Alligator (32 page)

Don’t hang up, he said. Please.

She couldn’t speak and the receiver was slippery in her hand, but she didn’t hang up. She couldn’t. She could feel through the silence in the phone that he would not call her again. Wherever he was going he would never come back; he would never get out. He knew it. She would not hang up on him.

I don’t have anyone else, he said.

She waited.

The wind nearly took the door out of Frank’s hand. Isobel ducked under his arm.

I was driving past and I thought my card might be ready, she said. She took off a clear plastic rain hat and pulled it taut by the ribbons and droplets bounced out.

He was taken aback by how beautiful she was. He almost said it out loud, without thinking, but they were alone in the room. It was just a few minutes before closing time. He turned the lights back on.

Let me get the mockup, he said. She watched him disappear into the back. She had once acted with a Polish troop. They’d rehearsed naked in a forest in northern Ontario. Chris was directing. It was after they had first met, working on an Artaud play in Montreal. What was the play in the forest? One of Chris’s actors was almost seven feet and had a canary yellow mohawk. Chris made them roll in the mud, naked. She had been twenty, the youngest in the troupe.

What had he said when he got her alone in that stand of birch, white and pink and blue with the sun slashing every which way? She was standing naked, the rain running through the mud down her shins, mud on her face — someone had smacked her in the face with a mud cake. Most of them were on acid. She was on acid. Chris had been videotaping them. They would do
Macbeth
on acid, had been Chris’s idea. He wanted them to say the lines as if they had already been said.

She was hardly able to see for the rain.

What she would have given to believe wholeheartedly in his project, this relentless living he had proposed. He said security would nullify them. He’d raised his naked arms to the skies and yelled with his head thrown back, Nullify.

Be convincing, he said. That was Chris’s advice. The ultimate lesson for the actor, the content doesn’t matter.

Deliver, he said. He wanted her emptied out. He wanted her to give up herself. Chris said to remember they were not the thing they were pretending to be. He wouldn’t have that sort of moral turpitude, that Stanislavsky slop. They had to be who they were and who they weren’t at the same time. He would accept nothing less. We convince, he yelled.

And when she did run into him later it was at the soap audition. She’d come into the room and could not see because of the footlights. They turned off the lights and there he was. His eyes were the same crazy eyes. But it was a soap opera; he was directing a soap.

And walking along Yonge Street afterwards, she had cried. Because she’d wanted the naked afternoon in the woods to be true — the mud and rain and acid and all the emoting. She wasn’t willing to live like that herself, but she wanted it to endure.

She was standing with her hands behind her back looking at the giant corkboard of sample business cards. Frank slid her card across the counter and she picked it up. She held the card out at arm’s length. She was shaken slightly, being in the boy’s presence, though he didn’t know who she was. She had wanted to see him with her own eyes. She needed to know his face wasn’t scarred.

She snapped the arms of her glasses open and put them on the tip of her nose. She wore one of those cords to keep the glasses around her neck and she seemed too young for it. She was frowning at the card, her chin crimped.

You want, she said. Then she took a deep breath, raised a hand in the air, fingers spread. A giant ring covered most of her index finger. It was a dragon.

Spaciousness, she said. She snapped the card down on the counter.

This is too busy, she said. She pushed it across the counter to him with one finger. Frank picked up the business card. They had gone over every detail together on the phone. It was a card advertising dinner theatre.

We could adjust the font, he said. I don’t know what you think of italics.

A business card, she said. You want it to feel as roomy as a golf course.

Frank scissored over the low counter and he was standing beside her, holding out the card for her to see. He was all ready to print. He’d spent hours. He’d done it exactly as she had asked.

Some people are fond of italics, he said.

Isobel turned around and looked up at him. He lifted weights, she could see. The shirt was ironed and she could smell fresh air. There was no scarring on his face. That was why she had come. They’d said in the papers the more serious burns were on his torso and limbs. She wanted to know for certain about his face.

The business card has to work, she said.

What it does, Frank said. It gives people an idea.

I almost wish the card could be empty, she said. Imagine if it didn’t say anything at all.

Frank felt the building pulse. Pa-boom. It was the furnace, or the water pipes. This woman was undeniably beautiful — shiny hair in loose curls, her eyes were big and blue and her mouth was wide.

The insurance money had come through and it was just enough to keep her going for a year or two if she lived in an apartment. The dinner theatre might fail, everyone said it would fail, but she would try. She wanted to try. She’d got a government grant for publicity — posters, business cards, a few radio spots.

A business card has to have the name of the business on it, Frank said. She suddenly looked very fierce.

I guess, she said.

I have something, Frank said. He left her for a moment and came back into the foyer with a sheaf of paper.

This has weight, Frank said. He opened the package and worked a piece out and handed it to her. She held it to the light.

I’d like to leave it blank, she said.

The point of a card, he said.

They have to know what it says at a glance, Isobel said.

So you’re going to have to say something, Frank said.

MADELEINE

S
HE
’
D HAD COFFEE
with Beverly. They’d stood for a few moments on Water Street while the wind lifted a paper cup up off the pavement and dashed it against the concrete. Mike Dower passed by. Mike Dower ran the Roman Catholic Archives and had shown her Archbishop Fleming’s letters.

Not a man at all, an instrument of God, Mike Dower said.

That is what she’d wanted: to bring the instrument of God down onto the snow-swept barrens, Archbishop Fleming’s brute desire to colonize the shore with Catholics, to have bells clanging in the grey sodden skies all over the island. Madeleine saw wan-faced children in rags watching wide-eyed as the archbishop ranted from the pulpit, his frosty breath hanging in the air.

Colleen is back, Beverly said.

It’s too hot to run away, Madeleine said. The girl had rebelled — of course she had. Look at the world — there was a blast of flame on the front page of the paper, flame in every news box along Water Street. Was it Iraq or the Sudan? Why wouldn’t the girl rebel. Who could walk past these boxes and do nothing?

The pain in her chest is monstrous in the late-August afternoon and she sits in her armchair and reads. She cannot work. She imagines Fleming standing in the room, by the wardrobe. First, it was
as if
he were in the room. Then a presence in the corner of the room made itself indisputably felt.The archbishop’s presence accumulated like a snowdrift in the corner, except the heat in her room is unbearable. She should get up and draw the curtain but she’s too tired. They all thought the film was her swan song. There were the letters about Fleming’s decrepit mother, and the soup he’d made her, onion soup. Fleming had the Vatican’s ear. He had put up a number of churches. What is the word:
raised
churches. He would have obeyed the summons from the Vatican, coming as it did from the Holy Father himself, but he was on his knees in the dirt pulling up onions for his ailing mother. I’m certain His Holiness will understand.

She sees Fleming with the ocean behind him, robes billowing with wind and he raises his arms and so begins the hammering, the sawing; the hoisting of a bell. He wanted silver chalices in every church along the coast.

We all want something.

Some mention of horses in a letter, says Fleming, standing in the corner. He was ingratiating and acerbic in his letters, each sentence bloated with hate and desire. He would have visited the Pope but his elderly mother had required nursing. Someone had wrapped the Eucharist in paper and brought it down the shore that way and Fleming bellowed there would be silver chalices from St. John’s to Renews within the year.

In paper, like you might wrap a piece of meat, the body of Christ. For days there’d been a tingling in her arm, the side of her face. And a mild paralysis she mentioned to no one. Not now. Fleming, florid with passion, his yellow teeth, he is shouting at her in Latin. Why shouting?

She’s in the grip of a pain that won’t let her catch her breath and she dials Marty’s number. Maybe she has to go to the hospital this time. She wants to talk to Marty.

She wants regret on the screen, and Isobel could do regret. If the film doesn’t get finished, Isobel will turn her hand to something else. The phone rings but there’s no answer. Perhaps Marty is out walking the new baby. The baby has made him ten years younger.

Madeleine, he’d said. You should see her.

This giving in to the darkness of a nap, but she can’t afford it right now. She has to stay alert for the phone. If the phone rings she will hear it. She is waiting to hear about the horses; no, the horses have arrived. She is waiting for Marty. She has completed the winter shoot and Isobel was perfect. The horses galloped out of a squall. They disappeared; they ate their own tails. Marty will ring and she’ll tell him she needs an ambulance. The young girl sat up in bed. She has to get those horses off the freighter, someone said a helicopter. The film will be a monument.

The trouble is to stay alive until the shoot is over. Then she’ll go to Cuba and rest. She’ll drink her face off and turn black on the beach. Just let her get through the shoot. She will rest, act her age.

I want to love Colleen again, Beverly had said.

And you can’t? Can’t you love Colleen?

Beverly crossed her arms under her chest and dug her fists into her sides.

I want to, she said. Of course I do. I love her.

She is telling the archbishop. She is giving him this much, since he won’t leave. They can both wait for the phone. No, the animals have arrived already. They’ve completed the winter shoot.

The great monuments, she tells him. You go out of your way to see them but they never stick in your memory.

She’d visited the Taj Mahal, arriving at sunset as she was advised. But she rarely thinks of the Taj Mahal. A particular alley is what comes back to her as vividly as if she were standing there now. The dusty alley persists, returns briefly, sweeping through her, like a current tossing some old shell at the bottom of the ocean where it’s pitch black; a lost afternoon from forty years ago. And yes, she admits to Fleming, this might very well be a heart attack. She’s dying in a chair she bought at the Salvation Army and refinished herself.

The archbishop raised his arms. The horses come by helicopter, pawing the clouds with their great hooves, a snowfall of moths. The city is covered in fluttering white snow. Moths on their hands, on their arms, on their upturned faces.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

F
IRST
, I
WOULD
like to thank my husband, Stephen Crocker, basically for everything, everything.

My big, extended family makes writing possible for me and I want to thank them all. I would especially like to thank Eva Crocker, Theo Crocker, and Emily Pickard.

I would like to thank everyone at Anansi for the tremendous effort that went into the creation of
Alligator
. Sarah MacLachlan has been extremely supportive throughout the process of writing this novel. She goes at every aspect of publishing with uplifting gusto and I am very fortunate to have her energy and experience behind this book.

Martha Sharpe is a very gifted editor and working with her was a privilege. Heather Sangster and Kevin Linder were also exacting, eagle-eyed, and generous with their editing skills, for which I am thankful.

Laura Repas is an excellent publicist, and I am grateful for her work on
Alligator
. Thank you also to Matt Williams. It has been my great fortune to have the aforementioned team at Anansi behind
Alligator
because of their expertise and passion for writing and because I have also become friends with them and I am thankful for that. I am grateful to Bill Douglas for
Alligator
’s beautiful jacket design.

Thank you to my agent, Anne McDermid, for, among many other things, her friendship.

These are the people who offered their valuable reading time, friendship, considerable knowledge, and love of writing while simultaneously holding off the men in white lab coats, at least until the novel was finished: Mary-Lynn Bernard, Libby Creelman, Eva Crocker, Rosemary Crocker, Stephen Crocker, Susan Crocker, Michael Crummey, Ramona Dearing, Barbara Doran, Gail Faurschau, Holly Hogan, Bob Howard, Dr. John Lewis, Mary Lewis, Lawrence Mathews, Sourayan Mookerjea, Elizabeth Moore, Lynn Moore, Susan O’Brien, Beth Ryan, Rose Smart, Medina Stacey, and everyone in the Burning Rock.

Michael Winter, Nan Love, and Claire Wilkshire went way beyond the call of duty and I am forever indebted to them.

I would also like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts and Memorial University of Newfoundland for having me as writer-in-residence, thereby providing the necessary financial assistance for the writing life.

About the Author