“What did I tell you?” she said.
“You told me how you—”
“Don’t,” she said.
He said, “The point is—”
She interrupted him, “So now there’s a point?”
He continued, “You tell, you’ve told the story again and again. And every time that you tell me what happened that night—”
“Don’t,” she said. “Please.”
“About your mother,” he said.
“Stop it,” she said.
“And your father,” he said.
“Louie—”
“You change it,” he said.
“What?” she said.
He got up.
He took an iron from the stand.
He stood with his back to her.
He shifted the logs in the fire with the iron.
He turned.
It was hard for her to make out his face in darkness.
He said, “The story. You never tell it the same way twice. You remember something new. Or you deny something old. It’s always a different version. You dig up bricks and bones, and I begin to build a wall of them—then—without warning—you change the story; and the whole thing, the wall comes crashing down.”
“And we have to start again?” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“Even now,” she said. “We’re starting again.”
“Yes,” he said.
“From the beginning?” she said.
“If you want,” he said.
“If I want—?” she said.
“Do you think that I want any of this?” she said.
He said that he didn’t know what she wanted.
Eloise said, “I’m telling you.”
She said, “I did something terrible and now someone is dead.”
“Do you want me to call the police?” he said.
She sighed, and fell back against the sofa.
He prodded the wood, waiting for the flames.
“You’ve taken your bricks and you’ve built a maze, a labyrinth,” he said. “And we are winding through it.”
She rested her head back against the velvet pillows of the sofa.
She covered her eyes with her palms.
“A maze,” she said.
“It’s only a metaphor,” he said.
“No,” she said. “It’s not. It’s metaphoric.”
With one hand covering her eyes—
She reached over to the table for her glass.
She drank.
Until her glass was empty.
“Eloise,” he said.
“Isn’t there a monster in the labyrinth?” she asked.
“We’ll get to him too,” said her husband.
“Yes,” said Eloise setting, with some difficulty, her glass upon the table. “He’s there. He’s waiting, isn’t he? It’s there waiting for us.”
“Our monster,” said Eloise.
Eloise closed her eyes.
Louis covered Eloise with a blanket.
Then he poured himself a drink.
And he sat in the darkness before the fire.
14.
Ice scars the windowpanes.
The snowbent boughs of the trees are dark with birds.
Each night I told the doctor my story.
Year after year, as his illness overtook him.
I thought of the story as medicine and disease.
A purge; a punishment; a palliative.
The doctor is confined to his bed. In the evenings I make my way through the woods and I go to his house to see him. I sit at his side. When he wakes.
He whispers: Tell me.
He says, Tell me.
I do. I do. I tell. I will. I must. I cannot stop telling. As long as the story continues; he lives. He will live. For he wants to know what will happen next.
I have only my story in the whole of the world.
And I cannot not stop telling it.
I remember this: one day—or maybe it was night—
Pru bit into a peach.
Then said that she was dying.
And I laughed.
15.
Louis Sarasine watched Eloise in the firelight.
“In the spring we’ll go away for a while,” he said.
“Would you like that?” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“I want you to do something for me first,” he said.
“What?” she said.
“Write it down,” he said.
“The story,” he said.
She said, “Everything?”
“Why?” she said.
“Tell what happened,” he said.
She said, “Like on television?”
She said, “A confession? Like on a police show?”
“So that you’ll remember it,” he said.
“I don’t want to remember it,” she said.
“Eloise,” he said. “Tell the story.”
“Yes,” she said. “You said that. I remember that part.”
16.
After forty years in the desert Moses must have hated his god.
17.
After forty laps in the heated Olympic pool, Eloise met Rachel for lunch at that adorable little place where absolutely everything is organic. Rachel pronounced that one could even eat the hemp tablecloths, and when Eloise did not laugh, Rachel said, “Why so glum, chum?”
Eloise said, “That boy; that one whom Louie defended. They found—”
“I know, I know; isn’t it awful?” said Rachel. “I saw it on the news this morning.”
Said Eloise, “Another girl in the woods.”
She rested her face in her hands.
“Louie said that it was bound to happen,” she said.
Said Rachel, “I guess he’s the expert. God,” she said looking at the menu. “I want everything.”
The waiter came by.
Rachel asked him about the organic wine.
He recommended a rustic blackberry red.
With a hint of licorice.
Rachel said didn’t that sound wonderful?
Eloise did not answer.
The waiter disappeared.
“You’re too quiet,” said Rachel.
Said Eloise, “I just, I keep thinking about that poor girl.”
Rachel said, “Really, El. What can anyone do?”
She reached across the table and took Eloise’s hands in her own.
“Is this new?” Rachel asked, admiring Eloise’s bracelet.
Eloise turned the bracelet round her slim wrist.
“Did I tell you? He showed me the pictures,” said Eloise.
“Those girls,” said Eloise.
“Don’t think about it,” said Rachel.
“I’m worried about Susu,” said Eloise.
“She’s a good girl,” said Rachel.
“People always say that,” said Eloise.
“Because it’s true,” said Rachel.
“—It isn’t. I mean, she isn’t. She isn’t a good girl,” said Eloise.
Rachel laughed.
“Maybe not,” she said. “But she’s something, isn’t she?”
“Have you heard from her?” said Rachel.
The waiter brought the wine and two glasses.
He poured out the glasses.
El drank.
Rachel drank.
Rachel said, “Look, it’s started to snow.”
“Do you know what?” said Eloise. “Sometimes I speak entirely in lines stolen from books—or poems. Once I kept it up for three whole days before Louie noticed.”
Rachel said that men were such idiots.
And Eloise said yes, she supposed that they were.
18.
I don’t suppose that I knew, or maybe I did, that while I was confessing to her father, that while I was telling my story, again and again and over and over in words soaked with plum brandy and every wonderful once in a while, a Cuban cigar with such rich plumes of smoke, as a p
awn fell, as a queen triumphed, that Beatrice was listening at the door.
19.
Louie was packing for a trip.
He was going to the annual meeting of the Mnemosyne Society. He had prepared his discussion topic for the gathering: The Memory Game: What Are the Rules?
His shirts were folded upon the bed.
He said that she should come with him.
Why didn’t she? She could use the sun.
She said that she didn’t want to go to California.
He said; he reminded her that it was just for a few days.
He’d be back after New Year’s.
He asked her what she wanted him to bring back for her.
“What do you want?” he asked.
She fell back upon the bed.
“Now look what you’ve done,” he said.
“What’s that?” she said.
“What have I done?” she said.
“Oh,” she said.
She watched as he began to refold—
The shirts—
So neatly, so perfectly—
So that everything fit exactly in his suitcase.
She said that oh Louie she couldn’t think of a thing that she wanted.
She said that she didn’t want anything.
20.
This is how memory works: pearls that by virtue of string and proximity become a necklace.
21.
Eloise had fought against the things that one fights against in youth, against her own—oh—commodification, against objectification. And then at some point, she had grown tired of fighting it. She was tired of fighting the vague and euphemistic it. She had struggled and then stopped struggling. Once it had bothered her to be like a character in a novel. Now she was certain that she lived only on the page.
22.
This past summer on a day in the warmth of June the doctor fell in his garden. He lay among the lilies; there I found him, fallen. I helped him to the house. After a glass of honey liqueur, held with his trembling hands, he recovered some strength.
And we sat in sunlight in the library.
Dr. Lemon asked a favor of me.
He asked me to care for his daughter, after he was gone.
He wanted that Beatrice should be kept safe.
She knew nothing of the world, he said.
Would I do it?
I thought. I pondered.
In sunlight, a bee buzzed.
In the library.
Among the books.
I thought of Beatrice.
The girl.
Running barefoot through the blackberry brambles.
I said, yes.
We celebrated that night, the three of us.
It was Beatrice’s eighteenth birthday.
Dr. Lemon said, “It was the ancients who imagined our world; we live by their clock; the mechanism turns, and we dream it is our own doing. History guides us by our vanities. Signs are taken for wonders. We fall to Fate. And Fate herself is a girl with scissors,” he paused. He sighed, “—Ah well, we drink to Beatrice.” He raised his glass. “In those long-ago times it was good to make an offering to the gods with flowers, salt, and wine; with the smoke of burnt offerings upon a fire.”
His daughter’s young dreamy face darkened.
“We are no longer ancient,” he said.
We laughed, the three of us, though I don’t know why or at what.
And we drank Strega and ate plum cake.
23.
Like a character in a novel, like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, like poor Arlova, doomed and defeated, when she tells Rubashov, You will always be able to do what you want with me: Eloise was impelled by some unseen ink, across the marble tile, across the lobby, across the rose carpet, across the page, to meet a fate who was called in this version of the story of her life, Zigouiller.
24.
I have been reading of the whims of gods and goddesses.
He who seeks to avoid Scylla falls on Charybdis.
Apollo punished Cassandra with the gift of foresight.
She would see the future. She would foretell all.
And no one would believe her.
The wind shakes the trees.
The waves roll.
They say that Zeus came to Leda as a swan.
And with the force of the moment—
In a fluttering of wings.
An empire fell.
Leda gave birth to Helen, whose face launched a thousand ships.
Helen gave birth to Clytemnestra, who murdered the warrior Agamemnon.
I was speaking of gods, wasn’t I?
Of fortune, of death, of wives, of darkness.
The day passed into darkness.
Beatrice came to me in the evening.
At the window she put her palm flat against the glass.
“Let’s build a fire,” she said.
Is language a prisonhouse?
I am bounded in a nutshell.
Of infinite space.
I live among birds.
I have seen augury and omens.
I have seen Beatrice walking a road at dusk.
And naked in the bath.
With her knees drawn to her breast.
Bare and barely there.
Do you doubt me?
I have heard such cries and questionings.
25.
Eloise and Zigouiller had the entire night before them.
26.
After dinner we watched television.
A crime drama came on.
Beatrice sat beside me.
We were promised by a deep and knowing voice a story ripped from today’s headlines.
A disclaimer flashed in white letters upon the black screen saying that any resemblance to real characters or real events was purely accidental.
A hardy-handsome man of indeterminate middle age and obvious fortune sat watching a baseball game on television. He was talking on the telephone. “See you in twenty minutes,” he said. There was a knock on the door. He looked at his watch. He rose from his chair. He opened the door. And, he said to his visitor, “Oh, it’s you. What are you doing here?”
Two quick gunshots.
In the next scene the room was crowded with police.
One cop explained to another: this was the swanky uptown digs of the famous loudmouth provocateur, Rivers Jackson. Jackson was dead.
There was no sign of a struggle.
A delivery girl had found the victim.
She discovered the body.
Rivers Jackson had ordered dinner: three cheeseburgers, onion rings, and chocolate cake, from a nearby restaurant.
Two tough but tender detectives were on the case: a buxom young woman in ill-fit trousers and her partner, a grizzled old man who chewed on a toothpick.
As he studied the crime scene, the man, his hands in clear plastic gloves, lifted the bun from atop a cheeseburger, turned to his partner, and said, “This stuff will kill ya.”
The girl put her hands on her hips.
Her blazer gaped open.
Her breasts strained against her tight blouse.
The body lay pooled in blood on the floor.
The girl said, “And they say that meat is murder.”
The theme music came up.
And the show went to commercial.
Beatrice and I sat waiting to see what would happen next.
Rivers Jackson: shot while watching a baseball game on TV.
The plot followed the grisly details of his demise.
The author’s life was pieced together in flashbacks, while the detectives followed the clues to find out whodunit.
Here was Rivers Jackson telling a dirty joke; eating ice cream; seducing a girl; winning an award; stealing a line; falling down drunk; dazzling an audience; typing; falling down dead.
A gloved hand shot a gun.
Was it the grieving widow? the nanny? the envious friend? the bitter ex-stepmother? I was uncertain about the last suspect—the ambitious youn
g writer. He was only there, I suspected, to lead the viewer down the garden path.
The names were changed.
The places were different.
The knife was replaced with a gun.
Even the final score of the baseball game was different.
Any resemblance to real or fictional events was purely unreal.
Any resemblance to a nutshell was purely spatial.
Beatrice gave a gasp.
She took my hands.
And put them between her thighs.
In the end the murderer was revealed.
The culprit was locked up like language in a prisonhouse.
The case of Rivers Jackson was settled neatly in one nail-biting hour.
While even now: Roman Stone’s murderer remains at large.
27.
Eloise opened the curtains.
Outside it was snowing.
In the darkness.
Zigouiller said that he knew the girl in the photograph.
“The girl,” he said.
He had seen her before.
Eloise stood by the window.
Where are the eagles and the trumpets?
She wore a black silk slip.
And her hair was undone.
CHAPTER 15
Susu draws a chalk outline around the body
IT WAS NOT ASTORY. It had no plot. It had neither sequence nor consequence. It had no characters. There was one shadowy indistinct unnamed girl who might have been any girl. It was not a story, and I heard him tell it in a lecture hall on a hot summer night. No, it was not a story. It was the shape and the space around a story. It had no hero. It had no plot. I listened, and I waited in the audience in the darkness. He stood at the podium. He read from his book, and then he set down the book in midsentence, he stopped, he paused, he poured water from a pitcher into a glass and then drank neither slowly nor quickly but drank in the silence of scuffled shoes and coughs, and he looked out blinking toward the light he shielded his eyes with a hand and thanked and told his audience how good we were and because of this, of this goodness that exists in the silence of auditoriums when a man stands at the podium in the lone light with only his book and his memories, he was going to tell us a story. He was going to tell the story of how he became a writer. Of course, it wasn’t a story, not really. There was a story hidden inside of it. It was not a story, but it contained a story. It was not a story. It was a box. It was a bird. It was both tree and forest. It might have been a bough or branch but it was not a story. It had no beginning. It had no end. It was an egg. It was a shell. It was a stone. It was an apple. It was an apricot. It was a house. It was a locked door. It was not a story. I heard him tell it. He talked about desire and deceit. He took the podium and he poured water into his glass and shielded his eyes from the light and told the story that was not really a story and then there was a reception with wine and chocolate and candles. He took my hand. He called me the next day. I went to him at the hotel with roses on the walls, and I drank plum brandy. He wanted me to go away with him. Did I want to go away with him? to the ancient world he said there were snakes and spiders and carnivals and pomegranates and burning kings. He was going away to the ancient world to write his story. I went away with him. We went to the carnival and had our cards and palms read. He talked and I tried to untangle the thread to lead me to the monster. It was not a story. It was a lamp, a vase, a clock, an ax, a cask, a casket. It was a sacked city. A ruined amphora. It was a lilac bush bursting into bloom. He told me the story. It was not a story. It was a spider. It was a swan. It was a snake. It was a king. It was a punishment. It was straw. It was ash. It was fire. It was murder at the hands of children. It was a body. It was not a body. It was the chalk outline around a body. It was not a story. It was every story. And he told me how it would end. Each night he told me more of the story. He started at the end. I walked in late to his lecture. He had already begun. The story was not really a story. It might have been an epic, a myth, a novel, a theory, a theft, a history, a poem, a polemic, a philosophy, rumination, speculation, a confession, a confusion, a lesson, a lamentation. It was a lie. It was the truth. It was a spoon turning in a cup. It was a shovel stuck in the dirt. It was a knife in the heart. I went to meet him at the hotel of roses, in the bar he tossed the coin on the table, and he told me how the story was to end. And the last morning on an ancient island with the birds and oranges the hot dry dusty sun and the singsong girls it was then that he told me how the story was to begin. He peeled an orange. And he asked if I believed him. We stood on the balcony, he scattered bread, and he told me that when it came around to it I would turn against him.
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