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

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    Still, when she broke it off, he was crazy with the desire to hold on, to keep it going. The most graphic images of their lovemaking occupied every idle moment of his day—at work, at home, driving around in his truck. He nearly cried out sometimes with the anguished hunger that would flood him thinking of her powerful long legs, opening, of himself kneeling above her, entering her. How she straddled him, how she pulled at him with her mouth, her teeth. A few times he had to stop the truck, torn between rage and jerking off. Once he hit the steering wheel so hard he carried the bruises on the curved outer flesh of his palm for a week.
    But he came out of it; he recovered. And as he became himself again, Eva came back to him, she emerged from the dark spell she’d been under.
    What did it? Mark was never sure. Maybe it was the sex, which had, oddly, gotten better and more frequent through the affair with Amy—at first because he had wanted to ensure that Eva didn’t guess he was involved with someone else, and later out of the appetite and sexual energy that had come to seem generalized in him, that occupied him constantly.
    But of course other things had changed in their lives by then too. The girls were a year older, and Eva had found care for them. His business was doing so well that they finally had what seemed like enough money. Eva had gotten a part-time job she loved, in a bookstore this time. In any case, it was like being rewarded for giving up an indulgence, getting his old, dear friend back. Rewarded with interest: the thought of her began to preoccupy him through the days as thoughts of Amy had at the height of their passion. As those thoughts still could, if he were honest, from time to time.
    But he felt it differently; he saw it differently. With Amy it had been, almost embarrassingly so, parts of her body that compelled him: her long, muscled calves and thighs, the wide dark triangle of her bush, the light clicking sound her sex made when his hand opened her legs. With Eva, he thought, it was the whole of her, as it had been from the start: the way she gestured and frowned when she spoke, her odd turns of phrase, her smallness, which made him feel powerful and protective. Even the way the house smelled when she was cooking, which seemed to him, somehow, to emanate from her, to be part of who she was. All of this made him, simply, happy.
    Summer began. The evenings were long. The girls were old enough now, they played well enough together, that Mark and Eva could resume their old habit of a glass of wine before supper. They sat together out on the terrace she’d painstakingly made from used bricks the year before. They sat in the shadows of the western mountains and looked over at the sun still laying a golden blanket over the eastern ones, and talked the way they had in the early days, but more calmly, more sweetly, he would have said. Eva had her own news to report now—eccentric, interesting customers who’d stopped in and the funny things they said; whatbooks were doing well, which had unexpectedly bombed; the visits from sales reps; the balancing of accounts—and so Mark felt he could at last speak openly of his own concerns: it wouldn’t be the occasion for her feeling the more resentful, the more deprived of a life in the world. They talked of the seemingly whimsical popularity of certain grapes, of how the valley was changing, of the exponential growth of the vineyards, of the problems of worker housing and the moral responsibility for it. They talked of foolish things too: whether Diane Keaton was actually acting in Annie Hall , or just being her ditzy self. Whether people on the East Coast, where Eva was from, had a stronger sense of irony than those in the West.
    They were sitting there one night in July when he told her about Amy. What he had come to feel as they drew closer together was that the secret of Amy was an impediment to their new openness, an impediment he couldn’t live