Lost in the Forest (21 page)

“What for?”

Eva didn’t know how to put it. For misunderstanding myself?
For using your affection to comfort myself? For using
you
? “I’ve been so … unstable, I guess. Not myself. Or, I feel actually, I’m only gradually becoming myself again. I’ve sort of … flailed about. I haven’t known what I wanted.”

“Well, that seems pretty natural, doesn’t it, given the circumstances?”

“I suppose. But it still bothers me to realize it.”

“You’re being awfully hard on yourself.”

“Not hard enough, I assure you.”

He smiled at her. “Eva. You’re always too hard on yourself.”

“Well, then, that’s how I have to be apparently.”

The waitress set the check down in its leather case. They fumbled, argued, but Eva insisted on paying it. She had, after all, asked him out, she said. And hadn’t even been very good company.

She felt an urgency to be gone, almost a physical need. She left too much money for the tip, not wanting to wait for change. She stood up. Without speaking, they walked through the bar, across the foyer with its mammoth bouquet of lilies, and out to the parking lot. Eva was walking just ahead of Mark. She turned at her car to say good night. Mark reached for her, and she stepped into his embrace—one last time, she told herself. It felt so familiar, so wonderful, his long, muscled body, his smell. She felt she was holding their youth together, their start, their hopes and then all that had wrecked that. She felt she was holding her past, something she’d already said good-bye to, at great cost, and now unexpectedly had to part with again.

He kissed her, and she kissed him back, but when he pushed harder against her, she pulled away slightly. With her hands still around his neck, she lowered her head, resting her forehead against his chest. His hands moved up and down her back.

“This is all I want, Mark,” she said after a moment, and then she stepped away and bent to open her car.

She didn’t look at him as she backed out, as she shifted gears and pulled forward toward the gate at the entrance to the lot. But she couldn’t stop herself from looking in her rearview mirror just before she turned out into the driveway, and he was still there,
standing where she’d left him, his face and his shirt pale smudges in the dim light.

As she drove slowly down the curving drive, she felt overcome by a sense of loss, a sense that included John, and herself somehow too. It shouldn’t have to be so hard, over and over, she thought. It’s too hard. She slowed and stopped at the road, and waited, her turn indicator blinking steadily, until she had forced down the tears that welled in her throat and eyes, until her vision cleared and she could start the drive home.

Chapter Ten

D
UNCAN WAS FULL
of opinions.

(It was only after Duncan, years after Duncan, when Daisy began to have love affairs with people her own age, college students, that she realized how unusual this was. She lay next to one or another new lover and listened to them talk, listened to them tell their stories—about how they ran away from home one summer, about how their brother was killed in a car crash in high school and the family was never the same, about how their mother slipped into heavy drinking and they finally performed a family intervention—and she missed Duncan: the blankness of his past and his endless opinions.
I’m not interested in stories
, she would think.
I could tell you a story. What about your opinions?
)

Duncan thought that the problem with contemporary politicians was that they didn’t believe that there was a permanent and deep evil in the world. Therefore they had no capacity to understand and take any dark pleasure in life, no wit. Kennedy was the last president with true wit, he said, and that was because he was Catholic and understood the power of evil.

It was Duncan’s opinion that the Napa Valley had become absurd and precious. That it represented all that was bad and would
get worse in America about the connection between wealth and race. That eventually everything would get so expensive that no one normal would be able even to afford the wine anymore, and the Mexicans would still be living in cheesy housing and drinking bad beer, and everyone would still be pretending that was just fine because they were a different
kind
of human being from the white folks who grew grapes.

Duncan thought her taste in movies was idiotic. He thought that the only contemporary directors whose films were worth seeing were Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph, the Coen brothers, and occasionally something by Woody Allen. She shouldn’t even speak to him of Bergman. (She wouldn’t have been able to, never having seen one of his films.) Bergman, he said,
that fraud
, who abused his art to moralize, to moralize simplistically about good and evil.

Duncan thought that computer use wouldn’t become widespread until the techies, who were in love with what they’d created, stopped insisting everyone else had to love it too. “We’re Americans,” he said. “We want something we can turn on, and it goes. Like the car. Like the electric light. We don’t want to have to admire the complexity or be involved in it. We don’t want to understand
how
. Americans don’t care about how. We just want to press the button and be happy.”

It was Duncan’s opinion that American girls were insipid. Dull. Because they had no culture, they had no deep sexuality. He had rescued Daisy from this fate. He would be a story she could dine out on.

“Yah, and who in the wide world would I ever tell this particular story to?”

“I promise you, Daisy, you will.” Suddenly, he smiled. “ ‘And when you speak of me,’ ”—she could tell he was imitating someone, quoting someone—“ ‘Be kind.’ ”

Daisy took in all this and much more over the course of the fall, even as she was learning from Duncan everything about her own body and how it could be brought to pleasure. Because she’d gone on seeing him.

Though she hadn’t known, after that first time, that she would.
In the car that afternoon on the way back to St. Helena, he had said, “Well, we’re even now, Daze.”

She wasn’t sure what he meant. She was stunned with what they’d done, what she’d done.

And now, his saying this. Was it over, so soon? Was that all he’d wanted? Did it end here? Was this the way things worked with grown-up sex?

Of course, she knew it wasn’t even really sex at all—he’d never put his penis in her; she hadn’t even
seen
his penis—but maybe these were the rules.

She said, in what she hoped was an indifferent tone, “Okay.” She looked away from him, out the window at the hillside that rose on the eastern side of Silverado Road, at the driveways cutting uphill, the houses you could see through the woods and undergrowth.

“Of course,” he said after a while, “if you’d like to do this again, have a
spot of tea
, as it were, I’d be willing. What do you think?”

She looked over at him. His face was pleasantly blank, unreadable. She shrugged. “I don’t care,” she said.

He grinned then. “Liar,” he said. “
Pants on fire
.”

She couldn’t help smiling slightly. “So?” she said, after a minute. “What do
you
think?”

“About what?”

Daisy looked back out the window. “If we should.”

“I think we should, Daze.”

Her heart thudded heavily.

“Don’t you?”

She shrugged again.

“Come on, Daisy. I’ll be your slave. Every teenage girl should have a slave, don’t you think? I’ll put my hands wherever you like. I’ll put my mouth wherever you like. I’ll look at you and simply adore you. All parts of you.”

She kept her face turned from him, but she could feel herself blushing.

“You liked it, didn’t you, Daisy?” His voice was serious, suddenly, and she looked over at him.

“Yes,” she said. “I loved it.”

“Would you like it again?”

“Yes,” she said, and felt funny, heavy and thick between her legs, in her abdomen.

“Good.” And when she said nothing more for a long moment, he said, “Is there a problem then?”

She said, “What about Gracie?”

This wasn’t what she meant, not really. Though she would have said she loved Gracie, she didn’t truly care about her in relation to what had just happened with Duncan. She meant something else, something about what all the other grown-ups would think, something about how illicit this was. She wanted him to acknowledge this, to make sense of it for her, though she couldn’t have found the words to ask for it.

“Well, we won’t tell Gracie, I wouldn’t think.” She could see his mouth twist a little bit. He looked over at her. “Just as we won’t tell Eva about your
larceny
.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said. And then, “They’re not the same, anyway.”

“But in a sense, they are. You’re taking from Eva what belongs to her, because you need to, for your own
private
reasons, and I’m taking from Gracie what belongs to her because, I would say, of my
own
very private reasons. Isn’t that the case?”

She didn’t answer. You didn’t always need to answer Duncan, she was discovering.

“Has Eva even noticed?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No,” she said reluctantly.

“And I can promise you Gracie won’t notice either.”

“But …” She was searching for exactly what it was she wanted to know from him.

“What?”

“Don’t you love Gracie?”

“
Love
,” he said. “I don’t quite believe in
love
. We see where love
gets you. ‘Love me tender.’ ‘Love is all you need.’ ” He looked over at her. “We don’t agree, do we, Daisy? We understand that love is an
idea
, a big fat overblown Western idea.
Culturally imposed
.” His voice mocked his own words. And then he was quoting something, something Daisy would recognize with a start years later, getting ready for an audition for a play. “ ‘Men have died from time to time,’ ” he said, “ ‘and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’ ”

Daisy waited a moment, and then she said, “But
do
you love Gracie?” She knew she was really asking him about herself, but this seemed the form the question needed to take.

“Well, of course, I’m
devoted
to Gracie. Gracie is part of my life and who I am forever and ever, till death us do part.”

Daisy felt tearful, suddenly. She bent her head. They were in town now. She lined up her books, her homework, on the seat next to her. She saw them through a blur.

“Of course, the question is, what about
you
, right?”

His voice was surprisingly gentle, but she didn’t look at him.

“I adore you, Daisy. I want you. I think about your body and your mouth and your legs all the time. I’ve thought … often. Of doing exactly what we did this afternoon.” They had turned off Main Street now. He drove a half block past Kearney and pulled over. He put the car in neutral and turned toward her. “Daisy,” he said. “I’m happy. I’m happy that you liked it so much. That you want to do it again. So now I’ll think about how beautiful your crew-cut pussy is, and how you taste, and what it feels like to push my finger into you and to look at you holding yourself open for me. And of how you looked in Gracie’s old bathing suit with your mile-long thighs. That was terrific, Daisy. And of how you looked, like a gorgeous giraffe, walking down the street holding your schoolbooks with your hair streaming out behind you. And how you looked thrashing around on my bed.” He reached over and stroked her hair.

She smiled at him.

“Snarls,” he said, and pulled his fingers a little. It hurt.

He dropped his hand. “Better run, Daze. I bet you’re late for dinner.”

She gathered up her books and looked over at him again. “When?” she said.

“Delicious Daisy.” He smiled. “Whenever you like. Whenever you can. I’m at your disposal.”

“I can Thursday.”

“Well then, Thursday,” he said. “I’ll find you on the way home after school. We’ll have a lovely little rendezvous.”

As she shut the car door behind her, she bent down and looked over at him, hoping for some claim, some sign. He was looking away, but he sensed her. He turned, he snapped his teeth at her.

The next day she put a note in Mrs. Loomis’s mailbox, withdrawing from chorus, which met on Thursday afternoons. Her mother needed her, the note said. She started to write something that connected directly with John’s death, but as soon as she began it, she felt washed with shame. She scratched out the words and just signed her name.

T
HROUGH THE NEXT
month and a half or so, Daisy managed to see Duncan twice a week usually, sometimes three times if she cut her piano lesson too. She lied to Eva all the time now—she lied about after-school activities, about chorus and music and sports. She lied to Mark about Eva’s needing her in the store. She lied to her piano teacher about conflicts, things that had come up. But of course, she said, Eva would pay him anyway.

The world narrowed for her, and Duncan’s studio became its center, the place where she felt most alive. She dreamed of it, sexual dreams of the way the light fell in from the skylights, of the order and quiet. In these dreams, sometimes the space opened up to other rooms, other spaces, with a sense of mystery and amplitude that pleased and aroused her.

She felt encircled by Duncan’s attentiveness to her body. She loved his absolutism. She loved the way he looked, the dark sober
eyes that never seemed to take part in the jokes he made or his sarcasm. She loved the delicate lines that netted his pale skin, the cuffs of his shirts turned back over his tendoned forearms. She loved his soft brown hair, thinning on top, graying by his ears.

She felt he offered her a new version of herself, one she more and more carried with her into her real life. She felt uplifted, in a sense; she felt an elevation over the daily ugliness of high school. She was less afraid, less shy. She saw that she would have a way out. Not that Duncan would be it—she understood that—but that she would be able to escape. How, she could not have said, but she was certain of it.