In the corridor of my dorm, I almost collided with Sadie Bridges, who informed me that I should hurry if I wanted to make it to dinner. I shook my head speechlessly. I had no desire to be seen in the dining hall, feeling that all the evidence of the wretched deed was written in my rumpled uniform, my unkempt tresses, and the odor that clung to me—an unpleasant odor like bleach, covering up something rank, humid, and feminine. I went to the washroom and ran myself a bath, stripping off my clothes in the misting mirror. Inspecting my naked form for changes, I thought that I could perceive a certain ripe, tarnished quality that hadn’t always been there. I turned away in self-disgust.
I could only hope that what I had read about the contraceptive properties of hot bathwater were true, lowering myself into the steaming tub. I closed my eyes and lay back, welcoming the sterile tide as it washed away the sin, with its residue of blood, dirt, and seed. When I tried to recall the act, I instantly felt his weight upon me and a splitting pain between my legs. There was no pleasure to recall; all the same, I felt my lips burning at the memory, and a throbbing in my loins. I recognized this at once for what it was: the curse of renewed desire.
I may as well have spent that evening in hell, so extreme and variable were my emotions. There was despair, which had me sobbing, dry-eyed, into my pillow, and thinking desperately of the canister of pills—still in my coat pocket, and as well-stocked as it had been that afternoon. There was disgust: for myself, for my lover, and for the sordid, undignified act. There was fear, physical and spiritual. There was delirium, sweet and fey and frenzied, which could have seen me stripping off my clothes or, just as easily, tearing off my own flesh in strips. There was repentance, which had me yearning to be a child again, in my mother’s arms, hidden from the world of men. Finally, there was the desire, constant as a heartbeat, which made suicide and repentance equally impossible.
By morning, I was numb. Unable to cope with the emotional turmoil of the night before, I had forced myself to adopt a new construct of feeling: one that did not distinguish among any of the prior sentiments or even the more fleeting, positive stirrings of triumph and tenderness. It was as if I were looking out over the whole spectrum of my emotions all at once—a mountain scape of blissful peaks, crags, and lows. Naturally, this made it difficult for me to act, even think. On Saturday afternoon, I took my books to the library and was less productive than ever. At Sunday Mass, I was unmoved by the sermon and found myself staring instead at the stained-glass windows of the chapel: pure, glazed windows that reminded me of my broken state, the sanctity from which I was eternally severed.
I STILL hadn’t managed to break out of my passivity by Monday, though I remembered Steadman’s promise that he would seek me out. Instinctively, I clung to my companions, hardly daring to venture from one classroom to the next without another girl by my side, acting as my dueña. The two occasions when I did glimpse him from afar, walking alongside Mr. Wolfstein and standing outside his classroom with a coffee mug in hand, I felt faint and didn’t allow myself to be seen. Our promises to meet each other again as soon as possible died away with last period, where I sat beside Marcelle drawing staid Japanese mountain scapes in black ink.
That evening, I found myself fretting over the broken engagement, half-convinced that it was he who had been avoiding me and that his passion must have cooled over the weekend. My former ambivalence was forgotten as I pined after Mr. Steadman, counting the hours until our inevitable meeting in the next morning’s English class. I selected my undergarments with care and laid them out with my uniform, letting my imagination run wild with thoughts of how free we really were, the unlimited caresses and compliments that would now be showered upon me—provided I could keep him interested.
In the morning, I took extra pains to make myself presentable, staining my lips “cinnamon” and donning an Alice band to keep my hair off my face. I arrived at his class in a flurry after biology, my cheeks flushed from the cold. He was cleaning the blackboard with small, fussy gestures. There was a vase of red chrysanthemums on his desktop. We were not yet alone, so our eyes could only meet briefly. Nevertheless, I noticed his suppressed smile of tenderness and felt myself responding; felt my body softening as the morning light, with all its dancing dust motes, flooded through the window and into my heart.
He was fluent, he was limpid, he conducted himself with ease. He shot me meaningful glances, full of black, liquid fire, as he read from Don Juan—seeking my face with every mention in the poem of the words “heart,” “love,” and “desire.” As for me, I didn’t take my eyes off him, sitting back in my chair with my legs gracefully crossed and my hands folded in my lap. I sat in my newly acquired wisdom, watching him and reminding myself that the lines of his body were known to me; that the touch of his hands was known to me; that the lips he recited with had been in contact with my lips only days ago. He was mine, all mine—never mind the strip of gold on his finger, the three days we’d spent apart. I rejoiced in my knowledge of him, which made me feel as privileged as a visionary who’s just seen the face of God.
He had us close our books five minutes before time was up so he could hand back our essays from the week before. One by one, the other eleven girls were called up to collect their work—some returning to their desks with scowls, some beaming. By the time that the bell went, my name still hadn’t been announced. My classmates clattered to clear the room. “How odd, Laurel, I can’t seem to find your essay.” He smiled at me as I approached his desk, making a show of rifling through his papers. “Give me a moment, it must be in one of these files . . .”
AFTER THE last girl had slipped through the door, Steadman smirked and retrieved my paper from where it had been lying the whole time, facedown at his elbow. As I reached in to accept it, he took hold of my wrist, swiftly pulling up the sleeve of my gray sweater. Laughing, I loosed myself and made for the door against his protests. He was silenced when he saw me slide the door shut and bolt it from the inside. I glanced at my grade and returned to him, simpering as I stashed the paper inside my satchel.
“Oh, you sly thing.” He patted his knee. “Come, sit with me.”
I hesitated. I had never sat on a man’s knee before.
“Come on.” He held me by the waist and drew me closer to him. I settled awkwardly on his lap and, immediately feeling his response, lowered my eyes.
“You’re still shy of me, aren’t you?” he said in a sugary voice, somewhat patronizing. “We’ll have to work on that.”
I shrugged and shook my head.
“I won’t bite, you know.” He sat back from me slightly—a teacher again, despite the bulge in his trousers.
“I don’t mind if you do.”
“Oh, my girl.” He thumbed my cheek. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
Maybe I didn’t. In any case, I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Our first conversations were really all something of a failure. In fact, when I think about it, we were only ever able to talk freely after making love. We didn’t have time to make love then.
Instead, I shuffled forward in his lap, making him sigh inadvertently. I brushed my fingers over his collar and blinked down at his tie, with its pattern of golden spears or arrowheads. I waited a long heartbeat, before giving him an amateurish, wet kiss. He accepted it graciously.
As our kisses grew deeper and longer, he must have noticed the discrepancy between my callow enthusiasm, which left his chin slick with saliva, and his refinements—refinements that struck me as somewhat grotesque at the time. I didn’t know how to respond to the sucking and nibbling of my lower lip, or the tongue artfully arching and caressing my own. His breath, teachers’ breath, tasted faintly of coffee. His hands smoothed over my hips and up to my small breasts, groping them through the wool of my sweater. I was becoming very hot and bothered with the knowledge that the bell would be going any minute, that the halls would be flooded any minute with girls refreshed from their morning break, and that I wouldn’t be able to find relief in time. It
was a relief then, in an anticlimactic way, when the bell did go and I jumped up from his lap, away from the source of my anxiety.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve been interrupted by one of those,” he said of the bell, in allusion to our first encounter. “Nor do I think it will be the last.”
I mumbled something about getting to math class and he nodded, stroked my leg in acquiescence. As I reached the door, he called my name. “Laurel! When can I see you again. . . ?”
OUR FIRST true rendezvous took place on Wednesday after third period. I had gone from his class to gym, changing into my red costume and getting my name marked off the list as usual. I had even run along with the rest of the class, past the tennis courts and toward the oval, cutting through the shrubbery. As a fine, mist-like rain began to fall, I took the opportunity to duck behind the bushes, where I waited for the last of the joggers to pass. By the time I made it to the English department, having turned back to collect my things from the locker room, I was quite drenched and the hour was more than half up. I locked the door behind me as he bolted up from his chair and came to meet me in the middle of the room, where he was to have me for the second time ever.
It was carpet burn and good, plain missionarsstellung, just as God had intended it—my soaking gym clothes piled in a corner of the room, between the wastepaper basket and the radiator. Against my expectations, it hurt just as much as the first time: more, even, for then I had been overcome with emotion, whereas that Wednesday afternoon in the well-lit classroom, I was perfectly lucid. All the same, I didn’t cry; in fact, I did what I could to accommodate him, wrapping my legs around his back and sighing into his ear to speed the whole thing up. At the vital moment, he pulled out—an unexpected wrench that pained me almost as much as the first, expected thrust—and, to my dismay, spilled his warmth all over my rain-glistening stomach.
The rain outside was coming down in heavy sheets, which crashed against the windowpanes like gunfire. At some point during his last loving labors, the lunch bell had sounded. From the halls beyond, we could hear the muffled chattering of schoolgirls who preferred to crowd together undercover rather than brave the downpour. He mumbled grateful nothings into my ear. He kissed my petal-mouth, the tips of my pale breasts. He went to his desk for tissues. “Was it better this time?” he wanted to know, dabbing at my stomach. “Yes,” I lied. Such was the miserable business that I’d gotten myself into.
We spent an hour together in the claustrophobic tenderness of each other’s arms and the heat of the radiator. As he stroked and fondled my young body, telling me that he’d never known such smooth skin, such lovely legs, such delicacy and tightness, I shyly inspected his own body from above. Though there was little beauty about the underarm hair, the chest hair, and the hair that grew across his belly, the sight of all this inspired me with awe, so marvelous was the contrast between his dark, hirsute virility and my insipid loveliness. Out of a desire to exaggerate this contrast, I reached for his wrist and removed his brown and gold watch, fitting it, at its tightest setting, halfway up my forearm. Predictably, he complimented my slenderness. I proceeded to try on his gold wedding band, swiveling it about the joint of my ring finger and asking him how many years he’d been married (sixteen), whether he got along well with his wife.
“Oh, yes,” he effused. “Danielle is a wonderful person.”
He went on to tell me tactfully that he obviously didn’t love her, the mother of his children, as he loved me; that he’d never loved anyone as forcefully and inevitably as he loved me; that he hoped I didn’t think badly of him for betraying her. I assured him that I didn’t, adding that I wasn’t bothered in the least by the fact that he was married.
As strange as it may seem, I really had the utmost respect for the sacred covenant of marriage. In the first place, I had been a daughter, the product of the lawful union between my mother and father. As sinful as my intentions may have been, I had always observed a certain piety, a childish reverence of convention, when it came to this union. I had no desire to supplant her, to take her place in the marital bed, to be anything other than the illegitimate ray of sunshine that brightened his workday afternoons. It was essential to me that Steadman was married, for it meant that—Byronic qualities aside—he was respectable; that he cared about appearances; that he hadn’t spent the years before we met as a roving bohemian, moving from woman to woman. It meant that, by the time we met, his longing had been refined. It was the refined lust of an educated, dissatisfied man in his early forties: a lust that, I was convinced, could only be fulfilled by the likes of me.
RAINS CONTINUED throughout the first week of our relationship. I was in love with the sodden fields beyond the classroom windows, with the slick bricks and asphalt, with every silver droplet hanging from the eaves. My love was boundless. It encompassed everything, since everything was part of the same world as my love for him. Everything in the world seemed to reference our love. The azaleas on the path to the library were as full and red as his desktop chrysanthemums, as anything that opens or bleeds with desire. When I heard the rains, I couldn’t help but think back to our midweek tryst in the locked classroom, and my own pearled stomach. I heard the rains and longed to be flooded.
I lost whole lessons in dreaming; dreams that differed from those of our courtship, since they were grounded in the rich stuff of reality—in the actual salt of his sweat, the actual dimensions of his manhood, the actual moans that I elicited from him, simply by being a young and beautiful receptacle. I gave thanks to the gods of interior design, to their unlikely penchant for doors that locked from the inside and windows that faced out onto the natural world, rather than into hallways where schoolgirls shuffled and lynx-like deputies prowled. When, at morning break, Marcelle waved a giggling palm in my face and snapped her cold-pinked fingers loudly, my only reaction was to beam.
“She’s out of it,” Amanda concluded snidely. “Totally out of it.”
AFTER POSSESSING me that Friday, my lover drew me onto his lap and lavished me with praises and caresses, much as he had the last time we were together. I took advantage of this by posing a deliberate, female question. “You really think I’m beautiful?”
“More than beautiful,” he assured me. “You’re a work of art. You’re a Pre-Raphaelite painting. In fact, I used to look at you reading by that window there and imagine you as Collier’s Lady Godiva. Do you know John Collier?”
I shook my head.
“I’ll have to show you the painting one day.” He smiled his slightly uneven smile. “Danielle and I saw it when we were in England. The likeness is astounding. Never did I dream I’d be touching—”
“When,” I cut in, more deliberately still, “did you realize that you were in love with me?”
“Oh, my darling, I wanted you from the start. The first time that I saw you, sitting under your laurel trees, looking just like Daphne . . .”
“Daphne?”
“Apollo’s first love. A wood nymph. He pursued her and she turned herself into a laurel tree to escape. Actually, it was her father who transformed her. He was a river god. She begged him to let her remain a virgin and he obliged.” Steadman laughed. “Fortunately for me, I’ve never had to worry about divine intervention. Have I, my Daphne?”
“No, never,” I quietly agreed.
“Did you know,” my master went on, looking into my eyes, “that Apollo was the god of poetry?”
“Apollo,” I tried out the name, sensing that this was what he wanted, “My Apollo.”
His expression, at that moment, could not have been more self-satisfied. I laid my head on his chest. I sighed. I told him that I too had been in love with him from first sight.
ALTHOUGH we had only been lovers for a week, it felt as if I had been doing it for much longer, as if we had been rehearsing the same dialogue for centuries. I knew, by then, that it would never get any better for me; that it would always be bitter and painful and perplexing. I also knew that I was helplessly addicted; that I would go on
doing it whether I wanted to or not, simply because I had to, and because it was the thing that was done. I was condemned to the repetition, to the mindless performance of a ritual that made little sense to me, and whose benefits shrank to nothing when pitted against the risk, the agony, the potential for disaster that attended our every coupling. I could only hope that it was a more pleasurable experience for him.
As I saw it, nothing could be simpler than the transports that he underwent, the radiant void that he inhabited, while I turned my face and attempted to predict where and how hard the next blow would fall. When it was over, perhaps, his feelings were not so simple. There was grief, guilt, and gratitude—an excessive kind of gratitude that made him take me onto his lap and whisper all kinds of praises and diminutives, which I blushed at receiving. At these times, I could ask him anything about himself and he would answer honestly; anything about myself, and he would answer in the most lyrical and hyperbolic of terms. The sweetness of the aftermath always had a palliative effect on me, contrasting as it did with the starkness of what had come before. I grew to depend on it, awaiting it as a forgetful mist that told me it had not been all terror, all agony.
In the week and a half leading up to Thanksgiving, we managed to make love on several more occasions. The usual times were established—Mondays and Fridays after school, Wednesdays during fourth period and lunch hour—as well as the usual techniques. For the time being, we wouldn’t deviate much from these techniques.
Technicalities: he continued to use his interruptus method, whenever he could stand it; he continued to be on top; he continued to have me on the olive green carpet of his classroom—though we tried it on his desk as well. Non-technicalities: I continued to feel, to pine, and to suffer more than he could ever know; to give myself over to the pain for pleasures that were at best ambiguous.
There was a kind of pleasure in it—I don’t deny that. Yet it wasn’t the divine pleasure that I’d brought myself to expect. Some weeks ago, in a rare moment of seriousness, Marcelle had asked Amanda to describe what it felt like. “It’s weird. You grow to like it, but it’s weird. Like having an alien inside you.” If I had to describe it, I would say that it was like learning to like a new kind of music by listening to the notes that weren’t played, finding warmth and relief in the hollows, the vales between the mountains of dissonance. It was a dull, woeful, earthbound pleasure—not at all divine.
The Wood of Suicides Page 9
