This All Happened (11 page)

29      It's six in the morning and I'm walking around Quidi Vidi Lake with Maisie Pye. She does this on every morning she doesnt have Una. It's part of her training, she says, for the regatta. The lake is lined with fishermen.

Why all these fishermen?

Maisie: Someone has released a tagged trout worth ten thousand dollars.

On the water there are teams of rowers practising.

Maisie says the fishermen make her wish to be sixteen and to fish in a pond at Flatrock, where her father fished he couldnt bring her to the best spots because the place he went was too treacherous. She got tired of fishing, though. Getting caught in the trees and her father patiently untying the knotted, tangled line. Parents, dont ever think your acts go unappreciated.

The fishermen are patiently spinning and the rowers are methodically rowing.

30      There are white flowers on the raspberry bushes.

31      I went swimming with Daphne at the university pool,which is much more utilitarian and small and low-ceilinged and choked with industrious swimmers churning out the lengths.

We shared a lane by the tiled cement and I banged my foot several times.

Daphne says, You sure speed along.

She loans me her goggles for a few laps. And I watch her underwater as she passes. Her belly full of baby. She's four months pregnant. Beautiful to see a pregnant woman swimming. It seems the perfect exercise.

Alex Fleming arrives and she has a tattoo outline of a canna-lily on her shoulder. The one painted by Georgia O'Keefe, she says, except in reverse colours.

June

1
Max and I eat pea soup and rolls.

Pea soup is easy to make, Max says.

He wants us to go down the Exploits River. A four-day trip in July. Three couples in three canoes. He can lend us a canoe.

They are on the couch, Daphne's legs on Max's lap. Holes in her tights at the big toe. It's easy to see theyre in love. They are cocksure. I touch Daphne's big toe after I bring the soup bowls back to the kitchen. They have a delicate, crenellated hibiscus flowering by the fridge. Max nursing his finger of metaxa. I have a snifter of Jack Daniels. He says we have to get out of town more and explore Newfoundland.

His father has taken a bad turn, is in hospital. Max has realized most of his life has been spent in the city, whereas his father is a rural man.

My feet are sore from dancing in flat boots. Max can dance. Leading, gently pushing Daphne to the end of her arms. They are used to each other and the pregnancy makes their dance more delicate and caring. And on that couch, comfortable. Daphne flexes her bare toe.

Lydia did not want to join us for a nightcap. So I kissed her goodnight at Hallidays meat market.

Lydia will definitely want to go, I say.

2        Iris: How would you feel if your roommate kept something from you?

Depends, I say. Did the roommate get married?

Yep.

In Madeira. Helmut was wearing shorts. A man named Junko was the sole witness. Under a full moon, on the beach. A Moravian minister performed the ceremony, for the money. They had thought about getting married here, but Iris wanted it to happen outside and it was cold in Newfoundland.

Lydia can understand Iris doing this, to avoid the palaver of a big wedding. It's one of the main reasons she doesnt want to get married.

3        Distance isnt a consideration for who I love or spend time with. Lydia gets absorbed with what's around her and neglects the rest. She hardly ever makes plans but follows suggestions. She is the kind to put down the phone and go, whereas plans tend to inject the event with obligation. Such as attending weddings.

I have been to twelve weddings in my life.

And this weekend there's another Murphy cousin getting married.

A wedding, or the promise to commit, is a good place to begin a novel. It starts with our protagonists deciding if they should marry. And they dont. In the ensuing months, friends around them break up and marry other people. While they stay constant.

Lydia hates clutter. She hates it when the ice trays are empty. She says she can't find her copy of
Sculpting in Time.

No no no, I say. I did not touch it. I've never even seen it. Youre not very supportive, she says.

If I said I had it, would that be supportive?

4        We are on a boat trip out of Bay Bulls, to see whales and puffins. I watch Craig Regular look down at Lydia in the back of the boat, and Lydia returns his look. How can I live with that look? She jogs on the spot on the flydeck in full view of him. Lydia dances for him in her new runners. She climbed down the aluminum stairs and went over to him and danced on the spot. Seeking some acceptance, some approval. As if to say I am attractive, and you can have me.

Lydia says to me, I can't understand why you look at it that way.

Duration has little to do with whether an act is remembered. It is the passion that is evinced from the moment. And something passed between Craig and Lydia in that moment of idle jogging. Something as strong as if she'd taken him into a corner and sucked him off, or spent three weeks with him. My life will be a constant reckoning with this kind of emotional argument. In the boat I heard Daphne ask where is Lydia. And Craig Regular said, She's lying down.

Craig Regular should not know that she is lying down. He should not be the one to answer that question. Already the external world is preparing for a change.

All this is jealousy. All this I must absorb or slough off. I cannot allow it to stay on my skin. It makes me too melancholic.

5        Lydia called last night and asked, Are you mad because I've phoned so late?

Yes.

Am I forgiven?

Yes.

You sure I'm forgiven?

Do you think you should be?

Your tone conveys a certain unforgiveness.

It's that you forget about me. You have to be reminded I'm in your life.

Dont you think it's a good thing?

I say nothing.

Who's there?

Iris and Helmut.

So you want to watch that movie?

Me: If youre up for it.

Unless you want to hang on there.

No.

Okay.

Well, I'll see you over at your place. I can pick you up.

No need.

Oh, yes, let me pick you up.

Youre not home?

I'm at Craig's.

Are you ready now?

How about in ten minutes?

I'll walk down.

I dont drive down because there is no parking without a permit on Gower. It's good I found out that she wasnt home. Because I would have been locked out, without a key. With no lights on. We often talk with a misunderstanding, like a boulder, that we have to lean around to see the other person. Even when we've safely navigated the obstacle, the effects of the obstacle can never be fully eradicated. Clearing something up doesnt dissipate the residual feeling. It lingers as if the misunderstanding were in fact the truth of the happening. To assume a false thing for any length of time makes it true. And I have pictured her with Craig Regular. Assuming the worst is the basis of grudges and resentment.

6        I'm in bed feeling anguish. I can't even write it down properly. So I dress and walk down to Lydia's and leave a note hanging out of her mailbox. That I'm upset that she invited Craig to supper with her parents. I thought she would at least call to say what was up. I can't stand not knowing what she's doing.

I decide to go for a walk. Walking is the correct speed for rumination. Cars and even bicycles propel the body too fast through space.

I walk towards Quidi Vidi, to the graveyard on the hill. And down a straight paved path. The penitentiary is glowing in a rhomboid. I can see into its perimeter. There is a grave with Pinto on it, born in Vega, Italy.

As I walk back Lydia's brown Cavalier slows, red tail lights. Reverses. It is slightly misty. She's dropped off Craig at the Battery. She kisses me, with a strong tongue. I tell her all this. As we sit in the car in my driveway.

In bed, I ask her what Craig's like.

Oh, nice. He says he's a loner now. Lives in Seattle. Pause.

Me: That's all?

What's wrong with that?

Youre starting to sound like me. You spend seven hours with a new guy and all you can say is he's nice.

He isnt new. I knew him back with Earl. My parents knew him then, too. They wanted to see him.

Well he's new to me, then.

Tell me what you want to know.

This, said in a stiff way.

What he's doing, his life, his ambitions, his humour.

He's managing this software design, which is a two-year project. He's kind of goofy, he doesnt get a joke right away but then laughs and that's sort of cute and he's handsome and he doesnt own any possessions. He's given them up except he has a dog, which he loves, and he remembers Tinker in his youth. He wears business kinds of clothes now, but you soon realize he's someplace else.

So youve got a little crush on him.

Lydia: And what do you think of that?

What, should I be jealous of a handsome man who lives on the Pacific and has cute ways and a dog and youve spent seven hours with him?

She cuddles into me and I can feel a laugh in her body. So did you kiss him?

Do you really want to know?

7        The story of my life with Lydia is the conflict of desire and being sated. Lydia is satisfied with me but dissatisfied with all other things. I'm the opposite. She appraises the world as a canvas to improve. I accept the canvas, am content to live within its confines. I dont think to upgrade the armchair or paint a room. I exist in a state of being, Lydia in a state of flux.

8        I've walked down to Ryan's Plumbing with Lydia's faucet. Mr Ryan is serving Boyd Coady, who has clear green cat's eyes. They are in disagreement. Boyd says to me, Do you know anything about plumbing?

I say,You can't be serious.

Mr Ryan dont know anything, Boyd says. He won't be able to help you with that. Boyd points to my faucet spindle. I walk back to Lydia's with the busted spindle.

The shadows of trees are more pronounced because of the new leaves.

Lydia is out weeding the back. Tinker Bumbo is barking at the backs of houses on Duckworth Street. He's just standing there, barking at the sun. Barely notices me.

Two girls sit on the steps of a house next door.

There's an electric chainsaw at work.

A gangly boy with thin wrists and sunglasses plays basketball in his paved driveway. Slow smack of the basketball. Thump of the net as the ball pushes through. Wind, warm, streaks of blue-and-white sky.

Lydia straightens. I kiss her on the cheekbone.

9        Lydia asks me what I'm thinking of. I say Wilf Jardine's tattoo.

Wilf has a tattoo?

The one on his arm.

She says, When have you seen it?

Several times.

Funny, I havent seen it.

You have seen it.

Oh, yes, that tattoo. Usually I dont like tattoos, but Wilf's is nice.

How did you forget he had a tattoo?

I dont think about Wilf.

You are, I say, much more into the here and now than I am.

Lydia: Youre caught up in introspection.

Do you think introspection and regret are connected? Are you regretting something?

I'm just following a train of thought.

Lydia: I dont think you'll regret much.You think about the past, but youre not emotionally wrought by it. Youre pretty solid.

There was this man sunning himself today. He was sitting in his front door. His whole arm was a tattoo, down to the fingernails. In his late forties. It looked like he had a reptile sleeping on his chest.

10      We're having a drink at Noel Wareham's wake. Max said he witnessed what he calls his father's chain-stoking. Inhaling, mouth open, eyes wide, then exhaling, fourteen hours of this. His liver crashed, they had him on morphine, looking at photos of his kids, saying goodbye to Max, but living five more days. Sixty-eight years old. How Max finds himself imitating the faces his father made. We go to the washroom to urinate and when we're washing our hands, I watch Max make that chain-stoking gesture. Like a goldfish who has exhausted the water's oxygen.

11      To know what someone looks like by what he says, how it's said. Tone and diction. Dialogue can describe a character's facial features.

When you hear basketballs dribbled and thrown at hoops, then you know the rain has ceased.

12      Three houses have burned to the ground on Cook Street. I watch a tractor yank down the charred chimneys with the shovel on his crane. As I sketch this in my journal Boyd Coady peers and says, Is that like a book youre putting in everything that happens to you? I say that is exactly right. And show him some drawings. Boyd's son rides over on his banana bike.

All I can see of the southside hills are the silver pipelines that snake up to the tank farm. And now comes the ridge against the sky. The contour pulsating in and out of greyness.

13      Max Wareham is wearing a denim cowboy hat on his back deck. There is a lilac tree. Daphne Yarn clutches a bunch of flowering sage. She keeps admonishing me with it.

We've agreed on the canoe trip: down the Exploits, mid-July. Lydia will do it. And Max and Daphne are in. Craig is up for it and Alex would like to do it, and Maisie, staring at Oliver, who is oblivious to the conversation, says she'll go if Oliver's not along and she doesnt have Una. Max: Who here invests in the stock market?

About half the hands go up.

Alex and Craig Regular dance to country music. Oliver bids goodnight and pockets his half bottle of Grouse Scotch. We all know he's going to meet his pregnant paralegal student. I hear Maisie's voice rise and say she disdains a limp penis because it immediately becomes a urine thing instead of a sperm thing.

Max: It has not been admitted yet on our media that power rests not in Parliament, but in big business and multinationals.

Craig takes Lydia aside and I look at her face. In that moment of nervous knowing, of climbing into bed with Craig, I see her face and it is the same face, the face I know, and that comforts me.

She says, Max, can I have a refill?

Max: Lydia is some bossy.

Lydia turns to confront Max.You want to get into it, Max? Max: No.

Silence.

Maisie: You may as well get into it.

14      Failure is a comfortable place, it locates you within a familiar frame. Success thrusts you into new territory. It's more work to succeed. The best-laid plans are vulnerable to sabotage from the self. Self likes to lay out old maps, because it is easier to live within old maps.

Sunny. The windowsills full of cilantro and bell peppers. The basil just up in flats. The dogberries are sheltering us, an arbour. Lydia is over for lunch. She says, Tell me about yourself.

She says it in a challenging tone. As if she knows it's difficult for me to funnel actions into principles. She is judging me again, even as she tries to open up and be honest. Her question is in fact a statement. And so I dont answer.

15      I run for twenty-six minutes, my shank aching. I run around Quidi Vidi while Lydia and the sculling crew row up the lake. I watch them practise the turn. Then I run over to Lydia's — she'll have arrived before me. How quiet it is at theback of her house. I hear her on the phone. Last night a distance between us before I left: I was peeling apples while Lydia rolled out pastry for rhubarb pies. She was at the counter, standing on her toes to press out the dough. She was jealous of the book borrowed from Alex. She thinks I want to be with Alex, which I dont care to argue. Yes, we all fantasize about being with others, the what-ifs.