In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [51]
Cato would always arrive late, Alice remembers, his bicycle clanging to the pavement outside her window. She would climb onto the handlebars and they’d weave down to the lake laid out like crinoline. They’d lie against the railway embankment a few yards from Lake Ontario. The branches in winter were encased in ice and she would lean her head back, exposing her white neck, and take twig and icicle in her mouth and snap it off with the pressure of her tongue.
But at other times she was glad she didn’t live with him permanently, to be pulled continually by his planet. If you were close to Cato you had to be a representative of his world, his friends, his plans for the week. Strangers, old lovers, ambled up to him on the street and embraced him and they had to join the group. It was impossible to go two blocks on a bicycle with him without running into someone who needed help to find a friend or move a cabinet. “Just one day, Cato,” she’d say. “Even four hours!”
And so he became the man who was Thursday to her. They disappeared into the ravines, the woods north of the city, or her favourite place – against the thick stones of the railway embankment, the willow bending over clothed in ice, loving each other along with the sound of the spring breakup. Kissing each other with stones in their mouths. The freeze still over the March lake, she would lie on her stomach, his hand under her, the shudder of the passing train, the Apalachicola boxcars, reaching through his palm to her breast.
So Thursday jumped out of the week like a fold-out bed. But there were no beds for them ever. By the time Hana was born he was dead.
Patrick lay his head on her stomach watching the secret lift of her skin at each heartbeat. Talking on the nights they could afford to stay up late. “He was born up north, you know, quite near where he died.” Her hand brushed against his chest. “His father moved here from Finland as a logger. Here his family no longer had to bow to priests or dignitaries and they were soon involved in the unions. Cato was born here. His father skated three miles for the doctor the night he was born. He skated across the lake holding up cattails on fire.”
Patrick stopped her hand moving.
– So they were Finns.
– What?
– Finns. When I was a kid …
Now in his thirties he finally had a name for that group of men he witnessed as a child.
She looked at Patrick, who was smiling as if a riddle old and tiresome had been solved, a burr plucked from his brain. In the green room the moon showed her face clearly. A moon returning from when he was eleven. He loved the power of coincidence, the pleasure of strangeness. Hello Finland!
– Come into me.
And who was she? And where was she from? His hands on her shoulders, his arms straight, so their upper torsos were separate, their faces apart. The brain and eyes interpreting pleasure in the other, these textures that brushed and gripped. He pivoted on her hands against his belly, moving deeper, moving back, and was still. Not a movement of the eye. He knew now he was the sum of all he had been in his life since he was that boy in the snow woods, her hands collapsing to hold him against her harder. Fingernail at his spine. His cheek against her turquoise eye.
He lay in bed looking at the light of the moon in the bones of the fire escape. The light of the electric clock advertising Cabinet Cigars. Out there the beautiful grey of the Victory Flour Mills at midnight, its clean curves over the lake. Any decade you wished.
– God I love your face …
She has delivered him out of nothing. This woman who jumps onto him laughing in mid-air and growls at his neck and pulls him like a wheel over her.
How can she who had torn his heart open at the waterworks with her art lie now like a human in his arms? Or stand catatonic in front of bananas on Eastern