The Gazebo: A Novel (6 page)

“What did you do to get the dean to agree to that?” asked Martin. “Did you offer to donate hats to the entire faculty for the rest of your life?”

“Never mind,” said Ash quickly. “It saved this family from embarrassment. And that’s all that matters.” Then he turned and descended the stairs.

Martin walked over to his bed, knowing that this would be the last night he would ever sleep here. As he lay down, staring up at the ceiling, his toes touching the carved footboard, the thought of leaving this too–big house and
this too–small bed made him immensely, surprisingly, sad. He had never liked it here, and now he was leaving; the sentimental feeling seemed to come from nowhere, but still it kept him up half the night.

Down the hill, over on Badger Street, he envisioned Claire living out the last hours of her own girlhood, furtively packing the clothing and birth certificate she’d taken from the bedroom she had slept in since she was born. On her bed were a few stuffed animals that had belonged to her as a little girl. All of them had been stitched and restitched over the years, and regardless of what color they had once been, they were all now the color of the gray slush that covered the ground when the snow began to melt in Longwood Falls each spring. Claire would be leaving behind this room that she used to share with her sister: the vanity table with its clutter of bottles of toilet water and hairbrushes threaded with fine, fair hairs, and various tubes of lipstick, the ends long ago blunted. Lucas and Maureen Swift would be disturbed and mournful over the loss of their younger daughter. But it wasn’t as though Claire would be dead. She would be
more alive than she had ever been before. In fact, she’d be different.

At nine in the morning, after his father had left for work and before his mother was awake, Martin met Claire at the row of hedges in front of his house up on the Crest. He had asked her to come here at this hour without telling her why, and although she was frightened, she’d agreed.

“I have to tell you something,” she began before he could even speak. She was studying her hands. Red clay had lodged under several of her fingernails. “I couldn’t get my birth certificate. I was positive it would be with my parents’ papers in the closet in the front hall, but it wasn’t there, and I couldn’t exactly ask them where it was, or they’d know something was up, and I—” She stopped, unsure of how she could possibly cushion the disaster.

Martin held her shoulders, then hugged her. “All right,” he said, and he realized she was crying. He could feel the rise and fall of her shoulders against his chest. “It’s all right. We’ll think of something.”

“I like how you said that,” she said. “The
we
part.”

Still, though they were a “we” now, getting to Europe wasn’t going to be as easy as they’d thought. Martin and Claire entered his house through the service entrance, where the fat Swiss cook was grating a hunk of cheese the size of a dictionary. As they went past, the cook looked them over with narrowed eyes but just kept on grating, her arm rubbing hard at the huge piece of cheese, shavings flying fast into a bowl. Martin led Claire out of the servants’ area and down a marble hallway that shone like a dark lake, and into the cherry–wood dining room.

“What are we doing here?” she whispered, but he only put his finger to his lips. On the wall in this room with its long, formal, highly polished table in the center hung a Frederic Remington painting of some long–dead man on a long–dead horse. Martin lifted the painting carefully from its hook. “God, you’re stealing it?” Claire whispered, shocked, but he shook his head no and smiled, revealing the wall safe hidden behind the painting. Martin dialed the combination swiftly, then he turned the handle of the gunmetal gray safe, and the door opened. Inside the darkness of the small
vault were various securities and bonds and bound stacks of paper money. Finally his fingers encircled what he was looking for: the gold Rayfiel family heraldic crest, which was practically breaded in diamonds and lapis lazuli It was a gaudy, ugly piece, about six inches by nine inches, that had been commissioned by Martin’s great–grandfather Simon Rayfiel a long time ago, and it was meant to be mounted on a wall or lent to a museum. It had belonged to Martin since he was born, though he’d never once given it a single thought.

But now he took the object, holding it in the palm of his hand. If his father was going to throw the weight of his money around, then Martin would do so in return. It would be a silent game of catch between father and son, a dialogue without words.

Claire was staring at the object. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” she whispered.

“Yes, isn’t it incredibly ugly?” he said, and he slipped the crest into his jacket pocket, closed the safe, and returned the painting to the wall. Then, just as he and Claire were leaving
the room, he heard a sound in the hallway.

Turning, he saw his mother. She was wearing a long brocade robe, belted loosely, and her blond hair was uncombed, her eyes groggy. She looked both fragile and ruined; drinking had changed her, so much so that Martin barely had any memories of her that didn’t include the stem of a glass being clutched in her careless hand.

“Martin?” his mother said.

Suddenly a memory broke through to him, just a fragment, really, from his early childhood: his mother embracing him before she and his father went out to the club for the evening. He remembered the gleam of her pearls and could feel her hand resting warmly on top of his head. He had thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

“What are you doing, dear?” she asked now.

“This is my friend Claire,” he said softly, not really answering her question. “And we’ve got some things to take care of.”

“Oh, I see,” his mother said, but she didn’t see, of course, and her voice sounded hungover, lost. She stared at Claire for a moment. “She’s lovely, Martin,” she said in a whisper,
as though Claire wasn’t there at all.

“Yes, isn’t she?” he answered, and then they were gone.

There was one difficult task to take care of: getting Claire’s passport application notarized without a birth certificate. Together they walked into Hudson Valley Trust and Loan, and Martin asked to see the manager, a Mr. Clendon. He explained the situation, showing Clendon the documents, explaining that Claire’s birth certificate was missing. But after peering at them for a long time through his rimless glasses, the manager shook his head. Coughing lightly, he said that in the absence of her birth certificate, the papers could not be notarized.

Martin looked at the bank manager, and he begged him to make an exception just this once. “Look, I know her well,” he said. Then he went on, “Come on, you know my family, you know me. Can’t you notarize the papers without a birth certificate just this once?”

But the man shook his head. “That would be illegal,” he said, and he pursed his lips. “Now perhaps I ought to give your father a call and sort this out with him.”

Martin thanked him anyway and quickly ushered Claire out of the bank. For lack of anywhere else to go, they went to the meadow, lying stunned on the grass, barely moving. “I want you to know that I’m very, very sorry,” he finally said to her. “I told you that we could go to Europe. You were willing, and I’ve disappointed you. I didn’t do my research; I didn’t know there would be this problem.”

“It’s okay, Martin, really,” she said. “It’s my fault, too. I was wrong about where my parents keep my birth certificate.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“We tried,” said Claire, “and it didn’t work.” Then she added, “Maybe this is a sign. A sign that we’re not supposed to go.”

“A sign?” he repeated. “There are no such things as signs.” He came closer to her. “Don’t back out now,” he whispered. “Please.” She didn’t reply. “Look,” he said, “let me try one more thing. Will you wait here for me?”

After a moment she nodded. “Where are you going?” she asked.

“To see a friend” was all he said.

* 
* 
*

When Martin returned a while later, he brought with him a tall young man about his age with restless fingers and a nervous expression on his face. “Claire,” said Martin. “This is the person I was telling you about I’ve always called him Hush, because he’s the quietest person I’ve ever known.”

The man smiled and shook Claire’s hand. She liked him at once, felt his seriousness of purpose. “Look,” Hush said, “Martin told me you have a little passport problem, and I said I’d try to help.” Hush had recently passed the notary public examination. He was the youngest notary public in this entire region, Martin told Claire, and if it was ever found out that he had notarized an application in the absence of a birth certificate, he would lose his license and be in significant legal trouble. But he took a breath and then stamped, sealed, and signed the pages of Claire’s application in all the right places.

“You’re on your way,” he said when he was done, handing over her papers.

“I can’t tell you how much we appreciate this,” said Martin. “Now Claire and I can get the hell out of here once and for all.”

Claire regarded Martin’s friend for a long moment “I’m curious,” she said to him. “What made you decide to do this for us? I know it’s illegal. I know it’s a big risk.”

Hush shrugged. At first he didn’t say anything, but then finally he looked down at his hands and began to speak. “I met a girl myself this summer,” he said softly, “and we’re getting married in the fall. Everybody I know thinks the whole thing is great. Her parents love me; my parents love her. And
I
love her, obviously; she’s got a great laugh, and she can whistle through her teeth, and she’s a beauty.” He paused a moment, looking up, then added, “If I couldn’t be with her, I don’t know what I’d do.”

Claire and Martin tried to thank him again, to tell him that they would send him gifts from Europe, and was there anything in particular he wanted—maybe some glassware, or a scarf for his fiancée—but Hush held up a hand. “Please,” he said, embarrassed. “Just go. You have a plane to catch.”

Near midnight that night, Claire and Martin were on a transatlantic flight. They sat in their
high–backed first–class seats, stiff with unacknowledged terror and almost not daring to speak or touch the trays of food in front of them. Claire had never flown before, so her terror also had something to do with the fact that she was improbably suspended thousands of feet above the water. For Martin, though, the terror was pure; he had wanted something, and now he had gotten it. And what he had wanted was taking him away from his life as he knew it. In his Introduction to Poetry class at college, he had learned that the great poets often considered love to be “transporting.” Right now, he thought, love was transporting him and Claire across an entire rolling ocean, away from the singsong cadences and rounded edges of childhood, and all that was familiar, that was known.

When the airplane touched down in France at Orly Airport in the brightness of day, Martin turned and kissed Claire hard on the mouth. “This is it,” he said.

“This is it,” she repeated, though neither of them really knew what “it” meant. A while later, they had checked into their room at the George V. The bellman had shown them
where everything was—even, to their amusement, the pull for the drapes, and the hot and cold water faucets on the sink—and then they had tipped him well, and he had retreated, murmuring. Outside were the muted bleats of French car horns and the occasional whistle and rapid burst of shouting, and the rows of trees and the ubiquitous presence of the Eiffel Tower, looking down over everything, Claire thought, like a watchful mother.

Her own watchful mother was far away, out of reach, and here in this hotel room with the cream–colored walls, the scroll–shaped pillows, the bidet in the bathroom, and the gauze curtains blowing in the open window, it was just the two of them: an exhausted man and an exhausted woman collapsed on a soft bed with their feet up, waiting to see what would happen next.

A
T NIGHT
,
THE
monuments of Paris were illuminated by individual white beams, each one glowing until midnight, when the lights were unceremoniously snapped off, the show over until the next night. Claire wondered if Parisians felt the same sense of wonder as she did when they looked up at the milkily lit Obélisque, and Notre Dame, or whether they simply took it all for granted, as she had long ago started to take for granted the lesser, unilluminated sights of Longwood Falls.

She and Martin stayed out each night at least until the lights were extinguished. “Good night, Notre Dame,” Martin said as they stood on a bridge, watching the cathedral fall into darkness. “Sleep well.”

Sleep was not something they themselves actively pursued. Paris in 1952 was a good
place to be young and American and wide awake. The city had recovered from the war, mostly returning to what it had once been, and anyone with a certain degree of kinetic energy, romanticism, and pocket money came here now. They flooded in from the States, and in every café or
boîte
you could suddenly hear a plainly American accent rising up over the clashing of glassware or the insistent syllables of people speaking hurried French.

At first, Martin and Claire shied away from other Americans, wanting to be alone together in this new city, to forget that they had ever lived anywhere else. They had the money that Martin had gotten for his family’s crest from an old, distinguished dealer who had sat on a stool and peered for a long time through an eyepiece at the gems studding it. It was actually a great deal of money, allowing them to live in style into the late fall, when Martin would turn twenty–one and be able to claim his full inheritance.

One afternoon, he took her to the Chanel boutique. The large rooms were cool and fragrant, and though Claire was at first reluctant, he ushered her inside and could see the interest
in her eyes as she looked all around her at the clean lines of fabric, the towering European models who wandered like gazelles grazing on a plain, the other women who were casually browsing. The men stayed on the sidelines, and Martin went to join them, his arms folded. It was like a strange, provocative sexual ritual, he realized: the women entering the dressing rooms and slipping into finery, then stepping out from behind the pale curtains to show the men their new, heightened selves. The women preened; the men appraised. Someone brought around a tray of drinks for the men, and Martin took a glass, as though he were at a cocktail party and not standing in a store. Claire was trying on a suit the color of green apples. It occurred to him that he compared most colors to food—no, he compared most
things
to food; he couldn’t help himself. The suit was perfect on her, though she refused the matching hat that the saleswoman brought forward.

“Non, non,”
Claire said, holding up a hand. She still hated the sensation of a hat on her head, though she insisted it had nothing to do with the fact that his unpleasant father sold
hats. She just wanted nothing to hold her sheaf of hair down; she wanted to feel free all the time.

And she did feel free here in Europe; she told him this after they left the Chanel boutique with a glossy shopping bag packed with tissue paper and an apple–green suit that was so expensive it frightened her. They were walking along the Seine, Claire swinging the bag, Martin feeding the birds small pieces of a brioche he had stuck in his pocket at the end of their room service breakfast this morning. She looked so happy, he thought as he watched her. He had never seen her look like this back in Longwood Falls. Even that first day at the gazebo, there had been something guarded about her, held back, invisibly fastened down. Now she was opening; he wondered what she would open into.

That night, Claire wore her Chanel suit, and Martin wore a new slate linen jacket, and they had dinner in a tiny restaurant in the Champs–de–Mars district called Solange. The room, which looked out over a garden, was lit by small scented candles, and the waiters moved silently across the beams of the floor. The food,
Martin said as they ate, was perfect. It wasn’t revolutionary cooking; no shocking duos of flavors were brought together for the first time on the plate. The meal was simply excellent: everything about it, from the bread hidden in its envelope of folded napkin in a basket to the sole dotted with capers, to the salad that gleamed with good oil and wine vinegar, to the smelly but appealing cheese plate, to the delicate pear tart that sadly ended the dinner.

Martin didn’t talk much during the meal but just studied the experience, looking around him, watching the way a waiter stood poised with bread tongs, watching the way another waiter confidently boned a fish in one sweeping gesture, watching the way a third opened a bottle of wine and stood patiently by while an elderly man took a slow, deliberate first sip. This was how it was done, he thought to himself, and he knew that he wanted to have his own restaurant someday. It wouldn’t be in Paris, though, for he could never become proficient enough at French cooking to dare to understand all its complexities. But wherever it was, he thought it would resemble this tiny jewel of a restaurant.

Claire watched him watch the room. “You’re working, aren’t you?” she asked, and he nodded.

But her words had brought him out of these thoughts. Now he was with her again, looking across the table with its candle in the center at the pretty American girl in Chanel. He brought her hand up to his mouth and kissed it. “Thank you for putting up with me,” he said.

“There’s nothing to put up with.”

“I know I get lost in myself sometimes,” he said.

“So do I,” said Claire.

Earlier that day, as they were walking to their hotel after shopping, he had seen this happen. They were passing a movie theater where, of all things,
An American in Paris
was playing. The movie had won the Academy Award the year before, and now here it was in a plush Paris theater. “Want to?” he asked, and she shrugged, and they went inside. They had seen the movie back at the Longwood Cinema the year before, sharing a big box of Milk Duds and enjoying it immensely.

But this afternoon in Paris the movie made
Claire cry. In the darkness, Martin turned to her in surprise. “Are you okay?” he whispered.

She nodded that she was, but a while later he saw that she was still crying a little, and when he asked her if she wanted to leave, she said yes, she did. Out in the sunlight again, she couldn’t really explain her reaction. The movie, after all, was a musical, with lots of dancing and singing and optimism. “I’m not homesick, exactly,” she said as they walked back to the George V. “There’s nothing in particular I miss. I was truly ready to leave home. I couldn’t stand it there anymore.” She paused, thinking hard. “But it’s the only place I really, really know. And I feel that maybe it will always be the case.”

He didn’t try to argue, to tell her that soon she would know all the
arrondissements
of Paris as well as she knew the neighborhoods and roads and ponds of Longwood Falls. She was an American in Paris, and while that was certainly a lucky thing to be, it had its moments of sudden sadness and dislocation, too.

One day, Claire and Martin were befriended by another young American couple who had
seen the
Treasures of European Sculpture
under Claire’s arm, and figured that she spoke English. “Excuse me,” said a slender blond–haired man on the steps of the Notre Dame cathedral at the end of a morning of sightseeing. “Are you by any chance Americans?”

“Is it that obvious?” asked Claire.

“Oh no,” said the pretty woman who was accompanying the man. “In fact, I said to Wally that you were both much too stylish to be Americans. I figured you to be European, maybe Scandinavian or something. But then we saw your book, and heard you speak to each other.”

“You found us out,” said Martin.

Soon the two couples—one from Longwood Falls, the other from New York City—were having lunch at a café nearby. Although Claire and Martin had been studiously avoiding other Americans, Claire seemed cheered by their presence. Wally and Kate were unmarried, too; they had lived in Greenwich Village in a fifth–floor walk–up apartment, where he spent the day working on his play, and she wrote strange pieces of modern music for the harp. Both of them had held night jobs in New
York to pay the rent and save for their trip to Paris; she had been a telephone operator, and he’d bused tables at a coffee shop. They were here in Paris until their money ran out, part of a loose–knit group of other would–be writers and composers and artists who were living here in cheap
pensiones
or apartments. When Wally asked Claire and Martin where they were staying, Martin was vague in his answer, suddenly embarrassed by the truth.

Late at night Claire and Martin went with them to a party at one of these apartments on the Left Bank. The halls and the stairwell were filled with chattering Americans; the place was smoky as a nightclub and stank of whiskey. A fat, drunken young man from Kansas took a tumble down the staircase and had to be helped to his feet Claire heard a man and woman passionately arguing about art; the fight, as much as Claire could tell, seemed to be over who was the better draftsman: Picasso or Braque. Claire had only recently been introduced to the work of these painters, and she was embarrassed. She wanted to be an artist, and yet she was way behind in her education. So far, walking through the wide halls of the
Louvre with Martin, she had been overwhelmed by all she was seeing. But there was so much more; she would never see it all, she had started too late.

It was
always
too late, she thought. At the point when you actually realized something important, the moment to do anything about it had already slipped by. She had found Martin when she was seventeen years old. That shouldn’t have been too late, and yet she knew that in some ways it was. Her family and her past already had a lifelong hold on her. She had cried at
An American in Paris
because the movie reminded her of what she had given up. She was different from Martin. He could make the break more easily; his family was awful, and their values were awful, too. She watched him now across the stairwell at the crowded party. He was talking in an animated way to two other men—something about the difference between American and European politics—and he was smoking a Gauloise that one of the men had offered him from a flat blue tin.

Martin hated cigarettes. Yet here he was, easily taking in the experience of being young
and impatient and standing on someone’s packed stairwell on the Left Bank of Paris with a lit cigarette in hand, absorbing it all into himself. He had nothing to lose. He had broken with his family, and he was on his own; he would become very wealthy soon enough. But Claire was more afraid than he was, more homesick. She felt as though she still had plenty to lose. That was the difference between them.

A would–be novelist in a black turtleneck approached Claire on the stairs now. She had heard him discussing his manuscript with someone else earlier. It was called
The Taste of Bitter Pomegranate
, she remembered. “Enjoying yourself?” he asked her, passing her a tray of cheese that was so runny it was practically drinkable.

“Oh, yes,” she said over the music, which was strummed chords of folk guitar along with some plaintive, mournful French lyrics that she couldn’t understand. There was an awkward pause. “So,” said Claire. “Your novel …
The Taste of Bitter Pomegranate
. That
is
the title, right?” He nodded. “What does it refer to?” she asked politely. “The pomegranate.
Does someone in the novel actually eat one, is that it?”

The man stared at her for a long moment. “No,” he finally said. “There is no pomegranate in the novel. It’s just a metaphor. Obviously.” And then he turned away to find someone more interesting to talk to. Claire felt her face grow hot; she was both embarrassed and confused.

That night in bed in the hotel, Claire and Martin rustled and turned under the sheets, but neither of them could sleep. He had had a good time at the party; she had not. Both of them smelled of smoke. “Let’s go somewhere tomorrow,” Claire said suddenly.

She could see Martin clearly in the moonlight that came in through the tall windows. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?” He was like that easy to be with. Claire was slightly sad and restless, and Martin was willing to make a change whenever necessary. So in the morning, after consulting a map and a guidebook and the concierge, they were on the train to Aix–en–Provence. City slowly changed into country, and when they got off the train, they rented a bright yellow Citroën and drove over
a series of small hills to the town of Lourmarin, where, Martin casually said, he knew someone.

“Who?” Claire asked in the car. “Who do you know?”

“Just an old friend,” he said at first.

They stopped for a snack in one of the outdoor cafés along the way. Martin had a tall lemonade, and Claire ordered a frozen dessert called a
mystère
, which the waiter dug up from a freezer full of various kinds of ice cream. The
mystère
consisted of an orange with the pulp scooped out and replaced with orange–flavored sherbert. As Claire ate, her long spoon suddenly clacked against something hard buried inside the sherbert. “There’s something in here,” she said.

“Oui, mademoiselle,”
said the waiter, who had overheard. “It is a prize.”

So this was the mystery of the
mystère
. Claire sucked at the spoonful of sherbert until her prize could be seen. “Oh, look,” she said softly to Martin. In her hand she held a ring. It was cheap, made of tin with a green glass “jewel” in the center, and it caught a fragment of the afternoon light They gazed at the ring,
and Claire knew they were both thinking about when they would be married.

They had agreed that they would get married when they had decided to settle somewhere. They would marry and have a houseful of children. But when would they find somewhere to settle? In many ways, Claire was more conventional than he was; she needed to know that they would be settled soon, she needed assurance. “Of course it’s going to happen,” he had said to her repeatedly.