by John O'Neill
Leonard was surprised by this contact. He had expected something more fervent, desperate, an urgent sequel to their tryst in the car. He decided he must let her direct things. Accommodating her distance, he put one hand in her hair, began to stroke lightly, carefully. He focused on the projector room and made himself think about this space, about all the paraphernalia of her trade.
It had a soft, blue mystery that hadn’t to do with the look or shape of its objects, but with the feelings they engendered, a sense of practical benevolence, that some aspect of life was being taken care of. That he’d been let in on a secret, that he was in a world, now, that made another world possible, where the apparatus of light gave shape to story, that in turn gave definition to what he thought of as shapeless existence. And Alison was part of this design. She seemed to have stepped fully formed from this world, her darkness, her thinness, generated by the mystery. In fact, Leonard, sitting there, with the sound of the projectors and the flickering darkness, felt as though he were already inside Alison, that sex would be redundant. The idea made him smile and put some ease into the way he touched her. She shifted, chin on his lap, and looked at him. Her dark eyes, a long too long not long enough long moment when she didn’t flinch from his gaze. He wondered if he’d ever locked eyes with anybody else like this, even his wife when their relationship was new. He had, of course. But before that memory could fully form, Alison took her eyes away, stood up and moved toward the shelves of DVDs and videotapes and ran her hand across their spines.
“I know we had a copy of a movie about Lewis Carroll here,” she said. “I was going to lend it to you, but.”
She came back, sat down. He half-curled toward her, tried to put his mouth on hers. As he did, though, he felt something had been lost, and wished she hadn’t moved from her position below him, her eyes on his. Even desire, now, seemed a lesser intimacy. She leaned back, pulled her knapsack onto her lap, between them.
“We should wait,” she said.
She jumped up and stuck her head inside the projection room. Leonard also stood, annoyed that it was she who had retreated. He couldn’t keep track of her body, the meaning of her movements, the language of how she carried herself. She was standing in front of him again. She put her hand on his chest but her face was serious.
“I really want to do stuff, but. I’m not sure it’d be fair. I mean, in your situation. What did your wife say, exactly? Did you tell her about me?”
“Haven’t told her much,” Leonard said. Then: “Alison, are we done? I missed you.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Lots of time. I think it’s important that, maybe, we not do anything. Or not much. It’s not all about down here.” She made a little mouth with her hand, and put it close to his crotch. “Another 20 minutes and I can close. Then we’ll talk. It’s been a long time for you, hasn’t it?”
Leonard was unsure whether she was referring to the promised conversation, or sex.
Once the auditorium had cleared, Alison made her rounds. She checked that the building was empty, locked the outside doors, extinguished lights. She led Leonard into the row of seats at the back. Smell of lavender and sweat. Perhaps some couple had grappled there, exploring things other than the mise en scène. But Alison and he sat rather formally. Instead of revealing details of the conversation he’d had with his wife, Leonard started by describing how, after they’d spoken, Cynthia had gone back to bed.
“Sleep is good. Sometimes there’s nothing else. I think that, later, your wife will see this was something you needed to do.”
Alison turned away and stared at the blank movie screen. Leonard tried again. “Things will never be the same for Cynthia and me. I’m not sure I can go back. But you don’t, I don’t know, you’re pretty calm.”
Alison slid across and straddled him. Hid her face in his neck.
“I guess what happened between you guys doesn’t seem so momentous, to me. I do care. I’m a little distracted. I’m meeting some friends. We’re talking about a film project. I had no idea you were coming, but. You can join us.”
“Don’t think I could be with people.” He pushed harder. “But can’t you, you know, cancel your plans? So we could talk?”
“They’re expecting me. They’re probably already at the club. What about tomorrow night?”
He wanted to tell her he couldn’t wait a whole day to see her again. But she kissed him on the mouth, knotting her fingers in his hair. She lifted her whole body up toward his head, climbing him, finally setting her feet on the armrests and stepping over his head into the row of seats behind. It was a comic, disarming move. He saw that Alison could use her body to change focus, to redirect a situation. Here, she used it to conclude their negotiation.
After she put on her knapsack and bicycle helmet (the helmet was enormous, her thin body like one of its straps), Leonard walked her out to her bicycle. As she removed the chain lock he mentioned, still manoeuvring for sympathy, his mother’s spitting habit, and how much it hurt him.
Alison was on her bike, leaning on one leg. A muscle bulged in her calf.
“Sounds like she’s trying to get rid of something,” she said.
Leonard squeezed her hand in farewell, then watched her sway and glide down Huron Street, her body rising, falling. She looked back once, rising, but Leonard wasn’t sure if she was looking at him, or checking for cars before she steered across Harbord Street.
On the drive home, Leonard was aware that he wanted to talk about Alison’s strangeness. But the only person he wanted to confide in was Cynthia. He found himself remembering Alison as she’d stood on their back patio, the ring of her cell phone, how she’d spoken into it, invisible in her hand, the ease of her voice and manner as she stepped outside herself, away from him. Now, he felt his age as something lodged in his throat, something to get rid of, to spit up. He looked in the rear-view mirror at the stain of his grey hair. He was obsolete; and, worse, engaged in the foolish process of abandoning everything that had made, and might make, his obsolescence tolerable.
The steering wheel was heavy, recalcitrant, and the darkness as viscous as oil. The heaviness increased when Leonard released an enormous, cannon-like fart. The noise startled him; he’d felt no build-up or discomfort since he’d restrained himself earlier. His stomach began to turn. The car filled with a wretched, strangling stench – wind from the grave. Leonard thought of opening a window, but resigned himself. He knew he could endure it. He even inhaled deeply. Grinned at his mettle.
11
DRESSED IN EDGE
He saw that the lights in his house still burned. The rows of small lights on the front lawn were benevolent, each lifting a patch of green above the darkness. Little halos of summer. Their easy beauty, the sense of time suspended, depressed him. This jewellery was mocking, like a necklace on the body of a corpse.
His wife sat at the kitchen table. Usually, by this time, she’d be in bed, or watching TV. Something in the space seemed different, some detail. He realized that all of the travel postcards that he and Cynthia had collected on vacations, that they’d tacked up above the kitchen cupboards from end to end, were gone. Cynthia was shuffling through them, fanning them in her hands like playing cards. She was already in the process of deciding which memories to retain, which to abandon. Also, the Lewis Carroll tin he’d shoved away on the counter had re-emerged, but Cynthia had emptied it of tea bags. It was home to a small blunt cactus. It sat to her left like a scowl. She didn’t look at him when he entered but asked him, in a perfectly reasonable voice, if he wanted a coffee.
He went to the bathroom to make sure that no evidence of Alison remained, that he’d smoothed out all dishevelment, that no traces disturbed his skin. When he returned, Cynthia placed his mug of coffee, its handle shaped like a moose antler, on the table. The coffee was black. As Leonard retrieved the cup of cream from the fridge, she said, “I wasn’t sure how you wanted it.”
“You know how I like it,” Leonard said, taking the bait.
�
��Well, there are lots of things I thought I knew,” Cynthia said.
Leonard’s mouth tightened. He’d been made the straight man. He knew that now everything she did in his presence would be a scalding comment, judgement on their relationship, a punch line.
“There are things I thought I knew as well,” he said. “I didn’t expect this, either.”
“Don’t do that,” she said. “Act as if you’re confused. You’re making decisions, every minute. You went somewhere tonight. I won’t interrogate. I won’t. You’re not saying the things you could. Don’t tell me you want to fix things. You’ve already decided.”
Leonard sipped from his coffee. It burned the tip of his tongue. Cynthia continued.
“I want you to transfer five thousand dollars into my account. I got a separate account for our mortgage today. I want you gone by the day after tomorrow. You can stay downstairs till you’ve found a place. Phone your sister, maybe she’ll help. Stop acting confused. You don’t have that right.”
Standing there limply, slouched against the counter with the antlered coffee mug in his hand, his lips pursed around the rim, Leonard found himself wishing that Cynthia had been as forceful in the months leading up to this moment. That she had bolstered their marriage with a series of such directives. That she’d prefaced each day with a sentence, line drawn in the sand: I want you to touch me when we’re in bed. When we’re not in bed. I want you to spend your desire on me, on the idea of me. I want your hands to create rather than explore. I want you to lose yourself to what we could be, to read books that explore the depth of what two people are. I want you to dream up those books if they’re unwritten. I want you to surrender to the shapes of the words and the spaces between the words. To your memory of me saying this. I want you to see me for what I dream, to comfort me in the moments, in the morning and night, when the dream asks, am I real? I don’t want you to think that shadows are bad, that sadness can’t be brought in and fitted to the way we live. That our ease can’t be sharpened, dressed in edge. I want our grave doubts to lie with us, to sit with us in sunlight in the kitchen. To be the third person when we walk together. I want you to tell me when you begin to disappear. When you wake to find that you’ve lost a hand, a shoulder, the small of your back. I don’t want your ghost to tell me. I don’t want your ghost, but your body.
Of course, Cynthia had said all these things, had told him unequivocally, at the airport when he’d said goodbye to her and Candace. She’d pulled him aside on that last true day of their marriage, pressed his hands, kissed him on the lips. But then she’d let her mouth frown, gave her head an almost imperceptible shake, as if she sensed that something was ending. In the strange delay, as Cynthia waited for him to erase her doubt, to recognize and dispel her clairvoyant moment of despair, Leonard let his eyes fall on a passing flight attendant. Magnificent, tall, long-legged, full-lipped, haughty, dark, distant, worldless, inevitable. His wife’s tremor of gloom was mirrored perversely in Leonard’s careless desire. By the time Leonard returned his gaze, her mother was pulling Cynthia through Departures.
Cynthia went to bed. Leonard wasn’t tired, still agitated by his meeting with Alison. Fortunately, distraction was at hand: the television was downstairs, at the end of the long Tudor-style interior. The room was also furnished with a built-in bar, but Leonard didn’t drink. He and Cynthia had tried, somewhat unsuccessfully, to lend the place a rustic feel, lining the walls with travel memorabilia from the wilderness areas they’d explored, including an antique set of snowshoes and a pair of caribou antlers they’d bought from a curio store in Whitehorse. Opposite the bar was a red brick fireplace. They’d placed the TV next to it, so their eyes could shift between the artificial and real light, from the light that entertained, distracted, to the light that consumed. When he entered the basement Leonard saw that Cynthia had already made up the pullout bed. He was grateful and annoyed. He sat at the foot of the bed, for a moment contemplating the blank TV screen and dark hole. He felt a chill, then imagined flames rolling over a crackling log, the dance of blue fire, that stranger. Small wilderness at his command. Instead, he found the remote, clicked the television on.
It was tuned to the 24-hour music station. A barrage of stutter-y images, jangling sounds and clipped but effusive commentary from a chorus line of VJs, all of them young and precisely unkempt, assaulted him. Crowds of teenagers pressed against the station’s studio windows. They were ghosts, lost spirits who vied to get inside so they might experience some moments of true fleshy existence, the weight of real desire. The imagery in the music videos, too, was dark and sexual. And, almost without exception, the featured artist was in your face, exuding either sullenness or anger, the sense that terrible wrongs needed to be redressed. Subtlety and self-effacement were not part of this world: a world without apology. Retreat wasn’t an option. Leonard was oppressed by it. Felt as if some video gang, spitting and squinting and wagging and flicking the fingers of their hands, might come and find him out in this suburban basement, drag him from his fold-out bed and punish him for his age, his powerlessness, for the sense of retreat he represented.
Leonard changed channels. He came to a new reality show that chronicled the adventures of a newlywed couple that was apparently suffering, mutually, from head trauma. Perhaps they’d met in a hospital ward. It was a sort of comatose take on reality, long silences interrupted by mind-numbingly inane dialogue; and scenes that, in their banality, achieved a kind of placidness. But designed, Leonard suspected, to lend the viewer a sense of superiority, the feeling that if these people could achieve celebrity, anyone could. He grew anxious whenever the camera lingered on the bride’s cute, sterile face. It was like staring at a broken clock. He preferred the mindlessness of the rapid images. And it was so easy to switch channels. Like blinking.
He switched channels. A VJ on the music station was interviewing an anorexic young man whose eyes were obscured by long blades of black hair. His arms were splattered with tattoos, cartoons of things that menaced: the birth of a snake from a hand-grenade, a knife protruding from a rope-bound heart, a skull embedded with the sharp ends of words, words like ruin and mock. He wore a t-shirt that hung sliced from his pencil neck. His thighs and calves were thin as his wrists, and his storm-trooper boots were scuffed black with thick heels. Built to pulverize: the footwear equivalent of an SUV.
When asked about the inspiration for his music, the young man said: “Way things are, man. The world (bleep, bleep). Utterly.”
Unperturbed, the VJ pressed on: “But what, specifically, angers you?”
“Look at 9/11. The world, man. Coming home to roast.”
The VJ frowned. “Roast? Do you mean roost?”
“Roast. The world’s bringing fire. So we made our own. We did the desecration. The government knows. Like blood-letting.”
The VJ nodded mechanically, unwilling to ask his guest to clarify, perhaps afraid that he’d hear yet another rant on how the American government was responsible for the terrorist attacks, and how this musician, all people in north America, were complicit, and thus obliged to rail against their masters. Another band member stepped forward, thin, tattooed, shirtless, his stomach tight as a drum-skin, and pushed his face at the microphone.
“Another war might be cool, though. We’d have, you know, a post-war thing, Paris in the twenties, New York in the fifties. Best times.”
The VJ subtly shifted his shoulders away from the pair, and said: “But what musicians have influenced you?”
Leonard flipped again, skittered from station to station; felt pleasure in how he dismissed the interview but uneasy about the darkness behind him, the space untouched by the television glow.
He stopped on an all-female band in mid-thrash. Three military girls who’d apparently gone AWOL, traded in their weapons for guitars. But the sense of military was not in their dress, but rather in their severity, their take-no-prisoners attitude. The look hinted at post-traumatic stress, their clothing a parody of middle-class values, wrecked
version of the status quo. As if they’d returned from some war and tried unsuccessfully to reintegrate into society.
The bass-player wore a stained, ragged prom dress cut off above the knees, where torn white stockings began. The guitar player writhed inside a kind of cotton shift, flowery, but lopsided, ripped at the shoulder. Their heads were shorn, shiny with sweat. The drummer wore a wife-beater undershirt, the rest of her hidden behind a shag of black hair and her battered silver drum-kit. Both the guitar players sported industrial black boots, like the ones the young tattooed man had worn. The music was long and sinewy, stretching like a snake that was continuously shedding skins, covering miles of desert, each new skin a pattern of diamond stab and glow. The sound was largely instrumental, but every few minutes the guitar player, chopping her white telecaster, spoke some lines:
“Stop and crack the book of your skin, book of your skin,” she calmly said, in contrast to the musical thrust. “Lie down and break in, break in.”
Her eyelids flickered as if she’d just been struck on the head, was slipping into unconsciousness. The camera focused on the drummer. Her head was still lowered, while her arms flailed and skidded over the drum-skins. Just before the camera swung onto the bass player, the drummer lifted her head, a swimmer breaking surface. She stared, expressionless, into the camera, at Leonard. It was Alison.
The song finished abruptly, without crescendo, a few ragged guitar notes dropping over the precipice at its end. No VJ stepped forward. The camera lingered pointlessly on the base of the microphone stand. A title went up at the bottom of the television screen: “The Craving.”
Leonard waited anxiously through the commercial break but when the show resumed, Alison’s band had been replaced by a Western swing combo, all loud embroidered shirts, Stetson hats and fat-bodied guitars. But the music was thin and anaemic. He preferred the textured din of Alison’s band. He was disappointed Alison had never mentioned her involvement in a musical group. He didn’t even know she played an instrument.