The Gazebo: A Novel (7 page)

“When?” she’d always asked.

“Soon,” he’d answered. Now he took the ring from her hand and solemnly slipped it on her finger. The ring was still very cold from having been inside a freezer for days, perhaps weeks. Martin leaned across the round metal table and whispered the answer to the question that she wasn’t even asking at the moment.
“Soon,”
he said.

The old friend in Lourmarin, Martin finally admitted to Claire, was Nicole Clément, who had been the Rayfiels’ cook and, for one afternoon, Martin’s lover. Her name was now Nicole Vachon; she had married a local auto
mechanic named Thierry Vachon. This much Martin had learned from Nicole’s occasional, chatty letters. But he did not know much more about her, and it had been five years since they had seen each other. Claire, to his relief, was not upset.

“It will be interesting to meet her,” was all she said.

When they arrived in Lourmarin, he’d hoped it was the kind of village where, if you stopped three or four people on the street, one of them would know the whereabouts of the person you wanted, or at least the family. And it was. The first person, in fact, a man wearing a long white apron and sweeping the street in front of a
boulangerie
, said yes, yes, pointed toward a steeple, and told Martin to turn left there and then ask anyone. Which Martin did, except for the asking part, because when they turned up the street past the church, there she was.

“That’s her,” said Martin. “I think.”

The woman was walking away from them, up the hill toward the end of the street. A child was tugging on either hand, pulling her back, singing a song.
“Lundi matin,”
both children
sang in high, clear voices,
“l’empereur, sa femme, et le petit prince …”

Martin turned off the ignition, and he and Claire stepped from the car. He looked at Claire. She nodded to him: Go.

“Nicole?” he called. The woman didn’t hear. “Nicole?”

The woman turned. She was older, in her thirties now, and pregnant, but still Nicole. “Martin?” She said it as she always had, the French way, final
n
vanishing. Then she screamed, and they embraced, and soon she was introducing her daughters Joëlle and Marie to Martin, and Martin was introducing Claire to Nicole, and the next thing Martin and Claire knew there was a dinner in their honor: a bounty of bread and bright tomatoes, cheeses and cracked olives, crustaceans in a garlicky broth and bottles of local wine, all arranged on a long oak table in a courtyard full of trees and children.
“Vendredi matin,”
Nicole’s daughters were now singing,
“l’empereur, sa femme, et le petir prince …”

At first Martin kept insisting that Nicole not go to any trouble, but it was easier, she told him, simply to surrender. Easier for him, because
she was going to make a fuss whether he wanted one or not and easier for her, because once word began to spread about the visiting Americans, her family and neighbors were going to be stopping by for a look anyway.

So they surrendered. Martin and Claire sat at the table as if it were their wedding day, receiving the good wishes of old women and applauding the acrobatics of children. The only time Nicole or Martin acknowledged what had happened between them so many years earlier, and what had perhaps hastened her return to Lourmarin, was in the late afternoon, when a man appeared in a doorway of the courtyard, wiping his hands on a pair of gray overalls, looking bewildered by the celebration that somehow had sprung up since he’d left for work at the garage this morning. Nicole got up from the table and went to him, but first she paused at Martin’s ear.

“Thierry,” she whispered. “He does not know about you.”

Martin hadn’t known what to expect here; he still didn’t know what he wanted from this visit At some level, he supposed, it was to
show Nicole that her peculiar apprentice Martin was turning out well—well enough, anyway. That his curiosity about cooking had blossomed, and so had his interest in a woman named Claire. And if it was, in fact, Nicole’s blessing he wanted, Martin more than got it. At the end of the evening, as a small band of nieces and nephews and two Americans strolled down the street to Nicole’s parents’ house, where Claire and Martin had agreed they would spend the night (it was useless to argue) before driving off first thing in the morning, Nicole squeezed Martin’s arm and said, “She is really quite charming.”

Several steps ahead, Claire was holding Joëlle’s hand and trying to teach the younger girl how to skip.

“Yes,” said Martin.

“And your father?”

Martin gestured with his hands. “He’s not so charming.”

Nicole laughed. “What does he think?”

“What you might expect.”

“And you do not care?” she asked. Martin shook his head. “No?” she said.

Martin looked at her. “You don’t believe
me?” Nicole offered a small shrug that might have meant anything. “Tell me,” he said.

“I think,” said Nicole, “it does not matter what I think.”

“You’re wrong. It matters a great deal to me what you think,” Martin said, and as soon as he had spoken he knew it to be true. “That’s why I’m here,” he continued. “To find out what you think.”

Nicole was looking on ahead. Her husband, Thierry, was carrying the older girl on his shoulders. “Boop, boop, boop,” Martin heard him singing.

“Are you happy with him?” Martin asked.

After a moment, she nodded. “He is a good father.”

Like her earlier shrug this, too, might have meant anything. Martin wondered whether to pursue the question, then realized that in a way he already knew the answer: Thierry seemed to be a kind man, but he was not a man in whom a wife could confide an indiscretion with an American boy nearly half her age.

Martin and Nicole walked a few more steps in silence, and then they were in front of her
parents’ doorway, and the moving band of strollers slowed. There were embraces all around, double kisses, handshakes, words of thanks, promises to see one another sometime soon. Joëlle continued skipping ahead down the little street, stepping on and off the curb. Claire circled back to Martin, and he placed an arm around her shoulder.

“I think I’ve taught your daughter a new trick,” Claire said to Nicole.

“How to run away,” said Martin.

“It will happen sooner or later,” Nicole said, and they all laughed. Then she turned to Martin and said, “Let me ask you something.”

He felt his smile hold fast, and he became aware of how closely she was watching him. It was she who had always been the person in the house who understood him, who encouraged him, who called him in to the kitchen while his parents slept, who saw in him the potential to become something greater than the lord of the greatest hat empire in all of upstate New York. “What is it?” Martin asked.

“You are going back to Paris?”

“Sooner or later,” said Martin. “We’re going to Italy first, I think. Claire needs to get a few
pointers from Michelangelo.” At this, Claire poked him lightly.

“When you are done with Italy, go to Ireland,” said Nicole. “See a friend of mine. He is the chef in a restaurant in a castle. If you are serious—”

“A castle?” said Claire.

“—about becoming a chef, about someday running your own restaurant, you will do this. Yes?” And she borrowed a pen from Martin and wrote something on a slip of paper, which she handed to him. Nicole examined him a moment longer, held him there with her gaze, then released him. She turned to her mother and father and said good night, called to her daughter to come back, and then led her family up the winding street to their home, both daughters hanging on her arms. She was trudging back up the hill precisely as Martin had first seen her doing this afternoon, as she no doubt did every day, as she might have been doing right now anyway, even if he hadn’t visited, just as if he’d never been here. And Martin watched her go, into the night, until she was gone.

I
N
I
TALY
,
THEY
walked. They walked under the arcade off the Piazza del Campo in Siena, pretending not to notice the unbroken stares of the men who suddenly appeared in the shop doorways at dusk, smoking. They walked through the back streets of Venice, ignoring the cries of the gondoliers who wanted to ferry them to sunny spots populated entirely by tourists, preferring instead to lose themselves along dark paths lined with distantly crying infants and hanging laundry. They walked the cool marble corridors of the Uffizi in Florence, their passage from gallery to gallery punctuated only by the repetitive clicks of their heels and the occasional, astonished “Oh.” Maybe because of all the walking, they quickly adopted the custom of eating a large midday meal before retiring for a good
part of the afternoon, returning to their hotel room from whatever distant quarter of whichever city they happened to be in, there to nap like newborns. And then, when they woke, they walked.

“Had enough?” Martin asked Claire one afternoon in Florence, walking back down the hill from the Pitti Palace.

“No,” she answered quickly. Then, “Yes. Never.” She hugged herself and lifted her head toward the rust–colored rooftops of the city on the other side of the river. “Ill never have enough time to see it all. I’d practically have to be immortal.”

“That’s true,” he said, their pace picking up now, their steps quickening as they neared the bottom of the hill. “The trick is to know when to stop.”

But it was difficult for Claire to imagine wanting to stop, to imagine calling a voluntary halt to the endless procession of rich food and rich art that spread out before them. This was what she’d wanted to do for years. No, that wasn’t quite true. This life she found herself leading now hadn’t even been a wish. It was more an idle thought, a daydream she’d barely
indulged: Europe, the unthinking answer to the question of where would she like to go if she could go anywhere in the world. But now it was real, and its vividness stopped her at every turn: frescoes in chapels, tapestries in churches, paintings in galleries, sculptures in gardens. Faced with one more hill, she climbed; with one more bridge, she crossed. How could she not? Her new Italian walking shoes were made of sturdy, resilient cowhide, and who knew what treasure might be waiting on the other side?

Yet she would have to stop. As difficult as it was to imagine their travels ever coming to an end, it was equally difficult to imagine being able to go on like this much longer. It wasn’t just the walking, though the liquid–limbed fatigue at the end of the day was an unfamiliar and unpleasant experience for Claire. And it was more than homesickness, or the private embarrassment she might feel at not being able to recognize the style of a particular artist, or remember even in what century he had lived. The weariness that was overtaking them now was something new. It was the momentum of their trip, its acceleration
and accumulation, and Claire was the one who was going to have to say, “Enough.”

Martin wouldn’t; she knew that. Paris, perhaps, had been his. Lourmarin, definitely. But Italy was all Claire’s. Martin could leave her in front of a triptych or sculpture, go out for a cappuccino, pick up a copy of the
International Herald Tribune
, and come back to find her in the exact position he’d left her. He amused himself with simple trattoria fare; he wolfed down bowls of spaghetti
con burro
with a fork and soupspoon, his face shining with butter; he learned to distinguish among the olive oils of various regions—the green ones, the gold ones, the ones swirling with sediment; he insisted they stop at a different gelato vendor every evening on the long walk back to the small, elegant Hotel Paolo e Francesca, near the Duomo. Sometimes Martin might gently question her, nudge her, ask her if she’d had enough yet—not rushing her, he’d emphasize, just asking—and sometimes Claire would concede that she had. But then she would ask if he would mind too much if they stayed just a little longer, another day, two at the
most
. Martin’s smile at these moments wasn’t exactly indulgent;
once, Claire made the mistake of calling it that.

“I’m not
indulging
you,” Martin corrected her. They were walking past yet another series of early Renaissance crucifixions, trying to remember where to turn for the gallery that housed Michelangelo’s
David
. “I don’t indulge you. I can’t imagine wanting to spend time with anyone I would need to indulge.”

“But sometimes I feel like it actually hurts to see so much art,” she said. “My eyes hurt. My head hurts. My teeth actually hurt.”

“And then,” Martin said.

“Right. Exactly. And then I see something I’ve never seen before and the pain goes away and I forget everything else in the world.”

“Even me.”

“Even you,” she admitted. “Is that okay?”

“If I’m going to lose you to someone,” Martin said, “it may as well be Michelangelo.”

And then they turned a corner, found the statue
David
, and after a minute Martin invisibly withdrew, knowing that this was the right thing to do. She needed to be alone here; she’d never explicitly said it, but he knew it was the case.

Several times Claire had visited
David
. It was almost a cliché, her allegiance to this particular work of all the masterpieces in Florence. She didn’t come here and keep coming here just because she wanted to learn from the master. This wasn’t a matter of looking harder. It was true that the more she looked, the more she learned; but this was true of most any work of art. What Claire hoped to get here, standing in this airy gallery far below the gentle curvature of a dome, several yards from the museum guards who now nodded to her each day because she had become a familiar face, was something more than an education.

When she looked at the
David
, she thought of herself. At first Claire tried to dismiss the association outright: how immodest to compare yourself with
David
, symbol of physical perfection. Yet it made a kind of sense. What Claire saw wasn’t just his nakedness. In David’s even gaze and the casual angle of his ankle, what Claire found was an acceptance of nakedness: the shrugging entitlement, the vague awareness of the natural gifts of being young. Sometimes, easing herself down from the precarious height of a four–poster hotel
bed, Claire would catch sight of her own naked body in a full–length hotel dressing mirror, and the simple fact of what she saw then, imperfect though it was, thrilled her in the same way that
David
did.

But most of all what the
David
reminded her of, of course, was Martin. When he returned to the gallery this afternoon, he found Claire staring up at the
David
exactly where he’d left her half an hour earlier. He’d been at lunch somewhere; there was still a slight gleam of oil on the corner of his mouth. She glanced at Martin, then took his arm, running her hand up the sleeve of his cotton summer shirt, touching hair, then muscle.

They skipped the gelato that evening. When they got back to the Hotel Paolo e Francesca, Claire pinned Martin to the bed, climbing on top of him with a new need that, if she’d thought about it, might have alarmed her. So she didn’t think about it. Instead, she saw it through, and when it had passed, Claire slid off Martin, who was still startled but happy, then lay beside him on the bed, and said, “Enough.”

* 
* 
*

In Ireland, a sedan from the hotel met them at the train station in Galway, and half an hour later they were pulling up the long drive through the grounds leading to the front gate of Thetford Castle, a vast but uncomplicated kingdom.

After the narrow cobblestone streets of Italy, Claire and Martin luxuriated in long, aimless walks across seemingly endless Irish fields. At the hotel restaurant at Thetford, Martin’s choice of food remained consistent. Every day he sampled a different preparation of the same fish, the ubiquitous Irish salmon that was as plentiful here as zucchini was in the summertime in Longwood Falls. The salmon had been plucked that very day from the packed river that ran through the property, and he ate it smoked, on toast, with capers and lemon; baked with butter and dill; steamed in parchment with tomato and onion. And although the halls of Thetford Castle housed the occasional suit of armor or heraldic crest, Claire found it oddly relieving not to have to wonder which door might be hiding a collection of masterpieces stacked, like bread in a bakery, with offhand indifference.

The second day at Thetford, Martin worked up the nerve to introduce himself to the chef, a tall, sandy–haired Englishman named Duncan Lear, who at first regarded the appearance of a customer in his kitchen with deep apprehension. When Martin mentioned their mutual friend, the French cook Nicole, however, Duncan’s mood lightened. And when Martin said that one day he hoped to open a restaurant of his own, Duncan invited him to have a look around. Martin slowly circulated among the assistants variously boning, cutting, stirring, calling out orders, and recoiling from steam.

“The cook’s tour,” Duncan said, but Martin didn’t offer even a polite smile. He was lost among the washtub–size pots hanging at eye level, running his hand along the blackened bottom of a cauldron that was used to cook God knows what.

“Look,” Duncan said, realizing how entranced Martin was, and how serious, “if you like, you can come back here one day and try your hand at something. We could always use help in the kitchen; it’s sort of a madhouse. How long are you staying at the hotel?”

Martin shrugged. “How long do I have?”

Duncan laughed a little, then sobered. “It’s real work, you know. It’s not easy. It’s not all fun and food.”

“I know. I don’t expect it to be.”

Duncan regarded him. “All right, then. Come by tomorrow after lunch. We’ll plan something together for the dinner menu.”

The following afternoon, Martin lingered with Claire at a corner table in the restaurant, draining cups of coffee, waiting for the last of the other diners to clear out. “Come on, come on,” Martin whispered, eyeing the stylish Dutch couple across the room sharing a slab of dense chocolate cake. Their forks were approaching from opposite sides of the plate, and out of either politeness or the desire to make a heavenly dessert last longer, they were taking uniformly small helpings of cake.

“They’re doing it on purpose,” Martin said, and Claire shushed him.

When at last the chic chocolate cake couple had finished and signed their bill and risen to leave, Claire said, “Well, this is it.”

“Wish me luck,” he said.

“You won’t need it,” she answered. “What do you say to wish a chef luck, anyway? `Break an egg’?”

“Good. Very good,” said Martin. “This is what I’m going to be thinking about all afternoon now. Your horrible pun is going to haunt me, somehow seeping like a bad taste into the food, and if I fail in my first day as a professional but unpaid kitchen worker, it’ll be all your fault.”

“Martin?” she said as he rose to leave. He stopped, turned to Claire. “Good luck.”

He hadn’t realized how hot the kitchen of a restaurant was, although, looking around him at all the other workers, nobody else seemed particularly affected by the heat. Martin kept wiping his forehead and neck throughout the afternoon, and as all the ovens were lit in anticipation of the approaching dinner hour, the heat became suffocating.

“You all right?” Duncan asked, and Martin nodded and said he was.

“Good, then,” said the chef, distracted by a waiter asking him a question on the other side of the huge, gleaming room. “Why don’t you go help out with the chopping, then?”

“The chopping” turned out to be an endless session devoted to potatoes, chicken breasts,
and, especially, scallions. Mountains of scallions, long and slender and bulbous at the tip, scallions that lay across the countertop like hanks of long green hair. Knives flashed; when one became the slightest bit dull, a whetstone was produced, and the knife was dragged along it, making a sound that set Martin’s teeth on edge. Of course, it was only a matter of an hour or so before he cut himself on a just–sharpened blade, an event that seemed commonplace to the rest of the staff, although the amount of blood was, at first, slightly alarming to Martin. Where was Claire to take care of him, as she had done the day of his black eye in the gazebo? Someone tossed him an adhesive bandage, and a moment later someone else gave him a new pile of potatoes and told him to get started.

But after all the chopping was through, Duncan called him over to a cooler part of the kitchen, near the refrigerators, and sat with him for a while to discuss the week’s menus. Duncan spoke eloquently about the different foods, about how he arrived at his choices, and Martin found himself paying attention in a way he had rarely done even in class at Princeton.

“Why don’t you try to come up with a dinner?” Duncan asked. “Remember, think salmon.” And with a little encouragement Martin mumbled a few new ideas, some of which Duncan lightly mocked, others which he commended. The next night, Duncan included two of Martin’s suggestions on the dinner menu.

Martin was thrilled, overexcited; when he came back to the suite late that night, Claire was asleep in the huge bed that looked out over the lawn and, slightly farther, a lake. She woke up then, lightly sniffing the air. “Scallions?” she said, and then she went right back to sleep.

For three days and nights, Martin Rayfiel worked in the kitchen at Thetford. It made the manager of the hotel nervous that one of the paying guests should be willingly exerting himself in this way, but Duncan Lear reassured the manager that this was what Martin wanted, that this was only adding to his stay at the castle. “Perhaps I should put all my guests to work,” said the manager. “The women could become chambermaids.” But he
didn’t stop Martin from working in the kitchen. Martin even celebrated his twenty–first birthday there. The entire staff surprised him while he was stewing a chicken. They gathered around him, singing in harmony. He was legally grown and could collect his inheritance now, which was a good thing, since the money from the sale of the family crest was rapidly diminishing.