Let the Dark Flower Blossom (9 page)

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.

“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.

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.

L
OUIS
S
ARASINE, 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.

They were driving home.

They drove on.

Louis was talking.

He asked her—

He was asking what she had thought of the—

When she interrupted him.

She said that she just remembered the oddest thing: that once her mother had tried to bake a pie from the green apples—

“From your tree?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “From our apple tree.”

“You never said before,” he said. “That they were green apples.”

“Didn't I?” she said.

“So what happened?” he asked. “With the pie?”

“Oh, I don't know—” she said. “It didn't turn out. We thought it was funny, Shel and I.”

“What did your mother do?” he asked. “Was she upset that the pie was ruined?”

“Oh, no, no.” said Eloise. “We were singing
Bye Bye Miss American Pie
.”

“And your father?” he asked.

“What about him?” said Eloise.

“Did he think it was funny?” he said.

Eloise looked out the window.

“We didn't tell him. We threw it away, the pie,” she said.

“Where was he?” Louis said.

“In the cellar. I think,” she said.