Invitation to a Bonfire

by Adrienne Celt

  Bright green grass lined the dunes and baked into yellow, receded back towards the distant inland. We had to walk through it to get to the shoreline, and already sand was starting to slip inside my shoes. Canvas sneakers, because I didn’t have boots, and anyway it was so god-awful hot. Vera had decided to go barefoot, though I warned her more than once that she’d cut her foot on a quahog shell.

  “A what?” she mocked.

  “A quahog. Kind of clam.”

  “A what?” When I learned the word from Margaret years earlier, I’d laughed too, imagining a wee piggy burrowing beneath the sea. Now I liked it because it was funny, which wasn’t a reason I liked many things. Vera just smirked. “I’ll watch my step.”

  “If you say so.”

  We were bright. The sun getting high, the water cut and riveted by waves. Her pants sat loose on her little backside, and her shirt was buttoned up too high to look winning, though it did protect her chest from getting burned. We picked our way over rocks and around tide pools, cooling our heels in the salt. We passed several houses with terrible fences, picket posts all leaning out at different angles, bidden by weather or wind, strung together with bits of razor wire. The houses themselves were charming and shingled, and eventually stopped showing up.

  At noon or thereabouts, we sat to rest on a piece of parched driftwood high up the tide line. We could see the café about a half mile away, and Vera inspected the soles of her feet, seeming pleased by the cuts she found there, which she claimed didn’t hurt a bit. I knew I was supposed to be getting close to her, earning her trust, but every time I tried I felt like I was moving backwards.

  “Doesn’t it make you feel small?” I asked, indicating the ocean with my chin. “I can hardly stand it.” It was less the sunny waves that made me think so, and more the memory of a gunmetal sea that my orphan ship had glided through. How I’d once spotted a big wall of water in the distance, approaching us with overwhelming speed. It would’ve eaten the boat and left no trace, but instead it dropped back into the horizon without getting near enough to cause a ripple. I’d been alone on deck at the time. None of the other orphans believed me when I tried to explain.

  “Not at all,” Vera replied.

  “Really?”

  “Of course. I enjoy the feeling of my own insignificance.” It seemed like she might be making a joke at my expense, but her face was serious.

  “You don’t really think that.” I was picturing Lev, his stout belief in Vera as the guiding hand that led him through his life. Point A to Point Z.

  “Of course I do. It would be awful to believe that anything I did mattered, in particular. I like the ocean,” she insisted. “I’ve always liked the ocean. It will be here forever. Not me, thank god.”

  Vera that day: sun-swept but not -kissed, flushed but unburnt. I kept seeing her the way Lev had told me to see her, and the way, too, I’d been imagining her since I was a child. Remarkable. Untouchable. She occasionally had things in her teeth, which didn’t fit either of our renderings, but then, it often looked like blood stuck between the gums. I held her slim figure up against my own—silly girl that I still was, trying to figure out whether I could measure up. As if that was the thing that mattered: my feet being larger than hers, my prints obscuring hers in the sand when I stepped on top of them. My arms being longer than hers, long enough to wrap all the way around her shoulders and still have some to spare.

  She seemed so different from how she had just the day before, standing imperious on the train platform. I wondered then how much she knew. How much she wanted me to believe she knew. Sitting here with her feet unshod and telling me she’d be perfectly happy to die if it meant she’d also disappear and leave behind something greater that obscured her completely.

  Lev

  10 July 1931

  No postmark

  Vera, where are you? You were not here when I got home. I swept into the bedroom expecting to find you sleeping and to kiss you awake, to see your sullen blink at being pulled out of a dream. But the bed was tidy, empty. Your suitcase missing. Mail spilled through the slot in the door and lay in a great sad stack on the floorboards. All I can do is write these notes and leave them in every room of the house, hoping that somehow they’ll transmit a message to you: come back. I love you. Whatever I’ve chosen, whatever I’ve done, I didn’t mean it. Please come back.

  You know it used to confuse me, Vera, the way you got angry when I woke you up. I was so eager for your company. “Let me sleep,” you’d moan, and like a brute I’d tug your arm and ask you, “Why?”

  But now I understand. You imagine better things than the world can provide, and your dreams are a refuge. A place where the streets never have the scent of trash and urine, and the wind only blows newspapers into your face if they are encoded with welcome messages. Birds aren’t nuisances, they’re harbingers. Cats are familiars. Yes, Vera, yes. Wherever you’ve gone, I assume it’s for similar reasons. You’re in your own world while I am here, inhabiting its pale reflection. So I will not hurry you, I’ll only say: please. Don’t leave me here alone. I thought I could stand it, but I cannot. My life is a perpetual insomnia without you.

  Signed, your limited, lonesome Lev. Lowly, left-behind, leprously forlorn.

  Zoya

  57.

  The café was a bit of a disappointment, serving cocoa made from a powder. I decided that the proprietor must’ve lived on the premises, as his red motorboat was tied up outside, and I spotted a pillow and blanket in the corner booth. We sat by the window watching the sea, and trying to convince one another that we’d seen a whale. Great lumbering presences off in the distance. A waiter came by with extra cocoa powder and stainless-steel pots of hot water, single serving; he leaned on the table and told us it wasn’t the right time of day for whales, and we both made a point of ignoring him. Oh look. Right there. Just missed. Yes, I’m sure.

  On the walk back the waves were larger, and you could see the shadows of tall seaweed arms suspended in them. The beach smelled raw. At one point Vera tripped, and when I reached out a hand to help her balance she looked at me like she’d never seen me before—which, of course, she hardly had. In a book, in a story, we’d become the best of friends and take off running down the sand together, laughing wild. Each of us would’ve worn one of my sneakers, to save half our feet. But it wasn’t like that. I thought about Lev cupping the fattest joint of my hips and pressing himself to me, hard as stone. I thought about him scratching out notes in the dark. My canvas shoes were soaked and they made my feet cold, despite the heat of the day. By the time we got back to the cabin, pulling ourselves up the rickety wooden stairs, we were both mute with exhaustion. Seabirds called out, mock, mock, mock.

  Vera threw herself into an Adirondack chair and squinted at me, against the light. Looking young, almost girlish.

  “We don’t really need to carry on with this pretence, do we?” she asked. “It’s awfully tiring. Let’s just admit it.”

  “What?” I felt a cold like needles in my blood as she twisted a piece of dark hair around her finger. Her expression could’ve pearled an oyster.

  “Lev sent you here to get rid of me.” Such a simple statement, made so plainly, that I couldn’t help but gasp. She smiled, perhaps assuming my shock was a put-on, but it wasn’t, really. I knew I was on unsteady ground. She continued. “He thought it was a secret—but please. He can’t keep secrets from me. Anyway, I’m not sure how you were thinking to do it. But I know that you won’t.”

  “You do?” Perhaps I should’ve run right then. Stood up and gotten my coat from inside and hurried to the train station without looking around. It didn’t feel possible, though, to walk away. I tried to make my face innocent, tried to turn my resolve to steel. She saw right through me.

  “Yes. You’re too smart. Or anyway, smart enough. To know a more important offer when you hear one.”

  “Which is?” I asked.

  “Let’s talk over dinner. I’m too tired now. I need a bath.”

&n
bsp; And at that she hefted her light body up and seemed to float into the house, as if having brokered an understanding with gravity. That sometimes, enough was enough.

  58.

  You’ll have doubtless sensed the space closing, reader, between where I sit now, writing with my cheap black pen, and where I was, then. A time eclipse. The two moments slowly moving together until a window emerges where like meets like. You can’t jump through, but you can at least peek, pressing your face against the glass to feel the heat from fading summer sun.

  When I came downstairs, Vera was heating up two cans of chowder on the stove—in honor, she told me, of the quahogs (emphasis hers) that had shredded up her feet. The spice of seawater cut through the cream, and a box of soup crackers sat open on the table.

  “So you do know how to cook,” I said. She raised an eyebrow.

  “I wouldn’t count this as cooking.”

  Still I imagined her crouched over a hot plate in Paris, keeping herself and her father fed during moments of crisis. So many ration cards; unclear how the per-card items were selected, but the food always seeming to fit the ticket, through molecular sympathy or some more systematic affinity. God knows I remember from home. Yellow cards for dyed margarine, blue for salt, beige for semi-edible meats. Did she chop the salt pork into bite-sized pieces and fry it up with rice or bread? In our cottage, she stirred the soup and watched me, daring me to ask.

  I imagined her, also, in Lev’s arms. So small she would disappear into him as he grinned all hot and mad. His face carrying so much aristocracy in the length of the nose, the sullen, heavy eyelids. As she reduced the flame so our chowder wouldn’t boil, I watched him unbuttoning her skirt. As she turned to find two clean bowls in the cupboard, I saw him take her from the back, his chin lifting in ecstasy, both of them flushing with the fever of their union. He would bite her lip, as he had sometimes bitten mine; I once bit back, too. His blood tasted different from my own, though they comingled soon enough. (And what was Vera’s flavor? Cinnamon sticks grated onto pine? Pennies dipped in tea? If I pricked her finger and swallowed a drop, would she change the essence of me?)

  Using her spoon as a baton, Vera directed me to sit down, and I did. Obedient as always. I was also very afraid. Was there a right thing to say now? Was that possible? She placed a bowl of soup before me, and shook the crackers farther down their sleeve so we could pick them out with ease. She nibbled the corner of one, and tested a bite of chowder: still too hot.

  “So,” she said. “You must be wondering.”

  “What in god’s name you meant? It’s crossed my mind.” I burned my tongue and throat with one great spoonful, and it took all I had not to gag. Vera was smooth and in her element.

  “Let me ask: what did Lev tell you about his trip?”

  “Hmm?” I tried to play coy while also nursing my burn. The teatime plan could still work out, if I just got up in the middle of the night to adulterate the sugar bowl. “I barely know him.”

  “Oh please. It wafts off you like perfume.”

  I regarded her. Not what Lev and I had expected, but I’d known that would be the case before I set foot on the train. It occurred to me, too late, that I shouldn’t have eaten anything she set before me, but my stomach wasn’t cramping, and I wasn’t shaking, vomiting, passing out. Which seemed like a gesture of good faith. My face dropped some ounce of pretence. “Alright. He told me he went to find the last copy of his book. The one you stole, and burned.”

  “Stole? That’s putting it rather—incorrectly.”

  “Well, he didn’t give it to you to destroy. What would you call it?”

  “Saving him.” She frowned and blew into her soup. “From himself. God, what a fool.”

  “Me?”

  “That remains to be seen. Tell me this: did you ever read any of the book?”

  “How could I?”

  “No re-creations? Little bits he’d saved in a journal, or maybe a chapter he’d rewritten?”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t known any such pieces existed.

  “Of course not,” Vera said. “Because he understands, deep down, that the book’s no good. I’m sure”—and here she raised an eyebrow at me—“he never told you, either, about the times he’s thanked me—on his knees—for getting rid of it the first time around? No, of course not. It’s become too big of a symbol in his head.” She put down her spoon in disgust, fidgeting it back and forth on the placemat. “Flag of freedom, bluebird of unhappiness. Never mind that getting rid of that awful book was what let him write real books. That loss, it gave him a career.” She exhaled. “My god. He’d ruin us all if given an inch of leash, just to say he ran to hell on his own feet.”

  I must’ve looked struck. I opened my mouth, and shut it again as Vera composed herself, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and then licking her lips. She rarely let much emotion show, but I could see that she was genuinely perturbed from the slight twitch of her mouth, and the way she moved to crack her back as a surreptitious correction to her posture. As if she were just stretching, and not tense, uncoiling and recoiling her muscles. There had been so many moments when I feared losing my nerve, crumbling to basic cowardice. Or perhaps worried about Vera suspecting, and shooting me down with a spell from her eyes, snapping her fingers and pinching shut my windpipe. Magic death. What I hadn’t counted on was this: the possibility that Vera would say she was acting for Lev’s own good, and that I would think she might be telling the truth.

  How did I get here? I suddenly wondered. Then thought, Maybe all of this is crazy. A little too late. I tried to remember Lev, reassuring me in bed. What it felt like when his fingers were in my hair, one leg sprawled lazily over mine. But instead my mind conjured Vera taking a sip of tea. Skipping a breath. Her hand going up to her throat and her lips turning purple as her pretty eyes bulged. Vomit, maybe, but not enough to make a difference.

  “Are you listening?” she asked, and I nodded. “Good. I told you I had an offer, and I do. Better than anything Lev could promise you, one hundred percent guaranteed, because”—this, crisply—“my promises mean something. They are permanent. And I’ll make you comfortable as long as you live, just so long as you do as I say.” Vera perched her fingertips together in a tent, and rested her chin on the edge of them. Her voice grew quieter, but more focused, like a hose with the nozzle twisted to direct the spray.

  “He thinks now that he can escape me, move on. That he needs to. And he’s roped you in to the whole endeavor, because god forbid he carry a plan through on his own.” She looked at me, noticing my face fall. Didn’t quite smirk, but still gave a cool smile. “And I’m sure he’s fond of you, too, little bee, why not. But listen. He’s going to change his mind. Do you really believe he’ll thank you for hurting me? He’s nothing without me, and he knows it.”

  There was, to this, the terrible ring of truth. Her reassurance so pale: I’m sure he’s fond. Why had I ever believed I could make her afraid of me, take anything from her? This woman who had kept Lev at heel for a decade, this girl who had played every game by her own rules for as long as she’d been alive. Lev traced my jawbone with his fingers, with his tongue. Took me to out-of-town operas and symphony performances where the strength of the music pushed me back in my seat and stunned me into letting his hand creep up my thighs. He told me stories of his wife sweeping into meetings and turning monolithic, dark-suited executives into her playthings. Why had I not noticed, or cared quite enough, how impressed she left him, how helpless? He didn’t do anything on his own, anymore, if he ever had: a childhood of riches, a career made golden by the maneuvering of his wife.

  But Vera’s face was still serious; she wasn’t triumphant. If I thought her goal was just to humiliate me, I’d misunderstood what was at stake.

  “Do you see what I’m saying?” she asked. “There’s something more important here than either you or me. More important than Lev, in a certain sense. Only Leo Orlov matters, really: the writer, and his public face. That’s who I’ve built m
y life around, god knows. That’s who I’ve built.” Her fingers curled into a fist, in spite of themselves, which she set down hard on the table to emphasize her point. “Let me tell you.”

  The truth, according to Vera, was that Lev’s beloved first novel was an atrocious failure. It showed promise in its prose, its psychological underpinnings. But there was nothing in it to take the reader by the hand. He attached to it a romantic importance that it absolutely did not deserve. I felt sick, and said so. She shrugged. “It’s juvenilia. And worse than that, it doesn’t take any chances. People love Lev’s work for its bold moves, and this book—well. It doesn’t tell the story about him that we need to tell.”

  “We, then?”

  “Could be we.” Vera sipped her soup, which had finally cooled, and crumbled a few crackers in. “I was being sincere, you know, at the beach. I don’t have any interest in being remembered. In fact, I’d prefer not to be.” She stirred, creating a little gyre in the bowl, and stared into the thick, spinning liquid. “It never did any favors to anyone, being picked over and kept as a memento. History’s unkind in that way. Once your life leaves your hands you become—mutable. Susceptible, I suppose you might say, to anyone with an axe to grind or a tale to tell. I’d rather stay myself.”

  Vera frowned then, as if she knew she was straying off course, away from the inviolable Leo Orlov she meant to invoke. But she pressed on. “Lev’s shadow has always kept me hidden, and let me do my real work behind the scenes. For a long time he was perfectly happy with that arrangement, because it meant he got the spotlight to himself. But now he’s changed his mind.” She looked at me, not quite accusing. “What he doesn’t understand is that if he interrupts one part of the narrative I’ve set into motion, he could ruin it all—one small change and everything comes into play. Even me. And I won’t have that.” It was funny. She claimed not to have any personal ambition, but her goals struck me as godlike, transcendent: to be invisible, yes, but in the way of an elemental force, wind or geology. The movement of the earth beneath your feet.