Alligator (16 page)

The hot-dog stand isn’t for sale, Frank said. Valentin lifted his lip then in a kind of slow snarl and a toothpick unfolded out of his mouth and he picked at his eyetooth with it and examined the pick and dropped it in the gutter. His black sunglasses were full of the coloured lanterns that were strung across the street. He turned and the lanterns ran across the black lenses, one after the other. The city had done up George Street to look like drinking was a Newfoundland tradition. But the old-fashioned street lights were brand new.

Valentin was taking all this in, this Old World look. There was a strip joint very near the hot-dog stand and the windows were covered with posters so you couldn’t look in, but light leaked out the sides. Frank glanced over at the taxi drivers and he noticed Lloyd with his back against his car, his arms folded over his chest. Someone in the Sundance had started up the mechanical bull. They could hear the rodeo music and the metal wrenching kicks and bucks and the yowls of whoever was riding it.

The permit is my permit, said Frank.

I think you’ll change your mind, Valentin said. At first Frank thought there might be something that wasn’t translating properly.

I think you’ll change your mind. He waited in case something else was coming. He waited for something else. He waited for things not to be the way they were.

But everything was the way it was.

He had understood perfectly.

Valentin had made himself understood.

Frank saw that things were exactly the way he had always understood things to be all his life. He had understood things to be this way when he was five and had to go into a foster home because his mother was hospitalized for breast cancer and had to have both her breasts removed.

He had understood things to be this way on several different occasions when he was, however briefly, a guest of the Whitbourne Correctional Institute for Juvenile Delinquents at the age of fourteen after a bout of shoplifting — he was caught, the last time, putting two T-bone steaks down the front of his jeans in the meat section of Dominion.

He understood things were this way when his mother was diagnosed with cancer a second time and when she explained to him that it was all through her, a phrase that has haunted him ever since, all through me, all through me, all through me, how thorough and definite such a phrase can prove to be, he well understood, and they wanted her to go to hospital at once because in the hospital they could manage the pain and there was a very good chance she wouldn’t be coming out of the hospital and all of that proved to unfold exactly as his mother had said it would for the simple reason that that was the way things were.

And when the Russians moved into the bed-sit on the third floor, Frank had the uncomfortable feeling that things would once again prove to turn out the way things often turned out.

The guy named Valentin had been slapping a girl around the bed-sit the night before and Frank heard her screaming and he heard what he thought was her head smack the wall and then he heard her running down the stairs. They had one of her shoes and Frank went to his window and she was dishevelled and snot-nosed and the knee was torn out of her stocking and her knee was bleeding like she’d scraped it.

The shoe flew out the window and hit her in the head and she dropped to her knees on the pavement and the men were laughing and a Gulliver’s Taxi came up and there was a long wait with her knock-kneed because of her tight skirt and she was dazed by the smack of the shoe on her head and the terrible predicament she’d got into because Valentin was yelling he would look for her wherever she went.

Try to leave, he shouted.

Just try.

Kneeling on the street and the back door of the cab opened and still she stayed and finally the driver got out, the guy named Lloyd. He picked up the shoe, took the girl by the elbow, and got her standing up. He put her in the back seat and a beer bottle flew out the window and smashed near Lloyd’s heel. The glass glittering and rocking near the heel of Lloyd’s boot and Lloyd didn’t even acknowledge it; he just walked around to his side and closed his door. The taxi sat for a moment because Lloyd must have been asking the girl where she wanted to go and probably wasn’t getting any sense out of her. Another beer bottle flew out the window and bounced off the roof of the taxi but it didn’t break, it just rolled down the street. Then Lloyd drove away. He didn’t burn rubber, he just drove off quietly.

Frank’s mother believed there was no difficulty that couldn’t be surmounted. This unending willingness not to be defeated kept his mother going, but she was also beaten down by it. Frank had learned from his mother not to give up on those things that are sacred. He could be yielding, but if something was sacred he would not bend.

What was sacred was he would not give up the hot-dog permit to those Russians because he had worked for it.

The girl at Sears had pink lipstick on, which made him focus on her mouth and the word
wet bar
sounded like an invitation to something altogether different; so he followed her to that part of the store.

It was black padded vinyl with vinyl-covered buttons that held the diamonds of padding in place. It had a shoulder of chrome and the part you’d rest your elbow on was a smoked mirror with gold veins running through it. It had a lazy Susan, which he had never seen before and thought ingenious. There was a lone bottle of Tabasco sauce in the lazy Susan. He had to admit it was an impressive piece of furniture.

The girl was chewing gum and she blew a bubble. She said she was getting married in a month to a guy who drove a bus and they had put this exact item on their registered wedding list and many of the guests had already put down as much as fifty dollars toward it. She said they had been buying furniture for three years always with the same plan in mind, when they had enough to furnish a small apartment they’d get married. They didn’t have a single thing on credit. Her fiancé was going to the technical college at night. She wouldn’t always be working at Sears, she said. What she wanted, and what she would eventually achieve, was accreditation as a dental hygienist.

Nothing is going to stand in my way, she said. Frank thought he could leave the mall now, the Russians had probably forgotten him.

I don’t want a wet bar, Frank said.

You should go to school, she said. You look smart enough. You don’t know anything about me, Frank said. The girl blew another bubble and it got big and sagged and clung to her chin. She took the gum out of her mouth and peeled it off her face.

I can see when people got potential, she said. She slapped the bar twice and turned her back on him and sauntered down the aisle running her hand over the stacks of towels.

MADELEINE

W
HAT SHE MISSES
is convention. She misses security and not having to explain to people she’s just meeting. She misses the way he sometimes held her at night when her heart was racing with anxiety. When she is afraid of having a heart attack, alone, dying alone, she misses him then.

Marty’s mother and father had nine children, and his siblings were either domineering and wild-eyed or acutely shy. They were either Irish-looking with big blue eyes and black hair or they had a Spanish look, dark-eyed and vixenish. One of his sisters was a ballerina with a small company in Boston, another owned a consulting firm that assessed the environmental impact of new industry and was known to be impartial and thorough. There was a nurse who taught prenatal classes, having helped deliver hundreds of babies early in her career. She was cheerful and fresh-faced and had a deformed hip that gave her a strange gait and she told stories of women on their knees in elevators, and husbands fainting at the sight of blood.

Martin’s sisters were good-looking, skinny, and energetic. The brothers were intellectual, three of them teaching at the university, two in politics. At family gatherings they were loud and drank as much wine as they could. Fights erupted easily. They were storytellers and fought each other for a chance to hold forth and slapped the table laughing.

The ballerina especially had a squawking laugh that turned her face red and made her gasp for breath. The table was always set formally and the men did not enter the kitchen. Madeleine loved being in the midst of them.

She loved the noise, the swish and grind of the labouring dishwasher, clatter of cutlery, laughter, and when the lids came off the steaming casserole dishes. But it wasn’t a life she could imitate; it was too clean and big. Once she went in the kitchen and three of his sisters were whispering and she knew they had said something about her.

She demanded, What is it?

The ballerina said, You let him push you around. You’ll never get what you want. Don’t you have any ambition of your own?

Later he was furious and got on the phone. He made calls. She could hear him behind the closed door.

They had been best together when they were alone. Being in Rome with Marty: if she could do that again before she dies she would be satisfied. What would Rome be like now? They’d eaten at an expensive restaurant in Rome. There were chandeliers and evening gowns and the portions were small. Ostrich in truffle gravy, oysters and scallops, grapefruit champagne sorbet, a chocolate dessert that had seven layers, a bottle of red and they left without paying. They strolled out the lobby and the porter held the door for them. Madeleine bent to pat a miniature poodle in a tartan coat on the leash held by a woman draped in shawls. She patted the poodle, they walked around the corner, and they ran for all they were worth. They ran down laneways, took two twisting stone staircases, and caught their breath leaning on a stone wall that looked out over all of Rome. Then they heard the slapping shoes of two waiters in black tuxedo pants and white shirts and bow ties and they ducked and the waiters ran past.

She could not stand anyone who slept in. It was slothful, joyless behaviour, choosing, essentially, to let life pass you by, and it meant you were morally weak.

Mornings are the best time of the day, she’d said.

Marty hadn’t looked up from his book.

Things smell better when you wake up early. He’d turned a page.

What are you reading? She put her cup down. What are you reading right now? Tell me the sentence.

It wouldn’t interest you.

Tell me anyway.

The sentence I’m reading right now?

The very sentence, yes, I want to know exactly what you’re thinking at this instant and every instant for the rest of your life, basically.

Okay, the sentence I’m reading now: We will see, for example, the wheel of a motor projecting from the armpit of a machinist, or the line of a table cutting through the head of a man reading.

She blinked at him. He shook off his shoe and put his stocking foot on her crotch under the table. He flexed his toes.

That’s the Futurist Manifesto, he said.

Weren’t they a bunch of fascists?

They wanted time and space to collapse. She put one hand over his toes, pressed the other hand flat on the table near her saucer.

Read me some more, she said.

They’d seen Fellini’s
La Strada
and when they came out into the afternoon light she said, Anthony Quinn. That was all she said.

The thing was they were alone together for three months and everything they did amazed them. They were escorted out of a book launch by a woman with clotted mascara and a spot of blood in the middle of her left iris. They’d guzzled the free booze, picking up full glasses off one passing tray and putting down empty glasses on another, and Madeleine watched the tray she had reached for with an empty glass swivel out of reach the instant her fingers let go of the stem and it smashed and caused a stir.

When the woman let go of Marty’s and Madeleine’s arms on the front step of the library their legs turned to rubber and they collapsed in a heap on top of each other, squashing all the pastries they’d put in their pockets.

They were childless and willing to become something. Everything they did or said was stored up for the marriage that was coming. They felt nothing and saw nothing because they were in the present.

They were so much in the present there was no time for reflection, and if his sisters were right about him ordering her around, about her hanging on his every word as if he were a god, about the dangers of loving without reserve, there was no time to think about that either.

Anthony Quinn wrapped in chains, on his knees in the dirt, busting chains with his chest, the tendons in his neck, the impossible strength.

They kept moving until they were invited to sleep in a thatched cottage in the Black Forest. A musty-smelling sleeping bag in a slant-roofed attic.

Who owned that house? Who invited them? They took long walks in a tree farm. Acres and acres of trees whose trunks were all exactly the same size, each tree the same distance from the next, as in a nightmare. The forest must have been manufactured in the nightmare of a gargoyle or gnome, some Nordic creature only half-human or not human at all. The branches were bare and it was always raining, or finely swathed in mist or socked in with fog. Marty leaned her against a tree and ripped her jeans down to her ankles and he dropped to his knees and made her come and she was looking up into the woolly sky criss-crossed with black branches and when she pulled her jeans up the earth began to shake and thrum and a man in a fluorescent orange cap in a yellow bulldozer drove past, the first person they had come across in two weeks of walking through the Black Forest. He took off his cap and waved with his whole arm.

She had wandered in the uniform forest at dawn when the sky lightened evenly and the only sound was the crunch of her shoes on the leaves. She was falling prey to a mysticism that was smarting and potent. A crow in the trees felt like a former life or the life to come and when it flew into the air, cawing raucously, it frightened her out of her wits.

That was where she became who she was, Madeleine thinks, in that solitude. Everyone becomes who they are in a stark landscape of undiluted solitude and bad weather. It’s possible to go through life without becoming who you are, but it is better, in the long run, to come upon yourself in an insanely ordered forest where nothing has been left to chance. She wishes every twenty-one-year-old girl a Black Forest of her own.