Stunt Read Free Page A

and they are coming undone.
    You tell me, ‘The woman on the chair fell to her death seconds after that photograph was taken. Some drunk shook the wire.’ And then you punch the wall of your studio, your fist immediately gloved in blood like you just birthed a calf. The blood is thick and it sticks to everything you touch. Making my cheek, my neck, my hair, me, red as you tell me, ‘Some drunk shookthe wire. Some drunk shook the wire.’ Two scars form on your knuckles. Of the seventy-two scars on your body, there are only four that I was there for. This moment accounts for half. I wrap a towel around your hand and I kiss your knuckles through the reddened towel, and with my new, worried mouth I pretend I am a queen in wartime. You do too. And then you lean in, your moustache now balsam-waxed in the style of his, straight across your face, a right angle in a world without right angles, Finbar’s words, not your own, ‘The trick is to have a stunt that no one else can perform.’ I see the words in the space between us. The lettering is gold and ornate.
    â€˜Did Finbar fall too?’
    â€˜He tried.’
    Sometimes a slow dance, tonight a toppling – the sun sets decisively and night sweeps in, all dark majesty and menace. A Cheshire grin. The air: teeth. I eat the liverwurst sandwich. It is wood chips. It is ashes. I can hear the vacuum cleaner inside. It is the sound of accusation. Mink is cleaning. We have not spoken yet. There is no need. I will be gone soon and with my absence there will be one less thing for her to worry about. She will have to wait a few weeks, but then she can turn my bedroom into an exercise studio.
    Across the street and five doors down, Meatball Marta draws her curtains closed. Of all the neighbourhood women, she is my favourite, the one whose affections I court. Her face is that of a film starlet reclining on a divan. Skin like butcher paper, lithe as an electric eel, she has a Polish accent even though she has lived here since she was a girl. When she speaks on the telephone to her relatives in Warsaw, it sounds like
cream eternity cream eternity cream.
She could have state secrets and a fan made of peacock feathers. She could have a young lover in riding pants. On her bed is a buffalo hide, a lantern shaped like a phoenix above it. Her apartment is full of candelabras. They are bronze and ornate, borrowed from Renaissance paintings. Mink calls her
the spinster in loungewear.
Marta is always dyeing her hair and apologizing to me for being moody. She collects old books. The Everyman’s Library. Her apartment is sinking from the weight of them. They are stacked in her attic. She says, ‘I am unemployed. I am existentialist. I have no reason to leave the house.’ I go there to look at the engravings in the books and to admire the adventurers, tall at the helms of ships, heading into the great unknown. Surely that’s still on someone’s map, somewhere: THE GREAT UNKNOWN.
    Now her lights flicker yellow, like gnomes live there and they are bustling beside a great hearth, like her hovel is the one you find when you are lost in the forest and need a heel of bread. For a moment, I want to go there and have her pat my head and speak to me in her hard syllables, bricks of gold. I want her to calm me. But I don’t dare. I could miss you.
    I see what you are thinking. Why you didn’t come earlier. It is all clear. As the outlaw says, cocksure, swayback, wet toothpick in the teeth, I must be under the cover of darkness to be wrapped in a horse blanket and stolen away.
Pow pow.
Now is the time. I know all about night, its roominess. I watched the movies with you, our fingers tangling in the popcorn. You would roar alongside the lion and then the movie would start and you would sink to a squat and fall still as a disciple. That black-and-white stutter broadcast on a sheet in your studio: cowboys liver-spotted with dirt loping through teepees;