by Lisa Moore
You discover that you are an asshole, he says. He winces. Tilts the lemon slice in his gin from side to side.
An asshole, he says. That’s what happened to me. It was a terrible thing. I took up yoga.
The moment you faced your worst fear, says Eleanor.
She tells about her mother trapped in her living room with a white weasel or mink. After Eleanor’s father died. Eleanor had been seventeen, in Stephenville, wrapped in a snowstorm, a giant wooden custard cone banging off the side of an abandoned convenience store. She’s trying to work it into the screenplay she’s writing — the custard cone squeaking on its hinges. Ice in her eyelashes. Later, in the student residence, the phone ringing down the hall, running to catch it, and it’s her mother, in her kitchen in St. John’s, standing on the counter. Somehow a rodent, fat as her thigh, long as her arm, had gotten into her house.
A white weasel or mink tearing through the green and gold shag carpeting, crazed. Eleanor could hear its piping squeals. Her mother, a tall woman, neck bent awkwardly, the back of her head touching the stuccoed ceiling. The stucco swirled with a scrub brush, a new idea then. They had a spiral staircase, a smoky mirrored fireplace. They had an open-concept upstairs, a lake, and in the winter veils of snow sashayed all over the dark ice. The snow could come up to her mother’s waist, and Howard, a mentally handicapped man who lived down the road, would come and shovel. Eleanor’s mother would bring him a Pepsi with ice, which he paused long enough to drink, his frosty breath hanging, his fluorescent orange cap. Just the two of them with no one around for miles. Her mother standing beside him, waiting for the glass.
And this became her mother’s life after her father died; she was only occasionally terrified; the mink’s eye flashing that alien green of trapped animals and then black again, under the dining-room table.
Most erotic moment without touching. The cork of a wine bottle rolling over a faded yellow rose on the tablecloth under Glenn Marshall’s palm. His hand on her back. That might have been a moment of grace. The Ship Inn on a summer night blocked with people, standing space only, some event at the Hall getting out, the band deafening, summer dresses, tanned faces. The way the light slowly tinted the sky over the South Side Hills indigo, yellowish, pale blue. The desire to keep going, another bar, someone’s house, her new sandal destroyed. The sidewalk on Duckworth Street. A police cruiser slowing beside them and moving on. Glenn Marshall had whispered something in her ear, I’d like to go home with you. She had sobered up immediately. The cool breeze coming up from the harbour. The smell of the sea.
I’d like to do nice things to you, he’d said. How illicit and tender it had sounded. Sweetly wrong. Hokey and forward! The prim fervour with which she explained she could never, ever, ever hurt her husband.
Frank Harvey is still talking about the moment you discover you’re an asshole. A Sunday afternoon in Bannerman Park, he says, hungover, fragile, children making the diving board reverberate, wind in the leaves, and it hit me. It was so cleansing, such a relief. He’s smiling at everyone. Frank Harvey is holding court. The sun hits his balding forehead. It gleams as if he is physically projecting his new wisdom. He’s good to have at a wedding; he’s the entertainment.
Eleanor thinks: How dangerous to fall in love with Frank Harvey. She could always do that if Philip leaves. It would be torrid . Yes, there would be battles in public, dishes shattered, lovemaking outdoors, in movie theatres, planes. Bike trips across Canada, leanness, bracing, voluntary poverty. She would have to shave her head or become vegetarian. Type on a manual typewriter. Maybe take up smoking. She could be a female Ernest Hemingway, grow a beard. It would be invigorating. Philip, stunned, shaking his head at some luncheon. Philip regretting his blonde. But Eleanor is already too old for Frank. His lovers are all under twenty-five, they are giggly, svelte, and have asymmetrical haircuts. Eleanor doesn’t have a haircut.
You see what I mean, says Frank Harvey, you’re an asshole, you have somewhere to go from there, don’t you? I rejoiced. No, seriously, I did. It was so unequivocal — my assholeness. The clouds broke and the sun poured down, cleansing me. I was cleansed.
Frank takes a moment to close his eyes and lift his palms and handsome face to whatever power cleansed him. This is ninety-two percent delivery, but the content he means. He means what he says. Timing, he understands. He’s parodying himself parodying himself. He’s dead serious. He opens his eyes and says almost viciously, I was brand spanking new.
Is Frank Harvey what they mean when they say bipolar? Or is he truly very, very near enlightenment? What enlightenment looks like: his eyes are so clear. He is so bursting with health. So goddamn sexy. Eleanor decides enlightenment would take too much energy. A lot of honesty. She’s hardly ever deceitful — she imagines herself hacking a path of truth through a vast field with a machete, stopping only briefly to wipe the sweat from her brow.
But Philip believes he is duty-bound to lie whenever it makes life easier. Eleanor imagines herself from an aerial view, the path she’s hacked winding in on itself, a spiral. Then she briefly allows herself to imagine Frank Harvey’s penis. The word dong leaps to mind. Something big and friendly. The sound of cymbals at the gateway of the Forbidden City. The whack of a baseball against a bat. Ying yang, ding dong. With Frank she could be oblique, like a heroine in a bodice ripper, Frank, take me.
The smell of cinnamon from a tray Constance passes under her nose and Eleanor is back in India with Sadie, ten, no twelve years ago. Icy air-conditioning, thwack of ceiling fans. How real it becomes for her sometimes. She can smell it. They were asked to be extras in a movie. Two shady-looking men outside the Salvation Army hostel in Bombay. They said, Meet us here at five in the morning. We’ll fly you to Bangor. You’ll be paid. Eleanor terrified, Sadie gung-ho.
Is this a good idea?
Sadie: Are you kidding? This is the movies .
With yoga, says Frank Harvey, there is so much pain. I tried to bury my self-hatred in pain. The instructor was so good. She really hurt me.
The Indian movie agents came for Sadie and Eleanor at five a.m. Drove them to the outskirts of the city, and beyond, into a dry landscape, almost desert. How had Sadie become so brave? And somehow this drive, during which Eleanor believed her twenty-three-year-old life was ending, and during which Sadie sang Joni Mitchell songs for the two men who had abducted them, her elbows flung over the front seat — he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator — singing with deep feeling, though they are too young to understand how sad or practical a dishwasher can be — all of this becomes vividly present. She remembers even the crack in the window, the rubber Ganesh (why is he blue) jumping on an elastic hanging from the rearview mirror. She was once this: a woman in the back of a car in the desert about to be killed/be in a Bollywood movie.
And now she is what? Philip might be leaving. How will she support herself and Gabrielle? She has to finish her screenplay. She could get at least three or four thousand in development money if she tried. Even if the film went nowhere, four thousand. There are avenues. A little low-budget video thingy. A seventeen-year-old girl in Stephenville going to art school, old army barracks buried in snow, the El Dorado Lounge, the Grim Reaper, losing her virginity, her father’s death.
The most erotic moment without touching: watching the nineteen-year-old boy, the first guy she’d ever slept with, sculpting a clay torso. Squeezing water from a sponge over the breasts, making the clay shiny like licked chocolate, a drip hanging on the nipple, the slosh while he dips the sponge, the water hitting the clay with a patter; he talks to her while his muddy hands smooth the muscles in the torso’s belly, the ribs, the clavicle. He sponges the curve of the torso’s neck, and Eleanor’s hand creeps up by itself to her own neck, and they both notice and laugh. They laugh, but she is blushing, hot.
The screenplay was taking forever
. The penultimate scene, a Halloween party in a sprawling bar. That much would be cheap enough to shoot. Sometimes she still thinks about feasibility. She used to think about it always. But the more true the script becomes — the closer she is to describing the loss she felt with her father’s death — the less she cares if it’s feasible. Sandra, the lead, is drunk in the penultimate scene. She has made up her mind to lose her virginity. The town is buried in snowdrifts; it’s a white film. White. Oh, the young girl Eleanor imagines playing the lead. Beautiful because she’s that strange mix of child and adult, a changeling, like all sixteen-year-olds, but ordinary-looking too. The camera will always be close up on her face. The boy Sandra has decided to sleep with, a student at the school, is dressed as the Grim Reaper. He goes to the bar for beer and another Grim Reaper comes to her table and takes her by the wrist.
Eleanor looks for Sadie, who is supposed to be at this wedding party but who is late. Always late. She’s in picture-lock, the message on the answering machine said. The film she’s working on; they’ve got the final edit. She won’t miss the potluck, she promises. I’ll be there, okay. She’s bringing Peach Melba isn’t she? How could she miss the potluck? But it’s almost over already, the potluck, and there is no Sadie.
She and Sadie were not killed in the desert by talent scouts as Eleanor had thought they would be! Instead they were extras in a Bollywood movie. They met a harem of dancers. Women who had been trained in the art of classical Indian dancing since they were five years old. Women who wore pale pancake makeup to lighten their dark skin. Kohl around their eyes. Plump, luscious women who fell asleep on wooden benches at one o’clock in the afternoon, dressed in brown calico housecoats. The Vamp (in the dance number, she peeks coyly out from behind a palm tree, searching for the Prince she’s about to seduce away from his virtuous wife) had chased Sadie around the change room. Sadie letting out yelps, leaping over benches, the Vamp trying to pinch her bum, the other dancers squealing, shrieking. Sadie backing her bum into a corner, bent double with giggles. Moments later the dancers huddled together, whispering, and they turned as a group. What, Sadie demanded. The Vamp stepped forward: You both must shave your underarms, it’s terrible. To appear on film like that. Have you no shame?
There had been a poolside scene; a long line of dancers held striped beach balls over their heads and then fell sideways into the water, one after the other, like dominoes. Sadie and Eleanor among them, arms raised over their heads. Gloriously hairy armpits. They stood in line, the smell of chlorine and the burning sun, the music bursting into action, the Vamp shimmying to the water’s edge, tossing her gorgeous black hair, slitting her sexy eyes at the camera, and one by one, the dancers fell into the water. None of them could swim. They began to drown as soon as they hit the water, the revved-up, hysterical music droning to silence, long black hair floating on the water, choking, coughing, panic. The cameramen reaching over the edge of the pool with poles. Sadie and Eleanor dragging the young women to the side, saving their lives after each take.
Eleanor walks across the lawn toward the house. She hears Dawn Clark’s voice above everyone else: I know the Net. You’ve got a demographic of nineteen-year-old males, what are you going to do, sell them walking canes? I don’t think so.
Eleanor goes inside, gets herself another beer from the fridge. She thinks, This beer will be the ruin of me. But it’s cold; the frost smoking off the lip of the bottle cheers her up. There is Philip. She walks over to him and lays her hand on his neck. He turns and looks at her, smiling while he talks. He has forgotten, for the moment, that he wants to leave her. Whatever he is telling Constance is more important. Eleanor and Philip are together at the potluck. They might go on forever. They are surrounded by friends. The rowers glide past on the lake. The room is full of flowers. The children are playing in their fancy clothes. Gabrielle waves to her from the lawn, the long grass combing her lemon dress.
Philip telling Constance about his book. Constance holding her forehead in her hand, elbow on the table. She taps a cigarette. She’s listening to globalization, still in the wedding dress.
The Swedes moving traffic from the left to the right side of the road, Philip says, without a hitch, overnight. Things can change overnight.
Eleanor has an overwhelming urge to pour her beer down the back of Philip’s shirt. How dare he think of abandoning her. She has given up travelling the world with Sadie for him. They had promised to travel all their lives together, she and Sadie, no matter what. She has given up jungles, and rides in rubber dinghies in murky lagoons, and pyramids. Why had she ever given up being who she was to love Philip? (He knows everything, everything, and is handsome, his big hands on the cheeks of her bum, last week she came in from a rain that bounced like ball bearings on the pavement, the house booming with Glenn Gould, so loud it was tactile, in the banister, in the linoleum, the Goldberg Variations, she yelled his name, and waited, and yelled again, but he couldn’t hear over the music and the shower and the rain and up the stairs two at a time, her coat, a boot, her sock, her shirt, the jeans — dropping them as she went — the other boot, the sock, the underwear, the bra, and she stood on the other side of the shower curtain, waiting, listening, the bathroom foggy and hot and the leaves of the spider plant on the windowsill trembling from the music, she got in silently, he was standing with his eyes closed, his hands resting on his chest and she cupped his balls and his eyes flew open and he screamed. He scared her so much she screamed, and they stood as if electrified, her hand on his balls, screaming into each other’s face, then laughing, then fucking, the wet slap of their bodies.) He thinks it’s wrong to stay in a relationship if you are in love with someone else. He does not believe in weathering through , or for the children , or because you promised . He believes, simply, in doing what you want.
First of all, Philip doesn’t believe in anything. He believes strongly in not believing in anything. He believes Eleanor’s whole problem is that she wants so desperately for there to be a right way. She has been too chicken-shit to shed this last vestige of her Catholic upbringing: the desire for a universal moral code, which, once understood, leaves only the small matter of putting it into practice. If he were to believe in something, it would be: admit what you want; get what you want. This line of action requires great stores of bravery. Apparently it’s not as easy as it sounds. But to do otherwise, Philip believes, sets in motion a whole chain of actions and events which totally fucks up not only your life but everyone’s life with whom you come in contact. To do otherwise is to act dishonestly.
There is something so blazing and committed about this baldly self-centred stand that Eleanor loves him all the more for it. She refuses to love him less. He’s stuck with her. He is what she wants.
Eleanor goes back out on the lawn. Glenn Marshall is where she left him. She’ll tell Glenn Marshall about the Taj Mahal, the warm marble and smell of feet. They’d seen a man levitate in front of the Taj Mahal.
But Glenn loves Newfoundland. He doesn’t like heat, prefers cool weather. He wouldn’t want to be on top of the Pink Palace with lithe monkeys. She has told him before, she suddenly remembers. She has told him that story before, about the Bollywood movie. Glenn Marshall had been mildly interested. He had listened, but he shook his head and said he’d never go there. Why would he? He loves Newfoundland. As if there were just the two choices: the Taj or Little Island Cove. He loves being in the woods by himself, he has a cabin, can build a leanto, set snares; he does some ice fishing, he likes the quiet.
Who is she kidding, she could never love Glenn Marshall. But if she slept with him. Maybe if she slept with him. Things can change overnight. The entire city of Stockholm, was it? Driving on the other side of the road as though they always had.
Frank Harvey says, And I had an epiphany, alone in Bannerman Park on a Sunday afternoon. I realized it was okay
to be an asshole. I rushed out to tell my wife about the affairs I’d had, you see, I had already forgiven myself.
What was Glenn Marshall’s most erotic moment without touching? Eleanor can only think of the galloping moose. He had kissed her on New Year’s Eve and said, How do you like a moustache?
Ted says, Constance sent me flowers in the middle of a rainstorm — someone announced it over the intercom at the bookstore. I was in the back room tearing off the covers of old Harlequin romances. A big box of white roses.
Ivory, says Constance.
The salesgirls falling all over themselves to find a card, says Ted.
The first night Eleanor slept at Philip’s apartment; walking up the steep hill from Kibitzer’s, broken beer bottles glittering by the curbs, someone’s white bedsheets flapping on a line. She walked under the sheets, the damp cotton stiff with frost when it brushed over her face. She turned to watch him, a big hand bashing through, the clothespins pinging into the air, and then the rest of him tumbling, falling. They were twenty-one and he had a three-year-old daughter. A light came on in the row of public housing, then another. They were rolling down the hill in the sheet. Grass, mud, stones, sky, stars. The sheet wrapped around them like a cocoon they wriggled out of together.
A snowy afternoon at four o’clock; walking past the war memorial with his three-year-old child on her shoulders, Eleanor counting change for a block of cheese. They had the macaroni already. They were a family overnight, some sort of family. The change in her hand just enough! The child’s shiny red boots hanging beneath her chin. Dusk swooping down on Duckworth Street, the second-hand bookstore still lit. Slush seeping into her boots. Holding tight to the child’s ankles. Later, the steam rising from the pot in the kitchen, she and the child painted fish on the clear plastic shower curtain. The who-she-was disappearing fast, gobbled by the who-she-is.