We ascended to the fourth floor and were seated at a table for two overlooking the lobby, beneath the golden, stained-glass dome ceiling. I pursed my lips as a starched serviette was spread out over my lap. My mother ordered for the both of us. There was a chill, water-sipping silence. In my handbag, my cell phone began to buzz. Our eyes locked. I excused myself.
I pushed my way out of the restaurant. He wanted me to meet him in the lobby. I told him that I could not. He persisted, arguing that it would only take a few minutes. I was weak and seeking any excuse to escape her; I took the next elevator down. I spied him among the smattering of people on the ground floor and, my heavy Mary Janes clip-clopping, hastened to meet him. I was white-socked and pinafore-dressed. He was check-shirted and carrying a shiny new shopping bag. I thought it best not to embrace him.
“I bought you something,” he said a little sheepishly.
“How nice.”
“Here.” He extended the shopping bag toward me. “Take it.”
I didn’t doubt that it was lingerie, and felt almost as embarrassed for him as I did for myself. I accepted the bag. Without inspecting its contents, I sequestered it inside my purse. “Thank you.”
Having smiled and curtsied, I was about to turn on my heel and go. “Wait!” He caught my arm. Undoing all my discretion, he pulled me close to him and ensnared me in a deep, long, roving kiss, right there in the department-store lobby. When, at last, he loosed his hold, I wiped my lips and backed away, nodding a speechless farewell. I crossed back to the elevator, hot-faced and down-headed and, only when I was inside, looked into the bag that he had given me. I saw sheer fabric and lace edging, as expected. I touched my burning lips.
In my absence, the tea and tiered-cake stand had been set down. My hands trembled as I retrieved my serviette from the table and smoothed it over my lap. “I waited for you before starting.” My mother’s voice was strained and thin. “Thank you. It looks very good,” I said of the scones, sandwiches, and petits fours. As she poured her tea and milk and spooned sugar into the rust-colored mixture, I saw that her hands were trembling even more furiously than my own.
HAD SHE asked me, I would have confessed to everything that night. As it was, the woman had been stunned into silence and didn’t dare to accuse me, either over our barely touched afternoon tea or in the northbound traffic home. Even the most venomous word, I felt, would have been better than that silence, in which I saw my shadowy deeds looming, assuming uglier forms. The man between the daughter’s thighs wore checks and chino pants. The man was old enough to be her father. What could this knowledge mean to the widow behind the wheel, shading her eyes against the late sun?
Passing her bedroom door that evening on my way back from the bathroom, I thought that I heard sobbing. The Caravaggio was still in the hall: prim young Judith beheading the bearded chief. I couldn’t bring myself to breach that threshold, to enter the room where it had all begun. I locked myself in my own chamber and wept into my stale pillowcase.
“I suppose I won’t see you until your graduation.” This was the last thing that my mother said to me, dropping me off at school on Tuesday. She presented me her cool cheek to brush and I got a whiff of her perfume: first love, fragrance on throat.
There were no classes that day. Steadman met me in his SUV and we made love among the live oak and madrone.
I KNEW in my heart that there was nothing left for us to do but separate before any more damage was done. I knew this, yet I was prevented from doing anything about it because I was weak, greedy, sensuous; because I couldn’t stand to go without the sins that he had accustomed me to until all the pleasure I reaped from them ran dry. His love was the only stimulus that I was capable of responding to, any longer. I sought it out as frequently and forcefully as I could get it.
A carelessness had come over us with the sense of how little time we had left. He had handed in his letter of resignation, effective mid-June. With this, he considered himself released from his teacherly duties in all but the official sense. As an instructor, he showed none of the inspiration, the enthusiasm for his work that he had when we fell in love. He was often grim. His mind wandered. He checked his brown-and-gold wristwatch and glanced outside the window, thrumming his fingers on the desk. He eyed my lips, my throat, my legs.
When we resumed our Friday lessons outdoors, I took my rightful place by his side in the shade of the willows, looking over his shoulder as he droned on and the minds of my coevals strayed. Afterward, I would help him carry the books upstairs, in defiance of the looks that were cast our way. Better still, I would wander off to our laurel arbor to await him in a vain attempt to relive the loss of my virginity.
It was April then and my world was shrinking, flourishing with spring green and flowers of hysteria. I had read somewhere that suicides multiply during fine weather and this made sense to me: whereas fall had sympathized with my melancholy, spring made a mockery of it. Only the truly forlorn could have seen the ugliness of birds in rape-flight, of wasps haunting the school trashcans, and the excruciating paleness of newly shaved legs. Only the truly forlorn could have smelled all the death in the air.
I chased the smell of death. I was careless. I took to meeting him every day after school, and Saturdays, too, whenever we could both get away from our respective jailers. One afternoon, waiting for him in his empty classroom, I didn’t even bother to close the door completely, but sat on his desk swinging my legs, for anyone to see. People did see, not the least of whom was Mrs. Faherty, whose lynx eye remarked me from behind gold-rimmed glasses. She strode into the doorway, hands on hip replacement. “Excuse me! What do you think you’re doing in there?”
“I’m just . . . waiting for Mr. Steadman. He said that I could see him about my English essay.”
“Well, wait outside!” She shooed me out of the room. “Really, it’s unthinkable for you to be here after school hours. This is private property!”
I had never seen Mrs. Faherty so close up and was surprised by how oddly straight and white her teeth were. I wondered if they were false. With an effort, I looked her in the face. “I’m sorry. He told me his door would be open . . .”
“What is your name?”
“Laurel Marks.”
“Go wait on that bench, Laurel Marks. I don’t care what he told you. These are the rules. If I see you in here again . . .”
She went on and on and I nodded duteously, my eyes glazed with boredom and contempt. The hag was still lecturing me from some paces away when Steadman arrived, finding me sitting disconsolately with my chin in hand, watching my fellow students walk by. “Laurel! Sorry to keep you waiting, my dear . . .” He nodded dismissively at Mrs. Faherty. “Dierdre, good afternoon.”
“I was just telling this one how unacceptable, how truly unacceptable, it is for her to be loitering inside empty classrooms . . .”
“Nonsense. There’s no reason for her to have to wait in the crowded hallway,” my lover replied smoothly, then, with admirable male insensitivity, turned his attentions back to me. “Come inside, Laurel. Dierdre, will you excuse us? I can take it from here.”
He closed the door behind us and, after contenting himself that she had moved along, set the lock. I sat back down on his desk and recrossed my legs. He clucked his tongue humorously. “Loitering in empty classrooms, Laurel? How truly unacceptable.”
We were reckless enough to take such close shaves in our stride, to remain stolid in the face of the schoolgirl gossip that I was almost certain we were a subject of. While waiting around outside French class one morning, I overheard Amanda remark to Marcelle, “Seamus is an idiot. I need someone more mature.” She looked askance at me and lowered her voice, “Of course, not as mature as you-know-who.”
“Who?” I inquired, regardless of the fact that I was not part of their conversation.
“Never mind,” they chorused, eyeing me sharply.
The end was in sight for both of us, though we couldn’t have perceived it more differently. Since the
beginning of the year, he’d lost a whole two inches from his waistline, as a result of taking up smoking and skipping so many lunches to have it off with me. He purchased new trousers in black, brown, and olive green to fit his slimmed-down waist. He purchased some very smart striped shirts, and a new pair of black wingtips. As far as he was concerned, he was in the prime of his life, unaware of the fact that the young body that he wielded was nothing more than a glorified carcass, beautiful carrion.
Whether indoors or outdoors, I gave myself up to the torments of our love, which left me shaking, hot and cold as one afflicted by fever. With increasing frequency, I cried after our couplings, causing my Apollo to take me in his arms, to coax and plead and repent. When all else failed, he’d simply grit his teeth and drive me back to campus, dropping me off somewhere outside the main gates.
THERE WAS a part of me that yearned to put him off, to sicken him with my instability, and so drive him back into the stable arms of his wife of sixteen years. There was a part of me that wanted to remind him that we had nothing of that staying power, that sixteen months together would’ve been a stretch for us. There was a part of me that wanted him to know that the future he piled before me was too rich to be palatable, like dessert on an anorexic’s plate. There was a part of me that wanted to flaunt its own insanity, to send him running from my rotting, dark woods and back home to his bungalow.
He had no obligation to marry me. I was not some nineteenth-century virgin who, robbed of her hymen, had lost her market value. What motivated him to stay with me, through my crying jags and sulks, was not honor but the stubbornness of his own desire for me. It was plain to see that I was still desirable to him, for all my mental frailty; that this frailty, if anything, made me more desirable.
Everywhere, the phantom of his manhood pursued me. I began to feel him in me, even when we were separated by a span of hours; felt him shaking me, bruising me, soothing me with hot sap. My loins were constantly tingling. My movements and belladonna-black pupils betrayed to the whole world the perversion of my mind. From a limpid nymph, I had developed into something far less poetic: a nymphomaniac.
Though no substitute for the English Romantics, whose words had been my first seduction, my hidden flower and winter withering, I was inspired by the singsong sadomasochism of Emily Dickinson, who never had a Steadman of her own. Likewise, I couldn’t hear my lover reciting Poe without thinking back to what he had told us about the poet’s usage of the letter L, the loveliest letter in the English language, and the poet’s insistence that there could be no topic more worthy of literature than the death of a beautiful woman.
I was haunted by what I knew to be true: that there was no truth, other than beauty. With the passage of each day and the dwindling of each week in carnal acts whose exact details were becoming ever more forgettable, I felt the truth chilling my blood and turning my thoughts in the direction that poetic justice had always intended them to turn. “Tell me again about the wood of suicides,” I sighed to him softly, while we were lying in the undergrowth one afternoon, at the height of spring. He obliged me.
“Dante and Virgil enter the wood. There is no path. The trees are rotten and deformed. Their leaves are black and drip with venomous, dark blood. Hideous, bloated harpies tear at the leaves, making their nests in the branches. All through the wood, the moaning of the souls encased in bark can be heard. Dante plucks a leaf from one of the trees, causing the soul within to wail and bleed. The poor, damned soul is a virtuous suicide, a jurist who killed himself after he was imprisoned under false pretenses. He attributes his downfall to La Meretrice . . .”
“The whore.”
“Not just any whore. Envy.”
HAD HE never come to me that day in the woods back in November, it is possible that he might have loved me forever; might have mourned forever the passage of my chaste beauty, and devoted the rest of his life to immortalizing it in verse. As it was, I could never have been satisfied with mere love: I had to be known, and everything this implied—every parting of the legs, every raising of the kilt, every palpating digit, stimulating me to the point of madness. I needed to be known, and so had condemned us both to a rut of lust and gratification, which there was only one foreseeable way of getting out of.
Speaking of what was to become of us after I graduated, we both realized that nothing definitive could be done in terms of cohabitation and the transportation across state borders while I was still legally a minor. Having rather miraculously avoided detection for the seven months that he had known me, unlawfully, it would have been folly to risk everything by taking me from under my mother’s nose at the age of seventeen years and ten months. I would be eighteen in mid-August. On August 12, 2003, I would effectively be an adult; effectively be capable of running away with, sleeping with, even marrying a man twenty-five years my senior, without breaking any laws. All that was required were two months of abstinence, in which to sort out our affairs and await the legalization of my young body. Two months for him to forget all that he knew.
He would sort out his affairs. He would do his utmost to find lodgings in the Philadelphia Main Line, to find himself a teaching post somewhere nearby. Meanwhile, I would age and wait, dreading the day that he would come for me and take me away from the last shreds of my greenness, into the black, decaying mass of adulthood. He would come for me. He would take me out of Arcadia and drive me all the way from Monterey County, CA, to Pennsylvania—meandering through the deserts and mountains of the middle states, staying overnight in motor courts and chalets, to arrive at Bryn Mawr in time for the start of fall semester. Or such was the plan. He told me he’d be divorced by then and that we could marry along the way, in the state of my choice. I told him that he should wait until we’d settled in before so much as filing for a divorce from Mrs. Danielle Steadman. My lover needed all the time that I could buy him.
AS WE approached nearer and nearer to the date of our parting, my feverishness was paired with an unexpected coolness of mind, which didn’t at all proceed from rationality. That I no longer cried after making love was something he could only interpret positively, perceiving nothing of the fatal resolve that it indicated. I had ceased to care for myself almost entirely and, by extension, cared less for my beloved Steadman. I was distancing myself further every day, even as I continued to desire him, to profess my undying devotion.
I was both terrified and relieved to think that my love for him was coming to an end; that the starvation of my sexuality over the summer would be enough to turn me off the man and pledge me forever to the other, the god. For a time, god and man had been inseparable. I had come to see, however, that, in the long run, they were incompatible, just as divinity and womanhood were incompatible, or art and life. I loved him, in those last weeks, with a love that knew its own perishability, a love that threw up its arms and rejoiced in the leaf-shadings, the all-pervading odor of dark earth and chlorine. In the car, in the classroom, in the copses, I loved him enough to feel that—without freeing myself from the whirlwind of lust—his knowledge of me was absolute; that we had loved enough to justify an eternity of torment.
We ran out of coursework early in the summer. Most lessons of his had come to be conducted outdoors, by the glittering lake that separated Saint Cecilia’s from Trinity, where the seniors’ dance was to be held on the last Friday of term. I was the near-naked girl of greener days. I spoke with him softly beneath the whispering willows, after the rest of the class had been given permission to engage in private reading, conversation, sunbathing, and just about anything else that would keep them occupied while he courted me. Nobody cared about our dissolution. The atmosphere was one of such license, such sun-soaked bliss, that he could even be observed to briefly rest his hand on mine or whisper in my ear.
It was not only our English lessons that gave out under the influence of the season. In art class, Ms. Faber invited us to make use of anything in the supplies closet for untutored drawing and painting. In gym, which I had altogether given up attending,
Ms. Da Silva was said to have escorted the class to the aquatic center at Trinity, where they splashed and shrieked and, soaking wet, enjoyed the lewd glances of schoolboys while traversing the fields back to the girls’ campus. The better part of my other lessons was spent rereading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an occupation that went unnoticed by my now indifferent instructors. Over and over again, I became Daphne, pursued by a panting god through the thickets of Arcadia. Over and over again, I let myself be caught, kissed, before I could so much as formulate my prayer for transformation. By the last week of the semester, I had taken to slipping out of the room whenever I had math or biology, to visit my love in the English Department. He would welcome with an embrace that confused cold wood with the warmth and softness of condemned flesh.
He conducted his final lesson outside with us on Thursday, fourth period. Before the lunch bell went, he made his parting comments to the senior class, announcing that he too wouldn’t be returning to the school in September; that he wished us all the best in our future endeavors; that he felt privileged to have contributed to the education of such an upstanding group of young women. The upstanding young women yawned, scratched, and smiled placidly, unmoved by his valediction. A few exchanged snide glances.
It seemed like a lifetime ago that he’d first taken us outside, as his attendant nymphs, to listen to him reading Wordsworth and luxuriate in the last sun of September. Since then, he had lost his following. He had lost more than he cared to admit. After the lesson, I went deep into the woods with him and consoled him as best as I could. “To think,” he said bitterly, smoothing his hands over the pleats of my kilt, “this is the last time I’ll ever see you in your uniform.”
The Wood of Suicides Page 16