wondered if the merchandiser, probably Toronto-based, was being intentionally subversive.
She shook the newness out of it and put it on. It was big enough to be a nightgown. “Thanks, Morgan,” she shouted, but he obviously couldn’t hear her over the sound of water beating like a monsoon against the shower curtain.
After the shower stopped running, he poked his head through the door. “Did you yell?” he asked.
“I said ‘thank you.’ Thank you for the wearing apparel.”
“You’re welcome,” he responded, waving his right arm in a discreet salute.
“Morgan!”
“Yes!”
“What’s that on your shoulder?”
“ Tangata manu.”
“Who?”
“He’s the bird-man. He’s everywhere on Rapa Nui. The moai — or giant statues — the bird-man, and komari. Everywhere you turn, there are images — and Maki Maki, he’s the main god. Komari are vulva. There are hundreds and hundreds carved into the lava rock.”
“You do know how to deflect questions, don’t you! Hundreds of vulva?”
“Hundreds and hundreds.”
“Morgan, you have a tattoo.”
“A little one.”
“Don’t you feel guilty?”
“For cultural appropriation?”
“Bad taste.”
He snarled fake anger and retreated behind the closed bathroom door.
She listened to him moving about, mumbling to himself, but when he emerged in his boxer shorts with a towel draped modestly over his shoulders, she didn’t look up. In a quiet voice, she asked, “Can I touch it?”
“Sure! What?”
“You know.”
“What?”
“Your tattoo.”
“No.”
He walked to his side of the bed and carefully lifted the covers to slip the bundling blanket between them as he climbed in. In the ruffling shadows he caught a momentary glimpse of her naked legs and he lay back, deciding not to read. He was almost asleep when she turned off the reading light, slipped out of the bed, and went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. Inside the bag of toiletries were a package of super absorbency tampons and a packet of grotesque cherry-flavoured condoms. She looked at herself in the wall mirror over the sinks. She was grinning and shaking her head, and seeing herself grinning, she chuckled audibly and blew herself a kiss. Then she turned and, dowsing the light, edged her way through the darkness to the bedside where she slid quietly under the covers and lay on her back, staring thoughtfully into the darkness.
After a while, she said, “You asleep?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good,” she said, “Sleep well, Morgan. Thanks for letting me stay.”
“G’night.”
Miranda had been reading Shelagh Hubbard’s sordid narrative and she knew Morgan might easily have been the next victim, but she felt strangely at peace with the world as she listened to the sounds of her partner sleeping beside her, felt the almost imperceptible surge of the bed in the rhythm of his breathing, and inhaled the fresh scents of their bodies, enfolding them both.
Suddenly, she opened her eyes and realized it was morning. Morgan was up and dressed, sitting in a chair, reading a blue binder. She had slept beautifully.
Morgan seemed absorbed.
“Good morning,” Miranda said.
“Mmmnnn,” he responded.
“You’re sitting on my clothes.”
“They’re on the bed.”
He glanced up. “She writes like Graham Greene,” he said. “All moral complexity and no resolution. So completely matter-of-fact you forget how squalid and corrupt her vision of life really is.” He was already back into the text before he had finished speaking.
Miranda gathered her clothes with a sweep of her arm that was impeded by the bulge of the bundling blanket still in place beneath the covers. She rose awkwardly, holding clothes and a pillow in front of her as she backed toward the bathroom. Morgan wasn’t even looking. She wheeled around — scorning his indifference — stepped through the door, and shut it behind her. At the same time, attracted by her pirouette, he glanced up, smiled appreciatively at the flash of her nakedness, and returned to his reading.
Her panties were dry but she had to apply the hair drier to her bra before putting it on. It felt warm to the touch as she leaned over and adjusted her shape to its contour. I’m too sexy for my bra, she hummed, too sexy for my bra. As she stood upright, drawing each breast into place with a peremptory tug, she caught an image in the mirror of a woman of no particular age. She loved that. That’s how it should be, she thought. And I hope to goodness when I’m seventy, God willing, I’ll sometimes look in the mirror and see a woman like me, of no particular age.
When she emerged from the bathroom, Morgan stood up and looked her over. “Good,” he said, in a burlesque of the dutiful spouse. “You look lovely today.”
“It’s a new outfit. An exact replica of the one I wore yesterday. Once you find your style, you stick with it.”
“Really,” he said. “You look fine.”
“I like you better sarcastic. What do you think of your friend’s English exploits?”
“We’ll talk on the road. Let’s grab our coffee and doughnut and get out of here.”
He drove, following the signs to Penetanguishene. She explained he needed the practice. They discussed the third binder, which was first in the deadly trilogy.
“Maybe it’s just fantasy,” he said. “A prelude to murder. If you read it as fiction, it’s brilliantly conceived. I know Madam Renaud’s in London. The Chamber of Horrors. I actually have bittersweet memories of being there, twenty years ago. It was a girlfriend thing. A sad parting. I’ve never told you about Susan.”
“There’s lot you haven’t told me, Morgan. I don’t need all the details. Was she nice? If it was sad, she must have been nice.”
“Too nice. The problem was she was too nice.”
“I can relate to that.” She paused, not sure if she could. “Why the Chamber of Horrors?”
“Just a place we knew,” he responded, trying to remember which of them had proposed meeting there. He had been on the Continent for months; they had already broken up after sharing a pair of adjoining bedsitters in Knightsbridge for the better part of a year. She had a child before she got married. She had flown over from London to Toronto for dinner, just before Morgan’s own wedding. Was that her idea or his? Was she married then or not?
Miranda’s voice penetrated his gnawing reverie.
“For Shelagh Hubbard, Madame Renaud’s was almost inevitable. I ran across a reference when I was checking her out. She actually worked there after she finished a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of London — it was an offshoot from studies in forensic reconstruction, working with wax to recreate faces. It didn’t seem relevant. It certainly does now. But it sounds like a B movie — Vincent Price on the late show.”
“That’s the point, isn’t it? Turning cliche into reality.” Morgan stared at the landscape ahead as the highway rolled under them, periodically reminding himself he was at the wheel. He felt distracted but amused. “Wax figures look dead, even when they’re not meant to. If she really did use cadavers waxed-over to create realistic corpses, and then systematically insinuated her macabre creations into the displays in an actual Chamber of Horrors, like she claims, well, it’s diabolical, isn’t it? Using the dead to simulate death!”
“She’d have to be very good. Not morally speaking, of course.”
