And then she did not.
3.
“Oh El, don’t torture us. Tell the story already,” said Rachel.
4.
Pru died.
5.
Boo Boo nibbled a deviled egg, waiting.
6.
On the burning August day that Prudence Schell died, as I left the hospital, I noticed the billboards were advertising some new television show that she would have liked, but that she would never get a chance to watch.
7.
“I used to imagine that I was the heroine of a novel,” Eloise said.
8.
I went on living in the house on Valhalla Street. And then it was autumn, again. Fall fell. And it was beautiful. Each leaf and tree. Each bird and branch. The days were bright. I taught classes. I graded papers. My colleagues offered their prayers, but I wanted none. Faculty wives brought food to my doorstep. My students were dull. The Blue Jays won the World Series. The frost came early. I cut down the roses. And I cleared away the rot of flowers in the garden. Winter followed. With storms and winds and ice. I shoveled snow from the walkway. Neighbors strung up Christmas lights. Children played in the snow. Girls made snow angels. I had become a widower. My typewriter sat on the kitchen table.
9.
Eloise was dressed in black.
She said that a long time ago—
10.
Show, don’t tell, I taught my students.
11.
Eloise had mistaken cruelty for a species of kindness.
12.
Pru had wanted to take her inheritance and see the world. And then when there was nothing left to see—she would find an island. She died when she was twenty-eight, before she ever got her long-awaited soda pop loot. Two years after her death—on what would have been her thirtieth birthday—the loot came to me. I could no longer bear the sight of my typewriter with its blacked-out letterless keys. I gave up writing. I quit my job. I abandoned Lindbergh College. And I sought out an island. I found myself this house among the mourning doves who coo Perdoo, Perdoo. For the death of my wife left me a very rich man.
13.
Eloise told her friends a story. She told them about a room over a movie theater. About a haunted house. About white flowers in the darkness. About streets that twisted like an endless argument. About marzipan, about almonds and cherries and chocolate. And how she had eaten salted black licorice. And lived for a time by the ocean. For a moment she faltered. As though on a branch in winter. She didn’t know how the story should end. Then she felt her heart flutter upward—and she knew just what to say.
14.
Beatrice is in the kitchen. She is watching Tomorrow’s Edge on the television as she turns her wooden spoon round and round in the mixing bowl.
15.
Like a hand untying a knotted loop of string. Eloise did not disappoint. She gave her audience what they wanted. Just when they most wanted it. When the women of the book club left Eloise that winter night—each one was happy. And a bit sad as well. For she had heard a love story. With hero and heroine. Separated by fate. Thwarted by chance. Undone by their own undoings. And if it wasn’t true? At least it was beautiful. Some say beauty is a form of truth; don’t they?
16.
If only I were in love with Beatrice Lemon. Her narrow shoulders; her small breasts; her childishness; her slim legs; her feet in woolen socks on the tile floor. I do not think that I am in love with her. Instead, I feel terror and pity—for the both of us, for the inevitability of us. As though her father wills us as such. Our lack of choice in the matter makes love an impossibility.
If only. If only the past were not the thing that it is.
One day I will forget everything.
Like a drunkard waiting for a shoe to drop.
Like a patient etherized upon a table.
Like a poet on payday.
Like a child at sundown.
I saw Mother give Father his medicine.
I saw Father turn his spoon round in his cup.
I tell Dr. Lemon the same story over and over.
Beatrice was barefoot when first I came to this island.
Now she is eighteen.
She’s a good girl, the doctor would say wearily, as Beatrice brought for him a book down from the shelf; he sighed the way that a man sighs over a woman whose life he has lovingly, without intention or malice, ruined. Oh, Beatrice: at dinner with the doctor the three of us used to sit. If I chanced a look, I might catch her lost in the responsibilities that begin in dreams—her face propped on her hands as she stared out the window into the darkness at the dark water.
And still it never occurred to me to fall in love with her.
It never occurred to me that this is what the doctor wanted from me.
He was elegant, in his velvet robe and striped pajamas. He clung to civilization. After dinner the doctor offered me a glass of his cordial—Goldwasser, perhaps. He held the bottle like a small treasure. He did not care for games of chance. He didn’t deal cards. He preferred chess. For it relied upon reason rather than chance. I argued that even reason relies upon chance. We sat up late arguing the finer points of impossibility. He was an expert host—offering coffee, tea, sweets and bitters—telling stories.
Later, I was the one who confessed while he sat in silence.
He asked me about my mother, about my father. And about my wife.
He asked about writing, and what it was like to be an artist. He held artists in tremendous regard. To the life of the mind, he said, raising his glass of caraway pale aquavit.
We moved our pieces across the board. And thought of the future as a game.
The doctor was already an old man when he came to this island—for solitude—with his books and his collection of rare wines. He married a local girl. Beatrice was the child that he did not expect. His wife died after the difficult labor. And the doctor raised his daughter. He taught her left from right. He taught her right from wrong. On the island all knew her; everyone called Beatrice: the doctor’s daughter.
For twelve years, we have shared nothing more, nor less, than a devotion to her father.
He is extraordinary.
His gray eyes see luxury beyond limitation.
So many nights. I sat. And do so still.
I will sit at his bedside and tell him my story.
I can’t untangle my years on the island.
I wander the years like Beatrice in the blackberry brambles.
The old doctor fought his illness. He tried to trick his memory into forgetting that it was disappearing. He told us stories. He told about how when he was sixteen he took a train to Chicago. In a jazz club he heard a tragic chanteuse sing her sad songs. When he left the club, outside on the street, he asked a beat cop where he could find a hotel. The cop looked the boy up and down, and he said in brass-button brogue: Would that be a hotel with hoo-ers or without hoo-ers?
Whores or no whores.
Beatrice laughed.
The next time that her father told the story, she laughed again.
And the next time and the time after that.
He was happy to remember it, but he soon forgot that he had already remembered it. And that he had told it to us. Each time it was a new delight to him.
Beatrice and I learned to forget the story. And to take it as new.
This is how the game is played.
This is how the years pass on an island.
Would you trade a tactical loss for a later advantage?
Beatrice’s small feet are scratched and scarred. Bruised berry-blue.
Sometimes in the evening we play chess.
In the moonlight at the glint of her skin—
I feel terrible guilt.
When I do not lament the past too much, I feel the creep of conscience.
When I ponder the future, I do not see myself.
When I imagine tomorrow, I see Beatrice.
When I sleep I dream that I am in a hallway of locked doors.
&nb
sp; One day—
A door will open.
And what will I do?
Pru with her hand on her hip.
Beatrice breaking an egg.
Ro on a roll.
Father pacing the floor.
Mother measuring out his medicine.
El and I looking on.
In dope there is hope.
We always said.
In the end the dope ran out. And hope was never quantifiable.
Eloise under the apple tree.
Pru eating a peach.
Pru in the parking lot.
Pru on paper.
Beatrice, bruised.
Dr. Lemon sighing, Queen takes castle.
The doctor raising his glass of Goldwasser.
Ro in the snow.
Ro on the ropes.
Ro hitting the bottle.
Ro hitting the road.
Ro hitting the floor.
Ro in the fire.
Ro deep with Dante.
Beatrice is baking a cake.
In a certain light, she is something better than pretty.
What was it that I came here to forget?
Beatrice—
Jars me from such thoughts—
Beatrice stands in the doorway.
“I have the strangest feeling,” she says.
“Benjamin Salt is on his way,” she says.
“How can I stop him?” she says.
She holds out a letter to me.
And I take her hand.
It was evening.
Beatrice took her cake from the oven.
Beatrice and I had dinner.
There were apples from my own trees and a bottle of Sauternes from her father’s cellar.
We ate dark bread.
We spoke of disasters.
We seemed, though I do not know how to explain this: frantically alive.
Like prisoners at a stay of execution—we would not escape. We would never be free, but oh, we longed for one more day, one more hour—without Salt.
We fell upon the food.
Then the wine.
Drunk, we fell upon each other.
And after—in the silence sweetened by a wine that tastes of honey and almonds yet comes only from the rot of blighted grapes—we slept. In my bed, Beatrice lay white, naked, frail—like any other small animal.
When I woke in the night she was gone.
I found her in the kitchen.
She was sitting at the table.
Outside it was snowing.
“Killer,” said Beatrice.
Killer, Beatrice calls the cat.
He was lapping milk from a dish.
The cat drank.
He was warm and content.
He brushed against her leg.
He rubbed against her legs.
He leapt upon the table.
He yawned.
And curled there on the cloth.
Beatrice held a knife.
Beatrice looked at me.
“Do we dare?” she asked.
She took the knife.
And she cut two pieces of her beautiful Santa Fe sugar cake.
And she set them each by each upon a plate.
We ate with our fingers.
Perhaps I do, after all, love Beatrice.
One day, when I see an open door, I will run to it.
17.
In the hotel room—
Zigouiller wanted to know about their daughter.
“Where should I begin?” Eloise asked him.
18.
While Beatrice sleeps, I go to my study and find the letter.
There are rules to every game. Even to this memory game.
I tear at the envelope—
To read—
A Frankenstein’s monster of a sentence.
What do you know about Roman Stone that no one else knows?
The black cat, his green eyes in the lamplight—
He is sitting at the window.
He is watching me.
Ro had always been a sucker for the ancient world. He fell, he had fallen in love with antiquity. And why not? Athena sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus. In Illyria there were no seasons. And Babylon itself was an infinite game of chance. Work, for Ro, meant sitting in a café drinking ouzo or watching a beautiful girl run naked into the Aegean.
The girl was Susu Schell.
I mean Zigouiller.
Susu Zigouiller.
He went away with her.
Ro’s books remain—lined as they are upon my shelves.
Black and white and read all over.
Ro kept at me over the years about my book.
So I never wrote it. So what?
What was it to him?
I don’t know if he felt guilt or curiosity.
I don’t know if the impact of a meteor crashing to the earth is more or less than the striking of an inked metal key upon a page. I write longhand. And there is barely a sound to signify my fury.
Babylon Must Fall was as impactful on me as an anvil landing upon a bone china teacup.
Ro with eggy fingers tapped out the book on my typewriter.
A book!
Whatta riot!
You should try it.
Ro thought it was hilarious.
It wasn’t until years later, when I was back and dug into the Midwest, when my literalism was in full dark flower, that I realized that the joke was on me.
The third rule of storytelling had a name: the fallacy of imitative form. I got it from Ro. I admit this, to some chagrin. But as I am still under the force and exaction of rule one, I must be true. In my defense: Ro learned the theory by happenstance. He said a girl wrote it in lipstick on a bathroom mirror. He thought it was a dirty joke. I am not entirely certain that it isn’t. I taught my students about the fallacy of imitative form. They did not understand. I said, “Do not write about a thing, in the manner of that thing.” They stared at me blankly. I said, “Do not write about ugliness in an ugly way; or about confusion in a confusing tangle. One should be ugly about beauty. And beautiful about vulgarity. One should be disorderly about order. And direct about confusion.” They were confused. I was not a good teacher. It was a long time ago. I sit now in lamplighted darkness. As snow falls I have a strange desire; I long to read tragedies.
My father’s workshop was in the cellar of our house. When we were children we were not to go down there.
Roman’s father read Babylon Must Fall. He hated it; and then he read it again. He hated it more; and he read it again. He could not stop reading his son’s book. He was looking for clues to his own murder. Really, he was the perfect reader; he was, you see, trapped in the story. He suspected that his wife and son were plotting against him. That they were in love. That his son was a thief. That his wife was a liar. Or maybe it was the other way around. He grew paranoid; a mad king. He began to see words, words, words, all over everything. So the old man divorced the girl—took her to court—and the tabloids ran amok: Fall of the House of Stone! Milton Stone was a doddering letch; his wife a gold-digger; his son a lothario. There were photographs in the newspapers, but the courtroom sketch artist rendered the characters in cartoonish beauty. When Mary Clare, waifish in a schoolgirl blue dress, her hair pulled back with a black headband, took the stand, she bore an uncanny resemblance to Alice just as she goes through the looking glass.
Mary Clare said that she did not have an affair with her stepson.
She said that her stepson had never seduced her.
He had never pushed her to the floor, nor torn her dress, nor tied her to a chair with her stockings, nor put his hand over her mouth because her husband was in the next room.
Nor had it happened the other way around.
She never seduced him.
Let alone plotted her husband’s murder.
It did not happen.
It had never happened.
Several items of lingerie were entered into evidence.
Ro was called
back from California to testify, and he confirmed her story.
He placed his hand on a Bible and swore under oath.
He had simply written a novel.
It was fiction for god’s sake.
It was only a book.
It’s only a book.
Only a book, Salt!
Not a falcon or a storm or a great song.
Not an eagle or a trumpet.
Not a buttered scone or crumpet.
Not a rock, not a boulder—so how much impact can it have upon a life?
Do not confuse depth with gravity.
Nor heft with heart.
In the grand story of things we all have our utility.
The ant, slug, the cowbird; both balm and bee; the failure and the success. An anvil is weight or counterweight, but you can’t drink tea from it; can you?
Who would be Schell when he could be Stone?
Anyone who would rather have nothing than settle for less.
19.
Eloise brought Zigouiller a photograph.
She gave it to him.
He looked.
And his face turned pale.
20.
I took up a widower’s life on an island. I had books to content me in winter. In the brief warm season I worked the day through in my garden. If I wanted for the drama of the world, I had newspapers; and I succumbed, I confess, at times to tabloids. I read when Ro got married. He had been writing travel articles for Esquire. While examining Southern Gothic—by judging a beauty pageant—he met a young belle called Dibby, a runner-up for Miss Teen Georgia. I know no more of it than any other inky-fingered idolator. I can only say that instead of leaving the girl broken-down or brokenhearted at the door of a rehab clinic; reader, he married her. The girl was an accomplished flaming-baton twirler. Regal Ro and his not-quite beauty-queen baby-doll bride. Thus, his bachelor days behind him, he set about settling down.
Let the Dark Flower Blossom Page 10
