Degrees of Nakedness by Lisa Moore

rubbed with linseed oil. There are scars from the burning cigarettes hiswife occasionally leaves lying around. Small black ovals. There are thousands of knife cuts that cross over each other like the lines on a palm. He runs his finger over the table, tracing the grain of the wood. He pours another cup of coffee, and glances at the phone. Sometimes the university calls for Marika before nine, although they have been told not to. Marika requires only seven hours’ sleep, but if she’s disturbed she’s tired all day. She wakes up at exactly nine every morning. She’s proud of the precision of her inner clock. Julian likes to pick up the phone before it rings twice. Lately, when the phone rings and Julian answers, nobody speaks.
    Marika is fifteen years older than Julian. The people on this street are very rich. The brick houses are massive. Some of them have been broken into apartments and rented. There’s almost no traffic. The trees block most of the noise. He and Marika don’t know their neighbours. Once, while out taking photographs, Julian met a man three houses up who was riding a sparkling black bike in circles. The man said he was Joe Murphy. Joe Murphy’s Chips sold a large percentage of their product in Newfoundland. He gave the silver bicycle bell two sharp rings.
    “The bike’s a birthday present from my wife. It’s a real beauty, isn’t it?”
    The trees shivered suddenly with wind and sloshed the bike with rippling shadows. Joe Murphy was wearing a suit and tie. The balls of his feet pressed against the pavement and there were sharp little crevices in his shined leather shoes. A crow lefta tree and flew straight down the centre of the street. Julian lifted his camera and took a picture of Joe Murphy. In the far distant corner of the frame is the crow. Joe Murphy is out of focus, a blur in the centre of the picture, his face full of slack features. The crow is sharp and black.
    “That makes me very uncomfortable,” said Joe Murphy. “I think you have a nerve.” He gave the bell another sharp ring, and pushed off the curb. His suit jacket flapping.
    For two years, Julian has been sleeping a lot. It’s taken him two years to fall away from any kind of sleeping pattern. This way he’s always awake at different hours. This seems exotic to him, but the cost is that he can’t will himself to sleep. He sleeps in the afternoon and then finds himself awake at four in the morning. At dawn he sometimes wanders around the neighbourhood. The light at dawn allows him to see straight into the front windows of the massive houses on their street, all the way to the back windows and into the backyards. It makes the houses seem like skeletons, with nothing hanging on the bones.
    Sometimes Julian is asleep when Marika gets home from work. If there’s no supper cooked for her she’ll eat white bread and butter with spoonfuls of granulated sugar. Julian likes to cook for her and she likes what he cooks. But she’s also happy to eat bread and sugar. She makes coffee and folds the bread and sinks it into her coffee. The soaked bread topples and she catches it in her mouth. The cats slink in from all the different rooms of the apartment and curl around her feet, or on her lap. She lifts the kitten and puts it inside her jacket. If Julianstumbles down the stairs, half awake, and he sees Marika bathed in the light of a fashion show on TV with her sugared bread, he feels that he has failed her. The failure makes him even sleepier. He can’t keep his eyes open.
    Marika is not one for dwelling on the past. Julian knows very little about her past. Not that she’s secretive. It’s the kind of conversation that bores her. Marika has a powerful charm. She’s a chemistry professor, but most of her friends are artists or writers. At parties, for conversation, she offers crystallized stories about nature or the stars. If someone interrupts her to ask about her parents, or something back in France, she answers in short