Alligator (23 page)

He never wanted close again. He had been living with close his whole life.

He wanted to communicate how this acceptance of second-best infuriated him and the guy better find a way to mix the right colour.

One of the women at the Salvation Army was named Gert, and the other was Shirley, according to their nametags. Frank could tell by looking at them they were seriously religious women, and he saw they kept a stern eye out for shoplifters and they stood in the late-afternoon light with their arms crossed under their chests and watched the weather come in over the harbour.

Frank had been coming to the Salvation Army on Waldegrave with his mother ever since he was born, but he wasn’t sure that they put him together with the baby and small kid he had been, or if they thought about his mother and wondered what had happened to her.

On the January day when Frank got the sugar bowl, Gert had pulled a chair across the floor and was leaning with a long pole to unhook a wedding dress from the ceiling. The dress was swathed in plastic and the plastic was covered in dust and Gert had to lean out too far and had lifted one foot in the air like a ballerina and Johnny, the groom-to-be, took her hand.

Frank saw how firmly he held her hand, saying, Hold on to me, Gert girl, before you break your neck. Everyone in the store was watching the hook sway slightly here and there around the wedding dress hanger, which was hooked over a waterpipe hanging just below the ceiling.

Gert lowered the wedding dress and shook off the plastic, clawing at it, and without the dusty plastic, the wedding dress, they all saw, was covered in sequins and it crackled with light and the girl with the misaligned face had covered her mouth with both her hands.

This dress was never worn, Gert whispered. She had fished a pricetag out of the froth and it said the dress was worth $1,500.

The girl gathered the dress up in her arms and went into the tiny dressing room and Gert and Shirley turned at once and started clucking and waving their arms at Johnny, telling him to turn around for the love of God and close his eyes.

After a few moments Shirley called out, Does it fit?

The door of the dressing room creaked open and the bride came out, and she was a scalded red with embarrassment and pride. She ducked her head into her shoulder and the beauty of the dress seemed more than she could bear. The red in her face made her eyes a dark, dark brown. Her misaligned face was lit up by her blushing and for a minute she looked weirdly beautiful.

Frank thought that maybe in the future this Johnny guy would beat the shit out of her, or they’d just live on welfare for the rest of their lives, or they wouldn’t know about Canada’s four food groups and the kids would be eating cake with blue icing blocked with sugar and chemicals and chips and cola and they’d be saucy and out of control all the time, and the parents would get something like cancer or they’d be alcoholics or have gambling addictions, but for now, in the middle of a snowstorm with the dress on, the girl, Frank saw, was ecstatic.

Frank saw her shoulders and neck were covered in deep brown freckles but below her neck the skin looked creamy and her body was pretty nice. Then he found the lid to the sugar bowl, his fingers had just brushed against it. It wasn’t chipped and there was a small dip to fit a spoon in.

This sugar bowl, now in the cupboard in front of him, on the yellow mactac is shimmering, struck as it is by the light from the window and he takes it down and puts it on the counter and is humiliated as he remembers that he thought he would marry Colleen after a one-night stand.

He thought he would marry her.

From one night of making love he thought they were going to get married and everything he gathered together from that night on would be for her too. If he found a sugar bowl, it would be for her. If he bought an exercise bike or took cooking lessons or if they got into yoga or signed a mortgage, it would be for her.

He had allowed himself to be duped on such a grand scale that it made him light-headed.

He looked at the sugar bowl and this is what he thought: And I still love her. Because he thought of taking the strawberries from the fridge that were very cold and he had squashed one in his fist and tried to get the juice that ran over his knuckles to drip into her mouth but instead it ran down her chin and onto her neck and the smell of it on her skin when he licked it, and she liked what he was doing, which amazed him.

She licked his knuckles that were sticky with juice and she took his finger in her mouth and sucked it and he thought he was having the love tugged out of him. Tugging every single drop of love and loss and sexual-wanting-to-fuck and aloneness up out of his body through his finger with her gorgeous hot wet mouth, the way a magician tugs an unending line of knotted silk scarves from a gloved fist. Her mouth was a fist and he wanted it elsewhere. Her eyelashes were sooty and thick and her cheekbones and the strawberry smell was full of summer and when he lifted her up against the wall was she ever light.

And when she came, which he had never made a girl come before, he saw her eyes fly open and how startled she was, and that look was love he was pretty sure.

Even if she did take the goddamn money, which he knew she didn’t need for anything, she just took it.

He took down the coffee jar and scooped out five spoonfuls. Then he tore back the bedsheets to check for a note.

For a minute he thought she might have left a note. He opened the door to the fire escape, half expecting to find the girl there.

When she wasn’t there he felt the room behind him beat like a heart, thumpthump, thumpthump, and it was a very empty room and he realized that no matter how much it was clear she had duped him, he couldn’t get it through his head.

COLLEEN

F
RANK HAD FALLEN
in love with her while they were having sex; she watched it happen. She fully expected to be caught and perhaps beaten up for taking his money. She had just met this guy in a bar and she went home with him and what happened was her eyes flew open and his eyes were already open and she’d had an orgasm, which was something that had never happened to her before.

And it had
happened to her
, unbidden and unexpected; her eyes flew open and his were already open.

He’d looked proud and shy. She’d been swallowing Jell-O shooters at the bar, layered globs of vodka and tequila and crème de menthe with a tiny wizened mushroom in the centre of each layer. She’d found herself convulsed with weeping after the orgasm: a wrung-out, lust-fuelled loss of self, an expulsion of her soul through her eyes and sweat glands and vagina and ears such as usually only happens in dreams.

Frank dealt with her crying the way one might treat a runover cat. He moved her gingerly and with lavish care until her forehead was resting on his collarbone; he kept very still. He smoothed her hair, which was full of static from his sweater; he didn’t actually touch her hair but patted down the brittle aura of electricity that circled her head.

Get it all out of you, he’d said. The bed rocked and gurgled with her sobs. He had hummed “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” with such gravity and profound lack of tempo that it took her a long time to recognize it. She was almost asleep when she heard him say, I love you.

He told her he loved her and the words tumbled down the drunken, bottomless well of her with a sombre finality.

As a thirteen-year-old she’d started drinking and smoking dope in the parking lot behind her school among broken beer bottles and cigarette butts and the hopscotch games drawn on the pavement with coloured chalk. There were bushes at the edge of the lot and she’d gone in there and allowed boys to grope her and put hickeys on her neck and eventually to do whatever they liked, sometimes two at a time. It had all happened in a haze of camaraderie and coercion that everybody forgot, as best they could, the next day. Maybe she was crying for all of that.

Or she was crying because of a glimmer of self-doubt concerning the bulldozers. Maybe she’d been wrong about the bulldozers. Or she was crying because Frank had no idea how vulnerable he was. Frank’s innocence was jolting and sensual and she felt the need to destroy it as quickly as possible.

In the morning, while Frank slept, she quietly put on her socks and reached under the bedside table for her shoes. She had the first mural painting meeting for juvenile delinquents in a couple of hours and she was still a little drunk. Her hand brushed against a cobweb and then a fat white envelope that she pulled out and opened. There were twenty-five hundred-dollar bills inside it. She counted them, careful not to let the paper rustle.

She tucked the envelope down the front of her jeans, one sharp corner digging into her hip. She bent to pick up her shoes and the room swayed. She stood up fast, holding the shoes near her chest. The room was mildly swaying in circles. It lurched and settled down and behaved itself.

The deadbolt made a screech. Frank’s face was turned toward her and his eyelashes were very dark and he was engaged in a sleep full of trust. He was thoroughly spent and his cheeks were flushed and she thought of him as a solitary boy, more solitary than any young man she’d ever met.

He’d listened so intently while she talked during the night. She’d flopped onto his bed and it wobbled violently. She spanked the waterbed with both arms and felt the swells.

Once, I was nearly decapitated, she said brightly. She told Frank about being at the Confederation Building when she was seven or eight, one in a phalanx of overheated Brownies and Cubs, during an official occasion of some sort and an elderly gentleman, a former soldier in full regalia, had drawn a ceremonial sword, but it was too heavy for him and it came down over his shoulder and would have probably cut her head off cleanly — she was standing directly behind the old man in her little brown dress with all its splendid badges — except her mother, who had always been overprotective and doting, had pulled her out of its path.

I felt the swoosh, she told him. The breeze from the blade. She closed her eyes and imagined her seven-year-old head with its smart little Brownie tam still perched at an angle, rolling over the floor of the Confederation Building, Brownies everywhere stepping out of its path.

I think the mushrooms are kicking in, she’d whispered.

She opened the door very slowly, still clutching her shoes to her chest. The hinges yelped. She heard a slosh from the mattress behind her and froze, not even breathing, and then she was out in the hallway and down the stairs. She had put herself in peril, Colleen thought, and then retrieved herself from peril. She liked to see what she could get away with, how far she could go.
This time you’ve gone too far, young lady
. What she wanted was bacon and eggs. She didn’t put her shoes on until she was around the street corner.

She headed for The Bagel Café and the cruise ship was still docked in the harbour and she saw a party hat lying in the gutter. It was a cone of silver cardboard with a print of birthday cakes all over it. It was rolling back and forth in the breeze and the sun sent a white flare running down its side. It looked like a dunce cap and she was seized instantly with remorse for taking Frank’s money. A consuming self-hatred, a wish for instant annihilation, the sort of swoosh that would leave no trace. There seemed to be no getting beyond it. She had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and the people in the cars driving past saw a bedraggled, washed-out girl staring at the ground in front of her, arrested, still as a statue, clutching her hair with two fists.

She withstood the remorse. She closed her eyes as she had seen her mother do when facing her own moral failings. If she had learned anything from her mother it was not to wallow in self-doubt. Doubt was a luxury, according to her mother, and it was always better to act, however unsure you might be. She would eat a big breakfast, she was starving, and find the mural painters at the Murphy Centre. She couldn’t think of Frank or the pine martens or anything else until she was completely sober.

FRANK

I
T WAS ALMOST
midnight when Carol showed up at the hotdog stand. She was wearing sweatpants and a cardigan and a black baseball cap; a pink curler hung behind each ear. Her fists were jammed into the pockets of her cardigan. He could see her knuckles pressing against the knit.

He’d never seen her on George Street before.

Frank, you’ve got to come home, she said. Frank handed the man in front of him his hot dog.

There’s water everywhere, Carol said. Frank watched as the man tried to get some bacon bits. He was weaving slightly and wore a look of deep thought. Carol was pulling on Frank’s sleeve.

Don’t mix up the spoons, sir, Frank said. The man held the plastic spoon from the corn relish in the air; he was blinking in disbelief.

The different condiments each got their own spoon, Frank said.

Can’t I have bacon? the man asked.

The plaster is after cracking off the ceiling, Carol said.

You can have bacon, just could you use the spoon for the bacon, Frank said.

There’s an inch of water, Carol said. I’m afraid to turn on a lamp I’ll be electrocuted. It’s coming from your apartment, Frank. Could you have maybe put something down the toilet?

Go ahead, Frank said. The man was still holding the spoon in the air as if he were paralyzed by it.

Go ahead what?

Whatever spoon you want, Frank said.

A tampon or something, Carol said.

Is it real bacon? the man asked.

The girl you had up there the other night, I thought maybe a tampon is the first thing I thought.

It’s bacon bits, said Frank. The man dug the spoon in deep and the bacon bits danced and hopped all over the spoon and mostly spilled on the sidewalk before he got the spoon to the hot dog. Then he put the hot dog down on the chrome ledge and staggered off without it.

Frank’s apartment door was open when he got there and he stood in the hallway and listened. Carol stood beside him.

He turned on the light and saw everything was soaking wet. He pulled the covers off the waterbed and saw it had been slashed from the headboard to the footboard. One long gash.