Degrees of Nakedness (12 page)

I imagine her standing on the doorstep of her parents’ house, knowing she was pregnant. No money. I imagine it like the moment in the air when you leave the water-ski ramp, your stomach flipping up, being completely still and flying at the same time. I don’t know where she could have gotten the courage. The first time you feel a baby move inside you, it’s like
a candle flame, not the heat of the flame but its chaotic flickering in a draft. It’s about the size of a flame and as frantic. If you could hold a flame in your fist. You feel it over the pelvic bone and immediately doubt that you’ve felt it. She must have decided not to tell anyone, not even the father. That movement inside her, that’s the only thing I can imagine giving her the courage to leave her parents’ house. November, with the streetlights coming on, the branches bowed down with ice.

For some reason she started seeing Marcel, Gabriel’s father, again when Gabe was five. He stayed a month. It ended when he took a swing at her. He’s a small guy and he was drunk. She hit him back and he fell onto his bum, his legs straight in front of him, his toes pointing toward the ceiling, his palms flat on the floor — like a kid at the beach, she said, sitting at the edge of the sea. She knocked his glasses off and he blinked, slightly sobered.

Mary was eight when Mike and I had a daughter of our own. Mary stood over me, watching Jenny breast feed. She tucked my hair behind my ear. “What does it taste like?” I hadn’t tasted it myself. I hate milk. Mike said he had tasted it before. Ingrid’s. Mary said in baby talk, “I want some.” The book said that if an older sibling shows curiosity, offer her some. After a few squirts of milk she’ll be bored with it. Mary sucked my nipple. I felt the sharp tug all through my breast and stomach, the touch of her teeth, rather than gums, harder than
my baby’s suck. One squirt was enough. “Moo,” she giggled, and was gone out of the room. With Mary, I sometimes feel that I’m pouring my love into a vacuum.

Sometimes when Mike and I have sex my mind races. The kind of kinetic energy that the shadows of the leaves have in that reflected murky square on the wall. The leaves are as sharp as characters of the alphabet, but they move over each other, disintegrate before they can spell anything. Sounds, smells, images, every sensation slipping over the next, chaotic, ticklish. I can feel the metallic yelp of the mailbox lid at the tips of my teeth and I have to run my tongue over them. The smell of ink, like the smell of blood. A fingernail broken to the quick, rubbed against a cotton bed sheet. Then the smell of paint thinner.

Paint thinner on the back deck in a plastic tub. A week ago I lifted the lid, then noticed Ingrid walking back from Carnell’s store. I could just see her through the alley between the opposite houses. She was weighed down with grocery bags, Gabriel scuffing behind her. She had to stop for a rest. I could imagine the plastic handles cutting into her fingers. She was under a streetlight and she stuck her tongue out. It had started to snow, an early November snow. She was catching snowflakes on her tongue.

In the middle of sex I mix her up with vapours from the paint thinner, how they evaporate in the air, like home-made vodka, or barbecue starter, nail polish remover. I was afraid there might be a time in the future when she wouldn’t be as important to me as she is now. When I might not know her.

Just as I’m about to come, I feel her on the edges of my teeth too, and I almost say out loud in Mike’s ear, “Ingrid’s coming for supper.”

Mike sometimes wakes and says he’s just had an erotic dream. They can be about anyone, but they’re often about Ingrid. “What happens?”

“What do you mean?” he says, “We were screwing, it was really nice.”

I ask Mike where his dreams happen. Do they have sex on damp concrete floors in the basements of strange buildings, or in a dory that’s heading through the Narrows, are there knives or vegetables or candles in the dreams? He says no, there’s just his body and Ingrid’s and intense physical pleasure.

Ingrid was visiting the first time I clipped Jenny’s fingernails. A nurse at the hospital had told me to bite them off, but I was using the clippers. Ingrid was washing the dishes. I sliced the top of Jenny’s finger off. The little knob of flesh sticking to the tip of the nail clipper. I held Jenny out in my stiff arms. For a long time she didn’t draw a breath, her face got redder and redder, her mouth stretched open. Then, as if to make her get on with it, I screamed myself. Ingrid turned from the sink and took Jenny from me. The blood drenched Jenny’s sleeper, smeared over Ingrid’s cheeks. It soaked a thick face cloth, then a dishtowel. I followed Ingrid to the bathroom, blood dripping on each step. Both my fists clenched over my mouth. Ingrid filled the tub and put Jenny in. The water turned pink,
then red. The finger spurted for fifteen minutes. The strength of my scream and a tingle in my arms from holding them so tight to my chest made me fill up with calm, like a glass of cold water.

When Mike got home I kissed him in front of Ingrid, something I never do. He smelled of yeast, poppy seeds; his mouth tasted of coffee, honey and cigarettes. He saw the stiffened sleeper on top of the garbage. Ingrid had turned to look out the window.

This is what I know about Marcel, Gabriel’s father. Ingrid said it was a one-night stand.

When I was seventeen, Marcel was thirty. A photographer. He lived in a house out in the Battery, by himself. The living room made up most of the house. One giant plate of glass looked over the harbour, into the city. At night the city was just orange and white lights. They licked the land like a fire that breathes in a wood chunk, with no flame. Sometimes they spread a flicker over the whole city like a shiver on a horse’s flank.

Marcel’s fridge was full of photographic paper and chemicals. Bottles of liquor, wine. A bottle shaped like a Spanish dancer. No food. He ate out, always. The front door didn’t close properly, he had to lean a car tire against it to keep it from blowing open. If we were lying on his bed we would know if someone came in by the wobbling tire, the circles getting tighter and tighter. When he left the house it was padlocked shut. It never occurred to me to wonder where he got his
money. He was silent about where he came from, except to say Toronto. He liked to dress in white. All white, including his socks, shoes, even his underwear, always. But wore black sunglasses.

Marcel’s pictures were full of geometric shadows. Everything was balanced, contrived, mannered.

There’s a photograph of himself in a room, empty of furniture except for a piano. He’s wearing a white tuxedo, sitting with his back to the camera. A naked girl, sixteen, lies across the piano top looking into the camera — two cognac glasses. He usually made a point of staying out of photographs himself. This picture of his back was the only exception.

I heard Marcel talking about the girl. Ingrid. I remembered the name because I didn’t know any Ingrids. He had the phone pinched between his ear and shoulder, he was swishing a shiny piece of paper in chemicals with a set of tongs. Even in black and white you could tell her pubic hair was gold. They must have been talking about it because I could hear his friend say through the receiver, “I like to get them young, then shave their pubic hair.”

Marcel said, “I like to get them before they have pubic hair.”

He hung up and pinned the photograph to a clothesline strung across the darkroom. There were ten other prints of the same picture. He was a fanatic about lint or dust, graininess.

I said, “I don’t see how you could sleep with someone who was sixteen.”

He said, “You’re seventeen.”

I didn’t say anything to that. We hadn’t had sex yet, not exactly. He hadn’t photographed me naked either.

My mother showed up, and dragged me away. I was stinking of licorice.

He made the Pernod viscous, milky, by adding water. He had teased me into taking it in my mouth but I wouldn’t swallow it. He dipped his tongue in my shot glass and licked it down the ridges of my throat. I could feel it cool, evaporating. I swallowed. The first time I had ever drunk alcohol. In an hour, I drank most of the bottle.

Marcel led me to the couch. He bit my tongue so hard he cut it on both sides.

My mother hit her horn at that exact moment. It might not have been the exact moment. It took a while for my mother’s horn to burn through the Pernod. The lights were off in his house. I don’t know how she knew I was there.

I stood up and tried to button my shirt, banged my shin on the corner of the coffee table, a shard of pain. I had a hard time moving the tire out of the way. It was as though photographing Ingrid was what made her pregnant. Nobody gets pregnant from a one-night stand.

In my mother’s car, my body was shivering from drinking so much. I was poisoned. It was like the one time I tried to water-ski. I forgot to let go of the rope when I fell. Currents of water ploughing my gritted teeth. Dragged until I thought I would drown. Her horn was a simple sound, like a voice finally coming through the throbbing of an outboard motor, underwater. A wobbled voice, almost in another language, until the
simplicity hits and you think you knew what it meant all along. Let go of the rope, stupid. Or: that’s my mother outside, get off me, that’s my mother.

It struck me he might have gotten the bottles mixed up, poured developing chemicals into me. All those Ingrids spilling off the black piano top like milky licorice in my mouth.

The Lonely Goatherd

T
he houses dig their heels into the hill to stop from tumbling into the harbour. The clapboard faces are stained with last night’s rain. Everything is squeezed together and sad. Carl loves Anita but lately he’s been sleeping with other women. It’s not idiosyncrasies he’s been sleeping with, it’s bones. Cheek bones, hip bones, knees. He sees inside apartments of St. John’s he will never see again.

Two nights ago he was in an apartment over Gulliver’s Taxi Stand. The girl’s stereo speaker picked up radio messages of the dispatcher. At about four in the morning Carl heard the taxi driver say, Sure that’s only your imagination, almost as if he were tangled in the bed sheets with them. Carl felt like a kid.

The sad thing is Anita’s art. She is painting golf courses from the TV set. The old man she nurses watches golf, tapes it with his VCR. She takes Polaroid snapshots of the screen. She wants to capture in her paintings the glossy finish of the
Polaroid, the snowy texture of the video, the play of light on the manicured lawns, and the slow motion time of the ball flying through the air. She says it’s an analytical reduction she’s after, always keeping herself distanced from the subject. They don’t talk about their problem, but when he looks at her paintings he feels she is stripping him like an onion, layer by layer, her eyes watering.

Carl works at the Arts and Culture Centre, building sets. He makes an adequate living working chiefly with Styrofoam. This week he is building sets for a fairy tale amusement park. He shows his own sculpture once a year.

A sea of white Styrofoam beads covers the floor, clings to his pants, his bald head, and sticks to his hands like warts. Thumb-tacked on the wall are several eighteenth century fairy tale illustrations, before illustration got cute. Red Riding Hood in the gnarled forest, eyes wide, the wolf, saliva drooling from his fangs. Where Red Riding Hood’s cape parts you glimpse a white vulnerable breast. Carl flicks his pocket knife into the illustration like a dart. Carl has been provided with an assistant from the Student Employment Office. The assistant studies day care management. Her name is Sarah. She is about ten years younger than Carl, and is now sweating in her paper suit over the giant chunk of Styrofoam from which the wolf will be carved.

Anita found out she was pregnant the same time she took the job nursing Mr. Crawhall. He sleeps most of the time she’s there. This gives her an opportunity to paint. The house is on
Circular Road, surrounded by trees which block the sound of traffic. Toward the end of the first week with Mr. Crawhall she entered the house and was assaulted by a loud consistent buzzing. She thought it was the buzzer by his bed, that Mr. Crawhall had died and his hand had fallen on the buzzer, but it was the egg timer on the stove. She has to serve him a three-and-a-half-minute egg every day. Her fingers shake a little on the silver teaspoon when she brings it near his mouth. It’s different from feeding a baby, there’s the question of Mr. Crawhall’s dignity. Because of her condition the egg makes her nauseous. Once a hairline crack ran down the side of the egg and yolk seeped through it over the gold rimmed egg cup down to the saucer, threatening Mr. Crawhall’s thin white bread. He said quite slowly, with his hands squeezed in the effort to speak, Oh, how have we managed to waste all that lovely yellow yolk?

Anita thinks of painting the egg as seen from under Mr. Crawhall’s magnifying glass, but the jelly of it and the overt symbolism make her sick. She’s planning an abortion. The baby isn’t Carl’s.

Sarah, the assistant, is more of a hindrance than a help. Her professional opinion after six weeks in day care training is that Carl is making fairy tale props too realistic. The Momma Bear and Poppa Bear look like real bears. Strands of melted clear plastic hang from their teeth. She says they’ll have a damaging psychological effect. She feels fairy tales are violent and sexist. She thinks we should ship loads of grain to India, she talks about
McDonald’s hamburger containers polluting the environment, American aggression in Nicaragua, and acid rain. Carl is building a cage for her out of two-by-fours and plastic sheeting so she can work with contact cement and the fumes will be contained within the cage. He gives her a gas mask, tightening the rubber strap around her fine hair. He puts her in the cage with one of the wolves. It’s impossible to talk with a gas mask on. The rest of the afternoon the studio is quiet, except for the chain saw.

Anita watches
The Sound of Music
with Mr. Crawhall. He tells her to fast forward over the scene with Liesl and her boyfriend in the gazebo where she sings
I am sixteen going on seventeen, innocent as a lamb
. This scene bores Mr. Crawhall, so they watch it in fast forward. The dance number changes Liesl into a maddened butterfly batting the wings of her white skirt against the boy’s head. She circles round and round him, flinging her arms this way and that, trapped in the amorphous white cloud. Her face in the close-up is contorted and pulled like plastic across the jiggling screen. When Anita presses “play,” Julie Andrews sings,
These are a few of my favourite things
.