Adrienne Celt - Invitation to a Bonfire

I didn’t say good-bye. There wasn’t any point. I wandered out into the street and found no one poking their head out to see what was wrong. Such a distinctive sound, a gunshot, but I suppose the neighbors all thought what they wanted to think: that a car had backfired, and they ought to get a few more minutes of sleep.

Was this the logical conclusion of hoping Lev’s books would live forever? To launch him into time immemorial, where he would with tenderness caress the lives of so many women and men, whatever their troubles? The man they needed, who would bring to them books, stories. Of a girl with wings, to soar above the clean blue of the world. A girl named Felice whose little claws would grip at twig and twine and whose body would twist and dance in the air—vainglorious in her triumph, weightless in her happiness—the way they dreamed they someday might.

At home I put a few things in my bag, which had been sitting out since I got back from the seashore. I washed my hands, scrubbing off the rime of oil from the pistol so I wouldn’t have to smell it. Then I walked to the train station and sat in the sun and waited for the ten-thirty express, watching with some remorse the types of bouquets men bought at the kiosk for their wives or mistresses. Unimaginative. Hardly half-inspired. I could’ve given them something so much better, if only things were different for us all.

From the Maple Hill Reporter , July 11, 1931

MAPLE HILL, NJ. The residents of Elizabeth Glen, a neighborhood in the center of town, were shocked yesterday morning to discover a murder in their own backyards. Leo Orlov, a teacher at the elite Donne School for Girls and renowned author of such works as the internationally bestselling Felice and the novels Impresario and Sun Sort , was found in his bedroom with a gunshot wound to the chest. No suspects have been identified at this time, but the police have confirmed that the novelist’s wife, Vera Orlov (née Volkov), was absent at the time of the shooting, and that her current whereabouts are unknown.

“It’s a very safe neighborhood,” said local Sadie Kensington, who lives in Elizabeth Glen with her husband, Daryl, and two children, Samuel (6) and Denise (3). “This really makes you wonder though, what do you not know about people?” The Reporter will publish updates on the situation as it unfolds.

Are you excited to know we’ve arrived? Or nearly so, at the moment of collision between present and past. It’s quiet while I wait for Vera to return from the grocery store, where she’s probably flirting with the checkout boy in that obscure way of hers. They like it very much, though she never smiles.

Sitting here, I have the almost constant urge to stand up and take myself back to the greenhouse, if only to reassure myself that it’s all still there. Go about my chores. Check the moisture underneath the summer blooms, perhaps cut a bouquet of zinnias and phlox. Set them in a vase of cool water. I haven’t been gone long, but it already feels like forever. I worry about when I last rotated the banana tree, and whether John will be able to tell when it needs to be moved to a brighter exposure. I would love to kiss my mother good-bye, ask my father what he did and why it was so dangerous. Ask him whether, in the end, it’s really better to be happy or to be good. What he’d choose for me now, after all that’s happened. All that’s still to come.

I think about John, too. Imagine him leaning on the door, picking mud out of his boot with a stick, ready to pull me into a hug and tell me—well, at least to say good-bye. I know I can’t stay, but I’d like to see him, even from a distance. The sunburned top of his head where he won’t admit he’s balding. The round pouch of his belly and the fibrous bubble of his nose. Dear man, he thought he knew me well.

When I got back to the cottage, it was empty. Quite according to plan: we’d agreed that Vera would join me when she saw the notice in the paper, and until then I would wait. A few days alone, no great hardship. The kitchen was stocked with tins of soup and boxes of ready-made, easy-bake, cut-and-dried concoctions. I wouldn’t starve, and I wouldn’t leave. That first day I spent a lot of time opening cabinets and taking inventory. There was only one kind of beans (kidney) but there were twenty cans of them, and in the cupboard above the stove I found a selection of very nice teas. Milk in the refrigerator as well as some fruit, though the apples were yellow and shriveled, the size of a child’s fist.

For a while I walked around the living room, tracing the coiled pattern of the rug with my footsteps. The center moving outward, or maybe the opposite. It was dirty, grime having worn in between the layers and settled there, no matter how much they tried to beat it out. An heirloom kind of thing that someone must’ve made by hand, which would take weeks of work and a sack full of rags, old baby clothes and retired dress shirts and tablecloths. People wrapped bodies in rugs sometimes, I thought, wasn’t that right? Then I tried to shake the thought away. It—the rug—probably just came from a craft fair in some old Shaker town, a throughway full of antiques and collectibles. It was designed to look beloved, but that kind of thing could always be had at the right price, in this country: the life you wanted, or at least the appearance of it. Finally I kicked the rug aside and went to the fireplace to try my hand at opening the flue.

Vera had thoughtfully left me several books for entertainment, but I wasn’t able to read much. Mostly I wrote down everything I knew, everything I remembered, and when I was tired I walked along the seashore. I got used to the way cold water seeped into the soles of my shoes, so they made my feet chilly even after I’d left the beach, just as I got used to having sand in my hair. My bed is small, with starched white sheets, and there’s sand all throughout it. I can’t decide if I brought it in on my body, or if my body was, by lying down, polluted. It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done.

It took three days for the local paper to print the story, or at least it took three for the notice to reach Vera at her hotel in Twisted Branch. Midway through, it occurred to me that I had no assurance that she was in Twisted Branch at all: there are a number of adjacent towns, some closer to Maple Hill, some farther away. She could’ve just left, and I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. All I had was her promise that we would have a new life in Paris, and that was supposed to be enough.

I spent those three days in increasing agony, crumpling the useless newspapers up into kindling after I’d paged through them. Three days of opening a book and then closing it again, washing the same pan every evening and hoping my stomach wouldn’t feel too bad after another meal of beans. Then one afternoon the knob twisted on the front door, and it opened, and there she was. I do think she stayed by the ocean at least, since she’s got a fresh spattering of freckles across her nose, and a pinkness beneath: pink, like the rim of a mouse’s eye. When she arrived she embraced me, and I could’ve sworn she’d grown much larger, her face all high and distant with a light that shone behind. She kissed me on the edge of my lips, and I felt the burn of it for some time afterwards.

She was very solicitous. She drew a hot bath and placed me in it, rubbing peppermint soap all up and down my back and asking me questions about how I left him. Were there smudges from my mouth on a cup? (Lipstick on cigarette.) Did I wipe the gun clean of fingerprints? (Hardly.) Did I touch him at all? (Entirely.) She wanted me to know that I was perfectly safe with her, though when I started to cry, heaving and phlegmatic, she didn’t like it. I grabbed her wrist and she pulled it away, splashing water across the floor.