Lost in the Forest (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Sue Miller

  “Don’t be ashamed,” Eva said.

  “I’m not. But I should be.” She ran her finger around the top of her glass slowly. “But it did stop,” she said. “It did. And now I have the rest of life to get through. One ordinary day after another.”

  There was a little smear of blood on the front of Gracie’s tunic. Eva thought of how different her ordinary day was from Gracie’s ordinary day. How extraordinary Gracie’s ordinary day would be for her.

  She gets up now and goes into John’s study. She opens the windows there too, a row of them behind his desk overlooking the street. She’s thinking, oddly, of the woman she’d sat next to on the plane, a woman who was returning from a five-day stay at a spa. She was coiffed, manicured, done up. She was about sixty, Eva thought, but with that careful grooming and elegantly dyed hair that makes a woman look at once much older and much younger than she is. This woman had explained reflexology to Eva.

  “And you believe in that?” Eva had asked.

  “Of course I do,” the woman said. “It works; I’m the living testimony. Why wouldn’t I believe in it?”

  Because it’s a lot of crap, Eva wanted to say. Because it makes no sense. Because you’re an adult in a post-enlightenment world. What she said was, “You do look fabulous.”

  It had occurred to her then that maybe some of her problem was that she didn’t believe in anything. She stands now looking out onto the front yard, the quiet street. Of course, that isn’t quite true. She had believed that she and John would grow old together, that he would always be faithful to her.

  But then she’d believed that of Mark too, she reminds herself. She’d believed that she brought some access to the world to Mark, that he needed her, that he’d never do anything to threaten that. She remembers now how moved she was the first time he’d asked her to read aloud to him the book she was holding. The sense of sorrow and simultaneous power.

  What power?

  Something that had to do with the words on the page and the sense of herself as their conduit for him. Or even their translator. Later, hearing Mark talk about a book, using words that they’d exchanged, repeating ideas about it that weren’t exclusively hers, but weren’t really his own either, she would sometimes feel constricted by this connection with him. And wasn’t that a sort of infidelity on her part? A betrayal of what might have been the deepest part of their relationship for him, as his sleeping with someone else had been for her?

  But this is the way it was between people, wasn’t it? That there is always, a little bit, the sense of being imprisoned by what we love. She thinks of the wait by the luggage carousel for her bag to appear today, when she had watched a family with two small children as they assembled their car seats, their backpacks, their carryalls, their collapsible stroller. There was something exhausted in the young parents—they didn’t speak to each other except to divide responsibilities. When they left, the mother had a baby slung across her front as she pushed the luggage cart, and the father had the older child in the stroller, a pack on his back. She had remembered it then—the visceral sense of confinement and burden when the children were small. As she remembered the same sense with Mark of being bound to him somehow, being responsible for him. Tied down to him, with him, even though she loved him so deeply.

  With John it had been different. Their worlds overlapped, they enriched each other. No translation was necessary, no taking of responsibility—at least on her part. And sexually too, there was a greater comfort and ease. It was not that it was less passionate, she thinks, but that the passion was quieter, was based in affection. And though she occasionally missed what had seemed so hungry, so driven, in Mark, she also thought of it as something inherent in him, something transferable. Something he could have, and then had, easily taken elsewhere.

  What happened between her and John sexually seemed born of, seemed part of, what happened between them otherwise.

  Though thinking of it now she remembers that he had felt differently. She remembers that she asked him one night, early on in their relationship, what attracted him to her. They were lying in bed in his house. The girls were home with a sitter in the house on the hill.

  “The absolute usual,” he said.

  “By which you mean?”

  “Your fuckability. The sense I had of you as delicious.”

  “What a nice answer,” she said, turning on her side to him. It was a hot night, and they were both naked, his thick penis fallen to the side. He had reached over and run his hand down her body, over the curve of her hip. She was actually startled to hear him say this, to have him use this language, her polite new lover. Startled, and then pleased. “So much better than, ‘Your lovely mind, your wit, your charm.’ ” His hair was oddly mussed, and he looked untended, silly. She reached up and stroked it back into place.

  He grinned at her. “And then, of course, all that—your wit, your charm—which is what made me love you.”

  Eva had rolled over on her back again. The streetlight fell in on them. She couldn’t get used to this, in town—the lights. It was so dark on the hill. Here, they could always see each other. After a minute, she said, “So you think being delicious to someone else is step number one.”

  “God, yes. Don’t you?”

  She wasn’t sure what to answer. John hadn’t been delicious to her, not in that sense, not at first. Not in the way Mark had, for instance, when she sat talking with him in the tent at the wedding that first day, nervously trying to hold his interest so they could stay together long enough that sleeping with him—sleeping with him that very night—might be a possibility. Talking and talking about nothing at all and attending only to the desire that quivered like music between them.

  With John, her attention had turned to him only slowly the night they met, drawn by the persistence and intelligence of his interest in her.

  “I suppose so,” she said. “Yes. Delicious.” And she’d reached over and touched him again, moving her hand down to encircle his cock.

  THE NIGHT they had met, it was Eva’s plan to fall in love with one of John’s authors, a man named John Doyle. It was Eva who had read Doyle’s book in the galleys that came to the bookstore. She had loved it; she had suggested more than once to the woman who owned the bookstore that they bring him in to do a reading. He lived in San Francisco—easy to get him, then—and John Albermarle, his publisher, ran a tiny publishing house in the valley. It would be politic to support the local effort.

  In the galleys it had been the novel itself, the writing, that had compelled Eva. But when the real book arrived with its elegant jacket and the author photograph, she saw that Doyle was darkly, mysteriously good-looking. There was no mention of a family in the brief biography, no hint in the dedication—“To Ethan and Seth”—of a wife or lover. Of course he might be gay. But the text itself argued against that in its enthusiastic heterosexuality.

  She had dressed carefully, elegantly, that night—the dress with all the tiny buttons, and a lacy shawl. She had arrived early—she was in charge of things. Of the chairs, to be unfolded in rows in a semicircle. Of the flowers—daisies tonight from her own garden, set on the counter in a vase next to the music stand John Doyle would read from. She was in charge of the wine and sparkling water and cookies laid out on a table pushed back against the shelves. Of the books, stacked on the signing table near the door.

  Frances, the woman who owned the store, would act as hostess and introducer, a role she loved, so she would have most of the interaction with Doyle. But there was to be a dinner afterward in a restaurant a half block away, and Eva was invited to come along for that—she’d go back to the store later to pick up.

  Dinner then. That would be her chance.

  The reading went well. Two-thirds of the chairs were filled, and Eva sold perhaps twenty-five books. John Doyle was a good reader—an actor, really—giving even the pauses a full dramatic weight, making his face, his voice, anguished, then jubilant, then angry. After he’d finished reading, he responded enthu
siastically to the questions asked him by the mostly female audience. Oh, perhaps he lingered a little too long, a little too self-importantly on the nuances of what his work routines were and how he approached his material, but after all, Eva thought, he had been asked.

  As they stood waiting for their table in the restaurant, Frances introduced Eva as the person in the store who’d championed the book. John Doyle and John Albermarle—the two Johns, one beautiful, one not—beamed down at her. When they were finally seated, she was placed between them at the circular table. Frances presided. Her husband, Roger, famously uninterested in anything that smacked of the literary, was also there. He liked to choose the wine, because he liked to drink it. Lots of it. A different bottle with each course. He liked Eva too, probably because she was young, as he saw it, and pretty. Tonight, before the wine relieved him of feeling the burden of social interaction, he talked to her. Talked her ear off, she would say to the girls later, and motion with her hand its falling from her head to the floor. He talked about wine, about the food and the chef, whose cooking he’d experienced years before in Boston. He talked about Boston, that dull, morally superior town.

  Frances had a loud, plummy voice—she practically rolled her r’s—and Eva, listening between bits of Roger’s commentary to John Doyle talking to her boss, slowly realized he was mocking Frances, repeating her eccentric phrasing, her elaborate constructions, in a dry, sarcastic voice. Though Frances didn’t seem to notice—or care anyway.

  Eva did. It pissed her off. She felt possessively hurt for Frances, her Frances. Sweet, smart Frances, who loved books, who read avidly and widely—Atwood, Musil, Brodsky, Grass, Amis—but who sounded elderly, prissy, unless you actually listened to her. Dismissable. In this case, she was being dismissed.

  Nearly simultaneously Eva realized that the other John, John Albermarle, had been plying her with questions off and on all evening—odd questions, which he would spring on her suddenly and which she hadn’t taken the time to answer seriously.

  And here he was with another, leaning forward toward her just as she was having this revelation about Frances and the other John, beckoning her with his posture: Ahem, ahem: he wondered, did she think a person drawn to books was seeking a kind of experience not available in ordinary life?

  “What?” she said. Maybe this was the first question she’d really paid attention to. At any rate, it occurred to her now to wonder how she had answered his other questions. Hmm? Could be? Who knows?

  “I mean …” He smiled, almost apologetically. “Do we, are we, looking for something we don’t find,” his hand smacked the table lightly, “here?”

  Now Eva leaned back in her chair and turned her body toward him, away from John Doyle, the meanie. She was a little drunk. Her mind swam. What kind of question was this, anyway? Did he intend her to take it seriously? After a moment, she said, “Well, why did you become a publisher?”

  He laughed. “I suppose in some sense because I could.”

  “What does that mean?”

  When he lifted his hands she saw how enormous they were. Mitts. They had freckles on their backs. “I had inherited some money. Enough so that I could ask myself what I’d like to do, without also having to ask myself whether I could support myself at it.”

  “Unimaginable,” she said.

  She was about to turn back to the other John, when John Albermarle said, “But don’t you think there could be a kind of apology for that privilege in my choosing work which steadily loses money?”

  “Well, will you end up impoverished?” Eva asked pointedly. “The resident of a poor farm?”

  “It’s not likely.”

  “Then you’re not sorry enough,” she said.

  “You’re very strict, aren’t you?”

  “I steadily lose money too, only I have none. I’m poor. I’m embittered.”

  “Embittered! You don’t seem embittered.”

  “Oh, I’m not.” Eva sipped her wine. It was excellent. Thank you, Roger. “I’m not. I love my work.”

  “And is that because, do you think, you’re seeking through books an escape from ordinary life?” His voice made fun of the question, of himself asking it, but he clearly wanted an answer, too.

  “No, I love ordinary life.” She leaned toward him and lowered her voice. “But I’m actually very angry at books right now. I’ve been tricked by books. Particularly by the book our friend here wrote.” She gestured vaguely in John Doyle’s direction. “Oh, I expected so much more of him. He’s disappointing, isn’t he?” John’s mouth opened, but Eva went on. “And this is your book too, of course. I’m angry at you too.”

  He smiled. “No you’re not. It’s a wonderful book. It shouldn’t matter to you who wrote it.” Somehow, though he was implicitly repudiating John Doyle, it didn’t seem a betrayal to Eva.

  Eva leaned very close to him. The air near him felt warm. “I’m sorry I met him though,” she said. “I’ve learned a lesson here: I should have settled for just the book. I shouldn’t have come tonight.”

  “Oh yes, you had to be here tonight.”

  “We needed young blood!” Roger asserted surprisingly—who knew he was still able to take anything in? He was leaning forward on the other side of John. He took another great gulp of wine.

  At the end of the meal, after John Doyle had left, after Frances had paid the bill and they’d all said good night at the door of the restaurant, John Albermarle offered to drive Eva home.

  When she said she had her own car, he offered to walk her to it. When she said she had to pick up at the store first, he told her he’d help.

  John did the chairs, folding them, carrying them by twos in his enormous paws to the closet in the back hall. Eva retrieved the empty glasses from where they’d been set down all over the store—on shelves; under seats; on books, she was appalled to see. She picked up napkins and wiped up spills and stains. John asked her about the store, about Frances, about her own preferences in books. There came a point when Eva realized the embarrassing imbalance of their exchanges, when politeness demanded that she ask him a question or two also.

  Hers were less speculative than his, and more rude. Where had the money come from for the publishing venture?

  Land, he said. His family had been in the valley a long time.

  And where did his interest in publishing come from?

  Well, he supposed from his wish—didn’t she think this was all to human —to impose his taste on others. The chairs clattered and clanged as he folded them.

  And where, she asked, did the confidence in his own taste, his taste in books, come from?

  “Why, from the Lord,” he said, bent over a resistant chair.

  Eva laughed out loud, and clapped her hands together.

  John stopped and lifted his face to her, his hands on the back of the chair—the prince of chairs: big, freckled John Albermarle.

  She should love him, she thought.

  He was smiling. She could see he was infatuated with her, maybe even charmed by her childish gesture—her clapping—though she hadn’t intended it as charming, it was just the moment’s delighted response to what he’d said.

  Now he asked her if she’d like to get coffee.

  No, she didn’t think so.

  He went down the hall with the last two chairs. When he returned, Eva had set her purse on the counter, she was wrapping herself in her shawl.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  She told him she had to get back and take the sitter home.

  She had children? His face seemed to mask over, all smoothness.

  “Yes, two.”

  It wasn’t possible. How long had she been married?

  She watched his long face open again when she said she was divorced. (This is part of what she would come to love about him, the openness of his face, the way it registered every shift in feeling without his seeming to know that about himself.)

  “Well, maybe I should follow you back and take the sitter home for you. You must have to l
eave the children alone for a while when you take the sitter home.”

  Would any other man in the universe have stopped to figure this out? she wondered. Even one? But she shook her head. “I couldn’t let you do that,” she said.

  He started to protest: it was no imposition.

  “No, I mean I don’t know you. I couldn’t ask the sitter to go home alone with you when I don’t know you.”

  “Well, I could stay with your children, then, while you take the sitter home.”

  Eva laughed. “If I wouldn’t let you take the sitter home, why would I let you stay with my kids?” She turned away from him—they were at the door now—and flicked the lights off. The light from the streetlamp fell in on them, white, cold. When she turned back to John again, his face in chiaroscuro seemed harder.

  He stepped up to Eva. He pulled her shawl tighter around her and knotted it at her bosom, pinning her arms inside it. He kissed her. As it happened, he was also standing on her feet when he did this, but Eva ignored that for the moment. John was holding her head in his hands as though it were a beautiful, fragile object. The Golden Bowl, she thought. She felt golden. His kiss was as soft, as tender, as those she gave the girls at bedtime. After a long moment, she said, “Ouch,” and moved her feet under his.

  NOW SHE TURNS from the windows in John’s study, she stands a moment behind John’s desk, then sits in his desk chair and swivels it around. The trouble is, she thinks, that coming home now is like returning to her grief, to her own emptiness. Home. What does it mean to her anymore, without John? She has a sudden vision of his face surprised in death, of the terrible moment when he sailed up backward away from her into the air. Then the sound his skull made, hitting the post. She will never forget it. She feels a moment of such bitterness and anger that it shortens her breath. She looks at her hands lying on his blotter, their torn and ripped cuticles, the bitten-down nails.

  She had cleared his papers from his desk after he died, but she’d left the framed photographs he’d chosen to look at each day, and now her gaze moves from one of these to another. She picks each one up and stares at it, as though it could connect her somehow with him to see these as he did. There’s one of all three children together on the front porch stairs when Theo was about one, beautiful and chubby, and the girls were still the same height, slim dark twins—though Daisy is looking off to the side in this picture, and her profile seems strangely adult. There are two of Eva, one in the bookstore, looking up, startled, from behind the counter with her glasses on. She has never understood why John liked it. The other one was taken on their honeymoon in Greece, and her face in it looks woozy to Eva—John had shot it just after they’d finished making love. There’s also one of her, stunned with relief and joy, holding newborn Theo, asleep in his jaunty nursery cap, in the hospital.