The Gazebo: A Novel (2 page)

This would have been his kind of story, she knew. Abby felt certain that a tale of two lovers reuniting every year for fifty years was one her father would have run in the newspaper. He knew what spoke to the community. Whether it spoke to
him
—whether he was capable of considering anything in any capacity other than as the editor of the newspaper—was another question entirely. Once, when Abby was a teenager, she had asked her mother, “Who does Dad love more, you or the
Ledger
?”

“That’s a complicated question,” her mother had answered, after a long moment’s consideration. “I think he loves us both, but in different ways.”

The answer stunned Abby. She had expected
her mother to say something reassuring: “Why,
me
, of course, but your father sometimes has trouble expressing his emotions.” But instead her mother had decided to give Abby a different truth, a more complete one, and in doing so she also had imparted an essential lesson: don’t ask the question unless you want to know the answer.

The question Abby had come here to ask at dusk was primarily whether she wanted to run this story in the paper. But she’d also come to sit on a bench near the gazebo in the square now to find out what
her
response was—not as an editor, but as a reader. Did the story speak to
her?
Did it resonate? But time was passing, Claire and Martin hadn’t shown up, and now, Abby supposed, she’d never know.

It was dark in the town square. The sun had slipped behind the stand of trees at the west end of the square, and then behind a cluster of storefronts. Martin had told her that he and Claire had never missed a meeting in the gazebo, not once in fifty years; Abby didn’t know whether to be irritated or concerned. She considered calling the police, but what
would she be reporting? She didn’t know either of these people. Maybe one of them was busy and had told the other one this morning, and they had rescheduled their meeting for a different day. Maybe she’d missed them. By the time she returned to the town square from her house, they might have come and gone. Or maybe the whole tiling was a hoax. But she couldn’t quite believe that was the case. Martin Rayfiel, in the brief time he had spoken to her, had been earnest and forceful: an ardent, breakable man.

Abby stood and looked around. She was alone now. The shops that ringed the square on all four sides were closed, their shutters drawn, their gates shut. She walked over to the empty gazebo, climbed its two white steps, and sat down inside. She tried to picture Martin and Claire meeting there, embracing as they sat on the white wooden slats. Then she noticed something; it was underneath one of the seats, half hidden there. Abby bent forward, then got down on one knee to retrieve it: a briefcase.

She pulled it out of the shadows and set it on the floor of the gazebo. It was old and
worn, but made of quality leather and stitching that had clearly lasted many years. She ran her fingers along the stamped letters of the monogram:
M.R
. This was Martin Rayfiel’s briefcase, the one he had carried into her office the day before. Had he left it here for Abby to find? And if so, why? She looked around the square; she was still alone. She hesitated a moment longer, then reached for the clasps. The locks sprang easily, and she flipped the lid open.

The briefcase was filled with a jumble of items, many of them difficult to see in the dim light from the streetlamps in the square, and none of them meaningful to her in any way. It looked like the assortment of things you might find in a chest in someone’s attic: old postcards, letters, restaurant menus, faded photographs, long–forgotten trinkets. She passed her hand over it lightly, fearful of disturbing some unseen order, until at last her fingers came to rest on a stack of several cassette tapes held together with a thick rubber band. She picked up the tapes, raised the stack to catch the light from a nearby lamp, angled it until she could make out the writing on the
first tape. In an elegant script were the words,
Abby Reston—please listen to these first
.

It startled her to see her own name here. It was as if someone had suddenly whispered her name from out of the half darkness surrounding the gazebo, and for a moment she considered slamming the briefcase shut and shoving it back under the bench, as if she’d never been here, as if she’d never seen this. But she
had
seen it. She held the tapes in the palm of her hand, hefting them lightly, as if weighing her options. So she was right; he’d left the briefcase in the gazebo for her to find—or at least for whoever did find it to deliver to her. But did she really want to get involved? If she were to take these cassettes back to the office and pop them in the tape deck that sat on her desk, the one on which she often listened to Chet Baker or old Beatles songs or Chopin études, she would be in the thick of it—whatever
it
was. She wanted to know who Claire and Martin were, and why they hadn’t come to the gazebo today. But how much did she want to know it?
Don’t ask the question unless you want to know the answer
.

Abby picked up the briefcase as though it
were hers and carried it back across the green. When she reached her office at the now–empty newspaper—her coworkers having all sensibly gone home to families and warm dinners and easy chairs and time away from their jobs—she tugged on the chain hanging from her gooseneck lamp, throwing a circle of light onto the chaotic surface of her desk. She cleared away the layout sheets and placed the briefcase down, then went to the refrigerator in the hallway and pulled out a bottle of Gewürztraminer wine that had been cooling there horizontally for several weeks, a present, she seemed to recall, from a satisfied advertiser—the owner of Shur–Foot Shoes for Big and Tall Men (“Widths to EEEE!”). She took a corkscrew from the drawer in the kitchenette, grabbed a mug from the dish drain, and brought it all back to her office. There, in the lamplight, Abby opened the bottle, poured a glass, and popped the first tape in her cassette deck.

“Hello,” said the recorded voice of Martin Rayfiel. “If I’m right, you’re probably listening to this tape in the evening, sometime after dusk, after you’ve realized that Claire and I
aren’t coming to the gazebo. I’m sorry to have disappointed you,” Martin went on, “but the circumstances are very complicated, and can hardly be explained in any superficial way. So if you care to, I thought you might like to listen to the story that I have to tell about Claire and myself. I hope the items in the briefcase will help illustrate what I have to say, although some of them may strike you as absurdly sentimental, and you’ll wonder why I’ve saved them all these years.”

Abby reached under the desk to remove her shoes, letting them drop to the floor, and then put her feet up on the desk. The sound of the voice in the calm of an office after hours was oddly soothing, and as Abby took a first cold swallow of wine and leaned back in her chair, she felt it was a voice she could have listened to all night. And so she did.

C
LAIRE
S
WIFT NEVER
wore a hat. In winter when she was a girl, her mother would come chasing after her with a woollen cap in hand, frantically waving it in the air, but Claire would already be gone. Throughout her entire life, whenever Martin thought of her, he would always see her hatless head, hair swinging. When they first met, though, he did not see her at all.

It was Friday, May 27, 1949, Martin recalled on the tape, and he and Claire were both seventeen years old. They had grown up in the same small town of Longwood Falls, but their lives within the town were so different that they had never spoken. As Martin explained it, the division was simple: his family was rich; Claire’s was not. She lived on a downtown cul–de–sac cluttered with small cottages and
attended the local public school. He lived at the top of a hill in a neighborhood of enormous, ostentatious houses known as the Crest, and went to a formal boys’ day school twenty miles away. Like these houses, Martin was constantly at a remove, suspended slightly above everything. But unlike the other people who lived in the Crest, Martin refused to isolate himself, and so he often ventured downtown, even though his wealth and his gray military–style school uniform made him an obvious target. On this particular occasion, Martin was buying himself a fountain Coke after school at Beckerman’s, a local soda shop with gleaming taps, swivel stools, and an impressively varied jukebox, when he heard the first familiar comments: he was a queer. He should go back to the Crest. He should get on his throne and stay there.

They were local high school boys, and he had seen and fought them before, and soon he was fighting them again, throwing and receiving wild punches. Martin swung at one of them, his fist landing on a jaw with a terrible soft crunch, like biting into an apple. But the boy hauled back and punched Martin in the
eye, and as the punch connected he felt a thud, a deep pain circulating inside his head, and then he was down on the white tiled floor, looking at the silver roots of swivel stools. Distantly, he heard the door stuttering shut, and the boys were gone. Beckerman himself, a worried middle–aged man who was always nervously wiping his hands on his white apron, helped Martin up and chiseled off a chunk of ice for him. Gratefully Martin took it and placed it over his eye, which had already retreated deeply into the flesh of his face, and then he wandered out into the day.

His family’s driver, Henry, was waiting around the corner with the Bentley, most likely leaning against it and smoking, but Martin couldn’t tolerate the idea of being ferried home, where his mother would make a foolish, woozy fuss over him, and his father would berate him for “engaging in violence with locals.”

Instead, Martin Rayfiel walked into the town square, the grass giving slightly underfoot. Because it had rained the night before, the mineral smell of earth was now slightly stronger than usual. His eye was pounding
with its own pulse and heat, and he somehow made his way to the gazebo. Martin had always liked the looks of the gazebo, the way it was poised in the center of the square, as if in the middle of nowhere. Now he climbed the white steps and lay down on the bench under the roof, his knees bent, his head resting on the smooth, varnished slats. Alone finally, he repositioned the piece of ice over his eye, and then he let out a groan. “Christ oh Christ,” he said to himself. “Isn’t this great?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said a voice.

Martin sat up quickly. A girl was facing him, about his age, and her arms were crossed. She was smiling at him. No, she was smirking, and Martin braced for an insult, some sarcastic comment about his family, his money. But none came. Through his one open eye, he noticed the book on her lap,
Treasures of European Sculpture
. She was a good–looking girl in a peach–colored summer dress, her arms and legs long, her hair fair and straight, and Martin was embarrassed as only a seventeen–year–old boy with a swollen eye who has been talking to himself in front of a girl can be.

“You know,” she went on, “I heard that meat works better than ice.”

“Is that right?” he answered. She nodded. “Thanks for the tip,” he said, and he stood carefully, trying to give himself some dignity, pretending that he was not in pain and that he could simply saunter out of the gazebo and back across the green.

“Would you like to try it?” she asked. “I live around the corner; I could get you a piece of steak.”

He looked at her. “You don’t even know me,” he said.

“No, I don’t.”

“And you’re inviting me to your house?”

She nodded to him.

“Why?”

“Because you’re hurt,” she said simply.

The girl was being kind, but she was also being playful, provocative. The mixture of these qualities made him curious, and to his surprise he soon found himself agreeing to be led to her house around the corner. The house was shockingly tiny, and surrounded by other houses just like it. Where did her family sleep? he wondered, looking around at the small, crowded quarters.

The kitchen was small but clean enough,
and she produced a slab of raw steak for him, a cheap cut still in its butcher paper, and sat him down at the table, where he obediently placed it over his eye. He could smell the fresh meat as he held it across his face, the blood of it somehow disturbing him now. “I was in a fight,” he explained to her, although she hadn’t asked. “Actually,
they
were in a fight with
me
. I’m not even sure why it happened.”

“I know why it happened,” she said. “It’s because of who you are.”

“Oh? And who
am
I?” he said.

“I don’t know your name,” said the girl slowly. “But I’ve seen you around town. In that silver car of yours. And with your family. And I know that what happened to you today happened because of that. People get jealous.”

He nodded. “That’s right,” he said.

“This has happened to you before, hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Martin.

“So why do you keep coming down here?” she asked. “Going to the same places, letting everyone see you?”

He paused, thinking about it. “I guess,” he finally answered, “it’s also because of who I
am.” She looked slightly puzzled, but he didn’t elaborate. He didn’t know how to explain that the reason he came downtown again and again, the reason he often found himself in the center of pointless fistfights, was precisely because he refused to be isolated up on the Crest.

Martin had never felt comfortable living there, growing up in the vaguely ridiculous columned home that had been built to look like an antebellum plantation house. The veined marble floors were too slippery to walk on comfortably, and when Martin was small and pretended to ice skate across them, his nanny or one of the maids always made him stop. His parents employed an ever–changing domestic staff, whose leave–takings were largely related to the unpredictable moods of Martin’s father, Ash Rayfiel, an imposing and demanding executive who had inherited the family business: ladies’ hats.

As a result, Martin’s mother, Luanda, seemed to have more hats than any other woman in the world. The walk–in closet where her hats were stored had been expanded and was referred to as “the hat room.” She owned
high, fluffy hats that looked like meringues, and squat black velvet ones that seemed appropriate for a state funeral. She had an eggplant–colored hat studded with tiny seed pearl buttons, and a wide–brimmed yellow one that was the exact same shade as the buttercups that bloomed in clusters on the family’s property, and it attracted about as many flying insects whenever she wore it. Lucinda Rayfiel was an abundantly unhappy woman, preoccupied with her hats and with her appearance in general, as a way of forgetting her unhappiness.

The main hub of the Rayfiels’ social life was the Longwood Golf and Country Club, located on a rolling spread of gated property, and to which all the residents of the Crest belonged. Every Saturday morning, Henry carefully drove the family car down the hill and through town to Longwood Golf and Country, where Martin’s father smacked ball after ball onto the greens, shouting vulgarities when he hit a sand trap, and his mother drank one stinger after another, letting the day slip by in a drunken fog, and Martin was left to his own devices.

He hated the club. The other children there seemed to him snobbish, unpleasant, or worst of all, dolts. They were miniature versions of their parents, he saw, and the idea that he, too, might become some version of his parents frightened him. His father was handsome but rough–edged, lacking subtlety. He was in a constant state of anger. Martin’s mother, while elegant and blonde, had a droopiness to her features that kept her from being actually beautiful. She looked, Martin had come to think, like Rita Hayworth’s slightly desperate older sister, if the actress had had one.

Martin resembled his parents only in some vague, oblique way. He was more introspective than either of them, and more distracted. His hair was straight and seal–black, and his eyes were gray with tiny lines and shapes embedded in the pupil, as though cut from a piece of his parents’ marble floor tile. His body was equipped with a kind of litheness that enabled him to easily scale fences and run anywhere he had to faster than anyone else. It seemed to Martin that he was always running, always escaping from someplace or other.

It occurred to him, as he sat here at the
kitchen table with this girl, that he didn’t want to escape from her house. To his surprise, he just wanted to sit here at this small, shaky table all afternoon. His eye was starting to feel better, and he removed the steak and set it back on its damp square of paper.

Suddenly the kitchen door opened, and a man walked in. This was the girl’s father, handsome but weary, his T–shirt soaked through under the arms with half–moons of sweat. He smelled strongly, too, although it wasn’t only a smell of perspiration. There was the mineral smell again that Martin had noticed walking across the green: dirt, and lime, and something else with a sharper note to it. Paint, he realized, and turpentine.

The man looked at Martin with an unreadable expression, then slowly nodded hello. “Claire,” her father said, “would you get me a beer, please? And maybe you could start my supper. Your mother says she splurged and bought me a little steak.”

So her name was Claire
. The name seemed right, a simple, easy fit. She and Martin exchanged guilty glances. The steak that had been pressed against his wound would now
be cooked and eaten—a vaguely disgusting but funny thought that they shared. “I’m Martin Rayfiel,” he said to Claire’s father.

“Ash Rayfiel’s son?” he asked, and Martin nodded. “I’ve done some work for him,” Claire’s father continued noncommittally, although Martin knew what he was thinking. It was what everyone thought of Ash Rayfiel: he was a bad person, no friend to the working men and women of the town. There had been rumblings, intimations of reprisals against Martin’s father, but because he was so powerful, nothing had ever come of these comments.

Martin was embarrassed, and tried to change the subject now. “Your daughter,” he explained, “helped me out today.”

“She’s a helpful girl, I guess,” was the reply. Then Claire’s father took the amber beer bottle by its neck and carried it out of the kitchen. Within minutes, Martin imagined, he would be fast asleep somewhere with his feet up.

“I should go,” said Martin.

“Yes,” said Claire. “I guess you should.”

But he didn’t move. They smiled at each other, because neither of them wanted him to
go, and they both knew it. He was unnerved by this girl with the fair hair who just sat there across the table, watching him, amused. She was playing, and he was excited by the odd little game.

The way he felt reminded him of something that had happened to him two years earlier. There had been a cook in his parents’ house named Nicole Clément. She was a woman from a small town in the south of France called Lourmarin. She couldn’t be described as beautiful, exactly; her hips were a little too full, and her dark hair always unruly, but she was attentive and welcoming. He often stayed near her in the kitchen while she stirred a copper pot of sauce or julienned carrots with a hand faster than a casino dealer’s. She taught Martin everything she knew about cooking, and when his parents were away he hovered over her in the kitchen, in the middle of the fragrance and the noise and the steam piping up from pots if you lifted a lid an inch. Nicole Clément showed him how to pound the air bubbles out of bread dough, and how to cook a perfect egg. Martin became an excellent cook, with a deft hand at preparing both French and American
dishes. While his mother was somewhat amused at his skill, his father merely thought it was a girlish parlor trick and not something that could help him in the world.

One day, when Martin was fifteen years old and Nicole was twenty–six, he had stood beside her at the table, helping her slice potatoes. Suddenly he turned to her, saw the pastry flour that dotted her hair like fresh snow, and the way her hands moved quickly, rounds of potato flying. Before he even understood what he was doing, he leaned forward and kissed the cook hard on the mouth. Her eyes opened wide, but within a moment Nicole had set down her paring knife and was frantically kissing him back. Soon she moved into the pantry with Martin. Together, on the floor of that small room, surrounded by cans of stewed tomatoes and jars of jam and hanging ropes of garlic, Martin and the cook undressed each other quickly, in absolute silence.

When they emerged from the pantry sometime later—he had no idea how much time had passed—Martin stood tucking in his creased white shirt, sweeping back the lock of hair that always fell into his face, and taking
a long breath. It was as though he understood that he would never become a hat man like his father, and that he would never live a life of country clubs and finance and deep unhappiness. He turned and saw Nicole standing nearby, quickly trying to retie her apron. He went over to her, because she looked frightened at what had just happened.

“You don’t have to worry,” he told her.

“Thank you, Martin,” she said, pronouncing his name in the French way, as she always did. “You are very sweet, you know. A real `catch.’”