The First Warm Evening of the Year: A Novel

by Jamie M. Saul

  Laura called her parents that same morning, but they didn’t seem at all upset. They assured Laura that Simon was going through one of those sulky teenage phases and would grow out of it by summer.

  Laura didn’t talk to me again about Simon and I didn’t ask questions. I knew if Laura wanted to talk to me about her brother she didn’t need my invitation. And that same year, she’d met Steve, and Simon and his problems seemed to fade into the background.

  If Laura did mention her family at all it wasn’t to talk about Simon. Her parents were not at all happy to hear that their daughter was seeing a jazz pianist, twelve years her senior. They had not, her father reminded Laura, sent her to Juilliard so that she could waste her talents on jazz and a jazz musician. It was bad enough that Simon was being so selfish, Laura had better stop thinking only of herself and come to her senses. They insisted that she end the relationship. Laura insisted that she would not.

  Laura told me that she felt as though her parents were asking her to make a choice, and it wasn’t an artistic choice of jazz or classical music, but choosing them over Steve.

  It was during the autumn of our senior year that Simon showed up again. One night after a gig at a club down in the Village, Laura brought Steve and a few of his friends back to her apartment to wind down. Simon appeared at the door, looking ragged, he’d been drinking and was apparently too high to notice that there were other people there besides Laura, or what he was interrupting. He did manage to stagger into the living room, knock over a few glasses and plates, get sick in the bathroom, and pass out on Laura’s bed.

  In the morning, Simon told Laura that he’d dropped out of college and was running away. He didn’t explain why he’d dropped out. He wouldn’t answer any of Laura’s questions. Laura doubted that it would do much good for her to go back home with him, but she would face down her parents for both of them, if Simon would only talk to her about what was troubling him. All Simon would tell her was that he knew he was letting her down, letting their parents down, and what he wanted was to be left alone, damn it. And he walked out of the apartment.

  Laura told me it wasn’t only Simon who was letting down her parents. It was breaking her heart knowing that her parents were disappointed with her, and to hear the disapproval in their voices. And it was breaking her heart to see her brother so lost and troubled. She was frustrated and angry with her entire family. Simon wouldn’t let Laura help him and he was incapable of helping himself. Her parents wouldn’t try to be less rigid and allow that Laura’s needs and passions were separate from theirs.

  I told her she wasn’t accountable for anyone else’s happiness but her own. She was twenty-two, for Christ sake, and that was too young to feel responsible for solving everyone’s problems, or to be made to think she could. Her parents and Simon shouldn’t be laying this all on her. At least, that’s what I remember telling her.

  That same year, Simon came to Laura’s apartment three more times. He’d always been drinking, and never wanted to talk. He’d just drop off his overnight bag, the few times he brought one, leave, and when he came back, usually early the following morning, he’d pass out on the couch, or make it no farther than the living room floor.

  He never said where he’d been, never said where he was going. All that Laura knew was what she saw. And now she couldn’t even talk to her parents about him.

  The last time Laura told me about Simon was also the last time she saw him.

  It was early spring, our senior year. Laura said it was a typical Simon appearance.

  Unannounced and uninvited. He was twenty years old by then, and nothing about him had changed much, boozy breath and bloodshot eyes. He did tell her that he hadn’t seen their parents for nearly a year.

  It was this visit when Simon got into the trouble Remsen had referred to when he called me that morning in March. He’d taken three blank checks from Laura’s checkbook, made out payments to himself, forged her signature, and cashed the checks, overdrawing against her account, and bouncing all three. This was, of course, before the Internet and online banking. It took days for Laura’s bank statement to come in the mail. Laura didn’t find out until a week after Simon had left the city.

  We were sitting in her apartment when she told me this, when she said it, it was as though a stranger had been visiting her these past few years and not her brother. Simon had not only embarrassed her in front of her friends and Steve, she said, but had stolen money from her. And how could he not know that he’d destroyed whatever bond they’d had. She said she could never trust him again.

  That was the last time I heard Laura talk about Simon. Until her wedding day.

  It was Commencement Week for Juilliard and Columbia. My parents were in town for a few days leading up to my graduation, and the day after, so I didn’t get to see Laura until her commencement. I went with Steve.

  A few days later, Laura was married in a no-frills City Hall ceremony, just a few friends, late in the morning. I was dressed, about to leave my apartment and meet the bride and groom downtown, when I heard someone banging on Laura’s apartment door. I stepped outside, looked down from the top of the stairs, and knew at once it was Laura’s younger brother, ragged, disheveled, slamming his fist against the door, kicking it, hollering for Laura to open the hell up and let him in.

  I walked to the edge of the landing and told him Laura wasn’t home. The first thing Simon Welles ever said to me was to mind my own fucking business. His words were slurred, his eyes half-closed. I repeated that his sister wasn’t home. She’d gotten married the day before and had already left for her honeymoon.

  Later, I would tell myself that Simon had brought my response on himself, otherwise I would have told him the truth. But truth is temporal, fastened to temperament, determined by disposition. I wanted to believe that what I’d decided in that moment was not premeditated, that I was already predisposed and had chosen Laura’s side, and no matter what Simon had said to me that morning, or anything else he might have done, I would have told him that lie. I knew that Laura had not told him about her wedding, that she wouldn’t want him there. That’s what I told myself that morning, watching Simon staring at the closed door, seeing his disconsolate expression. That I was protecting my friend. That was my truth.

  It was a hot morning. Simon was wearing a soiled and wrinkled tropical shirt that he hadn’t bothered to tuck in, over faded jeans, and scuffed loafers. He was smaller than I’d imagined, about five six or seven, thin, unshaved. But even in those dirty clothes and three days’ beard, there was no hiding that he was a beautiful boy.

  He turned and leaned his back against the wall, wrapped his arms around himself, looked at me, and wanted to know just who the hell I was and how the hell did I know so much about his sister. He walked up the stairs toward me while he said this, introduced himself, mumbling his name. When I told him mine and that I was Laura’s friend, he stepped around me, pushed on my apartment door, and went inside.

  I was already calculating how long it would take me to get downtown by cab or if I still had time to take the subway, and said that I had an appointment and I wasn’t going to leave him alone in my apartment and he’d have to leave now.

  He walked across the floor, saying more to himself than to me that he couldn’t believe that he’d missed Laura by one lousy day, and how could that happen? He said he couldn’t believe his life. I told him again that he’d have to leave, put my hand on his shoulder, and started leading him to the door. He shook me off, sat on my couch, asked me if my air conditioner was working, and I told him that there was no reason to turn it on, I was on my way out and so was he.

  His body sagged and he told me that none of this should have been any surprise, and covered his face with his hands. I had the very uncomfortable feeling that Simon was crying. He asked me if I would mind leaving the room. I pointed out that this was a studio apartment—my studio apartment—and I sure as hell wasn’t going
to sit in the bathroom.

  He raised his head and looked about as miserable as Laura had described him, then turned and stretched himself across the couch. He said this was the worst day of his life, he couldn’t think clearly, and would I please just let him stay there until he could get his head straight.

  I was starting to wonder how the hell I was going to get rid of him, when the phone rang. It was Laura, telling me I’d better hurry or I was going to be late. I managed to let her know that my friend Simon had dropped by and I didn’t think I could keep our appointment. I remember the sound of her breathing at the other end. She asked me if Simon knew where she was and I said no. She asked me to please not let him ruin her wedding. I said I was sure that wasn’t going to happen. Laura thanked me and hung up.

  When I looked back at Simon, he was sitting up, shaking his head and asking me if there was any way he could get in touch with Laura, did I know when she was coming back.

  He started pacing the floor. I told him again that he had to leave, which sent him back to the couch, where he sat down and glared at me, pushing his hands through his hair, his eyes red with tears now. He wanted to know if Laura told me anything about him, and what a complete wreck he was. I didn’t answer. He said he really couldn’t bear to be alone right now and would I mind just sitting with him for a few more minutes.

  He asked me if I’d ever felt like I’d fallen into a hole and didn’t know how to find my way out. Then he stretched across my couch again, and fell asleep. I tried to wake him but he wouldn’t open his eyes, wouldn’t move.

  I had taken Laura’s side because she was my friend, and I didn’t doubt the rightness of what I was doing. But Simon was just a frail lost kid, all alone. I took off my jacket and lay it across his shoulders, took off my tie, kicked off my shoes, and turned on the air conditioner and sat in the chair, while Simon slept on the couch.

  It wasn’t until long after dark that I managed to wake Simon. I got him out of my apartment only after I explained that the couch was a pullout bed and only one of us was going to sleep in it tonight and it was going to be me.

  I watched him walk down the stairs. He stopped for a moment and stared at Laura’s apartment door, a sorry-looking kid in rumpled summer clothes. Then walked down the next flight of stairs and out to the street.

  I’d missed the small party Steve’s and Laura’s friends had for her, but I did see the bride and groom the following day, gave them their present, and took them out for supper. Just the three of us. Laura asked me about Simon and about my day with him, and I told her all about it. It was a solemn evening.

  The next day she and Steve flew to Chicago for their first gig as a married couple.

  That night at Keens, I could have also told my friends how Laura learned to speak such impeccable French. She’d spent the summer after her junior year in Paris with Steve, playing jazz, playing house in his apartment in the Marais. Her mother and father forbade her from going. I remembered her telling me they could forbid it but they couldn’t prevent it. That was the last time I heard Laura talk about her parents.

  Not that any of this was important. What was important was this: I wanted to touch whatever it was that had made Laura and me close friends, what had made us trust each other. I wanted to touch the quality of her person. I wanted to feel what it had felt like when we were students, and what it felt like to hang out with her, to feel the pleasure of her friendship, the texture of those times, the content of her being. But there was something within me, an emotional indigence, which made this impossible, and which I now found uncomfortable and inconvenient.

  Later that evening, when I was alone in my apartment, I wasn’t thinking about Laura, but about Marian standing outside Laura’s house, and what Alex had said about distractions. I felt that urge to get away. Not to a remote beach somewhere, sitting alone in the sand with a cold beer. I wanted to drive up to Shady Grove.

  Six

  About five miles north of Shady Grove, just off County Road 8, a dirt road cuts through a state forest. Alone on the four miles of this road was the bluestone driveway, just as they’d told me at the gas station.

  A few yards from the bottom of that driveway, along a growth of woods, was an old barn and, parked in front of it, the yellow pickup. A long flagstone path curved left from the barn leading to the side porch of Marian’s house, an old farmhouse with a small, oval flower bed fanning out and away from the side porch, stretching to four larger flower beds.

  About fifteen feet from the right of the house, a smooth lawn opened to a woodland park, and I could see winding paths, hedges, deep stands of trees and gardens of various sizes that seemed to expand rather than recede toward an expansive vanishing point, like a phantasmagoria. I wondered if it was one of these gardens that Marian had described that day when I fell in love with her outside Laura’s house.

  Marian must have heard my car pull up. She was stepping off the porch just as I started walking across the driveway. She wore faded jeans and a gray sweater the color of pale smoke. Her hands were in her pockets. When she said hello, she sounded neither surprised nor displeased to see me.

  I could have made up a dozen excuses for my coming there, but I told her the truth.

  “I haven’t stopped thinking about you since we met,” I said. “And it’s scaring the hell out of me.”

  Marian smiled at me, turned her head toward the house, and said, “Let’s go in.”

  I followed her to the side porch and into the kitchen. She invited me to sit, and we sat facing each other across the table.

  There was a small desk to the left of my shoulder, above it on the wall a picture of a man who I assumed was Buddy, tan and aesthetic—not the way I’d imagined him—lying face-up on a white-sand beach.

  There was a shelf with cookbooks next to the door leading to the pantry, and above it a round clock that read four-thirty.

  I looked at the arrangements of platters and ceramic pitchers on the shelves of the corner cupboard, the two framed watercolors on the wall next to a window, then I looked only at Marian, at the way her hair was parted on the side and swept across her forehead, like a boy’s, and which would have been too masculine except for her eyes, which revealed a deep femininity. I may have noticed this before, but that was the first time I was aware that they were not the kind of eyes you could look at in haste. You had to take some time to see them, see the depth within them and her interest in what was happening.

  Her chin was a put-up-or-shut-up chin. And I wanted to be sitting with her in a restaurant in the city, in a dark corner booth, just the two of us telling each other cautionary tales because we both were aware of what was at stake, even if there was really nothing left to lose.

  And then, I wasn’t thinking about anything, except how happy I was to be seeing her, and all I wanted was to be there with Marian.

  She leaned forward and rested her hands on the table. I could smell her perfume. She looked at me as though she were making a calculation. It was the sort of expression that, if I’d known her better, would have made me ask what she was thinking, but I met her eyes with silence.

  We stayed like that for a moment longer, before Marian asked, “What do you want?” in a way that was neither challenging nor inhospitable. “I don’t mean right this second. I mean— You don’t need me to tell you what I mean.”

  “I have a girlfriend in New York,” I told her, “who’s smart and attractive, and who likes that we don’t live together, that we don’t want to get married and are too old to have children. When I get back to the city, she won’t even know I was gone. Or if she does, she won’t ask me where I’ve been. She’s been my girlfriend for three years. Until a few weeks ago, that’s what I wanted.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “Because I don’t want that anymore.” I leaned a little closer. “I want to know what you like for breakfast on a rainy Sunday. And what your hai
r smells like in summer. I want to hear your laughter at the funny parts of a movie and tell me what kind of day you had because that’s what we do. I want to know what it’s like to kiss you over and over again. And it’s driving me crazy to think that will never happen because you think what you have is enough for you.”

  Marian had been leaning closer while I said this, and when she spoke, her voice didn’t sound all that firm. She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue before she said, “I have what I want. You’ve met my boyfriend, and I get along with him just fine. I have my business, and this house that I come back to every day. That, Geoffrey, is enough for me. And—why should you care so much about what is or isn’t right for me?” Before I could say anything more, she said, “You’re not one of those people who gets a charge out of complicating other people’s lives, are you?” She still seemed to be having trouble finding her voice.

  “I don’t want to complicate anything.”

  “Because one thing I don’t want to do is complicate my life.”

  “You mean, what you don’t want me to do is complicate your life.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “No. You said the one thing you don’t want to do.”

  “Either way.” The expression on her face made me think of the way she had looked standing in the middle of Laura’s living room.

  “What I want right now,” I said, “is to hear you tell me what it’s going to look like outside in the summer. And tell me slowly, so I can memorize your voice. And I want to come back here and see your gardens with you.”