Read In the Skin of a Lion Online
Authors: Michael Ondaatje
In the Skin of a Lion (9 page)
He had been looking through the window for over ten minutes when he suddenly focused on a shadow on the glass and saw it was a tree frog. He lit the oil lamp and held it up to the creature. A
pseudacris triseriata
. Hello friend, he breathed towards the pale-green speckled body hanging against the pane.
– Clara …
– What is it?
– Ambrose.
Love was like childhood for him. It opened him up, he was silly and relaxed.
–What!
She was wide awake, watching him as if he were crazy.
– Come here, I want you to see this.
She looked at the window and then back at him, refusing to speak.
– He wants you with all your clothes off.
– It’s three in the morning, Patrick, you’re supposed to
be asleep. You’re supposed to be searching for my beloved. (
Beloved!
He grinned.) Do you want to make love, is that it?
– It’s a tree frog!
– A tree frog in the moonlight is not rare.
– Yes it is, they only come out during the day. He wants to consider your thorax, your abdomen.
– Is this some kind of Bolshevik gesture?
She unbuttoned the shirt, stood between him and the glass.
– Tomorrow night he’ll probably bring his pals to see you. Some places call them bell frogs. When they get excited they make a sound like a bell. Sometimes they bark like dogs.
She leaned forward and put her mouth to the green belly against the glass and kissed it.
– Hello Ambrose, she whispered, how are you doing?
Patrick put his arms around her and held her breasts.
– Marry me, willya …
He started barking.
– One of these days, soon, I’ll go.
– To join Ambrose.
– Yes … I know he’s alive.
– I have a fear I won’t see you again.
– You talk on, Patrick, but you have no remorse.
– A strange word. It suggests a turning around on yourself.
– Don’t speak. Here …
He met Ambrose in a dream. At the door he said, “There is this grey figure attached to my body, Patrick, I want you to cut it off me.” They were old friends. All Patrick had was a penknife. He unfolded the blade and made Ambrose move into the hall, underneath the one light near the iron elevators. It was easier to see what it was now. A grey peacock had been sewn onto his friend. Patrick began to cut it away.
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 had 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.