Open (9 page)

Lyle pulled the blanket up to Alex’s chin. He stood there remembering a summer afternoon last year when he and Alex had gone swimming at Archibald Falls, near the house they had in Conception Bay. The falls were a long hike into the woods, and he and Alex were usually the only ones there. They’d picked wild strawberries and blackberries, eating them as they went. Then they’d put on yellow-tinted goggles and watched two small trout swimming in circles just below the waterfall’s ramrod, feathery spine. Afterwards they sat on the lichen-splattered boulders and read their books together.

Standing at the foot of Alex’s bed with the empty baby bottle in his hand, Lyle felt that specific summer afternoon roaring through him. The thrashing of the falls, the smell of wild roses, and when the wind shifted, a sweet, poisonous smoke from a dump far off in the hills. In the evening he had heated beans and made scrambled eggs on the Coleman stove for supper. They ate outside, reading as they ate. It had been a full day of reading. They’d hardly spoken but had achieved an unequivocal harmony until the boy from next door had waded through the grass. The boy was Alex’s age, just eleven, with a jagged haircut and freckles, his eyes pale blue and commanding. He held before him, on a Dominion bag, a fresh cod. Without a word, Alex had turned her book over so the library plastic crackled. She hooked her dangling sneaker over her heel with one finger and followed the boy around the corner of the house.

Lyle watched them through the wavering old glass of the kitchen window while he washed the dishes. The kitchen smelled of wood smoke and bitter crabapples. Lyle’s dog, Sic’um, tore through the grass after the boy until the nylon rope snapped taut and drops of water and mist were flung from it to hang iridescent over the grass and the dog boomeranged a couple of feet back. The children stood still, facing each other. The boy joined his hands in front of his chest and bowed deeply. Then he clenched his fists near his hips, lifted his foot high above his shoulder and swung it with slo-mo gentleness toward Alex’s chin. She pretended the foot had caught her jaw. She began a flailing, ballerina dive into the grass, where she
disappeared. The boy stood waiting as though he were watching a lake for a swimmer who had been under too long. Then he dove into the long grass where Alex had disappeared. They stayed there, in the grass. When Alex came inside to help with dishes she was overtaken by a self-absorption Lyle had never seen in her before. When she finally met his eyes — he had lit the kerosene lamp and the darkness of the kitchen had cupped them like two giant palms cupping a moth — she seemed surprised to see him. She’d said, Girls in my class wear training bras. She was mangling a slice of bread with a knife and gob of butter. Of course, she’d said, I don’t have anything to
put
in a bra. She looked up and her whole face was rosy with shame and exultation.

After they’d cleaned up they went outside, where there was still enough light to read. Their books were damp, a fine, settling dew put a wave in the pages of his Heidegger. They read together until the boy returned, beating the grass with a plastic hockey stick. He wanted Alex to play spotlight.

Lyle looked up from his book. Reading Heidegger that afternoon, Lyle had been like someone copying pans of ice, desperate to cover distance, grasping a difficult phrase only long enough to leap to the next. A fast squall of grace had raced across the ice to engulf him. He had dipped a gingersnap into his coffee while he read, and had forgotten it was there in his hand.

But there was the boy and his daughter, the fringe of her cut-offs, red flashing lights in the soles of her sneakers. The cookie had sopped up so much coffee that it was falling over,
and he caught it in his mouth. Alex’s face: the big, new teeth, her sunburned, peeling nose, her fiercely blue eyes, a moist film of perspiration near her temple. He felt a physical ache in his chest because she was so unspeakably beautiful to him. Then he couldn’t remember what he had been reading, the argument fell apart. When he glanced back at the book the letters were fuzzy. It was too dark to continue reading. This was why he hadn’t wanted kids. They were a constant interruption. The field of loose ice sank away, nothing remaining but a phrase,
the abandonment of being
, which might have been Sanskrit. Where had Anna been that day? She was pregnant with Pete. Lyle had watched the pale arm of the flashlight riffling through the trees.

Anna said, Lyle, are you getting the bottle? Because I’m waiting here.

He was a man dreaming he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man. The winter night asserted itself. Snow pinging the glass. He could hear music, from downtown. The red
S
of the Scotiabank was in the top right corner of Alex’s window, it had a chef’s hat of snow glowing pinkly.

When Lyle was eighteen he’d slept with a girl named Rachel he’d met in first year university. Rachel was seventeen and he slept with her maybe half a dozen times. The first time, they’d met in the Breezeway, a raucous university bar with roving coloured spotlights.

They had never made an effort to get together after that; they’d just happen upon each other. The last time they met like this was in the wind tunnel between the library and the chemistry building. She was wearing a long candy-cane striped
scarf. It stood out in front of her, rippling. The wind was blowing her across a skim of ice and she was squealing and she slid into his arms. Their chests smacked, and when he bent his nose into the icy fox-fur trim he could smell her lipgloss.

It was four-thirty in the afternoon, already dark. His wrists stuck out of the leather gloves his mother had insisted he wear and he remembered that his wristbones felt like glass, that a sharp bang might have cleanly snapped off his hands. It was below zero. They’d gotten a bus to her parents’ house. The windows of the bus were grey with salt and a man sat beside him with crutches that cuffed his forearms and his legs were twisted and stiff like pipe cleaners.

Rachel told Lyle he should stop reading philosophy. She said, Literature is such a kick. You’ve got to read that. And she looked out the window over her shoulder as if one of the stout, soft-covered Penguins she had jammed in her knapsack —
Middlemarch, Anna Karenina
, or
Crime and Punishment
— was unfolding on the street. He told her his wrists were cold and she took the glove off his right hand and put her searing mouth over his wristbone so it bristled with needles like a startled porcupine.

When they arrived at her parents’ house, somewhere in Mount Pearl, she lifted a curled real estate guide from the mailbox, a hardened baton sheathed in ice. She poked his stomach with it, and when he looked down she slapped his cheek. The ice on the guide smashed to pieces that skittered across the concrete step. The slap left a sting.

That was for nothing, she said, don’t try anything. She
turned her back on him and unlocked the door and he followed her inside.

They smoked some pot in the bathroom, a white gauzy curtain gone yellow with age flying out the open window against the night sky. That evening of lovemaking has come over him lots of times since; often when he’s tired or drunk, it overtakes him, haunts him, so he can almost smell the crackling hope of the new subdivision, the whiff of cedar and camphor in the pink bedspread ruffles that had been unexpectedly rough against his cheek, the stinky dope meeting the stormy wind. There had been a marmalade cat with a fluffy tail drawing up the gold and rust shag carpet with her nails, very near his ear, on the living-room floor.

Pot exacted from him a languid thoroughness while making love. Every touch lost its path, outlived its life expectancy. She had licked under his arm, and that cool trail he’d felt for days afterward, while washing dishes for his mother, dopey with the steam rising from the sink and the heat of the oven, or while lazing on the living-room carpet before
Gilligan’s Island
and
Get Smart
with the slippery velvet of the golden retriever’s ear in his fingers. The cheeks of her bum, breasts like saucers of snowflakes, smoky breath, the bitten-down fingernails with chipped blue polish. He’d held her arms over her head, both of her wrists in one hand. He’d lowered her bra with his teeth, uncovering a nipple so it peeked out from a crush of eyelet lace, and he could feel with his tongue the roughness of the cotton and the softness of just the very tip of the pink, pink nipple. When his tongue touched her there she squirmed
against him. What a shock her mouth was. A hot, working muscle, a current, a force.

After they had taken off each other’s clothes she went into the kitchen for a drink of water. They had a fridge with a door that made crushed ice, and it was the first time he’d seen one. It was super-modern, a reflective black that matched the other appliances. She held the glass under a spout in the door of the fridge and the machine growled and the glass filled with slush. She drank the whole glass and filled it again, stopping to grin at him, wiping a drip from her chin with the back of her hand. She was wearing a fat mood ring, and it was dark green, which meant, she said, that she was fuckable. He lifted her, taking a cheek of her bum in each of his hands, surprised by how light she was. Her legs wrapped over his hips and her back was pressed against the door of the fridge. With each thump they heard jars rattling, glass clinking; something smashed, the engine whirred, her hand slapped the black door three times. A Reddi-Kilowatt magnet scuttled along the gleaming surface to the floor.

Rachel spilled the ice over his chest, it felt like flankers spat from a fire and a line of it glittered in their joined bellies, it dug into his thighs. It crunched in their pubic hair, and when he came it felt like his veins were running with blue antifreeze, so cold it made sweat spring to his forehead. He kissed her mussy hair. Her bum squeaked against the black door as he set her on her feet. Her mouth was cold from the water, like an igloo.

She switched on a fluorescent light and they both began to giggle. The copper cooking pots hung over the stove in order of diminishing size, there was an Esso calendar with a picture of
a terrier, a red and white gingham apron tossed over the back of a pine chair, a box of Ritz crackers. Their nakedness boinged forward like something on a trampoline. Nothing in the room had been altered by their sex. The kitchen immured their glittering, star-struck bodies in a sheath of bland fluorescence without giving them a thought.

The marmalade cat eyed Lyle through the kitchen doorway. She came into the room and raised her tail. She rubbed herself against the fridge, jutted her chin, and then crossed the black and white tiles to weld her static coat to Lyle’s bare calf. The street had turned a perfect, uncanny white. An errant draft raised goosebumps on Lyle’s arms. A rectitude stole over him with the chill. There was a sinister note in the freedom he felt in her parents’ kitchen. Rachel had been digging in the cupboard and had taken out a tin of chocolate chip cookies. She piled them on the counter and fit the lid back on the illustrated tin; it was the Norman Rockwell of a little girl with a pink bow in her hair and her drawers lowered for a spanking, ink hand prints on the wall behind her.

Ravenous, Rachel said, her mouth filled with cookie.

A paranoia shot through him, made his heart take off the way a cartoon heart, the Road Runner’s, might stretch through his brown fur and hang in the air while the rest of his spindly body fell miles and miles to the dusty earth. Lyle couldn’t get his jeans on fast enough, hobbling down the hallway from Rachel’s bedroom with one pant leg flapping to the side, nearly falling as he dragged the waist over his knees, leaving behind him a trail of coins.

He had not walked very far down the new cul-de-sac when a car passed him, plastering a sheet of slush to his shins. The car pulled into Rachel’s driveway. Her parents sat for a moment, and then they got out. They had groceries. He watched them make their way up the path. Her mother’s long coat was a gash of fuchsia. He was close enough to hear the aluminum storm door smack behind them. The living-room light came on. He stayed, he had no idea how long, but nothing else happened. The house remained inert. He stood under the streetlight and watched the snowflakes.

He was overwhelmed with the joy of not being caught. He made a decision, almost a pledge, that he would not sleep with Rachel again. He probably wouldn’t even run into her, but if he did he wouldn’t speak much to her. Lovers slipped out of his life when he was eighteen without consequence. He decided the freedom he’d felt in her kitchen would just be the start. He made a resolution: beam a mild vertigo from your forehead at all times, like a miner’s lamp. In this way you’d always step to the side when ruin tore down the path behind you. You’d always get out before the parents came home. He knew he was stoned but he could never discern which perception, stoned or straight, was most accurate. He promised himself he’d keep one set of thoughts in his left hand and the other set in his right.

When the phone rang several weeks later Lyle knew by the sound of his mother’s voice it was a girl. His mother said that any girl who called a boy’s house had no self-respect. She spoke loud enough to be overheard. The receiver was lying on a long roll of cotton batting with opalescent sparkles and tiny white
Christmas lights buried beneath it. Ceramic angels with velvet costumes and paper songbooks were stationed all over the cotton batting. Among them, the receiver looked like an alien spacecraft.

Rachel just said his name, Lyle.

It made Lyle think of when he first got contact lenses. He had stepped out of the optometrist’s office on LeMarchant Road and looked up into the branches of a tree and saw, for the first time, individual leaves. Each leaf distinct from the next, rather than the loose weave of luminous, swimming colour he had always believed a tree to be. His own subjectivity, previously transparent, became opaque. He saw his mother’s dark tweed sleeve shot through with minute white seeds, shiny where worn, bristling microscopic hairs of wool. He’d just had time to grasp the sleeve in his fist before he hit the sidewalk. He had fainted.