Alligator (20 page)

The driver left it running and the exhaust lifted in ragged clouds that turned amber and there was a red shoulder smeared against the passenger window in the back seat. The guy had his raincoat up over his head and he ordered five hot dogs.

Frank could hardly see through the sheets of rain on the steamy windows, but the Hummer seemed full of girls.

He thought he saw a leg. One of the girls was pulling on a pair of pantyhose in the back seat; he watched this through the eye-stinging coils of blowing smoke and the rain spilling off the umbrella.

The rain glazed the pavement and shivers ran through the water as it rushed down the street, wind-driven, and the hot dogs hissed and what he really wanted was to see how those girls fit in the back and smell their perfume and shampoo and why was she putting on pantyhose and what party were they going to and why did he have to be always standing in the rain.

He could not go home yet because he had not sold enough hot dogs to pack up and go home.

Frank got the five hot dogs ready and the man took them two at a time under his coat and passed them through the window to the women inside. Then he came back for his own and he only wanted ketchup.

The next day Frank heard Carol out on the fire escape pulling in her laundry. She had several pairs of underwear hung on the line, pastel colours, each pair flimsy and light-pierced. The panties were full of worms. They had gathered in the cotton-lined crotches of the underwear and made them look black. He was drinking his coffee on the fire escape above and she came up the stairs to talk to him.

They said about you on the radio, Frank, she said. They said about the hot dogs. A real entrepreneur, the guy said, standing out in the rain.

Then she whispered, Frank, don’t talk to those men upstairs. I’m warning you, Frank. Those men, you can’t reason. You’re a nice boy, well-mannered. I can say to you Frank with conviction. I have a bad feeling.

Frank watched her absent-mindedly picking the worms out of her underwear as she spoke.

MADELEINE

T
HEY WERE GOING
to an awards dinner, a gala, in honour of Isobel.

I should call Andrew, said Madeleine. She feels a panic about her son, who works for Médicins Sans Frontières in Ethiopia. What if Andrew is in trouble? There will be nothing she can do.

She thinks of him digging in the garden when he was a small boy; the day she found all the snails in the pockets of his tiny jeans, globs of moving slime and crushed shell.

Now he performs surgeries in canvas tents all over Africa with only a naked light bulb hanging from a pole and the sounds of gunfire in the background.

Her daughter, Melissa, is in Geneva and married to a heroin addict with old money. Melissa, in tailored suits and sensible shoes, striding down sidewalks lined with pristine fountains and gargoyles. She sends jewellery made from volcanic rock and woven wraps that snap under the arms and zipper across the breasts like straitjackets, the height of European fashion. She skis in the Alps and sends pictures of herself buoyed up by white wings of spraying snow.

Just tell me, though, said Isobel. Is this too ancient Greece? She had the hanger with the gold toga under her chin.

I’d have to see it on, Madeleine said.

Isobel pulls a black sequined dress down over her hips. The dress left one shoulder bare. She snapped the fishnet stocking, at her knee and at her ankle, and stood with her back to the mirror looking over her shoulder.

That’s the dress as far as I’m concerned, said Madeleine. The director of
Streetcar
had bought Isobel the sequined dress. He had a raw-boned face and wild black eyes and Isobel might have liked him if he had not worked her so hard. He was tired of naturalistic theatre, he had shouted at them while they stood blinded in the stage lights.

Isobel Turner, he had screamed. Do I give a damn about Isobel Turner? They had been rehearsing for six hours in the heat. Isobel put her hand over her eyes in an effort to see him. There was a silence.

No, I don’t give a damn about Isobel Turner, he screamed. She had slept with him the night before and this outburst was disorienting.

Audiences aren’t paying to see Isobel Turner from Newfoundland put on a Southern accent. Haven’t you ever lost anything? he screamed at her.

It was true there was something she didn’t get about Stella.

Isobel would never have let them take Blanche away. Even if she did stand for the South and all that was corrupt and decaying. Isobel would have saved her sister.

She stood with her back to the mirror, looking over her shoulder at her bum.

I didn’t get the soap, Isobel said.

Lately, Madeleine listens. Or rather, she doesn’t speak as much. Part of it is that she’s too tired to talk. She’s got the phone pressed to her ear and the aluminum tree branches spread out on the floor. It’s August, but she came across Christmas trees on sale in a bin at Canadian Tire. Fifty extras in the shoot with the stallions and there’s the underwater shot. Five divers lined up and they know the tides and they have to get the horses out in the surf. But at night she stops thinking about the shoot. She is mesmerized by an aluminum tree.

She listens to Marty. They have conversations lately, in the evening, after his pregnant wife, Gerry-Ann, has gone to bed. They talk about his wife.

She’s what? Madeleine said.

She’s thirty-five and she’s pregnant.

Are you having a good time, Marty?

She falls asleep in her soup, Marty said. The assembly instructions were in eight different languages.

Another child, Marty, Madeleine said. She fit the central pole into the stand; it was a sizable tree. They have talked about the baby a hundred times. Marty says bringing a baby into the world is a show of faith that she, Madeleine, is too cynical to understand.

Am I crazy or what? Marty said. She held a big silver branch before her face and shut one eye. It was still a big silver branch.

The crazy things we do, she said. She put the branch down on the carpet where the diagram told her to.

I’ve got four white stallions in the ocean later this month, Madeleine grunted. A whole crew in scuba gear. She inserted a final branch and gave the red bulb on its tip a little twist and the whole silver tree glowed hotly, infrared.

What are you doing? he said.

I’m trying out my new Christmas tree, she said.

In the middle of August?

It was on sale.

She picks up clothes while he talks, she sorts the mail. She smokes near an open window. She confesses to putting a fist through a wall, he confesses the same.

I miss you, he said. The tree is a blinking tree. The thing about a Christmas tree is to tart it up. Feathery red bursts of light tremble on the wall every twenty seconds.

She knew immediately how she felt about the tree; she hated the tree.

It was as though she had unleashed all of her loneliness. Her loneliness had been imprisoned in a tree, which happens all the time; and she had been forced by some evil spell to walk up and down the aisles of Canadian Tire, forgetting why she was there (clothespins), until she found the tree. When she got it home, the tree leapt out of the box, screaming absurd loneliness in eight different languages. A burning bush of shame, how old she is and weak-feeling lately and the film is lost and how profoundly alone with a ball and chain of a film around her neck.

Don’t make me tell you what I paid for this tree, she said.

I miss you, he said.

You miss me, that’s nice, she said. She calls him from the bath and is self-conscious about splashes, a bath seems too sexy for talking to your ex-husband, but then she doesn’t care; what is too sexy? And she splashes all she wants.

She listens to Marty while she does the dishes; she loves having her wrists immersed in hot water; domesticity peeling away her daytime demeanour.

She likes being nobody in the late afternoon. She wipes the counter thinking about the cigarette she’s been waiting for and listening to Marty who, it dawns on her, is angling to come over. Could he possibly want to have sex with her?

He does; he’s angling for a languid tussle, something rich and familiar and longed-for with every fibre of his being.

There is no need to question the rightness of the tree. She wanted some stone stupid objects in her life that are irrevocably themselves. She stopped short of a tree that rotates and that was in the same sale bin for the same price and she has no regrets about this.

What she regrets, occasionally, is leaving Marty.

Occasionally, it’s as though she’s been struck in the forehead with a rubber mallet and she is overwhelmed with a feeling of regret. How much she loved Marty and what would have happened if she kept on loving him?

Just as quickly, she’s glad. She could not have stood it; always having to answer for herself, always making allowances.

She remembers one bad-ass night of drinking during a festival in New Mexico, after the divorce, when a security guard shone a flashlight at her naked bum while she ran across the lawn to the hotel lobby in this little towel, a hand towel for God’s sake, held over her crotch and went to bed with no one, absolutely no one, closed the door, full of giggles, on Bob Warren, who knocked with one knuckle and leaned heavily on the door, and waited. She heard the clunk of his forehead on the door: the one-knuckle knock again. She had her hand on the knob deciding, a light summery sweat, the chlorine and nighttime smell in her hair; they’d been skinny-dipping in the hotel pool.

Bob was handsome and single and if she moved now, turned the knob, he would topple onto her carpet like a gift, but she didn’t move, was happy not to move, and she heard him wander off down the corridor.

And for this near miss alone she is glad she is not married. She had felt euphoria that night, falling onto the big hotel bed all by herself, and euphoria in the morning when the sun came up over the golf course and in through the window and she made a pot of coffee and she was writing and still naked from the midnight swim.

These irrefutable, stone-stupid near misses and the dalliances that came true and the men who found her fascinating because she stood on her own two feet — Trevor Barker upstairs, for instance, who had left three messages, who had turned out to be a more than passable cook — and the risks she took and fast friends she made and how she was the life of the party always. She wasn’t married because she couldn’t be married and she did not regret what she was.

If you fuck Bob Warren you’ll be one of thousands, a producer friend had said the next morning, after the night skinny-dipping in the hotel pool.

And she had answered, So will Bob Warren.

When she first left Marty, she was desolate. Beverly had come over to the new apartment and found her bawling, the sort of scream-crying that has no sound. She had tried to sit in one of the children’s plush cartoon armchairs, but it was too small and it was squashed beneath her and her knees were sticking out and she couldn’t get up. She was wrenching up absolutely no tears, her face like mauled Plasticine.

Stop this nonsense at once, Beverly had said.

The tree is artificial and it has red lights like an alarm system, it’s the middle of August and Marty wants to come over and it’s more of an appliance really, a household appliance, it has more in common with a fridge than a fir tree. She decides she loves the artificial tree.

VALENTIN

W
HEN HE CAME
back for Isobel, she had three Tupperware containers full of green tomatoes. Each tomato was wrapped in a paper towel, nestled in rows, two layers deep, and she was wearing sunglasses.

He was pleased with how reconciled she had become to the idea of the fire. The sunglasses had white frames with tiny rhinestones. She was wearing a simple, dark red dress that hung loosely and rustled when she moved. Her shoulders were bare, except for the narrow straps, and she was tanned. He thought the sunglasses looked expectant.

Isobel had let the grass get too long on her front walk and the legs of Valentin’s pants were wet with dew. He had seen, as he came down the path, that her front door was covered in worms. He had wiped most of them off the window with a flyer from her mailbox. Then he knocked on the door.

Standing in the sunlight he had the feeling the house was empty. What if she had called the police? He knew what her living room looked like at this hour, sunlight filtering through the trees, cool and full of leafy shadow. What if there were four or five police officers sitting around the living room quietly waiting? The gasoline was in the basement, all the gasoline.

He had put his hand on her throat and threatened to kill her and had promised, at the same time, about the money he would give her. Their faces were so close he could see her contact lenses lift with her rapid blinking and slide back down, slowly, over her irises. He was squeezing her neck and the pores in her skin on her cheeks looked large and there were tiny veins around her nostrils and these signs of age frightened him. She was old and he couldn’t quite count on what she would do next. He had described how he would kill her and the alternative: the boutique with pedestals draped in velvet, each displaying a bottle of perfume worth so much money she would only have to sell one a week.

If the house wasn’t empty, Isobel was probably sitting at her vanity putting in an earring. She had earrings that were peacock feathers weighted with tiny silver balls. She might just be sitting at the vanity with the wing mirrors on hinges, Isobel from several angles, letting him wait. He would wait. He didn’t mind waiting.

The shadows of the trees and clouds and telephone wires were reflected in the front-door window. When he put his face to the glass he saw Isobel’s sandals on the rope mat. The leather straps covered with clusters of colourful glass beads. He remembered how they sounded when she clipped down over the stairs.

He thought of Isobel coming through the front door and kicking the sandals off and walking barefoot into the kitchen. He thought of her crushing ice in her blender. She had tall glasses for summer drinks and he thought of how her skin looked flushed after a day of rehearsal.