The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore Read online

  A flashlight waves erratically through the shrubs, catching the bright green moss on a carved angel’s cheek, her cracked wing. Another flashlight, soft oval bouncing in the leaves overhead, scuffle of feet. I’m surrounded by a circle of teenagers with baseball bats and fence pickets. They step, one by one, out of the trees and bushes. Or else they have always been standing there. All the headstones, tipping, lichen-crusted. I stand up, my legs watery. We stand like that, not speaking or moving.

  You seen a guy run through here?

  I whisper, No. I haven’t seen anybody. Three policemen arrive and the teenagers flee. A policeman steps forward and puts an arm around my shoulder and I cry into his armpit.

  Robert lowers a tool into my mouth and I say, Stop.

  I say, That was a test.

  He says, That was a scalpel. I would just trust me if I were you.

  I feel him cut the gum and fold the flesh back. His eyes full of veins blue and violet; my blood sprays dots on his glasses. He takes up another instrument and tugs at the tooth, twisting it, and I feel it tearing away. The hoarse, sputtering noise of the suction hose removing blood and saliva. Robert worked for nothing in Nicaragua after he graduated, teaching the revolutionaries to be dentists, the distant spitting of gunfire in the fields beyond his classroom. During the dot-com boom he invested — in and out — unspeakably rich.

  My tooth hits a chrome bowl with a bright ping. He begins to sew the stitches. I feel the thread move through the gum and the sensation, though painless, nauseates me. Three tight stitches, the side of my mouth puckered. He gives me a wad of cotton and tells me to bite down. He peels the latex gloves. I worry the loose ends of the stitches with my wooden tongue. They feel like cat whiskers.

  I’ve wanted to ask for some weeks, Robert says.

  Maybe this is not the best time, I say.

  I want to marry you, he says.

  The sound of the sliding metal rings when I rip open the shower curtain unnerves me. Waiting for the toaster to pop, a butter knife in my hand, I am aware of a presence. The washer shimmies across the laundry room floor until it works the plug from the wall and the motor goes quiet. The water stops slushing. An engrossing, animated silence. Every object — the vacuum cleaner, a vase of dried thistles — has become sensitive. The fridge knows. The unmade bed is not ordinary. I put a glass down and check. It’s exactly where I set it down. Loving a dead person takes immense energy and it is making me cry.

  Robert works the champagne cork with his thumbs. The cork bounces off the ceiling and hits a mirror, causing a web of cracks. He hands me my glass and I can feel the fizz on my face.

  He says, This is the happiest day of my life.

  We twine arms and drink and the awkward intimacy of this, the complete lack of irony — I know instantly I’ve made a mistake.

  Robert is still at work and I’m watching the decorating channel. The camera slowly roves through a palatial, empty house in Vermont, a woman’s chipper voice: Here we have an oak table, very countryish, but workable chairs, this dining room absolutely screams to be used. Use me, it’s screaming!

  I turn the TV off and listen to the shrill nothing that fills Robert’s house. Leaves swirl off the lawn in twisting columns. A brown leaf hits the glass and sticks. The starlings are flying in formation over the university. A black cloud draws together and becomes thin as it changes direction. The sky is full of grey luster and the starlings seem feverish. I remember Des parking by the university once, just to watch them. It was late, we had groceries, ice cream in the trunk.

  They’re just playing, he said. I want to stay here, don’t you? I want to watch all night.

  I think: If you are there, get in touch with me now. I believe suddenly that he can, that it is just a matter of my asking.

  The phone rings at exactly that instant. It rings and rings and rings. Then it stops. I put my hand on the receiver and I can feel a warm thrum. Then it rings again, loud. I go upstairs and brush my teeth. I rinse and start flossing. The phone rings again. It’s ringing in all the rooms, terrifying me. I pour a bath and get in, and when it’s deep enough I dunk my ears under the water.

  Robert gives me a glass of scotch and drops into the chair beside me. He presses his watch face so the dial glows, sending a circle of green light zigzagging across his face. The sale of my house has come through. A young couple with a dalmatian. Most of the furnishings went to the Sally Ann. A closet full of Des’s shirts, a key ring with a plastic telescope, inside which there is a picture of Des and me on vacation in Mexico. It has to be held to a light. We are laughing, drinking from coconut shells. I’d let all the plants die. Robert has everything we need.

  You’re tired, I say, we’re both tired.

  What do you think of stem cell research, he says.

  There are the dishes.

  I could take a hair out of your head and make another you.

  The laundry is —

  Two of you. The real you and another you.

  I know I’m tired.

  One you is a roomful already.

  I can’t have sex with you tonight if that’s what you’re thinking, I say.

  Why would I be thinking a thing like that?

  I’m drifting to sleep while he talks. I dream I say I want my real husband, and I don’t know if I’ve spoken out loud or not. I believe that Des is in the chair beside me and things are as they were five years ago, as if the past can do that. Lay itself down on the present. Cover it over. Become the present, even briefly. A pair of flip-flops, I’d stumbled and skinned my toe. Des had been hammering all day. The hammering had stopped, but the silent ringing of the hammer went on. It was late September and we went to the beach.

  In the morning I hear a car coming up the long driveway and I leap out of bed. A dark green minivan pulls up under the trees. The windshield is opaque with the shadows of the maple trees. The van parks and a man steps out. He’s wearing creamcoloured pants and a pastel plaid shirt. He stretches and puts his hands on his hips. He helps a little girl out of the driver’s side. She’s wearing a white cotton dress and the skirt bells with the breeze. Finally the passenger door opens and a woman gets out. I’m standing in the upstairs window, struggling to get my jeans on. There is a wave rising inside me. It’s full of light. It’s dull and smart and hurting my throat. Robert rolls over in bed.

  He says, Who would disturb us at this hour?

  The woman has her hand over her eyes to block the sun and she’s looking up into the bedroom window where I’m standing and I know it’s Melody without even recognizing her. I run down the stairs and out the back without my shoes. I have never initiated anything in my life. I forgot her completely and here she is. She’ll give me something.

  She’s exactly the same. The child is just like her. The guy holds out his hand. Melody says his name and I tell him I’m thrilled, but I forget his name. I forget the child’s name but it’s Jill.

  I tried to call, she says, holding out her arms.

  I say, I’m married. I start to cry. Melody kisses me.

  I whisper, I’ve messed up, Melody.

  She says, You’ll just have to do something about it.

  MOUTHS, OPEN

  A woman climbs over me for the window seat — hair like vanilla ice cream, a purple mink. Beneath the fur, a sweatsuit and spanking new sneakers. She’s got a paper bag with twine handles. Lingerie. Her fingernails are false and black, an inch and a half.

  You raise your eyes from your book. She tears a hot pretzel — the bread inside porous and steaming — and dips it into the tiny container of honey mustard. The dexterity of a lobster. After each bite she touches her nails against a napkin, rubbing carefully under the concave side. A glistening gob of green gum on the side of her plate, the teeth marks. She’s a sex worker who flies to Halifax from St. John’s for the weekend. What costs as muc
h as a blow job, a carton of red peppers? Sable earmuffs?

  We are in Cuba. The lawn sprinkler beside the pool whispering rounds of silver ammunition that pock the sand. A cockroach with an indigo shell. Banana leaves as sharp as switchblades. The plastic of my recliner sweating against my cheek. The pool looks as solid as a bowl of Jell-O, a jar of Dippity-Do. The Italian transsexuals lower their bodies until they are submerged to the neck, careful of their curls. They have the most beautiful nipples. I can’t take my eyes off their more-than-perfect breasts.

  At the kitchen table at home in St. John’s. The tablecloth is gone; the table is red, bright red enamel paint, and there is the creamer, full of milk. The kitchen is pumpkin, forest green cupboards. The kitchen screams. My hands are on the table in front of me. I want to throw the creamer. Milk fluttering over your head, a long ribbon of surrender. It is a huge effort not to give in and throw it. Then my fist slams.

  What is wrong with you, I shout.

  I say, Speak. Do you think I’m joking?

  You say, I’m afraid of you.

  This is the first thing you’ve said. There have been pauses. I keep thinking, What is my tone? I vary my tone. We already know the lines. Do you think I’m joking? (whisper) Speak! (shout) What the fuck is wrong with you? (monotone) Do I exist? Maybe I don’t exist. (giggles)

  But it’s reassuring that you’re afraid of me. I have been worried that I don’t exist. I don’t think I am, therefore.

  Just speak. Speak.

  You say, I’m thinking of leaving you.

  The beach, in a windstorm. I bang my toe on a concrete block emerging from the sand. Pass a demolished building. A giant slab of concrete with a painted silhouette of Che Guevara excavated from the ruins. I stand on tippytoe and put my mouth up to his giant lips, posing for a photograph. Weeping, sand under my contact lens, scratching my eye. The wind flicks the tail of my dress against the concrete slab like a propeller trying to turn over, resolutely stalled. Everything in Cuba is at a standstill, waiting for ignition. Because of the embargo there is no anaesthetic for operations — everybody pre-operative, prepped. You wave me out of the picture.

  You say, Just Che. By himself.

  In the Museum of the Revolution in Havana, a clear plastic Petri dish containing a sample of Che Guevara’s hair and a sample of his beard. I feel ashamed for pretending to kiss him. Che and Fidel, wax figures, beating their way through the plastic bushes. The glass eyeballs have a yellowish cast. Beads of clear varnish on their foreheads, cheeks. Mouths open, as if they are shouting to soldiers behind them, or gasping for breath. We are here for a conference. You’re talking about the revolutionary spirit of Gian-Lorenzo Bernini, the seventeenth-century sculptor.

  We go into another hotel during the downpour, for espresso.

  You say, Someone else is doing the …

  You lift your chin toward an open doorway farther down the lobby. A couple is dancing. The patio is a slick of wet slate, and the reflections of a red skirt and the shadows of the palm trees are hydroplaning at their feet. Clothes soaked to the skin. A black man teaching a white woman the tango. A black girl carries a giant armload of canary yellow towels, brilliant against her black, black cheek. She slits her eyes at them. Everything is a ripe pomegranate.

  I say, Should we be sleeping together? If you’re leaving me?

  You say, I don’t see why not.

  Lightning cracks low over the horizon, stunted like bonsai trees. The espresso is strong. Tiny cups. The chink of the cup in the saucer.

  I say, From now on, if I say I love you, I’m speaking out of habit.

  I wonder, what are you? Am I you? What don’t I love anymore?

  Outside, we hold our feet under a fountain that squirts from a stone fish. I watch you hold up your foot. You turn it and the sand peels away from your ankle. I love your foot. That is the only part of you I still love.

  I say, I’m going to think of you as a long series of gestures. You are your nose and eyes and mouth and the things you do with them.

  You say, Don’t forget my cock.

  The hotel room smells of a lemon venom: insecticide. You are asleep. I stand on the bed and photograph you. Your arms thrown over your head, warding off the blades of sunlight from the swinging louvered shutters, a fencing match on your naked back. The maid has twisted the white towels into the shape of swans. Two towel swans joined at the beak, as if kissing.

  Back in the kitchen, at home, the creamer stops pulsing. The creamer has lost meaning.

  I say, This marriage can be anything you want.

  You say, I might be happier without you in my life.

  I say, Let’s go somewhere. We need a change.

  I guess I should read the Manifesto . The literary critic who spoke before you at the conference said it is an authorless tract. That Marx repeatedly tried to make it sound as though it came from thin air, or rose by itself from the people, spontaneously. He was willing to claim the bad poetry of his youth that even Penguin didn’t want to publish. But the Manifesto just was. Just passed through his pen.

  Tell me what happened? Did you meet somebody?

  The simultaneous translator becomes exhausted late afternoon, breaking down, translating word by word instead of for the sense. So each word is encased in explosive consonants, the meaning picked up later like shattered bullet casings. She is staccato, and then stuck. The people’s … ? The people’s … ? She looks around the room hopelessly. Someone offers the word struggle . Ah, yes, The people’s struggle. The room explodes with laughter.

  In the pastry shop. A young black girl with long black braids, thousands, in a ponytail on the top of her head. Like squirts of oil from a squeeze bottle, shiny, dragonfly blue in the light. She wears a slippery Lycra body suit. It stretches over her breasts and bum like burst bubblegum, bright pink. She gets in line next to you. Her hip presses into the glass of the display case.

  There is an older woman with a cane. We are both waiting, this older woman and I. The heat — there must be a lot of ovens — they keep bringing out bread tied in knots and other shapes. Giant wicker baskets of oily golden sailor’s knots. A man stacks them on steel shelves — the girl is talking to you, she is digging a high heel into the tiles and rocking a little. She has full breasts and is very young. She may be sixteen. But she may be younger.

  She may be the age of your daughter, fifteen. The girl touches your collar. You are blushing darkly. But you are laughing too. Two sides of the same coin, shame and pleasure.

  There is more bread and a blast of heat. You are buying the girl pastries. She is laughing and pointing and the woman behind the counter puts what the girl wants into a white box. The girl hesitates before she points to each pastry. She looks coyly at you each time she touches the glass with her finger, and each time you nod.

  But you have become serious now. The girl turns and sees me. Something passes over her face, perhaps embarrassment. This is what I feel: Fuck off, bitch. But the girl is only the age of my stepdaughter, whom I love and protect. I am ashamed of the look on my face. The woman with the cane is joined by her friend. They speak a few words to each other and leave.

  A moment more, and the woman with the cane returns. She asks: Do you understand Spanish?

  I say no.

  She says, A little?

  A little, I say. This isn’t true. What I understand is less than a little, but I know what she will say. She points to her eye and then out — so that I know to look out.

  She is telling me to look out. Her hand grips the plastic handle of the cane tightly. She does not hesitate or pause as she speaks. She isn’t experimenting with tone. She is telling me, Yes, he was flattered. Don’t doubt it. He was flattered.

  All I want is to be away from her, for your sake. But I am moved that she has come back into the pastry shop to tell me. She says, AIDS. I hear it mi
ngled with the Spanish.

  Then she leaves.

  There is a white statue of a woman with a basket on her shoulder at the end of the pool. Bernini talked about the paleness of marble. The absence of flesh tone makes it difficult to capture likeness. Would you recognize someone who had poured a bag of flour over his head? To compensate, Bernini suggests drawing the face just as it is about to speak, or after it has just spoken. That’s when the face is most characteristic of itself. He’s responsible for the sixteenth-century fashion of portraits with the lips parted. We are most ourselves when we are changing.

  I say, We can change certain things.

  It’s not that.

  We can sleep with other people. Is that what you want?

  You say you are making up your mind. You’re sorry. You can’t explain. It’s as much a mystery for you as it is for me.

  The man who lends towels and novels is set up in a grass hut with an impaled and glazed blowfish. This man leans on his elbows, chin in hands, and watches the transsexuals. They seem to let their mouths hang open, in a kind of pout. Like inflated dolls that are ready-made for oral sex.

  Before me my cup is very white and the white saucer is on the white table. Espresso. The table shimmers in its whiteness. A fly lands on the rim of the cup. The fly is so blue-black that it makes me think: significance. There is significance here. What is it?

  The fly touches the cup, and the whiteness of the cup becomes whiter.

  You say, You look insane.

  You say this just as I am applying significance to the white cup.

  How did you know?

  In the evening we meet Carl, Jorge, and Johann, from Austria. Carl takes a switchblade from the pocket over his calf. He opens it with an elegant motion of his wrist. There is a bartender working over a pestle and mortar several yards away.

  Carl says, You want me to demonstrate? He raises his chin toward the bartender. I see the blade open the white shirt and blood flushing. Carl closes the knife and slides it back into his pocket.