Lost in the Forest (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Sue Miller

  She didn’t answer. You didn’t always need to answer Duncan, she was discovering.

  “Has Eva even noticed?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “No,” she said reluctantly.

  “And I can promise you Gracie won’t notice either.”

  “But …” She was searching for exactly what it was she wanted to know from him.

  “What?”

  “Don’t you love Gracie?”

  “Love,” he said. “I don’t quite believe in love. We see where love gets you. ‘Love me tender.’ ‘Love is all you need.’ ” He looked over at her. “We don’t agree, do we, Daisy? We understand that love is an idea, a big fat overblown Western idea. Culturally imposed.” His voice mocked his own words. And then he was quoting something, something Daisy would recognize with a start years later, getting ready for an audition for a play. “ ‘Men have died from time to time,’ ” he said, “ ‘and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’ ”

  Daisy waited a moment, and then she said, “But do you love Gracie?” She knew she was really asking him about herself, but this seemed the form the question needed to take.

  “Well, of course, I’m devoted to Gracie. Gracie is part of my life and who I am forever and ever, till death us do part.”

  Daisy felt tearful, suddenly. She bent her head. They were in town now. She lined up her books, her homework, on the seat next to her. She saw them through a blur.

  “Of course, the question is, what about you, right?”

  His voice was surprisingly gentle, but she didn’t look at him.

  “I adore you, Daisy. I want you. I think about your body and your mouth and your legs all the time. I’ve thought … often. Of doing exactly what we did this afternoon.” They had turned off Main Street now. He drove a half block past Kearney and pulled over. He put the car in neutral and turned toward her. “Daisy,” he said. “I’m happy. I’m happy that you liked it so much. That you want to do it again. So now I’ll think about how beautiful your crew-cut pussy is, and how you taste, and what it feels like to push my finger into you and to look at you holding yourself open for me. And of how you looked in Gracie’s old bathing suit with your mile-long thighs. That was terrific, Daisy. And of how you looked, like a gorgeous giraffe, walking down the street holding your schoolbooks with your hair streaming out behind you. And how you looked thrashing around on my bed.” He reached over and stroked her hair.

  She smiled at him.

  “Snarls,” he said, and pulled his fingers a little. It hurt.

  He dropped his hand. “Better run, Daze. I bet you’re late for dinner.”

  She gathered up her books and looked over at him again. “When?” she said.

  “Delicious Daisy.” He smiled. “Whenever you like. Whenever you can. I’m at your disposal.”

  “I can Thursday.”

  “Well then, Thursday,” he said. “I’ll find you on the way home after school. We’ll have a lovely little rendezvous.”

  As she shut the car door behind her, she bent down and looked over at him, hoping for some claim, some sign. He was looking away, but he sensed her. He turned, he snapped his teeth at her.

  The next day she put a note in Mrs. Loomis’s mailbox, withdrawing from chorus, which met on Thursday afternoons. Her mother needed her, the note said. She started to write something that connected directly with John’s death, but as soon as she began it, she felt washed with shame. She scratched out the words and just signed her name.

  THROUGH THE NEXT month and a half or so, Daisy managed to see Duncan twice a week usually, sometimes three times if she cut her piano lesson too. She lied to Eva all the time now—she lied about after-school activities, about chorus and music and sports. She lied to Mark about Eva’s needing her in the store. She lied to her piano teacher about conflicts, things that had come up. But of course, she said, Eva would pay him anyway.

  The world narrowed for her, and Duncan’s studio became its center, the place where she felt most alive. She dreamed of it, sexual dreams of the way the light fell in from the skylights, of the order and quiet. In these dreams, sometimes the space opened up to other rooms, other spaces, with a sense of mystery and amplitude that pleased and aroused her.

  She felt encircled by Duncan’s attentiveness to her body. She loved his absolutism. She loved the way he looked, the dark sober eyes that never seemed to take part in the jokes he made or his sarcasm. She loved the delicate lines that netted his pale skin, the cuffs of his shirts turned back over his tendoned forearms. She loved his soft brown hair, thinning on top, graying by his ears.

  She felt he offered her a new version of herself, one she more and more carried with her into her real life. She felt uplifted, in a sense; she felt an elevation over the daily ugliness of high school. She was less afraid, less shy. She saw that she would have a way out. Not that Duncan would be it—she understood that—but that she would be able to escape. How, she could not have said, but she was certain of it.

  And she loved the strange sex, which asked so little of her.

  GET CHANGED,” Eva said.

  “Why? I look okay.” She set her books down on the kitchen island and picked up a cheese stick from the blue mug full of them that Eva had set out.

  Eva looked at her. Daisy was wearing jeans and a sweater. “Company’s coming,” Eva said. “Why don’t you put a skirt on for a change?”

  “Oh shit!” Some writer, she thought. Some book person. Someone boring. “Who?”

  “Gracie and Duncan.”

  “Gracie and Duncan?” she said stupidly. She hadn’t known. He hadn’t said anything. She’d left him fifteen minutes or so before.

  “Well, they’re still company, Daze. Just … something besides jeans anyway. Okay?”

  She couldn’t believe it. She was furious. She felt tricked. She went up the steep back stairs to the second floor. In her own room, she lay on her bed and let tears leak from her eyes. She put her hand over her face. It smelled of him, of herself. She thought of what they’d been doing, less than an hour earlier. He had sat next to her on the cot, bent away from her, his face between her legs. He had his fingers in her everywhere, and they were pushing in and out as he turned his face slowly from side to side in her wetness, as though he wanted to smear himself with it. She had been dizzy, laughing as she came. And then wanting him, as she more and more did now, to let her touch him, to come into her, something he had said more than once he wouldn’t do.

  On the drive back, she had finally asked him why not.

  He had smiled at her. “It’s not part of the game, Daisy.”

  “It’s not a game.”

  “In the sense that it has rules, and it’s fun, one might think of it that way.”

  “Well, one might think of it that way, but that doesn’t make it so.”

  He laughed. “We’ll talk about it next time. I’ll put it on the agenda.”

  “If you won’t do it to me, I’ll tell. I’ll tell everyone you seduced me. You took advantage of me. You ruined me.” Daisy was joking, but as she spoke, she felt the anger enter her voice, enter her. But what was she angry at? She didn’t know.

  “Daisy.” He shook his head. “You’re hardly a nymphet. You tower over me; I tremble in your shadow. I’ll tell everyone I was scared of you, that you made me do it.”

  “Very funny.” She gathered her books and put her fingers on the door handle. She said, “You know, if you won’t, I can find someone else, some high school jerk, who will.” She believed this suddenly—she, who’d never even had a date.

  “Idle threats, Daisy. Boring. Beneath you.”

  “It’s true.” She had slammed the door as hard as she could when she got out.

  DAISY DIDN’T GO downstairs until she was summoned, long after she heard Gracie yoo-hooing in the front hall, long after they trooped back noisily to the butler’s pantry to get drinks, long after they’d settled in the living room. From upstairs, she listened to the interplay of their voices, Duncan’s only occasion
ally audible against the two women’s. Theo’s rose from time to time, strident in some claim for attention.

  She felt a calm descend on her as she moved around. She did change her clothes, pulling on a straight skirt and a sweater Eva had given her, a pale blue sweater with a V-neck. She put on eye makeup too, and a bright red lipstick she got from Emily’s room. And, at the last moment, panty hose and heels. She never wore heels ordinarily because they made her so tall. The last time she’d had them on had been for John’s funeral.

  When she was done, she waited in her room until Theo was sent upstairs to get her. They were already seated in the dining room when she came down. She stopped in the doorway.

  Eva looked up first. “Sweetie, you look fantastic!” she said.

  Daisy was about to say thanks—lightly, regally—when Duncan said, “I liked her better in Gracie’s bathing suit, carrying a big stick.”

  She looked at him. The smile she knew from their times together played openly on his face. She thought of his mouth, his teeth, loving her.

  Gracie and Eva were on him instantly. “Oh for Christ’s sake, give it a rest,” Gracie said, and almost simultaneously Eva was saying, “Can’t you ever play it straight, Duncan?”

  Daisy looked levelly at him. She stood very tall, aware of her height, of her long legs, of her breasts in the sweater. She said, “And I’d rather you didn’t speak of me in the third person, since I’m right in front of you.”

  “All right, Daze!” Gracie cried out. Duncan just grinned.

  At the table, as they passed things back and forth, they started talking about salt—how much was good for you, whether it was an acquired taste or a primitive one. Eva was getting Theo set with the food he liked. Duncan explained the importance of salt in various cultures. Its religious uses. The pagan Roman custom of putting salt on a baby’s mouth a week after birth to chase away the demons.

  “It’s a purifier, it stands for everything holy and clean, probably because it was used to preserve food, to keep it incorruptible, as it were.” He smiled, his faint, twisty smile. “This is why Buffalo, where I grew up, is such a clean-living burg. It ran on salt. They kept mounds of it around, to spread in winter. Between the cold and the salt, there was no sin in Buffalo.” He raised a forefinger. “Thus ‘the salt of the earth.’ Buffaloans. Me.”

  “I didn’t know you grew up in Buffalo,” Eva said.

  “Someone had to.”

  “But you—you seem unlikely.”

  “Well, it gave me a keen nose for the hypocrisy of life. Of salt. Of religion generally.”

  They started in about religion. Eva was talking about its primitive pull, saying how just hearing a hymn could make her yearn for belief, for meaning in life.

  Duncan said she was being sentimental. That there was no meaning to life. That it was a sign of immaturity to look for it.

  Eva said that if she was immature (he smiled and began to shake his head), he was too. That his interest in fiction, in stories, was completely parallel, a parallel search for a shape to things.

  He thought for a moment, chewing, swallowing. “I might concede the point,” he said, “except that Handke is one of my favorite writers.”

  Eva said she couldn’t stand Handke.

  “There you have it,” he said. “I think we can all guess why.”

  “Well, yes. It’s just, ‘This happens, now this happens, now this happens.’ And none of it …goes anywhere. None of it adds up to anything.”

  He smiled. “As opposed to life,” he said.

  “But life isn’t like that. Life does add up.”

  His smile deepened.

  “It isn’t,” she said, passionately, and Daisy knew she was talking about John, somehow, about his death. “You notice it everywhere,” she said. “The shape of life, the coincidences, the way it makes meaning.”

  “I have to say it blew right by me,” he said.

  Eva turned to Gracie. “How do you stand it?” she asked.

  Gracie said, “Oh, it was ever thus with Duncan.” She lifted her wineglass and tilted it back and forth for a few seconds. Then she drank from it. “It’s what comes from his perpetual need to be dismissive. He’s always reducing everything. Right, sweetie?”

  Daisy watched as Gracie made a lascivious face, puckered her lips, and kissed the air at Duncan.

  “I’m arguing here, goddamit!” Eva said. “Pay attention, Gracie.”

  “Oh, Eva, you’re always arguing.”

  There was a moment of silence while Eva thought about this. “Well, maybe so,” she said. “But he is too.”

  Gracie laughed and set her glass down. “Boys and girls,” she said. She clapped her hands. “Time out.”

  Theo grinned. “Time out,” he echoed.

  Daisy didn’t like Duncan in this conversation. She didn’t like his flirting with Eva, being coy with her, smiling at Gracie. What had happened between him and her wasn’t included in any of this, hadn’t changed any of it. And it ought to have.

  Daisy felt put in her place, that was it. She felt dismissed. A child. Like Theo. She wanted to tell them, at this table, with their flirty, fake conversation, that she and Duncan were lovers. That he belonged to her as much as he belonged to Gracie.

  But that wasn’t true. And she knew it wasn’t true.

  But surely there was a way—wasn’t there?—a way in which he did belong to her, maybe even more than he belonged to Gracie? Shouldn’t there be some acknowledgment of that on his part anyway? Some signal to her?

  Shouldn’t he at least have told her he was coming to dinner?

  As soon as they’d finished dessert, she excused herself. Homework, she said. Eva smiled at her, approving, and asked her to take Theo up too and get him changed and into bed.

  Daisy carried her bowl to the kitchen sink. She didn’t look at Duncan as she left. She and Theo went up the back stairs and she helped him into his pajamas and watched him brush his teeth. When he lay down, she lay down next to him and read him a book, a story about a bad little cat who wouldn’t kiss his mother. He was leaned against her, his body seemed to radiate heat and energy. He laughed and pointed at the pictures, and Daisy lingered over the story with him. When she closed the book, she turned off his light. She slid down and lay next to him in the dim light coming up from downstairs.

  When Theo’s breathing changed, she got up and went into her own room. She changed her clothes. She did her homework with the door open, the sound of their voices drifting up.

  Daisy heard their departure, Gracie’s voice loud in the front hall, the thick thud of the front door. She knew that she was supposed to go down and help clean up, but she didn’t. She waited for Eva to call her. And even then, she yelled back, “What?” as though she didn’t know the routine. She wanted to make her mother have to ask. She felt the meanness in this, but it also felt like something she needed to do.

  Her feet were bare and the tiles of the kitchen floor felt cool under them. Eva was moving around in her quick, darting way. She had put on an apron, a big old-fashioned apron, cotton with a flower pattern and rickrack trim, given to her by her mother. She had three or four of these, and Daisy opened a drawer to the right of the sink and took one out for herself. She pulled it on, she tied it in back, and then, while Eva started to put leftovers away, she padded back and forth to the dining room, bringing dishes with her, dishes she set on the counter by the sink. Dishes and glasses and the candlesticks and dinner napkins and silverware.

  They worked silently, but there wasn’t any tension in this. They’d done it hundreds of times by now. Eva looked tired; she was working fast.

  Daisy was slower, thinking of Duncan. Duncan as he’d been with her today, and as he was at dinner. Duncan and Gracie and her confusion about that. Reaching over the big island in the center of the kitchen to wipe it down, she asked, “Why do you think Gracie and Duncan got married?” She hoped her voice sounded casual.

  Eva looked over at Daisy from the sink. “Oh, the usual reasons, I supp
ose,” she said, and smiled.

  That smile, and what seemed the assumption in her mother’s remark of some common, perhaps commonly female ground, irritated Daisy. “What does that mean, ‘the usual reasons’? There’s nothing usual about how they are.”

  “Okay. I know what you mean. I was being flip. They are an odd couple.”

  “So? why did they? You knew her before.”

  “I knew them both before.” Eva had stopped what she was doing and turned to face Daisy. “I introduced them. And I admit, I wouldn’t have imagined what happened—that they’d ever, ever get together. Much less marry.”

  “But they did! So?”

  “I really don’t know, Daze.” She frowned. “I think any marriage is really a mystery in some ways. Why it works when it does, why it doesn’t when it doesn’t.” She turned back to the sink. It was full of soapy water. “It’s occurred to me that Duncan likes to be … the bad boy. I like him enormously, sometimes, but he can be so … just childishly nasty.”

  “I’ll say.”

  Eva looked sharply over at her. “Was he unkind to you, honey?”

  Daisy shrugged.

  “You know, if he’s unkind, just ignore him. He’s like everyone’s mean older brother. He just needs a spanking, fundamentally.”

  There was a silence while they worked. Daisy was drying the dishes Eva handed her, and putting them away. After a while, Eva said, “I don’t know. I guess one theory might be that by the time Gracie met Duncan, she knew she wasn’t ever going to have kids.” She looked over at Daisy. “That that was over for her, you know?”

  Daisy nodded.

  “So in some ways, he’s like her child. She indulges him. She enjoys that bad-boy-ness, that rudeness.” She turned to the sink and pulled the plug. As the water drained out, she ran the disposal for a long, thunderously noisy minute. When it stopped, she said, “But I think even Gracie has her limits. Or her moments, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just … well, you know, that nastiness. It can get very pointed, very personal. He has a kind of list of things about Gracie. That he uses. That he can use. You know, her weight, her size, her loudness, the way she makes her money, which he doesn’t approve of, of course. Her … flabby arms, for God’s sake. Things she wears. Anything will do, in a pinch. And then apparently, if she reacts or gets upset—if she should cry, for instance—he’s incredibly disdainful of that.”