Let the Dark Flower Blossom

by Norah Labiner

  He drank.

  “—And a little hysterical,” he said.

  “Where’s the girl?” Wren said.

  “What girl?” said Ro.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  Ro poured himself more champagne.

  “Happy New Year,” he said.

  Eloise was peeling an orange.

  “Shut the fuck up,” I said.

  18.

  Zigouiller told Eloise to come away from the window.

  She placed her palms flat against the glass.

  19.

  The hard times, the sour hours; the bloody footsteps of ancient sacrifice, the portents, the omens; the portentous, the ominous. Ro killed her. Ro killed that girl in the snow. He smashed her skull. It was his offering to an ancient god of destruction. We took shovels and lifted the snow. We dug into the hard earth. We dug and the day darkened. We buried her. We covered her with snow and dirt. The snow fell and fell. It covered our tracks. It snowed all night. Snow covered the grave. Year after year, I have awaited a telephone call; a knock on the door. I have waited for someone to miss that girl. I thought that one day the body would be found.

  This has not yet happened. Will it? She is buried in the woods beyond that farmhouse. Near the pond, under a willow tree. Ro was nothing if not poetic. A real artist. Ro knew how to murder and to create.

  In 1981, though the girl’s body was not discovered, Roman Stone was. That is, Ro’s first book was published. He was hailed as sharp and smart and funny; the sign of the times, the face of the new generation. The New York Times sent a reporter out to Illyria to do a story on the latest literary boy genius. Ro was on his way. The face of that girl haunted me. And then after a while, I couldn’t remember her face, and I was haunted only by the idea of her.

  Ro and I buried the body. And we remained bound together by a gravediggers’ hitch. I went out to California with him. It seemed that our general distrust of each other kept us together. After we separated in California he always kept a loosely knotted noose on me. He needed to know where I was. He never feared our secret coming out; it was more of a game to him. A game of odds and chance and memory and probability. Which one of us would break first? Who would tell the story? It was only a matter of time. Stone & Schell, partners in crime. Sometimes I thought that he wanted me to confess, that he was daring me to write a book; other times it seemed that he had forgotten what happened in the woods. He had pushed it from his mind; so much had happened to him since then, so much success, so much happiness. And I too began to wonder if it had ever really happened.

  We sat that night before the fire.

  There were four of us.

  Wren was brooding. Eloise sat at Ro’s feet. We drank champagne. Ro began his ghost story. Of course, it wasn’t Roman’s story.

  It was mine.

  Do you know what I love about you? said Pru one night long ago in Little America. You make ugly things seem so beautiful. That’s what I call a real writer.

  “Tell the story,” said Wren.

  We drank champagne.

  We ate oranges.

  And sat before the fire.

  Roman told the story of how I found my mother and father dead.

  A true haunting.

  His ghost story.

  My ghosts.

  20.

  Eloise was standing at the window.

  Her back was to Zigouiller.

  She looked out at the city.

  She turned from the glass.

  She looked at him.

  In the darkness.

  “I wish I had killed him,” he said.

  He rose from the bed.

  He went to her.

  “You called me a whore,” she said.

  “It was a stupid thing to say,” she said.

  They sat upon the bed.

  They lay down upon the bed.

  The drapes were open.

  And the lights of the city shined upon the snow.

  Eloise on her side.

  In her black slip.

  With his hand on her hip.

  “Do you forgive me?” he asked.

  21.

  And in all these years; since I became the ghost of my own father; the years since we buried the girl in the snow; the years since my wife died; the years that proved my bad luck by virtue of my lack of virtue, I told my story only to one person.

  I told my story to Dr. Lemon.

  As we sat before the chessboard.

  As we moved our ivory pieces across the black-and-white squares.

  He poured me plum brandy.

  He was deep and knowing.

  I told him about my father and mother.

  About my wife.

  About my sister. About my book.

  About Roman. About the girl.

  The doctor could not remember the sins that I nightly confessed to him.

  And because the doctor could not remember that what I touched was subject to destruction; he asked me to possess his most beloved object.

  22.

  Zigouiller asked Eloise if she could forgive him.

  23.

  The ghost-perfume seeps from the wallpaper. Like roses.

  24.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked her.

  She was thinking of summer and salted licorice and an apple tree and no image that fit in a line with the next image just one thing after the next a ruined vase a cracked kettle a broken clock. She was thinking of Mother and Father. And the house and the tree and the garden and the table in the kitchen an unmade bed a closed door and the light burning burning in the window that you could see when you left your bicycle in the grass so you knew that Mother was reading. Eloise was thinking about Louie how he asked her again and again to tell him what happened. What did you see? he asked her. Do you remember? Did she remember? Father was in the cellar. He was making a box in which to lock all that was bad in the world. Father taught the children to be good. His wrath was a terrible thing. Mother was beautiful. In the garden. With the flowers and the aphids, the snails, the slugs cutting their way through green flesh; boring holes, sucking, destroying the life of flowers. Mother went at night to search for slugs in the garden. She crushed them between her fingers. To save the flowers. Mother’s kindness was a terrible thing. At night the moonflowers opened in their twining around the fence; white flowers that hid from the light. See? Mother said. Mother whispered. See? how they open in the darkness? I see, said Eloise. And she did. She had seen. She saw.

  She was the one who found the bodies.

  “What are you thinking?” said Zigouiller.

  She was thinking of the girl.

  Of the swan.

  Of the ocean.

  Of the salt.

  “El?” he said.

  She was thinking of how her mother taught her to knick the moonflower seed with a knife to break the hard husk so that when buried in the ground the green shoots could push out and up and twine and mingle and knot and secretly at night and in the darkness blossom.

  “I forgive you,” she said.

  25.

  There is nothing so much that people will beg for as the truth; and then when given this thing, this truth, they will immediately doubt it. Why is kindness repaid with cruelty? The greater mystery is why the bird clings to the branch. Or the mouse plays dead to avoid the cat. When I was a child I used to keep my stories locked in a cedar box. I don’t know whether I was protecting my story or the world.

  CHAPTER 17

  Susu breaks the second rule of storytelling

  WE WALKED. The smoke of burning sage and cigarettes. We walked. The white flowers in the darkness. We walked. The dark hours by the light of the lanterns. We drank coffee with honey. At a little shop I bought postcards. We walked. He told me about a box that contained all the misery in the world. It was night. It was not. It was not night. We walked. It was morning. It was a hot dull morning. We stood on the balcony. He broke an orange in two. And he handed half to me. He went back into the room. I op
ened the box. His manuscript was tied with my ribbon. He untied the ribbon. He undid the knot. His papers fell to the floor. The fallen pages, the papers fluttering. I collected the fallen pages. He sat in shadow. I waited. I waited. I asked him to tell me the story. In the vase the black lilies wilted. In the lobby the statue began to weep. And everyone said that it was a miracle. Then one day or maybe it was night: he was gone. I read about it in the newspaper. It said that he died. And there would be no more of him. I came back here to our room. The night porter’s wife asks about him and she brings me coffee with milk and honey but I have no taste for it. I do not tell her that he died. And I am waiting for a ghost.

  CHAPTER 18

  Sheldon suffers for art

  SUSU ZIGOUILLER LOVED AMERICA: the shopping malls, fast food, cheeseburgers and push-up bras, gossip magazines, baseball, poetic justice, and blockbuster movies in which sloganeering heroes jump from jet planes two-fisted with guns blazing. She couldn’t help but feel fondness for a certain species of vulgarity, for so much sugar and fat and sex and salt. The highs were high and the lows were low; truth was an artificial construct; beauty was in the eye of the beerholder; and her favorite gods and goddesses had long since ditched Mount Olympus for the Hollywood hills. She understood the sign of her own symbolism. She knew the difference between story and plot. All the history in the world had already happened. And she was in exile on an ancient island.

  2.

  Dibby Stone, once wife and now widow, in the warmth of a restored post-and-beam New England farmhouse that had been (not once, but) twice featured in House & Garden magazine, in a room that despite the absence of the subject had an objective (objectionable?) masculine presence: her late husband’s study (he had objected to her calling it a study, as he assuredly had never studied anything; he was a natural—), touched her fingers to the black keys of his typewriter.

  3.

  Eloise Sarasine, reading a novel (or rather, not reading—), let the book fall closed.

  4.

  Elizabeth Weiss held her raku cup in both hands and blew slightly to cool the lime-infused green tisane, and she let the moment linger into a dramatic pause before she answered the question of the girl who sat beside her on the overstuffed sofa. The girl was a graduate student. Her name was Eris. She had bombarded Liz with e-mails, until finally, Liz, both flattered and wary, had agreed to the interview. The girl’s hair was bleached white blonde. She was wearing a perfume of green apples, and she was working on her thesis: Who killed the novel?

  Her theory was murder-suicide.

  The girl broke off a bit of her buckwheat scone between her fingers.

  And Liz said, “What was the question?”

  Eris, caught between bites, set her plate on the cushion, put her hand before her mouth, and held up the other in a gesture, wait, wait—

  “How did you meet your husband?” she asked.

  5.

  Benjamin Salt arrived on Pear Island on the last day of December. His journey began in Brooklyn. He had taken a taxi to the airport. He had flown from JFK to Detroit, then changed planes and traveled on to Duluth. There he had rented a car. And continued on toward his destination. He spent the night at a grim motel called the Stockade; breakfasted the next morning at the Kracked Kettle. Salt arrived in Damascus, Wisconsin, in a flurry of snow. He smoked a cigarette and walked along the jetty. Lake Superior was dark. The water was dark with distant islands. He said aloud in the cold afternoon, archipelago. He liked the sound of the word. A posted sign announced that the ferry was no longer taking passengers across the lake; but this was no impediment to Salt. He was not to be stymied by such a small thing as circumstance. He hired a boat to take him across. And once on the island, he enlisted the aid of a boy from the inn to take him to the home of Sheldon Schell.

  6.

  Liz told Eris the story of how she met her husband.

  7.

  The book that Eloise had not been reading fell to the floor.

  8.

  “We take the truth and turn it into a lie. This,” told Louis Sarasine to his esteemed friends and colleagues, the members of the Mnemosyne Society, “is how memory works. We see, we experience: an event, an object, a person—real things that exist in our real world, made of bone or blood, of stone or steel or paper—and we say: this is reality. We make an imprint of this reality: a memory; and recreate and represent, revise and reorder, and change and become, even with each change and each act of recollection, certain of the solidity, the factual nature of our art. The drawings on the walls of a cave, the blood on the doorjamb, the face on the shroud; the sign, the symbol, the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel: each its own exquisite lie. If these are lies: the recollection of a face, a shape, a shadow; then what do we call truth? In what do we believe? The transcendent thing that signifies beyond significance? This thing called god? The creator, the authority, the artist. What if he is a liar by his very nature? What if he loves ink more than his audience? What are we to believe or to disbelieve? What will we do now? And what of tomorrow and the next day? We fear the truth of our truthlessness. We fear more the idea of an indifferent god than no god at all. We would rather have nothing than settle for less.”

  9.

  Eloise looked around the room: her escritoire; the sofa, the chairs, the woven rugs, embroidered pillows, apples, roses, pens and cream-colored paper, a chess set, a statuette of the virgin, a lamp with a glass dome; the fireplace, a hand-fascinated box, the gilt-edged photo of her daughter.

  10.

  On the last night of the year, in an ancient city, as she walked to her hotel along a twisting stone street, Susu looked up at the sky to see the stars composing the Northern Cross of Cygnus, over the neon of a McDonald’s sign, as though directing her homeward.

  11.

  Eris looked around Elizabeth Weiss’s bohemian home—she saw the framed alpine postcards, the collections on the bookshelves: tin toys, snow globes—

  The inkpots and antique typewriters.

  She said, “God, that’s a sweet story, but tell me—”

  “What?” said Liz.

  “Is it true?” the girl asked.

  12.

  Eloise ate an apple.

  13.

  Susu came to her hotel.

  14.

  Dibby Stone had inherited the upkeep of her husband’s empire, and she was entitled—or obliged—no; obligated—to the excavation of its artifacts. The manuscript of his final novel had been returned to her by the police. Ro had written it longhand on unlined paper. It was found with him, in the room where he died. Tattered, fray-edged: it had traveled the world with him. It was tied and knotted with a length of ribbon. The fact of the book, of its composition of paper and ink, caused Dibby to fear its very persistence; its existence. The murderer—the thief, really—hadn’t known, couldn’t have understood the value of the manuscript, and instead had taken his watch, that absurd Italian timepiece. Dibby knew all about murder. She liked to read mystery novels. The kind where a body turns up in the garden, and then a sleuth says clever things. This, of course, was not that kind of book. As if kindness had anything to do with it. Dibby dared not untie the knot on the manuscript. It seemed an act of undoing; not just of the knot, but of him. As though the knot, more so than the book, were the last of Ro. So she had placed the manuscript on his desk. And there it had stayed: unread. Through the summer and into the fall. Now it was winter. Snow fell, as she stood with her palm flat against the paper, the page—; she wondered: what is the story about? and, for no reason more tangible than the force of her desire, Dibby pulled at the string.

  15.

  It bears noting that when he arrived on the island, Salt was not alone. He had brought with him a beautiful blonde girl. The girl was called Inj.

  16.

  The knot came undone.

  17.

  Dibby set the first page on the stand.

  18.

  A white sheet of paper was rolled into the carriage of the type
writer.

  19.

  In the hotel lobby: men in rumpled elegant clothing—spies or gamblers or deposed monarchs—sat on worn sofas reading newspapers and smoking Turkish cigarettes. A serene-faced plaster lady in blue with her nose chipped away, but her eyes were forgiving; weren’t they? stood near the doorway—patiently—between a potted palm and an elephant umbrella holder.

  Susu yawned.

  She was tired of bones and candles and the eyes of watchful gods.

  20.

  A metal key struck a page, inking a letter.

  21.

  The good will not be rewarded and the bad will go unpunished.

  22.

  Dibby began typing the handwritten story on the green typewriter with the blacked-out keys.

  23.

  Dr. Lemon did not deserve the fate that Fate had assigned him. Nor did he warrant the plot imposed upon him by the author of all plots.

  24.

  Dibby let no pause fall between reading a word and translating it into type. She took the first page from the carriage. And she rolled another sheet into place. She saw the typed words—his words once, her words now—appearing black on the white page. And though she vowed, with a transcriptionist’s honesty, to be true to the original—she had to make some changes, didn’t she? She had a responsibility to fix, to mend and to amend, to correct him, to repair his faults and flaws. His spelling errors, his stream of consciousness ramblings, his words blotted into obscurity with jam or coffee or was it blood? Where was his dictionary? She began to search through his desk. It was as she opened the drawers one by one—that she found in the bottom drawer—a box.