Let the Dark Flower Blossom (2 page)

I am S. Z. Schell.

I am also a novelist.

This is not a novel. It is a memoir; it is a memoir by way of being a compendium of memories. It is a true story, even if the truth that I supply is based on nothing more tangible or less axiomatic than my capacity for remembrance itself.

I am a hermit, sure—a misanthrope, maybe. I won't attempt to provide some simulacrum of the past. I won't go about arranging memories into an orderly line of time—simply for the sake of readers. Readers; oh! was Ro ever mad for them. Pleasing an audience was only his second-favorite perversion. No one could toss the coin, knot the noose, or beat the clock as he could. When he had a girl tied to the chair, you always turned the page a little more quickly. Poor rotten Ro—the book club heartthrob. He was admired and annotated. He was born to be explicated. Who could deny him this rite of final exegesis?

I was born in Omena, Michigan, in 1960. I was named after my father. My sister was named for my mother. Twins ran in our family; and it was said that of the two children, one would be good and the other bad. A twisting dirt road led to us. Our house bordered a
salt creek. We crossed the creek to get to the woods beyond. We had a garden with an apple tree, with plums, and roses, and white flowers climbing a wooden fence. The fence was meant to keep the deer out, but it did not. They were drawn to the salt. The flowers must have tasted of it. The white flowers opened at night. The apples were sweet for only a short time before the snow fell.

My father saw the world in terms of right and wrong, and this caused him unbearable pain. He was prone to headaches. He had fits of despair. He slept by day; was wary of sunlight. My mother gave him medicine. Sometimes he wept. And his face would go ghostly white. At night he descended the staircase. He looked then as Moses must have when he came down from the mountain. We whispered, so as not to disturb the substance of his suffering. We were in awe of him, of his agonies. He built wooden toys: little ships, mazes, tops, dollhouses, and boxes. By trade, he was a casket-maker; by philosophical bent, a phenomenologist; by way of Medieval humor, melancholic. My sister and I called his dark moods: the crazies.

I spent hours in escape at the library. I read books filled with strange acts: bravery, sacrifice, love, unspeakable emotions. I fought bulls and fished with Hemingway. I walked the Liffey's banks with Joyce. Flaubert unbuttoned Emma's blouse. Fitzgerald took me for riotous excursions in his Stutz Bearcat. I hopped trains with Kerouac and shared a prison cell with Koestler. I went underground. I lighted out for the territories. I lost myself in Faulkner's wisteria-scented twilight. I lost track of time idling along Swann's Way. I learned. I dreamed. I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to write novels. It was with great adolescent and egomaniacal pleasure that I wandered the fiction stacks alphabet-wise—moving slowly, running my fingers along the spines—coming to a halt—finding the place where one day my own book would sit. I knew words. I had dreams. What did I lack? I lacked only experience.

I longed for experience. And then I went to college.

And I met Roman Stone.

Sheldon, I was named. Shelly, I was called. Or Shel.

I preferred to see my name in initials.

Eloise and I won scholarships to Illyria College. We traveled from Michigan to Iowa on a Greyhound bus. We took turns at the window seat. She read
The White Goddess
. I scribbled colossal thoughts in my notebook. I was anxious to begin my life. I had a portable typewriter; a box packed full of paperback editions of modernist classics; and a dossier file of letters of reference from former English teachers. I was, they agreed: a real writer.

Roman came from the East. He had been kicked out of any number of prep schools. His father was an economist, an expert in monetary theory. He played golf with the president and racquetball with Kissinger. He collected pop art, vintage pornography, young wives, and murder weapons from famous crimes. He was a nut, sure, but even he had limits to luxury; he was unhappy with his son's antics. He wanted Roman to take college seriously. Milton Stone exiled his only son to Illyria in hopes that Ro would get into less trouble out in Iowa than he had in Maine, in Vermont, in Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. What did Ro's mother think about all this? She couldn't be concerned with something as effete as her son's academic mishaps. She was a knockout Swedish girl who had appeared in one or two Bergman films in the late fifties. His parents met at a Nobel ceremony; their marriage—a brief ill-fit union of buttondown capitalism and sans-brassiere socialism that produced one singularly amoral child—didn't last long. Astrid, his mother, left Roman with his father in New York, while she went off and worked in refugee camps in various war- and disease-ravaged places across
the globe. When Roman was sixteen his father married again; this time to a nineteen-year-old piano prodigy. If I inherited from my father his mercurial moods, Roman got from Milton Stone the hapless ability to accumulate cash and appreciate spectacular girls.
Appreciate
is too politic a word. To hear Roman tell: he really fell for his stepmother. He said that he seduced the poor girl, while his father in the next room was on the telephone explaining risk aversion to the president. All this: the family yarns, the tangle of fame and sex and money and genius, made up the substance of
Babylon Must Fall
, Roman's blockbuster first novel.

We were an unlikely pair, Stone & Schell, like an old vaudeville team, the suave straight man and the goofy fall guy. It was the luck of the draw that brought us together; we were assigned as roommates at Illyria in September 1978. He had spent that summer slumming around London. I had been stocking shelves at the Ben Franklin. We got on as only opposites do. I was serious, and he was a showman. I was anxious, and he was an exhibitionist. He was a Yankees fan; his father had season tickets. I followed the travails of the Tigers on a transistor radio. If you want to be high-minded about it: he was Dionysian, and I was Apollonian. We were eighteen. I was a slow learner; he was a quick study. I was dark. He was blonde and blue-eyed; when he was drunk or otherwise inspired his high forehead glowed pink, damp, and radiant. He carried his weight well; he was broad and easy and affable. I was too tall and tended to stoop, hunch, and mumble. I had in me more of my father's crazies than I then dared to admit.

I never minded that Roman took center stage—or center field—and he, for his part, loved an audience. He was elegiac on the topic of baseball; in the truest degenerate crypto-Byronic sense, he was romantic. And this drove girls mad for him. He dated Eloise. He broke her heart, though she readily and repeatedly forgave him.
Girls always forgave him. His cruelty seemed, at least to them, unintentional.

He wrote the book in one draft on my typewriter. I should have taken this as a symbolic or territorial affront, as bad as, or worse than his mistreatment of my twin. But I was silent.
Babylon Must Fall
was published in our senior year of college. And it was a hit. The world was ripe and ready for Roman. He arrived on the scene at the age of twenty, just when readers needed him most. They were tired of important books: of morality tales, politics, the past, the 1970s; war and peace and psychedelia; of hullabaloo, hippies, and beatniks; historical epics; manifestos and feminism; radical chic and issue art; of intellectual games, puzzlers, and poetic one-upmanship. They wanted flat-out fun. They wanted stories about beautiful young people with money doing wicked things. This, Roman could and did provide. He wrote the perfect contemporary novel. It was sweet and sharp and smart and salty and melt-in-your-mouth at the shopping mall sordid.

The book was destined for Hollywood.

And we followed not far behind.

After graduation Roman went out to California. And I, with no plans of my own, and swept up in the maelstrom of his literary success, tagged along. In L.A. Roman fit right in. He was fair-haired and tan. He bought a Porsche convertible. He wore linen suits and sneakers. He turned up his collar and never turned down an invitation. I was adrift. I was aimless. I was no good at sunshine. I was—everyone in Roman's hip new entourage agreed—a real buzzkill. We went to discos, to parties, to private after-hours clubs where uninhibited rich kids shed the last of their inhibitions. I couldn't get troubled thoughts out of my head: my father's moral questions; Moses coming down the mountain; the image of Lot's wife—casting one last longing glance over her shoulder—harrowed me. Sure,
I swam in the ocean. I gazed at palm trees. I ate oranges. Sodom was sensational. Gomorrah was great. Roman was in his element. But I was lousy at the lewd life. So what did I do? I retreated from California in despair. My quest for experience was a gold-rush bust. I went back to the Midwest.

Roman left soon after. He headed for New York, where he got caught up in the cocaine, irony, and high-fashion crowd. He wore black and championed l'art brut. I buried myself in graduate school in Wisconsin. Ro sent me postcards. In Las Vegas gambling fascinated him. In Lake Tahoe he learned to ski moguls; he broke his leg and discovered the joys of Demerol. Paris was a blur. Rome was a riot. I took a teaching job at Lindbergh College in Minnesota. I married a girl named Pru. She was an art department beauty, a painter of abstract self-portraits. In brief: we were young. We were happy and unhappy by turns. I complained about my students. Pru colored her hair—pink, blue, violet. I never liked teaching, never had the knack for it. In New Orleans Roman got fat on deep-fried beignets and teacup bourbon. He leaned left—or right—depending on who was buying the drinks—in Miami with the expat intelligentsia. From Seattle, Ro wrote that kids were wearing torn flannel, shooting up heroin, and playing dark music down in basements. I couldn't have cared less. I stopped opening his letters. I barely glanced at the pictures—the Space Needle, the Eiffel Tower—on his postcards. I was getting on with my life.

I lost track of Roman over the years. At least, I tried to lose track of him. Just when I thought that he was gone, he would resurface with a new skill, a new interest, a new book. He was a great success at absolutely everything in general and nothing in particular. He hobnobbed. He gobbled. He got around. He dined at the White House. He met Princess Di; she was rumored to be a big fan. Roman became a celebrity. He was a natural. People liked him.
They bought his books; went to his lectures; laughed at his jokes; liked to know what he was wearing; where he ate and drank; what drugs he was doing or from which he was being rehabilitated. They followed his romances, indiscretions, his fetishes and bad breakups. And when he gave up his enfant terrible antics—married an honest-to-god Southern belle and finally, it seemed, traded his cosmopolitan perversions for suburban bliss—his readers breathed a collective sigh of relief. His readers wanted the best for him. For some strange reason, it seemed to be in America's best interest to see Roman Stone happy.

I never wanted to tell this story.

I wouldn't have considered it, but—

This morning Beatrice picked up my mail for me. I remember. I remember this. Her face in the cold morning. As though she had run all the way through the woods. I was lighting a fire in the stove when she came in through the kitchen door. Beatrice held a letter out to me—and for a moment I could not take it from her. I had a terrible feeling. I felt as though someone had begun to dig my grave. When I looked back at the stove, I saw the newsprint photograph of Roman burning.

I took the letter from her hand.

I opened the envelope.

It held a thin sheet of paper.

I unfolded it. And read it while standing before the fire.