Open by Lisa Moore

Author:Lisa Moore [Moore, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC029000, General Fiction
ISBN: 9780887848711
Publisher: House of Anansi
Published: 2002-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

If You’re There

I am waiting for Jeremy to show on his bike. I sit on the patio of Future Bakery waiting for him. Chilly, still. No leaves. But everybody, the bikes, a skirt flapping back off a thigh, the army boot touching down, a full stop. Red light, the bicycle. He’ll come around the corner. The cars are splats, blue, red, blooming and contracting in the big wall of glass beside me. Zoom. The girl on the bike, flicking through, gone. There he is, take him in. Take his measure.

A shirt, some snazzy thing he’s got on. We never hug; I hug him. Because I decided to. I’m starting to feel my age. A nostalgia for things that haven’t happened yet. Or they’ve happened at such a velocity that I’m left behind, still waiting for them. Anticipation so heightened it makes my funny bone ring. I’m going to hug Jeremy from now on, every time I see him. I’m never going to not hug. Not just him, everybody. A new me, a hugging me.

I came to Toronto because I hadn’t seen Lily and Marco for so long, because I had some money, to get away from the baby, drink coffee at Lily’s kitchen table, eat things. Fusion. Maybe get drunk. For a long time you couldn’t get shiitake mushrooms in St. John’s. Lemongrass we have. I wanted to see Jeremy. I haven’t seen him since he left Newfoundland two years ago. He’s come into some serious money and I think he might disappear with it.

Lily and I met at art school centuries ago. She’s got some new grey at the temples; other than that she’s exactly the same. They’re both the same, Lily and Marco, but why did I let five years go by? I need her. The way she knocks foreheads with the cat.

Lily says, I want to crack the new painting wide open. Her painting in the centre of the living room, some bare canvas still showing, the spotlight with a crush of tinfoil over the rim focussing the beam. The rest of the room is darkish, even in the morning. A quiet street, you can see the squirrels leaping, silhouettes, the branches thrashing briefly. The cavernous sofa that Lily’s recovered in velvet. A Graham Coughtry, two figures interlocked, just a few sure, dangerous lines of ink.

Often she sits for an hour or more in front of the painting, her back very straight, smoking. I’ve seen her drip gold from a tiny bottle. I stand behind her with my coffee. Blues, pinks, lemon, almost white in the centre, all of it in motion, sunlight on water.

It’s still representational, she says. One minute it’s brushstrokes and colour, the next minute —

She’s taking me to her Improv Contact class. I’m nervous.

Look, she says, it’ll be fine.

Walking there, the crocuses. Spring on Yonge, smart and awake, like toothpaste. We cross the bridge and into the subway station, warm uprush, vaguely feculent: feet, newsprint, grease.

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