Let the Dark Flower Blossom (11 page)

Telling his stories.

Stories of ghosts and gods and girls.

Pru in the moonlight shivered.

Ro touched her bare arm.

It grew late.

And then it was late.

Not too late.

Just late.

Pru held her face in her hand.

And looked up at the stars.

Did she mind?

If we went on without her?

Ro had so much to tell me.

Ro and I left Pru behind and we walked to a campus bar.

Ro was the same as ever.

He had put on a bit of fat.

Rather than making him seem soft; this bulk was imposing.

He asked me about my sister.

Two boys were running down the street in the darkness.

They ran past us.

We walked.

He said, “I bet you still believe in talent?”

He went on.

“And the house of fiction?”

He laughed.

“—The golden bowl, and the Grecian urn, the cracked looking glass, the rules of the game, and truth and beauty and all that marble faun bullshit?”

He paused to pull a sprig of blossom from a branch.

“Just give me a shovel,” I said. “And tell me where to dig.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” he said.

He was wearing khaki trousers and a white Oxford shirt.

He was sweating through his white shirt.

He asked about my book.

Was it finished yet?

I shrugged.

“Do you know what your problem is?” he said.

“Please,” I said. “Enlighten me.”

“You think,” he said, “—that failure is the proof of great art.”

We walked.

Past houses and gardens.

A dog barked.

Ro on a roll.

“Who said anything about art?” I said.

I remember saying it.

And thinking that I was being clever.

“Look at this place,” he said.

The air was tinged with smoke.

Burnt offerings to an old god.

“Jesus,” he said.

A light was extinguished in a window, behind a lace curtain.

“Why are you here?” I said.

He said, “I'm your friend.”

He was either so ironic that he had become serious—

Or so serious that he was nothing but ironic.

I couldn't tell.

We walked.

The hot night.

He wiped his brow.

“Don't look so smug,” he said. “It wasn't a compliment.”

He told me that he was going to a monastery in Tibet.

Or maybe to Barcelona for the winter.

Then on to Delphi.

And Crete to find the ruins of Daedalus's labyrinth.

Why didn't I come with him?

“What the hell,” he said. “Bring the girl too.”

He liked Pru. He knew that there was something secret and spectacular about her. He just hadn't figured out what it was yet.

We came to the place.

We went in.

We sat at the bar.

Ro lighted a cigarette.

“You'll destroy her,” he said.

He shook his head.

He squinted through the smoke.

“A girl like that,” he said.

“So now you can tell the future?” I said.

“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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.