by Lisa Moore
In Frankfurt the grass and trees were prematurely green and it was warm enough to sit at an outdoor café. Moss grew on the stone walls next to the khaki-grey river and when I got close to the edge to look down the set of steps that led to the water I saw something that was a bit of a shock: a white swan. On a sign near the steps it said that something (I had no idea how the rest of it translated) was verboten. Forbidden. Perhaps it was swimming in the polluted water that was forbidden, or another kind of defilement.
That afternoon, when I finally gained entry to the hotel room after the transatlantic flight, I dreamed I was at the Family Barber, an establishment that existed for fifty years in St. John’s and shut down last year, selling its chairs and barber pole. The pole was bought by a young man with dreadlocks who plays in a Newfoundland Rasta band.
In the dream I pissed in the barber’s chair while getting my hair trimmed. I had lost control of my bladder, my sphincter, all my faculties. I began to foam at the mouth. The barber looked away.
Then I was in Mumbai. And during the taxi ride, just before we pulled up to the hotel gate, I saw a rat on the dirty sidewalk and watched it scurry down a hole in the ground, no bigger than a hole I might make with my thumb and index finger, the international gesture to say that everything is okay.
Someone pressed necklaces of orange-and-yellow marigolds against the taxicab window. A woman with teeth like tree stumps in a raw-boned face. Then there were days of driving in the backs of cabs, traffic horns and near-accidents, the slamming of brakes, the hard thrust against the seatbelt in my gut. Cows, and when the jet lag struck, I saw the fluttering orange sun through my eyelids, sliced to ribbons by the waving palm trees overhead. I saw everything, flying past or stuck, mopeds with women in saris and a yellow earring, touching, or almost touching, the window of my backseat until the taxi lurched forward.
My client, the client I mentioned earlier, the client Gloria has been seen having lunch with in Toronto at an oyster bar, tipping those globs of salty flesh down their throats, one of the wealthiest men in Atlantic Canada, whose company, should I mention the name, would be very familiar, a household name, a company with interests in many industries, of course, but primarily oil, and for whom a concert hall was named just a few days ago, and to whom I have become, over the years, more than a trusted business acquaintance, my client had asked me to fly to India to meet with stakeholders and to inspect the groundwork for a massive call centre investment initiative. After which I took a flight to Goa, a vacation. The beaches are spectacular, there’s great surfing, and I wanted to see where Gloria had been, see if there was any remnant of the community she had been a part of, the epicentre of seismic spiritual quakes.
On the side of the road at dusk, small fires, burning bushes, or whatever they had to burn. And once, when I woke, another cab ride, stalls rubbing against the side of the cab with melamine balloons strung on a stick, a hundred blue-and-silver inflated sharks nudging against each other.
When you travel as much as I do, for short stays, business conventions, meetings with clients, one curve in the road in India will bring to mind a similar curve, taken years before — but where? Argentina? A brief memory, a café with a curtain of clear green plastic beads, and inside a young girl with a cat on her shoulder. An accident in the middle of the night, flames. The shattering glass of a windshield, a truck spilling sugar on the asphalt. Wailing. Or a taxi driver wagging a finger — there are tigers in this forest. Would you walk in that forest? I had asked. I am not afraid, the Indian taxi driver had said. Is it jungle? I asked. Jungle, jungle, jungle, he said.
I’ll see if I can catch the taxi before he heads out, Marissa says. Maybe I’ll cancel him. She repeats herself, I’ll cancel him, I’ll cancel him. Before he starts. Maybe someone else will engage him. I don’t want to be responsible for another accident. The roads are such a mess. I’m on your way. Am I still on your way, Jim? Are you in the same place?
I’ve moved a few times, I say. Several times. Marissa is digging in her purse for the phone now.
You’re still at the bank? she asks. Jim, I haven’t seen you in so long. She is shaking her head, as though the pesky details of managing her life have gotten away from her, and I am just one of them.
I manage portfolios, I say. Not at the bank anymore. I’m with a different operation. You wouldn’t have heard of it. I have a select number of clients. A handful. Eccentric old geezers, but they trust me.
I can’t keep a certain tone out of my voice. Even I can hear it. I am proud. There are bursts of adrenaline in my job. In getting it right, scoring big. If Gloria and I have shared anything at all, over the years, it is the thrill of seeing the inchoate, errant logic that runs through the flow of capital. The trick is to be limber in the face of the unexpected. You have to believe the market is an organism, subject to morphing viruses or infections that can be bled or stemmed or cauterized. If I were to be honest, I’d admit I think I am just a touch better at it than Gloria. That is the truth of it.
This afternoon I received word that I’ve secured a sizeable profit for the client of mine I was mentioning. With oil now at fifty dollars a barrel, shorting oil sands names has turned out to be a pretty good move. My client is wintering in Arizona. He practises yoga, has a meditation room strung with thousands of crystals. I’ve been in there. Rainbows shimmering on every surface. Incense. Silk throw cushions. The colour of the sunsets there is very orange. Dun-coloured rabbits. Snakes. That old man believes that generating wealth is a spiritual practice. He speaks of it as an art form. He talks about the paths it takes, how opportunity can touch down and lift. He sees transcendence in it. Money as the dust traces of the imagination at work, the huff and puff of invention. Like love, it can’t be kept up with. Never mind keeping up.
We had been drinking something crisp and chilled, staring over the infinity pool at the edge of his desert garden, when he requested I make the trip to India. To have a look around, he’d said, on his behalf. He spoke as though I were embarking on a quest journey. He said, Someone whose judgement is solid.
There would be a bonus. A show of appreciation for the oil sands tip. I was good at my job. I was better than Gloria.
You always liked things, Marissa says.
You liked things too, I say. You just liked different kinds of things.
Was that it? she asks. She’s turned her attention to me, finally. She can still make me draw myself up. If she bestows her full attention it is destabilizing.
But then it’s over: just as quickly, she lets go my sleeve. I have failed her, I am not what she wants, or she has been run down, like a battery, by the intensity of her experience of me.
Or worse, what she has seen disappoints her. She was always capable of instant, fierce intensity: the will to get inside. When it burned off whomever she had studied was left depleted. You felt your blood sugar had dropped dangerously, or you’d given blood, or that you were living a life less exciting than what was possible. You felt as if you had settled, too early, for all the wrong things.
I’d tracked down the strip of beach Gloria had mentioned. I arrived at dusk.
There was a giant market where all the sunburnt nakedness and free love and spiritual hunger and psychedelic dreaming had been. The Indian government had tossed out most of the leeching hippies in the late eighties and the Russian mafia had made life too difficult for the rest of them to stay.
The few who had hung on seemed to be fashion designers. I wandered through the stalls hung with bare light bulbs, the scent of curry, a river of tourists, brocades with slivers of mirror embroidered into the cloth, winking light, Bob Marley playing on one set of speakers, classical sitar on another, and stall after stall of haute couture, going on for acres.
One stall was selling shoes and boots, stitched by hand, each pair original. The proprietor stood with her back to me, a tall, shapely woman with long golden hair that hung all the way to the small of her ba
ck. She was wearing a pair of the boots that were on display, sewn in the softest leather, with an oddity in the design, a separate, pointed compartment for the big toe. The boots looked like they were designed for cloven hooves. When the woman turned around I saw that her face was dark and severely wrinkled. She might have been eighty. From behind she had looked like a girl of eighteen.
I said to this girl, Marissa is saying. The very best thing is an X-ray. I told her that’s the only way you can know about a bone.
She has the cellphone in her hand now, to cancel the taxi.
I begged the girl, she was a petite, pretty little thing, here for university, family on the west coast, to let me take her to the hospital, but she wanted to be dropped off at a friend’s house. I was afraid of shock. She wasn’t making decisions properly. A shock can do that. You don’t think straight. Or you don’t think at all. Everything is heightened. Skewed. An ice cream is the most absurd thing. I had one the other day. A drive-through. All I could think was the poor people in the house on the other side of the fence listening to that machine, Can I take your order? all day long, the static, the noise. Can I take your order? Can I take your order? Eating an ice cream cone with the car idling in a parking lot in a snowstorm, half the city without power. An hour before I hit that girl with my car. Jim, what do you think of all this snow?
I’ve been meaning to get over, Marissa, I say. To drop by. Somebody told me you’d been in hospital.
I have irritable bowel, she says. Isn’t that a funny term? That’s something you don’t want to hear about. You were always delicate when it came to the body. Sensitive. I remember that.
What was it? An afternoon, a curtain, rubberized on one side and an orange-and-brown synthetic weave on the other. I’d made some comment about the smell of sex. It was a cold room. The radiator was broken. The old-fashioned cast-iron radiators. We’d been going to cross on the ferry but it had been caught in ice and we’d got the last room at the motel. There’d been a hole punched, or likely kicked, in the Gyproc, inside the empty closet with the wire hangers. All the cars were buried in the lot. Marissa had loved it.
I’d gone out in the storm to get Kentucky Fried Chicken and the smell of that was in the room too.
I’d said it, about the funky smell, I said it was too close, and I felt that was true, too close.
I had come just as the radiator kicked in and the pipes banged loud, as if someone were banging a drum, some kind of primal booming instrument, base and ritualistic and lugubrious. There must have been something dead in the walls, a mouse, and as the room began to heat up, there was that smell too, a morphing stink, sweet, sweaty, greasy, and rotting. I had said it to bring her into the room. I’d felt she wasn’t really in the room with me. I felt alone.
Or it was the hours of waiting. I’d felt that there was no such thing as connection. There were only objects, there were stars, there was the ugly chair with the stained beige fabric on the seat, there was the scratchy nylon bedcover and the panel-board walls.
The sex had been protracted, powerful, wet, the heat our bodies made in the cold, the hiss of snow against the tiny blue square of window covered in rivulets of dripping water. She had cried out. A phlegmy yelp. A blast of something vulnerable and ravenous and sated; it seemed like it hadn’t come from a woman, or a particular woman. Or she hadn’t made that sound before. It was, the best I can describe it now, alien.
I wanted to be something big and swaggering in her eyes. As she said just a moment before, talking about Angus — I wanted to be robust.
There was a parking lot with a high fence outside that room, and it was dark out there. Everything was black and white. I’d got out of the bed. I’d needed to get untangled from the damp sheets, and I wiped a circle in the condensation. The side of my hand squeaked on the glass. It was so cold, standing naked on the tiles at that little window.
We’d had a misunderstanding. It was something I wanted her to invest in. But she said she didn’t want to be rich. She had no use for money. We were twenty. Or she was nineteen. No use for money.
On those roads in Goa, pedestrians appearing in the taxi’s headlights, a swath of colour against a travelling sweep of yellow light, a woman with a basket on her head, the slow barefoot tread, wrapped in an orange sari, or a man in white fluttering cotton. A drowsiness so intense I only knew I had given in to it when a horn weltering and zooming away drew me out of it.
The driver pulling out into the oncoming lane, and zipping back. Someone on a bicycle, the stink, sudden and passing, of rotten fish, so dense and assaulting over the fume of exhaust, and then just the fresh breeze. The smell of incense, sandalwood. For a long time the same moped driver, wearing a grey short-sleeved T-shirt, a woman in a sari clinging to his back, and on the sides of the cliffs luminous squares of white paint, phosphorescent, to mark the road.
I went to the funeral home when I read the announcement about Angus in the paper. I rushed there, from the office. I had been working on a Saturday afternoon, and I’d had a look at the newspaper online.
I had rushed over. But Marissa was downstairs. One of her daughters told me she’d gone down to get some sandwiches from a fridge they apparently have on a lower level. There were three girls, who must have only a year or two between them. Two of them were beautiful and hard to tell apart. The third was more ordinary-looking, but it was she who spoke to me. She asked if I knew her father.
I knew who he was, I said.
Who was he? she asked. It seemed like a trick. But there was nothing in her expression to suggest that. The question might have been an offering. A way to get me out of the fix I felt I’d got myself into.
He was upstanding, I said. And he was. Angus and Marissa believed the same things were important. I don’t know if they spoke much to each other — they wouldn’t have had to speak. Something in him caught her attention.
I had rushed over there as if I had been called to a fire and then I was speaking without having any idea about what I was saying.
Your father was a philanthropist, I said. As I was saying it I had a sudden panic I would say philanderer instead, though of course Angus was nothing of the kind. He was not a philanthropist, either, he didn’t give out money, which is what that term has come to mean. He gave other things: support, I suppose. There was no medium, he was the medium; he was flow-through.
The automatic doors keep opening and shutting, a grating, even whir. A sucking noise when they touch. When they open the wind blasts us, and then the stillness.
I saw your name in the book, Marissa says. I have no idea what she was talking about.
The book, she says. On the stand they had outside the room. Your condolences. I must have been doing something. They have a little room, you can get off your feet. A moment to gather yourself.
I have no recollection of signing the book. I had wanted to get out of there before she arrived with the sandwiches. It had been disturbing to see Angus’s name in those white plastic letters on the sign outside the room where he lay in the coffin. Angus McCarthy. How well can you know someone? I felt I knew him. I knew his gestures; he would raise a hand in the air before him with the fingers and thumb pinched when he was making a point. More specifically, when the point was dawning on him. He held up his pinched hand like a Frenchman, raising it higher and higher with the last two or three words. His point.
Get out of the door, I say. It’s a blizzard. I have to take her arm and lead her away from the doors. Inside a young security guard is holding a purse and there is an old woman in a sari. The old woman is crying. Perhaps she isn’t any older than us. The sari is lemon-coloured, with splashes of fuchsia. The security guard is trying to give her back the purse.
But she keeps turning her bony shoulder to him as if he is going to strike her. A cringing, defiant posture. She will not take the purse back no matter how much he thrusts it at her. He appeals to me.
The alarm so
unded, he says. It’s my job. She went through and the alarm was going. I had to stop her, it’s what the job is. I’m supposed to check the purses and bags. I’m after telling her she never done nothing wrong.
The security guard speaks to the woman again: You never done nothing wrong. See? Here’s your purse. I’m giving it back. You are free to go. The woman is thrusting a receipt and her change, offering it to the guard.
The doors fly open and the four of us are encircled in a private blizzard that blows Marissa’s hair and flaps the sari and receipt and dies back down.
Can you tell her she’s free to go? the guard says. I’m after telling her that over and over. She doesn’t understand. I had to stop her because the alarm. I have to check purses if I hear the alarm. Tell her she’s free. You have to stop whoever is going through if the alarm goes off.
She can’t speak English, Marissa tells the guard. Why did you stop her, an old woman? What difference would it have made? A can of tuna, or a chocolate bar? Look what you’ve reduced her to. How can we turn this around now?
The young man turns red. The woman refusing to take her purse back. The purse gaping.
The alarm sounded, he says.
And to me Marissa says, He fell, he fell. I heard his head on the stairs, what a crack. This was in the dark. I’d drifted off.
Your hair, I say. She touched it.
Oh my, she says. Am I a fright? She is. That’s the word.
It’s his hip and they had him restrained. Straps. Healthy as a horse, just sinew, just muscle. But his mind. Holding him down. They can’t do that.
Come out of the door, I say. You’re letting all the cold air in.
Tell her I didn’t mean anything by it, the guard says. It’s my job. Tell her to take the purse back.
