Let the Dark Flower Blossom (8 page)

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.

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.

H
E 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.

A
FTER 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?”

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.