In the Skin of a Lion

  Ambrose was quiet. There appeared to be no pain at all. Patrick got down to the ankles and with a final saw from the knife the surplus figure curled off. It lay there like excess undercarpeting that had not been cleared away. They walked back to Small’s door, shook hands, and parted. As he was falling through the final buildings of his dream he heard the news of Small’s murder – he had been found vertically sliced in two.

  – What?

  – I said, were you dreaming?

  – I don’t know. Why?

  – You were twitching.

  – Hmmm. What kind of twitching?

  – You know, like a dog asleep in front of the fire.

  – Maybe I was chasing a rabbit.

  They were sitting on the floor leaning into the corner of the room, her mouth on his nipple, her hand moving his cock slowly. An intricate science, his whole body imprisoned there, a ship in a bottle. I’m going to come. Come in my mouth. Moving forward, his fingers pulling back her hair like torn silk, he ejaculated, disappearing into her. She crooked her finger, motioning, and he bent down and put his mouth on hers. He took it, the white character, and they passed it back and forth between them till it no longer existed, till they didn’t know who had him like a lost planet somewhere in the body.

  The next day they drove along the country roads in her Packard. He watched her as she spoke of the Wheeler Needle Works where her father had worked, the Medusa factory by the railway.

  – This is the tour of my teenage life, Patrick. I’ll show you where I almost got seduced.

  – The crucial years.

  – Yes.

  He loved the eroticism of her history, the knowledge of where she sat in schoolrooms, her favourite brand of pencil at the age of nine. Details flooded his heart. Clara said once, “When I know a man well socially, the only way I’ll ever get to know him better will be to sleep with him.” Seduction was the natural progression of curiosity. And during these days he found he had become interested only in her, her childhood, her radio work, this landscape in which she had grown up. He no longer wanted Small, he wanted to exorcise Small from Clara’s mind.

  It was raining and they couldn’t get out of the car. She rolled down the window.

  – This is where I used to bury my lunch.

  Taking his pocket handkerchief she wet a corner with her tongue.

  – You’ve got mud on you, she said, rubbing his forehead.

  All these gestures removed place, country, everything. He felt he had to come back to the world.

  – Tell me something about Ambrose quickly.

  – Whenever he lied his voice became quiet and reasonable.

  – What else.

  – We used to fuck on the Cayuga.

  – The day ferry? Jesus, on the Cayuga?

  He was drawing out her history with Small, a splinter from a lady’s palm. He was constantly appalled.

  – Would it be forgivable to say I stayed with him because he gave me a piano?

  – What are you telling me?

  – I loved the piano. It was something to get lost in. My exit, my privacy. He had his money, gambling, he had his winning elsewhere. I had my radio work and my piano. Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy. And you?

  – I don’t know.

  – There was a time when I could have slept with his friend Briffa, for instance. Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities.

  – I like fraught air.

  – Briffa was lovely. European courtesy, a suggestion of brutality, happily married. I liked him because he was shaved down and focused. He decorated theatres.

  He had his vision, and that of course is a great aphrodisiac. The only man I met who had a vision. Ambrose didn’t. But he drew people like Briffa and others around him. Nobody else would touch them, let alone give them jobs. It was a battle – Small and his friends against the rest. Ambrose was laying siege, attacking all those remnants of wealthy families who really were the end of the line.

  – And you were the pianist.

  – Yes, the pianist, the musical interlude, the romance in the afternoon.

  – He was the first to bugger me.

  Patrick lay shocked and still beside her in the afternoon sunlight. When he spoke of his own past he was not calm like her. He flashed over previous relationships, often in bad humour. He would disclose the truth of his past only if interrogated with a specific question. He defended himself for most of the time with a habit of vagueness.

  There was a wall in him that no one reached. Not even Clara, though she assumed it had deformed him. A tiny stone swallowed years back that had grown with him and which he carried around because he could not shed it. His motive for hiding it had probably extinguished itself years earlier.… Patrick and his small unimportant stone. It had entered him at the wrong time in his life. Then it had been a flint of terror. He could have easily turned aside at the age of seven or twenty, and just spat it out and kept on walking, and forgotten it by the next street corner.

  So we are built.

  – Who are your friends, Patrick?

  – You. Only you.

  – Alice comes tomorrow.

  – We should go then.

  – No, we can stay. You’ll like her. But sometime after that I’ll leave you.

  – For Ambrose.

  – Yes, for Ambrose. And you must never follow me.

  – It takes me a long time to forgive.

  – Don’t worry, Patrick. Things fill in. People are replaced.

  He wondered if at first she had been something he wanted to steal, not because she was Clara but because she belonged to the enemy. But now there was her character. This daughter of the foreman at Wheeler Needle Works, who seemed to have entered him like a spirit, bullying his private nature. She had been the lover, of Ambrose Small, had been caught in the slow discreet wheel of the rich. And she would have learned those subtle rules that came alongside their gifts.

  She started laughing, the hair on her temples still wet after their lovemaking. He sensed suddenly the sweat on himself as well. As he held her, he still didn’t know who she was.

  After midnight Clara strolls behind her friend Alice, removes the shawl from her shoulders, and ties it on as a headband. Patrick watches Clara intently – the bones, the planes of lamplight on her face, hair no longer in the way. Follow me, she could say in her shawl headband, and he would be one of the Gadarene swine.

  – Did I tell you, Clara laughs, how I helped my father shave dogs? A true story. My father loved to hunt. He had four redbone hounds, with no names – they disappeared so often we used numbers. During the summer, hunters steal dogs and my father was always worried about theft. So we’d drive to the worst barber in Paris and ask him to clip the dogs. He was always insulted by this, though he had not much other business.

  I’d sit in the barber chair and hold the dog in my lap while it got clipped, and then we drove back with naked dogs. At home my dad got out his cow razor. He’d shave the midriffs to the skin, then we’d hose them and leave them to dry in the sun. After lunch my father wrote out DICKENS 1, DICKENS 2, and DICKENS 3 with tree paint in neat letters on their sides. I was allowed to paint the name on the last dog. We had to hold them to the ground until the paint dried properly. I wrote DICKENS 4.

  Those were favourite times. All day we’d talk about things I was not sure of. About plants, what wine tasted like. He put me right on how to have babies. I thought I had to take a watermelon seed, put it between two pieces of bread and drink lots of water. I thought this was how my parents talked when they were alone. We’d chat to the dogs too who were nonplussed, looking thin and naked. Sometimes it seemed to me I’d just had four babies. Great times. Then my father died of a stroke when I was fifteen. Dammit.

  – Yeah, says Patrick, my father too.… My father was a wizard, he could blow logs right out of the water.

  – What happened?

  – He got killed setting charges in a feldspar mine. The company h
ad tried to go too deep and the section above him collapsed. There wasn’t an explosion. The shelf just slid down with him into the cave and drowned him. He was buried in feldspar. I didn’t even know what it was. They use it in everything – chinaware, tiles, pottery, inlaid table tops, even in artificial teeth. I lost him there.

  – Here’s to holy fathers, Alice says, holding up her glass.

  Conversation dips again into childhood but the friend Alice plucks only details from the present to celebrate. She reveals no past, remains sourceless, like those statues of men with wrapped heads who symbolize undiscovered rivers.

  All night as they talk the sky and the fields outside seem potent with summer storm. The night kitchen with these two actresses is overwhelming. Clara and Alice slip into tongues, impersonate people, and keep each other talking long into the night. Patrick is suddenly an audience. They imitate the way men smoke. They discuss how women laugh – from the raucous to the sullen to the mercenary. He is in a room full of diverse laughter, looking back and forth from Clara’s vividness and erotic movement, even when she stretches, to Alice’s paleness and suppressed energy. “My pale friend,” Clara had called her.

  At three in the morning there is thunder in the distance. Patrick cannot keep his eyes open. He says goodnight, and abandons himself to the sofa, closing the door to the kitchen.

  The two women continue talking and laughing, a glance of sheet lightning miles away. After an hour or so they say to each other, “Let’s get him.”

  In the darkness of the farmhouse Clara and Alice approach his bed. They carry candles and a large roll of paper, whispering to each other. They uncover the face of Patrick hidden in the green blanket. This is enough. The candles are placed on a straight-back chair. They cut the paper with draper’s scissors and pin the four corners of it to the floor. They begin to draw hard and quickly, as if copying down a blueprint in a foreign country. It seems as illicit as that. Approaching a sleeping man to see what he will reveal of himself in his portrait at this time of the night.

  He sleeps, and during the next while they work together on the same sheet which sometimes tears with the force of the crayon. They have done this often to each other, these spirit paintings, the head leaking purple or yellow – auras of jealousy and desire. Given the vagueness of his covered body, they draw upon all they know or can guess about him. They kneel, their heads bright beside the candlelight, crayoning against the texture of the floor. Anger, honesty, stumble out. One travels along a descant of insight and the other follows, completes the phrase, making the gesture safe.

  A cave-mural. The yellow light flickers upon his face against the sofa cushion, upon the two women sweating during this close night, their heads down as if pulling something out of a river. One leans back to stretch while the other explores the portrait. “Are we witches?” Alice asks.

  Clara begins to laugh. She moans like a spirit looking for the keyhole out of the room. She places her hands on the frail walls, then her mouth explodes with noise and she tugs Alice out into the Ontario night. They crash down the wood steps, Clara’s growls unnaming things, their bodies rolling among the low moon flowers and grass and then leaping up as the rain breaks free of the locked heat clouds, running into the thunder of a dark field, through the stomach-high beans and corn, the damp rustle of it against their skirts and outstretched arms – the house fever slipping away from them.

  The rain comes through their thin cotton clothes against their muscles. Alice sweeps back her wet hair. A sudden flinging of sheet lightning and Clara sees Alice subliminal in movement almost rising up into the air, shirt removed, so her body can meet the rain, the rest of her ascent lost to darkness till the next brief flutter of light when they hold a birch tree in their clasped hands, lean back and swing within the rain.

  They crawl delirious together in the blackness. There is no moon. There is the moon flower in its small power of accuracy, like a compass pointing to where the moon is, so they can bay towards its absence.

  He moves quietly through the house in the early morning. At the top of the stairs he looks through a small round window into the fields. This is a fragile farmhouse. He has felt the winds shake it during the night. Now there is a strange peace, grass and trees seen through the white light of morning, the two women asleep. Yesterday they were up at dawn flinging rhubarb across the room at each other – as he discovered, waking to riotous laughter. He found them in the midst of battle, Alice bent over in laughter, in tears, and Clara suddenly sheepish when she saw him enter the kitchen.

  Now there is no noise but the creak of his moving. In the bedroom he finds them asleep in each other’s arms unaware of daylight filling the room. He touches the elbow of Alice Gull and her flesh shifts away. He puts his hand into her palm and she grips it unconsciously, not fully awake.

  – Hi.

  – I have to go soon, he says. A train.

  – Ummm. We left you a present from last night.

  – Yes?

  – She’ll explain it later.

  She stretches carefully without disturbing Clara.

  – Throw me a shirt, I’ll have breakfast with you.

  In the kitchen Patrick cuts open a grapefruit and hands her half. Alice shakes her head. She remains sitting on the stool in the long pink shirt and watches him move, efficient in her kitchen. He slides through company, she notices, as anonymously as possible. She points to certain drawers silently when he asks for spoons or a spatula.

  Patrick is not a breakfast talker and in fifteen minutes he is ready to leave. She holds his arm at the door. He kisses her accidentally too close to the eye.

  – Give her a kiss for me.

  – I will.

  – Tell her I’ll see her tonight at the hotel.

  – Okay.

  She closes the door firmly and watches him through the window on his walk to the train station, striding from one frame of glass to another.

  She climbs back into bed with Clara, puts her arm around her to accept the warmth she has lost by rising. Welcomes the sleepy haven of Monday morning.

  His mind remains against them, like an impress of his hand on their sleeping flesh, the cold train window at his cheek. Hungry for Clara, he thinks about Alice as if he has not focused on her before, as if Alice being touched by Clara has grown magically, fully formed.

  In the Arlington Hotel that night he studies the large drawing Clara has tacked to the door. He has come off well, Clara tells him, the soul is pliable. He does not believe her. Unless his soul expands during sleep, unless sleep somehow attaches the disparate elements of his character. Perhaps the portrait will teach him. He loves the closeness between the two women and he enjoys their gift of his supposedly guardless nature.

  – What did you think of her?

  – I liked her.

  – She’s a great actress.

  – On the radio?

  – No, on the stage.

  – Better than you, is she?

  – By a hundred miles.

  – Yes, I liked her.

  Later he will think of the seconds when he was almost asleep and they entered the dark room with candles. The approach of magicians. He feels more community remembering this than anything in his life. Patrick and the two women. A study for the New World. Judith and Holofernes. St. Jerome and the Lion. Patrick and the Two Women. He loves the tableau, even though being asleep he had not witnessed the ceremony.

  Sometimes when he is alone Patrick will blindfold himself and move around a room, slowly at first, then faster until he is immaculate and magical in it. He will parade, turn suddenly away from lampshades, duck under hanging plants, even run across the room and leap in his darkness over small tables.

  All night long Patrick and Clara have talked, the name of Ambrose like a drip of water in their conversation. All night they have talked about her plan to join her ‘beloved,’ the sound of his name like a poison, like the word nicotine. She will leave tomorrow. She will not tell him where Small is. She demands that he n
ot try to follow her after they drive to Toronto to put her on the train. Patrick feels he knows nothing of most of Clara’s life. He keeps finding and losing parts of her, as if opening a drawer to discover another mask.

  They sit half-dressed on the bed on this last morning. All night long they have talked and he has felt inarticulate against the power of his unseen enemy, unable to persuade Clara out of this journey towards Ambrose. He offers to perform his trick for her, draws her long silk shawl from the sleeve of her coat, doubles it, and ties it around his eyes.

  He positions Clara on the bed and tells her not to move. Then he takes off into the room – at first using his hands for security then ignoring them, just throwing his body within an inch of the window swooping his head down parallel to shelves while he rushes across the room in straight lines, in curves, as if he has the mechanism of a bat in his human blood. He leaps across the bed delighted at her shriek. He is magnificent. He is perfect, she thinks.

  He mutters to her as he moves – “Watch this tray” – as he flings it up and catches it. “And this eggshell on the floor which I’ll crush like the bones of Stump Jones. You are so beautiful, Clara, I’ll never go blind. I want to go to sleep gazing at your face each night. I couldn’t be satisfied with just touching you, smelling you.” He throws an apple into her lap, rips the date off the calendar. “I practised some nights when you were asleep.” He leans forward and bites the apple, chewing and talking.

  She refuses all this and moves off the bed, positioning herself on the northeast corner of the rug. She puts her palms against her ears to stop hearing his endearments and stands there with her elbows sticking out. He is moving, almost frantic, now yelling his love. She can still hear him, and presses her palms tighter against the sides of her head, and closes her eyes. She feels the floor shudder under her, feels she is surrounded, contained by his whirling. Suddenly she is hit hard and her left hand jars against her skull, knocking her over.