Alligator (11 page)

Lately, she’s been thinking about hitting him up for a loan. There have been unforeseen expenses. She misses him fiercely. She finds herself arguing with him in her head. He’s in the room and he’s cantankerous. She asks him what he thinks about this or that shot: the girl in bed, her red hair spread over the white nightdress, how pale and possessed she looks, and the surf smashing against the cliffs and the four white horses galloping over the road at night.

Archbishop Fleming’s cape, the scarlet lining in the moonlight, the cracking whip. Newfoundland has never looked so beautiful and dangerous, she wants to tell him.

They’d just got married and had figured out the cities in Europe that were nine hours apart so they could sleep on the train and save on hotels. A honeymoon in Europe, this is 1961 and she is what?

Twenty-one?

Chairs, four to a cabin, unfolded into cots and the train rocked them. They slept in their jean jackets and made love with their clothes half on and hoped no one would interrupt.

Sometimes they shared the cabin, once with a girl from Switzerland with fat red cheeks and thick blond braids whom Martin mistakenly called Heidi, though her name, she said, was Giselle.

Madeleine socked her bum into his hips, his cock pressing against his fly and the seam in the bum of her jeans and that was as close as they could get under the circumstances. Good night, Heidi, Martin said over his shoulder.

They were both twenty-one and couldn’t make love enough. There was never enough sex. They hung on to each other in their sleep, his arm under her shirt between her breasts, her chin resting on his fist. He always slept in longer than she did.

In the early mornings she made her way down the rattling train for coffee and she would see the fields, luminous green with blue shadows under the clouds, and the Alps, smoky and cold.

Cows that watched the train with profound interest and started a quick walk with their heads hanging low between their shoulders having decided to keep the train company and in midstep forgot what they were trotting after and stood as still as stone.

She saw villages, forests, and windmills sweep past and returned to the cabin and he was still sleeping.

She read
The Magic Mountain
and went for another coffee, but he did not wake until the very last minute when the train jolted and screeched and emptied out. They had to take their knapsacks down. She pulled on the collar of his jacket and his eyes flew open as if he had been administered electric shock. He stretched his face and had a little shake and sat blinking, his fists dug into the cot, staring at the floor. He had no idea where he was.

Come on, she said. She was taking down the knapsacks by herself, grunting under their weight, Come on, come on. By then she had lived a full life, felt vast gushes of euphoria and boiling impatience. The day was half over by the time he opened his eyes.

They brushed their teeth in filthy bathrooms with warped mirrors and naked light bulbs in mountain villages. The porcelain sinks had flares of rust and the drains went down into the earth and bubbled up close by. She thought about the phrase,
My husband
. She said it to herself, This is my
husband
, Martin. Or,
This
is my husband, Martin. She hated the word
wife
. It was not a word she could bring herself to say.

Husband, too, was questionable. It sounded stout, bifocaled, and involving of a cardigan.

There were things she would not do: she would not iron his shirts, she would not mow lawns or ever, ever, ever fake an orgasm or put her children in tennis or sailing or allow Martin to buy a motorcycle because she was afraid his head would get smashed in, though he wanted a motorcycle more than anything in the world, nor would she ever get fat or sleep on the couch or let the sun set on a fight or have an abortion or make meatloaf, although a recipe with orange rind and brown sugar had caught her eye.

She would not outright deny the motorcycle — how could she — but she would connive against it.

She would never freeze seven meals because she was going on a trip and didn’t want him to have to cook.

It frightened her, what she had got into. In her mother’s deep freeze there was a crown of rosebuds that she had worn and a wedge of wedding cake wrapped in tinfoil. Her dress had been cream-coloured, full of understated flounce, and belonged to her godmother. She’d stood on a stool at a dressmaker’s with her arms out from her sides and had the zipper moved so the dress would fit in such a way that she could draw breath.

She had fully expected, at the dinner in which they announced their wedding plans to his parents, to be told they were too young, that they had their lives ahead of them, that they’d known each other for only six months and if they were not pregnant what was the rush? She already knew she wanted to make films and she knew the marriage would make it hard to make films but she did not know how or why and so she didn’t think about it.

She’d worn a black turtleneck, a rust-coloured skirt, and square shoes and she can still see the way his parents looked up from their plates, how startled they were. How their eyes met and how they decided in unison what they thought of the news. They both took another forkful of food before they spoke.

She had called his parents’ house once, looking for him, and they hadn’t hung up the phone properly and she heard their conversation about the groceries they were putting away. She heard them say about the price of peas going up and then heard a can of peas, she assumed, slide across the cupboard shelf. She heard his mother say about her back, his father say about his card game. She was riveted to the phone. They chuckled at some remark about a turn of fate; Father Hearn had been dealt the ace just when all was lost in a game of bridge. They both chuckled, a comfortable, private chuckle, and the phone disconnected, but it had been a glimpse into an intimacy so rich it left her light-headed.

Their forks and knives, which had stopped over their plates, began to move again and she saw they were happy with the decision and she could not believe it.

The toilets were clogged and the floors were sometimes packed earth and straw, sometimes covered in a sluice of shit and chickens ran in and out, and they could not believe their luck. They were in Europe.

They hitchhiked to Madrid and fell asleep in a transport truck and the driver pulled over on a hill and got out to smoke under the stars and came back with a flowering branch of an almond tree cold with dew. She woke because the rain from the almond branch dropped on her cheek. She was disoriented and the flowers filled the cab with a green, sugary tang and the smell of cigarettes reminded her of her father, dead for years then.

Groggy with sleep, the flowers and cold night wind made her potently frightened. She was way too much in love.

Smell the flower, the Spaniard said.

I am too much in love, she said.

Smell the flower, he demanded. And he shook the twig near her nose and raindrops fell on her face. She wanted to know what was in the back of the transport truck. What they were carrying.

The landscape had been slipping past them for weeks and it felt like having a tablecloth pulled from beneath an elaborately laid feast.

For the rest of her life she would judge every trip against this trip and every love again this love and none would measure up.

No love would ever measure up.

The truck driver said they had come through the mountains and it had snowed. She saw a rim of slush outside the arc of the wipers and was surprised because two days before they had been swimming in the ocean near Marseille. Marty had pulled a pink starfish out of the waves, handed it to her, and the arms curled around her wrist.

BEVERLY

D
AVID HAD MADE
a substantial profit in downtown development in the early ‘90s. He’d had a hand in the construction of many downtown buildings whose main architectural characteristic was an arrogant disregard of the skyline they butchered. This sort of construction — fast and ugly — had inspired months of bitter letters to the
Telegram
, and left a handful of Newfoundland men as wealthy as any men in the world. David had come very close to attaining that sort of wealth.

Or who can say, Beverly thought, what is close. For years, thinking about how close they’d come to extravagant wealth was a metaphysical exercise that gave Beverly pre-migraine symptoms. A blurry spot hung over her newspaper all morning. The altered vision was accompanied by a hypersensitivity to smells.

She vaguely associated the condition with the supernatural. When she felt a migraine coming she almost always bought a lottery ticket.

The two and a half years of wealth had been the best years of her life. She started to work part-time and had time for watercolour lessons and played tennis three times a week. She sunbathed on the veranda that ran around their house, even in May, when the snow was sliding off the tree branches and the icicles on the eaves were dripping. She never wanted to have to work full-time again.

David had taken the family on three trips to the Caribbean during those wealthy years.

Colleen would remember for the rest of her life a sugar plantation in Barbados she had visited when she was seven; a plantation mistress had poisoned a series of husbands with voodoo.

Colleen had fed wild monkeys from her hand, and later heard they’d torn a Rottweiler limb from limb. She remembered crouching indefinitely on a floor of dried palm leaves, the ground full of flashing spears of light and shadow, waiting with the banana held before her. The monkeys blinked quickly and rushed forward and held still and fled to a safe distance. With each brave, wily scramble toward the banana the numbers of monkeys grew until there were perhaps thirty.

They screamed to each other and bared their teeth and a small monkey snatched the whole banana from Colleen’s hand. Then the gardener came out waving a machete and telling her to back away slowly.

As quickly as David had got rich, he’d lost everything. He returned to his job at a computer imaging company, specializing in hospital software; three-dimensional graphics that allowed surgeons to watch a laser operation three provinces away, then pick up the phone and tell the guys who were gouging away at someone’s tumour that they’d missed a spot.

He had handed in his resignation two years before with some flourish.

I’m getting a fat ass from all the airplane food, he’d said. He was an engineer and liked the clank of one steel girder lowered by crane onto another steel girder; he liked the smell of outdoor work. He hated the rinky-dink hospitals he’d had to visit and their earnest staffs. He wanted to work with men who had tattoos on their forearms, who could swing a sledgehammer without throwing out their backs.

Although David had not exactly told them to stuff their job, as Colleen had heard him rehearse in the bathroom mirror, his chin raised to the ceiling while he dragged viciously on the knot of his tie, speaking through gritted teeth and looking as though he might strangle himself, he had returned to the position bitter and flinty.

The company rehired him for almost double what he had been paid two years before. He had to travel for work and was gone once a month.

Beverly got calls from Provo, Utah, where David said the women were athletic and blond and dazed.

Impossible to get a drink, he said. He was doing pushups as he spoke, grunting after each sentence. He called from Texas to say they were having a windstorm. He had opened the patio windows because it was exhilarating.

Long white curtains are billowing into the room, he said. She heard a smash.

My God, he said. Now there’s porridge all over the floor.

He called from Ireland and when she hung up she heard a racket in the living room and her heart beat jaggedly; a bird had flown in through the chimney, an unmistakable omen of death.

The next time she spoke to David he was in Berlin and he said that he’d stood at the edge of a cliff in Ireland, in a small village full of ancient Druid dwellings of stone, and the wind through the crevices had sounded like voices and he’d suffered from vertigo and nearly given in.

Given in? she asked.

I could have jumped, he said.

Something had been compelling in Ireland, that’s what she remembered. Something had almost drawn him away. She could hear techno music bleating in the background like cash registers or air conditioners or hundreds of women panting toward orgasm.

I’m in an underground bar, he said.

What do you mean underground? she asked. She was imagining catacombs and rats.

Illegal, he said. It moves location, it doesn’t exist.

Do you still feel like giving in? she said.

That was Ireland, he said. Berlin is all broken glass and
BMW
s.

She was feeling around on the nightstand for her glasses. She hadn’t said anything about the bird. She’d had to ask eighty-six-year-old Mrs. Fowler from next door, who had taught botany at the university, to come over and catch it. Mrs. Fowler had Parkinson’s and stumbled in, gripping her walker from which there was hanging a clear plastic bag of urine. She positioned herself in the centre of the living room. She wore a lilac cardigan with a large stain that looked like pea soup and her glasses were hanging on a red satin ribbon.

The bird dive-bombed them twice, then settled on the curtain rod, and cocked its head, blinking inquisitively. Mrs. Fowler slowly put a quivering hand into the pocket of her black polyester pants and removed a plastic whistle.

The whistle shook violently in her hand and she dropped it twice and Beverly retrieved it and wiped it clean. When Mrs. Fowler finally had the whistle clenched in her teeth she blew with all her might and it was piercingly shrill and had an otherworldly warble. The bird flung itself at the opposite window and fell with a thud to the floor.

You’ve killed it, Beverly whispered. Mrs. Fowler shut her eyes in the effort to speak.

I am so often uncertain these days, she said. Beverly picked up the bird carefully and the fragile neck tipped over her finger but she could feel its heart, faster than anything, under her thumb.