Let the Dark Flower Blossom

by Norah Labiner

  A crash, something breaking, falling to the floor.

  I found him in the kitchen, sitting at the table.

  He sat at my typewriter.

  He rolled a sheet of paper into the carriage.

  He started banging on the keys.

  I stood watching him.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “Writing my life story,” he said.

  In a month the manuscript of his first novel was finished. I have to say this about him: once he started something, he was singularly focused.

  He wrote late at night, early into the morning, and then slept through his classes.

  Writing made him hungry, he said.

  I remember now: this was why he took hard-boiled eggs from the dining hall. He had pilfered a saltshaker as well. He always salted the egg in an absurdly delicate, even continental gesture, before cramming the whole thing into his mouth.

  CHAPTER 7

  Susu defies augury

  HE SAID THE WORD INSPIRATION. He said fate, and I laughed. He said time, and it stopped. I went away with him. He liked a dark place an ancient rundown hotel out of the way on a side street an avenue of twists and turns and insidious intent. He liked it when the night porter’s wife brought to him hot almond milk. He liked the chipped bowl and the tarnished spoon. He liked it if the sheets were worn, bleached, and darned. He looked for omens and portents. There was; there had been a shadow on my white dress. There was no wedding. There were signs. There was a carnival, a myth, a murdered king, a teacup, a fluttering bird at a crust of bread. He said, “Truth is an artificial construct.” He said, “All the poetry in the world won’t save us.” He liked salt, and he liked sweet. He liked the old stories. He said, “Many a man has been left hanging because there was no knife to cut him down.” I saw ruined palaces. I saw marble gods. I saw dark birds in doorways. He talked of poets and kings. I collected picture postcards. He talked. He told. He taught. I twisted up my hair and tied it with a ribbon. I turned my spoon in my cup. He took my arm. When I could not sleep, when the strangeness of the strange city kept me awake he said, “Imagine that you are sailing on a ship to Byzantium. It is night and you must navigate by the stars.” He said, “Imagine that you are winding your way through a labyrinth.” And as each night began to lead to the last day and one dark place lost its distinguishing charm from the next place as we wound our way through the streets I began to understand that there was a design a plan a destiny that each avenue was leading us to and toward some inevitable conclusion and I would have to listen I would have to learn or else I would never find my way to the end.

  CHAPTER 8

  Eloise argues about infinity

  AFTER DINNER (at that little Japanese place where they serve warm plum wine and the girl leaves the bottle on the table) and a movie (a restored print of Masculin Féminin) and then home looping the loop by midnight for dessert (the remains of a bitter chocolate torte) and an argument (no, no, it was just a discussion) about Goddard (she said: didactic; he said: dogged) and god (she opposed; he supported) over espresso (with lemon rind for him; cream for her) and he said, “Once the girl took the stand, I knew that the jury would come back with a verdict of not guilty,” just before she put the cups in the sink, and she said, “Is there a better word for it?”

  2.

  The second rule of storytelling was explained to me by an elementary school teacher: a dramatic dark-haired girl, just out of college, who one day ran off with the janitor—leaving behind for those of us who so unironically loved her a mysterious message on the blackboard: Godnight! She told me after reading my lengthy attempt at a short story, “Shelly, never kill off the main character.” I recall that story. I did kill off the main character (pro-tag-on-ist, she said, breaking up the syllables like lemon drops), but as, and I explained this to her; the pro-tag-on-ist returned as a ghost, it didn’t really count as killing him, did it?

  3.

  Louie said, “Innocent.” Eloise told him that that was not what she meant; not what she meant at all. She said, “Is there a better word for ‘girl’?” He said perhaps they could go away in the spring, “Would you like that?” Would she like that? And then it was late. Not too late. Just late. He said that there was no better word for it than girl.

  4.

  Roman Stone is dead.

  I write the sentence easily enough.

  It looks on the page like—

  A little pawn pushed out alone on the battlefield ahead of an army.

  What if I had not started this story with the moment that I met Ro?

  And yet now that it has begun: does it matter where it began? I could have started with my childhood. Dug up a first memory or two: sunlight on a windowpane; bread and butter; Mother with a knife in the jam; Father’s papers fluttering to the floor. I would if I could push-comes-to-shove the story relentlessly forward through the years—schoolbooks, lessons, silence broken by Mother’s laughter. Snow, sawdust; a hammer, nails; the stairs down to the cellar. El & Shel in the woods. She and me at the salt creek. Eloise and I riding bicycles; from under the apple tree we saw the locked door to the cellar workshop; where father worked on his designs, his puzzles, where he dug his grave ideas and built his great impossible knowledge.

  He knew everything. Is this possible?

  I seem to recall that he knew all that there was to know.

  Father had a sickness that we could not understand.

  Mother gave him his medicine.

  Eloise and I under the apple tree.

  Eloise and I arguing about infinity.

  I and El diagramming sentences.

  Me and she dividing one number into another.

  This is El and Shel. What the hell.

  When we were eighteen we went to college.

  On the Greyhound Bus.

  A little girl and her mother were sitting in the seats in front of us. The girl had her face pressed up against the window. She was licking the glass.

  I looked at El. And she at me.

  And the girl kept licking the window.

  Eloise looked sad, I guess. If that’s the word for it.

  On the way to Iowa.

  All that wheat and corn and wonder.

  All we had was each other.

  Until we met Ro.

  5.

  Eloise in her silk nightdress. Louie in his striped pajamas. He said, “Tell me about the box.” She pulled the chain on the lamp. In bed. In the darkness. She waited. She waited. When she said, “What box?” he was already asleep. Louie slept, but Eloise did not. She was thinking about a girl lost in the woods. She saw the shadows of trees against the wall. She heard, she seemed to hear the ticking of a clock. It must have been her own heart. She thought she heard, how could she explain this? the sound of a shovel digging in the hard frozen ground.

  6.

  The day, or maybe it was night, that Ro met my sister, he told me that he was in love with her.

  7.

  Eloise rose without waking her husband. In the kitchen she put on the teakettle. She was thinking of the house in which she had grown up; thinking of the tangled vines of the garden. Of Mother digging in the garden—pushing back with palm to forehead her dark curls. Of the white faces of moonflowers and lilies. Of Father. And the responsibilities that begin in dreams. Of Shelly cutting in half an apple with his penknife. Saying to her, telling her, El, it’s just us now.

  She turned off the flame on the burner. And poured the water from the kettle into her cup. She was thinking of dancing bears and dark birds. She was thinking of a modern Prometheus. Of signs and symbols: poor Susu! remember how brokenhearted Susu had been, at age six or was it seven? When she had wanted a part in that school play? Was it Aesop’s fables? No—it was mythologies, ancient stories, old stories. In the tale of Pandora, Susu had wanted to play Hope, who rises up in the end in her white dress. The dark-haired green-eyed girl was cast instead as Vengeance. Well, she had looked darling in black. It suited her, even then.

&nb
sp; Eloise dropped a sugar cube into her tea.

  She turned her spoon round in the cup.

  A small rock holds back a great wave.

  Vengeance is a better role than Hope.

  Susu on stage.

  Susu in her black leotard coming out of the box.

  With hands on her hips saying: take a picture, it’ll last longer.

  What was it and how long would it last?

  Eloise in the living room—

  She paused before the fireplace.

  Took in hand a jade statuette.

  Chronos, the great father who ate up his own children.

  Time would swallow us all down.

  Zola was sleeping on the sofa.

  Zola lifted her head from the velvet pillow.

  Wait, wait, Susu had played Discord, not Vengeance.

  Oh, what did it matter now?

  Roman Stone was dead.

  That was how the story had to go.

  She knew the story of old waxwinged Daedalus and his son.

  She knew of Apollo riding his chariot across the sky.

  Apollo had a sister. A girl running through the woods.

  Eloise knew of Discord and her golden apple.

  She knew all that there was to know, and this knowledge was no consolation.

  Eloise stood barefoot on the Persian rug.

  Zola watched her.

  Stared at her mournfully.

  Eloise sat at her writing desk.

  She unfolded the letter.

  She read the letter again.

  It was only a few words.

  How could these few words—

  Like petals on a wet, black bough—

  Hold the possibility to change everything?

  She picked up Zola and held her like a fat bullish baby.

  8.

  “Why do you write in the dark?” Beatrice asks.

  Beatrice stands in the doorway, as though to remind me with her slight youthful presence, that the things of which I have written happened a long time ago. That 1979 passed into 1980 with neither too much sturm nor nearly enough drang.

  She goes about the room, turning on lamps. And she brings about the illumination of objects. Magic, miracle; magically, miraculously: things appear.

  The fear of objects follows the illumination of the thing.

  The room suddenly becomes itself.

  We become ourselves.

  The chairs, the tables—

  No longer simply words to replace the real, but real.

  Where there was darkness there is light.

  Beatrice comes to me at the desk. She leans over my shoulder—

  Beatrice picks up the pages.

  She sits on the sofa and begins reading.

  Ro finished his manuscript. He got it to a literary friend of his father, and through a chain of vaguely shrouded and loosely nepotistic associations, the book was published in our senior year. Newsweek called Roman Stone: the face of the 1980s. And Time hailed him as: the voice of a generation. It was funny. It was a riot. I didn’t take his success very seriously. I had other things on my mind. Like aurochs and prophetic sonnets. Like durable pigments and the immortality of art. Although perhaps the immorality might have been more useful in the end. After graduation, Eloise landed a fellowship in Paris studying linguistics with a famous semiotician. I went to California with Ro. He got tan, took pills, tore through actresses. He was Ro, the real thing. I was Shel, the sidekick. We lived in a house on the beach. I set my typewriter on the kitchen table. Do you know the joke: why did the man throw his clock out the window? Ro liked that one, but it isn’t a joke. It’s a riddle. He wanted to see time fly. A year later: Eloise found us in our golden state. She brought Ro a tin of hand-fluted madeleines. And she gave me a volume of Balzac.

  And, oh, Eloise brought back something else from Paris: her new husband.

  He was an actor. His name was Zigouiller. He was called Zig. He had rough leading-man good looks. And he wanted to make it big in Hollywood.

  Eloise was bone-skinny. She chain-smoked. Her fingernails were painted black. She had gone from naïf to nihilist. She had been lonely in Paris, so she hid in the darkness of the cinema. She saw The Amityville Horror eight times. That was where she met Zigouiller—he ran the projector—or rather, to use his unfortunate and entirely real name: Herman Munster. He had grown up in some snow-globe perfect little mountain town, which was in the news awhile back, when a mass grave was discovered there. That has nothing to do with the story. Neither does this: Zigouiller means “to murder,” or rather, “to do in,” in French.

  Harlow Jamison was living with us; she was the actress starring in the movie adaptation of Babylon Must Fall. She had been discovered as a teenager in a shopping mall in Lincoln, Nebraska. She had white-blonde hair, a baby-doll face, and a disconcertingly weary voice. She thought that Ro was in love with her. She thought of life as a movie; fate was nothing more than a plot twist. We shared a habit of insomnia. Late at night, in the kitchen, while the clock ticked, and my fingers did not move on keys, she found me at the typewriter.

  I used to say that her voice sounded like a graham cracker crumbling into a glass of gin. Back when I said such things.

  It too was a long time ago.

  Harlow had Ro.

  And El had Zig. Sure, he wasn’t a big star, but he did all right for himself in the movies. He had a quality, somewhere between menacing and brooding, that lent itself to the role of the sympathetic sadist. He was in such B-screen erotic thrillers as Nightfall, King Me, Girl in a Maze, and the soft-core cult classic Ava and Eva. In the epic Fatherland he played a tortured writer. It’s true: he ended up playing one tortured sadist after another. He played sadistic spies, the occasional sadistic cyborg, terrorist, morally bankrupt cat burglar, or in the disturbing and utterly unerotic case of Ava and Eva, a sadistic sadist. Zig grew despondent; in France he could have been a hero, but in America he was a villain. He didn’t want to be relegated to a lifetime in a black turtleneck and ski mask. He was typecast. He was disillusioned. Zig had El. And El had Ro. Ro did what he wanted. I had my typewriter. And the sun shined every day. It was only right that Zigouiller and Roman became pals: drinking Pernod, swimming in the ocean, getting coked up and ranting about Cahiers du Cinéma.

  When I left for graduate school in Wisconsin, Ro and Harlow and El and Zig were living together in that house on the beach.

  “Is it true?” Beatrice asks.

  “Did all these things happen the way you say they did?” she says.

  “Does it matter?” I say.

  She gets her wide-eyed lost look.

  As though she is retreating into some deep feminine hideout in her heart.

  And she won’t argue the finer irritating points of semantics.

  Not tonight anyway.

  She wants to finish reading.

  Beatrice in the lamplight.

  She rests her head on the arm of the sofa.

  She reads on.

  One by one the pages fall to the floor.

  CHAPTER 9

  Susu sees the burning king

  I LEARNED OF BOILED BEDSHEETS the stains of blood bleach and bodies. I learned of cigarettes sand stars birds with dark wings bells clocks rain mildew mud heat fire flame hope signs salt symbols. He talked. He told. I remember I remember a carnival and we walked away along the water strung with lights. I was walking with him winding our way along a seawall stone steps children lighting our way with candles twined with burning knots of sage lighting the way for us and we went down like we were making a descent down down down to his underworld. Ghosts of straw were strung up all around us. He said, “Be true, be true, be true; show to the world your worst and if not your worst then some token by which the worst can be inferred. Show me the worst,” he said. “Fire, flood, locusts, destruction,” he said. A girl ran past us. He watched. We stood on the street. He held my face in his hands. A boy bounced a ball against a stone wall. He said, “You would do anything that I asked, wouldn’
t you? You really aren’t afraid, are you?” He took my hand as the narrow walk gave way to a wide esplanade where girls sold flowers and we followed its turns along past the girls holding wreaths of white with petals scattering past little boys throwing balls past the fortune-tellers past orange figs and lemon and licorice past the kings burning in effigy and the children in paper crowns. “I’ll do anything,” I said.

  CHAPTER 10

  Eloise turns toward an undeniable conclusion

  LOUIS SARASINE, IN CORDUROY AND TWEED, in the car on the drive back from Lake Forest to the city in the darkness of almost winter told his wife Eloise how well she had done, how absolutely beautifully she had soldiered through it. He asked if she needed another one? She said yes. Always answer yes as there is no such word as no in the unconscious. He doled out a pill into her gloved hand. The leather seats were heated; the evening was cold. The day had been cold and bright. If it had snowed, they could have gotten out of it. Thanks giving at his brother’s house? Oh, how could she bear it? The spoiled children, the gossip, the limp crudités and blood-orange cranberry jelly, the electric carving knife, and that sacrificial bird browning in the oven. Even at the front door she had turned to Louie and asked if it was too late to turn around? He didn’t need to answer. The door opened. And what could she do? Eloise was divested arm by arm of her marbled faux fawn coat by an eager niece, seized up and borne along by a battalion of perfumed aunts and cousins, into her sister-in-law’s kitchen where the congregated Sarasine women were drinking Goody cream soda, grenadine, and apple schnapps (it’s called an Original Sin!) while whispering about a certain missus who was engaged in an illicit such-and-such with that mister, from you-know-where. The crime was implied. The details went unspoken. Did the little girls, aprons tied over their velvet dresses, licking fingers of whipped cream from the mixing bowl, understand? what about their older sisters placing dessert chocolates on a tray? Eloise be a dear and—a crying baby of indeterminate sex was set by a young mother upon Eloise’s knee. Amidst the clatter of silver, the distant cheers of boys and men watching a football game; the crash of ice in glasses; the knife cutting flesh from breast and bone. A girl—a newlywed—wanted to hold the baby, and Eloise was happy to relinquish the bundle. Eloise sat with her back to the eggshell white wall. How did one bear it? Louis said, look at it as an experiment. A social experiment—It’s funny, he said, if you think about it. But she endured it, that is, got through it by imagining herself winding a skein through a labyrinth, taking each twist as it came; following the turns toward some undeniable conclusion.