Lost in the Forest (33 page)

Finally, though, she has to acknowledge him. She steps toward him, her hand out, and he raises his hand, shakes hers formally. “Good to see you,” she says, and he nods.

“Yes,” he says. He is the only man in the room wearing a suit, a suit of a beautiful, subtly striped fabric.
Bespoke
, Daisy thinks.

“Oh come on, Duncan,” Gracie says. “Work up a little more enthusiasm for this absolute
babe
.”

He turns to his wife. “Enthusiasm has never been my forte.” He pronounces it correctly of course:
fort
.

Daisy smiles and takes the opportunity to move away, over to hug Eva, to pour herself a mimosa.

There are ten of them around the table, and Daisy is glad for the sheer numbers, for the buffer they provide between her and Duncan. She has maneuvered herself between Gracie and Kathy’s older son, Kevin. Duncan is across the table from her, on Eva’s right hand. Looking at him from time to time, Daisy sometimes catches him looking back, his face unreadable. He seems frail, she thinks; she noticed how much more pronounced his limp was when he walked to the dining room. But the frailty is something separate from that, and it seems characteristic of someone much older than he is now—and, of course, she knows his age: sixty-seven.

He still feels compelled to weigh in with his opinion from time
to time—on the Democratic primaries, on Michael Jackson’s face—but no one here is under his spell any longer. Or maybe it’s simply that his age has changed the way these pronouncements are received. In any case, no one pays much attention to him—they’re too busy talking about their own lives, about what comes next for all of them.

Emily has center stage for a while, describing a house they’re thinking of buying, discussing mortgage rates and real estate. Gracie asks Daisy about work, and she talks about her role, about Miranda, about how even though she’s an important character to the play, it’s not a large part. “But she’s so incredibly difficult to act,” Daisy says. “Because she’s grown up on this enchanted island with no one else but her father and this … monster, really. And so she’s astounded, she’s amazed, when other humans arrive. And you have to
get
that—her innocence, her amazement—without making her seem stupid.” She runs a finger around the edge of her mother’s familiar plate, its bumpy rim. “And I have to say, she has—
I
have—one of the greatest lines in Shakespeare. And one of the hardest, because it’s so familiar. It’s ‘O brave new world, to have such people in it.’ ” She opens her hands. “I mean, how do you say it, and make it
new
? Make people really hear it, instead of the book title, or whatever.”

“You know, I’d forgotten that’s where that title came from,” Eva says. “Shame on me.” This last is so typical of Eva that Daisy smiles at her, and is rewarded by that warm smile back.

And now Kevin is asking her how she gets by, how she makes a living. He has asked this of Ted too, and Emily. He will graduate this June and he needs ideas.

Daisy laughs. “You know those cheesy circulars that fall out of the Sunday paper? where bright young things are standing around casually in their underwear, looking as sexless as they can while also being half naked?” He nods. She gestures at herself with her thumb. “That’s me. Underwear queen of Marshall Field’s. Underwear, and voice-overs, and a little bit of hand modeling. Stuff like that.”

After this the conversation fractures, multiplies. Gracie wants a
recipe from Eva. Gideon is fussing, he doesn’t
want
to stay in the high chair, and Emily and Ted are deciding whether he has to. Through the noise, Daisy hears the voice directed at her.

“Where would one get one of those circulars?” Duncan asks.

She looks at him. He is smiling, a smile that’s like a parody of the way he used to smile at her in his studio, a kind of stagy lasciviousness.

“Oh for Christ’s sweet sake, Duncan,” Gracie says, offended and indulgent at once.

“What?” he says, a vast feigned innocence on his face. He turns to Daisy. “Can’t an old man let a young woman know how lovely he finds her?”

Daisy stares levelly back. Her voice is flat and cold when she speaks. “No, I don’t think so,” she says.

“Daisy!” Eva says to her child. And then she hears herself and says more gently, in a self-mocking tone, “I didn’t
raise
you to be so rude.”

“No, you didn’t, Mom. I know that. This is something I’ve achieved all by myself.”

There’s a silence that stretches perhaps a few seconds too long.

“Well,” Theo says. “This must be the time for a story.”

Emily says, “Oh yes! Let’s. For Gideon.”

“You start then, Theo,” Daisy says. “Return the favor done so often to you.”

“Gladly,” Theo says. He’s pierced his ear at college, and the diamond twinkles as he turns to her. “The start is the easy part. They all start the same, right?”

Gracie leans toward Daisy. “At some point I’m going to get what’s going on, right?”

“Right,” Daisy says.

Emily is asking Gideon if he wants a story. Yes, he says almost inaudibly, he does. He is shy. Even stuck in his high chair, he is trying to lean against his mother, to bury his face in her shoulder.

“Okay. Once upon a time,” Theo begins, “there was a little boy, a brave little boy named … 
Gideon
!” He raises his eyebrows at his nephew.

“Me,” Gideon says. He almost smiles.

“Yes. And this boy was walking in the woods one day when he met an old, old woman.”

“Me,” Eva says.

“No!” several others chorus, Daisy among them.

Theo describes it, the woman, the house she takes the little boy to. He is overacting, Daisy thinks, he should pull it in.

He passes the story to Daisy. She adds candy to the house, and a magic bird who can talk to the boy. Then she passes it to Emily.

But Gideon won’t let Emily talk. He puts his small hand over her mouth and says, “No, no! Mumma.” She is his, not theirs.

So Eva takes it up. The bird flies out the window and through the forest to town, where he finds the boy’s parents, and they come and get him and they all live happily ever after. Gideon tilts his head against his mother and a vague, pleased smile lights his face.

Brunch breaks up. Emily and Ted and Gideon go upstairs to get ready for the wedding. The others clear the table and load the dishwasher. It isn’t until everyone is milling around in the hall getting coats, preparing to leave, that Daisy finds herself almost alone next to Duncan, that he turns to her and lowers his voice to be heard by only her.

“I’m surprised you came,” he says. “Surprised. Delighted. I’d gotten used to the family parties where you were conspicuously absent.”

“
Conspicuously
to you alone, I suspect. But this one could hardly be avoided. I needed to be here.” She has straightened her back; she’s at her full height, taller than him.

“Still, it had come to the point where I expected never to see you again.”

She nods. Then she says, “I’m surprised you would give it—that you would give
me
—a moment’s thought.”

His smile, his ironic smile. “You underestimate yourself, Daisy.”

“
That
I do not do,” she says, firmly.

“Well, you misunderstand
me
, then.”

“I think, actually, that I
don’t
understand you.” She turns her
light green eyes fully upon him. “I didn’t, and I never will. But I don’t need to, really. Because whatever use you were making of me, I made
use
of you, too. Good use.” Her voice is hard as she says this. She smiles her own ironic smile. “I should probably thank you.”

“But you won’t.”

“No, I don’t think I will.”

A
FTER THE WEDDING
, after the dinner at Kathy’s house, Kevin drives Daisy down to the airport. She’s catching the red eye to get back to Chicago in time for rehearsal, and he’s headed back to college. She has planned to sleep on the plane, but she doesn’t. She’s wide awake, thinking about the wedding, about her father and Kathy, about her family. And then, inevitably, about Duncan.

She felt nothing for him, and this surprises her. Seeing him was easy. He was an old man she used to know. She is a grown woman—a
grown-up
, she thinks, and smiles—who used to be under his spell, somehow, when she was a child. A child like those in Theo’s fairy tales, held in some cottage in the dark forest, unable to imagine escape.

“But you did escape,” Dr. Gerard had said to her when she used this analogy once in therapy.

“Not exactly.” She looked through the thin aureole of Dr. Gerard’s white hair to the bare tree outside the window behind her. “I was rescued. The noble woodsman. The prince. My father.”

“But how did this figure, this rescuer, know you were there if you didn’t somehow signal him, if you didn’t somehow find a way to call for help?”

They had sat in silence for a while. Then Daisy said, “I know what you’re saying. You’re saying I somehow deliberately let Mark know about my affair with Duncan.”

“I would call it
his
affair with you.” Dr. Gerard had her ironic smile too.

“Okay, point taken. But the other thing, that I somehow knew what I was doing—”

“I
didn’t
say you knew what you were doing. I said you managed to signal him, to make your life speak to him.”

Daisy thought for a minute. “Unconsciously,” she said.

Dr. Gerard grinned. “Why not? Why not the unconscious: the thing I believe in and you pretend not to.”

“It’s
not
that I don’t believe in it,” she argued.

“No? Then what is it?”

“It’s that that’s not how it
felt
to me. I was
angry
he found out. I was upset.”

“And
then
relieved.”

“Yes.” Daisy was reluctant, and it made her sound sullen.

“But all I’m suggesting is that you take some credit for having relieved yourself, for getting what you needed from your father.”

“Oh, that’s all.”

“That is all,” Dr. Gerard said, and smiled across the room, across her strange magic carpet, at Daisy.

It was Dr. Gerard who suggested she read
Lolita
, who felt it might help her to think about what had happened to her, how she had been abused. And Daisy had read it, she had considered what Humbert imagines Dolly Schiller, his transformed Lolita, wants to say to him at the end of the book: that he broke her life.

But that’s not what she felt, or feels, Daisy is thinking on the plane. Her life was already broken. There was a mystery in it when Duncan took up with her, a mystery she didn’t understand. It had to do with Mark and Eva, with Eva and John, with those things that hold people together in a sexual union, or push them apart. It had to do with how that is so deeply part of who they are, an expression of something central in them. And it had to do with the way the grown-ups are reckless with that, the way that others, even their own children, can simply
not matter
to them in the face of that. When she first heard the words
collateral damage
to refer to innocent people killed in war, Daisy had laughed at the inept horror of the phrase—and then realized those seemed the perfect words too, for herself as a child, as a teenager.

Duncan exposed the underpinnings of adult life, sexual life, to Daisy, though there wasn’t a way for her to have articulated that at
the time. He completed a kind of dark education that had begun in her with the divorce, and continued with John’s death. She’d been mired in confusion for all those years, unable to take in any of the events that shaped her life except as pain to herself. Duncan had made her see what else they meant, what they might have meant to Eva, to Mark. Even to John.

She remembers saying once to Dr. Gerard of John that she hadn’t really accepted that he and Eva had a sexual relationship until after Duncan. She hadn’t understood that essential part of Eva’s grief. She hadn’t known how much she stood outside the lives of her parents, her stepfather.

Duncan had made her understand her insignificance. He had toughened her and hardened her, and that was wrong; but she was lost, and he had, almost certainly inadvertently, shown her a way out. Or he and Mark had, working unwittingly together.

Looking out the plane’s window at the blackness below, Daisy remembers a terrible fight she and Duncan had in the week or so before Mark had found out about them, a fight that had shaken her deeply. She had been pushing him again to tell her what she meant to him, and if not that, then to beg her for sex. To
give
her something, as she felt it. In her confusion about what he was doing with her, what they were doing together, she wanted to understand his feelings, to be able to measure them somehow. Finally, in exasperation with her he’d turned away, walked to his work table—she could remember watching his hitching process across the room—and picked up his wallet. He’d taken out a handful of bills and come back to her, tossed them on her naked belly.

She stood up, not even brushing them away, and came at him, hitting him twice before he simply held her arm, and she felt how much power he could have exerted over her at any time he chose.

When he finally let go of her, she turned away and got dressed, wordlessly. She walked out to the car to wait for him to come and drive her to her father’s house.

She had wept that night, alone in her room at Mark’s, wept until her head ached.

But she would have gone on with it; she wouldn’t have given Duncan up, even then—except that somehow she must have been ready to. Somehow she
had
signaled Mark. On the plane, now, she thinks maybe even her weeping had been a signal intended for her father. She was thinking of it while she cried, actually, she remembers that now. She was thinking that her father might hear her and come to her, and she was wondering what she would say if he asked her why she was crying. Wondering if she would have to tell him the truth.

But he hadn’t come, and after a while she had stopped.