Degrees of Nakedness (11 page)

You rent a video camera for Sally’s birthday. When the children have gone home we replay the afternoon. You with the cake. The camera sears a residue of candle light onto the tape, a
bluish streak that floats over your shoulder like a streamer. The last line of “Happy Birthday” sounds almost melancholic, baritone. The other children, and their pointed party hats and kazoos, become brownish silhouettes as Sally bends over the cake. Her lips gleam. Her crimson cheeks can’t get enough breath to blow out the candles, the flames like punching clowns bouncing back, gilding her tangled hair.

In the evening I come into the bedroom and you’ve set up the monitor with the video camera pointed at the bed. The room on the screen is hot, yellowish, textured with fuzzy dots. I take off my clothes. You zoom in tight so my skin fills the screen like sand dunes. You zoom out and I turn my bum toward the camera, lift my leg. I turn myself every way. You take off your clothes and sit down beside me. The molecules of our skin are vibrating.

You say, I’ll do something about the colour.

I like the colour.

Tentatively, we touch each other, watching the screen. It takes a second for my hand to find you because you are closer than you appear.

I say, Is this thing running?

You say, Let’s tape it, we’ll erase it after.

At first the whir of the camera fills the room. You press my legs open in the direction of the lens, watching the monitor over your shoulder.

Then we make love, forgetting the camera.

Afterwards we watch it. For a long time you were bent with your head between my legs, the skin of your back shimmering. The only movement visible for several minutes is my knee entering the screen slowly and dropping away. Then my arms come up around your hips, move over your hips, my fingers spread on your back. It looks like a varnished oil painting, age disintegrating the image.

Our sex broken down into grains of pure colour, drawn through the blue eye of the camera, a private constellation of us, sticking to the magnetic tape. No sound.

You say, It comes from having sex with the same person for so long. That gentleness.

Walking up Victoria Street at night, headlights separate my shadow into several separate bodies that drop away from each other like a chain of paper dolls joined at the hands, all sliding sideways over each other, over the clapboard. The car roaring uphill and zooming away, the silhouettes becoming one at the toes of my shoes. All the possibilities coming into existence and dropping away with each step.

I think of having another baby. Perhaps our life would spill over. Perhaps we could no longer contain our life. Today I dropped Sally at day care and she cried to break her heart. I had to pry her fingers off my leather jacket to run out the door. But then I think, in the future I’ll regret not having another child. I will not understand whatever crooked path of thought led me to deciding I didn’t want another one.

Carol’s laughter is like spraying champagne suppressed by a thumb. It’s her turn to cook. She’s in the kitchen beneath us dancing the knife over the onions, toe-heel-toe-heel. Slow first, like Anthony Quinn in
Zorba the Greek
, then faster, red pepper, banana pepper, the seeds burning her lips, the cleaver juicy. The onions slip into the hot oil.

There you are in the mirror of the wardrobe, the door swinging open. Milky light flashing over you like a waterfall. You bend one knee coyly, cover your genitals with your hands, mock femininity. The light rippling over your white long limbs. You’re standing in a giant clamshell of laundry. You turn from the mirror with a big bobbing cock.

From the window I can look down on the back yard. Sally and some friends run through the front door — slam — the paddywhacks of their feet slapping the linoleum — slam — the back door, squeals with the garden sprinkler, they’ve turned on the sprinkler — like the giant feather fans eunuchs wield in old Hollywood movies about harems. Beads of silvery light, some red, some blue, languidly swaying on the children — Sally, three, is naked, except for the fur of cut grass that has stuck from the waist down, half goat/half child. The wind lifts her purple straw hat an inch off her head, it’s tied under her chin. You’ve cut my initials in the grass with the lawn mower, big block letters. Sally dives into the Big Bird wading pool, it makes a yellow blush on her body, like when you hold a buttercup under your chin. She splits the stagnant skin of water, dead bugs, cut grass. I want another child. Do you hear me? Soon it will be too cold for the sprinkler.

Downstairs the kettle whistles and Carol tells Kyle to wash his feet under the hose before he comes in. Carol has formed herself around her son the way a pearl grows around a grain of sand. Kyle has become handsome. His skin is dusky, a mole on his cheek, thick sooty lashes. Carol’s told me this story more than once. She noticed the silence behind her. She turned, her wrist falling loose with the knife. There was Kyle with a plastic bag over his head, an egg of hollow plastic drawn into his mouth, his face blue, blue. She thought he was already dead because he wasn’t moving.

She holds her hands out in front of her, elbows on the table, gargoyle claws.

I clawed it off his face, she says. I clawed it off. Tears start in the corners of her eyes. Her hands are still out in front of her. She draws them back, laughs, rubs them together.

Sometimes when we are having sex, a lost afternoon from months ago, or years, will creep over my skin. It’s visceral, the way a flatfish draws shades and patterns from the sand it floats over. Grainy blushes, they’re gone before I can speak them.

That perfume salesman in Toronto, crouching at the corner of Yonge and Bloor. He’s talking, opening cases, a loose crowd tightening around him like a shrinking sweater. He rips the lid off a stolen carton; inside, the dark gold bottles sit in cardboard pockets, like honey in a honey comb. The weave of the crowd is tight as tweed, his pants are tight across the muscles of his thighs. His shoes squeak, you can see the teeth marks of the comb in his thick, oiled black hair. Then two cops are pushing through the crowd, half jogging through the traffic. The crowd
turns back to the perfume salesman, but the circle of sidewalk where he was standing is empty, as if we had gathered tight around a lost possibility. That afternoon comes to me, we had walked all day, the wind making our cheeks smart. I want to grab your wrists and say, What afternoon am I thinking of? I’m convinced you’d know.

Or you would say, Sally standing on a chair wiping wide circles of condensation from the patio window. Mommy, make me a pumpkin. Her palm squeaking against the glass, the erased circle of condensation forming a halo around her. A wet slice of her red tricycle through the wiggly finger trails on the glass. Shrivelled pumpkins, their mouths puckered as if they have lost their teeth.

I catch the waterfall of mirror as the door swings and you’re standing in a pile of laundry, naked, your cock standing out from your body. The sun is sinking red, and when I turn from the window the room seems dark. The wardrobe door winches like splintering wood, dry wood cracked over a knee. The day is over.

I’m sitting with a cup of cold coffee. Your cock bobs, you walk right over and stick it in my mouth, your hand gentle on the back of my hair. There’s a stirring in the corner of the room. A panting. It’s the husky. The white husky we’re taking care of for the neighbours. We’re startled to stillness but the dog gets to its feet, an ovation, its pink tongue, thirsty. When your come — slam — the back door — Jesus you’ve got water all over the floor — hits the back of my — slam the front door —
throat, I’m still holding the coffee cup in the air, prissy, stiff, as if a waiter will come by to fill it.

I turn my head and the sun is down now, down. A red ray comes through the window and catches in the edges of the husky’s coat. Gold nettles and burrs are snagged in his white fur as if he has been galloping, chasing through the underbrush of our sex.

Ingrid Catching Snowflakes
on Her Tongue

I
ngrid moves around the kitchen. The shadows of the leaves flow over her like a home movie; the shadows on the linoleum lap at the toes of her boots. The cutlery rattles. She’s laying down forks and knives. I’m putting down plates. My husband, Mike, and Ingrid used to live together. They were together for three years. They were both single parents when they met, barely twenty. But I knew her before he did. I’ve just remembered this. I knew her, from a distance, in the summer of grade five, before anything had happened to either of them.

She was the girl in the yellow bathing suit. Competitive water-skiing. I’d seen her take the ramp. I didn’t know her name, but I knew who she was. Her yellow suit would shoot off the ramp, an erratic jerk, as she caught her balance. She could make everybody’s stomach lift with her. The spank as she hit the water. A curt wave to everyone on the beach, cut
short by a grab for the wooden handle. The guys in the boat went so fast they stippled the surface, making it like an unpaved road. She was as rigid and concentrated as a man with a jack-hammer.

I was afraid of water-skiing so my parents bought me Jesus boots. A giant Styrofoam boat for each foot. Bungling to a standing position, my legs slipping away from each other, I’d catch Ingrid out of the corner of my eye. On the other side of the lake she was so small she seemed to be standing still, loitering.

Now she smokes, is languid. Her chuckle is like cola pouring from a plastic bottle. But she still has an athlete’s body, angular, broad-shouldered, lean.

Once, when she was in the bath, she flexed the muscles in her leg for me, the water slurping as she lifted her leg straight into the air and moved her fingers down the back of her thigh.

“These muscles are my favourite, see the definition?”

I could see three ripples, drops criss-crossing through the wiry gold hair on her calves.

She had glued seashells around the edge of the old-fashioned tub. A mask, snorkel and flippers hung from the pipes. Three melon scented candles made the steam as yellow as smoke. Several squares of coloured glass lined the window ledge.

The coloured glass is from the apartment on Jasper Street where Ingrid lived when my husband was in love with her. It was no small love, I know that much. Sometimes when she’s
visiting, my throat constricts with jealousy. It’s not that I think they’re still in love. I’m jealous of when they were.

I like sitting on the staircase listening to our house. The gravelly voice of the coffee maker in the kitchen, something metal turning over in the dryer, the ebbing of canned laughter from behind a bedroom door on the third floor. Mike’s daughter Mary rubbing against the tub, flaccid splashes. The house is a skeleton and our moods surge along the wiring, spilling through the pipes, circulating like currents of heat. Living under the same roof with someone else shapes you both, the way liquid takes the shape of its container.

Ingrid’s old apartment building on Jasper Street was demolished recently. I was there when the construction workers started. The face was pried away; it fell onto the street with a ringing slap. The other walls were left standing for a while. Rain streamed down the wallpaper; seals with beachballs in Gabe’s room, raised velvet in Ingrid’s.

It was like a theatre set. I stood on the sidewalk, listening to the rain drum on a doorless fridge. I thought of the noises that used to be there — vegetables sliding into hot cooking oil, magnetic letters slipping down the fridge door when it slammed, her rowing machine, Mike’s typewriter, the scratchy needle on the record player, the sound of their sex.

My husband had a new daughter, Mary. He was taking her for three days a week. You could see your breath on cold days in the apartment. The wiring was dangerous. Ingrid and Mike put plastic over all the windows, holding a hair dryer over it to
shrink it tight. A trace of kerosene in the air from the heater they dragged from room to room.

Mike’s told me that sometimes the babies cried all night, Mary starting to cry when Gabe was finally exhausted. Mike’s only escape was to take a bath. Or he would go to the corner store, lean on the freezer holding a slice of bologna in wax paper, and watch the snow fall.

He’d put Gabe and Mary in his eiderdown army jacket and zip it up. They’d sleep like that, Gabe’s blond curls tangled with Mary’s straight black hair.

Once both the children were playing on the kitchen floor while Mike was chopping turnip. He lifted the knife dramatically over his shoulder and the blade flew out and stuck in the cupboard between the children’s heads. Another time a garbage truck backed over the children’s toboggan, just as Gabriel had rolled away from it, crushing the curved wooden lip under the back tires. The children would often bite each other until they broke the skin. Ingrid breast fed Gabriel even after he was able to ask for booby. Sometimes she breast fed Mary.

When Ingrid drops by and Mike is in the kitchen, sometimes they’ll talk about these memories and shake their heads with quiet astonishment. When they talk about that time they become almost shy of each other.

I go up to the bathroom to make sure Mary has rinsed all the shampoo out. Her hair is pressed against the water like licorice ropes in a glass jar, her body submerged to the neck in the shallow bath, her eyes closed. She looks like Snow White in the
glass casket. For the first time I see her breasts are growing, small buds. Without opening her eyes she crosses her arms over her chest and says, “What do you think you’re staring at?”

I bend a strip of the venetian blind, clear a spy hole in the condensation with my finger. Mike is coming down the street with an armload of groceries.

Ingrid concealed her pregnancy. She was working in a secondhand bookstore. One day she didn’t show up for work, the next day she came in with a baby boy. No one had guessed. No one knew who the father was, there weren’t even any rumours.

She doesn’t talk about her family much. They live in Alberta and they haven’t spoken to her since Gabriel was born. Ingrid’s careful with the small amount of money she lives on. She buys things rarely, but when she does it’s something that will last. Quality. An English duffle coat of navy felt with bone buttons for Gabe. A cutlery set with heavy mother of pearl handles she found in a second-hand shop. Sometimes two months or more will go by when she can’t pay the rent. She’s been evicted. Has had her heat cut off. On winter nights we’ve gone for long walks and she’s pointed out places she has lived in.