The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (15 page)

There is an older woman with a cane. We are both waiting, this older woman and I. The heat — there must be a lot of ovens — they keep bringing out bread tied in knots and other shapes. Giant wicker baskets of oily golden sailor's knots. A man stacks them on steel shelves — the girl is talking to you, she is digging a high heel into the tiles and rocking a little. She has full breasts and is very young. She may be sixteen. But she may be younger.

She may be the age of your daughter, fifteen. The girl touches your collar. You are blushing darkly. But you are laughing too. Two sides of the same coin, shame and pleasure.

There is more bread and a blast of heat. You are buying the girl pastries. She is laughing and pointing and the woman behind the counter puts what the girl wants into a white box. The girl hesitates before she points to each pastry. She looks coyly at you each time she touches the glass with her finger, and each time you nod.

But you have become serious now. The girl turns and sees me. Something passes over her face, perhaps embarrassment. This is what I feel: Fuck off, bitch. But the girl is only the age of my stepdaughter, whom I love and protect. I am ashamed of
the look on my face. The woman with the cane is joined by her friend. They speak a few words to each other and leave.

A moment more, and the woman with the cane returns. She asks: Do you understand Spanish?

I say no.

She says, A little?

A little, I say. This isn't true. What I understand is less than a little, but I know what she will say. She points to her eye and then out — so that I know to look out.

She is telling me to look out. Her hand grips the plastic handle of the cane tightly. She does not hesitate or pause as she speaks. She isn't experimenting with tone. She is telling me, Yes, he was flattered. Don't doubt it. He was flattered.

All I want is to be away from her, for your sake. But I am moved that she has come back into the pastry shop to tell me. She says, AIDS. I hear it mingled with the Spanish.

Then she leaves.

There is a white statue of a woman with a basket on her shoulder at the end of the pool. Bernini talked about the paleness of marble. The absence of flesh tone makes it difficult to capture likeness. Would you recognize someone who had poured a bag of flour over his head? To compensate, Bernini suggests drawing the face just as it is about to speak, or after it has just spoken. That's when the face is most characteristic of itself. He's responsible for the sixteenth-century fashion of portraits with the lips parted. We are most ourselves when we are changing.

I say, We can change certain things.

It's not that.

We can sleep with other people. Is that what you want?

You say you are making up your mind. You're sorry. You can't explain. It's as much a mystery for you as it is for me.

The man who lends towels and novels is set up in a grass hut with an impaled and glazed blowfish. This man leans on his elbows, chin in hands, and watches the transsexuals. They seem to let their mouths hang open, in a kind of pout. Like inflated dolls that are ready-made for oral sex.

Before me my cup is very white and the white saucer is on the white table. Espresso. The table shimmers in its whiteness. A fly lands on the rim of the cup. The fly is so blue-black that it makes me think: significance. There is significance here. What is it?

The fly touches the cup, and the whiteness of the cup becomes whiter.

You say, You look insane.

You say this just as I am applying significance to the white cup.

How did you know?

In the evening we meet Carl, Jorge, and Johann, from Austria. Carl takes a switchblade from the pocket over his calf. He opens it with an elegant motion of his wrist. There is a bartender working over a pestle and mortar several yards away.

Carl says, You want me to demonstrate? He raises his chin toward the bartender. I see the blade open the white shirt and
blood flushing. Carl closes the knife and slides it back into his pocket.

Jorge is studying to be a veterinarian. He picks up the cat that rubs against his leg. The tail under his nose.

Carl says, No animal can pass him without he picks it up.

Johann: And they could kill him; he is allergic.

I carry a pill, says Jorge, or I die like this. He holds the cat's tail in his teeth.

I say, Will you work with big animals or small?

He leans forward. We have finished four bottles of rum and two, no three, rounds of beer.

He says, I want to work in an abattoir. I don't know how you say in English.

I say, But they kill animals there. I thought you loved animals?

These cats will kill him, says Johann, if they break his skin.

Jorge says, It's a simple operation, the gun they put to the head like that. He holds the flashlight to my temple and flicks the light so my cheek glows orange.

And it scrambles the brain, says Jorge, switching off the flashlight. He sits back and his wicker chair screeches unexpectedly. His throat is exposed by a floodlight in a palm tree. It's covered with bruises like squashed blueberries, hickeys. I realize he is much younger than me.

Jorge tosses the flashlight to you. It turns over in the air and lands in your hand with a neat smack.

He says, Why don't you put this in your wife's pussy tonight? Is big enough?

Everybody laughs uneasily, and Carl changes the subject.

I think: This afternoon I saw one of the transsexuals rest her feet on Jorge's thigh. He cupped her feet in his hand. Her feet were strong and nicely shaped, like meat-eating flowers. I imagine again Carl's switchblade opening the bartender. The bartender may finally get a rest. He's been here since eight in the morning. The transsexuals are both very tall, with high cheekbones and beautiful breasts. The nipples are beautiful. They have changed so much. Full lips. Comic-book eyes. Betty Boop. They go topless at poolside. I've seen one of them riding down the beach at sunset on a bay horse. A loop of reins slapping on both sides of the withers. Sand tossed. You, a long way from shore, you stand. There is a sandbar, and the ocean comes to your knees. One of the transsexuals turns a Sea-Doo sharply, so a white curtain of surf falls on your shoulders like an ermine mantle.

I shaved your neck before we left St. John's. Shaving cream like a neck brace holding you, a guillotine. The scrudge of the razor against your neck and hair, and cream piling. You were kneeling, and you turned and pressed your face into my skirt. Smearing chiffon like a hand wiping condensation from a window.

I realize I am at a table with four men and a flashlight. I laugh. The rum is like a time-lapse film playing in my skin. Briefly, I feel a leaden euphoria. I am most myself now.

We have been given the key to a different hotel room after checkout so we can shower before the long trip home. The
room is more luxurious. It is dark, all the curtains drawn, and we turn on a light. We have to shower quickly to catch the bus to the airport. There is a dresser with a giant mirror.

I say, There isn't time.

My breasts flour white where the bikini covered me.

One foot on the bed frame and the heel of my hand on the desk edge. You stand behind me, gripping my hipbones, the strength in your thighs lifting me off my feet, letting me touch down. I watch in the mirror. Your hair is long and wet, stuck to tanned skin. Mouths open. I love you.

In the bathroom you open a jar of coconut pomade and put some in your hair. Pomade that someone has left behind. Another traveller. Later, in the Halifax airport, we sleep on benches, waiting for our connecting plane. I sleep and feel the planes taking off through the vibrations in the vinyl couch. I smell through every dream the coconut pomade. You smell like someone else.

M
ina O'Leary pulls a long silver skirt from her cupboard and holds it to her waist, one hand sweeping the folds. The fabric falls in sharp pleats, the light from the bedside lamp flashing in it.

How about this?

You sure have beautiful things.

It's stuff. I just like
stuff
.

The price tag still dangling from the waistband. Dried roses, petals crusty, in a vase on the vanity. I focus on the roses, but they look inert. The lack of motion in the dead roses buzzes. She picks a pair of nylons off the floor.

I'll put these on, I'd be wearing them in real life.

She takes armloads of clothes off the bed and throws them in the closet. She stretches the white duvet over the crumpled sheets.

Mina: I'm doing this mainly so you can watch me move.

Me: Put on that gold coat and give it a flap. Like the wings of the insect.

Mina: Okay, cool.

I'm making a five-minute film based on a poem by John Steffler, “The Green Insect.” The poem is about the
elusive
. I want to shoot a combination of animation and live footage. I need a woman who looks like a grasshopper. A woman who will sit in a white wicker chair with her ankles drawn up near her bum, knees sticking out. A woman who doesn't get kinks in her neck. The insect doesn't have to be a woman. It could be almost anything you follow because you can't help yourself. It could be a chiffon scarf floating down Duckworth Street in the wind. I saw a beautiful Chinese film with a recurring shot of a long, almost transparent scarf tangled in some branches at dusk. But I like faces. French movies always take a long time with a face. The plot turns when a man raises an eyebrow. Bergman spends a long time on a face, but there is no plot.

What could capture the essence of this poem. No single image by itself, but a storm of images. Some children with sparklers running down the sidewalk at dusk. Bannerman Park with Christmas lights. The insect is anything there's no holding on to. And greenness. Something you ache to own.

My eight-year-old daughter in a purple bathing suit, swinging in the hammock Mina brought back from France last summer. We are around the bay, my daughter is reading a book, and I'm watching her from an upstairs window. She's completely absorbed in the pleasure of reading, the warmth of the
sun, the long grass brushing her back with each sway of the low-slung hammock. Finally she gets up and wanders onto the dirt lane in front of the house. Her feet are bare. She's been wearing that bathing suit all summer, sleeping in it, picking blackberries that stain her teeth, leaping off a boulder into the river. Her long hair in a loose ponytail. She throws a baton. Far up in the blue sky it becomes liquid, a rope of mercury, but it comes down fast, bouncing off the pavement on its white rubber ends. There's no way to keep this moment in the present.

INT. RAMSHACKLE SUMMER HOUSE - DAY

MINA stands at a window on the second floor of
a weathered saltbox. The glass is old and
warped. She's watching a child in the long
grass throwing a baton. Her HUSBAND enters
and stands behind her. He's wearing swimming
trunks, his body is wet. She tilts her head
and he kisses her neck. He unbuttons her
blouse so it falls off her shoulders. Lowers
her bra strap.

MINA
She can see us.

HUSBAND
She can't. The way the light is.

Mina closes her eyes for a moment, lets her
husband touch her breasts. Then, tentatively,
she waves to the child on the lawn. The child
waves back.

I want Mina O'Leary riding the bus in St. John's in a rain-storm. She's in the back, a blur of green moving toward the door. She gets off and snaps open a green umbrella. Droplets of rain spring away from the tight silk. The air brakes sigh, steam rises from the pavement. The umbrella tips over her head. Drops hang, jiggling, from the steel points of the umbrella's skeleton. Her face,
thinking
. Liv Ullman is always thinking, her face is young, young, young. They just talk, Bergman's actors, straight into the camera about humiliation, fear of the dark, death. Liv Ullman strikes a match and lights the lantern, a glow floods up from the wooden table to her chin. They are always on an island. There are vampires, sacrificed lambs. A crow with a giant beak. Bodies draped in white sheets lying on slabs of stone, desolate fields of snow seeping into the mud. Trudging, a lot of trudging. Then, like a jewel, a flashing ruby dropped in a bucket of tar, Bergman offers a bowl of strawberries, or a child. A greenish cast over Mina O'Leary's cheeks from the streetlight through the silk umbrella.

INT. AN ABSTRACT SPACE - DAY

Mina is twenty-seven, she has dark, shiny
hair that she tucks behind her ears, a severe
cut that's growing out with deliberate
dishevelment. When she's listening she
becomes very still, captivated.

MINA
My mother was young, she was twenty-
one when she had me, and I was the
fourth. My father was away.

YOUNG WOMAN
Where was your father?

MINA
Oh, fucking around I guess.
(laughs)
… no, my father drank and he was
a musician, so that was part of it.

She reaches for a lobster claw from a platter
in front of her, cracks it open with a hammer.
She's eating the meat with her fingers;
such intent pleasure, both aloof and sensuous,
unwittingly intimate.

MINA
He'd get these houses for us on the
outskirts of town, isolated, and she'd
have to wait for him, just wait …

YOUNG WOMAN
To bring her food and stuff?

MINA
To get her out of there. She'd wait
and wait, and he just wouldn't come.
I think she went kind of crazy. She
saw things …

YOUNG WOMAN
What kind of things?

MINA
Scary things.

YOUNG WOMAN
Like what though?

MINA
Well, like once –

YOUNG WOMAN
No wait, don't tell me if it's too
scary.

MINA
No, it's nothing, she saw a dog,
that's all, a dog on the lawn pacing
back and forth, waiting to get in.

The John Steffler poem says that after the insect was trapped it tore up history. “It ripped up reality, it flung away time and space / I couldn't believe the strength it had, / it unwound its history, ran out its spring in kicks and / rage, denied itself, denied me and my ownership.”