The Spirit Wood

by Robert Masello

  “No, not really,” Peter replied. “Byron and I have knocked the balls around a couple of times, but neither one of us really knows the rules.”

  “You ought to learn them,” Caswell remarked, a ray of sunlight glinting off his steel-rimmed spectacles. To Peter, he momentarily looked, and sounded, like a turn-of-the-century schoolmaster. “It's a complex game, a lot of geometry involved.”

  “You wouldn't care to give me a lesson or two, would you?”

  “I'd be glad to,” Caswell replied with alacrity. “I'm always on the lookout for fresh opponents.”

  “Watch out,” Stan said. “He's a shark.”

  “How soon can I start getting you in shape?”

  “What about this afternoon?” Peter said.

  Meg overheard the invitation.

  “Why don't you come back to the house with us?” Peter continued. Then, with an expansiveness not common to him, he added, “Why don't you all come back with us?” To Anita, he said, “It'll give you a chance to start drawing up your plans for the auction. Where you want to put things, park the cars, all of that.”

  Anita jumped at the chance. Joan appeared to acquiesce by silently fishing another cigarette out of her purse. “Afraid I can't make it,” Stan said. “Promised Al Plettner a round of golf.” But Jack Caswell also agreed, and after they'd all watched a fife and drum corps march by, followed by assorted Cub Scout troops, Elks, and brightly festooned floats, there was an unspoken but unanimous decision to return to their cars and drive to Arcadia. Anita at first suggested she hitch a ride with Meg and Peter, but after glancing into the back seat of their battered Datsun and discovering more than a few of Dodger's stray hairs spread across the cracked upholstery, she pulled her head back out, explained, unconvincingly, that she was allergic to dogs, and hurried down the street to the Caswells’ chocolate-brown Audi.

  “So much for her love of animals,” Meg commented on their way home.

  Peter checked in the rearview mirror to see that the Caswells were still behind.

  “Peter,” Meg asked, not sure she should bring it up at all, “how come you went ahead and invited everybody back to the house without even looking at me to see if I liked the idea?”

  “Don't you?”

  “That's not the point,” Meg said, “or at least it's not all of it.” She didn't like the idea—he had to know that much. “I just thought it was sort of strange, and unlike you,” she added, hoping to soften the criticism that way, “not even to consult me about it. To just go ahead and invite without even a nod in my direction.”

  They were stopped at a light. Peter's fingers tapped a nervous tattoo on the steering wheel. “Is it okay if I invite the Caswells and the Simons over for a drink?” he said, staring straight ahead.

  “What?” Meg said with an uncertain laugh. This wasn't the reaction she'd expected. Why didn't he look at her?

  “Is it all right if I invite them over?” he repeated in the same measured tones.

  “Of course it is,” Meg said. “I mean, it's up to you who you want to invite back to the house. I was only trying to say that I wished you'd—”

  The light changed, and Peter gunned the engine. Meg put out a hand toward the dashboard and dropped the rest of what she'd been about to say. Peter's face was frozen, the only movement a slight tensing of the jaw. They drove the rest of the way without speaking a word, Meg both hurt and bewildered, wondering what on earth had gotten into him and how on earth she could learn to tell when he was going to explode like this. Had she seen it coming, had it made any more sense than it did, she might have exploded back herself—she did have a temper of her own. But what was the use, in a case like this? What were they fighting about, why were they fighting at all? And who—that was the most alarming thing of all—was she fighting with? This man behind the wheel, with the glistening black curls and the darkly tanned skin, more tanned than she'd seen him in any previous summer, was like a close, but in some ways terribly altered, facsimile of the man she loved.

  At the estate, Peter opened the gates with the electric beeper in their car and drove through with the Caswells following close behind. They parked in front of the house; Nikos, unexpectedly, was waiting for them there. When Caswell got out of his car, Meg noticed that Nikos met his eye, but seemed not to know how to react. Caswell quickly raised one hand in salute, hailed him loudly. “Nikos, you're looking well!” he said. Now that he'd been acknowledged first, Nikos smiled one of his broad, leathery smiles, pulled at his baggy trousers. He shook Caswell's hand, again with that unusual overhand grip of his.

  “Was there something you wanted?” Peter asked him; his tone of voice was normal again, even pleasant.

  “Nothing, nothing important,” Nikos replied. “This party you're going to have, I had some questions to ask you. About the grounds.” A breeze blew up, and Nikos squashed his canvas hat down more firmly on his head. “It can wait. You have guests,” he said, swinging one hand wide to indicate the Caswells and Mrs. Simon. With his body bent forward he appeared almost to be bowing to them.

  “That's my department,” Anita said brightly. “I'll be figuring out everything that has to be done.”

  “This is Anita Simon,” Peter said by way of introduction.

  Nikos seemed unimpressed by her offer, and again Meg couldn't tell if they already knew each other or not.

  “Shall we go in?” Peter said, walking toward the front steps.

  “You know what would be fun?” Anita said, not following, but turning instead to Meg. “To snoop around in your studio. Would that be all right?” she asked. “I've just been dying of curiosity ever since you told me what you do, and I'd love to see some of your pieces.” Meg hesitated just long enough for Anita to assume consent. “Jack,” Anita instructed, “you and Peter go on inside and play your game—I've never understood the fun of knocking those little balls into each other,” she confided to Meg and Joan—"and we three ladies will go off on our own. Won't we?” she said, taking Joan by the arm and waiting for Meg to lead the way.

  “After you,” Jack said to Peter, gesturing toward the front steps. At the top, Peter pushed open the heavy paneled doors, and they disappeared inside; Meg found herself stranded in the drive with her two expectant visitors.

  “There's really not much to see,” she warned.

  “That's not what Larry Lazaroff says,” Anita replied as they started around the east wing of the house. Nikos stayed right where he was, watching them.

  “How would Larry Lazaroff know? He's never set foot here.”

  “Oh, he knows,” Anita said, like someone privy to secret information. “He tells me you buy only the best, and most professional, supplies and that only a real artist would know how to use such things.”

  “You know, I've always liked it on this side of the tracks,” Joan said to Meg as they walked down the lawn toward the gleaming blue bay. “I told Jack that before I died, I wanted to have riparian rights. He put in a swimming pool.”

  “That must be nice to have.”

  “Looks nice. The water's a nice color. But having it there all the time makes you feel like you ought to swim in it once in a while. This used to be the boat-house?” she asked innocently as Meg fished in her pocket for the key to the door.

  “Yes. Though somebody else had fixed it up for pottery even before I got here.”

  Inside, Joan remained near the door, surveying the room with politely feigned interest, while Anita poked around like a customs inspector, reading all the labels on Meg's chemical bottles, running her finger along the surface of the stone work table, peering into the empty kiln. As if she'd been saving the best for last, she turned to the rack of shelves near the door, where the finished pieces were displayed, only when she'd finished taking in everything else.

  “Oh, these are beautiful,” she said, timidly remov- ing a deep-red ceramic bud vase and holding it toward the light from the windows. “I've never seen such a color.”

  “That one I mixed myself,” Meg said,
pleased, she discovered, even with a compliment from Anita. It was refreshing, and it dawned on her that she heard very little praise for her work, or herself, of late. “I call that color ‘blood lust,’ “ she said with a laugh.

  “Lucky you're not in the business of naming lipsticks,” Joan remarked.

  “Isn't it something,” Anita said, offering the vase to Joan for her approval. Joan took it, revolved it slowly in her long, thin hands, and then said, “Yes, yes it is.” She looked up at Meg with a touch of surprise, as if she hadn't really expected the work to be so good. She moved around to the front of the rack and studied the other pieces—the thick earth-colored tea set, the wide multicolored fruit bowls, the other bud vases, slender and smooth, in black and bone white—and then, crouching down to the bottom shelf, the pair of sculptured figures there.

  “Those are just some experiments,” Meg explained shyly, “just some new things I've been trying.” No one had seen this work yet, and she wasn't sure how she felt about its being seen now.

  One of the pieces was fairly conventional, a figure of a young woman, pensive, one arm folded across her bosom and holding the other arm near the shoulder. The other piece was more unusual, and particularly so for Meg: though this second figure could be the same young woman, in this piece she was nude, dancing, her hair blowing loose about her head, her arms flung out in a gesture of wild, even fierce, abandon. The clay surface had been roughly worked over, mottled and chopped at, with a palette knife, a technique that Meg had seldom before employed. But for this piece, which had sprung into her head full-blown, one cloudy afternoon when the only sound in the studio had been the anxious lapping of the water outside, no other style had seemed appropriate; indeed, in her haste to sketch the contours of the figure and plot the proper armature and materials, she had never stopped to consider her decisions, but simply rushed ahead, intent on capturing that fleeting image before it evaporated as mysteriously as it had come. Nor had she wanted to pause and reflect; the figure had been troubling to her, in the way it had thrust itself into her mind and in its general tenor, and she had wanted not so much to create it as to rid herself of it, to execute it quickly and put it out of mind for good.

  “Are these of the same model?” Joan said, asking the question that Meg herself had been unable to resolve. The first figure was loosely based on Leah, on an image Meg had preserved of her standing in the doorway of the dining room that first night she and Peter had stayed at Arcadia, when Nikos had come in and played his syrinx (she'd only learned the name of the instrument weeks later, from Byron; the Greek god Pan, he had told her, was reputedly its inventor). The second figure was very like Leah, a long-limbed, attenuated body, but Meg had never seen their housekeeper in any such pose, much less nude, and something told her it wasn't necessarily Leah, or anyone else she'd ever seen or known.

  “That's a professional secret,” Meg replied, and when Joan looked mildly surprised at the evasion, added, “and mostly because I don't myself know if they're the same person or not.”

  “You mean you just made up the pose, this girl, out of your head?” Anita asked earnestly, as if trying to grasp how such things as sculpture were done. “That's amazing,” she said, clucking her tongue. “How you artistic people do what you do.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I don't suppose—” She stopped herself as if debating whether she should go ahead or not. “I don't suppose you'd even think of donating, either one of these sculptures or something else, whatever you decide, to our auction?” Despite all the disclaimers, it was clear she thought Meg would provide her with something. “I realize that you and Peter have done so much already, just letting us hold it here, but it would be such run if we could have something that you yourself created to add to the auction. I'm sure that we'd get an awfully nice bid for it.” Her eyes flicked over to Joan, and Meg wondered if the glance had indicated that the bidding for her piece might be, in a manner of speaking, rigged, that friends and partisans might be encouraged, in gratitude for the loan of the estate, to bid more generously than usual. Meg, again, saw no easy out and wound up promising to donate something, she couldn't say what just then, in time for the auction. She crossed the room and, as a way of signaling that the tour of her studio was now officially over, closed the ponderous lid of the kiln—Byron had helped her secure the base so that it no longer rocked so precariously—and then followed Joan and Anita out into the waning afternoon sunlight.

  “How much exploring have you done here?” Anita asked as Meg secured the padlock on the door. “Have you been over all of the grounds?”

  “Most, I think.”

  Anita was looking over at the woods to the west. Then down toward the dock. “Such an unusual place,” she said, turning back to Meg. “And Peter's grandfather was such an unusual man.”

  “So I hear,” Meg replied.

  “But you never met him?”

  “No.” She added that for all intents and purposes, Peter never had either.

  “And Peter's parents?” Anita asked, as they ambled up toward the house.

  What was this, the third degree? Meg said Peter's father had passed away long ago, and that his mother lived in New York. Enough was enough, she thought.

  Joan seemed to think so, too; Meg thought she detected a cautionary glance at Anita.

  “What do you think of that?” Anita asked as they approached the statue of the priapic satyr. Meg was reminded of Angelos, weeks before, doing the same thing.

  “I try not to.”

  “Oh, surely you're not upset by it,” Anita said. “Peter's not, is he?” She sounded genuinely concerned.

  “I don't think he's losing any sleep over it,” Meg replied. It occurred to her that if she and Peter had been planning to live at Arcadia, she'd have had the thing removed altogether.

  “I probably shouldn't admit it,” Anita said, laughing nervously, “but I think it's kind of sexy. Imagine being done by that,” she said, gazing up at the outrageously oversized member.

  “Yes,” Joan said dryly, and with a faint smile, “imagine that.”

  Then both of them laughed, presumably at Joan's acid delivery, before following Meg around the edge of the fountain and on into the house.

  From the billiard room, they could hear the clicking of the balls colliding on the table, and the men's muffled voices. When they came through the arched doorway, Jack was leaning forward, demonstrating a shot; Peter was holding his own cue straight up and down, like an idle sentry with his rifle. On the raised platform, covered in quilted red leather, at the far end of the room, there was a tray, the one that Leah often served from, and on it Meg saw two wineglasses and one of the straw-covered bottles that Nikos used for his own homemade vintage.

  “Never push the cue,” Jack was saying. “Let it glide through your fingers,” and he sent the white ball gently rolling down the green felt table, where it grazed one of the red balls, and caromed off the bumper with sufficient velocity to touch the second red ball lightly and come to rest.

  “What a beautiful room this is,” Anita declared, taking in the wooden paneling and the red leather, the cue rack and the Tiffany-style lamp suspended over the table. “It's so masculine.” Joan hunted out an ashtray and lit a cigarette. “Your wife does wonderful work,” Anita informed Peter, “and she's even volunteered to donate a specially commissioned piece—it's okay if I call it that, isn't it?—just for the auction. Something connected to animals and nature.” Meg suddenly realized that she was expected to do an altogether new piece expressly for the sale. Peter looked at her with some surprise, but approval, too.

  “Has Jack been showing you the fruits of his misspent youth?” Joan asked, removing a flake of tobacco from her tongue with the tip of one finger.

  “I don't think our friend here,” said Caswell, referring to Peter, “has spent his youth so well either. He's got a not bad touch at all.”

  Leah appeared in the doorway and asked Meg if her guests would like something to drink. They settled on a pitcher of fresh
lemonade, and when Leah returned to serve it, the women seated themselves, like spectators, on the leather deck. Through the high, narrow windows that ran along one side of the room, a pale golden light, the last of the afternoon sun, filtered in and melted into the denser gold cast by the hanging glass lamp. Anita chattered on about the auction-party, while the men moved quietly, smoothly, about the table, stroking the balls into effortless trajectories. To Meg, tired from the heat of the day, the noise of the parade, the unexpected confrontation in the car, their actions seemed almost mesmerizingly fluid, removed, slow. Joan's cigarette spun a lazy wreath of smoke into the air. A Greek theme, Anita announced, that's what the auction should revolve around. The house looked like a Greek temple—why not go with it? Meg, finished with the lemonade in her glass, poured herself some of Nikos's wine. The auctioneer should wear a toga, the gavel should be a ... silver wine goblet! Peter retrieved, and sipped from, his own glass, said something—inaudible to Meg—to Jack, who laughed. The overhead light made the green felt of the table beat, with an emerald intensity, in Meg's eyes; she closed them for a moment, to rest them. The gazebo, on the back lawn, why, that could be filled with the items to be auctioned. The chairs for the bidders could be arranged on the grass around it. Meg took another sip of her wine; though it hadn't been chilled, it was oddly refreshing. Jack laid a friendly hand on Peter's shoulder; the words “topspin” and “English” came to Meg's ears. Caswell went back to the table. Peter, observing from the shadows, leaned slightly forward, one ankle crossed across the other, balancing himself with the cue. It was a classic pose, something from an antique sculpture or a French neoclassical painting. Poussin, Meg thought. Or Prud'hon. His black hair made a rich, dark frame for his tanned features, his white teeth. The cue was like a shepherd's staff. When it was his turn to make a shot, he smoothly unwound himself, moved to the edge of the table, into the halo of light. His bare arms held the polished stick, let it slide, back and forth, between his hands. He explained, in low tones, how he proposed to play the angles. Jack seemed skeptical, wished him luck. The tip of the cue addressed the ivory ball, retracted, then kissed it away. The ball sailed, glowing in the light, across the felt, grazed the edge of the first red ball, ricocheted neatly off a corner bumper, returned the entire length of the table, and rebounded again to click finally, satisfyingly, against the third ball. Jack shook his head in bemused admiration, and Peter, in a swift and natural way that Meg had never before seen in him, leapt nimbly into the air, the cue in one hand, his feet outstretched like a ballet dancer's, to celebrate his shot. From his lips escaped a whistle of joy, breathy, immediate, but, again, unlike any sound Meg had ever heard him make. For just that split second, as he was held suspended in the far shadows of the room, he seemed, to Meg's sleepy eyes, indeed to be a figure from some pastoral scene, a cunning boy, unknowingly observed, at play in some deep green landscape.