Allegra Huston - A Stolen Summer

Eve moves to return the instrument to its exile, but she can’t bring herself to do it. Now that she has touched it, she cannot push it back into the shadows.

It’s an extravagance, driving into Manhattan: the cost of parking; the idling crosstown traffic. But Eve needed her car for her expedition to the outer boroughs, and she is not ready to go home to New Jersey. She finds an expensive space in an elevator lot, and starts walking the eight blocks to the Public Library. She leaves the strange instrument, in its case, on the back seat beside a curly wrought-iron birdcage she picked up earlier.

“Eve? Eve Armanton?”

She looks around, unsure where this urgent voice is coming from. She has barely heard her maiden name since college.

“Eve! I can’t believe it!”

“Robert?”

Robert Burnett, her brother Bill’s best friend. And, beside him, a younger man who must be his son. The pair of them hit her like an optical illusion, a thirty-year warp in time: Robert now and Robert then, standing side by side on 34th Street. The son is, Eve realizes, even more beautiful than his father used to be, with thick black hair, a finely cut nose, and angled eyebrows over long, wide-set eyes. Age has dragged Robert’s once-fine jawline into jowls, and thinned his hair. The bright blue eyes that enthralled her when she was fifteen are murky, and there’s a sheen to his skin as if the cholesterol in his bloodstream is seeping through.

Back then, Robert reminded her of Tigger, with his bouncing energy and his recklessness. He and Bill were twenty-two: college roommates, party boys, the world at their feet. Everything seemed to come easily to Robert—but Bill saw shadows where Robert saw only the light. Robert’s wildness was pure exuberance; Bill, Eve sensed with a teenager’s unspeakable anxiety, was daring fate, as if hurrying up the tragedy he knew would surely come. Eve has barely thought of Robert since her brother’s funeral. After Bill’s death, she cut off all connection with the elements of his life, terrified that the darkness that drove him to suicide might invade her too.

Robert moves more slowly now, his boisterousness reined in by years of office-bred decorum, the crazy Hawaiian shirts he used to wear replaced by a well-cut suit, pink shirt, and brightly patterned tie. She knows what he wants to do, and she will let him do it, for old times’ sake: sweep her up in a hug and spin her round and round until they both get dizzy. Bill used to do that when he saw Eve after a gap of weeks, and the fact that Bill did it became Robert’s permission, a fond mastery over his friend’s little sister, whose adoration he accepted, without comment or attention, as his due.

Robert’s arms lifting her feel as strong as they always did. Cars, pedestrians, storefronts whirl past in a circular blur. Eve scrambles for a reference point, as she was taught in childhood ballet class, and there it is, like a hook catching her searching eyes: the younger man’s gaze, his eyes a startling green, strobing as Robert whirls her around.

Finally, she feels concrete under her feet again. Robert keeps hold of her arm to prevent them both from falling. Bill used to love it when she fell over: a big brother’s affectionate cruelty.

“How long has it been?” Robert’s face is alight with the pleasure of finding her.

“Twenty-nine years. Almost.”

“The funeral.”

Eve nods. It took place in November. Leaves stripped from the trees, naked branches that made her think of her brother’s dead bones.

“You remember, we had a baby with us? Well, here he is. Mick, meet Eve.”

“Micajah,” he says, gently correcting his father. A name she’s never heard before. Mic-KAY-jah. She likes the roll of it.

He holds out his hand. “Eve,” he says.

She’s reluctant to touch him, as if she might be touching an electrified fence. As his fingers close around her hand, her nerves register the calluses on his fingertips. She drops her eyes. He’s wearing jeans and a loose blue shirt, the sleeves partly rolled. His feet, in hiker’s flip-flops, are sinewy, with long toes. She feels suddenly that she shouldn’t be looking at them, these body parts naked to her gaze.

“Eve’s brother taught me everything I know about music,” says Robert. “Which, granted, compared to you, Mick, isn’t all that much. My son, I want you to know, Eve, is a rock star.”

“I play in a band.” His voice is low, almost hoarse—nothing like Robert’s. His words are no more than an explanation to tone down his father’s boast.

“Inked the last clauses of the deal this morning.” Robert pats his son’s shoulder. “We’re celebrating with lunch. Join us, Eve! Whoever you’re meeting, stand him up!”

This is the Robert she knew: someone who embraced the world with such total disregard for the possibility of rejection that it couldn’t resist him. He was always on to the next thing, always excited, as forceful as a tornado. It fascinated and frightened her, the way the past just fell away behind him into a detritus of facts stripped of meaning. She used to wonder whether anything could really be precious to him.

In memory of Bill, Eve says yes to lunch.

“It’s an old Shaker name,” Micajah tells Eve as they walk, in response to her question. “My great-great-great-great-grandfather’s brother was an architect, the first Micajah Burnett. The first I know of, anyway.”

“I visited a Shakertown in Kentucky once,” she says, “when I was driving my son to college. It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.”

She remembers the elegant symmetry: twin staircases, twinned rooms, to keep the men and the women apart. And the sense of tranquility, which she imagined had always reigned there, since there were no marriages, no children, no sex.

Micajah has his father’s excellent manners; but, where Robert held chairs and doors the way a peacock holds his splayed tail, Micajah holds Eve’s chair for her in an offhand way, as if in casual rebellion against the carelessness of the world. Eve never agreed with the militant college feminists that such manners were insulting; she taught her own son to hold doors, though not just for women. Once she stood outside the door of the bank for several minutes as people went in and out, waiting for the eight-year-old Allan to realize she hadn’t followed his heedless rush toward the M&M dispenser inside.

“Looks like you were scrubbing floors this morning.”

She noticed Micajah registering the grubby hem of her dress and the smudges on her knees as she sat down. She’d tried to wipe them clean in the car, but the dirt had ground itself into her skin.

“I was dragging something out from under a table, in a junk shop in the Bronx. I was on my way to the library to research it when your father waylaid me.”

“That’s cool,” he says. “That you don’t care your knees are dirty.” The corners of his mouth turn down when he smiles, as if he’s keeping back some of his amusement for himself. “What was it?”

“A musical instrument. I don’t know what you’d call it. I’ve never seen anything like it before.” Eve isn’t sure if he’s teasing her. Luckily, the instrument makes a convenient conversational shield. “It’s like a violin—strings and a bow—but squarer, with a really long neck.”

“Sounds like the kind of thing Mick plays,” says Robert. “Weird contraptions that don’t even have English names.”

There’s a sudden edge in his voice: annoyance, or jealousy? Praising Micajah, he was feeding his own ego, Eve realizes, and she dislikes being his audience: for the showing off and the putting down. She’s starting to wish, for more than one reason, that she hadn’t agreed to join them for lunch.