All of this arises out of Lydia singing a song with Wilf. Meanwhile the cards are dealt and the best hand I have all night is two pair.
30 I can hear Maisie Pye, Daphne Yarn, and Lydia stretching downstairs on Lydia’s area rug. The sun is just up. They must be pressing their faces into a wool rug that smells of Tinker Bumbo. That must be a pleasant yogic experience.
May
1 Daphne Yarn grasps a green bottle of Italian wine from Lydia’s fridge. From the grasp I can see the tone in her arms, the flex in her hands. I love athletic arms. Daphne says, It’s my favourite rose. I drink it all summer long. It’s not like that Portuguese stuff you drink at wiener roasts and picnics.
Then we’ll bring it to Max’s birthday.
I walk them down to the Y. Daphne and Lydia have begun training for the regatta. They practise on rowing machines. Daphne says she’ll be six months pregnant by the time the regatta rolls around.
I notice the buildings that have gone to fire and bankruptcy. Coffee shops have choked out drugstores and bookstores. Whenever they renovate an old building, you can be sure it will succumb to a mysterious midnight fire.
2 If you rise early enough, you’ll see a clear sun lift off the ocean, a bright band of hot light. The land warms faster than the ocean, which creates fog, and the fog consumes the sun.
My chili peppers are sprouting in their flats. Like a rooster’s comb.
I see Max, impatient in a bank lineup. He says, You’ll be able to take the wait behind this guy off your income tax.
I pay my mortgage and watch Boyd Coady lying flat on the pavement. A grating off a drain. He’s bent at the hips into the drain. A boy holds his ankles. Traffic passes. Boyd stretches up with a white bucket. He dumps the slurry along the curb. A woman leans on the bank railing and cautions them about the traffic. She’s wearing a windbreaker.
Woman: He lost his big gold ring, five hundred dollars. I look in the drain. The water is not moving.
Boyd:You couldnt see that rock ten minutes ago.
You’ll get it, I say.
Boyd looks at me with unquestioning faith in his ability. He doesnt need my encouragement. In fact, my words only bring doubt.
3 Maisie and I spoke of money. How Oliver wanted someone to fix the porch. Maisie said they can’t afford it. Oliver looked at the bank balance and said there’s a thousand dollars in it. Maisie: Several bills havent been paid. Oliver buys services, Maisie fixes things herself. Oliver’s argument was that if you spend your time doing what you do best, let specialists mend the rest.
My father never hired anyone, I say. He bought raw materials, not services. Even when pouring the foundation for the kitchen. We mixed the cement by hand. We found the gravel and sand. I envied the cement truck rotating its heavy belly, a load coming down the chute. But now I may do it by hand. I know the proper consistency of cement.
4 Last night I had Lydia listen to the Rosemunde by Schubert. Lydia says she never listens to music without doing something else. Music is always an accompaniment. But we lay on the bed in the dark with only the blue light of the stereo power button on and listened to it. It’s about thirty minutes long. And she saw that it is beautiful. Then she read me an article on how we are living further in the past as we learn more about it. I told her Bartlett listened to Schubert as his ship sank in the ice. He sat in his study, keeping the fire going with wax records, until the deck rail was flush with the ice. The last piece he played was Chopin’s Funeral March.
5 I help Max move a rolltop dresser from Duckworth Street, next door to the War Memorial. When we have the dresser roped into the back of his truck, we inspect the memorial. The front bronze by Gilbert Bayes, 1923. Thinking of the past makes Max tell me of fishing with his father in Placentia Bay for mackerel. How mackerel get stiff soon after theyre caught. He likes mackerel just as much as salmon. I say they are a handsome fish, a blue-grey skin with net pattern. Like herring. Max wants to go diving for sea urchins. The Japanese eat their roe. I said I didnt know sea urchins had roe.
Oh, yes, he says, and studies the harbour. I can dive down to twenty feet using scuba gear.
We drive to Max’s workshop and unload the dresser. Want a coffee? He has a little coffee maker in a corner. You have to weave around table saws, lathes, and drill presses to get there.
He sprinkles a pinch of salt and dry mustard powder in with the grounds. He says salt always makes bad coffee taste better.
And I have seen Max add salt to a pint of beer. And Lydia has shown me the ingredients of one brand of salt, which includes sugar.
6 There is a phone cord stretched across the bed, across my chest, as Lydia talks to Daphne Yarn. It’s Max’s birthday and we’re late.
Lydia: Have you seen the wine? Daphne’s wine? It was in the fridge.
Me: I havent.
Well, we’ll have to pick up beer.
Daphne lays out ten pounds of smoked salmon.
That’s a pound each, Daphne.
We dont have to eat it all tonight, Gabe.
Yes, Max says, displaying the work ahead of us. Tonight we eat all the salmon.
He is forty and someone tells him forty is the new thirty. He corrects them: Forty is the new nineteen. I can see now that Daphne is pregnant. And I feel convinced that they are happy. Something has turned in Max. Some physical change has occurred since he met Daphne. Some might say he’s settling down. But he’s just as active. A restlessness has been lifted from him.
I pass the bathroom door. Poofy woofy, I say.
That was one small crap for Max, Max says.
A shadow falls on his head and I can see what Max looked like with a full head of hair.
Maisie in a lemon white sockhop dress. She has baked bread, she’s slicing the salmon then notices it’s pre-sliced. She is set to slice it when the salmon falls into segments, as if she willed it sliced by lifting a carving knife.
Perf de derf, Daphne says. Testing the salmon.
Daphne, quiet and beautiful; there is a light on her face that shows a deep structure in her eyes and nose and those pigtails as if she has the brakes on because she’s going full tilt.
7 Maisie: I wish I had done something radical with money when I was younger. Now I have no money.
Me: You have one of the most chaotic lives, and youre a fine writer.You sway rooms full of people.
What do you mean?
You attempt to persuade people on a course of action youve convinced yourself would be good for them.
I like to offer my opinion.
And yet youre insecure.Youre always buying brand-new hardcover fiction to offset some geographic and cultural isolation.
Gabe. That’s professional. My one weakness.
I admire it. And your writing is sensual and particular. It’s in the active, present tense. Youre funny and strong and surprisingly unsure of your talent.
Are you trying to cheer me up?
Maisie’s money is tied up in a mortgage and car payments, the house in Heart’s Desire, feeding Una, and for once, she’s fearful of finances now that she has left Oliver.
Me: What is radical?
Brazil is radical. What Iris is doing. Anything lavish that is consumed.
Well, why not go to Heart’s for a weekend? It’s the next best thing.
Okay then, she says.
8 Today was a list of donts and shoulds. Lydia said, Dont use foot-bath powder in a full bath, you should change clothes after badminton, dont sneak up on me ever, dont barge into the bathroom when I’m in there, dont make coffee without measuring the grounds, dont peel carrots in the sink, dont put tomatoes in a salad, you should take my direction when driving otherwise youre being defiant, dont try to do accents youre no good at them, dont put extra oil in anything, dont serve a bowl without a plate under it, dont floss your teeth that way, this is how you make rice, dont use vinegar in a sa
lad dressing, dont leave your coat on a kitchen chair, dont talk to me when I’m falling asleep or speak to me when I’m remembering my dreams or tell me not to swear, dont compare me, dont make the bed that way, dont turn on the overhead light use lamps, dont use the bathroom fan switch it’s too noisy, close the bathroom door if I’m in bed.
9 I find a pair of men’s underwear in Lydia’s dryer and theyre not mine. I lay them on top of the machine. But Lydia does not pick them up. So I ask her and she says theyre not hers.
Lydia: I’ve never seen them before. Maybe theyre Earl’s.
From five years ago? They look recent.
Lydia: I dont know anything about them.
She’s convinced they must be mine. I hang them on the box of detergent.
10 In the post office I see Max’s father. A few months ago he fell fainted and Max found him. He was in hospital for eight weeks and had prostate surgery.
I had outdoor plumbing for a while, he says.
Mr Wareham’s pupils pinpricks in the blue. He’s wearing a pair of white cotton gloves and a tea-coloured coat. This man was born on an island off an island. He says he grows wheat in his backyard in Arnold’s Cove. Max takes him on trips to Witless Bay Line to boil the kettle and paint trees leaning over a rough shore. He has a white shag of hair. It’s funny that he has a head of hair and Max doesnt. Takes after his mother, Max does. Mr Wareham enjoys the company of women in their thirties. He has a small stainless-steel spring of joy in his ankle and a green shoot in his eye and an idea lightbulb burning in his temple.
11 I ride my bike to Motor Vehicle in Mount Pearl to relicense Jethro. First time on my bike this year. It had a flat. I flip the bicycle upside down in the backyard, wrench off the rim, tug out the tube, dunk it in the sink. I realize I’m thinking of that pair of underwear. Who the hell owns them?
The hole makes a flute of bubbles. I sandpaper the hole and dab on rubber cement and let it go tacky, apply a patch and wait for the tube to dry, and then, with the heels of three teaspoons hanging off the lip of the rim, it’s my childhood days. Been fifteen years since I changed a bicycle tire with teaspoons.
It’s a busy road. But a lull in between the two cities. With flat properties and a little farming. Rows of plastic cones over some tender crops. A gentle ascent into Mount Pearl. A girl digging in the soil, her glasses glinting gold. Or the glint tells me she’s wearing gold glasses. Her father in a row of trees. Cow manure trampled into the edge of pavement. A protest sign against the land freeze. Ballroom dancing at the Old Mill. Brookfield Drive-In. The word Brookfield has theatrical masks for the two o’s, reminds me of one of the entries I’d adjudicated a handwritten story and for the word look a fourteen-year-old had dots and eyelashes on the o’s.
At Motor Vehicle it is sunny and the skylights reflect all the hills and land around Mount Pearl. One queue is for the photo driver’s licences and men are stroking their hair back and one woman walks up to her boyfriend, pats his ear. You sign your name on an electronic pad that collects the signature directly onto the computer screen and to every province, territory, state, and free-trade zone in North America, you can be sure. It was forty-five minutes in the lineup and then two minutes at the wicket.
I say, Do I have to sign on this electronic pad? Couldnt I sign a piece of paper instead?
I wouldnt care, but the licence left off my last letter (I wrote over the edge of the pad) and reduced my signature by So percent. My signature looks tiny and mean.
12 Lydia and I drive to Heart’s Desire with Daphne and Max in the back seat. Jethro doesnt mind the weight. Maisie has knocked out a kitchen wall. She has discovered old linoleum. Maisie hands us a bucket of sudsy water to wash down the wallpaper. The walls have fat pink roses from the fifties.
Una asks me to rub down the butter chunks on her toast.
She has a purse, and in it a picture of Oliver when he was little.
I never knew your dad at that age, I say.
That’s Daddy, Una says, when he was me.
I walk to the beach with Daphne, Maisie, and Lydia. We pass Josh and Toby, who are building a fence. Leaves are bursting out of a birch. Toby looks like he doesnt get fed much. Josh nods. They are getting older. Next year they won’t even nod to me. They’ll be too cool.
Maisie: We bought this house on a whim seven years ago for six thousand. I bought it out of the money I made teaching.
Me: I’m reminded of what you said, Maisie that teaching made you realize what you believe.
Maisie: People used to give up. They would try to be a pianist or a painter, they would get to Paris and be told they werent good enough. They would become electricians. Not now
Daphne: That’s what happened to Max. Except he told himself.
13 We are driving home from Heart’s. A northerly has driven ice close to shore. It pushes Jethro towards the shoulder. Daphne says her grandfather was killed at the seal hunt and brought back in a pickle barrel. They laid him out on his mother’s kitchen table and the pickle came running out of him and ruined the cloth.
Daphne can’t wait to get back to her greenhouse. She says Craig Regular wrote a letter to the paper. He was complaining that she uses waste of eviscerated animals from the university labs as fertilizer. It’s not enough for some, she says, that I’m selling organic produce.
14 On Lydia’s desk there is a photo of Lydia dancing with Earl Quigley. They are in Lydia’s kitchen on Gower. The same table, same fridge, same brass chimes hanging in the doorway, same grey-and-red wool placemats, even the fridge magnets, the bulletin board behind the door all the same except Lydia is dancing with Earl Quigley, he’s bending her and they smile for a camera and this is five years ago when it would have been his underwear in the dryer and I’m certainly not anywhere near the dance.
I have walked down to Lydia’s to make Boston bluefish chowder with clams and shrimp. I have to ring to have her open the door. I notice a block of cheese I bought is gone. Did Lydia eat a whole block of cheese?
Youre the cheese pig, she says.
The photo and the cheese, the underwear still hanging there, and the fact I have no key make me irritable. But I say nothing about it. I am a cheese pig.
Lydia tests the chowder and wonders if something is off. It tastes zingy, she says. Like putting your tongue on a battery.
I decide not to stay, and I can see she’s relieved. You can take the chowder, she says. And I walk back up the hill. I pour out the chowder under a tree, where a dog like Tinker Bumbo will find it.
15 Lydia:You sure are spending a lot of time with Maisie. We’re writers. We’re conferring.
I realize I havent been discussing the novel with Lydia. The reason is she’s so busy with scripts, with the play, with funding proposals for the film in the summer.
Lydia thinks the novel could make a good film. Scenes of Bob Bartlett in the north, walking over polar ice that is floating south. Of the Karluk sinking, the phonograph playing. Of Rockwell Kent being accused of spying for the Germans. When I describe these images she gets excited, more excited than me. And I realize she’s good for egging me on. She’s much better at story than I am.
16 Just showered after a run with Lydia. Shaved a minute off Quidi Vidi, and much easier even though I ran feeling a little sore in the shins. A calm night, the lights of Pleasantville in bright focus. The oil tanks hidden behind a point of land, only the glow of lights on the bank behind them. The whole hill a dull apple-cider glow to protect the tanks from vandals.
Not a soul anywhere.
We stop at Lydia’s. When she peels off her running shoes I see she has a pair of Chinese slippers inside. The shoes are too big, she says. I love how her elbows move close to her hips when she jogs. There’s something oriental in all that.
We kiss and I continue on up Long’s Hill. The greys and blacks. No colour except in blurred pools around streetlights in the distance, showing shin
gles on the edges of houses.
I run past Theatre Pharmacy, where we hugged that first Christmas and I had the rolling pin down my pants. Feel that, I’d said.
Oh, my.
I had her, for a moment. When she didnt know my body. Starlings are walking through a grassy hill, eating insects. Green is the garbage of gardens. They are sloughing off green.
17 At Coleman’s grocery store. The distorted women, freakshow faces, warped eyebrows, blotchy complexions about four of them, their tiny husbands pushing carts. A pregnant woman with groceries. She comes out with the bags and there’s a man in the passenger seat, waiting, staring at the glovebox, defeated, with a nine-year-old in the back, and the pregnant woman, struggling into the door, forces her belly behind the wheel, pained, drives.
Thin legs on the women, big torsos, and their pushed-in, beaten faces, receding chins, thin hair crimped artificially. Then calling taxis, paying with Government of Newfoundland blue cheques that require MCP and SIN and theyre worth $301.50 and theyre buying cases of Pepsi, Spaghettios, tins of vienna sausages, cold pre-fried barbecue wings, I can barely write this as it’s all so cliche.
18 It’s 3 a.m. and Wilf Jardine will not leave Lydia’s party. We have to con him. Trouble is, he is used to this game and is wily, wary of deception. He cranks up the music another decibel. I tell him that he has to go now. That I’ll go with him. We can go down to the Spur, I say.
Wilf faces me, drunk and wincing. He is drinking shine, panty remover, he calls it. There is a yellow stain on his lapel. It makes the tweed in his coat look like sandwich spread. I’ll go to the Spur, he says. But not with you.
He turns to Lydia.
Lydia: I’ll go with you, Wilf.
That’s better, he says. No offence, Gabe.
I call a cab and we wait in the porch. Silent.
This All Happened Page 9
