“So she said, ‘Not with my daughter, you don't!'” The other men, Stan Simon and Jack Caswell, laughed. Byron drew on his cigarette and forced a smile. Meg was introduced to the red-haired man—"Al Plettner, pleasure to meet you"—and Peter slung a proprietary arm around her waist.
“The lady of the manor,” he announced, planting a wet kiss on her cheek. His breath reeked of gin.
“What are you drinking?” Stan asked her, taking the empty glass from her hand.
“No more—thank you,” Meg replied. “I'm afraid I'm pretty well done in for the night.”
Byron stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray balanced on the porch rail.
“It's early,” Stan complained. “And I'm paying O.P. to stay until three A.M.”
“No. But thanks,” Meg repeated, giving Peter a discreet squeeze around the waist. Byron leapt in, shaking everyone's hand and saying, “Good night,” “Thanks for having us,” or “Look forward to seeing you ail again.” Together, they were able to extricate Peter, against what remained of his will, from the group, and pilot him out toward the car. He stumbled twice going down the stairs, and when Meg tried to put him in the back seat, he suddenly drew himself up and resisted.
“I can drive,” he said. “Remember?”
“Of course you can,” Meg said, to placate him, “but right now I think it would be better if I did.” She tried to fish the keys out of his pants pocket. Peter pulled away.
“Get the hell in the car,” he said. All Meg could think of was that terrible night, months before, when he'd insisted on driving.
“I'll settle this,” Byron said, trying to make it all seem a joke. “Give me the keys.”
Peter looked blearily at his friend. He seemed to be debating how to respond. Then he slumped back against the car and said, “You want to be the estate chauffeur?” He pulled out the keys and dangled them on one finger. “Be it.” Laughing to himself, he clambered into the car, and sprawled across the back seat. Meg sighed with relief.
At the house, she and Byron virtually carried him up the stairs. They laid him on the bed, and each untied one shoe. “I can handle it from here,” Meg whispered, thinking Peter was already asleep.
“Yeah,” he muttered, his eyes still closed and his head thrown to one side. “We can screw by ourselves.” Meg stood stock-still, and Byron, looking as if he'd just been punched, dropped the shoe to the floor. A second later, Peter burped, then rolled over on his side, snoring.
Meg was still standing at the foot of the bed, her long hair concealing her face, when Byron, after rubbing her arm consolingly, closed the door of their bedroom.
Eleven
A STILLNESS SETTLED over Arcadia again for the next couple of weeks. Byron shouted “Eureka!” one morning and scrambled out of his room holding the completed manuscript of a new scholarly article. Meg got everything in her studio into working order and started experimenting with some new techniques. Peter plugged away at the dissertation. Diogenes snoozed. It was, Meg sometimes thought, a little like a private artists’ colony, with a highly restricted admission.
The Simons’ party had almost never come under discussion; its aftermath not at all. Once or twice the festivities had been referred to in the course of some other conversation, but for the first time Meg could think of, she and Peter had clearly come away with very different impressions. In the past, they'd always agreed about such things, finding great pleasure in comparing notes on their friends’ weddings, Phelps's grad student parties, the annual English department spring bacchanal. But about this, they seemed not to agree. Meg, or even Byron, might make an amusing, somewhat derisory remark, but Peter would refuse to take the bait. Instead of joining in, as he would normally have done, he kept his own counsel, or simply changed the subject.
Much of the time, he seemed, despite his best efforts, troubled and preoccupied. Part of it Meg attributed to snags in the dissertation, or the career doubts that had always plagued him to one degree or another; he didn't really talk about it with her, but by now she could sense when he was having one of his periodic crises. The inheritance of Arcadia had, in an odd way, exacerbated the problem; at least in the past, he had usually arrived at the conclusion that he had no choice but to doggedly pursue the academic career he'd begun, and then go back to his work with renewed determination. Now he knew that he could quit at any time, just chuck it all and do whatever else he liked—perhaps even nothing. Meg feared that the very feasibility of abandoning the Ph.D. could chip away, and maybe already had, at his all-to-fragile resolve.
The other part of the problem was simpler to understand, if not to manage: his mother had discovered their whereabouts. Either Connie, in Kennedy's office, had slipped up somehow, or she'd just become suspicious when too many of her phone calls to their Mercer number had gone unanswered. Peter had tried to call her from Arcadia often enough to forestall that happening—but however she'd found out, she'd found out. And called the house late one Sunday morning. Meg had answered the phone in the kitchen. “I'm disappointed, deeply disappointed” were virtually the first words out of her mouth. Meg whispered “Your mother” to Peter, who put the orange juice back in the refrigerator and signaled that he'd pick up on the upstairs extension.
“How long have you been there?” his mother asked. “Since the end of the term, I suppose?”
“Not quite,” Meg answered, feebly. “It wasn't something we'd really planned on—”
“No,” Mrs. Constantine cut in. “I'm sure it wasn't. Just a sudden inspiration. But why?" she asked, suddenly plaintive. “Because I expressly asked you not to? Because I'd warned against it? What did you think—that I was just a foolish old woman, nursing a grudge against her own father?”
Meg fumbled for words. Peter came on the line. “It's me, Mother.” And Meg heard a sob. “How could you?” she cried, and before Peter could even begin to explain, she said, “Please, please leave that place.”
“Mother, please, I'm sorry we didn't tell you we were coming out here—we didn't know it ourselves until a few weeks ago—but everything's under control. Byron, my friend from the college, is here, too. Everything's fine. Really it is.”
Meg couldn't hang up the phone, not yet.
His mother said nothing; Meg could hear only her muffled breathing. Peter tried again to explain what had brought them there—the curiosity, the difficulty of spending another summer in their cramped Mercer apartment, the need, after all that had recently transpired, for a change of scene—but Mrs. Constantine, she knew, was buying none of it. She was simply getting control of herself again, marshaling her forces for a new attack. And it came, the moment Peter, still filibustering, mentioned the cocktail party they'd attended.
“These people knew my father?” she burst in. “These were his friends?”
“Well, I guess some of them were,” Peter admitted. “The Simons, the Caswells, maybe the Plettners—they all seemed to have known him. How well I don't know.”
“If they knew him at all, it was too well.” There was a pause during which Meg imagined Mrs. Constantine was mulling over, and committing to memory, those names. But why the interest in who the old man had consorted with at the end of his life? Meg had tried never to cast any judgment on Peter's mother—whatever had happened in the family, it wasn't really her business, and she'd never know the whole truth of it anyway—but this unending vendetta, extending even to people Peter's grandfather had socialized with, began to seem more than a little odd. It seemed irrational and obsessive.
“Don't ever see them again,” Mrs. Constantine finally, and predictably, declared. “And don't make me repeat this call.”
Now it was Peter's turn to become silent. Meg knew he wasn't giving in, but that he had simply chosen to avoid another useless exchange. Did his mother know it, too? Probably. She didn't insist he swear to leave that day; they hung up with the issue essentially unresolved. The day of reckoning, Meg knew, was still to come.
All that afternoon, Meg was depressed by the call
and worried that Peter might be in even worse shape. She quit her own work a little early and went up to the main house to check on him. The door to the study was open, but he wasn't inside.
Nor did he appear to be anywhere else in the house. Byron, she knew, had borrowed the car earlier to do some errands in town—buy dog food, mail off his new article to some scholarly journals—and Leah, as she usually managed to do in the middle of the day, had disappeared. Meg assumed that she spent these hours closeted in her room, keeping a diary or listening to records or... she couldn't really guess what a girl like Leah would do with her spare time. She was pleasant enough, and actually very attractive in an exotic sort of way, but she wasn't your usual nineteen- or twenty-year-old. Meg had never known her to leave the estate; did she have a boyfriend? Who could it be? No one ever called for her there, and Leah, not that they'd had any heart-to-heart talks, didn't seem to care. A short upstairs corridor led to her room, and Meg considered knocking on her door and asking if she'd seen Peter anywhere. But something kept her from doing it; she got as far as the hallway itself—no sound came from the room at the end—but she didn't feel right about interrupting her. They didn't have that kind of a relationship, one that would admit of a personal question. Particularly a question that Meg felt almost certain Leah wouldn't be able to answer. She turned silently, paused, then went back down the main staircase, past the pebble mosaic that she still found slightly unsettling, and out of the house.
Diogenes, asleep on a sunlit spot of the portico, raised his head.
“Wanna go for a walk?” Meg asked, and the dog j was instantly awake and on his feet, scuttling past the cracked pillars, licking her hand, bounding down the steps. “Find me Peter,” she said.
Dodger did a quick loop of the driveway, then doubled back and took off around the east wing of the house. Meg followed at a more leisurely pace; the dog was always careful to stop every so often so she could catch up. They briefly investigated some of the wilder portions on the eastern side of the grounds, between the central lawn and the bay, but there was little chance of Peter having strayed in there for any reason. The gazebo was empty except for a collection of fat and furry bumble bees; her studio was as unoccupied as she'd left it. With Dodger close behind her, watching that his paws didn't slip between the wooden slats, Meg walked out to the end of the dock, stuck her hands in the back pockets of her jeans, and gazed out across the water. The sunlight beating down was so bright that the surface of the bay had turned a glinting silver, rippled with the palest blue; Dodger, now at her side, stared down intently at the shadowed water sloshing beneath them.
Would it ever come right, Meg wondered. She flipped her hair back over her shoulder. Would she ever again find a balance, an equilibrium, with Peter? Even before the accident, he'd been moody, unpredictable, not always open. But she'd taken it as part of the package, although she'd hoped, secretly, that be- ing with her, being loved by her, would gradually change that. Make him more open, more responsive, more . . . sanguine, she guessed it was. And sometimes it had actually seemed to be working: the summer before, when he'd won one of the English department's Hoster Fellowships (named after the alum who'd endowed them) and felt that the world had given him a strong vote of confidence; the few weeks they'd spent in England and Scotland shortly after they were married (a combination honeymoon and research tour); the days when, his work going well and his private demons sleeping, he had been able to reach out to her out of love and not loneliness, tenderness and not fear. At those times, she'd rejoiced inside, and she'd felt that the suppression—well, the cloaking—of her own needs had been worth it, that a victorious end to her campaign was clearly in sight, and that once it was secured, there'd be plenty of time then, all their lives together, to attend to her own unmet longings.
The pregnancy had been one blow; the miscarriage another. The whole thing had basically started as an accident, a slipup of some sort with her diaphragm. But neither of them had broached the subject of an abortion; Peter had even embraced her at the news, opened a bottle of champagne, shown all the traditional male solicitude. What he'd really been thinking, what sort of ambivalence he might have been secretly entertaining, she couldn't know. Nor, to be honest with herself, had she wanted to; she'd wanted to cling to this happiness, even if it wasn't as utterly sound and solid as it appeared, and to confirm it with her own certainty. To establish, in that universe of fine gray shadings created and inhabited by Peter, just for once, an unqualified good.
And Peter had accepted it; he had posed no obstacle . . . with the fatal exception of the accident.
A seagull swooped past the end of the dock. Meg wished she had some bread crusts with her; she loved to see the birds wheel and suddenly plummet to catch the bits in midair.
To the west of the house, there were even thicker woods, so tangled and dense she seldom ventured in. But the heat was so oppressive today, the sunlight so intense, that the rich, dark green of the leaves, and the faint rustle they made as the breeze blew through them, seemed friendly, even inviting. Diogenes stopped at the border of the lawn, wagging his bushy golden tail, waiting for instructions. When Meg said “Go on” and shooed him with her hand, he scampered through a space between the trees. Pushing aside a low-hanging branch, Meg followed him—not by sight, but by sound. She could hear him crashing about among the twigs and bracken, looking for passageways, or forging them, through the thick brush. The air was cooler here, the canopy overhead breaking the sunlight into stray, random beams that shifted on the ground, or slid like raindrops off the broad, fluttering leaves. Underfoot, there were mushrooms, dandelions, an occasional burst of violets. Meg picked a few of the tiny purple flowers, tucked them behind one ear and thought how Peter would smile when he saw them there. She came upon a faint pathway, one which must have cut in from some other direction. It was amazing to her how dense, and confusing, these woods could be—how great an area could they cover? Ten, fifteen acres, allowing for the rest of the estate? But each time she'd explored them, perhaps half a dozen times now, she'd felt they were totally unfamiliar to her. Almost nothing had been recognizable. The paths, such as they were, always seemed freshly made, tentative, and persistently, bafflingly, aimless. They ended, as often as not, at the trunk of a huge tree, or bumped smack into a stony outcropping and stopped dead there. The one she was on, which Dodger, too, must have discovered, as she could hear him pressing further ahead than usual, was only slightly more defined than most.
It appeared, even to her untrained eye, to be a little more permanent than the others, older. The dirt was packed harder; there were fewer weeds growing on it. Still, to follow it she had to study the ground closely and watch as the trail zigged and zagged around trees, up a slight incline where she had to struggle, just for a few yards, on all fours, clutching at roots and brambles, then down the other side; finally, guided by a glimpse of Dodger's fur shining in a bolt of sunlight, she emerged into what she discovered to be a hidden glade, open wide to the sky but surrounded on all sides by a moat of thick brush, and beyond that a circle of gnarled, blackened trees.
“What have you got us into?” she said, stepping into the pool of quiet light. “Our own little refuge from the world?” Diogenes didn't look up but kept his nose to the ground, inspecting a roughly circular spot, fifteen or twenty feet around, where it appeared someone had once built a bonfire or simply razed the earth for no obvious purpose. The spot was located in the exact center of the glade, like the bull's-eye on a target, and when Meg knelt down to look closer, she found a scattering of broken, blackened lumps—coals?—mixed in with the sparse grass and the fine, powdery silt. What was it, she wondered, sifting the dirt through her fingers. Some sort of outdoor barbecue pit? But for whom—and why here, in the very heart of the woods? Maybe it was just some kind of forestry business; maybe there'd been a bed of poison ivy or something here, and the best way to get rid of it had been to burn it. Though even that seemed unlikely, given the nearly perfect positioning of the spot—clearly circ
umscribed and in the dead center of the glade. And who would have discovered—much less worried about—a bit of poison anything, here? If it was here, it was probably growing all over the grounds.
She rose to her feet and brushed the dirt from the knees of her jeans. Still, it's an awfully pretty little sanctuary, she thought. So secluded. So unexpected. So quiet. The breeze, she noted, had died down—or else it simply couldn't penetrate here. The leaves had ceased stirring; they hung motionless on the branches. The dandelions, forming a delicate and decorative border to the glade, stood equally still—bright yellow in the sunshine, but utterly still. Meg suddenly noticed that there weren't any bumblebees here either. Or flies. Or, now that she listened, any birds. All through the woods she'd heard, and seen, blue jays, robins, sparrows. Here, there were none. And no squirrels either. No sign of life whatsoever. No sound. No movement.
Diogenes barked, once; his ears were back. He looked at Meg, then into the surrounding trees. Keeping his tail to the burnt circle, he swiveled slightly, like a radar screen tracking a moving object. Meg looked in the same direction, but all she could see was the dense wall of foliage, black branches, dark green leaves. Dodger barked again, pranced nervously in place. Meg felt the strangest little shiver, as if she'd just been chilled by a cool wind—but there was no wind here. She rubbed the goose bumps that had broken out on her bare arms. She strained to see what it was Diogenes was reacting to. He had turned almost entirely in place now, and she looked behind her.
There! Had she seen it, or hadn't she—a black shape, low to the ground, shooting past? It was so fast, so fragmentary, she couldn't be sure it hadn't been a trick of the light, or even a speck in her eye. She looked harder, saw nothing, and at the same time found herself drawing back from the trees, closer to the center of the glade. She felt the gritty edge of the burnt circle under her sneakers. And again, that chill—even with the hot sunlight filling the glade. She had never known anything to be so silent, so preternaturally still. It was as if all sound, all activity, all life, had fled this spot; the air was warm and terribly close. High, high above her, too far away for any sound to reach her, she saw a plane, a tiny black cross, passing slowly across the bright blue sky. She tried to draw some comfort from that, from the ordinariness of a jet, probably bound for Kennedy airport, flying overhead, going about its everyday business. There was nothing to be alarmed about, she tried to tell herself. Nothing unusual was going on here; there was nothing to fear. She'd go back up to the house, get herself an ice-cold drink, find Peter—probably back in his study now, wherever he'd been—and forget the whole thing.
The Spirit Wood Page 11
