Let the Dark Flower Blossom (6 page)

So to Iowa then I came, burning, with my bag of Hesperidian apples and the tools of my trade and my twin. I met Ro, and, oh we became the best of buddies. I suffered through his comedies and he laughed at my tragedies. He was polite. He knew how to use a knife and fork. He always said please and thank you. He knew how much a thing should cost. And this had very little to do with what he was willing to pay. El and I made our way at Illyria, scholarship kids that we were. I fell in with Roman, and El came tumbling after.

Louis told his wife the story of the murdered girls.

He yawned, and said then that it was late, and he was going up to bed.

What about her?

She in the lamplight looked up from her book.

She said that she just wanted to finish this page.

Ro and I talked about art. I suppose that we were foolish; but there was grand ambition to our foolishness. We were inventing the world; every idea and whim and want was new. He believed in inspiration. I talked of rules. I told him that a real writer must have three immutable rules of storytelling. Or else how would you know where to begin—? let alone how to end a story? I told him about the cracked kettle, the black flower, the house of fiction. I talked about the destruction of language. I talked about my book. I told him that it was a story about fate. Ro said, “Fate is a girl with scissors. How much damage—really—can one girl do?” I watched Ro pursue Eloise. She struggled at first; then she gave in. What choice did she have? Every story is a story about fate. She said that he was born to
be murdered. And he laughed. Ro and Eloise throwing apples at ghosts as they walked the willow lane. Weren't they like the star-crossed lovers in a novel? Or a god and girl on a Grecian urn?

The letter was tucked between the pages of her book.

The summer after our freshman year, Eloise and I went to New York with Ro. We made camp in Milton Stone's Upper West Side apartment. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were reputedly holed up somewhere in the building. Ro said the ghost of Boris Karloff wandered the hallways. Ro's father collected curiosities: art and artifacts; oddities. Ro showed me: laudanum vials, glass syringes, a hair bracelet from a long-dead queen, great silver scissors that—Ro hefted in his hand to dramatize his story—had been the very weapon used by the vengeful seamstress in that famous turn-of-the-century murder. He led us to the liquor: bathtub gin, rye, Siberian vodka. Ro held a bottle of wormwood absinthe. He poured us each a glass. El raised her glass. She drank; she said it tasted like licorice. I was already drunk when I saw the pink-and-orange Andy Warhol rendition of Roman's mother, Astrid. Ro stood beside me and looked up at the picture; he spread his arms in an expansive gesture of mock reverence. “‘
And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth
,'” he said. And what can I say? Ro was a relentlessly educated, pretentious bastard; really he was. He could chapter and verse it with the best of them. I was impressed. I saw Central Park from an empyrean height. This was a long time ago. Everything impressed me. Hell, even the air-conditioning impressed me. It was a miserably hot summer. We lived in cool and rarified absurdity. While down below:
the hoi polloi, the riffraff, the real citizens of the real world went about their sweat-soaked lives.

I found a part-time job at an antiquarian bookstore.
O.K
., Ro got me the job. His father was a friend of the owner. I spent my afternoons sitting at the front desk reading leather-bound editions of Swift and Dickens and dutifully snubbing the few customers who ventured into that dark literary sanctum. Eloise had an internship at a fashion magazine. Ro used to crank-call her at work; drive her nuts, things like that. Except for the poor put-upon maid, who arrived in her black uniform to clean up whatever mess we had made the night before, we had the apartment blissfully to ourselves. Ro's stepmother, Mary Clare, was in Milan. And Milton Stone was in London. So we drank his antique booze. Spun his jazz records. Had Chinese food delivered at two in the morning, whatta life! Moo Goo Gai Pan, Thelonious Monk, Coca-Cola, and crème de cassis, in our pajamas. Ro and El took over the master bedroom. Ro told me to take whatever I liked. And though I was impressed, I was still defensive about such things. About my relative poverty, my sudden dependence on Roman. I never took, honestly, more than I needed; nor took for the sake of taking. I knew, instinctively, that I did not want to be in his debt. That sounds odd, I know; considering that I was living it up so freely, so famillionairly, in his realm. I kept my eyes open. I wanted to see, to know. I wanted to learn about the world without being harmed or hurt or even hungered by its lessons.

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.

Eloise Sarasine née Schell folded the letter in half.

She had read it several times since its arrival.

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.