This All Happened

by Michael Winter

  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 watc
h 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.

  Lydia is sitting with palms up and outstretched, Tinker Bumbo at her feet, the phone crooked to her shoulder. She is flapping a man-made shoe in the air. She is talking to Craig Regular.

  16 Boyd Coady is standing inside his pickup truck’s open door, adjusting the knot in his tie. As if he’s releasing energy, a clenched muscle.

  I’m giving Max a hand with a job. I love seeing weight displaced. A lintel over a door. The lines of energy being diverted over the weak spots, such as windows. The crush of weight detoured. Dams on gravity. The turn of bricks into a bridge over a window. A bridge is a prayer.

  Max has a photo of a fly’s enlarged head glued to his tool chest. This photo tells him a lot about the twentieth century. The beauty of science and the power of life. His father once scraped the inside of his lip with a spoon. Not telling him why. Then showed him the cells under a microscope. That vitality taught him insignificance.

  17 Iris lends me her flashing rear light and a small triangle of reflecting banner. I bicycle out to Cape Spear in the dark. The name Shea Heights painted on a water tower like some military post. Strickland’s Salvage hidden behind a tall wooden fence. As though if you saw the beautiful wrecks behind it, you’d feel compelled to steal them. The beautification committee has bulldozed and paved an area for an open market. You could land a small plane on it.

  It takes an hour to ride to Cape Spear. I claim a spot on the grass above the World War II cannon in front of the bunker. The cannon faces a bonfire licking the cement wall below the stage. The singers look nervous about the cannon facing them. Or are they cold. I huddle into the grass as the wind picks up. An anonymous thermos of good Scotch is passed around. Then I see it’s Max’s. They wave and I join them.

  Clear night, dark sky, streak of milky way, Daphne calls it a fried egg on its side. The city to the north is two pots of jewels separated by Signal Hill.

  Max offers a ride home, throw the bike in the truck, but I want to whoosh back in the dark. There are no streetlights and I have no light. I pull up hills and then descend, plunge into the valleys of the road. I can make out the centre line and the side line and keep in the middle. But the condition of the road is a mystery. All I can sense is the whirring of my wheels and I can tell their distance from the sound they make. There is no motion except wind. It could be that I’m standing still. I look back and notice the frenetic blinking of Iris’s red light.

  18 Woke at six-thirty, the mist anchored in the harbour. Propped on an elbow I can see this bed of sneaky fog. And then coffee with Iris and Helmut. Hot sun. Everything lit.

  On the table is our box of co-op vegetables from Daphne’s organic farm: deep green bok choy, rhubarb, a green onion, parsley, tatsoi (a small bouquet of greens with a slender peach-coloured flower in the centre), spinach. Everything special and select.

  I wait for Lydia to call, and she does. She invites me down and I go.

  19 The rain wakes me at six, and I get up and make coffee. I wrap Lydia’s Bodum in a cup towel. I notice her faucet is fixed. I watch the rain, tons of it, slash down. Lydia smells the coffee and comes down for some.

  Me: You fixed your faucet.

  I didnt fix the faucet.

  Well, someone fixed the faucet.

  It wasnt me.

  She’s got an admirer who fixes faucets. Craig Regular fixed that faucet.

  20 At the Ship with Maisie and Lydia. Theyre having brandies and Earl Quigley says he’s alone at the bar could he sit with us and listen.

  It’s rare to see Lydia and Earl together. I like to see it. To see the one youre with talking to her ex provides a window onto a previous life in action.

  We had been to Alex Fleming’s photograph exhibit. And there was a picture of Maisie and Oliver wearing cowboy boots. It was seeing them again in their life together. Maisie said, Even though Oliver’s affair was the catalyst for my departure, I had already begun to drift from him. She hated how, when they married, his sink became their sink. His mess was their mess.

  Maisie: I dont ever want to clean up our dishes. Una’s I dont mind. But not the man I’m sleeping with. There’s no fun in that.

  Me: What about a guy who fixes your faucet? Just on the side?

  Maisie: That’s what I want. I want a weekend man.

  And yet there is something in possession, marriage. In becoming an object. Something erotic in that. We all agree with this admission, even Earl.

  21 Wilf walks into the Ship looking uncomfortable. Then he sees us and relaxes. He is in a suit he wants to wear in Lydia’s film. He looks like a Beatle in it. Wilf, at the age of fifty-two, has become a promising actor. That word, promising. Wilf buys a pint and sits with us and sighs with relief. Wilf: When you open up the Ship Inn door all by yourself. Youve walked downtown alone. You dont want to be alone. You feel like a dog and you want a bit of company. Well, you open up that door and you steel yourself. It’s got to be all one motion, no hesitation. Open the door and stride in, but a slow stride, maximum exposure. And you make your way to the bar. And all the way there you keep your eyes on the bottles and the mirrors and youre hoping, youre hoping there’s someone in there who knows you. You hope you dont make it to the bar before someone waves you over, grasps your arm, says, Hey Wilf, how’s it going? Yes, sir, that walk to the bar is the loneliest walk in the world.

  22 I lurch for the birdie. I lurch and a hockey player strikes a two-handed blow across my calf. I fall, twist, turn to face my attacker. No one. The floor hockey crowd is on their half of the gym, separated by a net curtain. Badminton players look down at me. I roll, seize my leg, grimace. I see Lydia looking down. Oliver: Would you mind rolling over into your own court? And Lydia: Okay, let’s keep playing.

  But there must be an image of agony that transcends their lust to play, for they form a huddle again, over me. Lydia kneels. Oliver offers a tensor bandage and a shoulder.

  I’m wheeled into emerge. Dr Singh feels the calf. He recommends ice. Lydia wheels me over to get crutches. I swing on the crutches back to the car.

  Want to get fish and chips from Scampers?

  Lydia loves getting the fish and chips, she skips in, as if she knows I really want it and getting me what I want pleases her. I realize I’m a hard man to get something for.

  I watch her from the passenger side. She stands under fluorescent lighting and orders, both elbows on the counter. She turns and mouths to me, through the take-out window: A drink? I write NO backwards in my breath on the car window. I try to write it in a soft way. To incorporate the thanks.

  23 In bed with my leg up. Lydia brings me juice, toast, poached eggs, and coffee. I try the bathroom. When the foot is below my hips, that’s when the pain rushes down. A bucket of liquid needles sloshing heavy into my foot. It’s as if blood can’t return to the heart.

  I have eaten a bowl of grapes and a clementine. I watch Lydia fill a grocery bag with wet lettuce. She slashes holes in the bottom of the bag, knots it, and, outside, whirls the bag over her head, like a pail of water at the beach. She is drying lettuce. She turns quickly and I watch her hair twist to meet her head. She is so determined.

  Max delivers frozen pea soup and a bag of cherries and a loaf of bread and a salad with a cookie. It hurts to even stand up straight. The blood burning in the back of my leg.

  24 The laburnum is floating, yellow cobs of dots. A woman, who has forgotten the name of palliative care, calls it that place where you goes and that’s it. Daphne’s on duty
and she props my leg over folded hot blankets.

  They tilt the X-ray bed. Tie two rubber tourniquets around my ankle to find a vein. Daphne tries twice, sticking me with a small needle attached to a thin glass tube. It’s called contrast dye. They wheel me in for an ultrasound. The specialist is wet from the rain. He hasnt operated the computer in three weeks. He coats my leg in cold gel. He sticks the scanner up to my groin. I see, on the screen, the vein and artery in cross-view He pushes and my vein flattens. My artery doesnt budge.

  25 Lydia’s father fries me a splendid mackerel after my venogram. We have the mackerel with cauliflower and lettuce.

  On crutches, I swing back home. I can’t push the clutch down, so I have to walk. I remember the man in Corner Brook who had one leg. Lived in the Bean and wore denim. He was active, tough, and got around on wooden crutches. He had strong hands. Amputees no longer do this. They have prosthetics or wheelchairs. It was a time when missing limbs were visible, the drains open, the sewers flooded over Valley Road when it was just dirt.

  At the fire station four firemen in blue shirts sit in portable chairs on the wall looking over the road. They watch my progress.

  Maisie and Una visit with a loaf of bread, an apple, a grapefruit, and a sesame-seed snack. Maisie’s given up smoking and resumed running, to supplement her rowing. Yesterday, twenty-eight minutes. There’s so much to do, she says, and here’s another thing.

  What thing.

  The not smoking, she says.

  26 At about two Helmut calls. He is leaving port at four oclock.

  There is a defined half moon accompanying the sun. Lydia and I drive down to say bon voyage to the crew and their company boat. Helmut invites us on. All the men are tanned, with thick forearms and tall. Most are American. I leave the crutches and hop aboard. A famous marine artist has painted a school of tuna across the bow The navigation is tied to satellite imagery. Helmut shows us St John’s harbour on a screen as it looks from the sky. We let him have a minute with Iris.

  Boyd Coady says, loudly, I’d rather fly to Boston. Saw one of those tupperware boats caught in ice last year. Sunk before you could blink.