Alligator - Lisa Moore [65]
White horses galloping through a blizzard on the Southern Shore, and she managed to grip the thing that was in the bed and it was clammy to touch and cold and she couldn’t throw it out of the bed because it was attached to her shoulder. It was her arm, paralyzed, and the paralysis was spreading into her chest and sweat ran down her temples or it was tears. She understood, though she was in the thick of sleep, that she was having a heart attack.
She had put the newspaper on the table next to a glass jug of orange juice. She poured a glass of juice and put the jug down. A parabola of light cast from the sun striking the jug jiggled over the photograph. A loop of wiggling, broken sunlight flickered over the humiliated Iraqi prisoner and it occurred to Madeleine his shoulder might be broken and she swept the egg off her plate into the garbage.
She’d written most of the script in six weeks and then she’d gone to Toronto to convince Isobel to come home: Isobel with her big, fraught, lonely, bursting life. Isobel had made a name in Toronto, finally, with her performance in A Streetcar Named Desire. Some newly arrived Eastern European director had the idea of blowing the dust off Streetcar — they were mad for Tennessee Williams in Romania — and Isobel had triumphed. Madeleine was coming from the airport in a taxi, the cellphone shrill in her purse.
I know the best place for Italian, Isobel had said.
I want you to look at a script, Madeleine said.
Madeleine was driving near a concrete overpass and there was graffiti, bulbous and illegible; the sun struck the grimy windows of the taxi. Transport trucks tore past. She loved the way the outskirts reared up all around her, arched concrete spines and roaring traffic. She loved Toyota spelled in marigolds on banks of manicured lawns and the massive car plants with the grey stacks kicking out smoke and the chainlink fences and how the highways loop over and under each other in the distance.
Of course she has people to stay with, there’s hardly a city in the world where she doesn’t know somebody. She has friends in New Delhi, a young man in Iceland; Marty’s sister in Jamaica is always begging her to come. But she’s happiest in the hush of a mid-luxury hotel, with the paper sheaths for the drinking glasses, maids with hairnets, big views, and the ravaged food trays waiting outside bedroom doors in the morning, gnawed bones, greasy napkins, glasses with lipstick streaks.
Some women aren’t meant for marriage, Madeleine had thought. They’d stopped at an intersection and a crowd surged in front of her taxi, a black man with three little girls, each with a strawberry ice-cream cone, passed in front of them — even if the conditions for love are exactly right these women can’t help but want someone else — the taxi lurched forward and she saw a transvestite in a zebra-striped minidress, big red necklace — maybe truly independent women are never satisfied in love.
There’s always someone else, Madeleine thought. One of her old boyfriends had become a neurologist; he worked on the spines of rats. She’d run into him at the airport.
You are exactly the same, he’d said. Do you remember the night I took you to the Starboard Quarter? It was every cent I had. She could not remember. You don’t remember? You ordered the steak! She didn’t remember.
And after all that, you married Martin, he’d said, giving his head a hard little shake as if to get rid of the idea. All what, she wondered. She doesn’t think she’s ever eaten in the Starboard Quarter.
Marty is having another child, she’d blurted. She reached out and gripped his arm — she cannot think of Marty being a father again without a mild wave of vertigo — but what a relief to suddenly speak of him. Here is someone who remembers Marty as he was back then, the elastic on his pant leg for riding the bike, when he was playing the sax downtown; Marty with long hair.
But he must be over sixty!
He’s way over sixty, Madeleine said.
Every cent I had I spent on you,