In the Skin of a Lion (10 page)

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.

She stretches carefully without disturbing Clara.

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.

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.

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 not 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.

She gets to her knees, dazed, and looks around. Patrick is grabbing a part of the sheet towards his face. He is snuffling, blood begins to come out of his nose onto the sheet. The blindfold is around his neck like a collar. He looks up at her and, as if
he can’t see her, turns back to the sheet as he continues to bleed.

She still cannot stand up from the pain and the dizziness. She knows if she tries to stand she will fall over again. So she sits where she is. Patrick is bent over watching the sheet in his hands.

So much for the human element, he thinks.

All his life Patrick Lewis has lived beside novels and their clear stories. Authors accompanying their heroes clarified motives. World events raised characters from destitution. The books would conclude with all wills rectified and all romances solvent. Even the spurned lover accepted the fact that the conflict had ended.

After Clara leaves him, Patrick cleans his room on Queen Street obsessively. Soap crystals fizz in a pail, the mop slices the week’s dust. Then he sits in the only dry corner where he has previously placed cigarettes and smokes the Roxy, dropping ash into the bucket beside him. The room smells like a clean butchershop. The furniture – a table, a chair, and an iguana cage – is piled on the bed at the street end of the room.

Sometimes he leaves a book in this corner. He has already smelled the pages, touched the print’s indentations. Now he can devour it like a loaf of bread with his bare hands. He wipes cigarette ash off his arm and opens
Wild Geese. “It was not openly spoken of, but the family was waiting for Caleb Gare. Even Lind Archer, the new school teacher, who had come late that afternoon all the way from Yellow Post with the Indian mail carrier and must therefore be hungry, was waiting.”
Clara wiping his forehead with her handkerchief. “
The rocker seemed to say, ‘Caleb! Caleb! Caleb!’ It amused the Teacher, rather wanly.”
Her ear listening to the skin that covered Patrick’s heart.

He feeds the iguana, holding the vetch an inch from the neutral mouth. Only the eyelid sliding down changes its expression. An animal born of another planet. He strokes the jaw with the flower. Through the window he sees men appear in the blue Toronto sky, inching into the air, scaffolding it. Pieces of Clara float around him.

A kiss at Union Station, her mouth half-open.

Stumbling back from argument.

So he had watched Clara climb, prim, silver-buckled, into the train. He walked home with the cage banging against his knee, threw in a cabbage, and left the animal alone for a week. It heard his tirades, the broken cups and glasses. The iguana knew Clara Dickens, knowledge of her was there within its medieval body. Patrick believed in archaic words like
befall
and
doomed
. The doom of Patrick Lewis. The doom of Ambrose Small. The words suggested spells and visions, a choreography of fate. A long time ago he had been told never to follow her. If Patrick was a hero he could come down on Small like an arrow. He could lead an iguana on a silver leash to its mistress.