Alligator - Lisa Moore [47]
You’re so demanding, he’d said. She was shocked by how stinging he could be. For some reason it stung. She was demanding, she knew.
Her arm is numb; she stretches her fingers but they’re stiff. She can see through the frosted glass of her office window, the girls from the costume department, standing around the coffee-maker in the hallway, probably having a smoke. Did she pay people to stand around? Guy has drawn up a chair; suddenly bored with skylights, he’s taken a crab sandwich from his satchel. He unfolds the wax paper and finds a packet of pepper. He tears it with his teeth. He opens the sandwich and taps the packet and slides half of the sandwich across the desk to her.
It’s only a film, Madeleine, he says.
Guy, she says. He has almost won and they both know it. The summer shoot will be magnifique, he says. He waves the sandwich in the air, to let her know he can foresee the entire shoot in all its glory.
Guy, she says. His mouth is full and he’s trying to swallow so he can speak.
There will be colour, Madeleine, he says. She and Marty had met a German painter living in Marrakesh. Big abstract explosions of colour, orange embers falling through the night sky, smoke and it might have been the Big Bang or Dresden or a future apocalypse. They three stood before each painting and the German clapped his hands twice and a maid appeared with a bowl of tangerines and later they were told he was a former Nazi who liked little boys.
It was that afternoon they’d seen the snake. There was the snake in the medina; she remembers hearing the rattle inside a woven basket, an ancient shimmy-shimmer all about death. How many people get to hear that in a lifetime?
Guy has pulled the spreadsheet toward him from her side of the desk, he’s running his finger down the columns of figures — intolerable — what does he know about budget, how dare he? But to let a man decide for a change, to give up the responsibility, just for a moment, to play dumb — she considers it.
A nearly naked man surrounded by a crowd in the medina had tipped the lid off a basket with his toe and played a reedy pipe. A weaving snake came up out of the basket, standing perhaps two feet high. Madeleine saw its lips were stitched together. A veil of perspiration sprang to her face, sweat dripped down the nape of her neck. The noise of the medina, the reedy, complaining music from the pipe had new, unearthly pitch.
A cart drawn by a donkey passed behind her and she suspected the squeaking of the wheels was an ingenious code, each wheel emitting a syncopation of dots and dashes of a frequency so high only dogs and ham-radio operators could decipher it.
Marty saw her eyes were glassy and she spent the next three days in a fever, puking, shitting, and shivering. It was an illness that never left her entirely, coming back over the years with renewed strength, making her feel as if she had been pummelled with a hammer, showing up in the darkest part of winter when she was in the throes of production. She was always in the throes of production.
Steady belt, her sister, Beverly, called it. I’ll be down with soup, Beverly said, whenever Madeleine was ill. Don’t get out of bed, I’ll be down with soup.
But in Marrakesh, Marty had taken care of her. He’d pinched her skin to see how dehydrated she was and found himself running through the narrow corridors of the medina past the stinking vats of urine where they dyed leather, the light-pierced banners of fuchsia and violet cotton, and the stalls that sold spices all heaped in cones of soft mossy green and rust and brown, in search of a stall where he might purchase a thermometer.
When he took her temperature the red line crept beyond all the numbers and she was speaking in tongues and he wondered how he would get her body back to Canada when she died but on the third day she was fine and they decided to head back to Europe.
She drops the pencil, remembering Marty’s relief when the fever broke. He had cried, his shoulders shaking. They were just kids on that trip and they’d hardly had any money.