Alligator (5 page)

Beverly thinks suddenly of the rooster eggcup that had once belonged to her grandmother. As a toddler, Colleen had hurled the eggcup at the fridge and cracked off the rooster’s head. Beverly had been inconsolable. An instant, jagged disappointment entirely out of proportion had ripped through her as she watched the china head dance over the kitchen tiles. The broken eggcup had brought her to an understanding: being a mother was an entrapment.

She had felt from the moment Colleen became visible in the mirror of the birthing room (she had screamed at the nurse, Tilt the goddamn thing, I can’t see) a profound rapture the magnitude of which dwarfed any sort of emotion she would ever feel again. It was a flooding hormonal love that never balanced itself out, never gained an even footing.

But her life was also irrevocably changed after the birth. She had been robbed of a store of vital, combative energy. Breastfeeding was an enchantment that caused her to drift into afternoon naps full of erotic dreams from which she woke blissful and useless.

Beverly had loved her grandmother — a fisherman’s wife with a loose, shiny grey bun and a network of delicate blood vessels over her cheeks. Her grandmother had bequeathed the beloved eggcup just before her death.

This morning Beverly had put the eggcup in front of Colleen without a word. It was an inscrutable reproach. Then she’d turned and stood at the kitchen window.

Colleen tapped the shell and the undercooked yolk streamed a hazard-tape yellow over the rooster’s wing and onto the saucer beneath. It made her gag, quietly, but she ate every quivering spoonful.

There were crystal prisms hanging in the windows all over the house. When it was sunny in the kitchen the crystals cast trembling rainbows over the white walls and chrome appliances. Beverly had collected 183 of these crystal prisms, not because she believed they had mystical power, but because they were pretty. But there were no rainbows that morning. The prisms were spitefully ordinary-looking.

MADELEINE

T
REVOR BARKER
’
S APARTMENT
was in the same condo as Madeleine’s on Military Road and was all coarse fibres and bran-coloured. It makes her worry about what he will cook. Why hadn’t they gone out to eat? She’d seen the fennel bulbs in his grocery bag and this was what decided her.

His skin was warm-toned and Mediterranean and he made her think of Paris when she was twenty-one. Her honeymoon with Marty, and it was Marty she was thinking about, really, and she didn’t want to be thinking about him. Marty had remarried and had a child on the way and he called her every night when his wife conked out with exhaustion.

A weekend she’d spent in Paris on the way to Germany after a month in North Africa and the city was streaky and saturated with colour. She’s been to Paris since, but it’s the honeymoon she thinks of when she thinks of the city. A grocer putting out his buckets of tulips, she’d posed jauntily with a baguette, and later there was a pool by the Seine. Before the children, when she and Marty had no money and spent every cent they could get their hands on.

She’d watched Trevor carry a bike on his shoulder and work it into the elevator. There were days last winter when she was torn apart by her work on the film, distracted, elated.

First she’d had to secure the funding. To bring an idea like this off the ground required a serious budget. She could be convincing. She could drink, she wore red and black and big silver jewellery. She carried a lucky rabbit’s paw and she was hilarious and sexy, the way she dragged both her hands through her hair and looked up under her brow.

She didn’t do coy because she hated coy. But she could do savvy and raunchy and acerbic. She could do spiritually enlightened if she had to. Coy she would not do. Girlish she would not do. Tenacious she could do.

Madeleine was entranced by her film and she stayed that way all through the winter shoot. She’d wanted Isobel to play the lead. She had written the lead with Isobel in mind. Snowstorms and ploughs and in the night they towed her car and there was all the talk of her heart being weak, angina, clogged arteries — they’d wanted to take a blood vessel out of her leg but she wouldn’t have it. She could barely pay attention to the boy she’d chosen for a doctor, his pen tapping a diagram of the heart, because she was besotted by her film.

She had a fist in her chest and sometimes it squeezed with all its might. Her daughter, Melissa, phoned from Europe to check up on her.

Mom, go back to the doctor, she shouted.

Madeleine felt the pain in her arm and her neck and her jaw but she didn’t give it any attention. She’d given up drinking and red meat, she’d started to exercise. She felt like a born-again Christian after laps in the pool. She’d embraced fad diets, vitamins. She’d tried, fleetingly, to meditate; her son, Andrew, the surgeon, had said about stress; but the tremendous pressure around her heart increased. The winter shoot was over and now they were gearing up for the summer shoot. Thirty days in the snow and sleet, mostly exterior shots. Madeleine had wanted landscape. Isobel had come from Toronto; she had a disturbing fragility, an odd, eerie edge Madeleine had not seen before. Or maybe it had always been there; maybe all the great actresses are fragile. But Isobel had been professional and strong and she’d carried the winter shoot. The rushes were everything Madeleine had hoped for. The landscape was stark and glittering white. She had been dead right about the cinematographer. She could hardly believe they’d got this far, she and the cinematographer, sidestepping ruin at every turn.

They did this on the Southern Shore back in the 1830s: two young men stole a priest’s collar and went up the Southern Shore hearing confessions.

It didn’t matter if they really did it; they couldn’t have really done it, but what a film. A claustrophobic community bandaged in snow squalls. And a girl is possessed by the devil.

There’s always a young virgin, and this one has streaming red hair and a white, white nightdress. A girl on a cliff in her nightdress, sleepwalking or fairy-led, the church bells rippling through the icy darkness.

And there is Archbishop Fleming! He comes from St. John’s to exorcise the old church bell and finds the girl, all wind-blown curls and shawl snapping in the gale. Isobel plays the girl’s mother; how Isobel commanded a scene, even without lines, everyone off set huddled around the monitors gripped by the simple arrogance of a woman in control of her craft. How Isobel makes the archbishop falter.

Madeleine has been haunted by the ghost of Archbishop Fleming ever since she read his letters in the Roman Catholic Archives — the rolling sentences, each clause stepping over the back of the last, blistering with vindictive ambition and scalding faith. They’d given her white gloves at the archives, and let her hold the actual letters in her hands. The paper was brittle. There was the old-man smell. Her heart would constrict in the middle of the night and she’d wake slathered in sweat, thinking, This is it, this is it. And she’d find Archbishop Fleming in the corner of her bedroom baring his yellow teeth like a dog. Once she dreamt he’d crossed the room, moonlight on the gold embroidery of his loose cream-coloured sleeve, and he put his pale, liver-spotted hand on her bare breast, and the pain receded. The pain left entirely and she woke rested and fresh. Sometimes it was just indigestion.

She had chosen a man for a doctor because despite her feminism — back in the late 1960s she had been on a floor of the Women’s Centre with twelve other women convulsed with laughter all trying to work a speculum and a hand mirror — she had chosen a man because the awful truth was she trusted a man more and now she gave him a look full of doubt and loathing. She was just her film and how much energy it would take to make it happen and she didn’t have time to argue with a doctor two decades younger than her. She needed to pass a physical in order to begin the summer shoot. Nobody would insure the film if the director had not passed the physical. The broadcasters wouldn’t release a cent.

My heart will hold up, she told him. She could unsettle and stir even a very young man by raising an eyebrow.

Stress is a determining factor, he said. He was rubbing his stethoscope against the inside of his thigh as if to get rid of some kind of static. His chair was on wheels and he pulled himself this way and that with his hand on the desk. He couldn’t seem to hold still.

You’re not a young woman, he’d said. He pulled himself a little closer to her with his heels on the tiles. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped before him, head bowed, as though lost in thought. Then he lifted his head and a lock of hair flopped into his eye. He ignored it.

You’re pushing your luck, he said. The casual gravity of his tone frightened her.

I know my own heart, she said, drawing herself up. He swivelled the chair suddenly and the castors battered over the tiles like a drum roll and he was at his desk ruffling the papers. He signed each form. She had wanted him to sign, but now that she heard him scribbling, it felt like a betrayal. He was casting her adrift. She was responsible for herself. He swivelled in his chair again and handed her the forms.

Must be some movie, he’d said. He turned his back on her and gathered up his papers and a plastic container of tongue depressors. He rose and slipped his pen into his shirt pocket and she saw he was wearing Birkenstocks. Grey wool socks and leather sandals. What had she done?

The film was all about the desolate, violent landscape and human triumph over nature, but it was also, in a much quieter, private way, about evil. A community in the grip of some religious fervour that had sprung out of the tyranny of mild, constant hunger and a giving over. The girl’s mother was a scapegoat the town would mercilessly devour. What a part! It demanded an actress of Isobel’s stature — an ageing beauty, a haggard temptress. Isobel’s cheekbones, her wide, full-lipped mouth — the strength in her face — an absorbing iconic face, the dark, heavy eyebrows, sooty lashes, almost masculine, except for a vulnerability you couldn’t put your finger on.

The cinematographer spent a long time getting the shadows right, her face becoming remote as marble and mesmerizing. The light struck her brow and cheekbones while she stood in a window, and it was a naked face. The church bell rang out in the middle of the night when there wasn’t a breath of wind. The priest dashing buckets of water over the bell, shouting incantations to rid it of whatever spirit had crawled inside. And there was Isobel, in candlelight, looking lost and alert.

It had taken Madeleine a lifetime to build the kind of career one had to have in order to pull off a feature. Investors saw at once that she could be trusted. These were the credentials she put forth when she argued in her head: I have never failed. I have never given up. I don’t take no for an answer. I’m a hard ticket.

The snow came and when Trevor Barker from the condo upstairs got in the elevator he smelled of snow and nighttime and childhood and lost love and she could smell the cold dripping wet titanium bicycle. They’d made small talk about the bike and keeping in shape. A titanium racing bike she’d seen him ride through snowdrifts going uphill. She had hardly noticed him all winter. But then he’d said about cooking for her. He was a man who enjoyed cooking. There were things he was willing to try. There were things he could do with sesame oil he was pretty certain she’d never tasted before. He had a way with fish, he’d said.

And here she was, their first date. She’d knocked on his apartment door and she heard something drop into a frying pan, something hissing and spitting and she could smell ginger. For a brief instant she thought of turning around. She thought of standing him up. But the door flew open and he was holding a champagne flute and there was bossa nova and the living room was blond and pine but not too much pine. The living room was inviting and she could see the definition in his arms.

The blondest thing in the room was his guitar.

It leaned against the bran sofa and it cried out to be played and she hoped he would not play it. It would be awful to watch him be overtaken with a special absorption, to watch his face go stiff with concentration. She did not want to be reminded that he was younger.

She was certain he had a secret and she didn’t want to know it. The last thing she wanted was to be implicated in some sticky moral rupture. She felt certain he was in a situation, he was just the right age for a situation, perhaps twenty years younger than her, and she hoped she had not been asked up here to listen.

She would indulge. She would pamper. She would cry out in ecstasy later on if things went that way, but she would not placate or console or absolve.

What she wanted was sweaty naked slippery fast slow deep hurtful tender altering sex with some Wagner in the background.

Wagner or the new Loretta Lynn.

She wanted to be drawn out, rapt, spanked. She wanted feathery touches and massage oil, handcuffs. She wanted to eat naked and she wanted him to feed her from his fork.

She hoped they would maybe smoke a joint. He drove the bike with such presence of mind. He was always on it and his body was without flaw. He was long-limbed and his shoulders were woody-looking and his clothes were new.

She had been paying attention to when he came and went throughout the winter, in a vague, distracted way — the way you watch a neighbour come and go. She heard him walk across the floor in the evening.

She could hear water running through his pipes and when his phone rang and his philosophical, turgid guitar. She had heard “Bridge Over Troubled Water” again and again.

She had seen him in the dark and at dawn. What she knew about him she’d read in the
Express
. He’d run a branding consultancy firm in New York. The sort of work one retires from early, he’d said. He was, according to the article, an enthusiastic supporter of the arts. He’d donated a ton of money to a local art project. Juvenile delinquents would paint murals all over the city. They didn’t say delinquents; what did they say? What was the word these days? Gloria Garland was co-ordinating. Gloria who was known for her clubbed seal pup paintings on silk, mostly grey paintings with splats of red, gushing blood, and her affair with a bank manager.