“Well, I lucked out. They told me you were pretty. Shall we?” He offered me his arm. “I’m Scott, by the way.”
Each table sat four couples. Inside, we were joined by Xavier Bernard—heavy-jawed, barrel-chested, broken-nosed—and dark Therese Arras, who was quite pretty with her sleek ponytail and dash of Cherokee blood. I knew her from my math class, though had never associated with her much. We exchanged a few polite words about one another’s dresses and Mr. Slawinski’s teaching methods. Within minutes, our conversation had died down. Scott stroked my bare arm with a stubby index finger. “Tell me about yourself, Laurel.”
I looked up, alarmed. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“Sure there is. You’re new, aren’t you? Me, I’m from San Diego. Have you been to San Diego?”
“No.”
“You’re missing out. But I’ll be going to Stanford, so it’s good for me, living up here. Do you have your top colleges picked out yet?”
He had hit upon a safe subject. “Well, I was thinking one of the Claremont colleges . . . But lately, I’ve been looking into Pennsylvania.”
No one was to know that this was Steadman’s influence; that the idea of being in the state where he had grown up thrilled me.
“Pennsylvania, huh? That’s pretty far, for a girl who hasn’t even been to San Diego.” He nudged me in a way that was meant to be playful. “Where in Pennsylvania?”
“Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, maybe Gettysburg . . .”
“Liberal arts all the way, then.” He gave me another lingering, moist look. “You’re an arty girl. A dreamy, arty girl.”
After forty minutes at the table (Scott attempting to impress me with his 3.6 grade point average and the breadth of his reading—a schoolboy’s Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Atticus Finch), we made the obligatory trip to the ladies’ room. We weren’t the only ones with this idea: there was a queue stretching far into the hallway. Eventually, we edged our way into a washroom as loud and colorful as a cage full of parakeets. “Oh my God, how weird is it seeing Flynn in a suit?”
“He looks cute!”
“That hair! Did he even brush it?” Amanda dabbed at her lips in the fraction of mirror that was visible above the other girls’ heads. “Could you tell that Seamus had his hair cut?”
“Guys always look weird after having their hair cut.”
“I know! But I love that military look on him. How’s Scott?” Amanda turned to me with a glint in her eye.
I shrugged.
“Do you think he’s cute?”
“He’s a bit short,” I said carefully.
“Sorry, I forgot to mention that. But otherwise? Do you think his face is cute? I saw you guys talking. You know, if he’s boring you, we can try to find Lawrence. I think he’s here with Dana, but everyone knows that was just a last-minute thing . . .”
“It’s okay.”
“Better to stick with our guys, anyway. They’re getting us drinks right now.” Amanda gave us a sly, sidelong look and—in case that wasn’t enough—added in a knowing whisper, “Actual drinks.”
There was a cup of fruit punch before me when I returned to my place at the table. I took a sip and tasted something sickly, rum or bourbon. Scott eyed me moistly over the top of his own glass.
WHILE THE spiked punch made time pass more quickly, it also made Scott Maccoby more presumptuous. I was sorry the moment I let him drag me out to the dance floor, where he wouldn’t stop trying to catch hold of me and press himself upon me. “Relax,” he murmured, his breath warm and disgusting against my neck. “Don’t be so stiff.” I had never liked dancing and Scott’s attentions made it nearly impossible for me to move naturally. When he grabbed my bare arm with his stubby fingers and attempted to draw me against his chest, that was all I could take. I shook my head and yanked my arm away, giving him my sharpest glare, before swiveling back to the table.
Therese was there with Rebecca Hammel and Flora de la Roche, who glanced at me kindly as I settled back down and took a solemn sip of my punch. “You don’t like your date?” Therese inquired.
“No,” I replied. “I like somebody else.”
I regretted my words straight away. Suddenly, I wanted Steadman with a force that practically winded me. I yearned to say his name aloud, to condemn him for making it so hard for me to breathe. It was agony to think that he was alive at that very moment, healthy and content with his wife and children, not sparing a thought for me. As long as I was tortured by love for him, I wanted him to be just as miserable as I was.
AFTER THE social overtime of San Rafael and Homecoming, I felt that I’d earned myself the right to be withdrawn, at least for a few weeks. I began giving Marcelle and Amanda the slip in favor of what I called “college applications”—really just protracted sessions of daydreaming about Steadman while flicking through pamphlets. Hiding out in the lofted section of the library, I stared into space, scratching out sentences between one sigh and the next.
As well as being the subject of my daydreams, Steadman had begun to inhabit my dreams at night. These dreams were never sexually explicit. Most often, they involved him smiling and making obscure, faintly embarrassing requests in a dream-jargon whose exact terminology I forgot within minutes of waking. The symbolic content of these dreams was easy enough for me to interpret as he sat in his chair holding out a thick pen or caressing the rim of his coffee mug.
Less common and more difficult for me to bear were the dreams in which we kneeled together, post-coitally. I would see nothing of the act that had just occurred or of our naked bodies—only a dim room filled with book crates and his beaming face. He would stroke my hair and in the warmest, most paternal manner possible, tell me that everything was okay, that we were in love, and that our love had already been consummated. I would ask him how this had come about, telling him that I remembered nothing, that it was all like a dream to me. At that, everything would dissolve into a heap of tender, hushing caresses. Awake, I’d lay in the dark for some moments, asking myself the same questions, trying to remember when the act of consummation had occurred, until the ceiling seemed to crumble down on me—leaving me with a taste of bitter dust, black heartache, and a keen desire for death.
It had gotten to the stage where my choice seemed to be between consummation and death. Since consummation was death, however, I didn’t have a choice at all. One way or another, I was soon to die, and this knowledge made me careless of myself, apparently immune to pain. I bruised my body without knowing how I did so, ate less than ever. I suffered a bad head cold one week in October but attended his class anyway, only to be sent to the sick bay by Ms. Da Silva the lesson after. I was prescribed lots of fluids and the rest of the week in bed, a fate that I accepted with relief, once I got over the initial despair of not being able to see him. My friends, who came to visit me on the Thursday afternoon, told me that my love had been asking after me; that it had upset him to hear that I was unwell. Suddenly, I was reminded of what a gentleman he was, of how courtly his behavior had always been toward me. I had visions of deathbed romances, of dying mysterious and pure like Dante’s Beatrice, and yearned to be afflicted with something more serious than a common cold.
I had them collect my homework from him. The next afternoon, they handed me a note in his barely legible red ink.
Laurel—
Read the chapter on Byron (but only if you are up to it!).
Have a look at some of the shorter poems—She walks in Beauty, To a Beautiful Quaker, etc. (but again, only if you are up to it, and only if it pleases you). I will compile some annotations to give to you on Mo Tuesday.
Most importantly, do not strain yourself. Get plenty of rest. Recuperate. I will be glad to bring you up to date with everything next lesson.
Warmest regards,
Hugh
Hugh! I couldn’t help it—my eyes misted up a little upon seeing that. The others were talking about their plans with Seamus and Flynn, what a shame it was that we couldn’t make it a triple date. When they ha
d gone, I thrust my face into the pillow, sighing with pent-up desire. By the end of the weekend, the scrap of paper had become softened, the ink running in places, from all the times that I’d pressed the note to my lips. Likewise, the portrait of Lord Byron in my textbook was on the receiving end of many congested kisses, as it occurred to me how much the poet resembled my beloved.
AS LUCK would have it, Marcelle caught my cold and was absent on Tuesday morning, my first day back in his classroom. This allowed him to attend to me more openly than he might otherwise have done, crouching by my desk and going through various interpretations of the poems they’d discussed the week before. “And your friend, where is she?” he asked me, some five minutes into the catch-up session, as if only just noticing Marcelle’s absence. Unfortunately, it could not go on forever. The class was in anarchy without his direction. “I’d better take care of that,” he murmured in my ear, unexpectedly hot, close, and conspiratorial, when one of the girls shrieked on the other side of the room. I turned to regard the seat of his corduroys—one hand cupped to my ear, in an effort to contain the condensation left by his words—only to have my glance intercepted by Amanda. I blanched. How much had she seen, exactly?
Later in the week, he found some other pretext to crouch by my desk for an extended period, thumbing through my textbook and stopping at a stanza that I had underlined. He read this stanza aloud in his resonant voice.
Weep, daughter of a royal line
A sire’s disgrace, a realm’s decay;
Ah! happy if each tear of thine
Could wash a father’s fault away!
“You like these lines? Why?” he wanted to know. “What do they mean to you?”
I blushed and spouted off something embarrassing, I barely remember what, about a royal line polluted by the vices of the father, inherited decay, original sin. He gave me a peculiar look and told me that this was an interesting interpretation of what was essentially a rather obscure, forgettable political poem. Mortified, I cast my eyes away. For the rest of the conversation, I crossed my arms and met his carefully placed questions with one-word answers.
As he went on to cater to others and I to hunch over my books, I felt his gaze returning to me from across the room. Looking up, I saw that his expression was fixed, sober. I didn’t doubt that I was in his thoughts, yet the obscurity of these thoughts filled me with dread. It was the first time since meeting him that I felt the true peril of what I had gotten myself into. He had seen me. He would know me, soon enough.
IT WAS beginning to seem like I could do nothing right, like the strings that had previously connected my mind to my body had somehow been severed. Every day, I distanced myself further from my friends. I was no longer a novelty to them and sensed private jokes forming in my absence. Suspicions flitted in their clear, cold eyes.
In the lunchroom, I was the token anorexic, anxiously nibbling on a Red Delicious while everyone else tucked into their hot meals. They would talk in their usual vulgar way—Amanda going into detail about Seamus’ body; Marcelle cackling and making silly comments—while I sat in torment, gnawed by hunger and love. In my torment, it was difficult for me to keep the pain from showing on my face, to keep my fists from clenching, and to control the awful lump rising in my throat. When it got this bad, I had to get out of there, rising unannounced and ignoring their confused inquiries. By the third or fourth time I did this, they no longer called after me, instead whispering something among themselves and erupting into giggles. I found out later that a quip had developed around my sudden, unexplained departures and that they now said it every time. “Oh, look, she’s gone to throw up her apple.”
I did go to the bathroom, but not to throw up, nor to self-harm, self-pleasure, or even cry. The impulse to do all these things was there, but not the resolve, as I sat with my feet up inside the locked cubicle, locked in a paroxysm of self-hatred, desire, and despair. I would stay locked in place until the bell went for final period, or something else—a flush from a neighboring cubicle, or a gaggle of sophomores outside, snapping gum and spraying aerosols—came along to break the spell. Pushing past them, through their headache-inducing scents, I would run cool water and regard my dark-eyed reflection, whose savage, love-starved look always came as a shock to me.
Although no good could come of it, I sometimes chose to wander the lonely halls of the English department, shuffling numbly between the teachers’ lounge and my locker, rather than hiding out in the library or returning to the lunchroom. I didn’t know whether I truly desired to see Steadman, or if I haunted his department merely out of force of habit; nevertheless, I could only go undetected for so long. It would only be a matter of time before he caught a glimpse of my fleeting figure in the bright slice of a door left slightly ajar, or distinguished my soft, dragging footfalls in the hallway.
I expected him to ambush me. What I didn’t expect was the direction from which he would do so, presuming that he spent all of his lunch hours in the staffroom with the other teachers. In fact, he’d been lying in wait in a lair of his own, listening as I passed from the staffroom to my locker, lingered, sighed, and turned back in the direction whence I had come. He timed his exit from the classroom to coincide exactly with the moment that I reached the door, greeting me effusively, “Hello Laurel!” he beamed. “Isn’t this a pleasant surprise!”
“I’m just . . . coming from my locker.”
“Well!” he was still beaming, his face flushed and eyes glinting, as if drunk. He was standing quite close and I couldn’t help hoping, fearing, that he was about to bend down and kiss me, right there in the hall where anyone could see us. He laughed, probably at my expense. “Don’t let me keep you!”
I stood staring, processing his words, until he laughed again. God, I loved his laugh; I loved his features, crinkling with laughter. We stared at one another for a while longer, until his smile softened, faded. I glimpsed something restless in his eyes, a glimmer of desire that I wasn’t meant to see, as his glance skipped from me to his empty classroom and back to me again. Noticing this, I bowed my head and plucked my skirt in a sort of frantic curtsy. I could feel his eyes following me down the hall after I had turned my back on him, but didn’t have the heart to enjoy it: I was too unnerved, too confronted by what I had seen.
IT WAS clear that we had taken it to a point beyond mere flirtation. It was no longer necessary for us to interact, to play games the way we’d been doing for weeks on end. Instead, we watched one another: he, with a proprietary coolness that suggested he already had possession of me; I, from the corners of my eyes—intent on gaining some control over his chameleonic character.
Cynical, self-deprecating, affected, indiscriminate, patronizing, immature, as sloppy intellectually as he was with his desk, fickle, vain, virile, brooding, pedantic, philandering . . . in short, Byronic, Byronic, Byronic, almost to the point of parody. It was only fitting that we should be learning about the Byronic male from a living, breathing specimen who was as much aware of his dark charms as I was. It didn’t matter how many negative attributes I ascribed to his name—each one only added more flesh to the archetype, made him more whole and tangibly mine.
I was the only one in the class who understood the more cynical of his jokes, who picked up on his more recondite references, who appreciated his genius. I was the only one who saw the lonely figure he cut standing at the window like a deflated version of the Wanderer Above the Mist, tacked on the wall behind him. I was the only one who pitied him, seeing how the other girls occasionally reared away from his excessive spirits, the manic edge to his cheerfulness. I was the only one who adored him in the blueness of his sulks and the blackness of his tempers; the only one who stood in awe of him at his golden best, skimming stones and quoting Dante in the original Italian. I was the only one in the world who wanted him; the only one who was made for him; the only one who craved the unbuckling of his belt, the flicker of his poet’s tongue. I was the only one who saw him as a man and loved him as a god.
I could feel myself crumbling, growing ever more masochistic, as the desire to taste our love, the cleaved fruit and flesh and blood of it, overwhelmed my imagination. In private, I broke my rule of not putting my feelings on paper, drafting love letters that God only knows whether I actually intended on sending to him. Though they were all torn up in the end, they were more or less reworkings of the same arguments, expressed with the same sticky metaphors, in the same madwoman’s rhetoric.
Dear Sir,
I know that it is wrong, that it is against all the dictates of reason, propriety, and morality to be writing to you in this manner, but all I can say is that I do not care. You have made me unreasonable, improper, immoral. Every day that I spend in your presence, I become a little more indecent, a little more lowly and self-deprecating. It is time that I bare all, that I make myself explicit—if indeed I still have a self. I am so afflicted, sir, that I have no other option but to confess that I want you.
I want you. There was a time when I may have been able to express the sentiment less crudely, yet it is too late now.
I no longer understand how to quiver modestly, how to hide sweet, delicate blushes. Now I am wracked with convulsions, burned by the fires of hell. If I am a virgin, it is only in the most trivial, membranous sense of the word. Please, make my damnation official. I ask only that you rid me of this technicality.
I am aware that you are a professional man, a married man, a father. You may also be a religious man, and feel that what I am asking of you is an unspeakable sin. I hope that you will remember, however, that beneath all this, you are still a man. It is the man in you that I wish to appeal to, as it is the man in you that appeals to me. Were you not such a man, you would not have had this effect on me. I was pure once; I once believed in the dictates of reason, God. Now I see no reason, I believe in no god, unless you be counted. Let me stroke your ego. Let me make you my god. I beg you.
The Wood of Suicides Page 7