Open

by Lisa Moore

  You can forge the signature and I’ll witness it, she says. She takes the top off the Bic pen with her teeth. She flicks a few pages and shows Melody where to sign. Melody signs and the nurse signs below.

  I don’t need to tell you, the nurse says.

  I appreciate it, says Melody.

  That year I live on submarine sandwiches microwaved in plastic wrap. When I peel back the wrap, the submarine hangs out soggy and spent, like a tongue after a strangling. The oozing processed cheese hot enough to raise blisters. I wear a lumber jacket over cheesecloth skirts, and red Converse sneakers. I learn to put a speck of white makeup in the outer corner of my eyes to give me an innocent, slightly astonished look. On Valentine’s Day in the dorm elevator I tear an envelope; dried rose petals fall out and whirl in the updraft of the opening elevator doors and there is Brian Fiander. I see I was wrong; he isn’t skinny. If he still wants me, he can have me. I will do whatever Brian Fiander wants and if he wants to dump me after, as he has Brenda Parsons, he can go right ahead. He seems to go through girls pretty quickly and I want to be gone through.

  Melody and I get tickets on the CN bus into St. John’s for the abortion. I wait for her outside a boardroom in the Health Sciences. I catch a glimpse of the psychiatrists, five men seated in a row behind a table. Melody comes out a half-hour later.

  What did they say?

  One of them commented on my hat, she says. He said I must think myself pretty special with a fancy hat. He asked if I thought I was pretty special.

  What did you say?

  The same smile as when she kissed me. Learning to smile like that will take time. The rainbow must belong to some other story. Stretching over the hills behind the Irving station, barely there.

  After the abortion I hold her hand. She’s lying on a stretcher and she reaches a hand out over the white sheet that is tucked so tightly around her shoulders that she has to squirm to get her arm free.

  Not too bad, she says. She is ashen. Tears from the corners of her eyes to her ears.

  Sometimes you have to do things, she says.

  During the rest of the winter I spend a lot of time with Wavy Fagan. She’s marrying her high-school woodworking teacher; they have to keep the relationship secret. Wavy smokes, holding the cigarette out the window. I fan the fire alarm with her towel.

  I don’t spend much time with Melody; time together is exhausting. Wavy smokes, and she taps the window with her hard fingernail and tells me to come look. Six floors below, Melody is crossing the dark parking lot. It’s snowing and a white circle of snow has gathered in the brim of her hat and it glows under the streetlight.

  She’s the one had the abortion for Hank Mercer, Wavy says.

  – 2 –

  I am drunk and in profound pain, my tooth. I am a forty-year-old widow in someone else’s bed. Whose bed? Robert turns on the bedside light. Primrose Place is where I am. Robert’s new house with new everything. Big housewarming party. I can feel the throb of it through the floorboards. Wrought iron this and marble that. Where I’ve woken up for the last eleven months. He untangles his bifocals from the lace doily on the side table and comes over to my side and gets down on his knees. He takes my cheeks in his hands. I can smell the alcohol in his sweat, on his breath.

  Open up, he says.

  I say, You have to take care of it.

  It’s five in the morning. He pays the taxi. I lean against the glass door of his office while he finds the keys. Everything behind the door leaps into its proper place just before the door swings open. The fluorescent lights flutter grey, then a bland spread of office light. The office simulates an office. A sterile environment for extracting a tooth. Robert passes down a hall of convincing office dividers. Turns on the X-ray machine.

  That’s got to warm up, he says.

  Just pull it out, I say.

  Robert gets a small card from the receptionist’s desk and slings himself into a swivel chair. The chair rolls and tips and he is flung onto the floor. He grips the desk and drags himself up and sits in the chair. He puts a pen behind his ear and feels around on the desk for it and remembers it behind his ear. The top of his head shines damply.

  Any allergies, abnormal medical conditions, sexually transmitted diseases? He’s slurring. I don’t bother.

  He leaves the room and I hear water running in a sink. The rip rip rip of paper towels from a dispenser. He comes back and pulls on a pair of latex gloves, letting them snap at his wrists, flexing his fingers.

  Who was the man you were talking to, Robert says.

  The gloves are the smell I’ve noticed on his hands, like the smell of freshly watered geraniums. He takes an X-ray and leads me to the chair.

  Make yourself comfortable, he says. There’s a poster of rotting gums — enlarged, florid gums oozing pus, the roots of the blackened teeth exposed and bleeding. Photographs of everyone who works in the office, the other dentists, the dental hygienists, and receptionists. I look for the redhead. A brief, uncomplicated affair, he said, terrific sex. Long after it was over Robert tidied away her student loan and Visa. Braids and a lab coat covered in teddy bears and balloons. I sink into the chair and a moment later feel myself sink into the chair. Robert prepares a syringe. He drops it. He picks it up and looks at the tip. He scrutinizes the tip of the needle for some time.

  That man was all over you, he says.

  I’m allowed to have a conversation.

  He tosses the syringe toward the garbage bucket; it hits the wall and bounces end over end across the room. Robert holds up one finger.

  I’ll get another one.

  You do that, Robert. I can hardly open my mouth. He puts his hands on my face and leans in to look, his entire weight rests on my sore cheek. He steadies himself and straightens up.

  The infection is too severe, he says.

  Coward, I say.

  We should run a course of antibiotics first.

  Robert, please.

  This is unethical, he says, I love you. He begins to sob. He sobs silently with his mouth hanging open, his shoulders curled in, cradling himself. I don’t care what position I’ve put him in. His house with the new, leakless skylights and cedar sauna. The spacious greenhouse, pong of aggressive rose bushes, dill, peat. Asking his dinner guests to pull the pearl onions from the earth. Orchids in aquariums with timed sprinklers. Philip Glass on the sound system, building tense, cerebral crescendos. Density of pixels this, lightweight that, gigs of this, surround sound. Pull my fucking tooth, you drunken idiot.

  You are so remote, he says, wiping his eyes.

  If you’re crying about that guy.

  Don’t you feel anything?

  He sticks the needle into my infected gum and I dig my nails into his wrist and my heel kicks the chair. The numbing spreads up my face and partway across my upper lip. My cheek is cold and stupid and the pain is gone in less than a minute. My nails break his skin.

  We’ll wait until you’re good and frozen, he says. He leaves the room. I hear him walk into the reception area. He crashes into something. A coffee maker starts to grumble. The smell of coffee. He turns on a radio. A woman says, That’s the reality of the situation, then static and classical music. He returns with the X-ray. He seems to have sobered.

  The bacteria think they died and went to heaven, he says. He has become reverent.

  Robert, I need to know you’ll stop if I ask you to. He clips the X-ray to a light board. My teeth look blue and ghostly. The white jawbone. I think of my husband buried in the cemetery near Quidi Vidi Lake. Robert goes into the reception area, I hear him pour a coffee. He opens a filing cabinet drawer.

  He shouts, Are you good and frozen?

  The toothache had been mild for weeks. I think I’m awake but the bed is facing in the wrong direction. Or I’m in the wrong bed. A toilet bowl filling continuously. Wet leaves and earth, is there a wi
ndow? Stenographers on squeaky keyboards wait for a breath of wind and resume. A car unzips a skim of water. Hard fingernails clicking glass, the leaves, the skylight, keying data. Data dripping from leaf tip to leaf tip. A religious cult in the sewer can be overheard whispering in the toilet bowl. A conspiracy and the stenographers ache to crack it. Wind sloshes through the trees and the typing subsides. The trees are just trees. I am my tooth, a monolithic grief. A man beside me. Please be Des; please. It is Des.

  The beach to ourselves, the park closed, early September. What heat, so late in the season. Each wave leaves a ribbon of glare in the sand as it withdraws. The sun is low and red, scissored by the long grass. Des strips to his underwear, trots toward the water. Stands at the edge of the ocean. High up, a white gull.

  Des charges, arms raised over his head, yelling. The gull is silent. So high up it’s barely there. Wide circles. It dips closer. The wave’s crest tinged pink, fumbling forward. He dives through the falling crest. The soles of his feet. He passes through, bobs on the other side. Flicks water from his hair. His fist flies up, wing of water under his arm. The gull screeches. Metallic squawk, claws outstretched, reaching for the sand. The sun through the grass on the hill laserbeams the gull’s eye, a red holograph. The gull’s pupil is a long midnight corridor to some prehistoric crimson flash deep in the skull.

  He calls, Water’s great. My shirt, jeans, one sock stretches long. I have to hop. The sock gives up. I run hard. The wave is building beneath the bed. Except how cold. My body seizes.

  Look at the one coming, Des says. The wave comes with operatic silence. Such surety, self-knowledge, so cold and meaningless and full of blase might. I reach out my hand. Here it comes. A wave full of light, nearly transparent, lacy webbing on the underside. The ocean sucking hard on my spine. The sandy bottom drops away.

  It smashes us. The bed plummets and thumps the floor. The room makes itself felt. Dresser, a housecoat on a hook. Des died four years ago of heart failure. Peanut butter jar on the floor, fridge open. Holding the knife. Smoking toast in the stuck toaster. The red light of the ambulance on the walls of the hallway. Now I’m awake.

  Tequila I drank, scotch. Elasticky top and sarong. Beer. Robert warned me, when he throws a party. Dancing. Slamming doors, laughter, the Stones. I have dated, since Des died, no one: an air traffic controller, a very young painter, no one, the reporter guy, absolutely no one, the carpenter. The tooth became unbearable two days ago. I didn’t tell Robert. Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name. You can’t leave. How can you leave? Bodies pressed close, smoky ceiling. Blow the speakers. We took a cab. Hope you guess my. Get a taxi. If we dance. In the fridge door. Mine are the cold ones. Pleased to meet you. Have one of mine. The cold ones. I got laid. Tell me. I’ll tell you after this. We need a toast. Our coats are where? Forget the coats. Don’t leave, it’s a party. Because the toilet. What happened to the tequila? Your own stupid fault. My wife took the traditional route. Does it have a worm in it? I’ll put one in if you like. There have been women, yes. There have been women, I’ll admit. We’ll call ourselves the Fleshettes. The people impressed me most. I’m not responsible. Hope you guess my. We haven’t talked. We’re talking now. This is talking? Name. I love you. Don’t say that. I love you, what do you think? I think more beer.

  The sky is the deepest blue it gets before it begins to look black. The stars are blue. The trees roar with wind and become quiet. I lie flat on my husband’s grave and look at the stars. Freshly mowed grass, a faint marshy smell, the ducks at the edge of the lake. This morning, resting my head against the hand dryer in the bathroom of Robert’s office. Tears start this way: the bridge of my nose, my eyelids, the whole face tingling, the clutch of a muscle in the throat. The smell of burnt coffee — homey, unloved office coffee — makes me cry. Some songs: Patsy Cline. Bad blue icing on the birthday cake the girls bought for the boss. I cry at least four times a day. The tears catch in the plastic rims of my glasses. My eyelids like slugs. While waiting for the elevator I hear laughter inside, ascending, inclusive, sexual. I cry with jealousy. Marcy Andrews coming into the bathroom after me. Unclicking her purse, getting the cotton swab out of a pill bottle, tapping two pills into my hand. Marcy smoothing her thumbs over my wet cheeks. She turns me to the mirror and she looks hard at me.

  She says, Lipstick will give you a whole new lease.

  I can’t be alone, I say.

  The leaves in the graveyard smell leathery, pumpkinish. The branches creak when the wind rubs them together. Des’s hands folded over a rose, his wedding ring. When do the teeth fall away from the skull? Does that happen? It’s beginning to get cold. Snow on his headstone makes me panicky.

  A flashlight waves erratically through the shrubs, catching the bright green moss on a carved angel’s cheek, her cracked wing. Another flashlight, soft oval bouncing in the leaves overhead, scuffle of feet. I’m surrounded by a circle of teenagers with baseball bats and fence pickets. They step, one by one, out of the trees and bushes. Or else they have always been standing there. All the headstones, tipping, lichen-crusted. I stand up, my legs watery. We stand like that, not speaking or moving.

  You seen a guy run through here?

  I whisper, No. I haven’t seen anybody. Three policemen arrive and the teenagers flee. A policeman steps forward and puts an arm around my shoulder and I cry into his armpit.

  Robert lowers a tool into my mouth and I say, Stop.

  I say, That was a test.

  He says, That was a scalpel. I would just trust me if I were you.

  I feel him cut the gum and fold the flesh back. His eyes full of veins blue and violet; my blood sprays dots on his glasses. He takes up another instrument and tugs at the tooth, twisting it, and I feel it tearing away. The hoarse, sputtering noise of the suction hose removing blood and saliva. Robert worked for nothing in Nicaragua after he graduated, teaching the revolutionaries to be dentists, the distant spitting of gunfire in the fields beyond his classroom. During the dot-com boom he invested — in and out — unspeakably rich.

  My tooth hits a chrome bowl with a bright ping. He begins to sew the stitches. I feel the thread move through the gum and the sensation, though painless, nauseates me. Three tight stitches, the side of my mouth puckered. He gives me a wad of cotton and tells me to bite down. He peels the latex gloves. I worry the loose ends of the stitches with my wooden tongue. They feel like cat whiskers.

  I’ve wanted to ask for some weeks, Robert says.

  Maybe this is not the best time, I say.

  I want to marry you, he says.

  The sound of the sliding metal rings when I rip open the shower curtain unnerves me. Waiting for the toaster to pop, a butter knife in my hand, I am aware of a presence. The washer shimmies across the laundry room floor until it works the plug from the wall and the motor goes quiet. The water stops slushing. An engrossing, animated silence. Every object — the vacuum cleaner, a vase of dried thistles — has become sensitive. The fridge knows. The unmade bed is not ordinary. I put a glass down and check. It’s exactly where I set it down. Loving a dead person takes immense energy and it is making me cry.

  Robert works the champagne cork with his thumbs. The cork bounces off the ceiling and hits a mirror, causing a web of cracks. He hands me my glass and I can feel the fizz on my face.

  He says, This is the happiest day of my life.

  We twine arms and drink and the awkward intimacy of this, the complete lack of irony — I know instantly I’ve made a mistake.

  Robert is still at work and I’m watching the decorating channel. The camera slowly roves through a palatial, empty house in Vermont, a woman’s chipper voice: Here we have an oak table, very countryish, but workable chairs, this dining room absolutely screams to be used. Use me, it’s screaming!

  I turn the TV off and listen to the shrill nothing that fills Robert’s house. Leaves swirl off the lawn in twisting columns.
A brown leaf hits the glass and sticks. The starlings are flying in formation over the university. A black cloud draws together and becomes thin as it changes direction. The sky is full of grey luster and the starlings seem feverish. I remember Des parking by the university once, just to watch them. It was late, we had groceries, ice cream in the trunk.

  They’re just playing, he said. I want to stay here, don’t you? I want to watch all night.

  I think: If you are there, get in touch with me now. I believe suddenly that he can, that it is just a matter of my asking.

  The phone rings at exactly that instant. It rings and rings and rings. Then it stops. I put my hand on the receiver and I can feel a warm thrum. Then it rings again, loud. I go upstairs and brush my teeth. I rinse and start flossing. The phone rings again. It’s ringing in all the rooms, terrifying me. I pour a bath and get in, and when it’s deep enough I dunk my ears under the water.

  Robert gives me a glass of scotch and drops into the chair beside me. He presses his watch face so the dial glows, sending a circle of green light zigzagging across his face. The sale of my house has come through. A young couple with a dalmatian. Most of the furnishings went to the Sally Ann. A closet full of Des’s shirts, a key ring with a plastic telescope, inside which there is a picture of Des and me on vacation in Mexico. It has to be held to a light. We are laughing, drinking from coconut shells. I’d let all the plants die. Robert has everything we need.

  You’re tired, I say, we’re both tired.

  What do you think of stem cell research, he says.

  There are the dishes.

  I could take a hair out of your head and make another you.

  The laundry is —

  Two of you. The real you and another you.

  I know I’m tired.

  One you is a roomful already.