Let the Dark Flower Blossom Read online

  COPYRIGHT © 2013 Norah Labiner

  COVER & BOOK DESIGN Linda S. Koutsky

  COVER PHOTOGRAPH PinkBadger, iStockphoto

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to: [email protected].

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  Good books are brewing at coffeehousepress.org

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Labiner, Norah, 1967–

  Let the dark flower blossom : a novel / by Norah Labiner.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56689-331-2

  I. Title.

  PS3562.A2328L48 2013

  813'.54—DC23

  2012036525

  FIRST EDITION|FIRST PRINTING

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Lines of poetry are taken from the following: “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” by T. S. Eliot; “Ode to Broken Things,” by Pablo Neruda; “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” and “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,” by Ezra Pound; and “Leda and the Swan,” by W. B. Yeats.

  You be the judges

  Between Me and My vineyard:

  What more could have been done for My vineyard?

  That I failed to do in it?

  Why, when I hoped it would yield grapes,

  Did it yield wild grapes?

  —ISAIAH 5:3

  Contents

  Chapter 1 Susu breaks the first rule of storytelling

  Chapter 2 Sheldon finds no justice in poetry

  Chapter 3 Susu wonders what it would be like to sleep with him

  Chapter 4 Sheldon mythologizes the past

  Chapter 5 Susu decides to go away with him

  Chapter 6 Eloise hides the letter

  Chapter 7 Susu defies augury

  Chapter 8 Eloise argues about infinity

  Chapter 9 Susu sees the burning king

  Chapter 10 Eloise turns toward an undeniable conclusion

  Chapter 11 Susu imagines that she is the heroine of a novel

  Chapter 12 Eloise mistakes cruelty for a species of kindness

  Chapter 13 Susu drinks all the wine in the winedark

  Chapter 14 Eloise admits to objectification

  Chapter 15 Susu draws a chalk outline around the body

  Chapter 16 Sheldon digs in the hard frozen ground

  Chapter 17 Susu breaks the second rule of storytelling

  Chapter 18 Sheldon suffers for art

  Chapter 19 Eloise lets the dark flower blossom

  Chapter 20 Sheldon explicates the egg

  Chapter 21 Susu puts the broken swan back together

  Chapter 22 Sheldon rebuilds the ruined fountain

  Colophon

  Funder Acknowledgment

  CHAPTER 1

  Susu breaks the first rule of storytelling

  HE ONLY SAID HER NAME TO ME ONCE. It was a hot dull morning. We had coffee and oranges on the balcony. He stood at the crumbling stone peeling an orange. He looked down at the street below. He said, “I saw you once years ago.” I came to the edge, the stone, a balustrade, he called it; and stood next to him, holding my cup, a demitasse. The coffee was bitter black boiled through with cardamom and sweetened with honey. “It was snowing,” he said. “I called after you,” he said. He looked at me in the sun, and I pitied him, but didn’t want him to know this. He put a hand to my face, and I knew that he wasn’t really talking to me, that he was talking to her. He said, “I saw you in a coat with a fur collar.” And then he broke the orange into two, and he handed half to me. He said, “I’m sorry.” He said, “I’m sorry about the world. I’m sorry that this is all that is left for you, just bones and rotten broken things.” He looked down at the street. This was the last morning, wasn’t it? of coffee and oranges and green birds. It was morning, and he talked, as he watched the girls on their bicycles, as we stood on the balcony. He waited. He waited. A bird flew low to him. I said, I asked him, “How does the story begin?” He picked up from his plate a heel of bread, buttered. He broke the hard floury crust to bits and scattered it for the birds. He licked the butter from his fingers. He did not answer. He turned. He went from the sun of the balcony back into the room all shadow. There was a box on the table. Each morning I opened the box. Each morning I asked him the same question. And he would not, he would never answer. I should have hated him, but I did not. I collected my things for the seaside: postcards; licorice; a mystery novel. He sat at the table. I was at the door. I looked back. I had a terrible feeling. I felt, I thought that I might never see him again. I was going to leave and then, I did not leave, because I was young and I thought that I would never see him again, because the green birds and bread and oranges prophesied, promised omens, and that the foreign sky was too old, too hot, too ancient for me; I went back to him. I waited. I waited. In a vase on the table there were dark flowers. In the lobby of the hotel there was a statue of a goddess. And everyone said that she was a saint. There was sun from the balcony, but he sat in shadow. He took his manuscript from the table. The pages were tied around and knotted with string. He untied the knot. A sheet of paper fell to the floor. And he said, “The story begins with a rock and ends with a scissor.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Sheldon finds no justice in poetry

  ROMAN STONE IS DEAD. I read about it in the newspaper. His obituary ran in the New York Times with that picture of him from the jacket of his first book: twenty years old, smiling, fair-haired, and careless. He was never one to put on the serious face of the tortured artist for a press photo. He was never the intellectual caught in deep contemplation of the human soul. No, you’d find him grinning as though the photographer captured him just at a dirty joke’s obscene one-two punch. He exemplified that rule so beloved by English professors, myself once included: he wrote from experience. Herein was—or is—the danger. He was a storyteller. His life was his logos. And his death—his murder—was only the second-best story that he never told.

  I live on an island. Nothing goes to waste here. The apples are sweet. The grapes are sour. I have a hatchet and a shovel. Newspapers come to my box at the postal station. I save the old papers for kindling. This morning when I lit the stove, I found myself burning Roman’s picture. I tried to get the page back from the fire, but I was too late.

  What could I do but let it burn?

  I have never found any justice in poetry.

  He died six months ago in Virgil’s Grove, Iowa, while watching a baseball game on television. He was discovered by a delivery girl bringing his dinner: two cheeseburgers, onion rings, and chocolate cake. She said that the door was open; that she heard the cheering crowd.

  He wrote of fate and then fell to it.

  The obit called him a provocateur.

  The police called his death the result of a robbery gone wrong.

  Anaxagoras said: The descent to hell is the same from every place, but it was my sister Eloise who pronounced on the day—or maybe it was night—she met him: Roman Stone was born to be murdered. She wasn’t joking. Eloise, who is the younger twin by a matter of minutes, felt—or feels—an absolute narrative honesty that I myself have never quite been able to evince.

  If there is a god who winds watches; if there is a destiny that shapes our ends; then Roman was lucky. He was lucky right up until the moment that he wasn’t. His father was a Nobel Prize winner; his mother, an actress turned politi
cal activist. He was big and brash and relevant as hell. Even his death was relevant. America’s literary zeitgeist cut down in the heartland? What did it mean? Was it a metaphor? Or a symbol? It was more than an ending; it alluded to godlessness and dark times ahead.

  Roman’s widow, Dibby, wore to his funeral a black dress made by some certain in-demand designer; and his mournful readers wondered, without guile or accusation, only curiosity, about how much such a garment must have cost. Roman’s two sons, in Eton suits with short pants and kneesocks, sat one on either side of their spectacularly pretty nanny. Dibby Stone sat further down the aisle—disconsolate; crying into a black lace handkerchief—propped between a foreign diplomat and a film star, both of them dear acquaintances of her late husband.

  The eulogy began with a question.

  Who was Roman Magnus Stone?

  The question sounds like a quiz show answer. I remember suddenly a winter afternoon years ago. Nothing brings out nostalgia—even for the rotten times—like loss.

  Who was Roman Stone?

  I am Sheldon Schell.

  I was once his sidekick. Back in the days when we were young, when the paparazzi loved nothing more than to catch a close-up candid of Roman—the loudmouth, the lothario—getting into trouble. Remember the time he threw that pompous actor into a swimming pool? Or how he smashed up his Porsche but walked away from the wreckage without a scratch? What about that award ceremony where he fell off the stage? You may not have noticed me in the photographs, but there I am nonetheless, lurking behind Ro or half-dissected—an arm or shoulder only—in the frame. There is one particular shot of us—; it was snapped at a Hollywood premiere. This was 1983. Roman’s first novel had just been adapted into a film. He could do no wrong. He was romancing a starlet. His name was inscribed in the gossip columns. The photo appeared in a glossy magazine known for tracking the comings and goings of the latest glitterati. The girl, Roman, and I stand before an absurdly flowing champagne fountain. I am scowling. Roman has his arm around the girl. She is fawnish and fragile. He appears like a golden good-humored satyr at her side. The caption reads: Harlow Jamison and Roman Stone, with unidentified friend, also a novelist. Soon after this, the girl made a splash by very publicly breaking up with Roman and then checking herself into rehab. I don’t know to what substance exactly she was addicted, but she had a complete breakdown. I heard that she never quite recovered her mind. This is not said as an indictment of the poor girl’s character; she was delicate. Soulful, even. I always liked her. I offer this detail as a testament to how difficult it was for the rest of us to keep up with Roman.

  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 toget
her; 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.