Let the Dark Flower Blossom (35 page)

I want the doctor to wake so that I can tell him my story.

I want to begin again.

I want to repair the ruined fountain.

How will I rebuild the ruined fountain?

Perhaps in summer.

It is winter.

Who is S. Z. Schell?

The author of his own silence.

Here in the doctor's library—amid—

Such magnificent marble, these statuettes, these books—

This proof of a great civilization.

I will begin.

The glass swan is broken.

It must have fallen from the table.

It was one of the doctor's curiosities.

The pieces are on the table.

A snapped neck, a broken wing, a terrible accusing eye.

I'll start again.

My house burned.

I saw the fire.

It wasn't my house.

It was only a shell.

I lived there for a while.

Before scuttling on.

The house had never been mine.

Should I care for ashes?

Inj and I and the fearsome black cat took refuge in the doctor's house.

Beatrice held the ragged cat.

“Oh you,” she said.

“You monster,” she said.

She kissed his ear.

The ragged cat.

Who lived by murder.

Who prowled the garden looking for birds and mice.

Beatrice held the cat.

I said to her that everything was gone.

“It's gone,” I said.

Beatrice said, “Good.”

This morning I found my manuscript on the table in the library.

I'll start again.

I'll tell what happened. I'll tell—

The story of how I killed my wife.

Pru had a garden. She grew ill, and the garden thrived. The disease spread. There was no stopping it. It was wild and tangled. It was a dark flower. Pru died, and her garden flowered through the fall: the asters, the Russian sage, and catmint, the black grapes in damp sunlight.

Pru in her hospital bed.

She said. She said to me.

Tell me a story.

And so I did.

I told her a story.

Of a girl in the woods.

Pru against the white pillow.

The fine bones of her face.

Her pale mouth.

A girl with a name of admonishing restraint.

A girl who once asked me—

What is the worst thing that you have ever done?

The story was the answer.

She closed her eyes.

That night she died.

She died in August.

The roses bloomed in October.

This is how I killed my wife.

With a story.

It is the kind of murder that comes from kindness.

A Halloween frost killed the last of the flowers.

I kept the typewriter on the kitchen table.

I killed her, I suppose.

Is there a better word for it?

Snow is falling on the ruined fountain.

I'll start again.

Dr. Lemon is dying.

The doctor has taken a turn for the worse.

I anticipate the end.

It is snowing.

And it is going to snow.

Beatrice has a terror in her eyes.

I am writing in the library.

I can do only what I know.

And continue on with my story.

As though telling it to her father.

Who listened with such sweet sagacity.

Language is the cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the while we long to move the stars to pity
.

That's Flaubert.

I used to want to move the stars. When I was young and wanted to be a storyteller, but I had no stories. When I longed for experience.

I wanted a story.

I have lied. Once or twice.

In the telling of a story.

I did not find the bodies.

It was Eloise.

This is what happened.

I came home.

In the dark of an autumn evening.

Doesn't it get dark so early in October?

I was riding my bicycle.

Listening to my transistor radio.

The Dodgers were playing the Yankees.

It was darkening.

Then it was dark.

There was a brightness up ahead.

I saw the fire.

Eloise called out to me.

She was under the apple tree.

Watching the house burn.

The typewriter beside her.

Later the story of the fire was on the news.

A murder-suicide.

Though there was no real evidence to suggest who killed whom.

Or whether one killed the other.

Only that both were dead.

And the house had burned down.

Eloise told me that there was a note.

Eloise had found a note.

Left in the typewriter.

We were quiet.

While the cold ripened the apples.

While the house burned.

We were seventeen. I am running so many autumn evenings together. We are children running down the street in the darkness. Shel and El, what the hell. Father used to say: he who avoids Scylla runs on Charybdis.

Did Father kill Mother?

In one version of the story it was Mother who killed Father.

Like the ancients, she followed after; to care for him in the next world.

And then it was just us.

El & Shel.

We had no one else in the world.

No one else in the world.

Eloise.

Her hair smelled of smoke.

And her fingers of chocolate.

The house by the salt creek burned down.

And then we went to Illyria. We got on a bus and headed to Virgil's Grove. I met Roman. And Roman met El. We let him seduce us, respectively. We were drawn in, collectively. We could not resist him. It did not occur to me until later that he also fell; he could not resist us.

Our tragedy.

It was like smoke and chocolate.

I'll begin again.

I will start again.

So there I was—eighteen, and just off the bus.

So there I was—young.

There I was with the image in my head—with an image that could not be replaced by the view out of the window or the burning red burnished landscape of autumn in Iowa or the glass bottles of orange soda or the hardbitten yellow apples—of my mother dead.

And how she lay across the bed like a fallen heroine.

With her dark hair upon the pillow.

And her palms turned upward.

My father was beside her.

The story overtook me.

I'll start over.

So there I was—eighteen and just off the bus.

There we were in Illyria. It was night. And there was nothing like it. We sat outside. We drank orange soda. Me and Ro. There was nowhere to go.

The next day.

It must have been.

Or the day after.

Ro and I were sitting together in the cafeteria.

Eloise sat down with us. She set her tray on the table.

Ro looked at her.

I saw him look at her.

Until she blushed and turned away.

This was the brash bravado that made Ro a hit.

Here comes Ro.

Everyone wanted to be his friend.

Ro was wearing a pink Izod shirt—you know, with the collar turned up and the little alligator?

I hated him from the first.

Maybe Fortunato hadn't done me quite a thousand injuries.

Maybe the shirt wasn't pink.

Does that part matter?

I'll start again.

El and I went to Iowa.

We were eighteen and had no one in the world but each other.

What one dreams is always possible.

I had the image in my head of Mother and Father.

Though I never saw them like that.

Eloise saw.

And she would not let me look.

Though she saved me from reality.

She could not save me from my own dreams.

She set the fire.

That burned the house.

That burned my story.

She saved the typewriter.

So that I could start again.

I'll start again.

One day in Illyria, where there were no seasons.

One day in Virgil's Grove, where the shades came to rise.

One day Ro's mother arrived, like some marble-white goddess.

Carried upon a palanquin.

And Ro, prince that he was—

Showed me dirty pictures of the queen.

The pages were frayed.

He wasn't afraid.

Of anything.

He showed me the pictures.

The evidence of her beauty.

Dirty pictures.

He had heaps of them.

That's not poverty, he said.

One day—

One day or maybe it was night.

At night along those quiet streets.

In our apartment on Bard Street.

When Ro, oh Ro, you know—

He was going on and on about what he had done to whom.

About what he had learned.

About what he knew.

What he wanted.

About the taste of it.

And I could no longer bear to listen, to hear—

About his experience.

About the world.

I said to him.

“Here's a story.”

I told him a story.

Mother killed Father, I said.

“I found them,” I said.

“I was the one who found the bodies,” I said.

I told Ro a story.

I told him how I found the bodies.

How I walked down the hallway.

How I stood in the doorway.

I told him my story.

He was quiet.

He listened.

He drank.

He kept refilling his glass.

And when I was finished.

He said.

“That is a story.”

I looked at him.

And didn't I feel terror then?

At what I had done.

What had I done?

I lied.

And the lie became a story.

The story became a truth.

I lied.

It was Eloise's story.

Eloise under the apple tree.

I told Roman my story.

And he stole my story from me.

He took it.

As an elemental thing.

A thing, a theft, that would make all else possible.

The spark that leads to a conflagration.

I'll start again.

An event, a scene; it only lasts a moment.

The memory of the event is inexhaustible.

It is not bound by time or space or reason.

The doctor's house is a maze.

It is full of beautiful things.

I cannot find the secret to their possession.

Beatrice is baking a cake.

If her father dies in the night, she will belong to me.

What will I do? With such a thing as Beatrice Lemon?

Who is small and fragile.

Who has dark hair. And gray eyes.

Who might fall from the branch and break a wing.

Who has freckles across her bare shoulders.

Who knows nothing about the world.

And everything about the wilderness.

Like the smell of snow.

And the taste of blackberries.

Who feels despair at the bodies of dead birds.