Happiness of Fish (32 page)

Gerry's pleased to find his bits and pieces take up more than one disk. He hadn't thought there was that much stuff. He feels like the spy who has micro-filmed the plans. He's got it all in pocket-size, ready to slip away.

Why am I making an escape kit?

Then he remembers that it was last Christmas that he told Vivian he was going back at his book.

Not my disk-and-a-half, he thinks. It's a long time since the fuse was lit on this particular firework. Perhaps she's tired of waiting for the explosion. Bombshells that don't explode become paperweights.

Noises of Christmas dinner preparation continue overhead. Gerry puts his new disks in a side-pocket of the laptop bag and calls up his e-mail account. He hasn't looked at it in a week or more. He doesn't get a lot of e-mail because he doesn't send much. Today, though, there's a reply to one he sent to Philip wishing him a Merry Christmas.

I was at my Humanist Discussion Group Christmas party the other night, Philip wrote. There was a lot of argument about whether we should have one. We finally called it a solstice party and went ahead
.

Gerry reads on.

I met this woman who is a sort of new-age Wiccan and after far too much humanist plonk, we wound up in her apartment. What rough beast whose hour has come...

“Slouches towards Bethlehem to be bored,” Gerry says sourly.

Before you say, ‘Why Wiccan? Why not RC or Seventh Day Adventist?' I say it just feels right. It's time for me to stop being alone
.

Or start, thinks a cynical Gerry and then instantly feels guilty.

She works in an alternate used bookstore and she says I can get a job there too. They want somebody to sort out some of their classics and take a look at their computer accounting
.

Gerry remembers The Vales of Har and The Books of Thel from his first life. His imagination smells the peculiarly alternate-bookshop mixture of mildew and cat.

Good luck to you both
.

I've told Charmian about the dinners you used to invite me to. I said you were a pretty fair amateur shaman in the kitchen. If we can get some money together we might get down to see you next summer. Merry Christmas (or solstice) to you and Vivian
.

Gerry wonders what it feels like to be at the start of something again, when reconciling Yeats and crystals and the Goddess seems possible. He tries to remember the miraculous foreign-ness of someone new, the magic unfamiliarity of everything from her body to the layout of her bathroom.

He is suddenly aware that he and Vivian have made love only twice since they got back from the funeral. Once was after they had a fight over where to put the furniture they'd shipped down. The second time was in the cold dawn after they'd ferried Melanie, Darren and Diana
home after their fire.

It sometimes seems to Gerry that they need a row or a disaster as an aphrodisiac.

For-giveness or for-titude equal fore-play, Gerry thinks. Good luck, Philip and Charmian. Good luck to you both and the books and the cats and the mildew.

Christmas dinner is a reminder you're old and jaded.

Gerry remembers being a kid and drooling at the prospect of Christmas dinner. He wonders if it was just that kids are naturally hungrier or if it was a sociological thing. Snacking hadn't been much of an option for a kid in the 1950s. Fast food hadn't fully arrived and kitchens were strictly controlled by Depression-trained mothers. If you got a snack at all, somebody made it for you and you were guaranteed it wouldn't spoil your dinner or supper or whatever the next meal in line happened to be. Gerry remembers the prospect of bland mega-food at Christmas being something you could daydream about. Now it's a lot of stodge that you'll still eat too much of. His annual Waldorf salad is as close as the meal gets to what they usually eat. Tomorrow he'll co-opt the leftovers into something less bland.

“Turkey curry tomorrow,” he says.

“That's a waste of good turkey,” Vivian says. She believes, implicitly, that turkey is good.

“I'll just do my share of the bits and pieces with a few veggies.”

“Yecch,” says Diana. “Yeah, yecch,” says Darren.

“Don't come looking for any when I get it made then.”

Gerry and Vivian have yet to evolve a traditional Christmas dessert. Vivian gave up baking when Gerry took over most of the day-to-day cooking. One year he bought a steamer and attempted a proper Christmas pudding full of suet, peel, crumbs and rum. It was voted down as too heavy. This year he's bought a little red-wrapped pudding from the grocery store. The pudding is about the size of a softball and comes in a plastic basin that can go in the microwave. There's a tin of hard sauce.

“It's like survival pudding,” Gerry says. “If you were going to put Christmas pudding in a life-raft, this is what you'd use.” As it is, he eats
most of the survival pudding.

The short solstice afternoon draws in quickly and the drizzle turns to snow as darkness falls. Vivian and Melanie are putting dishes in the washer with a litre-and-a-half of white wine between them. Darren is stretched out on the couch and Diana is watching TV amid a tangle of gifts on the living room floor.

Gerry decides to go for a walk. He puts on his coat, an old tweed cap and a pair of waffle-soled hiking boots and sets out by the kitchen door. His footprints in the new snow of the driveway are the first to escape the house today. Like some hatching dinosaur, he leaves the turkey-scented, vinyl-sided egg and makes his transient mark in the outside world. He stops at the street and turns to look at the house. The lights of his giant wreath sparkle and the front door and picture window drip icicle lights. Looking at the kitchen window, he sees Viv and Melanie pass back and forth at the sink, only the tops of their heads visible from street level. The house is like some illuminated novelty, a peepshow, observable but inaccessible. Gerry pulls his cap down to keep the fluffy snowflakes out of his eyes and sets off up the street.

It's fully dark when Gerry returns to the house, stamping snow off his boots on the deck and letting himself back into the scented warmth of the kitchen. Vivian is sitting at the kitchen desk, a smudged wine glass beside her, talking on the phone. The glass is one of a set of big, balloon-shaped ones that somebody gave them. It's one of only a few survivors of the set. The stems are too narrow for the big globes and they have broken with dignified restraint, one or two per holiday, for a couple of years.

“It's Duane,” Vivian says. “They're coming down. Here, talk to him.” She hands Gerry the phone but stays seated at the desk. He has to stretch the phone cord around her. He's reminded of the cartoons where somebody detaches the steering wheel and hands it to a passenger as the car careers out of control.

“Merry Christmas, Duane.”

“Merry Christmas, Gerry.”

“Your mother says we're going to be seeing you.”

“Yes, that's right. I've got laid-off. Things are slow in the field just now. We just found out a week ago,” Duane says, not sounding regretful enough for Gerry. Gerry also notices Duane always says yes, not yeah or yep or any of the short-hand affirmatives. It's as if he's relaying something solemn, something just this side of “yea verily.”

“That's too bad,” Gerry says.

“No, Gerry, I think it was a blessing.” Duane's voice warms. “I've been talking to some of the people at Pastor Bob's ministry. They think they can find something for me to do back home.”

“The move will upset the horse,” Gerry says surreally.

“We sold the horse. A friend of Gretchen's from the church bought it.”

“Too bad, or no, I guess, great really.” Gerry is unreasonably nostalgic for a horse he's met once. Irrationally, he wants loyalty to the family stable, the tribe's trusty steed. “Put on Gretchen and the kids, I'll say Merry Christmas.”

For a few minutes there's a confusion of people put on the phone, not knowing who they're talking to. Gerry finally makes his way through Duane's little family and hands them back to Vivian and Melanie.

Through much of Christmas evening, Gerry is by himself. Vivian and the kids disappear to the basement to play Christmas CD's and call extended family. He sits in the living room, scented with the Christmas tree, and toys with the idea of joining them or even of calling some of his own family that he rediscovered when his mother died. He discards the idea. They're fading back into the haze of the past thirty or so years. Besides, he doesn't really want family just now, extended or otherwise. He's got a basement full of it.

“I'll be home with bells on...,” the CD player rumbles underfoot in the basement. Vivian is singing along.

Gerry picks up a coffee table book on sailing from his pile of presents and looks at pictures of expensive boats that all appear to be crewed by male acrobats and the space debutantes from the coffee shop.

“Boat porn,” says Gerry to the Christmas tree. “It'll never take off in
Newfoundland until somebody invents the thermal thong.”

On TV, the Alastair Simm version of
A Christmas Carol
unwinds. Gerry has tried to correct himself of being a Scrooge-snob. He tries not to pronounce on its superiority at parties. If asked which version he prefers, he'll plump for the Disney cartoon or the Muppets. Now, however, watching Scrooge pine for Fezziwig's party, he unaccountably finds his throat choked and his eyes full of tears.

Gerry is asleep when Vivian comes upstairs to go to bed. She wakes him when she staggers slightly and bumps into the bedroom door. He hears her grunt as she pulls her sweater over her head and he feels the mattress cant sharply as she flops into bed.

“Are you awake?” She's switched from wine to beer in the course of the evening. He can smell it. He thinks beer is one of those smells like tobacco, smells that were warm and welcoming twenty years ago and are mildly sickening now.

“Now I am.” He hopes he's not being too obviously sarcastic. “I was just dozing,” he lies, to soften the tone.

“I don't think I'm going to take the tree down this year.”

Gerry has visions of a sort of Miss Haversham's Christmas tree, bald and shedding garlands in the height of summer. He lets her declaration lie there, hoping she'll fall asleep or change gears.

“Leave it up, boy... Love Christmas.”

“Yeah,” says Gerry, waiting. The gear change comes without warning.

“We should sell this place to Duane and get something smaller. He'd do all right on the difference between what he'll sell for up in Ottawa and what this place is worth.”

Gerry feels the universe wobble. In the past week or two he's felt smothered in the house. Now the suggestion of getting rid of it makes him feel exposed.

“You've been talking about this with him?”

“I'm going to leave the tree up,” Vivian says again. He waits for an answer to his question but none comes. He doesn't push. This isn't the time. A snore comes from Vivian's side of the bed, then another. He nudges her slightly. She stirs, settles again and the snore stops.

“We'll talk about it,” Gerry says. “Goodnight. Merry Christmas.”

It takes him a long time to go back to sleep. When he does, he dreams he's standing outside the house again, as he did when he went for his afternoon walk. There are no curtains on any of the windows. He can see Duane and Gretchen inside, and a crowd of strangers singing. When he goes to the door, it's locked. They don't hear him when he knocks.

In front of the dresser mirror, Gerry performs the half-remembered magic of tying a black bow tie. He is sweating slightly, holding his head up and trying to make his fingers perform the magic middle part of the process where the knot starts to bite in the centre and the ends take on definition. It's his third try and the two previous attempts have come out lop-sided or too loose. This time he judges the tensions right and gets a hard, tight knot between two reasonably equal wings of black, just enough crookedness to boast that this bow is tied by hand and not clipped or strapped-on. He sighs and shrugs the tension out of his shoulders, feeling the unfamiliar braces on them. He shrugs again, takes his dinner jacket off the back of the bedroom chair and puts it on. His image in the mirror is black and white. It seems to him that his face and hair are the monotone grey of old theatre marquee photos to match the puritan formality of his evening clothes, a middle-aged face, to be charitable about it.

“Behold the penguin in all his sober glory,” he calls down the hall to where Vivian is putting on her face in the bathroom. They're getting ready for a New Year's ball at a hotel downtown. Her office has booked tables. It's been a good year in the real estate business.

He walks down the hall and looks in at the open bathroom door. Vivian stops putting on eye shadow for a moment and looks sideways at him.

“You're all ready. You look nice.” Vivian likes Gerry to wear the dinner suit he's had since they started taking occasional cruises some years ago. She was surprised when he bought one.

“You could rent a tux on the boat. It says so in the brochure.”

“A tux is a rented dinner jacket,” he quoted from somewhere. “I
don't want to look like the senior prom.”

Surveying his shirt front above his cummerbund in the hall mirror, Gerry is reminded of the Shepard illustration of Toad in
Wind in the Willows
. He doesn't mind. He feels pleasantly anachronistic.

Vivian emerges from the bathroom. She's wearing black with a sparkle of encrusting-jet. A short jacket of the same material covers her shoulders. She looks encased, like something Egyptian or perhaps some rather splendid insect.

“I'm too old for off-the-shoulder,” she says. “God, I haven't had this girdle on in a while. I hope I can sit down.”

Melanie and Diana look around the corner from the kitchen.

“Wow,” Melanie says. “Wow,” Diana echoes obediently. Darren comes up from the basement in his pizza baker's whites. He's getting ready to go to work.