The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (23 page)

You go to Montreal, she says. I'll decide later.

What are you talking about, Dave says.

He can go. She might stay on. It sends a ticklish flutter, just the thought. The cookie is so good. The table butter is Bethany's influence.

The vegetables come right out of the ground, Bethany says, no sprays or pesticides, nothing like that. Mash them in a little bowl with table butter.

James is seventy. Sara cooked the most exotic things. Recipes off the Internet. She had never attempted these dishes before. He insisted on paying for the food and wine.

Once, to surprise her, he'd had a small jar of truffles imported from Italy. They took a truffle out of the little jar, there were five in all. It lay on the cutting board. James bowed, his hands clasped behind his back, almost touching it with his nose.

My God, he'd said. Smell it.

She'd leaned in and done the same. It was earthy, of course, but she imagined she was smelling something else. Whatever made the pigs dig for it. It went through her, a tingling in her belly, she felt it between her legs. Then she straightened up, blushing. She asked what he thought of Emily's married lover. The question was too personal, she was slightly drunk, but there was no way to retract it.

I want my daughter to feel passion, at any cost. A terrible thing for a father.

He picked up the truffle and bit it. He held the other half out for Sara. She opened her mouth and he put it in, his thumb resting on her lip.

She read later that one truffle will flavour a whole meal.

Sara hadn't returned either of James's two phone messages after the baby. The summer. A waterfall. The beach, a bicycle. Crabapples, kerosene lamps, rainstorms, the whales. Her bare feet on the dash, a take-out coffee. Dave driving. Dave's black curly hair, a dark tan. A ball of earwigs falling from the cupboard onto the shelf, a jar of rusted screws. Three Rottweilers swimming through the long grass like eels. She had just enough time to scoop up the baby and run inside. The hammock, smoothing massage oil on Dave's shoulders, his stomach, his thighs. The oil smelled of cinnamon and orange rind, the bottle said castor, sweet almonds, coconut. It got in her hair and the smell gave her dreams of furtive sex in jungles and sand dunes, a hothouse. She made Dave wake up.

The woman behind the vegetable counter handed her change and she jammed it into her pocket. The wind blew from behind James, his white hair, his scarf.

My eyes are giving me trouble.

We wouldn't have to eat.

You weren't around for so long.

I was busy. I was tired.

You had the baby to think about.

Weeping all the time. I watched so much Paul Newman. There was so much snow.

Last winter.

After the baby

The cat springs into an overhanging branch. The branch wags violently. Two sparrows rise up, fly over the Buddha. The rain is harder now. The fly is inert. It may have died there. She sees the wings are dusty. It's covered in a webbing. Had she imagined its legs rubbing together? It's been dead for years.

You'd leave me, Dave asks.

Anything can happen, she says.

She's late for Thomas, but only by a few minutes. Bethany is spinning a saucepan lid on the floor before him. Sara struggles to get him in his snowsuit. She kisses his face all over. She tastes banana in his hair.

Passes the living room on her way out. Bethany has just had it painted a dark gold. They've changed the wallpaper. Then Sara notices the azalea. The buds are closed tight.

Sara feels a glittery stomach-swirling foreknowledge.

How can that be?

Oh, I returned the one you gave me, Bethany says. This one hasn't bloomed yet.

I
am waiting for Jeremy to show on his bike. I sit on the patio of Future Bakery waiting for him. Chilly, still. No leaves. But everybody, the bikes, a skirt flapping back off a thigh, the army boot touching down, a full stop. Red light, the bicycle. He'll come around the corner. The cars are splats, blue, red, blooming and contracting in the big wall of glass beside me. Zoom. The girl on the bike, flicking through, gone. There he is, take him in. Take his measure.

A shirt, some snazzy thing he's got on. We never hug; I hug him. Because I decided to. I'm starting to feel my age. A nostalgia for things that haven't happened yet. Or they've happened at such a velocity that I'm left behind, still waiting for them. Anticipation so heightened it makes my funny bone ring. I'm going to hug Jeremy from now on, every time I see him. I'm never going to not hug. Not just him, everybody. A new me, a hugging me.

I came to Toronto because I hadn't seen Lily and Marco for so long, because I had some money, to get away from the baby, drink coffee at Lily's kitchen table, eat things. Fusion. Maybe get drunk. For a long time you couldn't get shiitake mushrooms in St. John's. Lemongrass we have. I wanted to see Jeremy. I haven't seen him since he left Newfoundland two years ago. He's come into some serious money and I think he might disappear with it.

Lily and I met at art school centuries ago. She's got some new grey at the temples; other than that she's exactly the same. They're both the same, Lily and Marco, but why did I let five years go by? I need her. The way she knocks foreheads with the cat.

Lily says, I want to crack the new painting wide open. Her painting in the centre of the living room, some bare canvas still showing, the spotlight with a crush of tinfoil over the rim focussing the beam. The rest of the room is darkish, even in the morning. A quiet street, you can see the squirrels leaping, silhouettes, the branches thrashing briefly. The cavernous sofa that Lily's recovered in velvet. A Graham Coughtry, two figures interlocked, just a few sure, dangerous lines of ink.

Often she sits for an hour or more in front of the painting, her back very straight, smoking. I've seen her drip gold from a tiny bottle. I stand behind her with my coffee. Blues, pinks, lemon, almost white in the centre, all of it in motion, sunlight on water.

It's still representational, she says. One minute it's brushstrokes and colour, the next minute —

She's taking me to her Improv Contact class. I'm nervous.

Look, she says, it'll be fine.

Walking there, the crocuses. Spring on Yonge, smart and awake, like toothpaste. We cross the bridge and into the subway station, warm uprush, vaguely feculent: feet, newsprint, grease. Lily drops two tokens. She's wearing a jacket I've never seen before, unholy pink. Her glasses on a string. Glasses she didn't have the last time I was here.

She and Marco hardly touch breakfast but she makes us cappuccino first thing, the whistling, hacking steam. The cappuccino maker is new. All the cats. Last year she coaxed a feral kitten by lying on her stomach in the backyard for a full week, extending a stick with a gob of wet food on the end. She stops halfway down the stairs to the trains. Stands still.

I need a can of house paint, she says, I'll pour it. A few subway transfers lift in a subterranean wind and eddy around her knees. She trots down the stairs again and I hurry to catch up.

This Contact thingy, I say. Do they talk, at Contact?

Roar of train, she closes her eyes against it.

There's little talk, she says.

So you just approach someone?

You sidle up.

And touch them?

You'll see. It's very sweet.

A church basement, no music. Everyone wearing sweats. A woman rolls toward me. Her bare foot squeaks on the gym floor. I'm lying on my stomach. Old wood, shiny brown varnish. High ceilings.

My first time, I whisper.

Mine too.

Our calves touch, we start like that. Her ankle looks stern, circumspect. Her ankle looks like the right-sized wrench grasping a bolt. This is a stranger's ankle. An ankle that has come from somewhere: an old-fashioned bathtub with a flare of rust near the drain, plume of leftover, slow-breaking bubbles, red sock, a streetcar, she's stepping off and pigeons fly up, just bones. I'm loving that I'll never see her again. So few people do I never see again. Our thighs, the backs of our hands, touching. One shoulder, the other. I'll see Jeremy later, tomorrow. He has an answering machine, the old kind, with a tape.

I say, If you're there. It's me. Jem, if you're there? But he doesn't pick up. I listen to the oceanic silence in the pay phone receiver, a phone on Bloor, it's sunny, someone opens a glass door and the world in the glass folds into spears of light and flings itself wide open again, cars emerge, skyscrapers, a woman it takes a beat to recognize, slightly elongated, the camel-hair coat, myself. I believe Jeremy's listening to my voice in the empty room. I imagine him sitting in a chair, the fabric worn shiny and torn at the armrest, burlap and coarse cotton batting with flecks of sawdust poking through. Some chair he dragged in from outside, a shawl thrown over the back. His hands in his hair. Listening, yawning, the kettle plugged in.

Jeremy? Pick up. I know you're there.

I roll on top of her, her bum. Imagine, in a city this big, the swimming pools from the air, trees, warehouses. My hipbone in the cleft of her bum, and rolling away, our feet locked. Just
toes. You don't not touch, you touch. Lily has assured me there's nothing sexual about Contact.

It's not that way, she says. It just isn't. There was a notice to that effect a couple of weeks ago. I can't remember how it was worded.

I'd love to know, I say.

It was the gist, says Lily.

Worded. Nothing exists until it's worded. How deliberate it all is: this ankle, my marriage, the baby, Jeremy's bike locked to a post somewhere. The money he's made, suitcases, Europe he's saying. Australia. He's not really saying. The way he will thread through a crowd the last time I see him, turn a corner. My voice in an empty room. I believe it is empty after all. Listen, if you're there.

Our spines, this stranger's and mine, touching like the inner workings, the cogs of something precious: a Swiss watch, a bank safe. My head drops into the curve of her neck. She squishes herself under me. Lifts. The end of her ponytail against my cheek. Her body as spare and emphatic as a jungle gym. Then I dance with a man who has sweat dripping from his face. It drips from his hair, his eyebrow, the tip of his nose. He wears drawstring pants and rising from the waistband is a swirl of black hair up his belly. He thrusts me skyward with one hand. My thigh pressing his damp neck.

Jeremy has broken up with Stella. Stella calls me in St. John's and we talk for hours. We have talked this way since grade ten. I've got the yellow tablecloth under my elbows. A white bowl with a mottled banana and a paperclip, the pip of
an orange. The baby is asleep, my husband has gone upstairs to write. He's writing a sociology of hell. He just showed me a picture of a monster eating people and shitting them out whole. A screaming, kicking person in each of the monster's hands, another coming out the monster's anus. Horned angels piggybacking naked sinners, dropping them through the clouds into the tortured throngs below. The caption says, An example of Renaissance overcrowding. He hands me a joint. It takes only one stretchy moment to feel stoned. I must make sense. I sit up straight, a nimble recruit in the war for adroit thought.

He says, If you watered the plants now and then you might have some appreciation for them. The phone rings. Stella, calling from Toronto.

She says, I wake up, my heart is racing.

Listen. If you want him back bad enough.

I do.

If you want him back, you go get him.

And I like, what, hit him over the head with a club?

Just coat the guy with snot and tears.

Snot, she says.

You weep and beg and cover him with snot, drip all over him. I believe any woman can get any man, I say.

The statement leaves me giddy, exhausts me. I wonder, during the ensuing silence, if I believe it. I find that I do, though I also know it to be, in some minor way, incorrect.

I've tried that, Stella says. There's another silence.

I've tried snot, she says.

More snot, I say. Just go with more snot.

After Contact, Lily and I sit at an old picnic table outside the church, facing a chainlink fence, a parking lot. Ukrainian hymns come through the brick. Lily lights a cigarette.

I like to sit here after, she says, and just —

She takes a deep draw on her cigarette. We're in the shade and the smoke looks blue and hangs. There's no hurry. Lily has always been beautiful. Right now she's very beautiful. My husband stirring something with his hand in a stainless steel bowl the night before I got on the plane. That hour after the dishes, the baby asleep.

The kitchen echoing itself, concentric rings of kitchen pulsing from the kitchen. This would be the moment my husband and I have worked toward all day, every day, for fourteen years, more or less. The dryer going. The kettle. The rest of the house detaching like the burnt-out parts of a rocket.

It was potatoes, he was pouring a dressing. Tapping the paprika jar with his finger, clouds of it sifting. The potatoes falling through his fingers against the bowl. He held his hand, shiny with oil, under the tap. Flicked his hand a couple of times, dried it with the tea towel. I knew he would say about the floor. About the floor would be the next thing. He covered the bowl with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge. He opened the paper. Look at that, he said. The phone rang and neither of us moved. Can you believe it, he said and turned the page.

I see
The New Yorker
lying in the breadbasket. A story it's taking me two days to read. A boy and his father, ducks. So rich that Louisiana came over me in the supermarket, and I've never even been there. Later, while putting clothes in the dryer, I
imagined the smell of swamps. Last night I'd crept down the stairs into the cold kitchen, my T-shirt and underwear, looking for
The New Yorker
to finish the story. Wanting the climax, resolution. Gunshots. The boy and his dad, unyielding loss. Wanting to read myself to sleep. But when I got to the kitchen I couldn't remember why I was there. Now, in the breadbasket.