Alligator (14 page)

And I say, I’m not buying, I’m exchanging. And there’s a customer behind me and I turn to him, a tall man, maybe six feet tall, with longish hair and gorgeous grey eyes though he’s over forty for sure, old enough to be my dad, probably, and maybe he saw me take the vodka off the shelf, but the thing is, once I’ve imagined the absolutely worst thing I could do in any given moment I have to do it. I have to see how it will end.

I had come to the mall to buy striped socks but as I was strolling past the liquor store, I got the idea of stealing a bottle of something. I had to know how such a thing would turn out. I can feel my pulse, the thunk-thunk of blood, before what is about to happen and what has already happened. I say to the tall man behind me, I’m so sorry for holding you up. I try to sound relaxed and sincere. Even if he saw me take that bottle, he will doubt what he saw. He will doubt it for perhaps two or three minutes, by which time I’ll be gone.

Now just a minute, the manager says.

I say, I can see you can’t help me and I fully understand, I’ll just have to regift.

I leave the store with the vodka and when I get around the corner I put on my jacket and sunglasses and put the bottle inside my jacket and I’m in the parking lot before they’ve even had a chance to shut their mouths.

MADELEINE

T
HERE
’
S A PROBLEM
in the art department. The cinematographer, Guy Leblanc, wants to shoot the interiors with natural light so there will have to be skylights, holes cut in the sod roofs. Where in the budget does it say skylights? the art department wants to know. Of course, there were no skylights in the 1830s.

Guy had drawn a sharp breath when Madeleine mentioned this fact, as if she had slapped him. Film is an impressionistic medium, he’d said, as if she were an idiot.

You don’t tell the truth, he’d said. But what you tell
becomes
the truth. He was pompous and irate. She loved his tirades. He could be so thoroughly French. She loved how he could dismiss whole libraries of historical scholarship by shutting his eyes and letting ripples of irritation run through him. He was bald on top with a ring of silver hair just over his ears, never combed. She had hired him because his raglan was ripped up the back, revealing a wine-coloured lining, because his hair stood off his head on one side, because he drank very good red wine and all he thought about was film. He got a far-off, concentrated look when he was on the set. She liked sincere, half-crazy men who took pleasure in their work. Her young, red-headed lead liked him too, Madeleine had heard.

I will not be a slave to the
facts
— Guy spat the word out as if it were poison. Who knows what the nineteenth century looked like? he’d said. I’ll tell them what it looked like.

Madeleine lets him rant. He had come through for her on the winter shoot. Blizzards, sleet, ice; he had come through. He’s the best in Canada, the best she’s ever seen. What he could do with natural light made him worth his staggering fee. He might be shouting and spitting now, but on the set he was energetic and wise. He spoke to the actors with respect. He was unobtrusive and bold. They all wanted to do a good job for him, live up to his expectations. Not every cinematographer could deliver like Guy — what he had made of the Southern Shore in winter — it was a Gothic, vicious landscape, a curse, a new kind of beauty.

She knew he suspected she was thinking budget. The whole notion of a budget offended him deeply. He didn’t care about cost, it wasn’t his job. He cared about light. That was his job: to care immensely about light.

She’s supposed to be working out the cost of skylights but for some reason she’s thinking of the train station in Paris; why is the train station barrelling through her with such force? The glass rooftop of a train station: sheaves of light, clank of the rails beneath, chopping every memory up, twenty-four per second. Holding Marty’s hand. She was gripping his hand and the straps of her knapsack dug into her shoulders. At some point they gave up holding hands; they became self-conscious about touching in public. A staid sense of coupledom settled over them. But in the cold station they watched pigeons flap against the skylights and he squeezed her hand so hard it hurt. Their shoes echoed and they promised each other they’d find the most expensive restaurant in France.

Let’s blow our wad in Paris, Marty had said. But by evening they’d forgotten about eating. They had walked all day, every cobbled street they could find. They hadn’t gone to see the Eiffel Tower and Madeleine found she was crying because she just was. She just was, okay?

She smiled at Marty and her eyes looked a rusty brown, through a glaze of tears, and he thought she looked insane.

There might be a strain of insanity in her family she had not mentioned.

If she had driven her Swiss Army knife into his forehead up to the hilt at that moment it would not have seemed incongruous to him. That’s what he’d said at the time. But, he’d said, she was simultaneously dazzling and he thought whatever errant emotion had caused her to well up had also made her beautiful and he would let her plunge a knife through his skull if that was what she wanted. Whatever she wanted from now on, she could have.

Guy is whispering with full-blown fury: Don’t speak to me about expense.

She’s touching the tip of her pencil against this figure and that figure but what she wants is the afternoon alone. They all imagine she can carry the great weight of this film by herself. She feels her chest constrict and she pauses to draw a deep breath but she can’t fill her lungs. Why does she always have to be fighting someone? Why is there always a battle? In Rothenburg they’d eaten putrid, green-veined cheese smeared on a baguette, then wandered through a torture museum. Marty had thrust handcuffs at her and wiggled his eyebrows suggestively and she hadn’t found it very funny. She remembers exactly the smell of algae from whatever river it was that ran near the museum.

You’re so demanding, he’d said. She was shocked by how stinging he could be. For some reason it stung. She was demanding, she knew.

Her arm is numb; she stretches her fingers but they’re stiff. She can see through the frosted glass of her office window, the girls from the costume department, standing around the coffee-maker in the hallway, probably having a smoke. Did she pay people to stand around? Guy has drawn up a chair; suddenly bored with skylights, he’s taken a crab sandwich from his satchel. He unfolds the wax paper and finds a packet of pepper. He tears it with his teeth. He opens the sandwich and taps the packet and slides half of the sandwich across the desk to her.

It’s only a film, Madeleine, he says.

Guy, she says. He has almost won and they both know it. The summer shoot will be magnifique, he says. He waves the sandwich in the air, to let her know he can foresee the entire shoot in all its glory.

Guy, she says. His mouth is full and he’s trying to swallow so he can speak.

There will be colour, Madeleine, he says. She and Marty had met a German painter living in Marrakesh. Big abstract explosions of colour, orange embers falling through the night sky, smoke and it might have been the Big Bang or Dresden or a future apocalypse. They three stood before each painting and the German clapped his hands twice and a maid appeared with a bowl of tangerines and later they were told he was a former Nazi who liked little boys.

It was that afternoon they’d seen the snake. There was the snake in the medina; she remembers hearing the rattle inside a woven basket, an ancient shimmy-shimmer all about death. How many people get to hear that in a lifetime?

Guy has pulled the spreadsheet toward him from her side of the desk, he’s running his finger down the columns of figures — intolerable — what does he know about budget, how dare he? But to let a man decide for a change, to give up the responsibility, just for a moment, to play dumb — she considers it.

A nearly naked man surrounded by a crowd in the medina had tipped the lid off a basket with his toe and played a reedy pipe. A weaving snake came up out of the basket, standing perhaps two feet high. Madeleine saw its lips were stitched together. A veil of perspiration sprang to her face, sweat dripped down the nape of her neck. The noise of the medina, the reedy, complaining music from the pipe had new, unearthly pitch.

A cart drawn by a donkey passed behind her and she suspected the squeaking of the wheels was an ingenious code, each wheel emitting a syncopation of dots and dashes of a frequency so high only dogs and ham-radio operators could decipher it.

Marty saw her eyes were glassy and she spent the next three days in a fever, puking, shitting, and shivering. It was an illness that never left her entirely, coming back over the years with renewed strength, making her feel as if she had been pummelled with a hammer, showing up in the darkest part of winter when she was in the throes of production. She was always in the throes of production.

Steady belt, her sister, Beverly, called it. I’ll be down with soup, Beverly said, whenever Madeleine was ill. Don’t get out of bed, I’ll be down with soup.

But in Marrakesh, Marty had taken care of her. He’d pinched her skin to see how dehydrated she was and found himself running through the narrow corridors of the medina past the stinking vats of urine where they dyed leather, the light-pierced banners of fuchsia and violet cotton, and the stalls that sold spices all heaped in cones of soft mossy green and rust and brown, in search of a stall where he might purchase a thermometer.

When he took her temperature the red line crept beyond all the numbers and she was speaking in tongues and he wondered how he would get her body back to Canada when she died but on the third day she was fine and they decided to head back to Europe.

She drops the pencil, remembering Marty’s relief when the fever broke. He had cried, his shoulders shaking. They were just kids on that trip and they’d hardly had any money.

If there must be skylights, it will have to come out of her own producer’s fee, she thinks. Let there be light. She balls up the spreadsheet and prints another one.

FRANK

F
RANK HEARS SOMEONE
say her name and she turns on the dance floor, her long hair flying off her shoulders. Her name is Colleen. She’s dancing with her arms over her head, biting her bottom lip, her eyes are closed and her face tilted down and to the side. This is a look; men will bow down for this look, this slow undulation, this is a look of concentration and abandon. Her hips swing and he sees she has a rhinestone in her navel the size of a dime. The band plays “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” nostalgic and embittered.

She’s wearing low-slung jeans and a black halter top. She’s doing a slowed-down hip swivel that’s erotic and full of self-satire and her figure is skinny and her hips are pale in the blue spotlight. The rhinestone winks lewdly at him. What he wants is to put his hands on her while she dances.

He had been a St. Brendan’s tap dancer, back when he was ten, in black pants and pink cummerbund, white shirt and bow tie. His mother slicked his hair down and he had a solo in a spot of light on the stage of the Holy Heart auditorium.

He could not see the audience but he could hear them in the dark. He was told, from behind stage, to step into the spot of light that spanked the scuffed floor.

The spot was animate and neurotic.

He stood transfixed, terrified, gripping a fistful of velvet curtain, convinced that if he stepped onto the spot, it would fly up the curtains and the audience would bellow with laughter.

He’d peeked at the audience while herds of children, choirs from all over the island, moved on and off stage throughout the concert. Then he’d been given a hard push right between his shoulder blades and found he was on stage.

His taps made loud clicks and he moved over the floor to the edge of the spot of light. He stood on the periphery of the light and it blinded him, but it remained utterly still. The audience was — he felt a breathing mass — engulfed in a dark with so much depth and texture he felt in him the urge to hammer the spot of light down to the floor.

What he remembers: he willed himself to dance. He did not want to dance. He refused to dance. But his mother was in the audience and he would dance.

She had switched shifts as a greeter at Wal-Mart, had traded Christmas Eve so she could come to the concert. It wasn’t her turn to work Christmas Eve but she wanted to see Frank on stage, so she traded Christmas Eve for the night of the concert with another mother. They were mostly single mothers or teenagers or older men who had suffered some version of emotional collapse that made them incompetent at their previous jobs. They were working at Wal-Mart because other options hadn’t panned out. Nobody wanted to be there on Christmas Eve.

Frank’s mother, besides cleaning people’s houses, stood at the door of Wal-Mart and said hello to people and put lime green or orange stickers on the parcels they brought in with them.

She was on her feet all the time and she had varicose veins, zigzagging veins that were raised slightly above the tight, shaved skin of her calves. Her legs were as white as bread, and peppered-looking where she shaved, and the veins were lumpy and blue as ink.

In the evening she put her feet in a Tupperware bowl full of hot water and Epsom salts because her feet were swollen. When she took off her shoes, her feet held the indentations of the cotton ribbing of her socks, and the mark of the tongue of her shoe.

Frank watched her dip her feet into the steaming water. She put one foot in and lifted it up and crunched her toes and put it back in the bowl and did the same with the other foot, her face wincing each time, because the water was so hot. Frank watched her feet get red up to the waterline.

His mother was in the audience by herself on that evening when he was ten and he could not move and the music had already started and Frank had missed his cue.

The music started and it stopped.

He would have turned and run but his feet with the heavy taps were stuck and then the music came back for him.