The Wood of Suicides

by Laura Elizabeth Woollett

  I had fallen in love with his contradictions, with his blend of flesh and godliness, bourgeois and bohemian, brute lust and cold refinement. This love hadn’t changed. My ability to cope with it, however, had. In the years before Steadman, when I was still my father’s daughter, I had hated contradiction; had, in fact, been willing to break the incest taboo to avoid it. Somewhere, deep inside, this girl still existed. This girl was suffocating under the strain of her own principles. This girl was gasping for God.

  It was difficult for me to think of my father then, for more reasons than I cared to name. I knew that, in life, he’d been an insignificant man—little more than a luckless wraith, who had experienced a decade of bliss in my mother’s earthly garden, only to return to his abject natural state. I knew that I was partly responsible for this abjection; that I’d never loved him as I should have; that my current attachment to his memory was shadowy at best, and had more to do with his instrumentality in uniting me with Steadman than any special qualities of his mind. For all this, I clung to the idea of his divinity: a divinity that was utterly impotent and could do nothing for me in life, but that comforted me with its sweet, cold, sad finality.

  It was a divinity that had nothing to do with that of my Apollo. In him, a deeply dependent and almost repulsively physical nature had been paired with something inhuman—an underlying, cold-blooded aversion to anything on the side of life. It was this aversion, I suspected, that led him to choose me as a mistress and not a girl better suited to the fulfilment of lust: a lively girl, a womanly girl, a girl without neuroses, a girl utterly devoid of poetry.

  He did not like women. As I was not a woman, but rather, a Waterhouse nymph (tall, lithe, lovely, doomed, nubile, pale as frost, with small schoolgirl breasts tipped with pink, and a broad, bony pelvis), this need not have bothered me then. Someday, however, if I were to go on living, I would be forced to become a woman; to take on the essential characteristics that disgusted me as much as they did him. It was my misfortune to have been born into a sex that I despised, a sex whose inherent physicality precluded all hopes of divinity. I would not allow myself to lapse into womanhood without a fight. I would sooner die than become the thing I hated, the thing that bred hatred.

  I couldn’t go on pretending that he was only his lust, or that the continued service of his lust was what he really wanted. When he took possession of me, I saw beyond the hot blood to the cold desire to shape, fix, and stifle all that was alive in me. His desire was to possess me and, through possession, to take more of my life away. I would let myself be taken until I was nothing more than his creation, a poetic body, the divine alternative to womankind.

  THAT WE’D passed a whole season cloistered together in his classroom, away from the elements of our bitter California winter, was difficult to believe. Although rains continued through most of March and the mornings remained cold enough to merit a sweater, I could sense a change in the air. I began to notice my classmates sporting socks in place of stockings and shedding their gray knitwear whenever they chanced upon a patch of sunlight or felt a room to be particularly overheated. The freshmen had begun to look like sophomores, the sophomores like juniors, the juniors like seniors, and the seniors, somewhat to my malaise, like college girls.

  Even the content of our lessons had changed, becoming looser, more open to interpretation, and requiring a heightened level of individual thought and inquiry. Having handed in our essays on Blake’s America, we were done with the British Romantic poets and given a neat segue into the next component of the course: the American Romantics. For this segment, we were to read critical works by Emerson, selections from Thoreau’s Walden, and later, when it was warm enough for us to return outside for Fridays, the poetry of Whitman, Dickinson, and Poe.

  I ignored the general buzz among my year group about college acceptances, most of which were due during Holy Week. As others jittered and stressed, I privately fretted, less afraid of rejection than I was of its unlikelihood. I yearned for some stupefying miracle to put a halt to my progress and so preserve me in his classroom, in his arms, for all time. Alas, I was too much of a coward to let myself flunk completely, attending Slawinski’s Tuesday afternoon sessions until I regained my B average and practicing my French accent to Madame Rampling’s content. One day, sitting in my lover’s lap, I gave voice to my misgivings, nuzzling against him and sulking. “I don’t want to go to college. I really don’t. Please, can’t you just teach me forever?”

  He laughed. “You overestimate me, my child. In a year, you’ll have surpassed me. No doubt, you’ll have all the professors chasing after you . . .”

  “I don’t want professors. I want this.”

  “This?”

  “Poetry,” I elaborated, “And art. And love. And I want you to teach me Italian. I’m sick of learning French.”

  “Well, I’d be more than willing to supplement you, in those departments. When we marry, we’ll have all our evenings together. I daresay you’ll be bored to death of poetry . . .”

  Glumly, I wondered whether he would be bored of me, by that point. I toyed with his tie and inquired coyly, “I’m not bored of poetry, but do we really have to read Walden?”

  “You don’t like Thoreau? What a pity. I was going to see if you wanted to make an excursion with me this weekend to the woods. Purely educational, of course. We’d be examining the plant life, discoursing on the transcendental effects of nature on the human soul. You’d be bored out of your mind, I expect . . .”

  Throughout the spring, he was to abduct me several times from the campus, with the intention of driving me out to this or that hiking trail, state park, or preserve. Thankfully, my status as a senior, set to graduate in a matter of months, gave me some leeway when it came to signing out for unchaperoned activities. More than once, I even forged a letter from my mother, insisting that Laurel Eloise Marks be permitted to leave the school grounds for the better part of a Saturday, to make the pilgrimage to her dear father’s gravesite. I was amazed by how few eyebrows were raised by this request. At the appointed time, my lover would pick me up in his dark-windowed vehicle from one of the less-frequented gates of the girls’ school, and from there we would make off toward hills and valleys, swimming in fog or crested with redwoods, as well as convenient thickets of artemisia, bay, and bracken.

  For obvious reasons, we preferred foggy days to clear ones, thickly wooded areas to sparse hillocks, and dubious, dirt trails to those that were more frequently trodden. He took me off the tracks and, against tree trunks or in the undergrowth, would clutch and force and bite, with barely a semblance of gentleness. Sometimes, the cracking of a twig or the crunching of gravel would cause him to break away, just as he was on the point of possessing me, and—sullen, engorged, adjusting himself—to march me to the privacy of his parked vehicle. Other times, too far gone for that, he’d simply clutch me tighter, force himself into me further, and bite into the skin of my neck, covering my mouth with his hand in an attempt to stifle my fine, mist-like sighs.

  At least once, we hazarded to meet on a day when it was raining heavily, and confined ourselves to his SUV. He parked off the road, not far from school. He had told his wife that he was going out for gardening supplies and, in fact, really did need to buy some. This he explained to me while fumbling in the glove compartment for his Dunhills, after an awkward entanglement in the backseat, which we both emerged from with bruises. I laughed bitterly. I thought of his hothouse. I thought of his suburban bungalow and his slim, lenient, pediatrician wife. I thought of his pouting son and his plump daughter, who didn’t resemble me in the least, and for whom he had no improper feelings. I thought that any man would be crazy to give this all up for a whore of seventeen, with bruises on her limbs and a buried father, beneath a flowerless headstone in Colma.

  ON LAZARUS Saturday, the last day of March, I was obliged to return to my mother once more for the Easter holidays. In the weeks since I’d seen her last, our contact had been minimal: she phoned only twice—the secon
d time, on March the thirtieth, to confirm that she was picking me up the next morning—and wrote only one brief letter, informing me that she had put the townhouse on the market and found a buyer for my father’s Lexus. All the same, it seemed that she was willing to recover something of our former, superficial relations. I mentioned that I was in need of a gown to wear to the end-of-year dance at Trinity Catholic College. An obliging parent, she offered to take me shopping the following Saturday.

  After a mere six months, she had traded her black clothes for half mourning, a development that coincided mysteriously with the revelation of my non-virginity. Throughout Holy Week—the only time of the year, aside from Christmas, that my family had ever been rigorous with churchgoing—we attended services at St. Dominic’s, with the widow looking lukewarm in shades of gray, dark blue, and lavender. Steadman, as he confided in me over the phone one evening, was exempt from attending the Presbyterian church that his wife and children frequented; had always been exempt, having refused, years ago, to trade in the Catholicism that he had been raised with and later abandoned for her watered down WASPism. Long before we met, he had considered himself, in his pseudo-Byronic manner, to be something of a lost soul, a restless non-believer—and yet, it was apparent to me that he still retained that original sense of guilt, sin, and hell; that he still yearned for judgment; that he yearned to feel himself accused by some higher power, divine or otherwise.

  I listened patiently as he told me about his break from the church during his late teens; about his defiance of his mother, who had become increasingly fat and overbearing; of how he effectively became like his father, studying medicine and bedding a lot of women until he finally met Danielle. When asked what was different about her, he told me simply that she was “good”; that she was unlike any of the others; that she had made him want to be a better person—though, obviously, not enough to keep his hands off me.

  During our bedtime conversations, I stayed silent about the letters that had begun to show up on my doorstep, morning after morning. With every acceptance, I became further embedded in my own indecision. I had not felt so powerless, so drained of will and the ability to think for myself, since the weekend that he had driven me back to boarding school after I bled on his wife’s sheets. The only decision that I was capable of making was that I was incapable of deciding; that I had to defer to my master, to have him settle the matter for me.

  We had arranged a tryst for Thursday afternoon, a time when I knew that my mother would be busy with the realtor. He picked me up and drove us a few blocks away from my house, stopping to search through the road map that he would come to rely on so much, when selecting locations for our plein air amours. “We could go to Camino Alto . . . that’s eleven miles . . . Cascade Canyon . . . that’s twenty miles . . . I did say I would be back for dinner, though . . .”

  I sighed. I took out the acceptance letters that I had folded away inside my handbag, and imitated him. “I could go to St. Mary’s . . . that’s forty-five minutes from you . . . Pomona or Claremont McKenna . . . they’re both better schools, but seven hours away . . . Gettysburg . . . that’s across the country, you know, I’ll need a plane to get to you . . . Bryn Mawr . . . they’ve offered me a scholarship . . .”

  My voice cracked. Against my will, I began to cry.

  “Darling!” he put his arms around me and secreted away the letters, reading them behind my back, “But this is wonderful, darling! It’ll be a new life for both of us. Incipit vita nova. And that scholarship could come in handy. I’m afraid we won’t be rolling in cash, once the divorce is finalized.”

  “You want me to go to Bryn Mawr?” I asked, looking up at him.

  “Well, it’s your decision, of course. It does have the inestimable advantage of being a ladies’ college, though, meaning I’ll have fewer rivals to worry about.” He said this with one of his charming, sharp-canined smiles. “Besides, I think we’ve both been in California for too long. Don’t you want to go somewhere different? Somewhere far from your friends and your mother and everything else that might come between us?”

  “Where will you work?”

  “My child, Philadelphia has the largest Catholic-school system in the country. I’m sure I’ll find another job teaching.” He stroked my hair and gave me an indulgent glance, “At an all-boys school, of course.”

  It was too much. Yet again, I broke into tears.

  “Laurel, Laurel, Laurel . . .” he murmured, taking me in his arms, “don’t despair. We’ll have a nice life. I’ll teach boys during the day, and at night, I’ll come home to you. We can marry. We’ll be together, we will!”

  “Are you really going to divorce her?” What I meant to ask was Do you really have to divorce her?

  “I’ve been saying that for weeks, haven’t I? Trust me, darling, this is only the beginning. We’ll be free, soon enough. Won’t it be wonderful not to have to sneak around anymore? To have a place of our own? A bed? Oh, my Daphne . . .” He caressed me furiously, “Let’s get a room somewhere now. Shall we? Shall we?”

  I COULD not find the words to express to him the idiocy of a grown man divorcing his wife of sixteen years for the sake of young flesh: flesh that had already been his, countless times, yet that he felt the need to ascribe permanency to; to make his own before the eyes of God, the government, and all the other invisible jurors who he’d defied by touching me in the first place. I could not, did not want to find the words, and so went along with all that he had told me, sparing hardly a thought for its idiocy.

  My mother was already home by the time that I returned, barelegged and befouled, from the motel that he had taken me to, and where he had taken pains to pleasure me, as if believing that a single, bodily shudder would be enough to cure me of my existential woes. She looked at me critically when I came in, putting aside her book. “Are you going to bathe before church?” I nodded and tramped upstairs, taking the smell of my sins with me.

  On Easter Saturday, the two of us drove into the city as planned for a day of shopping at Union Square. In department-store dressing rooms, I tried on gown after gown, before settling on a floaty number in green chiffon. It had a high neckline, though left most of my back quite bare, emphasizing the fragile sharpness of my shoulder blades, the incurve of my young spine; I had shed those three pounds, and some. Without batting an eyelash, my mother put the purchase on her credit card and told me that I would need a bag and shoes to go with it. I wondered whether she was hoping to buy my confidence; to inspire me to tell her about my “nice boy” by helping me be more desirable to him.

  I had informed Steadman in passing of my plans for that afternoon. He paid me an unexpected phone call while I was strapping on some stilettos at Neiman Marcus, half an hour later. “Where are you?” His voice was hushed, excited.

  “NM’s, women’s accessories. Why?”

  “No reason. What are you doing?”

  “Looking at shoes.” I saw that my mother was approaching. “Listen, I have to go. Can we talk later?”

  “Of course, my love,” he said smoothly and dialed off.

  “How are those?” my mother asked of the high heels, standing before me with her purse in hand.

  “Too tight. I think I need the nine and a half.”

  “What did I tell you?” She allowed herself a smug tap of her own size sevens.

  We had just paid for the shoes and were strolling toward the handbag section, when I caught sight of a lone, male shopper, out of place in the gynocentric surroundings. I felt a thrill of humiliation and arousal. I wondered whether it would be possible to pass him by without my mother seeing him. With the instincts of a stalker, perfectly attuned to his prey, however, my lover turned from the display of handbags that he had been pretending to inspect and dazzled us both with a charmingly uneven smile. He was wearing his chino pants and a cheerful, check shirt that was reserved for weekends. “Laurel! Mrs. Marks! What a pleasant surprise.”

  I felt my mother stiffen beside me. It seemed that she had becom
e less receptive to strangers, in the last few months. He continued, oblivious to her frigidity.

  “Perhaps you don’t remember me. I’m Catherine’s father. Laurel stayed with us over Thanksgiving.”

  “I remember,” my mother responded coolly.

  “Your daughter really is a delight!” He placed a firm hand on my shoulder—a bold move, even for him. “We would love to have her again sometime. In fact, what about tonight? I’m sure Catherine would be thrilled . . .”

  “I don’t think that would be appropriate. We have plans as a family tomorrow for Easter. Besides,” she narrowed her pale eyes at him, “it’s about time we had your daughter come to stay. I’ve been dying to meet her.”

  “Oh, no, Mom,” I was quick to object. “We can’t have people over. The house is a mess.”

  This was true enough. Since settling on a price for Arcady, my mother had been busy sorting through the contents of the townhouse, deciding the fate of each item. Mr. Steadman concealed his disappointment with a strained smile. “That’s a pity. Maybe in the summer . . . Laurel, don’t be a stranger . . . Mrs. Marks . . .” He offered her his hand.

  “Mr. Stratton, isn’t it?” my mother posed, accepting the handshake.

  “Steadman,” he corrected her, not understanding the cautionary glance that I shot him. “Hugh Steadman.”

  AS SOON as my suitor had skulked away, I sought to change the subject, drawing my mother’s attention to the beading on a nearby evening bag. It was some time before I was able to calm the thudding of my heart, the fluttering of my nerves. At the checkout, forking out for the final purchase of the day, my mother complained of a headache and suggested that we take afternoon tea at the Rotunda before making the drive home. When I was younger, she had often treated me to tea there after a long day of shopping, and this memory made me sick at heart. I agreed, tensely; if she were going to confront me about what she had seen, I supposed that it would be safer if she did so in public.