Alligator - Lisa Moore [14]
MADELEINE
TREVOR BARKER’S APARTMENT was in the same condo as Madeleine’s on Military Road and was all coarse fibres and bran-coloured. It makes her worry about what he will cook. Why hadn’t they gone out to eat? She’d seen the fennel bulbs in his grocery bag and this was what decided her.
His skin was warm-toned and Mediterranean and he made her think of Paris when she was twenty-one. Her honeymoon with Marty, and it was Marty she was thinking about, really, and she didn’t want to be thinking about him. Marty had remarried and had a child on the way and he called her every night when his wife conked out with exhaustion.
A weekend she’d spent in Paris on the way to Germany after a month in North Africa and the city was streaky and saturated with colour. She’s been to Paris since, but it’s the honeymoon she thinks of when she thinks of the city. A grocer putting out his buckets of tulips, she’d posed jauntily with a baguette, and later there was a pool by the Seine. Before the children, when she and Marty had no money and spent every cent they could get their hands on.
She’d watched Trevor carry a bike on his shoulder and work it into the elevator. There were days last winter when she was torn apart by her work on the film, distracted, elated.
First she’d had to secure the funding. To bring an idea like this off the ground required a serious budget. She could be convincing. She could drink, she wore red and black and big silver jewellery. She carried a lucky rabbit’s paw and she was hilarious and sexy, the way she dragged both her hands through her hair and looked up under her brow.
She didn’t do coy because she hated coy. But she could do savvy and raunchy and acerbic. She could do spiritually enlightened if she had to. Coy she would not do. Girlish she would not do. Tenacious she could do.
Madeleine was entranced by her film and she stayed that way all through the winter shoot. She’d wanted Isobel to play the lead. She had written the lead with Isobel in mind. Snowstorms and ploughs and in the night they towed her car and there was all the talk of her heart being weak, angina, clogged arteries — they’d wanted to take a blood vessel out of her leg but she wouldn’t have it. She could barely pay attention to the boy she’d chosen for a doctor, his pen tapping a diagram of the heart, because she was besotted by her film.
She had a fist in her chest and sometimes it squeezed with all its might. Her daughter, Melissa, phoned from Europe to check up on her.
Mom, go back to the doctor, she shouted.
Madeleine felt the pain in her arm and her neck and her jaw but she didn’t give it any attention. She’d given up drinking and red meat, she’d started to exercise. She felt like a born-again Christian after laps in the pool. She’d embraced fad diets, vitamins. She’d tried, fleetingly, to meditate; her son, Andrew, the surgeon, had said about stress; but the tremendous pressure around her heart increased. The winter shoot was over and now they were gearing up for the summer shoot. Thirty days in the snow and sleet, mostly exterior shots. Madeleine had wanted landscape. Isobel had come from Toronto; she had a disturbing fragility, an odd, eerie edge Madeleine had not seen before. Or maybe it had always been there; maybe all the great actresses are fragile. But Isobel had been professional and strong and she’d carried the winter shoot. The rushes were everything Madeleine had hoped for. The landscape was stark and glittering white. She had been dead right about the cinematographer. She could hardly believe they’d got this far, she and the cinematographer, sidestepping ruin at every turn.
They did this on the Southern Shore back in the 1830s: two young men stole a priest’s collar and went