The Bread We Eat in Dreams (35 page)

The ribbon of flame kissed the first papers of the red room and the sound of it was like taking a breath. The wooden Buonaparte exclaimed with joy upon seeing Branwell—Branwell himself, not his sisters!—and embraced him while Crashey and Bravey came out of their dreaming joy and roared with horror, while Charlotte, Emily, and Anne tried to smother the flames with the rich red curtains and sought about for water, their panic held down by Charlotte’s iron calm. Buonaparte embraced him while a world burned, and the ninepins danced in the ruin, stamping down on the papers like drumbeats.

And while Branwell held his best creation, a musket-ball splintered Buonaparte’s wooden sheep’s skull and the conqueror slumped at his feet. With a whoop and a cry and a thundering gallop the Duke of Wellington burst upon the scene, his wooden chest glowing, his white rhinoceros bleating, his sons spreading black and gorgeous ebony wings, their wooden rifles smoking still. Branwell howled as his Young Man fell dead and wept bitterly. Young Arthur and Charles Wellesley made work of the ninepins who, without their leader, seemed to lose all hope and fall one after the other in a clattering row.

“No, no, no!” cried Victoria, trying to put out the flames with her own body. Crashey and Bravey dragged buckets in from the fountain in the great hall, and coaxed the elephant into firefighting with her long diamond trunk. Damp, charred pages began to outnumber fiery ones, and Wellington prodded Buonaparte’s lifeless body with the toe of his wooden boot.

“Don’t cry, lad,” he said to Branwell. “He’ll be made alive again by suppertime, God save us all. That’s how it’s always gone. Judgment Day will come and go and still I will be fighting the man, round and around on the last piece of earth in a sea of darkness.”

Victoria clutched hundreds of papers to her breast, trying to piece some back together, trying to make them come right again. “So fast! All in a moment, less than a moment! Did you see them coming? Why did you not protect me, Captain Tree?”

Crashey looked stricken, then went ashy, as though he might pass dead away. Bravey buried his head in his hands.

“It’s all broken up now,” Victoria whispered, two heavy tears rolling down her face. “Look—my dear Albert is almost wholly burned out of the tale. My little wars of intrigue and interest have bled out and mixed together,” she grasped at a miserable black heap. “My children! All my little Kings and Queens! Now there is a black space in the midst of them, a black trench where half the world will fall and choke and break my kingdom of forever into burning shards. I wanted it so beautiful, I wanted it to be a kingdom without pain, and now it is on fire.” The child held out another slim clutch of pages to the children. “Even the part I had written for you, look now how it’s spoiled. The books are there, yes, but your lives are scorched to a few slim chapters, brittle and thin. The smoke in this room will wither you away in that country, so that even the water you drink will bring you no health, even your home will not make you whole. And the boy—” Victoria ran her fingers over a black page, her tears hissing as they fell upon it. “It’s written already, I can’t erase it. I only ever get one draft to make it right. You cannot revise a whole world.”

“Don’t worry,” Branwell said to his sisters. “It’s not
our
world. It’s copies of us, somewhere else, somewhere far away that will never touch us. I’m sorry, I should have sounded a warning, I will next time, I swear it. But it’s not us, it’s another place, another Branwell and Charlotte and Emily and Anne, and no harm done to us at all.”

The child Victoria pressed her forehead to the smoking floor and wrapped her arms around her belly, weeping as if her only child had been born dead and still.

Tabitha wrinkled her nose as she bustled the children in from the frosted twilight. Their clothes smelled faintly of smoke, their faces were smudged and exhausted and hollow-looking, which was not right at all for four young folk who had been playing in the sun all day! What they had been about they would not say, nor how they had been gone so long, nor how they had found their way home in the dark. In fact, all four were silent as monks. But they were not four—little Anne was missing. She sent the girls and Branwell to scrub their cheeks and dress for supper and perhaps play with their wooden soldiers a bit if being away from them for an afternoon had soured them so. The fish would not be ready for a three quarters of an hour—an eternity for minds like theirs. Tabitha drew on her woolen shawl and went out into the gloam to find the violet-eyed little wastrel that lagged behind, probably to watch some silver worm chew the earth or skip a rhythm on the cobblestones.

It would be spring soon, green snapped in the air though the yews in the churchyard gave no hint of bud. Tabitha spied a golden head—and no bonnet, the lamb!—among the monuments and went to the half-frozen child, who had gone where love bade her, to the sisters lost before she’d ever known them. Anne stood before three headstones on the slope next the moor, the middle one, Elizabeth’s, grey, and half buried in the heath; the children’s poor mother’s only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot, Maria’s still bare.

Tabitha and Anne lingered around them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass.

“How anyone can ever imagine unquiet slumber for our dear sleepers in that quiet earth I shall never know,” Tabitha said finally, and drew Anne in to the great candlelit house.

A few years ago I fell in love with Red Riding Hood. I know it sounds silly but you can’t help who you love. You see a girl in a cafe with a bowl of soup and a coat drawn up around her face and there’s something savage about her hands, something long and hooked, and while you’re wondering about her it just happens inside you, like cancer.

She didn’t really wear red all the time. It was more like purple or brown. A lurid, bruised color. When I asked her about it, she would wave her hand as if trying to clear smoke from the air.

“Oh, Catherine,” she breathed. Whenever she said my name she spelled it wrong, “it’s just, you know…transcription errors.”

She never liked that I was a writer. She didn’t trust writers—she said they just wanted to swallow her up. I said I didn’t, but it wasn’t true and she knew it. I lay there the first night with her, my head on her breast, her dark, hard nipple near my mouth, and I said I wasn’t like the others, I would keep her secrets, I wouldn’t try to tell her story the way everyone else did, the way I’d done with Snow White and Rapunzel and all those other girls. She was better than the other girls, and I was kinder than the other writers. She brushed my hair over my ear and drew up her battered old hood around her perfect face, as if putting on an old war helmet.

Sleeping with someone famous is strange. It’s like sleeping with a person, and also sleeping with a mirror showing that person as everyone else sees them. We’d go out and the flashbulbs would pop. Not so many these days, but someone always recognized her.

Here are some facts about Red Riding Hood:

She doesn’t speak German.

She is left-handed.

She prefers pan au chocolat in the mornings, with milk and tea.

Sometimes she wakes up blind and screaming, and she thinks she is inside the wolf, still.

I learned Icelandic so that I could calm her when this happens. In the dark, it’s the only language she knows.

She does not eat meat. “You never know who that’s been,” she says.

She liked me because I am Italian. She told me that she had lived in Italy when she was young. She was vague about the dates.

She is vague about a lot of things.

She is afraid of enclosed spaces. You must keep everything clean and bright or she will howl and cry.

Her cries are worse than anyone’s.

She has a mole on her thigh, and another on her earlobe.

Her hair is the same color as her hood.

Once I asked her if she wanted to bring the wolf to bed with us. I don’t mind, I said. It wouldn’t change anything between us. And she looked at me like she might say yes, like it might have been what she was waiting for, someone to pull back the coverlet and allow both her and her creature in, to love them both and not ask her to choose. She looked at me like she was afraid I would take it back, like it wasn’t possible that she could ever end the constant circle she ran, around and around, her and the wolf and the forest, her human mouth and her ferocious teeth. She looked at me like I’d offered her everything.

And then she said no. It doesn’t work that way, she said. It would change everything. You would vanish between the two of us, like a grandmother, like an ax. I love you but there are things older and murkier than love. Things that live not in the heart but the entrails.I don’t want you to see me with the wolf. I don’t want you to see what he does to me. I don’t want you to see what I do to him.

I wouldn’t love you any less, I told her.

But I would love you less, she said. I’m sorry. It’s in my nature. I like writers and Italian girls and red kisses just fine, but the wolf is a singularity, a collapsed, black thing that I can’t get around, I can only fall into.

I was so young. I didn’t know anything. I said: I could be a wolf for you. I could put my teeth on your throat. I could growl. I could eat you whole. I could wait for you in the dark. I could howl against your hair.

She looked at me with an old, sour kind of pity. I flushed, naked in her bed, no wolf but a girl.

Then a huntsman, I whispered. I could be that. I could cut you free.

And she sat up, her hair falling over her breast—and her nipple was dark, too, that lurid, reddish hue that wasn’t really red at all, but instead a color belonging only to the body, to flesh, rosy and blackened and engorged with blood.

You keep doing that, she said, her eyes full of trapped, unspoken anger. You want to keep retelling my story. But it’s
my
story. It’s not yours. You can’t just make things up because you’d like it better if I had been braver, if I had killed the wolf myself instead, or fucked him in the forest, or started a lesbian collective with the hunter and my grandmother and the local midwives, and made sustainable jams and pickles for a modest profit. Because you’d like me better if I were a symbol of menstruation and sexual power. It happened to me, it’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. It’s the only thing that ever happened to me. I own it. I own that wolf and the forest and my basket full of bread and my grandmother with her teeth in a jar. You can’t just make yourself the huntsman or the wolf and turn it into a story about us. It’s a story about me, and how my grandmother died, and how one day I could understand what monsters said and I thought I was going crazy. You want to make it an instruction. A morality play. But you shouldn’t do things like that, if you love someone. It’s theft.

I promised her I wouldn’t, that I just wanted to be closer to her, that I had been silly, insensitive. I would never write about her, I swore. What did I need to write about her for? There were plenty of other things. Things that did not mind.

She put her hand on my mouth. You’re lying, she said. It’s in your nature. I don’t hold it against you. You’re a wolf, too. You saw me in the wood and you didn’t know why you wanted me but you just had to. You crept up, and pretended you were someone nice. Harmless. Who would never take my whole life and lay it out in a book like a beetle specimen. Who would never make me wish I could just work in an office and drink my latte with soy milk and wear green. But you were lying and you’re lying now. You’re already writing a story about me in your head, even while you’re kissing me.

That was true, and it was this story and I woke up in the night, surreptitiously, to write it by the blue, steady light of my laptop and I felt guilty, like I was committing adultery and I suppose I was. In the morning, just as I was finishing it, as if it was finishing the story that did it, she left me and took her hood with her and everything she had ever left in my house, which wasn’t much. A toothbrush. A watch. A coffee cup. She must have gone while I was in the shower, cleaning off the slightly sour effort of staying up all night with a story.

I see her sometimes, on the train, standing, her hip slightly thrust forward, in a cocktail bar with long windows looking out on the rain-washed street. At conferences, in a suit the color of old, furious blood, on the arm of a nice young man with long hair, or an older woman with prim glasses. She likes writers. She can’t help it. When I see her I look for the wolf. I never see him. It’s a strange trick of the eye. I always think I see something moving, just behind her, a shadow, a gleam. But it’s nothing. Only her.

When this story was published in some anthology or other she came to the launch. She was thin. She said to me when I was finished reading: I should have told you before. Wolf doesn’t taste like you think it will. It’s not gamey. It’s soft, like a heart.
She drank some of the watery martinis they served and said I suppose it’s passable as fiction but you know how I feel about postmodernism. She said don’t put yourself in stories, it’s gauche, and tres 1990. She said next time I’d better fuck a realist. She said come home with me.

No, she didn’t. I want her to have said that. I want to write that she said that because it makes better narrative. I want to rewrite everything that happened like a fairy tale. I want her to have heard what I wrote and know that I loved her and forgive me because I can make beautiful things. Shouldn’t that be enough? But what she actually said, in my ear, soft as a stopped breath, was:
Die Wahrheit ist ich laufen immer und der Wald beendet nie. Die Blätter sind rot. Der Himmel ist rot. Der Weg ist rot und ich bin nie allein.

I understood her. But some things I have learned not to say.

I walked home from the reading in my red coat, the one I bought the spring after she left. I’m a sentimentalist, really. It’s a flaw, I admit. The night was cold; falling leaves spun around my hair. I pulled up my hood. My boots crunched on the hard ground as I turned toward the wood that leads to my house. I listened to the wind, and my feet, and I knew someone was following me. Someone tall and thin and hungry. Someone with golden, slitted eyes who can make it to my door before I can. And when I get there, when I get to my eaves and my stoop and I open the door—