Alligator - Lisa Moore [108]
Look at me, she’d say, holding his cheeks. It means the world to me when you do well in school, she’d say. Once he’d brought a math test home with a gold star and she’d moved her thumb over it and when she looked up she was exultant.
The wind made the raindrops on the windowpane shiver and then drove them sideways cross the glass. He brought the paper cutter down over the last stack of card.
Some girl looking for you, Lana said. Frank lifted the blade.
Lana pulled the bucket behind her so the wheels rattled over the tiles. He listened to her moving around in the other room, emptying the bucket, flushing the toilet.
Lana was washing the coffee mugs and called to him over the running water.
You know I’m taking Monday, she said. Then she jumped because he was standing behind her. He had a way of creeping up.
I don’t want to talk to anyone who’s phoning me, he said. Lana looked at him for a long moment, then picked up a rag and started on the counters.
A call comes for you, I mention it, she said.
He knew it was Colleen. He wanted his money back. Lana was some sort of Gypsy. Her husband was a fisherman during the crab season and worked at Stoker’s Auto in the winter. Lana had talked once about roasting goat on a spit over an open fire. You could see the snow coming through the mountain pass, she’d said. They’d eaten eggs and bacon fried on the engine of a car when she was growing up.
We moved in caravans, she’d said. I saw all of Europe as a child. It made Frank wish he had known Lana back then. If he and his mother could have travelled in caravans and eaten goat.
It got dark, Lana said, while we chewed the bones and afterwards the violins came out.
ISOBEL
GIVE THE LINES the time they need to materialize. This is essential. Actors forget this and it’s the only thing they’re required to remember, let the lines materialize.
There was a girl of twenty standing in the middle of the classroom, her hair drawn back in a ponytail, wearing sweats, holding a script.
Get up and take a book off a bookshelf if you must, Isobel said. Be deliberate and vague at the same time.
She told them she had once played Napoleon. Even Napoleon had to look uncertain. She’d worn one of those hats.
Here was her advice: Watch a person get on the bus or peel the paper lining away from a muffin. See how lost and present they are. Emulate this. That is acting: the alchemy of absence and presence. Embody the character, agree there is no character; there’s only a series of linked gestures, fudged acts, reprieves. She was teaching an evening course at the university. They had a growing drama department and she was finding she could pick up at least one course a semester. She was thinking about dinner theatre. There was a growing market with the cruise ships. It was something she could do easily.
What people don’t understand about regret is that it incubates; this was her strong hand. She knew regret and it was a hue in her palette the younger actresses didn’t have. They could not muster that tone. Regret could cast shadows in a performance: to have fucked up grandly, that could make you an actress of note, especially if you hadn’t got caught. There was talk of a big shoot the following summer. She’d received an e-mail. There was talk of a Hollywood actor, someone halfway big, and they wanted local colour.
First, you think the lines out, and then you say them. Say the lines as if everything has already been settled.
He had called once, after the fire. He said he was going to cover for her. She hadn’t spoken because she was sick about the boy. She hadn’t known — no part of her had guessed — he was capable of it. His capacity for hatred was stunning, shattering.
You’ll get the money, he’d said. He waited for her to answer. He had left the boy to burn alive. Isobel had slept with him, he had touched her.
Don’t hang up, he said. Please.
She couldn’t speak and the receiver was slippery in her hand, but she didn’t hang up. She couldn’t. She could feel