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Claire swift 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 faggot. 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 slightly exaggerated. 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 perched 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 deep groan. "Christ oh Christ," he said to himself. "Isn't this great?''
"I wouldn't say that," said a voice.
Martin sat up quickly, startled. A girl was facing him, about his age, and her arms were crossed. She was smiling at him. No, she was actually smirking, and Martin braced for an insult, some sarcastic comment about his family. 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 right now, pretending that he was not in great pain and that he could simply saunter out of the gazebo and back across the green, but she knew.
"Would you like to try it?" she asked. "I live just 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?" he asked her.
"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 being 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 answered slowly, "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 absurd 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 leavetakings were largely related to Martin's father's unpredictable moods. Ash Rayfiel was an imposing and demanding executive who had inherited the family business: ladies' hats.
As a result, Martin's mother, Lucinda, 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 outside Martin's window, and 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 green, 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 end up turning into 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 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. He 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 edge 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: that 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 at all. 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 Clement. 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 Clement 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 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.'''
Within a month she was gone. Nicole left her job, insisting that it had nothing to do with Martin, only that she missed her family in Lourmarin. He wasn't sure whether or not to believe her, but she cried when she left and said she would write to him, which she occasionally did. The new cook was a stout, bossy woman from the Swiss Alps who sang marching songs and grated cheese into every dish she made. While Martin picked up occasional cooking pointers from her, they never became friends.
After the experience in the pantry; he was quieter, more directed. Some sensation had come over him that day, and now, in another kitchen on the other side of town, it had returned. He suddenly wished he could lie down in a small, fragrant room with this smirking girl named Claire. He could imagine his life being shaped around her; he wanted that to happen, though he had no idea why.
It occurred to him that people didn't need to be exactly like each other in order for a strong current of feeling to pass between them. His parents liked to socialize only with people who were just like them; he had once heard his mother discussing, in a low, meaningful tone to a friend of hers at the club, another woman who was supposedly "not one of us." Which meant, it turned out, that the woman wasn't wealthy, and was therefore ineligible to join Longwood Golf and Country.
Martin wanted to be with this girl Claire who was clearly "not one of us." He liked that she was different, that the things she knew were clearly different from the things he knew. And yet he felt that they were oddly similar. It was time for him to go now, and yet he still couldn't bring himself to leave. For some reason he was stalling, lingering, loitering here in her house. Instead of saying goodbye, what he said to her was, "Can I cook the steak for your father?''
Claire stared at him. "You know how to cook?" she said, her voice full of doubt. He nodded. "You do not," she said.
"Yes I do.''
"You're kidding, right?" she asked, and he shook his head no. "Okay, be my guest," she said, shrugging and gesturing that the kitchen was his.
He took over in the narrow space, slicing cloves of garlic and cubes of butter on a cutting board the size of his hand. When he asked Claire if there were any spices handy, she said there were some herbs growing in a patch beside the house. She picked some for him, then brought them back inside. He minced onion grass and wild thyme and made an herb butter for the steak (which he rinsed well, since it had been on his black eye). When the steak was done, Claire regarded it in surprise, for it wasn't only clearly delicious, it was also artfully arranged on the plate. She brought it silently in to her father, who happily ate it up, announcing later that that was the best dish she had ever cooked for him.
Afterward, when the kitchen was still fragrant, and the day was almost over, Claire turned to Martin and told him he had to leave. "This time I mean it," she said. "My mother will be home soon from the fabric store with my older sister Margaret. And unlike my father, they'll ask a million questions.''
"I wish they would," he said softly. "I'd tell them anything. My shoe size: 11. My intelligence: fairly high. My--''
"Go," she said firmly, and she opened the kitchen door for him.
"Claire," he said suddenly. "Meet me at the gazebo tomorrow.''
Suddenly she wasn't smiling anymore. "No," she said. "There's no point. We're totally different.''
"So what?" he said. "Please. Just meet me.''
She looked at her hands, lacing them together, deciding. "Not tomorrow," she said. "Next week. Same time.''
"Fine. Next week," said Martin. They stood in silence at the half-open, curtained kitchen door. He didn't want to ruin this afternoon. It was like a recipe, he thought; if you stirred too long, you would change the consistency. So without saying another word, he walked out the door of her kitchen and didn't look back. Next week, he thought to himself as he walked down the path to the little cul-de-sac, whose name, he saw from a sign, was Badger Street. Without realizing it, his step became quicker, until he was practically running. Next week, he thought. Next week.
Henry was waiting by the car several blocks away, looking very concerned. "Are you all right?" he asked as Martin climbed in beside him. It was not the first black eye he had seen on this boy.
"Yes," said Martin, and he leaned his head back against the brown leather seat of the Bentley, one eye as big as a plum and swollen shut, as the car began its ascent up the hill toward home.
During the week, Martin was entirely distracted, performing poorly on an English examination and making a crucial error in chemistry class that almost resulted in a sulphurous explosion. The headmaster, Mr. Croft, invited Martin into his office for "a word." Croft was a decent man who was close to retirement, and Martin did not want to disappoint him. "I know you're headed to Princeton in the fall," said Croft, appraising him from behind his desk, "but still it's essential that you keep your grades up to the level at which they have been all along.''
Since meeting Claire, Martin had stopped thinking about the fact that he was going away to college in September. He had been accepted to the school his father and grandfather had attended. From the time of Martin's birth, it was assumed that he would eventually go to Princeton, where he would join the same selective eating club that the Rayfiel men had always belonged to, and that he would do everything that they had done: play varsity football, study economics, and date a certain type of extremely rich, dull girl with strong teeth and a throaty, slightly hysterical laugh.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Croft," Martin said to the headmaster. "You're right; I've been distracted. I'll try to be more attentive." But he was upset now at the idea of going off to college in the fall and leaving behind this girl Claire, who he hadn't yet gotten to know.
When next Friday came around, Martin did not have Henry drive him into town. Instead, after school he changed out of his uniform and into a casual shirt and pants, then headed down from the Crest alone, on foot, telling no one where he was going. He walked lightly across the green, afraid that she wouldn't be there, that she would have forgotten. Or, worse yet, that she hadn't forgotten but had just changed her mind and decided not to come. He almost couldn't bear to look, but now, as he approached, he did.
In the distance stood the gazebo, a simple, octagonal white structure that seemed half made of air. And inside it, she waited for him.
The Gazebo. Copyright © by Emily Grayson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
