Degrees of Nakedness (6 page)

The guy is tanned and carrying a tennis racket. He mimes taking swings as he talks. He says, “Yeah, I was away studying giant clams, they weigh as much as fifty kilos. The shells don’t really shut all the way, you can stick your whole arm in there, it’s real fleshy. Isn’t it, honey?” he says to his girlfriend. “They’ll suck your whole arm for hours if you let ’em. The islanders say that clam flesh is an aphrodisiac, makes the adolescent penis grow or something. You know, they’re a small people down there, aren’t they, honey? They used to joke about how big I was, they said Barb must be a happy woman.”

Barb smiles up at him. Her mouth glitters, unexpectedly, with braces. “Oh, they thought Tony was real big.”

When Mike shuts the door, he says, “That cup could have killed me.”

I say, “Are you trying to break me?”

Then he gets a cloth from the kitchen and wipes the splattered coffee off the wall. Joan walks in at that moment, sees the broken cup and leaves.

When Mike and I make love, a blush comes into his cheeks and the tips of his ears. That’s my private colour for him, almost
plum. The first time we were together we were behind the row housing under criss-crossing clotheslines, white shirts laughing with their bellies. We were drunk and his tongue in my ear sounded like a pot of mussels boiling, the shells opening, the salty shells clicking off one another, a riot of tiny noises. I got the flu. He made a pot of tea: cinnamon, cloves, apple and orange chunks. The next day we made love in his new house, empty of furniture except for a couch, covered with satiny parakeets, belonging to the former owners. Streetlight poured in. A plastic bag of chicken breasts glowed on the floor where I’d dropped it. I had been swimming in a hotel pool that day where they sold paper bathing suits. I made Mike close his eyes, and I put on the damp suit, which smelled of chlorine and was indestructible.

Once Mike did a tour of a glass blowing factory. They chose him out of the tour group to do the blowing. When we first met he gave me an irregular perfume bottle with his breath caught in the bubbles. I’ve worn lilac since I was thirteen. When he took the stopper off, it surprised me that it smelled like myself. Lilac on the sanded wand he rubbed down my neck, sticky and warm. It was as if he had trapped all my years in a bottle, then tickled them down my neck. Now he wants to leave for a year, to work. I don’t want him to go. I need him here. I’m afraid of him leaving. It looks as though Joan and I will share an apartment if he leaves.

Today, around five, the doorbell buzzes and it’s Jill, a little girl who plays with Wiley. The street is full of squad cars. The police are putting on bullet proof vests. They take rifles and
guns out of the trunks of the cars and load them with bullets. A cop comes to the door. Pushing Jill from behind, he says, “Can she stay in there? She can’t go around the corner.”

I ask what’s going on, my voice shrill. The cop looks as if he’s going to answer me but then he turns away and trots down the street with the gun. A CBC van arrives. Some guy coming up the street says there’s a man in one of the houses around the corner with a gun. Princess Anne had been on George Street earlier in the day. I’d taken Wiley and a bunch of neighbourhood kids to see her. It must be a sniper who has run up from George Street. Wiley is on the concrete step of the house across the street, eating a supper of Jiggs dinner a neighbour has given him. The cop cars glitter between us and I say, “Get over here.”

“What about my supper?”

“Just get over here.” He comes over with the plate. I phone Jill’s mother, Maureen, to tell her Jill is with us. A cop answers the phone.

“Sergeant Peddle,” she says.

I say, “Can I talk to Maureen?”

She says, “I wish you could, but I can’t get her down. What do you want?”

I say I just wanted to tell her her daughter’s at my house, I’m a neighbour.

“The daughter’s at your house.” Sergeant Peddle hangs up.

I whisper to Mike, “The man with the gun is in Maureen’s house.”

We met Maureen through Wiley. Maureen’s a lesbian. We’ve never seen much of her partner, who’s a surgeon. They keep
pretty much to themselves, but since Joan moved in, she and Maureen have called each other every now and then to ask if the other would mind babysitting for half an hour.

After twenty minutes the cops pull away, but the CBC is still there with the cameras. Jill wants to go home. I phone Maureen. The phone rings for some time before she picks it up. I hear long sobs. I keep saying, “Maureen?” but she just sobs into the phone, no words. I tell her I’m Joan’s sister-in-law, and I say, “I have your daughter here.” She doesn’t say anything. I say, “Do you want me to come down?”

“Yes.”

The large glass window in the front door of Maureen’s house is smashed in. Broken glass covers the concrete steps. Inside, the plush carpet crunches with every step. I call out to her. In the hall, two framed paintings have been torn off the wall, the frames cracked in half. Maureen is in the kitchen with her head in her arms on the table. The window beside her is smashed. The contents of the fridge lie all over the floor, and the glass shelves have been torn out of it. Some kind of orange drink has been spilled on the floor, so as I walk across to the table my sneakers make a sound like ripping cotton. I put my arms around Maureen and put one hand over hers. I rub the back of her thumb with mine. I say, “Who was it? Who did this? Was there a man with a gun in here?” She shakes her head. “Was it your ex-husband?” She shakes her head.

I let go of her and turn on the kettle. I realize I don’t know her at all. There are three giant yellow tubs of margarine lying on their sides. It seems like an incredible amount of margarine.
I can’t believe how much damage there is. I think about the kind of rage it would take to sustain this much damage. I think about the damage the fire caused in Joan’s house. I feel very tired. It seems utterly still. I say, “Where’s your partner? Can I call her for you? Does your partner know this has happened?” The phone book is open beside Maureen. “Let me call your partner for you.”

Maureen raises her head. Her eyes are sunken and bloodshot from crying or alcohol. “This was my partner,” she says.

I sit down.

“This was your partner,” I repeat. “She did this. How did the cops get here?” I am afraid. The kettle whistles. “Where are the tea bags?” She points.

“She’s caused over twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of damage in the last three months. I’ve had to replace every window more than once. She won’t let me out. She won’t let me see anyone. She’ll be back, she’ll kill me tonight, I can’t get away from her. If she was a man I would have done something, I wouldn’t have put up with it. But it’s taken my mother so long to understand. How could I tell them?”

The breeze blows gently through the window. It is the sunniest day we’ve had in a long time. You can hear some of the music from the Canada Day celebrations. I ask about the cops.

“I was sitting on the front step and the glass showered down on top of me and I said by Jesus that’s the last time she’ll break a window in my house. When Tom, my neighbour, came through the door, I was in the process, I was proceeding to kill her. I said, Tom, call the cops, please. They came in and arrested her.”

Somebody knocks on the door. Maureen crumples.

“Please don’t let anyone in.”

I walk out over the glass. A man is standing outside. He says, “I’m with the CBC. Can you tell us what happened here? We heard someone was arrested.”

I say, “Well, it’s pretty insensitive to come around here right now, isn’t it?”

He says, “We don’t know what happened, that’s all.”

I say, “Nobody here’s going to tell you.” It strikes me how absurd it is to speak to him through the broken window without opening the door. Down the street, a man is pointing a camera at us.

Then Maureen and I drink the tea. We sit in silence until the phone rings. It’s Mike. He asks if everything is okay. He says he is going to order the kids a pizza. I say that sounds good. I tell Maureen Jill can sleep at our house. We get a broom and start to clean up. Maureen hauls out a big sheet of plastic she has for sealing broken windows.

When I get home, Joan is dressed in Mike’s tuxedo. She hasn’t heard anything about the incident on the street and is dressed to go to the strip joint. I expect the dancers to be ugly in some way, but they have beautiful bodies. They dance on a raised stage and the bottom of it is covered with mirror. I have never been in this bar before. They have ultra-violet lighting that seems to erase everything in the room except whiteness. The women wear white G-strings so their crotches glow as if they are floating. There’s a man in a dark suit and tie sitting at
the table in front of me. I glance up and see him in the mirrors around the bottom of the stage. The mirrors reflect him from the neck down; his head is above stage level. His white collar is glowing, sharply cut. At first glance, it looks like a headless body. I watch his hand in the mirror, lifting his Scotch and aiming it at the empty neck of his shirt.

Joan and I are loaded, walking home past the Anglican cathedral. She starts to cry. I never hug people. I’m not a very physical person. But I hug her suddenly. I draw her body into mine and I grab her hair in my fingers. It shocks me when I realize I have a fistful of her hair in my hand and it is the exact texture of my husband’s. She’s wearing one of my husband’s jackets over the tuxedo. The jacket is gold silk. It looks like a wedding band on him. It has started to rain on our way home, while Joan is crying. The rain falls in giant splotches on the quilted jacket, making it heavy and tarnished.

Meet Me in Sidi Ifni

L
ook for me in Sidi Ifni. I’m leaving the back yard. Those weeds you spent half the summer thrashing have returned unscarred, thicker, greener, and the perfume from them makes the air moist. They grew back when you stopped to have a bottle of pop. We can’t just stop like that.

These are the things I’m leaving. I’m leaving the toys all over the stairs. That magic wand with the glow-in-the-dark star sitting on the coffee table, so that if you walk into the living room at night it seems to float. The paperweight with the unicorn and the snowstorm you shake. It’s May and we haven’t taken down the Christmas wreath from the back door, but the stuffed dove is under the kitchen table on its back, beak open, claws stretched forward. I’m leaving my water colours in the cookie tin.

Once we made love in a blackout. There were brass candle holders in sluffing drifts of wax. At the bottom of Cathedral
Street cars swished their tails like lethargic crocodiles. Engines straining.

You said, I’ll blow out the candles.

The wicks curled to protect themselves, flared orange against your breath, then out.

You said, Over here on the chair.

A passing headlight gleamed on the worn rose brocade of the armchair, and where the covering is torn, the stuffing and a coiled spring, just by the inside of your wrist. The shadows of the rubber plants climbed across the ceiling like blind crustaceans, and crawled back into themselves when the car passed.

People will see, I said.

But the whole island is dark.

Saliva soaked, water colours bled from your fingers. Burnt sienna spine, cherries on my nipples, ink black strokes. My knees dug into the back corners of the chair around your waist. I rose and dropped over the wavelets of frost on the window like a mermaid. A horn honked. And honked and honked.

Never mind, you whispered, never mind.

I’m leaving the cockroaches in the shower on the dirty tiles and all the foreign coins we saved for parking meters.

Your daughter, who doesn’t know how to swim, almost choking me, terror-locks her arms around my neck. Her naked body shivers, lips bluish, she squeals in a shrill pitch. Then we look into each other’s eyes, our noses almost touching. I’m trying to make her remember me always. She opens her mouth suddenly and shrieks and bashes her fist in the water. Her magnetic letters on the fridge arrange themselves, HA HA HA.

I’m leaving on the train. The first train we rode together. Holding each other on the narrow cot, people on both the cots beneath us. The darkness squeezing down on the train so it vibrated, the vibration passing through us into our toes. The conductor shook his black ringlets when he ripped the morning sunshine through the curtain.

Sunlight falling through the slatted roof over the souks, striping the brass pots, diagonals over your face, your freckled arms. The snake charmer tipping the lid off the woven basket with his big toe. Earthy coloured pyramids of spice, a boy with a bright green lizard on his outstretched palm. Don’t forget the German toy maker who could find his way by facing the sun. His spectacles pressed into his flushed cheeks like teeth biting apples. The sturdy way he set down his feet, two puffs of dust. Dripping loops of dyed fabric, fuchsia, turquoise, the odour of urine, light piercing the loose weave.

I’m going to Sidi Ifni. I’m leaving the shadows from the venetian blinds on the kitchen table and the fridge that makes so much noise it sounds like a spaceship. I can’t wait all night for you to move. You survey the board with your eyes squinted up, your beer bottle cuddled near your crotch, and then with a gesture of triumph you shoot a bishop across the board and put your own king in check.

Look for me in Sidi Ifni. The Spanish conquered it. An old man pushes a wheelbarrow filled with sizzling donuts glazed and hissing like wasps. Remember him? The ocean barely lifts its lip. It behaves like a pond. I’ll hire the blue Mercedes with the miniature weather vane on the hood. The windshield is
cracked, and inside the car smells like American cigarettes.

I’ll leave from Tiznit, silver capital of the country. There’s a salesman there who claims he is the grandson of the chief of the caravan. He wears an Adidas jacket under his djellaba and accepts credit cards. I’ll leave in the middle of a festival, when the streets are squeezed full of people, shoulder to shoulder. Boys in tree branches, boiled eggs, mandarins in dusty plastic bags. Women with tambourines, singing from their throats, heads thrown back. They hold in the air gowns on crucifixes with bushes of mint stuffed in the necks. The dignitaries drive their cars over Persian carpets and are showered with rose petals.