Happiness of Fish (16 page)

“There you are with your steamroller and that's the time you and your father made a boat out of the glider swing.”

Gerry looks at a picture of a lawn swing with a piece of tarpaulin tied, sail-fashion, to its frame.

“That was a great steamroller,” he says. “And the swing looks really shipshape.”

The album gives them digestible bites of themselves.

“That's Aunt Louise's new car, the Lark. That was 1960, the spring before I went to high school.”

“There's your dad's retirement party.”

The pictures become more jumbled as they near the present.

Just like real life, Gerry thinks. There are pictures of Patricia and him and his father in their first apartment in St. John's, from a visit just after they were married. There's a picture of Patricia and her mother in a later apartment. There's a newspaper clipping of an advertisement with a picture of Gerry as part of the radio coverage team for a provincial election long past.

Towards the end of the album, pictures are just piled in between the pages, often in the envelopes they came in. There's a picture of Vivian and Tanya and him on their first visit to Ottawa together. There's Melanie in a strapless dress going to her graduation. Her date wears white socks with a suit. Gerry can't remember his name.

There are also mystery pictures, children neither of them can name. They're kids of contemporaries of his: cousins, children of friends' children. In some cases there are cryptic first names written on the backs and they can work out the identifications. These pictures seem to run from the mid-'70s to the mid-'90s. In one case, Gerry holds two pictures of somebody called Barbara. The pictures are paper-clipped together. In one, Barbara is a baby in a Jolly Jumper. In the next she's graduating from the University of Toronto. This is all Gerry knows about Barbara. He suspects it's all he'll ever know. Still, the Barbara pictures and the snaps of Gerry, on a horse-drawn hay rake, in rowboats, or in his first dinner jacket, get them through the week.

Towards the end of the week, Gerry and Doc get together with two other old school mates, Bob and Mort. Bob is arguably Gerry's oldest school friend. They went to kindergarten together.

“But you were an Elf and I was a Brownie,” Gerry says as they settle into a restaurant of Bob's choosing.

“And you got to play the triangle while I was stuck with the stupid rhythm sticks. My God, what could you do with rhythm sticks?” Bob demands. “For the first God-knows-how-many-weeks you could only scratch them together and it was just before Christmas when you got to click them together.”

Bob is a partner in a law firm now, the estate side of the firm. He's a Q.C. but says he hasn't been in court in years. His partner handles the litigation and they have a herd of young lawyers doing the criminal work. Of all of them, Bob has changed least since high school. He was a widow's son. A friend of his father's had kept an avuncular eye on him growing up, and had passed on some middle-aged mannerisms. At twenty-something he could kid Gerry about being “a pot-smoking goddamn hippy.”

In fact, Gerry in his twenties was more of a hard drinker than a pot smoker and the kidding was always good-natured. Bob seemed to be one of those rare and wonderful people who knew stereotypes were inaccurate but useful. He didn't take himself any more seriously as a pillar of the community.

“I'll probably wind up disbarred or in jail,” he says. “I'll get senile and take somebody's trust fund across the river to the casino.”

Bob has grown into his mannerisms. Tonight his wife Mavis is out of town. Mavis is an ex-pat Brit. She runs a decorating consultancy and she's in Indonesia buying prints or something. Bob is enjoying slumming. He's picked a place that offers big steaks and ribs and peanuts in the shell that you can shuck onto the floor. He's shelling peanuts with a vengeance.

Mort, in his way, probably has the most in common with Gerry. He's a consultant or a lobbyist, depending on your point of view or prejudices. He skidded through journalism and into public relations as a photographer thirty years ago. He worked his way onto a couple of election campaigns and became a minor image and polling guru. Like Gerry, he sells ephemerals: spin, trends or information. He works out of his house and does “projects” for bigger consultants.

“So how are things in Newfoundland?” Mort asks while Bob is fussing with the waitress over what kinds of imported beer the restaurant has on tap.

“Damned if I know,” Gerry says. “I'm so far out of the loop these days it's not even funny.”

Mort looks at him appraisingly. It seems to be a look he's practised. “Yeah, but you'd know though.”

Gerry feels he's being discreetly flattered with the implication that he's being modest about what he knows. He's glad Mort is a school buddy and not somebody he has to deal with at work. Of all of them he's the most subtle. He's not married but has been seeing the same professor of Celtic archaeology for more than twenty years. Her five-year marriage fit somewhere about the middle of that relationship. They keep separate houses but take long holidays together. They've spent several summers in various European marshes. She's written a book on sacrificial pools.

“When she wants to go to the bog, she really wants to go to the bog,” Gerry had quipped once.

“Stella Artois for you, Mr. Snerd?” Bob asks. Mortimer Snerd as a nickname for Mort is as old as their friendship. In fact Mort is from his middle name, Morton. It was his mother's maiden name. He's actually Patrick Morton Bowes. His mother and sisters call him Patrick. His father, who has been dead for a decade, called him Paddy.

It dates them that they know who Mortimer Snerd was. They were raised on re-runs of '30s and '40s movies on television. They watched Edgar Bergen on
Ed Sullivan
, long after he should have stopped appearing.

“A great ventriloquist on the radio,” Doc says.

“Come, my little man, and I'll take you for a nice ride on a buzz saw,” Gerry says, doing his best W.C. Fields voice.

“It was Charlie McCarthy he said that to.”

“I always carry a little alcohol with me in case I see a snake.” He pauses. “Which I also carry with me.”

The waitress stares at them and waits for some cumulative punch-line. She's probably only old enough to have seen
Cheers
in re-runs. It occurs to Gerry that
Cheers
was probably the first TV series he almost totally ignored. He's pretty sure he never watched a single show all the way through. Even when he and Patricia hadn't owned a TV in the mid-'70s, they watched shows at other people's houses.

Why would I have needed to watch
Cheers
? he wonders. He was
living in bars in 1984 when it came on. Drinking wasn't the least bit funny. That's my religion you're making fun of there.

There have been lots of shows he's missed since
Cheers
, but he sees it as some sort of milestone.

“Three Stella Artois, pints, and a pint of soda water.”

The waitress decides that they are a sufficiently humanoid life form that she can go into her hospitality
shtick
. She takes a crayon from a plastic basket in the middle of the table and writes her name upside down on the brown wrapping paper that serves as a cloth.

“I'm your server, Alison,”

Not servant, Gerry thinks. I remain, sirs, your humble and obedient server, Alison Upside-Down.

Alison lists the oversized steaks and racks of ribs, giant burgers and trendy pizza toppings. She skips away to get the drinks.

“That's a really good trick, writing upside-down like that.”

“I wonder what else she can do upside-down.”

“Bob, you can tell you don't work in a progressive workplace.”

“Bullshit. I'll get my partner to collect little Alison a nice little fortune if she ever finds herself in an un-progressive workplace and wants to do something about it. I was simply speculating about her spatial perception.”

The restaurant is one of those that are happy enough to be a bar after the supper-hour rush. After they've polished off over-sized steaks and a dessert that Gerry wanted, they sit.

“I never used to eat dessert until I quit drinking,” Gerry says. “I had no sweet tooth at all. In the old days, Patricia used to make me a birthday meatloaf and ice it with mashed potatoes.”

“Alcohol turns to sugar. You were running at the equivalent of a nice steady three Black Forest cakes a day.”

“But look at all the chewing and tooth decay I spared myself.”

Bob is back on kindergarten trivia. “Do you remember going down to the inlet to catch tadpoles and Denny Menchetti fell in?”

Gerry wonders if he's got incipient Alzheimer's. He can remember Denny Menchetti's name and he can see his running shoes. They were scuffed black with round white labels on the sides of the ankle. Gerry wasn't allowed to wear that kind yet because his father didn't think they
gave you any support. However, he can't remember the greater context, the earth-shattering fact of Denny having fallen in.

“Stepped in, actually,” Bob says. “To about the knees.”

“I must have missed it.”

They are all arguing about scandalous cases of favouritism in the allocation of rhythm band drums and cymbals when Alison brings their bill. Bob and Gerry are arguing that the primary school they went to was far more corrupt than the ones Mort and Doc attended.

“This is the geezer equivalent of having a life,” Doc tells Alison, “fighting about what you did in kindergarten while you wait for your pension.”

“I hope we haven't been too much of a bore,” Mort says.

“Gee, no. I mean, I'm studying early childhood development and it's just so neat, the stuff you guys remember.”

“She means...” Gerry says, as they fluff up Alison's tip for being so nice, “that, up until now, she had no idea what power she'll have to warp the young when she passes out the modelling clay and the toilet paper tubes. I dare say we're the basis of a thesis on rhythm band pathology or the latent effects of eating white paste.”

Later, Gerry drops everybody off in his rental car, the automatic designated driver. Back at the motel he finds he's not sleepy. He's been swilling coffee while the others drank beer and he's probably wired from the killer-cheesecake he ate for dessert. He sits at the desk in his room and tries to be literary. He writes a poem he calls “Boys' Night Out.”

Our waitress Alison
Writes her name in crayon
On the brown paper tablecloth
,
Upside-down;
Pretty and pleasant
.
They happen, it seems, now
,
Or are we now invisible
,
Just not there?
Our waitress Alison
Plays the manners game well
,
Like someone with perspective sense
,
Dealing with elves;
If she can't see us
,
Alison pretends well
,
Looks at the place she thinks
Our voices come from;
Our waitress Alison
Sits down and chats awhile
,
Bright to either side of her
,
As if we're there;
If she has kids some day
,
She'll be convincing
,
Conversing with the penguins
Or invisible blue bears
.

Bob has been Gerry's mother's lawyer for some time now. She hadn't been crazy about the idea at first, but Gerry had persisted and had paraded Bob to show how thoroughly he'd grown into his middle-aged mannerisms, and she had come around. Today is the last day of Gerry's visit and he is meeting Bob in his office. The office had a lot to with convincing her. Bob has furnished it with his father's desk, brought from the family home when it was sold off. His wife, Mavis the designer, helped him capture 1950s respectability. There is a silver inkwell and a dark leather couch and matching chairs. There are old survey maps and deeds in copperplate handwriting on the walls. Gerry always feels that it looks like a film set, but it's a well-done film set. The furniture is real and not Bombay Company knock-offs.

A nice degree of wear around the escutcheons, generally good patination, Gerry thinks in an
Antiques Roadshow
voice. He's sitting in one of the big chairs, wondering at himself and Bob doing grown-up things. Bob's secretary brings in Gerry's mother's file. Gerry guesses she must be close to seventy. He wonders if Mavis found her somewhere. She wears a charcoal-grey suit and fusses over Bob in a well-bred way. Bob has told him that she's active in amateur theatre. She plays aristocrats in drawing
room farces. Her husband is in the late stages of Alzheimer's.

“So how is your mom getting along?” Bob asks.

“You tell me,” Gerry says. “Should I be picking her out some garbage bags and a heating vent to sleep on?”

“No, no she's fine financially for now.” Bob has full power of attorney. He pays the bills and does the taxes or at least his firm does. “Though we're not living on interest anymore, you know. We're starting to take a little bite out of capital.”

“So how's she doing?”

“Well, let's say three, or more like four, thousand a month for the care she gets now at the home. That's forty-eight a year from a pot of what, three-hundred-odd thousand, depending on the market.

And what happens when that goes? Gerry wonders. Money from the house and from Aunt Louise has allowed him to be quite comfortable, even with occasional gaps in the freelance business.

What happens if I have to start being responsible at sixty?

“So you're talking six years or so if things stay as they are now,” Bob is saying, putting a deadline on it. “Prices go up of course, but then again we haven't been making any very big amount on the interest.”

They have scheduled their meeting for late in the morning so they can go to lunch. Bob takes Gerry to his club. He's even gracious about having “a club.”