The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (7 page)

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.

J
ulian is thinking about the woman and child he left in Newfoundland when he moved to Toronto. He's remembering Olivia preparing him a sardine sandwich, the way she pressed the extra oil out of each sardine on a piece of paper towel. Then she cut the head and tail off, each sardine, until they were laid carefully on the bread. Her head was bent over the cutting board. Her blond hair slid from behind her ear. He could see the sun sawing on her gold necklace. The chain stuck on her skin in a twisty path that made him realize how hot it was in the apartment. She was wearing a flannel pajama top and nothing else, a coffee-coloured birthmark on her thigh, shaped like the boot of Italy. Eight years ago.

Julian is sitting at the kitchen table with a pot of coffee. His bare feet are drawn up on the chair, his knees pressed into the edge of the table. It's a wooden table top that has been rubbed with linseed oil. There are scars from the burning cigarettes his
wife occasionally leaves lying around. Small black ovals. There are thousands of knife cuts that cross over each other like the lines on a palm. He runs his finger over the table, tracing the grain of the wood. He pours another cup of coffee, and glances at the phone. Sometimes the university calls for Marika before nine, although they have been told not to. Marika requires only seven hours' sleep, but if she's disturbed she's tired all day. She wakes up at exactly nine every morning. She's proud of the precision of her inner clock. Julian likes to pick up the phone before it rings twice. Lately, when the phone rings and Julian answers, nobody speaks.

Marika is fifteen years older than Julian. The people on this street are very rich. The brick houses are massive. Some of them have been broken into apartments and rented. There's almost no traffic. The trees block most of the noise. He and Marika don't know their neighbours. Once, while out taking photographs, Julian met a man three houses up who was riding a sparkling black bike in circles. The man said he was Joe Murphy. Joe Murphy's Chips sold a large percentage of their product in Newfoundland. He gave the silver bicycle bell two sharp rings.

“The bike's a birthday present from my wife. It's a real beauty, isn't it?”

The trees shivered suddenly with wind and sloshed the bike with rippling shadows. Joe Murphy was wearing a suit and tie. The balls of his feet pressed against the pavement and there were sharp little crevices in his shined leather shoes. A crow left
a tree and flew straight down the centre of the street. Julian lifted his camera and took a picture of Joe Murphy. In the far distant corner of the frame is the crow. Joe Murphy is out of focus, a blur in the centre of the picture, his face full of slack features. The crow is sharp and black.

“That makes me very uncomfortable,” said Joe Murphy. “I think you have a nerve.” He gave the bell another sharp ring, and pushed off the curb. His suit jacket flapping.

For two years, Julian has been sleeping a lot. It's taken him two years to fall away from any kind of sleeping pattern. This way he's always awake at different hours. This seems exotic to him, but the cost is that he can't will himself to sleep. He sleeps in the afternoon and then finds himself awake at four in the morning. At dawn he sometimes wanders around the neighbourhood. The light at dawn allows him to see straight into the front windows of the massive houses on their street, all the way to the back windows and into the backyards. It makes the houses seem like skeletons, with nothing hanging on the bones.

Sometimes Julian is asleep when Marika gets home from work. If there's no supper cooked for her she'll eat white bread and butter with spoonfuls of granulated sugar. Julian likes to cook for her and she likes what he cooks. But she's also happy to eat bread and sugar. She makes coffee and folds the bread and sinks it into her coffee. The soaked bread topples and she catches it in her mouth. The cats slink in from all the different rooms of the apartment and curl around her feet, or on her lap. She lifts the kitten and puts it inside her jacket. If Julian
stumbles down the stairs, half awake, and he sees Marika bathed in the light of a fashion show on TV with her sugared bread, he feels that he has failed her. The failure makes him even sleepier. He can't keep his eyes open.

Marika is not one for dwelling on the past. Julian knows very little about her past. Not that she's secretive. It's the kind of conversation that bores her. Marika has a powerful charm. She's a chemistry professor, but most of her friends are artists or writers. At parties, for conversation, she offers crystallized stories about nature or the stars. If someone interrupts her to ask about her parents, or something back in France, she answers in short sentences, faltering.

She thinks of memory only as a muscle that must be exercised to keep the whole mind sharp. She is interested in sharpness. If asked, she can recall exactly what she did on any date two years before. She will remember what she wore, what Julian wore, what they ate, the content of any conversation that occurred on that day. But this is just a game.

Marika thinks about infinite tracts of time, about meteorology, about hummingbirds, about measuring the erosion of coastlines, and whether the continents could still lock together like a jigsaw puzzle, or a jaw grinding in sleep. She thinks about the Tower of Babel, or about fish that swim up the walls of fjords as if the walls were the lake bottom. What such swimming against the stream does to their skeletons. When she isn't thinking things like this, she watches soap operas, or drives in her car, or she and Julian make love.

Julian has watched Marika simulate theoretical galaxies on the computer. She has found this program mostly to amuse him. He has seen two galaxies blinking together, dragging their sluggish amorphous bodies toward each other across the black screen. Each blink represents a million years, until they pass through each other. The gravitational pull of each galaxy affects the shape of the other until some stars are clotted in the centre, and the rest spread on either side of the screen like giant butterfly wings. Marika has shown him thousands of things like this. She has described the path of the plague in the Middle Ages, drawing a map on a paper napkin at a donut shop. She told him that in Egypt they have found the preserved body of a louse, on the comb of Nefertiti. A drop of human blood, perhaps Nefertiti's blood, was contained in the abdomen of the louse. They have discovered many things about ancient disease from that drop of blood.

Julian collects the stories Marika tells him, although they often lose their scientific edges. He can't remember how old the louse was. For some reason the only thing he remembers about the plague is a medical costume, a long robe with the head of a bird. The doctor looked out through two holes cut in the black feathered hood, over a protruding beak.

When he is awake, Julian pursues the morals of these stories, something other than what lies on the surface. Just as he can't imagine how much time it took to create the universe from a black hole, he can't get at that hidden meaning.

Recently Marika contracted a virus that caused a nervous disorder. If not diagnosed, this disease can spread quickly through the body and destroy the tips of all nerve endings irreparably. It started with a numbness in Marika's left cheek. She had it checked immediately. Of course, she had access to the best medical care in Toronto. The disease was arrested before any serious damage was done, but the nerves in Marika's saliva ducts grew back connected to one of her tear ducts. Now when she eats her left eye waters.

Julian has begun to suspect that Marika doesn't talk about her past because she is afraid she will seem like an old woman. It was her eye, filling of its own accord, that started him thinking this way. The eye is the first sign of Marika's age. When her eye waters he's filled with fright. That fright causes its own involuntary response in him. He's remembering things he hasn't thought about in years. He has noticed that the skin on Marika's face looks older than before. The pores are larger. There are more wrinkles. The soft white pouches beneath her eyes are larger. That skin seems as vulnerable to him as the flesh of a pear he is about to bite.

He was going through their wedding photographs. Julian took them himself, so most of the pictures are of Marika. She is wearing a white silk jacket, cut like a lab coat, and the apartment is full of white blossoms. Her face looks so much younger that for a moment he has the feeling the photographs have been doctored.

They're eating a dinner of lamb and fresh mint. Marika's knife is whining back and forth on the dinner plate.