The Wood of Suicides (22 page)

“Laurel?” Jillian gave me a sly look, her knife poised over the cheesecake. “It’s
very
good.”

“No, thank you.”

“You can certainly afford it,” she said teasingly, with a maternal cinch of my waist. Jillian herself was a short, fat-bottomed woman with a disproportionately long neck and a head full of sleek, dark hair.

“Jill can’t afford it, but she still puts away more than all of us.” Lee slouched out from the house, crossing the deck and setting his trim, stonewash-jeaned behind on the arm of his wife’s chair. He gave her a genial, faintly condescending pat on her thick thigh. “Don’t you, my dumpling? Actually, I think I might have some of that . . .”

With only a touch of sadness, the woman lowered her small, indistinctly colored eyes and cut him a wedge of cheesecake. He took up the plate, remaining spryly poised on the arm of her chair, his legs in a constrained figure-four. Lee was a tallish, tannish, fit forty-something-year-old with an all-American look about him: rolled-up sleeves, oversized white teeth, square jaw, and wavy once-blond hair. For all this, I found him repellent.

“Are you
sure
you don’t want any, Laurel? Just a little slice like your mother’s?” Jillian insisted.

I shook my head.

“She’s worried about gaining weight,” my mother said in the stagy, catty manner that parents use with other parents.

“I’ve gained three pounds,” I defended myself lamely.

“I can’t see where. In hair, probably,” Jillian reached for my tumbling locks. “Her hair
has
grown since the funeral, hasn’t it? Look at it. She’s like that painting. You know, that Pre-Raphaelite one of the girl with all the red hair. Lizzie, help me out?”

My mother shrugged helplessly, showing her pale wrists and licking the crumbs from her fork. Lee gave her an appraising glance. “They both are. Regular Pre-Raphaelites.”

I scowled at his misuse of Steadman’s terminology and took a sip of my black coffee.

Later that day, Lee drove my mother and me around town in his convertible: pointing out cypresses and famous residences while expounding—ostensibly for my benefit—on the virtues of living in such a historically and artistically rich community. For my mother’s benefit, he referred to the two of us collectively as “girls” or “young ladies,” and talked endlessly of architecture: drawing her attention to the echoes of Antoni Gaudí in this or that Carmel cottage; speaking of the treasures of Barcelona, and pronouncing the city’s name, to my disgust, with an affected lisp. Despising his pomposity, I stared out the window until we arrived on the doorstep of Arcady.

The owners had flown to Greece for the winter, leaving a key in Lee’s possession. He ushered us inside with hushed exclamations about the quality of the redwood flooring, the exposed beam ceilings and the distribution of light. As the adults wandered from room to room, studying the architectural features, I could see my mother’s mind working, imagining which of her
objets d’art
could be transferred to this comparatively rustic setting.

Bored of interiors, I strayed out to the gray-cobbled, mossy, shadow-plunged back garden. I descended from the porch to a pergola, overgrown with pendulous pink and purple wisteria. I ran my fingers through the soft, trailing blooms. I spied a series of verdigrised bronze nymphs and, further into the garden, a gloomy green pool, deeper than it was wide. At the far side of it was a slanted willow, casting strange shadows over the depths.

I crouched on the gray cobblestones and dipped my pale hand into the greenish pool water. It was cold yet clement to the touch. Unthinkingly, I pressed my dripping digits to my lips. I tasted salt and chlorine; Steadman. Head-swimmingly, half-swooningly, I raised myself from the poolside to squint at the glaring white sky. Below it, the roof was gray and shingled. The second-story window gaped open, exhaling white drapes. I heard a buzzing. I looked down to the white-framed pergola and perceived, hidden amongst the wisteria, a festering hornets’ nest.

T
HAT
EVENING
, we sat out on the Waldens’ patio, awaiting their daughter’s return. The adults were drinking wine, which I was permitted as well, being almost eighteen and in the company of affluent liberals with European aspirations. I accepted a glass of red, hoping that it would alleviate something of my boredom. While it did take some of the edge off, however, it also induced a pang of longing, as I recalled that night on Steadman’s sofa back in Marin County.

As the adults talked, I dreamed and drank, and occupied myself feeding a handful of nuts to the Waldens’ spaniel. When Lee saw me doing this, he unexpectedly flared up. “Why would you do that? Don’t you know that it could kill her?” He proceeded, much to my bewilderment, to storm into the house, taking the spaniel with him. Jillian apologized. “Don’t mind Lee. He’s very protective of that dog.”

I remembered wistfully that my father had always disliked animals, particularly dogs; that the only pets I had ever been allowed were lone canaries and gloomy Japanese fighting fish, which sat like wilted flowers in their tanks and died within days. Twenty minutes later, Lee emerged from the house in perfect spirits, telling us that the paella was almost done and that Josephine had just called to say that she was passing the regional park and would be with us shortly. He resumed his place between my mother and Jillian, topped up his wine, and took a handful of nuts from the bowl on the table.

It was a little after eight when the daughter of the house arrived. She had her father’s teeth and height, her mother’s neck and hair. She was hand-in-hand with a short, scruffy creature, who I took to be her college boyfriend. After greeting everyone at the table, myself included, she settled into the seat beside me, accepted some wine, and remarked upon the pleasant aromas coming from the kitchen. Jillian took this as a cue to rise from her chair and, despite many polite protestations, was promptly followed into the house by my mother.

Over dinner, Lee began a tedious, heated discussion with Josephine’s beau about politics. On either side of Mr. Walden, the older women sipped at their wine, picked at their paella, and affected to listen—eyes glazed and chins resting on their hands. Josephine, a twenty-year-old Spanish major, turned to me and asked how I was liking her old boarding school. I told her that I liked it well enough and took the opportunity to engage her in reminiscences of the S.C.C.S. faculty.

She recalled, with fondness, her former Spanish master, Señor Rafael; hulking Mr. Higginbottom, and Albert Wolfstein, whose class on modern literature she had taken as a senior. “Did you ever have Mr. Steadman?” I questioned, making every effort to control my features. “Steadman . . .” she thought for a moment; that divine name meant nothing to her. “What does he look like?”

“Oh, you know . . .” I felt my face burning. “Sort of tall. Fortyish. Dark hair. Handsome, for a teacher.”

“I don’t think so . . . Actually, hold on. I might’ve had him as a sophomore. Is he kind of touchy-feely?”

My blush deepened. “In what way?”

“Leaning a bit too close. Crouching next to your desk. That sort of thing.”

“I like Mr. Steadman. He’s a good teacher.” Every part of me was blazing as I said this.

My mother, who I hadn’t realized was listening in—having given up the pretense of caring about the men’s conversation—languorously inquired. “Steadman? Isn’t that the name of the friend you stayed with?”

“
Stratton
,” I hissed, “Her name was Catherine Stratton.”

I took a gulp of wine and, swallowing my venom, asked Josephine whether she’d heard the rumor that Mr. Wolfstein was a homosexual.

L
ATER
THAT
night, when the adults were sufficiently intoxicated and Josephine sufficiently entwined with her young man not to notice my absence, I rose from the table to make a call to Mr. Steadman. His phone rang on, without regard to my feelings. Hearing the adults’ voices rising from the garden, it occurred to me that he was probably at a dinner party of his own; that I was alone and not in full possession of my faculties. I retired to the guest bedroom early to spare myself the indignity of sitting out on the patio with the rest of them, and of being awake when my mother stumbled into her nightclothes and passed out beside me, well after midnight.

She had been impressed with Arcady, as had I—insofar as I could be impressed by anything that didn’t directly relate to Steadman. Early in the week, we returned to the cottage once again, and I was allowed to bathe in the green waters as my mother and the Waldens strolled about the property. “How pretty the wisteria is!” I heard my mother exclaim, entering the garden. “You should do a painting of it, Lizzie,” kind Jillian remarked. Her husband, the sleaze, noticed me in the pool, pale and thin and insipid in my faded bikini. “Why don’t
you
take a dip, Lizzie?” My mother tittered appreciatively.

It was agreed that Lee should contact the owners of the cottage as soon as possible. He conducted a long discussion with them late that night, with my mother hanging off his shoulder, bartering through him, to reach a tentative agreement that made her squeal and Lee dip into the cellar for a celebratory bottle.

The week, from then on, was an endless string of diversions: dinners, cafes, galleries, bookshops, and boutiques. I could see that my mother was enjoying herself and, in a detached way, hoped that she would continue doing so, even as I moped and mourned over the impropriety of the situation, the absence of Steadman, and the rapidity with which both she and I seemed to have forgotten all that had once been true. I yearned for my father as I hadn’t in months, at the same time as I yearned for Steadman: confusing their images in a wholesale desire for god and man, a rejection of her and me.

Lying in the dark, clutching at phantoms, her presence at my side was loathsome. Also loathsome were the times when she changed out of one set of dark clothing and into another, shyly keeping to the opposite side of the room, as if sensing something of my aversion. As much as I tried not to look her way, some ancient lust or envy would cause my eyes to stray to her side of the room and notice various morbid details: the slight puckering of cellulite on the backs of her pale thighs; the persistent sacral dimples; her underwear, which was as lacy as anything that she had worn when I was a child, though as black as the rest of her mourning.

She was aging. She was past her prime. She would never be able to reclaim the milk and fire, the Birth-of-Venus brilliancy of her days as my father’s wife. And yet, she wasn’t so aged that her body had ceased to work to a monthly schedule. Indeed, as females who’d lived together for many years, we were fatefully synchronized, in that sense. This was what brought her scrambling through my toiletries bag on the morning of February the twenty-eighth, our last full day in Carmel; the bag where I happened to keep, among other things, my birth control pills.

I entered from the lounge to find her standing over my luggage with the dial of pills in her hand. I stopped dead in my tracks. She glanced up at me, flushed, and faltered. “I’m sorry . . . I wasn’t . . . I was just looking for a tampon.”

“In the left pocket,” I said coolly, and turned on my heel to go.

The fallout didn’t take place until later that day, when Jill and Josephine had absented the house with their spaniel. I was sitting on the patio stairs, reading a book on Pre-Raphaelite art that I had found earlier that week in one of the town’s bookstores. Although I heard my mother come out with her coffee, I didn’t look up—simply continued thumbing through the pictures, peering at the pale faces of Jane Burden, Lizzie Siddal, and Maria Zambaco. She stood behind me for several pages with her back against the balustrades, mutely fingering her mug. The gold of her wedding band glinted sadly on her dainty, white hand. “Laurel, darling, about those pills . . ..”

I sighed. “Are you really going to tell me off for this? You, of all people?”

“What do you mean,
me
of all people? I’m your mother.”

“As if I had any choice about it,” I muttered under my breath.

“What did you say?”