by Lisa Moore
The bathroom floor buckles in the grip of a swell and Eleanor is flung against the wall and hauls herself, hand over hand, up the roiling radiator to the cubicle. She lets her head drop against the door of the stall. If she can just hang on she will reach her purest self. She may have to puke to get there. Something pure, like a breeze through the pines of the Himalayas. She’d camped once in a forest in Kashmir. Slippery pine needles slicked the paths. At night the guide called from his tent: Watch out for the snow leopards!
The outer door bangs and she feels it reverberate in her bum. Two women have burst into the bathroom.
Sadie says, Someone in there?
I am, says Eleanor.
And who is I am? A fairy in a CBC Christmas special once when she was fourteen. They chromokeyed her so she floated over a frozen lake, pointed toes wiggling, to touch down beside an ice-fishing folksinger who grabbed up his guitar to play a carol. She’d once knit a long red scarf. Rode in a mock foxhunt. They had several bloodhounds, but it was Eleanor’s French poodle, Monique, who treed the old fur hat doused with musk hidden in the crotch of a birch. She’d hitchhiked the island maybe seven times. She’d taken all kinds of lessons: raku, clay animation, Spanish, watercolour painting. The secret to a successful watercolour is to use many, many transparent veils of colour. This is also the secret to raku, vegetarian cooking, synchronized swimming, and being very, very drunk when your husband is dancing with a bubblehead from British Columbia, or from anywhere for that matter. It is not the secret to flying trapeze, belly dancing, waitressing at the Blue Door, or being very, very drunk when your husband picks up the fine gold necklace that lies flat against Amelia’s collarbone with his lips. There is no secret for that. You must carom like the silver balls in a pinball machine, spitting sparks with each wall your forehead smacks. You must grip the wheel with both hands, you must pick a star and aim true.
Eleanor realizes that she’s unable to puke. She is bloated with woe. There’s so much woe. Puking she can forget. She drank; she is drunk. These honest statements grip hands like used car salesmen. She straightens up and steps out of the cubicle.
Sadie is holding her wrist to Constance’s nose.
It’s called Celestial Sex, says Sadie, everybody’s wearing it. Both women turn to face Eleanor and then lurch forward to catch her.
Eleanor says, Constance, your dress. It’s smeared with lipstick.
The women grip Eleanor’s shoulders just as the tiled floor slants toward her chin. They squash her between them.
Eleanor lets her face fall into Sadie’s cleavage. Eleanor wants to let go the wheel. Let them dash against the cliffs, let the ocean crunch them in its rotten chops. She closes her eyes, nuzzling Sadie’s breasts with her nose, and plummets. She’s a jellyfish pulsing through infinite inkiness, the ordinary encumbrances giving way: bone, jealousy, the smell of smoke and shampoo, the stinky emerald cloud of pot that still hangs over the cubicles, the way her mother stood a boiled egg in her wedding ring, her father smoothing cement with a trowel, Eleanor’s horse pawing the clouds with his front hoofs, the pink of his nostril, the white of his eye, good olives, her name, streets, books, aspirations, socks, coins, hair clips, all of it giving way. Then she grabs Sadie’s spaghetti strap and drags herself back up, surfacing amid the bagpipe screams of the toilets. What it means to be human is spelling itself in the grey mould spreading over the ceiling. She must speak. She will hint at the immanent peril. Sadie can take it.
Philip is all over her, Eleanor says.
Downer, says Constance.
Remember who you are, says Sadie.
She had imagined herself in love lots of times. Sometimes she knew she wasn’t and fought to convince herself, saying, See? That must be love, see? He’s done this, you felt that way, you thought of him while making mashed potatoes, you thought of him when the chain came off your bike, you thought of him.
Knowing she wasn’t in love but not knowing what love was and thinking, it might be this. It might be she and Sam Crowley hidden under the dripping laburnum, the poisonous flowers bright at dusk, his kid sister standing on the pedals of her bike, whizzing by like a thought through the liver-coloured maple trees. Clem Barker tearing the condom wrapper with his teeth. Paul Comerford, between the rolls of unlaid carpet, leaving the impression of his bum in a pile of sawdust. Eli Pack kissed the back of her neck, and led her to his back seat, his finger and thumb circling her wrist loosely, but it might as well have been a handcuff, because she couldn’t have said no if she tried. Then on a plaid blanket covered with cat hair. Eleanor is all of this. Tom O’Neill in a field of wild roses he claimed was inhabited by fairies. Stoned with Harry McLaughlin so his fingers stirred up a trail on the inside of her thigh like an oar in a phosphorescent shoal. When she was sixteen, Rick O’Keefe held her against his greasy coveralls, a fresh whiff of gasoline. With Brian Bishop in a motel in Port Aux Basques, a snowstorm, they’d missed the ferry. Afterward they devoured a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Wiped their greasy mouths in the tail of the bedsheets. Mark Fraser, on a bale of hay, a surprise because he’d sworn all summer he hated her. Hunched over, he had flicked a Bic lighter until it ran out of juice and he’d tossed it and gathered her roughly, the hay pricking through her jeans, he’d knocked her riding hat so the elastic tugged at her throat and then he had stopped, astonished. He’d whispered, You’re a nice girl, as if he’d opened her like a parcel. Donny White had let a line of sand spill from his fist into her belly button, up her stomach, and over the triangles of her glossy orange bikini. Mike Reardon had rubbed his jeans against her bum, pressing her hipbones against the counter until she rinsed the last cup.
Sadie tugs Eleanor’s dress roughly, this way and that, as if she were making a hospital bed. Constance trawls the bottom of her tiny purse until she draws out a lipstick, lethal as a bullet. She dismantles it and screws up the explosion of colour. She grips Eleanor’s jaw and covers the pouting bottom lip and says, Rub them together. Sadie has got her by the hair, dragging a punishing brush through so fast that Eleanor’s scalp yelps.
Listen, Sadie says, it’s only that yahoo Amelia Kerby, who cares?
And then it rises in her, the wave, plowing up through the guts of the evening, up through her platform shoes, grinding her kneecaps to dust, into her thighs, a spraying granite of surf hitting her crotch, stomach, her breastbone splintering, all blown apart.
I care, wails Eleanor, I lo-huv-huv-huv-huve him.
She and Philip bought a house around the bay. The grass up to their waists. Tiger lilies. Fireweed. Crabapples. Philip pulled over on the side of the road and rolled down the window.
Why are we?
Shhh.
Can we just.
Shhh.
He’d pulled over next to a copse of whispering aspen. The car filled with the leafy, percipient surf. The wind blew, and the leaves showed their silver undersides as if the tree had been caught naked and was trying to cover up.
And the wave withdraws. Eleanor is still standing. The bathroom is lustral, the fluorescent lights thrumming like an orchestra of didgeridoos. Sadie and Constance are angels with tangy auras like orange zest. They are springtime, a Scandinavian polar bear swim, they are the girls in the cake, Isadora Duncan, they’ve bested the mechanical bull, they’re electricity after an outage, they are her friends. Eleanor is okay. She’s okay. She’s going to be fine .
I will fight, Eleanor says.
There you go, says Sadie.
She had awakened in Philip’s apartment, ten years ago. Trembling, partly from the hangover, but mostly from fright. She knew she was in love. How terrible. She could still feel his finger tracing the elastic of her underwear. She lay on her back, her arms over her head, her wraparound dress — he had untied the string at her hip and lifted the fabric away, and untied the other string inside the dress, beneath her breast.
Little bows he pulled slowly. So she lay there in the black bra and underwear. His finger moved from one hip to the other, tracing the elastic. It was that finger moving over her belly that tipped her. It spilled her over. A car roared up the steep hill outside the apartment and squealed its tires, and the squeal felt like her heart, as if her heart were tearing around the corner of an empty street in the last sleeping city on the Atlantic. A brass candle holder crusted with wax. A Fisher Price telephone with a glowing orange receiver. She had stumbled over it on their way in and the bell rang clear. When she awoke in the morning she came into herself. Sunlight piercing the weave of a rosy curtain, the wardrobe door hanging open, his jeans on the back of a chair, the red suspenders sagging, exhausted from the effort of holding him back.
Eleanor jerks the wine glass back and forth as if it is a gear shift manoeuvring her across the room. She stumbles forward and grabs Sadie’s arm.
She says, This is the sort of drunkenness it takes a lifetime to achieve. I must actualize my potential before it wanes. I may never achieve this clarity of purpose again as long as I live.
Sadie says, You might regret this.
Whose side are you on?
I’m just saying, in the morning.
Because I’m ready here.
In the clear light of day.
If I’m all alone, just say so.
You’re not alone, it’s just I’m thinking a glass of water, a Tylenol, forty winks.
So you’re with me?
Whatever you say.
You’re in?
I’m in.
Let’s actualize.
Eleanor drags Sadie across the dance floor, grabbing at dresses and suit jackets to stay standing. Finally she taps Amelia on the shoulder. Amelia turns.
You, she says. Amelia smiles.
Eleanor says, You, you, you. Where is your husband?
I have no husband.
That’s right, says Eleanor. She grins triumphantly.
Your boyfriend, then, where’s he?
It was nothing, Amelia says, my last boyfriend.
Nothing? It was nothing? Okay, the one before that.
Him too, nothing. She makes a sound, Pfft.
Okay, the one that broke your heart, where is he?
Pfft, says Amelia.
Pfft? Pfft? says Eleanor. She suddenly rests her forehead on Sadie’s shoulder. It’s true the girl has no life experience. There is no way to make an impression on her. There is no way to dent that lamé. She is what she appears, bubbly and handsome with a certain talent for academic lingo and a healthy bank account. Eleanor feels no match.
Well, you’ve started it now, Sadie says.
Eleanor rouses herself. She will do it then, if she’s forced, finish this girl off, although already a new clarity has befallen her. The girl has nothing to do with it. Where, she wonders sadly, is Philip. Who is he? How can she remind him who he is?
I mean the boyfriend, then, says Eleanor, who took his bare hands and tore your flesh and pried the bones of your ribs apart and reached up and tore your beating heart out with his fingernails and then put it in his mouth and chewed it up and swallowed it. And then smiled at you with your own blood dripping down his teeth.
Here Eleanor mimes as she speaks (a trick she’s learned from Frank Harvey) a pulsing heart in her fist. She mimes the heart almost slipping out one end of the fist, but catching it, cupping it in both hands. The heart truly appears to be pulsing in her cupped hands. She looks at Sadie, astonished by her own facility. Sadie looks astonished too. Eleanor is holding Amelia Kerby’s slithering, tough little bungee-jumping heart. And then, snarling like a dog, Eleanor chews the tough meat of Amelia’s heart. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
That boyfriend, she says.
Um, that’s never happened to me, Amelia says. Sadie puts her arm around Amelia and gives her a squeeze.
I think what my friend is trying to say is stay away from her husband. He’s a little confused right now, but they have a kid and a really great marriage and you don’t want to inadvertently fuck that up, now, do you?
At four-thirty in the morning everyone forms a circle around the bride and groom on the beer-soaked dance floor. They hold hands and sway violently, some of them fall over and the other side of the circle drags them up from their knees. Then that side, because of the exertion, topples and they must be hauled back on their feet. They rush into the centre of the dance floor, joined hands raised over their heads. The circle rushes in and pulls out. The bright dresses like bits of glass and sparkle in a kaleidoscope that fall to the centre with each twist of the lens and drop away. Blue stage lights splash over them, up the walls, across the ceiling, the floor. The bride and groom hug the guests, making their way around the circle.
Constance holds Eleanor’s head in her hands tightly, she presses her cheek against Eleanor’s cheek, and her face is wet and hot. She draws back and the red light falls over her, splinters of purple searing from the sequins in her veil, on the bodice of her dress.
I love you, Eleanor, she says, I love you. And I love your husband too. And I love my husband. I love everybody’s husband.
She lets go of Eleanor’s face and falls into the arms of the man next to Eleanor. Ted grabs Eleanor and holds her. He has a beer in each hand and the bottles chink behind her back.
Eleanor tugs Philip’s shirtsleeve.
Come home with me?
Not yet, he yells.
She is lying in bed waiting for him. It’s 7:32 a.m. She lies still. There is a fear rushing around in her body. She remembers her mother calling a few years ago about the weasel. Eleanor can feel that mink fear rippling through her body because she fell in love the first night she slept with Philip and after that she fixed on him.
A body slams against a wall and falls onto the opposite wall of the porch. It’s either Philip or the three Norwegian sailors who rent the attached house. The angry saints with their haloes of white hair and steady brawling.
Philip lurches to the banister, wraps his arms around it as if it were the mast of a capsizing ship.
He looks up at her.
He says, I went to Signal Hill in a Cadillac.
Eleanor is standing at the top of the stairs.
We stopped at the Fountain Spray to buy candy necklaces and we had a giant bottle of wine. I bit the necklaces off all the women’s necks. He burps.
Glenn Marshall’s neck too. Spectacular Sam was there. That guy who dances on broken glass. Do you remember that guy? He does a lounge lizard thing, and the Caribbean drums.
He lunges past her and she follows him to the bedroom.
He says, Spectacular Sam poured cognac over broken beer bottles on the parking lot of Signal Hill. Lots of smashed glass. He lit it, fell into a trance, and danced on it with his bare feet. Then he knelt and scooped the glass up in his hands and splashed his face with it, and drops of blood came up all over his face. You know, there was the sun too, coming up.
Philip struggles for a long moment with the buttons of his shirt, tipping slowly on his heels like a punching clown in a breeze. He sighs and rips the shirt open. Buttons hit the wall above the lamp. He falls onto the bed.
She gets up to turn off the light, but he grabs her arm.
Stay here, he says. Stay here.
ALL ZOOS EVERYWHERE
Rotterdam. Something large and black thrashed through the glossy rhododendron leaves and broke out onto the asphalt. Harry heard the crowd screaming in German and French, but he heard the word gorilla in English. Or it is the same word in all those languages. This was Harry’s last day in Rotterdam. The bush was shiny-leaved and so green it looked dark, full of shadow.
The animal moved with a tumbling hitch in its gait. Shoulder bones rolling beneath silver fur, powerful haunches, leathery chest. It was big. It was bigger than Harry imagine
d and he thought he could smell it.
People mistake evolution for cosmic design, but it’s actually pure accident. It was not that man stood up because it would help him survive, but that the standing men were able to step to the side when the glaciers rumbled through. The men who were stooped over or glancing in the wrong direction were no match for ancient ice or amber or lava. The ones standing happened to be left over. They remained upright.
The gorilla busted out. It was disoriented and maybe rabid. It was what they had stood up to avoid. A paper napkin with a mustard stain, hard yellow, tippytoed across the parking lot in the breeze. The animal turned in one direction and then the other, as if it were checking for traffic.
The crowd had burst from the path onto the asphalt apron that surrounded the café and Harry was with them. It was like running a marathon, but more tentative; they weren’t sure where to go.
The café was an octagonal glass structure that might have been state-of-the-art in the early seventies. The zoo, like zoos everywhere, was shabby and unquaint. The soft stink of dung and buttered popcorn. The animals had been sluggish and pensive all morning, their souls atrophied, he’d thought. A guide had said it was rare to catch them mating, or even looking toward a camera.
Harry had been through the gorilla compound earlier in the day. The animals were leaner than he had expected in the waist, broader in the shoulder. There was a baby clinging to its mother’s back. The floor was strewn with branches. The male gorilla picked one up and the branch looked delicate in his hand. He ate each leaf with a dainty and morose concentration.
A young girl, a teenager, had put her hand to the Plexiglas, and the gorilla lumbered toward her. Several people in the crowd held their camera phones in the girl’s direction. She wore a rhinestone bracelet and when she put her mouth to the glass the gorilla did the same. It was a kiss. The gorilla flicked his red tongue back and forth and it was lewd and innocent and it sent a shiver down Harry’s back. He’d caught it on his cell; the video was jerky and dark and a lot of it was the bald head of the man in front of him, but there was a zoom of the gorilla’s teeth and a foggy cloud of the girl’s breath. Harry heard the teeth clink against the glass, or thought he heard, and it was an intimate and faraway sound. Then the animal screeched so loudly that the girl ducked to shield her face and turned and laughed. She had forgotten about the glass between them. Someone had thrown the baby gorilla a chocolate-bar wrapper and the mother took it from her child and looked at it, turning it over in her hands, then brought it to the other side of the compound and dropped it there.
