Lost in the Forest (30 page)

At some point later, a car waked him. He looked at the clock. It was two-thirty. He lay there awhile, and then he had to take a piss. He sat up and grabbed the crutches, made his way to the bathroom in the dark. There was a small, high window next to the toilet,
opening out onto the driveway and the backyard—the cement pad, the shed, the fig tree. After he flushed, he turned his head and looked out through it. He could see the car, George Somebody’s car. The windows were silvery with fog. Shapes moved inside, they pushed rhythmically against the driver’s-side window. Mark knew he should turn away, but he didn’t. He stood leaning on his crutches and watched for a while, feeling a response that combined arousal and shame.

These were his daughters’ lives, their real lives. The deep, submerged nighttime world of love and pain and sex. And he knew nothing at all about it. Nothing. Where had he been living? Why hadn’t he understood any of this before? Or cared to understand?

He’d left it to John, he thought. All of this. Because he didn’t
want
to understand this. Because he wouldn’t have known—because he
didn’t
know—how to be a father to them through all this. That was it, wasn’t it? It was why he had stayed in bed when Daisy was weeping, why he couldn’t begin to imagine what she was weeping about. It was why he was standing here in a kind of prurient shock, watching Emily fuck this unattractive idiot.

When they were little, when it was easy to love them, he had loved his daughters. He’d entered their games, he’d roughhoused with them, he’d been tender to them. He’d loved being their father then. But now, now that they were young women, he felt confused about how to do it, not ready yet to be a parent to them.

“Not
ready
,” he muttered as he turned away from the window, full of contempt for himself.

T
HE NEXT
Saturday night, he and Daisy went to Eva’s house—Emily was out on her last date with George. Eva was having a small party, what she called a post-holiday party. Gracie and Duncan, and Maria and Fletcher were there, and several of Eva’s neighbors had been invited too—the Bauers, the Fields.

When they arrived, Eva asked Daisy to help serve wine and drinks, and she began to move in and out of the butler’s pantry, carrying glasses to the adults. She was wearing a white blouse and
a black skirt and heels—high heels. She had lipstick on, which he’d noted in the car on the way over. She looked years older than she usually did. And lovely, he would have said. Somehow the stillness, the heaviness that had seemed part of who she was when she was younger had lifted, who knew how or why. Now a kind of nervous animation livened her face, made it striking.

Everyone was milling around, greeting one another, talking about their holidays. There was much discussion too of the Fields’ dog, a chocolate lab, who had had puppies three days before. Naomi Field invited Theo to come over and see them, and somehow, within the first fifteen minutes or so of the party, it was decided that the whole group would make a pilgrimage. Mark, who had just laboriously made his way up the front steps, who had gratefully sunk into one of Eva’s overstuffed chairs, leaning his crutches against its arm, who had just been served a drink, shook his head
no
when Eva ducked back in to the living room to ask if he wasn’t coming along.

She raised her eyebrows at him.

“It’s just too much work, Eva.” He held his hands up: This. Me. Life.

“Okay,” she said. She left.

He heard them all troop out the kitchen door; he heard their voices and laughter crossing the backyard. He sat back in his chair and drank his wine. The living room was picked up for the party, the usual books and objects put away somewhere. Eva’s tree was still up, by the front windows. It was strung with small white lights, and decorated, as always, with old small toys of the children’s—tiny stuffed animals and dolls, little cars. He remembered the ritual of decoration, and Eva’s insistence on certain ways of doing things. It had irritated him occasionally. Now he felt sorry for himself for having lost this, too.

When they returned, they stayed in the kitchen with Eva, talking, as people often did at her house while she cooked and assembled the meal. They had forgotten him. He’d have to get up and go in there in a minute. He heard someone in the butler’s
pantry behind him again, opening the small refrigerator there. Daisy, no doubt. It wasn’t Eva. She was still in the kitchen—he could hear her talking.

And then he heard Duncan’s voice behind him too, in the butler’s pantry, pitched low, for Daisy alone to hear. “Perhaps you could pour me a glass of gin while you’re pouring. Gin lightly touched with vermouth.”

There was what sounded like a too-long silence. Then Daisy said, “Well, perhaps I could. But would I? Will I?” Her voice was light, teasing.

Mark was electrified, suddenly.

“Let me rephrase, then,” Duncan said. “Under what conditions would you consent to pour me a glass of gin, Daisy, my dove?”

After a moment, Daisy said slowly, “Well, first of all, you’d have to say please.”

Mark’s heart was pounding. But why? None of this was so remarkable. Daisy had spoken in something like this slightly snotty way even to him.

“Ah, how could I have forgotten?” There was a silence, and Mark had the conviction—he would have sworn it—that Duncan was touching Daisy. “Please.” This was spoken softly, like a caress. “Please, Daisy.”

Daisy was almost whispering when she answered him: “And then you’d have to say, ‘Pretty please.’ ” There was something so sexual, so breathless, and to Mark, so horrifying in this that his hands lifted involuntarily.

Duncan’s voice was low too when it came, intimate. “Pretty please, Daisy.” Mark waited for a long moment.
“Pretty
please,” Duncan said. “Will you?”

Mark was up before he thought about it, and in his sudden motion, he knocked his crutches off the edge of the chair where he’d leaned them. They clattered to the floor. He picked them up laboriously, and set them under his arms. By the time he’d hobbled around the corner, there was no one in the butler’s pantry; and when he entered the kitchen, Daisy was standing with her back to
him, filling Naomi Field’s wineglass from the bottle she carried, and Duncan was leaning against the counter, seemingly listening to Gracie talking to Harry Field.

“Oh, Mark! What you missed!” Eva cried, spotting him. “They were adorable! Enough to make you believe in the possibility of perfection in this life.”

His heart was still pounding in his ears, his breath still felt short, but he smiled at his ex-wife and said, “Well, that’s something I’d like to believe in. I’m sorry to have missed it, then.”

Chapter Fourteen

D
AISY AND MARK
were the first to leave—he was tired, he said, and Daisy didn’t mind, she was ready to go. They drove in silence, Daisy at the wheel of the truck, laboriously shifting when she had to. She was glad to get out of St. Helena so she could just drive.

Her thoughts were jumbled, moving around fast, partly because of the two glasses of wine she’d had. She was thinking of the events of the evening. Of Duncan and the terrible fight they’d had a few days before. Then of his touch tonight, his hand moving up her leg under her skirt in the pantry—thank God they’d heard Mark in the living room and gotten out of there before he saw anything!

She was thinking of something Andrea Bauer had said to her—that she looked ravishing tonight.
Ravishing
, Daisy thought, and smiled. Then she was thinking of the puppies, helpless and dependent, curled blindly together against their mother, and of how they smelled, sweet and slightly urinous, when she picked them up and held them. She was thinking of how glad she was that she no longer had to invent things to talk about with Mark. Of how she’d gotten used to being with him, these last few weeks. How she
liked being with him, her handsome father. She looked over at him, and met his gaze, looking back. His face seemed sad, somehow. His hair was a little too long, curling over his collar.

He said, “Know what I think, Daisy?”

She smiled. “You know, Dad, I can’t say I do.”

“I think we should make this arrangement permanent.”

“What arrangement?”

“This one. Where you live with me.”

She was startled. It was inconceivable. Where was this coming from? She had a room, a life, at home. She stared at him for a few seconds. He was watching her steadily. “Have you talked to Eva about this?” she asked. “Is this something you guys worked out together?”

“Not a word. I swear.” He seemed to be thinking for a moment. He said, “But would that be so bad, if Eva and I were concerned about you? Talked about you?”

“But why
would
you be concerned about me?”

“Why.” His voice was toneless.

She looked over at him. “Yes.
Duh
. Why?”

Again that steady gaze back. He didn’t say anything. Then he looked away from her, out the window. His hand came up, his chin rested on it. His crutches, riding between them, had slid over and were resting on her arm, she was suddenly aware of their touch.

“I mean, I’m doing fine in school. I help out at the store.”

He said, without looking at her, “There were the piano lessons.”

“Well, yeah.”

“
Yeah
,” he said.

So Eva had told him. They
had
talked.

“Why did you skip them?” he asked.

“I already discussed this with Mom.” She had lied. She had said she hated the lessons, that they bored her, that she’d cut them to have more time for basketball. Eva’s eyes had darkened, she knew this was bullshit; but she hadn’t argued, she hadn’t contradicted Daisy.

“So I
should
be talking about you with Eva, if I want to know what’s going on.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

They drove in silence for a while, through the green light at the end of Lincoln Avenue, past the lighted gas station and the drive-in. Then it was night again. “Coming back to my idea,” he said.

She didn’t answer.

“The arrangement.”

She was suddenly aware that he seemed nervous, maybe because he was, after all, asking her for something. “I don’t know, Dad,” she said. She was trying to make her voice kind. “It seems … wacky.”

“Lots of kids whose parents are divorced live with their fathers.” He was looking out the window again. Maybe he could see the moon out there. Everything seemed touched with its silvery light.

“But I haven’t,” she said. “I’ve lived with Mom. I mean, it would be bizarre to change at this point.” Though Daisy was thinking about it, just trying to imagine how it might be.

“But maybe it would be good for you to change.”

She pulled up at the light at Petrified Forest Road and put the truck in neutral. She looked over at him. “Good, why? Why good?”

“I don’t know. I think maybe you and Eva have more or less … run out of gas, in terms of your relationship.”

“God! What does
that
mean?”

“I suppose, that there’s not much communication between you.”

“Oh yeah. And there’s, like,
so
much between you and me.” The light turned green, and she put the truck in first, grinding the gears slightly.

After a moment he said, “There’s more, I think, than there is between you and Eva. And there might be even more than that. Sometimes we really talk.”

She snorted.

“This is a stupid idea? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Well, it’s just like we’ve
really talked
about three times in my life.”

“But maybe that’s ’cause we don’t live together.”

She didn’t answer. She couldn’t even believe, in some ways, that Mark was serious.

“Who
do
you talk to, Daisy?” he asked, after a minute or two had passed. “Who do you let into your very private Daisy-ness?”

There was something almost sarcastic in his voice, and she looked over at him, hurt and startled. He was sitting back, his arm along the back of the seat, looking at her appraisingly.

“
Dad
,” she said, a complaint, a request.

Then they were passing Tubbs Lane. She remembered to signal, and she pulled into the long dirt drive Mark shared with his neighbors. Under the beam of the truck’s lights, the jackrabbits, with their absurdly long ears, froze, then scuttled off to either side. Daisy had to steer carefully to avoid the ruts and potholes left by the rains. The truck jolted and rattled. She turned into her father’s driveway and pulled up on the cement pad. She stopped the engine. They sat a moment.

“Why is this coming up now?” she asked. She had turned in her seat to look at her father, pushing the crutches back toward him.

He lifted his hands. “You’ve been living with me. I like it. I’d like more of it. I like you.”

She made a gesture, dismissing this.

“What? You don’t believe me?”

“Oh, sure, Dad. And what about when you can drive again and I’m living with you and Emily is gone and you want to resume your
dating
life again. Where is that going to leave me?”

His mouth opened; she heard his breath draw in. Then he said, “I think we should both try skipping the dating life for a while. That would be my plan, anyway.” His voice was neutral, careful.

“That’s like a … someone who drinks, promising to go on the wagon.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Who, me? I don’t
have
a dating life, Dad.”

“Then what would you call it?” He leaned forward a little now.

“Call what?” She was aware of the dogs barking in the house, a distant hysteria.

“Your social life,” he said. “Your social interests.”

She made a face. “I think you have me confused with some other daughter of yours.”

“I’m not confusing you with anyone, Daisy. I’m concerned about you.”

She hated this. She hated that word. She hated the way his face looked, so intent on her, so
serious
. She said, “The dogs are barking.”

“Fuck the dogs!” His fist hit the dash on the first word. “Talk to me!” He was almost yelling. He was ugly.