The Wood of Suicides (13 page)

I
HAD
little more than a week left of life as I knew it. Underrested, undernourished, yet essentially intact, my life as I knew it was ebbing. I had been up past lights out working on a masterpiece of a letter, which had since been folded and sealed into the thin white hope of an envelope, stamped with the S.C.C.S. crest. Even after slipping it into my satchel for the day, I still didn’t know whether I actually intended on giving it to him—and, if so, how I would achieve the task. Handing it to him face-to-face would be too embarrassing; leaving it behind for him to discover, on my desk or among his papers, could too easily go wrong—lost, overlooked, fallen into the wrong hands, or sucked up by some cleaner’s soulless vacuum. The best way, I thought, would be to catch his eye and drop it pointedly as I passed him or to visit him at his desk and—after much fidgeting and sweet, irrelevant questioning about the upcoming essay—place it before him before moving along, no explanations given. By the time that his class came around, however, last period of the day, I still hadn’t decided on a plan of attack and was beginning to question the validity of my “masterpiece.”

Worse than that, the man whose eye I hoped to catch was making the task almost impossible for me. He hardly gave me a second glance when I entered the room, and couldn’t be drawn by any of the showy gestures or looks I shot his way. In fact, he wasn’t at all himself that afternoon, but in a state of distraction, drumming his fingers on the tabletop and looking out of the window every few minutes. Halfway through the lesson, having instructed us to revise for Tuesday’s in-class essay, he got up from his chair and left the room altogether.

I watched the clock anxiously. All around me, the murmurs of conversation were rising, reveling in his absence, as I counted ten minutes, fifteen minutes, of him being gone. It was clear to me then that he did not care for me at all; that he had never viewed his classes with me as anything other than work, time to be wiled. I felt ashamed, and worse, dead depressed, at the thought of the letter in my bag—less a masterpiece than a total embarrassment. No, he didn’t care at all: not for my face, nor my legs, nor my mind, nor, least of all, for my feelings. I had no claim whatsoever on his heart.

As I was thinking this, there came a rapping on the classroom door. A woman who I’d never seen before peeked her head into the room and, flustered at finding it occupied, seemed about to slide it shut again, when she caught the sympathetic eye of Christina Tucci. Half-stepping into the room, the woman—slender, neatly dressed, aged in her mid-to-late thirties—leaned across to Christina, whispering something behind a dainty hand. The pale gold of her wedding band caught the light from the ceiling. Her silky blond hair, which was cut to her chin, flashed with the same light. Christina pointed outside and the woman smiled, shyly mouthing a thank you. She was gone as suddenly as she had come.

The trouble was, she wasn’t gone. If only I’d kept my eyes from following her figure out of the door, and closed my ears to the murmurings around me, I could’ve prevented the fatal knowledge from dawning. There was a stirring of curiosity about the room, in which I heard the word repeated: wife, wife. It was not every day that we caught a glimpse of a teacher’s spouse.

I watched through the slice of doorway, along with the rest of the class, as the lady was waylaid in the hallway by our dark-haired master. There was an upturning of palms on his part, a rueful shrug, before he glanced at his watch, nodded in the direction of the teachers’ lounge, and kissed her briskly on the cheek. I noted bitterly that in her low, sling-back heels she reached as high as his cheekbone—the same height I was when I stood before him in my oxfords.

“You can go early, sir, if you have somewhere else to be,” Marcelle quipped when he re-entered the room. He laughed off the comment, yet, I noticed, was unable to bring himself to look in the direction whence it had come. The last ten minutes of the lesson were taken up by his transparent attempts to make up for forty whole minutes of neglect—something that I hated him for, with every splinter of my shattered heart. As the bell went, he wished us a good weekend: “. . . though not too good. You have your essays to write on Tuesday.” I could not even begin to imagine how I would survive until then.

W
HILE
ANOTHER
would have fled the scene at once, to lick her wounds in private, I was intent on making the bad situation worse for myself. Having shaken off my friends at the nearest bathroom, I turned back in the direction of my locker, possessed by a dangerous desire to see more. My hands were shaking as I turned my combination; I hung my head, concealed doubly by the cold metal door and the warm curtain of my auburn curls. I stood that way for ten deep breaths as schoolgirls filtered out of the area, attempting to dull the thudding of my heart. At last, I sensed movement farther ahead, and peered over the top of my locker. Sure enough, coming from the faculty lounge was Mr. Steadman, clad in his navy sport coat and arm-in-arm with his lady. I closed the door of my locker promptly, pressing an armload of books to my chest, and started forth in their direction with my chin held high. Steadman had his head inclined toward his wife and was speaking with small, intimate gestures. My eyes flashed at him, black and bright with pride’s suppressed tears. With my shield of books and my hair streaming out behind me, I was impossible to overlook. As I neared him, I saw something anxious come into his eyes—a pleading, craven look. His lips faltered on his story. This acknowledgment lasted only a fraction of a second, before his eyes glossed over and the factitious flow of his gestures was resumed. I lowered my eyes. We passed one another. She saw nothing, nothing.

In my chest, my dulled heart was hammering once again, spreading hot poison through my body. Angry tears burned at the corners of my eyes. Stopping at a trashcan, I rummaged in my bag for the envelope and shredded the whole thing to pieces, cursing his cowardice.

I
F
I didn’t end things then, it was only out of spite—a desire to haunt, to hurt the one who had hurt me. I had considered, among more drastic measures, not attending his classes that week; on Tuesday morning, however, I was there to write my essay and avoid his shining coward’s eyes. I avoided his eyes as he handed me my question sheet. Noticing my coolness, he was swift to move along, down-headed and in no doubt about his culpability. He didn’t linger to speak with any of the other girls—something I might have been consoled by, had my spirit not been so broken. I wrote steadily, dutifully, intent on closing my mind to the awareness of his gray herringbone trousers and his gleaming belt buckle as he made his rounds. One thing was clear: I would never be free as long as I desired him.

The lesson left me more depressed than I’d begun it. My attendance had done nothing but broaden the gulf between us, into something that could not be bridged without excusing his disloyalty. How unfair it seemed to me that I should be the one to relinquish my pride, when it was
he
who had behaved badly, who had undone all our weeks of delicate maneuverings and hard-won intimacies with one indelicate action.

Though I intended to treat him haughtily, I was in fact meeker than ever. I didn’t think I could look at him without tears welling up in my eyes, or speak to him without my voice betraying me, dissolving into sobs. I could scarcely look anywhere but at my own feet, shuffling between classes, and didn’t dare utter a word to anyone, for fear of dislodging the lump in my throat. Over my melancholy, I wore a mask of blankness, which never fully disguised the downward quirking of the corners of my mouth.

I felt as if I’d been thinned, flattened, drained of all color. In the hallways, laughter scattered all around me, as I was elbowed, battered, pushed from place to place. November had begun, and I had taken to wearing my gray school sweater every day, a garment that made my complexion appear more whitewashed than ever and the shadows beneath my eyes a deeper reddish purple. Black stockings made pins of my slim legs. I was far from the near-naked girl he’d discovered in greener days, beneath the laurel trees. Instead, I was like the dead leaf in that poem of Verlaine’s, which we recited that week during French class.

Les sanglots longs

Des violons

De l’automne

Blessent mon cœur

D’une langueur

Monotone.

Tout suffocant

Et blême, quand

Sonne l’heure,

Je me souviens

Des jours anciens

Et je pleure

Et je m’en vais

Au vent mauvais

Qui m’emporte

Deçà, delà,

Pareil à la

Feuille morte.
¹

All choked up and pale, I was in the hall when the hour sounded for fourth period, gathering my books from the locker. It was Friday, the end of a week that had been nothing but an exercise in avoidance and self-abasement. I had been avoiding trips to the locker, avoiding routes that took me past his classroom, particularly in the onrush between one period and another. By some fateful slip of mind, however, I found myself back there to fetch my biology book, just as he was standing by the door and farewelling the last of his sophomores. He had a free period then, I knew. Framed in his doorway with his hands on his hips, he was looking away, probably pondering whether to spend the hour in the staffroom or to stay where he was. I thought that I would be safe, in my gray-sweatered plainness, to slip by him. Boldly, foolishly, he intercepted my sharp elbow, stopping me in my tracks and pronouncing my name with keen sonority. “Laurel!”

I don’t know why he did it: whether it was instinct, a moment’s amnesia, or whether he thought that the silence between us had simply gone on for too long, and wished to make it up to me, to force himself upon me, to smother my scruples with smiling friendliness. As I turned around to look at him, however, his hand still grasping my elbow, I knew I’d been right in keeping my eyes from his: I wasn’t strong enough to sustain even a moment’s contact. I looked at him in a shock of agony. As predicted, the tears had sprung.

He knew, had to know, what it was all about and that it was all his doing. I almost felt sorry for him, so quickly did his smile fade and his good intentions dissipate. I was not the woman for him: I was nothing but heartache, exasperation, needless melancholy. At the same time, I was aware that he couldn’t be trusted; that the classroom behind him was empty and would be empty for some time; that he was only a matter of heartbeats, a tug of my elbow, and a few whispered words away from pulling me into that room with him. I wanted it; I couldn’t bear it. I broke away.

I
WALKED
to the woods with my hands inside my coat pockets, fondling the canister of my father’s pills as another might have fondled a revolver. In fact, I didn’t have much need for the coat: it was a day of glare and white clouds, thick enough to trap whatever warmth came through. Having dumped my satchel in the dormitory, however, I had nowhere else to keep the pills. Besides, I was prepared to wait until nightfall, by which point it would no doubt be cooler.