In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [69]
Her low laugh when they stop, exhausted.
His breath is now almost whisper, almost language. She turns, a pearl embedded in her flesh. A violin with stars walking in this house. Fridge light sink light street light. At the sink she douses her face and shoulders. She lies beside him. The taste of the other. A bazaar of muscles and flavours. She rubs his semen into his wet hair. Her shoulders bang against the blue-stained cupboard. A kitchen being fucked. Sexual portage. Her body forked off him.
She smells him, the animal out of the desert that has stumbled back home, back into oasis. Her black hair spreads like a pool over the tiles. She pins the earring her fingers had strayed upon into his arm muscle, beginning a tattoo of blood.
There are jewels of every colour he has stolen for her in the past in the false drawers of her new bedroom, which he can find by ripping out the backs of the bureaus. Photographs of her relatives in old silver frames. A clock encased in glass which turns its gold stomach from side to side to opposite corners of the room. A wedding ring he can pull off her finger with his teeth.
He removes nothing. Only the chemise she withdraws from as if skin. He carries nothing but the jewellery pinned to his arm, a footstep of blood on his shoulder. The feather of her lip on his mouth.
A last plate tips over to the next shelf. He waits for her eye to open. Here comes the first kiss.
All she can see as she enters the dark hall is the whiteness of the milk, a sacred stone in his hands, disappearing into his body.
He lifts his wife onto his shoulders so her arms ascend into the chandelier.
MARITIME THEATRE
IN 1938, WHEN Patrick Lewis was released from prison, people were crowding together in large dark buildings across North America to see Garbo as Anna Karenina. Everyone tried to play the Hammond Organ. ‘Red Squads’ intercepted mail, tear-gassed political meetings. By now over 10,000 foreign-born workers had been deported out of the country. Everyone sang “Just One of Those Things.” The longest bridge in the world was being built over the lower Zambesi and the great waterworks at the east end of Toronto neared completion.
At Kew Park a white horse dove every hour from a great height into Lake Ontario. T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral opened in England and a few weeks later Dr. Carl Weiss – who had always admired the poetry of the expatriate American – shot Huey Long to death in the Louisiana capitol building. Just one of those things.
Released from prison in January, he took the Kingston train to Toronto’s Union Station. Ten Story Gang, Weird Tales, Click, Judge Sheard’s Best Jokes, and Look were in the magazine stalls. Patrick sat down on the smooth concrete bench facing the ramp down to the gates. This cathedral-like space was the nexus of his life. He had been twenty-one when he arrived in this city. Here he had watched Clara leave him, walking past that sign to the left of the ramp which said HORIZON. Look up, Clara had said when she left him for Ambrose, you know what that stone is? He had been lost in their situation, not caring. It’s Missouri Zumbro. Remember that. The floors are Tennessee marble. He looked up. Sitting now on this bench Patrick suddenly had no idea what year it was.
He brought Clara’s face directly back into memory – as if it were a quizzical smiling face on a poster advertising a hat to strangers. But Alice’s face, with its changeability, he could not evoke. A group of redcaps were standing with three large cages full of dogs, all of whom were barking like aristocrats claiming to be wrongly imprisoned. He went up to the cages. They were anxious with noise. He had come from a place where a tin cup against a cell wall was the sole form of protest. He got closer to the cages,