The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (21 page)

But every bystander at four in the morning is brought to a convenience store by some aberration in their regular schedule. A disruption no more or less dramatic than the one that has brought me here. I am here because I believe in retribution, have been half waiting for it, half longing for the relief it might bring, ever since the night with Bernard. This is a comeuppance, an answering for, a just reward. That is my motivation as an extra in this scene, if extras need motivation. The man with the knife turns to me. If he was brought here by supernatural voices, they are telling him now,
Not the boy, dummy, the woman
. I'm not an innocent bystander. Sirens so far away they could be out in the Atlantic. Policemen. Someone shouts, Don't move. But I am at the door, and then a punch in the guts by a force so powerful it knocks the breath out of my lungs. I am drilled open by a pillar of granite. I am knocked off my feet and
I'm driven across the tiles until my head smacks the beer cooler at the far end of the store. Cans and boxes, everything flies in my face. I'm drowning.

The baby was ripped from my arms though my every thought was to keep him there. My arms are crossed over my chest as though he's still in them. But he isn't. I am holding only myself. A firehose. I am in four inches of water. Everywhere there are bobbing lemons. There are more lemons than anything else. Pete is floating face up in his snowsuit. I lurch toward him, grip the front of his suit in my fist. The water gives him up with a smack like a kiss. We are both screeching with our mouths wide and our faces red.

The doctor at Emergency checks Pete's bones, his heart, blood pressure. He looks in Pete's ears. Pete is perfectly fine; the snowsuit is waterproof; he's not even wet. I phone the Ivanys and get the machine. They've gone downtown.

I am in the bedroom window looking out at the street. It's still snowing. I see the streetlights dim, for a moment some vague tube inside glows orange-pink, and then the light goes out. The sun is up now. I hear the front door open and quietly close. Lyle knocks his boots against the wall. I hear him sigh as he bends to untie his laces. I hear him drop his sheepskin coat on the banister and hear it fall to the floor. I can tell he's mildly drunk. I can tell by the squeak of the banister that he's leaning on it too heavily. Finally he comes into the room behind me. I turn and I have Pete in my arms.

I say, He's asleep.

W
e are on a yacht in St. Pierre. Maureen's boyfriend, Antoine, has invited us to go sailing, but there's something wrong with the engine, so we remain tied to the dock. The marina is a blast of white sails and the blue is very blue. We lie on the deck and suntan. I have a book by Marguerite Duras open on my stomach. Maureen and I read most of this book one night three years ago. A short novel about a seventy-six-year-old woman of great literary fame who attracts a thirty-six-year-old lover.

We read it in the kitchen on Gower Street during a snowstorm, taking turns reading aloud while the headlights of fishtailing cars swept the ceiling and the velvet funk of pea soup rose from the stove. We were overjoyed for Marguerite Duras. Way to go Marguerite, we yelled.

But now, three years later, the story seems very different than I remember. The young lover is bisexual. Has affairs with
bartenders in a nearby hotel. He seems to be terrorizing the novelist, who is too old and proud and drunk to do anything about it. She spends all her money on him and waits for him to bring food, sometimes going hungry. How had we mistaken this for hope?

I'm also hungry. We spent a lot of money at a local shop, but most of the food has been eaten. There is a florid pink sausage pebbled with lard, and a can of duck. A package of biscuits from Norway that hasn't been opened. We're too lazy to go back into town. For a long time nobody talks. Then my husband lifts his head from a faded canvas pillow and looks one way, then the other. He puts his head back down, rolls his shoulders.

He says, I've just had a very strong memory of a bus ride in Cuba.

I say, With the careening eagle in the ravine.

He says, Not that bus ride.

I say Maureen's name. She doesn't move. Then, very slowly, she sits up. She says, Isn't sleep strange, it overtakes us all, whole cities — the activities just stop for hours. It's just struck me.

Think of all the dead people, I say.

Antoine's hand emerges from a hatch, waving a baguette. Then his head appears very near Maureen's thigh. He bites her and she squeals. He beats her stomach with the baguette.

We eat the Norwegian biscuits and dip the hardened bread in cardamom tea in enamel cups, without saying much. The fresh air has made us all sleepy. For a while, there's commotion as a giant yacht ties up next to Antoine's.

The three sailors are dressed in Helly Hanson fleece, royal blue, red, yellow. A woman of perhaps forty with a long mane of steely ringlets raises the American flag. The flag flutters weakly and then wraps itself around the mast, like a barber's pole. A white Styrofoam plate lifts itself off their deck and floats in the water. They each pause and look at it. Then they step over the deck of Antoine's yacht to get to the wharf.

As he steps from Antoine's deck, one of the Americans loses his shoe. Maureen tries to fish it out with a long pole, but the shoe begins to fill with water. Antoine climbs over the side. He inches his back down the creosote timber of the wharf with his feet jammed against the yacht. It looks like he will either be crushed or fall into the filthy harbour. A speedboat passes and the yacht moves closer and the space for Antoine is very narrow. The American woman in white pants clutches the arm of the elderly man. The man removes a white baseball cap and rubs his forehead with the back of his hand. Maureen smokes and her hand trembles near her mouth.

All this for a shoe, the man says.

But Antoine scrabbles up, spider-like, and holds the shoe in the air like a trophy. He does a little bow and tips the shoe, letting the water spill out. Everyone applauds.

Early in the morning I go to the yacht club to shower. I meet a woman and child from France, a family who tied their catamaran onto the Americans' yacht during the night. The woman gets out of the shower and isn't in a hurry to cover up. She has a tattoo of an orange and black butterfly in the concave dip near her hipbone. She scrubs her daughter with a thick
white towel. The room is full of steam and the smell of shampoo. The child has the same blond hair as her mother, shiny and pale like mashed banana. The woman tells me she has been on the catamaran for five years. They have been all over the world. Both the children were born while they travelled.

When will you stop, I ask.

We will continue for a long time, she says.

Maureen wears her sunglasses. We have finished the Norwegian biscuits. In the big black lenses of Maureen's sunglasses the ropes and booms and masts all crisscross like a cat's cradle. She is crying and the tears slide down her cheeks and hang on her chin. I can't get a straight answer out of her. She has her arms wrapped around her knees. I sit up on one elbow and wave the Duras novel at her.

I say, This is nothing like what we thought.

She turns and the sun, which is setting, catches in one lens of her sunglasses and it burns a dark piercing amber and she ducks her head and puts her hand over her eyes.

She says, I wanted you to see this life.

It's foggy the day we leave. My husband shoots a video of Antoine on the dock as the ferry pulls away. He is wearing a navy and white striped T-shirt like a real Frenchman. He waves, and does not stop waving until he is engulfed by the fog.

Maureen and I met him in a bar last summer. He was wearing a faded fluorescent pink undershirt. He has an orange beard, tufts of orange under his arms, and a long orange braid.
He told us that his granny, on her deathbed, made him promise never to cut his hair.

Why would she do such a thing?

So I would understand the weight of a promise.

We watch him climb the rigging. His bare feet curling over the skeleton of the sails, a great height over the deck. His wiry body a part of the spare geometry.

Antoine's brother visits Newfoundland from Nigeria, where he's been studying giraffes and getting his pilot's license.

He raps the brass knocker on the front door and steps inside. Sunlight flashes under his arms and between his legs and the door closes and the hall is dark. He stands, not moving. I am in the kitchen with my hands in the sink. I walk down the hall to greet him. He's wearing a straw hat with tiny brass bells on the rim and patterns woven in wine and dark green straw. His face is so like Antoine's that for a moment I think it is Antoine, playing a joke. I hold out my hand, he grips it, soapsuds squish through my fingers.

Any brother of Antoine's is a brother of mine, I say. He tilts his head quizzically, and the bells jingle through the empty house.

He sleeps in the living room on the couch. There's a French door with no curtain and he sleeps in his briefs with the blankets kicked away. He finally gets up and I don't know what to do with him. With Antoine, misunderstandings could keep us talking for hours, but this guy has a firm grip on English and I'm at a loss.

Okay, stay still, I say. I'm going to paint you.

His knife pauses over the bread. A gob of marmalade hangs along the serrated edge. I do portraits in ink on wet paper. The thing about ink, as soon as you touch the brush to paper you have decided the course of the drawing. First, I am looking into his eyes. I am thinking about the shape of the eyeball, and the size, how far the eye sinks into the face. How the shadow slopes over the bone of the brow — if he sits back even an inch, the shadow will be radically different. Then the colour of his eyes startles me. I thought they were dark brown, but in this light there is a tawny copper underneath, like the bottle of marmalade, which the sun strikes so it seems to pulse. He has just come from Nigeria, and how far away that is, and what he has seen. Then I realize that I have been staring with an unself-conscious intensity into a stranger's eyes. And this brother of Antoine is staring at me and we become aware of ourselves, and the intimacy is briefly but fiercely embarrassing.

He says, gesturing to the sketchbook, Forgive me, it's my first time.

Weeks later in our kitchen I say, Antoine seemed strange to me. That weekend in St. Pierre I marked a change in him.

Late at night Maureen watched the video again and in the morning she said it was true. He had behaved differently.

I said, But he's hardly in the video at all, you can't go by that. There's a close-up of everyone playing pool. I tried to make it like John Cassevetes, swaying the camera around them, close-ups on laughing mouths, sultry eyes, chalking the pool
cue. The high-pitched scrudge of chalk and cue. The camera swings around the bar and when it passes the open doorway a blast of sunshine casts a trail over the last half of the shot. A flame of blue light, an afterimage, swims briefly over the bartender and leaves a halo on Antoine's white shirt.

She's sitting on the sill of the kitchen window, a cheek and a half hefted out, so she can smoke. She turns and blows into the garden and turns back.

She says, What do you think of that? He wants to sleep with other women.

She jumps down.

Maybe I could enjoy it, she says. She holds her cigarette under the tap. I can see a tremor in her hand. Freedom, she says.

Once when we were fighting Maureen grabbed my face and kissed me on the cheek. I told her never to touch my face when I'm angry. I ran up the stairs two at a time and she was at the bottom. I leaned over the rail to shout at her, Don't touch me.

She grabbed the banister. I'll kiss you if I want, she said. Normally we never touch, we aren't touchy-feely.

I'll kiss you if I want, she screamed, the spiteful squeak of her hand on the banister. It was true, there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it.

She slammed the kitchen door. Then she opened it and said, I'm sorry, that was over the top.

Antoine tells me that if he kissed me it would be very different.

From what, I say.

From the way other men have kissed you all your life.

I say, Yes, I know. French-kissing. We have that here, too. No big deal.

He says he isn't talking about just the tongues. He says speaking French uses a whole different set of muscles in the lips, the tongue, the mouth. A kiss is different.

But you're speaking English now, I say, you probably have your technique all fucked up.

At night he comes to Maureen with something on a fork, his hand cupped underneath. The yacht is rocking gently and the fog is already settling. He says, Ferme les yeux, ouvre la bouche.

She giggles.

What is it, she says.

You must trust me, he says.

She closes her eyes and opens her mouth. She chews once, twice. And he says, a snail.

Then she screams and spits it into her hand.

Maureen says of the woman with the blonde hair like mashed banana, A life defined solely by pleasure.

I say, Yuck.

Once Maureen held a big light for Antoine when they were trying to dock at night and he said, Get it out of my fucking eyes. It was their only fight in two months of sailing.

But he was proving himself, she says, and I could have blinded him.

She looks far away, her eyes so full of the dock and him reaching for the boat, him in the brilliant blast of light and a dark, uninhabited coastline behind him.

She says, That light. And she shakes her head in amazement. Get it out of my fucking eyes, she says.

It was so heavy. It was all I could do to hold it.

After she left for France I found a diary of hers on a high cupboard shelf where we kept linen. I was alone in the house, standing on a chair gripping the dusty book. I let the diary fall open and read just one paragraph. She described a gold dress.

I snapped it shut. It was as if she were in the room, but I could feel the longing for her too — how much I missed her. The dress was a metallic orange, shiny, formfitting to just above the knee, and she wore it dancing. We went out and got drunk, walked home in a windstorm when the bars closed. There was a sluice of yellow leaves in the centre of Cathedral Street. We walked up the steep hill with our calves aching and the wet leaves clinging to our boots like spurs.