The Wood of Suicides Read online

  LAURA ELIZABETH WOOLLETT

  The

  Wood

  of

  Suicides

  Copyright © 2014 by Laura Elizabeth Woollett

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Woollett, Laura Elizabeth—

  The Wood of Suicides / Laura Elizabeth Woollett.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-57962-350-0

  eISBN 978-1-57962-375-3

  1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Boarding schools—Fiction. 3. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. 5. Love stories. I. Title.

  PS3623.O7127W66 2014

  813'.6—dc23 2013039996

  Printed in the United States of America

  Acknowledgements

  This book could not have existed without the love, patience, indulgence, and hilarious annotations of Kirill Kovalenko; the excellent advice and unfailing kindness of my agent Victoria Marini; the vision of Marty and Judith Shepard; and the nurture, support, and diversion provided by my family and friends in Perth and Melbourne. I would like to thank you all for helping me to bring my first novel into the world.

  When the fierce soul makes its way from a body, From which it has managed to rip itself out . . . It falls into the wood, there is no choice of place;

  —DANTE ALIGHIERI, The Divine Comedy

  She had hardly ended her prayer when a heavy numbness came over her body; her soft white bosom was ringed in a layer of bark, her hair was turned into foliage, her arms into branches.

  —OVID, Metamorphoses

  PROLOGUE

  What did Daphne see, when her arms hardened into boughs and her world was choked with green?

  Was there a nymph’s wading pool, heavily chlorinated? Was there an overhang of pink and purple wisteria? Was there summer hysteria? Was there a hovel of hornets, ready to attack at the slightest whiff of pheromone or even a woman’s perfume? Was there the distant thump of a car door? A Pacific breeze? Was there a weeping willow? A god reciting poetry?

  Girls turning into trees. Trees pecked at by harpies. This is all I see.

  PART ONE

  My name is Laurel Marks and I am the daughter of one of those impossible unions: the intellectual man and the sensuous woman. I suppose this means that I’m blessed from a genetic standpoint, getting the best of both mind and physicality. For all this, I can’t help seeing myself as an evolutionary dead-end.

  I grew up in Lower Pacific Heights, in a Victorian townhouse—less grand, though as tasteful as any of the mansions of Pacific Heights proper. For me, it provided an almost immaterial world of dust motes and slanted sunlight and telebabble in the next room. My mother pottered about in the background with part-time work and yearly renovations. She wore a lot of white in those days, white dresses that billowed like drapes. She painted cherry blossoms, drove me to dance and deportment classes that I failed to complete. I was, quite idyllically, an only child.

  I liked to believe that I was raised in the style of the Germans. A psychologist (Ainsworth) once remarked on the huge number of anxious-avoidant attachments found among German infants. Defensive posture. Limited emotional expression. A preference for solitary play. Avoidant adults would rather be independent than intimate with another person.

  My father’s parents came from Trier, in the Rhineland-Palatinate. My grandfather’s surname was “Marx,” though he was neither a Jew nor a socialist. My grandmother was born “Dreyfuss”—literally “from Trier.” My mother’s side of the family were ruddy, pleasant Irish people with some money and no other children besides her. I always gave more authority to my German heritage, probably because it seemed somehow essential to my character: my obedience, my perverseness, my craving for order and patriarchy.

  I attended a nearby Catholic girls’ school every year with the exception of my last, when circumstances led me to become a boarder. My grades were good, As and Bs for the most part, though admittedly not what they could have been. I was quiet and disliked everybody, yet managed to fit in—if only because I was too indolent to do otherwise. Report cards praised my mature and consistent approach.

  HE WAS a non-interventionist god. A god who was impotent. A god who may or may not have seen everything but, in any case, never appeared to be looking when I sought out his sloe-dark eyes. A god whose image I was made in, perhaps, but imperfectly, impulsively, in a sticky, blind moment of self-purgation. A god whose presence was stronger in his absence. Could I call him a god?

  In the mornings, my father and I would both sit at the same table, drinking our coffee black and with two sachets of sweetener. A rare, intimate day would have me asking him a question: “What is Occam’s razor?” or “Do you think Dostoyevsky was an existentialist?” I would watch the angular patterns that he made with his hands, delighting secretly in our infrequent eye contact and his deliberate, droning speech.

  My father’s working hours were unpredictable and extensive. Nevertheless, there were times when I came home early in the afternoon to find him reading on the daybed: fully clad in two-piece suit and tasseled loafers and totally indifferent to my truancy, as if I were just another of his faceless coeds.

  The college where he taught was, like my own school, only a matter of blocks away from the family home. I was in the habit of skipping many classes in the afternoons, too dazed by the schoolyard dust, surrounding chatter, and my own self-enforced starvation to endure the stretch of the day. Often, I didn’t go to school at all, but simply stayed in bed until both parents had left the house for work. My hours alone passed without the slightest thought or action, workbooks open all around me unread, as I lay prone in the indoor sun.

  It was not uncommon for me to take my homework to the room with the daybed, knowing that it was his favorite and that he was in the habit of stopping there to put his briefcase down when he came home from work. I took pleasure in looking more studious than I was and would ignore him as he came in, my head down over the open pages. I often kept my uniform on well into the evening in order to better look the part for him. White button-up blouse. Maroon sweater. Gray skirt. Black hosiery. By the time I began reading Hamlet for eleventh grade English literature, I was filling out my uniform nicely, and he developing another habit, of glancing over my shoulder whenever he passed by to see what I was studying.

  The west-facing windows meant that it was a room for indoor plants and flower arrangements, as well as shelf upon shelf of legal dictionaries and publications. Medical books also began to show up in that room, in later years, with emphasis on the subjects of nervous-system pathology, neurosurgery, neuropharmacology, and cranial nerve disease. Detailed anatomical drawings showed faces split open, to reveal brainstems, ganglia, nerve divisions, and the sore teeth to which all this was connected.

  I WONDER now if he’d been a virgin when he met my mother. Though I realize this isn’t the sort of thing a daughter should be asking, in light of his actions, it would explain a lot. The briefness of their courtship. The perfunctory outdoor ceremony. The blatant sensuality of his choice in partner. My main difficulty is in trying to conceive of their initial connection. A frolicsome artiste-to-turn-interior-decorator and reticent young professor, united by mutual acquaintances at some crowded summer soiree.

  By the time I came along, they were obviously familiar enough. She would ask him whether he knew t
hat Margaret Pratchett was having her kitchen decorated, whether he thought it odd that she was not asked to help with the décor. She would joggle her dainty, high-arched feet (whose pronation I inherited, though I lost out on the daintiness) and moan about the weather or the construction workers outside. The man abided it all without complaint, eyeing her feet and flipping the pages of his students’ papers.

  Like my mother, he’d been brought up by elderly kin. Unlike her, a pandered only child and minor miracle (parents in their forties, presumed infertile), his growing conditions had been severe. Grandparents from the old country. A brittle, nervous mother who died during childbirth and a blue-collar father who took to drinking soon after. He had compensated as high-achievers do—debating team, essay competitions, scholarship to Stanford—and was already starting his clerkship by the time my grandfather succumbed to cirrhosis.

  He had a handsome if unmemorable sort of face—sharp-jawed, straight-nosed, dark-eyed and browed—with an impressively high forehead. His hands, like my own, were long and exquisite, though masculinized by roped veins that carried up his arms and, I assume, back toward his unknowable heart. His lineaments were trim, functional, touching in their very austerity. He held himself tall and erect and, despite his ectomorphy, exhibited a perfect, V-shaped torso. His body hair was sparse and his skin a couple of von Luschan tones darker than my own.

  He spoke in a low-pitched monotone, simultaneously stirring and difficult to make out. In his last decade, he often had problems with tooth pain, which proved later on to be of an entirely different nature. After the extraction of all the molars on his left side and the continuing trigeminal pain, he chewed with only one side of his mouth. I liked to think that I understood, through some secret attunement to suffering, the dark crescents of his under-eyes, the convict stubble of his jaw—prior to the pain, he had always been clean-shaven—and the spasms that occasionally caused his calm face to contort.

  She didn’t suffer, so couldn’t have understood. She handed him glasses of water to wash down the pills, and his packet of Dunhills (the smoking was a recent thing, to speed up the action of his anticonvulsants; meanwhile, he’d given up alcohol altogether). Her hands were as soft and dainty as her feet. She was like a modern-day Mary Magdalene, or perhaps a Botticellian Venus: sea-green eyes, cupid-bow lips, scarlet curls of a meretrix. She also had a pair of dimples on her lower back, I knew, from the countless times I sat in on her dressing as a child. I was fascinated, once upon a time, by the lingerie drawer, and by the eau de parfum, which she spritzed all over her breasts and torso (not only the traditional pulse points at the wrists and throat). Married at twenty-three, widowed at forty-one, she maintained herself wonderfully over those eighteen years of wifehood.

  In my own mind, it may not have been true love, but it was a nice arrangement. He gave her a large cut of his paycheck, enough to keep her occupied while he was writing his law reviews or rereading The Nicomachean Ethics. On weekend mornings, her moaning could be heard—high, delicate, persistent—from behind their bedroom door. The arrangement was liberal, almost aristocratic: the old world academic in his ivory tower, with the fresh, frivolous wife at his beck and call.

  I wanted to believe that it was nothing more than an arrangement, that a god so cold, so rational, would never fall prey to anything as base as passion. Let us say they loved well: the ring fit and they procreated. I was born in the summertime, August 1985—the product of the god and the woman.

  OF COURSE, my virginity is far more relevant than my father’s.

  I was a Pre-Raphaelite’s dream come true. Auburn hair, partway down my back, undulating and prone to flyaways. Deep-set almond eyes, which could morph from a rich, almost oriental black to a light-sodden leprosy of green and brown when I cried. My cheekbones were shaded, my brows dark, my pout petal-pink and obstinately wistful. I had the curious nose of any decent nymph, the pallid face, and the unwieldy, intellectual hands.

  I was devoid of muscle tone and with my adamant, teenaged tendency not to eat much, invariably got dizzy toward the end of the day. At seventeen, my BMI was exactly level with my age; nevertheless, softnesses persisted. My backside had a stubborn layer of female fat, which no amount of skipped lunches could do away with. Although the prongs of my hips were sharp enough to bruise a man during sex, they were also shaped for childbearing. I had regular periods from the age of twelve and a half onward. My breasts were small and pretty, with areole the same color as my mouth.

  I resented my body, even as I was entranced by it. I knew that its lushness was merely a semblance, disguising deep putrefaction, death. My warm breath was a funeral dirge. My burnished waves were the dead leaves of autumn. My smell was oversweet, with a catch of something acrid. As with all things green, my charm wasn’t in my freshness itself, but the certainty that it couldn’t last.

  FOR SEVENTEEN years, I shuffled through life: a life that was little more than a small eternity of lunchless lunch hours, hunger headaches, and a school within walking distance of my empty house. Weekdays held about as much interest and variation for me as the single slice of dry toast I started them with. My teachers rarely remarked upon my absences; my peers, still less. There is a sense of deliverance that I still associate with exiting past back buildings and strolling downhill, through dappled sun and shade, past the mansions and glass-fronted boutiques of Fillmore Street. On days like this, I could slip through the front door with a silvery clatter of keys and walk straight into the sunlit room where my father was aching.

  The sunlit room with its lily vases, ashtrays, hanging spider plants, and smell of dust and sweat. Silverfish crawling out of the oldest books.

  It happened now and then that I would come home while he was off work, nursing one of his “toothaches,” and would be obliged to fetch him his pain pills. The light would be coming in; impurities would be spotlighted inside the flower vases. His eyes would be screwed shut, either for the intensity of the sunlight or the intensity of his pain. I was aware that he barely distinguished between my mother and me in that state, in the midst of those throes that almost resembled ecstasy.

  I would bring him his pill with water, never daring enough to bring his Dunhills as well. He would hold me there occasionally until the spasm was over, forcefully grasping at my arm or hand. The first time this happened, I almost jumped out of my skin—I was so unused to him touching me without warning. I was prepared, however, for following occasions: even found myself easing enough to reciprocate the contact. If he clenched my hand, I would clench his in return. If he clasped my arm, I would clasp one of his arms too. From above, I would observe the silvery sheen of his gritted teeth, the details of his grooming and how he had let it slip. When it was over, I would extricate myself gently, always careful not to rouse him by rising from the daybed too soon.

  My movements conspired with his illness to blur the boundaries between wife and daughter. I had always believed that if he were to love me, really love me, it would be for the properties I shared with him, not because of any resemblance to her. It was becoming clearer to me, however, that one could not afford to be scrupulous in matters of love. I began to fantasize about using my likeness to her as a means of winning him over: of pulling down the blinds in the sunroom, watching him wash down his pills, and wafting over him like a sensuous phantom, like the smoke from the cigarettes I would bring to him immediately after.

  I WAS two months away from my seventeenth birthday when he turned forty-four. The event fell on a Saturday, which meant that she did not lead him out of the bedroom until close to midday, looking charmingly shabby with his dark beard and ill-buttoned white shirt. I slit my eyes at her as she sat him down at the kitchen table, with a coquettish kiss on the forehead and ruffle of his bed hair. “Stay right there, birthday boy.” She squeezed his shoulders, before turning around and busying herself with his breakfast.

  Unlike them, I was already bathed and dressed. I had wrapped up a copy of Civilization and Its Discontents in the original German, purchas
ed weeks ago from the foreign-language bookstore. Though it was not my favorite of Freud’s works, I thought he’d appreciate the fact that it had won a Goethe prize. Picking up the package, I tiptoed over to where he sat and bent down to brush my lips lightly over his bristled cheek. It was the first time in months that I had kissed him and I was careful to do so as softly as possible. At the moment of contact, however, my father flinched and cursed as that whole side of his face was crippled by a lightning bolt of pain. “For Christ’s sake, Laurel!”

  My mother set down the French press with a clatter and rushed to his side. “Oh, Jonathon! Jonathon, darling, I’m here,” she cooed into his ear, groping for his veiny left hand. Her softer, paler hand nestled inside his. In the midday light, his wedding band sparkled triumphantly. A gold crucifix glistened between her unfettered breasts.

  I stood aside, casting my eyes down at the unopened Freud. It was obvious to me that she was to blame for the attack. She had clearly overtaxed his nerves with the excesses of that morning.

  I HAD loved my mother once, passionately and indecently: loved with the love of a creature that is all body, and that depends on the body of another to survive. I had loved her, but early on I outgrew her, and my love soured like milk into something that resembled contempt.

  He had never known his mother. Whatever he may have needed from her was supplied by bottled formula and Oma Marx, with her thick calves and coiled gray bun. That he was never truly nurtured may explain his asceticism as an adult; then again, it may also explain his attraction to my mother, and that milky-white hourglass figure of hers, with its balanced C-cups—the very embodiment of nourishment.

  He proposed to her only five months after they met at a friend’s summer party. She had gone there barefoot, wearing only a white caftan, as if she could not afford to dress herself—although her pedicure told him otherwise. The pair were wedded in the April of 1984, in the Japanese gardens, when the cherry trees were in bloom. They honeymooned in Kyoto, feeding on seaweed, horseradish, and salmon roe, and sleeping late on a low futon bed behind the shoji. Their love was self-contained, absolute; it demanded no interference. I was conceived all the same. For that, I could never forgive them.