The Wood of Suicides (11 page)

“Marcy? Who knows. Probably still doing her makeup. Quick, sit down. Let’s see what I can do with you.”

I averted my eyes as she leaned over me, breasts joggling, piling further creams and powders onto my modest efforts and making conversation like a hairdresser. Within a quarter of an hour, my face had a snide, provocative look and my hair was as high as her own. She held alternate pairs of earrings up to my face and asked, “Which ones?” I plumped for the plainer.

In a few minutes, Marcelle was scrabbling outside the door like a stray cat. “
Merde
. Laurel, can you let Marcy in?” Amanda said, shedding her robe and reaching, fully fleshed, for the orangey-red, gold-brocaded gown that hung outside her wardrobe.

“Laurel! You look like a model!” Marcelle herself was wearing turquoise. With all her cosmetics, she looked as disarmingly overdone as a child beauty queen.

“Marcy! So. Hot.” Amanda smooched her lips from across the room. She was still struggling with her dress. “
Merde
, I forgot how hard this is to do up. Oh, double
merde,
these shoes are already pinching. . . !”

T
HE
T
RINITY
boys proved, predictably, to be an abhorrent bunch. Seamus Head, who took Amanda’s arm walking into the ballroom, was a tall, well-fleshed Alpha male with militantly cropped hair—her obvious mate, and as unappealing to me as a mountain gorilla. Flynn Radley, Marcelle’s date, was arguably even worse, with the shaggy red hair and low nasal bridge of a Neanderthal, and eyes somewhere to the side of his head. I could only imagine what odd-looking children they would have had. I was still marveling over the poor taste of my friends when my own prince showed up at my elbow, leering at me with moist, hazel eyes.

“You must be Laurel Marks.”

His was a Southern Californian drawl. He had too many muscles and was at least two inches shorter than I would’ve been without my high heels. He had a boy’s haircut and swollen cheeks; his upper lip, however, was faintly but darkly mustachioed. I wondered if he had grown the thing for the occasion.

“Well, I lucked out. They told me you were pretty. Shall we?” He offered me his arm. “I’m Scott, by the way.”

Each table sat four couples. Inside, we were joined by Xavier Bernard—heavy-jawed, barrel-chested, broken-nosed—and dark Therese Arras, who was quite pretty with her sleek ponytail and dash of Cherokee blood. I knew her from my math class, though had never associated with her much. We exchanged a few polite words about one another’s dresses and Mr. Slawinski’s teaching methods. Within minutes, our conversation had died down. Scott stroked my bare arm with a stubby index finger. “Tell me about yourself, Laurel.”

I looked up, alarmed. “There’s nothing to tell.”

“Sure there is. You’re new, aren’t you? Me, I’m from San Diego. Have you been to San Diego?”

“No.”

“You’re missing out. But I’ll be going to Stanford, so it’s good for me, living up here. Do you have your top colleges picked out yet?”

He had hit upon a safe subject. “Well, I was thinking one of the Claremont colleges . . . But lately, I’ve been looking into Pennsylvania.”

No one was to know that this was Steadman’s influence; that the idea of being in the state where he had grown up thrilled me.

“Pennsylvania, huh? That’s pretty far, for a girl who hasn’t even been to San Diego.” He nudged me in a way that was meant to be playful. “Where in Pennsylvania?”

“Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, maybe Gettysburg . . .”

“Liberal arts all the way, then.” He gave me another lingering, moist look. “You’re an arty girl. A dreamy, arty girl.”

After forty minutes at the table (Scott attempting to impress me with his 3.6 grade point average and the breadth of his reading—a schoolboy’s Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Atticus Finch), we made the obligatory trip to the ladies’ room. We weren’t the only ones with this idea: there was a queue stretching far into the hallway. Eventually, we edged our way into a washroom as loud and colorful as a cage full of parakeets. “Oh my God, how weird is it seeing Flynn in a suit?”

“He looks cute!”

“That hair! Did he even brush it?” Amanda dabbed at her lips in the fraction of mirror that was visible above the other girls’ heads. “Could you tell that Seamus had his hair cut?”

“Guys always look weird after having their hair cut.”

“I know! But I
love
that military look on him. How’s Scott?” Amanda turned to me with a glint in her eye.

I shrugged.

“Do you think he’s cute?”

“He’s a bit short,” I said carefully.

“Sorry, I forgot to mention that. But otherwise? Do you think his face is cute? I saw you guys talking. You know, if he’s boring you, we can try to find Lawrence. I think he’s here with Dana, but everyone knows that was just a last-minute thing . . .”

“It’s okay.”

“Better to stick with our guys, anyway. They’re getting us drinks right now.” Amanda gave us a sly, sidelong look and—in case that wasn’t enough—added in a knowing whisper,
“Actual
drinks.”

There was a cup of fruit punch before me when I returned to my place at the table. I took a sip and tasted something sickly, rum or bourbon. Scott eyed me moistly over the top of his own glass.

W
HILE
THE
spiked punch made time pass more quickly, it also made Scott Maccoby more presumptuous. I was sorry the moment I let him drag me out to the dance floor, where he wouldn’t stop trying to catch hold of me and press himself upon me. “Relax,” he murmured, his breath warm and disgusting against my neck. “Don’t be so stiff.” I had never liked dancing and Scott’s attentions made it nearly impossible for me to move naturally. When he grabbed my bare arm with his stubby fingers and attempted to draw me against his chest, that was all I could take. I shook my head and yanked my arm away, giving him my sharpest glare, before swiveling back to the table.

Therese was there with Rebecca Hammel and Flora de la Roche, who glanced at me kindly as I settled back down and took a solemn sip of my punch. “You don’t like your date?” Therese inquired.

“No,” I replied. “I like somebody else.”

I regretted my words straight away. Suddenly, I wanted Steadman with a force that practically winded me. I yearned to say his name aloud, to condemn him for making it so hard for me to breathe. It was agony to think that he was alive at that very moment, healthy and content with his wife and children, not sparing a thought for me. As long as I was tortured by love for him, I wanted him to be just as miserable as I was.

A
FTER
THE
social overtime of San Rafael and Homecoming, I felt that I’d earned myself the right to be withdrawn, at least for a few weeks. I began giving Marcelle and Amanda the slip in favor of what I called “college applications”—really just protracted sessions of daydreaming about Steadman while flicking through pamphlets. Hiding out in the lofted section of the library, I stared into space, scratching out sentences between one sigh and the next.

As well as being the subject of my daydreams, Steadman had begun to inhabit my dreams at night. These dreams were never sexually explicit. Most often, they involved him smiling and making obscure, faintly embarrassing requests in a dream-jargon whose exact terminology I forgot within minutes of waking. The symbolic content of these dreams was easy enough for me to interpret as he sat in his chair holding out a thick pen or caressing the rim of his coffee mug.

Less common and more difficult for me to bear were the dreams in which we kneeled together, post-coitally. I would see nothing of the act that had just occurred or of our naked bodies—only a dim room filled with book crates and his beaming face. He would stroke my hair and in the warmest, most paternal manner possible, tell me that everything was okay, that we were in love, and that our love had already been consummated. I would ask him how this had come about, telling him that I remembered nothing, that it was all like a dream to me. At that, everything would dissolve into a heap of tender, hushing caresses. Awake, I’d lay in the dark for some moments, asking myself the same questions, trying to remember when the act of consummation had occurred, until the ceiling seemed to crumble down on me—leaving me with a taste of bitter dust, black heartache, and a keen desire for death.

It had gotten to the stage where my choice seemed to be between consummation and death. Since consummation was death, however, I didn’t have a choice at all. One way or another, I was soon to die, and this knowledge made me careless of myself, apparently immune to pain. I bruised my body without knowing how I did so, ate less than ever. I suffered a bad head cold one week in October but attended his class anyway, only to be sent to the sick bay by Ms. Da Silva the lesson after. I was prescribed lots of fluids and the rest of the week in bed, a fate that I accepted with relief, once I got over the initial despair of not being able to see him. My friends, who came to visit me on the Thursday afternoon, told me that my love had been asking after me; that it had upset him to hear that I was unwell. Suddenly, I was reminded of what a gentleman he was, of how courtly his behavior had always been toward me. I had visions of deathbed romances, of dying mysterious and pure like Dante’s Beatrice, and yearned to be afflicted with something more serious than a common cold.

I had them collect my homework from him. The next afternoon, they handed me a note in his barely legible red ink.

Laurel
—

Read the chapter on Byron (but only if you are up to it!).

Have a look at some of the shorter poems—She walks in Beauty, To a Beautiful Quaker, etc. (but again, only if you are up to it, and only if it pleases you). I will compile some annotations to give to you on Mo Tuesday.

Most importantly, do not strain yourself. Get plenty of rest. Recuperate. I will be glad to bring you up to date with everything next lesson.

Warmest regards,
Hugh

Hugh! I couldn’t help it—my eyes misted up a little upon seeing that. The others were talking about their plans with Seamus and Flynn, what a shame it was that we couldn’t make it a triple date. When they had gone, I thrust my face into the pillow, sighing with pent-up desire. By the end of the weekend, the scrap of paper had become softened, the ink running in places, from all the times that I’d pressed the note to my lips. Likewise, the portrait of Lord Byron in my textbook was on the receiving end of many congested kisses, as it occurred to me how much the poet resembled my beloved.