This All Happened

by Michael Winter

  Her house on Lemarchant is little but solid. She has spent the weekend scouring it. I realize I havent been helping her.

  But when we get the furniture in, and we’ve had a beer (the only thing in her fridge is a box of beer), she says, Thanks, boys. Now I want to be on my own.

  Max says, Can we do your ass now?

  I am leaning against the bathroom sink, my pants down. I’ve washed myself and spread vaseline from my hips to my thighs. Lucky youre not very hairy, Max says. Some people I ask to shave.

  He is slapping patches of cold plaster over my ass. It’s nice to have a set of confident hands moulding my ass.

  He fires up a blow dryer.

  He begins by prying from my left hip. It reminds me of peeling dead skin off my brother’s sunburned back. Wet blisters of skin. Except this is an entire dry shell. And I see the form of my ass, I’m surprised how curved it is. It’s a pretty ass. Max offers no criticism of it. He makes off with the mould in the fashion of a thief.

  9 Lots of fat snow. We drive to Churchill Square for a bouquet of irises and carnations and a bottle of port. For Maisie. This encouragement of spring. I am in love with fresh flowers. They are a lavish and outrageous fact of living here. If nothing else, you can get fresh flowers at the start of March in Newfoundland. Lydia picks up some fat-free cookies and ultraviolet lotion.

  On the way to Maisie’s Lydia says, There arent enough storytelling songs.

  I say, It’s time Wilf Jardine wrote some love songs.

  But he hasnt experienced that. He’s experienced yearning. And break-up.

  That’s what love songs are all about, I say. The before and after.

  But we are both absorbed in the here and now.

  10 A trait in Lydia: to begin feeling guilty, then guilt transforms into resentment and anger. In the morning, when I’m leaving Lydia’s and she doesnt want me to go.

  I say, You want me to go, though. Youve said enough times you want more time alone.

  Yes, Lydia says. I should work.

  But she holds me, doesnt want me to go. I carry her to the couch. Then she’s rigid. I’ve got so much to do, she says.

  Okay.

  I clap my hands and say, All right, let’s get to it. Lydia pauses, then jumps up stiffly.

  Okay, she says.

  Me: What just happened?

  Nothing.

  Why are you being stiff?

  Oh, it just sounds like youre talking to Tinker Bumbo. Come on and get up, clap your hands.

  I’m not talking to you like youre Tinker Bumbo. I dont even talk to him like that.

  Well, it felt like it.

  I’m just trying to get us both started. If you want to work―if youre resenting not having worked yesterday then let’s get at it.

  She says, Are you upset that we’re not hanging out? I say, Not upset, just disappointed.

  It’s a little fuse of anger that Lydia focuses on time spent with me as the thing to cut back on in order to get her work done and I’m trying to cut through the lingering and so she resents it.

  Okay then, I’ll see you.

  And I leave, both of us angry.

  Lydia will often say, What’s wrong, baby? and when I tell her what’s wrong, involving her in blame a little, she’ll accept it for a minute, be sorry, then retaliate. She’ll become defensive. If she could absorb it and leave it, without feeling that she has to defend. That she’s in the right. It’s as if she holds a club behind her back, asks what’s the matter, and when I tell her, agrees, then gives me a quick dash on the head.

  11 It’s a sunny day and I’m thirty-four. When youre sad, events take on symbolic importance. Sadness connotes lacking, a want for something. Lydia brings over a Gabriel doll she’s made for my birthday and I cry laughing. The black leather coat and stuffed body, stitched face. A rose corsage blooming, not that I wear a rose, but it’s indicative of my joy at least what used to be my happiness. And it strikes me that this image is no longer who I am. Somehow, other emotions not my own have crept in. I’m no longer a romantic figure. I have grown wise. The clothesline is frozen in a shaded bank of snow. I have decided to settle my student loan. I phone the loans officer, Fabian Durdle. It’s my birthday. He says, Do you think that’ll impress Ottawa?

  I get a bank draft for nine thousand dollars, and fifteen hundred in cash. I grab an elevator and knock on Fabian Durdle’s office door.

  That’s half what you owe.

  The rest, I say, is outrageous interest.

  He calls Ottawa. Fabian is nodding in a bored way into the phone and then pauses.

  Yes, he says. Gabriel English is here in front of me. With ten-five on the table. He says take it or he’ll go bankrupt. Fabian puts the phone down.

  Sign here.

  Theyre taking it?

  He nods.

  I say, I’d like a witness, as it’s a lot of cash.

  Fabian: Gabriel, youve got to trust people more often.

  But he’s been dealing with me for ten years, and knows my idiosyncrasies. In fact, I know he respects them. No, I dont know that. But he is the perfect man for this job. Fabian Durdle holds no grudges. He calls in a secretary. As we’re waiting Fabian studies the bank draft. He’s not familiar with bank drafts.

  He says, I’ll have to call your bank to verify this.

  As he’s tapping the number I say, Fabian, youve got to trust people more often.

  Touche, he says.

  And now I owe a penny to no one. Nor do I own a penny.

  Ah, details.

  12 Lydia is working on her script. She wants me to read the scenes and see if it flows.

  I’ve been avoiding Jethro, trying to walk. I see a woman in a wheelchair in the melting road up against the sidewalk curb. I say, Do you need a hand? And she yells out, straining her neck around me to a tailor’s shop, Kevin, I wants you now!

  I’m wearing a pair of linen pants that I bought at the Sally Ann two days ago and dropped the cuffs an inch and they flop with a lazy southern wind over the rim of my cranberry leather shoes. They are quite out of place for March. On Mom’s advice I’ve had my shoes resoled at Modern Shoe Hospital. When I look down what I see are the pants and the shoes and I feel very lavish.

  Lydia’s door is locked and I have no key, which I resent but am silent about. Lydia has my key. She keeps meaning to get around to it, but she hasnt.

  I’m surprised when Wilf opens the door. He says, in Lydia’s voice: It’s me, transformed into Wilf’s body!

  He tries to kiss me.

  Bonus, I say.

  13 I call Max. Want to see a movie? When?

  In fifteen minutes.

  Pause. Let me check with Daphne.

  Pause.

  Okay!

  I pick him up and he chuckles on Elizabeth Avenue. He slaps his thighs.

  He looks out his window, enjoying this.

  So what’s the big delight?

  Daphne’s pregnant.

  Max.

  It’s a good thing. She’s moving in.

  Youre a fast worker.

  I’m a potent man. And speaking of which, your ass will be on display next month. Alex is giving me a wall.

  The movie has one good image: a peeled, steaming eel wriggling on a set of tongs. Then we drive to Burger King. This reminds me, Max says, of twenty years ago.

  I say, You have to go back twenty years to be reminded? Of this particular moment, yes.

  We watch the girl serving us lean towards the milkshake station, one hand on the waxy cup and the other pressing the chunky white button. She holds the cup near her waist and she looks down, and she is looking down past her own body, at the work.

  She shovels fries into cardboard pockets. The golden yellow lights of the fry stations on her forearms and hands. She’s wearing white shoes. I used to
work at Burger King. I used to date girls like this.

  We drive to a bar that has chessboards. A drawn-out win for Max. Then I drive him home. He has filled my tank with a credit card. He had tipped the card out his half-open window. Make it twenty bucks, he’d said.

  The whole night Max is revelling in his luck, his night out, my ass, his child-to-be.

  14 I train my binoculars on the southside hills. On the shadows and snow-capped mansard roof windows. The detail. I tell this to Lydia, about using the binoculars as a device in painting.

  I watch a crow on a pole. It looks around until its beak is hidden. Its furtive eye flashing grey, a pure grey I would never see with my naked eye. So binoculars make colour appear. A claw clamped on the edge of the pole’s top rim. As the crow lifts it plunges to the left, raising its breast slightly to the side to catch wind. It caws three times and lunges from the shoulders, swooping as it caws. I can hear the caw through the window.

  I wouldnt have heard it if I wasnt seeing it. So binoculars create sound.

  But looking at things up close — for instance, spruce inside a copse of hardwood — can inform you of the colours in a smear. Magnification breaks down smears to components (blue and grey and yellow and pink, instead of a smudgy green). Enlarging encourages colour to show itself. Lydia says Monet has become an adjective, describing something that, close up, breaks into fragments.

  15 I see Max and Daphne peering through the rippled glass of my porch. Daphne with a bottle of raspberry wine and a silver pendant with agate that the light shines through. These are Daphne touches. A tardy birthday gift. She holds the pendant up to demonstrate. Why would a stone appreciate light? What would be the advantage?

  We speak of mulberry trees and ginko leaves and selling oak and hawthorn to local nurseries and all sorts of farm things to do on crown land at a hundred dollars an acre.

  Daphne wants, eventually, to give up nursing and farm full time. And Max looks like a man who has considered this avenue his entire life.

  I’ve always thought berry liqueurs were a way to go. Daphne: If you make them I will cover them in chocolate.

  And suddenly I’m hooked.

  She has grafted apple plants and divided sucker seedlings and boiled down extracts, and has other assorted technical skills I would have to learn. If I’m serious.

  If I plan on getting into the tree-farm business.

  Do I plan on that?

  I realize I have been convinced.

  Who would love an Avalon farmer? Drop this literary crap.

  We eat a crisp salad in the living room with sun drenching the rooftops and catching the avocado leaves and making the dressing of mustard garlic with cilantro―which Daphne says is coriander―glow.

  I am so affected by the passions of others. There is nothing more I want right now than to be an Avalon farmer.

  16 I bump into Oliver Squires at the Honda lot on Kenmount Road. I’m picking up a wiper motor. He is with his paralegal student. She is young and thin and silent. Oliver’s dressed like the lawyer he is, but it surprises me as I never see him when he’s practising. He wants my advice because my brother is a mechanic. He’s not uncomfortable at all.

  But I’m not my brother, Oliver.

  Oliver makes a hand motion that implies I’m splitting hairs. There are new models in the showroom.

  I say, Cars inside buildings is a strange image.

  Yes, he says. Those cars they raffle in the mall.

  Mass-produced things are harder to replicate, in appearance, than natural things. It is easier to draw a tree than a telephone.

  Oliver is buying a car. To replace Maisie, he says. And laughs. And his paralegal student smiles. How people laugh when they are in pain. Oliver is getting on with things. And really, all this chatter is about not losing me as a friend.

  17 Lydia doesnt feel free to see other men, feels that I’m uncomfortable whenever she’s around a man. We were drinking cognac on my bed. She said she just wants it fair on both sides. I’m free to have lunch with someone I’ve had an erotic dream about (Alex) or share writing with Maisie, I live with Iris, but Lydia doesnt have the same freedom.

  I want to bring up dinner and rehearsals with Wilf, but this is too obvious.

  I said, I want you to do what you feel like. It’s true, I’ve felt jealous. Not all the time, just sometimes.

  Kissing me, she tells me a crewneck will get me laid before a turtleneck. How I like her making sure my shirt front is done up while my sleeves are unbuttoned.

  Lydia: If you find your cuffs are still buttoned, do you feel sad that I havent released you?

  Yes.

  18 I love Lydia. I love all her harbours and coastlines and high tides and contour lines and all four compass points of her body and the interior landscape of her brain and how the trail blazes through her and I want to thread her needle and sew up a life together and be scared with her and silly and stupid and profound and come to some understanding some kind of substantial truth on this shaky ground of living near the middle of our lives.

  19 Maisie Pye has pressed her nose to the window in my porch door. She is wearing a blue-and-orange silk blouse buttoned loose to her chest. It’s freezing out. I often forget to look at her. I talk to her but never look at her. But now that she’s not with Oliver I give her a look. She is small, a little awkward in her elbows and knees. Sometimes her smile slides up the side of her face.

  We have a drink in the living room.

  Maisie’s confidence makes me shy. She’s intellectual and she’s a good laugh. I must gather evidence on how she tries to express herself, her kindness, her appreciation of other people, not confrontational but sharing.

  We have another drink.

  Maisie: What happened to us, Gabe?

  And I know she is talking about ten years ago. When everything was different.

  We were both seeing other people, Maisie.

  Maisie: I’m thinking now that it was a mistake. You should have been bold.

  Me: And hang the consequences.

  Maisie: We should not have been devoted to the idea of fidelity.

  Her face, a strong personal beauty. When I first met her, she had plump cheeks. But these have gone. As has her time with Oliver. Maisie is remembering her life prior to Oliver.

  20 Lydia suspects I’ve been drinking, but I’m just loose. I want to run at the mouth, I want to be free to do anything, say anything, have anything happen, accept all consequences, embrace possibility, ramble on into the night. Lydia is wrapped up in a red tam and scarf and gloves. She has left the car running and says, Youre late. I decide to ignore things that usually irritate me. I try not to be sensitive. I want to be big.

  I try coaxing her.

  I ask, just to be provocative, Am I inside you? In here? Heart.

  She says, I dont know.

  This does not stun me. It makes me even more relaxed. Honesty. Lydia feels distant, asks if I feel it. I’m thinking she means do I feel distant too, and I dont, I feel the immediacy of life ticking on around me she means do I feel her distance. Yes. She hasnt felt connected to me.

  She doesnt feel as sexual as she usually does, and this has never happened to her before, not to this extent. A general lack of sexiness.

  Me: Is it related to me directly, or do you feel sexual to others?

  Lydia: I havent let myself do that, so I wouldnt know.

  She wants to be good for me but feels she doesnt know what I want.

  I tell her how Maisie understands me, and I know her. We instinctively understand and accept each other. This, of course, saddens Lydia.

  Sometimes, I say, it feels like you dont understand me. You dont like how I behave. You wish I were another way.

  Yes, she says. I agree with that. But I also resent that you compare me with others.

  I say, I should be cherished every day
.

  Lydia suddenly laughs, agreeing. And there is a melt between us.

  21 E-mail from Maisie: she woke up last night to singing. She went downstairs and found three sailors in her Lemarchant Road kitchen, with jugs of liquor and food. They cheered her. They were Portuguese. She had to yell at them and they were confused. She pointed to the door, but they would not go. So she called the police.

  Today, in court, she found out that the house she has rented used to be a brothel. The Portuguese come every year. They didnt know. Their ship was leaving port today and Oliver, who represented them, asked her to drop the charges. She did, on one condition: they make a plaque that says, in three languages, This House Is Not a Brothel. The men agreed.

  22 If I could hand deliver on this first day of spring. From my hand to Lydia’s. Hold her shoulder as I give her a simple message. If I could roll it into a thread and slip it in her ear as she sleeps in her bed. My last line would be . . . No, I would have no last line. There would be an ellipsis. There are no last words. Only words that belong in no last line. There are end words such as possibility and promise.

  23 Called Maisie to get a book. She says she admires Max because he persists in doing what he thinks is right (integrity) whereas Oliver does what people seem to expect.

  Me: People expected he’d stay with you.

  Maisie comes from a deep-seated philosophy, you can depend on her to say a point of view. And I realize I dont come from there, I’m too sceptical of a truth. I argue not from a position, but from an example.

  A sheet of thick plastic is wrapped in the bare oak on Long’s Hill. Max says the denser the wood, the harder it is for leaves to unfurl. Oak are the last to bloom. Beyond the oak the brick church steeple with green copper peak. I like looking at this spire while I write. I’m going to look up the kirk’s style. Squinches in spires.

  24 Maisie says she was washing dishes one day. And she slipped the ice cubes from a whisky glass into the dishwater. It was Oliver’s glass, from when he was on the phone with his brilliant paralegal student. Maisie held those cubes of ice under the warm water, held them fiercely, and noticed her wedding ring on the windowsill. That’s when she decided to leave Oliver.