The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(6)

Indigo was so much like the fairy tales she loved that I suspected she was one. It didn’t matter how many times I touched her, fucked her, held her. She was a phantasm to me, proof of the impossible and thus a talisman against the absence that had haunted my adult life.

I knew how these tales went. I knew that her condition bordered on the sacred, and if I crossed it, I would lose all the magic of her. So I agreed.

“Yes,” I said. “I can live with that.”

This was a lie I kept secret, even from myself.





Chapter Three

The Bridegroom




There are two kinds of love—one born from smiles, and the other from screams. Ours sprang from the latter. I had been enchanted with Indigo from the moment I met her, but I must confess that I did not truly love her until our wedding night dissolved into nightmare.

On a Sunday morning beneath a copse of oak trees and a canopy of pale orchids, Indigo and I were wed. She wore a gown the color of bone, a small crown of ivy and white anemone. She said there would be no one else in our marriage, and thus no need for witnesses. Our scant attendees—the officiant, and the trio of musicians—all wore blindfolds. When the ceremony concluded and the papers were signed, we took Indigo’s plane to a villa nestled in the rolling hills of Tuscany. And it was there, after a feast of wild boar stuffed with apples, glasses of red wine so dark they were nearly black, after I had peeled the lace from Indigo’s body, traced the echoes of its patterns on her skin . . . that the nightmare found me.

For months, I thought I was cured. I believed the nightmare could not reach me from where I slept in Indigo’s bed. I was wrong.

My nightmare is always the same.

I am naked and surrounded by shadows. The dark turns solid. It drapes across my knees, encircles my chest. It feels like velvet and smells of wood polish.

At first, it is a caress. And then it is not. Pressure builds in my chest, weighing me down until the shadows are over my eyes and my nose, prying apart my teeth and pouring down my mouth, my lungs are burning, and the air is full of cloth—

I woke screaming.

When I opened my eyes, I found Indigo propped on her elbow, watching me. Our large room was cast in darkness, and from the cracked window a peacock’s midnight cry broke the silence. The tapered candles Indigo had lit for our wedding night encircled us in frail golden light. In their glow, her unflinching stare reminded me of a cathedral icon’s knowing gaze.

I lay there, panting and mortified. I tried to move, but Indigo splayed her free hand across my chest and pushed me down. She took my shaking hand, brought it to the side of her throat, and held it there, breathing slowly, pulling me from the nightmare until all I could feel was her pulse hitting my fingertips in a delicate percussive dance. Then she sat up, her hair over her breasts and the sheets around her waist, and with her other hand touched where my own pulse strained against my skin.

Indigo did not speak. But our heartbeats shared the same rhythm. It said: Here is the dialect of the living and I am living alongside you. It said: I know this, too, and I can share it with you.

I’ve had many lovers comfort me in the aftermath of my nightmare over the years. They’ve soothed me, coddled me. A few even sang. What Indigo did was closer to prayer—her body bent, her head bowed. She was a different creature by night. Vulnerable, if not forthcoming. That night, I fell asleep to the sound of her heart beating.

For the first moment in years, I knew the lost peace of childhood, when autumns were endless and secrets unheard of, and even time revealed its coveted workings. I remembered how I once knew how to tame and lure whole hours to my side where they might doze like sleeping beasts until I wished for them to pass.

Safety was its own spell, and whatever Indigo had cast on me, I loved her for it.

I have since learned that marriage is nothing more than a spell strengthened by daily ritual. The spell requires libations: mundane musings hoarded and pored over, the repetition of small dismays, the knowledge of how your spouse takes their coffee. Marriage asks for that crust of time you were selfishly saving for yourself. Marriage demands blood, for it says: Here is what is inside me, and I tithe it to you.

A marriage cannot live on honest midnights alone.



After our wedding, Indigo and I moved into her house of glass, on a stretch of uninterrupted coast along the Pacific Northwest. Her home sat on several acres surrounded by red cedar and hemlock trees, sprawling pines and Sitka spruces that looked as if they were creeping toward the ocean more each day. But for all its grand space, there was nowhere to be alone. There were only two rooms that locked. One was our bedroom. The second was a study, which Indigo gifted for my exclusive use. Connecting them was a hallway Indigo called the Gallery of Beasts. It was lined with the cast bronze heads or figures of rabbits, oryxes, sphinxes, wyverns, crocodiles, and stags. I always walked quickly down that hall. It had an odd tang of blood from all the metal.

From the living room, I used to watch Indigo move through the transparent bones of our home. I knew her melting gait, the way she sank into armchairs and immediately—childishly—folded her feet beneath her. I knew how she held her pen, how she stacked dishes, how she lit candles by striking the match against her teeth. Our translucent house was a compromise: I could see all of her, but never know all of her.

Such a compromise initially proved easy. Soon after we married, I left the History Department and became something of a nomadic scholar. I published and held the occasional lecture, but by day my primary work—if one could call such an indulgence work—was as a concept development consultant for new and existing Caste?ada properties.