Read Online Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt - Free Book Online

anyway, when her family lived on a country estate? As big as our whole apartment building, surrounded by forests, veined with creeks and rivers. The house bright yellow and white, like the palace at Peterhof. Probably the land was farmed, but Vera’s hands would never have touched soil. She would’ve had smart calfskin riding gloves and a white Lipizzaner, its mane in braids. She would’ve learned to make the horse dance from side to side within a ring, but preferred to trot through the countryside and listen to birdsong, watch the secret life beneath the trees. Perhaps once or twice she came upon two peasants fornicating in the bushes, and this would have been the first time she saw the white of a thigh, the curve of a buttock, the hasty motion of stolen passion.
    I doubt, too, that she told anyone about them. Not from pity or understanding, you see—she just wouldn’t have known any peasants well enough to name names.
    It soothes me to remember Vera as she must’ve been then, during the time that stretched out between our meeting as children and the moment when we were reunited as women and rivals; adults of sound body and mind. Thinking about her youth is restful for me in the same way as looking at a beautiful painting, where a few flicks of the brush come together to create a tableau so warm you want to crawl inside. She had so much that I did not. Silk stockings, piano lessons, an enormous harp in the family’s sitting room, set up by a window that stretched ceiling-high. A peaceful image. I imagine her running her fingertips over the strings, not quite playing, but not without a certain sensitivity to their rhythms. At one point, I know, the family brought in a young scholar to guide her reading—a pleasant fellow, if somewhat foppish. Flopping hair. (Lev told me about him once: never met the man himself, but always thought Vera had a crush, from the way she said his name.) Not quite aristocratic, but attuned to the elegance of mathematics, and selected by her father with help from his connections at the university. Her father: an ordinary man, not overbearing, attached to his things. So attached that later, in Paris, he’d die clutching a golden cuckoo clock that had belonged to his grandfather.
    Perhaps you’ll wonder how I can be sure about any of this. And I can’t be, of course: all I have are pieces, stitched together with wobbly thread. I know what little is in the public record, and what she told her husband, up to a point. Lyrical Lev, Lying Lev, Lev the Lothario, or so he liked to think. He used to give me bundles of their letters to riffle through, as a gesture of closeness, knowing that I liked his handwriting, and some of those contained traces of her past. Just jokes, recollections. The rest I have to make up. Not an act of intrusion, in my opinion, but just embellishment and embroidery: we talk about our own lives this way all the time, stretching the truth to fit our feelings. And Vera and I have become so tangled together that in order to tell you my whole story, I have to tell you hers, too. (A nerve-wracking thought: that I am not complete until she is. Well, then, let’s continue.)
    Vera and the scholar would’ve been given a schoolroom, I think, but Vera never did like being contained. They would’ve gone to the library for their lessons instead, to her father’s study, to the sitting room, on a divanbeside the harp. Wherever her parents were not. The servants would bring in a samovar of hot tea, and dishes of honey and lemon and jam. Blue and white china cups. Vera’s lip on the rim of one, puckered out as she sipped. Her eyes peering sideways between dark lashes, and the scholar watching so intently that he spilled all over a rare collection of eighteenth-century anatomical prints which the two had been innocently perusing. Biology hour. His hand running along the inner, upper quadrant of her thigh. Explaining it to her as a surgeon