The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (28 page)

First of all, Philip doesn't believe in anything. He believes strongly in not believing in anything. He believes Eleanor's whole problem is that she wants so desperately for there to be a
right
way. She has been too chicken-shit to shed this last vestige of her Catholic upbringing: the desire for a universal moral code, which, once understood, leaves only the small matter of putting it into practice. If he were to believe in something, it would be: admit what you want; get what you want. This line of action requires great stores of bravery. Apparently it's not as easy as it sounds. But to do otherwise, Philip believes, sets in motion a whole chain of actions and events which totally fucks up not only your life but everyone's life with whom you come in contact. To do otherwise is to act dishonestly.

There is something so blazing and committed about this baldly self-centred stand that Eleanor loves him all the more for it. She refuses to love him less. He's stuck with her. He is what she wants.

Eleanor goes back out on the lawn. Glenn Marshall is where she left him. She'll tell Glenn Marshall about the Taj Mahal, the warm marble and smell of feet. They'd seen a man levitate in front of the Taj Mahal.

But Glenn loves Newfoundland. He doesn't like heat, prefers cool weather. He wouldn't want to be on top of the Pink Palace with lithe monkeys. She has told him before, she suddenly remembers. She has told him that story before, about the
Bollywood movie. Glenn Marshall had been mildly interested. He had listened, but he shook his head and said he'd never go there. Why would he? He loves Newfoundland. As if there were just the two choices: the Taj or Little Island Cove. He loves being in the woods by himself, he has a cabin, can build a leanto, set snares; he does some ice fishing, he likes the quiet.

Who is she kidding, she could never love Glenn Marshall. But if she slept with him. Maybe if she slept with him. Things can change overnight. The entire city of Stockholm, was it? Driving on the other side of the road as though they always had.

Frank Harvey says, And I had an epiphany, alone in Bannerman Park on a Sunday afternoon. I realized it was
okay
to be an asshole. I rushed out to tell my wife about the affairs I'd had, you see, I had already forgiven myself.

What was Glenn Marshall's most erotic moment without touching? Eleanor can only think of the galloping moose. He had kissed her on New Year's Eve and said, How do you like a moustache?

Ted says, Constance sent me flowers in the middle of a rainstorm — someone announced it over the intercom at the bookstore. I was in the back room tearing off the covers of old Harlequin romances. A big box of white roses.

Ivory, says Constance.

The salesgirls falling all over themselves to find a card, says Ted.

The first night Eleanor slept at Philip's apartment; walking up the steep hill from Kibitzer's, broken beer bottles glittering by the curbs, someone's white bedsheets flapping on a line. She walked under the sheets, the damp cotton stiff with frost when it brushed over her face. She turned to watch him, a big hand bashing through, the clothespins pinging into the air, and then the rest of him tumbling, falling. They were twenty-one and he had a three-year-old daughter. A light came on in the row of public housing, then another. They were rolling down the hill in the sheet. Grass, mud, stones, sky, stars. The sheet wrapped around them like a cocoon they wriggled out of together.

A snowy afternoon at four o'clock; walking past the war memorial with his three-year-old child on her shoulders, Eleanor counting change for a block of cheese. They had the macaroni already. They were a family overnight, some sort of family. The change in her hand just enough! The child's shiny red boots hanging beneath her chin. Dusk swooping down on Duckworth Street, the second-hand bookstore still lit. Slush seeping into her boots. Holding tight to the child's ankles. Later, the steam rising from the pot in the kitchen, she and the child painted fish on the clear plastic shower curtain. The who-she-was disappearing fast, gobbled by the who-she-is.

Frank Harvey says his wife went insane with jealousy when he told her about the affairs.

I've avoided women like that ever since, jealous women. I can smell it, and if I get even the faintest whiff, I'm gone a
hundred miles in the other direction.

He sounds so right, Eleanor thinks. She vaguely understands that everything Frank Harvey says is informed by the year of silence he spent in a monastery in Korea. Frank Harvey, the mime, had not spoken for an entire year of his life. It helped, he'd said, that no one spoke English. Cut down on the desire to blurt, he'd said. You come to understand the sublime beauty of chitchat, the fragmentary, absurd, chaotic, feral meaninglessness of everything we say. Whatever else about Frank Harvey, he is a talented mime. He can do the glass wall thing, of course, and the Michael Jackson moonwalk, but he can also run on the spot in slow motion as if he were being chased in a nightmare, his bones melting, and then he is caught and devoured by some unnameable monster you can almost smell. He can hold invisible animals in his hands, quelling their struggles for escape. She loves how convincing Frank Harvey is. Convincing is the thing to be, Eleanor decides; it doesn't matter what you're convincing about.

I came to love talk, Frank Harvey says, I live for it. And I learned how to tell a joke, he says. You must never telegraph the laugh. Let the material do the work. The best joke I ever told, I waited a year to deliver the punch line.

What was the joke, Tiffany White asks. Tiffany is a bright, new nurse who has arrived from Thunder Bay. Eleanor realizes she is taking Frank seriously.

That was the joke, says Frank Harvey. You didn't get it?

What was?

The joke was it took a year to tell the joke.

Frank turns back to Eleanor. We parted after that, he says, speaking of his wife. There was nothing left to salvage.

It's some Buddhist idea of Frank's, Eleanor thinks, we can't possess each other. We shouldn't even want to. She has an ache in her chest as if she had been Frank Harvey's wife, the one he had cheated on a thousand million times. She wants to defend herself against his airtight argument, that jealousy is vile. What kind of man doesn't talk for a year?

Constance takes a tray of honey garlic meatballs from the oven. The woman with the blond ponytail is sitting next to Philip. Amelia Kerby from British Columbia doing a PhD on Canadian ecofeminist novels. A gold lame dress: she had met Leonard Cohen in Greece, had somehow gotten invited into his limousine as it pulled away from a concert. Fans tearing open their blouses and squashing their breasts against the car windows as they pulled out of the garage.

She says, I put my hand on his crotch, he was wearing black leather pants, and the sun through the window made the leather hot. I couldn't help myself.

Eleanor: Your hand on his crotch, that's not without touching. It's supposed to be an erotic moment without touching.

The first night she and Philip slept together, he was sitting in an armchair and she sat on the frayed arm, in a homey downtown bar.
The Last Tango in Paris
was playing on a snowy screen bolted above the bar. Brando with the butter. Maria Schneider, those breasts. Empty apartment. The French are forever living in empty rooms with high ceilings and open windows, curtains.

Sadie's boyfriend, Maurice, has such an apartment. He wanders around it all day with a glass of something, and sighs, and writes something down, and wanders around the apartment some more. For this he gets a fair bit of money. As far as Eleanor can tell, that's all he does, but Eleanor doesn't speak French, so. Schneider's heels clattering on the tiles, the butter. The last movie ever about pleasure, expansive, extravagant, expensive, anger-incited, dangerous pleasure. Or pain. She isn't sure now.

At night in a hotel in Southern India, Bangor, monsoon rains drilling rivets in the corrugated tin roof, a week after the movie shoot; Sadie shook her awake. Sadie had opened her diary to an empty page. She was running her fingers through her hair and lice fell onto the clean paper. All those drowning dancers had lice.

We have them now, Sadie said.

Long shiny black ropes of hair floating in the aqua water, covering Eleanor's face and arms as she dragged the drowning dancers to the poolside after each shot.

You have them, said Eleanor. I don't have them.

The next day they were at a train station. Eleanor went to buy a drink and the train started to pull away without her. It was halfway out of the station gathering speed. Sadie's voice from a dark window, already in the white sun of the countryside, Jump on, jump on.

Eleanor ran and a soldier in khakis with a rifle leaned out of the last car and offered her his hand. He pulled her aboard,
and she yelled into the countryside, rice fields flashing in the sun, I'm on the train, Sadie. Then she sat down on a sack of grain and hung her head, feeling her fast-beating heart and, at the nape of her neck, the crawling lice.

Eleanor opens her eyes and pulls the heel of her sandal slowly out of the mud. She has been out on the lawn most of the afternoon. She can feel the heat of a late summer sunburn. She turns, looks up at the bedroom window.

Constance and Ted have disappeared. And this is Ted's story, she thinks. His stepfather woke him with the tip of a kitchen knife pressing into his windpipe when he was fourteen. Ted inching his back up the wall, his palms squeaking against the floral wallpaper, until he's standing on tip-toe, the knife pressing hard into his throat. The most terrifying moment.

Ted says, My father died when I was three. After my stepfather arrived we weren't allowed in my mother's bedroom. That's why I let the children sleep with us whenever they want. They just pile in, all four of them and the dog. Constance can't stand it.

She hasn't seen Ted or Constance for an hour or more. They must be making love. Consummating the marriage. All the guests on the lawn filling their faces. The wedding dress on the hardwood floor, a sinking angel food cake.

Ted's brother Earl, a hulking rugby player, leans over the railing of the verandah, a champagne glass in his giant ginger-root hands, as delicate and incongruous as an icicle. Earl had gone to
New Brunswick with his wife after a bankruptcy; he had five children. He worked in a cola factory for a time and was electrocuted while moving an industrial appliance. Enough electricity to lift him off his feet, blow him across the floor, and smash him against the wall. The moment you came closest to death.

He says, I lived because I kept my eyes open. If I'd closed my eyes I would have completed the circuit, and self-combusted, and this is the truth of what happened, whether it's scientifically true or not.

When Earl recovered he bought himself a small wooden table where he could sit and write poetry. He wrote several poems every day and understood his interest to have been ignited by the bolt of electricity. He called Constance late at night and read her the poems long distance, and she boxed up all her Eliot and mailed it to him.

Eleanor has imagined, ever since she first heard the story, that the electrical bolt had blown through Earl, back into his past, powering the restaurant he ran, the jobs he gave all his friends, including Eleanor (who once dropped a bowl of cod chowder down the back of another waitress), reached all the way back to the moment when his stepfather held a knife to Ted's throat, and protected Ted in a web of blue crackly light. Because Earl, with his near seven-foot height and boulder chest, wasn't a talker. Ted did the philosophy degree; Chad, the youngest, roamed the country with his thumb, became a clothing designer; and Earl protected, just as he was doing now, leaning on the verandah, the glass tipped, his eyes squinted against the glare of the lake.

Eleanor says, What do you think grace is, Glenn?

She's thinking, if she could attain grace, even for a moment, everything would fall into place. The scenes of her film script would snap together like a Rubik's cube, the scales would fall from her husband's eyes, and he would recognize how lucky he was to have her; Frank Harvey would return to his wife, or at least call and tell her she had been right all along. All women would be right. Glenn is watching Earl too. He doesn't speak until Earl turns and walks through the screen door, holding his fingertips against the wood frame so it doesn't bang.

Below Constance's bedroom window, the sunroom window. She sees a white streak that might be Philip's shirt.

Weasels don't come in white, Glenn says.

The one in my mother's house was white. It might have been a mink. Like spilled milk. My mother stood on the kitchen counter and it ran through the rungs of the chairs under the dining-room table.

I don't believe it, he says.

But you believe Leonard Cohen and the squashed breasts? You believe Amelia Kerby?

Amelia, Eleanor overheard while getting her beer from the kitchen, has also made a smallish fortune designing aromatherapy atomizers to squirt (mist, was the verb Amelia used) in the faces of colicky babies to shut them up (encourage serenity, Amelia said). The gold lame dress was shipped from Paris; it had been packed in helium.

What have you got in those atomizers, asked Constance. Agent Orange?

Amelia's uncle was a marine biologist. She had written a novel about eco-conscious cyborgs, a moral tale as yet unpublished because Amelia hasn't decided who to go with, apparently. She had bumped along the floor of the Atlantic in a two-person craft. There was nothing much to see down there, she said. It was dark.

Eleanor wants to tell Glenn Marshall she remembers him touching her back at the Ship Inn. Does he remember it? His hand on her back, a pulse of neon lighting up her bones, her hip, her ankle, all through. Once she heard Leonard Cohen dedicating a song to all the people who had conceived children listening to his music. The elegant arrogance of it. But Gabrielle was conceived that way. An attic bedroom in Toronto during a heat wave, a fitted bedsheet working its way off a coffee-coloured futon, she and Philip satiny with Toronto sweat. The whole day walking Yonge, crowds, bursts of music, exhaust, neon in daylight, sex shops with things she'd never seen before, battery-operated vaginas that could smoke a cigarette, the smell of hotdog stands. A food wrapper blew against her shin, squiggle of ketchup. Pastry shops. Even the breeze was hot. The sidewalk where they lived covered with blossoms. All part of their lovemaking, and Leonard Cohen singing about Joan of Arc.
Make your body cold, I'm going to give you mine to hold
.