by Lisa Moore
Companionship, she thinks. A longing for it.
Treat yourself, the woman says, nodding at the sweater in Helen’s hand.
Oh, I can’t, Helen says. She puts the sweater back on the rack.
… . .
Seance, November 2008
JOHN HAS LEFT the boozy business meeting and is walking several blocks in the direction of his hotel. Outside a novelty shop there are four inflated George Bush punching bags, weighted with sand, bowing and tottering and bouncing off each other in the wind. It has begun to snow. John is supposed to buy an airline ticket for Gabrielle but he needs a coffee. He needs, always, a pause before parting with money.
John needs a pause to think about the baby.
It is very, very cold in New York.
He ducks into a coffee shop where the staff wear earpieces and peaked caps. They marshal the line so it moves along, pointing to a clerk behind the counter and saying: Inez is ready for you now. Or: Jasmine, at the end, is ready.
A woman asks if she can sit with John because the coffee shop is crowded. She unzips her jacket and sighs so deeply she falls into herself like a cake.
They are getting ready for Christmas in New York and there is a fashion window across the street with mannequins in red evening gowns and a gold fireplace and a pyramid of gold boxes. The reflections of yellow cabs float in the glass like giant carp.
The woman sitting across from John in the café says she channels spirits for a living. It’s draining work, she says. She glances over at the counter that holds the cream and milk, and says she needs sugar and she’s going to get some. But instead she narrows her eyes and stays very still.
I feel a vibe, she says to John. Coming from you.
Let me get the sugar for you, John says. What do you want? Sugar?
I believe you’ve lost someone, the woman says. She stands up. She is about to pronounce upon John and all that he is; but an ambulance tears down the street and she is distracted. The siren screams and the red light from the cherry washes over the woman, once, twice, gone.
John thinks of the men and women who had been sleeping on the plane from Singapore, the red sun spilling in their windows. People with their mouths hanging open; the concentrated, hard-won abandon on their faces. Was that just yesterday? The world below had seemed like a dream they were conjuring together.
I’ll just get the sugar, the woman says. She is wearing, John notices, faded black jogging pants and cracked plastic sandals with white sports socks and a lilac down jacket with grime around the cuffs. She comes back to the table wagging a packet of sugar between her finger and thumb.
You commune with the dead you were saying, John says.
The woman pours the sugar and jerks her teabag by the string. Spirits come to me, she says. She smiles at John and rubs her hands together over the steam of the tea.
So, with candles, he asks. He is thinking about Jane Downey at the Hyatt in Toronto. John has booked her a suite and he has a reservation for himself. A separate room. Would they sleep together? He has never had sex with a pregnant woman. Jane Downey said he would be able to feel the baby move.
You just have to put your hand on my tummy, she said.
I don’t need candles, the woman in the café tells John. He can smell her raspberry tea.
You hear voices, John says.
Spirits show themselves, the woman says.
And you hold seances.
Seance is an old-fashioned word, the woman says. We say channelling now.
And it costs, John says.
The woman pulls the teabag out of the cup and drops it onto a pile of napkins. A red stain spreads at once. I have to charge, she says.
John takes a bank card out of his wallet and turns it end over end on the table and picks his teeth with it; then he realizes what he is doing and puts it away. All he can really think about is the baby. He is having crazy thoughts. He is thinking: Why not marry Jane. Or: Just don’t show up and it will all go away.
He is thinking about the way it had been light for twentyfour hours that week in Iceland with Jane, and he has a crazy notion that the light made her pregnant. The light had done something to them both. Befuddled them. They had hiked and eaten a lamb dinner with wine, and there had been orange light on the broken up, glittering pieces of hardened lava, and the stories of berserkers that Jane wrote about in her notebook while the tour guide talked.
I’m just curious about how it works, John says to the woman in the coffee shop.
Everything’s on the surface with you, she says. I’m seeing things already. Things from your past. Things in your future.
What things, John says.
The woman shrugs. Shapes, she says. Colours. I see sadness and loss. That’s without even trying.
That’s pretty good, John says. Without trying.
She glances up from her cup and her eyes, John sees, are green. She has an intense, theatrical glare. Her skin is milky and her eyebrows thick and arching. She must have been beautiful when she was younger.
Something is coming, the woman says. John takes a twenty out of his wallet and slides it across the table to the psychic.
What’s coming, he says. Jane had an infinite capacity for generosity, that’s what he remembers. Or he is mixing her up with all women everywhere. He and Jane had a week together. Jane was angular. Lean. Cinnamon-coloured hair, wild curls.
John has avoided being a father all his adult life. It has taken stealth and some underhandedness. It has taken clarity of purpose when the moment called for dreamy abandon. He has practised withdrawal. He has kept what he wants, what he actually wants for his life, in the centre of his thoughts even while in the throes of orgasm. He’s kept a tight fist on the reins of himself.
I’ll tell you what the future holds for you, the psychic says. She has not touched the money. The bill is sitting in the middle of the table. When the door opens, the bill lifts a little and moves sideways.
Maybe, John thinks, he doesn’t want to know what’s in the future. He has given a lot of thought to the nature of time and how a life can be over much too quickly, if you’re not careful. The present is always dissolving into the past, he realized long ago. The present dissolves. It gets used up. The past is virulent and ravenous and everything can be devoured in a matter of seconds.
That’s the enigma of the present. The past has already infiltrated it; the past has set up camp, deployed soldiers with toothbrushes to scrub away all of the now, and the more you think about it, the faster everything dissolves. There is no present. There was no present. Or, another way to think about it: your life could go on without you.
John had enjoyed making love to a gorgeous woman in Reykjavik. That is true. There was sunshine all day and all night. He hadn’t stopped to think about it.
Looking back, it seems to John as though he’d been in the present with Jane. The whole week had happened in the present tense. Maybe that is love. These are the kinds of crazy thoughts he is entertaining.
He and Jane had gone to the Blue Lagoon and put white mud on their faces because they were told it would heal them. They’d laughed at that because they felt there was nothing to heal. They both claimed they’d never felt better.
Stay in my apartment, John had said to Jane. Be my guest. Because it was fun and the sunlight lasted, waning only slightly at about four in the morning, and there wasn’t a whole lot else to do. He’d watched the waterfall splash down over Jane’s head and onto her hands as she held them up, and the water fell in a glossy sheen over her face, and her mouth was open, and her hair was plastered down and shiny. Her nipples in the glossy red bathing suit. The curve of her hip. He had seen the shadow of her belly button. The hard ropes of waterfall had washed the white mud off her face in rivulets.
Steam had risen up thick and torn apart, and there was the stink of sulphur that you could forget for a moment before the breeze brought it back twice as strong.
Anthropology, Jane said.
He said, remind me.
>
The study of humanity, Jane said. Ritual, symbolism, magico-religious practices, class, genre, kinship, taboo. The way we move and talk, she said. What we eat and drink and dream and what we do with our shit. How we fuck and raise the children. All that.
It’s Jane, she had said on the phone. As if he would remember.
You’ve lost someone in the past, the psychic says. Then she grabs John’s hand. Her fingernails are digging into his wrist, hard enough to break the skin. It’s as if she’s having a mini-seizure. Her eyes have rolled back in her head and the eyelids quiver. The whites of her eyes. It lasts maybe twenty seconds. Then the muscles in her face go slack. John sees a bit of drool in the corner of her mouth. Her pupils are dilated.
The psychic presses her thumb and fingers against her eyes and bows her head. When she finally looks up, she is disoriented. Or you are going to lose someone in the future, she says.
She sees that she is holding John’s wrist, and drops it.
… . .
Wedding Dresses, November 2008
HELEN HAS A commission to be completed by the new year. Each dress is one of a kind. They are simple and flattering dresses. Her clientele are mostly in their late forties or fifties and they do not want virginal and they do not want foolish. Nor do they want the stiff suits they have worn to boardrooms for the past twenty years. Her clientele are radiologists or engineers or surgeons, or they are at the university.
Lace scares the hell out of them. Lace or anything soft, it makes them feel young again and pretty. This is a tremendous risk. They would have to remember they were giving in to love; they would have to lay down their scalpels and gavels and chain mail.
Weddings have become expensive. The flowers are tropical, waxy, swollen and vaguely anthropomorphic. The videographers are young men who have gone to art school in Montreal or Nova Scotia, young men with longish hair. Helen gets the impression they listen to softer, more lyrical forms of punk. The kind of young men who are always nodding just slightly out of sync with what you’re saying to them. Nodding absently, just before you make your point, like they want you to hurry up with it.
Helen’s clients are mostly friends of friends, and often she goes to the weddings. She has a feeling about the wedding dresses she makes; they are sacred. They matter to Helen. Not the prom dresses, although she loves the emeralds and magentas and reds and cobalts that came in this year. The prom dresses are all cleavage and puffed skirts. The prom dresses are boisterous, innocent and sluttish in equal parts, almost ironic.
But the wedding dresses matter. Every stitch. Off-white or coral or pearl grey, nothing shiny, dresses that move and are comfortable to wear and durably built, covering more than they expose.
Today as Helen sews in the kitchen, Barry is working on the floor in the living room. For a while in the beginning she had offered Barry whatever she was having for lunch but he said he didn’t like to stop.
I don’t eat until I’m done for the day, he had said.
Barry had an ethic about working until the job was done. He liked the idea of toughing it out during the lunch hour.
I’m stubborn, he’d said.
He presses a line of caulking into a crack in the door frame and he smoothes it down with his thumb. She sits at her sewing machine and watches his thumb move over the crack. Someone calls him on his cellphone, she thinks, who needs a ride. Someone feels free to demand of him, to ask. It must be a lover or a wife.
She watches Barry’s thumb press the caulking into the crack and she thinks again the thing every adult woman thinks of herself—that she is still her sixteen-year-old self.
It is not a thought. Helen becomes sixteen; she is sixteen: the shyness and wonder. It comes over her briefly. And then it is gone. She is forty-nine, fifty, she is fifty-two. Fifty-six. The world has betrayed her, arthritis in her wrists.
How deeply she craves to be touched. Because what follows not being touched, Helen has discovered, is more of the same—not being touched. And what follows a lack of touching is the dirtiest secret of all, the most profane: forgetting to want it.
You forget, she thinks. You forget so deeply, desire is obliterated. A profound and altering chill befalls.
The only cure is to chant: I want, I want.
She is sixteen and she notices Barry’s worn belt and his jeans bespattered with plaster, and his hair is more silver than grey and there is still some black and it is longish, and he is not speaking. An old hippy. He has already let on that he enjoys the odd draw. He is not a drinker, or he has been a drinker and left it behind. She senses he has left many things behind, and in this way they have something in common.
They are too old for love. It is laughable. For an instant she sees them fucking: grey pubic hair, puckered skin, creaking joints. It is a grotesque comedy, this hunger. She is starving for physical tenderness—the shock of it buckles her knees, there at her sewing machine, and she pauses over her stitch, holding the fabric, the shock of it dizzying her; she is dizzy with lust.
But she and Barry are not too old for carpentry, for making a living, for sewing dresses, for snowstorms and night sweats and threats from the bank and children and crying grandchildren. They are called upon. They are expected to participate. Maybe it should be over but it is not over. It is not over.
And here is the blunt truth of it: Helen would like to sleep with him. She doesn’t care what she looks like (she actually looks not too bad in some lights), she does not care about anything except that she wants to maybe have sex with this man, who is a stranger, who smokes, who answers the phone. And how dangerous, how dangerous: I want, I want.
She and Barry have been together like this in the empty house for weeks. Tim Hortons for coffee mid-morning, and again in the afternoon. Barry doesn’t come up to the second floor; he doesn’t use her bathroom. Helen guesses there is a secret carpenter code about these things: don’t encroach. He smokes on the back deck. And Helen has found herself watching him from the third-floor window. The top of his black and white baseball cap.
She is sewing pleats into a waistband and pricks her finger. Her realization: she has been satisfied just to watch him smoke.
… . .
Helen Sunbathing, 2007
THE CHILDREN HAD bought Helen an airline ticket for Mother’s Day.
Mom, you’ve got to see Europe, Cathy said.
Enough of florida, lulu said.
And so there she was on a beach in Greece with Louise. She watched a young man sailing a catamaran, the belly of the sail almost touching the water, his body leaning out on the other side, leaning, just the bottoms of his feet on the boat, tugging hard on the sail.
Isn’t he too far out, she said to Louise. But Louise was asleep.
There was a fishing boat anchored just beyond the catamaran. The fishing boat bobbed up and down, working vigorously against the slapping waves. Every time the bow rose up a sheet of water fell off the rope that anchored it.
The beach wasn’t crowded but there was a couple a little farther down. A man and a woman, about Helen’s age. They lay side by side, absolutely still.
Finally the man rolled over and reached into his knapsack and pulled out a bottle of water. Helen could hear the plastic bottle dent and crinkle as he drank.
The catamaran slapped down hard and turned, and the sail flew out the other way, and the man ducked fast under the boom.
I just don’t think he has control of that thing, Helen said. But Louise didn’t move.
Then the woman down the beach sat up next to the man and took the bottle of water from him and drank and passed it back. She had short hair dyed a brassy blonde, and the wind blew it off her face and the dark roots showed around her forehead and she squinted into the wind. Her face was darkly tanned. She looked as though she had been on vacation for a long time. Helen watched the catamaran fly towards the beach. It bounced hard on the waves.
The woman had an apple and a paring knife, and she turned the apple and a ribbon of peel flapped in the wind. She
cut the apple in half. The man removed his navy baseball cap and smoothed his hand over his head and put the cap back on. The woman handed him half the apple and she ate the other half, leaning forward, squinting into the wind.
And the catamaran hit the beach and skidded up out of the surf, and the man jumped off and trotted beside it and dragged it hard onto the shore.
The couple sitting down the beach from them might have been her and Cal, Helen thought. She and Cal might have turned out that way, not having to speak until the apple was gone, drifting off to sleep on a beach, and waking, one after the other, and then talking, taking up where they had left off hours ago.
The couple had talked and come to some kind of agreement, Helen thought. They had said something about one of their children, or a neighbour back home, or some banking matter or something to do with their car. The wife had finished some story she’d started hours ago, picking up mid-sentence. Then they stood and shook out their towels. The towels snapped noisily. They put everything in their bags and walked off down the beach. The woman stopped and put on one sandal and then the other one, and after a few steps bent and fixed her strap over her heel. The man waited for her.
If Cal were here on the beach with her, Helen thought, he would be thirty-one. He was thirty-one when he died. And she would be as she was now, the skin on her chest wrinkly like old tissue paper, and tanned and freckled with age spots, and the flab of her underarms, and her arthritic hands and the deep lines at the corners of her eyes. Thin etched lines over her mouth.
Helen would feel a profound embarrassment about how old she was and she would marvel at Cal’s beauty.
We have grown apart, she thought. She’d gone on without him. She would have sat next to him and peeled the apple and she would have felt like his mother. The dead are not individuals, she thought. They are all the same. That’s what made it so very hard to stay in love with them. Like men who enter prison and are stripped of their worldly possessions, clothes, jewellery, the dead were stripped of who they were. Nothing ever happened to them, they did not change or grow, but they didn’t stay the same either. They are not the same as they were when they were alive, Helen thought.