The Spirit Wood (13 page)

Twelve

A
LL THE WAY
there, Mrs. Simon—Anita—talked. Byron, sitting in the back seat, hadn't heard talking like this since his Aunt Theodora. First, it was how magnificent the house at Arcadia was, then how hot the summer had been so far, then what trouble Stan was having with his duodenal ulcer, followed by a lengthy exposition on the behind-the-scenes planning for the Three Towns Fourth of July parade, this year to be held in Passet Bay. Never once did she drop a clue as to where they were going, and Meg, sitting quietly in the front seat, had given up asking. When she'd returned her call, Mrs. Simon would say only that she had something to show her that was
just unbelievable
and that she'd pick her up the next afternoon. Peter had begged off going along, and Meg had pleaded with Byron not to make her face it—whatever it was—alone.

Now he wondered if that had been wise. He found himself idly attending to Mrs. Simon's views of the current art scene—"with some of these artists appreciating the way they are, it's better than buying stocks"—and comparing the back of her elaborately coiffed head to Meg's silky, straight fall of hair that blew back from the front seat in the wind from the open window. “I don't know if you noticed, but Stan and I just purchased a lovely Leroy Neiman for the
den. It was up the night of my fiesta, over the fireplace.”

Byron, who'd been conspicuously silent, felt this was as good a time as any to leap in. “Yes, I do remember it,” he said, employing his most earnest Southern drawl, “and I thought it was extremely well placed. It looked just right there.”

Anita smiled with pleasure and glanced into the rearview mirror.

“Byron,” she asked, “where exactly is it that you're from?”

“Georgia, originally. A little town in the northeast corner.”

“Well, sometimes you sound to me like something right out of
Gone with the Wind.”

“Why, thank you, ma'am,” he said, stressing the accent even more, and tipping an imaginary hat. Meg turned enough in her seat to show him the corner of her own smile.

She looked fine again now—composed and reasonably happy—but Byron could hardly forget the shape she'd been in only a couple of days earlier, when she told him what had happened in the glade.

“Peter's going to get rid of those damned mastiffs?” he'd said, knowing that it would have been the first thing
he'd
have done.

“He doesn't know about it,” Meg had replied. “I haven't told him.”

So it was
that
bad, Byron had thought.
She's scared half to death, and she can't even tell her husband about it.
What other secrets did they routinely keep from each other, he wondered. What else didn't they talk about? It made him want to throttle Peter, for being so obtuse and careless with her . . . and it made him want to kick himself for the feelings he was finding harder and harder to suppress or deny.

He'd been pleased that she had confided in him and not Peter. And when he'd gently chucked her under
the chin to comfort her and she'd turned her face up toward his, he'd been within a hair of bending down and kissing her. Within a hair.

And then what? Then what would have happened?

He looked out the rear window; they were driving now on a two-lane blacktop. Only one car passed them, going in the opposite direction; it was a four-wheel-drive wagon, with what looked like a forest ranger at the wheel. He'd waved to their Mercedes as he passed.

On their left side, just beyond a range of scrubby dunes and wetlands, was the bay. They seemed to be driving along a narrow promontory, but what there could be to see at the end of it Byron couldn't guess. There weren't any houses along here, no boat yards or waterside restaurants, no picturesque lighthouse, from what he could see through the front window, at the tip. When Mrs. Simon slowed down, and pulled the car into a sandy rut off the main road, he was still mystified.

“Welcome,” she said, getting out of the car with her arms spread wide and her gold bracelets jangling, “to my pet project.” Looking around her with evident pride, at nothing Byron could perceive as worthy of it, she said, “I shouldn't take all the credit for it. A lot of people chip in. But it's really my doing more than anyone else's.”

Byron and Meg searched, in vain, the low dunes and surrounding marshes.

“When we started out, a few years back, we thought of it as just a bird sanctuary. Now we know it's more than that—it's a wildlife refuge, a place for all sorts of birds and animals.” In her tight white slacks, open- toed high-heeled sandals, and clanking jewelry, she appeared to Byron's eyes the least likely candidate for such a cause. “This whole stretch that we've been driving along, we call it the Passet Bay Nature Preserve—even though Stan tells me that, technically, it's
not within the town boundaries. It's what you might call a no-man's land right now. We're seeing if we can change that,” she added in a confidential manner.

A flock of birds, disturbed by their presence, took to the air and flew toward the water.

Neither Meg nor Byron knew quite what to say. “Have you always been interested in nature?” Byron finally offered and, when Meg looked his way, shrugged to indicate it was the best he could come up with.

“No, not really,” Anita admitted. “To tell you the truth, it's something I didn't think much about until a few years ago. In fact, it wasn't until much of this land was getting poked over by some out-of-town real estate speculators that I realized what a loss it would be to the whole area if it were overdeveloped, or housing developments cluttered it all up. It was just too beautiful,” she asserted, digging one heel into the sandy soil, “to allow that to happen. So I did something about it.”

Meg congratulated her on her stand, and as she did, a tiny light went on in the back of Byron's mind. It was something in the way Anita had described the would-be developers and the prospects for the land—housing projects, lots more people, less exclusivity, and unless his guess was wrong, lower property values for the few, nicely situated and widely zoned homes, like the Simons’, that already occupied the general area. Keep the speculators out, the values up, and the hoi polloi where they belonged—that, Byron guessed, was the unspoken game plan. But why, he wondered, drag Meg and him out there?

“What we have to do now,” Anita was saying, “is raise money—we did it last year, but that's run out—to pay for some wildlife-specialist types to keep an eye on things here, and to pay the lawyers who're lobbying for us to get this land declared a preserve. It's amazing what these things cost, to get them put through.”

Money
,
Byron thought—a contribution was what she'd been after.

“I'm sure, after I've had a chance to talk with Peter tonight, that we'll be able to chip in something toward the fund,” Meg volunteered.

“That's wonderful of you,” Anita said, reaching for both of Meg's hands and giving them a grateful squeeze. “I was so hoping you'd say that. But I thought it was only fair to show you the place first, so you could see for yourself just what it was we were all working for.”

“Thank you, I appreciate it,” Meg replied as she turned toward the car. “I've enjoyed it.”

But Mrs. Simon wasn't yet through with them, it seemed. She didn't take Meg's cue. “I wanted you to just fall in love with this place, as I have,” she continued, “so I could ask you"—and she scrunched up her shoulders, put one hand in front of her mouth, like a child about to divulge a secret—"for a favor.” Her ring, a cluster of diamonds, blazed white in the sunlight. Meg had stopped, with one hand loosely resting on the car's door handle.

“Last year, we threw—well I threw—a kind of charity fund-raising party. We had a raffle, for a gorgeous Ming vase Jack and Joan Caswell donated, and an old-fashioned auction. Everything from garage-sale stuff, lawn chairs, and kids’ old sleds, to some nice
odd
things that people specially contributed. Bill Nash, for instance, offered two free years of tax preparation to the highest bidder—that sort of thing. This year, we'd like to do it again.”

Meg waited patiently for Anita to come to the point. Byron thought,
She wants a check and something auctionable.

“This year,” Anita ventured, “we think we could really do something special, something very, very successful, if we could throw it—a sort of theme party
and charity auction all rolled into one—at your place. Arcadia.”

While Meg, nonplussed, wondered what to say and think, Anita raced ahead with her presentation, explaining how she, Anita, Betty Plettner, Joan, Lissie Nash, would do all the work, all the arranging with the caterers, all the invitations, all the party decorations, the collection of the auctionables. All Meg had to do (after discussing it with her husband, of course) was give her the okay, and everything from that moment on would be entirely taken care of.

“But why,” Meg asked, striving for as neutral a tone as possible, “do you want to do it at Arcadia?”

“Oh, honey,” Anita exclaimed, clasping her hands together in her excitement, “people would
love
to see Arcadia. Some of us were lucky enough to visit the place now and then, but lots of folks have never seen anything more of it than the gates and that awful wire fence that runs around it. It's a big
mystery
around these parts. An auction at Arcadia, and especially one for such a good cause, would bring everyone out and,” with a sly wink, “really put them in the bidding mood. Please say you'll at least think about it.” Like a plea from the refuge itself, a lone bird, somewhere in the surrounding grasses, let out a plaintive caw. Meg agreed to think about it—how could she flat-out refuse, she thought—and as a result, on the way back to Arcadia, Mrs. Simon was bubbling over with optimism, high spirits, and endless plans, all tactfully expressed in the conditional tense. Always “If you and your husband decide that you'd like to help.” Conditional, but relentless.

Thirteen

A
FEW MINUTES
after Meg and Byron had gone off on their mystery expedition with Mrs. Simon, Peter flicked off the power button on the typewriter, stretched, got up from the desk and dropped himself like a bag of laundry into the green leather armchair. He'd had his daily dose of coffee, but he'd never completely come awake. He just couldn't focus on his work today; now that he thought about it, he hadn't been able to the day before either. He couldn't manage to concentrate properly. The house, when everyone was gone, was astonishingly quiet and peaceful. In the afternoons, there was something almost narcoleptic about the place. More and more, he found himself in the worn, roomy armchair, flipping through one of the books from the now unlocked cabinet, dozing as he imagined his grandfather must have frequently done there, or simply daydreaming, thinking vague, disconnected thoughts, thoughts that often seemed not to come to him, not in the casual manner of everyday free association, so much as they
intruded
on him. It was as if there were subtle things, no longer dormant, now stirring inside him. Less and less could he differentiate between the troubled dreams he had at night and the curious things that came to mind during his waking hours.

Like Nikos. Here he was, thinking of him now. And
in his dreams, twice in the past week alone, he had imagined himself in a place he'd never seen—stark white cliffs, a cerulean sea, groves of small and slender trees—capering along, there was really no better expression for it, with the caretaker beside him. But in the dream, Nikos was moving so quickly, so furtively, that it was difficult to actually see him. Just as it was difficult for Peter to see himself either. The scene was so foreign, and his angle of vision so off kilter—everything viewed from a lower height, and jouncing about, as if recorded by a hand-held home-movie camera—that it was almost like trying to dream someone else's dream.

The accident, too—that came to mind now more often than he'd like. Ancient history in a way—months before their lives had changed with the inheritance of Arcadia. But maybe it was time now to reconsider its consequences—to rethink the pregnancy issue, for one. What stood in their way now? Why shouldn't they go ahead and this time
purposely
start on a family? Now they had all the money they'd need. There was nothing physically wrong with Meg, or with him. Even his arm, for that matter, was as good as new. Why did he sense a reluctance on her part, when she'd been so happy the first time around, to begin again? Was it just a lingering depression, an unwillingness to start that particular ball rolling again? Or did she feel differently about it now?

He'd idly removed one of the books in the shuttered case. Turning to the title page, he was amused to see that this one—a translation of a novel by J. K. Huys mans—was, like another book he'd leafed through earlier, published by the Emperor Press, Caswell's private imprint. He wondered if it was just a coincidence or if—and this he thought more likely—the two men, his grandfather and Caswell, had been well acquainted with each other.

He skimmed several pages of the ornate and labored
prose—his own academic style began to look positively breezy, he thought—until his stomach rumbled, and he remembered he'd never gotten around to making any lunch that day. Always glad of an excuse, legitimate or otherwise, to knock off work for a half-hour, he slipped his Topsiders with the crushed heels back on, brushed his hair quickly in the bathroom mirror—my God, it had been growing fast lately; he needed another haircut already—and went down to the kitchen to rustle up a sandwich.

The refrigerator, he was surprised to see, was blocked. A girl, her back to him, wearing a light blue, one-piece bathing suit, a white towel bunched around her shoulders, was holding the door open with one hand and with the other rummaging around on the top shelf. Her legs were long, straight, and slim; a glossy braid of black hair coiled across her back; until now, Peter had never seen her outside of her long and loose wrap skirts. She had an even better body than he'd imagined. Hoping not to startle her, he said, “Leah” in a gentle voice, and her head popped above the refrigerator door. “You going for a swim?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, fixing him with her dark eyes. “But I thought you'd gone with Mrs. Simon.”

“No, I wanted to get some work done. But isn't the water still too cold?”

“I don't feel it so much,” she said, drawing the towel from her shoulders and modestly tying it around her waist. “I can swim almost any time of the year.” She took two plums from the bin in the bottom of the refrigerator, then closed the door. She paused, then said, “If you're not going to do any more work right now, why don't you go with me?” The invitation was accompanied by one of her rare and enigmatic smiles, a Mona Lisa sort of smile, he thought; her lips turned slightly upwards at the sides, but her eyes seemed always untouched by it, as did her brows, straight and severe. She'd smiled that way the day before when
they'd discovered the contents of the locked bookcase together.

Though swimming was probably the last thing he'd thought of doing that afternoon, he found himself rapidly formulating reasons for going ahead anyway: it would clear his head and enable him to work better later, he could use the exercise, it would be a great way to build up his left arm again. Maybe this was just what he needed. He forgot all about getting a sandwich, told Leah to give him two minutes to change, and bounded back up to the bedroom.

The red swimsuit with the green crocodile that Meg had bought for him still had the price tag pinned to one leg. He put it on, thought it was awfully risqué compared to the baggy old tennis shorts he'd usually worn to the beach; but as he had no other choice just now, he grabbed a towel from the bathroom and hurried back downstairs. The fact that he felt slightly winded just from running up and down the stairs convinced him he was doing the right thing after all; clearly, he needed the exercise.

Though he'd expected Leah to lead him to the dock below the boathouse, she said the water there was too deep to wade into and that she had a better spot picked out. A couple of hundred yards to the west, shielded by the trees nearest the shoreline, she showed him a sort of cove, a tiny inlet dotted with broad, flat gray stones. A small patch of gritty sand and pebbles pro- vided the closest thing to a beach anywhere on the estate. Leah unknotted her towel there, laid it flat, and while Peter was still self-consciously taking off his shirt, stepped unhesitatingly into the water. As soon as she was immersed up to the knees, she threw her head back, her face to the sun, the thick black braid hanging down as straight as a sword. Her hips were narrow, her back long; her shoulders, looking to Peter as fragile as fine china, were flung back in a touchingly bold and natural fashion.

He dipped his own foot into the water, then instantly withdrew it. The water was bitingly cold; how could Leah stand it? Must be that famous extra layer of fat women are supposed to have. If Leah
did
have it, he thought appraisingly, it certainly didn't show. Her body was as lean and taut as a drawn bow. Before she could turn, he plunged his foot back in, held it there until the numbing sensation began to subside. The sun, thank God, was unobstructed by any clouds. He waded in up to his knees and scooped handfuls of the water over his thighs, wrists, the back of his neck. Leah, without ever looking back at him, suddenly slipped forward into the water, as effortlessly as a seal, barely making a ripple. With her head still above the surface, her feet fluttering silently below it, she glided out into the bay. One second he was watching her head, like a submarine periscope advancing smoothly forward, the next it had disappeared from sight. One heel broke the surface, then that disappeared, too, and the tiny cove was as placid as if they'd never entered it.

Peter rubbed the cold water higher up on his thighs and then, with Leah still underwater somewhere, took advantage of the unobserved moment to clench his teeth, extend his arms as if on a tightrope, and quickly dip himself down; when the water flooded his new trunks, his lips made a perfect, puckered O, as if he were about to blow a smoke ring. He held himself down as long as he could, until that first shock had begun to abate, then slowly lifted himself up again, the icy water streaming out of his newly christened bathing suit. Leah had still not reappeared.

Splashing his face and shoulders, he moved his feet about, trying to find a firm slab of stone to stand on. Between his toes, he felt a mixture of tiny rocks and shells, some of them sharp, and an ooze of mud, sand, and seaweed. It made him want to plunge forward and swim, just to get his feet off the bottom for a while. He
wondered if there might be crabs, too, lurking underfoot.

But where, he wondered with increasing alarm now, was Leah? What could it have been—thirty seconds? A minute? It seemed at least that long, and he hadn't seen even a ripple on the surface to indicate where she was. He called her name. A bird somewhere in the trees behind him answered. He called again, wading a little farther out. It had to be at least a minute now—maybe it was two. He suddenly feared that she might have hit her head on a rock while diving down. But if that had happened, even if she'd somehow been knocked unconscious, wouldn't she have floated to the surface by now? Around his legs, he noticed a warmer current, the water flowing around him as he moved, up to his chest now, like a slow, gentle whirlpool. On the surface, he could see the pattern of it, the lazy, concentric circles, and then, just as he dimly perceived a shimmering blue form skimming along beneath it, Leah shot up out of the water right in front of him, with her eyes wide open, and laughing like a girl who's just been kissed.

“Are you warmer now?” she said, and even now she seemed in no need of a breath. He'd expected to see her gasping; instead, she appeared exuberant, invigorated. He'd never yet heard her laugh so happily. And indeed, he did feel warmer. Nor had the encircling current begun to abate.

“How did you do that?” he said as she bobbed up and down. Her suit clung to her shoulders like a second skin; her breasts, small but round and high on her body, stretched the tight fabric. “Don't you ever need to come up for air?”

“I just did,” she said, and to please him she took in a long and exaggerated breath. Her nipples stood out in clear circles the size of quarters. “There. Now do you want to go for a swim?” she asked. One of her hands, before he knew it, had slipped into his, and drawn him
forward into the water, as she glided backwards, smiling still. The bottom fell away fast, and kicking his feet he could no longer even estimate the depth of the water. To his surprise, he found that he was coursing ahead much more rapidly than he was used to. Maybe he wasn't as out of shape as he thought, or was it this slender girl who was towing him with such ease? Just beyond the encircling arms of the cove itself, she released his hand and paddled away on her back. Peter, suddenly having to rely on his own power again, fluttered his feet in place. His arms made wide, sweeping arcs. Leah described a large circle around him and then, still on her back, submerged herself headfirst in a way Peter had never seen anyone do before. She was the most remarkable, natural swimmer he had ever seen. She broke the surface again like a whale breaching and, as if she had just read his thought, looked at him and spouted a glistening jet of seawater into the air. They both laughed, and Peter, tiring already, turned toward the shore, swimming in a slow and easy sidestroke. When he was well within the confines of the cove again, he lowered his feet to the mucky bottom and clambered back up onto the bank. Leah waved as he stood on the patch of beach, toweling himself off, and swam most of the distance back to shore underwater. She popped up again, her blue suit gleaming the color of the sky, only when she was a few feet from where Peter lay warming himself in the afternoon sun.

Without bothering to dry off, she lay down on her stomach, right next to him, leaning on her elbows. “Plum?” she asked, offering him one of the two she'd brought with her from the house. “I'm starved.”

“No thanks. You're one hell of a swimmer,” he said as she bit into the fruit. A trickle of juice ran down her chin. She wiped it away with a corner of the towel.

“I like the water.”

“It likes you, too,” he said, and she smiled. When
she'd finished with the plums, she rolled over and, after appearing to debate with herself for a moment, drew back one arm and hurled the pits out into the cove. She looked almost mischievous as she did it, and even after the pits had plunked into the water, she watched as the faint, tiny ripples dispersed and then vanished.

“Leah,” Peter said, her name, spoken here, sounding more intimate than it ever before had, “can I ask you something?” She turned to him. Beads of water clung to her dark eyebrows. “When did you actually come to work for my grandfather?” He wished the question hadn't come out sounding so much like something from a personnel office. “I mean, how long is it that you've been out here?”

She looked away again. “Not too long. Your grandfather had someone else before me ... She was the one who used to make pots, in the boathouse,” she volunteered.

“But what did you do, where did you live, before coming here to live with your father?”

To this she appeared to have no ready reply. “Before Nikos?” she said. Peter had heard her call him by his first name before. “I don't know ... I lived in other places. Not in this country.”

“But your English is perfect.”

“Oh, English is used all over now,” she said, and brushed a pebble from the towel.

Tossing her braid behind her, she lay back down, her face tilted upwards toward the sun. In profile, her long neck, narrow chin, and prominent brow reminded Peter of something from a classical Greek frieze. There was a large black and orange bowl ("A krater,” Byron had corrected him) on display in a niche of the upstairs corridor; around its lip wound a decorative procession of figures. Leah, Peter thought, could be dropped into that procession without disturbing its harmony or beauty. If anything, she would enhance it.