I had vowed not to cry that day. I looped my arms around his warm neck and kissed him softly. He tasted faintly of tobacco. “But you will be there, tomorrow night?”
“I’ll be there. In my best dinner jacket.” His wan smile did nothing to conceal the break in his voice.
I didn’t go to last period math, but stayed with him until dusk, accompanying him all the way to the staff parking lot. We were as tragic as any young lovers, who circumstances had conspired to separate. Watching his silver SUV, my would-be ride into the future, alloy with the golden sun, I broke my vow and dissolved into tears.
THERE WERE no classes on Friday. Instead, the time was set aside for packing, with many of the younger students being sent for by their parents soon after breakfast. For the girls in my grade, there were additional preparations to be made for that evening’s dance and the subsequent morning’s graduation ceremony. I had made an appointment at the campus salon, as much to distract myself from my inner turmoil as to ensure my own loveliness that night. In a recent staff meeting, Steadman had volunteered to play the piteous part of chaperon at the dance. That night would be our final meeting as master and pupil; our final meeting as anything, if I were to admit to myself the disease at my core, blackening my blood and slowly poisoning every cell in my young body.
“Aren’t you beautiful?” The lady at the salon held a mirror to the back of my head. She had done my hair up in an elegant, low chignon, with stray curls wisping over my face.
At seven in the evening, buses dropped us off in front of Trinity. Thin-legged in my high heels and floaty green dress, I looked every bit the forest-dwelling nymph. The ballroom was amber-lit, already teeming with staff and schoolboys. Due to the comparative largeness of the boys’ school, there was an obvious surplus of young men, which the organizers had compensated for by dispensing with the four-couple tables of Homecoming and seating us alphabetically, in one long conglomeration. Scott Maccoby, some seats up from me, gave me an aloof nod, and took to flirting with Rose Macpherson. I cast my eyes across the room, to the much smaller faculty table, though could see no sign of Steadman. Had he crashed his car on the way over? Had his wife forbidden him from leaving the house? Had he simply decided that he couldn’t bear seeing me?
“So, where are you going for college?” the boy at my right—“Jake Marone,” according to his place card—asked me from behind his acne.
“I’m not going to college.” This was a convenient conversation killer.
I had shot down three more Trinity boys and given away my entrée—a single pillow of lobster ravioli—to another before my master arrived. My heart leaped into my mouth. I drained the contents of my glass and stood up, intent on the dark corner from which he scanned the room. The music had started up again and couples were slowly trickling onto the dance floor.
“Dance?” A sweaty, fat palm was held up at my left (“Gabriel Mapp”). “I owe you for that ravioli.”
“Have my dinner too,” I said coolly, and proceeded to cross the floor alone.
I couldn’t help feeling exposed out of uniform, finding him amid the clamor of the dance hall. It occurred to me that every soul in the room was likely to outlive me: from Mitzi Gantz lurking near the punch bowl; to Marcelle in her fuchsia dress, laughing against Flynn’s shoulder; to my very own love, standing with his hands in his trouser pockets. His eyes were bright in the shadows. He looked ever so handsome in his dinner jacket. I greeted him shyly, stooping my head and clutching at my skirt in a graceless half-curtsy. “You’re late.”
He looked at me humorlessly, noting my bare shoulders and the beauty of my upswept curls. “You’re lovely.”
I reached for his right hand and gave it a covert squeeze, my fingers fumbling over the coolness of his wedding band. “Do you like my dress?”
“ ‘ . . . a nameless girl in freshest summer greens . . .’ ” was all that he said, somewhat wistfully.
“I have a name,” I countered.
“Too sacred to utter, I’m afraid.”
“Say it. No one else needs to hear.”
“Laurel. My Laurel.”
“Hugh,” I said, for what was perhaps the first time. “My Hugh.”
He passed a gentle, fatherly hand up my bare arm and onto my bony shoulder. So much, perhaps, was acceptable in a dark corner. I quivered with desire and regret. I asked whether we could please, dear sir, go outside.
“Let me go first. I’ll distract whoever’s at the door,” he replied and, just as he was about to exit, smoothed a not-so-acceptable hand over my naked back. I shivered at the touch.
I pushed my way into the crowded bathroom. I washed my hands and eyed my ghost in the mirror. Everything about me was as pale, frail, and green as it would ever be. I slipped out of the bathroom, out of the ballroom, and into the chill, early summer night.
My lover stood by the door, smoking with a grim Trinity guardsman, from somewhere in our distant past. Behind the doorkeeper’s back, he caught my eye and nodded to the lure of the dark woods beyond the rowing shed. I kept to the shadows, to the sides of unknown buildings. The muffled laughter of couples, drinking and groping through the night, was a cold burst of air to my ears. He had seen me escape downhill, past the shed, willowy among the willows. I knew that he would not pursue me until I was safely concealed by my natural element, nor would I halt until we reached that hallowed ground—though it was a long way from that side of the lake to our own private arbor.
I did not slow down, even when I felt that he was behind me. My high heels stuck in the dirt and my bare, pale back was certain to make me easy to spy against the black of the tree trunks. His eager tread reached me as a rustle of leaves, growing ever closer. His breath warmed my nape. He followed me with the insistence of a much younger god, closing in on me, long before he felled me at the roots of those evergreens.
He kissed my face, my throat, my flushed earlobe. He pried apart my legs, rubbing against me and calling me by my only name. I threw back my arms. I turned my face up to God, the leaves, the moonless sky. Something in my manner must have struck him as tragic, for he took to repeating my name, softer, faster, as if sobbing or in prayer. His fingers scraped and prodded inside my underwear. He mauled and mouthed my tiny breasts through the thin stuff of my dress before realizing in his delayed, male way that all he had to do to get at them was to tug at a bit of string around my nape. Although he didn’t know, with the death-bound certainty that I did, that this would be the last time, everything about his movements bespoke mourning, a heart as cankerous and worm-eaten as mine. When he emptied himself into me, there was no relief: only a more diffused kind of burning, which tingled from my toes to my lips to my fingertips, clutching at his spent, middle-aged flesh.
I would have given anything at that moment, to transform into cold wood within his arms, merging with the indifferent trees under which all this had occurred. He, however, had other ideas.
“ ‘ . . . e non se transformasse in verde selva . . .’,” he whispered, stroking my hair, my arms, my breasts. “ ‘ . . . et non se transformasse . . . ’ ”
“No more poetry, please,” I said languidly. “I’m so sick of poetry.”
“No more poetry,” he agreed, even as he continued to commemorate and caress my immortal, too mortal body. He caressed me with the extreme tenderness that always proceeded from his exertions, no matter how rough these may have been. That evening, however, in the darkness of the woods, with no poetry to express the pain of our eternal parting, the tenderness of these caresses was redoubled. He caressed me until my body seemed to have no reality beyond his touch, until I felt myself to be entirely spirit. I lay silent beneath my god. I didn’t want to be the first to shatter our divinity.
“Where, when?” he said at last. “Oh, my Daphne. When again?”
“In Arcadia. Always, in Arcadia.”
2.Lady Caroline Lamb to Lord Byron (1812):
Caroline Byron
next to Thysra Dearest
& most faithful�
��God bless you
own love—ricordati di Biondetta
From your wild Antelope
EPILOGUE
Even in Arcadia, there are pills that bring about death. It was two days before my eighteenth birthday. I sat by the bedroom window, with its flickering white drapes, and lined the pills up beside a glass of tepid water. There were twelve of them in total—one for every month since I first met Steadman. I placed a pill on my tongue. I picked up the glass. In the distance, a car door slammed.
If I pictured heaven then, it was his car waiting in my driveway, with a full tank of gas and nowhere to go. It was skipping up to meet him with a bag on my shoulder. It was a burst of greenery, a rustling of leaves, my name on his lips.
My lips were dry. I looked down into the back garden. Beneath my window, the wisteria was swaying, its sweet scent wafting into my white room. In that moment, the distance from my bedroom to the drowning pool seemed too far, the greenness of the waters too sickening. I put down the glass. I remembered his words that first time, as he thrust himself into my greenness: Do you want this? Do you want this?
I remembered how sick I’d felt under his weight.
SINCE SUMMER’S beginning, my mother had been meaning to call in someone about the hornets’ nest, which grew like a tumor among the wisteria. It was not until the Friday before my birthday that the exterminator arrived: a red-faced, pockmarked man a few years Steadman’s junior. My mother and I stood beneath the pergola together, arms crossed as he assessed the situation. It was the closest that we had come to one another in weeks. “This is a big one,” he clucked his tongue. “You really shouldn’t have left it for so long. They’re more aggressive in this heat.” He wiped his hands on his bag-like white suit and told us that he could come back on Monday when it was due to be cooler, with a cocktail of rosemary oil, mint oil, and lauryl sulfate. My mother agreed. It struck me that I would have to move my suicide ahead by a day; that I couldn’t possibly do what needed to be done with that man pottering around our garden.
It had been hot all through July and August. I spent my days by the drowning pool, in the shade of the willow, with an unread book or a wadded letter from Steadman. Against all my hopes, he never wrote to tell me that he couldn’t go through with our plans; that he was still too in love with his wife; that his children needed him. Instead, I received long missives one or two times a week, rife with em dashes, sweet appellations, and the details of his latest job applications and sleeping arrangements. Reading about the nights that he passed in his home study, on a sagging single mattress, staring up at Byron and Beata Beatrix, my heart was stung, as if by a whole hive of hornets. My responses were infrequent, evasive. I copied out lines of poetry, stuffed envelopes with flowers and foliage. I wrote haiku.
A green girl shivers
Shadowy water spreads
A death before twilight.
At the end of July, he was offered a post at a coed day school. Though it was no Saint Cecilia’s, he was sure that it would tide us over for the year. The divorce papers had been filed and the twins would no longer speak to him. With heartfelt apologies, he told me of California divorce laws, the six months that it would take for his marriage to be legally dissolved. He proposed a January wedding in Pennsylvania snow, among clusters of mountain laurel, my cold lips parted until death.
I did not tell him how much cause for hope those six months gave me; how I prayed that he hadn’t ruined his life completely, for my sake. Likewise, he was not to know—at least from my pen—of the letter that I posted on Friday, after the hornet man’s visit. This letter was addressed to Dr. Danielle Steadman of Larkspur, California, and has been transcribed below.
August 8, 2003
Carmel-by-the-Sea
Monterey County
Lady Steadman,
I pray that you will forgive me for taking the liberty of writing to you, although we have never been formally introduced. If what I have been told about you is true, then I may presume that you are a wise woman, a compassionate woman, a woman who will grant my words her gentle consideration. Even so, I am aware that what I am asking of you is the height of presumption; that you have no reason to show me any consideration, let alone mercy; that I am as low before you as any whore would be, before a lady of your virtues.
I have loved your husband—as much as a weak, heartless girl of my type is capable of loving. In return, he claims to love me, to the point that he wishes to start a life with me. He wants a life with me. He does not realize that such a life is impossible; that I am, in fact, death.
Death can be pretty. It can be young fruit, blushing amid the branches. It can be lips and hair and bare legs. All the same, it is death, and should not be treated as anything other than such. It is not art, it is not poetry, and it is certainly not life.
Your husband has been foolish. He has allowed himself to be seduced by death, in the guise of a virgin. Please, do not hold this against him. You are his true wife, and he loves you, as he cannot possibly love anyone else. You have a life together. You have a son and a daughter and a greenhouse. Without this life, there is nothing left for him but death.
I do not doubt that he will come back to you. When he does, if you can, I beg that you forgive him. His sins are mortal, yet, unlike mine, they are forgivable; they need not extend to the grave.
Sincerely,
Ophelia (a drowning girl)
I HADN’T intended to still be alive when my letter reached Danielle Steadman, nor when the hornet man returned with his bag of poisons. That time around, we watched him from the safety of the poolside, equally transfixed by the removal of that malign growth. For two months, I had watched the nest grow at the same rate as my anxiety over Steadman’s impending arrival. I stood beside my mother and hated her for being the cause of it all, the only one with the power to stop it. I began with the words that I had prepared a day earlier; words whose veracity I still cannot vouch for. “I didn’t want it. I didn’t want it at all . . .”
IT’S SPRING now in Pennsylvania and the Bryn Mawr girls can be seen walking around without stockings. I watch the prettiest ones go by over my coffee, which I drink black and with two sachets of sweetener. I’m still drinking it when I get to my mailbox, which I haven’t checked since the beginning of the week. I spent last night in Dani’s dorm and am running on only four hours of sleep. I remember tripping over her books in the dark this morning, Kristeva and Rilke and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I remember her sighing and curling up deeper inside her nest of red sheets and strawberry blond hair. He’d probably appreciate the irony of me finding a Danielle of my own.
My tongue is still furred with the taste of her, acrid and persistent through the sweetness of my coffee. I don’t know if I like this taste, but there’s satisfaction in what it recalls. Dani’s lips. Dani’s hair. Dani, wet and glistening in the dark.
There are two envelopes waiting in my mailbox. The first is postmarked from California and is addressed in my mother’s rounded, rather infantile hand. I haven’t told her about Dani yet and am in no hurry to, though I’m sure she’ll take the news easier than last spring’s bombshell. The second envelope looks older. It boasts a foreign postmark and a charming, almost illegible scrawl of red ink. There is no return address.
I have trouble concentrating in my comparative-literature seminar, and not only from lack of sleep. In the pocket of my camel-hair coat, the unopened envelope burns, hot as a summons to hell. Of course, I haven’t heard from him in months; not since he fled prosecution last fall. At the time, I thought his flight for the better. As soon as class is over, I rush out into the fresh April morning, my hands in my coat pockets. Here, I have no laurel groves to retreat to. I make do with crossing Merion Green and finding a place beneath the oaks. I breathe in and take out Steadman’s letter.
April 10, 2004
Fiesole
Italia
Laurel—
Don’t fret. This isn’t a declaration of Lust. As far as you are concerned, I am
a eunuch now—I haven’t the heart or the balls to desire, anymore. The nymphs of Toscana are free to frolic around me. I’ll look on coldly—if I look at all.
I had hoped for a new existence here. But my promised land is really more of a St. Helena. I don’t know if my little life warrants such a grand Exile.
You will be finishing your first year of college, I suppose. I suppose you will have a boyfriend by now. It must be wonderful, having your whole life ahead of you. It must be wonderful, being free of my affections.
Europe seems to me such a dry, dead place. At least the nights are getting shorter now. I’ve taken to avoiding rooming houses altogether—there are better ways to spend what remains of my money. Sleeping out is not too unpleasant, in this climate. I’ve grown a beard, but don’t feel too bad about this.
Were you never happy with me? Were my attentions misguided? Could I have been more tender? I don’t suppose I’ll ever get an answer, but I’m entitled to ask, at least. I remember us laughing about the illegality of it—as if you would never have anything to do with my ruin. Now I am a “sex offender,” a “perver,” a “statutory rapist”—not because of what I did, but because you were not ready to take me seriously.
I think about Hell. I think about Heaven. I am done wanting you. There is nothing more that I care to know about you. Find a mild, faithful lover. It will be enough for you.
Yours,
Hugh
I fold up Steadman’s letter and put it aside. I can feel my insides squirming, my heart hammering inside my chest. Closing my eyes, I lean my back against the oak’s broad trunk, and try to summon something of that old tenderness, but everything old is bitter. Everything old is repellent to me on this fresh spring day.
Perhaps in Tuscany there are still nymphs that rise out from the tree trunks, leading grown men astray. Perhaps there are girls who defy death by dwelling outside life, in the greenness of old woods, young suicide. In Pennsylvania, however, there are no nymphs—only college girls, who look just as good as schoolgirls without their stockings. I am one of them. I rise from the grass and brush the dirt from my raw knees, leaving his letter behind for whatever wind or rain may come. I cross the green.
The Wood of Suicides Page 17
