The Gazebo: A Novel (11 page)

“Sure,” she said. “Is everything okay?”

“You and Martin,” he said. “I want you to go back to London together. As soon as you can arrange it.”

Claire was startled; she stared at him. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Why do you want us to leave?”

“It won’t work out for you here,” he said.

“How do you know that?” she asked.

“I spoke to his father,” he began.

Claire’s mouth dropped open. “You
spoke
to
him?” she cried. “But Martin will be furious.”

“I wanted to see if that man would ever give in,” said Lucas. “And he won’t. He’s in a rage at his son, and it’s just going to burn and burn, Claire. So I want you to go.”

“But what about you?”

“Oh, I’ll be all right,” said her father.

“I worry about you,” she said. “How you’ll manage.”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said, but his voice was flat.

That night, in his sleep, Lucas Swift thought he heard his wife, Maureen, call out to him. For one confused moment he believed she was alive, and that she was still sleeping in Claire’s room. He bolted from bed in the darkness and out into the hallway, where he tripped over a small table and fell to the floor in a heap, badly spraining his ankle. Claire, hearing the crash, came hurrying out to him.

“Oh, Dad,” she said, snapping on a light and crouching down beside him. And as she looked at him in the light of her bedroom she saw how frail he appeared, his shoulders in his thin blue shirt narrow, his back stooped. His ankle was already swelling. He was on a
path of decline, and it would accelerate greatly if she left him now. Her father knew it, too; they both did. She helped him up and when he put weight on his ankle, the pain made him inhale sharply, surprised. What he had said to her before bed was that she should leave and live her own life with Martin because this was their moment. She should leave immediately and thrive, but when she left her father would sink quickly. Here was only one small example of what was in store for him.

Would you take care of him?
her mother had asked, and she had nodded yes. It was the decent thing to do. She wouldn’t leave her father, not like this. She couldn’t leave Martin, either, but in some way she would have to, at least for a while. To be more exact about it, he would have to leave
her
. He would have to go back to 17 Dobson Mews, where he had begun to make his name. She knew that he would achieve many things, that he would continue doing the kind of cooking he had always loved, in a kitchen equipped with pots and ladles in a hundred different sizes and an acreage of counter space where he could spread out to work and various small, strange tools—such
as the mandoline he’d once showed her, not trying to hide his delight in an instrument that could instantly shred a potato into a few dozen perfect, translucent coins. He was very much at home in the restaurant in London, living in the little flat and exploring the greengrocers and the exotic spice stores and haggling prices with the fishmongers. He would do his work seriously and become successful in London; she had no doubt about it.

For now, Claire would stay here and be with her father, as her mother had wanted. She and Martin would be together again as soon as they could, although neither of them had any idea of when. As she helped her father back to bed and brought him some ice for his ankle, he glanced at her. Then he sighed lightly, sadly, because he must have known from her expression that she had made her decision, and that she wasn’t going anywhere.

Throughout the spring, Claire and Martin debated the subject of whether Martin should go back to London without her. At first he absolutely refused to go, saying that his life was here with her, but after a while he began to
relent, seeing that the life they had here was in fact doing neither of them any good. With great reluctance, he bought a one–way ticket to London on a flight leaving New York City early on the morning of May 28.

The night before his voyage was the fourth anniversary of their first encounter in the gazebo, and it was important to both of them to be together there, as they had done every year on this date. So at dusk they sat under the white roof, both of them full of dread at the thought of his departure in the morning. It was starting to rain slightly, the town square looking like a pastel drawing that has gotten smudged. A few people hurried off in different directions, fumbling to open umbrellas.

“I bought you something,” she said to him. “A going–away gift.” And then she handed him a large white box.

“You didn’t need to get me anything,” Martin said, but he was clearly pleased, and when he opened it he saw the briefcase inside, a caramel color, with his initials discreetly stamped in gold on the side. “Claire,” he said, astonished, “where did you get this? I saw one just like it when we were in Florence, remember?
We had spent hours at the Uffizi, you never wanted to leave, and on the way to the hotel we—”

“I know,” she said. “I wrote to the shop—Cuoio di Lipari, I remembered it was called—and I asked them to send it to me.”

“But how could you afford it?”

“I’ve been saving up,” she said softly. “I wanted you to have something nice to carry all your recipes and papers and everything in.”

“It makes me look like a businessman,” he said, lifting the beautiful case up by its thick handle. “The son my father always wanted,” he added with some irony, then he put the case down. “I love it,” he said. “I’ll carry it for a long, long time. Until I’m old.”

She smiled slightly, embarrassed and pleased. “I can’t imagine you old,” she said.

“You will,” he said.

The rain had grown heavier now, the clouds suddenly gathering, the sky turning unnaturally dark. Somewhere off in the direction of the hills came thunder, a warning sound. Claire moved closer to Martin on the wooden seat of the gazebo.

“Promise me,” she suddenly said, “that you’ll come to meet me at the gazebo every year on May twenty–seventh at dusk. No matter what.” He didn’t say anything. “Promise me,” she said again, more urgent this time.

“I promise,” he said. “And you promise me that you’ll be there.”

“I promise,” she said.

He lifted her hair from the nape of her neck, and whispered something to her that she couldn’t quite hear. Slowly he opened her blouse, slipping the tiny buttons, no bigger than raindrops, through their eyelets one by one. No one was watching; the rain had made everyone scatter and now they were alone. “You’re so beautiful,” he said, coming forward and putting his face into the shadow between her breasts.

Then they sank down together onto the cool floor of the gazebo. She pulled him against her, thinking:
How can he be leaving? How has this happened to us?

Lightning intermittently shot across the sky, illuminating parts of their bodies: now a mouth, a hand, a breast, a shoulder. Neither
of them could speak or be heard. They were both silently crying, their faces wet in the stuttering white lightning that divided the sky high above their gazebo.

T
HEY KEPT THEIR
promise. Every year on May 27 they met at the gazebo at dusk. The first year after he had moved back to London he arrived at the gazebo before her and was sitting very still when she came running across the diagonal path toward him in a yellow dress splashed with a floral pattern, her face flushed. The second year, two little boys were sitting in the gazebo when they arrived, legs swinging, studiously examining a stack of baseball cards, actually having the nerve to continue to sit there even though this was Martin and Claire’s place. And the third year after they had made the promise to each other, Claire was waiting for Martin on May 27.

His plane had been late, and so the sky was fading into a stone gray by the time he arrived in Longwood Falls, tired from the trip. In a
way, he was tired from the entire year he’d spent without her. They wrote each other often, and spoke on the phone when they could, but the time difference made telephone calls difficult to choreograph, and Martin’s work hours were unpredictable. There were many times at the restaurant when something would happen—some small triumph or slight—and all he wished was that she was there to talk to in bed at night. It was a simple wish: to be with the woman he loved, both of them quiet and sleepy and settling in for the night. To talk and talk as late as they wanted. To wake up in the morning and there she would be, that half smile on her face even in her sleep. But he couldn’t have what he wanted, and the deprivation was wearing him down in small, almost imperceptible ways. When he arrived at the gazebo, they always sank against each other in relief, and it was minutes before either of them pulled back.

When Martin agreed to move back to London for a while and leave Claire here to tend to her father and her father’s business, he had never planned on being gone permanently. They assumed they would be together for
good one of these days, and yet one chaotic year had turned into another. They now led two separate lives but were still connected in some basic, irrevocable way, writing and calling and meeting at the gazebo on each anniversary. It wasn’t just Martin who was worn down by the absences, the back and forth, the dissatisfaction; Claire seemed somewhat unhappy lately, too, and slightly remote, as though she had some hidden sadness that she couldn’t yet talk about. He didn’t press it.

He had begun to realize, as the years unfolded, that Claire was slowly transforming from the girl he had met here eight years earlier. Now her pale hair had a shadow of darker russet in it, and there was a tiredness to her eyes. She worked so hard helping her father and barely had time to think, or take a walk, or do anything just for herself. “Do you get a chance to sculpt?” he asked her today at the gazebo.

She nodded and said, “Sometimes.” She was evasive now, he realized, and it troubled him. Evasiveness was a new quality for Claire, who had always been so open and expressive. But he himself had new qualities, too, he knew,
which had come from living in a foreign culture and being steeped in it for such a long time.

And now 17 Dobson Mews was his. Duncan Lear had defected to the town of Exeter in southwest England, where his new restaurant, Duncan’s Grill, was booming. In his absence, and perhaps in the absence of the feeling of being
watched
by Duncan, Martin had achieved a rapid success as a chef, and had been written about in the London papers as the new force behind the wonderful restaurant in Kensington. Eventually Martin was asked by a team of investors if he would like to join their group in a bid to buy the restaurant. Martin’s financial contribution could be merely a token, but he would have to agree to stay on and run the kitchen.

“You can rename the place whatever you like,” offered one of the investors. “Perhaps Martin’s. Or Rayfiel’s.”

He shook his head; he didn’t want his own name up on a sign. Perhaps he would call the place Claire’s, and when she was able to live here with him again everyone would know her as the lovely, slender American who had
a top restaurant in her name. But Claire was a modest person, and would be embarrassed having a restaurant named after her. Suddenly, the right name occurred to him: the Gazebo.

When the new owners took over, the architects constructed a soaring octagonal ceiling inside the main dining room. They also, at Martin’s instruction, made the large plate–glass windows even bigger, giving the restaurant the airy, wraparound feeling of its namesake. Within days of its opening, the newly christened restaurant was mentioned in the London
Times
, which called dining there “bliss.” Sometimes, when Martin stepped out of the gleaming white–tiled kitchen, patrons would wave to him, and he would go over and say hello. Women often flirted with Martin; there was one woman in particular who often came to dinner, a beautiful but serious Englishwoman named Frances Banks with a heavy brown braid down her back and a rotating collection of fine linen clothes. She had already been married to a much older Cambridge don and had been widowed, leaving her to raise their young daughter, Louisa,
whom she occasionally brought to the resturant with her. Frances Banks was made up of compelling angles, and she was both well bred and irreverent. Distantly, Martin realized he liked Frances’s ironic wit and her good looks, and he took note of the way she gazed at him.

One day she had said, “I was just thinking how lucky your wife is to have you cook like this for her all the time.”

“I don’t have a wife,” he found himself replying, and he immediately regretted it, realizing that the point of her comment had been to find out his marital status. In his heart he did feel married to Claire, even though he had not seen her since last May 27, when they had spent an hour at the gazebo before parting. He had asked Claire to come to the Lookout Motel with him that day, where he was staying, but she had declined, saying that she had to get home. But he knew it was almost too dangerous to go back in that direction, to lie together in that bed. If they did, they would find their separation unbearable. As it was, his visits were always brief; even so, they were almost too much, too painful a reminder of what they didn’t have the rest of the year. Nonetheless,
Martin was committed to Claire for life; their letters back and forth across the Atlantic were slightly less frequent lately but were still both ardent and tender. He wished he had said to Frances, “Yes, my wife loves my cooking. The first time we made love I cooked her an omelette.”

He hurried back to the kitchen after this conversation, and when Frances and her daughter returned to the Gazebo two days later, Martin did not poke his head into the dining room to say hello. A waiter came in and said that Mrs. Banks was asking for the pleasure of Mr. Rayfiel’s company, if only for a moment, but Martin sent the waiter out to apologize to Mrs. Banks and say that he was too busy today to leave his post.

Now Martin sat with Claire in the gazebo, leaning against her and gently holding her. She was still his, though her father had recently developed arthritis in both knees and had trouble with mobility. The fact was, her father now needed her more than ever, and the tone of the letters had begun to shift accordingly. Instead of mentioning with certainty that they would be together soon,
Martin and Claire simply neglected to broach the issue. All they knew for sure was that they still loved each other as fully as ever, and that they would see each other every May 27 at the gazebo, “come hell or high water,” Martin had written to her.

In the evenings in Longwood Falls, he knew, father and daughter sat on the back porch and talked as the sun set. Lucas Swift often told Claire that she should hightail it to London where she belonged, but when she replied that she was needed here, with him, he did not argue. In addition to the way she took complete care of her father, she also had come to oversee the family business. Swift Maintenance was doing very well, thanks to Claire’s attentions. She had proven to be a precise bookkeeper and had a real skill at dealing with customers and workers. She could not get away yet; neither could Martin. Both of them knew it, and there was an unspoken disappointment that inflected this year’s meeting at the gazebo.

But there was something else in the air today, too. Claire didn’t merely look older than she used to, or more tired; she also looked apprehensive.
As it turned out, there was a reason.

“Listen to me,” she said to Martin, and she took both his hands in hers. “I have to tell you something.”

His first thought was that one of his parents had died. He felt his back stiffen at the idea; although he had not spoken to his mother or father in years, he prepared himself for the news. But what Claire said instead was, “I’ve met someone.”

Her voice was miserable, full of regret.

Martin paused. “What do you mean?” he asked, although he was afraid he knew what she meant.

“His name is Daniel Clusker,” she said quietly.

Martin barely knew how to respond. How could she have met someone? They had an agreement, a pact. They were going to be together someday.

“How
could
you?” Martin finally asked, and he stood unsteadily, then slammed his fist against one of the wooden supports of the gazebo.

“Stop!” she said, going over to him, watching
him shake out his hand in pain. “Please,” she went on, frantically now, “I didn’t know what to do. I’m here, and you’re there, and you seem so unhappy all the time, Martin, so totally worn out by our being in separate places. And I’ve tried to find a way to make it work; it’s all I’ve thought about. But the years keep going by and we never confront it anymore—what’s going to happen to us. Where this is all going to end up. You know I love you. You know you’re my entire life. But Daniel came and helped out, and he’s very good with my father, and he’s reliable. And I know how lonely you are; I can see it every year. More than lonely. You’re disappointed. It’s taken something out of you. So I decided to be the first one to do something,” she said. She took a breath, and in a quiet voice she added, “And now you’re free to do the same.”

He stared at her, feeling the blood beating inside him, feeling his injured hand throb with its own separate beat. “Just tell me one thing,” he said, his voice thick and unfamiliar to himself. “This Daniel Clusker …” He spoke the name coldly. “Do you actually love him?”

Claire looked down at her lap. “He’s a very
kind person,” she said simply, and her reply reminded Martin of Nicole’s answer to the question about her husband, Thierry.
He is a good father
, Nicole had said, as if that were enough. Was it enough? Who decided what was enough for one person, what was satisfactory, what made a decent life? “Daniel can fix anything,” Claire was saying. “He does handsprings. He knows the name of every bird. He’s very thoughtful.” Then she looked up, took another breath, and said, “He asked me to marry him.”

Martin stared. “
And?
” he said.

“And I told him I would,” she said quietly. “I couldn’t think what else to say.”

Martin felt a sourness burst in the back of his throat. “Claire, come to London with me tonight,” he said.

“You know I can’t,” she said. “My father. The business;—”

“Then I’ll move here,” he tried. “Ill give up the whole stupid restaurant.”

“It’s not stupid,” she said. “It’s what you’ve always wanted.”

“Yes,” he said. “It is.” He thought about the softly lit room of the restaurant, and the way
it felt to stand and observe from the kitchen door as the first customers of the evening were shown to their tables. The things he felt were contentment, accomplishment, calm. But then he thought about the fact that he would never make love to Claire again, would never marry her or have children with her. Maybe once a year they would still briefly meet each other, as they had sworn they always would, but that was all.

“You’re really going to do this?” he asked.

She looked away and nodded.

“So that’s it, then?”

She nodded again.

“I have to go now, Claire,” Martin said. He picked up the briefcase she had given him and walked down the white steps, staggering slightly, like a man who has drunk too much champagne, or has been given some sudden and very bad news.

Daniel Clusker was a carpenter Claire had hired to work for Swift Maintenance, a man who lived in the next town. He was tall and red–haired, and she liked him right away when he came into the front office of the maintenance
company. He was charming in a soft–spoken, offhand way, and they talked for a little longer than might have been expected.

Later, when Claire was walking through the town square, she saw some of the workmen sitting and having lunch. Daniel Clusker was among them, and he was amusing the other men by turning an impressive series of handsprings on the grass. When he noticed Claire, he quickly got to his feet, embarrassed, and gave a small wave. Daniel was charming but deeply, bewilderingly shy. So Claire was surprised when, the following day, he came by again and asked her if she was free that night.

“Free?” she asked, not comprehending.

“You know. Available,” he said. “I thought we could go somewhere. I promise I won’t talk about carpentry.”

So, for some reason she didn’t even understand, she went with him, and he was true to his word, not discussing carpentry at all. They drove through the hills in his pickup truck, and Daniel pointed out particular trees, and trails he had hiked with his brothers. He was an amateur naturalist, someone who particularly loved birds. He owned four pairs of binoculars of different strengths.

They had supper together at his house—nothing elaborate, just some soup and a salad—and he played a few old Louis Armstrong records he liked. Sometimes during the day he would come say hello, wearing his work shirt and tool belt. Claire couldn’t decide whether or not he was actually flirting with her. She hadn’t paid any attention to men other than Martin for so long. Why in the world was she paying attention to this one?

At first she told herself that her reaction was only one of kindness. Daniel Clusker was sweet, and he was lonely. But it occurred to her that maybe, even though Martin would never admit it, he secretly wanted her to meet someone else, and that she was responding to his unspoken wish. Maybe he wanted her to make a break now, just at the point that his restaurant in London was turning into a big success. That way, he could feel the loss of Claire and mourn her and then move on, perhaps finding someone himself. She knew how much he hated going to sleep alone in the sleigh bed in the flat above the restaurant, where they were supposed to have lived together. Once, lying in that bed with Claire,
Martin had tried to describe for her the loneliness of having been an only child, and how different this was, being with somebody, and she thought of that lonely child now, and how he was becoming a lonely man.