The Wood of Suicides (24 page)

He did not like women. As I was not a woman, but rather, a Waterhouse nymph (tall, lithe, lovely, doomed, nubile, pale as frost, with small schoolgirl breasts tipped with pink, and a broad, bony pelvis), this need not have bothered me then. Someday, however, if I were to go on living, I would be forced to become a woman; to take on the essential characteristics that disgusted me as much as they did him. It was my misfortune to have been born into a sex that I despised, a sex whose inherent physicality precluded all hopes of divinity. I would not allow myself to lapse into womanhood without a fight. I would sooner die than become the thing I hated, the thing that bred hatred.

I couldn’t go on pretending that he was only his lust, or that the continued service of his lust was what he really wanted. When he took possession of me, I saw beyond the hot blood to the cold desire to shape, fix, and stifle all that was alive in me. His desire was to possess me and, through possession, to take more of my life away. I would let myself be taken until I was nothing more than his creation, a poetic body, the divine alternative to womankind.

T
HAT
WE
’
D
passed a whole season cloistered together in his classroom, away from the elements of our bitter California winter, was difficult to believe. Although rains continued through most of March and the mornings remained cold enough to merit a sweater, I could sense a change in the air. I began to notice my classmates sporting socks in place of stockings and shedding their gray knitwear whenever they chanced upon a patch of sunlight or felt a room to be particularly overheated. The freshmen had begun to look like sophomores, the sophomores like juniors, the juniors like seniors, and the seniors, somewhat to my malaise, like college girls.

Even the content of our lessons had changed, becoming looser, more open to interpretation, and requiring a heightened level of individual thought and inquiry. Having handed in our essays on Blake’s
America
, we were done with the British Romantic poets and given a neat segue into the next component of the course: the American Romantics. For this segment, we were to read critical works by Emerson, selections from Thoreau’s
Walden
, and later, when it was warm enough for us to return outside for Fridays, the poetry of Whitman, Dickinson, and Poe.

I ignored the general buzz among my year group about college acceptances, most of which were due during Holy Week. As others jittered and stressed, I privately fretted, less afraid of rejection than I was of its unlikelihood. I yearned for some stupefying miracle to put a halt to my progress and so preserve me in his classroom, in his arms, for all time. Alas, I was too much of a coward to let myself flunk completely, attending Slawinski’s Tuesday afternoon sessions until I regained my B average and practicing my French accent to Madame Rampling’s content. One day, sitting in my lover’s lap, I gave voice to my misgivings, nuzzling against him and sulking. “I don’t want to go to college. I really don’t. Please, can’t you just teach me forever?”

He laughed. “You overestimate me, my child. In a year, you’ll have surpassed me. No doubt, you’ll have all the professors chasing after you . . .”

“I don’t want professors. I want this.”

“This?”

“Poetry,” I elaborated, “And art. And love. And I want you to teach me Italian. I’m sick of learning French.”

“Well, I’d be more than willing to supplement you, in those departments. When we marry, we’ll have all our evenings together. I daresay you’ll be bored to death of poetry . . .”

Glumly, I wondered whether he would be bored of me, by that point. I toyed with his tie and inquired coyly, “I’m not bored of poetry, but do we really have to read
Walden?”

“You don’t like Thoreau? What a pity. I was going to see if you wanted to make an excursion with me this weekend to the woods. Purely educational, of course. We’d be examining the plant life, discoursing on the transcendental effects of nature on the human soul. You’d be bored out of your mind, I expect . . .”

Throughout the spring, he was to abduct me several times from the campus, with the intention of driving me out to this or that hiking trail, state park, or preserve. Thankfully, my status as a senior, set to graduate in a matter of months, gave me some leeway when it came to signing out for unchaperoned activities. More than once, I even forged a letter from my mother, insisting that Laurel Eloise Marks be permitted to leave the school grounds for the better part of a Saturday, to make the pilgrimage to her dear father’s gravesite. I was amazed by how few eyebrows were raised by this request. At the appointed time, my lover would pick me up in his dark-windowed vehicle from one of the less-frequented gates of the girls’ school, and from there we would make off toward hills and valleys, swimming in fog or crested with redwoods, as well as convenient thickets of artemisia, bay, and bracken.

For obvious reasons, we preferred foggy days to clear ones, thickly wooded areas to sparse hillocks, and dubious, dirt trails to those that were more frequently trodden. He took me off the tracks and, against tree trunks or in the undergrowth, would clutch and force and bite, with barely a semblance of gentleness. Sometimes, the cracking of a twig or the crunching of gravel would cause him to break away, just as he was on the point of possessing me, and—sullen, engorged, adjusting himself—to march me to the privacy of his parked vehicle. Other times, too far gone for that, he’d simply clutch me tighter, force himself into me further, and bite into the skin of my neck, covering my mouth with his hand in an attempt to stifle my fine, mist-like sighs.

At least once, we hazarded to meet on a day when it was raining heavily, and confined ourselves to his SUV. He parked off the road, not far from school. He had told his wife that he was going out for gardening supplies and, in fact, really did need to buy some. This he explained to me while fumbling in the glove compartment for his Dunhills, after an awkward entanglement in the backseat, which we both emerged from with bruises. I laughed bitterly. I thought of his hothouse. I thought of his suburban bungalow and his slim, lenient, pediatrician wife. I thought of his pouting son and his plump daughter, who didn’t resemble me in the least, and for whom he had no improper feelings. I thought that any man would be crazy to give this all up for a whore of seventeen, with bruises on her limbs and a buried father, beneath a flowerless headstone in Colma.

O
N
L
AZARUS
Saturday, the last day of March, I was obliged to return to my mother once more for the Easter holidays. In the weeks since I’d seen her last, our contact had been minimal: she phoned only twice—the second time, on March the thirtieth, to confirm that she was picking me up the next morning—and wrote only one brief letter, informing me that she had put the townhouse on the market and found a buyer for my father’s Lexus. All the same, it seemed that she was willing to recover something of our former, superficial relations. I mentioned that I was in need of a gown to wear to the end-of-year dance at Trinity Catholic College. An obliging parent, she offered to take me shopping the following Saturday.

After a mere six months, she had traded her black clothes for half mourning, a development that coincided mysteriously with the revelation of my non-virginity. Throughout Holy Week—the only time of the year, aside from Christmas, that my family had ever been rigorous with churchgoing—we attended services at St. Dominic’s, with the widow looking lukewarm in shades of gray, dark blue, and lavender. Steadman, as he confided in me over the phone one evening, was exempt from attending the Presbyterian church that his wife and children frequented; had always been exempt, having refused, years ago, to trade in the Catholicism that he had been raised with and later abandoned for her watered down WASPism. Long before we met, he had considered himself, in his pseudo-Byronic manner, to be something of a lost soul, a restless non-believer—and yet, it was apparent to me that he still retained that original sense of guilt, sin, and hell; that he still yearned for judgment; that he yearned to feel himself accused by some higher power, divine or otherwise.

I listened patiently as he told me about his break from the church during his late teens; about his defiance of his mother, who had become increasingly fat and overbearing; of how he effectively became like his father, studying medicine and bedding a lot of women until he finally met Danielle. When asked what was different about her, he told me simply that she was “good”; that she was unlike any of the others; that she had made him want to be a better person—though, obviously, not enough to keep his hands off me.

During our bedtime conversations, I stayed silent about the letters that had begun to show up on my doorstep, morning after morning. With every acceptance, I became further embedded in my own indecision. I had not felt so powerless, so drained of will and the ability to think for myself, since the weekend that he had driven me back to boarding school after I bled on his wife’s sheets. The only decision that I was capable of making was that I was incapable of deciding; that I had to defer to my master, to have him settle the matter for me.

We had arranged a tryst for Thursday afternoon, a time when I knew that my mother would be busy with the realtor. He picked me up and drove us a few blocks away from my house, stopping to search through the road map that he would come to rely on so much, when selecting locations for our
plein air
amours. “We could go to Camino Alto . . . that’s eleven miles . . . Cascade Canyon . . . that’s twenty miles . . . I did say I would be back for dinner, though . . .”

I sighed. I took out the acceptance letters that I had folded away inside my handbag, and imitated him. “I could go to St. Mary’s . . . that’s forty-five minutes from you . . . Pomona or Claremont McKenna . . . they’re both better schools, but seven hours away . . . Gettysburg . . . that’s across the country, you know, I’ll need a plane to get to you . . . Bryn Mawr . . . they’ve offered me a scholarship . . .”

My voice cracked. Against my will, I began to cry.

“Darling!” he put his arms around me and secreted away the letters, reading them behind my back, “But this is wonderful, darling! It’ll be a new life for both of us.
Incipit vita nova.
And that scholarship could come in handy. I’m afraid we won’t be rolling in cash, once the divorce is finalized.”

“You want me to go to Bryn Mawr?” I asked, looking up at him.

“Well, it’s your decision, of course. It does have the inestimable advantage of being a ladies’ college, though, meaning I’ll have fewer rivals to worry about.” He said this with one of his charming, sharp-canined smiles. “Besides, I think we’ve both been in California for too long. Don’t you want to go somewhere different? Somewhere far from your friends and your mother and everything else that might come between us?”

“Where will you work?”

“My child, Philadelphia has the largest Catholic-school system in the country. I’m sure I’ll find another job teaching.” He stroked my hair and gave me an indulgent glance, “At an all-boys school, of course.”

It was too much. Yet again, I broke into tears.

“Laurel, Laurel, Laurel . . .” he murmured, taking me in his arms, “don’t despair. We’ll have a nice life. I’ll teach boys during the day, and at night, I’ll come home to you. We can marry. We’ll be together, we will!”

“Are you really going to divorce her?” What I meant to ask was
Do you really have to divorce her?

“I’ve been saying that for weeks, haven’t I? Trust me, darling, this is only the beginning. We’ll be free, soon enough. Won’t it be wonderful not to have to sneak around anymore? To have a place of our own? A bed? Oh, my Daphne . . .” He caressed me furiously, “Let’s get a room somewhere now. Shall we? Shall we?”