The Spirit Wood

by Robert Masello

  Leah was concentrating now on the area around his ears; she was proceeding very slowly, even hesitantly. He felt her lift away the thicket of curls that covered his left ear, the one turned toward Nikos, and pause, the hair still extended. Nikos wasn't saying anything; the only sound was the steady snick-snick of Angelos's knife. Leah's other hand, the one with the scissors, rested idly on his right shoulder. Nikos, Peter sensed, was leaning forward—but doing what? One of his arms, short and swarthy, appeared on the table within Peter's field of vision; his fingers were raised, and it crossed Peter's mind that Nikos was going to reach up and touch his face. Instead, the fingers drummed a brisk rhythm on the sticky cloth, and he clambered to his feet.

  “Can I get you something to eat?” he asked, crossing behind Peter's chair. Leah had made a harmless pass at the hair she'd been holding out, then laid it back down over his ear. Nikos opened the refrigerator in the rear kitchen area; Peter heard the release of the rubberized strip, the rattling of jars ranged on door shelves, and saw on the newspaper spread around his bare feet (the National Enquirer, he now noticed) a glimmering of harsh white light.

  Angelos banged the front legs of his chair to the floor. “For me, the salami,” he said. “And a beer.”

  Nikos must have done a double take. “I didn't ask you.”

  “Nothing for me, thanks,” Peter said. A snippet of hair fell onto his lips; before he could even sputter, Leah's fingers had brushed it away with a quick, sure touch. Still, his lips tingled for many seconds afterwards.

  “Catch,” Nikos said, and the salami arced over Peter's right shoulder; Angelos caught it in his ample gut. The beer can followed, but that he fumbled, and it hit the floor. Nikos laughed and moved to Peter's side. As if at a signal from him, Leah stopped clipping the hair on the top of Peter's head and switched to the side. Just as before, she carefully drew out the dark tendrils that were massed about his ear, and held them away from his head, while pretending to disentangle and cut them. Nikos laughed again, apparently because Angelos had just sprayed himself opening the agitated beer can, and Leah dropped the hair back in place. Nikos sat down again, with a groan as he settled his crooked legs. He hadn't taken anything for himself from the refrigerator.

  “Where is your wife today?” he asked. “Angelos says she's not at the boathouse.”

  “She's in New York,” Peter said as Leah placed the scissors on the table. “She went in to see an old friend. She won't be back until sometime tomorrow.” Then, wondering why Nikos had asked, he said, “Why? Did you need her for some reason?” Leah pulled the towel away from his shoulders and shook it out over the papers.

  “Leah did—not me,” Nikos replied. “She wanted to plan the dinner for tonight. Things like that.” Angelos's penknife sliced through the hard salami and cut into the plastic tablecloth. Leah said, “Please don't do that—put a plate under it.” Angelos looked up at her, expressionless, and went right on cutting.

  “Your friend, he's gone, too?” Nikos said, already knowing the answer. “You'll be alone tonight, then?” He sighed, rather dramatically. “When I was young, like you,” he said, reminiscing with the hint of a leer, “I was never alone at night. Sometimes I was the mouse,” and his fingers scurried across the tabletop, “when the cat was away. I never wasted a night.” He clapped his hands to his knees, and Peter wondered if his legs had been so deformed in his youth, too. “In life, there are too few nights,” he concluded. “You cannot waste any of them.”

  Peter also wondered exactly what it was he was recommending. He slipped on his glasses; Leah was kneeling at his feet, gathering up the newspapers. Her long, glossy braid hung over one of her shoulders, lightly switching his ankles. She kept her eyes low- ered, as if embarrassed by what Nikos was saying. She straightened up without ever looking at Peter or her father and carried the crumpled papers to the waste-basket in the corner. Peter suddenly felt sorry for her.

  “This is a great haircut,” he said, patting at his hair. “Thanks. I feel cooler already.”

  “You're welcome,” Leah replied, still without turning around. Her legs, in the faint light coming through the window above the sink, were dimly silhouetted; Peter's eyes, inadvertently, lingered there for a moment. When he caught himself and quickly turned back to Nikos, he thought he detected, in the caretaker's face, a fleeting look of calculation and appraisal.

  Angelos sliced into the tablecloth again, and this time it was Nikos who corrected him, with a light, swift slap on the arm.

  Seventeen

  MEG'S CALL TO Peter's mother, at the office where she worked, had clearly come as a surprise. Not only because relations had been terribly strained since Meg and Peter had moved into Arcadia, but because, even in the best of times, Meg had seldom had much direct contact with Mrs. Constantine. Peter had always served as the conduit between them. There wasn't any animosity between the two women, no anger or bitterness or envy; if anything, to the extent that they knew each other, there was a benign mutual respect which, had they been thrown together more often, had they been able to spend time exclusively in each other's company might well have become a passable friendship. Meg sensed it in herself and suspected that Mrs. Constantine did, too. But there wasn't any such time, there weren't any such occasions, and when they did see each other, Peter was always there, acting, even if he didn't intend to, as a kind of interpreter to whom they both, for different reasons, deferred.

  Earlier in the day, Meg had met with the owner of the Solstice Gallery and had seen several of her pieces, along with the work of a half-dozen other artists and aritsans, displayed on the glass shelves of the small shop. It was a heady sight for Meg to see her pieces mirrored from behind, illuminated by targeted track lights, and flanked by small folded cards listing the title or description of the piece, her name, and, almost as an afterthought, the price. That was easily the strangest part, seeing a price—150, 200, 225, 95—attached to each piece. Meg found herself, without actually saying so out loud, quibbling with the valuations of nearly all of them; the dealer, she realized, was judging them only on their salability, on what she thought each would fetch, on what the market would bear. But in Meg's mind each vase, each pot, each tiny teacup was worth what it had cost her to make it, the particular trials she had gone through to get the glaze to come out just that color, the hours she'd spent pumping the foot-wheel, the half-dozen attempts that had gone before and been scrapped. By those standards, some pieces would not have been overpriced at a thousand dollars, and a couple, which she could recall having created in a single swift, effortless burst, she wouldn't have felt cheated by giving away.

  Mrs. Constantine had first suggested that they meet at her apartment after work, but Meg, who'd been prepared for just such a proposal, had as discreetly as possible vetoed it. She felt uncertain enough about arranging this meeting; the thought of conducting it in that dark, always musty apartment was too depressing for words. If they were going to talk, alone, together, it was going to be on neutral ground, in an open, airy, active place that might help ease the tension of the occasion. Rumpelmayer's, on Central Park South, was agreed upon.

  Though Meg was a few minutes early, Mrs. Constantine was already seated at one of the small tables opposite the door. She was studying the menu with intensity, and as soon as the hostess, who had escorted Meg to the table, had gone, Mrs. Constantine said, “I haven't been here in years. I had no idea it had become so expensive. If you'd like to go somewhere else . . .”

  Meg, unfolding her napkin, assured her it was no problem. “Have anything you like,” she said. “My treat.”

  Mrs. Constantine instantly demurred at that, saying there was no need for Meg to pay the bill. She said it the way she might have done before the inheritance, when a restaurant check of fifteen or twenty dollars might well have been a strain. Meg wondered if she had yet accepted the fact that her son, and daughter-in-law, were very well off. Rich.

  Mrs. Constantine ordered a bowl of orange sherbet, one of the least expensive items on
the menu. Meg had an iced coffee and a slice of Key lime pie. Both commented on how hot and dry the summer had so far been, then on the atttractiveness of the pink and white dining room around them. For a few minutes, Meg managed to hold forth on the Solstice Gallery and the downtown art scene, so far as she could comprehend it. Mrs. Constantine congratulated her on the progress she'd made with her work. There finally came a point at which they could no longer avoid the obvious.

  “Peter's got quite a tan this year,” Meg ventured.

  Mrs. Constantine dabbed at her lips with the napkin.

  “He's looking less like a professor and more like a surfer all the time.” Wasn't she going to take the bait? Meg wondered. “I don't think they'd recognize him back in Mercer.”

  “Will they have to?” Mrs. Constantine asked without looking up.

  “Next semester they will.”

  “That's the first good news I've heard,” Mrs. Constantine replied. Now she met Meg's gaze. “I know that none of this is your fault,” she said. “I want you to know that I'm not blaming you for what's happened.”

  “What has happened?” Meg asked, genuinely perplexed, and at last finding an opportunity to broach what was on her mind. “This awful rift has opened up, and I still don't understand why ... I thought if we could meet like this, just the two of us,” she continued, “we might be able to—”

  “Bridge it?” Mrs. Constantine shook her head. “Not while you're living at that place.”

  “Why?” Meg insisted. “What is it about Arcadia that we don't know? Please, tell me, whatever it is.”

  “If I could tell you, I would,” Mrs. Constantine replied. “I only know that I never knew my father, in his entire lifetime, to do anything that was either generous or good. I never knew him to do anything that wasn't somehow intended to do evil. If he left Arcadia"—the name took on a sinister tone in her mouth—"to Peter, it was because he expected something terrible, or destructive, to come of it. I don't know what. I don't know how. But I do know that” Then, with a weary attempt at a smile, she added, “And don't think I'm unaware of how crazy this makes me sound.”

  Now it was Meg's turn to smile. “It doesn't make you sound crazy at all,” she said. “I only wish it did.” Mrs. Constantine's eyes flashed up from her dessert. “Whether it was what your father intended or not, Arcadia—the whole inheritance—has had a strange effect on Peter.” But how could she explain to Peter's mother what she found so difficult to understand herself? “Sometimes I think it's as if he's been derailed by it all. As if, with every option in the world available to him now, he can't choose any longer. He can't decide what it is he really wants to do with his life.”

  That was certainly part of it. How many grad students, suddenly in possession of an estate and a fortune, wouldn't have found it a little tough to maintain their concentration? That much Meg could understand; it was natural. What she couldn't comprehend, and what was causing her to grow increasingly confused, even afraid, were the mercurial changes in temperament, the precipitous switches from tender- ness to indifference, calm to fury, industry to lassitude. She tried to find words to describe it—the moodiness, the brooding—to Mrs. Constantine. She tried, without losing her composure in the crowded restaurant, to explain the alienation, and loss, she felt. Mrs. Constantine listened with silent gravity, like a sibyl reluctantly hearing her prophecy fulfilled, and when Meg paused, unable to go on, she reached across the table and squeezed her hand with a cold, firm grip.

  “This will be small comfort,” she said, “but none of what you've said surprises me. All his life, Peter has been . . . changeable. There were periods, during his early teens, or when he was graduating from college, when it did seem to grow worse than usual, when he was more curious about his family ancestry, more restless, more despondent. That, I'm afraid to say, he has inherited.”

  “Could he also have inherited"—Meg had to summon up another ounce of courage even to mention it—"a problem with alcohol?” Mrs. Constantine listened as Meg described the jagged progression from that tragic night in Mercer, when he'd drunk too much at Phelps's party, to his subsequent abstinence. “He wouldn't even taste a mint julep on the night we celebrated Byron's job at Cumberland.” Followed by his gradual increase, marked by their first night at Arcadia. “He drank the wine made by Nikos, the caretaker at Arcadia—and I don't think he's stopped since.”

  At the mention of the homemade wine, Mrs. Constantine looked even more concerned. Her father, too, she confessed, had made his own wine. Though she hadn't brought it up at the reading of the will, it was Kesseogolou, the legatee in Heraea, Greece, the man to whom the money and artifacts had been left, who had taught him how. She remembered, as a teenage girl, seeing the two of them in the cellar crushing the grapes, distilling the juice. Then staggering up the stairs again, their sleeves stained purple, to drink themselves to sleep at the kitchen table, Kesseogolou with a battered Panama hat slouched down over his eyes.

  She hated his visits.

  “Who was he?” Meg asked.

  “I was never sure,” Mrs. Constantine said. “A business associate, I think. Though for the year or so he kept my father company, he always insisted that I call him Uncle.”

  “What did your father say?”

  “My father, who was deferential to no one, was always deferential to him. He often called him, in Greek, ’Daskalos.’ ”

  Meg waited.

  “It means ‘teacher.’ And I remember thinking, even then, that it was more than wine-making he was teaching.” She placed her napkin on the table, absently smoothing out the folds. “I think, in a way, that what he taught was the art of corruption. And with my father he'd found his prize pupil.”

  Eighteen

  AS PETER GROPED for the ignition, Caswell leaned in the open window on the passenger side and asked him if he was sure he could drive okay. Peter waved him away with one hand, put the car into reverse, and backed down the drive. Caswell was briefly caught in the headlights, the glass in his hand sparkling against the blackness behind him. Peter tooted the horn once, Caswell raised the glass.

  There was no one else on the road. Peter turned his wrist until he could read his watch by the light from the dashboard—eleven-thirty. Eleven-thirty. It seemed late. But it wasn't really. Meg wouldn't approve. Of where he'd been. But Meg wasn't home, so what did it matter?

  He drove slowly, not because he distrusted his own reactions, but because he was enjoying the night, the darkness, the solitude. Out here you could really appreciate the night; Mercer hadn't exactly been a metropolis, but even there the streets were well lighted and laid out neatly. Their apartment had been one of a row; often you could hear the guy from the music department, who lived two doors down, banging away at some dissonant postmodern piano composition.

  None of that here. This was what you called silence. Unless, of course, you listened very closely. If you were standing outside, along the road, or on some- one's lawn, anywhere but in town, you could hear the rustlings in the grass, insects, small animals like squirrels and rabbits—twice he'd spotted raccoons near the gates at Arcadia—and birds, all sorts of them, in the branches of the trees. It was just like tuning a radio, he thought—you had only to adjust your hearing to the right frequency, and then it all came in loud and clear. All the time it was playing on around you; you had merely to prick up your ears.

  In Arcadia, he was hearing better all the time. The longer he was there, the more alive the place became to him. At any moment, anywhere on the grounds, he could stop, hold his breath, close his eyes, and listen—anyone else would have thought it perfectly silent—to the hummings and flittings and burrowings of the unseen life around him. He had never been conscious of such things before; he had never cared. Until moving to Passet Bay, he'd have been suspicious of anyone who had. Now he felt that even if he tried, he could no longer be oblivious to it all; it was like looking at one of those popular optical illusions—you couldn't see the face, or the vase, until it was pointed out to you, but a
fter that, it was impossible not to see. It was a new talent, a new sensitivity, but at the same time, something that felt as natural to him as his own skin.

  He managed the gates to Arcadia without difficulty. But a hundred yards in, there was a rasping sound as the protruding brush clutched and scraped at the side of the car. He'd mention it again, maybe this time directly to Angelos. Angelos seemed to be the one delegated to do the actual work around the place. What work was done.

  He parked the car in front of the house, closer to the steps than he thought. And at a bad angle, with the back sticking straight out into the drive. He debated parking it again—then thought, What the hell. What difference does it make? Leave it.

  Inside, he turned on the entrance-hall light, a gaudy electric chandelier; the stark white walls and interior columns sprang up around him, as if raised from nothing in just that moment. The beckoning naiads above the fireplace seemed to have been frozen, only seconds from reuniting, by the sudden blaze of light. The mosaic in the floor appeared unconvincingly passive and static. Everything seemed to Peter to be holding its breath, waiting for him to extinguish the light and pass by. He left the chandelier burning.

  On the stairs to his bedroom, he stumbled, banged his elbow against the banister. He swore, and the words were swallowed up by the cavernous hall. In his room, the doors to the balcony were wide open, the curtains billowing out. He went across to close them, but down the back lawn—at the boathouse, it must be—he saw a light. There was a light on in Meg's workshop. Could she have come back early? Could she have returned to the house while he was over at the Caswells? Taken a cab from the station? But what would she be doing down there at this time of night?

  It was probably just that she'd forgotten to turn off the light the day before, he thought. He'd go down and do it now and check on Diogenes on the way. Passing through the entrance hall again, he had that same feeling of things suspended, awaiting his absence. Dodger, when he pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen, had already lifted his head from the mat.