The Wood of Suicides by Laura Elizabeth Woollett Page A

however, I was there to write my essay and avoid his shining coward’s eyes. I avoided his eyes as he handed me my question sheet. Noticing my coolness, he was swift to move along, down-headed and in no doubt about his culpability. He didn’t linger to speak with any of the other girls—something I might have been consoled by, had my spirit not been so broken. I wrote steadily, dutifully, intent on closing my mind to the awareness of his gray herringbone trousers and his gleaming belt buckle as he made his rounds. One thing was clear: I would never be free as long as I desired him.
    The lesson left me more depressed than I’d begun it. My attendance had done nothing but broaden the gulf between us, into something that could not be bridged without excusing his disloyalty. How unfair it seemed to me that I should be the one to relinquish my pride, when it was he who had behaved badly, who had undone all our weeks of delicate maneuverings and hard-won intimacies with one indelicate action.
    Though I intended to treat him haughtily, I was in fact meeker than ever. I didn’t think I could look at him without tears welling up in my eyes, or speak to him without my voice betraying me, dissolving into sobs. I could scarcely look anywhere but at my own feet, shuffling between classes, and didn’t dare utter a word to anyone, for fear of dislodging the lump in my throat. Over my melancholy, I wore a mask of blankness, which never fully disguised the downward quirking of the corners of my mouth.
    I felt as if I’d been thinned, flattened, drained of all color. In the hallways, laughter scattered all around me, as I was elbowed, battered, pushed from place to place. November had begun, and I had taken to wearing my gray school sweater every day, a garment that made my complexion appear more whitewashed than ever and the shadows beneath my eyes a deeper reddish purple. Black stockings made pins of my slim legs. I was far from the near-naked girl he’d discovered in greener days, beneath the laurel trees. Instead, I was like the dead leaf in that poem of Verlaine’s, which we recited that week during French class.
    Les sanglots longs
    Des violons
    De l’automne
    Blessent mon cœur
    D’une langueur
    Monotone.
    Tout suffocant
    Et blême, quand
    Sonne l’heure,
    Je me souviens
    Des jours anciens
    Et je pleure
    Et je m’en vais
    Au vent mauvais
    Qui m’emporte
    Deçà, delà,
    Pareil à la
    Feuille morte. 1
    All choked up and pale, I was in the hall when the hour sounded for fourth period, gathering my books from the locker. It was Friday, the end of a week that had been nothing but an exercise in avoidance and self-abasement. I had been avoiding trips to the locker, avoiding routes that took me past his classroom, particularly in the onrush between one period and another. By some fateful slip of mind, however, I found myself back there to fetch my biology book, just as he was standing by the door and farewelling the last of his sophomores. He had a free period then, I knew. Framed in his doorway with his hands on his hips, he was looking away, probably pondering whether to spend the hour in the staffroom or to stay where he was. I thought that I would be safe, in my gray-sweatered plainness, to slip by him. Boldly, foolishly, he intercepted my sharp elbow, stopping me in my tracks and pronouncing my name with keen sonority. “Laurel!”
    I don’t know why he did it: whether it was instinct, a moment’s amnesia, or whether he thought that the silence between us had simply gone on for too long, and wished to make it up to me, to force himself upon me, to smother my scruples with smiling friendliness. As I turned around to look at him, however, his hand still grasping my elbow, I knew I’d been right in keeping my eyes from his: I wasn’t strong enough to sustain even a moment’s contact. I looked at him in a shock of agony. As predicted, the tears had sprung.
    He knew, had to know, what it was all about and that it was all