In the Skin of a Lion Page 13
Now he aches for her smallness, her intricacy – he needs a second glance whenever he thinks of her. In the middle of a field she removes her blouse. Sightings of her breasts. Trompe l’oeil. An artist has picked up a pencil and made a fine crosshatched shadow and so they come into existence. He sits and watches her sniffing the wind across a field. The woman he looked through when in love with Clara. Clara’s eclipse. The phrase like a flower or event named during the last century.
During Cato’s funeral, while Alice held the infant Hana, there was an eclipse. The mourners stood still while the Finnish Brass Band played Chopin’s “Funeral March” into the oncoming darkness and throughout the seventeen minutes of total eclipse. The music a lifeline from one moment of light to another.
Now he aches for her, for those days that belonged to the moon. They would sit side by side in a Chinese restaurant, empty but for the two of them. Wanting to face each other but wanting to hold each other and having to decide on one pleasure. The intricate choices of desire.
I don’t think I’m big enough to put someone in a position where they will hurt another. That’s what you said, Alice, that made me love you most. Made me trust you. No one else would have worried about that, could have said it and made me believe it, that first night in your room. Every bird and insect froze into the element of air at that moment when the sentence slid up, palpable out of your mouth. You unaware you were expressing a tenderness, thinking you were being critical of yourself.
And another gesture of yours at a dance. I was dancing with someone else and could see you, dying to dance, and stepping up to a man and delicately tapping him on his shoulder, a shy yet determined expression on your face.
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 of Alice. By his feet is a black cardboard suitcase. He can think now only of objects. Something alive, just one small grey bird on a branch, will break his heart.
The night train travelling north to Huntsville contains a regatta crowd – men in straw boaters and silk scarves jubilant around him. They weave towards the sleeping cars, passing Patrick who stands in the corridor, their drunk bodies brushing against him. He gazes through his reflection, hypnotized by the manic parade of sky and rock and tree and moon. No resolution or pause. Alice.… He breathes out a dead name. Only a dead name is permanent.
Rectangles of light sweep along the earth. He walks to the end of the corridor, opens the door, and stands in the no man’s land between carriages, holding onto the stiff accordion-like walls, within the violent rattle of the train.
Alice had an idea, a cause in her eye about wealth and power, forever and ever. And at the end as she turned round to him on the street hearing her name yelled, surprised at Patrick being near, there was nothing completed or attained. And he could think of nothing but the eyes looking for him above the terrible wound suddenly appearing as she turned.
They arrive in Huntsville at three in the morning. Patrick watches a porter travel the corridor of sleeping berths, tagging the shoes left out to be cleaned, and return a few minutes later with a sack into which he throws them all. The passengers will not be awakened until seven.
The stewards sit on the steps of the train polishing shoes. They speak quietly, smoking cigarettes. Patrick sees them in the yellow spray of the station lamp. He strolls to the end of the platform where there is darkness. Bush. He feels transparent, minuscule. Civilization now, on this August night, is two men cleaning shoes as they sit on the steps of a train. He looks at them from the darkness. He has walked through the pools of light hanging over this platform and light has not attached itself to him. Walking through rain would have left him wet. But light, or a man polishing one tan shoe at four A.M., is only an idea. And this will not convert Patrick, whose loss creates venom. At times like this he could put his hand under the wheel of a train to spite the driver. He could pick up a porcupine and thrash it against the fence not caring how many quills were flung into his hands and neck in retaliation.
At eight A.M. the passengers walk from the train, sleepy, dazed by their own movement, to the dock belonging to the Huntsville and Lake-of-Bays Navigation Company. Patrick carries his fragile suitcase and boards The Algonquin steamer.
In the Garden of the Blind, on Page Island, a stone cherub holds out a hand from which water leaps up into the air. A tree full of birds spreads itself high over the southern area of the lawn. There is a falling of sounds – bird-calls like drops of water – onto the blind woman sitting there. Seeds float down onto the gravel borders, a sound path for those walking without sight. On one of the benches, under the tree, Patrick sits reading the newspaper.
If he closes his eyes, these noises will overpower him, in the way he imagines the cherub accepts that water which leaps from his palm into air and then falls back onto his face. He watches a bird dart. The woman on his right hears the rustle of his newspaper and realizes he is alien here.
He is one island over from last night’s fire, hiding now in this garden, unseen among the blind, till nightfall.
He had loosened the cap on the paraffin can and enclosed it gurgling within his black cardboard suitcase. Then he began his walk along the mezzanine of the empty Muskoka Hotel. He had waited until the guests and staff were outside on the lawns, busy with the regatta dinner. He leaned over the banister to look at the stuffed animal-heads below him, the liquid leaking down, then walked on, the suitcase innocent in his right hand, down the stairs to the lobby. The smell was evident now. Fire! he yelled. He lit a match, dropped it, and the fire ran upstairs and round and round the circular mezzanine. His arm was on fire. He plunged the sleeve of his jacket into an aquarium. The suitcase at the foot of the stairs exploded. He moved alone through the lobby of the Muskoka Hotel, the deerheads above him on fire.
He walked from the fire towards the water. As he made his way to the rowboat, he checked the explosive hidden under the dock. Everyone on the blue evening lawn looked at the flames, dumbfounded. Some men saw him unhook the boat and pointed. Patrick stood in the boat and waved. They waved back uncertainly then started to run towards the dock casually, in case Patrick turned out to be a friend, then jumped onto the dock and began running towards him.
He lit the fuse which raced towards the two men and started to row away from the dock. The fuse, like a nervy kid, buzzed and ran under the men’s feet. They stopped and turned. Now they realized what it was. The older man leaped into the water and the other, his hands on his hips, paused as the blue fizzing ran into the small explosion that separated the dock from the shore.
What he begins to witness now, in the Garden of the Blind, is not sound but smell – the plants chosen with care so visitors can move from fragrance to fragrance with precise antennae. To his left he can smell mock orange. He leans over the raised bed – three feet higher than the path – and sniffs deeply.
Patrick hears footsteps and a hand touches his back. The blind woman who heard the rustle of newspapers now attaches herself to him.
– You can see, she says.
– Yes.
She smiles.
– You have a loud nose.
Her name is Elizabeth, and she offers to show him the garden. She mentions that her sister is better at identifying flowers and herbs because she does not drink. “I drink like a porpoise but only from the afternoon on. Tragic love affair in my thirties.” They walk together and Patrick watches how her relaxed body drifts in this world, moving surely towards the basil and broadleaf sorrel. She lowers her hand in passing to brush the soft silk of the foliage called Rabbit’s Grass. Her garden is a ballroom and she introduces him to the intimacies of dill and caraway, those shy sisters; she advises him to bend down and bruise certain leaves which are too subtle for him to appreciate when untouched.
“To focus your nasal powers you must forget about sounds. The bird sounds here are lovely but sometimes I come here drunk or with a hangover and the noise is awful. Then I want to pour medicinal fluids into my handkerchief, climb into the branches, and chloroform them.” In the centre of the garden just north of the water-splashed cherub is another tree where there are no birds. “You must be looking at the camphor … birds recognize death better than us. Plants have complex genealogies. To a bird a succulent fruit must first be judged by its bloodlines. You may like cashew nuts or mango, or find sumac beautiful, but a bird knows that these are all, strangely, part of the poison-ivy family.”
She leads him towards the imported exotics – fruitless persimmon, and the pimpernella, which is anise. She is curious about him but he will not say very much though he is courteous and he likes her. He will have to stay here till night and then try to swim from the island out to a boat. Along the beds on the east side of the garden there is tarragon and lavender and cardamom. She puts her hands up bluntly to his face and searches him. She finds a welt by his ear.
– Put perumel on this. A balm.
– I am wanted by the police.
– For?
– For wilful destruction of property.
She laughs.
– Don’t resent your life.
They are a frieze, a statue in this garden, a woman with her soft palms covering a tall man’s face, blinding him.
When she moves her hands away from his eyes she feels the gasp on his face which is not shock or disgust but something else.
– What is it?
Her green eye echoes somewhere within him. Aetias Luna – and its Canadian name, papillon lune. Lunar moth. Moon moth. Her other eye is simply not there, the old loose flesh of the eyelid covering nothing. But this eye is forest green, moth green, darting all over as if to catch his gaze, moving with delight over his shoulders, alighting on his ear, his nose. He had loved the lunar moth, its flare of the lower wing like a signature, a papyrus textured object whose small furred body he used to see pulsing on a branch or rock within his lantern light. The woman shifts the watery green mirror of her eye attempting to reflect everything around her.
-What is it?
Patrick allows her to guide him back to the bench. They sit and she grips his hand, not letting go of him. He feels she receives all of his qualities, in this still garden, raucous with noise. The blue veins are narrow and clear in the tight skin of her hands. He is unable to talk, even if all he said would be hidden within her blindness. Alice Gull, he could say, who once pushed her hands up against the slope of a ceiling and spoke of a grand cause, who leapt like a live puppet into his arms, who died later on a bloody pavement, ruined in his arms.
No one else enters the garden as they sit there. Beside the wooden seat is mint pepper, rosemary. In the flower-bed to the right of where they sit is artemesia advacumculas, whose human name she says she doesn’t know. The muscles in her hand finally loosen and he turns to look at her face. She is now resting, leaning back, gently asleep. He moves his hand from her grip and leaves her.
Now he is part of the evening water, the reflection of dock lights rolling off him. Six stars and a moon. The news of the fire has left the Muskokas in an uproar and Patrick struggles to get free of the current off Page Island in order to swim towards that boat. It has crept across the blackness of the lake at a snail’s pace and is now about 500 yards off shore. A night cruise with dancing – he can hear music as he swims, voices and tambourine falling like muffled glass into the water. A half-moon, a few stars, a loop of dock lights.
Somewhere in his past he has dreamed such a moment: a criminal swimming in darkness to a lighted ship. He feels removed from any context of the world, wanting to
sleep at this moment, wanting to swim back into the current he has just escaped, return to the Garden of the Blind, and sleep. But he is magnetized to the nameless steamer.
A deadhead touches him in the ribs, comes up under him, and Patrick hears himself shout out in the shriek of an animal. The dreams he had of swimming to a ship involved tropic winds and crocodiles. He splashes out to discover what touched him, but it is gone. “It was a deadhead,” he says to himself, talking out loud now, determined, the fear suddenly an energy in him. Brushed by this deadhead he is fully alive, feral, exhilarated. He remembers his departure from the world, stepping out onto the porte-cochère of the Muskoka Hotel, flames behind him. Now he will be a member of the night. He sees his visage never emerging out of shadows. Unhistorical.
He swims on, smelling traces of hickory smoke from the campfires on the island. He is delirious with hunger. Music from the boat. “Beware of frozen ponds, peroxide blondes, stocks and bonds.…” the singer’s voice over the muffle of orchestra. And what will they do as they see him climb up a rope into their company, lake weed draped over his shoulder, the blood from the log’s glance on his ribs?
He is alongside the boat, in the shadow of the moon, looking up. The Cherokee. The panel windows from the stateroom and lounge throw out light that falls on the water. Higher up is the open deck, the dancing couples, the band. He pulls himself up on the vertical strips of rubber that protect the sides of the steamer when it docks. He smells food on deck, climbs fast, and goes headfirst through a window and lands on a table. He is in the kitchens.
A cook turns at the crash to see Patrick on his back surrounded by double-diamond glass. Patrick puts a finger to his lips, keeping it there till the man nods and moves to close the door. Patrick gets down off the table, glass all around him. On deck the pause in conversation is replaced by louder laughter, cheers for the dropped tray or whatever they thought caused the noise. The cook walks over with a broom and sweeps while Patrick stands there removing his wet clothes. There is a cut near his ribs and on his thigh. Then the cook mimes going to sleep and is gone like a ghost out of the room. Patrick walks to the switch and dims out the kitchen light.