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

might see it, while her cheeks flushed but her gaze remained steady. Her neck flushed and she let her mouth open. The thighs themselves flushing as they parted just a little wider, as her hand reached out and found something to hold.
    But wait.
    Let’s leave them alone for a moment, our young lovers. It’s the decent thing to do, and more than that, I’d like to walk around the room while their attention is otherwise occupied, removing Vera as the focal point in favor of the space at large. You see, if her life is like a painting, then the details are important: sometimes it’s only by studying the background that you understand a picture’s true meaning, its actual subject. (Not the pink cheeks of the child sitting for the portrait, but the skull on the shelf behind, the fly on the rotting fruit in the bowl, that tell you what the painter thought about youth and mortality.)
    I want to see, if only in my mind’s eye, her oak poster bed and the cherrywood tables that line the walls of her chamber. Her hairbrush, bristles chock with black strands because the maid hasn’t yet been in. Even the bedclothes, tossed. I want to smell her buttery sleep as I back out the door, so it becomes mine, just a little bit. Run my fingers along the Japanese vases lining the hallways, and see the automaton set behind glass that could, when wound, spin its cane and whistle a frightening tune. I want to sit deep in their sofas, all down-stuffed. Even if it makes me sneeze. To walk through the lemon and chicken-fat air of their kitchen, see the calf strung up for roasting. Take a bite out of a candle, leave tooth prints in the taper and flick wax onto the rug, knowing it’ll be vigorously beaten away. I want to see the servants scurry behind secret doors, order thegardeners to stand by height and by age and by favorite rose. Hellebore here, there gallica.
    Oh, but they’re finished now. She and he. So young, their love is instantaneous. It’s over in a second, and it lasts forever. He’ll go back to Leningrad, and she’ll be given a lady instructor. An older lady, compared to the girl. Perhaps thirty, thirty-two. Hair of dun. Glasses perched. Only the memory of Vera’s young scholar remaining, and the hope of meeting again.
    14.
    But they won’t. Sorry, Vera.

 
    Lev
    19 June
    Airmail via Paris
    My Vera. My Verenka. You aren’t cross with me, are you? I don’t think I could bear it. After all, before I left you pestered me to tell you about the women from my past, because of those beastly rumors, I suppose. And I gave in only because I wanted to soothe you after that series of fits you threw—your version of a fit. A pout. This has been a long time to go without seeing your face or getting a letter, even if I am en route . A long stretch without at least the tender animals of your handwriting creeping out across the page in front of me. Do you know I used to hold every one of your letters up to my face, so the words could caress my skin? I’m imagining it now. How I’d breathe them in, the perfect soliloquies of your q s and s s, the hot hint of the h , the burning uproar of the ж . And did you know your handwriting is identical in every language? That’s not true for everyone. It takes real strength of character.
    The scent changes, though, as you hop between tongues. I’m not sure how you achieve the effect, but you can trust me. I am fluent in you. Your Russian is full of pepper and thyme, all the old world and the new—there’s a bit of whisky in it, too, an undernote which I appreciate. It’s the way you smell on a hot day. After a walk, picking a piece of hair off your forehead, leaning down to pull a bit of grass from your shoe.Grasshoppers flicking by, pinging off the nearby stones and kicking up dust so it sticks to your skin. Intoxicating, of course. Breathy. Sun-bitter. You might think it would all be gun smoke and snow, but no. It’s