Happiness of Fish (19 page)

“I'm going to have to vote in an advance poll here,” he says. “I won't be able to vote when I get to Toronto.”

“The perfect moral situation,” Gerry says. “You can vote for whoever you like here and not have to live with the result. Then you get to complain about your member in Toronto because you had no say in picking the beast.”

“It all seems to be coming down to kiddie porn,” Philip says, shaking out the paper. Stephen Harper looks out of one picture like a politely interested android. Paul Martin appears to be experiencing convulsive cramps in a facing one. “Harper seems to think the Liberals are in favour of it.”

“I think Mr. Harper is on shaky ground there,” Gerry says, “Turn out the sock drawers of all your candidates and I suspect the neat and tidy Sunday school types will come off worst. Who's the obnoxious ex-cop MP who went down for molesting Indian kids? People with a sense of sin are more likely to commit them.”

“You have no sense of sin then?”

“Being mean is the only sin. I commit that all the time. Manners are better than morals most of the time. The world's full of Gladstones and Mackenzie Kings ready to give those naughty hookers a stern talking-to. There's lots of creepy uncles and daddies out there.”

“Vote Adamson, for an end to meanness. I like it, but it doesn't seem to have much of a platform to go with it.”

“When I was in university, somebody ran for student council on a platform of ‘A return to the golden age, an end to menstrual cramp and a tail for everyone.'”

“That's the Conservatives this time, except I think they're
for
menstrual cramp.”

“I'd like a tail. Tails are great. Wouldn't
you
like a tail?”

It is the time of year for Gerry to be lining up his summer work. Summer is his busiest time as people take vacations and his apparent suitability for responsible work increases. He meets with producers and they find that perhaps a few weeks of him working on their show won't quite end western civilization as we know it. This year, his talk with Bob, rhythm band sticks player and family lawyer, hangs over these chats.
We're getting through four thousand a month or so, out of a pot of three hundred
.

“I mean the money's got to run out in a few years,” Gerry says to Vivian after supper. “I don't mind not inheriting anything. We did okay off the house and Aunt Louise, but what about looking after the old dear? She seems to be planning to outlive me.”

“I've always said she could live with us,” Vivian says.

She has too, usually when they are fighting. They sometimes propose escalating martyrdoms they say they'd endure for each other, one-upping each other into slammed doors or angry silences.

Gerry pictures the frozen-in-amber atmosphere of the nursing home moved to their house. How much longer would the drives and walks and sails have to get to avoid death by osmosis? What new things would it bring to have fights or silences about?

“It's something to think about,” he says. That's true anyway. He thinks about it, talking to a producer. Gerry is trying to be an adult and get a real job.

“There are a couple of jobs you'll be filling when everybody gets back in the fall,” he suggests.

“Oh my God, I haven't even been able to look at them yet,” she says.

“One of these days I might just apply for a real grown-up job.”

They're drinking coffee in the break room. He tries to keep it light and bantering, fishing for any encouragement.

“Really? You'd be interested?” The producer's tone implies that he's suggested he'd like to take up brain surgery in middle-age: an interesting concept, but not very practical. “I mean, Gerry, would you really want the day-to-day? Weren't you working on a book? You really
should
write a book.”

“Yeah. Really.”

That night, while Vivian is out showing a townhouse somewhere, he pushes the laundry off the desk in the basement and tries to kick George and Ellen into gear.

Fragment: Argument

“Why do you keep that damn office?” Ellen asks
.

“To deny I'm dead,” George says bleakly. “To deny I'm dead, to deny that I don't care anymore, to deny that I have nothing to say and that all I've learned is that you should shut up and worry about your house!”

“Why are you so angry?”

“To deny you've got no one to talk to but people who tell you to walk on your hardwood floors in your socks,” he says. “To deny that you have to be buried for years before you die.”

To deny the rage you inflicted on yourself in good faith, George thinks. The world isn't unfair. The seating arrangements for viewing it are
.

On a shelf over the desk is a handful of paperbacks Philip has given Gerry. Philip's clearing out his duplicates, getting ready for his big Toronto move. Marcus Aurelius is on top of the pile. Gerry thumbs through the book. It's thin, more scholarly notes than musing emperor.

“No one loses any other life than the one he is living nor does he have any other life than the one he loses.”

You should get out of the emperor racket, Marcus, Gerry thinks. You should write a book.

Summer finally seems to be taking hold. Vivian is busy because people use the long evenings to look at houses after work. On the other hand, she gets some that aren't likely to buy and wastes a good deal of time.

“Not a pot to piss in,” she says, setting out to meet a young couple somewhere. They'd left a grunted message on the answering machine and wanted to see a house in a pricey new subdivision. “They can't afford that neighbourhood. I feel like Miss Jane on
The Beverly Hillbillies
showing some of these goofs around.”

“Push 'em in the cee-ment pond,” Gerry says. “But be nice, maybe they won the lottery.”

The evening is warm and Gerry decides he'll take in one of his rare AA meetings. He's going for all the wrong reasons: nostalgia for another set of problems that have faded,
schadenfreude
, voyeurism or the fact it's a nice night. He decides a walk would do him good and leaves the Honda home. The first lawn mowers of the season are out and doing. They make a bumblebee background to the shushing of the sprinklers as he walks to his meeting.

Gerry gets the reception he expects as someone who doesn't attend very often. There are the caring people who ask how you've been, in case you'd had a slip and been drinking and need support to come back. Then there are the others, the competitive losers, who want to know that your roll ended, that you fell off the wagon. Then, however brief the sober time they've got in, they've got more than you have.

Gerry supposes he was a bit that way himself when he first came to AA fifteen years ago. There were a lot of people with more sobriety who pissed him off.

I wanted to get sober to have a life and they thought getting sober was life, Gerry thinks.

In those days, somebody talking about seven years of sobriety sounded like a description of a hundred-mile tightrope walk with an egg balanced on the end of your nose.

Yes, it was an achievement of sorts, but why a tightrope and why the egg? Couldn't you just do what you did before, but sober?

It seemed to Gerry that if you decided it was a tightrope you had to keep concentrating on, you were setting yourself up for a long drop and a nose full of scrambled egg. There were times he secretly willed banana skins onto the tightrope.

Let the poor bastard have a life and not a substitute religion so I can learn to do the same, Gerry would think. In my worst moments I've tried to worship the drink and I've believed in vengeance and the whole nine yards. Now let's see something sustainable.

At tonight's meeting “Johnny” comes over to talk to Gerry while people are still milling around getting coffees and finding chairs with their buddies. He's always “Johnny,” never John.

He's one of us, Gerry thinks. One of the people with a built-in diminutive.

When Gerry first went to AA, Johnny had a year in. He got a medallion at the second or third meeting Gerry was at. Since then his luck hasn't been good. He has a collection of three-month medallions and probably a dozen years of sobriety in total, but he can't seem to string it together. It's made him bitter, although he keeps coming around.

“I haven't seen you around,” Johnny says,

“I've been busy. No rest for the wicked,” Gerry says. He's aware of his equivocal reasons for being here tonight. He suspects that Johnny hopes he's been out, that his world's a mess. Then he could regain some of that magic time he had when he had a year's sober ascendancy and Gerry thought a day without a drink was magic that only wizards could do.

“I'm suing those bastards where I used to work,” Johnny tells Gerry. Gerry recalls that he had some sort of tangled unfair dismissal case that had dragged on for several years. Building scrap had gone astray. No charges were brought but Johnny got fired. He claimed his union hadn't taken his part. At one point, when Gerry was trying to be a keen reporter, they had talked about him doing something on the story. However, the union and Johnny's sometime lawyer had both shied away. They stopped just short of saying that he'd got himself fired and that was all there was to it.

“It's a big fucking swindle, you know. Honest-to-God, sometimes I think you'd be better just going out to Red Cliff and jumping over.”

Or wait until the blood donor people send you a letter with a surprise in it, Gerry thinks, remembering his own reminder of mortality. Be careful what you wish for.

Gerry has never been able to find pat answers for people who talk about killing themselves. It's not something he considers for himself any more. He's not sure that he ever did, but he used to threaten. Once, in an empty house, he had stretched a toe to the trigger of a shotgun, a morbid rehearsal. Despite the fact he knew the gun was empty, it took every muscle straining to make the trigger click. He'd decided that the drunk's slower suicide was better suited to his more cowardly, lazier style.

Gerry knows he's a disappointment to Johnny. He wants the church-conditioned response: “You can't. You mustn't.” Gerry is afraid he's a bit more pragmatic than that. It's more a question of how much pain, or prospect of pain, you can take. It's like taking aspirin. Some people resist medication and do acetylsalicylic martyrdoms. Others pop a pill at the first twinge. Who's right?

People who talk about suicide get on Gerry's nerves a bit. They want him to be responsible for their life or death, to be their advocate in the capital case they're trying in their heads. Gerry suspects they would not be happy to be told to look at how they fit into the world and then do what they think best.

The meeting finally gets started.

“God grant me the serenity...”

Gerry looks out the window at the thickening dusk. The meeting is in an upstairs room so he's looking at a skyline. The trees are plump, frozen explosions of dark green against his horizon. He remembers summer dusks in early childhood, when the trees in the backyard seemed to draw closer to his bedroom windows as the sky purpled and the murmur of grown-up voices on the lawn swing replaced the last roulette-wheel whirr of the hand-pushed lawn mower.

A few late gulls flap purposefully across his patch of window. A droning small plane, its lights already gem-bright, bumbles across the sunset to get down before dark.

Gerry declines to speak tonight.

“No thanks. It's great to be here, but I'm just going to listen tonight.”

The deepening evening quiets him.

On his walk home he picks up chocolate ice cream drumsticks. Vivian is home when he gets there. They sit on the steps of their backyard deck and eat the dripping waffle trumpets in what is still a warm darkness.

According to the sun, it is just past mid-summer when Gerry and Vivian have Philip around for his farewell dinner. Gerry has never found mid-summer works very well in large parts of Canada, in Newfoundland in particular. The days may be long but the water is still cold and the fog can lie in. It's not as warm as it's going to be yet.

“What is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days,” Gerry recites from a '50s memory work assignment. “There ought to be a scale of correction for where you are. Add one month for mainland Canada. Add two for St. John's.”

Despite Gerry's grumbling, it is a pleasant summer evening. He has picked up Philip and his luggage and brought him home. He's not working this week. Summer relief work will start in earnest in a week or so with the July 1
^st
weekend. Vivian is working until almost six so Gerry has been cooking, pork tenderloin and roast potatoes. Vivian will buy a trifle for dessert on her way home. Philip sits at the kitchen table with a large glass of white wine. Gerry is fussing with salad makings.

“I'm going to miss dinners here,” Philip says. “I like your family.”

“That's because you only come a couple of times a year. We'd wear a bit thin if you spent more time with us.”

Gerry is feeling petulant because Darren has been in touch from Alberta.

“He misses Melanie and Diana,” Vivian had told Gerry earlier that week. “He
wants
to come home.”

“Jesus, he's like the cat, “Gerry said. “When he's in, he wants out. When he's out, he wants back in.”

“He called them the other night,” Vivian said. “He really misses them. He's stopped playing the machines.”

“His sister's smart enough not to let him near the till.”

“I told Melanie I'd pay for a ticket. I put it on Visa.”

“You were the woman who wanted the little weasel dismembered a couple of months ago.”

“He wants to come home. Diana's all excited.”

“We could buy her a pony cheaper and she'd still be excited. We'd only have to feed that,” Gerry had said.