by Lisa Moore
Frank is right. You have to be able to be alone. If only she could sleep with someone else. Once at the Ship Inn she could have gone home with Glenn Marshall. That first time with Philip she thought: I will spend the rest of my life with him. She thinks, I have never questioned this, and I have acted upon it. I have built a twisted organic life around the assumption that Philip was meant for me. She imagines the great coral reef around Australia as her life — as if Philip is Australia and she has accrued around the fact of him. Coral accrues.
But she’s afraid to be alone. Gabrielle had been afraid last night too. What was it? Can she guess her father might be leaving them? (But he’s not leaving Gabrielle, he has explained this patiently to Eleanor several times, she keeps forgetting. But you’re leaving, aren’t you? I might be leaving, yes. You might be. Yes, and Gabrielle will come with me half the time. Gabrielle will go with you? You’re leaving and Gabrielle will go with you. Sure, she can be with me half the time. In some apartment. Yes. So it’s me you’re leaving. I might be leaving you, he says. And you think that will be good for Gabrielle? He shrugs. It won’t be a good thing, he says, maybe a necessary thing. Gabrielle will be fine, he says. He turns back to the computer. He doesn’t let one thing overlap with the other. He might be leaving, but right now he has to work on his book about globalization.)
Gabrielle sobbing at the foot of their bed, her upper lip shiny with mucous. Eleanor let Gabrielle drag her down the hall. They stood in the doorway, she and her seven-year-old daughter. Eleanor saw the streetlight hit the dull glass of the hobbyhorse’s eye. She saw a rust-coloured flare thin as a needle in the button. Sinister and pulsing. Gabrielle terrified. It’s alive. It’s thinking . A horse’s head on a stick. The wind blew hard against the house, the windowpane rattled, and the fierce light, deep in the horse’s button eye, faded and went flat. Shadows of leaves tumbled over each other on the wall above the bed, like galloping hoofs, a spooked herd all turning at once. Gabrielle’s hand sweaty in hers, her face wet, nose running.
Eleanor thinks, I’m such a dupe . The shame she feels is so overpowering she could throw up all the red wine she’s been drinking, and the beer, and the goat cheese thingies. She could throw up over the red dress with its folds and beads. She decides she will go in there and kick Amelia Kerby and punch her, knock her teeth loose. I will cut her into pieces and wear a chunk of her around my neck on a rope until it rots. I will not speak to her, I will not notice her, I will be aloof, condescendingly kind, I will invite her to dinner parties, rise above it all, befriend her. I’ll sleep with her myself.
Her skin gets cold, and she thinks just as suddenly, It’s not so bad. I’ll go to China. No one there will know Philip has left me. A clean, simple life in China. They’ll never hear from her again. Someone had gone to China already, that doctor whose wife left him. There was a rumour he’d remarried, he was happy, had new children. Chinese children. The rowers have lined up next to the buoys. A team of women in orange tank tops. They just float while the coxswain harangues them. A shrill whistle. Eleanor thinks, it’s very unlikely that I will go to China. Instead. Gradually, over time, I will get over Philip. My passion for Philip will cool. That’s what happens. People get over it . They eventually get over it. This is the worst thing: to imagine normal without him.
Someone places her hands over Eleanor’s eyes. Eleanor reaches up and touches the wrists. Sadie! Eleanor is so happy she feels sharp little tears.
You’re here.
Did I miss anything?
Amelia Kerby. She’s over there tossing back champagne.
The gall!
Gold lamé, the ponytail.
She looks short to me. Am I right?
Ecofeminist.
Hefty, I’m thinking.
Here on scholarship.
What’s with the tinfoil dress? How Walmart.
You think?
Sure I think!
She’s into aromatherapy.
Of course she is.
And bungee jumping.
He’ll get tired real quick.
Naked, they bungee jump on the West Coast.
Real quick.
Eleanor hadn’t taken the scene of the naked skydiver to the pitch meeting. She’d had a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and when the producers looked at each other and told her, as kindly as they could, that a big record producer from the mainland sweeping a local girl off her feet was a cliché, the cup trembled in Eleanor’s hand. She spilled hot coffee on her thumb. And she’d said, with her voice all funny, Well, originally he wasn’t a record producer. He wasn’t? No, not originally. What was he, originally? No, it’s too silly. Tell us. It’s expensive. Tell us. It’s impractical, dangerous, you couldn’t get anyone to do it. But originally you had something different? Well, I see him falling from the sky. This beautiful man. He’s handsome, strange-handsome not ordinary-handsome, and he’s got a beautiful body. Beauty is good. We should celebrate beauty, and he’s naked, that’s the hard part, he’s naked. Naked skydivers, they have them. There are such things. There was an ad in the Telegram , and my friend, Sadie, she decided she wanted to jump when she saw the ad. She wanted something big and dangerous. Just their bums in the paper with the parachutes wafting behind, a promotional ad. Sadie had to do a one-day course, how to land, bend your knees, and then there she was hanging on to the wing, the guy in the plane yelling at her, Jump, and her yelling back, Jump? And him yelling, Jump! And her still yelling, Jump? And finally the guy in the plane, he leaned out and he just edged her feet off the step with the side of his shoe, he basically pushed her feet off the step, and she let go, and that was it. So Sally — my character, Sally — is driving along a country road and she pulls over because she sees something, she gets out, and it’s a naked skydiver. The whole thing is about fate. Big theme, fate. Sally feels fated to be with him. She watches him fall, her hand over her eyes to block the sun. And he lands, and rolls, and gathers up the parachute, and lopes over to her, he’s loping. He’s out of breath. Buck naked. A naked babe. There’s this big field behind them and the sun, you know, going down.
The producers looked at each other, looked at Eleanor, We could do that. You could? We could do that, yes. You could do a naked skydiver? We could, yes, we could.
Gabrielle comes around the corner of the house, whacking the grass with a cracked broom handle. There was a scream for attention in each whack. She has lost one of the gold earrings her grandmother gave her. She wants to be absolved. She leans on Eleanor, rocking gently.
How’s my girl, says Sadie.
What, Eleanor asks Gabrielle. What do you want? What? Gabrielle won’t mention the missing earring. We have heard enough about the earring, thinks Eleanor. She was too young for gold. Eleanor is tired of Gabrielle. Tired of the wedding. Tired of losing things. She wants it to be tomorrow already. Her neck, the back of her neck, she realizes, is tired.
Hi, Sadie, Gabrielle says. Then she grabs Sadie around the waist in a fit of passion, burying her face.
I love you so much, Gabrielle says.
Are you having a good time at the wedding, honey, Sadie says.
Gabrielle rocks harder, stamps her foot.
Eleanor says, What?
Nothing.
Tell me.
Nothing. My earring, she whimpers.
You’re impossible, Eleanor says. Philip comes out and sits beside them.
What’s the matter with her?
The earring your mother gave her. Philip rubs his hand over the stubble on his chin.
The French, he says, are sometimes full of crap. Do you get that feeling?
Is it crap, Sadie says.
Philip says, But still, I’m like you, Sadie, I prefer the French. Where’s Maurice, Eleanor says.
He’s showing Constance the dish he made for the wed
ding. Seaweed something or other.
We’ll have to eat seaweed, Eleanor says, how gloomy.
Nobody has to eat anything they don’t want to, Sadie says. He’s very clear about that. It’s part of his thing , his whole thing. He thinks it’s totally fucked up to eat out of politeness. And you don’t ever lie, or make promises; that’s also part of his thing.
We all have a thing , Eleanor says. If someone makes a dish you eat it, that’s my thing.
Philip says, I’m not eating seaweed.
Or marry for convenience, says Sadie, you never do that, according to Maurice, even if you need citizenship to get a job so you can stay in the country and be with your lover whom you supposedly love.
I’m eating it, says Eleanor.
Or marry for any reason. Or have children, because that’s a promise in itself. Never making a promise is part of Maurice’s thing too. Although he loves children, says Sadie.
I also love children, says Eleanor, children are also part of my thing . Staying married is part of my thing. And just generally being nice to people. I believe in being nice .
Philip grabs Constance’s dog, who is trotting by and stares into his eyes.
This dog wants to tell me something, Philip says.
Maurice loves other people’s children though, says Sadie. He loves this little girl for instance. She gives Gabrielle an extra squeeze.
Philip says, I think the dog is starting to look like Nicolas Cage.
Eleanor says, Try new things, right? Isn’t that right Philip? My god, there’s a whole ocean of seaweed out there.
They shot the skydiving scene during a blizzard on the Bally-Halley golf course. The man they’d gotten to play the part was strikingly beautiful. Eleanor had said, You have a beautiful face. He was surprised to hear it. He’d been a weightlifter, said his thigh had once been twenty-eight inches around, he couldn’t buy a pair of pants. His body was a separate thing, a thing by itself, he said while folding a Caesar salad into his mouth. He wasn’t successful as an actor, had turned to repairing fridges, which is what his father did. A part comes up every now and then, he says. A part like this. She can tell he doesn’t think much of nude skydiving. Of course, there’s a stuntman to do the actual dive. But the actor must run across the field without his clothes.
Costume had sewn tiny heating pads into the straps of the parachute, but he was nude in the snowstorm. All the crew in knee-length eiderdown, the actor completely nude, running through the snow, gathering the parachute behind him. Eleanor hadn’t written a storm but there it was. The shoot had been postponed and there was the storm. Two women waited outside the scope of the camera with thick blankets. The hulking actor trembling with frostbite. Everybody averting their eyes from his purple dick. The director called cut, and the girls ran up to the naked actor and flung the blankets over him and there was a consultation.
What the hell? I thought that was good, he called out over the field, hopping from foot to foot. Someone wiped his nose.
Snot? Snot on my goddamn face? I do the best goddamn performance of my life and there’s snot on my face. Come on, let’s do this thing, let’s do this thing, he yelled.
The first time Philip cheated on her, if you can call it that, when it’s out in the open, when there’s an understanding: Eleanor and Philip had gone to a movie together, and afterwards they sat in the car, which was parked facing their house. It was raining, and the yellow clapboard of the three-storey house wiggled and snaked.
Philip said, There’s something I forgot to tell you. When I was in Montreal for that conference, two years ago. I told you about the jazz, and the weather.
You told me about that, she says.
On the last night we were all going to a party in a hotel room. This woman and me, this very beautiful woman, we got into the elevator together. It was late at night. And we got out on the wrong floor. We were talking, about the conference, papers we’d heard. We got out in front of a floor-to-ceiling window, a whole wall of glass. And there was the city in front of us, spread as far as you could see, the lights. It was so beautiful. It shocked me. And I said, How beautiful. And this woman, she touched my hand, and she said, Yes, let’s get a room.
He turned the car on and let the wipers clear the glass for two swipes, and their house was solid again, the clapboard straight, and the car filled with music, the radio was on loud, jazz, several horns, Miles Davis, maybe, and he turned it off. The house went soft, melting. She looked at him under the streetlight. A splatter of rainy shadows migrating over his nose, across his cheeks. His hand still on the key, looking straight ahead.
How does this confession change things? The yellow house is still yellow, the harbour beyond, the Atlantic Ocean, the rain hitting the street so hard it rises in a silver fur under the streetlights. It makes Philip a stranger, she thinks. Like in the beginning, when she sat on the frayed arm of the chair at Kibitzer’s and just wanted to go home with him but was afraid. Maria Schneider making herself come without touching — they don’t exchange names, she and Brando, they just fuck while his wife lies in a coffin.
And you forgot to tell me this.
I decided not to tell you. I decided not to tell you, and then I forgot to tell you.
But that night, when I spoke to you on the phone from Montreal, she says. She tried to think of the night. He had called every night, waking her. She loved being dredged out of sleep, trawled into the bedroom. Out drinking, he’d said. A bunch of Newfoundlanders at the conference and his paper had gone well, he’d called to tell her something about flowers and stars. They had been drinking outside, it was an outdoor pay phone he called her from. Flowers had fallen into his beer, or birdshit. It was birdshit. Nothing about stars. There had been laughter in the background and she’d fallen back to sleep, blissful.
With great effort she speaks to Glenn Marshall: Last summer Gabrielle wanted a ladybug, but they’re like grace, you can’t will them, either.
Glenn rises from his chair and his snifter of brandy smashes. She sees it fall, hot amber coming up to the mouth of the glass like a jellyfish.
You prepare for grace, he says. Thomas Aquinas said, Get ready. That’s his advice, prepare.
Yes, she thinks, you wait. She glances at the window, but she can’t see Philip, he has moved into the kitchen. She thinks of her mother and the white mink, how much was lost when her father died.
Eleanor says, It’s about a girl who comes through grief via a sexual awakening.
The story editor says, What does that mean?
She says, When my father died, because essentially this script is about my father. Pleasure is a kind of betrayal, to feel pleasure, any kind of pleasure, after a death. Because pleasure is life affirming, and to go on living, enjoying life, when someone you love has died is to accept their death. And acceptance is a kind of betrayal, is my thinking here.
The screenplay is a messy jumble. Everything out of order. Full of dream sequences (self-indulgent, according to the story editor), the death, snowstorms, pregnancy, a prison where Sandra teaches art to a young woman who had attacked someone with a hammer (of course it’s all true, the screenplay tells exactly what happened, her mother struggling to get the lawnmower into the trunk of her car so she could mow her husband’s grave and finally throwing it at the car with a superhuman burst of strength brought on by grief).
The story editor takes up a coloured marker and approaches a flip chart. He draws a timeline.
He says, A half-hour screenplay is twenty-four pages. I want the grief fully realized by page four. I want to see the character attempt to overcome grief three times by page twenty. Three failed attempts, but each time she gets closer. I want the sexual awakening on page twenty. By page twenty-four she has come through.
And who is the father, the story editor asks.
Who is he?
I mean who is he, really, the story editor says.
She remembers her father bringing a Portuguese sailor home for supper when she was seven so they could hear a foreign language. She feels a burst of tears coming, her nose. But she won’t cry in front of the story editor. In the elevator she noticed his black turtleneck, his raglan, his polished shoes. He has uncapped the marker. Death has made her father finite. She could list all the things he was. Everyone else, this man with the marker, Philip wanting to leave her, Sadie working on her film, everyone else is changing.
Like what was his favourite food, says the story editor, who did he read. What did he take in his coffee. You have to know these things about your character.
Who was it Eleanor’s father used to read before bed?
Harold Robbins. Eleanor can see Harold Robbins in raised gold script. Her father would fall asleep each night with the book open on his chest, having read only a page or two.
After her father died, Eleanor’s mother had a nervous breakdown, and then began to see Doug Ryan. Eleanor first read Harold Robbins while her father was still alive, just two pages. Two forbidden pages when she was thirteen.
They had been jumping off the Ryans’ wharf, knees tucked up. The smack. Plunging down through a tunnel of bubbles and the murkiness near the bottom of the lake, the mossy struts of the dock, underground springs spurting up, making warm pockets, remembering the eels balled together in the darkness.
Eleanor had known about sex, the facts, for a long time, of course. She had been kissed. (She’d just let her horse, a fineboned pacer, out of the barn and the mare had bucked and reared, front hoofs pawing the clouds, neck tossing, back legs step-stepping in the deep snow, and Eleanor caught the yellow nylon rope snaking past her jeans, the mare yanking her arms, her hands burned by the rope, digging in her heels, her mother had company, and they’d brought their son, three years older than Eleanor, sixteen, he was drinking a cup of tea he’d taken from the house, standing in snow up to his knees, she had loved the horse, had spent winter evenings in the mare’s stall with just a flashlight, the smell of linseed oil she used to clean the tack, the brushes, she knew the animal’s body, the shiny black knees, the way to pick up the hoofs and remove stones with a pick, a flame of pink inside the right nostril, the wet snuffle of giant lips against her palm when she held out half an apple, the smell of manure, the molasses in the grain, the water bucket with a skin of ice, the blue salt lick, smell of horse in her hair, under her nails, outside trees creaking together, the starry, dark blue sky. Walking back to her house through the trees, all the while her family going bankrupt, the television murmuring, her father hitting the adding machine, hitting the adding machine, the washer going, piles of money in front of him, a dish with a sponge for counting, the adding machine, until morning, when she woke and found him leaning on the counter looking through the kitchen window at the sun coming up. He had cut up a grapefruit for her breakfast with a maraschino cherry in the middle. He was drinking his instant coffee.