Lost in the Forest (11 page)

Skinny, flinty Martha Bennett had misunderstood her. She was drinking sherry, and she set her glass down sharply on the scarred coffee table. “For me the moment occurred when my mother died,” she said. She pronounced it
muhthah
. “I suppose I was about ten years older than you are now when that happened, and what I felt was that I’d arrived at the head of the line—that those ahead of me had stepped aside and now I could see clearly what was coming.” Her eyes swam, magnified to an odd intensity behind her thick glasses.

“No, but this is different,” Eva said. “It’s not about death. It’s about these younger lives. About their having so much … I suppose, adventure, ahead of them.”

Martha looked at her, hard. She smiled, not ungenerously. “As I said, dear. Death.”

But it
wasn’t
about death, Eva thinks now. She felt that after John died, that death was all that waited for her. But now she wants to go on. She knows that. That is something, surely. She does want to go on. She wants life. More. More of something. She doesn’t know what.

Sitting on Emily’s bed, she reminds herself—consciously makes herself remember—the way she felt after things had ended with Mark. It was worse, she tells herself. It was so much worse then. She had been young and broke and still helplessly, ragefully, in love with Mark. All she wanted was her own irretrievable past, was what he’d smashed up.

She was working for peanuts then, and living way up on that godforsaken hill. And every piece of furniture, every room, every
picture on the wall reminded her of Mark. The bed she slept in alone, the sheets she used. Dishes they’d scrimped to buy together or found secondhand at yard sales. Her own clothes reminded her of Mark. A dress she had to wear regularly to work—since it was one of the few reasonable things she owned—was a dress he had loved because of the long row of tiny buttons down the front, the slow unfastening of which had become part of a teasing start to sex. There were nightgowns he’d given her, a blouse he liked her in because of its primness, because it made what he knew of her sexually such a secret between them.

Gracie was still working as a nurse then, and she’d often stop by after her shift, still wearing her work clothes, her thick white nurse’s shoes. Sometimes she spent the night, and they sat up late, drinking and talking about their lives, about men, telling stories from their past. Gracie thought Eva just needed to meet someone, needed to start going out, needed to begin to feel that something else, someone else was going to be possible. She wanted Eva to let herself be fixed up. Gracie was a person who liked to prescribe. Eva thought it came from her work. Or maybe she had chosen her work because she liked to prescribe.

Eva remembers that she’d pointed out Gracie’s own solitary life to her. She’d asked Gracie why it should be that
she
needed someone when Gracie didn’t.

“I’m different,” Gracie had said. They were in the living room, sitting opposite each other in the old, splayed chairs Eva and Mark had bought secondhand. The girls were long since in bed, though they’d had a dancing party for them before that, twirling them recklessly to an old Jerry Lee Lewis LP on the shiny wood floor that Mark had refinished himself the first summer they moved in.

“Why? You’re a woman. You’re alone too.”

Gracie had shrugged. She’d unpinned her hair when she arrived, and it fell over her shoulders, a thick blonde tumble that shifted now in the light when she moved. “I’m tougher than you are. And I don’t want to love anyone, and you do.”

This had struck Eva as true about herself. It silenced her. She wanted love. To love.

“Besides that,” Gracie said after a moment, “I
have
guys. Dozens of them.” She made an expansive gesture with her hand, suggesting an array of men standing before her.

Eva drank some of her cheap wine. “Not that you love,” she said, as she set her glass down. “Not that you even date.”

“Well, but I touch them. I hold them. I’m well acquainted with their rigs.” Gracie’s grin was lopsided. “I joke around with guys all the time, sometimes while I’m holding on to their penises.” Her head tilted quizzically. “Their peni?” She laughed. “Anyway, it’s part of my job description.”

“But not
a
guy. Not
a
penis.”

“But I don’t want
a
guy. I want six. That’s the difference between us.”

Eva remembers too that on one of those nights, she’d felt suddenly ashamed for whining about her life. She’d apologized to Gracie for talking as though her lot was so hard. She knew it was nothing like the kind of
hard
Gracie had lived through in Vietnam: she had no right to complain.

Gracie looked startled. “That wasn’t hard.” She shook her head. “Those were the best times of my life.” Something in her friend’s face made Eva reach forward across the table where they were sitting to touch Gracie’s arm.

“No, really,” Gracie said. She smiled sadly. “I’ve never been as happy, as thrilled on a daily basis, as I was in Vietnam. I’ll never get over it really. What could come up to that?”

“For what?” Eva had asked.

“For … excitement. For drama.” Gracie’s big face seemed to light from within, recalling it. “For feeling utterly
used up
. For sex, for love.” She looked at Eva and frowned. “I wanted it never to stop. I should be ashamed.”

“
Don’t
be ashamed,” Eva said.

“I’m not. But I should be.” She ran her finger around the top of her glass slowly. “But it did stop,” she said. “It did. And now I have the rest of life to get through. One ordinary day after another.”

There was a little smear of blood on the front of Gracie’s tunic.
Eva thought of how different her ordinary day was from Gracie’s ordinary day. How extraordinary Gracie’s ordinary day would be for her.

She gets up now and goes into John’s study. She opens the windows there too, a row of them behind his desk overlooking the street. She’s thinking, oddly, of the woman she’d sat next to on the plane, a woman who was returning from a five-day stay at a spa. She was coiffed, manicured, done up. She was about sixty, Eva thought, but with that careful grooming and elegantly dyed hair that makes a woman look at once much older and much younger than she is. This woman had explained reflexology to Eva.

“And you believe in that?” Eva had asked.

“Of course I do,” the woman said. “It works; I’m the living testimony. Why wouldn’t I believe in it?”

Because it’s a lot of crap, Eva wanted to say. Because it makes no sense. Because you’re an adult in a post-enlightenment world. What she said was, “You do look fabulous.”

It had occurred to her then that maybe some of her problem was that she didn’t believe in anything. She stands now looking out onto the front yard, the quiet street. Of course, that isn’t quite true. She had believed that she and John would grow old together, that he would always be faithful to her.

But then she’d believed that of Mark too, she reminds herself. She’d believed that she brought some access to the world to Mark, that he needed her, that he’d never do anything to threaten that. She remembers now how moved she was the first time he’d asked her to read aloud to him the book she was holding. The sense of sorrow and simultaneous power.

What power?

Something that had to do with the words on the page and the sense of herself as their conduit for him. Or even their translator. Later, hearing Mark talk about a book, using words that they’d exchanged, repeating ideas about it that weren’t exclusively hers, but weren’t really his own either, she would sometimes feel constricted by this connection with him. And wasn’t that a sort of infidelity on her part? A betrayal of what might have been the
deepest part of their relationship for him, as his sleeping with someone else had been for her?

But this is the way it was between people, wasn’t it? That there is always, a little bit, the sense of being imprisoned by what we love. She thinks of the wait by the luggage carousel for her bag to appear today, when she had watched a family with two small children as they assembled their car seats, their backpacks, their carryalls, their collapsible stroller. There was something exhausted in the young parents—they didn’t speak to each other except to divide responsibilities. When they left, the mother had a baby slung across her front as she pushed the luggage cart, and the father had the older child in the stroller, a pack on his back. She had remembered it then—the visceral sense of confinement and burden when the children were small. As she remembered the same sense with Mark of being
bound
to him somehow, being responsible for him. Tied down to him, with him, even though she loved him so deeply.

With John it had been different. Their worlds overlapped, they enriched each other. No translation was necessary, no taking of responsibility—at least on her part. And sexually too, there was a greater comfort and ease. It was not that it was less passionate, she thinks, but that the passion was quieter, was based in affection. And though she occasionally missed what had seemed so hungry, so driven, in Mark, she also thought of it as something inherent in him, something transferable. Something he could have, and then
had
, easily taken elsewhere.

What happened between her and John sexually seemed born of, seemed part of, what happened between them otherwise.

Though thinking of it now she remembers that he had felt differently. She remembers that she asked him one night, early on in their relationship, what attracted him to her. They were lying in bed in his house. The girls were home with a sitter in the house on the hill.

“The absolute usual,” he said.

“By which you mean?”

“Your fuckability. The sense I had of you as delicious.”

“What a nice answer,” she said, turning on her side to him. It was a hot night, and they were both naked, his thick penis fallen to the side. He had reached over and run his hand down her body, over the curve of her hip. She was actually startled to hear him say this, to have him use this language, her polite new lover. Startled, and then pleased. “So much better than, ‘Your lovely mind, your wit, your charm.’ ” His hair was oddly mussed, and he looked untended, silly. She reached up and stroked it back into place.

He grinned at her. “And then, of course, all that—your wit, your charm—which is what made me love you.”

Eva had rolled over on her back again. The streetlight fell in on them. She couldn’t get used to this, in town—the lights. It was so dark on the hill. Here, they could always see each other. After a minute, she said, “So you think being delicious to someone else is step number one.”

“God, yes. Don’t you?”

She wasn’t sure what to answer. John hadn’t been delicious to her, not in that sense, not at first. Not in the way Mark had, for instance, when she sat talking with him in the tent at the wedding that first day, nervously trying to hold his interest so they could stay together long enough that sleeping with him—sleeping with him that very night—might be a possibility. Talking and talking about nothing at all and attending only to the desire that quivered like music between them.

With John, her attention had turned to him only slowly the night they met, drawn by the persistence and intelligence of his interest in her.

“I suppose so,” she said. “Yes. Delicious.” And she’d reached over and touched him again, moving her hand down to encircle his cock.

T
HE NIGHT
they had met, it was Eva’s plan to fall in love with one of John’s authors, a man named John Doyle. It was Eva who had read Doyle’s book in the galleys that came to the bookstore. She had loved it; she had suggested more than once to the woman
who owned the bookstore that they bring him in to do a reading. He lived in San Francisco—easy to get him, then—and John Albermarle, his publisher, ran a tiny publishing house in the valley. It would be politic to support the local effort.

In the galleys it had been the novel itself, the writing, that had compelled Eva. But when the real book arrived with its elegant jacket and the author photograph, she saw that Doyle was darkly, mysteriously good-looking. There was no mention of a family in the brief biography, no hint in the dedication—“To Ethan and Seth”—of a wife or lover. Of course he might be gay. But the text itself argued against that in its enthusiastic heterosexuality.

She had dressed carefully, elegantly, that night—the dress with all the tiny buttons, and a lacy shawl. She had arrived early—she was in charge of things. Of the chairs, to be unfolded in rows in a semicircle. Of the flowers—daisies tonight from her own garden, set on the counter in a vase next to the music stand John Doyle would read from. She was in charge of the wine and sparkling water and cookies laid out on a table pushed back against the shelves. Of the books, stacked on the signing table near the door.

Frances, the woman who owned the store, would act as hostess and introducer, a role she loved, so she would have most of the interaction with Doyle. But there was to be a dinner afterward in a restaurant a half block away, and Eva was invited to come along for that—she’d go back to the store later to pick up.

Dinner then. That would be her chance.

The reading went well. Two-thirds of the chairs were filled, and Eva sold perhaps twenty-five books. John Doyle was a good reader—an actor, really—giving even the pauses a full dramatic weight, making his face, his voice, anguished, then jubilant, then angry. After he’d finished reading, he responded enthusiastically to the questions asked him by the mostly female audience. Oh, perhaps he lingered a little too long, a little too self-importantly on the nuances of what his work routines were and how he approached his material, but after all, Eva thought, he
had
been asked.

As they stood waiting for their table in the restaurant, Frances
introduced Eva as the person in the store who’d championed the book. John Doyle and John Albermarle—the two Johns, one beautiful, one not—beamed down at her. When they were finally seated, she was placed between them at the circular table. Frances presided. Her husband, Roger, famously uninterested in anything that smacked of the literary, was also there. He liked to choose the wine, because he liked to drink it. Lots of it. A different bottle with each course. He liked Eva too, probably because she was young, as he saw it, and pretty. Tonight, before the wine relieved him of feeling the burden of social interaction, he talked to her. Talked her ear off, she would say to the girls later, and motion with her hand its falling from her head to the floor. He talked about wine, about the food and the chef, whose cooking he’d experienced years before in Boston. He talked about Boston, that dull, morally superior town.