Open by Lisa Moore Page A

climb the rigging. His bare feet curling over the skeleton of the sails, a great height over the deck. His wiry body a part of the spare geometry.
    Antoine’s brother visits Newfoundland from Nigeria, where he’s been studying giraffes and getting his pilot’s license.
    He raps the brass knocker on the front door and steps inside. Sunlight flashes under his arms and between his legs and the door closes and the hall is dark. He stands, not moving. I am in the kitchen with my hands in the sink. I walk down the hall to greet him. He’s wearing a straw hat with tiny brass bells on the rim and patterns woven in wine and dark green straw. His face is so like Antoine’s that for a moment I think it is Antoine, playing a joke. I hold out my hand, he grips it, soapsuds squish through my fingers.
    Any brother of Antoine’s is a brother of mine, I say. He tilts his head quizzically, and the bells jingle through the empty house.
    He sleeps in the living room on the couch. There’s a French door with no curtain and he sleeps in his briefs with the blankets kicked away. He finally gets up and I don’t know what to do with him. With Antoine, misunderstandings could keep us talking for hours, but this guy has a firm grip on English and I’m at a loss.
    Okay, stay still, I say. I’m going to paint you.
    His knife pauses over the bread. A gob of marmalade hangs along the serrated edge. I do portraits in ink on wet paper. The thing about ink, as soon as you touch the brush to paper you have decided the course of the drawing. First, I am looking into his eyes. I am thinking about the shape of the eyeball, and the size, how far the eye sinks into the face. How the shadow slopes over the bone of the brow — if he sits back even an inch, the shadow will be radically different. Then the colour of his eyes startles me. I thought they were dark brown, but in this light there is a tawny copper underneath, like the bottle of marmalade, which the sun strikes so it seems to pulse. He has just come from Nigeria, and how far away that is, and what he has seen. Then I realize that I have been staring with an unself-conscious intensity into a stranger’s eyes. And this brother of Antoine is staring at me and we become aware of ourselves, and the intimacy is briefly but fiercely embarrassing.
    He says, gesturing to the sketchbook, Forgive me, it’s my first time.
    Weeks later in our kitchen I say, Antoine seemed strange to me. That weekend in St. Pierre I marked a change in him.
    Late at night Maureen watched the video again and in the morning she said it was true. He had behaved differently.
    I said, But he’s hardly in the video at all, you can’t go by that. There’s a close-up of everyone playing pool. I tried to make it like John Cassevetes, swaying the camera around them, close-ups on laughing mouths, sultry eyes, chalking the poolcue. The high-pitched scrudge of chalk and cue. The camera swings around the bar and when it passes the open doorway a blast of sunshine casts a trail over the last half of the shot. A flame of blue light, an afterimage, swims briefly over the bartender and leaves a halo on Antoine’s white shirt.
    She’s sitting on the sill of the kitchen window, a cheek and a half hefted out, so she can smoke. She turns and blows into the garden and turns back.
    She says, What do you think of that? He wants to sleep with other women.
    She jumps down.
    Maybe I could enjoy it, she says. She holds her cigarette under the tap. I can see a tremor in her hand. Freedom, she says.
    Once when we were fighting Maureen grabbed my face and kissed me on the cheek. I told her never to touch my face when I’m angry. I ran up the stairs two at a time and she was at the bottom. I leaned over the rail to shout at her, Don’t touch me.
    She grabbed the banister. I’ll kiss you if I want, she said. Normally we never touch, we aren’t touchy-feely.
    I’ll kiss you if I want, she screamed, the spiteful squeak of her hand on the banister. It