by Edward Riche
But this spring she dreamed of wisteria and soupy risotto with sciopeti, with shrimp and asparagus and nero di seppia and a heat the sun never brought to Newfoundland.
Even to return for a restorative visit.
But Jules was going nowhere. He was her tether.
She listened but did not hear the shower running. He’d forgotten.
Five
Matt’s secretary, Audrey Manning, knew which events Mayor Olford wished to skip and which he would attend. Petitions were continual; Celebrity Karaoke in Support of Cystic Fibrosis hosted by the Kinsmen of Mount Pearl. Avalon HAM Radio. Kiwanis Music Festival. St. John’s Clean and Beautiful. Monarchist. Horticulturist. New Canadians. Old Newfoundlanders. Blind. Deaf. Lame. Halt. Riddled. There wasn’t an amateur sports association that did not request his presence at their fund raisers — from Under 16 Girls Bowling to Masters Slo-Pitch, they all called. To avoid offending any of the many groups involved in minor hockey by favouring one or the other, he begged off all of them. Matt was obliged to lace up every year and play a charity match for the Brain Injury Association: local politicians versus media (he’d dressed for the journalists last contest, as their numbers were in such decline they couldn’t ice a full team). He always dreaded the game, always contemplated bowing out but always ended up enjoying himself, always scored a couple of easy goals for a laugh. He did a couple of tennis things because his daughter, Katie, was involved when she was younger. Matt took other sports as they came. With the rising costs and concussions of hockey, soccer was now as popular.
“Don’t forget you have Kids Eat Smart tonight,” said Audrey. Matt nodded. Making sure kids got a nutritious lunch and even breakfast at school; this was one he wanted to support.
“Right. Is that . . .?” he asked.
“Yep, dinner.”
“It would be. That hotel food . . . you know . . . it kills me.”
“It’s not good?”
“It’s . . . I dunno. Hate hotels,” said Matt.
“And I have to confirm you at the Board of Trade luncheon next week.”
“That’s?”
“Imogene Hume,” said Audrey. “Wrote some book about music.”
“Yes, right, I told someone I would go . . . so, yes, confirm.” Music seemed an odd choice for the Board of Trade, but a welcome change from the usual market shill. Matt’s late mother was a music teacher at an elementary school. She owned a collection of classical stuff on Deutsche Grammophon vinyl that, filed, was at least two metres wide. In a house that was never as strict as those of his friends, one of the few prohibitions was on Matt touching the treasured discs. Those records — one night Chopin, the next Bartók or Brahms — and a glass of affordable wine were among his mother’s few indulgences. “That all, Audrey?”
“Don’t forget Parks and Public Spaces Committee Wednesday afternoon.”
“It was mentioned in the council meeting. People living in Bowring Park apparently.”
“And there is a man outside to see you.” Audrey checked a sheet. “Clayton Ivy.”
“About what?”
“Hockey cards.”
Clayton Ivy stood as Matt exited his office. “Mr. Olford.”
“Mr. Ivy.” Matt took the hand offered. “What do you have?”
Ivy off-gassed tars and nicotine, like his car was his toxic terrarium. He fished in the front pouch of his St. John’s Ice Caps hoodie and withdrew three hockey cards, each in a sized plastic sleeve.
“Three cards. I was hoping you could sign them. If it’s not a problem?”
“Not at all,” said Matt. Though it was. Young people were one thing, but adult collectors of memorabilia gave him the creeps. And did not three cards mean the thin man meant to trade them? “Do you have a pen or marker . . . ?” A fine-point Sharpie was proffered.
“There’s two from your Stanley Cup season and the third is from 91–92,” said Ivy, handing Matt the card from Matt’s final season in the NHL. This card featured the picture Matt favoured, caught taking a sharp turn on the ice, skates throwing snow, his attention on a puck out of frame like an animal hunting, a predator detecting a stirring in the grass. He signed his name to the front and turned the card over. This was Matt then,
“The Stanley Cup Year cards are more valuable. Obviously,” said Ivy.
“Sure,” said Matt, signing the cards from his stint on the triumphant Oilers. “Like what?”
“In pristine condition like this, twenty-five bucks maybe.”
“Sorry? Twenty-five bucks?”
“I’ll trade the duplicate. Less for the later card, first season for the Sens but . . .”
“Got it.”
“How was that team?”
“The Senators? It was all right. I was having some injury problems. My hand.”
“You got my vote. For mayor.”
“Thanks for that.”
Ivy slipped the cards back into their plastic sleeves.
Six
Lloyd Purcell knew that his brother, Dave, had rushed to secure his tiny wine cellar before flying off to “blow eighty-five days in the middle of France.” The metal of the bolt was shiny and there was a litter of coiled wood shavings and sawdust on the floor below. Dave, wisely, did not trust his big brother with the stash beneath the stairs. Lloyd wondered if Dave had purposely left the signs that the lock was recently installed where they could be seen. A wine cellar seemed awfully grand for a house in Rabbittown.
Lloyd thirsted, but it was too early to start in on the Irish. A glass of red was the ticket.
Perhaps he should have gone to rehab in Los Angeles, back when he could afford it. What sort of discount regional facilities existed in Newfoundland, he wondered. Doubtlessly dreary joints jammed up with skanky court-mandated clients. And he was sure to know half of the people in there, would have gone to school with them. “Jaysus Murphy, if it isn’t Lloyd Purcell, back from the States, must be in for ‘the blow’ are you?”
Yes, a glass of red to steel himself in advance of settling down to create a Facebook page in . . . “support?” he supposed . . . of Harry Davenant.
Social media — another of the stakes driven into Lloyd’s career. Facebook was akin to walking around the house naked with the curtains thrown open, the village gawking at your dangling junk. There were only so many “eye hours” out there, and every one of them dedicated to computer screens and phones was bread taken from Lloyd’s mouth. The movies were dying. The new twentysomething media moguls had figured out a way to make the audience pay for the privilege of providing their own scripts, and then further humiliate them by having them painstakingly type them out by thumb.
Shag it, he thought, time to tackle the ugly business. He opened the laptop sitting on Dave’s dining room table.
It asked how he wished to proceed. No, he did not want to create a page for himself. He’d so far managed to navigate the professional writing life without one. And without a goddamn Twitter account. His agent, Mike Vargas, back in Los Angeles, kept hounding Lloyd to “get in the game,” to start tweeting his every banal thought in an effort to promote himself. Wasn’t the shill Mike’s job? If that was now “the game,” then Lloyd didn’t wanna play.
When Lloyd crash-landed in Toronto, the crowd putting on his play at Theatre Passe Muraille wondered about “a social media strategy.” They’d dropped the line of inquiry after Lloyd’s unwelcome exposition on the futility of the echo chamber, how it was an orgy of self-congratulation, like-minds stroking each other. Lloyd’s play was lauded by the critics, but no one went; not even the like-minded heard about it.
Lloyd scanned the computer screen. An “event”? It would be, he hoped. More a “spectacle” if all went according to plan. “Cause or Community.” There it was: “Cause.” Harry Davenant was going to be a “cause.”
Facebook wanted his email. Lloyd was still using his AOL address fr
om the States. A reminder that he was never allowed to return. Lloyd had burnt that bridge. Torched it, watched the scorched deck and trestle thunderously collapse into the river, hissing and gasping as it was dragged under by the torrent.
He searched his pockets for and found a cigarette, a Winston, another prompt to regret, an American brand for which he here paid a premium. And they only carried the foul things at a few shops in town. He purchased the fag he lit now, against Dave’s strict prohibition against smoking in his house, at Caines Grocery and Confectionery on the east end of Duckworth Street, a place unchanged since Lloyd left St. John’s all those years ago. For all the screen credits on pictures good and bad, and despite his above-the-line Hollywood friends, the fleeting tabloid television infamy of his drugs arrest had landed him back at Caines buying smokes. “Coke, a smoke, and a raisin square,” they used to say; townie comfort food, stuff you could gum.
What a shithole St. John’s was, he thought. How impossible to endure after having lived the life in Los Angeles. Thinking about it now it was simple; he missed only one thing, one thing in a profound way, in a way that made him ache . . . the sun. He missed the hot sun. Lloyd was born and raised on a slippery rock in the North Atlantic; the sun of Southern California breathed new, essential vitality into his shivering frame. There were a few stinking months during his stint in Toronto, immediately after his deportation, something like the warm air under the sheets of a sickbed, but nothing like Southern California heat, desert heat Baja heat Santa Anna heat.
He needed something to drink, so let it be Irish.
“Post a picture?” Facebook asked. Bambi? Or maybe that Richter painting of the tender young stag hidden in the saplings. No, play it straight, the straighter the better, the character’s truth. “Acting” had spoiled so many of the best lines he’d crafted. You could never lose playing it straight. Maybe a copse of trees, suggesting Harry hiding within?
A bottle of Bushmills was next to the kitchen sink, in which was scuttled Lloyd’s plate from breakfast. A clot of egg floated on water slicked with oil from a kipper. A window above looked out on an insignificant yard.
He shouldn’t have strong drink so early in the day. Did he have to meet anyone later? He had Natalie Sommerville tomorrow; if the moment presented itself, he was considering asking her if he might borrow a few dollars. He had no other appointments. He would not connect with another living soul today.
The backyard supported little flora. There was a skeleton of kindling that must have once aspired to be a flowering shrub. And, he’d never noticed it before, there was an old wheelchair out there. That’s what it was, an antique cart from a sanatorium, from a fever hospital, with Japanese knotweed, “Mile-a-Minute,” they called it here, growing up through the spokes. A wheelchair! That settled it; he poured a double dose into an unwashed glass.
Seven
People searched, in desperation, for meaning, searched the same way they clawed at garbage dumped on the kitchen floor for a lost wedding ring, Patty thought. Yet the answers were all around them. The traffic light, the mind to make road networks and cars and how we all knew and obeyed the rules, the illuminated softball pitch beyond the trees. It was, all of it, wondrous, and if you let yourself see it, see God’s work, you could be always at peace.
What was the dark force that made people turn away from the bliss found in clarity and seek instead confusion? Pastor Maggs said it was Satan and Patty didn’t think, from the way he talked about it, her minister was referring to some abstraction. Pastor Maggs was talking about an entity, about a being among us. This Patty could not see. Her muddle was of her own making; she’d done it to herself. Patty was confident she had never met the devil and was sure that Pastor Maggs was not suggesting that it was she.
Pastor Maggs’s message was transparency; metaphors and symbols were confusion. What was wrong with embracing one simple, clear answer to all life’s vexing questions? Why not accept the answer? The world could not have emerged from chaos; it absolutely, doubtlessly came from order.
She’d first heard Pastor Maggs’s voice not in testament but in song. With her kids away in university, time opened like a vast plain in front of Patty, but these were dry and empty flats, a place to wander lost, not to breathe. She joined the Symphony Choir to fill some of the hours. She knew the pastor not as a man of faith but as a full-throated singer with perhaps more enthusiasm than tune, a belting tenor a couple of metres behind her left ear.
One day, during a break in a rehearsal for the Messiah, the woman in the chair next to Patty’s, a woman about her own age named Melissa Cooper, broke down in tears. It turned out that Melissa had that morning put down her dog, a fifteen-year-old Jack Russell named Bette. Her tears were out of all proportion for the loss of an old dog, however beloved. Through the sobs, Patty heard and sympathized with Melissa’s complaint; it wasn’t the end of the dog but the end of another in a series of dogs that hit Melissa so hard. There was Bette and before her Valentine and before that Monk and when she was a girl they’d had Foster, a big Newfoundland, and Chilly a crackie they got from the pound that was the smartest dog there ever was. She was crying because there was one dog after another, there were the marriages, the births, the deaths, the graduations, the Messiah and all the rest and for what? And if another person told her to “get a new puppy straight away,” Melissa swore she’d punch them. Pastor Maggs — Denis, he introduced himself as — was soon at Melissa’s side. He told Melissa she was right to be sad about Bette, because mourning the dog’s death was in fact the very essence of being alive. If a mere dog’s life was meaningless, exactly how could it be felt so profoundly?
Patty thought the pastor kind and felt if she declined the invitation he extended after rehearsal to join his congregation, just one day, in worship, she would be ungrateful. So she went.
The traffic light changed and Patty continued driving east on Empire Avenue. The dandelions were in pissy riot on lawns untended by renters. Why should one flower be yellow and another red? Why would we have evolved to perceive the beauty in the things? Why did she miss her children so?
She saw a young man looking aged, face pained and peppered as if caught in a blast, fighting to climb a flat stretch of sidewalk. Drugs or mental illness, Patty supposed. If not God’s work, whose?
Eight
Both bedside lamps were on. Patty lay on her side, her face turned so Matt could not tell if she was awake or asleep until she spoke.
“How was the Kids Eat Smart thing?” she asked.
“Long, otherwise not unpleasant.”
“Food?”
“Not great. Chicken breast, you know.”
“In a nice sauce or anything?” Patty turned on to her back to watch her husband undress.
“A gravy, I guess. I didn’t pay much attention. Didn’t eat much of it.”
“Dessert?”
“I can’t remember, didn’t even taste it.”
“You’d think, Kids Eat Smart, the food . . .”
“The cause and the thing are different.” Matt stepped out of his trousers. The reliable yet never familiar current of hurt ran through his knee. And there was, of late, something hot in his hips.
“How was the council meeting?” Patty asked.
“Very Wally O’Neill.” Matt climbed under the covers.
“If it weren’t for you Wally would be mayor.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“He would.”
“People aren’t that stupid.” Matt turned out his light. Patty followed his lead.
“They are sometimes.”
“What did you eat, hon?” asked Matt.
“I made a grilled cheese and I had it with a glass of red wine and it was so delicious I can’t tell you.”
“Really.” Matt laughed.
“Sometimes it’s what you want. Simple things can be wonderful.”
It felt good to
close his eyes. Matt thought about the fundraising dinner and tried to recall to whom he’d spoken but did not possess the energy. It was an event like so many others. Good people working for such a good cause; he felt bad that he didn’t have the will to remember what any of them said.
Wally O’Neill was stupid enough to be a danger, he thought. If Patty was right (it wasn’t the first time she’d said that Wally wanted Matt’s job) then Matt’s otherwise uneventful mayoralty at least saved the city from getting Wally-ed. They needed more people like Alessandra Cappello, but she had recently told Matt she would not run again. She was going back to her job at the university, something to do with maps. The geography department, he supposed. What went on there? What could be the contemporary study of geography? Surely everything to be known already was? Matt often found people as smart as Alessandra — intellectual types — tiresome, but she was charming. She never seemed to lose her patience and never condescended to her fellow councillors even when she set them straight. She was a small woman. Her hair was as black as any he’d seen, shot through with grey. She didn’t bother dying it. She kept it short. There was faint chevron bridging her eyebrows and a feathery line like shade on her jaw that women usually removed. Matt guessed that most women of Italian descent had her large smoky eyes. He would miss her during the next term. He was going to run again, likely unopposed by a serious contender, if only because he couldn’t think what else he might do.
The dress Alessandra had worn to the last council meeting looked very smart, Matt thought, with big, floppy, cloth buttons down the front, like blossoms, like the sort of wild roses you saw along the roadside, and a wide belt. The fabric was tweedy — he didn’t know what you called it — and in a cheerful lemon colour. There was often a sense of fun about how she dressed. From his chair in the council chamber he could watch her without being seen to do so. She constantly fought a desire to fidget but couldn’t keep her feet in her shoes, always unconsciously letting them slip off before pushing her toes back into them again. Where did she say it was in Italy that she was from? He’d like to go to Italy. Her ankles. Supposing, if she was lying on a bed, on her back on a bed, and he took one of Alessandra’s ankles so lightly in his hand. He would lift it and gently push it back. She would open up.
