Alligator - Lisa Moore [27]
It was an uncertainty that lasted for almost a month. During that month his hearing became unbearably sensitive. Words failed him. What do you call the utensil you eat soup with? The struggle for the word caused an acute anxiety. He would think he was speaking Russian and realize it was English. He would tell a French waitress he wanted a thing to eat his spoon but he would be speaking English. He would say he meant soup but he had switched to Russian.
He’d made love to the widow of a dentist in Bosnia and had taken her husband’s dental instruments in a satchel and claimed he was a professional for so long that a weak paper trail identified him as such and he had crossed some European borders he would not have crossed if they’d known he was a common thug. By the end of it he could remove a rotten tooth with the appropriate tool causing minimal pain.
Thug was an English word with which he identified. He liked its truncated sound, its gangster-movie anonymity, its gritty truthfulness.
He’d read a book called The Successful Executive published in the 1930s and found everything he had already assumed to be correct. Ask questions later. Don’t ask. There was a stream of philosophy that recommended reflection but those guys were all dead. He could persuade, or coerce, he had both these abilities. He had an intermittent genius that came and went like a bad cellphone connection. Plans came to him this way: fully formed and without flaw.
For example, he had decided he would douse the house on Morris Avenue with gasoline. He would take the pickup to every gas station in St. John’s over the period of two weeks and fill up three five-gallon plastic tanks in each gas station.
The idea of torching the house came to him when Isobel Turner was opening her mail. She had a letter from her insurance company and as she stood reading it she opened the breadbox and then became still, transfixed by the statement.
She put the statement on the counter and took out the loaf of bread. She said insurance rates had doubled since she bought the house. She said this to the toaster. She picked up the statement again and the toaster began to smoke. At first she did nothing.
The fire alarm began to bleat and it was a new design with a female voice between each peal of shrilling rings that said, This is an automated message. This is a fire alarm. This is a fire alarm.
Isobel flapped at it with the dishtowel, dragged a chair over, and pulled the batteries out. The toaster made a grinding squeal and she got a fork from the drawer and poked at the bread that was blackened and tossed it, smoking, into the garbage bucket under the sink.
She’d bought the house fifteen years before, filled it with her grandmother’s furniture. The contents of her grand-mother’s house in Old Perlican had been left to her in a will. She’d rented out the house to a family until she came home from Toronto. The husband had worked for the telephone company and his wife had kept the house immaculate, as if it were her own.
Valentin had sent her flowers in December, after they had spent their first night together. He had been gentle with her and he found a way to respect her during the evening. She was a woman who enjoyed sex, who could summon a kind of exaltation. There was no trace of selfishness in the way she made love. When she came, Valentin thought of it as a kind of giving over; the soft clutching of her orgasms sent tremors through him. He decided, too, that Isobel Turner had been smart once, but something had got away from her. She wasn’t smart any more.
She was working on a film shoot that winter and after they made love she would put in a fire and go over her lines. He watched her lips move while she silently memorized the script. She hardly knew he was there.
He could see a gaping weakness in her, a profound vulnerability that he knew he could take advantage of. He’d known nervous people; he’d