The God of the Woods

“Louise? Do you believe me?”

“I don’t know,” she says. And she doesn’t: feels her instincts are all wrong. Always have been. How, she wonders, can she fix her instincts about people? About men?

If she believed in a God, it was in one who functioned something like Louise in this moment: rooting for her charges from afar, mourning alongside them when they were rejected, celebrating every small victory that came their way.

You ever notice how the children of rich people are never as smart as the parents? Never as ambitious, never as successful? You gotta have something to strive for in life.

He’d take over the business, it was said, and she could see it: he already had the air that all these men had. The feeling he was owed something. Everything.

As a child, she had avoided naps: for waking from them caused in her a sort of supernatural despair.

“Kissing someone—someone you want to kiss, I mean—is like living inside the best song you ever heard. It’s the same feeling.”

“It’s just—lately I’ve been wondering whether having all of our material needs met from birth has been a positive aspect of our lives. It seems to me it may have resulted in some absence of yearning or striving in us. The quest, I like to call it. When one’s parents or grandparents have already quested and conquered, what is there for subsequent generations to do?”

The notion that some decision had been made already on her behalf began to settle onto her shoulders toward the end of the meal.

It wasn’t unpleasant.

It let her return, in fact, to her preferred state of being: dreamy unavailability, a cultivated air of mystery that she hoped might mask the lack of intellect that she accepted as a fact about herself.

Being humorless, she thought, was even worse than being dumb.

To panic, said T.J., was to make an enemy of the forest. To stay calm was to be its friend.