by Linda Rogers
this moment to arise.
The film loops and loops, and I’m wondering about morning, the sound of wheels rolling in perfect unison, the static, the beat, our crowfriends warming up the frozen telephone wires outside our bedroom window, dancing and defecating, messaging, the crow thing, their aubade, words and music. Scat. Thaw. Hello crow. Can you hear me? I hear you. Will we be alive again?
Put on those red shoes and run away from the blues.
It’s all good. We stay with the rogue dream and the rogue top sheet, sex and death, and isn’t jazz derived from jism, jelly roll with or without a marriage license, feathers flying? We ask the crows, and they always answer. Yes, to clicks, rattles and coos; yes, to the message in drumming and tap dancing, hearts beating in unison, unmade beds, juke jam. Yes.
I roll over and sniff your chest, jasmine, my own perfume, scent of Paradise, the Persian word for enclosed gardens, winter in Havana, summer in Izmir, plants on the porch in summer, rooms in winter, so many rooms, so many beds and the constants, cats at night, blackbirds and doves in the morning. All that jazz. Cu-ckoo, the slang for pussy in Istanbul.
I’m still here, somewhere between asleep and awake, anticipating the world view, bird’s-eye view, but not quite ready to end this dream, but you stir first, unwind the sheet, preen your feathers.
Are we going somewhere today?
Our smooth groove skaters fade into their glory hole, but the crows keep rocking the wire outside our bedroom window
“Boogie Woogie’s a disease,” you say, laughing as usual, pulling me into a column of light surrounded by blackbirds. We’re fully-fledged, dressed for success.
“Lift off,” you say. “Rise and shine!”
If I was a blackbird, I’d pack my troubles on my back. I would leave this world, and I never would look back.
LUCY LAUGHED
I met her at a gallery opening, his. Once a year, in revolving seasons, Liam and Lucy travel to Madagascar, where he paints lemurs and she studies lemur behaviour. Her books, cover art by him, were on sale at his show.
The gallery was packed, and the crowd nudged me into the personal zone, nose to nose with Liam’s creatures. His impasto was so compelling I wanted to touch it, to pat the fur, scratch behind the ears. Sometimes we cross boundaries. Sometimes we are seen doing the wrong thing. Last year, I set off an alarm when I got too close to Van Gogh’s feverish sunflowers at the Tate. Lucy’s alarm went off when a lemur hand reached out of the canvas to grab mine. She startled.
“Sorry,” I apologized.
“Don’t be,” she said. “It’s a compliment. You must be from the same cohort.”
CLUE, my brain should have signalled, but it didn’t. We laughed, and then I told her about watching a toddler in the virtual generation attempt to climb inside a computer frame and curl up with the kittens inside.
“We all need to sleep in piles,” she agreed.
“I know,” I said, “where the wild things are!” and Lucy nodded.
I know about lemurs but not as much as Lucy, clearly warmed up by my enthusiasm. Lemurs are adorable, and endangered, chased to Madagascar by the first Diaspora and thereafter hunted by humans.
“You probably know the Romans thought they were ghosts,” I stopped there because, of course she knows and competitive pedantry is boring. Besides, I am at the age when nobody cares what I think. Time to put a cork in it.
Lucy is a little outside the zone herself, could be a lady lemur with her kohl eyes.
“Your hair is stunning,” I observed, circumventing blurts about her primate makeup, tattooed eyeliner and lipstick, focusing instead on her luxuriant mane, which danced like Disney princess hair, to her waist.
“Liam grooms it,” she answered, and my eyes swerved from her self-touching to a painting of two lemurs picking one another’s nits.
“I don’t have cooties, but he’s a mean man with a brush,” she laughed, an unforgettable sound.
“Clearly.”
“Did you know that ‘gossip’ started as ‘God’s sip,’ woman talk during community nitpicking sessions?”
“No,” I lied, crossing my fingers discretely around the stem of my cocktail glass; but I think she was smart enough to see I was being disingenuous to get her to talk. Chat is my Internet. Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly when I told her I’d missed the gossip story at Sunday School. In fact I was a prize-gathering star at Sunday School, partly because I had a comic book Bible, Old and New Testament, and couldn’t resist the uncen-sored stories of lust and vengeance, with paradisiacal bookends, truth and reconciliation, forgiveness.
She’s an anthropologist, and gossip is an anthropologist’s gospel. Maybe that is why my mother boasted about sleeping with Margaret Mead after she had helped Mead out of her girdle at a conference on sexual norms, where they were both giving papers. My mother’s lecture was on women in art. Mead’s was on devolving primate orthodoxies.
I knew I’d be telling Lucy this story when I got to know her better. Apparently Mead travelled with a photo of her ex-husband, and my mother woke up from a post-coital nap to find the castoff staring at her. She dined out on the story for years. Every time I heard it, I reminded myself that she’d thrown darts at a portrait she’d done of my father when she was still in lust with him.
Yes, I knew about God’s sip. I am after all, curious, and we all, all but sociopaths, need stories to justify our desperate behaviour, outrunning mothers with darts.
“When lemurs are extinct, we will still have Liam’s paintings,” Lucy said, as if reading then translating my thoughts. I must be transparent in my glass hat, like those thought-revealing Leakey sculptures at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
“Why don’t you come to our fruitcake tasting party next Sunday afternoon? I’ll show you his studio.”
“Fruitcake?” Would I have to be certified to get past the butler?
I am an art dealer’s dream. Certain words, certain phrases fire my endorphins, my insatiable hunger for information and acquisition, and drain my savings. “My studio” is one of them, and “tasting” is another. An art historian, driven by curiosity, I know how medieval painters laid down their gold leaf and their models, how they got the virtuous Marys and St. Annes to show their nipples. I know how to pounce a cartoon in gesso and how to pounce on a story.
I smelled the nutmeg. Lucy, who looks as if she could be Liam’s transmogrified model, threw an antique finish over a surreal overture.
“Wear your furs. We keep the heat down.”
I was at once intrigued and repelled by this possible joke. Surely Liam and Lucy are animal conservationists? Once again, she read the sand moving through my mind, and laughed. How to describe the sound? Picture a leash of bucks in space shaking their belled antlers in unison. Irresistible. Fruitcake. Resistible. Fat and salt are my food groups.
This is the appointed day. I take care to dress like an adult primate, brown velvet and my mother’s old sable coat with high-heeled crocodile boots. I don’t wear new furs; only animals that died before I developed a conscience. I am anxious to engage Lucy in a conversation about possession by animal spirits.
In Oak Bay, where Liam and Lucy live, activism is chic. Power lines are buried underground, grocery stores are organic, and activists as brave as the Palestinians who put themselves between Israeli bulldozers and ancient olive groves stand in the rain to defend the Garry oaks from developers.
Liam and Lucy have put up an off-putting sign telling their guests to park in the field at the bottom of the hill to their house. I’m wearing my ridiculous boots, and the driveway is a quagmire. Only last week, I lost my bearings, walked into a pile of canine droppings and had to sacrifice a favourite pair of satin pumps. Nevertheless, curiosity rules, so I remove my ankle breakers, and brave the squishy moss and whatever vermin lives in the gravel, which is ice-cold, sharp and really unpleasant to step on.
My inquisitive spirit has taken me to some dark places, but I am determined this will not be one of them, in spite
of the mud oozing between my toes. I reach the summit out of breath and put my boots back on when the driveway levels and circles around the house. Lucy watches, then strikes.
“Shoes off!” she sings from the top of the stairs, and I consider sliding down the driveway on the gluteus sled God gave me. Instead I comply. On my way to sleep tonight, I will imagine rapturous and discrete couplings between the microbes that live in her rugs and those on my stocking feet.
“Sorry, I didn’t bring slippers,” I apologise, but I’m really thinking about ways I might hide my ugly feet. As a ballet-mad teenager, I danced my way to deformity.
“Never mind,” Lucy says, shaking my hand with her left and caressing my sleeve with her right. “Oh, soft. Leave your coat in the green bedroom.”
Green, I find out, is the master bedroom, the walls painted with trees and predictably hung with Liam’s lemurs. I toss my coat in the heap on the bed. It poufs and drops with a sigh on top of the others, letting out the dogs and a top note of gardenia.
My mother wore Chanel Gardenia. Nothing else. No one else. She was quite singular, quite authentic and unabashedly hungry. Hunger without boundaries. I smelled gardenias on my pillow when I returned home after giving a class on Mannerism and the Counter-Reformation at Reed College and kicked my husband so hard he rolled out of the bed.
That was the end of my first marriage. My second husband told me my mother had just happened to walk across the sixteenth green stark naked while he was putting. That marriage lasted a little longer because I value honesty more than I despise golf.
When I return to Lucy in the hall, she’s greeting a man in a camel hair coat. He too is sent to green, and when he brushes by me, his sleeve feels as soft as baby rabbits. “Cashmere,” Lucy says, winking, then points to the drawing room, where an elderly Scottish woman in a maid’s uniform is serving tea.
Am I imagining she is the doppelganger for my nanny, who also had seven grey whiskers on her chin?
“Please, Scotty,” I say, “You decide.” She doesn’t correct me, and I am hoping she will recognize me as the baby who wouldn’t let go. There are dozens of cakes. “Heavy on the marzipan, please.” One of my marriages lasted longer than it should because he liked fruitcake and I liked marzipan. We ate our way through dozens of weddings before we discovered our incompatibility.
Did I mention Scotch and tea?
She brings me a slice of something vibrant and tea infused with “Venus in Furs,” and I am halfway to heaven after the first sip of silver moonlight with a salty finish. I am so happy with this flavour I don’t at first notice that, with the exception of the help and myself, I am in a room full of men.
That calls for a second, and a third.
The odds are in my favour. I probably won’t be driving myself home, and I can sample to my heart’s content. I chat up a man who tells me he beads animal skulls. I ask if he kills them first and if his name also begins with the letter L.
“I’m Lewis,” he says, gives me the look and remembers he needs to refresh his drink. After this happens several times, I wonder if I should spin the story that I am shod in chocolate socks, not mud. I could dip my toes in their bone china teacups. The room is thinning out.
This gives me a chance to study Liam’s paintings, which are exquisitely tender. Like many magic realists, he prefers tempera. His animals are beautifully groomed, every brushstroke a caress. I’ve heard lemurs gather in troops like Girl Guides, but the proper collective noun for Liam’s lemurs would be “a kindness.”
Where is the promised atelier? I’m dying to see his work in progress.
The bearded nanny maid directs me to Liam’s studio in the attic, access through the kitchen. I find the kitchen, break through a knot of cake nerds hanging around the cutting board and proceed upstairs, where the smell of turpentine is overwhelmed by something else, what my mother called jungle essence, but in plain talk is a mixture of sweat and tears with a top note of testosterone.
Liam is having an exchange with an art critic called Lloyd. Lloyd has had more than his measure of enhanced tea. I understand he is Welsh and should probably not mix his genres. What do the Welsh eat and drink? What makes them sing? Perhaps it is women like Lucy, who stands between them, giving out equal opportunity wrist slaps with her Chinese fan: one for Liam, one for Lloyd, as if they were children fighting over a toy.
“Mine,” Liam shouts, rubbing his left hand in his right armpit and waving it about. Because I know my lemurs, I recognize this as a stink fight and for the sake of drama imagine the best man throwing Lucy over his shoulder and carrying her down to her boudoir. I worry about what will happen to my mother’s coat.
The worst has happened before, when the sable was new. My mother phoned me from a room in the Hotel Vancouver and told me a man she’d picked up at a meeting in the ballroom had made a mess of her coat, and as it was cold outside, I’d better send her another in a cab. Fifteen and hormonally nasty, I said, “Get him to buy you one, or stay there,” and hung up.
The sable came home the next day, smelling of alcohol and vomit. Now it smells like dogs. The next time my mother went on one of her elected absences, I made it into a bed for our three King Charles spaniels.
I am sensitive to smells, and the stink fight makes me dizzy. I sit down on a wooden chair and put my head between my knees. All I can see are my feet, a swirling circle of toes and moss, and I am ashamed of them.
After my extreme body posture clears the room, I examine the paintings in progress, everything from bare gesso to cartoons, to nearly finished temperas. It’s like watching progressive ultrasounds, growing foetuses thrashing and tumbling in the womb; only this time it’s lemurs swimming from their island home in the new disapora.
What about us, I wonder. If it’s sink or swim, will our fur coats make us buoyant or pull us down to the bottom of the sea from which we emerged with our superior intelligence? I’m voting for swim, because I am, in spite of everything, an optimist.
I go back downstairs to rejoin the human race, but except for nanny-maid banging dishes in the kitchen, all is quiet. The L people have vanished. I wander into the dining room and discover the most amazing arrangement of fruit: marzipan melons, pomegranates, grapes, figs, dates, apples and pears and lovely fruitcakes sliced and arranged on beautiful plates. I help myself to a branch of grapes and go exploring.
The door to the master bedroom is shut. I open it. “Hello?” I say, almost swallowing a grape.
The bed, piled with coats, moves and giggles.
“Hello?” then sounds like a leash of bucks shaking their belled antlers; or am I wrong, the laughter of ghosts playing hide and seek in dark rooms. Lemurs.
“Shhh,” someone says, and the pile shifts on Liam and Lucy’s queen-sized bed. “Come out, Mum.” I hear myself saying, “Enough’s enough.”
THREE STRIKES
I like baseball. Three strikes and you’re out. How clear is that—rules, cut and dried, a perfect covenant, à la grisette, Jonathon Swift’s poeticized/satirized ho, a piece of jerky in her little grey dress?
And, thy beauty thus dispatch’d
Let me praise thy wit unmatch’d
Set of phrases, cut and dry
Evermore thy tongue supply.
My mind travels fast, faster than fastballs and agile tongues—from grisette to ball(s), ball to diamond, a song “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” and so on.
The first strike came though my editor’s bay window, bevelled glass blasted to kingdom come, at least as far as the dining room and, as luck would have it, the kitchen, because the pantry door was open. It was a sunny afternoon. Light must have leaked through the broken window, and of course it refracted in the lethal bits that penetrated the Martha Stewart wallpaper and slipcovers and the oil painting of his mother, turning his living room into a veritable disco ball.
He never found the ball or the kid who threw or hit the ball, even though he ran directly outside, naked as it happens because he had just extricated himself
from the shower. No kid, no ball, no mother dragging kid by the ear to apologize, no contacts. That would be four balls, a walk.
Because he prided himself on logic, he deduced from this lack of forensic information that the beautiful explosion in his living room was caused by a bullet. This is what he told the cops, “I was standing in the window (actually showing his wet/naked/fragrant, I’m leaving out steatopygous, self to the young Adonis drinking a gin and tonic on his porch across the street), and someone shot at me. Luckily he missed.”
Did the cop smirk as he wrote this down in his book? Did he roll his eyes when a careful search failed to turn up bullets or balls of any description?
“Were you singing?” he asked, a leading question. This cop wants to be a lawyer and clearly likes to practice his clever-in-court theatricals. Windows break when the fat soprano sings.
No runs, no errors. Nothing. The cop left and he was alone with his fears, his undisciplined King Charles spaniel and a sideboard full of expensive distillations. He had a few and then slept like a baby infused with cough medicine.
“It could be car,” his cleaning lady, Magda, a Bosnia survivor, suggested the next morning. “I very scare when car make bang.” Magda cleaned up what was left of the glass (“Oh Mama in Paradise,” she said, pulling a glinting sliver out of his mother’s right eye glaring from the canvas, which was appropriate because that is where all of Magda’s family now resided thanks to the sharpshooters in Sarajevo. His mother probably resided in hell. He would be willing to bet on that, no prayer in her lips when the plug was pulled.)
He agreed, the last thing he needed was to freak out his cleaning woman, who, because of language barriers, didn’t realize other cleaners were getting minimum wage, plus carfare, plus lunch.
His dog, who normally thought the world was her big green latrine, refused to go outside, relieved herself in the shower. She also ran and hid under the bed every time the phone rang.
One of those calls was from me. I had bought a new dress and had hired a bartender and catering for two hundred for my launch party. He was publishing my book on erotic Inuit art, how to make love in a snowsuit, and my copy edit was overdue, about five years overdue.