I stand up in the back of the canoe. I can see Max and Daphne lean and capsize. We pull into shore.
All I can think is, Daphne is pregnant.
They have gone down several steep shelves of rock. They are hanging onto the sunken canoe in the last pool before the falls. The current is fast.You can tell from how theyre balanced that their purchase is tender, up to their necks. They are leaning into the river.
Max is nimbly leaning back into the current, holding the nose of the canoe. The falls are twelve feet and very rough, massive rocks. Max calm in the face of a ridiculous situation.
I throw a rope and Max secures the canoe. Craig hauls the canoe over and I steer it in. I throw a rope to Daphne. It’s not clean around her. She loses her footing and swings, she swings towards the edge of froth, gripping the rope in her armpit. I see Craig lean to dive in. The rope snaps taut and we pull her in. Then it’s Max.
It’s six-thirty, the sky grazing the tops of heavy spruce. The food tubs were not roped in. So their gear is floating down-river. It begins to rain. Daphne a little in shock. We set up tents on the only clear spot, rocky and steep. A dreary scene. Build a fire, a fire is good, you hear about fires, everything you read about a fire is true. A fire never offers despair. A fire is pure hope, a true raw heart.
Make some tea. Tea is the drinkable equivalent of fire.
We portage the canoes. We spot a tiny cabin behind the bluff of a hill in the rain. We decide to break in. Max assures us the cabin owner wouldnt mind, considering our predicament. The rain plummeting.
We scuttle our miserable camp, our last stand, and make for the cabin. We ruin a screen on the window breaking in. There are six bunks. Six of us. A fine woodstove. Drying out the gear.
We leave money on the table to replace the screen.
We all try our best to lose our stiffness. We’re too serious. Or perhaps it would be best if someone admitted how close to death Max and Daphne were. And Daphne pregnant. But it’s too early, or too severe, to admit to anything, and we play cards and drink Scotch and light candles and kerosene lamps.
13 Lydia: Take a gander at the map.
Me: You mean, take an exploits at the map.
What?
Gander River. Exploits River.
I knew you were gonna say that.
We take a vote and decide to continue down the Exploits. We’re sick of the cabin. We feel better in a canoe, even in the rain. We make it to Badger by nightfall and camp at the edge of a farmer’s field. Max walks into town the highway runs very close to the river, so even when youre out on the water youre never that far from civilization. Craig strings up a tarp and a line to hang clothes.
The farmer and his wife come by. They are politely leery of the fire and their grass, which could transport a line of flame straight over to the sheep barn. They tell us that the Badger Chute is around the bend and that we must portage it. Search and Rescue, the farmer says, are hauling people out of that every year.
Max returns with a bottle of dark rum. And Daphne mixes drinks. It is clear Daphne has scolded Max and Max has apologized.
Craig repairs everything. A missing tent pole. He leans over to apply duct tape to the heels of Lydia’s sandals.
14 We reach the chute and size it up. We portage the gear over the knob of rock and stand studying the chute. I try to stand as if I know what I’m gauging. Craig and Alex want to do it, which convinces us. Max and Daphne have already begun to portage. We flip a coin and Lydia and I win the toss. We tow our canoe upriver a little. We have to cross the current and then swivel midstream and hit the chute at a little off-centre to avoid a massive rock. It’s difficult to see what is under the boiling froth below the chute. I throw in a carrot and it bobs safely enough. Lydia says, But we’re not a carrot. The wind picks up and Daphne clambers along the shore to us.
It feels ominous, Daphne says. You guys are the only ones not to have capsized.
The others have gone over on tricky rapids, shelves, and ledges. It does seem a little foreboding.
I say, How often will we get to shoot the Badger Chute? The worst that can happen, it seems, is we’ll put a hole in Max’s canoe.
Max: Dont worry about the canoe.
Daphne: Put pressure on them, why dont you?
Max: I’m just saying.
We are close to the road, so there’s no problem with hitchhiking back to the cars and getting out our gear.
Lydia: Let’s do it.
We sit by the canoe and I quietly go over the path with Lydia. Hit the lip of the chute about two feet to the left of that first bit of whitewater, okay?
Okay.
This is the first time I have seen Lydia take blind-faith instruction from me.
We kneel on the floor of the canoe for a lower centre of gravity.
As I push off I see Craig hoisting their canoe over the rock. Theyve decided to portage too.
Everyone watching at the rocks. We hit the lip perfectly, which slows us and then, gathering determination, sucks us down from the peak. Heavy water plunges over the sides. We are swamped. We avoid the big rock and strike the whitewater and float over yellow boulders and push through, the stern fishtailing but then brought back straight. We’re through. We turn and paddle hard to shore against a strong current. To hearty cheers.
Later, a moose and her calf cross the river. A horned owl blends into bark. A rabbit hunched in the undergrowth. And finally, Max’s car shining by the embankment.
We lift the canoe from the water. I hand Lydia my knife to cut open a mango. I watch her slice the fruit in half, remove the pit, and score the fruit into cubes. She pops each half up like city blocks and hands one to me.
15 Back working on the novel. Outside my window I can see Boyd Coady on an aluminum ladder. He’s scrutinizing the work of the roofer. The roofer is carefully rolling a glistening licorice mop over the aluminum edges. This mop has magic in it. They say there’s a halo around the sun today. But I can see it in the treacle of the mop. Boyd yells down, Okay, boys, two more hot!
Below, the boys fill a black bucket with steaming tar and hook the handle to a thick rope. They hoist it on a pulley lever. The liquid tar jiggles but never drips on the clapboard. The pulley is like the ones on clotheslines, except it’s made of cast iron, not white metal. I am comforted to know that pulleys are still used. Every civilization has discovered them.
The boys take a break and sit in the shade on the tailgate of their red pickup. Boyd and the roofer sit on the pressure-treated wood of his wife’s flower boxes. All over, city roofs are being tarred and shingled. Repairs have been decided on. Is this seasonal or a sign of money? The fixing of what has already been built. Maintenance.
I borrow a scalpel from Iris’s dissection kit and slit the seed pods of poppies. I make a tea slurry from the pods and drink it. It’s bitter. Nothing happens.
16 I get together with Maisie to tell her the canoe trip. She’s astonished at the falls, and sorry she couldnt go. She hates to miss anything. It makes me want to write down what I know of Maisie. I should write it now. How she ended up with Oliver. And now she’s on her own. I first knew her when she was seeing Max. Max thought Maisie loved him. I can believe it. So when they broke up, Maisie dated a lot of men (including me) and then she found Oliver. A month later Maisie was pregnant. Maisie was still in love with Max, but she knew she was pregnant with Oliver’s baby. She could feel it. It was just a weekend fling with Oliver, but enough to make her pregnant. And Max admits he still slept with Maisie occasionally. Almost for old time’s sake.
So Max was convinced the baby was his. And Maisie wanted Max to think it. Maisie said to Max that he wouldnt see the baby if he didnt come back to her. So he went back.
But when the baby was born, Una, you could see Oliver’s looks all over her. There was not a drop of Max in her. When Max saw the baby, and saw that Maisie knew, he closed up. He left her. So for a
year it was just Maisie Pye and Una.
Then Oliver’s sister would offer to babysit, and she’d bring Oliver over on the sly. Bring Una up to see Oliver’s parents too. And then Oliver made it understood that he wanted to try things with Maisie. They started going out. They had never gone out.
Were you in love with Oliver?
Maisie: I loved him. But there was always something lacking. It’s very complicated and hard to talk about, but I can see myself falling for a sensuous man. And Oliver is none of this.
17 Out on the grass of Long’s Hill. The arugula large enough for salads. Lydia picks a handful. She’s by for a half-hour lunch break. She has begun pre-production. I make a green salad, and lay out slices of avocado, tomato, and feta. Lydia likes her greens separate. And this preference has grown on me. Before, I did not have an opinion on salads, but now I prefer them green.
She says, The least you can do is offer me a coffee. I’m all out of coffee.
Sure, you took the whole bag from my cupboard.
Lydia. I did not take an ounce of coffee from your house. I add, Perhaps you should ask someone else that question.
She says she feels unimaginative and everyone is down on her. Surrounded by cube vans, thick cables of electricity, thousands of watts of light, thirty-seven crew members waiting for her call to roll camera. The amount of money riding on a shot. The pressure.
18 Max and Daphne invite us to Brigus, but Lydia can’t go. As I drive I think that things should only ever be half lit and half known. It is false to know everything. The earth, the moon are only ever half spheres. We believe the rest. To portray the whole story is false and grotesque. Even the edges of what we see are blurred. There is only a circle the size of your eye you can be sure of.
As I gas up at Canadian Tire I spot Oliver. He is on his twenty-year-old green Raleigh. He bought it new from Pike’s. It has a dynamo in the front-wheel axle. He’s wearing clips on his cream slacks.
That bike, I say, is so you.
I tell him I’m off to Brigus. Put your bike in the trunk. Okay, he says.
I’ve brought baked chicken and a quart of Ontario strawberries. And now Oliver and his bike. I dont care about allegiances. Oliver may be an asshole, but I still like him.
There’s a new crop of mosquitoes and people are polite to Oliver. They are welcoming him. Everyone asks me how Lydia’s doing on her shoot. I say I’ve barely seen her.
19 This morning, the first real emotive moments of love, and this because Lydia’s marrying Wilf onscreen.
Do you mind if I marry Wilf? she asks.
Before this, she says she’s going to loan Wilf the money for his mortgage.
Lydia: I can see you dont like it.
No. It’s just I’m concerned about lending money to friends remember how you felt about it last time?
But she comes over to me and asks if it’s okay to be Wilf’s wife.
I’m fine with it.
You are?
You dont have a crush on him. Why should I mind you marrying onscreen an old fart who wants to jump your bones.
20 Oliver Squires is sitting on the red carpet. He has warm hands. Strong hands from the all the bicycling. Since Maisie left he is a bicycle fiend.
He says, There must be a word to describe how you carry on normally, or habitually, even when you want to scream or be raw or be away from an energy that isnt satisfied by you.
I can only shrug and Oliver, very proudly (and why not?), pedals off through a red light on Long’s Hill.
You have to be motivated by love, guided by reason.
21 I’m the best man on-set. I watch Wilf Jardine take Lydia’s hand before a justice of the peace. We are outdoors in a copse of pine near the fluvarium. Earlier I’d seen fat trout swim past the underwater windows as Lydia’s cameraman took shots of the couple passing by the salmon. The trout were happier than me. One looked at me sympathetically, and if he could, he’d put a fin on my shoulder.
Six white cube vans feed juice to the shoot, electric cables begin certainly and then vanish in the grass, only to reappear around the perimeter of the set. An army fording a river.
The extras blow on bubble wands and a man toots Stand by Me on a saxophone.
I hear Wilf and Lydia say I do. And we all believe, for a moment, that they are married. Perhaps the only person who does not is Lydia.
22 I started going out with Lydia a full six months before she started going out with me, and I celebrate a kind of kinky-perverse-celibate-monotheistic-kind-of-solipsistic-devoted-like-a-dog thing near the end of July to commemorate my pathetic attraction and initial infatuation with this woman but this is a private matter that I keep to myself and write here and never include Lydia in the picture.
23 Lydia drops in. She just got back from the lake with the girls. Theyve shaved a minute off their time. Lydia has them feathering their oars. She said, If you add up the square footage of all those blade surfaces, it’s like holding up a sheet of plywood to the wind. Tonight she’s meeting Wilf Jardine to go over a few scenes.
She kisses me and is off now for a quick pint. Do you mind me going off? Good.
I remind her that Max says the weekend is good for the Flat Islands. She says, Can you pack for me?
I work on the novel until I hear her return. She recounts this conversation she heard Craig Regular having with Oliver Squires at the bar:
Craig: So how are you and Maisie?
I dont give a sweet-smelling shit about me and Maisie. Pardon?
A flying carnivorous fuck.
Oliver.
I dont give – and I pause for emphasis, boys – one snot-haired jism about that loud-mouthed trout.
Jesus, Oliver. What’s up with you?
I’ll tell you what’s up there Mr Craig Regular my friend. The jig is up. Up shit creek and as far as I’m concerned it can stay up her hairy-arsed self-important self-centred woe-is-me crease for all time.You can string her up by the jeezly tits.
Me: This is getting ridiculous.
Lydia: He’s got to get over her.
It’s hard to get over someone leaving you.
Perhaps he should have thought of that before waving his dick around.
That’s what he’s wishing.
And now he’s having a baby with her.
24 Lydia needs a scene on an abandoned island, and Max takes us over to the Flat Islands, out of Burnside. Tremendous swell. Daphne, pregnant and wary. We take in the lee of an island and wait. I have a boiled dinner ready, though no pease pudding. The best salt beef is the kind with two circles of bone.
We hunt up gravestones. Lydia says raspberries and wild roses grow where people used to live. Lilac bushes are a dead giveaway, Daphne says.
Graves from 1838. Samsons. Methodists. We meet a man and his three kids. He’s clearing up crab pots. Coiling rope.
Making a film, he says.
When he speaks he looks at his feet, but when he’s listening he stares you in the eye. Kids throwing themselves in the tall grass. Lydia points out a rusty bedspring. I figure the kids know of it, but the eldest bangs his head on it. It’s as if Lydia created the bedspring and then drew the boy to it. He rubs his head, says to his dad, I bashed me head in! but forgets it as he sees a white sail at the horizon. The man tells Lydia she can film anything she wants. His wife inside the house the whole time.
25 Life is the battle between attaining comfort and rebelling against it.
26 It’s Friday and I am feeling a little sorry for myself. I wonder if everybody suffers this in their loneliness.
Lydia worked late and then we went to the Ship. I had wanted to spend just ten minutes alone with her, but she wanted to go have a drink with the film crew. She said, Theyre all going down.
I didnt tell her I wanted the ten minutes.
When we got out of the car, she raised her
face to mine to be kissed. And said: Youre a good boyfriend, you dont ignore me.
27 I overhear Maisie Pye and Daphne Yarn talk at the bar. Maisie says, Drinking does nothing for your relationship. It may be great for getting fucked, but not to meet men.
Alex arrives and I ask how things are with Craig.
A disaster. I ended up in behind his house in the dark curled up in a ball, crying. My emotions are all over the place. I’ve got photographs. Of the canoe trip.
Oh, let’s see.
There’s one of Alex in her canoe navigating the rapids. Craig is lying down in the back with the paddle gently steering.
Alex: Now that tells you so much, doesnt it?
What.
Well, look at my arm, so stiff. Like I’m twelve and I’m trying to be cool.
I dont see it that way, Alex.
Wilf Jardine comes in and we watch him as he leans over to Lydia.
Excuse me, he says. While I kiss my wife.
Lydia, in bed. What did you think of Wilf saying Excuse me while I kiss my wife.
It was funny. But I wish he didnt feel like he was doing something wrong.
Good.
He didnt see me.
It’s just for the past five days we’ve been married on-set. And he lives the part.
28 Lydia is at Craig Regular’s now, playing crib. She has called. I say, You two alone?
Yes.
That’s cozy.
She says she will be by soon. But she waits an hour. She waits on purpose until it’s too late. I say this. She says, I dont want to be made uncomfortable on the phone. She doesnt have any friends. Any time she spends with friends I resent. And Craig’s been a major help to her on-set. Any time we spend with other people she instigates. We fight for fifty minutes. And now she has gone home because she has a long day ahead.
I’ve got to lighten up. Cut her some slack, as she says. Saying cozy was out of line.
Iris in the house the entire time.
Lydia would prefer if I just asked if Craig was interested in her, was she interested in him, okay? Instead of this stuff. She said, If you were man enough.
She’d thought that Craig and I could be friends. She used to have a lot of male friends whom she didnt sleep with.
This All Happened Page 13
