Happiness of Fish (23 page)

Sister Angela and Patricia emerge from the office with a discreet clatter. They shake hands solemnly. Turning away, Patricia rolls her eyes and mouths “outside.” Her suede shoes click down the shiny tile of a corridor and Gerry is being ushered into the office. Sister Angela is hitting her stride. She asks straight off if he'd like the instant coffee.

They sit at a boardroom table with a tape recorder on it. Gerry notices it because it's a good make and looks new. On the other hand, it's a model that has been replaced by digital in Gerry's work.

The volume of annulment depositions mustn't be burning out the equipment, he thinks. Either that, or nuns take better care of their gear than reporters do.

The interview, from Gerry's point of view anyway, has an
Alice-in-Wonderland
feel.

“What religion would you be, Mr. Adamson?”

“Nothing formal, sort of Taoist, I suppose.”

“That must be foreign.”

We smile like sick cats, Gerry thinks, mentally writing this. We talk about the people who made the vows so long ago, the matches that are broken or are being broken now
.

“Did Michael and Maureen's separation surprise you?”

“Probably no more than mine surprised me.”

“Was there a lot of drinking?”

As compared to what, he thinks.

“Not that I remember, but then again I was drinking heavily in those days.”

“Did you see anything that made you think there may have been abuse?”

“No. No, I don't think so.”

The questions and answers succeed each other. Gerry continues to write a poem in his head.

I remember a day:
Two couples and Volkswagen
,
With a 410 shotgun
,
Looking for birds;
There's a photo of us
In a weed-bright gravel pit
,
Laughing in big sweaters
,
On a day like this;
One of us, (we're saying now) was crazy;
Another was a drunk
,
But we didn't care;
The two normal ones have got out, or want out
,
But it was still a nice day
And nice days still come;
We shot no birds;
I don't believe we saw one;
As I recall, we went home to cook
Pasta and red wine

In a mobile-hung walk-up
,
With old-time ads stuck
On the kitchen wall;
I hope the question
Isn't if that time was bad;
It wasn't then
And it doesn't seem so now
.

“Thank you for your help, Mr. Adamson,” Sister Angela says, the end of the interview recalling him to reality.

“I don't know that I've been very much help.”

“These things are difficult. I'm sure Michael and Maureen appreciate what you're doing.”

Gerry isn't sure that Patricia will have waited in the parking lot. His watch tells him the interview has taken less than twenty minutes but he's lost track of time. She has waited though. She's sitting in her van reading a paperback novel. It's
Catcher in the Rye
.

“One of the kids left it in the car,” she says. “I haven't read it for years. I think we had it when we lived on top of Frankie's.”

They drive to a Tim Hortons, diplomatically about mid-way between their respective homes.

“That was pretty awful,” Patricia says when they've bought coffees and sat down at a table.

“I kept wondering if I was doing them any good,” Gerry says. “It's like maybe we should have been saying they were unconscious drunk at the wedding and never consummated it and spent the rest of their time beating each other up and having perverted sex with wombats.”

“Wombats?”

“You never found out about the wombats in leather? God, there I was, thinking that's what drove you into Brian's arms.”

“Fool.” She smiles.

“And here it turns out you were just embittered by having to carry me over the threshold drunk.”

“You weren't drunk then.”

“No, I guess I wasn't. I was later on, though.”

“Do you ever wonder why?”

“Christ, you do harder ones than Sister Angela.”

“No really, I mean you've been sober for years now. You go to meetings and stuff. Did you ever figure out why?”

“Well,” Gerry says, “I always liked that old line that I drank to make other people more interesting.”

“You did always say that, usually to guests.”

“But I think maybe I was trying to make me more interesting.”

“How do you mean?” Patricia asks. “I mean sober I was way too uncomplicated,” Gerry says, cradling his coffee mug in both hands. “Booze was my religion, something I could be the guru of. I wasn't just drunk. I was declaring a new reality.”

“You were pretty real. I didn't like phonies.”

“Worst sin you could commit back then, being phoney. Now how phoney would we look?”

“When I said I wanted to come down here on the bus to live, you just asked when we were leaving. That wasn't phoney.”

Gerry looks at the face framed in the silver hair. He looks for and finds the eyes that floated in candlelight as they'd sat up, naked in two sleeping bags zipped together, talking about taking off to Newfoundland.

“I just wanted to be as cool as you. You were so damned grown-up. I figured I had to be some kind of Byronic wild-man or you'd throw me back in the pool.”

“I really believed in your writing, the poems, the novels. Do you still write?... Outside of work I mean.”

“Yeah, I do, but a lot more slowly. I know I've got to work for it now. The booze-muse doesn't dictate whole chapters anymore. Do you still paint?”

“Touché,” Patricia says, “You know, Gerry, apart from the drinking you were never a bad guy. You were drunk when you fucked around.”

“You knew then.”

“Some of those perverted wombats were friends of mine.”

“I never wanted to hurt you, Pat.”

“I know that now. We didn't hurt each other much. I mean, hey, we're nice people.”

“Yeah, pretty civilized.”

The autumn afternoon is turning to orange and gold when they walk to their cars.

“See you, Gerry. Say hello to Vivian.” She gives him a hug. He returns it and finds there's no muscle memory of her. They embrace like strangers, unsure of the fit, the pressure to exert. He remembers when they fitted each other's fronts like hot poultices. Still, the unfamiliarity is comforting in a way. They're immune now.

“See you around, Pat. Say hi to Brian and your mob too.” Civilized, Gerry thinks as he drives home. That's what we are, civilized.

It is an October day and Gerry is waiting for a bus in the early morning. The rain in the night has changed to mostly drizzle and fog, but with occasional hard showers, like parting shots in an ice-cold argument, sneaky, over-the-shoulder afterthoughts which sting if they don't kill. The mist skirmishes through the spruce trees on the hill above Gerry's neighbourhood, a guerrilla army of diagonal, wet ghosts, angling down the slope to invest the day.

Gerry turns his back to the clammy drift and turns his raincoat collar up. He's riding the bus today because the truck is in the shop for its umpty-seven-hundred-kilometre check-up. He has to go downtown and it's too wet to walk all the way. He's consulted the bus schedule he and Vivian keep stuck to the fridge for car-less emergencies. If they haven't changed the schedule he should be able to ambush a bus without being out in the wet too long.

As he waits under the dripping bus-stop sign, a string of ducks scrambles up the sky. Hitting it running, they hurtle up from the furtive muskrat stream that subverts the tameness of the neighbourhood. The stream lurks in the alders and reeds, stalking the tame horticulture of gardens and lawns. Gerry remembers the old Dorothy Parker tag on horticulture: You can lead a whore-to-culture, but you can't make her think.

The ducks gain frantic height. They cut through the wet grey over the morning traffic on the parkway. They level off and fly fast and straight over the oiled-looking shopping mall parking lot.

There's an asthmatic, diesel bulldog snuffling from a side street. The bus snorts around the corner and fusses damply to a halt at Gerry's stop. The pneumatic doors give an iron-lung slurp and gather him in.

The bus pulls away, a window-steamy rolling community. Cheek-by-jowl, its residents are morning loud or quiet, depending on their natures. Gerry is quiet. He digs in an inside pocket for his notebook and pen. He looks out and sees a crow on a wet post and thinks of the rhyme for magpies and crows. One for sadness, two for joy, three for a girl and four for a boy.

Gerry reflects that you don't often see just one crow. He suspects the old rhyme-maker was hedging his bets. He'd have been more likely to see two crows or magpies or ravens or whatever. He'd be more likely to get “two for joy” because crows are social.

Maybe the old rhymester wanted a son who wouldn't cost him a dowry, Gerry jots. Maybe he wanted somebody to help out with the heavy work around the small-holding. Four crows are probably just as likely as three, maybe even more likely. Make it three for a girl and four for a boy. From a peasant perspective, the deck of crows is stacked for optimism, but can there be too many crows for luck?

Gerry remembers his father's stories of the First World War. He said he'd seen the sky black with crows after Passchendaele. They flew in from all over Flanders to gorge on the dead. What would the old peasant make of that in his couplet, assuming a passing army didn't loot or shell him out of his contemplation?

Four million crows for Armageddon
, Gerry writes.

The bus turns another corner. On the Kiwanis ball field is another crow. This one is on the ground with a flock of seagulls. They're eating the suicidal autumn worms the rain has driven up into the cold.

Do crows, separated by a couple of minutes of bus ride and mixed with gulls, count as “two for joy”? Do gulls count?

The bus goes on through the fog as Gerry tries to do the math.

The woman sitting next to him has a newspaper open to the local arts section. The paper flops into his line of sight. He sees a picture of someone he knows. It's Nish from his writing workshop.

“Coastal boat steward serves up salty treat,” the headline reads. “
This Bucket Here
, a must-read!”

But I've got the crows counted, Gerry thinks. Right here in this notebook.

It's not quite four on a Friday morning and Gerry stands at his kitchen counter, drinking coffee with his raincoat on, staring out the window. He's waiting for a taxi to take him to the airport, and his old folding suitcase and shoulder bag are slumped together by the door, like old dogs waiting patiently for a walk. Only the reading lamp on the small desk in the kitchen is turned on. Its downward glow makes the kitchen shadowed and cozy.

He hears the bedroom door open down the hall. Then the bathroom door shuts. A minute later the toilet flushes. Vivian shuffles into the kitchen in flannel pyjamas with snowmen on them. They were a gift from Melanie, picked out by Diana, last Christmas.

“Did I wake you?”

“No, I never heard you. I just got up to go. You're all ready then?”

“Cab's on his way, or says he is.”

“Call me when you know how your mother is. Did you take that calling card we had on the boat? It's good for a couple more months.”

“I did. Right here. You'd better go back to bed.” Gerry hugs Vivian. She seems shorter, barefoot and smaller, as if she was slightly compacted
for sleep and has not completely unfolded.

“Call me,” she says and shuffles back along the hall.

After supper the night before, they had said they meant to go to bed together, but they didn't. Gerry had turned in early because he has an early flight. Vivian had a house-showing that ran late. Gerry knows the feel of the snowman pyjamas and now wants to run his hands under them but it's too late. The cab is called. Car lights flash on the kitchen window. He picks up his bags and lets himself out the kitchen door, locking it behind him.

There's been frost. The steps are slippery under his desert boots. The grass of the lawn is glazed under the street lamps and feels like frozen vegetables when he pauses, humping his bags down the driveway, and tests it with his foot. He throws the bags in the back seat of the cab and climbs in beside the driver.

“Airport, please.”

On the ride through the empty streets he reviews what is happening. The retirement home in Ottawa has called. His mother had a fall.

“She must have got up in the night. One of the girls found her on the bathroom floor.”

There had been a trip to hospital and X-rays. Now there's apparently a broken arm and pneumonia. She isn't eating. She's been sent to hospital.

The night before, Gerry had spoken to a doctor who sounded about fifteen.

“She's not eating and she's very disoriented and she's a bit dehydrated. I think we may be looking at tube feeding. For the moment we're just giving her electrolytes and something for the pain.”

“I've got a ticket bought,” Gerry had said. “I'll be there tomorrow.”

“Business or pleasure?” the cab driver asks, breaking in on him.

“Family,” Gerry says. None of the above.

Gerry balances a Hortons coffee through security, shoving his corduroy jacket, raincoat and shoulder bag through the scanning machine. He took the trouble to empty his pockets of pennies before he left home. He manages not to swamp the change and key tray as he often does and goes by the sweeping wands virtually beep-less.

In the departure lounge little tribes form around the various gates. At his, he runs into Kayla, the girl who did the voice report on the car crash back in the summer. She's been moved from a regional station into St. John's.