Alligator - Lisa Moore [55]
Mornings are the best time of the day, she’d said.
Marty hadn’t looked up from his book.
Things smell better when you wake up early. He’d turned a page.
What are you reading? She put her cup down. What are you reading right now? Tell me the sentence.
It wouldn’t interest you.
Tell me anyway.
The sentence I’m reading right now?
The very sentence, yes, I want to know exactly what you’re thinking at this instant and every instant for the rest of your life, basically.
Okay, the sentence I’m reading now: We will see, for example, the wheel of a motor projecting from the armpit of a machinist, or the line of a table cutting through the head of a man reading.
She blinked at him. He shook off his shoe and put his stocking foot on her crotch under the table. He flexed his toes.
That’s the Futurist Manifesto, he said.
Weren’t they a bunch of fascists?
They wanted time and space to collapse. She put one hand over his toes, pressed the other hand flat on the table near her saucer.
Read me some more, she said.
They’d seen Fellini’s La Strada and when they came out into the afternoon light she said, Anthony Quinn. That was all she said.
The thing was they were alone together for three months and everything they did amazed them. They were escorted out of a book launch by a woman with clotted mascara and a spot of blood in the middle of her left iris. They’d guzzled the free booze, picking up full glasses off one passing tray and putting down empty glasses on another, and Madeleine watched the tray she had reached for with an empty glass swivel out of reach the instant her fingers let go of the stem and it smashed and caused a stir.
When the woman let go of Marty’s and Madeleine’s arms on the front step of the library their legs turned to rubber and they collapsed in a heap on top of each other, squashing all the pastries they’d put in their pockets.
They were childless and willing to become something. Everything they did or said was stored up for the marriage that was coming. They felt nothing and saw nothing because they were in the present.
They were so much in the present there was no time for reflection, and if his sisters were right about him ordering her around, about her hanging on his every word as if he were a god, about the dangers of loving without reserve, there was no time to think about that either.
Anthony Quinn wrapped in chains, on his knees in the dirt, busting chains with his chest, the tendons in his neck, the impossible strength.
They kept moving until they were invited to sleep in a thatched cottage in the Black Forest. A musty-smelling sleeping bag in a slant-roofed attic.
Who owned that house? Who invited them? They took long walks in a tree farm. Acres and acres of trees whose trunks were all exactly the same size, each tree the same distance from the next, as in a nightmare. The forest must have been manufactured in the nightmare of a gargoyle or gnome, some Nordic creature only half-human or not human at all. The branches were bare and it was always raining, or finely swathed in mist or socked in with fog. Marty leaned her against a tree and ripped her jeans down to her ankles and he dropped to his knees and made her come and she was looking up into the woolly sky criss-crossed with black branches and when she pulled her jeans up the earth began to shake and thrum and a man in a fluorescent orange cap in a yellow bulldozer drove past, the first person they had come across in two weeks of walking through the Black Forest. He took off his cap and waved with his whole arm.
She had wandered in the uniform forest at dawn when the sky lightened evenly and the only sound was the crunch of her shoes on the leaves. She was falling prey to a mysticism that was smarting and potent. A crow in the trees felt like a former life or the life to come and when it flew into the air, cawing raucously, it frightened her out of her wits.
That was where she became who she was, Madeleine thinks, in that solitude. Everyone becomes who they are in a