Let the Dark Flower Blossom (12 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pru watching a game show on television. Pru with scissors lopping off loops of her hair. Pru smashing plates.
Let anger be general
, she used to say,
I hate an abstract thing
.

Pru becoming more and more unreal in my memory.

“Your name is like an admonition,” I told her the night we met.

Riding the streets on our bicycles.

With nothing behind us and nothing ahead of us.

A girl in November—

With a name of admonishing restraint.

Like the streets that she rode on her bicycle in the darkness. As she coasted downhill, as she flew far beyond me. “What does that mean?” she called back to me.

“What does it mean?” she repeated.

She called out in the darkness.

When she came to a wooden bridge over a swollen creek, she stopped.

She held up and waited for me.

She waited on the bridge, looking into the cold moonlit water.

In her plaid coat, her knotted scarf, her black dress.

Pru asked me—“What's the worst thing that you have ever done?”

And then she was off again—

Pru not sticking around for an answer.

Through dinner (at that Spanish place, where they pour chocolate martinis with just a wonderful burning dash of cayenne—) Louis Sarasine talked about bones with Dr. Ira Black, the paleontologist, and his wife Tiggy, the defense attorney (who answered her cell phone at the table three times during the tapas alone) while Eloise (was thinking: what if I took all the treasures in the world—the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold—and carried them in a sack out to sea?) rested her face upon her hand and just couldn't decide what she wanted.

They toasted to Louis Sarasine's success in swaying the jury.

“
Survivor's guilt
,” said Ira. “What a strategy.”

“Louie, you've got to let me pick your brain,” said Tiggy. “About my new case—”

Louie looked at his wristwatch.

“Shall I start billing now?” he said.

They all laughed.

Tiggy had taken on the defense of five high school football players accused of gang-raping a girl, who just so happened to be, Tiggy said, the town whore.

“It goes beyond guilt and innocence, doesn't it?” said Louie Sarasine.

Tiggy said yes. Yes, exactly. It was about belief—

She said, “Is there anything in the world better than a case in which you really believe?”

Was there anything in the world better than a chocolate martini? Eloise thought not. And so she had one or two. The boys had raped the girl. There was
DNA
evidence. And it was no point in the favor of Mrs. Black's clients that they had videotaped the attack. Still, Tiggy assured Louie and Ira and dear drunk Eloise that these boys were genuinely good, really good kids. And that her clients were not in an indefensible position. There was no question regarding their guilt; but certainly there were things more tangible, said Tiggy, more relevant, than guilt or innocence.