The Wood of Suicides (21 page)

When it was time for us to start on William Blake, Mr. Steadman deviated by spending the better part of a lesson showing us the poet’s illustrations for Dante’s
Inferno.
He spoke of the lovers’ whirlwind, where the souls of those condemned for lust were blown about endlessly; of the wood of suicides, where sinners were caged in bark like Ovid’s nymphs. In the dimness of the classroom, with only the projector screen for illumination, his features were obscure. His intonations seemed to come from a deeper, more distant place, lulling me with the inevitability of my punishment.

Out in the hallways, he could still be seen walking alongside Mr. Wolfstein, Mrs. Poplar, and less frequently, Miss Kelsen. I passed him by without appearing to pay heed, though the mere sight of him had me itching with desire, nerves, and compunction over our most recent couplings. The physical evidence of these couplings was always increasing. After he gave me a large reddish-purple love bite, I was forced to powder my neck and wear my hair down over my throat for a full week. Undressing in the locker room, smaller bites could be observed at my clavicle, my ribcage, and my hipbones, as well as more enigmatic scrapes and bruises from the classroom carpeting and furniture. One morning early in February, I woke up to find myself afflicted with my first ever cold sore.

Weeks later, the same sore appeared at the side of Steadman’s mouth. I almost yearned for someone to take notice, to put two and two together, to see how the corruption of one lover was echoed in the other. Out of a similar impulse for sabotage, I would sink my teeth into his torso and suck until the blood pooled beneath his skin, until the vessels burst and he pushed me away, laughing that I was hurting him like a veritable lamia. I was proud of the bruises I left on him, which matched my own, and which he was forced to wear like badges of his infidelity, going home to his wife. Likewise, I was thrilled by the prospect of my scent—my warm, acrid, unmistakably youthful scent—announcing itself to her whenever they lay down at night. As much as I shied from the thought of him actually telling her anything, throwing away his marriage for a future that I had trouble contemplating, I wanted her to sense my physical claim on him. I wanted her to know that, though their lives were bound in every other respect, his flesh was mine.

Three times a week, I’d be anointed with his fluids—fluids that had their origins in the knotted system of ducts and glands inside him, and that came out smelling mysteriously of chlorine. On Wednesdays, when we habitually made love during lunch hour, I would bring this smell with me to history class and dwell in its alkaline dankness as Mr. Henderson’s chalk scraped on the blackboard and Kaitlin Pritchard’s lovely neck hovered before me. It was plain to see that I was no longer pure, that I was tainted in more ways than the fastest girls at school. Nevertheless, it all took place without comment. Nobody cared enough to acknowledge my contamination.

U
NLIKE
MY
spiritual decline, my academic decline was acknowledged. Before winter break, a special assembly was held for twelfth-graders, where the phenomenon of “Senioritis” was addressed. Mrs. Faherty, trembling with indignation at the thought that any S.C.C.S. girl could be willing to endanger her future prospects (and the school’s reputation), called up a procession of witnesses. There was a tragic character called Donna Sibley, an ex-student whose acceptance into Berkeley had been rescinded when she got a D in AP history. There were department heads, who spoke of the scores of bright students they’d seen letting their grades slip as soon as their college applications were in. There was the school psychologist, Dr. Lisa Bakewell, who invited us all to drop by for a chat if we ever had trouble coping. Finally, there was Kaitlin, who gave a pep talk about the virtues of supplementing study with wholesome social activities and exercise—all the while tossing her golden hair and shifting her weight from one long leg to the other.

The whole thing was a farce, redeemed only by scenic views of Steadman. He sat on the podium in a purely decorative capacity next to Mr. Wolfstein, looking bored and slightly haughty. At one point, he said something behind his palm to Wolfstein, causing the older man to convulse with silent mirth. My lover, it seemed, was something of a comedian.

We were only able to eye each other from afar, shuffling out of the auditorium: Steadman, talking with his hands while keeping in step with bearded Mr. Wolfstein; me, turning my head to look at him as the crowd carried me off in a swell of gray and tartan. From there, it was straight to second-period math class, where Mr. Slawinski grilled us for an hour with equations. As we were clattering out for morning break, he made an announcement.

“Not so fast. Libby Cloud, Laurel Marks, Ella Massie, Mary-anne Rhymes, Jenny Smith . . . I’d like you to all stay back a minute.”

There was a collective moan and exchange of eye-rolls. We settled back behind our desks, crossing our legs and cupping our chins in our hands. He remained standing, short and utterly sexless with his pocket pen and striped necktie. With a pang, I thought how much better my Steadman looked in chino pants.

“As you may know, the five of you scored below the class average in your latest test. In light of this morning’s assembly, I think you could all benefit from a few hours of extra tuition. How does Tuesday afternoon sound?”

It didn’t end there. In French class, Madame Rampling called us up individually to discuss how we might improve our proficiency in the language. “Laurel, you have a wide vocabulary and a good understanding of French grammar, but I feel you lack confidence in speaking and aural comprehension. Have you heard about the French conversation group after school? You can’t make it on Mondays?
Quel dommage.
Perhaps you would like to borrow some cassettes. . . ?” Meanwhile, before last period, I received a memo from Dr. Bakewell recom mending that I pay her a visit. I promptly tore it up.

That afternoon, entering Steadman’s classroom for our first tryst of the week, I unpinned my hair and told him of my woes.

“Your mind is too beautiful to be wasted on mathematics,” he declared. “Or on high-school psychologists, for that matter.”

H
E
WAS
due to turn forty-three at some point between the twenty-eighth of February and the first of March. It didn’t matter when exactly: either way, the event fell during winter vacation, the better part of which I’d be spending down at Carmel-by-the-Sea with my mother. On Saturday morning, she would pick me up from Saint Cecilia’s and drive straight down to the Waldens’ cottage, Yellow Leaf. That same day, Lee Walden would take us to inspect Arcady, the cottage he’d described to my mother. Lately, she’d been raving about this cottage to me over the phone and in her letters.

I told Steadman about my plans with the greatest indifference, remarking that I was only sorry to be passing the week so far from him. As an afterthought, I added, “And now our ages will be further apart too. Twenty-six years.”

“Oh, don’t remind me,” he groaned. “I’m well aware of how bad this would look, in a California court.”

“ ‘Statutory rape.’ ”

“ ‘Corruption of a minor.’ ”

“ ‘Criminal congress.’ ”

“ ‘Unlawful carnal knowledge.’ ”

“How many years, do you think?” I asked, only partly in jest.

“Five, six years. Maybe less on probation.”

“I’d visit you,” I ventured.

“You’d better.” He laughed. “It could be worse. Peter Abelard was castrated for bedding Heloise.”

I’d been given the love letters between Abelard and his nineteen-year-old pupil earlier in the month, and was amused by a perceived similarity between Abelard’s smug, cultivated tone and that of my teacher. This tone was something I also found in Byron, who—beyond the mood swings, the hot blood, and the indiscriminate appetites—seemed to me quite a cold character: the epitome of the rational, hypocritical male. Naturally, I was attracted to this. Nevertheless, it didn’t escape me that such men had a habit of turning their women hysterical: Heloise continuing to be plagued by lust as an aging nun in her convent, Lady Caroline Lamb starving herself and running around London dressed as a pageboy.

It was Lady Lamb who inspired me to make him a special gift before we parted at the end of the week. In class, he’d told us a salty story about how Lord Byron’s craziest girlfriend had once enclosed her pubic hair in a love letter. After bathing and perfuming myself the night before, I took out my nail scissors and made a clipping from my own delicate brown triangle. This was placed in a green marbled envelope, along with a note that I’d been agonizing over all week.

LAUREL STEADMAN

NEXT TO LAURA DEAREST

& MOST FAITHFUL—GOD BLESS YOU

OWN LOVE—RICORDATI DI DAPHNEA

FROM YOUR CALIFORNIA NYMPH
²

“Perfect! It’s perfect,” he effused when I handed it to him. “And, of course, I will remember Daphne. I could never forget Daphne.”

“Or Laura?”

“Or Laura.”

“Or Lady Caroline?”

“Or Lady Caroline.”

“Or Heloise?”

“Or Heloise. Let them castrate me; I’ll never forget my Heloise.”

I
WAS
in a pleasant if languid state of mind, making the two-and-a-half-hour trip south the next morning in the passenger seat of my mother’s Peugeot. She still wore mourning. She had packed a suitcase full of elegantly mournful clothing, including a bathing suit of black nylon. For all this, her conversation was far from gloomy. She told me of the scandalous amount of money that our neighbors, the Pratchetts, had spent adding another turret to their Châteauesque monstrosity. She asked me if I recalled my father’s colleague, Alan Hancock, and informed me that he was leaving his wife of fifteen years for a grad student. “Poor Jemima. I must go see her when we get back,” my mother frowned—practicing, rather than expressing sympathy for the other woman’s plight. Prematurely widowed, it was a plight she’d never have to suffer through.

It was after midday when we arrived at Yellow Leaf. We were greeted at the door by Lee and Jillian Walden, along with a fat old spaniel, which plodded up to me and sniffed my ankles at length. “What a terrible bruise you have on your leg, Laurel!” Jill gushed over a bit of Steadman’s handiwork. I told her that it was nothing, merely an injury from gym class. Lee grinned a large-toothed grin and, with some swagger, offered to take our bags to the guest bedroom. “I’m afraid you’ll have to share, girls! Josie is getting in from Pomona tonight.”

“Josephine! How nice.” My mother glowed, responding favorably to that “girls.” “We don’t mind sharing a room, do we, Laurel?”

In fact, I could think of few things I wanted less than to share a room and, as the case had it, a bed with my mother. All the same, I was a well-bred young lady and could put up no objections. At Jillian’s invitation, I followed my mother and herself out to the patio, to take some post-travel refreshments.

“Cake, Lizzie? Laurel?”

“Oh!” My mother leaned forward to better inspect Jillian’s offering, then bit her lip modestly. “Just an itty-bitty slice for me.”