The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (16 page)

There's a dried squirt of breast milk on my computer screen. I wipe it away with the tip of my finger and saliva, the pixels magnified in the wet streak. The way my husband, Jason, talks to our new son: Oh, the saucy thing, the
saucy
thing. Jason can't get enough of him.

Mina will be here soon, I say.

She'll eat him up, Jason says.

Mina, in Paris, about to miss her flight home for Christmas. She has to find an elevator, a moving sidewalk underground, swinging doors on the left. Forget
that
. She drags the luggage cart outside and crosses the four-lane highway between the two wings of the airport.

EXT. AIRPORT RUNWAY - DAY

A plane is taxiing away from Mina, who is
running through a blizzard. She stops and
waves her red wallet over her head. The plane

stops like a sluggish animal, a crocodile,
the staircase falling open like a jaw. The
attendant steps out into the snow in a short-sleeved
white blouse and navy skirt.

Bergman has said about writing a script, “All in all, split-second impressions that disappear as quickly as they come, forming a brightly colored thread sticking out of the dark sack of the unconscious. If I wind up this thread carefully a complete film will emerge, brought out with pulse-beats and rhythms characteristic of just this film.” I think about how so much of a good story seems to happen elsewhere, off the canvas or screen or page, in Europe or a backwater New Brunswick town, in what is left unsaid. A word on the tip of the tongue, ungraspable. The teasing smush of a feather boa over naked breasts in a striptease. Mina is ten years younger than me, and is rarely jealous of her husband, Yvonique. It's New Year's Eve, a dinner party at Mina's. Her necklace has broken and she's trying to fix it.

Mina: I can't believe this. Can you believe this? I loved this necklace.

Yvonique asks the baby, Do you know what Coco Chanel says? When you walk into a room,
think
champagne,
feel
champagne,
be
champagne. But of course, you will be carried into the room. The same rules apply.

He talks to the infant with an ease that suggests an affinity between them I can't imitate. Anything I say to the baby sounds studied or, when I'm overwhelmed by the fact of him, maudlin. Yvonique rips a bottle of champagne from an ice
bucket and tells us one judges the quality by the size of the bubbles (the tinier the better) and their plenitude. They must taste crisp and clean.

I think
plenitude
is one of those words that only gets spoken by someone whose native tongue isn't English. I want to say this, but I'm afraid of offending him. Yvonique becomes shy at unpredictable moments, blushing dark red, his earlobes the darkest, his gold earring seeming to brighten.

Jason says, Can you taste a bubble?

Yvonique: Oui. But of course.

He reaches over the fireplace for a machete, which he unsheathes from a tooled leather case hanging by a gold braid and tassel. He places the bottle on its side with the neck sticking over the edge of the dining table and runs the blade of the machete around the glass so it whistles eerily.

Mina: He's bluffing, he doesn't know how to do that!

Yvonique lifts the bottle and cleanly slices the glass with the machete so champagne gushes over his upturned face and open mouth for a moment before he fills the crystal flutes on the sideboard. We have finished the second course and there is a pause.

In the kitchen Mina has thrown out Yvonique's roux. We hear a spat of bitter words.

She says, But I thought you were done with it.

Jason and I sit at the table waiting for the main course. The other guests have left the table to smoke. The baby is nursing. We sit for a long time in the empty room.

Jason says, What colour are these walls?

Wedgwood blue, I say.

Someone in another part of the house turns on some music. Apocalyptica —
Plays Metallica by Four Cellos
— so loud that the ornaments on the Christmas tree vibrate. Then it's turned down, and then off. The whole house is silent. Outside, the city is covered in a quick, brief snowfall.

Jason says, Maybe we should order out.

Yvonique kicks the swinging door open, holding a platter of lamb studded with wizened apricots. We eat and exclaim how good it is, but afterward Yvonique seems disappointed. He says, Has nobody noticed the flavour of green tea?

The dessert arrives with a young Australian woman: a President's Choice tiramisu with a tartan ribbon around the rim.

I want to catch the dessert on fire, says Mina, all season I've been lighting desserts on fire.

I ask the Australian what she does.

I can't tell you, it sounds too pretentious.

Oh, go ahead.

I'm a digital artist.

INT. DOWNTOWN CAFE - DAY

Mina is sitting in a fat armchair near the
window looking out onto Water Street. She is
speaking to her girlfriend. The waitress
brings them lattes in tall glasses with long
spoons. It's lunchtime, and at first Mina is
distracted by the passing lawyers and
teenagers.

MINA
Do you know what Yvonique said, that
he developed my palate. Can you
believe that?

YOUNG WOMAN
He roasts a mean duck.

MINA
Like I'm trailer trash.
(giggles)
It's true.

YOUNG WOMAN
Me too. I'm trailer trash too.

MINA
Lay it here, sister.
(they slap hands in the air)

YOUNG WOMAN
But don't you love him?

MINA
We were both coming out of heavy
relationships and we agreed not to
get emotionally involved. But the
sex was so good. So good. We just
kept going like that, a month, two
months. This was Paris. Then I told
him I cared if he slept with someone
else.

We hear Mina's voice while watching her run
through a sparse birch forest. She's wearing
a white cotton dress and white sneakers, she
is running very fast. Her feet hardly touching
the ground, sunlight crashing through the
overhead branches, she is just a blur.

MINA (V.O.)
That's what we agreed we'd say if we
found ourselves getting emotionally
involved. I care if you sleep with
someone else. And he said,
run
. Just
that one word,
run
. I wrote it on a
piece of paper in big block letters
with a highlighter at work. RUN. I
just stared at the word. I kept it
on my desk for a long time. It would
turn up under a pile of books. It
was my father all over again.

After midnight on New Year's Eve the digital artist and Yvonique got lost in the crowd on the waterfront. They fell into a snowbank together, kissing.

Everyone did ecstasy, Mina says, it happens.

And that doesn't bother you, I ask.

She's sucking the last bit of meat from a lobster claw.

Not
really
. She thinks for a minute, wipes her lips with the back of her hand. I mean, if it
meant something
I guess it would bother me. I
guess
it would bother me if it meant something. I'm not sure.

Jason and I sit with the car warming up in the parking lot of the Avalon Mall, Cuban music on the radio. I think of a tropical ravine we passed once, in a tourist bus, and a band that came out and played at a dusty bus stop at ten o'clock in the morning, an hour outside Havana. There was a corrugated roof of green plastic and the musicians wore white straw hats and white pants that looked green under the shelter. Jason bought an orange. How charged the musicians were. I had licked a drop of orange juice before it dripped off Jason's chin. I think of the possibility of him kissing someone else in a snowbank, just kissing. It would bother me.

Mina tells us while we're eating that she smuggled the cheese through Customs.

She says, It's illegal outside of France, unpasteurized cheese, it's a problem with the EU. The other countries want to ban it. But the French, you can imagine how they feel. They're so passionate.

Jason lays his fork on his plate, wipes his mouth with a serviette. I put down my fork.

I say, I'm breastfeeding you know, there could be anything in that.

Mina says, We used to give our hens lobster shells and the yolks would be bright red. Bright red yolks in a cast iron skillet. Too bad this film isn't about a red insect.

She's fastening a necklace with a pendant of medicine-blue beach glass.

Fold your limbs like an insect, I say. Mina raises her arms to the back of her neck, elbows jutting. The green velvet dress she got married in.

Lean into the mirror and put on lipstick, I say.

I'm getting all this on video, then I capture stills on the computer, print them. Twenty-four pictures for one second of film. I'll loop the clip of the lipstick moving over her mouth. During the twenty-four frames her eyelids droop and close, then open. An amber ring on her finger fires a sparkle of light in frame twelve. A bar of sunlight moves over her nose and across one cheek. I'll colour the background with oil pastels, lime green, lemon, emerald, an ocean of grass.

Jason looks at the print I've tacked to the wall over the computer. He says, Mina O'Leary could be a movie star.

You think?

She has that kind of face.

Mina says, I wrote a novel while I was in France. But I used too many words. I'd rather a novel with fewer words.

Shorter, you mean?

Not necessarily shorter.

What was it about?

It was about — she looks up from her beer and adjusts the collar of her jacket, a big, distant smile as if the novel is unfolding in front of her and she likes it.

Just then a Scottish swim team crowds through the door with a blast of snowy wind. Snow on their shoulders and caps. One of them, a man with a beard full of ice and steamed glasses, interrupts Mina, begins a conversation about trade unions. The singer is doing Bruce Springsteen, snapping her fingers and tapping one foot. When she's finished she scans the audience with her hand over her eyes.

She says, I'd like my bass player to come on up, unless he's taking a leak.

She tells a filthy joke and the whole bar groans. Mina takes a notebook from her purse, writes something, tears off the page and gives it to the Scottish swimmer, who balls it up and swallows it. She laughs and lays her hand on his cheek. The team has gathered around her and they all raise their pints and give a cheer.

I say, I'm surprised anyone would tell a joke like that.

Mina's eyes narrow.

She says, I'm not surprised at all. I've seen her tend bar at the Spur, not that I go there.

All of the joy from flirting with the swim team vanishes. She is grimly considering the singer.

Finally she says, I'm not that keen on other women.

Green things. Lantern glass, John Steffler mentions. Escapes.

INT. ABSTRACT SPACE - DAY

Mina hammers another lobster, the crackling
of shells. She's talking to her friend. Her
face is full of the memory she's describing.

MINA
He took me up in his arms in the
middle of the night. A drop fell
from the eave onto my forehead, and
that's how I woke. I was about
eight, too old to be carried. He
walked over the field of snow for a
long time and into the woods. We
hadn't seen him for months maybe, or
days, I don't know. We got to a
clearing, and there was an eclipse
of the moon. It turned red. The moon
was red, a bright red yolk.

Mina thinks Liv Ullman's face is grotesque.

She says, Her lips are so puffy, her cheeks, bone structure. Her face bugs me. But she's beautiful too. A face can be beautiful and grotesque by turns.

The thing about beauty, says her husband, it's mostly anticipation and memory.

Somehow, when she was in France, Mina met Yvonique, a very, very rich man who was working as a bicycle courier. He had wanted to try out work, and he'd enjoyed it, liked winding through traffic in black spandex, lithe and rubbery as a stick of licorice. His bike was so light he could lift it with his pinky. She married him and brought him home. I met him for the first time at a party. He was handing out tiny drinks called lemon drops, which you toss over the tongue. After three of these the black and white tiled floor karate-chopped my knees. I demanded of Yvonique that we become blood brothers. He took up a paring knife from the counter, wet with lemon juice and pulp, and cut his thumb. I cut my thumb, felt the sting of lemon, and we staggered around the crowded kitchen, yelling and holding each other up by our joined thumbs. Mina helped me home, through Bannerman Park, where the trees lay down on their sides and the moon shot through the air like a high bouncer, crazy zigzags. There was no hangover the next morning. It was as though the party hadn't happened. It made me think their marriage couldn't last.

INT. A COMMUNITY HALL - NIGHT

The hall is crowded for a turkey-tea. A HANDSOME
MAN in a cowboy hat sits alone on the
stage playing a guitar and singing “Your
Cheating Heart.” Nobody listens.

HANDSOME MAN
Thank you very much, thank you. Now
I'd like to invite my daughter Mina
up here with me for a duet we've
been practising together.

An eight-year-old Mina dressed in frilly pink
with a bow in her hair walks onto the stage
and the room goes silent.

EXT. AIRPORT RUNWAY - DAY

Eight-year-old Mina, in the frilly pink dress
and bow from before, stands on an empty runway
in a blizzard. The sound of roaring
planes, descending. She looks up into the
storm trying to decide which way to run. We
hear adult Mina speak and the roar subsides.

MINA
I got a phone call while I was in
Ottawa at a swimming competition.
They told me there was a call. I was
watching through a big glass window,
girls from all over Canada, diving
into the pool. The way they entered
the water with hardly a splash. My
aunt told me I had to come home, I
had to be on the next plane. I knew
he'd died somewhere, probably drunk.
That I'd never see him again.