Let the Dark Flower Blossom (15 page)

It was evening.

Beatrice took her cake from the oven.

Beatrice and I had dinner.

There were apples from my own trees and a bottle of Sauternes from her father's cellar.

We ate dark bread.

We spoke of disasters.

We seemed, though I do not know how to explain this: frantically alive.

Like prisoners at a stay of execution—we would not escape. We would never be free, but oh, we longed for one more day, one more hour—without Salt.

We fell upon the food.

Then the wine.

Drunk, we fell upon each other.

And after—in the silence sweetened by a wine that tastes of honey and almonds yet comes only from the rot of blighted grapes—we slept. In my bed, Beatrice lay white, naked, frail—like any other small animal.

When I woke in the night she was gone.

I found her in the kitchen.

She was sitting at the table.

Outside it was snowing.

“Killer,” said Beatrice.

Killer
, Beatrice calls the cat.

He was lapping milk from a dish.

The cat drank.

He was warm and content.

He brushed against her leg.

He rubbed against her legs.

He leapt upon the table.

He yawned.

And curled there on the cloth.

Beatrice held a knife.

Beatrice looked at me.

“Do we dare?” she asked.

She took the knife.

And she cut two pieces of her beautiful Santa Fe sugar cake.

And she set them each by each upon a plate.

We ate with our fingers.

Perhaps I do, after all, love Beatrice.

One day, when I see an open door, I will run to it.

In the hotel room—

Zigouiller wanted to know about their daughter.

“Where should I begin?” Eloise asked him.

While Beatrice sleeps, I go to my study and find the letter.

There are rules to every game. Even to this memory game.

I tear at the envelope—

To read—

A Frankenstein's monster of a sentence.

What do you know about Roman Stone that no one else knows?

The black cat, his green eyes in the lamplight—

He is sitting at the window.

He is watching me.

Ro had always been a sucker for the ancient world. He fell, he had fallen in love with antiquity. And why not? Athena sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus. In Illyria there were no seasons. And Babylon itself was an infinite game of chance. Work, for Ro, meant sitting in a café drinking ouzo or watching a beautiful girl run naked into the Aegean.

The girl was Susu Schell.

I mean Zigouiller.

Susu Zigouiller.

He went away with her.

Ro's books remain—lined as they are upon my shelves.

Black and white and read all over.

Ro kept at me over the years about my book.

So I never wrote it. So what?

What was it to him?

I don't know if he felt guilt or curiosity.

I don't know if the impact of a meteor crashing to the earth is more or less than the striking of an inked metal key upon a page. I write longhand. And there is barely a sound to signify my fury.

Babylon Must Fall
was as impactful on me as an anvil landing upon a bone china teacup.

Ro with eggy fingers tapped out the book on my typewriter.

A book!

Whatta riot!

You should try it.

Ro thought it was hilarious.

It wasn't until years later, when I was back and dug into the Midwest, when my literalism was in full dark flower, that I realized that the joke was on me.

The third rule of storytelling had a name: the fallacy of imitative form. I got it from Ro. I admit this, to some chagrin. But as I am still under the force and exaction of rule one, I must be true. In my defense: Ro learned the theory by happenstance. He said a girl wrote it in lipstick on a bathroom mirror. He thought it was a dirty joke. I am not entirely certain that it isn't. I taught my students about the fallacy of imitative form. They did not understand. I said, “Do not write about a
thing
, in the manner of that
thing
.” They stared at me blankly. I said, “Do not write about ugliness in an ugly way; or about confusion in a confusing tangle. One should be ugly about beauty. And beautiful about vulgarity. One should be disorderly about order. And direct about confusion.” They were confused. I was not a good
teacher. It was a long time ago. I sit now in lamplighted darkness. As snow falls I have a strange desire; I long to read tragedies.

My father's workshop was in the cellar of our house. When we were children we were not to go down there.

Roman's father read
Babylon Must Fall
. He hated it; and then he read it again. He hated it more; and he read it again. He could not stop reading his son's book. He was looking for clues to his own murder. Really, he was the perfect reader; he was, you see, trapped in the story. He suspected that his wife and son were plotting against him. That they were in love. That his son was a thief. That his wife was a liar. Or maybe it was the other way around. He grew paranoid; a mad king. He began to see words, words, words, all over everything. So the old man divorced the girl—took her to court—and the tabloids ran amok:
Fall of the House of Stone!
Milton Stone was a doddering letch; his wife a gold-digger; his son a lothario. There were photographs in the newspapers, but the courtroom sketch artist rendered the characters in cartoonish beauty. When Mary Clare, waifish in a schoolgirl blue dress, her hair pulled back with a black headband, took the stand, she bore an uncanny resemblance to Alice just as she goes through the looking glass.

Mary Clare said that she did not have an affair with her stepson.

She said that her stepson had never seduced her.

He had never pushed her to the floor, nor torn her dress, nor tied her to a chair with her stockings, nor put his hand over her mouth because her husband was in the next room.

Nor had it happened the other way around.

She never seduced him.

Let alone plotted her husband's murder.

It did not happen.

It had never happened.

Several items of lingerie were entered into evidence.

Ro was called back from California to testify, and he confirmed her story.

He placed his hand on a Bible and swore under oath.

He had simply written a novel.

It was fiction for god's sake.

It was only a book.

It's only a book.

Only a book, Salt!

Not a falcon or a storm or a great song.

Not an eagle or a trumpet.

Not a buttered scone or crumpet.

Not a rock, not a boulder—so how much impact can it have upon a life?

Do not confuse depth with gravity.

Nor heft with heart.

In the grand story of things we all have our utility.

The ant, slug, the cowbird; both balm and bee; the failure and the success. An anvil is weight or counterweight, but you can't drink tea from it; can you?

Who would be Schell when he could be Stone?

Anyone who would rather have nothing than settle for less.

Eloise brought Zigouiller a photograph.

She gave it to him.

He looked.

And his face turned pale.

I took up a widower's life on an island. I had books to content me in winter. In the brief warm season I worked the day through in my garden. If I wanted for the drama of the world, I had newspapers; and I succumbed, I confess, at times to tabloids. I read when Ro got married. He had been writing travel articles for
Esquire
. While examining Southern Gothic—by judging a beauty pageant—he met a young belle called Dibby, a runner-up for Miss Teen Georgia. I know no more of it than any other inky-fingered idolator. I can only say that instead of leaving the girl broken-down or brokenhearted at the door of a rehab clinic; reader, he married her. The girl was an accomplished flaming-baton twirler. Regal Ro and his not-quite beauty-queen baby-doll bride. Thus, his bachelor days behind him, he set about settling down.