“Not the future,” he said. “Your future. Because it looks just like your past.”
After a drink or two, it occurred to him.
“She’s got money,” he said. “The girl. She’s got money, doesn’t she?”
He didn’t need to hear my answer.
He had a sense about these things.
There was a baseball game on the TV over the bar. The Twins were playing the Mariners, out West. We watched for a while. Ro kept ordering us shots of Maker’s Mark. And I remember saying how I still preferred to listen to the games on the radio.
“Same old Sheldon,” he sighed. “You stupid sentimental fucked-up motherfucker.”
And then he ordered us another round.
He spent the night on my sofa and left the next day.
His father died soon after.
And Pru read about it in the newspaper.
“Your poor friend,” she said.
9.
Eloise and Zigouiller had a drink or two.
They drank vodka, warm and neat: a shared peculiarity.
He told her that he was in from L.A.
He was in a movie that was a real hit.
Had she seen it?
She hadn’t seen it.
He said no, he supposed that she wouldn’t have. He said that it was a movie based on a video game based on the story of the Trojan War. He explained the technical complexities of the movie; that it was some sort of hybrid digital, pixilated, animated, and real three-dimensional version of himself whom he had played. He said that it was big with teenage boys.
He said, “Boys.”
To which she laughed.
He laughed too.
As though it meant something; which it did not.
She felt a rush of uncertainty—as though he were a specter, a figment, a phantom; what had he called it? A hybrid three-dimensional version of himself containing the past and the present—because it was impossible for her to believe that she was talking about fate with Zigouiller in the dark rose-wreathed gloom of a hotel bar. She touched her hand to her cheek. It was warm and real; she was not a ghost, nor a version of herself; she was only herself; and she supposed that she was, after all, real. Or at least real enough.
He said that he would be in town for a while.
He had a part in a play.
He knew that it was fate.
That had brought him here.
He wanted to see her.
He liked this place. Did she?
She said that whether one liked a thing or not mattered so little these days.
He said that it was good to see her.
As she held her glass in both hands.
The inevitability of what would happen next was delayed only by politeness. By decorum; by formalism; by what it meant to be respectively: an almost beautiful woman wearing a large diamond wedding ring and an imposing French actor drinking warm vodka and sharing peculiarities at three in the afternoon in the bar of the grand old Parliament Hotel.
They sat in silence.
And then—with a presumption as absolute as it was accurate—he took her arm.
And she knew that he was real, that he was, in fact, Zig, as she had named him.
It was without speaking that they walked together to the elevator.
He hit the button.
They waited to go up.
They waited.
The elevator arrived; the doors opened.
They got in.
The doors closed.
He used to say lift, instead of elevator; she remembered this.
And when the doors opened again—she saw the plum carpet with the crushed roses.
They continued on down the hallway.
Into his room. With a memory of licorice.
The door closed behind them.
And it wasn’t until later, after the afternoon passed into evening—
—that she, wrapped in a sheet—
Remembered to ask him, whom had he played in the movie?
10.
Not all of the memories are my own.
I defer to my sister for a moment. Eloise told me of a winter afternoon when she was nineteen; it is her story. So here I paraphrase—
She and Ro were watching Jeopardy! on the little black-and-white TV in her dorm room. There was a snowstorm; classes had been canceled. The two of them had spent the day getting drunk. It was just past four o’clock—outside it was already dark—when Ro decided that he wanted to go sledding. They didn’t have a sled. And the snow wasn’t stopping. They went out into the woods. Eloise was then deep in her tragic heroine phase; and never very good with liquor. On the narrow path through the pines she fell and twisted her ankle. Roman lifted her up and carried her. She thought Roman was carrying her back toward school. She closed her eyes. She fell asleep in his arms. The thing is: he wasn’t heading back—he was taking her out farther; past the sloping hill down which kids used to sled and tumble on makeshift toboggans, past the creek, into the thickening woods. And when Roman was far into the trees, he dropped her. And he walked away. Eloise didn’t know how long it was that she lay there—asleep, drunk, dreaming, unconscious—in the woods. When she awoke—cold, lost, and alone—the snow had stopped falling. She cried for a while; then she resolved to find her way home. She said that it was a good thing that Roman cut such a big path. She said that by moonlight, she followed the trail of his footsteps in the snow.
11.
Zigouiller answered her.
He said, “The king.”
Priam, Priam O age-worn King—
Zigouiller had his hand on her hip.
Eloise said, “He ignores the prophecies. In the end it destroys him.”
Zigouiller said, “Everyone ignores the prophecies.”
“I know,” she said.
He said, “Everyone is destroyed in the end.”
She said, “That doesn’t make it any easier. Does it?”
He said that she hadn’t changed, had she?
Those whom the Gods would destroy—
They would first make mad.
She supposed that she should hate him.
There was a travel alarm clock on the table.
“When can I see the girl?” he asked.
“You can’t,” she said.
“El—,” he said.
“I’m not being difficult,” she said.
“She’s gone away,” she said.
12.
Roman Stone is dead. He died this summer. In June there was rain. The roses were sick. They caught a blight, a mildew. I cut the branches down to the union bud; in another season they may thrive. Dr. Lemon was in decline. Ro was in Iowa. He had gone back to Virgil’s Grove. Ro was to deliver the commencement address at Illyria. I read that the only thing missing from the scene of the crime, the guesthouse in which Ro was staying, was his wristwatch. Granted: it was a ridiculously expensive miracle of Italian design; notable for being able to keep time both underwater and on the surface of the moon. Oh, and the murder weapon. That was gone too. It was never found. Wasn’t it odd, for what appeared to be so random, such a small theft; that he was stabbed through the heart? The mold ate at the roses. Roman Stone was murdered in Iowa on a hot June night as he sat watching a baseball game on television. He never gave his speech. Ro left his advice ungiven. If he had stood at the dais—what would he have told those kids looking so sincerely to the future?—what secrets would he have divulged about the mysteries of the world? He was cremated: his bones into ashes; and his ashes scattered to sea.
13.
Eloise turned away from him.
She reached for her handbag.
And from it, she pulled out a postcard.
Zigouiller read it aloud.
“—Have drunk all the wine in the winedark sea.
Please don’t be angry.”
“You see?” said Eloise. “She’s gone away.”
14.
Pru said that she liked Ro.
She said that he
had grabbed her.
“Where?” I asked.
“In the kitchen,” she said.
“Funny,” I said.
She said that she pitied him.
“Is that all?” I said.
“Nothing happened,” she said.
We fought then.
I was jealous. I didn’t believe her.
She smashed a plate, a glass.
She was angry because I didn’t believe her.
15.
In the taxi on the way home, Eloise saw a murder of crows perched upon a rooftop against the darkening winter sky.
An augury of things to come.
This is how the gods will make you mad.
They will make you doubt yourself.
They will make you doubt your own reliability.
As a witness to your life.
Even what had happened only moments ago.
In a hotel room like licorice.
Down a hallway carpeted with roses.
As one came up from the underworld.
Was already a memory.
Eloise had to remind herself, as her taxi speeded along snowy streets; under the moving eye of dark birds watching from window ledges, clustering in doorways, upon rooftops.
One can’t outrun the past with—or through—memories.
Making up the ending to fit the beginning.
That’s what Louis told her.
That’s what Louis said, anyway.
He said that one should live in the eternal-now.
She ran a gloved hand over her lamb coat.
And collected her shopping bag, which contained two books, Here Comes Everyone, by Benjamin Salt and Babylon Must Fall, by Roman Stone.
The taxi came to a stop.
She paid the driver, thanked him a bit too profusely, and told him to keep the change.
16.
I don’t tend to remember conversations quite so accurately as the one Ro and I had that night we walked together to the bar. Something about it has stuck with me. Maybe it was the oddity of finding Roman sitting on the steps with Pru. Or it could have been that he spoke to me with a new and paternal authority; offering me his advice, his admonition, his disapproval, and then, worst of all, his sweet melancholy. I fear that I recall it—as we ambled; the boys running past along the sidewalk, the drooping white mops of hydrangeas in the moonlight, the thick midwestern heat, the houses, the dogs, the gardens, the stars—because I knew that he was right.
That sickening smell of butchered hogs.
Who wouldn’t cry out at such a ruthless truth?
He was right.
I wasted my time on words.
My poetry class left off that evening discussing “Leda and the Swan.”
I came home to find Ro and Pru on the porch steps.
Do you recall specific days in your life?
Or do they blur into a continuum?
Would you be able to line them up?
To put them in order one after the next?
Or do the images refuse to be orderly?
What was real? And what was not?
We walked.
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
Past houses with windows darkened.
Along those avenues—
Ro chastised me.
What had become of my high ideals?
What about suffering for art?
“Ain’t this suffering?” I asked him.
“Grief without torment,” he said.
Ro had been reading Dante.
“When are you going to tell your story?” he said.
What was it to him?
Oh yeah, he was my friend. He cared.
I thought that maybe it was something else.
That he was lonely.
Lonely with his terrible knowledge.
Like the serpent who got Eve to take a bite.
What was I waiting for?
Or hiding from?
I wasn’t waiting.
Or hiding.
I was holding out.
I wasn’t ready for his kind of knowledge.
Ro was ready.
Ro was smart and self-aware.
Educated, inculcated into a world of possibility—
He wasn’t bogged down by guilt.
Nor sandbagged by responsibility.
Ro didn’t fear anything.
Ro didn’t fear any god.
And so he was free to believe in himself.
He was the real god.
Ro and I walked to a bar in Little America.
Though the name of the bar is lost to me.
He spoke of our friendship like a rare object in a museum.
Absurd, tricky, priceless: a Fabergé egg.
Those two boys ran past us kicking a ball.
Over the years I saw Roman do terrible things.
But there was only one thing for which I could not forgive him.
He took something from me.
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Ro was right.
Pru on the porch.
Pru with a strap having slipped her shoulder.
Roman said I didn’t deserve her.
He said that I would destroy her.
Her pale skin, her charcoal-stained fingers.
He said when the time came I wouldn’t know what to do.
Pru had money. Heaps of it.
He was right, Ro was.
I never betrayed him.
And this is the greatest proof of my weakness.
17.
Eloise sat at her dressing table.
Along the lakeshore snow fell. They were going to dinner with Dr. Ira Black and his wife, Tiggy, for a belated celebration of the jury’s decision. Louis had proven that the girl—the lone survivor of the brutal attacks—was an unreliable witness. That she was suffering from posttraumatic stress and had manufactured a memory to please the authorities and to appease her own unconscious guilt. Survivor’s guilt, that’s what Louis called it.
At the mirror Louis stood behind her.
He straightened his tie.
“Is that a new perfume?” he asked.
She said, no, no, she just hadn’t worn it in a while.
“Why not?” he asked.
Her black silk nightdress lay across the bed.
The perfume was a note of rose.
“Will you do this?” she said.
She held her pearls around her neck, the clasp open.
18.
Prudence Goodman was the heiress to the Goody Soda Pop fortune.
She didn’t tell me the night that we met. Nor for many nights after. It was her secret. She told me only after our wedding. We were married in a civil ceremony in the Little America courthouse. It was in August 1989—Pru in a pink crinoline dress—
Later—
In the lingering summer evening.
With nothing behind us and nothing before us.
As she lay across the bed.
Naked, nearly blind.
In the darkening hour.
She told me about the soda pop loot.
That’s what she called it. Her secret—
She had the rich girl’s woe.
Whom could she trust?
She didn’t want people to know about the money.
It always came back to the money.
Until that moment—her confession—
She was Pru, the abstraction.
She was my discovery.
She had occurred to me.
In a blur of her own momentum.
A girl in pictures. And then—
She became someone else.
A girl with money.
Prudence, a judgment. A virtue. An admonition—
Her pink hair, a tangle of loops and knots and curls.
Her pink dress on the floor.
An antique stiff contraption of crinoline and bone.<
br />
It lay on the floor—on its side, like a fallen heroine.
“You’re angry,” she said.
On her side in the bed, like a fallen heroine.
“Are you angry?” she asked.
No longer my discovery.
No longer my invention.
“Do you think less of me?” she asked.
“How could I think less of you?” I said.
She laughed, in the darkness.
And she told me her stories.
How her great-grandfather sold bottles of medicinal tonic, lithiated lemon and sassafras soda, two for a nickel. And then a fruit punch that tasted like angel food cake. How her grandfather started Goodman’s Bottling Works of St. Louis. How he heaped up the loot. How her father sold the business to a multinational food conglomerate.
And now all this loot was locked in a trust for her.
It would come to her on her thirtieth birthday.
She talked about St. Louis.
“It wasn’t so bad,” she said. “It’s where T. S. Eliot is from, you know?”
Some of it was sugary sweet.
“Do you know what I’m going to do with all that money?” she said. “I’m going to see the world. And when there’s nothing left to see, I’m going to find an island and hide out.”
“What would you do?” she asked.
I told her that I didn’t want her money.
I told her that I didn’t want anything from her.
“Why not?” she asked.
She sang that silly catchy jingle:
George Washington may be the father of the country, but Goody is the Pop!
We talked about that fruit punch that tasted like angel food cake.
And the difference between limes and lemons.
And for a while we continued to exist.
On that street calledValhalla.
Pru on her bicycle. Pru walking the primrose path.
Prudence on paper. Pru in looping lines.
Pru upon a sofa. Pru at a window gazing out.
A certain bemused expression on her face.
Pru waiting for water to boil.
Pru peppering plums. Pru reading poetry. Pru with her hair pinned up. Pru defying the future because she had no future to defy. Pru growing pale. Pru with that illness beginning to eat away at her. When did she know that she was done for? Her funny glance; that strange blurry look; she knew. Didn’t she? Did the tarot tell her? When did it happen? While I corrected papers. While the swan ravished Leda. And the inhabitants of Limbo and Little America alike felt grief without torment. As Pru painted. Pru washing her brushes. Pru paring potatoes. Pru digging a grave in her little plot of garden for the burial of a dead mouse.
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