Lost in the Forest (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Sue Miller

  “Ugh.” Daisy is imagining this, Gracie crying, Duncan smiling, saying something sarcastic.

  “Ugh is right.”

  “So why would she stay with a person like that?”

  Eva shrugged. “At first, I suppose, because she was besotted.”

  “Besotted?”

  “Drunk. Drunk with love. Crazy with desire.” She looked at Daisy again, almost speculatively. “She loved sleeping with him. Apparently he’s quite the lover.” There was a half smile on her face. She was enjoying telling Daisy this. “Are you surprised?”

  Daisy shrugged and said nothing, though she was furious with Eva for saying this. For knowing it. For asking her to respond to it.

  “But after a while, when that didn’t weigh quite so heavily in the balance anymore, she did leave him once. This was about two years ago. She left and she stayed with us for a few days. Don’t you remember?”

  Daisy shook her head.

  “She’d really had it. She actually started looking around for a rental. She was going to let him have the house. And the funny thing was, she was relieved. She really wasn’t sad about it at all. Oh, I’m sure she would have had some teary times if they’d split permanently, but she said she felt such relief. I remember she used the expression out from under.”

  “But they got back together.”

  “Yes indeed.”

  “How come, if it was so great to get away from him?”

  “Well, Duncan just fell apart, I guess. He came after her, he pursued her. He wept. He said he couldn’t live without her.” She rinsed the pan she’d been washing and reached for a dish towel. “Actually, I don’t know what he said. I don’t think he told her he’d never do it again. How could he have? He knew he would. But he gave her to understand that she meant everything to him. That he wouldn’t be able to bear his life without her. And of course, that’s very powerful. That carries you through a lot of bad times, knowing that. So that, now, I think, even when things are hard between them, she understands that it’s just his darkness, his perversity. That he’d be lost without her.”

  They worked silently for a few minutes, putting away the last cooking things. As Daisy hooked her towel through the ring hanging on the wall, she said, “So Gracie told you all this?”

  “Yes. I think … well, she was so thrilled by it. And I am her oldest friend.” There was an apologetic tone in Eva’s voice. She was defending Gracie, her talking about the most intimate details of her marriage. “And also, I think she might have felt I deserved to hear why she was going back, after I’d also heard how awful he was, how she never would, how this was it, and so on.”

  She leaned back against the sink and crossed her arms. She was frowning. “It’s an odd dynamic, and one I’ve never been interested in, where you have such a difficult lover. And you feel, I guess, so grateful, so stunned by the moments of not-difficulty. I think people who love like that, the way Gracie does, feel this intensified sense of intimacy, because the intimacy is so hard won, so infrequent. It’s like intermittent reinforcement.”

  “And what does that mean, intermittent reinforcement?” Daisy hated it when Eva did this, set things up so she’d have the pleasure of making some elaborate explanation.

  “Oh, it’s behaviorism, the study of how behavior gets developed. And the theory is—or maybe it’s proven: anyway, the idea is, if you reward someone for a certain behavior every single time, they become less reliable in that behavior, they figure they don’t need to do it all the time because they know the reward will be there whenever they do decide to do it, so they don’t learn it as well—the behavior. Whereas if the reward is unpredictable—sometimes they get it, sometimes they don’t—then they’re more interested, more focused in their behavior, more anxious, more consistent.”

  “So Gracie loves Duncan because he’s only wonderful to her every little once in while.”

  “Yes, I think that’s right, actually.”

  “That doesn’t explain why he loves her, if he even does. Which I doubt.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it,” Eva said, smiling in a way that seemed smug to Daisy. “Not for a minute.”

  THE NEXT WEEKEND, Daisy worked both days in the bookstore. Sunday, she took twenty dollars, a five, five ones, and a ten. That evening, after supper, she was sitting in her closet doorway, counting it again, when Theo burst into her room, calling her name.

  For a moment they just looked at each other, Theo still hanging on to the doorknob, swinging a little with it; Daisy cross-legged in the open doorway to her closet, bills fanned out around her. Then Daisy whispered fiercely, “Shut the door!”

  “What are you doing, Daisy?” he asked.

  “Shut the fucking door!” she said.

  “Why are you having all that money?” he said.

  “Jesus,” she answered. “Shut the door, Theo!”

  He shut it, and then came over and stood by the closet. “You have too much money.”

  Daisy was shoving the money back in the box now. She put the cover on. “Yeah, well, it’s a secret. I’m saving it up.”

  “But how did you get all that money?”

  “I’m big, Theo. There are lots of ways for big kids to get money.” Daisy got up on her knees, and set the shoe box in its place at the back of the closet.

  After a long moment, Theo said, “I can get money too. I’m big.”

  “Yeah?” she said. “And how is that? How can you get money?”

  “I can get money whenever I want.” He thought for a moment, and then his face cleared. “I can get money from my dad.”

  “Is that right?” Daisy shut the closet door. She went to her bed and flopped on it. Theo came and stood next to it, right next to her head.

  “Yes, that is right.”

  Daisy didn’t answer. She looked at him, at his pretty face, his perfect mouth, the down-sweeping eyelashes.

  “ ’Cause John’s going to give me lots of money when I see him.”

  “Is that right?” Suddenly Daisy felt an interested, rising meanness that had something to do with Theo’s having seen her, his having seen the money. She lifted her head and propped it on one hand, turning sideways on the bed to face Theo. “When will you see him, do you think?”

  “I think, when I’m getting a little bit bigger, then I will.”

  “And how much bigger will you be?”

  “Oh, this much.” He raised his hand as high as it would stretch over his head.

  “So when you’re … ten, say. When you’re ten, you’ll see John and he’ll give you money. Pots of dough.”

  But there was no doubt in Theo’s face. “Yes. About around ten.”

  “And will I see John then too? Or just you?”

  Theo looked confused, but only for a few seconds. “Yes. That’s when we both will see John.”

  “Do you know how old I’ll be then?” she asked.

  “How old?”

  “I’ll be a grown-up. I’ll be twenty-two.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “So maybe if I get married when I’m twenty-two, John will come to my wedding.”

  This made Theo frown. “But who will you marry, Daisy?”

  “Oh, let’s say I marry … Duncan. John would like to be at that wedding, don’t you think?”

  Theo looked uncomfortable. “But. You’re not … marrying Duncan.”

  “Why not?”

  “I know you can’t marry Duncan, because he is too big, he’s too grown up for you.”

  “But I’ll be grown up then too.”

  “But he is more grown up.”

  “Well, we’re pretending a little bit here. We’re pretending I’ll marry Duncan, and we’re pretending John will come to my wedding, right?” Daisy’s voice was friendly, beckoning.

  Theo’s mouth opened for a minute. You could see his small, even teeth. Finally he said, “But John will come.”

  “So, I will marry Duncan, right?”

  Theo watched her. Then he got it. He smiled. His face re
laxed in relief. “It’s a joke, right, Daisy? It’s a joke about Duncan.”

  “Right,” Daisy said. She flopped onto her back again and stared at the ceiling.

  Theo turned and started toward her door.

  “Theo!” she said.

  “What?” He stopped and looked back at her.

  “Don’t tell about the money.” Her voice was low. “It’s a secret. If you tell, I’ll kill you.”

  “Okay,” he said cheerfully, and left.

  Chapter Eleven

  DAISY WAS LATE, and Duncan didn’t seem to care. He was moving slowly, poking through some drawings to find one he wanted to take home with him to work on there, then hunting for his keys. It occurred to her he was limping more than usual too—something she’d come to suspect he did willfully from time to time.

  Daisy was standing by the open door. It was almost dark out, and she was supposed to have been at the bookstore about ten minutes earlier. There was a reading tonight, a reading she had promised to help with. Eva would be nervous, and then pretty quickly pissed off, when she got there to find nothing had been done—the chairs not set up, the books not unpacked and put out for signing. What Daisy hoped was that Callie might have started to do all this when her tardiness became clear—if Callie wasn’t otherwise too busy.

  “Come on,” she said to Duncan, even though she knew this was unwise. That in his perversity, the more she pushed him, the more he would resist.

  He looked up and smiled, the smile you would have thought was open and sweet if you didn’t know better. “Ah, the impatience of youth.”

  “The impatience of the late.” She smacked the door frame on the word.

  “What won’t wait for you, dear girl? The whole world waits.”

  She made a face. The night air was chilly. In her mind’s eye, she saw the bookstore, the front window with its light spilling out onto the darkened street, the first few customers already arriving for the reading, milling around self-consciously, choosing seats—if there were seats set up to choose.

  “I’m going to wait in the car,” she said. “I can’t stand watching you dick around endlessly.”

  She sat in the car with the door shut. From here she could see the yard full of old machines—crabbed, monstrous shapes in the fading light. Twice recently, someone from the family that rented the garage to Duncan had been in the yard when they arrived. Once the man, once the woman. They were both gray, lumpy, elderly. He had seemed busy with one of the machines as they drove past him, Daisy slouched low in her seat, Duncan cordially waving. But the woman had stopped in her progress across the littered yard—going from where to where? for what?—and had taken the opportunity to scrutinize them, her eyes squinted and mean, as they drove slowly in, as they got out of the car and went to the door. Duncan had slid his hand down Daisy’s back and cupped her bottom before he opened the door. “Might as well make it worth her while,” he said, and then he swung the door in and Daisy walked quickly past him. This had irritated her.

  But lots of stuff irritated her now. Things had begun to change between her and Duncan, and Daisy knew only some of the reasons why. Certainly Eva’s talking to her about Duncan and Gracie had triggered part of it—talking about his needing Gracie, his begging her to take him back. But probably more important than that had been the sense Eva conveyed during that talk of how Duncan seemed to her, his being not quite adult in her eyes, his need to provoke being somehow childish rather than a sign of superiority, as Daisy now recognized she had seen it. So, there was that: the way her lover apparently existed in her mother’s imagination; the echo of her mother’s voice and the image of her face, slightly amused, slightly contemptuous, speaking of Duncan.

  And there was the sex, which was still a matter of his looking and his touching and his kissing and poking her. Poking her. That’s how she thought of it sometimes. Daisy was getting tired of it. Sometimes her body felt so ready for contact, for flesh, for something reciprocal, some muscular other body meeting hers, that she had the impulse to hit him hard, to bite him, to pin him down and make him fight her.

  She didn’t know how to understand their affair, if that’s what you would call it. She didn’t know what it was that he got out of their version of sex. Or why this was their version of sex.

  Was it that he was ashamed of his body? She had considered this. There must be wounds, after all. Scars. She knew there had been many surgeries, plus the accident itself, a car crash, spectacular and flaming and meaningless, a dramatic event in one of those dumb car movies. He was supposed to have walked away from it, that was the deal that went wrong. Perhaps his body was so wrecked, so ugly that he was ashamed to be with her—she pictured purple, gouged-out welts everywhere, missing musculature with the flesh stitched shut over the absence, crooked bony growths.

  Or was he impotent? She knew this happened to old guys—though she always thought this meant really old guys—guys in their seventies, their eighties. And Duncan was fifty-three. Old, but not really old. But maybe that was it. He couldn’t do it. Or maybe he couldn’t do it because of the accident. Maybe something down there had been injured.

  Though her mother had said Gracie liked having sex with him.

  But maybe what Gracie liked was exactly the same thing he did with Daisy—the licking, the sucking, the fluttering fingers, the way they entered you everywhere. She had imagined them, imagined big flabby Gracie spread out like some beached sea creature, while Duncan, trim and neat and fully clothed, lay between her legs and worked on her. She had felt some jealousy, and then none—and that too must have been because of the changes that had come between them.

  She hadn’t seen him for almost a week after her talk with Eva. She made no real decision about this. It wasn’t as though she wanted never to see him or be with him again. It was nothing absolute. It was simply that when she had a piano lesson, she went. When she was supposed to be at the bookstore, she went—no lies, no excuses. Basketball practice started that week, so she really was busier than usual. She didn’t look for Duncan; she didn’t run into him on the street. When she left school, she avoided her usual route home, the streets he would cruise at the end of the school day, looking for her. Instead, she stayed on Main Street, and cut back up to Kearney a block from home. And being in the center of town lifted her spirits—the storefronts beginning to be decorated for the holidays, the twinkling lights in the dark afternoons.

  He had called, finally, last night. He wanted to see her. He missed her, he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

  She felt instantly the resurgence of her pleasure in his having chosen her, in her power over him. “Sure,” she said. “How about tomorrow?”

  In the car as he drove her back to the reading, she sat silently, nearly twitching, as she felt it, with impatience.

  “Are you so eager to get away from me?” he asked.

  She looked over at him. He was smiling, but it was such a pathetic thing to say. “Ugh!” she said loudly, and turned away from him in her seat. Turned to her window.

  “Quite right,” he said. “No whinging allowed.”

  She didn’t answer. The hills rode alongside them, the lights of a lone house fluttering here and there behind the leaves of the trees.

  After some minutes, he said in a conversational tone, “I didn’t know this reading meant so much to you.”

  “It’s not the reading,” she said. “It’s that I said I’d be there.”

  He was quiet for a while. Then he said, “This is something I hadn’t taken in about you, Daisy. Your punctiliousness.”

  She turned back to look out the windshield. “Yeah, well. There’s lots you haven’t taken in about me.”

  “Hardly anything, I’d argue.”

  “Nearly everything, I’d argue.” She pushed in the cigarette lighter.

  “But you like to argue, Daisy. I have taken that in.”

  “I like to argue with you, because you’re always affirming the ridiculous.” The lighter popped out, and she pushed it in a
gain.

  “Daisy, is this kind?”

  “Who cares? Have you been kind to me? Is seducing someone half your age—God, less than a third your age!—is that kind?”

  “You would rather I’d left you to the tender mercies of some teenage clod who can barely speak, let alone read. Or think. Or bring you off.”

  Daisy said, “Yeah,” but she thought about it. The lighter popped out again. She actually thought about it. She knew he was right, she wouldn’t have wanted that, wouldn’t have wanted any of the boys she knew or could imagine. Noah? God, no. She thought of how Emily had described sex with Noah, how once he got inside her, he forgot all about her and whumped against her and came within a few seconds. But she wasn’t so sure she wanted the kind of sex she had with Duncan anymore either. Though she couldn’t imagine not having him, not having his touch, his attention to her, to her body. He was all she had, she thought.

  They were approaching the stoplight. “Drop me off here,” she said.

  He signaled, and pulled over. He turned to her. “Shall we plan another meeting? A tête-à-tête?”

  “I’ve got a lot of stuff happening between now and Thanksgiving. I think I’d better wait till after then.” She was already gathering her books, getting out. She shut the door and started walking quickly up the block, not looking to see when he passed her.

  Eva’s face was pinched and grim when she looked up and saw Daisy, but she was talking to people she knew, people arriving for the reading, so Daisy was spared for a bit. The sparkling water and wine and cookies were laid out. The chairs were set up, and people were already filling them, though others were still standing, looking at books or talking in little groups. Callie was at the register, and Daisy lifted her hands: What should I do?

  Callie pointed to the signing table where the books were still stacked on a dolly and in boxes on the floor. Daisy worked her way through the crowd and began to unload them, folding the cover flap into the title page as she stacked them on the table, so they could be opened quickly to that page for the author’s signature.