Alligator - Lisa Moore [72]
They hadn’t had sex since Isobel had accepted the idea of the fire. Seeing the sandals on the mat he felt glad he had decided to burn the house down. He wanted to teach her that things could change. It was a matter of taking charge.
He had imagined the fire and what he had seen for her was a small boutique of some sort. He didn’t like her. There was nothing to like. She was not committed to anything. He had no idea why he saw her selling perfume, but that is what he saw.
She’d told him she never slept with married men because they had been formed by years of routine and she couldn’t count on them to falter or be alert or to know what was at stake. She’d said she didn’t have the stamina to stand in front of a camera any more. She had come back from a publicity shoot where she’d posed in front of a cliff that was encased in ice. Though it had been ten below, she was wearing a chiffon dress and a tiny white synthetic stole that had wide satin ribbons and that looked like a toilet seat cover. The photographer’s knees were bent. He was crouched with the camera angled up at her, it was obscene. She watched the shutter flick and flick and flick. She had summoned what she thought of as her soul to the surface of her skin and stared into the lens with it.
Forehead, the photographer said. And chin.
She’d given her hair a toss, unfurrowed her brow.
And chin, the photographer said. She’d lowered her chin. She had been pouring herself into camera lenses since she was eighteen and she had done this for her entire career without questioning the effects of the transference. She knew, now, that she had been diminished. She had become unknowable. The thing is, we’re all unknowable, but we usually mask it. Now her unknowableness had surfaced.
There’s a point, she’d said, when there’s more behind you than what’s ahead. It’s called regret. It can happen any time in a life — when what has happened is more vivid than what will happen. She had been twenty when she fell in love with Chris. She has been looking over her shoulder ever since.
Valentin leaned in again to look through the window and saw a flash in the band of sunlight that came through the window above the landing and then she was at the front door in her red dress, she held her white cat in her arms.
He had told her she would have to leave the cat, but there she was in the doorway of her house with the cat in her arms. He had told her to leave the garden as it was but when she peeled back the lid of one of the Tupperware containers and he smelled the greenness of the tomatoes, bitter and hard and full of promise, he let her take them.
It was plausible she would bring tomatoes, he decided.
The hallway was dark and cool and she passed him the cat and bent over the hall table to put on her lipstick in the mirror. He thought about wringing the cat’s neck. He knew how to kill it with his hands so that it would die quickly and almost soundlessly. He was suddenly full of rage about the cat. He didn’t want a cat in his truck and he had told her to forget the cat. He was angry that she had defied him.
He thought of wringing the cat’s neck and throwing the limp body at her back. He was rubbing the animal’s cheek with his thumb and it started to purr.
Isobel went into the kitchen and he followed her. She was barefoot just as he had imagined. He saw she had done the dishes, and this placated him. The dishes in the dish rack looked exactly as they should. They looked like an ongoing project. They looked like a middle-aged actress going off for a weekend to visit her family in Old Perlican.
She turned on the water and let it run and she took a glass from the cupboard and filled the glass and drank all of it and threw the glass at his head. She whipped it across the room, but her aim was off and it hit the wall above his head and smashed all over the floor. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
He had her wait in the truck