Happiness of Fish (30 page)

Gerry and Vivian check in at the Ottawa airport.

“Adamson, Vivian and Gerald,” Gerry says, presenting the tickets and his wallet, open to his driver's licence. “Going to St. John's... Three bags to check and we'll carry the little ones.”

Vivian leans around him to show her driver's licence too. They have travelled a lot together. They perform the check-in rituals unhurriedly, but deftly, dancing around each other, playing to each other, but contained, like old vaudevillians reprising the routine that made them famous. Gerry swings the heavy bags onto the scale. Vivian gathers the shoulder bags for quick redistribution. Gerry wonders how the counter girl likes their performance. He thinks they'll remind her of somebody in an English movie she saw on a late show. They still dress up a bit to travel.

“Gate twenty-eight. You can go right through.”

Gerry is glad to be rid of the big bags. They were heavy. They both had suits for the funeral and Vivian had his mother's suitcase with stuff she was afraid to leave for the movers.

“Feels good to get rid of that load,” Gerry says. Their talk is the smallest kind of small talk. It hits Gerry that it has been for days, a Popeye and Olive nattering that gets them around the big stuff. “Thank God you couldn't get anything else in the damn bag.”

“It's just jewellery and little stuff,” Vivian says. “Things that would get broken or lost.”

“I never realized the Adamson family jewels were so heavy,” Gerry says.

They find their gate and sit on slinky aluminium and leatherette benches waiting to board. The walls of the waiting area are floor-to-ceiling glass. They can see right across the airport in the late afternoon sun. Far off, towards a backwater corner of the airport, the hot-air balloon they'd seen as they drove to the terminal is slowly descending. It seems to have followed them in its aimlessly majestic way. The gas bag is striped and imprinted with the sign of a big real estate chain.

“Look, there's the balloon again,” Vivian says. “It looks like a big Christmas tree ornament.”

“Check the tickets,” Gerry says. “With the bargain bookings and all the last-minute running around, that could be our flight.”

They lose sight of the balloon as it drifts downward behind a row of hangars. Their flight is called a few minutes later.

They have changed planes in Halifax. They are somewhere off the south coast of Newfoundland. The plane has the snugness of nighttime as it tunnels through the dark sky. The interior seems cozy, almost fire-lit, with only a few reading lamps turned on. Gerry's is off. Vivian's is on. She's reading the in-flight magazine. Vivian tells people that she is not a nervous flier, but she doesn't sleep on planes. The magazine isn't holding her. It's full of articles about Japanese gadgets for the business traveller. She's a person who needs things to do. Gerry suspects he's a person who just needs things to happen.

“Are you tired?” she asks, looking at him in his nest of shadow next to her cone of lamplight.

Gerry doesn't answer right away.

“No,” he says finally. He's a bit surprised, but he's not tired. He's been
sitting thinking about the last seven days. Their events seem to be receding the farther east they go.

“Are you okay?” Vivian asks.

“Yeah, I am,” Gerry says. “We did okay there. I think we did about as well as could be expected. For a fifty-something orphan, I think I'm holding up pretty well.”

“You always do the right thing.” Vivian pats his hand. “You're good that way. You just seem to know what to do.”

Gerry looks for an implication that there are ways in which he's less good, that knowing what to do is not a trump card under Vivian's rules. He's looking for a fraying of the accord they've lived under for the past week.

“Eventually,” Gerry says ruefully. “Give me long enough and I'll figure it out eventually.”

He wonders how long is long enough. He fiddles with the lever on the armrest and leans his seat back.

How long did I have to rehearse this? When did I start doing the right things? What has it got me?

Suddenly he feels tremendously tired and tries to relax. It seems to have taken a very long time to get here, to this time, to this seat. A life recedes in the plane's invisible wake.

“You've been uptight, I know,” Vivian diagnoses.

“Yeah, I guess I have. It's like for the last, I don't know, the last year or so, I've been frozen, waiting for something to happen. I feel lighter.”

Gerry leans back and thinks about waiting and doing the right things.

The plane bumps heavily, seems to skitter sideways slightly and bumps again.

“I hate this,” Vivian says to Gerry.

“I know, kid. It's just a little rough.” Water streaks the window beside him and beyond that the green of the wingtip light is only a stain in the speeding murk. The plane's white strobe pulses off the walls of the cloud tunnel they seem to be caroming down. “It's not a very nice night out there.”

The plane's hydraulics squeal and the cabin tilts, levels and tilts again. Gerry supposes the computer is flying the plane. Somebody told him computers do the final approaches now.

If we crash and burn, was it worth it trying to get here? a morbid bit of him asks. Is this the place you could die trying to get to? Could you have stayed where you were?

The plane rips its way out of the belly of the cloud like a movie alien. The lights of a subdivision scroll by under them, like the too-fast credits of a TV show. The airport fence rushes under them and they hit with a solid thump. They're forced forward in their seats as the brakes grab with a rumbling shudder. They effortlessly make the transition from plummeting sky beast to big, tame, three-legged bus with fins.

Once upon a time, in the old EPA days, that landing would have got a cheer, Gerry thinks. We must be getting jaded.

He looks at Vivian, unclenching beside him. She smiles a small guilty smile. She knows you're supposed to trust the technology. Studies have been done. It's safer than walking, breathing even.

“We're home,” she says. “Home again.”

“Back where we belong,” Gerry says.

It's almost Christmas again, a month since Gerry and Vivian got back from Ottawa. Gerry finds himself doing some pre-holiday filling-in as a morning producer at the radio station. The Atlantic Accord shit is hitting the federal-provincial fan, and upstairs they've opened the phone lines for the last hour of the show. They're giving out the numbers to call, but somebody has decided to ring Gerry on the office number.

“They shouldn't be taking down the shaggin' flags, they should be burning the shaggin' flags.”

It's not my job to decide if this guy has managed to get drunk before nine in the morning, Gerry thinks. I used to be able to do it myself.

“I was on hold for fifteen minutes on that number they're giving out,” the man says.

“Well, I can transfer you back upstairs,” Gerry says. “But I'm afraid I can't guarantee you won't go back on hold. It's a stacking system. You get out, you go back to the bottom and we're really busy. A lot of people are upset with the feds, just like you are.”

“I bet you're not fucking upset, buddy. You're trying to keep me off the air. I bet you're not from here. Where are you from?”

It's been a long morning. Gerry wonders why he isn't supposed to be upset with the feds too. It's not genetic. He's probably lived here as long as the drunk on the phone has. The man has an aggrieved, Generation-X voice. Gerry thinks of his own adoptive tribe of X-ers. Vivian's kids count Ottawa's Alberta elk. They make their electronic widgets and make pious, ex-pat nuisances of themselves in Ontario. Darren's Donair and Pizza has probably created half a dozen federal jobs in employment and taxation.

“Hey, personally I think the feds are off-base here too.”

“You aren't from here, buddy. Where do you belong to?”

“Outer space,” says Gerry, and hangs up. “And a very merry bloody Christmas to you too.”

Gerry had half-expected his caller to ring back on yet another number and complain. He doesn't, but Gerry's end of the conversation has been overheard by enough people for it to become office gossip. He's asked about it.

“Just some obnoxious drunk,” he says. “I'm sorry, I lost it. I don't need to be sworn at in the mornings by some asshole.”

That explanation is allowed to stand, given that there's no aggrieved listener who wants to make an issue of it. However, Gerry finds himself being looked at askance. It's suggested that it might be too soon after his mother's death for Gerry to be back at work. Perhaps he'd like to have some more time off at Christmas. He can't explain that he's feeling less stressed, getting lighter all the time.

Vivian meets Gerry downtown in the space debs' coffee shop on a colourless December afternoon. They're supposed to be buying a carpet for Melanie and Darren. Darren has landed a baker's job with another pizza joint and they're trying to fix up their place. Viv and Gerry are going rug-hunting this afternoon.

Gerry had expected Vivian to be upset that he's not working, but she's not.

“You need a break,” she says. “We both do. It's been a hard fall.”

Gerry orders them veggie sandwiches with sun-dried tomato and African peanut soup.

“Bob called from Ottawa, this morning,” Viv says. “He said to tell you he's getting on with the will and you should get a nice little bundle. It'll be sometime after February. He says he's got to sort out your mother's income tax.”

“Just as well, if the station thinks I'm losing it. It's time to be a greeter at Wal-Mart and write.”

They are paying their bill when Leona from the writing group comes into the coffee shop, stamping her boots. She's got a school satchel over her shoulder. She fumbles in it and puts up a Xeroxed notice on the coffee shop bulletin board.

“Gerry,” she calls. “I'm starting up the group again after Christmas. Are you interested?”

“I could be, Leona. Maybe Nish getting published was contagious. I'll give you a call.”

Leona joins them. She'd met Vivian at a party she gave when the group wound up last spring. “Make this guy write big stuff,” she says in a heartily confiding, gym-teacher voice. “He should let go, loosen up. Merry Christmas, you guys.”

“So should you loosen up?” Vivian asks Gerry, after Leona has gone and they're standing in the street.

Gerry looks east to Signal Hill, lowering over the east end of town. The hill, he supposes, is like
the big stuff
Leona is talking about, a dirty big fact, popped out of the earth, smacked around by waves and weather. Still, as he looks at it, framed by the Christmas decorations on the street lamps, what interests him is that the top of the hill is bathed in weak winter sun, while farther down, a snow squall is dragging a smaller, private winter across the lower slopes.

Maybe I'm a landscape writer, he remembers telling Philip last spring. Maybe changes in light on the scenery are all I do.

Then there's loose itself. Should he loosen up? God knows, his collection of George and Paula and bar sketches is loose. Patricia and he got loose from each other.

Mom got loose, he thinks. The home ties are loose. I've got a loose attachment to...hell, you name it. How loose do we all have to get?

He knows that the telepathic strand they seemed to have when they were in Ottawa seems to have parted again. It's been stowed away in a
past that already seems remote. A deal seems to have been made. Vivian has done her part. He, apparently, has done his. The system worked.

Will a week in a motel, arranging a funeral, be one of our golden moments? Gerry wonders.

“So do you need to loosen up?” Vivian repeats.

He realizes he hasn't answered her, not out loud anyway.

“I don't know,” Gerry says. “Let's go find some carpet for the kids. Maybe we can start getting some of the Christmas groceries on the way home.”

They found a carpet, with, for them, relatively little bickering. With only days to go until Christmas, the act of buying it and taking it home seems the last normal thing they do in a season that goes suddenly claustrophobic.

The first really cold night they have, the pipes freeze in the house next door to Melanie and Darren in their row-house. Somebody who's had a few beers has a late-night go at the pipes with a blow-torch and sets a wall on fire. Melanie and Darren's house gets smoke and water damage and the power is out in the row. Melanie, Darren and Diana are now living next to their rolled-up Christmas carpet in Gerry and Vivian's basement.

Early one morning Gerry paces the house, up before everyone else, padding around in his socks with a coffee mug and taking emotional stock. The previous night he overheard Vivian on the phone telling Tanya in Calgary how good he'd been in Darren and Melanie's emergency. Tanya's staying out west this Christmas.

“We'd gone to bed. He just got up and was over there at three in the morning and picked them all up,” Vivian said. “Just threw stuff in garbage bags and came on.”

Gerry feels unfairly lionized. What else could you do with family driven out of their house? Of course you take them in.

It makes him grumpy that Viv is boasting about something so normal. He wonders if it's a warm-up for the lowered expectations of the nursing home: shoes on right feet, socks match, still housebroken. Isn't he a wonder?

“He wipes his ass every morning too,” he says sourly to the empty kitchen. “And the prize for being such a little paragon is a basement full of Darren and Melanie.”

As if to confirm his mood, he goes down the basement stairs and peers around. The new rug lies in a roll, stuck diagonally across the basement floor, a misplaced Yule log that seems to take up more space than it needs to. Next to it are the garbage bags of clothes and linens, salvaged from the smoke and water.