Alligator - Lisa Moore [17]
There was a head of radicchio on the counter and she’d seen a package of mascarpone. She had a craving for whatever Trevor Barker would cook and to have sex and for it to get dark and he could light the fat candles on the mantle and she could just take the elevator back to her own condo when they were done.
She wanted to be done. She didn’t know what she wanted. How irritating to be ruffled. She had been jubilant moments ago — a date with a younger man — pushing the tiny leather strap of her shoe through the tiny buckle just below her ankle, the swish of her gauzy skirt, atoms of sprayed perfume still hanging in the air. How instantly her granite confidence evaporated. There, not there.
But here was the wine in an ice bucket and she bet it was very cold. She didn’t want a relationship with Trevor Barker; she didn’t want a relationship. What she wanted, actually, was an idle conversation on the phone with her ex-husband, Marty.
She wanted to hear Marty puffing his cigar. She wanted to hear the ice in his glass. She wanted to hear the scratchy static of a baseball game, broadcast from some southern state, on the transistor radio he keeps on his desk, turned down low. There is no such thing as a one-night stand; she has never seen one.
Three thirteen-year-old girls had jump-started cars and driven them all over town last winter. The police tailed one girl and she tried to outrun them. She’d gone through the red light on Topsail Road by Brookfield Road and through the light after that and it took seven police cars to box her in by the Village Mall. She would be painting the murals Trevor had financed all summer. They were doing waves because waves are about change and empowerment, Madeleine had read in the Express. The girl boxed in by seven police cars was at present in charge of waves rolling toward a sandy beach. She was a girl who had never held a paintbrush before.
Please, no what do you do or who are your parents or what kind of books. Nothing of the ex-wives and children and seashore reveries, no life-altering moments and minor illuminations.
What if she said about his bike, and how she had heard him practise “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and whatever was that delicious smell, sautéed ginger and what?
She could forgive “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” She could be magnanimous when she had to be. She glanced into the bedroom.There was a futon on the floor.This made her reassess.
There was a spiritual aspect to a futon, some mystical benevolence that she wanted to steer clear of. She did not want to make love on a futon. Her futon days were over.
Will we sit? Trevor Barker asked. He was pouring the wine into glasses he had taken from the freezer. They were foggy with frost.
We could sit, yes, let’s just sit.
Then sit, sit wherever you like. She undid the tiny buckles on her sandals and slipped them off and stretched her legs. The sofa demanded this sort of casual sprawl. It was dark out now and the city was lit up and Mount Pearl was lit up and it spread much farther than five years ago. There was a yielding hardness about the sofa and she realized it was a beanbag couch. The couch threatened to slowly, gradually, swallow her whole, and she thought she might just let herself be swallowed. Why not give in? If there was a mess later on, let there be a mess. Strings of orange lights and a few pink and thousands of white and the headlights of cars moved through the whole city like quick, quick