As the adults talked, I dreamed and drank, and occupied myself feeding a handful of nuts to the Waldens’ spaniel. When Lee saw me doing this, he unexpectedly flared up. “Why would you do that? Don’t you know that it could kill her?” He proceeded, much to my bewilderment, to storm into the house, taking the spaniel with him. Jillian apologized. “Don’t mind Lee. He’s very protective of that dog.”
I remembered wistfully that my father had always disliked animals, particularly dogs; that the only pets I had ever been allowed were lone canaries and gloomy Japanese fighting fish, which sat like wilted flowers in their tanks and died within days. Twenty minutes later, Lee emerged from the house in perfect spirits, telling us that the paella was almost done and that Josephine had just called to say that she was passing the regional park and would be with us shortly. He resumed his place between my mother and Jillian, topped up his wine, and took a handful of nuts from the bowl on the table.
It was a little after eight when the daughter of the house arrived. She had her father’s teeth and height, her mother’s neck and hair. She was hand-in-hand with a short, scruffy creature, who I took to be her college boyfriend. After greeting everyone at the table, myself included, she settled into the seat beside me, accepted some wine, and remarked upon the pleasant aromas coming from the kitchen. Jillian took this as a cue to rise from her chair and, despite many polite protestations, was promptly followed into the house by my mother.
Over dinner, Lee began a tedious, heated discussion with Josephine’s beau about politics. On either side of Mr. Walden, the older women sipped at their wine, picked at their paella, and affected to listen—eyes glazed and chins resting on their hands. Josephine, a twenty-year-old Spanish major, turned to me and asked how I was liking her old boarding school. I told her that I liked it well enough and took the opportunity to engage her in reminiscences of the S.C.C.S. faculty.
She recalled, with fondness, her former Spanish master, Señor Rafael; hulking Mr. Higginbottom, and Albert Wolfstein, whose class on modern literature she had taken as a senior. “Did you ever have Mr. Steadman?” I questioned, making every effort to control my features. “Steadman . . .” she thought for a moment; that divine name meant nothing to her. “What does he look like?”
“Oh, you know . . .” I felt my face burning. “Sort of tall. Fortyish. Dark hair. Handsome, for a teacher.”
“I don’t think so . . . Actually, hold on. I might’ve had him as a sophomore. Is he kind of touchy-feely?”
My blush deepened. “In what way?”
“Leaning a bit too close. Crouching next to your desk. That sort of thing.”
“I like Mr. Steadman. He’s a good teacher.” Every part of me was blazing as I said this.
My mother, who I hadn’t realized was listening in—having given up the pretense of caring about the men’s conversation—languorously inquired. “Steadman? Isn’t that the name of the friend you stayed with?”
“Stratton,” I hissed, “Her name was Catherine Stratton.”
I took a gulp of wine and, swallowing my venom, asked Josephine whether she’d heard the rumor that Mr. Wolfstein was a homosexual.
LATER THAT night, when the adults were sufficiently intoxicated and Josephine sufficiently entwined with her young man not to notice my absence, I rose from the table to make a call to Mr. Steadman. His phone rang on, without regard to my feelings. Hearing the adults’ voices rising from the garden, it occurred to me that he was probably at a dinner party of his own; that I was alone and not in full possession of my faculties. I retired to the guest bedroom early to spare myself the indignity of sitting out on the patio with the rest of them, and of being awake when my mother stumbled into her nightclothes and passed out beside me, well after midnight.
She had been impressed with Arcady, as had I—insofar as I could be impressed by anything that didn’t directly relate to Steadman. Early in the week, we returned to the cottage once again, and I was allowed to bathe in the green waters as my mother and the Waldens strolled about the property. “How pretty the wisteria is!” I heard my mother exclaim, entering the garden. “You should do a painting of it, Lizzie,” kind Jillian remarked. Her husband, the sleaze, noticed me in the pool, pale and thin and insipid in my faded bikini. “Why don’t you take a dip, Lizzie?” My mother tittered appreciatively.
It was agreed that Lee should contact the owners of the cottage as soon as possible. He conducted a long discussion with them late that night, with my mother hanging off his shoulder, bartering through him, to reach a tentative agreement that made her squeal and Lee dip into the cellar for a celebratory bottle.
The week, from then on, was an endless string of diversions: dinners, cafes, galleries, bookshops, and boutiques. I could see that my mother was enjoying herself and, in a detached way, hoped that she would continue doing so, even as I moped and mourned over the impropriety of the situation, the absence of Steadman, and the rapidity with which both she and I seemed to have forgotten all that had once been true. I yearned for my father as I hadn’t in months, at the same time as I yearned for Steadman: confusing their images in a wholesale desire for god and man, a rejection of her and me.
Lying in the dark, clutching at phantoms, her presence at my side was loathsome. Also loathsome were the times when she changed out of one set of dark clothing and into another, shyly keeping to the opposite side of the room, as if sensing something of my aversion. As much as I tried not to look her way, some ancient lust or envy would cause my eyes to stray to her side of the room and notice various morbid details: the slight puckering of cellulite on the backs of her pale thighs; the persistent sacral dimples; her underwear, which was as lacy as anything that she had worn when I was a child, though as black as the rest of her mourning.
She was aging. She was past her prime. She would never be able to reclaim the milk and fire, the Birth-of-Venus brilliancy of her days as my father’s wife. And yet, she wasn’t so aged that her body had ceased to work to a monthly schedule. Indeed, as females who’d lived together for many years, we were fatefully synchronized, in that sense. This was what brought her scrambling through my toiletries bag on the morning of February the twenty-eighth, our last full day in Carmel; the bag where I happened to keep, among other things, my birth control pills.
I entered from the lounge to find her standing over my luggage with the dial of pills in her hand. I stopped dead in my tracks. She glanced up at me, flushed, and faltered. “I’m sorry . . . I wasn’t . . . I was just looking for a tampon.”
“In the left pocket,” I said coolly, and turned on my heel to go.
The fallout didn’t take place until later that day, when Jill and Josephine had absented the house with their spaniel. I was sitting on the patio stairs, reading a book on Pre-Raphaelite art that I had found earlier that week in one of the town’s bookstores. Although I heard my mother come out with her coffee, I didn’t look up—simply continued thumbing through the pictures, peering at the pale faces of Jane Burden, Lizzie Siddal, and Maria Zambaco. She stood behind me for several pages with her back against the balustrades, mutely fingering her mug. The gold of her wedding band glinted sadly on her dainty, white hand. “Laurel, darling, about those pills . . ..”
I sighed. “Are you really going to tell me off for this? You, of all people?”
“What do you mean, me of all people? I’m your mother.”
“As if I had any choice about it,” I muttered under my breath.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“Honey, I think it’s time for you to put your book away. I’m not mad. I just really need to know what’s going on with you, why you felt you couldn’t come to me with this. Oh, Laurel, you know all I want is for you to be happy . . .”
“I’d be happier not talking about this.”
“Please don’t shut me out, darling. You don’t need to hide this from me. I’ve been there before. There’s nothing wrong with what you’re doing—it’s a wonderful, natural thing!
It’s only the secrecy that makes it seem bad. Please.” Her sea-green eyes shone. “Let me understand, Laurel.”
My voice stuck in my throat. “You can’t.”
“Give me a chance! Please.” My mother squeezed my hand. “You’re my only daughter. It upsets me that we’re not close like Jill and Josie are. Don’t you see that this can bring us together?” She looked beyond me with misted eyes. “I’ve never told you this before, but when you were younger, I sometimes had the feeling you were judging me, like you were sort of cold toward me. It can be different now. We’re both old enough to try to understand each other better. Believe it or not, I do know what it’s like to be in love . . .”
It took all my effort to respond in a low, seething voice. “It has nothing to do with love.”
“What, then? Sex?”
“You don’t understand.” I shook my head, “It goes so much deeper than that. Whether you analyze it or not, there are some things that do run deep. Don’t make me tell you those things. You’re better off not knowing those things.”
“For God’s sake, can’t we just talk like normal people? I don’t understand why you have to be so obscure all the time. Tell me something real. Who is he? When did it start? Anything.”
“I can’t.”
“Is it really so horrible for you to confide in me? Do you really hate me that much?”
“Please, just leave me alone. I want to read.”
“Oh!” She sobbed, “I don’t know why I bother. You are cold! You always have been! How any man can stand you . . .”
I pretended not to notice her words, nor her stormy exit into the house. For a long time after she’d gone, I remained staring at the page upon which my book lay open. On it was a picture of Millais’s Ophelia, modeled by Lizzie Siddal. Although my tresses were not quite as copper as hers, and my beauty not as flat and mask-like, there was a resemblance. It occurred to me then that no matter how bad the situation was, I could be thankful for one thing: that it was Steadman’s pills she’d found and not my father’s.
WE WERE silent all the way through the two-hour ride back to San Francisco the following morning. For the first time ever, the distance between my mother and me was apparent to both of us: undisguised by the surface chatter that she’d been kind enough to supply in the past. Without this chatter, the starkness of our relationship was more terrible to me than I could ever have imagined. As we neared the south of the city, I found myself suggesting lamely, “Maybe we could stop in Colma and bring some flowers to Daddy’s grave?” She appeared not to hear me.
That night, we withdrew to our separate rooms. I took the opportunity to telephone Steadman, who I hadn’t spoken to in almost a week. I intended to confide in him about the argument with my mother. When he answered the phone, however, all that I could say was, “I need to see you.”
“I need to see you, Daphne. This whole week has been wretched. Your lovely envelope—I keep coming in here to look at it. They hate me, I’m sure. Everybody hates me . . .”
“I love you. When?”
“Midday? I’ll pick you up.”
“Make it one o’clock.” I bit my lip. “And park a few houses up. I’ll find you.”
“Oh, my nymph, I’ve been trying to write verse for you all week, but nothing sticks. I’m nothing but a hack, a sad old schoolteacher. I’m forty-three. How did that happen?”
“It’s not that old,” I reassured him.
“ ‘. . . ‘Tis time the heart should be unmoved/ since others it hath ceased to move . . .’ Byron was only thirty-six when he wrote that. What I wouldn’t give to be thirty-six again!”
He went on in that manner for some time, talking about worms and cankers and yellow leaves until I quite forgot my own woes, in sympathy for his mid-life crisis. I suspected this crisis had more to do with him being deprived of our tri-weekly pleasures than anything else, and would be alleviated the moment that I pressed my young body against him. In the meantime, I told him that I was green enough for the both of us; that he was my laureate; that he’d never grow old with me—all the while aware that there was no truth in this; that my soul was far from young; that I was merely perpetuating the myth that he loved so well.
I was not expected to accompany my mother the next day, when she went out to visit some faculty wives, including poor Jemima Hancock. She didn’t leave the house until close to one. I stayed in bed, watching her walk to the Peugeot in a navy dress through the blinds of my upstairs window. Having little time to repair my appearance before Steadman’s arrival, I met him as I was: hair unwashed, face clean of makeup, dressed in an old sweatshirt from the University of Heidelberg. My bare feet were shoved into bedroom slippers.
I tapped on the tinted window of the SUV. He opened the door and pulled me inside, so that my limbs were skewed awkwardly between him and the car seats. Kissing my lips, my neck, my hair, he told me that my disheveled state was very becoming; that I looked exactly like a truant schoolgirl, faking sick in order to spend her days inside making love. I disentangled myself. I asked him up to the townhouse—a proposition that he accepted boldly. Somewhere between the car and my front porch, I lost and retrieved a slipper.
I took him to the room with the daybed and pulled down the blinds. There, he had me vigorously: too vigorously, perhaps, for I felt quite bruised inside by the end of it—though, God knows, my moans had done nothing to discourage him. Afterward, he pulled up his trousers and lay back, reaching into his pocket for a pack of Dunhills. I’d told him a few weeks ago that I wouldn’t mind him smoking, as long he smoked Dunhills.
I pulled on my sweatshirt, stretching it over my naked knees and drawing them to my chest. I watched him light his cigarette. I looked and felt younger than my years.
“I want to ask for a divorce,” he told me inevitably, smoke curling at his fingertips.
At that, I began to cry.
WE WERE both glad to be back where we belonged on Monday. Though we had no lesson together that day, we met after school in the classroom for a coupling on his desk. He had promised, after witnessing my reaction the previous week, not to do anything rash; to in fact stay silent on the subject of divorce altogether. I couldn’t help feeling, however, that he was merely humoring me; that the matter was already settled, in his mind; that he regarded my tears as little more than a feminine outburst, brought about by weakness of the nerves and a youthful incapacity to cope with big decisions; that he’d already decided what was best for me.
If my best interests did not coincide with his children’s, he didn’t admit it. Instead, he rationalized his poor parenting. “Cathy and Cole don’t need me. They’re not little kids anymore,” or “You should see the deadly looks that my daughter gives me, these days. She doesn’t want me around.”
I thought that I knew the source of these deadly looks. Way back in December, after taking me to that awful clinic and subsequently parking for half an hour in a dark grove of oaks, Steadman had dropped me off in his SUV at the field-side parking lot. It was a windswept day. A few younger girls were standing about on the playing field in bright red soccer jerseys, arms akimbo. Stepping out of my gas-guzzling steed, I caught sight of another gleam of red among the shrubbery. It eventually metamorphosed into the thin, jerseyed back of Karen Harmsworth’s sister, bent over the errant ball. I slammed the car door. My Mary Janes crunched over the gravel. The freshman straightened up, ball under arm, and peered at me with her pale, husky-dog eyes. We both flinched as Steadman backed out of the parking lot with an indelicate honk of his horn.
From that day on, whenever I saw Karen Harmsworth’s little sister in hallways and bathroom queues, I felt her eyes on me. Sometimes, if she were with a crowd of other freshmen, they would all look at me. Karen herself, who I had the misfortune of having in my English class, would sometimes cast a stolid, curious eye my way, especially when Steadman was near my desk. Thankfully, her glances had none of the insistence of her younger sister’s.
I tried to take the issue up with Steadman
one day, when he was complaining of his children’s diminished respect for him. “Doesn’t your daughter have a friend at this school?”
“Cathy? I don’t think so.”
“She had some photos in her room . . .” I paused, afraid that he might not have approved of my trespass. He remained unfazed. “. . . with Karen Harmsworth’s little sister.”
“Which one is that?”
“Small. Freckles. Short, black hair. Creepy eyes.”
“Ah.” Steadman laughed. “I think I’ve seen that one. Not much to look at, is she?”
“That’s not the point. I’m worried she might know something. I’ve seen her staring at me.”
He laughed again. “I wouldn’t worry about her. She’s a queer one. She probably just likes the look of you.”
“I don’t think so. What if she’s told Cathy?”
“So be it. The kids are going to have to find out eventually. After all . . .” This was a tasteless joke of his, “You might be their stepmother, someday.”
It irked me that he could take it all so lightly when, for me, our situation was nothing if not dire. Like poor Heloise, I was fated to find more sweetness in the word “whore” than “wife.” I saw myself as Steadman’s whore, his fetish, his poetic indiscretion—nothing more permanent than that. At the hint of anything more permanent, my head instantly became crowded with counterarguments; considerations of age, family, and temperament that made our love seem ill-starred, instead of the miracle of cosmic alignment that it really was. For, whenever I cast my mind back, all the way back, to that initial meeting, I couldn’t help being struck by how divinely arranged it had been. Every detail, from the dead father to the trees I sat under, to the whiteness of his shirt, had conspired to bring us together.
I was afraid of straying too far from the poetry of this initial connection. Though I was still his nymph, though he still showered me with poetry, he did little to protect me from the realities that hurtled toward me like a bulldozer through woods. In fact, more often than not, he was that bulldozer—trampling the greenness that he, as much as I, needed to uphold. It wasn’t only the references he made to our future, to us living together as man and teen wife: it was the sloppiness, the ignorance of aesthetic truth, that such references implied.
The Wood of Suicides Page 14
