The Spirit Wood (15 page)

“There's really not much to see,” she warned.

“That's not what Larry Lazaroff says,” Anita replied as they started around the east wing of the house. Nikos stayed right where he was, watching them.

“How would Larry Lazaroff know? He's never set foot here.”

“Oh, he knows,” Anita said, like someone privy to secret information. “He tells me you buy only the best, and most professional, supplies and that only a real artist would know how to use such things.”

“You know, I've always liked it on this side of the tracks,” Joan said to Meg as they walked down the lawn toward the gleaming blue bay. “I told Jack that before I died, I wanted to have riparian rights. He put in a swimming pool.”

“That must be nice to have.”

“Looks nice. The water's a nice color. But having it there all the time makes you feel like you ought to
swim
in it once in a while. This used to be the boat-house?” she asked innocently as Meg fished in her pocket for the key to the door.

“Yes. Though somebody else had fixed it up for pottery even before I got here.”

Inside, Joan remained near the door, surveying the room with politely feigned interest, while Anita poked around like a customs inspector, reading all the labels on Meg's chemical bottles, running her finger along the surface of the stone work table, peering into the empty kiln. As if she'd been saving the best for last, she turned to the rack of shelves near the door, where the finished pieces were displayed, only when she'd finished taking in everything else.

“Oh, these are
beautiful,”
she said, timidly remov-
ing a deep-red ceramic bud vase and holding it toward the light from the windows. “I've never seen such a color.”

“That one I mixed myself,” Meg said, pleased, she discovered, even with a compliment from Anita. It was refreshing, and it dawned on her that she heard very little praise for her work, or herself, of late. “I call that color ‘blood lust,’ “ she said with a laugh.

“Lucky you're not in the business of naming lipsticks,” Joan remarked.

“Isn't it something,” Anita said, offering the vase to Joan for her approval. Joan took it, revolved it slowly in her long, thin hands, and then said, “Yes, yes it is.” She looked up at Meg with a touch of surprise, as if she hadn't really expected the work to be so good. She moved around to the front of the rack and studied the other pieces—the thick earth-colored tea set, the wide multicolored fruit bowls, the other bud vases, slender and smooth, in black and bone white—and then, crouching down to the bottom shelf, the pair of sculptured figures there.

“Those are just some experiments,” Meg explained shyly, “just some new things I've been trying.” No one had seen this work yet, and she wasn't sure how she felt about its being seen now.

One of the pieces was fairly conventional, a figure of a young woman, pensive, one arm folded across her bosom and holding the other arm near the shoulder. The other piece was more unusual, and particularly so for Meg: though this second figure could be the same young woman, in this piece she was nude, dancing, her hair blowing loose about her head, her arms flung out in a gesture of wild, even fierce, abandon. The clay surface had been roughly worked over, mottled and chopped at, with a palette knife, a technique that Meg had seldom before employed. But for this piece, which had sprung into her head full-blown, one cloudy afternoon when the only sound in the studio had been the
anxious lapping of the water outside, no other style had seemed appropriate; indeed, in her haste to sketch the contours of the figure and plot the proper armature and materials, she had never stopped to consider her decisions, but simply rushed ahead, intent on capturing that fleeting image before it evaporated as mysteriously as it had come. Nor had she wanted to pause and reflect; the figure had been troubling to her, in the way it had thrust itself into her mind and in its general tenor, and she had wanted not so much to create it as to rid herself of it, to execute it quickly and put it out of mind for good.

“Are these of the same model?” Joan said, asking the question that Meg herself had been unable to resolve. The first figure was loosely based on Leah, on an image Meg had preserved of her standing in the doorway of the dining room that first night she and Peter had stayed at Arcadia, when Nikos had come in and played his syrinx (she'd only learned the name of the instrument weeks later, from Byron; the Greek god Pan, he had told her, was reputedly its inventor). The second figure was very like Leah, a long-limbed, attenuated body, but Meg had never seen their housekeeper in any such pose, much less nude, and something told her it wasn't necessarily Leah, or anyone else she'd ever seen or known.

“That's a professional secret,” Meg replied, and when Joan looked mildly surprised at the evasion, added, “and mostly because I don't myself know if they're the same person or not.”

“You mean you just made up the pose, this girl, out of your head?” Anita asked earnestly, as if trying to grasp how such things as sculpture were done. “That's amazing,” she said, clucking her tongue. “How you artistic people do what you do.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I don't suppose—” She stopped herself as if debating whether she should go ahead or not. “I don't suppose you'd even
think
of donating, either one
of these sculptures or something else, whatever
you
decide, to our auction?” Despite all the disclaimers, it was clear she thought Meg would provide her with something. “I realize that you and Peter have done so much already, just letting us
hold
it here, but it would be such run if we could have something that you yourself
created
to add to the auction. I'm sure that we'd get an awfully nice bid for it.” Her eyes flicked over to Joan, and Meg wondered if the glance had indicated that the bidding for her piece might be, in a manner of speaking, rigged, that friends and partisans might be encouraged, in gratitude for the loan of the estate, to bid more generously than usual. Meg, again, saw no easy out and wound up promising to donate something, she couldn't say what just then, in time for the auction. She crossed the room and, as a way of signaling that the tour of her studio was now officially over, closed the ponderous lid of the kiln—Byron had helped her secure the base so that it no longer rocked so precariously—and then followed Joan and Anita out into the waning afternoon sunlight.

“How much exploring have you done here?” Anita asked as Meg secured the padlock on the door. “Have you been over all of the grounds?”

“Most, I think.”

Anita was looking over at the woods to the west. Then down toward the dock. “Such an unusual place,” she said, turning back to Meg. “And Peter's grandfather was such an unusual man.”

“So I hear,” Meg replied.

“But you never met him?”

“No.” She added that for all intents and purposes, Peter never had either.

“And Peter's parents?” Anita asked, as they ambled up toward the house.

What was this, the third degree? Meg said Peter's father had passed away long ago, and that his mother lived in New York. Enough was enough, she thought.

Joan seemed to think so, too; Meg thought she detected a cautionary glance at Anita.

“What do you think of that?” Anita asked as they approached the statue of the priapic satyr. Meg was reminded of Angelos, weeks before, doing the same thing.

“I try not to.”

“Oh, surely you're not upset by it,” Anita said. “Peter's not, is he?” She sounded genuinely concerned.

“I don't think he's losing any sleep over it,” Meg replied. It occurred to her that if she and Peter had been planning to
live
at Arcadia, she'd have had the thing removed altogether.

“I probably shouldn't admit it,” Anita said, laughing nervously, “but I think it's kind of sexy. Imagine being done by that,” she said, gazing up at the outrageously oversized member.

“Yes,” Joan said dryly, and with a faint smile, “imagine that.”

Then both of them laughed, presumably at Joan's acid delivery, before following Meg around the edge of the fountain and on into the house.

From the billiard room, they could hear the clicking of the balls colliding on the table, and the men's muffled voices. When they came through the arched doorway, Jack was leaning forward, demonstrating a shot; Peter was holding his own cue straight up and down, like an idle sentry with his rifle. On the raised platform, covered in quilted red leather, at the far end of the room, there was a tray, the one that Leah often served from, and on it Meg saw two wineglasses and one of the straw-covered bottles that Nikos used for his own homemade vintage.

“Never
push
the cue,” Jack was saying. “Let it
glide
through your fingers,” and he sent the white ball gently rolling down the green felt table, where it grazed one of the red balls, and caromed off the
bumper with sufficient velocity to touch the second red ball lightly and come to rest.

“What a beautiful room this is,” Anita declared, taking in the wooden paneling and the red leather, the cue rack and the Tiffany-style lamp suspended over the table. “It's so masculine.” Joan hunted out an ashtray and lit a cigarette. “Your wife does wonderful work,” Anita informed Peter, “and she's even volunteered to donate a specially commissioned piece—it's okay if I call it that, isn't it?—just for the auction. Something
connected
to animals and nature.” Meg suddenly realized that she
was
expected to do an altogether new piece expressly for the sale. Peter looked at her with some surprise, but approval, too.

“Has Jack been showing you the fruits of his misspent youth?” Joan asked, removing a flake of tobacco from her tongue with the tip of one finger.

“I don't think our friend here,” said Caswell, referring to Peter, “has spent his youth so well either. He's got a not bad touch at all.”

Leah appeared in the doorway and asked Meg if her guests would like something to drink. They settled on a pitcher of fresh lemonade, and when Leah returned to serve it, the women seated themselves, like spectators, on the leather deck. Through the high, narrow windows that ran along one side of the room, a pale golden light, the last of the afternoon sun, filtered in and melted into the denser gold cast by the hanging glass lamp. Anita chattered on about the auction-party, while the men moved quietly, smoothly, about the table, stroking the balls into effortless trajectories. To Meg, tired from the heat of the day, the noise of the parade, the unexpected confrontation in the car, their actions seemed almost mesmerizingly fluid, removed, slow. Joan's cigarette spun a lazy wreath of smoke into the air. A
Greek
theme, Anita announced, that's what the auction should revolve around. The house looked like a Greek temple—why not go with it? Meg,
finished with the lemonade in her glass, poured herself some of Nikos's wine. The auctioneer should wear a toga, the gavel should be a ... silver wine goblet! Peter retrieved, and sipped from, his own glass, said something—inaudible to Meg—to Jack, who laughed. The overhead light made the green felt of the table beat, with an emerald intensity, in Meg's eyes; she closed them for a moment, to rest them. The gazebo, on the back lawn, why, that could be filled with the items to be auctioned. The chairs for the bidders could be arranged on the grass around it. Meg took another sip of her wine; though it hadn't been chilled, it was oddly refreshing. Jack laid a friendly hand on Peter's shoulder; the words “topspin” and “English” came to Meg's ears. Caswell went back to the table. Peter, observing from the shadows, leaned slightly forward, one ankle crossed across the other, balancing himself with the cue. It was a classic pose, something from an antique sculpture or a French neoclassical painting. Poussin, Meg thought. Or Prud'hon. His black hair made a rich, dark frame for his tanned features, his white teeth. The cue was like a shepherd's staff. When it was his turn to make a shot, he smoothly unwound himself, moved to the edge of the table, into the halo of light. His bare arms held the polished stick, let it slide, back and forth, between his hands. He explained, in low tones, how he proposed to play the angles. Jack seemed skeptical, wished him luck. The tip of the cue addressed the ivory ball, retracted, then kissed it away. The ball sailed, glowing in the light, across the felt, grazed the edge of the first red ball, ricocheted neatly off a corner bumper, returned the entire length of the table, and rebounded again to click finally, satisfyingly, against the third ball. Jack shook his head in bemused admiration, and Peter, in a swift and natural way that Meg had never before seen in him, leapt nimbly into the air, the cue in one hand, his feet outstretched like a ballet dancer's, to celebrate his
shot. From his lips escaped a whistle of joy, breathy, immediate, but, again, unlike any sound Meg had ever heard him make. For just that split second, as he was held suspended in the far shadows of the room, he seemed, to Meg's sleepy eyes, indeed to be a figure from some pastoral scene, a cunning boy, unknowingly observed, at play in some deep green landscape.

Sixteen

M
EG'S DECISION TO
go to New York that day, apparently made before Peter had even awakened, came as something of a surprise to him. She'd seemed, for the past couple of days, a little quieter than usual, a little distant, but he'd assumed she was absorbed in her work. Or simply, well, relaxed. In any event, it hadn't concerned him very much—he had his own work to do. That damned dissertation, stuck in the same place for over a week while he struggled to elucidate the connections between Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, only to find the whole thing, even what he thought were his most original points, laid out, item for item, in a monograph over twenty years old. What
was
the point, he thought, of sitting in that stuffy library all day, every day, grinding out dozens of pages of useless “scholarly” prose, to be read by dyspeptic Frank Dunlop, and three other people in the department, and then buried forever in the stacks of the university library. Why was he wasting his time, his mind, his life itself. When he'd tried to explain what he was doing to Leah, one day when she brought him his lunch on a tray, she'd regarded him with a look of such utter incomprehension—not confused, not respectful, not derogatory, just
uncomprehending
—that he'd been paralyzed in his chair for hours after. Maybe hers was the legitimate, the reasonable, reaction to what he
was doing, the reaction of anyone who knew what life was all about—that it wasn't dropping into a chair each day, banished from the sun and the sky and the trees, to pound a tinny machine and clutter up sheets of paper. More and more, he had been feeling the urge to spend his time outdoors, to breathe the air off the water, to bask in the sun, even to run, barefoot, across the lawns and through the groves of trees. At night, in bed, he sometimes felt his legs twitching nervously, as if they were charged with unspent energies. Several times, he'd gotten up, stealthily, so as not to wake Meg, and gone out onto the balcony off their bedroom. More than once he could swear he'd heard, borne on the night wind, the distant sound of a flute, just a few fleeting notes, presumably Nikos tootling from his hammock. The moonlight, playing across the sculpted satyr below, at times imbued it with an eerie illusion of movement.

Meg was going to meet with the New York dealer, she explained, at her gallery downtown, and see firsthand how her pieces were displayed there. Afterwards, she was going to go and visit her old friend Jackie, from the pottery co-op in Mercer, at Jackie's parents’ place, a townhouse on the Upper East Side. She'd catch a train back to Passet Bay sometime the next afternoon; she'd call and let him know exactly when.

As they'd waited on the platform for the train to New York, Peter had finally brought up the question he'd been trying to decide all the way to the station: should Meg give his mother a call, or even try to see her, while she was in the city? On the one hand, he thought, it might be a nice surprise for his mother, and politically wise since she was still terribly upset about their occupying Arcadia; on the other hand, it didn't seem fair to Meg to make her face the brunt of his mother's displeasure alone. How did Meg feel about it,
Peter had asked. Would it be worth the trouble, or would she just as soon skip the whole thing?

Meg hadn't answered immediately. She'd turned her head away, to look down the track; the train was already a few minutes late. She seemed anxious to be on her way; she'd seemed in a hurry all morning. “Can I play it by ear,” she replied, “see how long it takes me at the gallery, see what time Jackie wants to get together, and then see if I have any time left?”

Fine with him, Peter had said. Privately, he was just as happy not to have to make a decision either way. Let it be up to Meg; he could live with it, whatever happened. When the train
did
pull in, there was an awkward moment when they said good-bye, Meg ducking her head toward his for a quick kiss on the cheek, Peter, not expecting it, adjusting his sunglasses at just that moment. His knuckles had brushed her lip, and his glasses had become entangled in her hair. They'd both tried to laugh it off, self-consciously, and she'd had to jump onto the train while he fumbled to slip the earpiece back in place. It was funny, to find themselves so out of sync. Funny, too, to be left, alone, on the platform. There had been very few occasions, during the entire time they'd known each other, when they'd had to part at train stations or airports. Most trips, even short ones, they had taken together.

At the house, everything was even quieter than usual now: Byron's door stood open, to keep his room aired; Dodger, left behind for the week, was asleep on his blue bath mat in the kitchen. Peter wondered where Leah was—not that her absence was out of the ordinary. He glanced down the short hall to her room; the white door was closed, as always, and not a sound came from behind it.

For a while, he sat at his desk in the study, staring at his notes and papers. When, at one point, he checked
his watch and realized that twenty minutes had passed and he hadn't done a jot of work—he couldn't even have said where his thoughts had been—he flicked off the light and pushed his chair away from the desk. He resented it, sitting chained to this chair, and his dissertation, frankly, bored him. The only way to get it out of the way, of course, was to finish the damned thing, to somehow find the energy and stamina to see it through. He eyes inadvertently focused on the solid black box—a pyxis, Byron had told him it was called—that he now kept behind the locked lattice-screen of the bookcase. The box was ancient, part of his grandfather's collection, but the contents of it, a little gift from Jack Caswell, were new—and used sparingly,
could
help him get the job done. But was that, he thought, any way to do it? Sure, he'd be able to write like the wind, but would what he wrote wind up making even the slightest bit of sense?

Something else occurred to him, too—that in addition to feeling bored, he also felt, with Meg away for the day, like a kid in the classroom when the teacher's stepped out. He realized, not proudly, that a lot of what normally kept him there, cranking away, was knowing that Meg was around and about, and that he'd have to face her, and make up some excuse for not being at work, if he left the study. Not that she'd ever accuse him of anything like sloth, not that she'd lash him back upstairs and lock the study door behind him. Meg wasn't like that; she knew how sensitive he was on the subject of his work, and she wouldn't say anything. But that was just it—she wouldn't
say
anything; he'd have to find the disappointment in her eyes. And he'd see it there for sure, no matter how hard she tried to disguise it. She wanted him to do well, to complete his doctorate, to be content with himself. And sometimes, though he knew it was unreasonable, though he hated himself for it, he resented her, too—for her caring, her concern . . . and above all, for her
knowledge of him. Seeing himself through her eyes, as he often did, he was stripped of the easy excuses, the self-justifications, the evasions, that he might otherwise have employed. She left him, oddly, feeling defenseless against himself.

In just the same absentminded way that he'd lost twenty minutes staring at the same page on his desk, he now found himself shuffling down the front stairs. In the billiard room, he took three or four shots before losing interest in that, too, and leaving the cue laid flat across the table. He started to head into the kitchen, remembered that Dodger was in there, and not wanting to deal even with the dog just now, left the house through the massive front doors.

The sun was shining in a cloudless sky; it would be another hot, bright, dry day, as most of the days had been so far. He stepped out of his shoes and left them, like lonely footprints, on the porch. Mincingly, he made his way along the gravel drive; the soles of his feet were tender, but it felt good to be barefoot, outdoors. He enjoyed the uneven feeling of the earth, the sharp pebbles, the hard-packed dirt, and then, when he came around the west wing of the house, the blades of grass springing up between his toes. Where was he going? To Nikos. He knew it, he realized, without ever having thought it. He was going to Nikos's cottage, to tell him there was shrubbery blocking a bend in the driveway—branches had brushed against the side of the car when he'd taken Meg to the station that morning. Most of the time, the unruly look of the place, the untrimmed hedges, the felled, but unremoved, tree trunks, didn't bother him; if anything, he'd come rather to like the ungoverned, natural profusion of the grounds. It struck him as original. But there had to be some practical limits to the wildness of the place; some things still needed to be done.

As the summer had progressed, the garden plots around Nikos's cottage had blossomed into a dense
green carpet of leaves and stalks and vines, dotted with deep-red tomatoes and yellow and purple wild flowers. The tree in the front yard, a huge and ancient oak, had grown heavy with foliage and seemed to have bent down and enclosed the house below in a cooling, shaded embrace. It was a scene out of a Hardy novel, Peter was thinking, all rustic simplicity, peace, and charm—until Fifi and Fritz, in the kennel in back, smelled him approaching and began to bark furiously. He could hear the rattling, too, of the wire fence as they hurled themselves against it.

“Shut up!” Nikos called from inside the house.

Peter rapped on the frame of the screen door; when there was no immediate response, he knocked again. The door rattled loosely, unlocked.

“Nikos?” he said through the screen.

There was another pause, then the sound of a wooden chair scraping against the floor. Then jangling—the open clasps on the familiar rubber boots. Something was said inside, in low tones, and Peter was just about to call Nikos's name again when a figure, thin and graceful, appeared to open the door. Leah.

“Hello,” Peter said, feeling suddenly awkward. “Hi. I didn't expect to find you here.” Why it seemed so odd—Nikos, after all, was her father—he couldn't have said. This was probably where she disappeared to, more often than not.

“Were you looking for me?” she asked, still framed in the half-open door.

“No, I was actually hoping to talk to Nikos.”

“Then come in and do it,” Nikos called boisterously from inside. “Leah, get out of the doorway and let the man in.”

Leah stepped back, and Peter entered the house. He'd never been inside before; he and Nikos had always consulted at the main house, or out of doors. For a few seconds, he had to adjust his eyes to the dimness of the room; the ceiling was low, and criss-
crossed by thick wooden beams; from them dangled strings of onions, red peppers, herbs with unfamiliar aromas that Peter could not identify. One of the strings grazed the top of his head.

“That's rosemary,” Nikos said, pointing above where Peter stood. “I grow it myself.” Nikos was sitting on a yellow vinyl chair, part of a dinette set, and across the table from him, bare-chested except for a dirty towel around his neck, was Angelos. Newspapers were spread on the floor around his chair.

“It's haircut day,” Nikos announced. Leah had already taken her place again, behind Angelos, with a scissors in her hand. “You can be next if you want.”

“Might not be such a bad idea,” Peter joked, pulling at his own shaggy thatch.

“Have a drink first,” Nikos said, pushing the third chair out from the table with one of his booted feet, “a welcome to my house.”

Angelos sat stolidly, head bent forward, while Leah clipped away at the long, lank hair that hung down his neck. Peter poured a small portion of Nikos's familiar wine into an empty plastic tumbler.
"Stin egiasoi,”
Nikos said, raising his own glass.

Peter repeated the salute as closely as he could. They drank the wine, and Nikos eagerly refilled Peter's glass.

“I am honored to have you here,” Nikos said, indicating, by twitching one finger between Peter's glass and his own, that they should drink again. Though he didn't really want to—he'd meant to do at least a little more writing that afternoon—Peter lifted the glass and toasted once more. “But I have to ask myself,” Nikos continued with a little wink,
"why
you are here.”

The effect of this wine, Peter noticed once again, was almost immediate; it left him feeling, not tipsy, not languorous, not sated, but
open
somehow, released. It seemed to expand his throat as he swallowed and
course directly into his veins from there. After drinking enough of it, as he had that day in the billiard room with Jack Caswell, he'd become convinced that he could actually feel it, undiluted, surging beneath his skin. Angelos grunted, and Leah muttered an apology—she must have nicked him with the scissors.

“It's nothing much,” Peter said. “There's some brush extending into the driveway, about a hundred yards short of the gate. I thought, when you've got a chance, if you could clear it away . . .” He still wasn't accustomed to issuing orders, instructions even, to anyone. They always wound up sounding more like suggestions.

Nikos listened impassively; when he heard what had to be done, he glanced at Angelos, as if to be sure that Angelos understood the job. Leah pulled the barber towel away from his neck; his fat white chest was hairless, pulpy and soft looking. His nipples were small, colored an angry red, and more protuberant than most men's. Peter found him a very unappetizing sight.

“It'll be done,” Nikos replied, laying one palm flat against the table, the stubby fingers splayed out and upwards. Angelos rose from the chair, his belly swinging forward over his jeans. Leah shook the towel over the newspapers, then knelt down to gather them together. Nikos stopped her.

“There is one more still to do,” he said, one black rubber boot pinning the newspapers to the floor. “We promised our guest a haircut.” He smiled ingratiatingly at Peter, and with a broad flourish invited him to take Angelos's chair. Leah stayed where she was, staring up at Peter with solemn dark eyes.

“Really, that's okay,” Peter said. “I
do
think it can wait at least a while longer. I've got some work to do right now, anyway.” He started to get up from his chair, but Angelos had lumbered around behind him, blocking the feeble light from the screen door; Nikos
shook his head slowly and said disdainfully, “Work, work—work can wait. How often does a pretty girl like this offer to cut your hair—or maybe you don't think she
is
a pretty girl,” he said, raising his eyebrows quizzically.