In the Skin of a Lion (24 page)

Now he pours milk into the tall glass and drinks as he walks through his brother-in-law’s house, the coolness of milk filling him on this hot Toronto night. He is seated on the stairs, facing the door. He hears the dog’s one clear bark and her laugh as she approaches the front door.

In the dark hall the whiteness of the milk disappears into his body. Her shoulders nestle against his hands. The home of the other. Touching her, a wetness passed from her lip to him, his hands in her dark hair. She moves within the shadow of his shoulder.

She steps into the half-lit kitchen and her bare arms pick up light. He catches the blink of her earrings. Removing one, she drops it to the floor. Her hands go up to the other ear – unscrewing the second pin of gold. Her laughter with her breast in his mouth.

He breaks the necklace and pearls fall around them. He can smell soaps in her hair. Her wrist moves up his arm riding on the sweat. Her cheek against the warm tile. Her other hand, sweeping out, touches the loose jewel.

Giannetta feels the scar on his throat. Her soft kiss across it. He carries her, still in her, holding up each thigh, her eyes wide open, crockery behind her crashing from shelf to shelf, as she nudges the corner cupboard. Blue plates bounce and come through the lower panes like water and smash on the floor.

With each step her bare foot on a pearl or a fragment of plate. She opens the fridge door. In its light she pulls her foot up to her stomach and examines it, brushing something away. He lies back and she sits over him, swallowing the cold wine. He traces the path down her body at the speed he imagines liquid takes.

Her chin on her knee. Planting her foot on his shoulder she leaves blood when she moves it. When she opens her eyes wide he sees glass and crockery and thin china plates tumbling down from shelf to shelf losing their order, their shades of blue and red merging, her fingers on his scar, her fingers on the thumping vein on his forehead. She’s a laugher who laughs while they make love, not earnest like a tightrope-walker.

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

I
N
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, looked into the eyes which saw nothing, the way his own face in prison had looked in a metal mirror.

He was still crouched when the redcaps wheeled the cages down the ramp. On his knees in Union Station. He felt like the weight on the end of a plumb-bob hanging from the very centre of the grand rotunda, the absolute focus of the building. Slowly his vision began to swing. He turned his head to the left to the right to the left, discovering the horizon.

He moved tentatively into the city, standing in front of strangers, studying the new fashions. He felt invisible. Outside Union Station the streets were deep in snowdrifts. He walked towards the east end, along Eastern Avenue, till he eventually came to the Geranium Bakery, entering the warm large space where winter sun pierced through the mist of flour in the air. He passed the spotless machines, looking for Nicholas. Buns moved forward along rollers till they were flipped over into the small lake of sizzling shortening. Finally he saw him in his suit covered with white dust at the far end of the bakery, choreographing the movement of food. Nicholas Temelcoff walked forward and embraced him. A bear’s grip. The grip of the world.

Nicholas nodded.

Patrick climbed into the service elevator and pulled the rope beside him which took him up to Nicholas’ living quarters on the next floor. He went in and knocked on the door of the small room.

Hana was sitting on the bed wearing a frock, her hands on her lap. Looking down, then up slowly, the way Alice used to glance up, the eyes moving first. So much like Alice it was terrible to him. He turned away and looked at the girl’s neat room, at the packed suitcase, the light on beside her bed in the daylight.

She watched him, understanding what kind of love was behind his stare. His cheek was pressed against the door frame, the new jacket collar rough against his neck. Five years earlier, before he had taken the train to the Muskokas, they had come to the Geranium Bakery. And Nicholas had offered to look after her. She was welcome to stay with his family. He had suggested this casually and with no hesitation, sitting in his office under the clock Hana loved, where each hour was represented by a different style of doughnut.
“Each of us is on our own for a while now,”
Patrick had said. “
I know.”
She had been eleven years old then.

She rose from the bed. “Hey, Patrick, look how tall I’ve got!” Stepping forward towards him and embracing him quietly, her arms all the way around him, the top of her head just reaching his chin.

At the Balkan Café they sat down and ordered
sujuk
, the sausages with leeks and pork and garlic that he had not eaten for so long.

He felt comfortable joking with her, gathering her perspective. In prison when he imagined freedom it was as a solitary. Nothing to carry, nothing to fall back into the arms of. This was the image he luxuriated in, awake all night, watching the other prisoners turning like great grey fish in their cells. In prison he had protected himself with silence – as if any sentence would be unsafe territory, as if saying even one word would begin a release of Alice out of his body. Secrecy kept him powerful. By refusing communication he could hold her within himself, in his arms. But on the night Caravaggio was attacked, his father’s neutral song slid out as warning. And Patrick turned from himself.

Ambrose Small, as a millionaire, had always kept the landscapes of his world separate, high walls between them. Lovers, compatriots, businessmen, were anonymous to each other. As far as they knew there were no others, or they assumed the others lived in far countries.

When Clara Dickens joined Ambrose Small after he evaporated from the world of financial power she thought she would see the vista of his nature. But during the years that she lived with Ambrose she would know him only as he wanted to be known by her. There was no other road towards him. She was too close to him now – to his new daily obsessions, his temporary charm. She wanted to climb above him even once and gaze down, see the horizon that held him together.

What she discovered in the end – when he sat on the floor of the emptied room in Marmora nothing else around him but Clara and the walls and the wood floor and the curtainless windows so he could sleep at night neatly within the coffin of moonlight – was much worse.

In the days before he died, Small’s mind slipped free of its compartments as if what had kept all his diverse worlds separate had been pulled out of him like a spine. So as he talked and muttered towards Clara, events fell against each other – a night with a lover, a negotiation at the Grand Opera House. Strangers and corpses of his past arrived in this sparse room with its
one lamp lit during the day, so the shadows were like moon-tides around it.

Words fell from his mouth and shocked her in the intricacy of his knowledge of so many women, such deep interiors of the financial sea. She heard his varied portraits of her which had gone unspoken for years, his affections and passions and irritations and reversals, his sweet awe at her sense of colour with certain flowers, the memory of her standing in a hall years earlier and smelling each of her armpits when she thought she was alone.

Clara crouched in front of Ambrose and now he could not see her. He was sitting lotus, bare-chested, his hands moving over his face sensuously rubbing the front of his skull, as he revealed the mirrors of himself, his voice slowing as his fingers discovered his right ear. Then he bent forward as he sat so his head would touch the floor in a long grace-attempted bow, ascetic. A heron stretching his head further underwater, the eyes open within the cold flow, open for the fish that could then be raised into the air and dropped moving in the tunnel of the heron’s blue throat.