Alligator (6 page)

There was a head of radicchio on the counter and she’d seen a package of mascarpone. She had a craving for whatever Trevor Barker would cook and to have sex and for it to get dark and he could light the fat candles on the mantle and she could just take the elevator back to her own condo when they were done.

She wanted to be done. She didn’t know what she wanted. How irritating to be ruffled. She had been jubilant moments ago — a date with a younger man — pushing the tiny leather strap of her shoe through the tiny buckle just below her ankle, the swish of her gauzy skirt, atoms of sprayed perfume still hanging in the air. How instantly her granite confidence evaporated. There, not there.

But here was the wine in an ice bucket and she bet it was very cold. She didn’t want a relationship with Trevor Barker; she didn’t want a relationship. What she wanted, actually, was an idle conversation on the phone with her ex-husband, Marty.

She wanted to hear Marty puffing his cigar. She wanted to hear the ice in his glass. She wanted to hear the scratchy static of a baseball game, broadcast from some southern state, on the transistor radio he keeps on his desk, turned down low. There is no such thing as a one-night stand; she has never seen one.

Three thirteen-year-old girls had jump-started cars and driven them all over town last winter. The police tailed one girl and she tried to outrun them. She’d gone through the red light on Topsail Road by Brookfield Road and through the light after that and it took seven police cars to box her in by the Village Mall. She would be painting the murals Trevor had financed all summer. They were doing waves because waves are about change and empowerment, Madeleine had read in the
Express
. The girl boxed in by seven police cars was at present in charge of waves rolling toward a sandy beach. She was a girl who had never held a paintbrush before.

Please, no
what do you do
or
who are your parents
or
what kind of books
. Nothing of the ex-wives and children and seashore reveries, no life-altering moments and minor illuminations.

What if she said about his bike, and how she had heard him practise “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and whatever was that delicious smell, sautéed ginger and what?

She could forgive “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” She could be magnanimous when she had to be. She glanced into the bedroom.There was a futon on the floor.This made her reassess.

There was a spiritual aspect to a futon, some mystical benevolence that she wanted to steer clear of. She did not want to make love on a futon. Her futon days were over.

Will we sit? Trevor Barker asked. He was pouring the wine into glasses he had taken from the freezer. They were foggy with frost.

We could sit, yes, let’s just sit.

Then sit, sit wherever you like. She undid the tiny buckles on her sandals and slipped them off and stretched her legs. The sofa demanded this sort of casual sprawl. It was dark out now and the city was lit up and Mount Pearl was lit up and it spread much farther than five years ago. There was a yielding hardness about the sofa and she realized it was a beanbag couch. The couch threatened to slowly, gradually, swallow her whole, and she thought she might just let herself be swallowed. Why not give in? If there was a mess later on, let there be a mess. Strings of orange lights and a few pink and thousands of white and the headlights of cars moved through the whole city like quick, quick drips of liquid. Trevor dropped onto the couch beside her and there was the scrunching noise of beans rubbing against each other while they settled into place. It was the sort of view that took root inside you and blossomed later, when you were working or scrubbing the bathtub. It was a view that had nearly bankrupted her, and she loved it all the more because she couldn’t afford it. She had got away with it. Two glass walls. Trevor had the same view, only slightly higher. Would he be sleeping with Gloria Garland of the bloodied pups? she wondered.

So Trevor, she said. What do you do? He clinked his glass against her glass.

BEVERLY

S
HE HAD WATCHED
Colleen, just last week, from the guest-room window that overlooks a long, gentle hill and the playground beyond. The park was sunlit and pulsing green and after a moment Colleen lay down on the grass and rolled down the hill.

She turned over and over very quickly and then lay on her back with her arm thrown over her eyes.

She looked both joyful and shipwrecked.

Beverly felt a thud of relief: she’s still a child. When she turned away from the emerald-bright window to finish her ironing, the room dimmed and she was satisfied as when a good movie ends.

The vandalism Colleen had inflicted on the bulldozers was a rogue act — Beverly had this thought watching a documentary about a demolition team on television with the sound muted — a rogue act so charged with alien zeal that she imagined Colleen had been brainwashed.

Eco-terrorists had kidnapped her daughter and turned her from her mother and everything she’d ever been taught, such as being polite at all costs, using cloth napkins, wiping the sink if there’s toothpaste crusted on it, achieving excellent marks at school, avoiding sexual intercourse, and oral sex in the back of school buses, which is the rage, recycling, and eating what’s on your plate — all of this had been erased.

On the television screen a quick succession of shots showed a leaden ball hitting a New York tenement in slow motion, and then a hotel in Bombay and then a skyscraper in Paris and the buildings bowed down like supplicants greeting a Japanese emperor.

What pissed off Beverly the most was the brutish lack of imagination.

Self-indulgence she could have forgiven; self-righteousness pissed her off.

It was a calculated and dull-witted act; Colleen had got caught.

Beverly had been drinking blueberry wine by herself at the dining-room table when the pale red and blue washes of light swept across the glass doors of the cherry-wood cabinet. A police cruiser had pulled into her driveway. It was late afternoon and the officer who got out from the driver’s side wore sunglasses and a gun. The other cop was a short woman with plump hips and a heart-shaped face.

Beverly had watched them coming up the driveway and there was an elastic moment when it seemed they might have lost their way. Colleen had been staying at a friend’s for the weekend. Jennifer Galway had asked her to sleep over. Jennifer’s mother played bridge with Beverly.

She saw the police officers and imagined Colleen asleep on the mauve-and-blue shag carpet of Jennifer Galway’s rec room in Mount Pearl. A wooden bowl of chips nearby, crunched cans of soft drink; what else did they eat? And the other girls too, Sherry Ryan and Cathy Lawrence, all asleep in the gloomy renovated basement smelling of old sneakers, cigarette smoke, and dampness. Beverly tried with all her might to imagine Colleen’s dark hair shushing over the nylon sleeping bag when she turned her head in the murky morning light from the base-ment’s grimy, half-sunken window and knew at once that her daughter was not there. She had not slept at Jennifer Galway’s last night. She had not, had not, had not slept at Jennifer Galway’s. Colleen hadn’t mentioned Jennifer Galway in months, except to say that’s where she would be sleeping. Beverly had been delighted.

The male officer drew a small pad of paper from his breast pocket and flipped a few pages and then studied the front of her house. Beverly immediately assumed Colleen was dead, but also believed she could not be dead.

If Colleen was not dead, why were two police officers coming up the walk? Colleen could not be dead because Beverly couldn’t live without her.

She had come to think of life not as a progression of days full of minor dramas, some tragedy, small joys, and carefully won accomplishments, as she figures most people think of life — but rather a stillness that would occasionally be interrupted with blasts of chaos.

The wine was the last of the batch David had bottled just before he died. David was — had been — a short, pudgy man with fine silver hair and a lot of cufflinks. Beverly keeps a brown velvet box with a stiff hinge under her pillow. She gives it a shake, listening to the cufflinks rattle around, before she drifts off to sleep.

He’d had a thing for cufflinks. He’d believed in finishing touches, nice soaps, napkin rings that had some heft to them. He’d smoothed eye gel under his eyes every morning because it felt cool and helped him wake up. He’d clipped his toenails with his foot resting on the toilet seat. The wine was surprisingly right for homemade wine. The trick was real fruit juice. He’d squashed the blueberries himself, with his knuckles. What she missed most were his eccentricities. The weird constellation of qualities she would never find in anyone else. She didn’t want anyone else.

The wine was potent, full of the four lost summers and suspended sediment. She had been saving the bottle for a special occasion. But the day had been unbearably forlorn, the weather windy and sunny, all the trees finally in bud. Daffodils whipped back and forth. David had never cleaned the sink after he shaved. The porcelain peppered with bristles is something she misses, though it had always mildly shocked her when she came upon it before he died. She had never expected it; now she misses it like a stab with a sewing needle right through her heart. How white and cold a sink can look when you live without a man. How sterile. She misses the smell of sex, is what she misses, a shadowy smell, full of lapsing time and cut grass and seaweed.

The alcohol slammed like a door, perhaps because she was dieting. She had decided David’s death would not destroy her entirely. Here was her prescription: behave as if you are unaffected and never stop behaving that way.

There had been a lot of cottage cheese, iceberg lettuce.

In yoga class she lay on her mat, allowing the smell of socks to be a form of comfort, and let tears stream from the corners of her eyes over her temples and into her ears. She was fifty-eight and kept her house very clean and always set a formal table, even when she was eating alone.

A badge or decorative square of metal on the policeman’s cap flared with light. They were standing near her tulips. The man looked up and Beverly could see he was young and she saw her bungalow in his mirror sunglasses. She had bought the bungalow two weeks after David was buried. It had been cowardice that had made her sell their house. She sold their house because she was brave beyond measure. She drove past it almost every evening trying to peer through the curtains. She had once seen the silhouette of a woman with oven mitts carrying a giant pot aloft and there were people around a table and candlelight. It had provided her with stores of comfort. Whoever they were they were young and celebrating. She wanted it to go on until dawn.

The officer touched the row of buttons on his shirt before starting forward.

Beverly wrote her sister, Madeleine, occasional e-mails, though they spoke on the phone once or twice a day. Madeleine had a headset she wore while driving.

I like to get my emotional work done on the move, Madeleine said. Beverly could hear squeals from the tires, as though Madeleine were taking the bends recklessly.

Is it work? Beverly had asked. Madeleine, the eldest by six years, had always been vigilant and uncompromising about Beverly’s well-being. Often there were car horns in the background; Madeleine running red lights or pulling U-turns, absent-mindedly enraging other drivers.

But her e-mails were hard-nosed and terse. No matter what new fear arose, Madeleine’s e-mail advice was the same and consisted of a single phrase: Drive on.

Beverly frequently wrote: I’m losing it. Just that.

The officers started up the concrete walk to the front door. The buzzer rang twice. Beverly had begun to believe in the inevitable. David’s aneurysm had been inevitable. More disaster was inevitable. She would have liked to have written Madeleine at just that moment: I’ve surrendered. Tell them not to shoot.

For four years there had been a physical ache that started in her solar plexus and pulsed through her whole body just as if she had been shot.

People think sadness is ephemeral and romantic, she wrote to Madeleine. On another occasion: People must think I’m an ice queen, carrying on as I do with ordinary life.

She didn’t know what people thought. She had thought nothing herself about sadness until she was penetrated with it.

Every sensual act since David’s death fell flat. More than once she’d noticed orange peels next to her lawn chair and realized she had already eaten the orange.

She found herself saying things to people she had already said. Two or three times she said the same thing.

People hesitated.

They tried to behave as if it were fresh, what she was saying, but it subdued them. They had a look. A certain numb look that made her feel like her slip was showing.

Beverly had told one of the secretaries at work about leather couches, she’d received a flyer. She had stopped by the coffee machine and the secretary was putting in the creamers. They were almost half-price, because the secretary had said about wanting a new couch, and this was a real opportunity, these couches, they were a find.

She went into her office, closing the door with her foot, and stood there surprised by how dark it had become. She heard the rest of the department faxing and printing and phoning each other from their cubicles — all the burgeoning, insipid vitality of the tourism sector where she had worked for the last twenty years — but behind her office door, alone, she was dazzlingly lost. The room was very dark in the middle of the afternoon. Every object grainy in the shadows, her fountain pen, the snow globe from Banff, her winter boots drying on a rubber mat, bent over each other, each object, indistinct, hardly there at all.

It was later than she thought.

It must be much later.

She usually left the overhead lights off, but in the time it had taken her to get a coffee, it had become dark and quiet. She felt disoriented; she hardly knew what year it was or how old she was.

She might have been twenty, flying down a hill on her bike, the wind making her squint. She remembered a skirt she had when she was twenty and brown knee socks and the wind billowing the skirt; she was going to see a boyfriend. She arrived at his house, Darren Jones, and he’d had a hose. She opened the latch on the garden gate, and a spray of water full of rainbow shimmer and spears of late-afternoon sunlight and a man she hardly knew — he was just a boy, she realizes in the darkened office — and she thought she was in love with him.