The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore Read online

  I’ve persuaded Joan to go to the only strip joint in town with me the next night. I just want to see what it’s like. A woman can’t get in without a male escort. Joan’s hair is very short, and she’s going to dress like a man to get us in. The newspaper ad says formal wear required. The woman on the phone said that means no construction boots or torn shirts. I dig out the tuxedo Mike wore to our wedding for Joan to wear.

  I’m not usually one for telling strangers things but I’ve gotten into the habit of telling the woman who sells the coffee and muffins in the cafeteria of the building where I work the most intimate things about myself. Early in the morning, the ugly cafeteria is huge and empty; my footsteps echo as in a cathedral. Usually, it’s just the two of us at that hour. She wears a brown polyester suit with two seams down the front, and a gold bull horn on a chain around her neck. Sometimes when I fall asleep I can see that horn and the skin of her neck. The exact location of her mole, the tiny gold horn jiggling while she wipes the counter. When I give her a twenty she looks at me as if I should know better. She says with her eyebrow arched, “Are you trying to break me?”

  Sometimes, just as I’m dropping off to sleep, I see her arched eyebrow, exaggerated, and a disconnected voice “Are you trying to break me?”

  I have told her, for instance, that my sister-in-law has moved in because her house burned down, that Joan hates her ex-husband, and that we have no idea when she will move out. That my husband had a daughter with another woman, before he met me. Sometimes we have the child over for supper. I have told the cafeteria woman I believe Joan got drunk and set fire to the house on purpose. Often I find myself saying to her, “Strange old world, isn’t it?” and shaking my head like an old man. She wears a plastic name tag that says “Cathy.” Once I said, “Good morning, Cathy,” and she said, “That’s not my real name.”

  At the dinner table, Mike says, “Joan, I bought you a little present.”

  Mike drops a tape into the tape deck. It’s Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Joan squeals with delight and jumps up to dance to “Tijuana Taxi.” At the end of all the big brass, there’s a deep honking sound. Joan wiggles and struts, and when the honk comes, she sticks her bum out. Then she falls onto the floor, giggling. From the floor, she wheezes, “That’s what Mike and I did when we were kids.”

  Wiley takes this opportunity to scrape his broccoli into the garbage. I take a single triangle of cold pizza out of the fridge, hold the pizza in front of my crotch, lay a bunch of bananas on my head, and start miming a striptease while the Tijuana Brass do their thing. Joan drags herself off the floor, pulling herself up by the rungs in the chair, still panting with laughter, and starts to drink her coffee. We tell Wiley, “Okay, okay, settle down.” But when another honk comes, Joan almost chokes and the coffee comes out of her nose. She is snorting and choking, her eyes watering. Wiley says, “Jeez, Mom, will you give it up?”

  With the fourth honk, Joan bursts into tears. Mike turns off the tape. “For God’s sake, Joan.” I point my fork and a limp piece of broccoli at Mike. “Leave her alone, she’s allowed to cry.” Joan has been bursting into tears a lot since the fire.

  Joan’s last boyfriend broke up with her two or three nights before the fire. She says he was a real sweetie. She slapped a newspaper at his chest outside a restaurant and it bounced off and fell between a mail box and a newspaper vending box. It’s still there. We walk past it on the way to the supermarket. It’s waterlogged and you can see she twisted it in her fists before she flung it at him.

  I remember the cover of the album, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. A naked woman covered in whipped cream, the heart-shaped swirls of cream covering her breasts, she licking a blob of cream from a long red fingernail. One smooth long leg parts the soft folds of cream, almost up to her hip. You can almost taste that cream in the brass music.

  Later that night, when Wiley is in bed, Mike and I fight. I throw my cup of coffee across the room as hard as I can. The cup hits the wall behind his head and leaves a mark in the gyprock like a frown. There are no curtains on the front window. It’s dark outside and the living room is lit like a fish tank. A woman in a cotton skirt with a black palm leaf print is standing on the opposite sidewalk under a street lamp, arms crossed over her breasts. She is watching our fight as if it were a movie. Then, on our side of the street, two heads pass under the window, a man and a woman. They wave, surprised to see us. Mike’s face is stiff with anger, but both of us wave back, uncertainly. They knock on the door. It turns out they were neighbours of ours two years ago. We hardly spoke to them then and haven’t seen them since, but they seem delighted to see us. Mike and I stand in the doorway to talk to them. I can feel the snarl on my face thaw. The breeze is warm and it rushes through the trees on the traffic island as if it can’t make up its mind which way to go.

  The guy is tanned and carrying a tennis racket. He mimes taking swings as he talks. He says, “Yeah, I was away studying giant clams, they weigh as much as fifty kilos. The shells don’t really shut all the way, you can stick your whole arm in there, it’s real fleshy. Isn’t it, honey?” he says to his girlfriend. “They’ll suck your whole arm for hours if you let ’em. The islanders say that clam flesh is an aphrodisiac, makes the adolescent penis grow or something. You know, they’re a small people down there, aren’t they, honey? They used to joke about how big I was, they said Barb must be a happy woman.”

  Barb smiles up at him. Her mouth glitters, unexpectedly, with braces. “Oh, they thought Tony was real big.”

  When Mike shuts the door, he says, “That cup could have killed me.”

  I say, “Are you trying to break me?”

  Then he gets a cloth from the kitchen and wipes the splattered coffee off the wall. Joan walks in at that moment, sees the broken cup and leaves.

  When Mike and I make love, a blush comes into his cheeks and the tips of his ears. That’s my private colour for him, almost plum. The first time we were together we were behind the row housing under crisscrossing clotheslines, white shirts laughing with their bellies. We were drunk and his tongue in my ear sounded like a pot of mussels boiling, the shells opening, the salty shells clicking off one another, a riot of tiny noises. I got the flu. He made a pot of tea: cinnamon, cloves, apple and orange chunks. The next day we made love in his new house, empty of furniture except for a couch, covered with satiny parakeets, belonging to the former owners. Streetlight poured in. A plastic bag of chicken breasts glowed on the floor where I’d dropped it. I had been swimming in a hotel pool that day where they sold paper bathing suits. I made Mike close his eyes, and I put on the damp suit, which smelled of chlorine and was indestructible.

  Once Mike did a tour of a glass blowing factory. They chose him out of the tour group to do the blowing. When we first met he gave me an irregular perfume bottle with his breath caught in the bubbles. I’ve worn lilac since I was thirteen. When he took the stopper off, it surprised me that it smelled like myself. Lilac on the sanded wand he rubbed down my neck, sticky and warm. It was as if he had trapped all my years in a bottle, then tickled them down my neck. Now he wants to leave for a year, to work. I don’t want him to go. I need him here. I’m afraid of him leaving. It looks as though Joan and I will share an apartment if he leaves.

  Today, around five, the doorbell buzzes and it’s Jill, a little girl who plays with Wiley. The street is full of squad cars. The police are putting on bullet proof vests. They take rifles and guns out of the trunks of the cars and load them with bullets. A cop comes to the door. Pushing Jill from behind, he says, “Can she stay in there? She can’t go around the corner.”

  I ask what’s going on, my voice shrill. The cop looks as if he’s going to answer me but then he turns away and trots down the street with the gun. A CBC van arrives. Some guy coming up the street says there’s a man in one of the houses around the corner with a gun. Princess Anne had been on George Street earlier in the day. I’d
taken Wiley and a bunch of neighbourhood kids to see her. It must be a sniper who has run up from George Street. Wiley is on the concrete step of the house across the street, eating a supper of Jiggs dinner a neighbour has given him. The cop cars glitter between us and I say, “Get over here.”

  “What about my supper?”

  “Just get over here.” He comes over with the plate. I phone Jill’s mother, Maureen, to tell her Jill is with us. A cop answers the phone.

  “Sergeant Peddle,” she says.

  I say, “Can I talk to Maureen?”

  She says, “I wish you could, but I can’t get her down. What do you want?”

  I say I just wanted to tell her her daughter’s at my house, I’m a neighbour.

  “The daughter’s at your house.” Sergeant Peddle hangs up.

  I whisper to Mike, “The man with the gun is in Maureen’s house.”

  We met Maureen through Wiley. Maureen’s a lesbian. We’ve never seen much of her partner, who’s a surgeon. They keep pretty much to themselves, but since Joan moved in, she and Maureen have called each other every now and then to ask if the other would mind babysitting for half an hour.

  After twenty minutes the cops pull away, but the CBC is still there with the cameras. Jill wants to go home. I phone Maureen. The phone rings for some time before she picks it up. I hear long sobs. I keep saying, “Maureen?” but she just sobs into the phone, no words. I tell her I’m Joan’s sister-in-law, and I say, “I have your daughter here.” She doesn’t say anything. I say, “Do you want me to come down?”

  “Yes.”

  The large glass window in the front door of Maureen’s house is smashed in. Broken glass covers the concrete steps. Inside, the plush carpet crunches with every step. I call out to her. In the hall, two framed paintings have been torn off the wall, the frames cracked in half. Maureen is in the kitchen with her head in her arms on the table. The window beside her is smashed. The contents of the fridge lie all over the floor, and the glass shelves have been torn out of it. Some kind of orange drink has been spilled on the floor, so as I walk across to the table my sneakers make a sound like ripping cotton. I put my arms around Maureen and put one hand over hers. I rub the back of her thumb with mine. I say, “Who was it? Who did this? Was there a man with a gun in here?” She shakes her head. “Was it your ex-husband?” She shakes her head.

  I let go of her and turn on the kettle. I realize I don’t know her at all. There are three giant yellow tubs of margarine lying on their sides. It seems like an incredible amount of margarine. I can’t believe how much damage there is. I think about the kind of rage it would take to sustain this much damage. I think about the damage the fire caused in Joan’s house. I feel very tired. It seems utterly still. I say, “Where’s your partner? Can I call her for you? Does your partner know this has happened?” The phone book is open beside Maureen. “Let me call your partner for you.”

  Maureen raises her head. Her eyes are sunken and bloodshot from crying or alcohol. “This was my partner,” she says.

  I sit down.

  “This was your partner,” I repeat. “She did this. How did the cops get here?” I am afraid. The kettle whistles. “Where are the tea bags?” She points.

  “She’s caused over twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of damage in the last three months. I’ve had to replace every window more than once. She won’t let me out. She won’t let me see anyone. She’ll be back, she’ll kill me tonight, I can’t get away from her. If she was a man I would have done something, I wouldn’t have put up with it. But it’s taken my mother so long to understand. How could I tell them?”

  The breeze blows gently through the window. It is the sunniest day we’ve had in a long time. You can hear some of the music from the Canada Day celebrations. I ask about the cops.

  “I was sitting on the front step and the glass showered down on top of me and I said by Jesus that’s the last time she’ll break a window in my house. When Tom, my neighbour, came through the door, I was in the process, I was proceeding to kill her. I said, Tom, call the cops, please. They came in and arrested her.”

  Somebody knocks on the door. Maureen crumples.

  “Please don’t let anyone in.”

  I walk out over the glass. A man is standing outside. He says, “I’m with the CBC. Can you tell us what happened here? We heard someone was arrested.”

  I say, “Well, it’s pretty insensitive to come around here right now, isn’t it?”

  He says, “We don’t know what happened, that’s all.”

  I say, “Nobody here’s going to tell you.” It strikes me how absurd it is to speak to him through the broken window without opening the door. Down the street, a man is pointing a camera at us.

  Then Maureen and I drink the tea. We sit in silence until the phone rings. It’s Mike. He asks if everything is okay. He says he is going to order the kids a pizza. I say that sounds good. I tell Maureen Jill can sleep at our house. We get a broom and start to clean up. Maureen hauls out a big sheet of plastic she has for sealing broken windows.

  When I get home, Joan is dressed in Mike’s tuxedo. She hasn’t heard anything about the incident on the street and is dressed to go to the strip joint. I expect the dancers to be ugly in some way, but they have beautiful bodies. They dance on a raised stage and the bottom of it is covered with mirror. I have never been in this bar before. They have ultra-violet lighting that seems to erase everything in the room except whiteness. The women wear white G-strings so their crotches glow as if they are floating. There’s a man in a dark suit and tie sitting at the table in front of me. I glance up and see him in the mirrors around the bottom of the stage. The mirrors reflect him from the neck down; his head is above stage level. His white collar is glowing, sharply cut. At first glance, it looks like a headless body. I watch his hand in the mirror, lifting his Scotch and aiming it at the empty neck of his shirt.

  Joan and I are loaded, walking home past the Anglican cathedral. She starts to cry. I never hug people. I’m not a very physical person. But I hug her suddenly. I draw her body into mine and I grab her hair in my fingers. It shocks me when I realize I have a fistful of her hair in my hand and it is the exact texture of my husband’s. She’s wearing one of my husband’s jackets over the tuxedo. The jacket is gold silk. It looks like a wedding band on him. It has started to rain on our way home, while Joan is crying. The rain falls in giant splotches on the quilted jacket, making it heavy and tarnished.

  PURGATORY’S WILD KINGDOM

  Julian is thinking about the woman and child he left in Newfoundland when he moved to Toronto. He’s remembering Olivia preparing him a sardine sandwich, the way she pressed the extra oil out of each sardine on a piece of paper towel. Then she cut the head and tail off, each sardine, until they were laid carefully on the bread. Her head was bent over the cutting board. Her blond hair slid from behind her ear. He could see the sun sawing on her gold necklace. The chain stuck on her skin in a twisty path that made him realize how hot it was in the apartment. She was wearing a flannel pajama top and nothing else, a coffee-coloured birthmark on her thigh, shaped like the boot of Italy. Eight years ago.

  Julian is sitting at the kitchen table with a pot of coffee. His bare feet are drawn up on the chair, his knees pressed into the edge of the table. It’s a wooden table top that has been rubbed with linseed oil. There are scars from the burning cigarettes his wife occasionally leaves lying around. Small black ovals. There are thousands of knife cuts that cross over each other like the lines on a palm. He runs his finger over the table, tracing the grain of the wood. He pours another cup of coffee, and glances at the phone. Sometimes the university calls for Marika before nine, although they have been told not to. Marika requires only seven hours’ sleep, but if she’s disturbed she’s tired all day. She wakes up at exactly nine every morning. She’s proud of the precision of her inner clock. Julian likes to pick up the
phone before it rings twice. Lately, when the phone rings and Julian answers, nobody speaks.

  Marika is fifteen years older than Julian. The people on this street are very rich. The brick houses are massive. Some of them have been broken into apartments and rented. There’s almost no traffic. The trees block most of the noise. He and Marika don’t know their neighbours. Once, while out taking photographs, Julian met a man three houses up who was riding a sparkling black bike in circles. The man said he was Joe Murphy. Joe Murphy’s Chips sold a large percentage of their product in Newfoundland. He gave the silver bicycle bell two sharp rings.

  “The bike’s a birthday present from my wife. It’s a real beauty, isn’t it?”

  The trees shivered suddenly with wind and sloshed the bike with rippling shadows. Joe Murphy was wearing a suit and tie. The balls of his feet pressed against the pavement and there were sharp little crevices in his shined leather shoes. A crow left a tree and flew straight down the centre of the street. Julian lifted his camera and took a picture of Joe Murphy. In the far distant corner of the frame is the crow. Joe Murphy is out of focus, a blur in the centre of the picture, his face full of slack features. The crow is sharp and black.

  “That makes me very uncomfortable,” said Joe Murphy. “I think you have a nerve.” He gave the bell another sharp ring, and pushed off the curb. His suit jacket flapping.