This All Happened (21 page)

Well, eventually she would come back, after spending the afternoon next door, drinking tea.

Mothers, he says, go through a period of madness.

He says his arm still hurts from when Eli was born. He kept Daphne's head down when she was in labour. For five hours Max's arm crooked around her neck, bending her.

When Max tells me this he pats himself on the shoulder, on the ribs. As if to reassure his body that it's all right.

17      Oliver drops by. He's in his legal-aid suit. Smiling uncomfortably. As if a pain is spreading across his chest. He has been returning Maisie's junk mail and he's just off to the mailbox. For one, from an environmental agency, he has scribbled on the envelope, Stop sending mail, or I'll club a seal.

I show him an untitled recipe Lydia left on my fridge: Keep it white. Peel and dice potatoes. Saute in butter. You dont want any skin in there. Make love to your potatoes. Glazed, melt. Chopped onion. Translucent. Cover, barely, with water. Put lid on, simmer. Stop. Cool down. Lay on chunks of fish and scallops. Let the steam tickle your fish for four minutes. Break apart. Milk and cream. Never boil. Sometimes sweet corn.

That's pretty erotic, he says.

I find things like this all over.

And he understands my sentiment.

18      I walk towards the harbour, thick snow on the dogberries. Thinking back on when I asked Lydia to marry me. Part of the reason we did not marry was my own reluctance to answer yes to Lydia's every okay. The truth is, I knew about responding with okay to every hesitation a woman gives you on a commitment. As soon as Lydia hesitated I pounced on it. I was relieved. I wanted the decision not to get married to be her responsibility.

I pounced on it in a very subtle, disinterested way.

I had that sort of tone in my voice when I met Lydia's hesitation with my own brand of hesitation.

This is a maddening personal trait. To slip out of responsibility. To pretend an act is someone else's decision.

The truth is my future is always a dull extension of the evidence around me. That's why I'm frightened to have children. The new.

19      At the cash the woman says I remind her of Prince Charles. This one's got royalty in him, doesnt he?

Oh, he's much more handsome than Charles.

No, Charles as a young man.

The other woman, keen to assure me I'm better looking, says, When he's older he'll be far more handsome than the prince.

20      There's a big wooden fence out by Mount Pearl. It's supposed to be a barrier between the houses and the highway. But as you accelerate, the fence begins to blur, the gaps between the pickets link up, and suddenly the fence vanishes. You can see, with no interruption, the houses in behind. But the houses can't see you. If you slipped off the road and hit the fence at the right speed, you'd slip right through it.

21      Max: Let's do some heavy drinking.

Yes, I need a few heavy drinks.

You need a chaser.

I need to be chased.

You will be chased. You have to stop chasing in order to be chased. Youre too exposed and everyone sees the wind blowing through you and they won't touch you while that wind is blowing. No one likes a man with his heart wounded by another.

I need sutures.

We're gonna get you some sutures.

22      I phone Lydia. She says, I'm just reading an old paper. What time did you get up?

Oh, nine-thirty.

Me: I'm just up.

You sound like youre not up. Like youre way under a blanket. You sound horizontal.

Me:You sound half asleep.

Yeah, I'm just noticing that. It was getting up. From the table.

So how are you.

Lydia: I'm good. I'm really good. I went for a run. I'm not feeling too good. Oh my God, my nose.

What is it?

It's all puffy on one side.

Are you okay?

I feel okay. But the side of my face.

You must have fallen.

I must have. I was with Max until the sun came up. You got home okay?

I was pretty drunk. But I beelined home. I must have hit a lamppost. No, I hit a tree.

23      Helmut will be home for Christmas. They placed first, Iris says. She shows me their web page and the maps of their progress and Boston harbour. They were eight hours ahead of the next boat. Five months of racing and they won by eight hours. There is an article all about the racers, and a photo of Helmut and the team in today's papers. He has long hair, he's thinner. I recognize him by his hands.

24      Alex and I sit on the cold concrete at one in the morning, down in the heart of the town. The river flashing below us. A river takes you out of the human landscape and transports you into a terrain without clocks. A bridge is a place of confession, of consolation. Confessions are anything you know to be true.

Alex: I want to write a song as good as a Wilf song.

Yes, a song.

I want to fall in love. I mean, really fall in love. Don't you, Gabe?

Yes.

Can you imagine it?

It's hard to separate it from the sexual side.

Not for me. I've got a picture of the perfect man.

And what's he like?

He separates what I say and do from who I am. He doesn't criticize me. You know, men do that all the time.

Well. It's hard to know the difference between criticism of acts and criticism of the person.

I know I'm sensitive, she says.

We hold hands. It's meant for comfort. It is like holding your own hand, or patting your own sides to offer encouragement. It is dark, the river rushing under us, the air a little chilly. I have fished this river, and fishing takes the mystery out of a river.

It's true that all rivers connect. The sound of a river belongs in the same folder as all other rivers, and nothing quite compares, and so the memories of what has happened at other rivers is easy to summon. And so rivers are nostalgic and nostalgia means returning home, plus pain.

25      They call out to me as I'm walking up Long's Hill. The night so empty, sound travelling for miles.

Maisie: Let's go for a beer.

Max: One beer.

Maisie: We'll split a beer. Three ways.

Okay, I say. Say, arent you parents?

26      I walk to the art gallery, and pass through the graveyard. The graveyard on Mayor always puts me in a mood. Boyd Coady is combing his dog there. The dog is tied to a pipe railing with a blue ribbon. There's a number spray-painted on some of the pines above the Farrell graves.

I ask him why.

He says he just needed things. He needed to do his laundry. Did you fix the faucet?

It was not a big problem. A washer, he says.

And that's your TV?

She didnt have a TV. I like to watch TV. It was the TV that did me in.

Me: I thought it might have been the underwear.

And Boyd looks at me as though I'm nuts. It's evident he knows nothing about the underwear.

The sky darkens at 4:30.

At the gallery, the commissionaire is reading a self-image book. I ask what it's all about. It helps you improve your image. This war vet, sitting at a desk between rooms of Chinese prints and wrought-iron sculpture.

27      I drive Iris to work at the marine lab. Jethro's wipers are broken. Iris says she's cooking supper tonight. She has brown eyes that remind me of a small ceramic deer I had once when I was eight. It came from a box of tea.

I tell her that I saw Boyd, that I talked to him.

I can't believe you didnt hit him. With a stick. If I were Lydia I'd clean everything I own, she says.

28      At St Patrick's Church we watch Max Wareham and Daphne Yarn wed. Their son, Eli, in a pram with a blanket the same colour as Daphne's dress.

I flip through the book of hymns, and learn that the angel's sole purpose is to praise God.

Lydia reads a passage about the good wife. And she changes it. She adds vice versa to all the commands on the wife. She is sitting with Wilf and I hear him say, You changed the Old Testament on a whim? and she whispers, It was sexist.

Also in the hymn book, the word chrism.

Daphne's mother ties a knot at the back of her necklace, to shorten it on her clavicles.

29      Max's house is larger than it looks. One of his knuckles is carefully scarred from a chainsaw and plastic surgery. He has thick wrists. His legs are thin. When he sits he is careful. He has an old man's caution about sitting. His features are young. It's only in the sum of his actions that he becomes his age. I have seen a pained look cross his forehead. This pained look is new.

He once asked Maisie to marry him, and she started chatting to a man at another table. I have told him that he fears success. What? When something good comes by you sabotage it.

He nods slowly at this.

30      Been reading Thucydides. Where he says he's not interested in the applause of the present, but writing for future attention. Here I am, 2,500 years later, reading his words, feeling his person.

The ancients were equal to us in diplomacy and civilization. It might take them an afternoon to bone up on warfare (theatre of the air), and then they'd be a match for anyone. Technology does not outstrip diplomatic methods.

December

1
Today I polished shoes. I took my old leather coat and stitched the armpit. I soaked my feet in an enamel basin. I threaded new laces. I scoured the bathtub. I drew a sketch of the harbour. I bought the
Manchester Guardian.
I finished a novel. It takes just as long to read a novel as it did ten years ago. It still takes nine months to have a baby. If a woman walks away from you, it's with the same gait as if it happened in the eighteenth century.

I have stopped eating pasta. I will make pastry and bake a pie. I will ignore the clock. I will wash down the windowsills. I will study the town with binoculars. I will extract the precise quality of love that objects possess.

2        We are learning carols at Oliver's. Max's new baby asleep in Oliver's bedroom. Una sitting by the piano hugging a stuffed cheetah.

Me: I dont think this is what Maisie had in mind. Oliver: I think Maisie can have her mind changed. Think she won't mind?

Oliver: I think she'll look in and say this is something else.

Maisie arrives. She has a box of beer and the carol sheets. A studded leather belt that makes her tough. She's letting her hair grow. She had asked my opinion on this, quietly, and I'd said let it grow. Around the piano she has Daphne and Alex while she plays and they try harmony.

Me: How can you know the next note?

Maisie: It's all written down on the sheets. You dont have to guess.

I look around for Oliver's pregnant student. I've forgotten Oliver is circumspect.

Being shocked at how badly Alex sings. Knowing she has said she can't sing but never knowing it was that bad. She was reticent about singing and we were all, separately, encouraging her and finally she blurts out a random note and at least her ear understands it's outlandish or maybe she recognizes now the reaction of others to tone-deaf singers but she stops after three notes and retires to the couch.

Oliver leaves on Silent Night because he can't handle singing a song that possesses serious, sentimental conviction. He doesnt have the bone you need to shift the corniness aside, the irony and the slyness to allow the heart room to manoeuvre in the mood of a genuine song. He left to get a beer and I wonder if he is bereft of a clear bone of sincerity.

Then I see he's just gone because he can't handle Maisie back in his house and all of the above is false.

Max and Daphne are leaving with Eli, and Max admits to taking a half-carton of egg nog topped up with my Old Sam. He has it tucked in the tweed pocket of his overcoat. Sorry about this, Max says. Will make it up to you. He opens the mouth of the carton to show me the contents. This is while it's sticking out of the coat pocket. I love the fact that he thinks he can do this. I love the comfort.

3        Maisie says, After Christmas, I want to party hard. I want to go out with Max and Wilf and I want to have a good time. What about work.

I've been working. After Christmas I'm going to devote myself to partying.

I meet Oliver in the bathroom at the Spur. He says, You just missed out. A guy was sharing a line of coke. Man, it burnt my nostrils. I couldnt tell the guy it had no effect because it was a freebie. But good coke, Gabe, doesnt burn at all. If it burns, you know it's full of Old Dutch.

Oliver, Maisie says, is a guy who plays both sides. She says this with admiration. He's a lawyer by day and a hound at night. He's up at seven every morning and out till four every night.

4        Two cats in a tree. In the taller branches a brilliant blue jay. With a seed propped in its thin black beak.

Beyond them a barge docked in the rain. A man operates welding gear. Acetylene torches under a blue tarpaulin, flashing in the fog.

The smell of brewery as I jog past Lydia's.

I watch a man operate a Taylor down at the dockyard. He is lifting a blue Ace container off the back of an eighteen-wheeler. He turns (his rear axle turns) and lays the container onto a stack three-high. I know the hoister is called a Taylor because I've called up Oceanex.

What is that loader called?

Theyre called hoisters or tailers, either one.

Which is better?

Depends how much you want to spend. I prefer tailers. How much would one cost?

About $700,000 Canadian. What do you want to lift? Oh, about the same thing youre lifting.

You get them through Materials Handling, Bernie Faloney, he's the man to talk to. He used to play for the Hamilton Ti-Cats. The hoisters are French-made and theyre good, except when they break down, theyre a you-know-what to get parts for.

And who makes tailers?

Taylor makes them.

Oh, it's Taylor.

The eighteen-wheelers wait in line, snorting exhaust, the Taylor operator does not hesitate. He spends less than five seconds at the side of the transport truck, his hydraulic front end (at least forty feet high) clamps onto the container is it magnetic? lifts, the rear wheels pivot, he swings towards the neat stack of blue containers awaiting an Oceanex vessel. He pivots the rear wheels, returns to the next truck. The previous truck now making a slow loop around the stacked containers.

5        I attend Boyd's trial. I sit with Lydia and we share a look. That beyond it all life is peculiar, we're healthy and blessed, and we are curious. We are not going to be mean to each other. Oliver Squires allows Boyd to confess to taking 114 items from eight houses in the neighbourhood. His neighbours are all present. Boyd says it wasnt personal. He just needed things now and again and he was tired of waiting in line to pay for things. He says he's sorry.

The judge sentences him to three years.

6        Alex says things tailored for me. The ideas seem to be performed or moulded to what she thinks I'd like to hear. It's flattering but annoying. Because I want her to be herself. Lydia never did that, unless she was talking to Craig Regular. Perhaps we do it to those we have crushes on. I hate seeing it in Lydia, because it implies the person she is talking to is out of her reach.

7        Alex says, Have you ever been to the synagogue? Come on, let's go.

It's Hanukkah. A wall of windows made from Stars of David.

Alex: You might be expected to wear a keepah – there's a box of them at the door.

Is that the same as a yarmulke?

Yes.

Does this one fit?

It's fine, Gabe.

In a cold room plaques of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, proclamations during the Yom Kippur War. In 1931 Hymen Feder donated three dollars. A Chagall print of Moses with the Torah.

Alex says all synagogues smell the same. A mixture of must and stale seeds. She says only five people attend Friday meetings. It's outport Judaism, she says.

How do you know so much about it?

I keep an interest in what goes on, Gabe.

We sit in the warm room at a table near the stage. There is to be a children's play. The play has a scientist refusing to go to the Hanukkah party. When her friends leave, she is killed during a chemical discovery. Moral: beware the works of man.

We are sitting with a doctor and his wife. They are both learning Hebrew There are no vowels. Alex asks if shellfish can be kosher. No, the doctor says, because they are scavengers on the bottom.

He sticks out his hands and scrabbles his fingers over the tablecloth, the cloth gathers under his fingers until a glass topples. Scavengers, he says again.

8        Una and I watch Max filing pyrophyllite. He sits cross-legged and wears a surgical mask. The soapstone is from Manuels. He pulls down the mask and smiles. Newfoundland, he says, has the best stone in the world. He's doing this piece for Daphne, it's slightly abstract. Near his knees are wedges of cast-off stone. That's a tail of a humpback, Una says.

Max says, You can have the humpback.

When I say a new word, like pyrophyllite, I have a propensity to forget it.

Una's game when we're walking home: Why does underwear start with an H?

Why?

Because they lie in a heap on the floor.

9        Maisie's favourite found poem is: thick fat back loose lean salt beef. We are walking up from the Ship. She opens a frail yellow umbrella. The poem was on a piece of shirt card in Vey's corner store for ten years. Now Vey's has been sold, renovated, and is for sale again as a house. There was a pot-bellied wood-stove between the aisles.

Maisie says there's wonder in this life. I say, And bewilderment. Thank you, Gabe. That's the word.

10      Alex says, There's your Christmas present. I look behind me, Where. There, she says. In the near vision I see a tight filament of dental floss and a small box hanging from it. At eye level. You look in the box. The box has a glass front that's been sandblasted except for an eye, which you can look through. At the back of the box is another eye. It is a photograph of my eye. Then she shows me bits of furniture she's made: wooden arms for a chair. Human arms. She's adding pearls and chunks of mirror. Alex has sculpted an ear that she carved by feeling her own ear. She carved from touch. Translating touch into vision.

Alex wants to build a corner camera. You stand at an intersection and the two barrels of the camera take a picture of both streets converging. The photographic paper is at a right angle and you mount the photo in the corner of a room to get the correct perspective. Of two streets meeting. I say, Does such a camera exist? Alex: No. I'm going to invent one.

She says she's bored with flat art.

We eat off plates made of fired clay.

Everything in Alex's house is art.

We bake squash stuffed with lemon and dates and mushrooms and garlic.

We drink the wine and I walk home in the clear, cold air.

Sometimes you can see more in night air than you can in the day. Maybe it's the city lights.

11      Oliver talks of legal scandals. He's not the only lawyer to have left his wife for a paralegal student. He puts on his overcoat, a new coat for him. I say, Nice coat. He says that Maisie never liked it on him. That it's grubby. She's got something against second-hand clothes. It's okay if you have money. But for the poor, it marks you as poor.

I tell this to Maisie later. And I say, The coat is a bit grubby. Yes, she says. Fact is, it doesnt look good on him.

12      Max: When they were building the office tower, I didnt think it would ruin the view. At first, the scaffolding around the infrastructure blocked only a little bit of the Narrows. It wasnt offensive. I thought I could live with that. Seemed a narrow building. Then I found out that was only the elevator shaft. So we grew trees in the backyard and now there's nothing.

13      I watch Craig Regular walking out of a restaurant carrying an Obusforme for his back. Tinker Bumbo at his side.

Craig holds the door. He is holding the door open for Lydia.

I follow them. I havent allowed myself to think that they really are an item.

They enter the Mighty White laundromat.

I stroke Tinker, who wags, blind, but his nose knows me. I think of the dog that saved Ernest Chafe. Chafe, lost in a storm, tied his sled dog to his wrist. The dog sniffed his way back to camp.

Craig is pushing detergent along the lid of a public washing machine, coaxing it down the crack in the lid. Wiping his hand over the lid to get all the blue detergent down. His money's worth.

Now, he's trying on a new shirt. I can tell that Lydia has bought the shirt. She tells him to try it on. Does she want to see if it will fit?

They get in Lydia's car. I follow in mine. They drive into the Battery. To Craig's house beyond the yellow rail.

I sit in the car and watch them through Craig's kitchen window. It is a beautiful window that looks back over St John's. His view is the reverse of my view.

There are two frozen salmon steaks hauled out to thaw. Their pink skin crystallizing to a hot white. Craig turns on a light and closes the curtains.

14      There is a warm wind blowing, a soft buttery moon. Max baked a brie with glazed crushed walnuts, a date on top. There is fresh-baked sourdough bread. We dip chunks into the melted brie and drink wine.

I ask Daphne what they did today.

Daphne: Max cooked a pheasant.

A pheasant?

Max: Daphne told me you can find pheasant in Sobeys and I imagined them hiding in behind the boxes of Cheerios, wild pheasant nesting in the rafters.

Pheasant is a good dish, Daphne says.

Max: I stuffed it with plums and quince and sewed it up. He pronounces sewed like lewd.

Daphne: Then we sat down and ate it.

I walk home from Max's, a wind bouncing off the southside hills. It's on nights like this that things happen. It was a sinister wind. And the moon with fast wisps of cloud over it. Max raised a glass to Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon. On this very night.

15      Maisie launches her novel at the Ship Inn. She has a beautiful line where a character fires up her zipper. That's what I like about Maisie: she chooses the right word. There's more going on in the story, but it's that word I remember.

Maisie's nervous at the Ship. She has no need to be nervous. The work is good.

16      I walk past Lydia's house. I look in through the front window. I see Craig passing two pills to Lydia's cupped hand. Then a glass of water. Tinker Bumbo stretched out on the couch. Craig holds the water in his right hand and Lydia takes the pills into her left hand. So there is a moment when their arms are crossed, in reception.

I remember Lydia asking, But what do you love about me? When I paused she said, Youre obsessed with my body. Yes, I said.

Youre obsessed with being in love, she said.

I am obsessed with being in love. I admit to this.

Lydia: You are weak alone.

I've never liked being alone, it's true.

17      When you describe an experience, what you are recounting is your memory of the act, not the act itself. Experiencing a moment is an inarticulate act. There are no words. It is in the sensory world. To recall it and to put words to it is to illustrate how one remembers the past, rather than actually experiencing the past. Keep this in mind as you read the words of others as they remember an incident.