The Spirit Wood (9 page)

Larry covered the painting—broad swatches of blue and green and yellow—in a sheet of brown paper, tied it with string, and carried it out to Mrs. Simon's car. “Right back,” he called, as the door swung shut behind him; Meg and Byron, left alone in the store, looked at each other as if they didn't know what had just hit them. Meg took her list from the pocket of her blouse and unfolded it. Byron said he was already beginning to feel underdressed for Passet Bay.

Ten

W
HAT WAS REALLY
driving Peter crazy was that old internal censor of his, that constant critic that took apart each of his sentences, each of his thoughts, as soon as he'd put it down on the page. It was like trying to write with Dunlop, the department chairman, sitting on his shoulder, chain-smoking and making nasty cracks. Nothing he did was quite good enough, nothing he wrote was as felicitously phrased as it should have been, no idea or opinion was really all that startling or original.

Yes, what he'd said to Meg he still thought was true—the peace and tranquillity of Arcadia (the name still amused him) made it easier to concentrate, to work without interruption. But the silence around him, the absence of class bells and students in the hallway, had also made that inner voice just that much easier to hear. There was nothing to drown out the insidious dissenting, the carping that went on and on and on, and that left him wondering, in the solitude of the study, if he was really cut out for the career he had chosen. Or the career that, for want of any other particular ambition, had chosen
him.

Meg's faith in him made it even worse. It made him feel like a fraud. When she'd come into the study a few days before, to tell him about the party they were invited to that night, she'd asked him twice if she was
interrupting his work; she treated his dissertation with a respect that he himself found it hard to give. He
did
want her respect, indeed he needed it if he was ever going to get anywhere in this business, but he wanted to feel he had legitimately earned it. Her blind faith was admirable, but it wasn't especially consoling. He wasn't quite sure what, if anything, he would ever find truly consoling.

In the bedroom, he could hear Meg moving about, getting dressed for the party. He knew she was wondering if he was aware of the time. He turned off the power on the typewriter; without the monotonous hum of the motor, there was a sudden vacuum in the room. He opened the study door, and observed Meg in front of the bureau, pulling the white Mexican dress over her head. Her arms wriggled upwards toward the sleeve holes, and the blonde crest of her head appeared just above the top. With a shake, the dress fell, her arms sprouted like branches from a tree, and her head, with her hair flattened all around it as if she'd just come up from underwater, popped through. When she'd brushed the hair away from her eyes, she saw him leaning against the doorframe, wiping the lenses of his glasses on the tail of his shirt.

“Did I steam up your glasses?” she joked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I had no idea there was a seven o'clock show.”

“Well, please don't tell the neighbors.” “What
will
I tell the neighbors?” he said, stepping on the heels of his sneakers to remove them without untying the laces. “Who are these people we're going to see, anyway?” He kicked his shoes off, tossed his shirt onto the bed, and went into the bathroom to wash up. “We know anything at all about
Mr.
Simon?” he called through the open doorway.

“Nope. Only that he likes his women, and his paintings, done in bold colors.”

Peter laughed, above the splashing of the water. “I'm about to shave,” he admonished her. “Don't say anything to make me laugh.”

“You shaved late this morning, didn't you?” she asked. “Now you've got to shave again?”

“Seems so,” he said. “Must be the fresh air and sea breeze out here. Makes the whiskers grow.”

Meg strapped on her new white sandals and hoped she'd managed the correct degree of dressiness, or perhaps informality, for the party. Not that she particularly cared how she and Peter—and Byron—went over on the Passet Bay cocktail circuit. She wanted to make a decent impression, that she'd admit, but the last thing she wanted was to be on everyone's guest list for the summer season. Peter had his dissertation to finish, she had her own work to do—the New York dealer had already sold three of her pieces—and more than anything else, she wanted their idyll in Arcadia to proceed as it had so far, with a minimum of distraction or interference.

Peter put on a pair of chinos, some dark brown Topsiders, and a blue shirt and blazer. Meg told him he looked like a Yuppy poster.

Byron, waiting for them in front of the house, was also wearing chinos, but he had on his brown tweed sport coat.

“By,” Meg asked, before thinking, “aren't you going to faint in that jacket?”

Byron looked embarrassed, as if he'd hoped they wouldn't notice what he had on. “I'm afraid I don't have a whole lot of choice,” he said. “I just tried on my alternate—the summer model—and it seems I forgot to have it cleaned. The last time I wore it, last summer, Dodger knocked a glass of beer off a picnic table and it landed all over it. I think I'm stuck with this one. Sorry.”

“You could borrow one of mine,” Peter suggested.

“And look like a scarecrow,” he replied, swinging his arms at his sides. “If you two just want to leave me home, I'll understand.”

“No way,” Meg said, taking each of the men by one arm. “Tonight it's the Three Musketeers. All for one, and one for all.”

The Simons lived just a couple of minutes away, on the other side of the road, in one of the modern glass and wood houses Meg and Peter had noticed on their first trip out. They left the car in a cleared patch, where other cars were already haphazardly parked, and approached the house like wary saboteurs. None of them was entirely sure where, among the jumble of rectangular boxes and decks of which the house was composed, the front door was located. From somewhere on the other side of the house they could hear music playing—something vaguely salsa—and then a voice, like a ship's captain calling from the quarterdeck, hailed them.

“It's right under your nose,” and they looked up to see a man in a madras jacket, gesturing with a highball glass at a set of spiraling wooden stairs.

“Thanks,” Peter replied, sheepishly, and they climbed the steps. At the top, the man introduced himself as Stanley Simon, their host, and when they explained who they were, he clapped Peter on the shoulder and said, “Right, right—my wife told me all about you. Glad you could make it. Come on around back—that's where all the action is.”

The house was surrounded on all sides by the elevated wooden platform, but in back the deck extended out twenty-five or thirty feet. Here, there were strings of red and yellow paper lanterns swinging in the night air; a long, bountifully laden buffet table attended by a black woman in a starched white uniform; three or four smaller tables with canvas chairs and furled awnings. A couple of dozen people, all of them middle-aged or older, were laughing and talking,
pointing at each other with toothpick hors d'oeuvres, rattling ice cubes in their glasses. The thickest concentration was at the bar table, where a black man also dressed in white served up the drinks with the efficiency and dispatch of a machine.

“Welcome back to the old plantation,” Meg whispered in Byron's ear at precisely the same moment that Peter whispered in hers, “Nice to see things are so well integrated out here.”

“What can I get you?” Simon asked. “There's nothing that O.P. here can't concoct—just name it.”

Meg had a white wine spritzer, Byron and Peter gin and tonic. O.P. registered each of them, as he handed them their glasses, with a quick flick of his eyes, before removing himself again to the distant plane he appeared to inhabit. Meg felt something like talons encircling her elbow, and turned to find Mrs. Simon at her side.

“And this has got to be your husband,” Mrs. Simon ventured. “I'm Anita Simon—I'm so pleased you could come. Didn't we get just a beautiful night for a party?” she said, beaming at each of them in turn and allowing time for agreement. “This morning they said something about rain and I nearly keeled over—but it just couldn't have turned out to be a nicer night, could it? Let me introduce you around,” she said, the sleeves of her scarlet blouse billowing out as she looked for a good place to start. “Stan, go and fetch the Nashes over here.”

Dutifully, Stan brought back the Nashes, and for a while they all made conversation about the weather, the new street signs in Passet Bay, the tree spraying for Dutch elm disease that was due to commence soon. Byron found himself eventually drawn aside by Mrs. Nash, who was from Virginia herself and fancied that she'd found in him a fellow rebel; Peter was carried off by Mr. Simon to meet a friend of his from a New York publishing house; and Meg found herself back with her
two original acquaintances, Mrs. Simon and her friend Mrs. Plettner. “Please, just call us Betty and Anita,” they insisted, and though it seemed a little awkward to Meg, she complied.

“But are you a professor, too?” Betty asked ingenuously.

“No, I leave that to my husband,” Meg replied, and she smiled at hearing herself use the words “my husband” she nearly always called him Peter. She figured she must be trying, despite her best intentions, to “fit in,” after all. “I have a studio in what used to be a boathouse, where I do some potting and some sculpture.”

The news of this was greeted with extraordinary enthusiasm. “So that's what you were doing at the Artworks shop!” Anita cried. They were both very excited about finding a real-live artist in their midst—when they learned that her pieces were actually
sold
through a gallery in Manhattan, they fairly swooned—and to Meg's great dismay, they
insisted
on coming for a private viewing sometime
very soon.
They were also, Anita hinted strongly, art lovers and collectors. The promise of a sale hung heavy in the air.

Peter was over by the buffet table, with Mr. Simon—Stan, as he would no doubt insist—and someone Meg hadn't met, a tall good-looking man, probably in his early sixties, with steel-rimmed glasses and wavy silver hair. She expected to see Peter wearing his all-purpose expression of interest and attentiveness—an expression she'd seen at such functions before, a mask for boredom and impatience—but she was surprised instead to hear his laughter suddenly erupt over something the third man was saying, and to see him shake his head vigorously in agreement. Stan looked wryly amused; with one raised finger, he caught O.P.’s eye, swirled the finger in a small circle to indicate another round for them all, then returned his attention to the conversation. Peter turned slightly, so
his face was no longer visible to her, but she could tell from the movement of his head and elbows that he was talking. Animatedly.

Byron, on the other hand, appeared to be in trouble. Mrs. Nash had recruited another, equally plump lady, and the two of them were double-teaming him at one of the little tables. Anita excused herself to check on the supply of guacamole, and Meg took the opportunity to go to his rescue. They were talking about the glories of colonial Williamsburg, and Byron was already looking a little glazed.

“It's the
authenticity
I love,” Mrs. Nash was saying. “Everything, right down to the knockers, is completely authentic.” Meg and Byron smiled discreetly.

From Williamsburg, they drifted on to the reproductions sold through the museum store at the Metropolitan, to flowers, to home decor, to the inevitable difficulty in finding good, reliable cleaning help these days. At some point, Byron tapped Meg's foot under the table, and she noticed that Larry Lazaroff, from the Artworks shop, had come in. Meg wouldn't have expected to see him there. He was younger than the other guests; he couldn't have the money most of them appeared to possess; and he just seemed as if he'd be a part of some very different, and funkier, social set. Still, he was there, and Meg thought to herself, maybe there's a stronger sense of community out here than she was accustomed to in Mercer. Maybe she shouldn't be so quick to judge Passet Bay.

Silver serving tureens were carried out onto the deck by O.P. and the maid—from the way they worked together, wordlessly but totally in sync, Meg could tell they were a married couple—and placed on the buffet table. One tray was filled with enchiladas, another with chili, a third with something else cheesy and hot. It dawned on Meg that the “theme” of the party—the salsa music playing on the stereo deck speakers, the
festive red paper lanterns—was Mexican, and that her own white peasant dress had been the perfect choice, after all. Byron, however, was only three forkfuls into his dinner plate before the sweat began to trickle down his forehead. He mopped at his brow with a wadded handkerchief, and Meg laughingly asked if he'd just swallowed a pepper.

“No, it's not the food,” he confessed, “it's this damn jacket. I feel like I'm wrapped in a blanket.”

“Then take it off,” Meg insisted. “No one will care. Look,” she said, surveying the deck quickly, “there's a man over there with his jacket thrown over the back of his chair, and that Lazaroff guy came in without wearing one at all.”

For a split-second more, Byron debated, then shrugged the familiar brown jacket onto the canvas back of his seat. “Now I feel naked,” he said. “What's happened to Peter, anyway? I don't even see him around.”

It was true—Meg hadn't seen him for the last half-hour either. He must have taken his dinner plate into the house, through the sliding glass doors; the gray-haired man was absent, too. Meg was considering going to find him when Lazaroff turned at the buffet table, spotted her, and hurried over with a heaping plate of enchiladas.

“Saw you guys on the way in,” he said, drawing up a chair to the table, “but I had a little business to drum up first.” He took an enormous mouthful of enchilada and retried beans and, before completely swallowing it, said, “Met your husband. Great guy.” He swallowed. “Really interesting. He and Caswell are hitting it off inside. Talking about Henry Miller, Paris in the forties, Nexus, Sexus, Plexus, all that shit.” Meg wondered why Peter hadn't introduced her to Caswell and drawn her—and Byron—into the conversation. Lazaroff rubbed a dab of melted cheese off his beard. “Stan, by the way, thinks you're hot stuff. He's partial
to blondes. I thought you might like to know,” he said, digging into his plate again. Meg didn't know what to say, or how she was supposed to react to this; she'd hardly met Stan Simon, and she couldn't imagine why he would be commenting on her to anyone. She wasn't complimented, but she
did
wonder, a little annoyed, exactly what it was he'd said. Lazaroff, she suspected, had given her the edited text of his remarks.