I told myself that I was only a spectator. An observer. Not really a participant.
I could justify anything then, just as I can rationalize everything now.
Ro slept through the days of that summer on Egyptian cotton sheets and swansdown pillows in his father’s monumental bed; while Eloise edited copy at the short-lived Pout, which taught teenage girls the latest in starvation and sex tips; I wandered Greenwich Village, toasting literary ghosts at the White Horse Tavern. I saw the haunts of Henry James and the streets that Whitman sauntered, pondering. But Ro liked Rabelais. More than once we took the train to Coney Island. The boardwalk, the Ferris wheel, the fortunetellers, the Cyclone, the sea? Eloise had a sunscreen that smelled of oranges. We ate hotdogs and drank red grape Mad Dog from the bottle; in the sand laughing at the tourists, we vowed to spend every holiday together.
The night that Eloise and I turned nineteen, Ro took us out on the town. He was in a grand and infectious good mood. We met up with a couple of his former prep school buddies. They had taken the train down from New Haven. We had dinner at a posh French restaurant. We drank. We ate. We smoked cigars. We were the picture of youthful dissipation. We were served bavette de boeuf au buerre d’escargot by waiters in white jackets. Then for dessert: gâteau de Marie Antoinette. Ro and his buddies (whose names I can’t recall; something like Brett and Donny) bellowed the birthday song, while El blew out the candles as though facing the guillotine. We had champagne and strawberries. And when there was no more food to be found or drinks to be drunk, the waiter brought the bill on a silver tray. Ro didn’t even look at it. He just paid up. He impressed me with his apathy. I saw the generous tip that he left for the waiter. Yes, that night Ro was buying. After dinner, Eloise begged off with a headache and took a taxi back to the apartment. While Roman, Brett, Donny, and I continued on.
There were bars, bright lights, booze, dirty picture houses, pinball arcades, dark alleys, fateful choices, sudden vicissitudes. The world was a Hollywood backlot. The world was ready; but it could wait. Ro wanted ice cream. I found myself sitting between Brett and Donny in a basement cafe on Mulberry Street drinking espresso, while Ro spooned up spumoni and regaled us with the story of his seduction of his stepmother.
I had heard the story before.
This did not matter.
Each time that he told it, he changed it.
In this version of the story: Mary Clare and Milton Stone had just come home from a night at the theater. Ro’s father took a telephone call in his study.
And there was Mary Clare in her black dress on the velvet sofa—
On her hip, explaining the plot of the tragedy that she had just seen.
Mary Clare explained tragedy to Ro.
Clytemnestra slaughtered Agamemnon.
All that terror and pity.
Mary Clare unpinned her hair.
She said that it had been so so so very damned cathartic.
That it had left her wanting more.
The waitress came by.
The drink of the day was called la Mela del Peccato.
Did I want to try it?
I ordered another coffee.
Brett leaned forward in his chair.
Donny drank.
He was drinking Campari and soda.
His mouth was stained red.
The basement was dark with smoke and licorice.
Ro had Mary Clare on the floor.
Her stockings—
Her dress was torn.
She begged Ro for more.
That’s how Ro told it anyway.
He lifted his spoon.
He ate, while we waited.
While I waited, young and eager.
Ro may have been a romantic, but fate was an ironist.
His spumoni had the look of a bowl of cherries.
“And then what happened?” I said.
The waitress came by with my coffee. Brett grabbed her by the arm. The white cup fell to the floor and smashed. The waitress slapped Brett. Donny, in a show of solidarity to his friend, or just for the hell of it, overturned our table.
Ro laughed, but he knew it was time to go.
He threw a heap of money on the bar. And we beat it. We stumbled up the basement steps with the waitress chasing after us with a broom. That’s how the night ended. Ro decided—instead of putting up his buddies in the apartment—to drive them back to Connecticut. His father had bought him a new car that summer, a Range Rover. Brett and Donny passed out in the backseat. Outside of the city we stopped at a sad shack of a gas station. This was past four in the morning and there was a girl working alone at the cash register. I was getting some coffee. Ro—he was buying cigarettes—and when the girl turned to get the cigarettes from the shelf, he boosted a twenty-five cent pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum from the counter.
I never knew a rich kid who wasn’t a thief.
As I saw him slip the gum into his pocket and give the girl a bit of his big-city bluster, it seemed that I also saw the events of that evening suddenly—clearly—with clarity. What had really happened? The wine was bitter. The food was salty. The cigars were wretched. The waiters rolled their eyes. Didn’t I catch a glimpse of the sommelier spitting into a bottle? The Yalies were boorish and foul-mouthed. Eloise choked back tears from the cigar smoke. Marie Antoinette herself, a cake of white buttercream, bore a suspicious resemblance to Betty Crocker. And bavette de boeuf? It was gristle and garden snails. When Ro told his story of seduction, I admit; I listened. I thought he was brash. I thought he was joking. I was charmed; I was too eager. The more I thought about it:—the black dress, the torn stockings, the smoke, the licorice, the stifled pleas, the very apple of sin—the more it mystified me. At least Eloise missed that part of the night. As she got into the taxi she fell and twisted her ankle. Back in the apartment with only the lonely ghost of Boris Karloff to keep her company, she took a handful of Valium and passed out on the velvet sofa.
Ro and I drove on to New Haven in the dawn.
I felt betrayed, not so much by Roman, but by my judgment. I fell for his generosity without understanding—or acknowledging—that repayment for such largesse would certainly come later, and at an impossible cost.
I was young and later was a long time off.
7.
Eloise Sarasine née Schell folded the letter in half.
She had read it several times since its arrival.
8.
Ro and I lived in an apartment our sophomore year. My typewriter sat on the kitchen table. The light was good in there, or maybe the thin wall that separated my bedroom from Ro’s afforded me too much knowledge of what went on in there with my sister. He had a crowd of carousing pals to whom he could tell his stories. He kept late nights. I had morning classes. We left notes shift-locked in all caps on the typewriter: WHO IS THE GIRL? he wrote. WHAT GIRL? I answered. And he typed back: THERE IS ALWAYS A GIRL.
He was right, of course. There is always a girl. This one was called Wren. We met in a class called the Politics of Liberation. She loaned me her Marx, and I lent her my Lacan. Wren had dark hair and damp hands; she wore black-rimmed glasses. I talked of objects, and she, of objectification. She was a militant peacenik in dungarees, combat boots, and a green army surplus jacket. She rhapsodized about the rights of workers. About her dreams of a utopian society. And sexual liberation: she was big on that one.
Kill your television! Keep your laws off my body! I’d rather be smashing imperialism! She was sloganeering, soapboxing, intolerant, and emphatic, but Wren had too the fluttering quality of her namesake; those remarkable round little birds whose body temperature reaches 120 degrees, in a fever of flight. She called me brother. She called me comrade. She called me S. Z.; and I confess: the slight bright way she elided the letters of my name caused me to feel the first raptures of ironic love.
We met in September.
We used to take our books and go into the woods.
She lay back amongst the black flowers, the weeds, the rot and ruin.
She made chains of late violets, nightshade, and dandelions.
Wren unbuttoning her flannel shirt.
It was a burning autumn, a fall of Rousseau and Thoreau.
There were leaves of grass caught in the pages of my Whitman.
Then the rains came.
I read Baudelaire. And she, de Beauvoir.
Wren spoke of the cause of her sisters in struggle.
In my bedroom—
Naked, but for her eyeglasses. Adamant, adamantine—
Ranting about the military industrial complex.
She loved peace. She hated hatred.
And she hated Ro. Other girls were taken in. Other girls fell for him, but not Wren. She was certain that he listened to us, his ear to the bedroom wall. He represented the myriad woes of the world. He was a tyrant. He had driven empires into the dust. He was not simply patriarchal; he was the patriarchy. It was as though he had risen from the pages of a history book to taunt her. She talked with a sharp fondness of the guillotine.
There was one thing about Ro that did impress Wren. Not a thing, really, to be fair and grammatically accurate; a person: Ro’s mother, the first Mrs. Stone, the brainy Swedish pinup who ditched the glitz and glamour of a film career to dig irrigation ditches with UNICEF. She gave up caring for her own child to care for the children of the world. Wren called Ro’s mother an icon. It was true, no one looked more beautiful in the throes of an IRA sympathy hunger strike. Who else had donated her payout for appearing in Playboy to the plight of California’s migrant grape-pickers? Who but Astrid Stone had made the bandoleer a bold fashion accessory on the Paris catwalks? No one protested with more panache than Ro’s mother.
I only met his mother once.
It was that October, in 1979.
The Orioles and Pirates were in the World Series.
Astrid Stone showed up at our apartment. Unexpectedly—for she never announced her travel plans in advance. It was a bright warm autumn day. She was wearing a fur coat. And oversized sunglasses. She came in, looked around our dismal digs. She took off the dark glasses. She took off her fur. She dropped the coat on the floor. She was wearing a leather skirt and black lace blouse with nothing beneath it. She sat on the sofa, crossed and uncrossed her long legs in high black boots.
“Roman,” she said in her glacial Nordic drawl. “Baby, you live like a pig.”
And she lighted a cigarette.
She didn’t like being in the States; it made her edgy. She thought that she had been followed to our apartment. There were important people in the world who wanted to see her shut up. That’s what she said anyway. In her see-through blouse. With her face an exquisitely feminine version of her son’s face. She had come to raise money for an orphanage in El Salvador. She was on her way to New York to roll Ro’s father for some dough. Certainly Roman understood that she had to keep her plans secret? She had to stay one step ahead of her enemies.
Ro made Cuban coffee. She drank it black. She held the cup flat on the palm of her left hand, while grasping the handle with her right.
She lowered her voice into a whisper. She asked Roman to go check the street for suspicious strangers. And while Ro excused himself—he actually went outside to look around—I was left alone with the first Mrs. Stone.
She got up and went to the window.
She drew the curtain aside only slightly and peered out.
She sat back on the sofa.
I was sitting across from her.
She looked at me.
“You’re the boy who lost his parents,” she said.
“Lost?” I said.
“Not so the right word?” she said.
“Dead?” she said.
“Died, no?” she said.
She set her cup upon the table.
She ran a hand through her hair.
She opened her handbag and found a silver case. She took out a cigarette, offered me one; I declined. She tapped it against the case.
She leaned toward me.
I lighted her cigarette.
She tilted her chin upwards.
Her neck was long and swanlike and white.
She exhaled smoke.
Her eyes narrowed in the smoke.
She told me then how in a church outside Mexico City she had seen a statue of the weeping virgin. She told me that she had seen swarms of locusts descend upon green fields and leave nothing in their wake. She had seen starving children; destruction; war; flood; ruin; and she thought each day would bring the end of the world.
What was I going to do while I waited for the end of the world?
She asked me, “What are you going to do?”
I told her that I was going to write a book.
Smoke spiraled upward in the sunlight.
She laughed.
“When you tell about me,” she said, “don’t forget to say how beautiful I was.”
Ro returned reeking of pot to report no nefarious or likewise shady activity along the quiet streets of Virgil’s Grove. Astrid Stone was appeased. They spoke for a while, mostly about Ro’s father. And then his mother put on her dark glasses and fur coat and left.
ROMEEN BAYBEE, I typed, WHY YOU LEEEVE LIKA PEEG?
Ro dug out from his secret stash of treasures.
A magazine.
He handed the magazine to me.
Open, pages spread.
I looked.
She was beautiful.
I studied English literature. Eloise took courses in linguistics, and Ro was in economics. I scribbled in my notebook. I went on about art. I used words like truth and beauty. Eloise talked about signs and signifiers. And Ro was fascinated by currency.
Ro told me about his stepmother. And what they had done. He talked about Mary Clare. How goddamn happy he would be if it were just the two of them; how maybe he would do away with the old man, hunh? Why not? It was just an idea. It was just a goof. It wasn’t real. How would you do it? he asked. With a gun, with poison? And there I was. Sitting at the kitchen table with my typewriter. Oh, I was thinking about words, words, words. Ro sat beside me at the table. With a knife jamming the bread. Saying how damn sweet the world was. Wasn’t it?
“Would that make a good story, do you think?” he asked me.
A story about a boy and his stepmother plotting to kill the old man?
“It’s a little cheap, isn’t it?” I said.
“The crowds in the Colosseum had a taste for blood,” he said.
“That was a long time ago,” I said.
“The world may change,” he said. “But not me.”
And he was pretty damn happy about it.
As he ate his dark bread.
And stared out the window.
“Want to go to the old farmhouse?” he asked me.
“What old farmhouse?” I said.
“Just a place my father keeps,” he said.
He was planning to go over winter break.
“Bring the girl too,” he said. “What the hell.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“You can’t?” he said.
“Why not?” he said.
He tilted back in his chair.
“Rock, paper, scissors me for it,” he said.
“For what?” I said.
He pulled his chair close to the table.
We hit the table, one, two, three.
I was paper.
He was rock.
He lost.
“Is Eloise going?” I asked.
He lighted a cigarette.
Then tipped back in his chair.
And smoked.
While I wrote.
In silence for a while.
Then he said, “So it’s yes?”
I said, yes.
“You really can’t help yourself, can you?” he said.
“What?” I said.
“From stealing lines,” he said.
I told him that I’d rather be a liar than a thief.
He told me to shut the fuck up.
&n
bsp; The farmhouse.
The snow.
The winter.
New Year’s, 1980.
Ro, Eloise, Wren, and I.
The four of us sat around the fire.
Wren wanted a ghost story.
Ro said that he knew one so terrible—
That the telling of it might curse him forever.
We drank champagne.
And felt a certain terror.
Even with the crackle of wood in the fire.
At each sudden spark or errant burst of flame.
“Should I go on?” said Ro.
Ro began.
Wren sat rapt.
Eloise was eating an orange.
After that holiday something changed. Maybe it was too much booze or too many ghost stories. Wren and I did not fall out of love. How could we? She assured me that we had never been in love. She said that romantic love was a terrorist tactic used by the patriarchy to keep women down.
We were comrades.
It was a wretched winter.
I read Frankenstein, and she, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
What hope was there for us then?
The snow fell.
One day—or maybe it was night—
Wren lay smoking in my bed.
She was naked, reading.
Her book fell to the floor.
She leaned on her elbow.
She turned on her hip, ashed the cigarette.
And she asked me, “Do you believe in monsters?”
Then she dressed.
Wren buttoned her flannel shirt.
She dropped out of school at the end of the term.
And moved to Oregon to join a feminist farm collective.
Her ideology had outpaced her desire.
We vowed to remain brothers.
Scissors cut paper.
Rock smashed scissors.
Ro had a laugh about it.
I spent hours at the library.
Reading Greek tragedies.
Ro and I lived in our apartment on—what was the street name, again?—on Bard Street. Sure. Why not? All the world was a stage. And we defied augury. Or at least, we tried.
One night Ro came home drunk from a party.
I heard him.
Let the Dark Flower Blossom Page 5
