Alligator (21 page)

There were bookshelves in every room, and there were open paperbacks, turned over on the coffee tables and the stairs and the bathroom counter. Isobel read in the bath and on the landing. She left scarves draped over the backs of chairs. He had walked into her bedroom one afternoon and she was naked, lying on her stomach; she was reading in the heat, her legs crossed at the ankle and swinging a little; the small of her back was shiny with perspiration.

Listen, she’d said. An ice-cream vendor. Then he heard the bells. But it was someone selling root vegetables. He had found her on another hot afternoon trudging fast on her treadmill, reading something else.

It was a shame about the treadmill. He knew he could get good money for it but he had decided not to take anything out of the house. It was a rule; he believed in rules. Anything that might weasel through the tight fist of his plan could be beaten back with a fast hard rule. Leave the treadmill. Leave the cat. Leave the piano and her scarves and books. Leave her jewellery and the pharmaceuticals. He wouldn’t get caught for the price of a second-hand treadmill.

There was an open Chinese umbrella resting on the door to the living room. She had a collection of masks carved from coconut shells that were important to her. All of this would go up easily.

Over the summer she’d played her piano for him. She sat on the bench with her back straight and shoulders squared. It was music he could make no sense of, discordant and full of storm. Sometimes he leaned on the piano and watched her face while she played. Her nostrils flared and her eyes narrowed as if she were judging a grave matter. She had a habit of raising her chin slightly and looking down her nose at the sheets of music. Her hands were like claws, stiff and surprised. The water in the fish-bowl on top of the piano absorbed the vibrations of her playing and concentric rings trembled over the surface. The goldfish held still in the very centre of the bowl, electric and alert. Valentin could feel the music through his elbow and he watched intently as she closed her eyes altogether and her head began to sway or jerk, some quaking argument taking her over.

Once, she had invited him to sit in her backyard and she gave him a tall, wet glass of crushed ice and fruit, some pink, milky drink with black seeds suspended throughout.

Absolutely in
can
descent with vitamins, she’d said.

She had flopped into the chair beside him and they had been silent. She had tilted her face toward the sun and her lips were full and wet and she was smiling to herself. She was full of serenity and it agitated him. He thought about kissing her roughly, stirring her up. She had been wearing a navy dress with white polka dots, form-fitting and stiff, full of straps.

She took a deep breath and held it and he waited and then she breathed out and she told him to take off his shoes.

It’s too hot for shoes, she’d said. When he ignored her, she got down on her knees in the grass and the slit in her polka-dot skirt rode all the way up her thigh and he could see the lacy trim of her underwear, which was magenta and satin.

She took off his boots and then his socks. She kneaded his feet until they hurt. She hurt him very sharply, digging with her knuckles. He knew his feet were clean and he’d used a powder for odour and he didn’t mind her touching him in this way. She pressed her thumbs between his toes and pinched the skin as hard as she could.

You store your saddest memories in your feet, she’d said.

The dress was low-cut and her bra was the same colour as her panties and when he closed his eyes he could still see the colour on the inside of his eyelids. It was hot in the garden and he thought of the dentist’s widow, how her baby had cried all night behind a rag of a curtain. He had tasted the widow’s breast milk, sucking hard on her nipples, though she had tried to slap him away. In the morning when he got up he saw the house was surrounded in every direction by a field of lavender and the wind brought the scent to him and he thought the woman’s breast milk had tasted like that, like the flowers.

Isobel pressed her thumbs into his arches and she talked, as if to herself, about how things were in St. John’s and perhaps every town or city in the western world. She talked about an inside and an outside and she said she was on the outside, had always been on the outside, and the outside wasn’t safe for a woman her age.

She said she could have done something else, but perhaps she couldn’t have done anything else. There was a vast spectrum of emotion and she had, at one time or another, fallen prey to all of it. She had felt; it was her special gift.

Perhaps we are made a certain way, she had said. She kept talking and she was impassioned and soft-spoken and he could not follow her. There was no logic in what she said or else he couldn’t translate it.

She said she was getting old and she had put nothing away. She’d had a faith in simply having faith. And it had turned out to be true, there were advantages to being outside, she’d said. But look at her now. She was lost. Financially, anyway, she said. She’d laughed and dug into his foot so hard it caused a cramp and he had to stand and shake the foot.

She’d put her hand over her eyes to block the sun and when she looked up at him her eyes looked too bright. He felt he had walked over a thousand miles of broken rock and that all the smallest bones in his feet had been crushed. She was talking about fate. He would never accept that any single thing was the way it was because it had to be that way. He would not accept it.

I have nothing to fall back on, she said. He saw tears come to her eyes. She had once cried for him on demand. She said she could do it in less than a minute and he had timed her.

They had been sitting at the kitchen table over breakfast. She put her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her hands and she became very still.

Go, he said. He watched her nose and cheeks and chin grow pink; he saw her chin crinkle a little and her lower lip tremble and then he saw tears drip from both eyes quick, quick down her cheeks. She had accomplished this in less than forty seconds.

She should have sprayed the worms, Valentin thought, as he waited by her front door. There was a suffocating laziness about her; she was too easily overwhelmed. If she had taken care of the worms he might have married her. He didn’t care what she thought about, or who she was, she probably didn’t know herself. Most people had no idea what they thought. He had a rigid, generous notion of love; it was without guile, full of sacrifice. It was fearful sex followed by overwrought, motherly tenderness. It was true he and Isobel had had sex like that; merciless, raw, religious sex they had passed through the way a plane passes through a bank of dark cloud to come out in the blinding red sun; but outside of the sexual act he knew she was keeping something in reserve. He might have married her, but at her core she was no more substantial than a soap bubble.

The night after Isobel had massaged his feet he’d woken in sweat, his heart tearing through his chest, and he couldn’t get back to sleep. He had dreamt that someone in the mall had handed him a cellphone and his mother had spoken to him. It was her voice, just as if she were in the room.

Sometimes it wasn’t a life at all, she’d said.

He stayed awake, thinking about his mother, until dawn. Her simple sentence had seemed cryptic to him, full of unmanageable heartbreak. The cellphone, with its shushing static, had sounded like a tomb.

They hadn’t had sex since Isobel had accepted the idea of the fire. Seeing the sandals on the mat he felt glad he had decided to burn the house down. He wanted to teach her that things could change. It was a matter of taking charge.

He had imagined the fire and what he had seen for her was a small boutique of some sort. He didn’t like her. There was nothing to like. She was not committed to anything. He had no idea why he saw her selling perfume, but that is what he saw.

She’d told him she never slept with married men because they had been formed by years of routine and she couldn’t count on them to falter or be alert or to know what was at stake. She’d said she didn’t have the stamina to stand in front of a camera any more. She had come back from a publicity shoot where she’d posed in front of a cliff that was encased in ice. Though it had been ten below, she was wearing a chiffon dress and a tiny white synthetic stole that had wide satin ribbons and that looked like a toilet seat cover. The photographer’s knees were bent. He was crouched with the camera angled up at her, it was obscene. She watched the shutter flick and flick and flick. She had summoned what she thought of as her soul to the surface of her skin and stared into the lens with it.

Forehead, the photographer said. And chin.

She’d given her hair a toss, unfurrowed her brow.

And chin, the photographer said. She’d lowered her chin. She had been pouring herself into camera lenses since she was eighteen and she had done this for her entire career without questioning the effects of the transference. She knew, now, that she had been diminished. She had become unknowable. The thing is, we’re all unknowable, but we usually mask it. Now her unknowableness had surfaced.

There’s a point, she’d said, when there’s more behind you than what’s ahead. It’s called regret. It can happen any time in a life — when what has happened is more vivid than what will happen. She had been twenty when she fell in love with Chris. She has been looking over her shoulder ever since.

Valentin leaned in again to look through the window and saw a flash in the band of sunlight that came through the window above the landing and then she was at the front door in her red dress, she held her white cat in her arms.

He had told her she would have to leave the cat, but there she was in the doorway of her house with the cat in her arms. He had told her to leave the garden as it was but when she peeled back the lid of one of the Tupperware containers and he smelled the greenness of the tomatoes, bitter and hard and full of promise, he let her take them.

It was plausible she would bring tomatoes, he decided.

The hallway was dark and cool and she passed him the cat and bent over the hall table to put on her lipstick in the mirror. He thought about wringing the cat’s neck. He knew how to kill it with his hands so that it would die quickly and almost soundlessly. He was suddenly full of rage about the cat. He didn’t want a cat in his truck and he had told her to forget the cat. He was angry that she had defied him.

He thought of wringing the cat’s neck and throwing the limp body at her back. He was rubbing the animal’s cheek with his thumb and it started to purr.

Isobel went into the kitchen and he followed her. She was barefoot just as he had imagined. He saw she had done the dishes, and this placated him. The dishes in the dish rack looked exactly as they should. They looked like an ongoing project. They looked like a middle-aged actress going off for a weekend to visit her family in Old Perlican.

She turned on the water and let it run and she took a glass from the cupboard and filled the glass and drank all of it and threw the glass at his head. She whipped it across the room, but her aim was off and it hit the wall above his head and smashed all over the floor. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

He had her wait in the truck with the cat and her tomatoes and he poured the gasoline in all the rooms and on the staircase. The gas glug-glugged out of the plastic containers and sloshed over her books and clothes and he was careful not to get it on his shoes. He poured lots of it into her furniture and on her bed and doused all the curtains. He splashed the walls. He had an idea it needed to soak in. The fumes hurt his nose and he could feel a pain in his forehead, but he wanted everything soaked through and through. He wanted the house to go up all at once.

He drove Isobel and the cat to Old Perlican, stopping at the beach for a soft-serve ice cream. He had reached over during the ride and put his hand on Isobel’s thigh and the cat hissed and pricked him with its claws and Isobel removed his hand. The idea of the fire had made her look less intense. He decided he liked her better this way, becalmed, pleasantly subdued. There had been too much pent up inside her to begin with. Whatever she was scared of, whatever she had wanted so much, all of that was over. She would just have to work the counter of a cosmetic boutique.

When they were driving past Northern Bay Sands she said she wanted to swim. She was tapping the window with her fingernail. He saw children with inflated air mattresses and towels and snorkels and he thought why not let her swim.

We can leave the cat, she said.

COLLEEN

W
HEN I WAS
a kid we went out in a glass-bottomed boat. This was a vacation in Barbados. My mother was wearing a white, semi-transparent blouse and orange bikini and a hat with a floppy brim. I was sitting with my feet on the warm glass and watching the fish flick past, orange and blue and red, transparent and silver. All these different kinds and coral and the sunlight refracted in the waves making lacy shadows on the white sandy bottom.

Mom was drinking from a coconut shell and she had already given me the little umbrella when something big and dark swam under us.

So dark and blurred it made me scream, but no one else had been looking down. I was the only one to have seen it. Back on the beach, in the brilliant sun, bartering for shell necklaces it was easy to believe I’d imagined it.

But the fish, I think it was a shark, has come back to me in dreams ever since. Not the glass-bottomed boat, or the way the sunlight pierced the weave of Mom’s hat, making white freckles of light all over her cheeks, or later that night sleeping between Mom and David. What I dream is falling over. Some part of me wants to fall over. In every dream I am about to fall over the side and be devoured by something.

When I asked Madeleine about the alligator footage she said the man had suffered brain damage. The teeth had punctured his skull in several places and infection set in. But he had recovered. Or pretty much recovered.

He runs an ecological reserve in Louisiana, Madeleine said. He farms alligators and puts them back in the wild.