The Spirit Wood (10 page)

“Who did he tell this to?” she said, unable to resist asking. “Was my husband there?” There it was, that locution again.

“Peter?” Lazaroff said, unnecessarily. “I don't remember.” He seemed to be stalling. “I don't know—does it matter?” he added, realizing he'd said the wrong thing. “I just thought it was kind of funny. I didn't know it would tick you off—I'm sorry I mentioned it. Forget it—okay? I'm sorry.”

Meg was suddenly embarrassed by her reaction and touched Lazaroff's sleeve. “It's okay,” she said. “I don't know, it just struck me as sort of strange.” She mustered a weak smile. “Nice to know I'm a femme fatale.”

“Who are most of these people?” Byron interjected, just to change the subject. “This Nash guy I met made his living doing something I never did understand.”

“Oh, Nash, he's a drag. He runs some kind of numbers outfit, an actuarial firm, that does statistics for big insurance companies and all. Most of the people out here do pretty boring things, but they make a ton of bread doing them. Stan, and Caswell, are actually the exceptions. Stan made a killing in the restaurant business, with a place in New York called Rio—”

“I've heard of that,” Meg said.

“—and Caswell used to run something called Emperor Press, sort of an underground operation that made a lot of money publishing the second-rate work of some of the first-rate writers.”

“Or third-rate work of the second-rate writers,” Byron said. Lazaroff laughed and said, “Right.”

“A lot of quote unquote erotica,” Byron said to Meg, by way of clarification.

“Anyway,” Lazaroff continued, “the rest of them made their packet in plumbing supplies, or dry-wall construction, or orthodontia.”

“If you don't mind my asking,” Meg said, “how do you know so much about all these people? I mean, you don't strike me as . . .”

“Their sort?” Lazaroff laughed again, in that strange staccato fashion. “I'm not. But it's not a very big town, and all these people for some reason like to think they're art lovers. They're always bringing me some new piece of dreck to frame. How'd you like that hunk of junk Anita Simon had done?” When he saw Meg and Byron smile in agreement, he said “Check it out—it's hanging over the fireplace right inside. It's their newest, most prized possession.”

Later on, in search of Peter, Meg and Byron went into the house, where they saw the painting, a pastel blur of polo players, mounted above a fireplace made of round gray stones; a Duraflame log was laid in the grate, ready to go. Several of the guests were sitting or standing around the room, on white sofas, or against white walls, or on oversized white floor cushions; the room was apparently the den, with a color-TV console, an elaborate array of stereo components, a standing chess board with the pieces arranged as if in midplay.

“What do you want to bet me the set came that way?” Byron said, sotto voce.

Peter was sitting cross-legged, his shoes off, on one of the white cushions; the pose was so uncharacteristic Meg would hardly have recognized him. On the other side of the coffee table, on which he had rested his dinner plate and drink—his gin and tonic glass, unlike the plate, was full again—sat the silver-haired Caswell
beside a tall, thin woman in an expensive-looking striped silk tunic. With Peter on the floor and the Caswells on a white settee, it looked like one of those informal living-room seminars some of the “hipper” young professors held, with Peter cast as the eager student. When Meg and Byron were introduced—Joan Caswell gave them both a polite if somewhat perfunctory smile—they had no choice but to sit on the floor with Peter. Jack Caswell, leaning forward, said they'd been talking about the later diaries of Anaïs Nin, and then, in a smooth and cultivated voice, went on with his lecture.

His conversation was indeed interesting, peppered with famous names and unusual anecdotes, all tellingly documented, cross-referenced, catalogued. Even scenes at which Caswell could not possibly have been present—a bedroom squabble in Beverly Hills between Henry Miller and one of his last attachments, a hostile encounter between Jean Cocteau and a Parisian journalist—he related with such relish and acuity that it seemed he must have been secreted somewhere nearby, with a tape recorder and camera in hand. But there was also something Meg found slightly . . . distasteful about it, something oily and self-congratulatory. He laid claim to too much, insinuated himself into too many impossible situations, took too much satisfaction from other people's lives or triumphs. It seemed somehow voyeuristic to Meg, to be so bound up in someone else's career or struggles, particularly people who could in the last analysis be known, despite all of Caswell's claims, only in terms of their public persona.

Peter, however, sipping repeatedly from his drink—was it his third, or even fourth, Meg wondered—seemed not to mind. He seemed enthralled by Caswell's remarks and often prompted him to further recollection—or appropriation—with a question, or respectful aside of his own. Part of it, Meg knew, was
genuine interest. Peter was, after all, an English instructor, and even people and events beyond the scope of his specialty would hold some residual appeal for him. But watching him attend to Caswell's every word—while sitting at his feet, no less—it appeared to Meg that something else, subtler but stronger, was also at work. Something Meg had seen before, with the former chairman of the English department at the college, for instance. It was, even though she hated to resort to psycho-babble clichés, a “search for the father figure,” as much as she could make it out. Peter had never known his own father; he had no older brother; his grandfather had been kept apart from him all his life. Once in a while, he would develop a crush—Meg didn't know what else to call it—on an older man, someone who would serve as a sort of cross between a mentor and a parent, an authority figure that Peter could at once learn from and play to, for guidance and also for approval. With the English chairman, it had been perfectly harmless, even beneficial, up to a point—Peter had gotten some useful professional advice, some shaping and direction for his doctoral work, some old-fashioned masculine evenings of tweedy talk and brandy by the fire. But he'd also been drawn, deeper and deeper, into the chairman's own personal problems—his suffocating wife, his ungrateful daughters—and even more dangerously, into his professional vendettas and feuds. At a time in his career when Peter needed allies, not enemies, he was increasingly perceived as one of the chairman's minions, which went down well with some, but badly with plenty of others—particularly other grad students and junior faculty members. Though Meg knew Peter wasn't a brown-noser, she also knew it couldn't help but look that way to most outsiders. And Peter, absorbed in his own elusive quest, was blind not only to all appearances, but to what, in anyone else's case, he would have been quick to see and understand.

Now, with Caswell, the problems didn't even seem so distant or difficult to predict to Meg; this was no one to emulate in any way whatsoever.

She excused herself to find the bathroom, threading her way through the other guests; Mrs. Plettner waved to her with three fingers from the kitchen. The bathroom was exactly what Meg might have guessed: pink walls, fuzzy pink toilet cover, a matching pink floor mat. When she opened the door to leave, Mrs. Caswell was standing right outside.

“Gets a bit academic at times, no?” she said. “I think our husbands are rather taken with each other.” Meg smiled, as if in tacit agreement, and moved to one side of the door so that Mrs. Caswell could go in. But she'd apparently only been waiting to talk to Meg. “Your husband's very bright,” she said, then rolling her eyes, added, “Jesus, I didn't mean that to sound so condescending.” Her voice had a cool, dry edge to it. “I suppose we all strike you as hopelessly bourgeois and tacky,” she said, and when she saw that Meg was about to assure her otherwise, she laughed and said, “We are, we are. If you didn't think so, I'd wonder where your standards had gone.” Meg was amused, despite herself, at the woman's candor and even at her presumption that she knew what Meg's “standards” were. “Jack and I sometimes wonder what ever happened to ours.”

Drawing Meg aside into a little oasis of quiet in a dim, carpeted hallway, she asked, with evident interest, about Meg and Peter's plans, how they felt about the house, who exactly Byron was. Her face was long and somewhat drawn, her skin a little leathery from too many summers in the sun. But still, she was an attractive woman, Meg thought, probably beautiful in her youth, and now one of those sophisticated, world-weary types Meg associated with the jet set and private parties on the Riviera. Gradually, between the questions, she wove into the conversation some infor-
mation about herself and her own husband, how they'd met when Jack and his second wife had moved into the apartment across the hall from the apartment in which she was living at the time with her first husband. How they'd invited the new neighbors over for drinks. And how everything had just become musical beds from that point on, with a Japanese masseuse mixed in there somewhere, and a lot of unexpected acrimony, two more divorces, some rebound affairs, and finally, as far as Meg could follow the elaborate concatenation of events, a reasonably satisfactory union with Jack, whose shoestring publishing venture had ultimately caught fire and begun to bring in some very considerable sums. “Bad form, I know, to mention money, even in the most oblique terms,” Mrs. Caswell confessed, “but if the truth be told, that's what eighty percent of the conversations out here are really all about anyway . . . the other twenty is sex, and who's still capable of it.” She laughed again, with the sound of gravel in her voice, and gave Meg a long, appraising look. Then, cocking an eye at the unoccupied bathroom, she said, “You wouldn't care to step inside, would you, and"—making quotation marks in the air—"do a line or two? I find these parties interminable without it.”

For a moment, Meg didn't know what Mrs. Caswell was suggesting; it wasn't that she hadn't heard the expression before. Plenty of times. It was just so unexpected here, so out of the blue. Cocaine? With Mrs. Caswell? In that little pink powder room with the fuzzy seat and the matching mat? She had already felt as if she'd wound up at one of her parents’ parties, with the uniformed help, the bossa nova beat, the stilted, or awkwardly bawdy, conversations. Now she felt like a teenager again, the way she had when she was sixteen years old and Mary Kaye Ash had suggested they go up to the attic and experiment with
some marijuana she'd found in her brother's dresser drawer. Mrs. Caswell was still observing her, with cool but critical gray eyes, waiting for her reply.

“Thanks, anyway,” Meg mumbled, “but I think I'm doing fine.” She gave a feeble smile and jiggled her glass in her hand, to indicate that she was at least drinking, and not on priniciple against intoxication of one sort or another; the glass, unfortunately, turned out to be empty. Mrs. Caswell drew a gold compact case out of the sequined clutch purse she'd been holding under her arm, and said, “It's really the very best. Larry—you know Larry, don't you, the framer from town—he's what I like to call The Source,” and she laughed again. “You're sure now you don't care to try some? Anita
won't
be upset with you if you do,” she said, acutely tapping Meg's subtle sense of dislocation. “No one will even know,” she whispered. Meg politely declined again; Mrs. Caswell paused, then disappeared into the bathroom by herself. Meg, feeling a little like she'd just flunked a pop quiz, went in search of Peter and Byron and found them outside on the deck. Byron was standing at the fringe of a small group; Peter was laughing at something a short man with bright red hair was saying. The man's hand was gripping Peter's shoulder as he spoke.

“So she said, ‘Not with my daughter, you don't!'” The other men, Stan Simon and Jack Caswell, laughed. Byron drew on his cigarette and forced a smile. Meg was introduced to the red-haired man—"Al Plettner, pleasure to meet you"—and Peter slung a proprietary arm around her waist.

“The lady of the manor,” he announced, planting a wet kiss on her cheek. His breath reeked of gin.

“What are you drinking?” Stan asked her, taking the empty glass from her hand.

“No more—thank you,” Meg replied. “I'm afraid I'm pretty well done in for the night.”

Byron stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray balanced on the porch rail.

“It's early,” Stan complained. “And I'm paying O.P. to stay until three
A.M.”

“No. But thanks,” Meg repeated, giving Peter a discreet squeeze around the waist. Byron leapt in, shaking everyone's hand and saying, “Good night,” “Thanks for having us,” or “Look forward to seeing you ail again.” Together, they were able to extricate Peter, against what remained of his will, from the group, and pilot him out toward the car. He stumbled twice going down the stairs, and when Meg tried to put him in the back seat, he suddenly drew himself up and resisted.

“I can drive,” he said. “Remember?”

“Of course you can,” Meg said, to placate him, “but right now I think it would be better if I did.” She tried to fish the keys out of his pants pocket. Peter pulled away.

“Get the hell in the car,” he said. All Meg could think of was that terrible night, months before, when he'd insisted on driving.

“I'll settle this,” Byron said, trying to make it all seem a joke. “Give
me
the keys.”

Peter looked blearily at his friend. He seemed to be debating how to respond. Then he slumped back against the car and said, “You want to be the estate chauffeur?” He pulled out the keys and dangled them on one finger. “Be it.” Laughing to himself, he clambered into the car, and sprawled across the back seat. Meg sighed with relief.

At the house, she and Byron virtually carried him up the stairs. They laid him on the bed, and each untied one shoe. “I can handle it from here,” Meg whispered, thinking Peter was already asleep.

“Yeah,” he muttered, his eyes still closed and his head thrown to one side. “We can screw by ourselves.” Meg stood stock-still, and Byron, looking as
if he'd just been punched, dropped the shoe to the floor. A second later, Peter burped, then rolled over on his side, snoring.