Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje [31]
The three of them entered a calm long conversation. They talked in the style of a married couple joined by a third person who was catalyst and audience. And Buddy watched her large hip as she lay on the floor of the room, the hill of cloth, and he came into her dress like a burglar without words in the family style they had formed years ago, with some humour now but not too much humour. Sitting against her body and unbuttoning the layers of cloth to see the dark gold body and bending down to smell her skin and touching with his face through the flesh the buried bones in her chest. Writhed his face against her small breasts. Her skirt still on, her blouse not taken off but apart and his rough cheek scraping her skin, not going near her face which he had explored so much from across the room, earlier. When Cornish had still been there.
They lay there without words. Moving all over her chest and arms and armpits and stomach as if placing mines on her with his mouth and then leaned up and looked at her body glistening with his own spit. Together closing up her skirt, slipping the buttons back into their holes so she was dressed again. Not going further because it was friendship that had to be guarded, that they both wanted. The diamond had to love the earth it passed along the way, every speck and angle of the other’s history, for the diamond had been earth too.
So Cornish lives with her. Willy, who wanted to be left alone but became the doctor for everyone’s troubles. Sweet William. Nothing ambitious on the valve trombone but being the only one able to read music he brought us new music from the north that we perverted cheerfully into our own style. Willy, straight as a good fence all his life, none to match his virtue. Since I’ve been home I watch him and Nora in the room. The air around them is empty so I see them clear. They are for me no longer in a landscape, they are not in the street they walk over, the chairs disappear under them. They are complete and exact and final. No longer the every-second change I saw before but like statues of personality now. Through my one-dimensional eye. I left the other in the other home, Robin flying off with it into her cloud. So I see Willy and Nora as they are and always will be and I hunger to be as still as them, my brain tying me up in this chair. Locked inside the frame, boiled down in love and anger into dynamo that cannot move except on itself.
I had wanted to be the reservoir where engines and people drank, blood sperm music pouring out and getting hooked in someone’s ear. The way flowers were still and fed bees. And we took from the others too this way, music that was nothing till Mumford and Lewis and Johnson and I joined Cornish and made him furious because we wouldn’t let him even finish the song once before we changed it to our blood. Cornish who played the same note the same way every time who was our frame our diving board that we leapt off, the one we sacrificed so he could remain the overlooked metronome.
So because Willy was the first I saw when I got back I pretended to look through his eyes, the eyes Nora wanted me to have. So everyone said I’d changed. Floating in the ether. They want nothing to have changed. Unaware of the hook floating around. A couple of years ago I would have sat down and thought out precisely why it was Cornish who moved in with her why it was Cornish she accepted would have thought it out as I set the very type it was translated into. The Cricket. But I shat those theories out completely.
There had been such sense in it. This afternoon I spend going over four months’ worth of The Cricket. Nora had every issue in the bedroom cupboard and while she was out and the kids stayed around embarrassed to come too close and disturb me (probably Nora’s advice—why doesn’t she still hate me? Why do people forget hate so easily?) I read through four months’ worth of them from 1902. September October November December. Nothing about the change of weather anywhere but there were the details of the children and the ladies