The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (10 page)

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.

I read, “the haiku is like a finger pointing at the moon. It's important that it's not a bejewelled or perfect finger. It only points to something.” I met Mike, my husband, after that. We were out drinking and Mike brought me home to his apartment, which was Gordon's old apartment. Mike had used the last of Gordon's shaving cream, wore a pair of Gordon's construction boots that were left under the bathroom sink. They fit him perfectly.

My mother's only sister, Sherry, is a real estate agent. The best in St. John's. In the weekend paper there's a whole page, a pyramid of real estate agents' photographs. Sherry is always at the top, or in the second line from the top. The agents are placed according to their sales. Sherry is afraid of two things. Fire and cats. She says when she was a baby, a cat lay over her face, filling her mouth and nose with fur, almost suffocating her. She was less than two years old but she remembers it. Cats are attracted to the smell of milk on the baby's breath. She didn't want Mike and me to buy this house. A fire trap, she said.

I was sewing a dress for my step-daughter with a friend who lives on the other side of the city. We were drinking coffee and Tia Maria. The phone rang and it was Mike. He said he
was standing in the front doorway of our house. Fire was pouring down the street. He said it was still safe there, but embers as big as his fist were dropping at his feet. The sky is orange, he said. I pulled the phone over to the window. There was an orange and black cloud breathing in the sky on the other side of the city. I said, That's over my house. He said, You should see it, it's like lava in the street. They'll evacuate us when it gets hot enough.

I ran home. Some streets were blocked. Ours was a frozen river of water from the fire hoses. A blizzard of orange flakes. I had to cover my head with my scarf to keep my hair from catching fire. Mike had closed the front door because of the soot and smoke. The radio said if the fire reached our street the whole of downtown would be lost. It said the firemen were losing control. There were high winds. A policeman rapped on the door of our house with a billy knocker. He said, Move now, NOW. The street was full of people carrying blankets, photo albums, figurines. A spark landed on my daughter's hand, making a tiny burn. We went to my sister's, stayed up all night listening to the radio, drinking, unable to get drunk. At three in the morning the radio said the firemen had contained it. Our house was safe. I felt a quick stab of disappointment. I wasn't comfortable in the city any more.

I woke early, afraid of looting. The Dominion supermarket had burned to its foundation. Blackened girders twisted up from the debris. Beautiful arcs of water shot from the fire trucks at the four corners of the lot. Everything hissing, steaming, delicate rainbows. Under a broken metal shelf I saw a pile of
brilliant oranges, strangely preserved, each with a tiny white cap of snow. Our front door had been beaten in, tracks of soot over the carpet — the police had checked each house for someone left behind.

Since the fire the house has become infested with mice. The cat is playing with a mouse now, under my chair. I have my feet drawn up on the seat. I smash the mouse under a book. The cat finally bites its head. I hear the crunching of the bones of the mouse's skull between the cat's teeth; although the body is still moving, the tail has become a stiff S. In a few seconds the cat has devoured the entire body. She gives a cry. I half expect the mouse to scramble out of her mouth, whole. Perhaps because I know the mice will keep coming.

My daughter caught cold the night we were evacuated. Her cough sounds like cotton ripping. I draw her into me, her spine between my breasts, the soles of her feet burning against my thigh. I curl around her like a shell around a soft snail. Even her fingers are hot, as if the fire entered her hand through the little burn. When I was a child I used to climb into bed with my sister because I wanted to protect her from the devil. I believed the devil could draw my sister away through her dream, to a parallel universe, where there was a parallel city. Anything could be drawn out of this world, sucked into that one. Three years younger, she slept on her stomach. I'd put my nose in her hair. It had the colour and smell of unripe corn. She dreamed so strenuously that her cheeks were red, her lips slightly parted. I would lie on top of her, matching limb for limb, my arm over her arm, my leg over her leg, my fingers locked into hers.
The way you lie flat if someone has fallen through the ice. The devil couldn't pull us both down. I'd hook the bone of her ankle between my toes. I could stop her from falling too deeply that way, by hooking the bone of her ankle, but that always woke her up and she'd throw me off.

I went to see a Japanese performance artist. Wine glasses set in a circle like the numbers of a clock. Each wine glass filled with a different coloured spice. Grey-green, mustard, turmeric. He tipped the contents out on the floor and they floated down in gaseous clouds. On the video screen it looked like an aerial view of the Earth. The way the Earth looks as though it's made of water and cloud, with nothing holding it together. The video cameras were as fragile as cheap toys. He attached wires to himself, and a gas mask with a paper bag on the end, that filled and crumpled with his breathing. The screens showed a mushroom cloud exploding over and over, silently. Then he made a pyramid of the wine glasses and poured a jug of honey into them. The honey clung to the stems of the glasses until each glass was filled. It glistened in the spotlight, the whole pyramid one viscous city of glass. Then he put a syringe into his arm and poured his own blood into the glass, mixing it with his finger.

I became fascinated with real estate when Aunt Sherry became an agent. All of my cousins punctuated every emotional event by buying or selling a house. It took me a while to recognize this pattern. Who would expect symbolism in real estate? But when I think of it, Sherry has made real estate her life. There's her religion — a private part of her I can just barely guess the workings of — the fierce and protective love
she has for her family, and real estate. I see all these parts of her bleed into each other. The houses she has bought and sold are spread out over the city like clues in a scavenger hunt. Some houses she's sold three and four times to different families, noting the changes in wallpaper, carpet, light fixtures, as though the house has a camouflage that matches the families that move in. She will often point out houses that have ghosts. A house where a son murdered his seventy-three-year-old mother, and she was found two weeks later. Sherry says this property is eternally on the market, the house like a lost soul that can't find bodies to move into it. She's bought houses for all her children, and when any of them tell a story, they always start, When we were on Holbrook Avenue, or Forest Road, or Prince of Wales Street.

There's a small island of trees and grass near my house. My daughter and I played there tonight, to bring down her fever. It had snowed the night before, covering the bone dry sidewalks, and another squall blew over in the afternoon. It was past Sarah's bed time, and my toes were cold in my rubber boots, but we stayed out as long as we could. The streetlights threw perfect shadows from the trunks of the trees, thick straight columns like the Parthenon's. An image drawn with sonar radar of a three-dimensional palace. I thought of Gordon Austin and his haiku books, of Philip's daughter playing in the snow of another continent. Sarah and I trampled the snow but the columns still looked clean, the shadow edges hard.

I imagine a map of the city with plastic inlays of Sherry's sales, family migration patterns from one neighbourhood to
another. Each move changing lives irrevocably. Sherry is responsible for it. You sell a house to a customer and five years later they'll be back to you for another. There are only three things to think about in selling real estate. Location, Location, Location.

In India several years ago I was on a tour of a city palace. A guide separated me from the crowd, ushered me into a stone tower. Before I knew what was happening he had bolted the door and the windows. No light leaked in. The darkness seemed to affect my inner ear and I swayed. Before I could scream he struck a match. There were thousands of convex mirrors imbedded in the walls. The guide, myself and the flame — reflected, wobbling. The guide said, The bridal chambers, night of a thousand stars. Our image splintered infinitely. Smashed but contained whole in each of the convex mirrors.