Open by Lisa Moore

stomach. Maureen and I read most of this book one night three years ago. A short novel about a seventy-six-year-old woman of great literary fame who attracts a thirty-six-year-old lover.
    We read it in the kitchen on Gower Street during a snowstorm, taking turns reading aloud while the headlights of fishtailing cars swept the ceiling and the velvet funk of pea soup rose from the stove. We were overjoyed for Marguerite Duras. Way to go Marguerite, we yelled.
    But now, three years later, the story seems very different than I remember. The young lover is bisexual. Has affairs withbartenders in a nearby hotel. He seems to be terrorizing the novelist, who is too old and proud and drunk to do anything about it. She spends all her money on him and waits for him to bring food, sometimes going hungry. How had we mistaken this for hope?
    I’m also hungry. We spent a lot of money at a local shop, but most of the food has been eaten. There is a florid pink sausage pebbled with lard, and a can of duck. A package of biscuits from Norway that hasn’t been opened. We’re too lazy to go back into town. For a long time nobody talks. Then my husband lifts his head from a faded canvas pillow and looks one way, then the other. He puts his head back down, rolls his shoulders.
    He says, I’ve just had a very strong memory of a bus ride in Cuba.
    I say, With the careening eagle in the ravine.
    He says, Not that bus ride.
    I say Maureen’s name. She doesn’t move. Then, very slowly, she sits up. She says, Isn’t sleep strange, it overtakes us all, whole cities — the activities just stop for hours. It’s just struck me.
    Think of all the dead people, I say.
    Antoine’s hand emerges from a hatch, waving a baguette. Then his head appears very near Maureen’s thigh. He bites her and she squeals. He beats her stomach with the baguette.
    We eat the Norwegian biscuits and dip the hardened bread in cardamom tea in enamel cups, without saying much. The fresh air has made us all sleepy. For a while, there’s commotion as a giant yacht ties up next to Antoine’s.
    The three sailors are dressed in Helly Hanson fleece, royal blue, red, yellow. A woman of perhaps forty with a long mane of steely ringlets raises the American flag. The flag flutters weakly and then wraps itself around the mast, like a barber’s pole. A white Styrofoam plate lifts itself off their deck and floats in the water. They each pause and look at it. Then they step over the deck of Antoine’s yacht to get to the wharf.
    As he steps from Antoine’s deck, one of the Americans loses his shoe. Maureen tries to fish it out with a long pole, but the shoe begins to fill with water. Antoine climbs over the side. He inches his back down the creosote timber of the wharf with his feet jammed against the yacht. It looks like he will either be crushed or fall into the filthy harbour. A speedboat passes and the yacht moves closer and the space for Antoine is very narrow. The American woman in white pants clutches the arm of the elderly man. The man removes a white baseball cap and rubs his forehead with the back of his hand. Maureen smokes and her hand trembles near her mouth.
    All this for a shoe, the man says.
    But Antoine scrabbles up, spider-like, and holds the shoe in the air like a trophy. He does a little bow and tips the shoe, letting the water spill out. Everyone applauds.
    Early in the morning I go to the yacht club to shower. I meet a woman and child from France, a family who tied their catamaran onto the Americans’ yacht during the night. The woman gets out of the shower and isn’t in a hurry to cover up. She has a tattoo of an orange and black butterfly in the concave dip near her hipbone. She scrubs her daughter with a thickwhite towel. The room is full of steam and the smell of shampoo. The child has the same blond hair as her mother, shiny and pale like mashed banana. The woman tells me she has been on the catamaran for five years. They have been all over the world. Both