CHAPTER 4
Sheldon mythologizes the past
A WEEK HAS PASSED. My pen never touched paper. I wanted only to watch the winter birds test the reality of branch and bough with their questionings. Do you doubt me? How can I, without benefit of wing or claw—with nothing more than ink—attempt to journey back into the past?
Today: I collected my mail from the island’s postal station. I admit, I felt a strange sense admixed of dread and anticipation. The afternoon was gray. The damp-eyed and ancient postmistress was lonely. She gave me my letters, but she held one back. She commented on its faraway postmark. She noted the looping girlish hand of the sender. And said how she had once been to New York City herself, when she was a girl; could I believe it? and she had gone all the way up to the top of the Statue of Liberty. Finally, wistfully, she relinquished the letter.
I walked home through the woods.
It is only now—as I sit at my desk that I open the envelope.
I unfold the page.
To find only one sentence:
How does the story begin?
Beneath his words, a stain, a sticky thumbprint of raspberry jam.
2.
Now and again, Eloise thought about murder.
3.
I am witness and widower. I was a student. I have been a teacher. I have professed. I took the podium. I have taught, corrected, consoled, passed and failed; pitied. I am a hypocrite. I offered hope where there was none. I took the arm of the grieving. I grieved; took the shovel; took my turn; took my share; turned away. I grew rich through misfortune. I grew up. I grow old. I get gloomy. I hide out. I hid, too. I keep my own counsel, as the ancients used to say. I’ve kept silent. Now I am no longer silent. I am forty-eight years old. Roman Stone preceded my arrival into the world by four months; my sister followed me by barely eighteen minutes. There are things that I wish that I had not seen. I will confess to acts that I have committed, no less terrible for having been done in the name of kindness. No less kind for being terrible. Philosophers and criminals agree at least upon one thing: guilt and innocence are relative terms.
Is this how I am to begin?
I write longhand on unlined paper.
4.
Eloise opened her book.
The story was dark and terrifying.
5.
September 1978, Illyria College in Virgil’s Grove, Iowa. On a day all of sun. From the brightness into the dark hall of the dormitory; up the stairs to find my room I went. I opened the door; I stood for a moment in the doorway. Roman sat at the window. He was smoking a cigarette. He wore a white shirt and madras trousers. I remember this— because I had just come from the Greyhound station, from that interminable trip from Michigan. I was tired and dirty; had slept little on the bus, and little in the days that preceded it. Hungry too. El and I, we had peanut butter sandwiches in Fort Wayne; coffee and Hostess Snowballs from a vending machine at a stop in Moline; in Cedar Falls at a fruit stand, Eloise bought a sack of yellow apples. She took one out of the sack, and she made a show of shining it on her blouse before she handed it to me. “What did Eve say to the asp?” she asked. And she paused, waiting. “This bites,” she said. She did not laugh. I did not laugh. She shrugged her shoulders. She pitied me, but she did not want me to know this. We had left nothing behind; a fire had burned down our house the year before. Eloise still imagined the smoke caught in her hair. And I suppose that I too invest more symbolism than I should in the fact of the doorway in which I stood, when I saw Roman. I was soggy and sweat-stained. I had a suitcase and my typewriter, a green Baby Hermes. Ro sat with his back to me. I didn’t know what to make of him. He had pulled the desk chair over to the window. He had his feet up on the window ledge. A paperback—that account of the Andes plane crash in which a soccer team resorts to cannibalism—was on his knee. He wasn’t reading. He stared out the window toward the courtyard where, moments before, my sister and I had parted ways. A large black trunk with shined metal fixtures sat on the floor. He smoked in silence. He turned; sized me up; knew in an instant what I was and what I was not. He produced a key and unlocked the trunk. He took out a bottle of whiskey; opened it; drank, and handed the bottle to me. I was exhausted from the long bus ride. I drank. I got drunk that day, really and thoroughly tight, for the first time in my life. While he talked and I listened.
He told me about his famous father and his young stepmother. About getting kicked out of school. And his summer kicking around London. He had nothing, it seemed, to hide.
He unpacked his trunk. I recall: he had stashed booze and dope, Gauloise cigarettes, chocolate bars, detective novels, dirty playing cards, pills and toffee and caramels, binoculars, a Bible, a blindfold, and a baseball bat. God knows Roman must have thought Iowa was the end of the world. Last exit on the train to purgatory. All that his trunk lacked in the substance of temptation was Mephistopheles, a handgun, fireworks, and real live naked girl. I should have seen Roman for what he was: a bright brilliant magician. He pulled sleight of hand over fist, his tricks; his ropes and rabbits—every experience for which I so yearned—out of a silk top hat.
In asking for this story, in putting forth the command: tell! Salt is asking me to mythologize the past. To find something remarkable in a random meeting between two teenagers, who had by luck or lack thereof, been thrown together as roommates.
Stone & Schell, read an index card taped to the door.
Is Salt to haunt every page as I write this?
Does he need to know—what it is like in September in Iowa? The color of the leaves; the angle of the sun? Am I expected to recall what was served for dinner—that first night and all the nights after? Such things are lost to me. What happened? There was a get-to-know-ya cookout in the courtyard. We drank Goody soda pop, sugary orange and spiked with Everclear. We talked about god. A couple of girls were sitting by us. Ro charmed the hell out of them. We rolled joints and ranted about revolution. We smoked dope and waited for Godot. Did this happen on that first day? Perhaps. It might have. I can’t say that it didn’t. It happened so many times over the next four years that I couldn’t say to a high degree of certainty that it did not happen that first day, as well as every day thereafter.
Does Salt need to be acquainted with the geography of small liberal arts colleges in the Midwest? We were surrounded by woods, by thousand-year-old oaks and impassive pines.
We were up to our necks in Gothic gloom.
The dark ivy-covered brick buildings were ominous. The trees added shade to shadow. We crossed the stone-paved courtyard to get to the dining hall. Ro used to put hard-boiled eggs in his pockets; though I can’t remember why. What else? The professors lived in professorial misery in bungalows on a willow-lined lane called the ghost walk. Everyone said it was haunted. Here I add a fact, perhaps prematurely: it was in one of these nutshells—a guesthouse for distinguished visitors, no less—that Ro’s own story will end. While I continue to begin—
Our room was small and dark.
I set my typewriter upon the desk.
Ro set his fingers to the keys.
“What the hell?” he said.
He looked down at the keys. As people who don’t know how to type will do. And he saw that the letters on the keys were blacked out. Or rather, each key had been carefully covered with a perfectly-sized square of black tape. This is how my father had taught me to type.
This is how my father trained me in the art of memory through absence.
Never look down, my father told me, when you are crossing a bridge, climbing a mountain, or telling a story. My father was funny like that. What mountains had he climbed? What bridges had he crossed? What stories did he leave untold?
In the dining hall—the next day—Eloise brought her tray and sat down beside us.
Ro said, “Hey, you two look exactly alike.”
Eloise said, “We’re twins, you idiot.”
And Ro burst out laughing.
He didn’t like it when girls gave in too quickly.
He liked it when a girl would put up a fight.
I either remember or I do not remember.
I am either or I am not.
One day I will burn every piece of paper upon which I have written a word, and take my possessions—the cracked cups and kettles and keys and rotten apples, the bells and books and clocks and candles, the spoons and knives, the ink pens and plates and pictures, the bones and bottles—down to the water and throw them into the dark waves. What good does it do to incinerate or to drown? This I have learned through repetition; this I have learned by rote: nothing disappears. Even ashes have a name.
CHAPTER 5
Susu decides to go away with him
HE WAS ON THE PHONE ORDERING BREAKFAST from room service. It was morning. He ate a chocolate bar. He lighted a cigarette. I was watching television. Workers draining a pond found a lost girl packed into a suitcase. In home video footage she was shown reciting a poem in a leotard and pink tights. He took the remote and went through the stations: a talk show host had the blackened sole for dinner last night, and wasn’t it to die for? The Yankees won; a dog chasing a cat; an infomercial for knives; Miss Marple solving a murder, teacup in hand; an airplane crashing into a rolling blue ocean; the girl again, running; the funeral of a dictator; scenes of an old war; a cat chasing a mouse; a beauty pageant; a black-and-white horror movie: two boys and a girl walking in the woods; a tree falling in a forest; a game show with questions as answers; girls going wild; a divorce court; a burning house. He left it on a soap opera: an elegant widow in a black dress was confessing to a crime. He crumpled the wrapper of the chocolate bar. He handed me his cigarette. I took a drag off it, but coughed. He laughed. He changed the station. The girl again, the poem, the suitcase. The face of a young man. A spoon turning in a mixing bowl. A swimming pool. The Three Stooges. A gardener with a shovel. A cartoon Zeus hurling a lightning bolt. A bikini. A home run. A tour through a vineyard. A bicycle race through the mountains. Teen vampires. Hunters in the snow. A flag unfurled. A chicken roasting on a spit. Cars driving in circles around a track. The dramatic reenactment of the murder of the Romanovs, Anastasia falling in the darkness. I kept thinking about the girl in the suitcase. And the morning, the sun, and the chocolate, and the shadow on my white dress, and the diamond ring, where was it? On my finger. There was a knock on the door. Breakfast arrived. There was coffee with cream and sugar. There was bread and butter; he ate bacon and eggs. He ate in bed. He ate with his fingers. He took a poached egg and put it on his buttered toast. There was a plate of pastries. There were croissants and jam pots. He said, “Do you like gooseberries? I used to have a gooseberry cake every year for my birthday.” I said, “That sounds awful.” He ate. He said, “It was.” He said, “It was awful, but I looked forward to it.” He shrugged. He said, “Or maybe it was blackberry.” He took a pear tart and set it on a plate. And he put the plate in my hand. He said, “I’m going away soon. I’m going to see the burning king.” He set his plate, with its wreckage of crust and jam and egg, on the bedside table. “Who’s he?” I said. He said, “It’s a carnival.” He said the name of a faraway place. I had seen it written in books. “It’s the celebration of the fall of a tyrant. He was wicked, this old tyrant. I know, I know, all tyrants are, but this monster married his own daughter. It took a hero to vanquish him. The carnival goes on for three days. The women wear white. The men hang straw effigies of the king. And then at the end of this celebration of the fall, the fate, of the wicked king, children light the straw bodies on fire with torches,” he said. “And they sing. They sing a song about murder and hope. It’s inspirational in an I’ll-grind-your-bones-to-make-my-bread sort of way. You should come with me,” he said. He turned to the horror movie. The boys were walking through the woods with an ax. Where was the girl? He smoked in silence. I went to the window. I drew back the curtain and saw that it had rained and that the day was sunny but fine and perfect for a wedding.
CHAPTER 6
Eloise hides the letter
LOUIS SARASINE CAME HOME in a better mood than might have been expected, considering the grisly details of the murder trial, and the delays in both airline transportation and the slow-but-fine grinding wheels of justice. The jury had been deadlocked up until the last, but this he took as no indication of his execution of the defense or his expertise on the topic of Repressed Memory Syndrome. His authority was unquestionable. He had the uncanny ability to separate a sign from a symbol. To see, in this case, brutality as a textbook phenomenon, even when the bloody knife was brandished before him wrapped in a plastic evidence bag. In the muted hues of their living room, they sat: she on the sofa, and he in a leather chair. He brought her—a bracelet, antique—and his stories, which he told. One after the next. Until it was hard for his wife to listen, let alone hear about the girl’s body left by the roadside.
Mrs. Sarasine, dressed this evening in dove gray, extended her arm toward her husband and let him fasten the delicate clasp on her emerald bracelet.
2.
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.
3.
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.
4.
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?
5.
The letter was tucked between the pages of her book.
6.
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.
Let the Dark Flower Blossom Page 4