The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (29 page)

They had a tiny fan jammed in the window that did nothing but make a noise that she felt on the edges of her teeth. This was the cement of her love for Philip: this attic room, the swelter of summer, Newfoundland a gazillion miles away. She
went with him to write her first film script. She'd written a naked skydiver. Swinging like a lazy pendulum beneath the big red bulb of a parachute, the sky behind utterly blue.

She had dreamed a skydiver, and he compelled her to make him real. The room she and Philip shared was so small that when they both sat at their desks the backs of their chairs touched. He went to the university during the day, and when it started to get dark outside she would listen for his footsteps on the sidewalk under the window. Listen for his key, the sound of his knapsack hitting the floor, the zipper of his jacket, the Velcro of his sneakers, the cats rubbing against his legs. She anticipated him. Tried to piece together who he was, and he was this: the cracked leather of the knapsack, dusk, clammy heat, the sound of coffee beans being ground in the kitchen. The unrelenting desire to fuck. She promised herself all day she would wait for the little things, the kiss, to take his earlobe in her teeth, unbutton his shirt, take a long time between each button — but her desire leapt all over itself, and she would want him inside her, couldn't wait.

Glenn?

He might have fallen asleep. The children are throwing a Frisbee at the edge of the lake.

Eleanor says, I want to be full of grace. Then she's embarrassed. What is she talking about, at a wedding? She is clearly drunk. She firmly reminds herself: You can't be sexy and maudlin at the same time.

Glenn says, Grace is bestowed, you can't will it.

Grace is bestowed. Everything worth anything is like that, she thinks. You can't just know what you want and go get it, as Philip says. You wait. She closes her eyes. Watches the lake through her lashes. Wait for it to come to you. She can see the children, silhouettes, standing on the rim of the lake as if they will upend it. It's only late afternoon, there's still the evening, there's more drinking to do. There's a lot more drinking.

Frank Harvey says, It's about identity. My wife started to think of herself as us. What we made up together.

Frank is right. You have to be able to be alone. If only she could sleep with someone else. Once at the Ship Inn she could have gone home with Glenn Marshall. That first time with Philip she thought: I will spend the rest of my life with him. She thinks, I have never questioned this, and I have acted upon it. I have built a twisted organic life around the assumption that Philip was meant for me. She imagines the great coral reef around Australia as her life — as if Philip is Australia and she has accrued around the fact of him. Coral accrues.

But she's afraid to be alone. Gabrielle had been afraid last night too. What was it? Can she guess her father might be leaving them? (But he's not leaving Gabrielle, he has explained this patiently to Eleanor several times, she keeps forgetting. But you're leaving, aren't you? I might be leaving, yes. You might be. Yes, and Gabrielle will come with me half the time. Gabrielle will go with you? You're leaving and Gabrielle will go with you. Sure, she can be with me half the time. In some
apartment. Yes. So it's me you're leaving. I might be leaving you, he says. And you think that will be good for Gabrielle? He shrugs. It won't be a good thing, he says, maybe a necessary thing. Gabrielle will be fine, he says. He turns back to the computer. He doesn't let one thing overlap with the other. He might be leaving, but right now he has to work on his book about globalization.)

Gabrielle sobbing at the foot of their bed, her upper lip shiny with mucous. Eleanor let Gabrielle drag her down the hall. They stood in the doorway, she and her seven-year-old daughter. Eleanor saw the streetlight hit the dull glass of the hobbyhorse's eye. She saw a rust-coloured flare thin as a needle in the button. Sinister and pulsing. Gabrielle terrified. It's alive. It's
thinking
. A horse's head on a stick. The wind blew hard against the house, the windowpane rattled, and the fierce light, deep in the horse's button eye, faded and went flat. Shadows of leaves tumbled over each other on the wall above the bed, like galloping hoofs, a spooked herd all turning at once. Gabrielle's hand sweaty in hers, her face wet, nose running.

Eleanor thinks, I'm such a
dupe
. The shame she feels is so overpowering she could throw up all the red wine she's been drinking, and the beer, and the goat cheese thingies. She could throw up over the red dress with its folds and beads. She decides she will go in there and kick Amelia Kerby and punch her, knock her teeth loose. I will cut her into pieces and wear a chunk of her around my neck on a rope until it rots. I will not speak to her, I will not notice her, I will be aloof, condescendingly
kind, I will invite her to dinner parties, rise above it all, befriend her. I'll sleep with her myself.

Her skin gets cold, and she thinks just as suddenly, It's not so bad. I'll go to China. No one there will know Philip has left me. A clean, simple life in China. They'll never hear from her again. Someone had gone to China already, that doctor whose wife left him. There was a rumour he'd remarried, he was happy, had new children. Chinese children. The rowers have lined up next to the buoys. A team of women in orange tank tops. They just float while the coxswain harangues them. A shrill whistle. Eleanor thinks, it's very unlikely that I will go to China. Instead. Gradually, over time, I will get over Philip. My passion for Philip will cool. That's what happens. People
get over it
. They eventually get over it. This is the worst thing: to imagine normal without him.

Someone places her hands over Eleanor's eyes. Eleanor reaches up and touches the wrists. Sadie! Eleanor is so happy she feels sharp little tears.

You're here.

Did I miss anything?

Amelia Kerby. She's over there tossing back champagne.

The gall!

Gold lamé, the ponytail.

She looks short to me. Am I right?

Ecofeminist.

Hefty, I'm thinking.

Here on scholarship.

What's with the tinfoil dress? How Walmart.

You think?

Sure I think!

She's into aromatherapy.

Of course she is.

And bungee jumping.

He'll get tired real quick.

Naked, they bungee jump on the West Coast.

Real quick.

Eleanor hadn't taken the scene of the naked skydiver to the pitch meeting. She'd had a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and when the producers looked at each other and told her, as kindly as they could, that
a big record producer from the mainland sweeping a local girl off her feet
was a cliché, the cup trembled in Eleanor's hand. She spilled hot coffee on her thumb. And she'd said, with her voice all funny, Well, originally he wasn't a record producer. He wasn't? No, not originally. What was he, originally? No, it's too silly. Tell us. It's expensive. Tell us. It's impractical, dangerous, you couldn't get anyone to do it. But originally you had something different? Well, I see him falling from the sky. This beautiful man. He's handsome, strange-handsome not ordinary-handsome, and he's got a beautiful body. Beauty is good. We should celebrate beauty, and he's naked, that's the hard part, he's naked. Naked skydivers, they have them. There are such things. There was an ad in the
Telegram
, and my friend, Sadie, she decided she wanted to jump when she saw the ad. She wanted something big and dangerous. Just their bums in
the paper with the parachutes wafting behind, a promotional ad. Sadie had to do a one-day course, how to land, bend your knees, and then there she was hanging on to the wing, the guy in the plane yelling at her, Jump, and her yelling back, Jump? And him yelling, Jump! And her still yelling, Jump? And finally the guy in the plane, he leaned out and he just edged her feet off the step with the side of his shoe, he basically pushed her feet off the step, and she let go, and that was it. So Sally — my character, Sally — is driving along a country road and she pulls over because she sees something, she gets out, and it's a naked skydiver. The whole thing is about fate. Big theme, fate. Sally feels fated to be with him. She watches him fall, her hand over her eyes to block the sun. And he lands, and rolls, and gathers up the parachute, and lopes over to her, he's loping. He's out of breath. Buck naked. A naked babe. There's this big field behind them and the sun, you know, going down.

The producers looked at each other, looked at Eleanor, We could do that. You could? We could do that, yes. You could do a naked skydiver? We could, yes, we could.

Gabrielle comes around the corner of the house, whacking the grass with a cracked broom handle. There was a scream for attention in each whack. She has lost one of the gold earrings her grandmother gave her. She wants to be absolved. She leans on Eleanor, rocking gently.

How's my girl, says Sadie.

What, Eleanor asks Gabrielle. What do you want? What? Gabrielle won't mention the missing earring. We have heard
enough about the earring, thinks Eleanor. She was too young for gold. Eleanor is tired of Gabrielle. Tired of the wedding. Tired of losing things. She wants it to be tomorrow already. Her neck, the back of her neck, she realizes, is tired.

Hi, Sadie, Gabrielle says. Then she grabs Sadie around the waist in a fit of passion, burying her face.

I love you so much, Gabrielle says.

Are you having a good time at the wedding, honey, Sadie says.

Gabrielle rocks harder, stamps her foot.

Eleanor says, What?

Nothing.

Tell me.

Nothing. My earring, she whimpers.

You're impossible, Eleanor says. Philip comes out and sits beside them.

What's the matter with her?

The earring your mother gave her. Philip rubs his hand over the stubble on his chin.

The French, he says, are sometimes full of crap. Do you get that feeling?

Is it crap, Sadie says.

Philip says, But still, I'm like you, Sadie, I prefer the French. Where's Maurice, Eleanor says.

He's showing Constance the dish he made for the wedding. Seaweed something or other.

We'll have to eat seaweed, Eleanor says, how gloomy.

Nobody has to eat anything they don't want to, Sadie says.
He's very clear about that. It's part of his
thing
, his whole thing. He thinks it's totally fucked up to eat out of politeness. And you don't ever lie, or make promises; that's also part of his thing.

We all have a
thing
, Eleanor says. If someone makes a dish you eat it, that's my thing.

Philip says, I'm not eating seaweed.

Or marry for convenience, says Sadie, you never do that, according to Maurice, even if you need citizenship to get a job so you can stay in the country and be with your lover whom you supposedly love.

I'm eating it, says Eleanor.

Or marry for any reason. Or have children, because that's a promise in itself. Never making a promise is part of Maurice's thing too. Although he loves children, says Sadie.

I also love children, says Eleanor, children are also part of my
thing
. Staying married is part of my thing. And just generally being nice to people. I believe in
being nice
.

Philip grabs Constance's dog, who is trotting by and stares into his eyes.

This dog wants to tell me something, Philip says.

Maurice loves other people's children though, says Sadie. He loves this little girl for instance. She gives Gabrielle an extra squeeze.

Philip says, I think the dog is starting to look like Nicolas Cage.

Eleanor says, Try new things, right? Isn't that right Philip? My god, there's a whole ocean of seaweed out there.

They shot the skydiving scene during a blizzard on the Bally-Halley golf course. The man they'd gotten to play the part was strikingly beautiful. Eleanor had said, You have a beautiful face. He was surprised to hear it. He'd been a weightlifter, said his thigh had once been twenty-eight inches around, he couldn't buy a pair of pants. His body was a separate thing, a thing by itself, he said while folding a Caesar salad into his mouth. He wasn't successful as an actor, had turned to repairing fridges, which is what his father did. A part comes up every now and then, he says. A part like this. She can tell he doesn't think much of nude skydiving. Of course, there's a stuntman to do the actual dive. But the actor must run across the field without his clothes.

Costume had sewn tiny heating pads into the straps of the parachute, but he was nude in the snowstorm. All the crew in knee-length eiderdown, the actor completely nude, running through the snow, gathering the parachute behind him. Eleanor hadn't written a storm but there it was. The shoot had been postponed and there was the storm. Two women waited outside the scope of the camera with thick blankets. The hulking actor trembling with frostbite. Everybody averting their eyes from his purple dick. The director called cut, and the girls ran up to the naked actor and flung the blankets over him and there was a consultation.

What the hell? I thought that was good, he called out over the field, hopping from foot to foot. Someone wiped his nose.

Snot? Snot on my goddamn face? I do the best goddamn performance of my
life
and there's
snot
on my face. Come on, let's do this thing, let's do this thing, he yelled.

The first time Philip cheated on her, if you can call it that, when it's out in the open, when there's an understanding: Eleanor and Philip had gone to a movie together, and afterwards they sat in the car, which was parked facing their house. It was raining, and the yellow clapboard of the three-storey house wiggled and snaked.

Philip said, There's something I forgot to tell you. When I was in Montreal for that conference, two years ago. I told you about the jazz, and the weather.

You told me about that, she says.