The Wood of Suicides (18 page)

Behind us, there was a wall of bookshelves crammed with novels, knickknacks (a jar full of foreign currency, a Venetian mask, a Pompeii medallion), and photographs of the faultless nuclear family: darkly handsome husband; fair, angelic wife; brown-haired boy and girl, born in the April of 1989—roughly four years later than myself. The walls were hung with Romantic landscapes, a dreamy William Blake watercolor, and Jacques-Louis David’s
The Death of Marat.
Everything about the room seemed to betray a precarious yet unbroken balance between Steadman the bourgeois and Steadman the bohemian: the Steadman who lived comfortably and the Steadman who was willing to destroy his own comfort.

As I was thinking of the two Steadmans, praying that the balance would never be broken, he was laying the foundations for a second seduction. He offered me walnuts, topped up my wine glass every time I took so much as a swallow. He invited me to stretch my legs across his lap, applying many caresses to them as he moved from one topic to the next: commenting on how much nicer his sweater looked on me than it did on himself; asking me whether I had yet had a chance to read any Keats, who we would be starting on in class the following week; expressing mock disapproval when I inquired about who the man swooning in the bathtub was in Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting. “You don’t know Marat? What do they teach you at that school?”

“There’s only one teacher who I listen to, and he has more important matters to instruct me in.”

“Is that so? And who might this learned individual be?”

“Mr. Wolfstein, of course.”

“I’ll have you know,” he puffed himself up, “that Albert Wolfstein is a flaming homosexual. He made a pass at me back when I first started teaching.”

I laughed. “You’re making that up.”

“I swear. He caressed my hand while we were taking a smoking break near the willows. Just like this . . .” He trailed his fingers over the back of my own hand.

“You don’t smoke.”

“Now
I don’t. Danielle made me quit after my thirty-fifth birthday.”

I liked the thought of him as a fresh-faced thirty-five-year-old almost as much as he seemed to like thinking of me in my childhood deportment classes. To keep on the subject, I asked him, “Do you like being a teacher?”

He shrugged. “I’ve never done anything else.”

“Why didn’t you become a professor? You’re smart enough.”

A momentary pall came over his features, making me regret my presumption. With typical smoothness, however, he was fixing me with a jaded smile in the next instant. “I’m not cut out to be an academic, you know that. Just like I wasn’t cut out for medical school. I don’t have the patience. Or the ambition. Besides . . .” He had lightened up his tone another notch or two. “. . . I much prefer the company of schoolgirls.”

I
CAN
’
T
say when exactly he took me back to the bedroom. I do remember a lot of flirting, and a change in his looks when we got onto our second bottle of wine. On any other man, this change would’ve been quite ugly. His eyes were bloodshot, unfocused, and leering. His imperfect teeth were stained slightly red. I was suddenly conscious of the stubble on his jaw, his hairy limbs, and the extra weight around his midsection. “You look more like Dionysus than Apollo, tonight,” I remarked naively.

“I can be whoever you want me to be.”

All of this devolved pretty quickly. I sat on his lap, warm-breathed and light-headed, ready to get it over with right there and fade into the blackness of a wine-induced sleep. I reached past the waistband of his shorts. I felt heat, coiled hair, expansion. “Oh, you bad girl,” he commented on my boldness. “You’re a bad, bad girl. I’m going to have to put you to bed and teach you a lesson!”

My knees buckled as I stood up from the sofa. I was forced to lean on him for support, slurring all kinds of nonsense as we stumbled upstairs. “I’m not bad. I’m good. You told me I was good once. You told me I was clever . . .”

My point went unacknowledged as he led me to the bedroom. My eyelids fluttered shut. When they opened, I was completely undressed and he was leaning over me, fumbling to fit himself in. I closed my eyes again, giving myself up to the blind force of my intoxication.

I
HAD
never slept naked before and, like a lot of new things, I wasn’t sure whether I enjoyed it. During the night, he had full access to my body, which he seemed intent on making use of, even in his sleep. I was caressed by too many hands, brushed by too many lips. I curled up on my side to escape them. I slept, yet I had no rest.

In the morning, which was really afternoon, he was prompt to possess me again, though the air was almost too stale to breathe and my flesh sorely in need of bathing. As soon as he was done, he permitted me to head to the shower, telling me that there were fresh towels in the cabinet and that I was welcome to the royal blue bathrobe hanging on the hook. Midway through my ablutions, he let himself into the en suite, grumpily mugged at his unshaven face in the mirror, and prepared an Alka-Seltzer. He looked in at me showering and left the room without a word, returning half an hour later from another part of the house with wet hair, smooth cheeks, sudsy earlobes, and a bathrobe that matched my own.

In his absence, I had taken the liberty of drifting around upstairs, examining the family portraits, the bric-a-brac and minor artworks that lined the halls. I looked into his son Cole’s bedroom, a gloomy lair of closed curtains and crossed wires, with posters by M.C. Escher and a number of amateurish, Escher-esque drawings pasted along the walls. His daughter’s chamber, the next room along, was comparatively conventional, boasting a shelf full of Jane Austen novels and a wall plastered with pinup hunks. There was a plush horse on her bed; a photo-collage above it of the healthy, plumpish, brown-haired, brown-eyed girl and her friends. I leaned in closer to inspect the photographs, eager to confirm the lack of resemblance between us, and experienced a minor shock. Among young Cathy’s girlfriends—dressed in a soccer jersey in one snapshot, gothic black in another—was the spooky little sister of Karen Harmsworth, with her face full of freckles and husky-dog eyes.

I went back to the master bedroom to await Steadman and couldn’t resist peering into the wardrobe he shared with his wife. Her shoes—dainty slingbacks and sensible slip-ons—were lined up at the base of the closet, below the hems of her neat pencil skirts, cocktail dresses, jackets, and twinsets. These came in colors like cream, beige, lilac, lemon chiffon, and pastel blue. Their textures were fine and soft: cashmere, lambswool, silk, 100 percent cotton. I didn’t doubt that this clean grown-up woman would hate the state their bedroom was in, with its heavy, impure air and Laura Ashley quilt set in disarray. This notion filled me with a mix of pride and despair.

To escape these feelings, I closed her side of the wardrobe and opened his, losing myself in the familiar odors and textures of his shirts, his sweaters, his jackets, and his underwear, until I heard him padding down the hall. At this, I put an end to my snooping and busied myself with the bed linen in a sham display of domesticity.

“Don’t bother yourself with maids’ work, my Godiva,” he said gruffly as he entered the room, drawing me away from the bed. “We’re just going to mess it up again tonight. Let’s have some breakfast.”

Neither of us had cleared up the kitchen the previous night. He dumped the turkey carcass and piled our dirty dishes into the sink, halfheartedly telling me that he would get to them later. I sat on the same stool as I had at dinner and watched as he brewed the coffee, asking me whether I liked it with milk or sugar. “Two sugars, no milk,” I instructed him. As I sipped my sweet, steaming black coffee from a mug patterned with banal Van Gogh sunflowers, he left his own milky coffee to cool on the countertop and made an excessive amount of toast. I disappointed him by choosing just a single charred slice, which I nibbled on dry and with little appetite. He slathered the remaining five slices in butter and marmalade, and dispensed of them with relative ease. He followed them up with a fresh fig.

He apologized for his behavior the night before, though didn’t specify what it was he’d done wrong. I was also faintly ashamed and couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d somehow gone too far, that I’d let him see and do too much in my intoxication. Taking pains to be tactful, he asked me whether there was anything special that I’d like to do that day—within the confines of the house, of course; he couldn’t have the good people of Larkspur seeing him with a woman who was not his wife, a girl who was not his daughter. I told him that I’d like it very much if he could read to me, a request that seemed to please him. “We’ll take some poetry out to the hothouse. You’ll love it in there, my flower.”

After finishing our coffee, we passed through the den, ignoring the empty wine bottles and the bookshelves that lined the walls. He informed me that all the best volumes were in his private study—a small, well-concealed room located just beyond the den. Upon entering, I remembered the prior evening’s thoughts about the two Steadmans, bourgeois and bohemian, and knew at once which one the tiny room was devoted to. On one wall was a portrait of Byron in Albanian garb; on another, Rossetti’s
Beata Beatrix.
Not one home-and-garden magazine was in sight. Instead, the shelves were stocked with English and Italian poetry, poets’ love letters, and illustrated art books. On the desk stood a miniature of the Belvedere Apollo, a bust of Dante, and a canister of writing implements, including a genuine crow feather quill. Steadman the bohemian had created a hideout for himself within the family home: the perfect place for a lonely, overeducated schoolteacher to indulge his fantasies of poetic glory.

The writing desk looked out onto the backyard, a furnace of autumn leaves. I squinted outside, bristling when I felt the unexpected warmth of his lips on my neck, his arms binding my waist. “It’s strange to see you in here,” he murmured.

“Why?”

“This is where I do all my marking, not to mention all my thinking about you . . .”

He proceeded to tell me of how, in days past, he would break from duty to flip through his books on Pre-Raphaelite art—finding my image in the thin-armed virgins of early Rossetti, the diaphanous nymphs of Waterhouse, Collier’s russet Godiva. He told me of how he’d dreamed of expressing his desire for me in verse, though never got further than a line or two before deferring to the works on his shelves. He invited me to select something from there and, recalling his frequent references to Dante, I reached for the Rossetti translation of
La Vita Nuova
. He approved of my choice. He slipped the thin volume into the pocket of his bathrobe and, taking my hand, suggested that we retreat to the garden.

T
HE
BACK
porch overlooked a sprawling lawn, which boasted a set of green-plastic furniture, a totem-tennis pole, plots of soil, and pruned flower bushes. He told me that the garden was always alive with color in the spring, when his wife grew golden daffodils, blue delphinium, and all manner of roses. It was November, however, and the backyard’s main source of color was in the orange-brown leaves clinging to the sycamore tree I’d seen through the window of Mr. Steadman’s study. Beyond this tree lay Mrs. Steadman’s hothouse.