Degrees of Nakedness (10 page)

At the end of the hall Olivia can see the woman in the ticket booth for the movie theatres. There’s just one woman on tonight, although the twin booth is also lit with flashing lights that circle the outline of the booths. The ticket woman has taken a Q-tip from her purse and is cleaning her ear.

“You have a truck outside?”

“Yes, an eighteen-wheeler.”

“Would you consider joining me for a beer? I can give you my address and you can pick me up later. I have a daughter
but I have a babysitter lined up for the evening. I was going out anyway.”

Olivia has asked the taxidermist out for a beer because she suddenly feels sad about being alone on her birthday. She has an image of this man driving across an empty Saskatchewan highway with these wild beasts frozen in attitudes of attack, stretched in frozen gallops in the back of his truck. He is the first person she has met in months who seems lonelier than she is. There’s the chance he won’t show up.

At the bar Olivia gets drunk very fast. Harold drinks the same bottle of beer most of the evening. At last call he buys himself another. He feels jumpy, excited. He’s been on the road for six months and almost always finds himself eating in empty hotel restaurants where the waitress watches a miniature TV with an earphone so as not to disturb him.

Olivia is beautiful, Harold thinks. She’s wearing a man’s shirt of moss-coloured material, and grey leggings. When she walks to the bar he can see all the muscles in her long legs. She reminds him of a giraffe, graceful despite her drunkenness and the fact that her legs are too long for her. Harold is adept at recognizing different kinds of drunkenness. In some people it twists free something bitter, but Olivia is blossoming. Her cheeks are flushed, her s’s are lisping against her large front teeth. She has been telling him about the father of her child.

“My memories are like those animals in the back of your truck. I can take them out and look at them, all but touch them. Today is my birthday. I’m thirty, but time hasn’t moved at
all since he left. I don’t look any older. I’m just waiting, that’s all. Do you know what I think? I think he’ll be back. I know he will. I know how to get in touch with him if there’s an emergency with Rose, our daughter. I’ve got the number in my bedside table. But I haven’t called him since he left. I’m waiting until he comes to his senses. You know what I think? I think he’s been enchanted by an ice queen. You know, a splinter of glass in his eye, but one of these days an unexpected tear is going get it out. He’ll be back, don’t you worry, Harold.”

Suddenly Harold is seized with worry. He removes his glasses. He puts his hand over hers on the table.

“Be honest with me, now. Does it bother you that I have a wandering eye?”

Olivia lays down her beer glass and draws one knee up to her chest.

“At first it was strange. I didn’t know which eye to look into.”

“In some cultures it is thought to be auspicious. In some cultures it’s a sign. I’d like very much to go home with you this evening.”

Olivia looks into his eyes, first one, then the other. Without his glasses they look even stranger. They are flecked with gold, the lashes, long and black, like a girl’s.

They are lying side by side in bed. Harold is already asleep, his cheek nuzzled into her armpit, her arm over her head. He insisted on bringing the polar bear into the bedroom. He said it was worth thousands of dollars. He couldn’t afford to leave it in
the truck. A gang of men in a Montreal parking lot had broken into the truck, which was empty at the time, but he hadn’t yet gotten the lock replaced.

The steps to Olivia’s apartment were icy and when they got to the top, both of them straining with the bear, it slipped and its head thunked down the fifteen steps, denting its cheek. This almost made Harold cry with frustration.

He said, “What an indecency for that poor creature, the most noble creature in the wild kingdom.”

The thumping woke the babysitter, who had fallen asleep on the couch. She pulled on her coat and boots and helped them with the bear.

The cold sobered Olivia considerably. They are lying in bed talking, with all their clothes on except for their shoes. She says, “Harold, do you mind if we don’t make love?” and he says, “Not at all,” but he is very disappointed.

She talks more about the father of her child. She has glow-in-the-dark stars pasted onto the bedroom ceiling. When Harold removes his glasses, the galaxy blurs and it looks as though they are really sleeping under the milky way. While she talks he puts his hand under her shirt onto her belly. The warmth of it, the small movement as she breathes is so charged with unexpected pleasure that Harold becomes almost tearful. He can’t trust his voice to speak, so he lies beside her silently. They both fall asleep.

Olivia’s eight-year-old daughter, Rose, is awake in her bed, terrified. She heard the thumping of something large and
dangerous on the stairs outside, and drunken laughter. She heard whispers from her mother’s room. She makes herself small against the headboard of the bed. She sits there watching the door of her room, waiting for something terrible to bash it open. She watches the clock radio with the red digital numerals change, change, change. Then she gets out of bed. She creeps along the hall to her mother’s room. The hall light is on. She squeezes the glass doorknob with her sweaty hand and slowly, so the hinges won’t creak, pushes the door open. The light falls on the raging polar bear, frozen in the act of attacking her sleeping mother. Rose doesn’t move. The bear doesn’t move. Everything stays as it is for a long time until the man next to her mother raises himself up on his elbow and says, “Little girl?”

Rose slams the door and runs to the phone. She dials the number and it rings several times. She can hear her mother calling her. Then a man answers the phone. She says, “Daddy, is that you?”

Julian has been awake, although it is four in the morning. He has been sitting on the couch holding Marika’s hand. He hasn’t moved her or disturbed her in any way since he took the chip bowl from her, except to hold her hand. He says, “Yes, this is daddy.”

He has been awake but it feels as if the child’s voice has awoken him. He knows who she is but for a moment her name slips his mind. For a moment, he can not for the life of him remember it.

Granular

C
arpet burns on my elbows, our skin smelling of pond water, mud. You part the lips of my vagina with your tongue licking summer dampness and my own clear sticky mucus. Your thumb rubs circles outside my vagina, slow idle circles like someone making the rim of a crystal glass whine with a wet finger. My skin is cold from swimming, like the skin of someone else. I get up and go to the kitchen, take a cucumber from the fridge and peel away the dark rubbery skin with a paring knife. Carol has taken Sally and Kyle to the park. The house is empty.

Greenish white flesh, a clammy spring smell. I lie flat on the bed in our room, my arms over my head, legs spread. You move the cucumber down the ridges of my neck, chest bone, circle one nipple, a shiny snail’s trail down my belly. Icy on my clitoris, numbing. You hold it gently against the opening of my vagina. You lick my clitoris, hold it between your lips, suck it.

You shift so your penis hangs in my face; I rake my fingers down the backs of your thighs. I have to lift my head off the bed to take your penis in my mouth. You stop licking me just as I’m about to come, my spine arching stiff as a bridge, each vertebra locking like a keystone. You don’t let me come. You push the cucumber inside me, shocking cold.

I suck your cock hard.

The phone rings. The phone rings.

We are statues, like in the children’s game when the music turns off and everyone freezes. Then you put your mouth back on my clitoris and I come in long shudders, the cucumber dragging the orgasm longer, gritty like the trail of a wet towel in the sand. You put the cucumber in my mouth and I bite it, a burst of jelly and seeds. My foot cramps, stiff, surprised as a starfish out of water. You bellyflop onto my stomach, your penis deep in my vagina. I reach down and rub my clitoris; my gold rings clink together, a tiny sound between our wet bellies, digging my heels, I’m coming again.

When you’re about to come all the muscles in your face draw down in a surprised grimace, your eyes open wide. You pull out of me, jerk yourself a few times so you come over my belly. That’s our birth control. Our teeth kiss, awkward. We lie side by side on the bed.

Who do you think was on the phone? I say.

You say, Your mother.

Your mother, I say.

Did you have a good time?

Yes. Did you?

I had a very good time, did you?

Yes I did.

I pull the blanket over me. My arms are under the blanket and you sit up on your elbow. What are you doing?

Nothing. What do you think I’m doing?

Ellen, you weren’t putting my sperm inside you, were you?

Jesus, Rob.

Were you?

No. I wasn’t. What a thing to accuse me of.

Then I’m thinking about if I had. I’m thinking about all the possibilities that spring up every time we act, then fall away to be replaced with another set of possibilities. Sometimes the import of our actions catches up with us. Import settles on one thing or another, the rim of a coffee cup, for instance, like a butterfly.

Carol told her boyfriend for six years that if he didn’t marry her she’d leave him. She got pregnant and left. She and the baby moved in with us. Her boyfriend knew the split was coming and didn’t know. It was a possibility that existed simultaneously with the more likely possibility that Carol would never leave him. He wanted to marry her then, but it was too late. He’ll never get over the loss. That happens sometimes, a loss is indelible.

If you left me I could never sleep beside someone else in the same way. It would be more like a business agreement. I’d be terse. Silly or not, I believe in this particular love. I’m sealing my fate.

Your mother said when you were five you went up to your waist in surf, holding a sandwich out of the water and a seagull snatched it out of your hand. You covered your eyes with your arm and the wings slapped your face. The seagull screeched, hovering, touching you repeatedly. When you looked, the sandwich was gone. I imagine that the seagull bestowed on you the gift of charm in the sandwich’s stead, like a fairy godmother. Your charm is made of a kind of nerve and innocence. You trust people and it takes them by surprise. Your trust is an ambush.

I’ve thought about cheating on you only once. I hitch-hiked a ride with a stranger travelling through Alberta. The sun fell through the windshield into my lap.

He said, But I admire you, that you can have these crushes on other men and not be afraid of cheating on your husband. You admit the possibility exists, though? Look!

I looked and it was a field of rippling sunflowers. Vivid yellow. A transport truck flew past on the other side of the highway and our pick-up veered into its path. The man gave the wheel an involuntary jerk. The height of the transport truck, the chance of being crushed to death, the thought that sex with this man would be an isolated act, without consequence — the possibilities dispersed in waves of diminishing strength over the nodding heads of the sunflowers.

Squinting at the sun through my eyelashes. Splintered yellow petals. Vision as clear and potent as vodka. The vodka Carol’s Bulgarian friend collected like sweat from the still he
made by sealing a pot with a wreath of bread dough. Catching the drips, the pot vibrating on the orange element, frothing with a religious fervour, sweating a few drops into a cup. The Bulgarian pours some on the palm of his hand, and lights it with a match. A blue flame licks his palm like a dog’s tongue. He holds it out, smiling, then — Ah ah ah ah! when the slick of alcohol burns off and the heat touches his palm, he shoos it like a pitched butterfly. Pssst. It’s out.

I dream I’m lying naked on my stomach in the sand. The sun is hot, my skin just beginning to burn. You take a heavy paper bag, and begin to pour careful lines of sugar on my body. You begin with the bone of my heel. My toes dig in until they reach wet sand, the line of sugar continues up my calf, thigh, between the cheeks of my bum, up my spine. The sound of the sugar falling through the creases of the paper is as ticklish as the grains of sugar bouncing on my warm skin.

You say a word to me without moving your lips. One word that contains the Holy Grail, a key that will unlock me. You are communicating it at a huge sacrifice to yourself. The word becomes saturated with overwhelming love the way tea will creep into a spoonful of sugar if you dip just the tip of the spoon. The word is
granular
. As I’m drawn out of sleep I know I must hang onto the word, as if I’m holding the string of a kite, but as I draw it in, the meaning of the word is lost, just as chunks of the sky swoop away from a descending kite. I say the word
granular
in a whisper, then in an ordinary voice. I can’t even think what the word usually means.

When I wake, you’re practising the cello. The instrument
sounds drunken, losing the thread of its own thought. It takes me a while to recognize “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Someone in the house applauds. The geranium is straining toward the rain-pitted window. Then, a shower of four petals.

I sit on the toilet seat and talk, while you are in the bath, about a drive across the island. About a moose I’d seen on the side of the road, a small female that stood still at the edge of a pool. The pool was marbled with cloud, the moose golden in the six o’clock light, completely still.

You stand and the water makes a smacking noise like a big kiss. You take a towel and squeak the steam from the mirror. The hair on your legs is flattened with water, water seeping onto the linoleum around your feet.

I say, Get on the mat.

Breathing warm steam. Droplets form on my heavy sweater. I’m too lazy to lift my arms over my head to take it off.

You smooth shaving cream onto your face and neck, raise your lower lip up toward the ceiling, top lip crimped tight. Holding your neck with your thumb and forefinger, you stroke hard with the razor under your chin, jutting one side of your jawbone, then the other, toward the mirror, cream piled against razor like a snowplough. The bathroom window reflects in the steamy mirror. A crow lands on the telephone wire outside, and for a moment the wings seem to batter your head gently.