The Spirit Wood

by Robert Masello

  When would Meg and Byron be getting back, he wondered. What had Mrs. Simon been so anxious to show them? Leah's scent, mingled with the salt from the bay, carried over to him. He tried to think about other things: the next chapter in his dissertation, the course he'd be teaching in the fall. But he saw Leah in his mind's eye—her olive skin and jet-black hair. The way that her breasts had strained against the fabric of her bathing suit. The feel of her hands clutching his in the water. Her lips devouring the fruit. He felt himself getting hard. His thoughts traveled to the books, the erotica in the locked case. To an illustration, on a page of cracked vellum, of a raven-haired girl, naked and on her knees, performing fellatio on an absurdly fat and hideous man; with one oversized hand, spread like a fan, he held the back of her head.

  “Were those books any use to you,” she asked, “the ones in the locked case?”

  He felt as though he'd just been exposed. It was as if she'd been reading his mind the whole time.

  “No, not really,” he said, glancing over at her. Her eyes were still closed; she was still facing the sun. “Just a weird collection of old books,” he added.

  Then she turned toward him, shielding her eyes with one hand. Smiling. “Any illustrations?” she asked, and when Peter didn't answer, she laughed and turned away again.

  “You should concentrate"—she pronounced the last word one syllable at a time, as if unfamiliar with it—"on your work, you know. Otherwise, you'll wind up living here, with us, in Proseleni.”

  Fourteen

  BUT A BIRD sanctuary,” Meg repeated. “Isn't that the funniest thing, coming from Anita Simon?” She looked across the dinner table, to Byron, for help.

  “We always had birds at Tara,” he said, doing an impression of a wistful Scarlett O'Hara. He'd already told Peter that Anita considered him a character from Gone with the Wind. "And darkies, too, of course.” The moment he'd told Meg what he thought Anita's scheme was really all about, she'd slapped her forehead for not having seen through it herself.

  Peter, his eyes remaining lowered, showed only the slightest and most perfunctory smile. “Come on,” he said, idly spearing one of the green beans Nikos had supplied from his garden. “I don't think it's all that fair to write her off as a bigot just because she wants to preserve some of the land out here from developers and housing projects. After all,” he added, finally looking up, “we've got a stake in this area, too, now.”

  Meg could hardly believe her ears. She glanced across at Byron, who resumed eating; he was now officially butting out, she could see. This one was going to be up to her.

  “Why?” she asked. “We're just staying for the summer.” She was trying to keep her tone light-hearted, unaroused, but even she could hear the edge that had crept into it. Peter, she knew, wouldn't have missed it.

  “We don't have to stay out here to keep the house,” he said, in a coolly logical manner.

  Keep the house? It was as if he'd dropped a bomb on her.

  “How on earth can we do that? Kennedy said all along that once the estate taxes were paid, there—”

  “There'll be enough to do it, if we wanted to,” he interrupted. Then, in answer to her unasked question, “I talked to him twice last week. Once when you were in town getting supplies, and the other morning—Tuesday—while you were down working in the boat-house.”

  Byron wondered where he'd been.

  “I'm not saying we will, I'm just saying we can. And that while it's still up in the air, it might not be such a bad idea for us to do what we can to cooperate with the other people out here. Like throwing the auction party at Arcadia.”

  “You want to do this?” Meg asked.

  “Leah,” Peter called over his shoulder. “Could we have the fruit now, please? Yes,” he said, returning his attention to Meg as if she were some importunate customer at a tony shop. “I think we ought to. Why not? It'll give us a chance to repay the Simons’ hospitality and to get to know a lot of other people.” Leah came in with a bowl of plums, cherries, and grapes and put it down at Peter's right elbow. “Those look great,” he said with enthusiasm. “Thanks.” Leah left again, looking unusually pleased with herself.

  “But what about your work?” Meg inquired, trying another tack. “Do you really want to have to start worrying about party invitations and buffet tables and where everybody's going to park their cars? Do you really want an invasion coming up, just when you've gotten your dissertation back on track again?”

  Peter selected a ripe purple plum, then pushed the bowl down the table toward Meg and Byron. “I don't see what one has to do with the other. The auction's only for one day, and all the arrangements for it, you said she said so herself, will be made by Anita and Joan Caswell and that Plettner person. All we have to provide is Arcadia.”

  “And that doesn't bother you either?” Meg said, feeling that she was playing the last card in her hand. “Having all those strangers crawling all over the place, poking their noses into the house and all over the grounds like this is some kind of amusement park? That's perfectly okay with you?”

  Peter gave a short, exasperated laugh and leaned back in his chair. “I don't get it,” he said, pretending to be amused. “Why are you two so opposed to this? It's not such a big deal, and whatever you say, it is, when you get right down to it, for a good cause. Do I mind having those people poking around the place for a few hours? To tell you the truth, no. I don't mind.” He considered for a moment, taking a bite from the plum. “To tell you the whole truth, I think I sort of like the idea. This is a fantastic estate we've got here—what's wrong with showing it off a little?”

  Now Meg was utterly at a loss. Nor could she expect any help from Byron, who, not that she could blame him, was conscientiously playing a neutral role. If Peter was going to have his mind changed, she would have to do it herself. But how could she do that, when she no longer felt she even knew that mind? In a million years, she would never have expected him to favor the idea of the auction at Arcadia. The old Peter would have dismissed it out of hand, and he would have agreed with her opinion—and Byron's—of their neighbors in Passet Bay. The old Peter had shared with her the feeling of being an imposter, or interloper, on the estate; they had often laughed together about being discovered and summarily evicted. The new Peter seemed much more at home there. He seemed capable, should the situation arise, of evicting others. The new Peter, finishing the last of the wine remaining in his glass—that little prohibition he had abandoned weeks before—was someone she was only now beginning to know.

  But would she ever be able to like this Peter, she wondered, as much as she had the one she married?

  With dinner over, Peter abruptly excused himself to work on his dissertation; but from the glazed look on his face as he left the room, Meg doubted any writing was going to get done that night. Byron lingered on and suggested Meg join him for a stroll. Outside, the air was warm, but not unpleasantly so; they walked, without saying much, down the back lawn and out onto the dock. The water sloshed lazily under their feet, and the moon hung like a perfect white lamp in a sky still faintly blue. Byron lit a cigarette, recited some lines he identified as Homer's.

  “There's a new theory around,” he said, “that claims Homer was a woman.”

  “Is that what your last paper was about?”

  “Not me. I'm not the grand theorizer type. I work best in miniature.” Then he added, “When I work at all.”

  Meg had taken off her shoes and, sitting down, dipped her feet into the water. "You work,” she asserted. “Just last week you mailed out that new paper.”

  “That paper was almost done when I got here,” he said, sitting down beside her. He drew on the cigarette, looked out at the pale, placid expanse of water. “There's just something about this place that makes me want to flop down in a hammock and snooze my life away. Lives up to its name in that respect. Don't you ever feel it, too?”

  “Yes, sometimes,” she said, lifting her feet in and out of the bay. “But sometimes I feel
something else, too, something that's even harder to describe.”

  Byron waited, and what she said was what he'd half-hoped, half-feared she'd say. Because he'd felt it, too. That strange sensation that here, within the borders of the estate, all the rules were off, all the conventions of everyday life suspended. During the days, a lazy tranquillity reigned, but a tranquillity so extreme, so exaggerated, that it was menacing. Meg had often felt, and Byron confirmed it, that she was intruding on the trees themselves. She laughed and said, “You know that song, ‘I Talk to the Trees'? Sometimes I feel like they could talk to me around here.”

  At night, it was even odder—a feeling of things awakening, coming to life. A sense that just out of sight, deep in the woods, under cover of darkness, something, God knew what, was stirring. Byron had told Meg all about the chase, or hunt, he had observed on his first night in Arcadia. And he'd been able to prove it the very next day—there were several sets of hoofprints, cloven, like a goat's, in the dirt near the water.

  “I don't think we should talk about this anymore,” Meg said with a shiver. “It's giving me the creeps.” Byron wrapped an arm around her and briskly rubbed her shoulder.

  “I did actually have something to tell you,” he said. “I'm going to be leaving tomorrow, for Georgia. I've decided to go to my family's annual reunion there.”

  Meg turned her face toward him, quickly. “For how long?”

  “Just a week or so.” Was she really that concerned? His hand stroked her sleeve. “I don't think I'll be able to afford to go next year, all the way from Omaha. And besides,” he said, studying the ash at the end of his cigarette, “I think I need some time away from here.” He tapped the ash into the water.

  “Is it Peter?” she asked. Meg knew that their friendship was becoming increasingly difficult.

  “Partly,” he said. She looked into his eyes now; my God, how he wanted to reach out and hold her. But instead, he simply squeezed her arm. “It's other things, too.” Why not just tell her, he thought, lay his cards on the table and be done with it? “I need some time to think some things through. A lot's been going on lately.” He despised himself already, for not coming out with it. Yes, Peter was his best friend—or had been—but this was too important to consider even that. This was something that needed to be said.

  Meg's feet had stopped moving in the water. She held his eyes with her own—and he felt she could tell what he'd been about to declare. Would she have hated him for it? For spoiling their friendship? Ruining their idyll in Arcadia? Or would she—could she possibly—have expected, even welcomed, it?

  He would never know, because a moment later, before she'd even been able to finish saying his name, she'd been tugged from below, and almost toppled off the pier. “My foot!” she cried, and grabbed hold of his arm. Her leg had been pulled down into the water—her pants were wet to the knee—before she managed to yank both her feet back up onto the pier. “Jesus Christ,” she murmured, staring down incredulously into the now black water, “are there crabs out there? I could swear that something had a hold of me!”

  III

  Corruption

  Fifteen

  MEG AND PETER took a place at the curb outside the drugstore where Meg had bought her hand lotion on their first trip into Passet Bay. All the streetlamps had red, white, and blue bunting tied around them, and over the corner of Main Street and Pine there was a wide white banner proclaiming the “25th Annual Three Towns 4th of July Parade.” The spectators were three or four deep all along the parade route: mothers in straw sun hats; children in strollers or running loose with dripping ice cream cones in hand; the fathers hanging back a few paces, jingling the change in their pockets, passing the time with a mixture of business and cocktail conversation. Peter heard a pair behind him discussing the safety features, required by law, when installing a backyard pool.

  “Six-foot tall, chain-link fence, with a gate that locks. Otherwise, God help you if there's an accident—might as well just file for Chapter Eleven.”

  A vendor went by selling buttons, balloons, and small American flags on wooden sticks topped with gold-colored bulbs. “Wave ‘em and be proud! How about it?” he said to Peter. “What are you, some kind of Communist?” Meg smiled, and the vendor diverted his pitch to her. “One buck—buy a flag and join the parade!” He extended one of the flags to her, and Meg was transported back to her girlhood, to a hometown parade in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where her father had bought her a similar flag, and cotton candy, and carried her on his shoulders. Peter was pulling his wallet out of his back pocket, handed over a dollar bill.

  “He saw us coming.”

  “Thanks,” Meg said. “I think it's fun,” and she waved the flag in a little loop over her head. Peter removed his sunglasses, wiped them with his handkerchief.

  “Wasn't this thing supposed to start at two o'clock?” he said, consulting his watch.

  “What is it now?”

  “Ten after,” he said irritably.

  Meg bit her tongue. He'd been in a strange mood for the past couple of days, one minute filled with energy and optimism, the next cranky and despondent. He blew his nose while looking down the street impatiently.

  “You haven't got a cold, have you?” Meg asked cautiously.

  “Why? No, I'm perfectly fine.”

  “Hay fever, maybe?”

  “Here they come,” he said with relief.

  At the end of the street, a white convertible ap- peared, occupied by the mayor and his wife. Behind that, another car, driven, it turned out, by Larry Lazaroff, towed a crepe-covered float adorned with the queen of the Three Towns parade and her two attendants. Lazaroff tried, as he inched by them at five miles per hour, to say something, but his voice was drowned out by the drummers of the Passet Bay High School band.

  “What did he say?” Peter asked over the booming opening strains of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

  “Got me,” said Meg, cupping her hand around Peter's ear. “But if I had to bet,” she said, brushing away his curly black hair, much longer than he usually let it grow, “I'd say he was probably trying to sell us something.” Wasn't that funny—Peter's ear, she only now noticed, in the subtlest sort of way tapered upwards. She guessed she'd just never really looked at it before. Incredible—you could be married to a person and still have missed something like that. Her own Mr. Spock.

  “Sell us what?”

  “You name it—seasoned clay, a Leroy Neiman, Colombian coke.”

  “Take the coke.”

  Meg looked at him. He'd said it with a wry smile on his face, but she wasn't absolutely sure if the smile was part of the remark, or a reaction to the phalanx of baton twirlers, totally out of sync, just then shuffling by. Between two of their ragged marching rows, she spotted, directly across the street, the Simons and, yes, right behind them, the Caswells; the women were waving little American flags, just like hers, to catch her eye. Meg waved back, though her heart wasn't really in it, and as soon as the baton brigade had passed, Anita hustled their contingent across the street.

  “You bought one, too,” Anita cried, indicating Meg's flag. “Did he tell you that you were a no-good pinko if you didn't have one?”

  “He didn't go quite that far,” Meg replied politely. “I think he left it at Communist.”

  Jack Caswell shook Peter's hand with warmth. Joan drew on her cigarette and asked what they'd done with their friend Brian.

  “Byron,” Meg corrected her.

  “He's gone, reluctantly, to his annual family reunion, somewhere in Georgia,” Peter said.

  Stan, his thumbs hooked in his beltless summer-weight slacks, observed Meg with an openly appreciative glance. She wondered if he expected her to reciprocate.

  “It was so terrific of you both,” Anita was saying, “to offer us your place for this year's auction.” Had she forgotten that she'd requested it, Meg thought? “We're looking at August tenth, with the eleventh as the rain date, if that's going to be okay with you.” A green van c
rawled by, with a loudspeaker making announcements for a local candidate for Congress. “And we've got some super things already donated. Jack and Joan have come through for us once again,” she said, and Joan looked as if she'd wished it hadn't been mentioned, “with a framed letter from William S. Burroughs.” Anita announced the name, even the middle initial, with all the satisfaction of someone who had no real idea who William S. Burroughs was.

  “A framed, charitable tax deduction,” Joan muttered under her breath and around her cigarette.

  “And Bill Nash is offering five free hours of estate planning.” Meg did her best to appear impressed.

  Another band approached, playing a barely recognizable version of “Georgy Girl.” They were followed by a gaggle of paunchy Shriners dressed in red fezes and white shoes. “Must be the Sidney Greenstreet fan club,” Caswell joked.

  But something about their leader, a fat, elderly man with a saturnine face and a puff of white hair escaping from under his hat, reminded Peter, oddly, of his grandfather. Of the man in the black overcoat on the grammar school steps.

  “Jack,” Peter asked, “how well did you know my grandfather?”

  “Personally?” Caswell replied. “Well enough, I suppose.”

  “Did you know he had several books published by the Emperor Press? I found them, in a locked case yet, the other day.”

  “Locked ‘em up, did he? There's a man who knows value.” Caswell consulted his gleaming gold Rolex, glanced down the street to see how much more parade was coming. “Actually, Alex and I played billiards once or twice. He had a marvelous table.”

  Peter was still getting used to the “Alex.” He'd never heard anyone call his grandfather by that name; he'd never heard anyone speak of him so ... familiarly. Even Nikos and Leah had always kept a certain note of respect, or reserve.

  “You play?” Caswell asked.

  “What?”

  “Billiards. You play at all?”