The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (30 page)

On the last night we were all going to a party in a hotel room. This woman and me, this very beautiful woman, we got into the elevator together. It was late at night. And we got out on the wrong floor. We were talking, about the conference, papers we'd heard. We got out in front of a floor-to-ceiling window, a whole wall of glass. And there was the city in front of us, spread as far as you could see, the lights. It was so beautiful. It shocked me. And I said, How beautiful. And this woman, she touched my hand, and she said, Yes, let's get a room.

He turned the car on and let the wipers clear the glass for two swipes, and their house was solid again, the clapboard straight, and the car filled with music, the radio was on loud, jazz, several horns, Miles Davis, maybe, and he turned it off. The house went soft, melting. She looked at him under the streetlight. A splatter of rainy shadows migrating over his nose, across his cheeks. His hand still on the key, looking straight ahead.

How does this confession change things? The yellow house is still yellow, the harbour beyond, the Atlantic Ocean, the rain
hitting the street so hard it rises in a silver fur under the streetlights. It makes Philip a stranger, she thinks. Like in the beginning, when she sat on the frayed arm of the chair at Kibitzer's and just wanted to go home with him but was afraid. Maria Schneider making herself come without touching — they don't exchange names, she and Brando, they just fuck while his wife lies in a coffin.

And you forgot to tell me this.

I decided not to tell you. I decided not to tell you, and then I forgot to tell you.

But that night, when I spoke to you on the phone from Montreal, she says. She tried to think of the night. He had called every night, waking her. She loved being dredged out of sleep, trawled into the bedroom. Out drinking, he'd said. A bunch of Newfoundlanders at the conference and his paper had gone well, he'd called to tell her something about flowers and stars. They had been drinking outside, it was an outdoor pay phone he called her from. Flowers had fallen into his beer, or birdshit. It was birdshit. Nothing about stars. There had been laughter in the background and she'd fallen back to sleep, blissful.

With great effort she speaks to Glenn Marshall: Last summer Gabrielle wanted a ladybug, but they're like grace, you can't will them, either.

Glenn rises from his chair and his snifter of brandy smashes. She sees it fall, hot amber coming up to the mouth of the glass like a jellyfish.

You prepare for grace, he says. Thomas Aquinas said, Get ready. That's his advice, prepare.

Yes, she thinks, you wait. She glances at the window, but she can't see Philip, he has moved into the kitchen. She thinks of her mother and the white mink, how much was lost when her father died.

Eleanor says, It's about a girl who comes through grief via a sexual awakening.

The story editor says, What does that mean?

She says, When my father died, because essentially this script is about my father. Pleasure is a kind of betrayal, to feel pleasure, any kind of pleasure, after a death. Because pleasure is life affirming, and to go on living, enjoying life, when someone you love has died is to accept their death. And acceptance is a kind of betrayal, is my thinking here.

The screenplay is a messy jumble. Everything out of order. Full of dream sequences (self-indulgent, according to the story editor), the death, snowstorms, pregnancy, a prison where Sandra teaches art to a young woman who had attacked someone with a hammer (of course it's all true, the screenplay tells exactly what happened, her mother struggling to get the lawnmower into the trunk of her car so she could mow her husband's grave and finally throwing it at the car with a superhuman burst of strength brought on by grief).

The story editor takes up a coloured marker and approaches a flip chart. He draws a timeline.

He says, A half-hour screenplay is twenty-four pages. I want
the grief fully realized by page four. I want to see the character attempt to overcome grief three times by page twenty. Three failed attempts, but each time she gets closer. I want the sexual awakening on page twenty. By page twenty-four she has come through.

And who is the father, the story editor asks.

Who is he?

I mean who is he, really, the story editor says.

She remembers her father bringing a Portuguese sailor home for supper when she was seven so they could hear a foreign language. She feels a burst of tears coming, her nose. But she won't cry in front of the story editor. In the elevator she noticed his black turtleneck, his raglan, his polished shoes. He has uncapped the marker. Death has made her father finite. She could list all the things he was. Everyone else, this man with the marker, Philip wanting to leave her, Sadie working on her film, everyone else is changing.

Like what was his favourite food, says the story editor, who did he read. What did he take in his coffee. You have to know these things about your character.

Who was it Eleanor's father used to read before bed?

Harold Robbins. Eleanor can see Harold Robbins in raised gold script. Her father would fall asleep each night with the book open on his chest, having read only a page or two.

After her father died, Eleanor's mother had a nervous breakdown, and then began to see Doug Ryan. Eleanor first read Harold Robbins while her father was still alive, just two pages. Two forbidden pages when she was thirteen.

They had been jumping off the Ryans' wharf, knees tucked up. The smack. Plunging down through a tunnel of bubbles and the murkiness near the bottom of the lake, the mossy struts of the dock, underground springs spurting up, making warm pockets, remembering the eels balled together in the darkness.

Eleanor had known about sex, the facts, for a long time, of course. She had been kissed. (She'd just let her horse, a fineboned pacer, out of the barn and the mare had bucked and reared, front hoofs pawing the clouds, neck tossing, back legs step-stepping in the deep snow, and Eleanor caught the yellow nylon rope snaking past her jeans, the mare yanking her arms, her hands burned by the rope, digging in her heels, her mother had company, and they'd brought their son, three years older than Eleanor, sixteen, he was drinking a cup of tea he'd taken from the house, standing in snow up to his knees, she had loved the horse, had spent winter evenings in the mare's stall with just a flashlight, the smell of linseed oil she used to clean the tack, the brushes, she knew the animal's body, the shiny black knees, the way to pick up the hoofs and remove stones with a pick, a flame of pink inside the right nostril, the wet snuffle of giant lips against her palm when she held out half an apple, the smell of manure, the molasses in the grain, the water bucket with a skin of ice, the blue salt lick, smell of horse in her hair, under her nails, outside trees creaking together, the starry, dark blue sky. Walking back to her house through the trees, all the while her family going bankrupt, the television murmuring, her father hitting the adding machine, hitting the adding machine, the washer going, piles of money in front of him, a dish with a
sponge for counting, the adding machine, until morning, when she woke and found him leaning on the counter looking through the kitchen window at the sun coming up. He had cut up a grapefruit for her breakfast with a maraschino cherry in the middle. He was drinking his instant coffee.

Catching the horse's nylon halter, kelly green, bright against the blue sky, white clouds, after coaxing the mare into stillness, the white of her eye, Danny Martin came up to her and kissed her lips, he took his time, she could feel the mare's breath on her wrist, he was holding the cup and he tasted of milky tea out there in the snowbank on a spring day, the snow creeping back off the pavement, the asphalt shiny, the horse.

For weeks after, months, she imagined the kiss while falling asleep, and when her father sat her down on the plaid sofa and took her two hands in his, cradled them between his, explaining they would have to sell the horse, his heart nearly broken, she could hardly remember why she had ever wanted one.)

Harold Robbins described being overcome. Sexually overcome. Losing control. To think that such a thing could happen to adults. Those who made the world stable. Even after the bankruptcy, when there were less treats in the cupboard and no new clothes for a long time, everything had a certainty.

She understood why she hadn't been allowed to read the Harold Robbins. Her parents hadn't wanted her to know, and knowing, she could feel herself crossing over, becoming adult.

Terrified of the eels, which were definitely thickly knotted under the wharf, kicking hard to the dazzling surface of the lake; but as soon as she gets there, thirteen-year-old Eleanor
instantly forgets the eels, climbs up the slimy ladder to jump again, ribs heaving to catch her breath.

Mr. Ryan used to deep fry battered cod tongues and serve them with tartar sauce.

The men always had one specialty and they were praised for it as if it were a miracle. Doug's cod tongues.

Somewhere she has heard the story, a famous editor had given Harold Robbins an advance after receiving the first half of a novel. When the final half came in, it was an entirely different story. The characters had different names, different crimes, different lovers, different settings. But Robbins wouldn't change a word. His editor found him on the Riviera. Robbins wouldn't leave his yacht. A champagne glass held high, women in bikinis. The editor claimed it would destroy Robbins's career, published the novel as it was, and nobody noticed. It sold as well as all the other Harold Robbins books. People read for the sex and wealth.

Glamour, thinks Eleanor, and she remembers Mr. Ryan's plastic toothpicks with the Playboy bunnies at the tip, in silhouette, jutting breasts and ponytails, the tiny cheeks of their bums perched on the picks, sticking out of the cod tongues. Mr. Ryan was being ironic with the toothpicks, making fun of himself, his inability to let loose. But the toothpicks were also a parody of the desire to let loose; he didn't believe in letting go.

Mrs. Ryan sent her to the house for ice. Eleanor had left the wharf, wandered up through the raspberry canes, eating some, pressing her tongue into the nubbly thimbles. Spiderwebs in the shade of the spruce trees wobbling with droplets of an
early morning rain. Her sister, Fran, stood near the sprinkler for hours, the lines of water hitting her bright bathing suit in a burry asterisk of mist (the bathing suit was blue with bananas all over, the things that suddenly come back to you!), the steely threads moving over Fran's scrunched eyes, down her throat, chest, protuberant belly, and thighs. Hitting the sharp bones of her ankles and resting there like silver spurs.

There was too much sun. The Ryans' house was empty. She opened the freezer and took out the metal tray of ice. In the living room she lay the tray on the TV and picked up a Harold Robbins novel from the shelf. She checked the bay window in the living room, looked out over the lawn. She could hear the Ryan children at the wharf. The crashes of their bodies on the water, shrill laughter.

Mr. Ryan, just outside on the verandah, preparing the cod tongues. Their parents drank so much in the middle of the afternoon, thinks Eleanor. All day, in the sunshine with the fireweed swaying, the mild breeze lifting clouds of seed into the air, and the dark spruce with ribbons of lake hanging in the branches. They had been rich briefly, then the construction company had failed. The sprinkler reaching her sister's feet, and then, mysteriously, the water had dried up, someone, somewhere, had turned off the tap, and Eleanor's sister opened her eyes and blinked in disbelief.

It's such a shock when someone dies, all that energy, angst, desire, memory, love, the sheer
propulsion
, amounting to nothing. She just wants the screenplay to capture that: the shock.

The Harold Robbins novel: Eleanor on the cusp of puberty,
small breasts, ears pierced with two ice cubes freezing the lobes, and then the sewing needle, a drop of blood; in the mirror, her earlobes as dark as cherries, burning, the delicate jiggle of the dark red stones in the gold settings, her grandmother's, the hot sting of the sewing needle through numbed flesh.

But I'd never read a word of pornography, she thinks.

She opens to the second-last page. A man is holding a gun, he has caught up with a woman he is going to kill. Eleanor can tell he has chased her through the five hundred pages, she has betrayed him again and again, and he comes back for more, they are in a room alone, his arm out straight, his finger on the trigger. (Maybe she should shoot Philip, blow his head off with a rifle, ruin Constance's wedding.)

I will be independent, she thinks. She feels alert, squares her shoulders, a cold breeze from the lake, the potluck is ending, she is out on the lawn by herself, had she fallen asleep? She checks her chin for drool. She wonders if Philip has been waiting for a specific date when he can leave, like Mrs. Ryan. Has he planned to leave her all along?

Grace was not bestowed, she realizes. Nothing. Was it something Philip decided one night, resolved, resigned himself to? Surely Mr. Ryan, arranging the bowls of tartar sauce, the toothpicks, the serviettes, must have known something was going to happen.

Eleanor's mother singing out: Doug's cod tongues, what a treat!

How unthinkable that he would one day be with her mother for a short time, he would, in his confusion after
Mrs. Ryan left, turn to Eleanor's mother, who was herself so disoriented with grief, so lost, how unthinkable on that particular sunny afternoon when Eleanor read pornography for the first time. As if the characters of the afternoon had stepped into a different novel halfway through. Her mother in Mr. Ryan's arms. Her father buried on a hill overlooking the ocean. Mrs. Ryan seeing a lawyer in British Columbia.

The man grips the gun. The woman takes out her hairpins. Her shiny mahogany hair tumbles over her shoulders. She begins to unbutton her blouse. The man breaks into a sweat, he tries to look away, but he cannot. The woman reaches behind and unzips her skirt, it falls to her ankles, the man is trembling. He tells her not to move. She stands before him in a black lace bra and panties, garters, and fishnet stockings. The woman reaches back and unhooks her bra. Out on the verandah Mr. Ryan lowers a basket into the boiling fat and a roar rises.