The Wood of Suicides Read online

  I convinced myself not to take this judgment to heart. All teachers were weird, when I thought about it. Six-foot-seven Mr. Higginbottom was weird with his plaid shirts, sermons, and brood of seven boys. Five-foot-six Mr. Slawinski was weird with his cold-blue gaze, shaved head, and immunity to the charms of pretty girls when they tried to flirt their way out of bad test scores or forgotten math homework. Madame Rampling, the francophile Englishwoman who taught us French, was weird. Mr. Henderson, who wore shorts and gartered socks in all weathers, as if his hairy hams were too attractive to cover up, was weird. Mr. Wolfstein, the head of the English department, was weird with his turtlenecks, tobacco-scented beard, and smoking breaks that lasted up to half a lesson. Marcelle and Amanda, who had been in his class the year earlier, still doubled over in mirth when they remembered the way that he used to sing poems instead of simply reciting them.

  I took it upon myself to find out everything I could about Mr. Steadman. Every day, I watched and listened for new information. It was a fine Thursday when Mrs. Poplar knocked on the door of our classroom and asked him, in her simpering, middle-aged way, “Hugh, may I borrow you for a minute? I have a man’s job for you in the next room.” This was how I discovered his first name: Hugh.

  Name: Hugh Steadman. Date of birth: February 29, 1960. I had learned as much a lesson earlier, listening to an exchange between him and Christina Tucci, who was bragging about having just turned eighteen. “Well, that makes you eight years older than I am! I’ve only had ten birthdays, you know” (a corny joke that I didn’t really approve of, but that allowed me to calculate his true age, and the twenty-five years that lay between us).

  I was not hurt by his casual habit of mentioning his wife in anecdotes. In fact, I already felt that I knew “Danielle.” His twin children had also become familiar to me: sulky Cole and dutiful Catherine, who attended the same coed middle school. It seemed almost perverse that I should know anything about them—I, who had so many impure thoughts about their father. Although it would’ve made more sense to interpret such references as evidence of his love for them, I turned them to my own advantage: as I saw it, he was catering to me, indulging my curiosity, at the expense of their privacy.

  I saw further evidence of indulgence in his approach to teaching, which encouraged rapt listening over reading and note-taking. On the rare occasions when he did assign us work during class, he would prowl the room with his hands in his pockets, moving between the desks with a swish of corduroy or chino cloth. Once a suitable amount of time had elapsed, he would come and crouch by our desks, looking over our shoulders at the skimming of eyes under fluttering lashes, or the scratching away of mechanical pencils. “That’s an interesting point,” he would murmur with a smile, or “What do you make of that couplet, there?” (pointing to the line in question with a hardy index finger, which I instantly imagined being touched by).

  He was an indulgent teacher. He joked with his outgoing pupils and was kind and courtly with his timid ones, so that he seemed to favor anyone he spoke to. It was an honor to be the focus of such tact, such charisma—especially as I felt myself to be sorely lacking in both. If I imagined that he was more tender, more attentive with me than the others, however, I doubted it a moment later: listening to him lower his voice with shy Sally Flores, who sat alone in the row behind us, or conversing in Italian with Graziella and Christina on the other side of the room.

  He knew Italian. Where he had learned it, I didn’t know. I did know, for he had mentioned so in passing, that he had briefly attended the Perelman School of Medicine, dropping out after a year or so to study literature. I had the notion that his wife was also a doctor; that they had met while only students. This was confirmed a fortnight later when I heard that Kaitlin Pritchard had become chummy with Dr. Danielle Steadman while volunteering at the children’s hospital the year before, had even been invited over for dinner. I would have given anything to hear her describe the interior of their home, the manners of the lady of the house, and whether the handsome schoolmaster had made a pass at her while driving back to boarding school that night, but couldn’t think of a polite way of asking.

  The most trivial details of his life excited me. The mugs of milky coffee that he brought back from morning break and nursed, lukewarm, until lunch hour. The flowers that presided over the anarchy of his desk, larkspur and narcissus, plucked from his very own garden. His singular, left-handed scrawl, indecipherable in red ink, hopeless in white chalk. The outfits, teachers’ outfits, paraded before me day after day.

  There were beige chinos, cornflower shirt. Beige chinos, navy sweater-vest. Tweed suit, white shirt. White shirt, camel corduroys. Navy sport coat, slung over the back of his chair. On cooler days, he sometimes sported a sweater over his shirt and tie in charcoal, burgundy, or chocolate brown. Around the end of the month, he acquired a pair of gray herringbone trousers. Ties came in maroon, royal blue, gold and brown, patterned with paisley, fleur-de-lis, lozenges, and prancing Flemish lions. He wore brown wingtips, carried a brown leather briefcase. His wristwatch had a brown band and golden fixtures.

  I had little desire to see him dressed otherwise. His buttons and buckles, his collars and cuffs, his taupe trouser socks, all filled me with a sweet, bright admiration. The desire to see him undressed was something else entirely: it was a desire that was almost too physical to entertain. Now and then, thinking more innocent thoughts, I would be assailed by images of dark, curled hair and tumescent flesh, never-before-seen flesh that, nevertheless, throbbed with heat and reeked of male sweat. It was all that I could do to keep myself from crying out with the thought, which was less thought than sensation—a brute, black force that made my knees clamp together, my mind close shut.

  MY CASE wasn’t helped by the fact that there were reminders of him everywhere. The Molière play that we read for French class, in which a man of forty-two plotted to marry his ward, a girl of seventeen. Headlines over breakfast: a history teacher in Vermont; a music teacher in Kentucky. The sight of the other English teachers, alone: grizzled Mr. Wolfstein; fat Mrs. Poplar; even that detested hussy, Miss Kelsen.

  He was sociable, oh so sociable. I had seen him bounding alongside Mr. Wolfstein, an excited pup next to the wolfish old man. He was adored and caressed by Mrs. Poplar, a fond and frumpy mother who, when I thought about it, couldn’t have been more than five years his senior. Naturally, he was flirtatious with Miss Kelsen. Yet as bitterly as I looked upon the young woman’s dimpled laughter, the older man’s murmured quips and upturned, explanatory palms, I was aware of his ways. He was an incurable flirt.

  He flirted with seniors, juniors, sophomores, freshmen; with female teachers and librarians. Outside of work, I was sure he was the sort of man who struck up conversations with waitresses, shop girls, and stray women whom he saw waiting at bus stops or on park benches. One art lesson, while burrowing in the supplies closet for pastels, I was startled from my task by what sounded like his sonorous voice blustering into the room. “Flowers for milady,” he greeted Ms. Faber, a snaggle-toothed woman with a flesh-colored mole on her left cheek. I wasn’t thinking about her appearance then, however; the shock of his voice had brought on graver concerns, as I sent the entire tin of pastels (located at last) crashing down, along with various brushes, twigs, hard erasers, and the good willow charcoals.

  “Jeez, Laurel, stop dropping things!” Marcelle cackled across the room.

  I bent down demurely to clear up the mess, aided by a couple of nearby handmaids. He didn’t come to my service, but stayed standing with Ms. Faber, arms crossed and smiling (smirking?) at the proceedings. He was wearing his corduroys with the chocolate brown sweater, which brought out the chestnut tones in his hair. On my down-headed walk back to the communal table, I saw that he had placed a vase of amaryllises on Ms. Faber’s desk.

  Sitting down, I didn’t look at him—simply smiled at Marcelle’s jibes and piled my hair up, sticking it in place with a pencil. He continued speaking to Ms. Faber, asking if she knew the myth
of Amaryllis, the white-clad girl who had stabbed herself repeatedly in the heart to make a bloody flower for her beloved. “Do we have English today, sir?” Marcelle interrupted. We did.

  Ms. Faber thanked him for the flowers, which we were to begin drawing that lesson. It seemed nothing more would pass between us. On his way out of the studio, however, Mr. Steadman stooped by my desk, retrieving something from the speckled vinyl floor. “You’ll be needing this,” he smiled slyly, placing a red pastel before me.

  IT WOULD be interesting to linger for a while in the art studio, a spacious annex of paneled windows and cool, northern light. It would be interesting to linger over the flowers drawn by each girl, the deviations of mind and body that they suggested.

  Marcelle’s flower, for instance, was clear and bright, somewhat one-dimensional. Jade van Dam’s was green-seeded, green-centered, in grading shades of pink rather than true red: intricate yet dispassionate. Winifred Maddock’s was huge, shapeless, and somehow sad: the overblown bloom of a corpulent, side-burned virgin.

  As for mine: raw and hungry and beginning to wilt, with petals that opened wide, only to turn back in on themselves. By the time that I completed enough drafts to transfer the thing to canvas, the outer white had diminished to an irregular fringe and the wilting had increased dramatically. The final product was, according to Ms. Faber, “expressionistic,” full of pathos and lacking in perspective.

  OUR DAYS in the sun were numbered. I knew it and, if the additions to Mr. Steadman’s wardrobe were anything to go by, he did too. Nevertheless, until mid-October, we were still having Fridays outdoors: a pleasure that he reserved for his seniors.

  There was something traumatic about the beauty of those Fridays in the sunlight, where we could not touch. Sometimes under the enchantment of his words, I would let my legs open a little wider than I should have, in hope of enchanting him with a glimpse. I didn’t know how much he saw, if indeed he ever looked (facing me across the circle, could he have avoided doing so?), yet no amount of shadowy thigh could have been an accurate measure of what I felt for him. My whole body could not have been an accurate measure. What I wanted was to merge with the grass, to be there under his fingertips, every nerve laid bare.

  In the sunlight, however, I was untouchable, as was he. I knew this when I saw him closing his book, but also when I saw him laughing, joking with the other girls. One Friday, I even saw him stand up from the grass, to stretch and skim a stone across the glittering surface of the lake. Never again did he ask if anyone wanted to help him carry the books upstairs. Never again did he put himself within my reach.

  Every Friday brought with it a new defeat, a new cup of sorrows. It got to the point where I couldn’t even sit through Thursday’s lesson without a certain awful fluttering in my stomach, a tightness in my chest, which was a premonition of the loss that I was to suffer the next day. The tweed suit became an object of ambivalence. Not to mention the willows, which caused me to fill whole pages of my notebook as follows:

  I watch the willows weep and cannot breathe

  I watch the willows weep and cannot breathe

  I watch the willows weep and cannot breathe

  It was the closest that I ever came to versifying my love, though now and again the instinct to express myself in words seemed to grab me by the throat. More than once, I had to stop myself from taking up a pen and making a journal entry in one of my notebooks; emotional expression was for the weak and, besides that, far too risky. I didn’t even consider confessing my predicament to another girl, although I often longed for an ally—a perverse nurse or fairy godmother who would conspire with me to administer him love potions, and kindly lead me to the slaughter.

  I had no illusions about my friendships with Marcelle and Amanda. Had I been less shadowy, more open about my aberrations, I might have dispensed with them entirely. As it was, I didn’t have the courage for that; I required a cloak of conventionality. It had been the same before Steadman, when I was a student at Sacred Heart—though as my attendance became poorer and my eating habits more abstemious, the cloak began to slip. Sometimes, I wondered whether I would not be happier forming ties with a different variety of girls: girls who were not so shallow; who weren’t constantly clowning and gossip-mongering; whose IQs weren’t so much lower than my own. Casting my eye across the school grounds, however, the girls who attracted me weren’t the solemn ones, but the shiny ones: the Jessica Brittons, Kaitlin Pritchards, and Jade van Dams of the world.

  These girls would’ve sensed in a heartbeat that I didn’t belong among them. It wasn’t only that my GPA was lower than theirs, or that I had an aversion to committees, club memberships, and charitable pursuits. There was also that other thing—the shifty aspect of my admiration, which made me vie for the seat behind Kaitlin in history class, or a position near Jessica in the locker room, where I could get a good view of the hooks of her bra, the curve of her waist, the brown ponytail dangling between her shoulder blades.

  I didn’t respect my friends. I maintained a discreet distance between myself and them. Nevertheless, there were times when the intrusiveness I hated them for gave me to celebrate. I’m thinking of that Friday in the sunlight, when Marcelle sat herself beside me and, with childish admiration, began playing with my loose hair—winding it up and fanning it out and holding it up to the light. “Your hair is so pretty, Laurel,” she told me guilelessly, as he stood nearby. My heart practically burst with gratitude. There was also another time, in the middle of a quiet English lesson, when Amanda leaned across the row to tell me in a cool stage whisper, “Lawrence Benning wants to date you.”

  “Lawrence Benning wants to do you,” Marcelle echoed, at my other side.

  “I don’t know who that is,” I said truthfully.

  “You met him.”

  “Two weekends ago.”

  “I don’t remember.” I bit my lip and looked over at Steadman, who was working at his desk, a matter of feet away, feigning disinterest.

  “Well, he wants you.”

  “Well . . .” I let the word hang in the air, a dreamy suggestion, as I continued to eye my only love, whose shirtsleeves were rolled up, whose brows were lowered, who wore a petulant pout of concentration. “. . . I don’t care.”

  Later that lesson, Steadman came by with the mini essays that he had ostensibly been marking. “Beautiful, Laurel.” His dark eyes met mine, as he passed back the meaningless slip of paper. I ignored the page in my hand. I stared after him, repeating his evaluation to myself: beautiful.

  WAS I beautiful? The question merited investigation. In study hall, I spent hours hunched over my textbooks with a compact mirror in hand, ignoring the words before me to examine my face from every angle. Between classes, I visited my reflection as often as I could, as if in danger of forgetting what I looked like. What I saw in the mirror always came as a shock to me—the unblemished skin, the fresh flush of the lips, the somewhat feline features—so that I stood there, intoxicated, for minutes on end.

  I was constantly comparing myself to the girls around me and was proud to count myself among the top tier: admirably slim, clear-skinned, with nice hair and no unfortunate facial features. While I didn’t exude sexual experience in the way that Siobhan Pierce or Hannah Williams or even Amanda did (from the very first, I sensed that she was not a virgin—an intuition she confirmed for me on a bus trip to San Rafael), I had a freshness that was far more rare and delicate. In purely physical terms, I wouldn’t have looked too out of place standing next to the prettiest girls in my grade. The white blouses and reddish tartan of our uniforms became me. Never in my life had I felt so genetically blessed.

  As one of the blessed, I rejoiced in the defects of others. There were the fat ones, who came in all different heights and colors, and who orbited the school like so many tartan-skirted planets, high socks slicing into the flesh of their calves. Perhaps even more delightfully grotesque, however, were those girls whose irregular features, irksome facial expressions, and general awkwardness c
ombined to make me hate them on sight. There was a junior with large, purplish lips, frizzy hair, and a freakishly long neck who I often saw carrying a violin case on my way to history from my locker. Another had inky eyes, set in a broad, flat face scarred so badly by acne that, from afar, she resembled a burns victim, but also a lion (I think it was her sandy bob cut). Then there was Mitzi Gantz, a girl in my grade whose Eurasian blood, rather than producing a fine-boned, exotic beauty, had created an anomaly: slanty eyes, freckles, and an Amazonian physique, with large bones and no breasts to speak of. Had she carried herself well, she might have been perfectly acceptable; as it was, she slouched and lurked. Her messy, black hair was constantly hanging in her eyes, and she never spoke, unless forced to—at which, a husky, barely intelligible murmur would issue from her chapped lips. “Ugh, that freak,” Amanda was given to saying, whenever we saw Mitzi lurching past. One weekend, we spied her in the company of a white-haired man in a yellow golf shirt and a much younger oriental woman. We could only conclude that these were her parents.

  There was also a freshman girl, Karen Harmsworth’s little sister. Like Mitzi, she wasn’t entirely ugly. Nonetheless, my aversion to her amounted almost to a passion. Even among the freshmen, she was small. She had a beaky nose and the eyes of a husky dog. Her freckles and pale eyebrows were those of a natural strawberry blonde (Karen’s color), but the hair on her head was solid black and worn in a pixie cut. The shortness of her hair meant her vulnerable nape was constantly exposed, as were her ears. These ears always seemed too red and oddly shaped, as if an animal had been gnawing on them. I once found myself behind those ears and that nape in a toilet queue, and experienced an involuntary shiver of dislike.