Happiness of Fish (7 page)

Fragment: Mistress at the Overpass

Driscoll drove them to the cabin in a large black car that moved like a battleship through lesser traffic. After dropping Mrs. Driscoll off at her bowling league, they made their stately way across town, out of the narrow street canyons of the east and out to the Breughel-landscape scrub around the overpass. There, they drove down snowy ruts among the rabbit tracks and rail sidings
.

The mistress, whose name was Yvonne, arrived in her own small car. She was the widow of a man who had died in a hunting accident. She said she could never understand why he hunted because he didn't like moose meat very much although she did. Anyway, his buddy killed him, shooting blind, somewhere down around the Horse Chops
.

The three of them drank Scotch through a late winter afternoon. Around Driscoll, Yvonne had the air of a guide at some historic monument. They had a full set of weights and a weight-lifting bench in the cabin. Driscoll lifted weights to keep fit and Yvonne had taken it up. They both took vitamin B from a huge plastic jar
.

“Good for the liver,” Driscoll told George. “You can drink what you like if you eat right and take those.”

It was fully dark when George finally excused himself and left them
alone. He had to give a cab very elaborate instructions for finding him in the overpass wilderness. Twice, corrections had to be telephoned to the taxi company and relayed by radio to the cab which had gone up the wrong dead-end lane
.

Driving across the overpass, Gerry looks down and scans what's left of the woods by the old railway right-of-way, trying to find a sign of the cabin or even the track that led to it.

He remembers that Patricia disapproved of the visit when he told her about it.

“The man's married for God's sake! Think of his wife!” She stopped short of saying something to Mrs. Driscoll. That would be too much tampering in Gerry's supposed literary laboratory, a spoiling of his experiment. However, afterwards, she seemed to examine Gerry for symptoms of having affairs. Perhaps it was contagious. He realizes now that she was right. In a few years they both caught it, but he just caught affair sniffles from time to time. She got a terminal case and married somebody else. At the time, though, he just made a mental note that if adultery upset her, best not to tell her.

Words to live by, he thinks.

There's no sign of Driscoll's cabin now, or at least Gerry can't find it. Neither can he get the range hood, or at least not by Christmas. The people at the warehouse know the one he means but it's out of stock and they're not even sure it's made anymore. They say the people at the main store should have been able to tell him that.

A few years ago, Gerry read in the paper that his Patrick Driscoll had died. He hadn't seen him in twenty-five years or more but he went to the funeral home. It was a soft spring night, one of the first warm ones of the year, and Gerry went up in the gathering dusk. He wore a blazer and a button-down shirt and tie with khakis and boat shoes. Once upon a time it would have been called irreverent but no one seems to change to go to funeral homes anymore.

Gerry's “Yvonne” was the widow. The original wife had died years ago and she and Driscoll married. The children seemed to have accepted her, although some of them were her age. They stood around her protectively. Gerry knew some of the kids from the first marriage.
There was one daughter who acts, and another, Siobhan, who took up public relations for some government department years ago. When he met her, Gerry had never seen “Siobhan” written as a name before and referred to her privately as Shaboom. Once he told her that at some office party and she thought it was cute. Now she greeted Gerry at the door. He introduced himself but found he didn't need to.

“You're still on the radio?”

“Until a grown-up job comes along, I guess. I'm still trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up.”

“Who says you have to grow up?” she asked. “He never did. Not so you'd notice anyhow.”

She inclined her head to the long casket where the slightly yellow face reposed, propped up a bit in the satin ruffles. Except that his eyes were closed, Driscoll looked like he was trying to see the TV without too much effort while lying on the couch. Gerry looked at the yellow face and wondered if the vitamin B kept working. In his head floated a line from his drinking days: I know my liver redeemeth.

Siobhan told him she was living in Toronto now, working at a public relations firm. She had to be close to sixty but she looked fit and tanned. Her fingernails were painted a smooth cocoa brown.

Gerry had to be introduced to Yvonne.

“We met at Pat's cabin,” he told her when Siobhan took him over. They could have been sisters, one of whom had had a harder life. Yvonne seemed to have blended into the role of an old man's wife.

“Oh my, the cabin...” she said. “That's been torn down for years.”

It wasn't a very sad wake. Driscoll was old and had been sick the last few years. Gerry was re-introduced to the other kids, all of them his age at least. There were two sons with Florida golfers' tans. They seemed somehow impressed that Gerry could have drunk with their father and still be alive to tell the tale.

“Here's a man who used to go down to Frankie's place with Dad.”

“I remember him boasting about you the year you won some big golf tournament, a junior club championship?”

“God! That must have been what, '73, '74?”

Later, Gerry drove home with the window down for the first time that year. You could tell it was really spring. The dotted lines and arrows
on the streets bloomed bright white in the headlights, repainted and vivid after fading to nothing in the winter's salt. Visibility of street markings is becoming what Gerry has now learned to call “an issue” with him. On wet nights in late winter and early spring, he sometimes wonders what lane he's driving in. Recalling the brightness of the lines that night, Gerry reflects that now they're starting to fade again under this year's December salt.

“Tempus certainly does fugit,” he says aloud.

Gerry is in the mall for his final rush of Christmas shopping. He has a strategy for mall-stalking in the last days before Christmas; catch it while it's still asleep. He gets up in darkness and drives through the quiet streets where there are only a few luminously striped joggers. The ones he sees are the skinny Spandex variety with the bright glowing V's that seem to point to the middle of their backsides. Is it supposed to focus attention on the fitness of the bum or give you a central aiming point? Gerry is an inconsistent jogger at best, and, when he does jog, he wears a pair of ancient Zellers sweatpants and an old sweatshirt. The black long-underwear look of this morning's joggers isn't for him. If you're going out in tights you have to hark back to the Tudors, he thinks, although even they needed a sort of post-feudal ferocity to carry it off. Essex or Drake or some of Lady Jane Grey's tribe could get away with it because they'd thunder into your courtyard and impale you on your own maypole over a slow fire. At the other end of the scale, Malvolio and Osric come down to us as fashion fools.

“A hit, a very palpable hit,” Gerry mutters, mowing down joggers in his imagination.

The parking lot is almost empty when Gerry pulls in. With no cars, you can appreciate its bald topography, actually rolling over a low rise in the middle so it sheds rain. The ploughs and salt crews have been out and you can see the painted stalls on bare pavement, although the hills all around are ghostly with light new snow on the trees. Gerry parks carefully between the painted lines in the centre of the empty lot. He points the front of the Honda out into the hypothetical traffic lane for a quick getaway in case the shoppers turn nasty.

“S-A-S parking,” Gerry says to himself. Years ago he bought the Special Air Service survival book and learned to avoid snakes like tai pans and bushmasters if they ever slithered into Newfoundland. He read up on how to boil the goldfish and drink the water as you tried to outlive the neighbours after nuclear Armageddon. So far the need hasn't arisen. However, he parks, nose-out, for a quick getaway.

In the mall, he finds one coffee shop open earlier than the others. He carries a foam cup with him to the barber shop that is part of this morning's plan. The barber opens at seven. A haircut and the morning papers will occupy him until Wal-Mart opens in an hour or so.

The barbershop is a transplant from downtown and is old-fashioned in a modern sort of way. According to framed clippings on the walls, when it started up in the '50s it was ultra-modern. It had low, swivel easy chairs instead of high barber chairs. It gave the short back and sides haircuts, the Sal Mineo comb-backs and crews and brush cuts that still grace framed photos on the walls. Some of the photos are advertising shots, showing what you can do with Wildroot Cream Oil or Brylcream. Others are sports teams, hockey and softball mostly, wearing narrow-lapel jackets and skinny ties with big clips that go past the width of the tie. Team members sport the haircuts in the pictures.

When Gerry first came to town he wouldn't have gone to this barbershop. They were slow to get the hang of long hair. Besides, they were busy watching their sports teams grow up and move to the suburbs. By the time the long-haired had taken over the downtown sometime in the '80s, the barber shop moved to the mall.

Gerry fancies he can recognize some of the ancient sports teams in the chairs in the barbershop yet. There are retired faces under haircuts that are renewed weekly, although they don't need it. Gerry himself gets
monthly haircuts. He started coming here in the '90s, well after he'd begun keeping his hair shortish and after there had been a sort of convergence of styles. The barbershop has given long cuts for years now. Some disco-flavoured pictures of mullets and shags have even joined the ducktails and buzz-cuts on the wall. They all look about equally antiquated now.

Gerry gets his Christmas trim with the minimum of fuss. The conversation is morning, Christmas and minimal.

“Have you got your shopping done?”

“Just about, I should have it clewed up today.”

“You got your boat up for the winter, I guess?”

Gerry is not a sports follower so talking about his sailboat is his occasional key to some sorts of small talk. “Oh yes, got it up in October, Thanksgiving weekend.”

“The snow's holding off a bit.”

“Just enough for a white Christmas would be okay with me.” One day in this barbershop, Gerry had a long chat with a man who was waiting for hospital results. He didn't seem to expect them to be good.

“I've only just got enough hair again to need cutting,” he complained. “Now I'm going to have to start chemo again.”

The man was about ten years older than Gerry, thin and golf-club smart-casual. As he was leaving, he introduced himself. Gerry recognized the name. Twenty-odd years ago when he and Pat were falling apart he had spent some time with the man's ex-wife. The man had left her for somebody younger at work. She'd complain about her stretch marks as they smoked cigarettes in bed after making love. Gerry would trace them with a dismissive finger, or kiss them. He felt plagiarized when the movie
Shirley Valentine
came out and made a thing out of stretch-mark kissing. Sometimes he would lie with his head cushioned on her small belly while she would lay elaborate curses on her ex: biblical plagues and disasters. Sitting in the mall barbershop, it appeared to Gerry that the statute of limitations for those curses hadn't yet run out.

“Chemo's the shits.”

Today the barber vacuums his collar and holds the mirror up behind his head.

“Okay for another couple of weeks.”

“Yup, I ought to be safe from the dogcatcher for a little longer.” Gerry pays and leaves a five instead of his usual three-dollar tip for a fifteen-dollar haircut.

“Merry Christmas if I don't see you before the day.”

“Yes, you have a Merry Christmas now too.”

Conscious of his glowing, new-shaved neck and a few hair-ends in his collar, Gerry sets about his shopping. Last night he asked Vivian to reconfirm sizes for him. It's the sort of attention to detail that pleases her and can expiate other failings. He thinks he has the liturgy down pat. Vivian is medium. Melanie is smallish medium and Tanya is smallish small. Gretchen is large medium or smallish large. Duane is large and Darren is medium. Vivian offered to size the kids too, but Gerry has a personal rule against clothes for Christmas for little kids. Because Vivian has already shopped for all the grandkids once, he can relax in the knowledge he's doing extras.

For Joshua he finds a little radio-controlled car. It's not much bigger than the Matchbox toys he played with in the '50s. It sits on a little battery pack to charge itself and costs less than forty dollars. Radio-controlled stuff has got a lot cheaper. Gerry anticipates getting to play with the car himself when the kids are in bed. He buys a big economy-size box of spare double-A batteries.

AA batteries from Grampa in AA.

Natalie and Diana both get do-it-yourself jewellery kits. They're cheaper than the car but Vivian had told him she had only got Joshua a sweater so he could go a bit wild on boy-toys to even things out.

Despite the warnings from the police about stowing stuff in your car, Gerry shuttles bags out to his Honda and conceals them under seats and under the roll-out cover for the boot.

Trotting back inside, he hits Eddie Bauer and buys sweaters for the girls and shirts for Duane and Darren. That exhausts his mall shopping. When the Christmas range-hood project fell through, Vivian said she could use new winter boots and he'll have to go downtown to get what she has said she wants. He takes himself to a Second Cup for an espresso and a chocolate croissant to celebrate his efficiency.

With only the expensive trendy stores left, the downtown at Christmas seems unnaturally quiet to Gerry these days. In late afternoon he watches the streets clear. Vivian has taken the kids to the mall and they plan to stay and have supper and go to a movie. Gerry is back in the old street canyon of thirty years ago, watching the traffic thin out.