The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore Read online

  So I just push the button, Laurie asked. I think I can do that. She smiled at the interviewer and imagined her pointy white teeth.

  We’ll give you a shout, he said.

  The text had arrived before she exited the mall. It said that while she had appeared confident and knowledgeable during the interview process and had scored high in terms of appearance and attitude, the successful applicant had scored even higher by half a point. The text offered her warm wishes for a happy season. There was an animated emoticon of a tiny snowman with a candy cane yanking him off stage.

  Edward White of the Talent Hunters office was her second audition of the day and her final hope. He opened the office door and looked past Basil and Laurie down the long empty corridor.

  Nobody else, Edward White asked.

  Just us, Laurie said.

  Okay, he said. I’ll see both of you at the same time.

  They followed him through an office with a single desk, the side of which had been kicked in. On top of the damaged desk was a cardboard box with a dust-coated plastic poinsettia and a keyboard and coffee maker without the carafe or the plastic basket for the filter. The basket had been flung across the office and the soggy, recycled brown paper filter, half full of coffee grounds, had spilled onto the indoor-outdoor carpeting near the baseboard and there was a brown runny stain down the wood paneling where the filter had smashed against the wall.

  Edward White saw Laurie glance at the stain and said: My secretary has stepped out on me.

  Laurie and Basil sat in two chairs in front of the desk and Edward White sat behind it.

  So, let’s start with you, Basil, Edward White said. Basil was a cowboy from Edmonton, it turned out. Basil had little to say during the interview except that he had watched nine horses die while driving a herd of two hundred to a rodeo in the centre of the city.

  They had fallen over a bridge, he said. Spooked by a train. Wild broncos, the last of their kind. That’s why I come looking for a different kind of employment.

  Acting is a vocation, Laurie said. You don’t say to yourself, I know, think I’ll try acting now. You have to be born to it.

  The men shifted uncomfortably.

  Suggestive, Edward said. Suggestive is okay. He was talking about how they would be with each other in the glass box. How they should behave. He was providing direction.

  There’s no room for lewdness, he said. That isn’t the sort of vacation we’re selling. You’ll want to appear Christmasy. Please don’t tip back on the chair.

  Basil had been tipping back on his chair. He brought the front legs down on the floor with a little snap.

  These were animals, Basil said. You see a horse with his eyes so wild with fright they roll up in his head. All you see is the white of it. It affects you. You don’t sleep. We’d brought tourists on the ride knew nothing about horses. It wasn’t right.

  Are you a horse whisperer, Laurie asked.

  I’m a goddamn cowboy, Basil said. I speak with a volume appropriate for normal conversation.

  Do you take steroids, Basil, Edward asked. Is that how your arms got that way? Basil glanced down at his arms. They seemed to be made of bowling balls.

  I was born with these arms, Basil said. Edward flicked a pencil back and forth in the air so it appeared to waggle like rubber. Eyeing was a component of the interview. Edward White eyed Basil in an instant, and then he swivelled his chair a touch and eyed Laurie. A sizing up of all that Laurie was and could ever become.

  I’ll be straight with you, Edward White said. He threw down the pencil. Three days, $500 a day. New York and environs. We’re selling Christmas vacation packages. You have to look like you’re having fun.

  Can we read a book, Laurie asked. People read books at the beach.

  No you can’t, Edward White said. Books aren’t fun.

  What’s our motivation, Laurie asked. She had read that during job interviews it was good to turn the tables, ask a few questions of your own.

  You’re just kids having Christmas at the beach.

  But are we travelling to find ourselves, or anything like that, Laurie asked. Is there a quest?

  Fun, Edward White said. Can you do fun?

  I can do fun, Laurie said, but she sounded dispirited.

  That’s the concept here. Fun is the concept.

  There was a string of tissue-paper Christmas bells on the wood panelling behind him and the tape must have let go because one end dropped and swooped back and forth without Edward White’s noticing it. Basil and Laurie glanced at each other. It seemed like they had the job.

  You’ll pick up Max, the third actor, just outside New York, Edward White said. I want you to wear these at all times. He tossed them red sequined Santa hats and little red sequined bathing suits that glowed like bonfires in their hands.

  It turned out Max was a Mormon from Salt Lake City and his blond head was almost shaved so his skull appeared to be gilded.

  Not really Mormon, he said. We’re a splinter group. We broke off from those other guys. We have a different read on the Second Coming.

  His bathing suit was a couple of sizes too small and showed everything. He used the evening hours to exercise while Basil and Laurie lay on the recliners and watched the fields of snow whip past, interrupted now and then by the silhouette of a farmhouse, or a Christmas tree in the distance, all the coloured lights twinkling in the frigid air, until the long empty stretches of blackness were broken up by small towns and then small cities.

  I hear compliments about my back, Max said. He was looking at his reflection in the glass. Here and there a traffic light burned through, red on his shoulder, green on his thigh, and an office tower checkered him with sliding light.

  They had woken near dawn on the third morning and they were on the outskirts of a town and crowds were preparing for a Christmas parade. Laurie thought she heard the jingling of bells. She had suffered from carsickness ever since the beginning of the trip and sometimes had to bang her fist against the glass to get the truck to stop so she could run outside and puke. But for the first time in three days she felt fine.

  She had to press her nose to the glass and cup her hands around her face to see beyond their own reflections, the sandy beach and tropical sunset that lay itself over the snowy streets they were floating through. A flare of her breath steamed the Plexiglas wall.

  Under the pearly lambency of a single streetlight she saw fifty or sixty Santas each holding a hand-bell. Some of them had cups of coffee and there was one in a wheelchair smoking a cigar. Several of the Santas were crowded around a hot dog stand. An army of toy soldiers in white tutus and red top hats with red and white pompoms were milling together, one or two tossing batons that turned end over end, silver splinters winking in the night and dropping down, and a couple of clowns with big red light bulbs on their noses were talking to a reindeer. Just as quickly the crowds were swallowed up in swirling snow and gone.

  Then out of black, frozen nothingness between one streetlight and the next: a single man in a Santa suit on a unicycle. The wheel lurched and zigzagged violently under him. His eyes were cast heavenward and Laurie saw with astonishment that he was juggling oranges. She could not count how many, they were a blurred circle of motion with daubs of fierce orange like flames haloing his upturned face, and her own reflection slipped over him in the glass or passed through him or he passed through her like a spirit and she slapped her hand against the wall as if to touch him but he was gone.

  Did you see that, she asked.

  See what, the guys said.

  Max was focusing on different sets of muscles, small groups of three or four, he said. He was methodical and the skin bulged and the bulging moved over his back as if there were a small animal foraging under the skin, a rodent that hesitated and then rippled on. He watched the animal move over one shoulder, and tossing the pompom of his Santa hat out of the way watched the animal slide across his back to the other shoulder.

  Most
people forget all about their backs, simply because they can’t see them, he said. His head looked so small on his massive shoulders. He was intent and she saw his bum tighten as hard as concrete.

  And left buttock, he said, releasing the muscles in his left cheek. He’d told her they met in big warehouses — the single Mormons — so that they could find dates. There were mixers but they didn’t dance or touch or kiss.

  And right buttock, he said.

  For the first time it occurred to her how innocent he was. His strength and undiluted dedication, the half-crazed solemnity he brought to the simple things. Mostly he lived on eggs and green shakes of vitamins and chlorophyll that looked like windshield washing fluid. She and Basil had seen him eat six raw yolks every morning they’d been on the road together. He’d crack the shells and drop the insides from one half shell to the other until the whites slopped over the sides and then he’d tip the half-shell into his mouth.

  I am going to design a regime for people who have forgotten their backs, Max said. Yes, abs are important. I’m not going to pretend they aren’t. But a big thick back gives the illusion of a smaller waist.

  Basil had found Laurie’s bag of stocking stuffers and he had taken Seraphim’s yo-yo out of the plastic package and was flicking it out fast so the sparks spat and sizzled.

  Then I’ll go into politics, Max said.

  I admire your bum, Laurie said.

  Max looked away from his reflection. He turned and kneeled in front of her as the men had been directed to do now and then.

  We aren’t allowed to have premarital sex, he said. For a moment she thought he was talking about the three of them and the Plexiglas box they were hurtling toward Christmas in, but of course he meant the members of the cult to which he belonged. He put his small hands on her knees.

  God asks that we keep ourselves pure.

  I’ve been having sex like a bunny, she said softly. She could not bring herself to be any more vulgar with him than that, afraid of the damage it would do. She had decided that beneath the bulk and heft of both men there was something as fragile as a Christmas ornament batted about by the paws of a kitten. Besides, it was in their contract. There would be no self-discovery, no falling in love, no imminence or epiphanies, no gathering together of the universe, no speed bumps of Salvation. There were to be no unexpected miracles. There were no small parts; there was the cap gun in the first act but no shot would be fired. They were trapped in amber, they were coal burning white in engines of fun.

  I know your boyfriend broke up with you, Max said. But I think you might be pregnant.

  My God, Laurie said. She touched her naked belly with one hand and then tapped each of her fingers against her thumb, counting off the weeks.

  They were back in Toronto by the twenty-second. Laurie stopped at the hospital on the way home to her apartment to give Seraphim’s mother the Santa and Mrs. Claus salt and pepper shakers, along with the presents she had picked up for the children.

  She found Elizabeth in a chilly basement hallway lined with empty hospital beds and laundry bins. She was wearing a pale green hospital gown and she was sitting on a cot and her head was bowed either in pain or prayer. Laurie called her name.

  What are you doing here child, Elizabeth asked.

  This is just a token, Laurie said.

  I don’t have anything for you.

  Why don’t you go ahead and open it, Laurie said. Elizabeth pulled the crushed lump of tissue paper out of the mouth of the bag.

  What is it, she asked.

  Go ahead, Laurie said. See what’s inside.

  Elizabeth slit the tape on the lid with her fingernail. The ceramic Mrs. Claus had a big belly under her white apron and her hands were spread over her girth as if to contain a volcano of laughter. There were perforations on the top of her white gathered bonnet.

  That’s the salt, Laurie said. But Elizabeth was pinching the bridge of her nose with her fingers and thumb. Her lips parted and all her teeth showed. She drew in a deep breath through her clenched teeth and when she opened her eyes they were covered with a limpid film and they were a more luminous brown than before and Laurie realized Elizabeth was crying. She was crying without making any noise at all.

  Laurie looked down the long corridor. One of the fluorescent lights way at the end fluttered and pinged and went grey.

  This is a cold country, Laurie said. You must find it awfully cold.

  It is cold, Elizabeth said. It’s really cold. Especially at this time of year. She grabbed Laurie’s shoulder and squeezed it hard.

  You have a good Christmas, Laurie, she said.

  I’ll try, Laurie said.

  On her way out of the hospital Laurie passed through a large group of couples, young men and women, crowded in the Emergency entrance.

  And this is the door you’ll use when the time comes, a nurse told them. The group turned at once and Laurie saw that all twenty or thirty of the women in the group were pregnant.

  Some of the women held their partners by the hand, a few were teenage girls with their mothers, one rested a hand on the small of her back, a couple of the women were alone, some of the women had spread their fingers against their big hard bellies, cradling them. Some of the women had tilted their heads as though they were listening to something deep inside or far, far away.

  NIPPLE OF PARADISE

  I expected some epiphany during the birth. Some way to order the material, some profound wisdom. It seems important to document exactly the way it went. In fact I would like to set the whole summer down in point form. Collect it, pin it. The birth, the affair, the postpartum-affair depression. Already I remember the summer in short-hand, distilled, made up of only a hundred or so specific images intermingled; meals, sex, nights on the fire escape, hours in the office, the birth, the affair. And by next summer I won’t even remember it that clearly. But for now it has reached the half-dissolved stage, the separate gestures of the summer exaggerated like the colour in Polaroid photographs.

  After I found out that Cy had slept with Marie I sat on the fire escape with my foot on the railing, and a spider crawled over my foot, my toes tensed, each toe stretching away from the others. I could feel the spider make its web, lacing my toes together. It struck me that I had never felt anything so sharply before. That’s how a story should work. Like that Chinese ribbon dance. They turn off the lights so you can’t see the dancer. All you see are two long fluorescent ribbons, drawing in the dark, like the strokes of that summer. Or that guy Volker we met in Germany, did drawings with a pen flashlight inside a cave. A photographer Volker knew shot them with fast film. Volker was a shadow but he drew the outlines of men and women embracing. He said it took incredible concentration because he had only ten seconds to make the drawing. The result was a fury of limbs locked through each other, the lines themselves seared onto the walls of a cave, the condensation glittering like sweat.

  Example: Hannah, Cy’s daughter, in her satin ballet costume, black with red sequins, lime green tulle, dragging herself up the staircase, howling like a wolf, “I got no one to play with, I got no one to play with,” hand over hand on the banister while the sky blisters with rain, while Cy and I make love in the bathroom. He’s soaking in this chemical blue bubble bath Hannah bought him for Christmas the first year I met him. It comes out of a plastic bottle shaped like a Havana nightclub dancer. The woman’s hat, a mountain of bananas, unscrews, and although the bubbles are turquoise, the bathroom stinks of synthetic bananas. We try to make love first on the side of the tub but it’s slippery from the steam, then on the toilet, and then one foot on the radiator, hiked up on the sink so I can see my own sunburnt face in the antique mirror we found in an abandoned house around the bay. The mirror is watery, my face wobbled with laughter because the position is so ridiculous, my legs bound by the pink maternity overalls wrapped around my knees and Hannah banging now on the bathroom door. Cy comes, and then both of us are completely still, him hugging me from behind. We look at each
other’s faces in the mirror. His hand is on my belly and the baby kicks so hard that both our eyes widen at the same time. We answer Hannah in unison, “Just a second.” I haul up my overalls while Cy opens the door. “Jeez,” says Hannah and sits on the toilet to pee.

  After the baby was born, and I was still drugged, I thought I felt her move again, inside me. I guess it was like when someone feels an itch in a missing limb. It was only a ghost of the way she felt inside me, and already I was forgetting what it had felt like to have her flutter in there, as if a million years had passed.

  I didn’t really get the chance to read very much birthing literature. I’d collected it, seen a film of an Australian woman who gave birth in her own living room. Her nextdoor neighbour dropped over, made himself a cup of tea and ended up holding the mirror for her, between her legs. She wore an old T-shirt and moaned in an Australian accent. The baby was blue when it came out. Cy gritted his teeth while he watched.

  Our Bodies, Ourselves says that some male partners seek other sexual partners during the pregnancy. “You wouldn’t do that, would you, Cy?”

  We only got to one of the pre-natal classes. It happened to be the one on “Things that can go wrong.” The nurse started off by assuring everyone that in most cases nothing goes wrong, but that we had to go through this anyhow, just in case. She showed the suction cups the doctors sometimes use during natural births. They had pink cups and blue cups, the nurse told us, “… but as sure as shooting, if you used the pink cup you’d get a boy and vice versa. The funny thing about these cups is they seem to go in and out of fashion. You might notice a certain doctor using them for a couple of months and then it seems the cups stay in the cupboard for six months and nobody uses them. They don’t hurt the baby, of course, except they do sometimes come out with cone-shaped heads when the doctor uses the suction cups. In fact you have to be careful after you have the baby that you lay him on different sides every time you lay him down, otherwise his head will go flat. Actually, there’s a little community up the southern shore that’s into head sculpting. All of them have heads as flat as frying pans on one side.” And she snorted, “No, that’s only a joke.”