In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [55]
They sit in a field. They sit in the red and yellow and gold decor of the restaurant, empty in the late afternoon but for them. Hunger and desire spiriting him across the city, onto trolley after trolley, in order to reach her arm, her neck, this Chinese restaurant, that Macedonian café, this field he is now in the centre of with her. There are country houses on the periphery so they have walked to its centre, the distant point, to be alone.
He will turn while walking and see the fragility of her breasts – the result of a pencil’s shading.
She drops into his arms, held out stern as a school desk. He walks then, he dances with the wheat in his hands. When he was twelve he turned the pages always towards illustration and saw the heroes carry the women across British Columbian streams, across the foot of waterfalls. And now her hand above her eyes shielding out the sun. Her shirt on her lap. He has come across a love story. This is only a love story. He does not wish for plot and all its consequences. Let me stay in this field with Alice Gull.…
REMORSE
HE HAD ALWAYS wanted to know her when she was old. Patrick sits in her green room, in front of leaves and berries in the old river bottle – a bouquet of weeds collected by Alice the day before her death. Sumac and valley grasses that she picked under the viaduct. When night comes he lights the kerosene lamp which throws a shadow of this still-life against the wall so it flickers dark and alive.
Let me now re-emphasize the extreme looseness of the structure of things. Whispered to him once.
He undresses and climbs into the bed where there is the smell of her, where he is unable to sleep. He stays in her room, he escorts her last flowers through death and afterlife, after whatever spirit in them has evaporated out of their brownness. He knows he doesn’t have long before he loses the exact memory of her face. His mind moves closer to the skin at the side of her nose where the scar lies. She was always too conscious of it, a line she assumed unbalanced her face. How can he evoke her without this fine line?
He had wanted to know her when she was old. At lunches she would argue her ideas against him, holding up her glass, “To impatience! To the evolving human!” while he was intent on her shoulder, romantic towards the dazzle of her hair. Her grin was always there when he spoke of growing old with her – as if she had made some other pact, as if there was another arrow of alliance. He couldn’t wait to know her when, in years to come, they would be solvent, sexually calmer, less like wildlife. There was always, he thought, this pleasure ahead of him, an ace of joy up his sleeve so he could say you can do anything to me, take everything away, put me in prison, but I will know Alice Gull when we are old. Even if we cannot be lovers I will come each afternoon, come as if courting, and over lunch we will share our thoughts, laughing, so this talk will be love.
He had wanted that. And what had she wanted?
– I was happiest when I was pregnant. When I bloomed.
– I don’t understand why you like me.
– I feel good about myself since I met you. Since the days with Clara, when you could see nothing else but her and I was watching you. I wasn’t jealous. I wasn’t in love with you. I was learning wonderful things then, with Clara. You and I will never enter certain rooms together, Patrick. A woman needs a woman to laugh with, over some things. Clara and I felt like a planet! But there was a time after that when I went under. And you gave me an energy. A confidence.
Now there is a moat around her he will never cross again. He will not even cup his hands to drink its waters. As if, having travelled all that distance to enter the castle in order to learn its wisdom for the grand cause, he now turns and walks away.
* * *
Patrick steps out of the Verral Avenue rooms. He enters Union Station and, once he is travelling, the landscape slurs into darkness. He focuses thirty yards past the train window until his mind locks, thinking of nothing, not even the death