The Devil You Know: A Novel by Elisabeth de Mariaffi Page B
Authors: Elisabeth de Mariaffi
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Ali fighting The Hulk.
She scooped the stiff little body up with her spade and moved it off the path, dropping it into the softer, fresh snow in the flower garden.
So who’ve you got, she said. She gave her shoulders a little stretch back. Her head tilted up toward the sky. Besides Lianne.
Lianne is old guard, I said. Lianne is from the time before. Toronto officially goes bad in 1983. Did you know that?
Long list?
I skim through, I said. I don’t read the details. Names and dates and basics. I only read the stuff I need to report, I said.
Basics, she said. Just the facts. She took hold of the spade with both hands and shook the snow off it a little. Just the facts ma’am, she said. Okay, let’s finish up and go inside. You going home to work?
I have this standard, amiable-type nod I can pull out at a time like this, where people know Yes I have to work, but also Yes I’m still good for one drink.
The look on your father’s face when he walks in and finds us rip-roaring drunk in the middle of the afternoon. She threw her shoulders into a final, radical ice-chopping pose.
I scooped another shovelful of snow off the sidewalk and glanced over to where my mother had set the sparrow. It was gone. In its place there was a little sinkhole in the snow where the weight of the body had borne it down and away, through the top layer of powder. Out of our sight.
I came in the downstairs entrance and up the skinny flight of steps to my own front door. I was dragging a white ceramic sink I’d found on the way home from my parents’. I saw the sink from the bus window, on the curb at the corner of Dufferin and Dragon Alley, and I jumped out and grabbed it, which meant maneuvering the rest of my way home with some ingenuity and a fierce stubbornness besides. Someone had put it out for garbage along with a few other renovation castoffs: a sky-blue toilet, an old brown cabinet with a chipped-off knob, a roll of once-creamy, greasy linoleum.
It was in good shape. A country sink, almost square. During my first year of j-school I’d had a strong, one-day crush on a nineteen-year-old fine arts student I met in the park behind the Art Gallery on Dundas Street. He’d also had a wide white sink. He was using it for a project he called Loss and Foundling, art in a found object, and painting a water scene inside the basin, lilies and fish and whatnot. He was quiet while he worked and I watched him. The whole process was deeply pleasurable. I had a bar of Toblerone in my bag,along with a copy of Joan Didion’s The White Album, two pens, and my wallet. We ate the chocolate and made out for a while in the park and when he suggested I come home and let him cook dinner for me, I surprised myself and said no.
Since then I’ve turned this plan over and over in my mind about a found sink. The gentleness of his hands, doing that fine work, left me with a jealous longing. You can want to touch someone and not want them, but instead want to inhabit them.
The idea was to paint the thing and mount it on the wall, inside the front door, and use it as a convenient place to keep small objects. My keys, for instance. I mean, you’d have to keep the plug in, or lodge something in the bottom drain. So your things wouldn’t all roll down and fall out through the hole. The idea of a wall-mount sink that’s not attached to any plumbing appealed to me. A dry sink. I’d paint it to feel like sand.
I leaned it against the wall in the place I planned to put it later, if in fact I could figure out how to mount something as heavy as that without tearing a hole through the plaster. There was some ice jammed up inside the drain and I stuffed a tea towel under it to catch the melt. I waited for the toaster to finish with the last of an old baguette and dotted cold butter onto it in pieces, and went to work.
My home computer lives in the kitchen. I recognize this isn’t the best place to keep electronics. It’s like keeping a piano in your bathroom.
She scooped the stiff little body up with her spade and moved it off the path, dropping it into the softer, fresh snow in the flower garden.
So who’ve you got, she said. She gave her shoulders a little stretch back. Her head tilted up toward the sky. Besides Lianne.
Lianne is old guard, I said. Lianne is from the time before. Toronto officially goes bad in 1983. Did you know that?
Long list?
I skim through, I said. I don’t read the details. Names and dates and basics. I only read the stuff I need to report, I said.
Basics, she said. Just the facts. She took hold of the spade with both hands and shook the snow off it a little. Just the facts ma’am, she said. Okay, let’s finish up and go inside. You going home to work?
I have this standard, amiable-type nod I can pull out at a time like this, where people know Yes I have to work, but also Yes I’m still good for one drink.
The look on your father’s face when he walks in and finds us rip-roaring drunk in the middle of the afternoon. She threw her shoulders into a final, radical ice-chopping pose.
I scooped another shovelful of snow off the sidewalk and glanced over to where my mother had set the sparrow. It was gone. In its place there was a little sinkhole in the snow where the weight of the body had borne it down and away, through the top layer of powder. Out of our sight.
I came in the downstairs entrance and up the skinny flight of steps to my own front door. I was dragging a white ceramic sink I’d found on the way home from my parents’. I saw the sink from the bus window, on the curb at the corner of Dufferin and Dragon Alley, and I jumped out and grabbed it, which meant maneuvering the rest of my way home with some ingenuity and a fierce stubbornness besides. Someone had put it out for garbage along with a few other renovation castoffs: a sky-blue toilet, an old brown cabinet with a chipped-off knob, a roll of once-creamy, greasy linoleum.
It was in good shape. A country sink, almost square. During my first year of j-school I’d had a strong, one-day crush on a nineteen-year-old fine arts student I met in the park behind the Art Gallery on Dundas Street. He’d also had a wide white sink. He was using it for a project he called Loss and Foundling, art in a found object, and painting a water scene inside the basin, lilies and fish and whatnot. He was quiet while he worked and I watched him. The whole process was deeply pleasurable. I had a bar of Toblerone in my bag,along with a copy of Joan Didion’s The White Album, two pens, and my wallet. We ate the chocolate and made out for a while in the park and when he suggested I come home and let him cook dinner for me, I surprised myself and said no.
Since then I’ve turned this plan over and over in my mind about a found sink. The gentleness of his hands, doing that fine work, left me with a jealous longing. You can want to touch someone and not want them, but instead want to inhabit them.
The idea was to paint the thing and mount it on the wall, inside the front door, and use it as a convenient place to keep small objects. My keys, for instance. I mean, you’d have to keep the plug in, or lodge something in the bottom drain. So your things wouldn’t all roll down and fall out through the hole. The idea of a wall-mount sink that’s not attached to any plumbing appealed to me. A dry sink. I’d paint it to feel like sand.
I leaned it against the wall in the place I planned to put it later, if in fact I could figure out how to mount something as heavy as that without tearing a hole through the plaster. There was some ice jammed up inside the drain and I stuffed a tea towel under it to catch the melt. I waited for the toaster to finish with the last of an old baguette and dotted cold butter onto it in pieces, and went to work.
My home computer lives in the kitchen. I recognize this isn’t the best place to keep electronics. It’s like keeping a piano in your bathroom.
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