The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (14 page)

Robert is still at work and I'm watching the decorating channel. The camera slowly roves through a palatial, empty house in Vermont, a woman's chipper voice: Here we have an oak table, very countryish, but
workable
chairs, this dining room absolutely screams to be used. Use me, it's screaming!

I turn the TV off and listen to the shrill nothing that fills Robert's house. Leaves swirl off the lawn in twisting columns. A brown leaf hits the glass and sticks. The starlings are flying in formation over the university. A black cloud draws together and becomes thin as it changes direction. The sky is full of grey luster and the starlings seem feverish. I remember Des parking by the university once, just to watch them. It was late, we had groceries, ice cream in the trunk.

They're just playing, he said. I want to stay here, don't you? I want to watch all night.

I think: If you are there, get in touch with me now. I believe suddenly that he can, that it is just a matter of my asking.

The phone rings at exactly that instant. It rings and rings and rings. Then it stops. I put my hand on the receiver and I can feel a warm thrum. Then it rings again, loud. I go upstairs and brush my teeth. I rinse and start flossing. The phone rings again. It's ringing in all the rooms, terrifying me. I pour a bath
and get in, and when it's deep enough I dunk my ears under the water.

Robert gives me a glass of scotch and drops into the chair beside me. He presses his watch face so the dial glows, sending a circle of green light zigzagging across his face. The sale of my house has come through. A young couple with a dalmatian. Most of the furnishings went to the Sally Ann. A closet full of Des's shirts, a key ring with a plastic telescope, inside which there is a picture of Des and me on vacation in Mexico. It has to be held to a light. We are laughing, drinking from coconut shells. I'd let all the plants die. Robert has everything we need.

You're tired, I say, we're both tired.

What do you think of stem cell research, he says.

There are the dishes.

I could take a hair out of your head and make another you.

The laundry is —

Two of you. The real you and another you.

I know I'm tired.

One you is a roomful already.

I can't have sex with you tonight if that's what you're thinking, I say.

Why would I be thinking a thing like that?

I'm drifting to sleep while he talks. I dream I say I want my real husband, and I don't know if I've spoken out loud or not. I believe that Des is in the chair beside me and things are as they
were five years ago, as if the past can do that. Lay itself down on the present. Cover it over. Become the present, even briefly. A pair of flip-flops, I'd stumbled and skinned my toe. Des had been hammering all day. The hammering had stopped, but the silent ringing of the hammer went on. It was late September and we went to the beach.

In the morning I hear a car coming up the long driveway and I leap out of bed. A dark green minivan pulls up under the trees. The windshield is opaque with the shadows of the maple trees. The van parks and a man steps out. He's wearing creamcoloured pants and a pastel plaid shirt. He stretches and puts his hands on his hips. He helps a little girl out of the driver's side. She's wearing a white cotton dress and the skirt bells with the breeze. Finally the passenger door opens and a woman gets out. I'm standing in the upstairs window, struggling to get my jeans on. There is a wave rising inside me. It's full of light. It's dull and smart and hurting my throat. Robert rolls over in bed.

He says, Who would disturb us at this hour?

The woman has her hand over her eyes to block the sun and she's looking up into the bedroom window where I'm standing and I know it's Melody without even recognizing her. I run down the stairs and out the back without my shoes. I have never initiated anything in my life. I forgot her completely and here she is. She'll give me something.

She's exactly the same. The child is just like her. The guy
holds out his hand. Melody says his name and I tell him I'm thrilled, but I forget his name. I forget the child's name but it's Jill.

I tried to call, she says, holding out her arms.

I say, I'm married. I start to cry. Melody kisses me.

I whisper, I've messed up, Melody.

She says, You'll just have to do something about it.

A
woman climbs over me for the window seat — hair like vanilla ice cream, a purple mink. Beneath the fur, a sweatsuit and spanking new sneakers. She's got a paper bag with twine handles. Lingerie. Her fingernails are false and black, an inch and a half.

You raise your eyes from your book. She tears a hot pretzel — the bread inside porous and steaming — and dips it into the tiny container of honey mustard. The dexterity of a lobster. After each bite she touches her nails against a napkin, rubbing carefully under the concave side. A glistening gob of green gum on the side of her plate, the teeth marks. She's a sex worker who flies to Halifax from St. John's for the weekend. What costs as much as a blow job, a carton of red peppers? Sable earmuffs?

We are in Cuba. The lawn sprinkler beside the pool whispering rounds of silver ammunition that pock the sand. A
cockroach with an indigo shell. Banana leaves as sharp as switchblades. The plastic of my recliner sweating against my cheek. The pool looks as solid as a bowl of Jell-O, a jar of Dippity-Do. The Italian transsexuals lower their bodies until they are submerged to the neck, careful of their curls. They have the most beautiful nipples. I can't take my eyes off their more-than-perfect breasts.

At the kitchen table at home in St. John's. The tablecloth is gone; the table is red, bright red enamel paint, and there is the creamer, full of milk. The kitchen is pumpkin, forest green cupboards. The kitchen screams. My hands are on the table in front of me. I want to throw the creamer. Milk fluttering over your head, a long ribbon of surrender. It is a huge effort not to give in and throw it. Then my fist slams.

What is wrong with you, I shout.

I say, Speak. Do you think I'm joking?

You say, I'm afraid of you.

This is the first thing you've said. There have been pauses. I keep thinking, What is my tone? I vary my tone. We already know the lines. Do you think I'm joking? (whisper) Speak! (shout) What the fuck is wrong with you? (monotone) Do I exist? Maybe I don't exist. (giggles)

But it's reassuring that you're afraid of me. I have been worried that I don't exist. I don't think I am, therefore.

Just speak. Speak.

You say, I'm thinking of leaving you.

The beach, in a windstorm. I bang my toe on a concrete block emerging from the sand. Pass a demolished building. A giant slab of concrete with a painted silhouette of Che Guevara excavated from the ruins. I stand on tippy-toe and put my mouth up to his giant lips, posing for a photograph. Weeping, sand under my contact lens, scratching my eye. The wind flicks the tail of my dress against the concrete slab like a propeller trying to turn over, resolutely stalled. Everything in Cuba is at a standstill, waiting for ignition. Because of the embargo there is no anaesthetic for operations — everybody pre-operative, prepped. You wave me out of the picture.

You say, Just Che. By himself.

In the Museum of the Revolution in Havana, a clear plastic Petri dish containing a sample of Che Guevara's hair and a sample of his beard. I feel ashamed for pretending to kiss him. Che and Fidel, wax figures, beating their way through the plastic bushes. The glass eyeballs have a yellowish cast. Beads of clear varnish on their foreheads, cheeks. Mouths open, as if they are shouting to soldiers behind them, or gasping for breath. We are here for a conference. You're talking about the revolutionary spirit of Gian-Lorenzo Bernini, the seventeenth-century sculptor.

We go into another hotel during the downpour, for espresso.

You say, Someone else is doing the …

You lift your chin toward an open doorway farther down
the lobby. A couple is dancing. The patio is a slick of wet slate, and the reflections of a red skirt and the shadows of the palm trees are hydroplaning at their feet. Clothes soaked to the skin. A black man teaching a white woman the tango. A black girl carries a giant armload of canary yellow towels, brilliant against her black, black cheek. She slits her eyes at them. Everything is a ripe pomegranate.

I say, Should we be sleeping together? If you're leaving me?

You say, I don't see why not.

Lightning cracks low over the horizon, stunted like bonsai trees. The espresso is strong. Tiny cups. The chink of the cup in the saucer.

I say, From now on, if I say I love you, I'm speaking out of habit.

I wonder, what are you? Am I you? What don't I love anymore?

Outside, we hold our feet under a fountain that squirts from a stone fish. I watch you hold up your foot. You turn it and the sand peels away from your ankle. I love your foot. That is the only part of you I still love.

I say, I'm going to think of you as a long series of gestures. You are your nose and eyes and mouth and the things you do with them.

You say, Don't forget my cock.

The hotel room smells of a lemon venom: insecticide. You are asleep. I stand on the bed and photograph you. Your arms
thrown over your head, warding off the blades of sunlight from the swinging louvered shutters, a fencing match on your naked back. The maid has twisted the white towels into the shape of swans. Two towel swans joined at the beak, as if kissing.

Back in the kitchen, at home, the creamer stops pulsing. The creamer has lost meaning.

I say, This marriage can be anything you want.

You say, I might be happier without you in my life.

I say, Let's go somewhere. We need a change.

I guess I should read the
Manifesto
. The literary critic who spoke before you at the conference said it is an authorless tract. That Marx repeatedly tried to make it sound as though it came from thin air, or rose by itself from the people, spontaneously. He was willing to claim the bad poetry of his youth that even Penguin didn't want to publish. But the
Manifesto
just was. Just passed through his pen.

Tell me what happened? Did you meet somebody?

The simultaneous translator becomes exhausted late afternoon, breaking down, translating word by word instead of for the sense. So each word is encased in explosive consonants, the meaning picked up later like shattered bullet casings. She is staccato, and then stuck. The people's … ? The people's … ? She looks around the room hopelessly. Someone offers the word
struggle
. Ah, yes, The people's struggle. The room explodes with laughter.

In the pastry shop. A young black girl with long black braids, thousands, in a ponytail on the top of her head. Like squirts of oil from a squeeze bottle, shiny, dragonfly blue in the light. She wears a slippery Lycra body suit. It stretches over her breasts and bum like burst bubblegum, bright pink. She gets in line next to you. Her hip presses into the glass of the display case.