apprehensive. It was as though fragments of her mother’s personality were making an appearance in Claire. She was willing to go off with him to Europe—something she had dreamed of—but still she was afraid. She didn’t know how she could say good–bye to her parents and her sister. Would she sit them
all down in the tiny living room and announce her news? No, it was much better just to
go
, she realized, leaving behind a note on the kitchen table that explained what she had done, and telling them not to worry about her, though of course they would. She wasn’t a little girl, she was twenty years old; so why did she feel so guilty?

Now Claire and Martin parted until tomorrow, the day they would head down to New York City by train to fly out of Idlewild Airport in the evening. After they separated, Martin went home to his family up on the Crest, and his parents were shocked to see him. So as not to make a scene, he lied and told them that he had taken all his examinations the day before.

His mother, through the veil of her drinking, seemed to believe him, and his father only raised his eyebrows and said nothing. But late that night, when Martin was sitting in his room, he heard a heavy tread on the carpeted stair. He looked up; his father was leaning against the door frame of his son’s boyhood room and peering inside, looking around at the old framed prints of jungle animals on the
walls and the swimming and baseball trophies on the shelf, all of which seemed to Martin to be relics from someone else’s childhood, not his own. “So,” Ash Rayfiel said, “how were your final examinations?”

“Not too bad,” said Martin stiffly.

“Glad to hear it,” said his father. “I remember how difficult they could be. Sitting there for hours, hunched over a desk, surrounded by other men, everyone incredibly nervous, and all you can hear in the big room is the squeak of pens on paper.”

“Right,” said Martin, looking at the floor.

“Look at me, Martin,” said his father, and Martin’s eyes moved upward, to where his father stood.

“You’re a pathological liar,” said Ash Rayfiel calmly. “But I guess this girl of yours doesn’t mind. It goes well with her own character flaws. What does she care that you dropped out of college the day before final examinations, that you lied to suit your own little needs? All she cares about, I guess, is the money. My hat—so to speak—goes off to her.”

“You’re wrong,” said Martin.

“Am I?” said his father. “Look, you have to
face it. This is a girl with no advantages. Zero. A girl who imagines that she was destined for a better life, except for the inconvenient fact that she happens to be the daughter of a maintenance man. So she gets it into her head that
you
can be the one to change everything, that
you
can make her life a whole lot better. And she desperately pursues you. And because you’re inexperienced and gullible and apparently dying to get under her skirt, you take the bait.”

Martin sat very still and straight in his chair. Finally, when his father was done speaking, he asked, “How did you get to be so suspicious of everyone? Were you born that way, or is there something in the water of this town?”

His father looked amused. “Hard to say,” he replied, and then he paused, changing the subject. “The dean at Princeton called me,” he said. “That’s how I found out about what you did. Your mother, however, doesn’t yet know. She was at the club when the call came, so she’s not yet aware of your stunt.”

“When are you going to tell her?” asked Martin.

“I haven’t decided,” said Ash. “Soon
enough. She’ll be heartsick, of course.”

“Well,” said Martin, “I guess she can heal her sickness with vodka.” He immediately regretted the casually cruel remark.

Ash gazed steadily at his son. “You have a choice,” he went on. “You can continue down this self–destructive path, or else you can return to Princeton in the morning. You’ve been granted permission to take all your examinations tomorrow afternoon in the dean’s office without penalty, so long as you show up on the dot of three o’clock, appropriately remorseful.”