Lost in the Forest

by Sue Miller

  As soon as she hung up she realized how ridiculous that concern was. Mark had been over at her house so often in the last year, they’d done so many things together, that anyone interested could have made note of all of that long since if he wanted to. There was already plenty to gossip about, if gossip was what you were after.

  It occurred to her then that she might have chosen the Auberge for herself—that perhaps she wanted a public place. Because this meeting felt different to Eva from all the others—and the reason for this was, of course, that he had kissed her. On the other hand, it certainly wasn’t the case that she thought anything was going to happen between them. That was an impossibility, which is what she had assured Daisy the night of the party.

  Then what, exactly, was different? She didn’t know.

  She got there first and sat outside, on the balcony that ran around the outside of the circular bar. It had a spectacular view down the wide, darkening valley—this was why the tourists came. Thick stems of an old wisteria vine twined up the posts from the ground below and reached for the roof. From the guest cottages hidden among the trees down the hill, you could hear a party—the voices and music rose muted; there was laughter and the odd loud squawk. Below Eva and to the left in the blue-lighted pool, someone was slowly doing laps.

  She ordered wine and sparkling water. She was, she realized, excited to be out, excited to be meeting Mark. This was the difference, she understood abruptly: it was in her. And it came, she acknowledged to herself now, because when he had touched her the night of her birthday party, she had been aroused. It had confused her and saddened her at the moment—this arousal—but she’d had to explain it to Daisy just afterward, and as she’d spoken she’d realized she was explaining herself to herself as much as to Daisy; and what she said made sense to her.

  She had told Daisy that quite naturally there was an old, deep bond between Mark and her. They had been married, after all. They’d had children together, whom they both loved. (Daisy’s face had registered contempt at this. She was backed up into a corner of her bed, hugging a pillow. She hadn’t wanted Eva to talk to her, even to come into her room. She’d screamed at her when she knocked, to go away, to leave her alone, but Eva had come in anyway, and Daisy had crawled back quickly across her bed to where her mother couldn’t touch her.)

  Eva had been sitting at the foot of the bed, not even trying to get closer. Just talking. Below her, she had heard Mark leave the house, and then his truck starting up and pulling away.

  She told Daisy that it was natural for Mark to have felt the wish to comfort her, to hold her when she was upset—and here for a moment she knew she was misrepresenting things: her tears, after all, had come after he held her. But it seemed that it could have happened as she said. And as she went on, it seemed more and more to Eva that it had happened as she said. It seemed reasonable and right that it should have happened that way.

  She told Daisy that of course holding her was bound to stir old feelings in Mark. In her too. But that these feelings weren’t real, they weren’t current feelings. They weren’t feelings that she and Mark would act on. And most of all, they weren’t feelings that had anything to do with John.

  Daisy’s face changed at that. She seemed startled that Eva would say John’s name in this context. She looked, actually, almost frightened, and Eva felt she’d gotten to the heart of what was upsetting the girl: some sort of betrayal of John that she needed reassurance about.

  She said Daisy should try to think of her and Mark as old, old friends, if she could. Friends who loved each other dearly, but who weren’t lovers. Who wouldn’t be lovers, she could promise Daisy that.

  Daisy had sat, not looking at Eva now. She was chewing on her knuckles, rocking slightly over the pillow she held.

  Eva’s finger was tracing the pattern of the crewel work on Daisy’s bedspread as she spoke. “So what you stumbled in on, just now, was … residual. Was like an old, leftover part of what we once felt, that emerged out of sympathy, really.” She looked up at her daughter. Daisy’s face was turned away, her long, wild hair hid her expression from Eva. “Can’t you see that? Daze? Those feelings—they don’t ever completely go away.”

  Daisy swung her head lazily, as though the air she was moving it through were thick. She seemed suddenly exhausted. She turned and stretched out, lying down to face the wall. Her body seemed huge, endlessly long to Eva. “Whatever,” she said at last.

  Eva knew better than to touch her. “Not whatever, Daze. What I said. Exactly what I said. You can take it to the bank.”

  The girl looked quickly over her shoulder.

  “I mean it, Daisy. It’s a kind of promise. Okay?”

  There was a rustle, a shift. Daisy sighed.

  “Okay, Daze?” Eva resisted the impulse to touch Daisy’s leg, which lay close to her now. It was shaved smooth. She hadn’t known Daisy had started to shave her legs. This made her sad, somehow, that the girl had managed this transition, this step into womanhood, on her own.

  “Yes. Okay.”

  “Okay,” Eva said. She made her voice cheerful. “Okay, then. I’m gone. I’m outta here.” At the door, she stopped and said, “I love you, honey.”

  There was a silence. Then Daisy said, again, “Okay.”

  Eva left.

  She had lied to Daisy, Eva was thinking now. The feeling between her and Mark wasn’t residual. Mark had said he wanted her. And when he touched her, she had wanted him.

  The sun had set behind the ridge, and lights were coming on in the valley below. The traffic was steady on Silverado Road. Eva sipped her wine, a chardonnay.

  But what did it mean, really, to want him? Did she want to have sex with him?

  That wasn’t what she’d felt.

  What she wanted was his touch, his kiss—simply to be held by him. That’s what she missed most of all, in her aloneness. Being touched. Being held.

  So maybe she hadn’t exactly lied to Daisy. She sat back in her chair. In any case, her promise was good. She wouldn’t sleep with Mark. That would be a fool’s game, the opposite of comfort: a way to open herself to pain again. She thought of him, after all, as incapable of fidelity, of loyalty. She had watched him over the years since they’d split up, she’d seen the flow of women in and out of his life. She heard the stories, from friends, from the girls.

  No, that way lay disaster.

  Though she wouldn’t be averse to a flirtation, if it could be kept away from the children. She wouldn’t be averse to using him to comfort herself—as, she thought, he had once used her.

  Oh, come on, Eva. That’s not what had happened. That was bitterness speaking. He had loved her. She believed he had loved her. He had simply been unable to be faithful, that was all.

  She smiled. That was all, she thought.

  She drank again, letting the wine roll around in her mouth before she swallowed. At the next table, the two couples who’d been comparing hotels moved on to restaurants—Terra, Tra Vigne, Mustards. No one mentioned bookstores. What about bookstores, she wanted to say. She smiled again. The question, of course, would be the answer. What about bookstores?

  They were middle-aged or older. Moneyed. One of the men balding, the other gray, both in expensive, slouchy, pale sweaters, like the ones Andy Williams used to wear on television. The women wore convincing, subtle color in their hair. They were carefully made up. They had red, red lips. It made Eva think of Daisy in her Charades costume last week at her birthday party, her big dark wound of a mouth. She signaled to the waitress, and pointed to her nearly empty glass for another.

  Mark startled her, touching her shoulder. She’d been looking out at the sky, still a light blue high over the dark valley. He sat down, something eager, something open and boyish in his face. When the waitress came, he ordered wine too. Eva watched their exchange, the way the waitress responded to him, just as women always did. After she’d gone, he leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. He asked her how it had gone the other night with Daisy. />
  She reported her conversation. She left out her promise never to sleep with Mark, not to get involved with him again.

  “That sounds about right,” he said.

  “Well. Thank you.”

  “And she was really okay with all that? She seemed so pissed off when she … when she went upstairs.”

  “Oh, you know Daze. She was as all right as she’ll ever acknowledge being.”

  The waitress came with their wine. She watched him swirl his glass, check the liquid out as it slid down its sides, a thoughtless habit by now. They talked a little about Daisy, about his feeling that she had gotten more relaxed around him as she’d gotten more difficult for Eva. They talked about Emily, who was coming home in a few days, who’d written to both of them through the summer—enthusiastic, slightly condescending letters. “Well, after all,” Eva said, “what do we know about the world? Rubes that we are.” He talked about the ripening of the grapes, the preparation for the crush. They talked about the fatwah against Salman Rushdie, about what his life must be like now. He told her a George Bush joke. They talked about her birthday party, about Gracie and Duncan.

  He said, “It feels like old times, Eva, talking like this.”

  He said, “It’s nice to sit like this, across from you.”

  It was fully dark. The expensive couples had moved on to one of their restaurants. The only other people left were at the far edge of the balcony.

  As they were leaving, he said, “Shall we do this again? Shall I call you?”

  And she didn’t say no. She didn’t say, “I don’t think so.”

  She said, “I don’t know. Let me think about it. Let me call you.”

  And then, standing by her car in the dark parking lot, she let him hold her and kiss her gently again.

  SHE DID CALL HIM, but she waited more than a month and a half, the month and a half in which Emily had come back from France and then left again for Wesleyan. In which Daisy had started school, and seemed to be trying to make it a better year than the last one—signing up for things, and then actually doing them. Becoming, in fact, too busy much of the time, with extra activities. A month and a half in which Mark came by to pick up the girls together once, and then Daisy alone several times, in which he took Theo once, too. In which Emily wrote long letters home, sounding like a different person—older, suddenly. Newly curious. Letters that Eva read out loud at dinner to Daisy and Theo. In which she’d gone out twice more with Elliott, the man she’d been, after a fashion, dating. A month and a half in which she’d allowed Elliott, also, to kiss her, and felt only dutiful. She knew he would take her coolness to be connected to John, and she let him. After all, it was, for the most part, connected to John. But she knew too that she had felt differently when Mark held her; and that if Elliott had made her feel that way, the way Mark did, she might have felt free to respond more passionately.

  It was mid-October by the time she called Mark again. She had been out the night before with Elliott, and had what she described that morning in the bookstore to Gracie—who’d stopped in before going up the street to open her own office—as “a perfectly lovely time.”

  And it had been. She liked Elliott more each time she saw him. He was soft-spoken and intelligent, with a kind of slow, warm humor. He seemed to delight in human detail in the same way she did—something a child was saying in conversation as you passed him on the street, something one of his patients had told him—he was a psychiatrist. He had grown children, and she liked the way he spoke of them, she liked his pride in them, and what sounded like their adult affection for him. She liked sitting opposite him at a restaurant table with its smooth white cloth and the heavy silverware. She liked the way he looked, slightly avuncular, a little paunchy, almost completely bald, but large, burly, attractive. He had nice hands—nicer, better taken care of, than her own.

  Gracie made a face. “Oh, ‘A perfectly lovely time,’ ” she imitated, in a trilling, elderly voice. “You sound like some New England dowager. Get off it.”

  “I am a New England dowager.”

  “What horseshit,” Gracie said. She was flipping through a big coffee-table book on home decoration. She looked up at Eva. “What is a dowager, exactly?”

  “Oh, it must come from the same root as endow. An old woman left with dough. Maybe dough comes from that too. Dough, dow. I’ll look it up.”

  “No, don’t bother. I don’t give a damn what its etymology is. Just don’t sound like that no more.”

  “But it is who I am, Gracie. I’m not like you. I can’t do this the way you would.”

  “Oh, honey. I don’t mean anything, really. If Duncan died, I don’t think I’d ever go out again.”

  “But Duncan will never die.”

  Gracie grinned. “The bastard. I bet he won’t. He’s too mean to die.”

  After Gracie left, Eva moved through the store, getting ready for the day—neatening shelves, straightening the stacks of books on the display tables. She looked up dowager: as she’d thought. Though it most often referred to a queen. A dowager queen. Queen Eva. At ten Callie came in, and Eva went back to her office and started to call the customers whose special orders had come in the day before.

  On and off through the day, she thought of Elliott, whom she liked but didn’t want, and of Mark, whom she wanted, she supposed, but didn’t want to be involved with ever again.

  Was that it? Were those her feelings? She didn’t know. It seemed to her she ought to know, to be clear about it all. Perhaps she needed to see Mark again.

  But she knew, even as she was thinking it, that this was suspect. What she wanted was his attention, his wanting her. Why? Because it felt good to be wanted, to be desired. Even if the desire was something he distributed widely, it felt good focused on you. It made her feel alive, flirting with Mark, making him think of her sexually again. Maybe she needed that right now. Maybe it was part of recovering from John’s death to feel sexy with someone safe, someone from her past. Someone she wasn’t going to sleep with.

  Or was she perhaps punishing Mark? Taking some belated revenge, now that she seemed to have some power over him, for the pain he’d caused her years ago?

  Maybe she could sleep with him. Could she? Images of certain times they’d made love together rose quickly in her mind, and she tried to busy herself with some imbalances she’d noticed in the finances to stop them.

  She had lunch with a sales rep who always made her laugh. When she came back, she told Callie three new jokes, one about a talking horse, one about a duck ordering grapes in a bar, one about a forgetful old man in a whorehouse.

  At four, Daisy came in. Eva was back in her office, but she could hear her daughter’s voice mingling with Callie’s and Nancy’s as the two older women got ready to leave. She came out to greet Daisy and to say good-bye to the two women.

  Daisy was friendly and easy while the others were still there, but as soon as they’d left, the slight coolness that marked their relations now fell between them. Her face stilled and grew sullen, unreadable, as Eva went over with her what she needed to do. “I’ll be in the office if it gets too busy,” she said.

  “Yep,” Daisy answered, already slouched on the stool behind the counter. She didn’t look at Eva. She was folding and refolding a piece of paper.

  Eva sat in the office in front of the computer with the columns of amber figures glowing on the screen. How she hated this business with Daisy! It was as though the girl blamed her for John’s death. There was nothing she’d done right since. Not when she was lost in grief. Not when she began to recover a little. Certainly not dating Elliott or that thing she’d seen with Mark. There was never a moment of lightheartedness or ease between them. She couldn’t remember the last time Daisy had laughed in her presence.

  She got up and went to the door. As she stepped into the corridor, she could see Daisy doing something at the cash register.

  “Daze,” she said.

  The girl jumped, turning. The drawer clanged shut.

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nbsp; “I didn’t mean to startle you,” Eva said, approaching the counter. Daisy was watching her, attentive, alert.

  “I have two good jokes for you,” Eva said.

  “Oh! Cool,” said Daisy, almost breathlessly, it seemed. She sat down again on the stool. She was all attention, smiling—smiling!—as Eva started. And at both punch lines, she laughed out loud.

  “Dumb, aren’t they?” Eva asked, grinning back at her daughter. How lovely she was, really, when her face opened.

  “Dumb is okay,” Daisy said. “For a joke, anyway.”

  “It’s true, isn’t it? The dumbness is part of the pleasure.” And then, because the moment had made her happy, because she didn’t want to push it, she stood straight. “Back to work,” she said.

  But in her office, she was restless, too distracted by the warm surprise of Daisy’s response to concentrate.

  She called Mark. He was in his truck, she could hear it. His voice softened in response to hers; he said her name.

  “I just told our sullen younger daughter not one but two jokes, and she laughed at both of them.”

  “Jesus, these are jokes I need to know.”

  She asked him if he was free that night. By the hesitation in his voice before he said, “Sure,” she knew he wasn’t.

  “You aren’t to rearrange anything on my account,” she said. “How about Monday instead?”

  “Either is fine.”

  “Monday, then. It’s actually better for me. A drink after dinner? as usual?”

  SUNDAY NIGHT Daisy came downstairs in a bath towel, full of indignation. There was no hot water.

  Eva was reading. She had only recently begun to be able to read again, whole books—this had been impossible for almost a year. Now she looked forward to it. The book, waiting in the living room after she got Theo down. Waiting at her bedside. The circle of light falling over the white bedsheets, the subtle smell of the paper, the ink, the arrangement of the words on the page. Wanting just another chapter, and then, perhaps, another. Wanting something she could so easily have. When it had been gone, she hadn’t been able to miss it—she was too taken up with grief. But now that it had returned to her, she was grateful to this old love—books, the words—for coming back, for reminding her of the possibility of pleasure, of anticipation. Of being transported out of her own life into others.