The Spirit Wood (19 page)

Twenty

P
ETER WAS AT
the Simons, or perhaps the Caswells—Meg never really knew where he went anymore—when the cab pulled up in front of the house, and Byron climbed out of the back seat with his battered suitcase and, in a cloth bag tied tightly at the top, two pounds of his Aunt Theodora's hickory-smoked bacon. Diogenes raced down the front steps and could hardly decide which to lick first—Byron or the bag held just above his nose. Meg hung back and, once Dodger had subsided a bit, gave Byron an affectionate, but brief, hug. They separated without letting their eyes really meet.

“Better get that bacon into the fridge,” Byron said, picking up his suitcase and heading up the steps. “It was all I could do to keep Aunt Theo from coating it with peanut butter.”

Neither of them had forgotten their conversation—elliptical, filled with things left unsaid—on the dock the night before he'd left. And now, it seemed to hang in the air, still unresolved, as if they'd just stopped speaking. Byron bustled about his room, tossing his clothes into the dresser, dropping the papers he'd taken to Georgia back onto the makeshift desk, switching from his scuffed wing-tips to the sneakers he generally wore.

“Get my postcard?” he asked as Meg leaned up against the windowsill.

“Yes, it was lovely,” she said, smiling. A picture of a desolate small-town street, with a row of unoccupied parking meters and a prominent hardware store.

“My roots,” he said, lacing up the gym shoes.

Downstairs, they continued to talk about the everyday things, the Fourth of July parade in Passet Bay, Byron's eccentric relatives, how Peter was doing with his dissertation. The Caswells.

“Is that where Peter is now?” Byron asked.

“Probably.”

Byron guessed it would be wise to change the subject. “How's
your
work coming? Got anything new to show me?”

Meg shrugged. “More of the same, I suppose.” Aside from those two figures Anita Simon had been so curious about. “You want to come down and see for yourself?”

Byron paused, looked up at her now, evenly, for the first time. “Okay,” he said. “I'd like that.”

On the way down to the boathouse, their hands brushed once or twice, and Meg left the door standing open once they'd gone inside. Was she trying to make sure everything appeared thoroughly open and above-board? Their conversation still felt strained to her, not at all the easy camaraderie they had shared in the old days, back in Mercer.

Byron took the stool at the worktable; Meg sat down on the metal saddle of the electric wheel, with her feet resting on the cinder blocks.

“You look like you're driving a soapbox derby car,” Byron observed.

“It's got the engine,” Meg said, slapping the wheel so that it turned, squeaking, several times.

Byron toyed with the implements on the table, quizzically held up a pair of chopsticks.

“Not for chop suey,” Meg said. “For etching designs into the wet clay.”

Byron nodded. The sunlight cut a bright swath across his long legs. “I wrote you a letter, too, you know.”

“You did? I never got it,” Meg said.

“That's because I never sent it. Horace said that whatever you write, you should put away for ten years and then read it over before making it public.”

“You're telling me I'll get the letter a decade from now?” Meg replied. In a way, she wished that it
would
take that long, that she could put off what she knew was coming, what she knew Byron was leading up to. It wasn't that she didn't return Byron's feelings—they had been good and close friends now for several years, and since coming to Arcadia, she had learned to rely on him more and more for comfort, and even affection. But now . . . now she was so concerned with Peter, with the disintegration of her marriage, with the topsy-turvy state of her entire life, that she felt she couldn't take on even one more thing. She couldn't handle one more complication.

“I've done a lot of thinking over the past week or so,” Byron was saying, his eyes lowered.
Here it comes,
Meg thought, flustered herself. His friendship with Peter, so changed of late . . . his regard for Meg (only Byron, she thought warmly, would call it “regard") . . . his own loneliness . . . his inability to conceal his feelings any longer. God, this was even more painful than she could have imagined. And why had she positioned herself twelve inches off the floor, on a hard metal saddle?

“I know that you're well disposed toward me,” Byron admitted, blushing even at that. “At least I
think
I can say that you are . . .”

Meg had never seen him this awkward, this embarrassed. He folded and refolded his long, skinny legs.

While talking, he nervously plugged the tips of his shoelaces into the eyelets of his sneakers. Her heart went out to him. And not only in pity—under the circumstances, that much would have been unavoidable and relatively easy to deal with. Much as she would have liked it to be that simple, it just wasn't. She
did
feel something more than pity for Byron. But that was precisely what frightened her now and made her want to close herself off. She was vulnerable now, and she knew it; her estrangement from her husband was as great as it had ever been. She didn't feel in control of her own emotions, and couldn't be sure of her own motives. Was her response to Byron's words—the quickened beating of her heart, the heat she felt rising to her cheek—an honest return of his love, or only a complex mixture of guilt, embarrassment, and need? Did she long to be held by Byron, or did she simply long to be loved again by anyone?

“Byron,” she said when he finally looked up at her. “I wish I could give you some sort of a straight answer to all this.” She found herself self-consciously fiddling with the wheel, turning it to the right, then the left; they were just like a couple of school kids, she thought. “I wish I could say something simple like ‘Sorry, I'd never think of leaving my marriage’ or ‘Yes, let's run away together and everything will be fine.’ But I can't. You know that.”

The moment she'd started speaking, he had become still as a man in the dock waiting to hear his sentence handed down.

“Things between Peter and me aren't good right now. You know that. Maybe it is pointless for me to keep trying to make it work, to patch things up. But I feel like Peter needs me now, that whatever he's going through, I might be able to help him.” Could she? Did she still believe that, or was she just reciting the lines of the dutiful wife? “Either way, I can't just walk away
without giving it all that I can, without being sure first that . . . well, there was nothing left to save.”

“I think this is the point,” Byron said, clearing his throat, “where, in the British novels, the hero says ‘May I have reason yet to hope?'”

“Hope for what?” It was Peter, standing in the open doorway. “When did you get back? And what's that vile-smelling sack in the refrigerator?” he said, sauntering into the studio.

How long had he been there? How much had he overheard? There was a mischievous glint in his eye, but it could've been liquor.

Peter clapped Byron on the shoulder, something he once would never have done, and propped himself against the edge of the table. “Has she shown you what she's been up to in your absence?” he said, looking around the room. “Where are those new statues,” he asked Meg, “the one of Leah and the nude dancer that looks like her? Where'd you stash them?”

When could Peter have possibly seen those, Meg thought, her eyes flicking to the lower shelf near the door, where the sculptures appeared to be standing just as she had left them, under a canvas cloth. Getting up from the saddle and brushing off her trousers, she asked innocently, “How did you know about those? Did Anita Simon tell you?” She should never have let those women into her studio.

Peter grimaced, and raked at his hair. “I don't need Anita Simon or anyone else to tell me what goes on around here,” he said, looking suddenly at Byron, then back at Meg. “I am like Nikos,” he declared, holding his arms open but stiffly extended, “I go
everywhere.
Remember?”

Twenty-one

M
RS. CONSTANTINE HAD
accomplished next to nothing all day. Even though she'd skipped her lunch break, she was still typing up letters that she'd have normally finished hours before. There were three packages on her desk that should have gone out already, Federal Express, and at least two file drawers that she'd intended to reorganize.

Nor was the next day likely to be much better; if anything, it would be worse. Ever since she'd discovered Meg and Peter were staying at Arcadia, she'd been increasingly troubled and upset. After the meeting at Rumpelmayer's, she'd been positively alarmed. Talking to Peter on the phone, she could hear for herself what Meg had tried to explain—he was so touchy, so volatile. At one point, she had quite innocently asked if he'd caught a cold, he sounded a little stuffed up, and the next second he'd exploded. Thirty seconds after that, he'd calmed down again and become so contrite and apologetic that it was hard to get him to talk at all. She considered herself fortunate that by the time they hung up, she'd been able to get him back to merely cool and guarded.

It wasn't enough, she realized, to try to persuade him over the phone to leave the estate, or to patiently wait for the next semester to begin at the college. If the feeling she'd had about her father's intentions was
true, if she'd guessed right, then Peter, and Meg, too, might actually be in some danger. From whom, or what, she couldn't say. Awful as it was for her even to contemplate it, there appeared to be only one thing left for her to do—and that was to go there herself. To Arcadia . . . her father's house, and see for herself what was afoot and what, if anything, she could do to avert some gathering catastrophe.

The thought alone made her feel faint.

But when Kurtz buzzed her on the intercom and asked her to come in and take a letter, she decided she'd put in now for her two weeks of vacation. When she said she'd like to take them starting the following Monday, he looked a little surprised.

“Some sort of emergency?” he asked.

“No, not really,” Mrs. Constantine replied. “It's just that my son and daughter-in-law have invited me to come and stay with them for a while, and I thought I'd take them up on it.”

What if they refused? What if Peter said no?

“Sounds good to me,” said Kurtz, nodding his head in approval. “Enjoy yourself, Ellie. You've earned it.”

She knew there'd be a little “vacation bonus” in her pay envelope that Friday; for fifteen years, there'd never failed to be.

At seven-thirty, she called it a day, at last having completed all the letters that had backed up, and went home to fix a quiet dinner, read a story or two in
Ellery Queen,
and call Arcadia to say she was coming.

Twenty-two

I
THINK WHAT
you're missing,” said Caswell, leaning back in his desk chair, “is the fraudulence of these guys.”

“Fraudulence?” Peter asked.

“Sure. Everyone knows now what Ruskin was up to—or I should say
not
up to—in his private life. Everyone knows that the aestheticism, the precious philosophy, was all just a scrim for the closet homosexuality, or total dysfunctionality, whichever it was, that he suffered from. Pater, too, with all his gobbledy-gook about sweetness and light and civilized values. These guys couldn't handle Rousseau, much less their own emotions and proclivities.”

Peter watched as Caswell flipped through several more pages of his dissertation, his steel-rimmed spectacles reflecting the stark white light of the desk lamp. The walls of the room, Caswell's study, were lined with bookshelves packed with everything from ragged paperbacks to handsome leather-bound sets. Sterne, Balzac, Conrad, Kipling, Voltaire. In a separate section between the windows were gathered together the distinctive purple bindings of the Emperor Press.

Caswell read, intently, a couple more pages while Peter, anticipating another objection, felt himself sink-
ing even lower in his chair. Jack had volunteered during a game of billiards one night to look over what Peter had written so far, and Peter had jumped at the chance for an impartial opinion. Now he wondered if that had been such a good idea.

“I also have to wonder,” Jack said without looking up from the desk, “what drew you to these guys in the first place and how much, if any of it, you swallow yourself.”

“Well, I'm not so much subscribing to it,” Peter offered, “as I am commenting on it, analyzing what they had to say. I mean, I'm not about to start wearing a green carnation in my lapel, if that's what you're afraid of.”

“That I wouldn't mind,” Caswell replied. “Wilde made some sense. He was in touch with his darker side—the only mistake he made was in broadcasting that fact.”

“Look what it got him.”

“Jail?” Jack said with a derisive laugh. “Listen—
De Profundis
is a whole lot less sincere, and moving, than
Lady Windermere's Fan.
I think you vastly overestimate the importance, and profundity, of that particular cri de coeur.”

One more thing he'd gotten wrong. For the past half-hour, Peter had dutifully listened as Jack, in the interest of clear, constructive criticism, had systematically dismantled, chapter by chapter, nearly everything he had done. And the worst part of it—worse than the oblique disparagement of his prose style, or his logic, or his organization—had been his gut feeling that Caswell was right, that none of it was any good. It was at once depressing . . . and, in a way, a relief. If there was really so little worth salvaging, then why go to the trouble of salvaging it at all?

Jack was just about to say something else when Joan popped her head through the door, looked from one of
them to the other, then said, “Uh-oh—looks to me like a drink might be in order.”

Peter smiled weakly.

“Just remember one thing,” Joan advised him, “Jack never did finish up his own degree. Keep that in mind.”

“She's right,” Caswell admitted, getting up from the desk. “Everything I say is suspect.” On the way out of the study, he looped one arm, in an avuncular fashion, around Peter's slumped shoulders. “I hope I haven't discouraged you,” he said. “It isn't that I don't think you have talent, you know.”

In the living room, Joan poured out drinks from a collection of crystal decanters. There was a small home-movie screen and a projector set up.

“You sit there,” she said to Peter, directing him to the end of the sofa with the best view of the screen. Jack seemed to know what was going on.

“I only remembered that we had these films this morning,” she said. “But it took me all day to find the right ones.”

She dimmed the lights in the room, turned on the projector. “Meg should have been here, too,” she said, over the whirring of the projector. “This would give her some idea of last year's auction.”

The screen sprang to life with a shot of a poster, hand-lettered, advertising the “Passet Bay Nature Preserve Benefit and Auction.”

“It was held at the Simons last year,” Joan said from behind the sofa. “Very intimate, compared with what I believe Anita's got in mind for this year.”

Peter recognized the outdoor deck on the Simons’ house. The camera swept, too quickly, from one end to the other—there was a blur of faces and bodies.

“I'm afraid this was one of my maiden efforts,” Joan apologized. “I didn't want to miss anything.”

A thin coil of smoke from her cigarette unwound over Peter's shoulder.

Stan Simon, in a loud madras jacket, was filmed standing in front of a table covered with a motley collection of items: toasters, pictures, books, records. The movie had no soundtrack to it. Peter watched as Simon silently auctioned one object after another, holding it aloft, turning it this way and that, acknowledging the raised hands of the bidders. The camera swung about, trying to capture each one. In the front row, Peter spotted Al and Betty Plettner. Leaning against a porch rail, Jack. He was talking to a couple of men, one of whom turned and waved to the camera—Lazaroff, in a bright Hawaiian shirt.

The reel ended abruptly, and Joan began to thread a new one onto the projector. “This is from later that day. I don't think I'd given enough thought to the lighting problems. You'll see for yourself.”

It appeared to be dusk, of a summer day. The crowd had thinned considerably. The auction table was gone. The people who were left were mostly sitting, at the same little tables Anita had used at her last party. As Peter watched, two or three couples got up and began to dance, as if to a slow, romantic song, in a cleared space in the middle of the deck. When they'd finished, the camera panned from table to table, concentrating for a few seconds on one in back. Jack and Lazaroff were sitting at it, as were two older men, one in a Panama hat with a broad black band, the other with thick wisps of white hair fanning out from the sides of his head. They all laughed suddenly and twisted in their seats, as if reacting to something they'd heard. The man in the Panama hat shook his head, declining something; the other pushed out his canvas chair and, with a glass in his hand, lumbered to the center of the deck. Arcing his arms above his head, like Atlas holding the globe, he bent his body slightly forward
and, presumably to the rhythm of the music, slowly, artfully, started to dance in place. Despite his age, and the paunchy belly that swelled the front of his white shirt, he moved with a surprising delicacy and nimbleness. The camera tried to pick up the movement of his feet, but the evening light was too dim. When the camera rose again, his back was turned; his arms were extended like a scarecrow's, the hands twisting gently, tortuously, in the air.

“I thought this might interest you,” said Jack knowingly.

Peter felt a prickling at his neck. He waited anxiously for the old man with the puffs of white hair to turn and face the camera again. There were several people in the background, Anita Simon among them, clapping their hands together in unison. Some appeared to be urging the old man on. With agonizing slowness, head lowered, he completed his circle; the buttons on his shirt had burst open, revealing a matting of thick gray hair sweeping up and over his collarbone. As if to a sudden, heightened tempo, he shook his body more wildly now, moved his legs, enveloped in baggy black trousers, more quickly. With his eyes closed, his features distorted into what appeared to be some sort of painful rapture, he jerked back his head—and Peter saw a face that had floated in his memory, murky and ill defined, for almost as long as he could remember. When the eyes opened, dark and liquid, and the man laughed, flashing rows of neatly spaced, small white teeth, Peter's breath caught in his throat—it was as if he were looking into his own eyes, terribly magnified, his own features, made fleshy and old. It was like traveling forwards and backwards in time, all at once. The music apparently over, the man stopped and took a brief, stiff bow. As he made his way back to the table and his elderly friend in the Panama hat, he held his arms, crookedly, away from his sides.

“Think you could dance like that, too?” Jack asked Peter from somewhere behind him.

And Joan, as if she were stepping in to help preserve Peter's modesty, said soothingly, “I'm sure he could. He just needs time.” The reel ended with a whir and a snap, and the room was suddenly plunged into darkness.