by Lisa Moore
Laurie had been in Cuba with Gary when the window was smashed. They had gone to Baracoa, it was just last month, and stayed with a family and every morning they’d had breakfast on the roof overlooking the city and it rained hard three of the seven days. They drank the silkiest hot chocolate from a teapot the woman of the house brought to them on the roof, and when it rained they sat under a square of corrugated green fibreglass and the lightning spread over the darkened dome of the sky.
The trip was a last-ditch effort. That’s what Gary called it later.
There was a chocolate factory, opened by Che Guevara, and hot chocolate was a specialty in the region and there was a hotel with a couple hundred steps up to it and they went up there and sat by the pool and drank beer delivered by a waiter in a bowtie. They’d taken a taxi to the beach when the weather cleared.
They’d had a lot of sex and got badly sunburnt and went to a bar where Laurie was asked to dance the tango by a professional dancer who was hired by the bar to get people up on their feet.
The man was black and tall and very handsome despite a bad complexion and Laurie didn’t realize, at first, that he was being paid to dance with her.
In the bath, she thought of how it felt, his hand on the small of her back and the music and how he had tipped her over his knee and she’d found she could keep up with him and she saw him lift his eyebrow, surprised by how good she was. It had been an incredible thrill, the look on Gary’s face afterward.
How lit up and happy Gary had seemed, with his cigar, waiting for her at the table. He had seemed proud of her. How sexy she was, out of breath and warm and graceful and there had been applause afterward. She’d done an ironic little bow, and swayed her arm through the air toward her dance partner and he’d bowed too. He had plucked his shirt away from his chest a few times with a finger and thumb, as if she’d made him hot, or like his heart was beating out of his chest, and the audience laughed. He’d wiped his brow and blew breath from the O of his lips, hamming it up, and he’d fanned himself and the audience cheered. The man was making the audience laugh, but there was something authentic in the way he was treating her.
She’d caught, out of the corner of her eye, a minor grimace, a strain. As if they were in it together, getting the audience on their side, and it had been a delicate operation. He’d held her fingers tight, squishing them together in his raised fist as they bowed for the final time, and he’d let her go and kissed the fingers on both his hands and flung them out toward her.
Later, when Gary and Laurie were leaving, she’d glanced over the crowd and the man was at the bar and she waited to catch his eye and he saw her and lifted a little shot glass full of a light-struck dark amber drink and nodded as if they’d reached an agreement.
When Laurie and Gary got back to St. John’s they discovered the bathroom window.
This is just great, Gary said. Who’s supposed to pick up the pieces here? Tell me that?
Lila left for Montreal the very next morning, and two weeks later Carl was off to summer camp and Gary told her he wanted to try a separation, which was both out of the blue and coming all along.
The thrum in the cast-iron tub of the brass band playing ABBA, Darling, can’t you hear me, SOS. Splinters of glass still glittering on the baseboard radiator.
Laurie thinks the brown telephone-cable box probably leaks some kind of radiation that causes an obscure nerve-damaging disease. She knows a man who lived in an apartment whose bathroom window was near a telephone pole with a transmitter and half his face became paralyzed. The paralysis was spreading down his neck when he decided to move out.
The sex workers have moved up to Laurie’s block because of a Facebook campaign, last summer, to shame the johns down on Henry Street. The girl who keeps wringing her hands and has the limp most often sits on the concrete steps in front of the brown metal box and Laurie thinks that the girl will end up with a paralyzed face or a paralyzed everything.
A couple of nights ago, she heard the girl say to her cellphone: You know I would do anything for you. But don’t ask me to do it alone. The girl flung out her arm in a gesture that took in the whole street, including Laurie, who was invisible because of the light at that hour, and all the cars and houses and the Kirk and the parking lot and the stubby pathetic memorial, as if the girl would give whoever was on the phone the whole world if she could, and if it meant she didn’t have to be alone.
Laurie had watched her hobble down the street with the cellphone pressed to her ear. The petals had fallen off the peony Laurie’d had in a low glass vase on the side table, left over from a dinner-party centrepiece, the first dinner party she’d had without Gary, and she was trailing her fingers through the petals as she watched the girl and they were wrinkling up and getting sticky and turning black as she touched them.
Don’t ask me to do it alone. The black car showed up again, with the blue racing stripe, driving down Livingstone next to the girl at a crawl and the girl stumbling on, ignoring the driver. What had she stolen?
She should have taken him for everything he had. It wouldn’t have been enough, Laurie thought.
* * *
Laurie wakes up in the middle of the night because of the car horns. Bleating horns, like a wedding. The dog galumphing down the stairs to the living-room window, front paws on the sill, barking. Laurie throws off the bedsheets and pulls on her jeans and picks up the phone and calls Gary’s number on her way down the stairs.
The phone rings and rings in her ear. Four cars are pounding on their horns and tearing around the traffic island, one after the other, at high speed. The sex worker with the bad leg is standing in front of the brown cable box facing Laurie’s window. Her cellphone is emitting a faint green light, and is pressed against her chest. The four vehicles have her trapped there, one of them taking the corner on two wheels and she is hesitating but it seems like she is going to step out between the cars.
She sees Laurie in the window and she is going to run over to her. Make a run for it. That’s what it looks like. The tires squeal and the cars have their hazard lights going and other lights are coming on in the houses all around the neighbourhood. The back wheels of the cars skid and swing out and squeal as they turn the corners and one of them hits a parked car and there are sparks and the horns keep bleating. Just as Gary picks up the phone Laurie bangs on the window with her fist and screams as loud as she can: Stay where you are.
Lovers with the Intensity I’m Talking About
I come in out of the storm with my beard full of ice and my face numb and wet, and there is Marissa in the porch of the supermarket with her groceries. The motion-sensitive doors sliding open with every move she makes, snow blasting through.
The plastic bags in her cart flutter in the wind and the doors shut again, leaving us in a vacuum, still as a snow globe.
Thirty-five years ago: a tent in a burnt, fog-strewn campground, we arrived in the dark and woke to fields of charred and glittery stumps for miles, skeins of mist floating through; the house she rented one summer in the Battery; for a while, my uncle’s house in Torbay, a saltbox on the cliff edge, now a weathered, silvern pile of wood and replaced by a single-level, sprawling, brick-and-glass construction; on a trip to Florida, and in the plane on the way down there (ridiculous, snorting laughter, the roar of the toilet when one of us hit the flush by accident, making our eardrums pop) — that was just an attempt, and although penetration more or less happened, we couldn’t really get it on; in ditches on the roadside when we hitchhiked; a campus dorm with orange-and-brown curtains and a scratchy synthetic bedspread with a bucolic fox hunt galloping over her hip; a solid year of soul-sucking, brain-pulverizing fucking wherever we were, in whatever location, that left me humbled and scrawny. I am saying I was not ever the same after that year with Marissa.
It was the kind of peripatetic, inside/outside fucking in which twenty-year-olds partake. We were both twenty. Maybe she was nineteen, turni
ng twenty. Endless, maladroit, unprotected, slippery, backwards, forwards, inside-out, charged, agile, sentimental, raw, galvanizing, gilded, mean, shiny-muscle-squirming, almost-still, innocent, bedframe-cracking, momentous fucking.
We could look each other in the eye. We held each other’s eyes through orgasms. Try it. The eyelids get so heavy it is a feat of great strength to keep them open; but boy, what you find out about the other person if you do. What you find out about yourself.
Such unfiltered being.
Do I remember the details? Is it the details I remember in the supermarket porch with the automatic doors shutting around us? What her body was like, what she did, her mouth, what I felt? I remember a brass buckle, the taste of it, I remember it clicking against my teeth, and the braided rawhide of a belt, salty with sweat and dirty, she wore around the waist of a particular pair of her jeans. The rivets in the pockets of those jeans were copper-coloured, I can see them, rather than brass.
But that is all I remember, because I was in it.
I hardly remember how it ended, our relationship. Except there was no reason. She lost interest. It was quick and definitive.
Or I lost interest.
I come into the supermarket, out of the snow bomb, looking for vanilla.
Her grip on the shopping cart is tight. I say her name. I take off my hat and there is a halo cupped in the brim and I slap it against my leg and the snow falls to the tiles.
Jim, she says. She sounds stricken — as if she has conjured me, but I’ve arrived too late. My name a sort of squawk, the rough sound of someone who hasn’t spoken for hours, or years. A monk on a mountain peak. I remember she brought me a hyacinth for my birthday once in Ottawa when we lived there, my wife and me, and she was travelling through, and when she left my wife threw the hyacinth away. I can’t stand the smell, my wife said. It reeks.
And it was true, for a whole week after they’d taken the garbage, I thought I could still smell it.
But Marissa speaks very quickly once she gets started, with a catch of breath between each phrase, the sentences dropping and rising like a Ferris wheel.
Angus fell, she says. I heard it, she says, his head hitting the stairs on the way down. Bump, bump, bump. Like something out of a cartoon. Hard cracks. When I got there he was lying in a heap at the bottom. I should have installed a gate, I should have. One of those gates for children, we even had one in the basement.
Her voice. Part of that relationship when we were twenty was the phone. Not cellphones, of course. We were moored to the wall by a cord. Long silences. We talked about what it would mean to rent a living room in a house with five people, if you only had a curtain for a door. We drank a lot and we talked about walking home at dawn after a night downtown. We talked about people who seemed in love and other people who seemed incapable of it. Her voice.
Angus was very fit, physically, even at the end of it, she says. He could have gone on forever. Robust, but he started to forget things, get confused. Just in the last year or so.
What did I know of Angus? We’d been to the same parties, on and off, for the last thirty years, though not for a while. He’d often been stationed at the barbeque, his head in the rising smoke, batting at it with the spatula. Joke apron. He was a talking head during provincial elections. They’d met at McGill, where she studied art history and he did Canadian history. He was handsome, even in his sixties. Cable-knit sweaters, worn jeans. I’d see him zipping around the lake, black spandex with stripes of lime neon, matching running shoes. Flashing in the dusk.
Marissa is saying: If I went as far as the corner store I had to write a note for him to hold in his hand. Just to remind him where I was. The layout of the house became confusing for him, and he’d started to wander in the middle of the night. I lay awake listening, for the last eight months before he fell, just listening, but it was so exhausting. On the night it finally happened, I’d drifted off.
I know, I say. Your daughter told me the story.
I didn’t see you at the funeral home, she says.
I was there, I say. We just missed each other.
Marissa has taken hold of my jacket sleeve. She is unsteady and her hair is down over her shoulders. Her hair the kind of grey that very dark hair turns, coarse, and more silver than white.
My jacket sleeve twists up in her fist. And then she sees what she is doing, loosens her grip, and smooths the Gore-Tex out and just holds the fabric between her fingers and thumb. Her fingernails have been painted with glitter nail polish, micro-flecks of sparkle. The same stuff my eighteen-year-old daughter wears. Her hands are red and shiny and the skin cracked, from throwing pots on the pottery wheel. The clay dries out her skin. Even at twenty her hands were rough and bleeding and she was constantly applying moisturizer, rubbing them together vigorously. Sometimes I can remember the smell of the hand lotion, a cupcake, fresh-cotton smell. But the nail polish is absurd, almost sinister.
The doors open and a woman passes us, dragging a crying child in a red snowsuit by the hand. She has a car seat over the other arm, the infant muffled in a fleece blanket with a print of Dora the Explorer. I know Dora because my granddaughter has Dora books that my wife reads to her.
Tiffany is two, wispy, pale blonde curls. She looks like her father, who broke up with my daughter before the baby was born. Tiffany is a foreign being, splashing porridge, the stained-glass parrot that hangs in our kitchen window streaking her cheeks with a splotch of red then purple light, as she drums porridge out of the plastic bowl with the back of her spoon, causing my wife to clasp her hands and rock back and forth on her chair with laughter.
These are the moments in which my wife sheds her wifeliness. The wifeliness of wifedom. Being married turns her into inert matter, so I can’t see her or hear her. So she is awkward furniture, to be sidestepped. The wife. Meet the wife.
These are the characteristics at the core of my wife’s wifedom: her fastidiousness when it comes to hygiene in the kitchen and bathroom (every surface scrubbed each day with Mr. Clean, a scent that lingers, an odour that is perfectly paired with the luminous, poison colour of the product, a murky roiling psychedelic puce). The sinus-cutting smell goes faint, once Jillian starts cooking or baking, but it’s ever-present.
She does almost no housework in the other rooms. Dog hair covers all the other surfaces, in the living room and bedrooms, dust thick on the bookshelves, clots of it under the bed, sometimes furring an old sock, shiny on the sole from sweat, one of mine, though we share, buying econo-packs of black socks from Walmart, identical, in case one of a pair goes missing. Of course my foot is bigger and stretches them out of shape and when Jillian puts them on they aren’t snug on her feet, they sag, cause blisters.
The slow, sometimes pretentious, elastic poses of her early-morning yoga also mark her wifeliness, the rolled, pale-pink corrugated mat and carrying sleeve she has, with a strap to wear over her shoulder as she trudges up the hill in the dark, yes, before sunrise, to meet the other such pilgrims in the community; she uses the word community (she’s part of a lot of communities, belongs, is central to the workings of, coordinates, and invigorates, is adored by) and she’s resilient, dedicated, brings a calculating exactitude to her job. She is the associate director of a government-funded housing project for battered women, which includes clinics for birth control, a needle exchange, a supervised injection centre, and counselling.
I recently saw a clip of Jillian speaking, an in-house video made by the clients, a training opportunity, speaking about consensus-building and empowerment, and something termed “the self-help piece.”
There is her joyful dancing in a local Irish dance class, one pointed toe touching the other knee, bright red knee socks (this is a sixty-year-old woman we are talking about), plaid skirt, arms overhead, fingertips touching; the biographies she reads, Nixon, the Kennedys, Marie Antoinette, and Ghandi, and her lifelong obsession with Anne and Mary Boleyn, all t
he low-grade movies on Netflix dedicated to their demise, a kind of historical soft porn, the blood-strewn bedsheet after politically charged miscarriages, Henry gnawing on a turkey leg, enraged by the lack of an heir, all the velvet and cold stone lit by torches, the phallic, straw-strewn tower where the wives await their fate, the American accents of the actresses; how these biopics move my wife so easily to sudden tears: Marie Antoinette, that poor young girl, leaving her family when she was just a child to marry an imbecile. An imbecile! Then they cut off her head. Everybody my wife reads about meets a gruesome and fated demise.
Those are the characteristics that make up my wife, those actions and routines and thoughts, with which I have become bored, a boredom that has made me completely blind and deaf to who she is, for long periods of time, months perhaps, over the decades of our marriage.
She is the repository of all those ordinary moments, minor failures, and swings in mood. I can become deaf and blind to it all, until, until, until, I come upon her like this, in the kitchen.
Jillian, when she laughs at our granddaughter like that, the baby my daughter had when she was only sixteen, drawing up the kitchen chair in front of the child’s high chair as though to watch a movie, her legs crossed, yogi-style, how firm her body still is, hands clasped as if she might explode from the glee.
Should she glance up at me then, to see if I’m experiencing it too, to share it with me — in those unexpected moments, it’s like the Leonard Cohen song: “When she came back she was nobody’s wife.”
But I am not thinking of Jillian at the moment.
The howl of wind rushes at Marissa and me there in the supermarket porch. Inside, just behind Marissa, there is a display of flowers and potted plants, poinsettias, roses in rustling cellophane, a crush of harshly dyed petals, blue, crimson, and the more delicate colours: shell, yellow, pink, the cellophane and bright foil around the pots flashing in the light.
