The Wood of Suicides (12 page)

A
S
LUCK
would have it, Marcelle caught my cold and was absent on Tuesday morning, my first day back in his classroom. This allowed him to attend to me more openly than he might otherwise have done, crouching by my desk and going through various interpretations of the poems they’d discussed the week before. “And your friend, where is she?” he asked me, some five minutes into the catch-up session, as if only just noticing Marcelle’s absence. Unfortunately, it could not go on forever. The class was in anarchy without his direction. “I’d better take care of that,” he murmured in my ear, unexpectedly hot, close, and conspiratorial, when one of the girls shrieked on the other side of the room. I turned to regard the seat of his corduroys—one hand cupped to my ear, in an effort to contain the condensation left by his words—only to have my glance intercepted by Amanda. I blanched. How much had she seen, exactly?

Later in the week, he found some other pretext to crouch by my desk for an extended period, thumbing through my textbook and stopping at a stanza that I had underlined. He read this stanza aloud in his resonant voice.

Weep, daughter of a royal line

A sire’s disgrace, a realm’s decay;

Ah! happy if each tear of thine

Could wash a father’s fault away!

“You like these lines? Why?” he wanted to know. “What do they mean to you?”

I blushed and spouted off something embarrassing, I barely remember what, about a royal line polluted by the vices of the father, inherited decay, original sin. He gave me a peculiar look and told me that this was an interesting interpretation of what was essentially a rather obscure, forgettable political poem. Mortified, I cast my eyes away. For the rest of the conversation, I crossed my arms and met his carefully placed questions with one-word answers.

As he went on to cater to others and I to hunch over my books, I felt his gaze returning to me from across the room. Looking up, I saw that his expression was fixed, sober. I didn’t doubt that I was in his thoughts, yet the obscurity of these thoughts filled me with dread. It was the first time since meeting him that I felt the true peril of what I had gotten myself into. He had seen me. He would know me, soon enough.

I
T
WAS
beginning to seem like I could do nothing right, like the strings that had previously connected my mind to my body had somehow been severed. Every day, I distanced myself further from my friends. I was no longer a novelty to them and sensed private jokes forming in my absence. Suspicions flitted in their clear, cold eyes.

In the lunchroom, I was the token anorexic, anxiously nibbling on a Red Delicious while everyone else tucked into their hot meals. They would talk in their usual vulgar way—Amanda going into detail about Seamus’ body; Marcelle cackling and making silly comments—while I sat in torment, gnawed by hunger and love. In my torment, it was difficult for me to keep the pain from showing on my face, to keep my fists from clenching, and to control the awful lump rising in my throat. When it got this bad, I had to get out of there, rising unannounced and ignoring their confused inquiries. By the third or fourth time I did this, they no longer called after me, instead whispering something among themselves and erupting into giggles. I found out later that a quip had developed around my sudden, unexplained departures and that they now said it every time. “Oh, look, she’s gone to throw up her apple.”

I did go to the bathroom, but not to throw up, nor to self-harm, self-pleasure, or even cry. The impulse to do all these things was there, but not the resolve, as I sat with my feet up inside the locked cubicle, locked in a paroxysm of self-hatred, desire, and despair. I would stay locked in place until the bell went for final period, or something else—a flush from a neighboring cubicle, or a gaggle of sophomores outside, snapping gum and spraying aerosols—came along to break the spell. Pushing past them, through their headache-inducing scents, I would run cool water and regard my dark-eyed reflection, whose savage, love-starved look always came as a shock to me.

Although no good could come of it, I sometimes chose to wander the lonely halls of the English department, shuffling numbly between the teachers’ lounge and my locker, rather than hiding out in the library or returning to the lunchroom. I didn’t know whether I truly desired to see Steadman, or if I haunted his department merely out of force of habit; nevertheless, I could only go undetected for so long. It would only be a matter of time before he caught a glimpse of my fleeting figure in the bright slice of a door left slightly ajar, or distinguished my soft, dragging footfalls in the hallway.

I expected him to ambush me. What I didn’t expect was the direction from which he would do so, presuming that he spent all of his lunch hours in the staffroom with the other teachers. In fact, he’d been lying in wait in a lair of his own, listening as I passed from the staffroom to my locker, lingered, sighed, and turned back in the direction whence I had come. He timed his exit from the classroom to coincide exactly with the moment that I reached the door, greeting me effusively, “Hello Laurel!” he beamed. “Isn’t this a pleasant surprise!”

“I’m just . . . coming from my locker.”

“Well!” he was still beaming, his face flushed and eyes glinting, as if drunk. He was standing quite close and I couldn’t help hoping, fearing, that he was about to bend down and kiss me, right there in the hall where anyone could see us. He laughed, probably at my expense. “Don’t let me keep you!”

I stood staring, processing his words, until he laughed again. God, I loved his laugh; I loved his features, crinkling with laughter. We stared at one another for a while longer, until his smile softened, faded. I glimpsed something restless in his eyes, a glimmer of desire that I wasn’t meant to see, as his glance skipped from me to his empty classroom and back to me again. Noticing this, I bowed my head and plucked my skirt in a sort of frantic curtsy. I could feel his eyes following me down the hall after I had turned my back on him, but didn’t have the heart to enjoy it: I was too unnerved, too confronted by what I had seen.

I
T
WAS
clear that we had taken it to a point beyond mere flirtation. It was no longer necessary for us to interact, to play games the way we’d been doing for weeks on end. Instead, we watched one another: he, with a proprietary coolness that suggested he already had possession of me; I, from the corners of my eyes—intent on gaining some control over his chameleonic character.

Cynical, self-deprecating, affected, indiscriminate, patronizing, immature, as sloppy intellectually as he was with his desk, fickle, vain, virile, brooding, pedantic, philandering . . . in short, Byronic, Byronic, Byronic, almost to the point of parody. It was only fitting that we should be learning about the Byronic male from a living, breathing specimen who was as much aware of his dark charms as I was. It didn’t matter how many negative attributes I ascribed to his name—each one only added more flesh to the archetype, made him more whole and tangibly mine.

I was the only one in the class who understood the more cynical of his jokes, who picked up on his more recondite references, who appreciated his genius. I was the only one who saw the lonely figure he cut standing at the window like a deflated version of the
Wanderer Above the Mist
, tacked on the wall behind him. I was the only one who pitied him, seeing how the other girls occasionally reared away from his excessive spirits, the manic edge to his cheerfulness. I was the only one who adored him in the blueness of his sulks and the blackness of his tempers; the only one who stood in awe of him at his golden best, skimming stones and quoting Dante in the original Italian. I was the only one in the world who wanted him; the only one who was made for him; the only one who craved the unbuckling of his belt, the flicker of his poet’s tongue. I was the only one who saw him as a man and loved him as a god.

I could feel myself crumbling, growing ever more masochistic, as the desire to taste our love, the cleaved fruit and flesh and blood of it, overwhelmed my imagination. In private, I broke my rule of not putting my feelings on paper, drafting love letters that God only knows whether I actually intended on sending to him. Though they were all torn up in the end, they were more or less reworkings of the same arguments, expressed with the same sticky metaphors, in the same madwoman’s rhetoric.

Dear Sir,

I know that it is wrong, that it is against all the dictates of reason, propriety, and morality to be writing to you in this manner, but all I can say is that I do not care. You have made me unreasonable, improper, immoral. Every day that I spend in your presence, I become a little more indecent, a little more lowly and self-deprecating. It is time that I bare all, that I make myself explicit—if indeed I still have a self. I am so afflicted, sir, that I have no other option but to confess that I want you.

I want you. There was a time when I may have been able to express the sentiment less crudely, yet it is too late now.

I no longer understand how to quiver modestly, how to hide sweet, delicate blushes. Now I am wracked with convulsions, burned by the fires of hell. If I am a virgin, it is only in the most trivial, membranous sense of the word. Please, make my damnation official. I ask only that you rid me of this technicality.

I am aware that you are a professional man, a married man, a father. You may also be a religious man, and feel that what I am asking of you is an unspeakable sin. I hope that you will remember, however, that beneath all this, you are still a man. It is the man in you that I wish to appeal to, as it is the man in you that appeals to me. Were you not such a man, you would not have had this effect on me. I was pure once; I once believed in the dictates of reason, God. Now I see no reason, I believe in no god, unless you be counted. Let me stroke your ego. Let me make you my god. I beg you.

I do not ask for you to love me. In fact, were you to declare your love for me at this moment, I would spit on it, I would laugh in your face. Your love cannot save me. The best thing you could do for me would be to relieve me of myself, to take me and use me as you see fit. I do not care how you do it, or where: a bed of coals, a motel room, or (if you will permit me to be sentimental) beneath the very evergreens where you first wiped these tears and sparked these flames.

Bear in mind that I am young, nubile, and reasonably pretty. If all this does not please you, bear in mind simply that I am female, and that I am offering myself to you as a slave, who will do all the things that a wife would never dream of. I may be young, but I understand what I am proposing. You must understand, sir, that I am prepared for absolutely everything.

I promise that I can be discreet. You have said yourself that I am intelligent, and must know by now that I am by nature secretive and not liable to speak a word of what goes on between us. You are my master, my confessor. What is more, you are my teacher, and there is still so much I have to learn.

Your Eager Pupil

I had laid my mind out on the page for him and couldn’t see how he could fail to be convinced by it. In fact, had this letter made it into his hands, I don’t know how he would have received it. It is very possible that the audacity of the letter, and the violence of the emotions expressed might have deterred him. After all, he was a dominant male, swollen with stupid male pride, and may not have appreciated having his conquest undermined by the ravings of the very sex-starved schoolgirl he aimed to conquer. I could imagine him dismissing the letter as inappropriate in a fit of conventionality or sham guilt, and going on to refer me to the school counselor; to request my transfer to a different class; to betray me by playing the part of calm, responsible adult—hypocrite of hypocrites.