Lost in the Forest (12 page)

Frances had a loud, plummy voice—she practically rolled her
r
’s—and Eva, listening between bits of Roger’s commentary to John Doyle talking to her boss, slowly realized he was mocking Frances, repeating her eccentric phrasing, her elaborate constructions, in a dry, sarcastic voice. Though Frances didn’t seem to notice—or care anyway.

Eva did. It pissed her off. She felt possessively hurt for Frances,
her
Frances. Sweet, smart Frances, who loved books, who read avidly and widely—Atwood, Musil, Brodsky, Grass, Amis—but who sounded elderly, prissy, unless you actually listened to her. Dismissable. In this case, she was being dismissed.

Nearly simultaneously Eva realized that the other John, John Albermarle, had been plying her with questions off and on all evening—odd questions, which he would spring on her suddenly and which she hadn’t taken the time to answer seriously.

And here he was with another, leaning forward toward her just as she was having this revelation about Frances and the other John, beckoning her with his posture: Ahem, ahem: he wondered, did she think a person drawn to books was seeking a kind of experience not available in ordinary life?

“What?” she said. Maybe this was the first question she’d really
paid attention to. At any rate, it occurred to her now to wonder how she had answered his other questions.
Hmm? Could be? Who knows?

“I mean …” He smiled, almost apologetically. “Do we, are we, looking for something we don’t find,” his hand smacked the table lightly, “here?”

Now Eva leaned back in her chair and turned her body toward him, away from John Doyle, the meanie. She was a little drunk. Her mind swam. What kind of question was this, anyway? Did he intend her to take it seriously? After a moment, she said, “Well, why did
you
become a publisher?”

He laughed. “I suppose in some sense because I could.”

“What does that mean?”

When he lifted his hands she saw how enormous they were. Mitts. They had freckles on their backs. “I had inherited some money. Enough so that I could ask myself what I’d like to do, without also having to ask myself whether I could support myself at it.”

“Unimaginable,” she said.

She was about to turn back to the other John, when John Albermarle said, “But don’t you think there could be a kind of apology for that privilege in my choosing work which steadily loses money?”

“Well, will you end up impoverished?” Eva asked pointedly. “The resident of a poor farm?”

“It’s not likely.”

“Then you’re not sorry enough,” she said.

“You’re very strict, aren’t you?”

“I steadily lose money too, only I have none. I’m poor. I’m embittered.”

“Embittered! You don’t seem embittered.”

“Oh, I’m not.” Eva sipped her wine. It was excellent. Thank you, Roger. “I’m not. I love my work.”

“And is that because, do you think,
you’re seeking through books an escape from ordinary life
?” His voice made fun of the question, of himself asking it, but he clearly wanted an answer, too.

“No, I love ordinary life.” She leaned toward him and lowered her voice. “But I’m actually very angry at books right now. I’ve been tricked by books. Particularly by the book our friend here wrote.” She gestured vaguely in John Doyle’s direction. “Oh, I expected so much more of him. He’s disappointing, isn’t he?” John’s mouth opened, but Eva went on. “And this is your book too, of course. I’m angry at you too.”

He smiled. “No you’re not. It’s a wonderful book. It shouldn’t matter to you who wrote it.” Somehow, though he was implicitly repudiating John Doyle, it didn’t seem a betrayal to Eva.

Eva leaned very close to him. The air near him felt warm. “I’m sorry I met him though,” she said. “I’ve learned a lesson here: I should have settled for just the book. I shouldn’t have come tonight.”

“Oh yes, you had to be here tonight.”

“We needed young
blood
!” Roger asserted surprisingly—who knew he was still able to take anything in? He was leaning forward on the other side of John. He took another great gulp of wine.

At the end of the meal, after John Doyle had left, after Frances had paid the bill and they’d all said good night at the door of the restaurant, John Albermarle offered to drive Eva home.

When she said she had her own car, he offered to walk her to it. When she said she had to pick up at the store first, he told her he’d help.

John did the chairs, folding them, carrying them by twos in his enormous paws to the closet in the back hall. Eva retrieved the empty glasses from where they’d been set down all over the store—on shelves; under seats; on
books
, she was appalled to see. She picked up napkins and wiped up spills and stains. John asked her about the store, about Frances, about her own preferences in books. There came a point when Eva realized the embarrassing imbalance of their exchanges, when politeness demanded that she ask him a question or two also.

Hers were less speculative than his, and more rude. Where had the money come from for the publishing venture?

Land, he said. His family had been in the valley a long time.

And where did his interest in publishing come from?

Well, he supposed from his wish—didn’t she think this was all to human —to impose his taste on others. The chairs clattered and clanged as he folded them.

And where, she asked, did the confidence in his own taste, his taste in books, come from?

“Why, from the
Lord
,” he said, bent over a resistant chair.

Eva laughed out loud, and clapped her hands together.

John stopped and lifted his face to her, his hands on the back of the chair—the prince of chairs: big, freckled John Albermarle.

She should love
him
, she thought.

He was smiling. She could see he was infatuated with her, maybe even charmed by her childish gesture—her clapping—though she hadn’t intended it as charming, it was just the moment’s delighted response to what he’d said.

Now he asked her if she’d like to get coffee.

No, she didn’t think so.

He went down the hall with the last two chairs. When he returned, Eva had set her purse on the counter, she was wrapping herself in her shawl.

“Why not?” he asked.

She told him she had to get back and take the sitter home.

She had children? His face seemed to mask over, all smoothness.

“Yes, two.”

It wasn’t possible. How long had she been married?

She watched his long face open again when she said she was divorced. (This is part of what she would come to love about him, the openness of his face, the way it registered every shift in feeling without his seeming to know that about himself.)

“Well, maybe I should follow you back and take the sitter home for you. You must have to leave the children alone for a while when you take the sitter home.”

Would any other man in the universe have stopped to figure this out? she wondered. Even one? But she shook her head. “I couldn’t let you do that,” she said.

He started to protest: it was no imposition.

“No, I mean I don’t
know
you. I couldn’t ask the sitter to go home alone with you when I don’t know you.”

“Well, I could stay with your children, then, while you take the sitter home.”

Eva laughed. “If I wouldn’t let you take the sitter home, why would I let you stay with my kids?” She turned away from him—they were at the door now—and flicked the lights off. The light from the streetlamp fell in on them, white, cold. When she turned back to John again, his face in chiaroscuro seemed harder.

He stepped up to Eva. He pulled her shawl tighter around her and knotted it at her bosom, pinning her arms inside it. He kissed her. As it happened, he was also standing on her feet when he did this, but Eva ignored that for the moment. John was holding her head in his hands as though it were a beautiful, fragile object. The Golden Bowl, she thought. She felt golden. His kiss was as soft, as tender, as those she gave the girls at bedtime. After a long moment, she said, “Ouch,” and moved her feet under his.

N
OW SHE TURNS
from the windows in John’s study, she stands a moment behind John’s desk, then sits in his desk chair and swivels it around. The trouble is, she thinks, that coming home now is like returning to her grief, to her own emptiness. Home. What does it mean to her anymore, without John? She has a sudden vision of his face surprised in death, of the terrible moment when he sailed up backward away from her into the air. Then the sound his skull made, hitting the post. She will never forget it. She feels a moment of such bitterness and anger that it shortens her breath. She looks at her hands lying on his blotter, their torn and ripped cuticles, the bitten-down nails.

She had cleared his papers from his desk after he died, but she’d left the framed photographs he’d chosen to look at each day, and now her gaze moves from one of these to another. She picks each one up and stares at it, as though it could connect her somehow
with him to see these as he did. There’s one of all three children together on the front porch stairs when Theo was about one, beautiful and chubby, and the girls were still the same height, slim dark twins—though Daisy is looking off to the side in this picture, and her profile seems strangely adult. There are two of Eva, one in the bookstore, looking up, startled, from behind the counter with her glasses on. She has never understood why John liked it. The other one was taken on their honeymoon in Greece, and her face in it looks woozy to Eva—John had shot it just after they’d finished making love. There’s also one of her, stunned with relief and joy, holding newborn Theo, asleep in his jaunty nursery cap, in the hospital.

She wants her children, Eva thinks.

No, that’s not right; the one she wants is Theo. Not Daisy, she realizes. Thinking of her daughter, Eva feels the
no
in herself, the defeat. Enormous Daisy. Sullen. Needy. Sullen because needy. She reaches for the phone and punches in Gracie’s number.

She put Theo down a little while ago, Gracie says. “But I bet he’s still awake. If he is, I’ll be right over with him. So here’s the deal: if you don’t hear from me within a few minutes, I’m on my way. And I’ll call back if he’s konked out.”

While she waits, Eva goes into her own room, her and John’s room, and changes her clothes, unpacks her bag. She takes her toiletries into their bathroom and spreads them out. How much space she has, without John’s things! She is tired of space.

She is down in the kitchen, seeing what there is in the refrigerator, when the front door opens and Gracie halloos.

By the time Eva steps across the tiled floor to the hallway door, Theo is there, running toward her in bare feet. She bends down and scoops him up, feels his legs circle her waist, his short arms twine her neck. He smells of an unfamiliar soap. She rains kisses on his face, and swings their bodies together from side to side. Gracie is beaming at them from down the hall.

When she finally sets Theo down, he jumps up and down a few times, in excitement. He’s wearing short seersucker pajamas
printed with football helmets. He says, “What did you
bring
me, Mumma?”

Ah! Nothing!

She’s brought him nothing!

And she has a sense of herself suddenly, as the child, the one who has grabbed at him, wanted something from him, while offering him only her hungry self in return. She feels ashamed. Everyone knows about the gift after the trip away. She knows about it. She knows better.

But when she says they’re going to get something special tomorrow, he doesn’t protest, and she turns to thank Gracie, who’s still standing in the hallway by the opened front door.

Once Gracie has left, she carries Theo upstairs to bed. She sits next to him and sings softly until he falls asleep, suddenly and deeply, poleaxed by fatigue. She sits a long time after that, watching his still face, which seems almost returned to infancy, softened as it is in sleep, his eyelids and mouth slightly opened.

She remembers one night when John was still alive, after Theo had climbed into bed with them, his waking her by saying aloud in his sleep, “Where I put it? Where that goddam piggie is?” The phrase was so incongruous, so sweetly childish in its focus, and casually, profanely adult in its language, that she had felt a complicated series of emotions in response—surprise, amusement, joy; and then sorrow, sorrow at the thought of his adulthood, its inevitability and the loss it would bring.

She had intended to sleep next to Theo tonight—that was in her mind, she realizes now, when she called Gracie: curling up with his thin wiry body, hearing him mutter and breathe in the night.

Why, then, has she carried him to his own bed? Why does she go back down the hall to her room now, and start to undress there, to get ready to lie down alone?

It’s something about not having brought him a present, she thinks, about seeing herself as so in need of him, as so like a greedy child herself in that. She had felt exposed in front of Gracie at that moment, and ashamed of herself.

She can’t go on using Theo for comfort, she tells herself. She needs to let go of him, to have a life—more of a life anyway—in the world.

T
WO DAYS LATER
, with the sense of doing something self-prescribed as being good for herself, something almost medicinally necessary, Eva goes upstairs after the dishes are loaded in the dishwasher and calls a man she barely knows, Elliott McCauley, a man whom Gracie has suggested will be
good company
. Eva asks him if he’d like to meet for dinner sometime in the next few weeks, and he says yes, yes he would.

Chapter Six

T
HE VALLEY BOOKSTORE
is on Main Street in St. Helena, three doors down from the grocery. It’s in essence one large open room, with a comfortable office and a lavatory down a little hallway at the back. There are posters on the walls, enlargements of famous photographs of famous writers, a few more women than men: Colette looking up from her desk with her steel-wool hair, her black mouth prissed. Toni Morrison, mammoth and fierce in an elegant dress and graying dreadlocks. A blurry portrait of an unexpectedly tentative-looking Willa Cather. And perhaps a dozen or so more, including the dramatically lighted Hemingway by Karsh, and a smiling photo of Saul Bellow as a younger man, wearing a rakish hat.