by Lisa Moore
DUFFY THOUGHT SUDDENLY of the girl’s mother, the flaky mother with her hand on his arm.
Mr. Duffy, my daughter is a stranger to me, she’d said. Beverly Clark’s eyes filled with tears. Her eyes were green and the watery film over them changed their colour; they became even more luminous, ultramarine. She was wearing mascara that made her lashes into sharp black spikes that seemed to hold her tears back. She caught her lower lip in her teeth and her eyes cleared and she laughed.
That’s just what I didn’t want to happen, she said. He knew he was being taken in.
She was not genuine; she was slippery and convincing. Her hand on his arm, as though she’d mistaken him for the sort of man one might sway or indulge.
Yet it was pleasurable to have her smile at him while overcome with emotion. She was offering a weird intimacy, an unengaged, effortless form of flirting. He was astounded by it and miffed. He found, to his shame, he was flattered.
Mrs. Clark, you’ve raised a misguided little torment, he said. He had meant to sound gruff. But it came out all wrong; it sounded courtly, like a compliment.
Duffy had a girlfriend, a young hairdresser who worked in Churchill Square. He’d had a plan for that evening: the Bulgarian restaurant. He liked to be lavish with the hairdresser. She was a good cook, and when he visited she’d have candles on every available surface, and incense burning, which he chided her about.
She had a little wooden jewellery box that had been carved in Kenya, inlaid with shell, where she kept her dope, and sometimes they got stoned together.
He was unable to say why it couldn’t add up to much, except that they had become too comfortable too quickly. He’d never mentioned the relationship to his children. He wondered if Beverly Clark was still in the food court, waiting. Of course he had no intention of giving Colleen Clark’s vandalism another thought. He’d had his fun. He put his hand on his arm where Beverly had touched him. Maybe he could catch up with Beverly Clark.
MADELEINE
MADELEINE WAS WEARING her shiny red kimono and she’d just made a cappuccino. She cracked a brown egg on a pot of boiling water and the yolk tipped over the jagged shell in one plop. The egg white stretched itself into opaque skeins and transparent veils and broke away from the yolk and frothed over the sides of the pot and settled back down. She splashed some balsamic vinegar into the pot. Madeleine had cleaners coming, two women from Placentia Bay who left the condo smelling of the artificial pine scent they put in the vacuum and every surface smelled of Pledge and she would smell Windex for days after they left. The smells made her hopeful and slightly congested. She liked getting the place cleaned.
She’d gone down in the elevator and out onto the sidewalk in her bare feet to get the paper. The concrete was cold and damp and she half hopped and picked up the paper. It was a warm morning, already warm. A dog was barking in some-one’s backyard. She heard a reverberating clank that rang out over all the empty streets; someone had dropped the lid on a Dumpster. A truck revving its engine. The cars parked along the street had blotches of rain over the roofs and hoods and someone had drawn a heart in the condensation on her windshield.
She picked up the newspaper and saw the photograph on the front page, first through a running blotch of rainwater that had collected in the folds of plastic. The water spilled over the picture and magnified the naked figure and warped him so his shoulder stretched and the black hood smeared and she tore off the plastic but she hardly knew that she had done so. She was only half awake and when she came inside, the hallway looked dim after the bright street. The hallway dimmed as if on a dimmer switch and she turned over the paper and stood still. The plastic fell out of her hand onto the floor of the elevator and she didn’t notice.
The photograph was soft focus, a digital photograph that had an amateurish cast, a naked man in a hood standing on a platform. He stood with his cuffed hands over his genitals. One shoulder slouched, an almost girlishly coy slouch except for the hood that was large and black, and the brutal fact of his nakedness. The man’s nakedness shocked her deeply. The photograph was low resolution, and looked like it had passed through a variety of media and the image had been degraded in the process. The hues in the print were off, an almost imperceptible wrongness of hue and focus, sinister in its casual ineptitude. Madeleine leaned against the wall of the elevator. She brought the picture close to her face to see if she could see pixels, how the colour had been reproduced; she tried to understand the image. A blooming horror made her skin prickle; what was this photograph? It was a homemade joke about torture, folksy and kitsch, full of abject glee and hatred. She had left the egg boiling. The egg was boiling over. She went back to the kitchen and put the paper on the table. The shock of the photograph receded; shock smacks and recedes. She would not let herself think the word evil. The egg was rubbery. The photograph was evil.
Her screenplay came to her in a dream the next night, she’d woken streaming sweat. There was something heavy underneath her on the mattress and she wanted to throw it on the floor. She tried to lift it, whatever it was, but it was too heavy. All the while, the dream unfolded, the plot and wrenching emotion and everything you needed for a film.
White horses galloping through a blizzard on the Southern Shore, and she managed to grip the thing that was in the bed and it was clammy to touch and cold and she couldn’t throw it out of the bed because it was attached to her shoulder. It was her arm, paralyzed, and the paralysis was spreading into her chest and sweat ran down her temples or it was tears. She understood, though she was in the thick of sleep, that she was having a heart attack.
She had put the newspaper on the table next to a glass jug of orange juice. She poured a glass of juice and put the jug down. A parabola of light cast from the sun striking the jug jiggled over the photograph. A loop of wiggling, broken sunlight flickered over the humiliated Iraqi prisoner and it occurred to Madeleine his shoulder might be broken and she swept the egg off her plate into the garbage.
She’d written most of the script in six weeks and then she’d gone to Toronto to convince Isobel to come home: Isobel with her big, fraught, lonely, bursting life. Isobel had made a name in Toronto, finally, with her performance in A Streetcar Named Desire. Some newly arrived Eastern European director had the idea of blowing the dust off Streetcar — they were mad for Tennessee Williams in Romania — and Isobel had triumphed. Madeleine was coming from the airport in a taxi, the cellphone shrill in her purse.
I know the best place for Italian, Isobel had said.
I want you to look at a script, Madeleine said.
Madeleine was driving near a concrete overpass and there was graffiti, bulbous and illegible; the sun struck the grimy windows of the taxi. Transport trucks tore past. She loved the way the outskirts reared up all around her, arched concrete spines and roaring traffic. She loved Toyota spelled in marigolds on banks of manicured lawns and the massive car plants with the grey stacks kicking out smoke and the chainlink fences and how the highways loop over and under each other in the distance.
Of course she has people to stay with, there’s hardly a city in the world where she doesn’t know somebody. She has friends in New Delhi, a young man in Iceland; Marty’s sister in Jamaica is always begging her to come. But she’s happiest in the hush of a mid-luxury hotel, with the paper sheaths for the drinking glasses, maids with hairnets, big views, and the ravaged food trays waiting outside bedroom doors in the morning, gnawed bones, greasy napkins, glasses with lipstick streaks.
Some women aren’t meant for marriage, Madeleine had thought. They’d stopped at an intersection and a crowd surged in front of her taxi, a black man with three little girls, each with a strawberry ice-cream cone, passed in front of them — even if the conditions for love are exactly right these women can’t help but want someone else — the taxi lurched forward and she saw a transvestite in a zebra-striped minidress, big red necklace — maybe truly independent women are never satisfied in love.
There’s always someone else, Madeleine thought. One of h
er old boyfriends had become a neurologist; he worked on the spines of rats. She’d run into him at the airport.
You are exactly the same, he’d said. Do you remember the night I took you to the Starboard Quarter? It was every cent I had. She could not remember. You don’t remember? You ordered the steak! She didn’t remember.
And after all that, you married Martin, he’d said, giving his head a hard little shake as if to get rid of the idea. All what, she wondered. She doesn’t think she’s ever eaten in the Starboard Quarter.
Marty is having another child, she’d blurted. She reached out and gripped his arm — she cannot think of Marty being a father again without a mild wave of vertigo — but what a relief to suddenly speak of him. Here is someone who remembers Marty as he was back then, the elastic on his pant leg for riding the bike, when he was playing the sax downtown; Marty with long hair.
But he must be over sixty!
He’s way over sixty, Madeleine said.
Every cent I had I spent on you, he said.
And now you work with rats, she said.
Just the spines.
A lucrative business, I guess? Madeleine said. She can’t believe he has brought up paying for a dinner a thousand years ago.
I’ve done well by rats.
The driver lets Madeleine out and a doorman in gold braid and a black jacket, awful in this heat, takes her luggage while she struggles with her purse.
It meant she was alive, Madeleine thought, as she stepped into the air-conditioned lobby: to always want more; never settling. It was what drove her. She saw herself on a London street, clutching a map. Some street corner long forgotten, she’d had a date with an old friend and couldn’t find the pub; the wind had taken her hat. Just look at how full her life had been; how many lovers, full to bursting. She drags her luggage down the hall to the elevator and talks on the phone.
Isobel, she says, I think you’ll be impressed.
There was a crowd waiting to be seated but the waiter had a table for them in the back. He brought them past the deli counter with homemade pastas, sausages, and cured meats and the feeling Madeleine got was that the family was all in the kitchen and they were overweight and had made a religion of the preparation of food. There were white truffles in small jars under lock and key. The ceiling was stucco with bits of mirror and the tablecloths were checked and the balsamic vinegar and olive oil were poured into a saucer that must have a matching teacup in the back.
They talked the way they always talked, in unison, without listening to each other, their mouths full of pasta. They were campy and loud and full of themselves. They laughed while they were drinking and got wine up their noses and had to snort.
I want bleak, Madeleine said. What year are we talking? 1834. You want turnip soup and fish flakes and scurvy. I want pouting orphans with sunken eyes and scabby knees. And you see me? I see you, yes. I’m the lead? It’s a big part. I don’t know. You don’t know? I’ve been offered something. What have you been offered? I’m this close, according to the grapevine. How close? A soap opera, I’ve been called back three times. You’re kidding. It’s a permanent job, Madeleine. You don’t need a soap opera. I need something. Read the script, that’s all I’m asking. I’ll read the script. Read the goddamn script.
FRANK
HE STOOD IN the rain under the umbrella but the rain came in sideways. The rain shuddered and was enraged and held its breath and slapped itself down in ropes, but people were still buying hot dogs.
Frank wasn’t going home if people were buying hot dogs.
A man drove up in the 97.5 K-Rock Hummer; it had an amber light on the roof that swivelled and the vehicle was pumping muffled music. It looked like people were squashed in, sitting on each other’s laps, a shoulder against the roof.
The driver left it running and the exhaust lifted in ragged clouds that turned amber and there was a red shoulder smeared against the passenger window in the back seat. The guy had his raincoat up over his head and he ordered five hot dogs.
Frank could hardly see through the sheets of rain on the steamy windows, but the Hummer seemed full of girls.
He thought he saw a leg. One of the girls was pulling on a pair of pantyhose in the back seat; he watched this through the eye-stinging coils of blowing smoke and the rain spilling off the umbrella.
The rain glazed the pavement and shivers ran through the water as it rushed down the street, wind-driven, and the hot dogs hissed and what he really wanted was to see how those girls fit in the back and smell their perfume and shampoo and why was she putting on pantyhose and what party were they going to and why did he have to be always standing in the rain.
He could not go home yet because he had not sold enough hot dogs to pack up and go home.
Frank got the five hot dogs ready and the man took them two at a time under his coat and passed them through the window to the women inside. Then he came back for his own and he only wanted ketchup.
The next day Frank heard Carol out on the fire escape pulling in her laundry. She had several pairs of underwear hung on the line, pastel colours, each pair flimsy and light-pierced. The panties were full of worms. They had gathered in the cotton-lined crotches of the underwear and made them look black. He was drinking his coffee on the fire escape above and she came up the stairs to talk to him.
They said about you on the radio, Frank, she said. They said about the hot dogs. A real entrepreneur, the guy said, standing out in the rain.
Then she whispered, Frank, don’t talk to those men upstairs. I’m warning you, Frank. Those men, you can’t reason. You’re a nice boy, well-mannered. I can say to you Frank with conviction. I have a bad feeling.
Frank watched her absent-mindedly picking the worms out of her underwear as she spoke.
MADELEINE
THEY WERE GOING to an awards dinner, a gala, in honour of Isobel.
I should call Andrew, said Madeleine. She feels a panic about her son, who works for Médicins Sans Frontières in Ethiopia. What if Andrew is in trouble? There will be nothing she can do.
She thinks of him digging in the garden when he was a small boy; the day she found all the snails in the pockets of his tiny jeans, globs of moving slime and crushed shell.
Now he performs surgeries in canvas tents all over Africa with only a naked light bulb hanging from a pole and the sounds of gunfire in the background.
Her daughter, Melissa, is in Geneva and married to a heroin addict with old money. Melissa, in tailored suits and sensible shoes, striding down sidewalks lined with pristine fountains and gargoyles. She sends jewellery made from volcanic rock and woven wraps that snap under the arms and zipper across the breasts like straitjackets, the height of European fashion. She skis in the Alps and sends pictures of herself buoyed up by white wings of spraying snow.
Just tell me, though, said Isobel. Is this too ancient Greece? She had the hanger with the gold toga under her chin.
I’d have to see it on, Madeleine said.
Isobel pulls a black sequined dress down over her hips. The dress left one shoulder bare. She snapped the fishnet stocking, at her knee and at her ankle, and stood with her back to the mirror looking over her shoulder.
That’s the dress as far as I’m concerned, said Madeleine. The director of Streetcar had bought Isobel the sequined dress. He had a raw-boned face and wild black eyes and Isobel might have liked him if he had not worked her so hard. He was tired of naturalistic theatre, he had shouted at them while they stood blinded in the stage lights.
Isobel Turner, he had screamed. Do I give a damn about Isobel Turner? They had been rehearsing for six hours in the heat. Isobel put her hand over her eyes in an effort to see him. There was a silence.
No, I don’t give a damn about Isobel Turner, he screamed. She had slept with him the night before and this outburst was disorienting.
Audiences aren’t paying to see Isobel Turner from Newfoundland put on a Southern accent. Haven’t you ever lost anything? he screamed at her.
&nb
sp; It was true there was something she didn’t get about Stella.
Isobel would never have let them take Blanche away. Even if she did stand for the South and all that was corrupt and decaying. Isobel would have saved her sister.
She stood with her back to the mirror, looking over her shoulder at her bum.
I didn’t get the soap, Isobel said.
Lately, Madeleine listens. Or rather, she doesn’t speak as much. Part of it is that she’s too tired to talk. She’s got the phone pressed to her ear and the aluminum tree branches spread out on the floor. It’s August, but she came across Christmas trees on sale in a bin at Canadian Tire. Fifty extras in the shoot with the stallions and there’s the underwater shot. Five divers lined up and they know the tides and they have to get the horses out in the surf. But at night she stops thinking about the shoot. She is mesmerized by an aluminum tree.
She listens to Marty. They have conversations lately, in the evening, after his pregnant wife, Gerry-Ann, has gone to bed. They talk about his wife.
She’s what? Madeleine said.
She’s thirty-five and she’s pregnant.
Are you having a good time, Marty?
She falls asleep in her soup, Marty said. The assembly instructions were in eight different languages.
Another child, Marty, Madeleine said. She fit the central pole into the stand; it was a sizable tree. They have talked about the baby a hundred times. Marty says bringing a baby into the world is a show of faith that she, Madeleine, is too cynical to understand.
Am I crazy or what? Marty said. She held a big silver branch before her face and shut one eye. It was still a big silver branch.
The crazy things we do, she said. She put the branch down on the carpet where the diagram told her to.
I’ve got four white stallions in the ocean later this month, Madeleine grunted. A whole crew in scuba gear. She inserted a final branch and gave the red bulb on its tip a little twist and the whole silver tree glowed hotly, infrared.
