Happiness of Fish (3 page)

The chair asks the newcomer if she wants to speak. She's got a narrow face collapsing into the black holes of her eyes and she's twisting Kleenex and paper napkins into tight, white worms.

“My name is Lori–”

“Hi Lori,” the room booms for her.

Hi Doctor Nick, thinks Gerry, who watches
The Simpsons
before the news comes on at suppertime.

“I just want to... I don't know, just feel better, I guess.”

“You're in the right place, Lori,” the chair tells her. “Just sit back and listen.”

And hope you recognize somebody, Gerry thinks. He remembers coming to a first meeting fifteen years ago and being surprised at the number of people he thought were dead who were there, apparently alive and well and sober. He'd lost track of them when they disappeared from the pieces of the bar scene he inhabited. Any program that could raise the dead had something going for it.

The chair knows his crowd and turns the evening into a sort of greatest hits night for Lori's benefit. He's a square-set man with a grey ponytail. Gerry remembers that he's some kind of geologist and used to play rugby. He remembers singing hymns and rugby songs with him at a keg party somewhere a million years ago.

A few people looked askance at Gerry tonight because he didn't identify himself as a newcomer. That's how seldom he goes to meetings anymore. There are people at this meeting who consider themselves regulars and have never seen him before. The chair must remember their singing together though, because he remembers Gerry's name and calls on him.

“Hi, my name is Gerry and I'm an alcoholic and I'm glad to be here tonight.” Gerry's not a hundred percent sure he is glad to be here but, what the hell? Something brought him. He could have stayed home or gone shopping or whatever. Besides, he used to be glad, unbelievably, unbelievingly glad when a week of doing the impossible and not taking a drink stretched into three months and he got a copper medallion like a licence tag for a big dog. He lost the medallion somewhere, but the months have turned slowly into years.

He decides it's important that Lori should be glad to be here, so he talks indirectly to her.

“The first time I came in here I'd walked around town all day to keep moving so I wouldn't have a drink. I couldn't make up my mind if I wanted to admit I was a drunk or go to the Waterford Hospital and
say I was crazy. I decided to be a drunk because I was afraid that if I got in the Waterford, they'd never let me out or they'd zap my memory. I write and I figured I needed my memory. Once I came in here, I sort of knew I'd made the right decision. It gets easier.”

Gerry sits down.

“Good words there,” the chair intones.

Gerry sits back and wonders who he is trying to convince by mentioning that he writes. He does his journalistic writing of course, but he suspects he could do that zapped or lobotomized or whatever. He doesn't do anything very challenging.

The meeting flows on around him and he looks at the room. This library has bemused him before. It's richly lined with books from religious publishing houses. Gerry has sometimes wandered around looking at titles before meetings, or afterwards, during the coffee and cookies. They range from studies of the obscure miracles of obscure saints to '50s
Readers Digest
-style things like
Switchblade and the Cross
and Doctor Tom Dooley's medical missions in Indo-China. There are how-to books on daily devotion and “issues” books like
God and Globalization
. As far as Gerry has been able to discover through casual browsing, Saint Rose of Viterbo and Saint Beatrice da Silva have Thomas Merton heavily outnumbered and there's no sampling of other philosophies.

He remembers going to parent-teacher night, back when there was still denominational education and Tanya, Vivian's youngest daughter, was in school. For reasons that made sense to Vivian when she took the kids and got out of her first marriage, Tanya was in the Catholic system. At one session, her homeroom teacher enthused about the new religious education text that had come out that year. In the meet-and-greet afterwards, Gerry had suggested the book didn't give much space to anything but the home team.

“Couldn't it be taught like herpetology?” Gerry asked the teacher, a youngish version of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew on
The Muppets
, round and bland and up-to-date.

“How's that, Mr. Adamson?”

Gerry could see him riffling through a mental card file of “ologies,” trying to place herpetology.

“Snakes, right?” He looked at Gerry hopefully, expecting a joke perhaps.

“I mean,” Gerry said, “that it's a grand thing to know all about snakes and have a serious enthusiasm for snakes, but the goal isn't necessarily to graduate snakes at the end of the course.”

The faux Honeydew said that was an interesting point and went on to talk to somebody else.

Gerry has a friend, Philip, who hangs out in the coffee shops and is a sceptic who wants a funeral. He says most religions demand that he take on faith the existence of a giant pink rabbit. Empirical evidence of the big pink bunny strikes him as being in short supply, so he's moved away from organized religion. Still, he says, there's no reason that a sceptic shouldn't have some inspiring words read over him. On and off, he is cherry-picking his way through the ancients, east and west. He's gathering snippets of text that he says should do for a humanist send-off. However, he feels classic Buddhism is bleak, and Taoism and Zen are a bit slap-dash and happy-go-lucky.

“Lackadaisical even,” he says, looking at the Chinese notebook like Gerry's, where he writes down his snippets. Gerry told him the shop to buy them at.

Gerry also has a story about “lackadaisical.” At his work, he tells Philip, they have to transcribe the clips of people speaking that they put in radio pieces. Some reporter, who went to school after spelling stopped being a subject and apparently didn't read a lot, transcribed “lackadaisical attitude” as “lack of daisy-go attitude.”

“That's what I suffer from,” Gerry told Philip. “A lack of daisy-go attitude. I can't remember the last time I had even a touch of daisy-go attitude.”

Philip continues to gather final-sounding aphorisms. At the moment though, his hypothetical funeral features a lot of Marcus Aurelius and Confucius.

Sitting in the church library listening to people stay sober through Christmas, Gerry feels that Philip's pink rabbit is over-represented on the bookshelves. There should be more Marcus and Confucius and a section on what to do when your daisy-go goes.

When the meeting breaks up and Gerry goes outside, it has started to snow. He brushes off his grubby little SUV and drives home through big snowflakes like flower petals, daisy petals maybe, daisy petals going.

On a Saturday when Vivian has gone Christmas shopping, Gerry goes to the basement, passing under the plywood duck-shape he cut out and stuck over the stairs as the international symbol for “duck.” He roots in his cabinets and desk drawers for the scribblers, notebooks stamped with glass and cup rings like old passports. He makes piles of paper, sorting by period, mood, or degree of physical damage, reconstructing how he got here.

Call this the CFA pile, Gerry muses as he unearths a nineteenth-century looking duplicate notebook that he'd found in his mother's house on a visit a couple of years before. It's the kind with one-sided carbon pages that automatically left a copy of what was written. In it he'd printed a bunch of poems by hand. Today it seems impossible that there was a time when he didn't type, when ballpoint and carbon seemed the best way to leave smudges of a human-shaped animal on the cave wall.

Gerry pours a coffee and looks at his come-from-away self before he knew he was a CFA. His 1960s and early '70s lurk between the blue marble-pattern covers.

Cupid is a fascist
With shiny black jackboots
Smeared with small pieces
Of hearts he's machine-gunned;
A thousand valentines
Flap wildly in his camp
,

Battle flags abounding
.

“Christ, this kid!” Gerry says softly to himself. The oil furnace cuts in with a breathy, but probably sympathetic sigh. He wonders if he goes upstairs and finds the Leonard Cohen anthology Vivian gave him a few anniversaries back, will he be able to track what he was reading when he wrote some of this. Then again, maybe it wasn't that profound.

I was walking my serpent in the garden
And I let him off the leash
To frolic among the flowers and lovers
,
When up came a silver-wingèd cop
Who said all serpents must
,

Must be kept on the leash, not
Let frolic et cetera et cetera;
So I sadly took my serpent and went home
To eat apples in my room
.

“Record jackets,” Gerry says aloud, “I must have been reading frigging record jackets.”

In another pile of paper, Gerry finds himself in St. John's for the first time. At some point over the years he has transcribed some of the stuff he wrote when he and Patricia, his first wife, lived in the east-end.

Why is the night?
Because of the dog, child
,
Obscene fat doggy
,
Soul beneath his waggle:
He licks the sun
From the pavement
Like ice cream;
Dirty, mouldy dog
,
Like a hairy Dutch cheese
,
Dreams all gurgly
And burps another morning;
Nice fat doggy
.

Gerry had written that the first autumn he and Patricia had come to St. John's. It occurs to him that you no longer see the packs of almost mythologically ugly crackies that used to drift up and down the hilly streets in the older parts of town. Dogs are tied on now and belong to recognizable breeds and, for all Gerry knows, health clubs and spas and new-age churches. Their owners walk them with pockets full of shopping bags to pick up the dog shit. Gerry sometimes argues that picking up dog shit is making humanity stupider. A basic lesson in watching where you're going has been removed. Shuffle along any old way. Never mind the dog poop. There's no need to be watchful or learn the steps in the dance of life.

“Don't be silly,” Vivian tells him. “It's not sanitary.”

At any rate, the weird dog creatures are no longer around, but they were when he and Patricia were setting up housekeeping in 1972
or so. Maybe they huddled together for safety from the mythological crackies. They'd only just learned the word and could conjure with it. Maybe when the crackie packs disappeared they had no further need of each other and fell apart.

The house is ghostly quiet and Gerry goes upstairs to make a cup of tea. He feels like a museum visitor, sidling past the baroque splendours of Vivian's Christmas decorations. The few cars that pass in the street make soft noises like rotten old flags tearing. He makes the tea in the pot rather than in the cup and takes it back to the basement with him. Somewhere over the years he had come by a mini electric pad, a tiny hot plate for keeping a mug warm. He plugs it in, balances the teapot on it and returns to thirty years ago. Pawing through the snippets and false starts in his middle-class basement, he compares then and now.

It seems to Gerry that he and Vivian dress quite a lot alike now. They both wear khaki pants in summer and blazers when they dress up. They buy sweaters and suburban sweatshirts at Work Warehouse. He and Patricia may have shopped in the same stores but their look was different.

Patricia wore a lot of Danskin leotard tops and he remembers a short suede skirt. They'd joke and call it a wide belt. On other days she went to the opposite extreme and wore a maxi-length jumper that he called her one-legged overalls. In the winter she piled an antique raccoon coat over it all.

Gerry wore high-top work boots and cords under old tweed or leather sports jackets or the sailorish, vinyl-shouldered donkey jacket he'd bought in the UK after university. He bought a salt-and-pepper cap and wore it. They had a gypsy air as they walked to and from the bus stops of the east-end. Gerry has an old picture of them in an album Pat sent back when everybody had divorced and remarried and settled into amiability. In the picture they look as though they might be about to break into some sort of street performance at any moment.

All we needed was a tambourine and a dancing bear.

Gerry is being good today. He actually turns on the computer and transcribes bits of stuff and looks at old scenes he's written. Often he doesn't get that far and curls up with a book on the couch.

“I don't know what you do all day, “Vivian will say. “I wish I had time to just sit and read.”

“If you don't read, you can't write,” Gerry retorts, but with his fingers slightly crossed. You do have to stop reading at some point to start writing. As it is, he works enough odd hours and relief shifts in radio to find excuses for not doing much personal writing. That, and the fact he usually has supper on the table when Vivian gets home, save him from being accused of being lazy, a major sin in Vivian's world.

“People like you enjoy painting stones white in the army,” Gerry says, only half-teasing.

“So what?” says Vivian. In fact there is a ring of small white-painted beach rocks around a tree in their backyard.

Gerry has tried to trick or coerce himself into putting something substantial down on paper, to jump-start his creativity. Some time ago he joined a writing workshop, although he doubted that it would do anything about the real problem of sitting down long enough to put the bits together.

At first the workshop felt slightly odd, with a home-and-school-meeting flavour to the cups of coffee and the homemade muffins, notebooks and journals. Then it became the first day at the nude beach. People tended to look over each other's shoulders, obliquely at the walls, or at the pattern in the carpet and wonder if everyone else was doing the same. Then came the old dressing room cliché, the sideways comparative glances. People began to learn either to pay polite attention to each other's naughty bits or to forget about them entirely.