Dead Letters(9)

But really, are you planning to not talk to me for the rest of forever? Or just until you wind up in bed with a chain-smoking, shrugging Parisian? Really, Ava, it’s not that big a deal, what happened. I’m over it. He’s over it. Weirdly, I find myself washing and changing your sheets on a regular basis. I barely even wash my own. What do you think that’s about?


Your repentant, embryonic other half,

Z is for Zelda



—

I bundle Nadine into bed, though I don’t lock the door behind her—Zelda wrote that she has started sleepwalking lately, but I can’t bring myself to lock her in. What if there’s another fire? After setting Marlon up in the guest room, I creep outside with a flashlight. Everything still smells of smoke, and I head toward the barn’s remains. It’s still warm; summers have been getting hotter and hotter here, though many of our die-hard Republican neighbors still refuse to comment on why this might be. Zelda speculated about what it would do for the grapes (“Did you know French Champagne growers are buying up real estate in the south of England? They’re predicting that the growing conditions will be more Champagne-esque than Champagne in twenty years! Do you think we’ll be, like, the next Chianti?”). I’m barefoot, so I make my way gingerly across the lawn, avoiding bits of burnt wood and other debris. I scan the flashlight over the area and finally squat down a few yards from where the barn doors would have been. There’s a small yellow flag poked into the burnt wood and ash. Shutting my eyes, I can see the structure perfectly; I imagine sliding open the heavy doors, padding my way across the cement floor where we kept all sorts of menacing farm equipment, and climbing up the steep ladder rungs to the loft.

Marlon built the barn with some rustic fantasy of cramming the loft full of hay, keeping a few goats and sheep downstairs in the quaint mangers he constructed. But he left before we ever acquired either hay or critters to feed with it, and the barn became ad hoc storage for the ancient tractor and backup steel wine drums and random bits of equipment that weren’t used often. Zelda colonized the upstairs as her own stately pleasure den, insisting on loading books and furniture up through the hay chute in her teenage stubbornness. She had a few cast-off futons up there, a big worktable, some chairs, lots of ironic art (mainly featuring baby farm animals) that she had picked up at the Salvation Army in Ithaca. Even in her teens, she’d felt trapped in the house with our mother and had hidden out here whenever they fought. Used to watching her abandon projects, I observed her rehabilitation of the barn with surprise. It seemed terrifically unlike her.

As high school ended, she began to invite people over to what she had started calling the Bacchus Barn (Zelda names everything). My mother would grit her teeth in passive-aggressive fury, staring out the window at the lights in the barn, the sound of music keeping us awake well into the night. Nadine never knew what to do with Zelda. Or this property.

We had a collective story about how Silenus came to be, cobbled together from four different people with radically different narrative designs. The gist of it, the median account of that particular yarn, is this: My mother’s money paid for Silenus, though it was my father’s vision. Marlon was not the sort of man my mother usually went for; she liked very Waspy men, men who had been to law school and golfed on the weekends. Men who knew how to tie a variety of knots and always specified “Tanqueray” when they ordered a martini. Marlon Antipova, perennially relaxed and pathologically easygoing, all sun-weathered and full of vim, was the antithesis of what she always thought she had wanted in a partner. But when Nadine’s mother died after a lengthy, debilitating illness (Parkinson’s), leaving her an orphan, she pulled up stakes and moved to New York. At thirty-two, she had to decide what to do with herself and her money. When Marlon sauntered into that bar in the Village where she sat slurping gin and tonics and avoiding the silent, carpeted apartment she had rented on the Upper West Side, she saw escape, from herself and her past. She launched herself without blinking into a haphazard life with the adventurous Florida-born wanderer.

My father was never a practical person, but he had aspirations: a dangerous combination. He gave an impressive impersonation of a vagabond bohemian, all the while zealously keeping his quiet ambitions just behind that convincing veneer of exceptional recklessness. I’ve spent quite a bit of time imagining that scene, so pivotal in our family story. A time when they wanted each other, when the future hadn’t barreled disastrously into their plans. Zelda and I used to tell the story to each other, handing off the narrative like a cadavre exquis.

—

I would always start: Marlon’s pickup pulled onto the graveled shoulder that would someday be the bottom of our driveway. The lake spread out below him and my mother, and Marlon crunched the truck to a halt as they neared the dusty For Sale sign drummed into the ground. A telephone number was written out in Sharpie ink, with no area code in front of the seven digits. Locals only, the sign was subtly suggesting.

“Is this your grand surprise, then?” Nadine asked him, trying not to sound either disappointed or eager. She sought to remain impassive, to never betray what went on behind those cool blue eyes of hers. To neither lose her temper (as she was prone to do) nor reveal her excitement, her happiness, which was a new experience for her. Having spent the last few years watching her parents’ unsightly decline, she was free now, for the first time since early childhood. Still young(ish), with some money and self-determination, she could do whatever she pleased. And what pleased her most was this sly, smooth man with a ponytail and an easy smile. How strange that he would choose her, with her stiff manners and the tight kernel of anger she carried with her. That he would go rapping, rapping on her apartment door at all hours of the night, and saunter into her bedroom with a bottle of bourbon and the southern drawl that he revealed, seemingly only for her, for moments of intense intimacy beneath her expensive down comforter. She had never allowed anyone so fully into her life, her inner world, and sometimes she would stare at Marlon in disbelief that he wanted her.