Lost in the Forest (20 page)

“I am a New England dowager.”

“What horseshit,” Gracie said. She was flipping through a big coffee-table book on home decoration. She looked up at Eva. “What
is
a dowager, exactly?”

“Oh, it must come from the same root as
endow
. An old woman left with dough. Maybe
dough
comes from that too.
Dough, dow
. I’ll look it up.”

“No, don’t bother. I don’t give a damn what its etymology is. Just don’t sound like that no more.”

“But it
is
who I am, Gracie. I’m not like you. I can’t do this the way you would.”

“Oh, honey. I don’t mean anything, really. If Duncan died, I don’t think I’d ever go out again.”

“But Duncan will never die.”

Gracie grinned. “The bastard. I bet he won’t. He’s too mean to die.”

After Gracie left, Eva moved through the store, getting ready for the day—neatening shelves, straightening the stacks of books on the display tables. She looked up
dowager:
as she’d thought. Though it most often referred to a queen. A dowager queen. Queen Eva. At ten Callie came in, and Eva went back to her office and started to call the customers whose special orders had come in the day before.

On and off through the day, she thought of Elliott, whom she liked but didn’t want, and of Mark, whom she wanted, she supposed, but didn’t want to be involved with ever again.

Was that it? Were those her feelings? She didn’t know. It seemed to her she ought to know, to be clear about it all. Perhaps she
needed
to see Mark again.

But she knew, even as she was thinking it, that this was suspect. What she wanted was his attention, his wanting her. Why? Because it felt good to be wanted, to be desired. Even if the desire was something he distributed widely, it felt good focused on you. It made her feel alive, flirting with Mark, making him think of her sexually again. Maybe she needed that right now. Maybe it was part of recovering from John’s death to feel sexy with someone safe, someone from her past. Someone she wasn’t going to sleep with.

Or was she perhaps punishing Mark? Taking some belated revenge, now that she seemed to have some power over him, for the pain he’d caused her years ago?

Maybe she
could
sleep with him. Could she? Images of certain times they’d made love together rose quickly in her mind, and she tried to busy herself with some imbalances she’d noticed in the finances to stop them.

She had lunch with a sales rep who always made her laugh.
When she came back, she told Callie three new jokes, one about a talking horse, one about a duck ordering grapes in a bar, one about a forgetful old man in a whorehouse.

At four, Daisy came in. Eva was back in her office, but she could hear her daughter’s voice mingling with Callie’s and Nancy’s as the two older women got ready to leave. She came out to greet Daisy and to say good-bye to the two women.

Daisy was friendly and easy while the others were still there, but as soon as they’d left, the slight coolness that marked their relations now fell between them. Her face stilled and grew sullen, unreadable, as Eva went over with her what she needed to do. “I’ll be in the office if it gets too busy,” she said.

“Yep,” Daisy answered, already slouched on the stool behind the counter. She didn’t look at Eva. She was folding and refolding a piece of paper.

Eva sat in the office in front of the computer with the columns of amber figures glowing on the screen. How she hated this business with Daisy! It was as though the girl blamed her for John’s death. There was nothing she’d done right since. Not when she was lost in grief. Not when she began to recover a little. Certainly not dating Elliott or that thing she’d seen with Mark. There was never a moment of lightheartedness or ease between them. She couldn’t remember the last time Daisy had laughed in her presence.

She got up and went to the door. As she stepped into the corridor, she could see Daisy doing something at the cash register.

“Daze,” she said.

The girl jumped, turning. The drawer clanged shut.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” Eva said, approaching the counter. Daisy was watching her, attentive, alert.

“I have two good jokes for you,” Eva said.

“Oh! Cool,” said Daisy, almost breathlessly, it seemed. She sat down again on the stool. She was all attention, smiling—smiling!—as Eva started. And at both punch lines, she laughed out loud.

“Dumb, aren’t they?” Eva asked, grinning back at her daughter. How lovely she was, really, when her face opened.

“Dumb is okay,” Daisy said. “For a joke, anyway.”

“It’s true, isn’t it? The dumbness is part of the pleasure.” And then, because the moment had made her happy, because she didn’t want to push it, she stood straight. “Back to work,” she said.

But in her office, she was restless, too distracted by the warm surprise of Daisy’s response to concentrate.

She called Mark. He was in his truck, she could hear it. His voice softened in response to hers; he said her name.

“I just told our sullen younger daughter not one but two jokes, and she laughed at both of them.”

“Jesus, these are jokes I need to know.”

She asked him if he was free that night. By the hesitation in his voice before he said, “Sure,” she knew he wasn’t.

“You aren’t to rearrange anything on my account,” she said. “How about Monday instead?”

“Either is fine.”

“Monday, then. It’s actually better for me. A drink after dinner? as usual?”

S
UNDAY NIGHT
Daisy came downstairs in a bath towel, full of indignation. There was no hot water.

Eva was reading. She had only recently begun to be able to read again, whole books—this had been impossible for almost a year. Now she looked forward to it.
The book
, waiting in the living room after she got Theo down. Waiting at her bedside. The circle of light falling over the white bedsheets, the subtle smell of the paper, the ink, the arrangement of the words on the page. Wanting just another chapter, and then, perhaps, another. Wanting something she could so easily have. When it had been gone, she hadn’t been able to miss it—she was too taken up with grief. But now that it had returned to her, she was grateful to this old love—books, the words—for coming back, for reminding her of the possibility of pleasure, of anticipation. Of being transported out of her own life into others.

She put her finger in her place and looked at Daisy. “Well, that can happen. This isn’t a hotel. It’s an old, beat-up house.”

“But can’t you fix it?”

“I can, I think, and I will try, if you will speak to me just a little bit less like a servant.”

“Oh, Christ, Mom.”

“And less like that, Daisy, too.”

“All right.” Daisy swung her head, throwing her hair back behind her shoulders. She pulled her face into a new, artificially sweet expression. “Mother dear, Mommie dearest,” she said, “could I ask you please to try to do something about the fact that only cold water is pouring out of the hot-water faucet?”

Eva got up. “Yes, my darling daughter. But even if I get it turned on again, it’ll take a while to heat up, so you should get some clothes or pj’s or something on while you wait.”

Eva went into the butler’s pantry, off the hall between the living room and kitchen. She found matches and a flashlight in the drawers there. She descended the stairs into the basement. It was unfinished, cobwebby and dank, a place they all avoided. The water heater was in a far corner. She knelt by it and took the cover off the service opening. Bending over, she could see that, yes, the pilot was off. She rested the flashlight so its beam was aimed into the hole. Reaching in, she pressed the gas button and offered up a lighted match. With a little rip of enthusiasm, the pilot went on; and seconds later, more enthusiasm, the gas itself lighted.

Eva recapped the hole and was about to stand up, when she noticed the glue trap behind the tank. It was one of many scattered around the basement, most of them holding only insects and grit. But a mouse had died in this trap—months ago apparently. At any rate, bugs had devoured its flesh long since. Its skeleton lay curled on its side on the clear glue. Eva picked the trap up carefully, avoiding the stickum, and looked closely.

It was perfection—the exquisite miniature bones of its paws, the hollowed-out, belled delicacy of the empty white rib cage, the tiny skull, the teeth smaller than the smallest grains of rice. She
was struck—made suddenly tearful actually—by the extravagance, the loss: this much beauty lavished on this tiny dead creature, useless or worse to her. She thought of John, his bones. How they had felt when she scattered them, the odd chunks among the gritty ash, which reminded her of his final fragility, of the way he had so quickly and carelessly been destroyed, the bone that had shielded
who he was
so easily smashed to bits. Exactly such bits as she had thrown off to the sides of the path up Mount St. Helena when she scattered his ashes.

In two weeks he would have been dead a year. Perhaps he and the mouse had died at the same time. She hadn’t thought she would mark his death in any way. It seemed morbid to her, grim. Better to remember him alive, every day—as she did, she thought—than to make a fuss about the anniversary of his dying.

But it seemed to her suddenly, holding the little white tray with the dead mouse, that she’d betrayed him. That she’d started down the wrong path, with Mark, with the stirring of feeling for him she’d allowed herself. Even the
way
she’d thought of it, the way she’d limited it in her mind, seemed wrong, seemed disrespectful of what she’d had with John.

She imagined carrying the mouse upstairs to John, as she would have done when he was alive, and marveling at it together. A tiny Yorick, she might have said. Yorick-ini. And then John, no doubt, would have recited half the passage from memory.

When she went upstairs, she threw the glue trap away, covering it with paper towels in the trash compactor so Daisy or Theo wouldn’t see it and be revolted, or scared. She washed her hands. She went up to John’s study and looked up the Yorick passage.

Sitting at his desk, she read, “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?” She resisted the tears she felt. Cheap, she thought. Then she read, “Now get you to my lady’s chambers and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. Make her laugh at that.”

An image of her mother, her face seamed and embittered by the lines of age, rose in her mind—her mother as she set her sherry glass sharply down and spoke: “As I said, dear, Death.”

B
Y THE TIME
she left the house on Monday evening to meet Mark, she didn’t want to go. She was sorry she’d called him. She saw it as weak on her part, wrong—the wish to flirt, to be held, to be admired, or, in Mark’s fashion, loved. John’s memory should be enough for her, she thought. His memory. She had been truly loved. John had loved her. And she had learned how to love from him.

Sitting opposite Mark, she felt herself distant and sad. He looked wonderful. He’d been working flat out with the end of the crush, he said, and she remembered how he had always loved this season, the nonstop pressure, the excitement of it. His hands holding his drink were stained dark.

Their talk was more desultory than it had been before. The energy to be flirtatious, the wish to be found attractive, was flattened in Eva. She found herself thinking about what time it was getting to be, thinking about how much longer she would have to stay, looking forward to arriving home again, to reading for a while, to sleep.
Perchance to dream
, she thought.

Mark asked her for the jokes, and at first she couldn’t remember what he was referring to. But then she told them, including the one she hadn’t told Daisy, about the old man in the whorehouse.

He laughed. They sat quiet for a long moment. They seemed to have run out of things to say. Eva was about to announce that she needed to get back, she was going to make up some excuse about Daisy’s needing homework help, when he said, “Do you sometimes compare me to other men you know? You know, when you’re sitting here with me?”

“Other men I know?”

“The guy you’re dating, for instance.”

She made a face. “My, word certainly gets around.”

He lifted his shoulders. “Gracie,” he said. “Our pal.”

Gracie. She nodded. “Well, I don’t know that I’d say I’m
dating
, exactly. That seems to imply a more … a bigger commitment of some kind or another than anything I’m thinking of at the moment.” She saw his face relax, some tension ease. “But I suppose I’ve thought at one time or another about the differences among various men I’ve known, you included. That would be human, would it not? I don’t think I’ve done it when I’m with you, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“No, that’s not what I’m asking.”

“What are you asking, then?”

“I don’t know.” They were at the inside bar tonight. It was cool and dark out, the tall windows behind him were black. “I suppose … what you want. Why you called me. Why we’re here.”

Eva felt ashamed, embarrassed. But he had every right to ask her this, because she hadn’t known what she was doing either when she called him. She struggled to frame a reply, an answer, that wouldn’t wound him.

“Oh Mark, I don’t know,” she said. “Because I’m human. Because I’m alone and sometimes that’s hard.” He started to reach over to touch her, but she went on. “Because you’ve been kind and … attentive, and I felt I needed that. No simple answers.”

“No.” He watched her face, steadily.

She had forgotten how beautiful he could be, how much pleasure you could take just in looking at him. “I should go, I think.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.” His hands reached across the table and closed over hers.

“No, really, I think I should.” She slid her hands out from under his, and lifted one to signal the waitress.

A silence fell between them. Eva was looking away from him, out the dark window. There were candles on the empty outside tables, flickering. “I feel I owe you an apology,” she said.