Lost in the Forest (24 page)

In the car as he drove her back to the reading, she sat silently, nearly twitching, as she felt it, with impatience.

“Are you so eager to get away from me?” he asked.

She looked over at him. He was smiling, but it was such a pathetic thing to say. “Ugh!” she said loudly, and turned away from him in her seat. Turned to her window.

“Quite right,” he said. “No whinging allowed.”

She didn’t answer. The hills rode alongside them, the lights of a lone house fluttering here and there behind the leaves of the trees.

After some minutes, he said in a conversational tone, “I didn’t know this reading meant so much to you.”

“It’s not the reading,” she said. “It’s that I said I’d
be
there.”

He was quiet for a while. Then he said, “This is something I hadn’t taken in about you, Daisy. Your punctiliousness.”

She turned back to look out the windshield. “Yeah, well. There’s lots you haven’t taken in about me.”

“Hardly anything, I’d argue.”

“Nearly everything, I’d argue.” She pushed in the cigarette lighter.

“But you like to argue, Daisy. I
have
taken that in.”

“I like to argue with you, because you’re always affirming the ridiculous.” The lighter popped out, and she pushed it in again.

“Daisy, is this kind?”

“Who cares? Have you been kind to me? Is seducing someone half your age—God, less than a third your age!—is that kind?”

“You would rather I’d left you to the tender mercies of some teenage clod who can barely speak, let alone read. Or think. Or bring you off.”

Daisy said, “Yeah,” but she thought about it. The lighter popped out again. She actually thought about it. She knew he was right, she wouldn’t have wanted that, wouldn’t have wanted any of the boys she knew or could imagine. Noah? God, no. She thought of how Emily had described sex with Noah, how once he got inside her, he forgot all about her and whumped against her and came within a few seconds. But she wasn’t so sure she wanted the kind of sex she had with Duncan anymore either. Though she couldn’t imagine not having him, not having his touch, his attention to her, to her body. He was all she had, she thought.

They were approaching the stoplight. “Drop me off here,” she said.

He signaled, and pulled over. He turned to her. “Shall we plan another meeting? A tête-à-tête?”

“I’ve got a lot of stuff happening between now and Thanksgiving. I think I’d better wait till after then.” She was already gathering her books, getting out. She shut the door and started walking quickly up the block, not looking to see when he passed her.

Eva’s face was pinched and grim when she looked up and saw Daisy, but she was talking to people she knew, people arriving for the reading, so Daisy was spared for a bit. The sparkling water and wine and cookies were laid out. The chairs were set up, and people were already filling them, though others were still standing, looking
at books or talking in little groups. Callie was at the register, and Daisy lifted her hands: What should I do?

Callie pointed to the signing table where the books were still stacked on a dolly and in boxes on the floor. Daisy worked her way through the crowd and began to unload them, folding the cover flap into the title page as she stacked them on the table, so they could be opened quickly to that page for the author’s signature.

The author had already arrived, apparently—Daisy heard someone speaking of how much older she looked than her photo. She must have been back in Eva’s office then. Eva straightened it up a little when there were readings, setting flowers and water out on her desk so the writers could sit there in comfort if they wanted to be alone before they had to perform. Some liked to hang around and talk to their fans. Daisy had more sympathy for those who fled, who waited until the moment they were introduced to appear.

The book Daisy kept opening was called
Creating the Life You Want to Live
. Drek. She hated self-help, and she’d forgotten that this was what was being read tonight. This was her punishment for being late, she supposed.

Now Eva was standing at the podium set up in front of the rows of chairs. She waited, smiling, while everyone sat down and slowly fell silent. She made some announcements—future readings, books that had come in. Daisy could see the writer, who had come down the hall and was standing at the entrance to the room, waiting for Eva to finish. She was fiftyish, carefully groomed. Her hair was stiff, her makeup perfect. She wore a beige suit, and a lot of jewelry.

Eva started her flattering introduction. Daisy looked at the book she had in her hands as she listened. The author photo was on the front cover. The woman faced the reader with her arms folded across her chest. The photo was slightly overexposed, so that everything distinctive about the face was erased. The author—her name was Joyce Garabedian—was neither young nor old in this picture, Daisy would have said. Just, perhaps, absent. Or abstract, anyway. An abstract woman.

Now Eva said her name and she came forward to the podium. She nodded, acknowledging the applause. When the room had quieted, she began to speak.

She wasn’t going to read, Joyce Garabedian said. Instead she wanted to tell her story, the story of how she’d come to write her book. She held it up, as though the audience might not know what book she spoke of. Daisy, whose hands were moving more slowly now since she didn’t want to make any noise, listened and watched her as she worked.

Joyce Garabedian described her life as it had been. A high-powered job that she hated, as an attorney; a high-powered husband who was rarely home, and when he was, was critical of her, of how she looked, of what she cooked, of how she’d furnished and kept their house. She described the house, a pretentious apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She said, “But the point here is I didn’t know I hated my job. Or my house. Or my husband. I would have said that everything was marvelous. Wonderful.” She smiled. “This was your
classic
unexamined life.” She pivoted behind the podium and spoke to the other side of the room. “And then one night I was having dinner with a friend, a friend who was seriously depressed—which I didn’t feel I was, not at all. I mean look at all I was accomplishing, look at how busy my life was. Depressed people couldn’t
do
all that stuff.” She lifted her shoulders, gestured with her hands while she spoke. Rings flashed on her fingers.

“And I was trying to focus her on the upside of things, so I asked her, ‘Well, what makes you happy?’ And she couldn’t answer. I was shocked. She
couldn’t answer
. She said to me, ‘I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.’ And finally she shrugged and turned the question around. She said to me, ‘What makes
you
happy?’ ”

She paused for a long moment, surveying the room, almost smiling. When she spoke again, she spoke slowly. “And that was what did it. That’s what changed everything. Those four words. What. Makes. You. Happy. Because, my dear friends, here was the hard truth.” She leaned forward and said in a lowered voice, an intimate voice, “I didn’t know either.”

Then she stood straight and looked around again at the audience. Daisy’s hands, which had been moving steadily, lifting a book, opening it, tucking the flap in, setting it on the table, had stopped. Joyce Garabedian said, “The honest answer? Nothing. Nothing made me happy. And I suddenly knew that. I knew. But of course, for the moment I faked it. ‘Oh, certain things at my job.’ ‘Coming home to my lovely apartment.’ I can’t even remember what I said. I invented a couple of things. But all the way home in the cab that night, all the next day, the next week, I kept asking myself that question.

“And my answer scared me. Scared me enough to start me on the long process of self-examination, self-questioning, and finally self-actualization that I record for you in this book.” She lifted it again and set it down, looked up once more.

“And that’s where I want you to start.
What makes you happy
? What does make you happy?”

Daisy was thinking about her own life, about happiness. She remembered the paper she’d gotten a D on in the spring, the paper with the two sentences about happiness. She thought of John. She thought of Mark in the hillside house.

Joyce was saying, “If you have even a fragmentary answer for yourself, you’re ahead of where I was. You’re in better shape. Maybe you’ve got kids, or you love to cook, or you play the guitar, or you go jogging among these gorgeous vineyards you live in.”

Her sparkly hand lifted toward the front window. “Maybe sex makes you happy.” She smiled and her eyebrows lifted, and there was general laughter.

Why? What was funny about that, Daisy wondered. Sex
did
make her happy—the moments as it began, opening herself, wanting it. And then when it happened, the feeling of it.

Then it faded; of course it faded. Was that what was funny? Daisy picked up another book.

“Whatever works,” Joyce Garabedian was saying. “That’s what tells you where to start. Do more of that.
Feed it
, I say in the book. And I tell you how to do that, how to make what gives you joy more central to your life. We even look at what you lie about for
clues. If you say, ‘Oh, my house,’ while knowing full well that it doesn’t, well, then you need to look at that. There are two possibilities as I see it that connect to that lie. The first is that you feel your house ought to make you happy. It ought to. And therein lies the problem. Because nothing, my dears, that you think ought to make you happy is ever going to. And the second possibility is that you would in fact like it to, but for various reasons it doesn’t. And exploring
those
reasons will help you get there.

“But maybe some of you are like me, the way I was. When you ask yourselves that question, what you come up with, looking in the mirror, is a big fat blank stare. What makes me happy?
I don’t know
. Nothing. And it’s for you ladies especially,” she raised her finger, “that this book will be most helpful.”

Daisy didn’t know either. That was true. She didn’t know what made her happy. But it was something that would come to her, that would arrive, she thought, and then she’d know it. She’d know it instantly. It would come into her life the way Duncan had come into her life. She’d look up one day, and it would be there. Only it would be real; it would be better than Duncan.

Duncan, having Duncan, had made her believe this, she realized with a start. That things could
arrive
, that things could change. Her hands began to move again, lifting Joyce Garabedian’s book. Her life wasn’t like Joyce Garabedian’s, who was pushing the book hard now, laying out a series of steps she had taken and recommending them to her audience in order to discover the life they truly wanted to lead.

But Daisy by now had tuned her out anyway. There was no connection. Daisy’s life would be different. Special. There would be no steps, no strategies in this cheesy way. What good was it, after all, if you had to work at it?

The audience was asking questions now, and Daisy, listening half attentively, noted how skillfully Joyce Garabedian kept referring them back to the book, telling them just a little of what they wanted to know and then citing a whole chapter that would explain everything to them.

When she was finished, the applause was prolonged. She had trouble making her way back to the signing table, so many people stopped her and wanted to say something. Daisy pulled the chair out for her, and offered her a choice of pens, but she had her own, a fancy silver one with a real nib. Daisy began handing her the books, and the women stepped forward.

The line for signing was long, and Joyce Garabedian talked expansively to many of the audience members who stepped up opposite her and spoke to her of their problems, their hopes. It was late when Eva shut the door on the last customer and turned off the window lights. Callie had left to walk Joyce Garabedian and her escort to their car, so Daisy and Eva were alone.

Daisy had already begun picking up—she’d started as soon as the last book was signed, when there were still plenty of people in the store—and Eva came back from the front of the store and joined her. For a while they worked silently, staying as far apart as they could. But when they got to the chairs and began to pass each other going up and down the hall, Eva stopped in front of her and said, “I’m so furious with you I can hardly speak.”

“I’m sorry I was late,” Daisy said. Her voice was cold, and Eva’s face tightened. She moved away.

They each carried several more loads and then Eva, coming back, stopped in the hallway again as Daisy was approaching her. “Why? Why
were
you so late?”

Daisy set down the chairs. “Practice ran late.”

Eva looked hard at her. “Daisy. I called over. Someone told me practice was done much earlier. At four or so.”

“Yeah, but a couple of us stayed on and shot around for a while after.” She shifted her tone. “I’m not all that good, Mom. If I’m going to make the varsity team, I’ve really got to work on it.”

Eva sighed, and Daisy knew it was okay. She’d won. “Couldn’t you have called?” Eva asked.

“I didn’t notice, Mom. There’s no clock in there. And I was all sweaty so I had to shower and clean up and I didn’t even
want
to take the time to call then, I was rushing so much.” She lifted her
chairs again. “I’m sorry. I said so, didn’t I? I am sorry.” Daisy realized that she was actually feeling impatience with Eva—Eva, to whom she was elaborately lying, after all. Impatience for Eva’s slowness in yielding to her lie, in forgiving her. But it didn’t change anything to recognize the unfairness of this—it was what she felt.

They walked home in silence. It was chilly out, and Daisy held her whole body rigid against the cold. The movie was still going—the marquee was lighted—but the rest of the town was as quiet as it usually was at this hour on a weeknight. Tourists and vineyard owners would still be dining in restaurants, but the shops were closed and there was almost no street traffic.

As they turned onto Kearney Street and approached their house, Eva said abruptly, “Sometimes I can’t stand it.”