Let the Dark Flower Blossom (10 page)

“What happened in the cellar?” he said.

“That sounds like a horror movie,” she said.

“
What Happened in the Cellar?
” she repeated.

They drove on in the darkness.

“How old were you?” he asked.

“When?” she said.

“The pie—” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “Really little. Five or six.”

Eloise closed her eyes.

How tired she was—

“That song,” Louis said.

“What?” she said.

“It didn't come out until later, did it?” he said.

“We were singing it.” she said.

He went on, “Not until the seventies, I'd say—probably '72.”

“I was small,” she said. “I remember.”

“You must have been, what—?” he said.

“We were in the kitchen—” she said.

“About twelve?” he asked.

She knew then that he had trapped her.

Led her to his own undeniable conclusion.

He had unwound the skein and she had followed it.

And she didn't want to talk anymore, but he kept asking her questions: which part of the memory did she have wrong? Could she and her brother have been singing a different song? Or had she been older? Was it an apple cake, not a pie? Or had it happened, really, at all?

She supposed that he doubted her memory.

He said that it wasn't the reality of the memory that was important, it was the fact that her mind wanted to have this image—this idea—within its archives.

She was too tired to disagree.

To tell him that it was
the reality
that mattered.

Chair
is a word. It replaces an object, a thing, a concrete utilitarian device that is called also
chair
. One can't sit in
chair-the-word
, but does occupy
chair-the-reality
.

Baby
is a word. It replaces a fat little person of indeterminate sex, who is called
baby
. And when one of these creatures is plunked down upon your silk shantung dress as you sit in a chair with your back to the wall in an eggshell white kitchen where the women come and go and do not talk of Michelangelo you realize just how wretched and hopeless the world is.

She rested her head against the leather seat.

Louis turned on the radio.

It was a call-in show about hunting.

Deer hunting season had begun.

“Turn the station,” she said. “Will you? Please, for god's sake.”

I left California for the Midwest. I went to Wisconsin, and I worked on my PhD in Madison. I taught classes. I lurked in libraries. I fell for the dark romantics: I hid among the hardbound copies of Hawthorne. Ro called me from Paris, where he was eating a Toblerone and reading
Oui
in his hotel room. He called from Rome, where he was romancing a fashion model; he bought postcards, remedies, and black licorice in the botteghe oscure. Ro called me drunk, da Milano; high, from the mountains of Turin, where he searched for the shroud and found instead the dark sweet miracle of ciccolato. He asked, “How's the book?” How did Ro find where I was hiding? The beat beat beating of my telltale heart must have given me away. I laughed, I was bitter, I was broken. I said to him, “What book?”

Mr. & Mrs. Sarasine ate breakfast at their kitchen table.

It was such a beautiful thing, a rare find: an authentic black walnut and ash-inlaid eighteenth-century executioner's table. They had bought it in Prague and had it shipped home.

Louie asked her, what was she going to do today?

He said that if she was going out, she should take a taxi.

It was going to snow, he said.

The streets would be awful.

Are we out of cream?

Eloise looked up from her horoscope in the newspaper.

“Snow is general,” she said.

Louie picked up a knife.

Louie took an apple and began to peel it in one long seamless tangle.

I met Pru in Minnesota, in a town called Little America. She was twenty-three. I was twenty-eight. She taught introductory drawing. I taught freshman composition and a survey course of American literature: Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, and Poe in paperback to bright-eyed butter-cheeked blond-haired farm kids. This was at Lindbergh College. The students and professors alike, with an antediluvian lack of irony, called the town
L.A
.

I was caught in the vortex of all symbols.

I became a symbol myself: the dark outsider.

One thing happened and then another.

Eloise and Zigouiller divorced. After the failure of the interminable eroto-historical epic,
Fatherland
, Zigouiller retreated back across the Atlantic. And Eloise was in Chicago, raising their little girl on her own. Ro was as riotous as ever. The last that I heard from him had been a postcard from Copenhagen, with a cryptic note about mermaids and ice skates. I was dispensing doses of literature in Little America. I didn't have the temperament for teaching. I was doused in Dickinson's metaphysical gloom.

It might as well have been gasoline.

Because I could not stop for death; would he kindly stop for me?

That's what I remember about Lindbergh College.

Hester Prynne's lexicographical shame—

Bartleby's polite preferences
not to
—

And lost Lenore—

I found Pru at a faculty art show. She was standing—her back to me—before a canvas. And as if suddenly aware that she was being watched by a lurching stranger, she turned; her face, her face over her shoulder and she gave me a funny half smile.

Pru painted abstract nudes: self-portraits.

“Doesn't that defeat the purpose?” I asked her.

We left the gallery together. I left with her. She with me.

On bicycles, for god's sake.

It was November and cold and the flat dark prairie smelled of burning. She was wearing a plaid coat over her dress; I think it was black, the dress, though it is hard to recall. Yes, that's right. Pru in her black dress and plaid coat and boots riding a bicycle. She rented rooms on the top floor of an old house. I followed her up the staircase. The steps creaked. She clung to the banister. She fumbled for her key. It fell from her hand. She found it on the hallway floor. She unlocked the door. She boiled water for tea. Did I mention her hair was blue? Bicycles, black dress, blue hair, autumn, burning, fallen key, tea in mismatched china cups: we were that innocent. She read my fortune in the tarot. She chose three cards from the pack. She squinted at the symbols. I learned that she was nearly blind and she had that day broken her only pair of eyeglasses. When she had looked across the room at the gallery, she didn't see me. She turned the three cards over, one after the next. She waited for the kettle to boil. Her eyes were bothering her. The weakness of her eyes troubled her; but I admit, I confess; I was relieved that she couldn't really see me.

We sat in the darkness on her second-story porch in our coats.

The tea went cold in our cups.

It began to rain and we went inside.

She was Prudence Goodman from St. Louis, Missouri. A painter of indecipherable and yet impossibly desirable shapes. And I was a promising writer suffering for his art. I told her about my novel. She gave me her blurry-eyed smile and said,
I bet it sucks to be you
.

How could I not fall for her?

Her singularly soft mouth? Her slightly sloping shoulders?

She went in big for fate and destiny and ghosts. She read our horoscopes from the newspaper.
The problem is not in ourselves, but in
our stars
, she used to say. She was funny like that. Her skin was white. Her eyes were brown. And her hands smelled like turpentine.

Pru on the porch.

Pru in her plaid coat with a scarf wrapped around her neck—

When did I learn that the burning, which seemed to fill the air, was the acrid bluish smoke coming from a nearby hog rendering plant?

When did the beginning cease to begin?

Eloise Sarasine, in variant shades of gray: Persian-lamb coat, charcoal gloves, and scarf knotted into an ashen knot, wandered a crowded downtown bookstore on a day in December.

It was Eloise's turn to choose for her book club.

Opening a book had a certain secret thrill for her.

It was like standing with one's hand on a doorknob.

It was like untying the string on a box.

A boy was sprawled on the floor reading Beckett. He looked up at her belligerently. And as she passed him, she wondered; she couldn't stop herself from wondering: had he ever murdered anyone? She picked up a book from the end display. There was a typewriter on the cover. The young author stared out at her from the back jacket, as though he had not existed before she imagined him—with his eyeglasses and witty winning face. The critics praised him; they called him
Literature's last best hope
—. Oh well,
hope:
that was something, right?

Mrs. Sarasine, having selected two books with her gray-gloved hands, waited in the line at the cash register. The salesgirl took up the first book; she opened it and she read the first sentence aloud. She closed the book, then asked, “Do you need it wrapped?” Eloise chose a fleur-de-lis paper. Eloise asked the girl if she had read the
other book. The girl sighed, her hand on the scissors—and said that she was just
so
tired of bright young men. She preferred the classics. The girl had violet hair, and Eloise felt a bit envious. So she had the book wrapped, for the sake of not disappointing—or courting the displeasure of—this girl whom she wished she knew; a girl who seemed so much like the girls whom Eloise had long ago known and the girl whom she herself used to be, but was no longer.

Mrs. Sarasine thanked the girl, looked at her watch, and then took her shopping bag out the revolving door into the cold afternoon.

She was in luck. She caught a taxi just at the curb.

She got in and directed the driver to take her to the Parliament Hotel.

The day after the night that I met Pru, I went back to look at her house, in the sunlight. In the diffuse damp autumn afternoon. I waited at a distance. Then the door to the house opened. Pru stood in the doorway. She didn't see me. She got on her bicycle. I watched her ride off down the street. I had an image of her. I was already collecting pieces of her. So that if she were broken, I could put her back together. If she were shattered, I could reassemble and save her.

Eloise—gray lamb's wool coat, black boots—strode through the lobby of the Parliament Hotel.

The letter had led her here. The letter contained so few words that it barely seemed to exist.
Meet me at the bar of the Parliament Hotel
. It wasn't signed. Only the hour and date of the proposed assignation. Once she had been called by its sender:
almost beautiful
. What about now? And now? She was walking through the lobby, upon the carpet patterned with crushed roses, into another world:
an underworld; the darkness of the elegant old bar. She went to her fate. She could not stop herself. She went to Zigouiller.

Pru and I lived in a house on a street called Valhalla. She took the sunny back room as her studio. I used to get such an odd feeling—an uneasiness, then a sudden rush of familiarity—to see her bicycle left, unlocked, lying on the grass before our doorstep.

It was July 1989. I was teaching an evening course of Intro to Poetry,—when I came home to find Pru sitting on the front steps with Roman. I hadn't seen him in years. I should have been surprised. And yet I was not. His magical appearances did not astonish me, but I still might marvel at the deftness of his disappearances. Roman was talking. Pru had her face tipped toward him, listening. As I approached, I couldn't hear what he was telling her. Pru was laughing. The hot night. In her thin dress. A strap had slipped down over one shoulder.

Ro was on his way to the Mayo Clinic. His father was there; Milton Stone was dying, but Ro wasn't too broken up about it. “Something's wrong with the old man's heart. That's funny, isn't it? He always thought he'd be murdered,” he said. “Milton Stone in the library with the great silver sewing shears,” he said. He might not have said
heart
. He might have said
ticker
. He might not have said
shears
. He might have said
scissors
. Pru thought that he was being brave. I knew that he was just being Ro. And we sat outside drinking Grain Belt in the darkness. Ro and Shelly and Pru as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

Pru with pink hair.

She sat listening to Ro.

Ro reached over—

Between one word and the next—

And fixed the fallen strap of Pru's dress.

Yeah, Ro kept us laughing.