The Wood of Suicides (17 page)

“It would be nice, Mom. I think it’s a very nice idea.”

T
HE
FOLLOWING
day, we had a modest lunch of turkey breast, string beans, and sweet potato. Despite its modesty, my mother cried on cue partway through the meal, lamenting the fact that my father wasn’t with us at the table as he’d been the year before. I reminded her that he’d hardly eaten anything the previous year, that eating had been painful for him. At these words, she grew quiet, much as a child might between one storm of sobs and another. “He was a very sick man,” she hiccupped. “Poor, poor Jonathon. He was a very sick man.”

“He was very sick,” I echoed and offered to refill her wine glass.

I was clearing the table and my mother was in the den, nursing her third glass of Pinot Gris, when I received the call from Mr. Steadman. I promptly stole outside to take it, settling on the porch steps and shivering from the late afternoon chill. Stained-glass windows glowed across the street like Chinese lanterns.

“Oh, I’m dying,” he moaned into the receiver. “Tell me it’s sorted. By this time tomorrow, I could be holding you in my arms.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Don’t let me down, or I’ll be rattling around all weekend like a lonely bachelor. Eating leftovers. Drinking all the wine in the cellar . . .”

I laughed. He really was a master of hyperbole.

When I returned to the den, I found my mother poring over old photographs and dutifully went to join her on the sofa. My father as a young graduate. My father as a young law clerk. My father as a young groom at their outdoor wedding, which she attended in strappy sandals and a garland of cherry blossoms. I was struck by how youthful my father was compared with Steadman and wondered whether I’d ever regret not giving myself first to an upright young man, with a trim waistline and an unwrinkled face.

There were far fewer pictures of him in middle age, though he remained handsome enough. The most recent were from Easter that year and had him unshaven, looking quite the roué with his two-piece suit and glass of red wine (the truth was, he couldn’t have more than a couple of sips without it interfering with his medication). It gave me a peculiar feeling to see the shots in which I’d been asked to pose beside him in my white Easter frock, patterned with evil black flowers; to remember how anxious I’d been, and how I’d tried not to let my anxiety show when he placed an arm around my waist at my mother’s bidding. I felt a similar anxiety as the lie stumbled past my lips. “Mom, my friend Catherine is touring St. Mary’s College this weekend. She wants to know if I can come with her.”

“Catherine who?”

“Catherine Steadman.”

I
WAS
ready for him almost two hours earlier than I had to be, dolled up in a plum-colored dress and matching lipstick. Before dressing, I had spritzed myself liberally with my mother’s French perfume: oriental spicy, with notes of plum, bay, citrus, jasmine, myrrh, and Lily of the Valley. My legs were sheathed in black pantyhose. On my feet, I wore high-heeled black Mary Janes.

It was well after five by the time he arrived at my doorstep, unshaven and dressed far more casually in jeans and his chocolate brown sweater. Though my mother and I answered the door together, he greeted her first. “Good evening! You must be Mrs. Marks.”

“Lizzie,” she smiled, accepting his hand.

“Hugh Steadman. As you can see, my daughter is
in absentia
. We told her she needed to have her room ready hours ago but, as usual, she left it right until the last minute.” He laughed—a convincing display of parental cynicism—and glanced at me darkly. “I hope your own is more organized.”

“Oh, Laurel has been dressed for hours! Darling, why don’t you go fetch your bag from the den?”

I flounced away, face burning. When I returned with my bag, they were discussing art, as his eyes had apparently chanced upon the framed Klimt picture while following my figure down the hall.

“Have you been to the Belvedere Gallery?” he was asking her.

“I have! My husband and I were in Vienna a few years ago.”

“Then you must have seen the Schieles too.”

“I love Schiele!” she simpered.

It went on that way for what seemed like forever. At last, duly charmed, my mother kissed me farewell and closed the door behind us—though not without accepting his hand once more. He took my bag from me and, walking down the path, gave me an innocuous compliment. “Those are nice shoes. What do you call those?”

“Mary Janes.”

Parked across the road was a silver SUV. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but the sight of it amused me: it was so family man, so bourgeois. He placed my bag in the trunk and helped me into the vehicle, holding the door open and his hand out. As soon as we were safely hidden behind the tinted windows, I melted into his arms. We were both flushed and tongue-tied when we broke apart, minutes later. He started up the engine. I adjusted my dress.

“Did you have to flirt with my mother so much?” I asked him coyly, once we were on the road.

“I wasn’t flirting. I was being a gentleman.”

“Do you think she’s attractive?”

“I think she makes very attractive daughters.”

As we drove north through Pacific Heights, I pointed out the public gardens that I used to pass through every day as a Sacred Heart schoolgirl, the street along which my old school had been located, and various mansions whose owners’ daughters I was acquainted with. We cut through the Presidio and across the Golden Gate Bridge. From there on, it was all tunnels, hills, and forest. Night spread across the sky like the warmth of his hand resting on my thigh.

At last, he announced, far-off and sonorous as a dream pilot: “. . . Welcome to Larkspur.” I shook off my reverie to peer out through the velvet-blue gloaming at a sycamore-lined street, full of sprawling bungalows and ranch-style family homes.

He pulled up in front of one of the bungalows. I couldn’t tell what color it was in the failing light, but there was a trellis and picket fence. Without a word, he got out and walked around to the trunk, straining his neck to scan the sleepy street for onlookers. Satisfied that we were alone, he opened the passenger door. “Come out, my nymph.”

I felt woozy as I stepped out of the warm, stuffy vehicle and tottered down the garden path ahead of him. Cradled in the darkness of the front porch, he slipped an arm around my waist and breathed hotly down my neck, scrambling to fit the key into the lock. He dropped his keys. He cursed under his breath and gave a sharp gasp of laughter. Gripping my waist tighter, he forced the key in and pressed me forward into the house.

The shadows in the hallway were long and sharp. I was as disoriented as a child waking up from a long sleep, but this didn’t matter to him. The bedroom was upstairs and he wanted me in it.

Oak sleigh bed. Flowered Laura Ashley style spread. A wedding photo on the nightstand. A slice of mirrored wardrobe, partly open. A whiff of mothballs, lilac, another woman’s perfume. He was kneeling at the foot of the bed. He was tugging at my tights. He was kissing my insteps, moving up my increasingly bare legs. As his mouth brushed my inner thighs, it dawned on me what he was doing.
Not that
, I thought.
Anything but that
. I squirmed. I giggled. I closed my knees around the back of his neck. He pressed on with his cool, over-refined tongue. I was about to cry out when the phone in the hallway shrilled, louder than I ever could have. He rose from his worship to answer it, giving me a tigerish glance as he leaned and paced and listened.

“. . . A delay? Two hours? Oh, no, I wouldn’t . . .” I sat up on my elbows, pressing my scrawny legs together as best as I could. He came and sat down beside me, pushing me back into a position of repose and caressing me artfully, even as he continued talking. “. . . Yes, I was just about to. Yes, I know where it is. Don’t mind me, Danielle, I have everything I need . . .” I writhed quietly beneath his touch. “All right, call me tomorrow. Have a safe trip, my dear.” He hung up and tossed the phone on the carpet.

“Nothing to worry about. A flight delay,” he explained curtly; then, more tenderly, “Why don’t you take off that dress? I like you better without it.”

H
E
TOOK
his time with me, drawing out my torture as he’d never been able to do during our brief classroom trysts. I was quite stupefied by the end of it, unable to account for the sensations that had passed through me, the utter break between my mind and body. He held me. The hair on his chest was matted. His chin was coarse, resting against my forehead. He was large and coarse and sweaty and male, regardless of the fact that he had read Petrarch. I was a soiled lily, limp in his arms, utterly lost to myself.

He was a man with appetites. Having satisfied his appetite for me, his cravings were far more mundane. He asked if I wanted some supper and, finding me unresponsive, said that there was no need for me to get up; that he could fix me a plate and bring it to me right there.

I watched him rise from the bed completely as he was. It still frightened me somewhat to see him undressed; to fathom the discrepancy between his full-blown, middle-aged manhood and the pale, frail, teen-aged beauty that I was accustomed to. He put on what was nearest at hand—his undershirt and shorts—and left me strewn beneath the sheets. Minutes later, unable to stand being alone with my lack of self, I tremulously dressed and padded downstairs to the kitchen.

I found him standing at the oak bench before a spread of leftovers, soberly sipping at a glass of red wine. “Hello, Laurel,” he greeted me—all politeness, as if he hadn’t just left me alone in his bed, in a state of utter desecration. “Would you like some wine?”

I nodded dreamily and sat on one of the kitchen stools, barelegged beneath his brown sweater and my crumpled plum dress. “Vintage 1985. I chose this just for you,” he boasted, pouring me a glass of dark Merlot. Then, more bitterly: “ ‘Vintage!’ Imagine.”

I didn’t have the capacity to imagine, at that point. As he busied himself with the food, I took a sip of my wine. It tasted bitter, as all wine did to me, and went straight to my head, enhancing the warmth of my afterglow. I hadn’t eaten since midday; nevertheless, it was only at his insistence that I took up a fork and began on the plate of cold turkey, yams, and cranberry sauce that he had lovingly prepared from the scraps of the day-old Thanksgiving meal lovingly prepared by his wife. It was the first time I’d eaten in front of him, and I was afraid that it might disillusion him to see me perform such a rudimentary action. I need not have worried.

“You eat so daintily. Like a bird.” He regarded me with a smile partway through the meal. “Look, you even point your little finger.”

“Deportment classes,” I said with a dab of my napkin. This seemed to genuinely please and fascinate him, and a silly smile took over his features. I suppose he liked the thought of a room full of girls doing dainty things.

After we’d polished off our supper, we took the wine to the den and sank into the softness of the family sofa—a lumpy, pale thing that could’ve done with reupholstering. Draped over it was a reddish throw rug, which brought out the brick of the disused fireplace, the warmth of the mahogany floorboards and coffee table. On the table was a bowl of walnuts, an assortment of home and garden magazines, and a botany book. For my benefit, he opened the book at
Laurus nobilis,
Grecian laurel. I smiled and flipped the page over to California laurel. I was a New World nymph, after all.