Significance

by Jo Mazelis

  ‘Like what?’

  Lamy consulted his notebook. ‘The woman who lives on the top floor of the building reported that a…’

  ‘Oh her? She’s crazy, a troublemaker. Fancies she can see into the future, can cast spells.’ He twirled a finger wildly in the air near the side of his head to show the level of his tenant’s insanity.

  ‘Yes, but we must look into what she claims, so please, sir, can you answer my question?’

  ‘Is this to do with that girl?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that. Now please can you tell me if you or your staff found or saw anything?’

  The man nodded morosely.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘What did she say? That crazy bitch, did she say I did something? That one of my staff did something?’

  ‘No, sir. Not at all.’ Lamy looked at his notes again. ‘She reported that a man left an object, a white cloth, on your premises.’

  The proprietor raised his eyebrows and picked up the linen napkin to show it to Lamy. ‘A white cloth? Like this?’

  Lamy saw his point. In a restaurant where the staff wore white aprons, where the napkins and tablecloths were also white, finding a particular white cloth was somewhat futile and given the vagueness of the description, arbitrary.

  ‘It may have been a garment, a scarf or sweater perhaps? It was placed on the low hedge that borders your pavement seating area.’

  ‘I will ask my staff if something was found. We are particular about this, we have a store for lost property.’ He took a mouthful of wine and seemed to warm to his topic. ‘Some years ago a lady who had visited this region and my establishment on a previous trip, happened to mention that…’

  Lamy broke in, ‘Sir, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Ah, but of course.’

  The proprietor stood up and reluctantly dropped the napkin onto the table. ‘One moment.’

  Lamy watched the man head out of the front door and make his way to the nearest waiter. They conversed for a moment and then the waiter shook his head and shrugged. The proprietor moved to the left disappearing from view. Lamy gazed about the bar, noting the stack of crisp snowy linen in a press near the toilets and the clean white aprons hanging on a hook to the left of the door which led to the kitchens. A white cloth reportedly left here by a woman who was possibly mad, it was hardly an important mission, but it was not his job to question orders, merely to undertake them to the best of his ability.

  He heard footsteps approaching rapidly and looked up to see the proprietor bearing down on him, a look of excited triumph on his face and behind him, confused and somewhat worried, a younger man in a long apron. He was baby-faced with auburn hair tied back in a stub of a ponytail with a gold sleeper in one ear.

  ‘Christoph found something this morning. Not a cloth at all, but a cardigan. A ladies’ white cardigan.’

  Christoph stood in front of Lamy nervously, fiddling with his earring. ‘I forgot about it. I’m sorry. Is it important?’ With the hand that wasn’t twirling the earring, he indicated the place where he’d left the cardigan. ‘Was it the girl’s?’ He looked both frightened and sad, as if he had suddenly realised that he had touched death itself, but until that moment, he’d failed to recognise it. ‘Shall I get it?’

  ‘Yes, yes’ the proprietor said. ‘Of course.’

  Lamy nodded in agreement.

  Minutes later Lamy headed back to the station, a soft pale nest of knitted wool in a paper bag in his hand. In his notebook names, dates, times and addresses.

  If he had felt somewhat weary earlier, now he was transformed, energised. He picked up his pace, swung his right arm smartly, while his left, with its precious cargo, he kept perfectly still. It was as if this scrap of almost nebulous fabric had some unusual effect on gravity, transforming itself into lead and thus countering the effects of his brisk movements and the instinct to move both arms. A cardigan. A breakthrough. Lamy’s find. He’d bagged it.

  Bloodlines

  Marilyn woke to darkness. She still had her blouse on, although it was unbuttoned to the waist and one breast had freed itself (or had been freed) from her bra. Her long skirt was twisted; it coiled itself about her like a winding sheet.

  Scott, next to her; right next to her with an acre of empty mattress behind him and her precariously on the other edge. Between her legs a sticky wetness. She imagined blood. The blood that spelled the end of what was only just begun. The end of something she had not yet even mentioned to Scott, which she might now never tell him about. How to explain such a secret coming and going? He would not understand the loss; having never known or believed in this thing, this event, this future, it would be entirely without meaning. He could not mourn what had always been (she saw him thinking this) a figment of her imagination.

  She wriggled to untwist herself and turned from her side onto her back. Scott, in his sleep, pressed closer.

  ‘Scott, move over. You’re pushing me off the bed.’ She put the flat of her palm against his shoulder, nudging him away without quite waking him.

  He made a noise that signalled a sleep-heavy protest, then rolled away, turning his face from her.

  Marilyn lay on her back, her eyes adjusting to the darkness, looking at the soft grey of the long curtains and sent an exploratory hand to the wet place between her legs. Dipped her middle finger into the slick heat of herself then brought that same finger up to her nose. The sharp tang of sex and a faint, almost fungal yeastiness. Not blood then, though she could not quite be sure. Keeping the finger aloft she leaned over and switched on the bedside lamp, saw that what was there was colourless; was hardly even a gleam of moisture. She turned the light off again. Then breathed a sigh of relief and moved towards Scott again, fitting her belly in against his spine, drawing her knees into the back of his knees, tucking her feet into the smooth undersides of his. She threw her right arm around his waist and her fingers tidied themselves away between the soft swell of his belly and the bed beneath.

  She lay there a moment enjoying the nearness of him, the simple fact of his body, the rise and fall of his shoulder. I am happy, she thinks. But no sooner has she thought this than she finds it falling to pieces. As if she had shaped the thought from wet river mud. Or the weighty, slightly gritty black soil from the lake at the bottom of her ex-lover, Lawrence’s garden. She had played with Lawrence’s children there one summer, making mud pies that they set on rocks to dry in the sunshine. But once dry they crumbled and fell apart.

  But she didn’t quite feel unhappy either.

  She felt, despite the proximity of their bodies, alone.

  But then she was alone. Alone in the sense that he was there and not there.

  And she had made herself more alone with her small dishonesty. Her secret. And it was not her only secret. She had two secrets. One dead, one alive. They were laid out in her mind side by side. Like twin babies in a shared cot. No pillow under their identical heads.

  At the beginning, when she first started seeing Scott, she had also been sleeping with Lawrence. That was no sin. She forgave herself that, as this is what happens. Relationships have fuzzy edges. Grey zones of uncertainty. A dinner date with Scott on Tuesday, the theatre on Friday, then on Sunday a walk by the side of the Ottawa River, holding hands. Head tipped just so. Eyes turning coyly to look at the tall man by her side. That night brazenly telling him she wanted him to stay the night with her, because, so far, he’d been too much of a gentleman.

  But on Wednesday there was the regular meeting of the poetry workshop group, and the usual drinks in the bar of the Metropolitan after. Which of course she didn’t invite Scott to, because he wasn’t a poet and because she’d only had one date with him. The one dry peck on the cheek he’d given her just before she’d stepped into the taxi on Tuesday night had left her thinking he didn’t particularly desire her, and probably wouldn’t ring again. So on Wednesday, with the usual gang in the bar of the Metropolitan, she found herself sitting next to Lawrence. In a booth that’s meant to sit four,
but accommodates, at a squeeze, six poets with another three on stools at the end of the table. The wine and words flow freely. Marilyn saying something about cocktails, about Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath; the moths that danced around a flame. Gregory responding sneeringly by saying something belittling to Marilyn, about women poets and their privileged self-indulgent psyches and their strained verse which was littered with dull domestic banalities. Lawrence standing up for her, saying a clever thing that silenced Gregory. Then, under the table, Lawrence’s hand curling around her knee. Comforting her. Then, surprisingly, the same hand – as he twists his head around to look at her, after he has asked ‘You alright?’ and she has nodded – that same hand moves up her leg and kneads her thigh. Lawrence who is married to an actress and has three children. Lawrence whose first book of poetry was snapped up by one of the best publishers in Canada. Lawrence who also writes plays. Lawrence who has gallantly defended her against the awful Gregory, has his hand on her thigh and, as it happens, she is not wearing nylons, but knee-high socks, and her Indian cotton skirt that still smells faintly of patchouli joss sticks and is constructed in such a way that it wraps around her waist and comes to just below her knees, falls open slightly when she sits. Just enough for one bare knee to poke out, which she might have been more careful about were it not for the booth they’re sitting in, and the modesty the table affords.

  One by one, the gang departs; Yasmin first, then Gregory, then Daphne, who at seventy-two is the eldest and claims to have seen both W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas read in New York. Then the others drift away, until there is only Lawrence and Marilyn, who has decided that she is not the sort of woman men want to date and marry, so she had better find consolation by being someone’s mistress. Lawrence suggests a drive, wants to show her the place where he wrote the title poem of his second collection and she agrees. How could she not?

  She agrees to everything he suggests, in fact. Even sex without a condom as he promises to pull out in time. And does. Or at least she thinks he does.

  Then on Thursday, Scott rings and says he’s been given two tickets to the theatre. A David Mamet play. A long explanation about the friend who bought the tickets and had to fly to Toronto because of a death in the family. Scott actually bought the tickets himself, but disguises this fact. It protects him from rejection.

  But the explanation about the tickets is so longwinded she feels he does not really want her in particular; he just wants company to see the play. Because it’s a good play by a good playwright and has had good reviews, and is therefore good culture and good for you, like bran for breakfast, like going to the gym or using unleaded gas in your car.

  She says yes to the theatre on Friday. This time, after the play and as she is about to get into the taxi, he stands with two hands lightly holding her shoulders, looks into her eyes, and solemnly bends to kiss her, but again it’s only a peck on the cheek.

  Saturday she goes to a reading at a bookstore and who should be there, but Lawrence, so they go for coffee after. He buys her a Greek pastry, sweet and sticky with honey, then after she has complained that there are no napkins, he licks her fingers clean. He holds her hand by the wrist while he swallows one finger after another. There in the brightly lit café with the painting of the Acropolis on the back wall under the stucco arch.

  He drives her to a bluff overlooking a steep valley, where he leads her into the trees and undresses her in the moonlight. ‘I should write a poem about this,’ he says, as she shivers. It’s understood that they’ll forego the condom and in the nick of time he’ll withdraw. He asks her for her phone number, does not give her his, because of the wife, the kids.

  Later that night Marilyn rings Sarah; a friend from college whom Marilyn knows has been having an affair with a married man for several years. She confesses about Lawrence, but doesn’t name him.

  ‘Be prepared to bleed,’ Sarah says, mysteriously.

  ‘What do you mean? Be prepared to bleed?’

  ‘Oh, you numbskull. It’s a line from ‘A Case of You’. Joni Mitchell? I mean that it’ll hurt. You’ll always come second. Christmas, birthdays, holidays. Sundays are hell! Who am I to talk, eh? But if I was you, I wouldn’t go there. Just don’t fall for the bastard, eh? Watch your heart, you deserve better.’

  Sunday morning Scott rang, suggested a walk.

  Maybe he’s gay, Marilyn thought, just enjoys female companionship. But then he’d held her hand, the same hand that she was ashamed to remember had been fellated the evening before by Lawrence.

  Sarah’s words had stuck. She threw herself at Scott. And he caught her.

  Unlike Lawrence, he was careful to use a condom.

  But the condom, damn it, the condom wasn’t so careful. Perhaps her nail snagged it, who knew? But that was beside the point. It broke.

  She saw Lawrence one more time. The next Wednesday she went to the poetry workshop again. She half-believed Lawrence would have new poems to read, hoping perhaps, to find some fragment of herself, a finger, a nipple (small and pink, he’d said, unlike his wife’s), a lock of hair in one of his poems. Disguised perhaps as Freyja from the Norse myth, or Brigid the Celtic goddess, or Phaedra or Echo. But he declined when invited to read. They all went for drinks after as usual. There’d been two new writers at the workshop that evening – an attractive mother and daughter from Seattle and he danced attention on them all night long. So she only found a sudden clarity about Lawrence. A clear-sighted realisation that she really didn’t matter one bit to him. A lucky escape.

  Then her period failed to arrive and there she was caught up in her growing romance with Scott.

  So quietly, without telling either man, she made her careful arrangements to undo all the old carelessness. Told only Sarah.

  Bled like a stuck pig for days afterwards.

  How right Sarah had been.

  She’d been prepared to bleed.

  But not now, thank God, not now.

  Nature Morte

  Vivier was contemplating stillness. Aware of his own body, his stomach at last silenced, leaving a faint buzzing in his ears and beyond that far-off voices and distant sounds, a door opening, then closing, footsteps approaching and retreating, the chirrup of small birds.

  In his mind’s eye an array of images. He possessed, if not a photographic memory, then something close to one. He can summon up the picture of the dead woman’s face without looking at the photograph pinned to the notice board. He can visualise the scene that morning, the sandal which dangled from her foot, the fall of pale hair covering her face. Then, unsummoned, he found himself picturing a painting he had seen at the Staatliche Museum in Berlin two years earlier: Portrait of a Young Girl by Petrus Christus – which had been painted in Bruges around the middle of the fifteenth century.

  Oblivious to the crowds moving around him, Vivier had spent a long time gazing at this painting, startled and entranced by the egg-like contours of the subject’s face, the hint of a defiant pout on her lips, the steady almost disdainful expression in her brown eyes, the oriental slant of her hooded eyelids, the delicate childlike neck and the nearly complete absence of brows which added to the alien quality of the whole. And the picture’s surface, seemingly ruined by the deterioration of paint which had broken down, producing an overall effect like that on a crackle-glazed pot. Crazed lines ran everywhere like a fine webbing, showing up most notably on her creamy skin. She was damaged, but still utterly, unforgettably beautiful.

  All this Paul Vivier thought about in mere seconds, as when dreaming. Epic scenes seem to take up hours in the sleep world, but in reality they are only the product of a few minutes of R.E.M. sleep.

  Damaged, but utterly, unforgettably beautiful.

  Paul Vivier moved slowly towards the door that led out of his office, feeling as if he were floating; as if the part of him that travelled across the room was some spirit self, while his physical body remained near the desk, lost in contemplation.

  It was only a sensation borne out of tiredness and stres
s. He knew that well enough. And he was particularly prone to it. Had first discovered it in himself when he was a boy of no more than perhaps seven years old. It was the age of self-awareness, of wonder and perhaps also terror. The age where one self-consciously discovers the potential to lie and invent. Or as Vivier did, to fake sickness in order to avoid the rough and tumble of school and spend a glorious day in bed with his books, his crayons and sketch pad, while his mother spoilt him, bringing chilled glasses of freshly made lemonade and tempting him to eat by cooking his favourite dishes. Then as he feigned a headache, his beloved mother fretfully laying a deliciously cool hand on his not at all fevered brow.

  At the doorway he glanced back at the place he had been standing seconds before, almost expecting to see himself, almost disappointed to find that he did not meet his own surprised eyes looking back at him.

  He needed to eat. To sleep. To recharge his batteries. But first, duty.

  Meaning to move forward into the corridor, into action, Paul Vivier looked to his left, subtly aware of someone moving down the corridor towards him. And there he was, Lamy, back already from his mission. His step rapid and weightless. Lamy the plodding, the exacting, the wearying, the over-dutiful, over-keen, was fairly bouncing along the narrow corridor. The overhead lighting was green-tinged and harsh, casting heavy shadows under the eyes, making Lamy appear ghoulish despite the obvious energy and earnestness in his step. In his hand a paper evidence bag and in the bag something white and almost weightless.

  The ectoplasm of an evil spirit, a voodoo charm or, as it turned out, a cardigan.

  Written on the Body

  Hilda and Michael sat in the back of the car that had been sent for them. The car was a courtesy offered in regard to their age and also because they were assisting the police – not resisting them as in their many previous encounters with the forces of the state.