by Bill Gaston
People began arriving in a flurry, as if the weather had found them and chased them in off the streets, for rain had started and so had a heavy wind. May E ran lightly down the drive, both hands on her bare head, hoping to keep her hair dry, and when he opened the door for her, here came Drew and Pauline and son Chris and a friend, James his name was, who looked in, saw all the candles and said, “Cool,” with no attempt at toning down the sassy irony.
Andy took May’s coat and half listened to her exclamations over his “lovely house,” May still proud of her Ls and overdoing them. He also checked out Drew and Pauline, who, though they’d arrived together, and slept last night in the same house, and stood within elbowing distance of each other now, would tomorrow morning go their separate ways. They didn’t look any different; they never did dote on each other. Drew seemed obviously tired, but he always did working this shift. Pauline helped take Chris’s and his friend’s coats. As if anticipating their early departure she told them she was “just going to fling them on the bed in the bedroom over there.” She told them to make themselves at home but turned back to waggle a finger and say but not too much at home. She returned from flinging the coats and it was just Pauline and Andy in the hall. She sighed, her work done, and she nodded and whispered to herself, “Party,” remembering why she was here.
“Partay,” Andy corrected. Pauline turned, only now aware of him, and though she smiled, her eyes intended deep sadness.
“You okay?” she asked, trying to catch and keep his eye.
“Ça va très, très bien,” he said, fiddling with an umbrella handle extruding from the tall bronze bucket.
“Okay,” she said. “Partay.”
May E had run, girlish, to the living room. She acted like she’d just been let out of a cage, and Andy wondered how bored she’d been. She seemed different, without her unfortunate cohort beside her, and Andy could see that they hadn’t been close, likely the opposite. Though she didn’t have to, she stood on tiptoes to look out the blackness of the picture window and exclaim and laugh about the view, “due west” and “all the way to China.” She caught Andy’s eye to deliver her punchline, that she could see her house from here.
Now Leonard shouted a grunt and shouldered open the carport door to the kitchen, holding one end of a six-foot Styrofoam cooler. His nephew, who for some reason was wearing those same catering whites, hefted the other end. Both men grunted while shuffling their feet under the burden, which they took directly into the mudroom. On their heels came Leonard’s glum wine-pouring niece, whose eyes were heavily enrimmed with kohl, and who smiled sweetly but insincerely for Andy this time; and then came two more Natives, one a prematurely hunched woman of perhaps sixty, the other a boy of ten or eleven.
Andy followed the cooler into the mudroom. “You gotta see this sucker,” Leonard told him over his shoulder. He did a private double take and then added, “Actually it is sort of a sucker.”
The fish, much alive and looking unconcerned as it hovered in its close confinement, did look like a sucker. On the underside of its head, its mouth was for vacuuming bottom stuff. A fleshy whisker, its base as thick as a finger, ran back from either side of its mouth, no doubt a sensor for the lovely rotting flesh of corpses, or for dangerous shards of beer bottle glass. Its shark-shaped body was knobby-sided and vaguely armoured, in shades of grey and tan that, against the white Styrofoam, looked black. Its nose and tail both stayed an inch away from their respective ends of the cooler. The fish was as long as a boy and as thick as a man’s leg.
“That’s a sturgeon,” Andy said.
“A youngster,” Leonard said. “Probably less than fifty years old.”
“Really?” asked Andy.
“It’d be around that,” Leonard said, nodding. “It was serendipity. They’re pretty rare up here. It was in a guy’s weir, upriver. He didn’t know what to do with it. I think down south they smoke them.”
“In the mouth,” Andy said softly, “more pudding than flesh . . .”
“You’ve had sturgeon?”
“Not really. No.” Sometimes he had trouble knowing what he’d had and not had. “But I’m not sure I wanted a sturgeon.”
“You said you wanted something alive,” Leonard said, stabbing a finger at the fish. His relatives surrounded the cooler, staring down at it. “A sturgeon can stay alive forever, man. They’ve been beached for hours and then thrown back and they swim away. They have almost no metabolism.”
Andy watched the fish hang suspended, the picture of patience, and he could not put the sight of this creature together with odori, with eating it alive, the dance of cells, of spirit, as its flesh became his flesh. Looking at it he felt absolutely no hunger. He could not even joke about sturgeon sushi. In his imaginings a salmon, the bullet of the sea, had always come to mind. Salmon ran in mindless uniform schools and got harvested like grain. This fish looked goofy, and somehow kind. He had the not unpleasant fantasy that this fish was, like him thirty-nine.
“How you gonna kill it?” Leonard asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
Leonard nudged Andy’s gut with an elbow and whispered, “You actually going to cook that nose?”
Andy put a finger to his lips.
The ten-year-old boy, whose name was Alex, wanted to feed the sturgeon a mussel and Leonard said why the hell not, grabbed a mussel from the other cooler, crunched it under his foot and handed it to Alex, who fingered out the raw orange flesh and dropped it in near the sturgeon’s head. The big stoic fish appeared not to notice. But of course, Andy understood, it was impossible to know anything about a fish that lacked face muscles and couldn’t blink. For all he knew, that sturgeon thought the mussel meat was an attack from above and it was frozen with panic, it was hysterical.
“Eat it,” Alex said, and gave the cooler a kick. Leonard grabbed the boy’s shoulder and told him firmly “no,” but the kick resulted in an instant powerful flick of the sturgeon’s tail, which drove the fish’s bony snout into the cooler. Andy could see a dent there in the Styrofoam, but it didn’t look new. And now he saw the boy’s hand, shooting out of a long sleeve, where he kept it hidden, to scratch under his nose. At first Andy thought it deformed, but saw it was missing half its thumb and most of its index finger, a messy rather than clean injury. How had it happened? Alex seemed the kind of kid who’d stick his hands in anything and wouldn’t stop, even now. It was his right hand, probably his writing hand, his everything hand.
Oh, he was tired, too tired for any of this. He left the mud-room for now, deciding not to decide. Humans killed and ate things all the time. That fish was tonight’s pièce de résistance. It was the party’s raison d’être and joie de vivre, non?
But here, finally, came Laura and Amelia down the drive. Only when he saw them did he understand that he’d been spending any snatch of free time at the kitchen window. He’d been stirring stew, sipping wine, greeting friends, but mostly he’d been waiting.
THE NIGHT HE MET her at the airport he’d taken her straight to her hotel, not even that good a hotel, the Aurora. She’d booked it, she explained, “online in some airport a few hours ago, I think.” She was on eastern time, for her it was the wee hours and she was “half dead.” Indeed in the car and on the ferry ride she appeared to doze a bit, and she cried once, briefly, and their only conversations involved glancing at each other and then shaking their heads saying, “This is too amazing. Look at you. I can’t believe this.” As he dropped her off she apologized for “not being up to a proper reunion with you,” and she said she’d call tomorrow and “we’ll do it then,” if that was okay with him.
After working all that night, aflood with what “do it” might conceivably mean, when he got home he managed only the most fitful sleep. Nested in a pillow, his head held a carousel of notions. “Do it” couldn’t possibly mean do it, could it? To calm himself he had to slap the juvenile side of hope hard in the face. It would be unrealistic and also ungainly and even a bit gross for her to want to jump into bed
with him after eighteen years, one day after her mother dies. But there was a syndrome wherein a stricken person confuses grief for lust, and you did see it in movies, but it didn’t make sense in this case, in his and Laura’s case. And so he did manage to convince himself that not sleeping with her right away was a good thing. But first he had to agree with his adult, unslapped side of hope, that nothing in her signals tonight had ruled out jumping in bed eventually. He’d always known, without really knowing it till now, that their eventual uniting would not resemble the teenage version. Their eventual jumping into bed would involve no jumping at all and it would be mature, patient, and burnished. Staring up from his pillow, picturing Laura here at last, but across town in a pastel hotel, aroused all sorts of such notions that had to be wrestled with and understood. A mantra-like one being: her mother just died she’s not in the mood. He leapt up more than once for a cup of green tea, which no doubt didn’t help his sleeplessness, and then the bathroom urge woke him when he did finally lose consciousness, and when her call came at one the next afternoon, even after his quick shower he felt yellow-eyed and bejittered. He donned his Johnny Cash suit and felt ridiculous.
On the phone she said she’d already had lunch — being three hours ahead of Prince Rupert — but she asked him over “for dessert or something. Let’s meet in the café here.” And entering the café, seeing her sitting alone in a red leatherette booth, this short-haired and womanish replica of Laura, wearing a mature, patient, and burnished smile, nearly two decade’s worth of questions came back to him in a nutshell: there might not be anything left after this long, but why wouldn’t there be? We didn’t burn it out, we’d only got started. We were ripped apart — wouldn’t two bloody severed ends recognize each other and want to reattach?
He sat and ordered green tea from the young waitress, who was one of the Jenkins kids, and who said she’d have to check to see if they had any of that. When Andy told her they did have it, Laura laughed and asked for the same. She smiled at him as if to say she knew not only him again, but also the workings of this town.
“So, sleep okay?” It was like asking how was her flight. He could hardly look at her.
“Not bad. It felt wrong to get up when it was still pitch-black, though.”
You should have called me right then. Better yet, you should have been with me in the first place. But he talked instead about northern latitudes and S.A.D., and as they waited for the tea he became thuddingly disappointed to see them entering into a pleasant catching up. Obviously she was labouring under her mother’s death — she told him it made her “not know what death means” — and she looked a little relieved to talk about mindless things. He asked about her dance career and he got the condensed version. As to her health, she was long in remission and thinking positively. With this type of breast cancer, two more years and she would be considered cured. Laura rapped the table with soft knuckles. Andy found this sort of talk so unlike their letters, which somehow leaped over news altogether and went to ideas. He wanted to tell her this — and telling her this would be more like the nature of their letters — but he didn’t know how.
“You miss performing?” he asked.
“Half of me does.”
“Which half?” Andy leaned in at her for a comic appraisal of one side of her face and then the other.
“The half that daydreams all the time.”
“Ah, that half.” Andy nodded. He wondered if that side of him didn’t take up more than just half.
“Actually it was unfortunate that getting sick was what made me have to stop. It’s worse that way, it’s like an injury. The career-ending injury. Instead of, you know, it being your own choice.” Laura nodded sadly, but the comic glint rose in her eye. “It’s just like with athletes. Those really embarrassing comeback attempts. I’ve been trying to resist one of those.”
Andy pictured her again in Vancouver, and wondered when the time would be to tell her about it.
He flinched as she slid her hand toward his, across the Formica. “Give me your hand.”
He held out his hand and she took it, gently but firmly. As she pulled it across the table toward her, he knew he was being given a lesson, she had seen something in his face and she was correcting things; but mostly he was aware that he was being touched, touched by Laura Schultz. Laura Schultz had him by the hand, Laura Schultz was pulling.
“Stick out your finger.”
He stuck out his pointer finger and she grabbed the finger’s knuckle and guided the finger in so it touched her left breast, through her burnt-orange sweater. She pulled it in harder, an inch deep, looking him in the eye, then prodded herself with it rhythmically, in and out, what felt like sponge rubber.
She held his eye and might as well have said, That was then, this is now, snap out of it. Andy simply nodded to her. He tried to look chastised. Laura manoeuvred it to the topic of dance.
“It wouldn’t look like the other one. Or move like the other one. And I won’t just take it off, because I’m too chicken to make that statement.” She released his hand. Then smiled again. “Easier to stay retired.”
Andy wanted to reciprocate, to offer something he thought important, something about his life without her, but he couldn’t. Laura described the main two schools of modern dance she’d followed and performed, Graham and Limón, and raised her eyebrows when Andy knew about both of them. He decided not to reveal how much he knew, because she might see it as either pathetic or a form of stalking, and anyway there was so much else to talk about. She asked him about his work, not letting him pooh-pooh it that easily and making him expand on some details, so he did. He said it would make for an entertaining hour’s tour for her, entertaining if she liked Charles Dickens, that is, and she laughed. She talked about arrangements for her mother’s funeral, and how bureaucracy had its unfeeling finger everywhere (Andy didn’t like this image, given how he’d just touched her), and she gently cried, at which point she slid her hand out to be held and he did so, brotherly. Nothing was said of her plans beyond these next few days. Nothing about her, nothing about him. Nothing about here. He couldn’t broach such a thing unilaterally. Any segue to that here in this café would feel as natural as him ripping off his shirt and yodelling. He was happy to have the excuse that now was just not the time.
But he stared at her, deeply. He supposed he was telling her that her breast-poking gesture hadn’t worked on him, not really. Sure, this is now, but it isn’t much different, Laura. She met his gaze only fleetingly. She was beautiful to him still, but he didn’t feel overwhelmed. It was here he mentioned his party, one he said he’d planned around her arrival, “to get some people together for you,” but now it could also be a wake. If she liked.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’m not sure how jovial I’ll be.”
She looked to be trying, but for now the pall of her mother was a constant, clumsy weight over everything they could possibly say or do. It made his tea only bitter, without taste. It made the teary spark in her eyes an empty thing, a reflection of fluorescent lights on irises. And now she was asking him if he would mind ferrying out to the airport that afternoon to pick up her daughter while she attended to necessary business. He said of course, but wondered aloud about her not greeting her daughter in person, and she told him she’d left her only yesterday, they’d been visiting for Christmas. He realized, again, that he knew nothing about her life, not the details anyway. He asked himself how much the details mattered.
He had to leave right then if he was going to make the ferry. He reached into his pocket for his wallet and Laura waved at this almost violently and said she’d charge it to her room. So he stood facing her. He smiled, paused, and shrugged rather emphatically. Andy wasn’t sure himself what he meant by it — then she smiled and shrugged identically back.
“Sorry, Andy, we —”
He put a hand up to stop her talking. “It’s okay.”
As he left the café he hoped he wasn’t the gangly fool he felt like. He didn’t know wha
t had just transpired, only that they still hadn’t had their reunion.
EVERYONE WHO WAS drinking tonight had one in hand. Drew, who Andy made music master for the night, had put on the Goldberg Variations, a heady but good early choice if only because there was no forced fun in it. The fire out back had burned down almost to coals so it was time to get out there and smoke the mussels. Climbing into his black rain-gear, he saw he’d forgotten to change his clothes for tonight’s big to-do, which was funny given the shopping spree and all the rest of it. Here he was wearing worn-out blue jeans and an old sweater, comfy brown wool with a yellow and olive Aztec sort of thing going on. He pinched up the ribbed hem and brushed off what looked like pastry flour. It was good he was dressed for action. He had these mussels to smoke. Later he’d be butchering a five-foot fish.
He knew he was being watched through the wall of picture windows as he humped the mussel cooler to the firepit. He didn’t mind the audience, the attention, maybe because it was in his own yard. It felt like a current of water that moved him along. Leaning back, elbows out, he waddled side to side and understood that from behind he looked like a tall penguin. Though there was no snow underfoot. The rain had taken care of it. His workboots felt cruel on the lush grass, richly bejewelled even from the living-room candlelight. It was good to be outside, no longer buffeted by people and talk. In this solitude, where he could hear nothing but the wind and his own grunts, he could feel how busy he had been and how tired he was. He really hadn’t slept much lately at all. Things had edged beyond the numb and into the vivid, where indefinite rabbit-like creatures spring out from the legs of coffee tables or from shrubbery. He hoped tonight’s measured doses of wine would steady him.
He was starting things off with the “mussels smoked under pine needles,” one of the supposedly authentic Order of Good Cheer recipes he’d found. He was changing only one thing. The recipe called for the dried needles to be placed on top of the mussels, and then lit, and when the needles had finished burning, the mussels would have opened by themselves and be done. Well, theoretically the mussels got cooked and smoked enough sitting under the burning needles, but Andy didn’t believe they would. Plus, as they opened, wouldn’t all the pine ash fall into the exposed meat? It sounded so wrong that Andy suspected a failure in the translation he’d read. So, out here in his yard, he did it the more logical way. He poured two bucketsful of pine needles on the coals, dumped the mussels on a sheet of chicken wire, and lifted them onto the smoking needles. As he did so, applause broke out from behind the living-room windows, and through the billowing smoke, which still reminded him of his father’s aftershave, he could make out his cheering guests. May E laughed at something, her own joke probably, and Pauline smiled in her ear, nodding. His mother and Doris and Rita stood shoulder to shoulder as though in support, and his mother looked only concerned, perhaps about the smouldering hole in her lawn, perhaps about the neighbours. Off to the side, Laura was lifting her wine mug to him. Beside her, Amelia neither cheered nor lifted a glass, but appeared to be checking him out. Chris and his friend James lurked in the darkness behind her, their eyes probably on the prize. Leonard was vigorously waving him in and yelling, but then Andy looked to his right and saw it was little Alex being waved to, no coat on, arms wrapped around himself, staring at the black shells as big as dance slippers like he wanted to get in there and grab something. Andy wedged his body in front of Alex’s. And in the time it took to become aware of his own patience, one by one the mussels began to ease apart. As they did, the fire hissed with their juice, and to the pine smoke was added the smell of living ocean.
