Lost in the Forest (6 page)

But he’d forgotten his love for Eva. Or rather, he’d misplaced it. He knew it was still there somewhere, but for the moment, he didn’t know how to get to those feelings.

The problem, it seemed to him, was that she’d sunk so heavily into motherhood, into
managing
all their lives. He’d barely be in the door at night before she would start rattling off her list—what needed to be done to get supper on the table, what had broken in the house that he’d have to fix, soon! what one or the other of the girls had taken to doing that he’d have to help her deal with. Oh! and had he picked up milk? (or Pampers, or dog food) on the way
home? And why was he so late? and since he was so late, how come he couldn’t have called?

It seemed to him that what she wanted—without ever articulating it and maybe without even understanding it—was for him to have had to live through her day, to be as stuck, as mired, as she was. This is what made her angry and cold. He felt too that there was a kind of squalor to their life at home that couldn’t help but feed both their misery. Dishes always sat undone in the sink. The children’s projects—spilled paints, scissors and scraps of colored paper, dried-up playdough, toys—were always spread on the dining room table, on the floor. Books, dolls, blankies, dress-ups were everywhere. You couldn’t sit down without first having to pick up whatever child’s toy you might have sat on. Sometimes, coming into the house, he felt he couldn’t stand it. Once, within a few minutes of arriving home, he had filled the sink with soapy water and started to wash all the leftover dishes, to wipe the smeared and crumb-scattered counters. When Eva came into the kitchen and saw what he was doing, she charged him.

“Oh, stop it!” she cried out. “Just fucking stop it, stop it, stop it!”

He thought at first she just wanted to hit him, to pull him away from the sink. Then he realized she was tugging at the apron he’d put on, trying to tear it from him. He yanked it over his own head and threw it on the floor, and Eva burst into tears.

She let him hold her that time. “I just can’t
do
it,” she sobbed, while he said to her, over and over, “I only wanted to help. I was just trying to help you, Eva.”

He saw how it had happened. They were living out in the country, she was too much alone, she had to manage the house and the girls and the shopping and the meals. There was the house itself, with its tilting floors and the doors that didn’t quite shut, the faucets that dribbled water. It took half an hour to draw a bath. There was the long rainy season to endure, the girls cooped up, fussy, wanting to be entertained and read to. There was the dry, hot summer and the dust that coated everything. He understood
much later that she’d been depressed and overwhelmed. At the time, though, he mostly hadn’t cared to understand, because her anger at him made him angry at her. He had simply turned away from her. He sought comfort first in the life of the girls’ world, the intense love for them that was like a shield against Eva’s sorrow, a blameless weapon against the anger he felt coming from her. When he arrived home, they were the ones he greeted with love, the ones he touched, the ones he smiled at.

And then he turned to Amy.

Their affair lasted just under a year, starting with a relaxed flirtation in the cantina where Amy was a bartender and he sometimes stopped in to talk with friends, to have a few more moments of ease before heading home to face Eva’s pinched-in rage.

Mark liked to flirt—he liked women generally—and in some sense flirting was part of Amy’s job. When she had a male customer who seemed receptive to it, she gave a special spin to the opener, “What can I do for
you
?” Mark had laughed out loud the first time she asked him that.

When he stopped by, they talked, brokenly but easily, between her serving other customers. The third or fourth night he was in, Amy told him that she knew who he was, that she lived in a tiny bungalow at the edge of one of the small vineyards he managed. That she’d seen him there.

Yeah, he’d noticed it, he said.

He’d envied it, in fact. He’d seen her too, on the little deck at the back of the house, a woman alone, sunbathing and reading, and he’d imagined how simple, how easy it would be to live like that in such a place.

He should come by for coffee some morning and check it out, she said. She had a towel slung over one shoulder. She always had a towel slung over one shoulder, and he pointed this out to her. She tilted her head and grinned. She was pulling a tall glass of ale, slowly. “Just looking for a guy with a bar of soap,” she said.

He did go to her house, one rainy morning when there was nothing much doing in the vineyards. And after that they began to meet several times a week, for coffee, for sex, for the easy conversation
that followed it in a house where there were no children, no chores he was responsible for. It was all so simple, so without blame and resentment. Sometimes he managed to get away on a weekend afternoon, and they’d fuck and sleep, and then wake to fuck some more. In the summer Eva took the girls to her parents’ place in Martha’s Vineyard for a week, their more-or-less annual visit. Mark waited for Amy outside the cantina in his truck nearly every night and followed the red taillights of her old Volkswagen Beetle down the dark, empty road to her house.

But over the long, rainy months of that next winter, she began to want something more from him. Because he couldn’t give it, because he couldn’t imagine inflicting the pain it would take to extricate himself from Eva and Emily and Daisy—couldn’t, in those rare moments he allowed himself to think honestly about it, imagine making any kind of life with Amy that he’d want—she gradually came to be angry with him too. More and more she insisted on her terms: if they were going to continue, he needed to get a divorce, they needed to get married. But even while she spoke of this, of their coming together permanently, she seemed increasingly to dislike him—even to despise him. In the end he couldn’t talk about a book or a movie, he couldn’t have an
idea
, without inviting her contempt for his critical faculties. He could see, long before they got there, where they were heading.

Still, when she broke it off, he was crazy with the desire to hold on, to keep it going. The most graphic images of their lovemaking occupied every idle moment of his day—at work, at home, driving around in his truck. He nearly cried out sometimes with the anguished hunger that would flood him thinking of her powerful long legs, opening, of himself kneeling above her, entering her. How she straddled him, how she pulled at him with her mouth, her teeth. A few times he had to stop the truck, torn between rage and jerking off. Once he hit the steering wheel so hard he carried the bruises on the curved outer flesh of his palm for a week.

But he came out of it; he recovered. And as he became himself again, Eva came back to him, she emerged from the dark spell she’d been under.

What did it? Mark was never sure. Maybe it was the sex, which had, oddly, gotten better and more frequent through the affair with Amy—at first because he had wanted to ensure that Eva didn’t guess he was involved with someone else, and later out of the appetite and sexual energy that had come to seem generalized in him, that occupied him constantly.

But of course other things had changed in their lives by then too. The girls were a year older, and Eva had found care for them. His business was doing so well that they finally had what seemed like enough money. Eva had gotten a part-time job she loved, in a bookstore this time. In any case, it was like being rewarded for giving up an indulgence, getting his old, dear friend back. Rewarded with interest: the thought of her began to preoccupy him through the days as thoughts of Amy had at the height of their passion. As those thoughts still could, if he were honest, from time to time.

But he felt it differently; he saw it differently. With Amy it had been, almost embarrassingly so,
parts
of her body that compelled him: her long, muscled calves and thighs, the wide dark triangle of her bush, the light clicking sound her sex made when his hand opened her legs. With Eva, he thought, it was the whole of her, as it had been from the start: the way she gestured and frowned when she spoke, her odd turns of phrase, her smallness, which made him feel powerful and protective. Even the way the house smelled when she was cooking, which seemed to him, somehow, to emanate from her, to be part of who she was. All of this made him, simply, happy.

Summer began. The evenings were long. The girls were old enough now, they played well enough together, that Mark and Eva could resume their old habit of a glass of wine before supper. They sat together out on the terrace she’d painstakingly made from used bricks the year before. They sat in the shadows of the western mountains and looked over at the sun still laying a golden blanket over the eastern ones, and talked the way they had in the early days, but more calmly, more sweetly, he would have said. Eva had her own news to report now—eccentric, interesting customers who’d stopped in and the funny things they said; what
books were doing well, which had unexpectedly bombed; the visits from sales reps; the balancing of accounts—and so Mark felt he could at last speak openly of his own concerns: it wouldn’t be the occasion for her feeling the more resentful, the more deprived of a life in the world. They talked of the seemingly whimsical popularity of certain grapes, of how the valley was changing, of the exponential growth of the vineyards, of the problems of worker housing and the moral responsibility for it. They talked of foolish things too: whether Diane Keaton was actually acting in
Annie Hall
, or just being her ditzy self. Whether people on the East Coast, where Eva was from, had a stronger sense of irony than those in the West.

They were sitting there one night in July when he told her about Amy. What he had come to feel as they drew closer together was that the secret of Amy was an impediment to their new openness, an impediment he couldn’t live with. He wanted there to be no separation between them. He felt it as he would have a sexual necessity: the need for Eva to take in and understand—no, to
love
, that’s what he wanted—even the part of him that had betrayed her.

During the long silence that fell after he’d said it, before she said, in a voice gone cold and distant, “How long?,” they could hear Emily inside talking to Daisy, imitating Eva’s voice at her most playful and affectionate: “Know what, my silly girl? You are the funniest bunny
ever
.” In the difference between the two voices—Eva’s, the little girl’s playing at being Eva—Mark could hear what he’d already lost. Instantly he understood, of course, that he should never have told her. He saw, just those few moments too late, that it was worse than cruel: it was uselessly cruel.

And he hadn’t bargained on Eva’s own capacity to be cruel. Or, at any rate, to be unforgiving. He should have remembered from all their arguments that she saw these things—these moral issues, he supposed—in a clear, hard light. There was black and white. There was before, and there was after, for Eva.

It was over, she told him. Well, what she said was, “Okay.” She stood up, carefully setting her wineglass down. “That’s it, then.” Her voice was hoarse, strained.

She went back into the house. He sat in the cool shade looking over at the warm hill opposite for a few minutes. He could hear her in the kitchen. She was slamming pots and pans around as though she were about to cook for hundreds.

“Get out,” she shrilled when he followed her, when he began to plead. “I want you out.” Her hands made frantic crisscross, waving gestures, her neck was corded with rage. “Gone! Take your … ridiculous penis, and … just go!”

His ridiculous penis?

The girls had come to stand in the doorway now, wearing strange dress-up costumes, old clothes of Eva’s that drooped on their chest and showed their tiny nipples, that puddled on the floor around their feet. Their round mouths were dropped open at the sound of their mother’s rage—they looked like dopey cartoon fish out of water. They shouldn’t have been there. They shouldn’t have had to see this, or hear it. But there was no one to rescue them. Mark couldn’t. He had to get through to Eva somehow. He could hear his own voice speaking Eva’s name, trying to make his case.

“Do you think I could ever want you again?” she was shrieking. “When every time we made love I’d be thinking of your … fat ass pumping up and down over that … weaselly woman!”

His fat ass? His ass wasn’t fat.

She stopped now, and looked at him. She was panting. She’d backed up as far away from him as she could get, to the kitchen counter. She was resting against it, she was bent slightly forward from the waist. She started to laugh.

Mark heard the hysterical note, but the little girls didn’t, and in their relief—oh, this was all a joke! a game!—they imitated her, laughing falsely, much too loud, much too shrill. He looked at them. The fear was still in their eyes, but the kitchen was full of laughter, a raucous accusatory sound: nightmare gaiety.

Mark couldn’t stand it. He left.

He left. As he was shutting the front door, he thought he heard Eva’s laughter become weeping, but he didn’t stop to be sure. He just kept going, across the yard, into his truck, then down the long
curving drive in the dusk of the overhanging trees to the road that led to town.

Later, when he tried to call up the words he’d used to tell her, he couldn’t imagine what they might have been. “Eva, there’s something you should know”? “Eva, I need to tell you about something I’ve been keeping to myself”? “Eva, I want to tell you something bad about me, something terrible, and then I want you to rise above it”? How could he have thought it would work? How could he have thought there were any words he could speak about his affair that she could stand to hear? Yet he must have said something like one of those phrases.

He
did
remember the sense he’d had just before he spoke: the excitement—excitement, that’s what he’d felt!—of beginning a new adventure.

M
ARK AND EVA
had met at a wedding, Mark’s third wedding in as many weeks. He was depressed by this one, as he had been by them all—by the sense of purpose swimming all around him in these friends of his, by the fearless, touching commitment they were undertaking that was so unlike anything he could imagine for himself. To each couple he’d given the same thing—thick glass beer mugs. He liked beer. Either they did or they didn’t. The hell with it. The hell with them. The hell with everything.