Lost in the Forest by Sue Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

and the girls and the shopping and the meals. There was the house itself, with its tilting floors and the doors that didn’t quite shut, the faucets that dribbled water. It took half an hour to draw a bath. There was the long rainy season to endure, the girls cooped up, fussy, wanting to be entertained and read to. There was the dry, hot summer and the dust that coated everything. He understoodmuch later that she’d been depressed and overwhelmed. At the time, though, he mostly hadn’t cared to understand, because her anger at him made him angry at her. He had simply turned away from her. He sought comfort first in the life of the girls’ world, the intense love for them that was like a shield against Eva’s sorrow, a blameless weapon against the anger he felt coming from her. When he arrived home, they were the ones he greeted with love, the ones he touched, the ones he smiled at.
    And then he turned to Amy.
    Their affair lasted just under a year, starting with a relaxed flirtation in the cantina where Amy was a bartender and he sometimes stopped in to talk with friends, to have a few more moments of ease before heading home to face Eva’s pinched-in rage.
    Mark liked to flirt—he liked women generally—and in some sense flirting was part of Amy’s job. When she had a male customer who seemed receptive to it, she gave a special spin to the opener, “What can I do for you ?” Mark had laughed out loud the first time she asked him that.
    When he stopped by, they talked, brokenly but easily, between her serving other customers. The third or fourth night he was in, Amy told him that she knew who he was, that she lived in a tiny bungalow at the edge of one of the small vineyards he managed. That she’d seen him there.
    Yeah, he’d noticed it, he said.
    He’d envied it, in fact. He’d seen her too, on the little deck at the back of the house, a woman alone, sunbathing and reading, and he’d imagined how simple, how easy it would be to live like that in such a place.
    He should come by for coffee some morning and check it out, she said. She had a towel slung over one shoulder. She always had a towel slung over one shoulder, and he pointed this out to her. She tilted her head and grinned. She was pulling a tall glass of ale, slowly. “Just looking for a guy with a bar of soap,” she said.
    He did go to her house, one rainy morning when there was nothing much doing in the vineyards. And after that they began to meet several times a week, for coffee, for sex, for the easy conversationthat followed it in a house where there were no children, no chores he was responsible for. It was all so simple, so without blame and resentment. Sometimes he managed to get away on a weekend afternoon, and they’d fuck and sleep, and then wake to fuck some more. In the summer Eva took the girls to her parents’ place in Martha’s Vineyard for a week, their more-or-less annual visit. Mark waited for Amy outside the cantina in his truck nearly every night and followed the red taillights of her old Volkswagen Beetle down the dark, empty road to her house.
    But over the long, rainy months of that next winter, she began to want something more from him. Because he couldn’t give it, because he couldn’t imagine inflicting the pain it would take to extricate himself from Eva and Emily and Daisy—couldn’t, in those rare moments he allowed himself to think honestly about it, imagine making any kind of life with Amy that he’d want—she gradually came to be angry with him too. More and more she insisted on her terms: if they were going to continue, he needed to get a divorce, they needed to get married. But even while she spoke of this, of their coming together permanently, she seemed increasingly to dislike him—even to despise him. In the end he couldn’t talk about a book or a movie, he couldn’t have an idea , without inviting her contempt for his critical faculties. He could see, long before they got there, where they were