The Spirit Wood (18 page)

“I've almost got it,” she said. “Don't move.” He felt her with exquisite care pinning the sliver between two of her fingernails and drawing it slowly out. Now he wished that he
could
have another taste of Caswell's Scotch.

“There,” she murmured, inspecting the culprit between her fingers. “It looks to me like a piece of the boathouse.” She held it up for Peter to see: a slim shard of wood the length of a match, dyed a pale pink with his blood. It did appear to be a sliver of board, rather than a twig. Leah flicked it onto the tabletop. “We've really got to wash your foot off now,” she said. She crossed the room to the work sink, directed the faucet away from the old coffee can in which assorted tools were soaking, and returned with a wet paper towel. She dabbed the blood away. “It still needs an antiseptic.”

“I'm sure there's something up at the house,” Peter said. “Thanks for getting it out.”

Leah lowered his foot again. “Even bathing it in salt water might help,” she said softly, without raising her eyes.

Peter, though still a little foggy from the excessive
food and drink at the Caswells, took note of her embarrassment. Along with a tiny flutter in his own stomach. A midnight swim—that's what she was suggesting. His first impulse, natural and ingrained, was to decline. Thanks, but no—that way lies trouble. He remembered her in the blue bathing suit. But the impulse, quickly as it had come, was engulfed and destroyed, as if by some new and powerful antibody in his bloodstream. It was gone without a trace, and he was hobbling toward the door, one hand on Leah's shoulder, one of her arms loosely wrapped around his waist; they turned out the light, pulled the door closed with a loud whomping sound in the swollen frame, and made their way around the back of the boathouse and then along the shore to the secluded gate that Leah had first shown him.

By night, the glade was even more mysterious, a pocket of darkness etched in silver by the light of the nearly full moon. The trees that surrounded it formed an impenetrable black wall, the gaps between them even blacker than the trunks themselves. Leah helped Peter to the edge of the water, where he lowered himself onto one of the larger flat rocks and, with his pants leg rolled to the knee, dipped his foot in. The water was warmer, and the salt less stinging, than he'd expected. He moved the foot back and forth, languidly, feeling only the slightest bit of resistance from a tiny flap of open skin. Leah had disappeared behind him, and when he turned to look for her, all he saw was a spot of whiteness—her skirt and blouse—left neatly on the ground. Of the girl, there wasn't a sign.

Except for a laugh, a trilling sound, almost like a gurgle, that came to him now from somewhere in the water. Somehow she'd made her way out of her clothes and into the water in a matter of seconds, without his seeing her and without making any noise whatsoever. Not even a splash. He scanned the rippling pool and thought he saw, like the Lady of the
Lake, one hand poised and beckoning above the surface. The hand slipped out of sight, but the laugh, oddly enough, came again. And from a place some distance away; it had to be some trick of the night wind, Peter thought, puzzled. Then he saw another hand—the same hand?—tilted back at the wrist, the fingers spread, as if the swimmer were skimming along underwater with her face to the night sky. How could Leah have covered such a distance so quickly? He remembered what a natural, expert swimmer she had seemed the first time they had come to this pool. But still, he was amazed at her incredible prowess.

For a while, the pool became perfectly quiet; had he not been aware of her ability to stay silently underwater for as much as a minute or two at a time, he'd have become alarmed. Instead, he lifted his foot from the water, inspected the sole—in the moonlight, the cut appeared as a vertical black crease—then dipped both feet in again. His thoughts returned to the pile of clothes behind him. Was she skinny-dipping out there? Or had she been wearing a swimsuit under her clothes? If she
had
been wearing something, she probably wouldn't have stolen into the water so stealthily. He looked for her again—and saw, for a moment, her slender shoulders and black hair shining in the moonlight. When she dived down once more, he stretched himself out to full length and was just able to hook her blouse and draw it toward him.

From the border of trees, he heard, instantly, a low growl. Without thinking, he gathered the blouse to his chest, and then there came a furious bark. It had to be Fifi. Or Fritz. He never could tell them apart. Slowly, keeping low to the ground, the dog emerged from the trees. Where was Nikos? Peter thought. Or Angelos? Was the dog just running loose, for God's sake? Peter pulled back onto the rock, moving very gradually so as not to alarm the dog.

“Calm down, Fritz,” he said, as gently as he could
manage. Then, “Take it easy, Fifi,” to cover both bases. The dog moved closer, toward Leah's skirt and shoes, and Peter slipped off the rock and waded back into the pool. As the dog crept closer, Peter waded further in, over his rolled-up trousers. “Leah,” he called, trying to sound less nervous than amused, “I think we've got a problem. Leah?”

“Yes?”

She was several yards away, her head poking up above the water.

“Your bodyguard's shown up,” and he pointed toward the dog, who was standing like a sentinel above her clothes. Leah looked, and laughed. And laughed again when she noticed that Peter was nearly up to his waist in the water, with his own clothes still on.

“Fifi—sit!” she called, and the dog obediently did. On top of her skirt. “What's that you're holding?” she asked Peter, and he held out her blouse with the sleeves spread. “Just throw it onto the shore,” she said, and Peter collected it into a ball and threw it. It landed just short of Fifi. “Now why don't you do the same with your own clothes?” she suggested, and, as if to allow him some privacy, glided away with her back turned. “Doesn't the water feel wonderful?” she called over her shoulder.

Peter fumbled with the buttons on his shirt, then threw that, too, toward the bank; it landed on the rock he'd been sitting on. When he saw that Leah was still some distance away, he peeled off his wet trousers, leaving his underwear on, and, wadding them into a tight ball, pitched them directly at Fifi. The dog watched calmly as the pants also fell short.

He dipped himself down, up to his neck, before remembering that he was still wearing his glasses.

Those, of course, he couldn't throw onto the shore. Nor could he swim, in the usual way, with them on. He tried doing the sidestroke, keeping his head well above the water; the sidestroke had always been par-
ticularly easy, and effective, for him. In high school, he'd even been assigned to demonstrate it to the lowerclassmen, pulling himself powerfully—proudly, too—through the indoor pool. Now he found that he was making no headway; his legs were scissoring as well as ever, he felt, but his arms ... his arms weren't straightening out as they had to. Not only the left one, that he'd bumped on the banister, but the right one, too. It was almost as if he'd never learned how to swim at all. His chin sank well below the surface; water filled his nose and splashed the lenses of his glasses. He coughed, and struggled to regain his footing. But he was already too far out, and the bottom was below his reach. Even treading water was difficult, as he couldn't generate enough power or sweep with his arms. This was bizarre, he kept thinking; he'd always been a fairly good swimmer. Now he could barely keep afloat. A wave swelled up, billowing black and silent, and suddenly filled his open mouth. He sputtered and coughed, and kicked harder; through his streaming glasses, he searched for the nearest spot onshore. Another wave slapped him, lightly, but full in the face; the water gushed into his throat and nose, and he felt himself sinking, and tiring, and trying to catch his breath enough to call to Leah for help, when a warm current suddenly welled up from somewhere beneath him, rose up beside him, and two arms slipped easily under his own, lifting him up, above the waves, holding him securely while he cleared his throat and breathed deeply. He felt a woman's body pressed against him, her legs fluttering between his, her arms now clasped behind his back, her breasts rising and falling, evenly, against him. His incipient panic melted away, his breath returned; he wondered how she could so easily maintain them both in the deep, turbulent water. Her face was just below his own, but blinded by his glasses, all he could see was a blur of jet-black hair,
a white face. A wave crested, their bodies were buoyed up, and her lips grazed his cheek.

“Leah,” he said, and would have said more, but her lips were now touching his, her mouth open, tasting of salt and, when he kissed her more deeply, of wine. That sweet, subtle wine of Nikos's own making. His arms embraced her shoulders, then slid down her naked sides; in the water, her body felt more substantial than he would have imagined it, her breasts more full. Her hair, he discovered, had come undone and spread across her back like an open fan, silky and smooth. She kissed him ardently, her legs now entangled with his, wrapped around them. How were they staying afloat, he wondered—they couldn't
both
stop kicking. He tried to separate his legs from hers, but she clung to him tightly. He tried to draw his mouth away, but her lips, too, kept their hold. She squeezed him passionately, her nails raking his back, her pelvis grinding against him. He wanted to say something, her name; he wanted to return to the shore with her. But her tongue had penetrated his mouth, and her hair had washed up onto his shoulders and surrounded them both like a fine, invisible net; with one hand she had deftly removed his underwear, slipped them past his feet with one of her own. With his glasses on he couldn't see, with the water sloshing around them he couldn't hear, with her body gripping his with mounting fervor he couldn't think, or reason, or understand. He could only feel; he could only give himself up to the immediate sensation. He threw back his head, and she seemed to rise up out of the water, to ascend him. They
would
float on the water; they wouldn't sink: it was the last coherent thought he remembered. He wanted to sing at the abandonment he felt as he gripped her thighs and clamped them around him. Was it their bodies rocking together, or the pounding of the waves? He couldn't tell; he didn't care. He had never
before felt like this, never felt
so much.
He was immersed in sensation, blind, deaf, and dumb, engulfed in a whirlpool, at once riding the waves and sinking, with dizzying speed, into a powerful vortex. At the bottom, there was something strange and unnatural, something he could never imagine but which, in the surrender of himself, he already knew. Locking his crooked arms around the body above him, enveloped in the black sky and the black sea and the girl's black hair, he felt himself transformed, felt, for the first time in his life, freed. The feeling possessed him, overpowered him, terrified him. And yet, it was as if he had wished for it, as devoutly as he had ever wished for anything. He felt as if he were returning at last to a place he'd never been before.

Nineteen

L
ET'S LEAVE,” MEG
announced.

“And go where?” Peter replied, still outside on the balcony. “Back to Mercer? Do you know what the temperature is in that apartment right now?”

“We don't have to go back to that apartment. We can rent another apartment. Any apartment we want. We can rent a whole house, for that matter.”

“We've
got
a whole house.”

Meg wished that Peter would come back to the bed, where at least they could argue face to face. It was a cool night, and she pulled the light cotton blanket up around her shoulders. “But how long,” she said, trying to keep any hint of exasperation out of her voice, “do you want to go on playing lord and lady of the manor? With servants and roving dogs and iron gates? Come on, honey—you know this isn't us. It's been
fun,
for a while"—she hoped that she sounded reasonably convinced of that—"but don't you think it's time we went back to what we do best, living like ordinary, everyday people again?”

There was a long pause. “I don't know what that means,” he finally replied with chilling precision.

Meg pulled the blanket even more closely around her. The way he'd said it, it was as if he truly
didn't
know anymore. And almost, though it was difficult to judge nuances with Peter speaking from the balcony,
as if even
he
found that puzzling. She yanked the end of the blanket free of the mattress and, wrapping it around her, slipped off the bed. Supporting herself against one of the massive bedposts, she stepped into her sandals and went out onto the balcony after him.

He was gazing down at the water, his hands resting on the stone balustrade. The belt of his robe dangled, untied, at his side. She scooped it up and knotted it at the waist. With her arms around him, she touched her cheek to his back and gently held him. She felt his shoulder blades briefly tense, but aside from that there was no reaction.

“Aren't you cold?” she asked, letting go. How long had it been this time—a week? Ten days? She propped herself against the balustrade; through the blanket, she could feel the rough texture of the cold carved stone. He sneezed.

“Told you it was cold out here,” she said.

Peter fished a wadded handkerchief from the pocket of his robe and wiped his nose. His chest was still exposed to the night air, the lapels of the robe hanging open; Meg's eyes went to the profusion of black curls that matted his skin, the “wings,” as she had always thought of them, that spread across his chest. In the darkness of the balcony, they appeared even more full, more black, than usual. She took hold of the lapels and pulled them closed.

“I'm not cold,” he said.

“Then you probably
do
have some kind of allergy, to something out here,” she said briskly.

He looked at her now, and only then did it occur to her that he wasn't wearing his glasses. His eyes, capturing a hint of silver from the bedroom light, shone, but with a sort of flat, hard polish. The black floor of the room in back, the “skating rink,” was what, oddly enough, came to her mind.

“I don't have an allergy, either,” he said. “If anything, I
like
the air. I find it invigorating.”

And what does it invigorate you for?
Meg thought. For reading those sleazy books in the locked case (twice she'd popped into the study unannounced and seen the latticed doors ajar); for playing billiards with Jack Caswell, either here or at his place; for disappearing, God knows where, in the middle of the day, presumably on aimless walks around the grounds of the estate? He was getting to be like Nikos and Leah in that respect—gone without a trace for hours at a stretch and then reappearing again, as if out of nowhere. She'd given up asking where he'd been; he only resented the intrusion.

“You know, there's something I've been meaning to tell you,” she said. “I don't even know why I let it go this long. But on my trip to New York, I did in fact—”

“See my mother.”

“You know?”

“I called her a couple of days after. She told me all about it.” There was something ominous in his tone.

“Then I guess you know we met at Rumpelmayer's, like a couple of Park Avenue matrons,” Meg said, hoping now to pass off the occasion as relatively innocent. She chattered on about how his mother had looked, how she'd acted, what she'd ordered. “I think she's still convinced we're barely scraping by—she ordered the cheapest thing on the menu.” She tried to make it seem as if the whole thing had been a peacekeeping mission designed only to patch up the quarrel over Arcadia. But how much did Peter already know? What had his mother said to him over the phone? From the blank, forbidding way he was listening to her now, plenty.

When he finally interrupted, she knew for certain. “Are you under the impression that I'm losing my mind?” he asked.

“What?”

“Do you think I've been corrupted by good fortune?” he elaborated, with cool irony. When Meg
remained silent, Peter shrugged and looked back down the lawn. “From what my mother had to say, I got the idea you thought I was well on my way to Bellevue. Or Alcoholics Anonymous.”

Everything—Mrs. Constantine had apparently divulged everything.

“I never suggested anything like that,” Meg said softly, placatingly. “I have been concerned about you. I don't think you've been yourself lately—”

“Who
have
I been?” he said accusingly. But there it was again, that same strange note of uncertainty, puzzlement, mixed in with the anger and brevity. “Your friend Byron?”
Her friend?
"Or maybe you think I'm going to the dogs"—he laughed, joylessly—"like that goddamned Diogenes.”

His reasoning was too bizarre to follow: Meg found herself totally at sea. She never knew what to expect from him anymore, or what he'd say next. She knew he couldn't be drunk—she'd been with him the entire evening, except for maybe a half-hour or so that he'd spent in the study. She'd hoped to hear the typewriter clacking. But hadn't.

He took out his handkerchief again and dabbed at his nose. “I don't know what people want from me anymore,” he said, as if to the night air. “I've given you the kind of life most people would kill for—a house like this, servants, all of it. I've given Byron a vacation like he'd never be able to afford on his own. I've offered my mother whatever the hell she wants: money, security—I've even asked her to come out here. None of it's enough. None of it's enough for anybody.”

“Maybe that's because none of it's what anybody wants,” Meg said defiantly. “Maybe it's because none of it
means
anything!” She hated what he'd just said, and the superiority with which he'd said it, and it felt good now—even if she'd regret it later—to be angry, to fight back. She only wished she weren't dressed in
the blanket. “I didn't
ask
for any of this. Byron didn't
ask
to come out here. Your mother has never asked us for a dime, or anything else, for that matter.” And then, before she could stop herself, “And what if they had? It isn't as if you've had to do anything to get it. I'd say it all came to you pretty easily.” She knew that, by some tacit understanding, she wasn't supposed to have brought this up; it had rankled him from the first, and she'd done her best until now always to help him feel entitled to his good fortune. She'd wanted him to be able to accept, and enjoy, it. Now she'd thrown it right at him.

It had hit home. Peter flinched for a second, and his fist clenched the balled-up handkerchief. The long hair along the sides of his head twitched, stirred by the night wind. But that had angered her too—Leah cutting his hair that day she'd been in New York. And leaving it so long on the sides. She was sorry now for what she'd said, but she was still too angry with him to go about ameliorating it. Everything else, all her other grievances against him, were roiling around in her now: his emotional detachment, that made her feel so alone and unneeded; his physical abandonment of her, that left her feeling unattractive and unloved; his obdurate unwillingness to listen, or accommodate himself, to her or anyone else. With the possible exception, she thought with renewed fury, of his new circle of friends: the Caswells, the Simons, Lazaroff, and who knew who else. Part of her wanted, now that she'd begun, to attack again, to drag it all out in the open then and there, but another part of her wanted, even now, to apologize and make it up to him. If only
he'd
reach out to
her
this time; if only he'd recognize and acknowledge what he was doing to them both . . .

She suddenly realized, with astonishment and then horror, that even now, he wasn't
listening
to her, that he had tuned her out. A moment ago, he'd been cut to the quick, and now she saw that he was attending to
something else entirely. His head was tilted slightly to one side, like the dog on the old RCA Victor label, and his eyes were slotted away from her, unfocused, concentrated on whatever it was he'd heard.
My God,
she thought—
he's that far away from me. That unreachable. That unconcerned.
She listened herself, and above the rustling of the leaves in the trees and the distant murmur of the water, she could now detect the broken bits of a melody, as if someone were playing a record, or a radio, somewhere in the night. And voices, too, though the words were equally indistinct. So far as she could tell, the revelers—it was funny, but revelry was what came to mind—were somewhere in the woods to the west of the lawn. There was an exuberance, a note of surprise, in the occasional shout that wafted up to them on the balcony. The music, she noticed now, was just a single instrument—a whistle or flute. Or Nikos's pipes. It must be Nikos, and Angelos, and Leah cavorting out there.

Peter was leaning forward now, over the stone balustrade, with his elbows splayed outwards. He was absorbed in the sounds, and when Meg tentatively asked if he thought it was Nikos and company playing hide and seek, he again didn't answer. She pulled the bottom of the blanket away from under one of her sandals, and when she was sure that he had no intention of answering, she went back into the bedroom, her anger already entangled with resignation and sadness, and climbed up into the huge, empty bed.

Peter was unaware of how long he had remained that way, poised on the balcony in his open robe. He remembered Meg standing beside him, talking, arguing. About what, he couldn't recall. And the next thing he knew, he was alone again, and the light in the bedroom behind him was off. He'd had a dream of sorts, a waking dream. It began where others had left off, with a running pursuit of something in a place filled
with sunlight so bright it bleached the slender trees and the white stones that, in his mind's eye, he was scrambling past. He hadn't been able to see his companions, and yet he knew that he wasn't alone. He was happy, too. But not laughing—it didn't seem possible to laugh anymore. No more than it did to stand entirely straight.

He was following the sound of the flute, up a grassy and rubble-strewn slope. At the top, he was surrounded on all sides by a limitless vista of blue-green sea. White columns towered above him. And on a broad slab of stone, bedecked with flowering vines and leaves, an animal, its feet bound, lay on its side. As he approached it, across a patch of scorched and gritty earth, the animal shook, sensing his presence; it was a goat, mottled gray, its eyes bulging in fear, its rib cage heaving. He stood over it, staring back into the rolling eyes; it bleated wildly, and he reached out with one hand to stroke its scruffy beard and calm it. But his arm extended stiffly and came down between the two hollow horns atop its skull. The animal convulsed in terror, and Peter suddenly grew angry with it. He discovered a knife with a long, curved blade clutched in his other hand, and pinning the goat's head to the stone, he drew the knife across its taut throat with a single deliberate stroke. The eye stopped dead, and hot blood, after saturating the gray beard, suddenly poured out onto the altar stone; carved grooves carried it to either end, where it gathered in shallow depressions. The flanks jerked once, twice, and the legs shot out and upward, the cloven hooves flashing in the sun like gigantic pearls. When he saw the hind legs drop again and grow rigid, he bent his head, watching the milky film descend over the goat's yellow eye. Then he lapped, contentedly, at the pool of cooling blood.

He came to again on the balcony, with the taste of wine, sweet red wine, on his tongue and lips. He
shivered and pulled the lapels of his robe together. His neck and arms were stiff from holding himself so still in the damp wind. The moon had passed behind a cloud; the music in the grove had stopped. Like a photographic image changing from positive to negative, the dream abruptly lost color and definition in his mind, then vanished entirely, leaving him with only a residual uneasiness and confusion. He'd have to quit with the pyxis, he thought. The stuff was wrecking his nerves. And giving him nightmares.

He tip-toed into the bedroom, pulling the balcony doors closed behind him. He draped his robe across one of the heavy armchairs, lifted the edge of the blanket, and slipping into bed, pressed his chest against Meg's sleeping shoulders. Her hair, spread across the crumpled pillows, smelled faintly of shampoo. He put his face close to it; the scent was so reassuring, so familiar. He wished she weren't asleep, though he didn't want to awaken her. Raising one arm above the blanket, he reached around to stroke her cheek with the back of his hand, as he had often used to do. But to his wonder and chagrin, his arm had once again locked in that odd way, so that he wound up running his fingers across her forehead and into her hair. This
couldn't
be the result of that little bump on the banister, he thought—the arm must have set improperly after the accident in Mercer. Now he'd aggravated it somehow. He drew the arm back and shoved it under the blanket, angry with its failure to behave. He tried to tell himself there was nothing to worry about, that if he kept it rested and protected for a time, it would return to normal. But something bothered him even more and made it almost impossible to fall asleep—the arm
did
feel normal this way.