by Lisa Moore
Marissa is waiting for a taxi. She is looking into my eyes now and it’s a funny thing to have forgotten someone for long stretches, years, and then to be brought up, stopped in your tracks like this.
Her eyes, and I can feel the grit that was in the bedsheets in the motel room in Port aux Basques, that snowstorm, my feet dug in, driving myself through her, pine needles, orange pine needles in the cotton sheets. Sheets with brown and amber ferns and fronds, a pattern of forest undergrowth, bushes and rabbits, and washed so thin they were transparent in patches.
And in a motel in Florida, the rumble of a maid’s trolley on the concrete walk outside, coming to a stop and the knock. Checkout time. Opening my eyes to the dark room, hearing the key and watching the slice of burning light spread across the room as the maid opened the door, a feather duster of fluorescent pink waving through the gloom.
I see I forgot Marissa, just as surely as I forget Jillian: forget is the only word I have, though it’s a loose fit. Blotting out the connective tissue, the getting there between the fiercer moments. We imagine we forget what isn’t important, but what if it is the other way around? Am I the only one who loves this way?
It has been maybe five years since we ran into each other last, at an art show, a local artist who is known for hyperrealism, capable of capturing that Dutch thing, so that the paintings seem to emit light from within. Seem full of energy, glowing all on their own.
We’d ended up, both of us, standing side by side in front of a painting of a near-naked model. The woman in the painting was wearing a pair of panties, cheap polyester underwear, but shiny, a floral print, and the mark on her bare skin, of the jeans she must have just removed, the snap and zipper, visible on her naked skin.
We talked at that time about Miley Cyrus, and a lewd dance she had done, or a gesture that had gone viral, and to demonstrate, Marissa had made a V of her fingers and held it to her lips, darting her tongue in and out quickly, imitating cunnilingus. I admitted to Marissa that I knew about the gesture. (I knew because I’d had a fender-bender and my insurance adjuster, a young woman in her early twenties, had told me about it; she thought it was disgusting, but Marissa felt it was a radical action, a reclaiming of female sexual pleasure.) We had both been staring at the painting. The polyester panties had tiny flowers, cheap underwear a woman might buy by the half dozen, slippery and cool to the touch.
At that time, in the art gallery, Marissa’s hair was still very dark. Perhaps it turned silver when Angus died, a stress-induced alteration. Or she just stopped colouring it after his death. Where had Jillian been during this conversation in the gallery? I remember Marissa making the gesture and it had startled and disgusted and aroused me, and I had looked around to see where Jillian was.
I know the kind of women who allow their hair to go silver in their mid-fifties, as a political statement, and Marissa is not one of them. We have a few of those women in the firm, running major accounts or managing mutual funds.
A woman named Gloria, whom you might call a colleague, or counterpart or competitor, in Toronto. Gloria had once lived on a beach in Goa for two years, mostly naked, part of a community of hippies.
She left there when she got sick, at the age of twenty-two, some thirty-seven years ago, that would be, and took the better part of a year to recover. She has never specified what she had to recover from. She longed with everything inside her to return to India, she’s said, but as time wore on and her fevers passed, or whatever the hell was wrong with her, perhaps a mental breakdown, the place began to seem like an illusion.
There had been psychedelic drugs, probably, and lovers. True lovers. Or just one true lover, I have no idea. All I know is what I heard Gloria say in a moment of drunkenness—and there was only one such moment, to my knowledge—about this trip, this loss. She described it as a loss that brought her to her knees.
I have no idea what it was she left there, on that remote beach in Goa, so long ago. But when she had healed she found she was also broke, and, I guess, broken, and she had no way to get back there.
These women, I am talking specifically about the ones I know from work, are always looking for a way to get back to something they’ve abandoned.
That old-fashioned phrase well-preserved comes to mind, but it doesn’t cover the frightening vitality they have.
They’re ruthless about advancement. Gloria fits this bill. Unwilling to serve. But fierce about doing everything for themselves. About the stubborn lid of a bottle of spaghetti sauce or changing a tire or opening a car door: No! I can do it!
They aren’t with men out of kindness anymore. They will not accommodate, though there was plenty of that, years before.
This sort of woman hits sixty and she begins to say what she thinks; tact evaporates; she’s often the life of the party.
I have had occasion to think about this because I’m in competition with such a woman, for a client. With Gloria, in fact. I believe Gloria has been wooing one of my most valued clients. I would like to think that if my client is thinking of moving his investments into Gloria’s care, it is because she is good at her job. That she deserves his patronage.
What I see in that woman, Gloria, is a hormonally led craving for honesty, for finally, finally, admitting in public exactly what she wants. Not wheedling, needy, or shrill. It’s just a case of putting her hand out, as you would to a child, and demanding that something, whatever it is, be handed over: Give me, give me. Or: Give it back.
What is the phrase? Honey instead of vinegar. If they want what you have, don’t bother with the honey. The grey hair is a statement. The statement is a deluge of vinegar.
Gloria wears runners to work and switches into pumps under her desk. At parties, clinging black dresses and artisan jewellery, chunky, a mix of precious stone and metal, and something scrounged, or befouled and delicate, a feather, a scorpion in amber, something iridescent and dead.
We have worked in the same racket for fifteen years. Run into each other. We have never exchanged a flirtation, unless you count this recent competition, a kind of poaching that is tacitly considered not okay, and which has created a charge between us that feels rarefied and toxic.
My wife, Jillian, is blonde. It takes a long time to get her that way, at an expensive place on Duckworth Street. The colour is called butterscotch. She comes back brittle, shiny as candy. She says there’s a slinky gay man down there with fine bone structure, who massages her scalp. He wears mascara and a low-slung black studded belt on his girl hips, and black T-shirts strategically torn and held together with rows of safety pins. His hair is also butterscotch, so they’re like siblings. He puts a hot towel under her neck and proceeds to scald her with the shower nozzle, but she doesn’t say anything. They don’t talk to each other, according to Jillian.
Sometimes, she’s told me, when he massages her scalp, she can come close to falling asleep and a moan will escape. She doesn’t like how lewd she sounds. It fills her with shame. Afterward she tips him, separately, though the usual practice is to just add the tip at the counter after the three- or four-hour procedure is complete.
He is an assistant, according to Jillian, hired to sweep the cut hair, massage the clients, every now and then check the foils, see how the dye is taking.
They are called foils, the things they put in Jillian’s hair, and once I ran in with a message about Tiffany needing to be picked up at daycare, and found Jillian in a basement room with lava lamps and overwhelming perfume, beaded curtains and a Vogue on her lap, and silver flaps of foil standing up all over her head, space-age warrior.
And there was a room off to the side with a bed and a young woman, her naked back exposed, her hair wrapped in a white towel, a table beside with bowls of foaming chemicals and the beautician or whatever they are called closing the door on this slice of sacrificial ritual.
I raised my eyebrows and Jillian crooked her finger for me to bend near and she w
hispered in my ear — so close that her breath tickled all the way to my eardrum and later, when I emerged on the sidewalk almost gasping for fresh air, I had to vigorously wriggle my pinkie in my ear canal — that the woman was having her anus bleached.
Sometimes I’m in the bath and I submerge my head because I can drive myself crazy thinking of that moment, the broad naked shoulders of the girl and the chrome bowls glinting in the strong light beside her.
Marissa’s silver hair has the glow of incandescent light, warmer than the blue cast of the bulbs that have replaced them for environmental reasons. I heard on the radio just yesterday that those bulbs, particularly the forty- and sixty-watt bulbs, when they disappear off the shelves, will not be replaced. They will soon have disappeared for good.
I am of the generation that has lived exactly the right number of years to feel this absence sorely. I have had incandescence since I was born, and nothing else. Now these cold, white, screw-shaped bulbs.
I’m also certain Marissa has not been Botoxed. Her face is natural, though hardly lined.
Decades ago, when we knew each other, she wore her hair up, messy. She kept it up with two black lacquered chopsticks with goldfish painted on them. Or she used a garbage twist-tie. She had the colouring of what my mother used to refer to as Shanty Irish, the blue eyes and curly dark hair, freckled, pale skin, people from around Waterford, where they make the famous crystal.
She was messy then, slender, curls all around her face, and she sometimes blew them out of her eyes with little puffs of air. But now it was all down around her shoulders, swishing on the nylon ski jacket.
You’re not driving? I ask.
I hit a girl last week, Marissa says. I wanted to take her straight to the hospital but she wouldn’t. I could have killed that poor girl. She fell in front of the car. I mean she went down. I had no idea what happened.
Marissa’s voice is speeding up; anxious, breathy. She’s staring forward at the row of shopping carts, snow and ice caught in the wheels, water dripping off the bars. The car accident is playing out in front of her as she talks. She might be telling anyone, a random stranger. She has forgotten me.
It turned out she had hurt her hand but she kept saying she was all right, Marissa says. I made her get in the car. I had a line of traffic behind me. The back of her hand was bruising right before my eyes, swelling up.
But she was trying to console me, Marissa says. The girl held the hand out for me to see but she couldn’t hold it still. Her hand was trembling. But she was very calm. She was saying I wasn’t to blame because the drivers couldn’t see. She kept saying that. Because of the snow banks.
But it was because of Angus, of course. I’ve had the jitters since he died. I’m trying to get used to him being gone. I couldn’t see what was coming.
You shouldn’t be driving, I say. This is an old flare-up, the need to direct her. A habit that rubbed her the wrong way back then, but she seems relieved to hear it now.
I shouldn’t be driving, no. I’m not anymore, in fact. I dropped that young girl off at her friend’s house. I gave her my number. I told her to get an X-ray. Then I drove to a used car lot, straight away, and I said to the man, get rid of it. I said, take this car off my hands. I got a taxi back from there. I just left the car. That part of my life is over. Driving is over.
But I can give you a lift, I say.
There’s a man coming, a taxi.
Get out your cell, I say. Have you got a cell? Call him back. Cancel the taxi. Marissa, I’ll put these groceries in my car. I’ll take you home.
I’ve got this man engaged now, Jim. He’s on his way. I don’t want to bring him out in this for nothing. They said five to ten minutes. They’re very good.
Call them back. Just say you have a ride. I’m already out in it, I say.
The parking lot is a whiteout now. There have been rolling power outages — a new term for us — for three days. Someone with a puffy black coat is running across the lot with her hands over her ears, and behind her the white city goes grey and dark.
The supermarket doors fly open again and the wind is icy. We are experiencing record temperatures. It hasn’t been this cold in a hundred years.
Have you lost power? I ask Marissa. I wonder if her pipes will burst. All over the city, houses are getting colder and colder. Windows covered in opaque frost. The streets full of a serene, brown quiet; windows black. People huddled in their living rooms under blankets, their breath visible in the candlelight. On the radio they are concerned about the elderly. Those who are isolated, or live alone. Marissa and I are in our early sixties. But they don’t mean us. People like us have propane stoves and fireplaces. Or we know someone who does.
They are working on the problem, the radio says. Sending men out. But a transformer blew in Holyrood and there was a great flash in the sky, people said. At first they thought clouds of smoke, but it was steam. No injuries, nobody dead. Thankfully the workers were in another building. The government is saying it will not be replaced, that we can expect these kinds of outages for the next three years, until the new power source at Muskrat Falls is up and running. On the radio, convenience store owners have been interviewed about the run on flashlights, tea candles, BIC lighters, camping stoves. People are being alerted to be ready to go to community centres, with long tables full of Tetra Pak juices and bulk pallets of muffins.
Tree branches are down and they’ve taken lines with them. One man had the good sense to sit in his car and not move until they told him he could. A wire had fallen on his hood. They said if he had left the car he would have completed the circuit and fried like a strip of bacon.
Last night I was alone too, with only the dog for company. Jillian had gone to her sister’s near Stavanger Drive, where the power had returned. I wanted to stay with the house. I had a candle in the empty bathtub, and another I brought with me from room to room. I had an eiderdown draped over my shoulders; going up the stairs, my shadow stretched up high like a spectre. I could see my breath in the candle flame.
Over Marissa’s shoulder, I can now see out onto the supermarket parking lot, and beyond, to Parade Street, where there’s a man with a shopping cart full of recyclable bottles. He’s pushing it down the centre of the road with a line of cars behind him. The snow slanting in the fan of headlights.
But you have to get your groceries, Jim, Marissa says. Don’t be silly. I’m interrupting you, I’m sure you have a full and busy life.
I wonder if this is a dig. I am reminded of the scathing, near-wordless arguments that came and went, without any real substance; they must have been enough, in the end, to make us walk away for good. Real lovers, true lovers, even people who are lovers only briefly, as we were, but lovers with the intensity I am talking about, they never ever say what they mean. What they mean is between them, known, fully articulated, always, before they even know it. There is no need to bring it into words.
Sometimes it can never be said. Sometimes those kinds of lovers, the kind I am thinking of, refuse to say it because there’s the sense it will be dirtied or dissolved if it is put into words. It being anything at all. And meaning is generated at such a speed, between true lovers, there would be no way to catch up with it. Meaning fires continuously, at a consistent rate, at the speed of light, or whatever. Whatever is fastest: faster than that. Like money. If they were able to say what they meant, these lovers, it would already be fossilized by the time they caught up with it, and it would turn to dust and blow away. I am talking about the kind of love and sex that befalls you. Befalls is the word. No choice. Pure charge. Outpouring. You have to be twenty or younger. After twenty there’s no chance of it.
They say we are receiving this weather, the worst I can remember since I was a child, because the Arctic vortex has moved or shifted, or strayed. It’s a frightening development because the question is: Can it go anywhere now? Will we become the Arctic in Newfoundland? Or even
Toronto, where they lost electricity a few weeks ago during an ice storm, to devastating effect? Or the Southern States?
Just a week ago, on a remote beach outside the town of Gokarna, in South India, I watched a young woman, probably German, with bright blonde hair and a man’s oversized white shirt over her black bikini, sitting with her boyfriend under the thatched roof of a snack bar that offered European-style espresso. The young man wore a necklace of turquoise beads that he’d lifted into his mouth, was sucking on, and he had an orange ponytail that hung between his jutting shoulder blades, and a hooked and peeling nose. He was reading a thick soft-cover book, a work of philosophy, I thought, and he had a pencil behind his ear, and his bare foot was touching hers, tapping it, constantly tapping, and she was absorbed too, flicking through photographs in the viewfinder on the back of an expensive camera that sat in her lap, a telephoto lens, fat and long, resting on her leg — that couple appeared to be lovers of the kind I mean. They did not exchange a single word over breakfast, though they were always touching.
I was only going to pick something up, I tell Marissa. I realize I have forgotten what I’ve stopped for. Jillian asked me to stop on the way home. Our power is back on and she is baking Christmas cookies. But I know with clarity what I want. I want to take Marissa home. I want to see what her house is like. I am afraid for her. I am exhausted and maybe still jet-lagged.
I landed in Mumbai after a day in Frankfurt, where I’d booked a hotel room, only to discover it wasn’t available until two o’clock in the afternoon. I wandered the streets of Frankfurt, first taking a train, then a cab to the old part of the city.
On a bridge, crossing from the new to the old, there were hundreds of padlocks attached to the railing. They had been engraved with the names of lovers. The lovers, judging by their names, were from all over the world. I saw the same thing in Paris last year. Sometimes there was a year engraved beneath the names, an anniversary perhaps, or the date of a single fuck.
