Alligator - Lisa Moore [16]
The cinematographer spent a long time getting the shadows right, her face becoming remote as marble and mesmerizing. The light struck her brow and cheekbones while she stood in a window, and it was a naked face. The church bell rang out in the middle of the night when there wasn’t a breath of wind. The priest dashing buckets of water over the bell, shouting incantations to rid it of whatever spirit had crawled inside. And there was Isobel, in candlelight, looking lost and alert.
It had taken Madeleine a lifetime to build the kind of career one had to have in order to pull off a feature. Investors saw at once that she could be trusted. These were the credentials she put forth when she argued in her head: I have never failed. I have never given up. I don’t take no for an answer. I’m a hard ticket.
The snow came and when Trevor Barker from the condo upstairs got in the elevator he smelled of snow and nighttime and childhood and lost love and she could smell the cold dripping wet titanium bicycle. They’d made small talk about the bike and keeping in shape. A titanium racing bike she’d seen him ride through snowdrifts going uphill. She had hardly noticed him all winter. But then he’d said about cooking for her. He was a man who enjoyed cooking. There were things he was willing to try. There were things he could do with sesame oil he was pretty certain she’d never tasted before. He had a way with fish, he’d said.
And here she was, their first date. She’d knocked on his apartment door and she heard something drop into a frying pan, something hissing and spitting and she could smell ginger. For a brief instant she thought of turning around. She thought of standing him up. But the door flew open and he was holding a champagne flute and there was bossa nova and the living room was blond and pine but not too much pine. The living room was inviting and she could see the definition in his arms.
The blondest thing in the room was his guitar.
It leaned against the bran sofa and it cried out to be played and she hoped he would not play it. It would be awful to watch him be overtaken with a special absorption, to watch his face go stiff with concentration. She did not want to be reminded that he was younger.
She was certain he had a secret and she didn’t want to know it. The last thing she wanted was to be implicated in some sticky moral rupture. She felt certain he was in a situation, he was just the right age for a situation, perhaps twenty years younger than her, and she hoped she had not been asked up here to listen.
She would indulge. She would pamper. She would cry out in ecstasy later on if things went that way, but she would not placate or console or absolve.
What she wanted was sweaty naked slippery fast slow deep hurtful tender altering sex with some Wagner in the background.
Wagner or the new Loretta Lynn.
She wanted to be drawn out, rapt, spanked. She wanted feathery touches and massage oil, handcuffs. She wanted to eat naked and she wanted him to feed her from his fork.
She hoped they would maybe smoke a joint. He drove the bike with such presence of mind. He was always on it and his body was without flaw. He was long-limbed and his shoulders were woody-looking and his clothes were new.
She had been paying attention to when he came and went throughout the winter, in a vague, distracted way — the way you watch a neighbour come and go. She heard him walk across the floor in the evening.
She could hear water running through his pipes and when his phone rang and his philosophical, turgid guitar. She had heard “Bridge Over Troubled Water” again and again.
She had seen