She burned down the house.
But she did not burn the story.
She took the cedar box.
She hid the box in the woods.
She did not open the box.
She had not opened the box.
Not in all these years.
She could not open it.
The story was locked inside.
She didn’t have the key.
She had the box.
She gave her brother the key.
When they were children. In the woods.
He put out his hand for the key.
And she gave it to him.
So that he could lock the box.
Locked inside the box—
There was.
There is.
Their story.
The first story.
It was the story of a brother and sister.
A girl and boy who kill their parents.
It was only a story.
It was a dream in the woods.
They dreamed in the woods.
What one dreams is always possible.
She hid the box beyond the salt creek.
She gave her brother the typewriter.
So that he could tell his own story.
She set the house on fire. She stood watching the house burn. She waited for Shelly. She told him that she was burning down the house because the story had come true. He took an apple from the tree. He cut it in two halves. And he gave her half. He said, “El, it’s just us now.”
And then he said, “We’ll start again.”
Once years later.
It was day or maybe it was night.
She saw Roman.
She heard him call her name in a hotel lobby.
It was snowing.
She held her daughter by the hand.
She did not let go.
She did not turn.
If she had turned—
She would have turned to salt.
And god knows she loved salt.
And sweet.
Each word is a symbol.
Each word replaces a thing.
A clock.
A bird.
An apple.
A girl.
A minute.
An hour.
A day.
Or maybe a night.
A story is a memory game.
This is the memory game.
Choose one moment.
Choose one word over another.
Choose rock or paper or scissors.
She didn’t want words.
She didn’t want memories.
She didn’t want licorice.
She wanted chocolate cake.
On a green plate.
Maybe she would stay up all night.
Zig was sleeping.
Ro was dead.
Sheldon was living on an island.
Louie wanted a story.
She rolled the red ball across the floor.
Zola chased it.
She threw it.
Zola caught it.
She took the ball from the dog.
She threw it; it bounced.
It knocked a vase from the table.
The Etruscan vase fell to the floor.
And broke.
On the Persian rug.
She laughed.
She might stay up all night.
She might stay up one thousand and one nights.
After all, who would stop her?
Eloise she was named after her mother
Eloise she named her daughter.
She sat on the velvet sofa.
And picked up her book.
It was open to the first page.
She began again.
CHAPTER 20
Sheldon explicates the egg
WE ATE BAKER’S BREAD THICK WITH MARMALADE, honey, and butter. There were garden roots, al forno: red potatoes, yams, carrots, quince, and peppered turnips. The black cat stood at the windowsill. The morning sun did not impress him, as though he knew something about destruction that the rest of us did not, or could not, or pretended not to know.
We talked of dreams.
Salt said, “Last night I dreamed I was at King Arthur’s grave. And the great old ghost in a coat of armor pointed his sword and held up his shield, and he said to me, “Benjamin Salt! Benjamin Salt? You have a very stupid name. Are you ever called anything else?”
Inj laughed. In sunlight.
The day was promising, wasn’t it?
Whatta day!
And then I remembered the fire.
It had burned everything to ash.
“I woke up,” said Salt. “And I knew just how my story should go.”
Beatrice peeled a hard-boiled egg.
Ben and Inj and I set out for the jetty after breakfast. Inj swung her arms as she walked. Ben talked. He spoke of pine trees; ash and candle; of paper and ink, pepper and plum liquor. I let him go on ahead of me, and his voice was lost against the cries of the birds.
I had a terrible desire—
A nearly sickening want—
To confess to her.
In the woods.
To tell my story to a girl.
Who never had a tragedy to call her own.
One could love or hate a girl for this.
For being so easy. For not being difficult.
For being a girl, just at the moment when one wanted a girl most.
She turned and looked back at me.
There was nothing tragic about her.
Nothing terrible had ever happened to her.
Nothing terrible would ever happen to her.
Salt had made his way far beyond us.
Into the woods.
Deeper, darker.
She took my hand.
Salt went on—through the thick trees—into the sunlight.
He was so taken with the day.
Can you imagine?
A day so bright—
That you couldn’t see the past.
Only the future.
Only the path before you.
A day so promising.
That you couldn’t see the shadows of the pines.
I held her hand in mine.
And then I let go.
She opened her hand.
Palm up in the glittering sunlight.
Her cheeks were flushed.
She said.
She told me—
From beyond us Salt called out.
“Inj,” he called.
“Here’s the boat,” he said.
Inj pulled away from me.
Inj closed her hand.
And kissed her rolled fist.
“Benny,” she called.
She ran to him.
The lake was dark blue.
The ferryman waited.
Inj waved to me from the boat.
The boat moved slowly, cutting through the cold dark water.
Benny was staring straight up at the sun.
A cloud came across the sun.
It began to snow.
I took the path through the woods.
To the doctor’s house.
Thinking about Inj and her questions.
And why I answered them.
I could describe her face.
But I won’t.
I want to remember Inj.
The idea of a girl.
The memory of a girl.
Inj at the window.
Pru on her bicycle.
Wren waiting to hear Ro’s ghost story.
Eloise in the woods, running.
A girl in the snow.
I want. I want.
I want the doctor to wake so that I can tell him my story.
I want to begin again.
I want to repair the ruined fountain.
How will I rebuild the ruined fountain?
Perhaps in summer.
It is winter.
Who is S. Z. Schell?
The author of his own si
lence.
Here in the doctor’s library—amid—
Such magnificent marble, these statuettes, these books—
This proof of a great civilization.
I will begin.
The glass swan is broken.
It must have fallen from the table.
It was one of the doctor’s curiosities.
The pieces are on the table.
A snapped neck, a broken wing, a terrible accusing eye.
I’ll start again.
My house burned.
I saw the fire.
It wasn’t my house.
It was only a shell.
I lived there for a while.
Before scuttling on.
The house had never been mine.
Should I care for ashes?
Inj and I and the fearsome black cat took refuge in the doctor’s house.
Beatrice held the ragged cat.
“Oh you,” she said.
“You monster,” she said.
She kissed his ear.
The ragged cat.
Who lived by murder.
Who prowled the garden looking for birds and mice.
Beatrice held the cat.
I said to her that everything was gone.
“It’s gone,” I said.
Beatrice said, “Good.”
This morning I found my manuscript on the table in the library.
I’ll start again.
I’ll tell what happened. I’ll tell—
The story of how I killed my wife.
Pru had a garden. She grew ill, and the garden thrived. The disease spread. There was no stopping it. It was wild and tangled. It was a dark flower. Pru died, and her garden flowered through the fall: the asters, the Russian sage, and catmint, the black grapes in damp sunlight.
Pru in her hospital bed.
She said. She said to me.
Tell me a story.
And so I did.
I told her a story.
Of a girl in the woods.
Pru against the white pillow.
The fine bones of her face.
Her pale mouth.
A girl with a name of admonishing restraint.
A girl who once asked me—
What is the worst thing that you have ever done?
The story was the answer.
She closed her eyes.
That night she died.
She died in August.
The roses bloomed in October.
This is how I killed my wife.
With a story.
It is the kind of murder that comes from kindness.
A Halloween frost killed the last of the flowers.
I kept the typewriter on the kitchen table.
I killed her, I suppose.
Is there a better word for it?
Snow is falling on the ruined fountain.
I’ll start again.
Dr. Lemon is dying.
The doctor has taken a turn for the worse.
I anticipate the end.
It is snowing.
And it is going to snow.
Beatrice has a terror in her eyes.
I am writing in the library.
I can do only what I know.
And continue on with my story.
As though telling it to her father.
Who listened with such sweet sagacity.
Language is the cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the while we long to move the stars to pity.
That’s Flaubert.
I used to want to move the stars. When I was young and wanted to be a storyteller, but I had no stories. When I longed for experience.
I wanted a story.
I have lied. Once or twice.
In the telling of a story.
I did not find the bodies.
It was Eloise.
This is what happened.
I came home.
In the dark of an autumn evening.
Doesn’t it get dark so early in October?
I was riding my bicycle.
Listening to my transistor radio.
The Dodgers were playing the Yankees.
It was darkening.
Then it was dark.
There was a brightness up ahead.
I saw the fire.
Eloise called out to me.
She was under the apple tree.
Watching the house burn.
The typewriter beside her.
Later the story of the fire was on the news.
A murder-suicide.
Though there was no real evidence to suggest who killed whom.
Or whether one killed the other.
Only that both were dead.
And the house had burned down.
Eloise told me that there was a note.
Eloise had found a note.
Left in the typewriter.
We were quiet.
While the cold ripened the apples.
While the house burned.
We were seventeen. I am running so many autumn evenings together. We are children running down the street in the darkness. Shel and El, what the hell. Father used to say: he who avoids Scylla runs on Charybdis.
Did Father kill Mother?
In one version of the story it was Mother who killed Father.
Like the ancients, she followed after; to care for him in the next world.
And then it was just us.
El & Shel.
We had no one else in the world.
No one else in the world.
Eloise.
Her hair smelled of smoke.
And her fingers of chocolate.
The house by the salt creek burned down.
And then we went to Illyria. We got on a bus and headed to Virgil’s Grove. I met Roman. And Roman met El. We let him seduce us, respectively. We were drawn in, collectively. We could not resist him. It did not occur to me until later that he also fell; he could not resist us.
Our tragedy.
It was like smoke and chocolate.
I’ll begin again.
I will start again.
So there I was—eighteen, and just off the bus.
So there I was—young.
There I was with the image in my head—with an image that could not be replaced by the view out of the window or the burning red burnished landscape of autumn in Iowa or the glass bottles of orange soda or the hardbitten yellow apples—of my mother dead.
And how she lay across the bed like a fallen heroine.
With her dark hair upon the pillow.
And her palms turned upward.
My father was beside her.
The story overtook me.
I’ll start over.
So there I was—eighteen and just off the bus.
There we were in Illyria. It was night. And there was nothing like it. We sat outside. We drank orange soda. Me and Ro. There was nowhere to go.
The next day.
It must have been.
Or the day after.
Ro and I were sitting together in the cafeteria.
Eloise sat down with us. She set her tray on the table.
Ro looked at her.
I saw him look at her.
Until she blushed and turned away.
This was the brash bravado that made Ro a hit.
Here comes Ro.
Everyone wanted to be his friend.
Ro was wearing a pink Izod shirt—you know, with the collar turned up and the little alligator?
I hated him from the first.
Maybe Fortunato hadn’t done me quite a thousand injuries.
Maybe the shirt wasn’t pink.
Does that part matter?
I’ll start again.
El and I went to Iowa.
We were eighteen and had no one in the world but each other.
What one dreams is always possible.
I had the image in my head of Mother and Father.
; Though I never saw them like that.
Eloise saw.
And she would not let me look.
Though she saved me from reality.
She could not save me from my own dreams.
She set the fire.
That burned the house.
That burned my story.
She saved the typewriter.
So that I could start again.
I’ll start again.
One day in Illyria, where there were no seasons.
One day in Virgil’s Grove, where the shades came to rise.
One day Ro’s mother arrived, like some marble-white goddess.
Carried upon a palanquin.
And Ro, prince that he was—
Showed me dirty pictures of the queen.
The pages were frayed.
He wasn’t afraid.
Of anything.
He showed me the pictures.
The evidence of her beauty.
Dirty pictures.
He had heaps of them.
That’s not poverty, he said.
One day—
One day or maybe it was night.
At night along those quiet streets.
In our apartment on Bard Street.
When Ro, oh Ro, you know—
He was going on and on about what he had done to whom.
About what he had learned.
About what he knew.
What he wanted.
About the taste of it.
And I could no longer bear to listen, to hear—
About his experience.
About the world.
I said to him.
“Here’s a story.”
I told him a story.
Mother killed Father, I said.
“I found them,” I said.
“I was the one who found the bodies,” I said.
I told Ro a story.
I told him how I found the bodies.
How I walked down the hallway.
How I stood in the doorway.
I told him my story.
He was quiet.
He listened.
He drank.
He kept refilling his glass.
And when I was finished.
He said.
“That is a story.”
I looked at him.
And didn’t I feel terror then?
At what I had done.
What had I done?
I lied.
And the lie became a story.
The story became a truth.
I lied.
It was Eloise’s story.
Eloise under the apple tree.
I told Roman my story.
And he stole my story from me.
He took it.
As an elemental thing.
A thing, a theft, that would make all else possible.
The spark that leads to a conflagration.
I’ll start again.
An event, a scene; it only lasts a moment.
The memory of the event is inexhaustible.
It is not bound by time or space or reason.
The doctor’s house is a maze.
It is full of beautiful things.
Let the Dark Flower Blossom Page 24