The Gazebo: A Novel (12 page)

Was this what Martin secretly wanted, perhaps without even knowing it? Or was this what she needed to tell herself, what she wanted to believe, in order to allow herself to let Martin go? Even if he didn’t want it, it had begun to occur to her that maybe she ought to give it to him anyway—that maybe she ought to force the issue. Martin would never leave her on his own; he would have to be pushed out into the world. Martin was at his best with a woman beside him, someone to tell everything to, someone to touch him; he’d said as much, over and over. He needed comfort, and while she wanted to be the one to give it to him, she couldn’t, at least not often enough, and she didn’t know when she’d be able to.

And comfort—this was something that Claire needed, too. And then she’d thought of Daniel Clusker—his fair eyelashes, his shyness, his attentiveness. Would he do? Maybe he would.

That was two months earlier; a great deal had happened since then. Claire had let Daniel bring her a bunch of freesia and a box of saltwater taffy and even—ironically—a funny Tyrolean hat that he’d picked up at a local fair and thought she’d like. He didn’t know that she never wore hats; she realized that he didn’t know much about her at all.

One afternoon Daniel had picked Claire up at work and driven her home in his pickup, and neither of them talked to each other the entire way, as though they knew something was up but couldn’t acknowledge it directly. When he stopped the truck in front of her house, he’d turned off the ignition, composed himself for a moment, then leaned across the seat and kissed her.

Claire closed her eyes when he did this, not only because that was what you were supposed to do during a kiss, but because she couldn’t bear to watch this thing she had set in motion.

Although she never knew it, Martin came back to town and stood across the road from the small country church where Claire and Daniel had just been married. He watched as the new husband and wife came out of the church doors, and saw the way their friends and family tossed a small hailstorm of rice at them. Daniel Clusker was a red–haired man with fair, freckly skin. He threw an arm around his new bride and kissed her on the mouth while Martin looked on, dazed. Claire’s pale face was flushed, her hair decorated with lilies, her dress long and white and simple. Her little niece and nephew—Margaret’s twins—played on the stone steps of the old church, picking up grains of rice and throwing them at each other. And there was Claire’s father,
dressed in a morning coat and being helped out of the building by two young, strong men. Lucas Swift had deteriorated greatly, Martin saw, watching as Claire’s father took a couple of careful, stiff steps with his arthritic knees.

Daniel Clusker and his wife climbed into a car that was waiting in front of the church.
Claire Clusker
, Martin thought bitterly as he stood behind a sycamore. What a clumsy, wrongheaded name. He was hidden from view, behind some thick bunches of leaves, and he watched the bride and groom drive off together, a string of tin cans clanking noisily from the bumper of their car.

The next night, Martin returned to London. He slept hard on the airplane, his head against the window, not hearing the stewardess when she came by offering a choice of dinners from a cart. And when the plane landed he went straight to the restaurant, not even bothering to stop upstairs to shave or wash up or check his mail. Cooking would help him, he thought; it would send everything else away from his mind, and the only thing that would remain
would be whether the sauce he was stirring needed more salt.

Later, during the hectic evening, a waiter came in and said that Mrs. Banks was dining with her daughter tonight and wondered if Mr. Rayfiel might come out and say hello.

“I’m sorry,” Martin started to say to the waiter, as he had done before. “Please tell her—” Then he paused, remembering the way Claire had looked at her wedding, her cheeks a high color, her hair floating up around her face. “Tell her,” he went on, “that I’ll be right there.” And he put down his ladle, wiped his hands on a dish towel, and walked out through the swinging doors.

Frances Banks was sitting with her six–year–old daughter at a corner table, sharing a dessert plate of wild berries strewn over homemade ginger ice cream. She put down her spoon as Martin approached and said to her daughter, “Look, darling, here’s the chef.” She paused, then smiled a slow, wry smile, adding, “And he’s in desperate need of a shave.”

Within a week, Martin was invited to her house in Bloomsbury. It was a sprawling place, scattered with books that had belonged
to her late husband, as well as many pieces of doll clothing and doll furniture that belonged to Louisa. In the corner, Martin noticed a small bronze sculpture of a mother and child. Claire would love that piece, he thought to himself. Frances noticed him staring at it and asked him what he was thinking. “Nothing,” he told her. Then he turned to her, and in a calm, easy voice, he said, “Let’s go to bed.”

Frances was a woman who had been married and borne a child; she was a seasoned person, worldly and sexually complex. He lay with her in her huge featherbed and thought of the sleigh bed where he and Claire had made love.
Stop
, he told himself.
Stop thinking about Claire
. For surely Claire, who according to Hush was on her honeymoon at a hotel in the Pennsylvania Dutch country right now, was not thinking about Martin as she lay in bed with Daniel Clusker. Or was she?

The thought occurred to him as he kissed and caressed the unfamiliar, warm body of Frances Banks. She had fuller hips and breasts than Claire. Everything about her was weightier, more voluptuous, and yet Claire was the one who resonated. Claire rang out, even as
Martin, made love to this new woman in her Bloomsbury home. “Claire!” he said in a light, choked cry during lovemaking that first night with Frances. She heard him, and he was embarrassed.

“It’s all right,” she assured him later as they lay together drinking the wine that she earlier had put in a brass bucket of melting ice beside the bed. “I know about her.” She lit a cigarette with a lighter that had her late husband’s initials on it.

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh?” he said.

“I asked around,” said Frances. “Tried to find out why you were avoiding me. And the maître d’ gave me my answer.”

“How did he know?” asked Martin.

“Oh,” said Frances, “he said many people know. Your friend Duncan Lear may be a great person, but apparently he’s not very discreet.”

Martin propped himself up on an elbow and regarded her. “So what do you think about all of this?” he asked.

She shrugged and brushed her hair from her face. “I think,” she began, “that I’m a woman who is too young to be a widow forever. I’m only thirty years old.”

“I’m twenty–four,” said Martin.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Frances. “We don’t have to be exactly the same.”

Mrs. Frances Banks was telling him she wasn’t exactly like him, nor he like her, and that she didn’t care, but she was telling him more than this, too. She was saying that she wanted to make an arrangement with him. He could call out the name of another woman in bed, and she wouldn’t care. She was attracted to him and taken by him, and wished him to be with her, to make her less lonely, and to give her young daughter a father.

It would be an arrangement, but probably that was what Claire had with Daniel Clusker. He kept her company, made her life in Longwood Falls more bearable. Martin hoped Claire was happy, hoped Daniel was wonderful to her. And he hoped that she was still sculpting, that she never stopped.

So much had been given up, Martin thought as he lay stunned in this new bed: the wedding he and Claire would never have, the children they would never have, with her pale hair and his dark eyes. “Our children will be artistically talented,” Claire had once said, a
long time ago, “as well as great cooks.”

“I pity them,” Martin had responded. “Artistic cooks. They won’t have it easy in life.”

“No,” Claire had said. “They won’t. But when we’re old, they’ll cook bland, digestible food for us, and arrange it on the plate in very creative designs.”

Now he could almost see these phantom children he’d never meet or swing into the air or take to the first day of school or carry on his shoulders above a crowd. Frances’s daughter, Louisa, was a lovely, shy girl of six with her mother’s thick braid of auburn hair, and something tragic around the eyes and mouth, the result of having lost her father to a coronary when she was just two years old. Martin liked Louisa and knew that if he stayed in Frances’s life he would in fact become a father to this little girl. It didn’t seem such a bad idea. He couldn’t promise Frances the sun, moon and stars, but she wasn’t asking for them either. Apparently, the great love of her own life had been her late husband James, a philosophy scholar she had studied with at Cambridge, and whom she had worshipped until his death.

Now she didn’t want passionate love from Martin. It was true that she wanted passion, and it was also true that she wanted something resembling love, but the two, he had come to realize, didn’t need to be offered in one heaping serving. She would take what she could get, and so would he. They had an understanding.

When Martin Joseph Rayfiel married Frances Antonia Banks at a small ceremony at a well–maintained Anglican church in London on August 18, 1956—a month after Claire’s wedding—he did not send a wedding announcement to the love of his life on the other side of the ocean. It would have been cruel. He was still angry with Claire for starting this chain of events, but he didn’t blame her anymore. It all made a strange kind of sense now. On Martin and Frances’s honeymoon in Positano, they stayed in a beautiful house on the water with stands of lemon trees nearby. The fruit reminded him of the way Claire smelled. He was being haunted by her scent on his own honeymoon, as though she were a ghost that was lingering in the tiled rooms of the house.
But Claire wasn’t a ghost; she was a living, breathing woman, someone he could not have. Martin drank heavily on his honeymoon and often sat outside smoking, a habit he usually disliked. Frances had to call him inside. “It’s dark,” she said, coming up behind him and draping her arms loosely around his neck. “Why don’t you come in for the night?”

Reluctantly Martin stood, tamping out his cigarette and breathing in the citrus smell of the trees all around him—a smell he knew and loved so deeply—and then he turned and went inside the house with the woman who was his wife.

I
T WAS THE
middle of the night by the time Abby learned of Claire’s and Martin’s marriages to other people. When she heard the news on one of the tapes, she had to stand and pace around the silent hallways of the
Ledger
. She walked back and forth, unable to be still In all the offices, the lights were off and the computers were either bright and dotted with the dancing pattern of a screen saver, or totally dark. Everyone who worked at the newspaper was off in their different homes, most of them now fast asleep beside a husband, wife, or lover. Abby thought about packing up for the night and returning to her own home, but she couldn’t stop now. She was curious, of course; she knew now that she could no longer look into the eyes of those photographs from fifty years earlier and say how the story was going
to end. But more than curiosity was impelling Abby now. It was also her anger with Claire.

Claire could have gone back. She
should
have gone back. Abby herself had returned to Longwood Falls because she wanted to preserve the
Ledger
and her father’s work—but also because she had nothing to keep her in New York City. Nothing she’d allowed to keep her in New York City, anyway; an occasional phone call from a shaggy–haired young pediatrician didn’t count. Claire, however, had Martin. She had a life waiting for her in London. Abby couldn’t understand the logic of Claire’s decision to take care of her father, or of Claire’s decision to get married to Daniel Clusker, and Martin’s copycat decision to marry Frances Banks. And that was just it; these were decisions based on logic, lives led according to the demands of reason, whereas Claire and Martin’s relationship was based on love. Love versus logic—it all came down to that. Abby felt almost protective of what Claire and Martin had had, wishing that she’d been there all those many years ago to counsel them, to tell them
don’t do it
when they were
about to get married to this other man and woman.

Abby returned to her own office now and peered inside the briefcase again. She found a tin ring with a small green stone set in it; it was the ring from Claire’s
mystère
dessert at a café in the south of France, so long ago. Then she found a wedding announcement from the
Longwood Falls Ledger
—the very paper she now ran—yellow and flaking and over forty years old, held together between two sheets of plastic, announcing the marriage of Claire Swift to Daniel Clusker. She found another wedding announcement—this one much grander, and with a photograph above it—from the society pages of a London paper the following month, showing Martin posing beside a formidably attractive woman. Both of them appeared somber and contemplative. Abby also found clippings from several London newspapers and magazines about Martin’s restaurant, the Gazebo. There was a picture of him in his tall white chef’s toque, standing and holding a roast game hen on a silver plate. There was an old, cracking lunch
menu from the restaurant, too, dated March 8, 1958, and which read as follows:

*  *

*  *

This meal had been cooked and served more than forty years ago, but still Abby felt as though she could imagine the individual flavors and could see Martin at the stove, whisking a pat of butter into a pot of something, letting it swirl and dissolve. But when she imagined him in his home life, married to Frances Banks and living in London with her and her daughter, Abby pictured an unsmiling man, his face grown slightly gaunt and tired because of the resignation that guided his life.

Abby carefully put the old menu aside, and beneath it she found a birth announcement,
dated April 3, 1958, and printed on stiff paper with a delicate pink border. “Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Clusker are pleased to announce the birth of a daughter, Alison Martina Clusker, 7 lbs., 2 oz.” The baby’s middle name caused Abby to take in a sharp breath.

Slowly she sat back down in her chair. Maybe there was more to Claire than Abby had imagined; maybe there was more to this woman who would honor her private past in such a candid way. Abby turned the cassette player back on. The middle of the night had come and gone, but now Abby knew she would not sleep at all before the morning.

Alison Martina Clusker
. The first and middle names were, on the surface, appealing and benign, a collection of pretty syllables fitting this baby who had her mother’s pale skin and eyes and delicate features, but her father Daniel’s shock of bright red hair. But beneath the surface of those syllables lay Claire’s tribute to Martin, Claire had spoken frankly to Daniel about Martin before she agreed to marry him, telling him that she and Martin had been lovers and now they were not, but that they still
cared about each other very deeply and would always meet at the gazebo once a year on their anniversary. Daniel hadn’t liked the idea of it, but he had simply nodded and thanked her for telling him, and then he hadn’t wanted to talk about it anymore. Of course Daniel knew how she had arrived at the baby’s middle name. Half the town of Longwood Falls knew, too, but if they gossiped about it—which they surely did—then Claire never found out. No one dared to spread any false stories, such as a suggestion that Martin—not Daniel—was really the baby’s father. Just one look at that baby’s fiery red hair told them that was ridiculous. Alison was Daniel’s child through and through, but the stories about Claire’s love affair with Martin were still told in Longwood Falls, a kind of local folkloric legend: the rich boy and the poor girl, and how they had lived abroad in sin and tried for a life together and ultimately, like all sinners, failed.

Claire would never be unfaithful to Daniel with Martin; there was no question of that. And yet her deeper sense of faithfulness
was
to Martin. He was the man who knew her. They would always know each other in this
way; not even marriage could touch that.

During the wedding ceremony, Claire and Daniel had promised each other fidelity. Although she never felt particularly moved by their lovemaking, she felt a kind of reassurance when she was in bed with him. He came home at the end of a long day of carpentry, his body smelling of cedar shavings—a kind of delicious, almost edible scent, she thought—and Claire returned from work, too, and sometimes they lay down in the high bed in their house on Conley Lane, and he eased himself on top of her, as though afraid he might hurt her with his hard, workman’s body. His skin was freckled, a fact that was slightly displeasing to her the first time she saw it, but which she grew used to. He was a seriously sweet man, someone who could speak of table saws and circular saws for hours if Claire would let him—which she wouldn’t. He made love like one of his saws: easing back and forth with an almost mechanical rhythm. She didn’t mind it—in fact, sometimes it was quite nice—but it bore so little resemblance to her overwhelming experience of making love with Martin, that the two couldn’t be placed in the same category.
Still, lying in bed with Daniel kept the long winter nights less lonely; they would often talk quietly about what they had done that day, or about her father, whom Daniel was very close to, or about the baby, who they often brought into the bed in the middle of the night to be nursed.

Claire loved nursing Alison, loved feeling the grate and tug on her nipple and watching the baby extract the milk with impressive greed. Two years after redheaded Alison, Claire gave birth to a son, Jonathan, and then fourteen months after him came a surprise baby, another son named Edward. Now Claire was surrounded; this was what she had wanted, wasn’t it? To have all these people all around her, the cacophony of being in a family. The children still needed milk as they grew older, except now they sought it from the tall, sweating bottles that were delivered to the house each morning at an ungodly hour. The boys, especially, knocked back glass after glass of milk. They shot up quickly, both of them athletic and full of muscle. Edward, the baby of the family, seemed the most soulful of the three children. Once, when he was four years
old, he had asked her, “Does love have a color?”

“What do you mean, Edward?” she said, startled by his question.

“You know, when you think of love, do you see a color?”

Claire nodded. “Green,” she said simply, for she was picturing the grass all around the gazebo, how lush and green it was every year on May 27 when she met Martin there. They had not missed a single anniversary, not even during these childbearing years. Daniel continued to be unhappy about the meetings at the gazebo, but he didn’t try and stop her, or make her change her mind. “I mean, I can’t forbid you,” he said. “And if it’s the thing that for some reason keeps everything else afloat—then I suppose I shouldn’t complain.”

“Thank you,” Claire had said quietly. Daniel didn’t understand—how could he?—but he accepted it anyway. He made sure to be busy on that particular day at dusk, to be nowhere near the town square, for he didn’t want to see her there with this man who had a hold over her. Slowly, Daniel grew used to the inevitability of this day. And the entire town grew
used to it, too, to the sight of Martin and Claire sitting together in the gazebo once a year—right out there in plain sight. The gossiping ceased.

She had come to the gazebo eight months pregnant with Edward one May 27, and although Martin had heard that Claire was going to have another baby—his old notary public friend, Hush, continued to write him—he seemed shocked by her appearance.

“Look at you,” Martin kept repeating. “God, look at you.”

“You’re making me self–conscious,” Claire said, but secretly she was pleased by his reaction. She enjoyed being pregnant, feeling her body expand and change. It was like having a secret that she shared with everyone—a paradox that didn’t exactly make sense, but there it was. Her breasts were heavier, her pale skin was flushed all the time, and her hair was somehow more textured. Her stomach swelled outward and her navel had popped, a fact that embarrassed her a little. There was a fine vertical tracing of golden hair down the center of her abdomen. Sometimes Claire stood before the mirror and looked at herself, amazed at what was happening inside her.

“Can I touch?” Martin asked. She nodded, and as they sat beside each other in the gazebo he reached out and placed one of his hands on her stomach. “Oh,” he said when his hand met the swell of skin, and she knew he longed to kiss her, to cover her with his hands, his mouth, to be buried again in her hair and her citrus scent, but he did not move his hand at all from its station on her stomach. This hand had touched her so many hundreds of times before, had explored everywhere, the fingers splayed, inquisitive, but now they were respectful and almost shy, for this was someone else’s territory and not his own. His eyes closed and he breathed in hard, as if trying to steady himself. Beneath the skin was someone else’s baby, the tiny brine–shrimp–size creature blossoming, sprouting hands, becoming human, his mother’s child, and his father’s.

Martin kept his hand cupped on the curve of her stomach, and just then the baby kicked. He was shocked, pulling his hand away for a second as though he had touched a hot stove. “It moved!” Martin said, smiling, but revealing something else, a sadness beyond words, a brief, ecstatic flare followed by a great letdown.
Although they tried and tried, Frances was unable to conceive more children, and this was a source of mute, lasting sadness between her and Martin. He had never before felt a shiver of life under his hand. Claire knew that he had sometimes fantasized about one day placing a hand over her stomach, as he had just done, feeling the baby move and swim and flutter deep inside her. But the baby, in all these fantasies, was his.

In 1965 Martin and Frances’s fifteen–year–old daughter, Louisa, who had become an expert equestrienne, was thrown from the horse she was riding in Hampstead Heath, and severed three vertebrae in her back. At first the doctors said her situation was very grave and that she might never have the use of her legs again, but Frances and Louisa moved to the countryside for six months so that Louisa could stay at a rehabilitation clinic there, and very slowly she learned to walk. It was a traumatic time for all of them, and though Martin was there every weekend and on the phone to her every day, Frances complained that Martin cared more about the restaurant than he did about her and the child.

“That’s not true,” he said patiently, but he understood what she was getting at. He would easily have thrown over the restaurant for his family—that wasn’t even a question—but the restaurant would always have a hold on him. When he was at work in the huge, bright, industrial kitchen, which he had tailored over the years to suit his needs exactly, he entered an almost meditative state. The rest of the world fell away from him, the memory that there was a big roomful of hungry people sitting at linen–covered tables nearby, waiting for their grilled snapper or their cheese plates, or that he had a daughter who had been seriously injured and a beautiful, stately wife who was very frightened about it, and who sometimes seemed inconsolable. Instead, he thought only about the chopping, the peeling, the stirring, the combining. His hands moved very fast, as Nicole had taught him long ago at the kitchen counter in his parents’ house, and he worked himself into a trance. While he cooked, he sometimes daydreamed about Claire, picturing her when she was young and unencumbered and still belonged to him. Sometimes he got lost in these thoughts, entering
into them completely, almost imagining that Claire was still that optimistic, hatless girl, and that he was that arrogant and, passionate boy who loved her.