Degrees of Nakedness (13 page)

When Carl gets round to asking Sarah to sleep with him he tells her he is bored sleeping with his wife. Sarah asks, Is she intelligent?

Carl says, Yes, of course, she’s a very articulate woman.

Does her conversation bore you? asks Sarah.

No, I love her.

Then I don’t see why she should bore you in bed.

Well, her conversation might bore me if she were the only woman I had a conversation with in seven years.

He says after a moment, Don’t worry about Anita; she gets it whenever she wants it. She has no idea how I feel.

Although Sarah feigns moral indignation, Carl feels her going soft like butter. She blushes when he compliments her and enjoys the special attention she gets around the workshop.

Mr. Crawhall’s house is designed to allow as much sunlight as possible. When he’s asleep Anita watches a white chair with faint apricot flowers. The shadows of the leaves on the chair are in constant motion. At about seven in the evening it’s almost as though the chair catches fire, a silent fire. It’s the only moving thing in the stiff-backed room besides the two goldfish. They are kept in a clear glass bowl with no plants or coloured stones. A soft spoken friend speaks to Anita over the phone, You really have no choice, Anita. This will hurt Carl so much. It was a one-night stand.

The goldfish are identical. Anita calls one fish the option of keeping the baby and the other the abortion. She watches them swim around and makes a game of seeing how long she can tell which is which.

That night Anita says to Carl, about her new painting, If you spend enough time alone the pain of emptiness passes and you realize your own voice is the only company you need.

The image is entirely nonrepresentational, red and yellow dots only, but the canvas shimmers with anxiety.

Carl tries to remember what it is he loves about Anita. The smell of turpentine on her flannel painting smock, burnt match sticks and beer bottle caps between the bed sheets. The squeezed paint tubes in her leather box, curled in on themselves, the limbs of their shirts and jeans twisted together on the floor. The photographs in his sock drawer, in the beaten Tooton’s envelope, of the night they walked to Signal Hill. It was summer and the sky was a skin of ticklish rain. Anita was drinking pop that turned the down of her upper lip and tongue orange. She tasted like summer, childhood. In the photographs the lights of the city at night burned coloured sizzles on the film. They made love on the grass, watching out for broken beer bottles, an aureole of amber glitter around their bodies.

Anita slept with a tourist named Hans. He was a German gymnast who had trained for the Olympics for eleven years and gave it up. Now he was driving a VW van across Canada. St. John’s was his starting point. He was golden, muscular, but small. He walked with his hands loosely by his sides. He seemed to place his steps, walking on the balls of his feet as if he were stepping onto a mat in front of a large audience. He had been sitting alone at the Ship Inn drinking milk. It was as though the blondness of his hair alarmed almost anyone who might have joined him. Hans and Anita discussed what was scenic, the hospitable Newfoundlander, and Jiggs dinner, briefly. He had come from California, that was his first stop in North America. He had learned to speak English in a place called Pure Springs, a self-awareness camp with hot springs where they practised
Gestalt and taught hyperventilation to relax. Hans talked about group therapy.

You are one of twenty-five for a month. You come to know each other very well and one day you step outside the room and the others decide on one word or a simple phrase that describes your essence. Sometimes it’s very painful, but for the first time you see your true self. Everyone hugs and is supportive.

Anita asks, What was your word?

Cold fish.

Outside the Ship Inn a rusted sign pole stuck out from the brick wall. The sign itself had been removed. Hans climbed on the windowsill easily and, jumping, gripped the bar. He swung back and forth, then with his legs straight, toes pointed, lifted himself into a handstand. It was the moment while he was upside down that Anita realized she would sleep with him because he was passing through and because her faithfulness to Carl was a burden. When he swung down, Anita felt the pocket of warm night air he cut with his body.

Hans swept the seats of the VW van with a small hand brush before she got in. The van was spotless. There was a string bag full of fruit, none of it bruised. On the wall was a calendar from Pure Springs. The photograph for June was four pairs of naked feet, toes twisted, all caught in the same hammock net. Nestled between the hand-brake and the driver’s seat was a glossy purple diary. Anita picked it up and opened it.

What’s this?

Inside were poems written in German, diary entries, dried flowers, and coloured pencil drawings of mountain peaks.

My ex-fiancée made that for me.

Hans took out his shiny Swiss Army knife from the glove compartment and effortlessly cut the rind from a pineapple while he spoke, She was a gypsy. Long dark hair, black eyes, small like me, we wore each other’s clothes. We hiked together in the mountains of Switzerland for two and three months at a time. We were together for ten years and were to be married. The invitations were sent. One hundred invitations. A week later she said she wanted to go to Africa. She met another fellow there, a German. The wedding was called off.

Hans held a quivering slice of pineapple out to Anita on the blade of the knife.

You must be very hurt, said Anita.

No, at Pure Springs they taught me to see myself as I really am. When I have finished my trip I will return there as a counsellor.

They sat in silence looking at the stars over Long Pond.

The fruit is very sour, remarked Hans. In the morning Anita could see the Arts and Culture Centre from where they had parked. She saw Carl get out of his car.

Hans dropped her off later at Mr. Crawhall’s. When he left she could only imagine him in a hat with a little red feather, shorts with straps, and a walking stick; Julie Andrews’s voice echoing off the Alps.
Such is the cry of the lonely goatherd la-he-o, la-he-o, dee-lo
.

It shocked her later to think her baby might be blond with eyes like an iceberg, if she had it.

Carl’s troll is hunched under the bridge, naked, its long green fingers hanging between its knees. Carl is placing glass eyeballs in the carved eye sockets. Sarah is standing on a wooden chair, perfectly still, her pressed lips full of pins. She’s modelling the Red Riding Hood costume for the seamstress. She’s identical in size to the five Styrofoam Red Riding Hoods standing in various positions around the warehouse. The roar of the chain saw subsides. Carl holds the glass eyeballs over his own eyes and tilts his head mechanically from one side to the other. He laughs and snorts, feigning a limp.

My dear, what firm milky breasts you have, all the better to …

He pops the glass eyeball into his mouth, rolling it between his lips, which close over it like eyelids. Slowly he reaches for Sarah’s throat and pulls the bow of her cloak so it falls off her shoulders onto the floor. Sarah squeals through tightly pressed lips.

For Christ’s sake, Carl, she’ll catch her death of cold, says the seamstress.

Carl and Sarah have been using a glue that foams into a cement. It has been taken off the market because the fumes are highly toxic, but over the years Carl has grown accustomed to using it and he knows a guy who imports it from Italy. It’s a two-part solution and becomes active when the two separate solutions are mixed. Sarah and Carl are the only ones in the workshop. She’s pouring the solution and he’s holding the bucket for her. She spills the solution over his hands and
frantically tries to wipe it. The foam has an acid base, and in her effort their hands have become stuck together. Carl shouts obscenities between his teeth and drags her to the sink. It’s difficult for him to get at the cold water tap. Sarah is crying hysterically and his other hand is stuck to the bucket. It takes him fifteen minutes to separate their hands. The seamstress hears the commotion from the kitchen down the hall and gets the first aid kit. She wraps their hands with burn ointment and gauze. Carl apologizes for cursing at Sarah and sends her home. He stays a long time in the empty warehouse, his burnt hands cradled between his knees.

Haloes

A
halo is the vibration of that which is perfect. Once the fish in the harbour of St. John’s were so thick and silver they slowed sailing vessels. The great fire of 1892 razed the city when it became imperfect. Now sometimes, something is added, a hoar frost, a shipment of mangoes, fog, and the equation of the city can’t contain its perfection. There’s a surplus that you must stand very still to see. Perfection spills over in a glow at the edges of the city.

There’s a photograph of the house my parents built together when it was just a skeleton. Blond two-by-fours like a rib cage around a lungful of sky. They worked back to back shifts in the restaurant they sold before I was born. The house was built on the weekends. I never once heard my parents make love, or saw them naked together. But the photograph of the two-by-fours is like walking in on them, unexpected. The house without its skin. Their life together raw, still to come.

I sat on the bar stool next to Philip. I can talk to Philip only when I’m drunk. I know things about him. He has a small daughter in Germany. He doesn’t talk much. At the bar, I said to him, Now, Philip, how do you justify having a kid in Germany? Some poor young woman taking care of a baby all by herself? Philip barely moves his lips when he talks. There’s a lisp like a run in a silk stocking. A ventriloquist throwing his voice into his own mouth.

He has that weird relationship with alcohol few people can maintain. He soaks himself in it every night without letting it own him. He’s forty-six and liquor hasn’t ruined his face. Instead of making him old, it’s kept him from maturing, from ever making enough money to leave the city. He designs stained glass windows. I saw him in a church once, staring at his work, red and blue light floating over him like tropical fish; another face surfacing in his face, his true expression. There’s something sexually magnetic about Philip’s drinking, as if he could easily ignite.

His face turned crimson. I was giggling. We had been walking across a lake of clear alcohol, our fingertips barely touching, and suddenly lost belief in our buoyancy. I know a woman who left her house at two in the morning and knocked on Philip’s door. He was watching television with a remote, the empty walls reflecting a syncopated beating, like butterfly wings. He had a plaid wool blanket wrapped around his knees. Whatever happened between them wasn’t pleasant and she didn’t say anything much about it. She said he had just finished an orange and two of his fingers were sticky, webbed together.
She separated his fingers with her tongue, tasting the orange pulp. This is a strange detail, but I have picked up a few esoteric things like this about Philip without even listening for them. He eats marmite. Once some teenagers lured him into an alley and beat him with pickets torn from a fence, breaking two of his ribs. When he’s absolutely drunk he can sink every ball on a pool table. I asked about his daughter again, not making the connection between his red face and his rage.

Philip didn’t raise his voice. He said, If you were a man I’d punch you in the face. What a stupid question. How can you ask something like that? If you don’t get away from me I will punch your face in. You’re a mother. I can’t believe you’re a mother. You haven’t learned anything in your whole life.

I almost asked Philip to punch me. I willed it. A smack in the face would have evened things out, tipped me off the bar stool. I realized that over the previous ten years I had gathered only little splinters of Philip.

That afternoon I had been on the veranda with my daughter blowing psychedelic bubbles. The bubble solution was saturated with glycerine and that’s what made the colour so lurid. Hot pink, chartreuse, turquoise. The bubbles trembled. One touched the splintery wood rail without breaking. My daughter and I, shadows stretching over the convex surfaces, bursting. I slid off the bar stool and went back to my seat before Philip decided to hit me. He stood up and pulled on his bomber jacket. It was grey nylon, and the wrinkles in its back seemed to shimmer a one hundred proof hatred as delicate as a bubble.

That night I dreamed I was about to take a penis in my mouth, but there was a jagged piece of glass embedded in it, and it split my lower lip. Blood gushed freely and I got weak, the same weakness that happens when you give blood. A beatific lightness that absolved me.

This incident with Philip was nothing. Something he probably wouldn’t remember in the morning. But it sank inside me. It made me avoid the cafes and stores and streets where I thought I might run into him. It made me want to leave the city. Move away.

I’m reading one of the volumes of
The History of Haiku
that Gordon Austin left for me before he committed suicide. He was someone else whose pain I brushed up against accidentally. I knew him for only one night. We went on a blind date. He was an American, a draft dodger who manufactured false eyelashes in Ontario, a front to employ illegal immigrants, he said. Gordon had followed a woman to Newfoundland. He took me to an expensive restaurant, but he couldn’t taste the food. Gordon had no sense of smell. He talked fast. I hardly said anything. The restaurant emptied. The waiters were leaning against the back wall waiting to go home. He kept talking. He said he was rich. He was working on sonar radar graphics, writing a program that could draw icebergs three-dimensionally for free floating oil rigs. You’re only seeing the very tip, he said. His heart wasn’t in it, though. He was thinking he’d buy a fast convertible, drive to Mexico. I could go if I wanted. He did buy the convertible shortly after our date, I heard. He bought it
and left town for a month. Then he came back and left the haiku books for me in the restaurant where I was working, did a few other errands, and drove the silver convertible off Red Cliff. I couldn’t understand why he had driven back to St. John’s from Mexico to commit suicide. He had lived in St. John’s for only the last five years of his life.