Alligator

by Lisa Moore

  What are you doing? he said.

  I’m trying out my new Christmas tree, she said.

  In the middle of August?

  It was on sale.

  She picks up clothes while he talks, she sorts the mail. She smokes near an open window. She confesses to putting a fist through a wall, he confesses the same.

  I miss you, he said. The tree is a blinking tree. The thing about a Christmas tree is to tart it up. Feathery red bursts of light tremble on the wall every twenty seconds.

  She knew immediately how she felt about the tree; she hated the tree.

  It was as though she had unleashed all of her loneliness. Her loneliness had been imprisoned in a tree, which happens all the time; and she had been forced by some evil spell to walk up and down the aisles of Canadian Tire, forgetting why she was there (clothespins), until she found the tree. When she got it home, the tree leapt out of the box, screaming absurd loneliness in eight different languages. A burning bush of shame, how old she is and weak-feeling lately and the film is lost and how profoundly alone with a ball and chain of a film around her neck.

  Don’t make me tell you what I paid for this tree, she said.

  I miss you, he said.

  You miss me, that’s nice, she said. She calls him from the bath and is self-conscious about splashes, a bath seems too sexy for talking to your ex-husband, but then she doesn’t care; what is too sexy? And she splashes all she wants.

  She listens to Marty while she does the dishes; she loves having her wrists immersed in hot water; domesticity peeling away her daytime demeanour.

  She likes being nobody in the late afternoon. She wipes the counter thinking about the cigarette she’s been waiting for and listening to Marty who, it dawns on her, is angling to come over. Could he possibly want to have sex with her?

  He does; he’s angling for a languid tussle, something rich and familiar and longed-for with every fibre of his being.

  There is no need to question the rightness of the tree. She wanted some stone stupid objects in her life that are irrevocably themselves. She stopped short of a tree that rotates and that was in the same sale bin for the same price and she has no regrets about this.

  What she regrets, occasionally, is leaving Marty.

  Occasionally, it’s as though she’s been struck in the forehead with a rubber mallet and she is overwhelmed with a feeling of regret. How much she loved Marty and what would have happened if she kept on loving him?

  Just as quickly, she’s glad. She could not have stood it; always having to answer for herself, always making allowances.

  She remembers one bad-ass night of drinking during a festival in New Mexico, after the divorce, when a security guard shone a flashlight at her naked bum while she ran across the lawn to the hotel lobby in this little towel, a hand towel for God’s sake, held over her crotch and went to bed with no one, absolutely no one, closed the door, full of giggles, on Bob Warren, who knocked with one knuckle and leaned heavily on the door, and waited. She heard the clunk of his forehead on the door: the one-knuckle knock again. She had her hand on the knob deciding, a light summery sweat, the chlorine and nighttime smell in her hair; they’d been skinny-dipping in the hotel pool.

  Bob was handsome and single and if she moved now, turned the knob, he would topple onto her carpet like a gift, but she didn’t move, was happy not to move, and she heard him wander off down the corridor.

  And for this near miss alone she is glad she is not married. She had felt euphoria that night, falling onto the big hotel bed all by herself, and euphoria in the morning when the sun came up over the golf course and in through the window and she made a pot of coffee and she was writing and still naked from the midnight swim.

  These irrefutable, stone-stupid near misses and the dalliances that came true and the men who found her fascinating because she stood on her own two feet — Trevor Barker upstairs, for instance, who had left three messages, who had turned out to be a more than passable cook — and the risks she took and fast friends she made and how she was the life of the party always. She wasn’t married because she couldn’t be married and she did not regret what she was.

  If you fuck Bob Warren you’ll be one of thousands, a producer friend had said the next morning, after the night skinny-dipping in the hotel pool.

  And she had answered, So will Bob Warren.

  When she first left Marty, she was desolate. Beverly had come over to the new apartment and found her bawling, the sort of scream-crying that has no sound. She had tried to sit in one of the children’s plush cartoon armchairs, but it was too small and it was squashed beneath her and her knees were sticking out and she couldn’t get up. She was wrenching up absolutely no tears, her face like mauled Plasticine.

  Stop this nonsense at once, Beverly had said.

  The tree is artificial and it has red lights like an alarm system, it’s the middle of August and Marty wants to come over and it’s more of an appliance really, a household appliance, it has more in common with a fridge than a fir tree. She decides she loves the artificial tree.

  VALENTIN

  WHEN HE CAME back for Isobel, she had three Tupperware containers full of green tomatoes. Each tomato was wrapped in a paper towel, nestled in rows, two layers deep, and she was wearing sunglasses.

  He was pleased with how reconciled she had become to the idea of the fire. The sunglasses had white frames with tiny rhinestones. She was wearing a simple, dark red dress that hung loosely and rustled when she moved. Her shoulders were bare, except for the narrow straps, and she was tanned. He thought the sunglasses looked expectant.

  Isobel had let the grass get too long on her front walk and the legs of Valentin’s pants were wet with dew. He had seen, as he came down the path, that her front door was covered in worms. He had wiped most of them off the window with a flyer from her mailbox. Then he knocked on the door.

  Standing in the sunlight he had the feeling the house was empty. What if she had called the police? He knew what her living room looked like at this hour, sunlight filtering through the trees, cool and full of leafy shadow. What if there were four or five police officers sitting around the living room quietly waiting? The gasoline was in the basement, all the gasoline.

  He had put his hand on her throat and threatened to kill her and had promised, at the same time, about the money he would give her. Their faces were so close he could see her contact lenses lift with her rapid blinking and slide back down, slowly, over her irises. He was squeezing her neck and the pores in her skin on her cheeks looked large and there were tiny veins around her nostrils and these signs of age frightened him. She was old and he couldn’t quite count on what she would do next. He had described how he would kill her and the alternative: the boutique with pedestals draped in velvet, each displaying a bottle of perfume worth so much money she would only have to sell one a week.

  If the house wasn’t empty, Isobel was probably sitting at her vanity putting in an earring. She had earrings that were peacock feathers weighted with tiny silver balls. She might just be sitting at the vanity with the wing mirrors on hinges, Isobel from several angles, letting him wait. He would wait. He didn’t mind waiting.

  The shadows of the trees and clouds and telephone wires were reflected in the front-door window. When he put his face to the glass he saw Isobel’s sandals on the rope mat. The leather straps covered with clusters of colourful glass beads. He remembered how they sounded when she clipped down over the stairs.

  He thought of Isobel coming through the front door and kicking the sandals off and walking barefoot into the kitchen. He thought of her crushing ice in her blender. She had tall glasses for summer drinks and he thought of how her skin looked flushed after a day of rehearsal.

  There were bookshelves in every room, and there were open paperbacks, turned over on the coffee tables and the stairs and the bathroom counter. Isobel read in the bath and on the landing. She left scarves draped over the backs of chairs. He had walked into her bedroom one afternoon and
she was naked, lying on her stomach; she was reading in the heat, her legs crossed at the ankle and swinging a little; the small of her back was shiny with perspiration.

  Listen, she’d said. An ice-cream vendor. Then he heard the bells. But it was someone selling root vegetables. He had found her on another hot afternoon trudging fast on her treadmill, reading something else.

  It was a shame about the treadmill. He knew he could get good money for it but he had decided not to take anything out of the house. It was a rule; he believed in rules. Anything that might weasel through the tight fist of his plan could be beaten back with a fast hard rule. Leave the treadmill. Leave the cat. Leave the piano and her scarves and books. Leave her jewellery and the pharmaceuticals. He wouldn’t get caught for the price of a second-hand treadmill.

  There was an open Chinese umbrella resting on the door to the living room. She had a collection of masks carved from coconut shells that were important to her. All of this would go up easily.

  Over the summer she’d played her piano for him. She sat on the bench with her back straight and shoulders squared. It was music he could make no sense of, discordant and full of storm. Sometimes he leaned on the piano and watched her face while she played. Her nostrils flared and her eyes narrowed as if she were judging a grave matter. She had a habit of raising her chin slightly and looking down her nose at the sheets of music. Her hands were like claws, stiff and surprised. The water in the fish-bowl on top of the piano absorbed the vibrations of her playing and concentric rings trembled over the surface. The goldfish held still in the very centre of the bowl, electric and alert. Valentin could feel the music through his elbow and he watched intently as she closed her eyes altogether and her head began to sway or jerk, some quaking argument taking her over.

  Once, she had invited him to sit in her backyard and she gave him a tall, wet glass of crushed ice and fruit, some pink, milky drink with black seeds suspended throughout.

  Absolutely incandescent with vitamins, she’d said.

  She had flopped into the chair beside him and they had been silent. She had tilted her face toward the sun and her lips were full and wet and she was smiling to herself. She was full of serenity and it agitated him. He thought about kissing her roughly, stirring her up. She had been wearing a navy dress with white polka dots, form-fitting and stiff, full of straps.

  She took a deep breath and held it and he waited and then she breathed out and she told him to take off his shoes.

  It’s too hot for shoes, she’d said. When he ignored her, she got down on her knees in the grass and the slit in her polka-dot skirt rode all the way up her thigh and he could see the lacy trim of her underwear, which was magenta and satin.

  She took off his boots and then his socks. She kneaded his feet until they hurt. She hurt him very sharply, digging with her knuckles. He knew his feet were clean and he’d used a powder for odour and he didn’t mind her touching him in this way. She pressed her thumbs between his toes and pinched the skin as hard as she could.

  You store your saddest memories in your feet, she’d said.

  The dress was low-cut and her bra was the same colour as her panties and when he closed his eyes he could still see the colour on the inside of his eyelids. It was hot in the garden and he thought of the dentist’s widow, how her baby had cried all night behind a rag of a curtain. He had tasted the widow’s breast milk, sucking hard on her nipples, though she had tried to slap him away. In the morning when he got up he saw the house was surrounded in every direction by a field of lavender and the wind brought the scent to him and he thought the woman’s breast milk had tasted like that, like the flowers.

  Isobel pressed her thumbs into his arches and she talked, as if to herself, about how things were in St. John’s and perhaps every town or city in the western world. She talked about an inside and an outside and she said she was on the outside, had always been on the outside, and the outside wasn’t safe for a woman her age.

  She said she could have done something else, but perhaps she couldn’t have done anything else. There was a vast spectrum of emotion and she had, at one time or another, fallen prey to all of it. She had felt; it was her special gift.

  Perhaps we are made a certain way, she had said. She kept talking and she was impassioned and soft-spoken and he could not follow her. There was no logic in what she said or else he couldn’t translate it.

  She said she was getting old and she had put nothing away. She’d had a faith in simply having faith. And it had turned out to be true, there were advantages to being outside, she’d said. But look at her now. She was lost. Financially, anyway, she said. She’d laughed and dug into his foot so hard it caused a cramp and he had to stand and shake the foot.

  She’d put her hand over her eyes to block the sun and when she looked up at him her eyes looked too bright. He felt he had walked over a thousand miles of broken rock and that all the smallest bones in his feet had been crushed. She was talking about fate. He would never accept that any single thing was the way it was because it had to be that way. He would not accept it.

  I have nothing to fall back on, she said. He saw tears come to her eyes. She had once cried for him on demand. She said she could do it in less than a minute and he had timed her.

  They had been sitting at the kitchen table over breakfast. She put her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her hands and she became very still.

  Go, he said. He watched her nose and cheeks and chin grow pink; he saw her chin crinkle a little and her lower lip tremble and then he saw tears drip from both eyes quick, quick down her cheeks. She had accomplished this in less than forty seconds.

  She should have sprayed the worms, Valentin thought, as he waited by her front door. There was a suffocating laziness about her; she was too easily overwhelmed. If she had taken care of the worms he might have married her. He didn’t care what she thought about, or who she was, she probably didn’t know herself. Most people had no idea what they thought. He had a rigid, generous notion of love; it was without guile, full of sacrifice. It was fearful sex followed by overwrought, motherly tenderness. It was true he and Isobel had had sex like that; merciless, raw, religious sex they had passed through the way a plane passes through a bank of dark cloud to come out in the blinding red sun; but outside of the sexual act he knew she was keeping something in reserve. He might have married her, but at her core she was no more substantial than a soap bubble.

  The night after Isobel had massaged his feet he’d woken in sweat, his heart tearing through his chest, and he couldn’t get back to sleep. He had dreamt that someone in the mall had handed him a cellphone and his mother had spoken to him. It was her voice, just as if she were in the room.

  Sometimes it wasn’t a life at all, she’d said.

  He stayed awake, thinking about his mother, until dawn. Her simple sentence had seemed cryptic to him, full of unmanageable heartbreak. The cellphone, with its shushing static, had sounded like a tomb.

  They hadn’t had sex since Isobel had accepted the idea of the fire. Seeing the sandals on the mat he felt glad he had decided to burn the house down. He wanted to teach her that things could change. It was a matter of taking charge.

  He had imagined the fire and what he had seen for her was a small boutique of some sort. He didn’t like her. There was nothing to like. She was not committed to anything. He had no idea why he saw her selling perfume, but that is what he saw.

  She’d told him she never slept with married men because they had been formed by years of routine and she couldn’t count on them to falter or be alert or to know what was at stake. She’d said she didn’t have the stamina to stand in front of a camera any more. She had come back from a publicity shoot where she’d posed in front of a cliff that was encased in ice. Though it had been ten below, she was wearing a chiffon dress and a tiny white synthetic stole that had wide satin ribbons and that looked like a toilet seat cover. The photographer’s knees were bent. He was crouched with the camera angled up at her, it was o
bscene. She watched the shutter flick and flick and flick. She had summoned what she thought of as her soul to the surface of her skin and stared into the lens with it.

  Forehead, the photographer said. And chin.

  She’d given her hair a toss, unfurrowed her brow.

  And chin, the photographer said. She’d lowered her chin. She had been pouring herself into camera lenses since she was eighteen and she had done this for her entire career without questioning the effects of the transference. She knew, now, that she had been diminished. She had become unknowable. The thing is, we’re all unknowable, but we usually mask it. Now her unknowableness had surfaced.

  There’s a point, she’d said, when there’s more behind you than what’s ahead. It’s called regret. It can happen any time in a life — when what has happened is more vivid than what will happen. She had been twenty when she fell in love with Chris. She has been looking over her shoulder ever since.

  Valentin leaned in again to look through the window and saw a flash in the band of sunlight that came through the window above the landing and then she was at the front door in her red dress, she held her white cat in her arms.

  He had told her she would have to leave the cat, but there she was in the doorway of her house with the cat in her arms. He had told her to leave the garden as it was but when she peeled back the lid of one of the Tupperware containers and he smelled the greenness of the tomatoes, bitter and hard and full of promise, he let her take them.

  It was plausible she would bring tomatoes, he decided.

  The hallway was dark and cool and she passed him the cat and bent over the hall table to put on her lipstick in the mirror. He thought about wringing the cat’s neck. He knew how to kill it with his hands so that it would die quickly and almost soundlessly. He was suddenly full of rage about the cat. He didn’t want a cat in his truck and he had told her to forget the cat. He was angry that she had defied him.