Degrees of Nakedness by Lisa Moore Page B

the bedroom and you’ve set up the monitor with the video camera pointed at the bed. The room on the screen is hot, yellowish, textured with fuzzy dots. I take off my clothes. You zoom in tight so my skin fills the screen like sand dunes. You zoom out and I turn my bum toward the camera, lift my leg. I turn myself every way. You take off your clothes and sit down beside me. The molecules of our skin are vibrating.
    You say, I’ll do something about the colour.
    I like the colour.
    Tentatively, we touch each other, watching the screen. It takes a second for my hand to find you because you are closer than you appear.
    I say, Is this thing running?
    You say, Let’s tape it, we’ll erase it after.
    At first the whir of the camera fills the room. You press my legs open in the direction of the lens, watching the monitor over your shoulder.
    Then we make love, forgetting the camera.
    Afterwards we watch it. For a long time you were bent with your head between my legs, the skin of your back shimmering. The only movement visible for several minutes is my knee entering the screen slowly and dropping away. Then my arms come up around your hips, move over your hips, my fingers spread on your back. It looks like a varnished oil painting, age disintegrating the image.
    Our sex broken down into grains of pure colour, drawn through the blue eye of the camera, a private constellation of us, sticking to the magnetic tape. No sound.
    You say, It comes from having sex with the same person for so long. That gentleness.
    Walking up Victoria Street at night, headlights separate my shadow into several separate bodies that drop away from each other like a chain of paper dolls joined at the hands, all sliding sideways over each other, over the clapboard. The car roaring uphill and zooming away, the silhouettes becoming one at the toes of my shoes. All the possibilities coming into existence and dropping away with each step.
    I think of having another baby. Perhaps our life would spill over. Perhaps we could no longer contain our life. Today I dropped Sally at day care and she cried to break her heart. I had to pry her fingers off my leather jacket to run out the door. But then I think, in the future I’ll regret not having another child. I will not understand whatever crooked path of thought led me to deciding I didn’t want another one.
    Carol’s laughter is like spraying champagne suppressed by a thumb. It’s her turn to cook. She’s in the kitchen beneath us dancing the knife over the onions, toe-heel-toe-heel. Slow first, like Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek , then faster, red pepper, banana pepper, the seeds burning her lips, the cleaver juicy. The onions slip into the hot oil.
    There you are in the mirror of the wardrobe, the door swinging open. Milky light flashing over you like a waterfall. You bend one knee coyly, cover your genitals with your hands, mock femininity. The light rippling over your white long limbs. You’re standing in a giant clamshell of laundry. You turn from the mirror with a big bobbing cock.
    From the window I can look down on the back yard. Sally and some friends run through the front door — slam — the paddywhacks of their feet slapping the linoleum — slam — the back door, squeals with the garden sprinkler, they’ve turned on the sprinkler — like the giant feather fans eunuchs wield in old Hollywood movies about harems. Beads of silvery light, some red, some blue, languidly swaying on the children — Sally, three, is naked, except for the fur of cut grass that has stuck from the waist down, half goat/half child. The wind lifts her purple straw hat an inch off her head, it’s tied under her chin. You’ve cut my initials in the grass with the lawn mower, big block letters. Sally dives into the Big Bird wading pool, it makes a yellow blush on her body, like when you hold a buttercup under your chin. She splits the stagnant skin of water, dead bugs, cut grass. I want another child. Do you hear me? Soon