The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [8]
Spellbound, Norval watched his mother sob as his father walked out of the room. Was he going away forever? Was that a tear running down Papa’s cheek? After the door closed behind him, Norval watched his mother primp in the mirror for a few seconds, then walk to a window overlooking a courtyard. She flicked the light switch on and off, waited a few moments, then smiled at the sounds of a key turning in the back door below. It’s Papa! Norval thought. He’s coming back! They’re playing a game! When he walks in the room I will jump out from behind the curtains and say the line from the movie that will make him laugh! He listened to the sound of footsteps climbing the stairs.
And then watched, in bewilderment, as a man with a black shirt and suit entered the bedroom. A gangster? His mother ran to him, threw herself into his arms and kissed him all over while … unbuttoning his shirt! He was an older man with a paunch and white tufts of hair on his back. Snorting like a bull, he ripped off his mother’s diaphanous night-gown. As they wrestled on the marriage bed, Norval tiptoed out of the room unseen and crawled back into bed. He put his face deep into his pillow, which got wetter and wetter. When he finally raised his head, gasping for breath, he remembered that he had left his sword behind the curtains.
Twenty-four years later in Montreal, Norval awoke with the repugnant mental image of a hairy back, enlarged as if under a microscope: a wasteland of gnarled and niggardly grey trees, filth-encrusted furrows, sewerish sweat and mountainous moles. He groggily opened his eyes and saw, directly in front of him, more hair: blonde female pubic hair. Further down, inches from his groin, were ears riddled with ornamental buckshot, and a nose run through with a trio of silver rings.
But this wasn’t the strangest part of the tableau. Standing menacingly before him, in a frozen caricature of an angry man, was … an angry man. With a Fu Manchu moustache, a spindly plume of hair sprouting out the back of his head, and unibrowed eyes narrowed into angry slits. A jealous boyfriend? Before Norval could inquire, the man said something in impenetrable joual, with the intonation of a death curse, before clomping out of the room with Harley boots.
Norval smiled. With diamond-cutter caution he then extracted himself from the woman’s limbs and rooted around for his clothes amidst overflowing ashtrays, guttered candles, scattered pills, powders and dead bottles of wine. One by one he located his bone-white cotton boxers, heraldic-crested socks, alabaster linen shirt with Byron collar, taupe suede trousers, black nappa ankle boots, digital camera and journal. He looked at himself in the mirror, seemingly in approval, brushed back his long wavy chestnut locks. What’s her name again? Some New-Age creation like Rhapsody or Revery or Radiance? It started with an r; otherwise he wouldn’t be here.
Leaving a snoring Rhapsody or Revery or Radiance on the bed, Norval went out in quest of coffee and cigarettes. On the freshly ploughed sidewalks he had a spring in his step, a pleasant awareness of his tasteful attire, above-average height and flabless abdomen. At a café called Metaforia, while gulping down espressos, he remembered the woman’s name. From his bag he pulled out a book bound in dove-grey Nigerian goatskin, with Rover’s Diary on the cover and alphabetical tabs on the side. On the “R” page, he wrote:
R Rainbaux. A self-described “biker-bitch.” Physically unimpeachable, but can never remember who came first, the Greeks or the Egyptians. Owing to a number of crippling intoxicants, I can’t remember much else. And in the night that bloody dream agai
He laid down his silver pencil-pen because the lead had snapped, lit another Gauloise, then flipped backwards:
Q Quincy. The quiet sort, endearingly shy but a tad prim—the kind that never go to the toilet