Alligator - Lisa Moore [109]
I don’t have anyone else, he said.
She waited.
The wind nearly took the door out of Frank’s hand. Isobel ducked under his arm.
I was driving past and I thought my card might be ready, she said. She took off a clear plastic rain hat and pulled it taut by the ribbons and droplets bounced out.
He was taken aback by how beautiful she was. He almost said it out loud, without thinking, but they were alone in the room. It was just a few minutes before closing time. He turned the lights back on.
Let me get the mockup, he said. She watched him disappear into the back. She had once acted with a Polish troop. They’d rehearsed naked in a forest in northern Ontario. Chris was directing. It was after they had first met, working on an Artaud play in Montreal. What was the play in the forest? One of Chris’s actors was almost seven feet and had a canary yellow mohawk. Chris made them roll in the mud, naked. She had been twenty, the youngest in the troupe.
What had he said when he got her alone in that stand of birch, white and pink and blue with the sun slashing every which way? She was standing naked, the rain running through the mud down her shins, mud on her face — someone had smacked her in the face with a mud cake. Most of them were on acid. She was on acid. Chris had been videotaping them. They would do Macbeth on acid, had been Chris’s idea. He wanted them to say the lines as if they had already been said.
She was hardly able to see for the rain.
What she would have given to believe wholeheartedly in his project, this relentless living he had proposed. He said security would nullify them. He’d raised his naked arms to the skies and yelled with his head thrown back, Nullify.
Be convincing, he said. That was Chris’s advice. The ultimate lesson for the actor, the content doesn’t matter.
Deliver, he said. He wanted her emptied out. He wanted her to give up herself. Chris said to remember they were not the thing they were pretending to be. He wouldn’t have that sort of moral turpitude, that Stanislavsky slop. They had to be who they were and who they weren’t at the same time. He would accept nothing less. We convince, he yelled.
And when she did run into him later it was at the soap audition. She’d come into the room and could not see because of the footlights. They turned off the lights and there he was. His eyes were the same crazy eyes. But it was a soap opera; he was directing a soap.
And walking along Yonge Street afterwards, she had cried. Because she’d wanted the naked afternoon in the woods to be true — the mud and rain and acid and all the emoting. She wasn’t willing to live like that herself, but she wanted it to endure.
She was standing with her hands behind her back looking at the giant corkboard of sample business cards. Frank slid her card across the counter and she picked it up. She held the card out at arm’s length. She was shaken slightly, being in the boy’s presence, though he didn’t know who she was. She had wanted to see him with her own eyes. She needed to know his face wasn’t scarred.
She snapped the arms of her glasses open and put them on the tip of her nose. She wore one of those cords to keep the glasses around her neck and she seemed too young for it. She was frowning at the card, her chin crimped.
You want, she said. Then she took a deep breath, raised a hand in the air, fingers spread. A giant ring covered most of her index finger. It was a dragon.
Spaciousness, she said. She snapped the card down on the counter.
This is too busy, she said. She pushed it across the counter to him with one finger. Frank picked up the business card. They had gone over every detail together on the phone. It was a card advertising dinner theatre.
We could adjust the font, he said. I don’t know what you think of italics.
A business card, she said. You want it to feel as roomy as a golf course.
Frank scissored over the low counter