Lost in the Forest (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Sue Miller

  And then he turned to Amy.

  Their affair lasted just under a year, starting with a relaxed flirtation in the cantina where Amy was a bartender and he sometimes stopped in to talk with friends, to have a few more moments of ease before heading home to face Eva’s pinched-in rage.

  Mark liked to flirt—he liked women generally—and in some sense flirting was part of Amy’s job. When she had a male customer who seemed receptive to it, she gave a special spin to the opener, “What can I do for you?” Mark had laughed out loud the first time she asked him that.

  When he stopped by, they talked, brokenly but easily, between her serving other customers. The third or fourth night he was in, Amy told him that she knew who he was, that she lived in a tiny bungalow at the edge of one of the small vineyards he managed. That she’d seen him there.

  Yeah, he’d noticed it, he said.

  He’d envied it, in fact. He’d seen her too, on the little deck at the back of the house, a woman alone, sunbathing and reading, and he’d imagined how simple, how easy it would be to live like that in such a place.

  He should come by for coffee some morning and check it out, she said. She had a towel slung over one shoulder. She always had a towel slung over one shoulder, and he pointed this out to her. She tilted her head and grinned. She was pulling a tall glass of ale, slowly. “Just looking for a guy with a bar of soap,” she said.

  He did go to her house, one rainy morning when there was nothing much doing in the vineyards. And after that they began to meet several times a week, for coffee, for sex, for the easy conversation that followed it in a house where there were no children, no chores he was responsible for. It was all so simple, so without blame and resentment. Sometimes he managed to get away on a weekend afternoon, and they’d fuck and sleep, and then wake to fuck some more. In the summer Eva took the girls to her parents’ place in Martha’s Vineyard for a week, their more-or-less annual visit. Mark waited for Amy outside the cantina in his truck nearly every night and followed the red taillights of her old Volkswagen Beetle down the dark, empty road to her house.

  But over the long, rainy months of that next winter, she began to want something more from him. Because he couldn’t give it, because he couldn’t imagine inflicting the pain it would take to extricate himself from Eva and Emily and Daisy—couldn’t, in those rare moments he allowed himself to think honestly about it, imagine making any kind of life with Amy that he’d want—she gradually came to be angry with him too. More and more she insisted on her terms: if they were going to continue, he needed to get a divorce, they needed to get married. But even while she spoke of this, of their coming together permanently, she seemed increasingly to dislike him—even to despise him. In the end he couldn’t talk about a book or a movie, he couldn’t have an idea, without inviting her contempt for his critical faculties. He could see, long before they got there, where they were heading.

  Still, when she broke it off, he was crazy with the desire to hold on, to keep it going. The most graphic images of their lovemaking occupied every idle moment of his day—at work, at home, driving around in his truck. He nearly cried out sometimes with the anguished hunger that would flood him thinking of her powerful long legs, opening, of himself kneeling above her, entering her. How she straddled him, how she pulled at him with her mouth, her teeth. A few times he had to stop the truck, torn between rage and jerking off. Once he hit the steering wheel so hard he carried the bruises on the curved outer flesh of his palm for a week.

  But he came out of it; he recovered. And as he became himself again, Eva came back to him, she emerged from the dark spell she’d been under.

  What did it? Mark was never sure. Maybe it was the sex, which had, oddly, gotten better and more frequent through the affair with Amy—at first because he had wanted to ensure that Eva didn’t guess he was involved with someone else, and later out of the appetite and sexual energy that had come to seem generalized in him, that occupied him constantly.

  But of course other things had changed in their lives by then too. The girls were a year older, and Eva had found care for them. His business was doing so well that they finally had what seemed like enough money. Eva had gotten a part-time job she loved, in a bookstore this time. In any case, it was like being rewarded for giving up an indulgence, getting his old, dear friend back. Rewarded with interest: the thought of her began to preoccupy him through the days as thoughts of Amy had at the height of their passion. As those thoughts still could, if he were honest, from time to time.

  But he felt it differently; he saw it differently. With Amy it had been, almost embarrassingly so, parts of her body that compelled him: her long, muscled calves and thighs, the wide dark triangle of her bush, the light clicking sound her sex made when his hand opened her legs. With Eva, he thought, it was the whole of her, as it had been from the start: the way she gestured and frowned when she spoke, her odd turns of phrase, her smallness, which made him feel powerful and protective. Even the way the house smelled when she was cooking, which seemed to him, somehow, to emanate from her, to be part of who she was. All of this made him, simply, happy.

  Summer began. The evenings were long. The girls were old enough now, they played well enough together, that Mark and Eva could resume their old habit of a glass of wine before supper. They sat together out on the terrace she’d painstakingly made from used bricks the year before. They sat in the shadows of the western mountains and looked over at the sun still laying a golden blanket over the eastern ones, and talked the way they had in the early days, but more calmly, more sweetly, he would have said. Eva had her own news to report now—eccentric, interesting customers who’d stopped in and the funny things they said; what books were doing well, which had unexpectedly bombed; the visits from sales reps; the balancing of accounts—and so Mark felt he could at last speak openly of his own concerns: it wouldn’t be the occasion for her feeling the more resentful, the more deprived of a life in the world. They talked of the seemingly whimsical popularity of certain grapes, of how the valley was changing, of the exponential growth of the vineyards, of the problems of worker housing and the moral responsibility for it. They talked of foolish things too: whether Diane Keaton was actually acting in Annie Hall, or just being her ditzy self. Whether people on the East Coast, where Eva was from, had a stronger sense of irony than those in the West.

  They were sitting there one night in July when he told her about Amy. What he had come to feel as they drew closer together was that the secret of Amy was an impediment to their new openness, an impediment he couldn’t live with. He wanted there to be no separation between them. He felt it as he would have a sexual necessity: the need for Eva to take in and understand—no, to love, that’s what he wanted—even the part of him that had betrayed her.

  During the long silence that fell after he’d said it, before she said, in a voice gone cold and distant, “How long?,” they could hear Emily inside talking to Daisy, imitating Eva’s voice at her most playful and affectionate: “Know what, my silly girl? You are the funniest bunny ever.” In the difference between the two voices—Eva’s, the little girl’s playing at being Eva—Mark could hear what he’d already lost. Instantly he understood, of course, that he should never have told her. He saw, just those few moments too late, that it was worse than cruel: it was uselessly cruel.

  And he hadn’t bargained on Eva’s own capacity to be cruel. Or, at any rate, to be unforgiving. He should have remembered from all their arguments that she saw these things—these moral issues, he supposed—in a clear, hard light. There was black and white. There was before, and there was after, for Eva.

  It was over, she told him. Well, what she said was, “Okay.” She stood up, carefully setting her wineglass down. “That’s it, then.” Her voice was hoarse, strained.

  She went back into the house. He sat in the cool shade looking over at the warm hill opposite for a few minutes. He could hear her in the kitchen. She was slamming pots and pans around as though she were about to cook for
hundreds.

  “Get out,” she shrilled when he followed her, when he began to plead. “I want you out.” Her hands made frantic crisscross, waving gestures, her neck was corded with rage. “Gone! Take your … ridiculous penis, and … just go!”

  His ridiculous penis?

  The girls had come to stand in the doorway now, wearing strange dress-up costumes, old clothes of Eva’s that drooped on their chest and showed their tiny nipples, that puddled on the floor around their feet. Their round mouths were dropped open at the sound of their mother’s rage—they looked like dopey cartoon fish out of water. They shouldn’t have been there. They shouldn’t have had to see this, or hear it. But there was no one to rescue them. Mark couldn’t. He had to get through to Eva somehow. He could hear his own voice speaking Eva’s name, trying to make his case.

  “Do you think I could ever want you again?” she was shrieking. “When every time we made love I’d be thinking of your … fat ass pumping up and down over that … weaselly woman!”

  His fat ass? His ass wasn’t fat.

  She stopped now, and looked at him. She was panting. She’d backed up as far away from him as she could get, to the kitchen counter. She was resting against it, she was bent slightly forward from the waist. She started to laugh.

  Mark heard the hysterical note, but the little girls didn’t, and in their relief—oh, this was all a joke! a game!—they imitated her, laughing falsely, much too loud, much too shrill. He looked at them. The fear was still in their eyes, but the kitchen was full of laughter, a raucous accusatory sound: nightmare gaiety.

  Mark couldn’t stand it. He left.

  He left. As he was shutting the front door, he thought he heard Eva’s laughter become weeping, but he didn’t stop to be sure. He just kept going, across the yard, into his truck, then down the long curving drive in the dusk of the overhanging trees to the road that led to town.

  Later, when he tried to call up the words he’d used to tell her, he couldn’t imagine what they might have been. “Eva, there’s something you should know”? “Eva, I need to tell you about something I’ve been keeping to myself”? “Eva, I want to tell you something bad about me, something terrible, and then I want you to rise above it”? How could he have thought it would work? How could he have thought there were any words he could speak about his affair that she could stand to hear? Yet he must have said something like one of those phrases.

  He did remember the sense he’d had just before he spoke: the excitement—excitement, that’s what he’d felt!—of beginning a new adventure.

  MARK AND EVA had met at a wedding, Mark’s third wedding in as many weeks. He was depressed by this one, as he had been by them all—by the sense of purpose swimming all around him in these friends of his, by the fearless, touching commitment they were undertaking that was so unlike anything he could imagine for himself. To each couple he’d given the same thing—thick glass beer mugs. He liked beer. Either they did or they didn’t. The hell with it. The hell with them. The hell with everything.

  Mark was twenty-five. It had taken him six years to get through two and a half years of college—he was dyslexic—and he’d only recently decided to stop, to quit. He could do it—he could have done it—he was sure of that. But that would have been the point, the only point: proving that to himself. It didn’t seem worth it. Everyone else he knew was moving on, entering life, thinking about work, about what came next—getting married—and Mark figured it’d be two or three more years anyway at the rate he was going before he even got a degree. A degree that would equip him to do nothing in particular.

  He was drinking too much. It was the way he’d gotten through all of the weddings. This one was of a woman he’d dated several years earlier. They’d since become “good friends,” and when she bent to enter the getaway car in her pale suit and he saw her long, nicely shaped legs, legs he’d once pushed this way and that with the ease of sexual ownership, he felt somehow abandoned. Damaged goods, he thought. Unexpected tears of self-pity sprang to his eyes.

  Eva was in bad shape because she’d just graduated, and her graduation meant the end of her yearlong affair with one of her English professors. She hadn’t quite believed in this ahead of time. She’d thought it was possible they’d continue to meet. She’d thought it was possible he might end his marriage and join himself to her forever.

  But he’d said he mustn’t stand in her way. Those were the words he’d used. He’d sat down behind his wide desk, a desk on which they’d made love more than once, using it now like a barrier between them. He’d said, not unkindly, that she must move on.

  Move on? To where? To whom?

  As the car pulled out, as the other, lucky couple turned to wave together out the rear window—like royalty: the pretty tilting back and forth of one hand of each—she felt herself begin to cry. She reached into her shoulder bag for a plastic packet of tissues and began to extract one. When the car pulled out onto the country road at the end of the driveway, Eva stepped blindly back and bumped into Mark. They turned and faced each other in the crowd of happy people, two weepy wedding guests. “Got an extra one of those?” Mark asked, and Eva handed over a tissue. As one, they blew their noses. Then, looking at each other, each still holding the tissue to his face like a kind of mask, they began to laugh.

  “There’s just nothing like a good honk, is there?” Mark asked after a minute.

  “I’ve always said so,” she answered.

  And they walked slowly back to the tent together, where they ordered coffee and didn’t move again until, in the gathering dusk, a young woman on the catering staff asked for the folding chairs they sat on.

  They’d stumbled into each other, Mark liked to say, and he often described the early years of their marriage as “further stumbling.” Neither knew what he wanted, what she’d be good at. Eva taught high school English in San Francisco and hated it. Mark did construction, got a union card. They moved north, out of the city. Eva waited tables and hated it. Mark worked on a housing development at the edge of Napa, a crummy development using the cheapest possible materials. Eva got a job in a stationery store, first selling, then running it.

  At night she sometimes read to him, books he’d never read himself, or struggled so hard just to get through that he hadn’t been able to think about them. She read him Conrad, and they talked about honor, and when it became too costly—a foolish, expensive notion. She read Chekhov, who amazed them both by the way he turned his stories around with just a phrase or two at the end and made you wonder what in them was meant to be taken as true. They took long walks. They made love, they argued about life, about where they were headed, what they wanted to do. About what one should do. They argued fiercely, dramatically, in a way that Mark realized only later that he loved, that made him feel alive.

  Then Mark was hired by some friends who had bought land outside Calistoga with family money and were going to plant a vineyard, doing the work themselves. He spent the next year and a half with them. It felt like a new life starting, a door opening. The land was rocky and uncultivated, but it was level, on the valley floor. They cleared it, they pulled out trees and the biggest rocks. They ripped the soil. He came home every night dirty and exhausted, having pushed himself all day long to the edge of what he was capable of. If they hadn’t been the age they all were then, they could never have done it.

  One of the others had been a vineyard manager for a big winery, had gone to UC Davis before that. But all of them had read up on the valley and its long story, and they knew a great deal that he didn’t—how the land had been formed in prehistory, what chemicals and nutrients the different soils in the valley contained, what the differences were in temperature and rainfall from north to south, from hillside to valley, what kinds of grapes would be best suited to the land they’d purchased, and what they would need to do to those grapes to make them flourish.

  They started the vineyard in the spring, driving stakes into the still-rocky soil. In the fall, they planted their root
stock, irrigating it by hand with water hauled in a truck from a nearby stream. That winter, when the work slowed, Mark went back to construction, but the next spring and summer, he came back to help dig a pond and install an irrigation system.

  They made mistakes, and they certainly did everything the hard way. But neighbors were generous, once they saw they were going to stick with it. They offered advice and equipment, and the work got done. Those long days were the ones that cemented Mark’s relationship with the place, the land. He felt he’d found a home. This was exactly the work he wanted to be doing, exactly the person he wanted to be.

  Eva got pregnant with Emily that year, and they rented the house on the hill with the little vineyard of their own. She quit her job, and Emily was born. They didn’t argue so much. Eva ran the house and grew vegetables and baked, and played with Emily. Mark started his own business, managing a few small vineyards using what he’d learned. They were, he would have said—he did say—happy. His business expanded slowly but steadily as wine and winemaking became chic, as people in the money descended on the valley, people who wanted vineyards of their own; as the number of vineyards exploded—now twenty-five, now forty, now one hundred. They made love, it is true, with less frequency than early in the marriage, but with a comfortable ease, a knowledge of each other’s body and pleasure that only occasionally seemed too practiced.

  They had Daisy. They had talked about wanting a boy, but when the doctor held the baby’s slicked body up above Eva’s knees and Mark saw the deep cleft between her incurving helpless legs, he felt flooded with a loving relief, with gladness. He realized that he’d been frightened all along of a boy. He didn’t want him—a dyslexic, wild boy, like himself.