Lost in the Forest (15 page)

But Duncan. Mark looked at him, speaking quietly in his contained, precise way. He was wearing a soft linen shirt of the palest gray. His eyes were small and dark, hooded slightly. His skin was pale, lightly lined, especially around the eyes, and somehow almost luminous. Duncan was a tough nut, Mark thought. There wasn’t an interpersonal bet he didn’t hedge—with sarcasm, with mockery. Even, sometimes, with a certain facial expression—a slight lifting of his upper lip.

What Mark knew of him, of his life, he knew in bits and pieces from Gracie or Eva. He’d wanted to be an actor when he was young, but had ended up a stuntman for some years—a good one, as it turned out, Gracie had said. She had spoken proudly of this. That he was naturally athletic, utterly fearless. But then he’d been
injured in a terrible accident at work. He still limped as a result. He’d spent more than a year in various surgeries and several years after that in pain. He moved always with economy, maybe because it hurt to move. The effect, though, was of control. Steely control, Mark thought, given his lack of expressiveness otherwise. His eyes settled on you, steady, observant, but somehow not connected to you. Cold.

Gracie maintained that the accident wasn’t all bad. That the rehabilitation had changed his life in many ways for the good. For one thing, he learned woodworking and slowly became a kind of master furniture maker, which was how he made his living now. And for another, it had given him time to read, widely and deeply. He became an avid reader. This was how he’d met Gracie, actually, four years earlier—at Eva’s bookstore, where each of them had taken to dropping in regularly, for different reasons: Gracie to schmooze, to gossip—about neighbors, about the kids and Eva and John and Mark and life; Duncan to talk about books. And to buy them, ten or a dozen at a time. Eva introduced them, and they married a few months later.

What could have drawn them to each other? Watching them, Mark was thinking that he couldn’t have answered that question. Gracie was talking now, telling a joke actually, imitating a haughty British accent—Princess Anne on a quiz show. Duncan’s eyes were steady on her with no emotion Mark could recognize, except a mild, disinterested amusement. There was something in his constraint, though, his self-containment, that Mark could see would be attractive, might have drawn Gracie. When she got to the punch line, delivered in the fruity voice, “Oh! I know! It’s a horse’s cock!” Fletcher and Maria laughed out loud. Nothing changed or shifted in Duncan’s face.

Maybe he’d wanted her money. She was quite well off by the time they met. But then Mark remembered that Eva said there’d been a huge settlement after the accident.

But maybe he’d already run through it. Maybe the medical care used it up. He did all right with the furniture he made, more than all right: it was written up in arts magazines, in
Architectural Digest
.
But all that kind of work must be a little irregular anyway—steady commissions or purchases for a few years, and then maybe a barren stretch. So money could have been part of it.

Now something did shift in Duncan’s face—a sudden sharpened attentiveness. His gaze had moved though, away from Gracie. Looking up to follow it, Mark saw Eva in the opened doorway to the house. Eva, and Daisy and Theo. Gracie must have felt his gaze move too, because she had turned around.

“Eva!” she cried out, getting up. “Late to your own party, aren’t you ashamed. Hey, Daze. Hey, Theo, cutie-pie.”

And then they were all standing, lining up, shifting positions, everyone kissing and embracing Eva and the children. Mark waited his turn. He held Eva first. She was wearing a black backless sundress, and her flesh was cool and silky under his fingers. He hugged Daisy. As he pressed her against himself, he was aware, abruptly, of the push of her breasts against his chest. When had that happened? He had to resist looking at her as she stepped back. Instead he picked up Theo and swirled him around.

But he watched Daisy, particularly a little later, as she helped Gracie and Maria bring the food out. She was wearing a gauzy, billowy shirt, maybe Indian, over baggy khaki shorts with many pockets that reached almost to her knees. You could see her bra through the shirt, a skimpy, mostly symbolic garment. She seemed more self-conscious, more self-aware, than she usually was. Did that come with these changes in her body? Once she looked up to find his eyes on her, and she blushed. Blushing was new for Daisy, he thought.

Earlier, Maria had been asking her what she was up to this summer, and she spoke, shyly it seemed, about her job in Eva’s bookstore. They were all attentive, even Duncan, and that seemed to overwhelm her, being the center of attention. Color rose to her cheeks as she answered their questions. He noticed she sank back in what seemed relief when the conversation moved on, when Maria and then Gracie began to talk about their first jobs, Maria’s in a drive-in, on roller skates, Gracie’s as an au pair in Winnetka for a wealthy family. She’d eaten with the cook, in the kitchen, she
said. She’d never understood anything about class in America before. She said, “I thought my title was
au pére
, actually—for the father.” She raised her eyebrows and grinned. “I thought this for very good reasons, I’d like you all to know.”

At some point during all this, Mark saw Duncan reach over and turn Daisy’s glass right side up, then fill it with wine and push it toward her. It seemed a gracious gesture, a welcoming of her as a quasi-adult, someone with experiences like the ones they could all remember. He was sorry he hadn’t thought to do it himself.

They ate, and as they ate, the sky turned gold and pink, and then quickly a darker and darker blue. It became
inky
, he thought. There was a kind of intimacy in the candlelight now, in the way it made a circle of their faces in the surrounding dark.

When they finished the first course, but before Duncan set off the fireworks, there was an elaborate ritual they observed every year: the tranquilizing of the dog, an old spaniel named Miranda—she was terrified of the noise of the explosions. As Gracie held the dog’s jaws apart and dropped the pill in, they all raised their glasses and toasted her: “Miranda! Here’s to Miranda!” Mark watched Gracie’s sure hands stroke Miranda’s throat until she swallowed.

Gracie asked Theo to be in charge of letting them know when Miranda was groggy. He went to sit next to her on the floor by the table, dropping from Mark’s view. “But what is
groggy
?” he asked, his voice floating up.

“Sleepy. Out of it,” Daisy said.

“Loagy,” Duncan offered. He’d put on rimless glasses that reflected the candlelight.

“Thank you, my darling,” said Gracie, “for offering a uselessly-more-obscure-than-the-original-word synonym.”

“What is
loagy
?” Theo’s voice asked, and Mark watched as Eva’s slow smile changed her face.

The third or fourth time Theo reported Miranda as groggy, saying the word importantly, Gracie confirmed that this time she was, yes indeed, recognizably
groggy
, and Duncan got up and walked out to the edge of the vineyard. Watching him move away,
the laborious heaving up and then falling of each step, Mark thought—he was sure they were all thinking—of the damage done to him. He stepped farther and farther into the night, and finally he was just a pale shape moving around out there.

Suddenly there was the singing of a rising rocket and the sky lighted up—white first, and then in successive falling, expanding sprays, blue, and green, and deep red. Theo leaned back in Eva’s lap with his thumb in his mouth, his face turned to heaven. But they were all rapt for five minutes or so as the artificial thunder echoed across the valley floor and the colors radiated in gorgeous, spilling, liquid cascades of light. Miranda lay uncaring and woozy at Gracie’s feet, lifting her head occasionally with a slow, rocking, swinging motion, as though it were too heavy for her neck. She looked, as Daisy pointed out, like one of those plaster animals with suspended bobble heads some people set in the rear windows of their cars. The sulphuric smell of the gunpowder floated over the table.

When it was over, they sat for a few minutes. In the silence they heard coyotes howling back and forth across the valley. Duncan had joined them, to applause led by Eva. The talk was more desultory than before. Why fireworks were so magical. Remembered July Fourths. Childhood. Theo’s eyes had closed. Daisy’s glass was empty, and Mark, this time, reached over and filled it.

After a while, they went inside, into the surprisingly bright domestic light. Eva took Theo to the guest room to put him down to sleep, while the rest of them cleared dishes and cleaned up in the kitchen. When Eva reappeared, Gracie divided them into teams for Charades.

Gracie insisted on this annually, and organized them, though she didn’t play herself. She was, as Duncan called her,
the boss
. She even assigned them their words.

Mark and Eva were on the same team, with Fletcher. Their word was
confidence
. They went back into the kitchen to confer on the short skits or scenes they would act out for each syllable, and then for the whole word. As it worked out, all three of them were in the skits for the separate syllables, using costumes and props
from a wicker box full of old clothes and junk Gracie kept especially for parties and children’s visits. But for the word itself, Eva and Mark stood up alone, side by side.

“Whole word,” Eva announced. Then she turned to him and said, “I have something to tell you, but you mustn’t tell another soul.”

“Last thing on my mind,” he said.

She stood on tiptoes and he bent down. She whispered to him for a few minutes, just nonsense syllables. But her breath was warm on his face, in his ear, and he was suddenly aroused and sad. Still, when she stepped back and said, “Now, you won’t tell anyone, will you?” he answered, as he was supposed to, “You can trust me, absolutely.” The others got it in two and a half minutes.

Then Mark and Eva and Fletcher sat down, and it was the other team’s turn—Duncan and Daisy and Maria. They gathered in the kitchen, and in the lapses of conversation in the living room, Mark could hear their voices planning their skits. He listened for Daisy. She made only an occasional contribution.

Finally, Duncan and Maria emerged to do the first syllable. They stood, facing each other, and Duncan told Maria a series of knock-knock jokes. After each one, she turned to the audience with a confused look and said, “I just don’t get it.” After a flurry of guesses, Fletcher came up with the answer: “dumb.”

The second syllable involved Duncan and Maria calling to Daisy, who was offstage in the kitchen, “Come on, we’re late, let’s go!” and Daisy answering, “Just a sec.” They were irritated, clearly parents who had to wait for this daughter often. They called again and Duncan checked his watch. After a few more repeats, when Daisy called out “Just a sec,” he said, “This is a lot longer than that. A
lot
longer. Maybe sixty times longer.”

Eva guessed “minute.”

Maria signaled shorter—shorter word. “Min!” Eva called, and Duncan nodded. “Min!” she said. “Dumb. Min.”

For the whole word, Duncan came out alone and bowed. Something about the way he carried himself made Mark realize how extraordinarily handsome he must have been once. He was
still good-looking enough, though the accident and age had harrowed him. He slowly got down on all fours. Daisy and Maria were backstage in the kitchen with the box of props—you could hear them laughing—and with some boots they’d asked for.

“Just a sec,” Daisy called. She laughed. “Just a sec for
real
this time.” Her voice was lighter, more giddy, than he remembered ever having heard it.

After a few more minutes, she came out. She flung her arms wide. “Ta-da!” she said. She was wearing an old black bathing suit that must once have been Gracie’s. It was too big for her, and she’d held it in at the waist with a tight belt studded with rhine-stones. She had on dark red lipstick and the pair of scuffed brown boots Gracie had found for her, which struck her midcalf. Her thighs seemed endless and muscular. Her eyes were ringed with black. She carried a ruler.

She walked over to Duncan and stood behind him. She lifted one leg, set her foot on his back, and smacked the ruler on her own open palm. “Speak!” she commanded in a guttural, mock-German voice:
schpik!

Duncan lifted his head and barked several times, mournfully.

“Oh, that’s way too easy,” Fletcher said. “ ‘Domination.’ Dumb, Min, Nation.”

Daisy smiled and lifted her foot off Duncan, dropping out of character abruptly as she stepped back. Duncan rose up to his knees and lifted his hands in mock resignation.

Mark had looked at Eva when Daisy first walked out. He’d seen that she was as startled as he was by their daughter’s appearance. He looked at her again now and saw that her lips were primmed and tight, her nostrils pink. She was angry. But at whom? At Daisy? At Duncan? Somehow Mark felt she might be angry at him, but he couldn’t think why.

But now Gracie was standing up and herding them outside again to wait for the cake. Daisy was about to follow them, still in her costume, but Gracie caught her. “You better change, honey. It’s hard on these old geezers to have you wandering around like that.”

“Woof,” said Duncan at the door, grinning at Gracie and Daisy.

Daisy went back to the kitchen, and they trailed out into the darkness, where the candles jumped and flickered in their glass bells on the table. The air was lighter, cooler, than it had been all day.

Mark was behind Eva. She sat down next to Duncan at the table, turned her fierce face to him, and said, “Whose idea was that?”

Duncan’s lips curved slightly. “Oh my dear, clearly what you mean to say is ‘Whose
bad
idea was that?’ ”

“You bet I do.”

There was a silence. Duncan shrugged. “We were
playing
a
game
,” he explained, his diction as pronounced as though he were speaking to a child.

Eva turned to Maria. “How could you let her?” she asked.