Order of Good Cheer (14 page)

“All this way and we don't get up the inlet to see the damn glacier!”

“A shame,” said the older one, smiling nonetheless, hearing what he already knew.

“Too much ice? Can you believe it? We wait and —”

“And they say the Hubbard's a magnificent sight.”

“— We wait out at the mouth, you can see all the bergs clogged in there, sure, but we wait a whole day and they tell us, ‘Too much ice, we're not goin' in.' ”

“Well, they're protecting their investment, aren't they. Plus the lawsuits from all the relatives of all us drowned loved ones?”

Andy liked the old smiler. The other wasn't really listening.

“We came for
that glacier
!”

“And it's a shame.” Here the smiler whacked the other on the elbow. “All that ice, and all this talk about global warming!”

The other said, “I
know
,” and scoffed.

What bothered Andy wasn't so much that the dumb guy somehow didn't know all the bergs were from the glacier melting, calving faster than usual. What bothered him more, what made the world feel
doubly
stupid, and doomed, was that he didn't get the old guy's joke.

But that's what his yard was doing: calving.

He started his car, stepped lightly on the gas and made the gentlest U-turn. What a marvel, to have changed the weather over our heads and the ocean at our feet. Someday he was going to buy a hybrid, he truly was. He'd actually considered one but opted for the Mustang. He often visualized his trip to the airport to meet Laura. There he was in the airport parking lot standing beside this black stallion, a hand on its hood, calming it. She would step from the terminal, carrying her luggage, she would scan the parking lot for him, the clouds would part, she'd see him and his glossy black steed and — Andy had no idea how she'd take to it. Maybe, once a PR girl always a PR girl, she'd want to crack a beer in the front seat and blow her hair back.

Over the steering wheel, he eyed the mounded thrust of his car's black hood, which gave you the sense of driving in the skull of a powerful hunting dragon. He asked himself what would be sexier, this Mustang or a beige hybrid, even to a woman with cancer, poisoned by the world's pollution. He knew the answer. There was nothing sexy in a reasonable car and there never would be. When you hit the gas, that punch to the gut and gonads was something both girls and boys liked.

Of course he felt uneasy thinking any of this but he sped away, savouring the car's rumbling lust while he still could. In his rearview sat the entire grain terminal, the row of silos, the annex up on a bin top, his speck of a tin shack, book in there waiting for him. What a marvel, to think of Champlain and those men in their compound, huddled over pitchy fires tossed by breezes they couldn't keep out, how they laboured out there in the snow, chewing at logs with dull axes, stacking firewood, burning a mid-sized tree to bake a dozen loaves of bread. If you explained climate change to them, if you told them what they were starting, here on their new continent, they'd stare off in incomprehension. Or maybe cross themselves, no wiser.

ANDY CAME TO
at his kitchen table when Pauline rang the doorbell, watching him through the door. He was embarrassed to get caught this way, fists clenched and breathing a little oddly, in a fantasy with Laura. Pauline could probably see it on his face. He leapt up, let her in, and on her cue they hugged, and as usual when he felt her excellent breasts against his chest he was aware that this was his best friend's wife. Pauline hung her coat on the wall peg and went off to the bathroom. It looked like she'd just dyed her hair again, that matte-black goth look. It didn't go with her hearty wash of freckles. It both did and didn't go with her health-food leanings.

He'd been fantasizing Laura's arrival. Usually it involved her emerging from airport bustle, her uncertain approach, her setting down a carry-on, and some sort of shy kiss, she usually pulling away, but then the deep and magical light in each other's eyes. Sometimes she was cool, so he adjusted by playing hard to get. Sometimes the fantasy took a more fantastical route. When Pauline rang the doorbell Andy was on his knees at Laura's feet, aware of the public spectacle and using everyone's energies of curiosity, amusement, and disapproval to add potency to his act. He an able knight to her ailing queen, resting his temple against her jutting hip bone. On his face that knight's mix of earnest sorrow, one less naive than those bystanders over there might think. His knight's sorrow came from awareness that his queen might ask him to leave her, forever, and of course he then must; or she might ask him to die for her and he would; or she might love him, but then of course one of them would be the first to die some day in any case.

Last night's Laura fantasy had been weirder than today's. Today's was pleasantly chest-swelling, but last night's was badly
lunatic. In real life he'd been watching a French film where two strangers meet in a tavern and go out into a dark alley. Spliced into their mostly comic sex act, up against the bricks, was a sudden clip of a sperm cell penetrating an egg, revealing the subterranean import of their dalliance. Andy had identified not with sperm but with egg. He was not sure why. Maybe it was his passivity, his lifestyle of mostly just sitting here, thinking, egglike with unborn fantasy. Wasn't there something a little womanly about his waiting for a lover to stop voyaging and come home? Maybe it was a danger sign, signalling a bad tilt to their relationship, an iffy power structure. In any case, in his fantasy here she came, flying in from an exciting life, lithe, sleek, penetrating, possibly
breastless
, a sperm to his egg. It was a dark image he had to shake his head to be rid of.

Andy reckoned he was generally excused and even sometimes applauded for his rich fantasy life. Though, sure, he was at times
accused
of having one. Accusers — those for whom pulling a spark plug weighed more than, say, reading a book on Zoroaster — saw a fantasy life to be only ostensibly rich, worthy only in a diaphanous sense, unbankable. Andy could agree that, sure, maybe he did live too much in his head.

He wasn't sure if Laura was an applauder or an accuser.

He remembered one hiking date to Stutz Rapids. It was that phase of their relationship where the main point was to find a secluded spot, unfurl a coat, and under nature's green witness make out with that ferocity known only to eighteen-year-olds who have decided that, having done it once, they are allowed to never stop. The destination was a treeless knoll Andy thought he could find. It threatened rain and they hadn't been together for a week. Andy remembered trembling with anticipation, and to cover his horniness talking non-stop. Actually she asked him to talk, to talk loud, for they'd neglected to bring some sort of
noisemaker to alert any bears of their approach. And that was when Andy invented his character Haggis Chandelier — Scottish gay detective — and in his best gay Scottish accent began a racy but ultimately lame story involving Haggis falling in love with any criminal he investigated. (Accosting one freshly handcuffed scowler, Haggis asked in the softest voice, “Be ye not even a wee bit remorseful then, big laddie?”) There was nowhere to go with that one, so Andy launched into a description of how great this hidden knoll was going to be, how
enchanted
, with fairies you could sense but not see, spirits who protected you from all harm so long as your mood stayed good, because that is what woke and sustained them, the good mood of happy humans, especially horny ones. In fact the famous capriciousness of fairies was a backward interpretation, it was happy human mischief that brought them to life in the first place. Andy kept it coming — when they found the knoll he pointed to the invisible ornate oak bed waiting just for them. Though smiling, Laura said, “I hope you like me as much as all the stuff you can't really see.” With her face lit up by a sun just now breaking through clouds, and further perfected by this coy humility, he almost died right then of love and horniness, and all afternoon took the greatest pains to show her how much more he liked her than the stuff he couldn't see.

But he couldn't tell then, and couldn't remember now, if what she said was accusation or applause.

“Um. Earth to Andy. Can I make more coffee?”

Andy nodded; Pauline knew where everything was. He told himself it didn't matter what Laura thought. He really shouldn't care. He was tired of these unmanly poses of his. Here in front of Pauline it was almost humiliating. If she could read his mind, this morning she would have seen him kneeling, and last night penetrated by sperm.

So why was he scared of Laura? Why was he picturing her as the top dog? It wasn't that way when they were together. They'd had balance. They'd seen eye to eye. Their yearning appeared to hurt about equally.

“Hey, that's not so bad,” Pauline said, pointing out the window at the backyard. “Drew said you lost a major chunk.”

“Maybe I exaggerated when I told him.”

“But, jeez, you lost some trees too.”

“Can see more water now.”

“What are you going to do? You going to put up a fence?”

Andy couldn't tell if she was being funny, or meant a fence to keep kids from falling off the new cliff, or if she'd just spoken mindlessly, which she could do. But she changed topics.

“So what we need to do,” she said, taking a pad and pencil from her pocket, “is make a list. We're going to get you at least three outfits. Outfit number one, something for the banquet tonight, right?” Behind her, coffee burbled in the maker.

He was afraid of Laura. Laura was coming back and he was afraid. Of the unknown. There. He'd just shucked the Andy Winslow oyster: he was afraid of anything new.

“You still going to that tonight?” Pauline asked. “You even listening to me?”

“I'm going. I'm listening.”

“Number two, something for basically ‘going out.' You know, even to the pub. Even”— she made a beaverish show of teeth, meant as disgust —“hitting the bar with Drew. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And three, something for when Laura gets back. You want something maybe just a bit souped up for that, right?”

Andy could see Pauline holding back, keeping her excitement in check on this one. She had long ago given up any matchmaking
on his behalf. Just as, like Drew, like everyone else, she had long ago stopped telling him to go somewhere, find someone, do
anything new.

She asked again, “Right?”

“Why not.” This concept of getting “outfits” was novel. It sounded so female. Guys had pants and shirts and the colours matched or didn't. Maybe metro-males had been wearing outfits for years and he hadn't noticed.

“You doing okay?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I dunno, you look really tired.”

“No, I'm okay.”

“Drew told me you looked really tired too. You sure you're okay?”

“I don't sleep well starting day shift, or something.”

“I like the sideburns, by the way. Way better than the beard.”

“Thanks.” These sideburns were always here. I just had to envision them and sculpt a way in until they were revealed.

“For some reason, those sideburns, I think Johnny Cash, even though you don't look anything like that. But maybe one outfit let's go for a man-in-black look.” She splashed herself more coffee, spilling a bit. “This is going to be fun, right?”

“Right.”

“God. Andy. What's it going to be like with her back here?” She was looking at him, guileless, innocent, the question rhetorical. She was including herself in it and minutely shook her head in wonder. Pauline and Laura had been friends. The four of them had been two couples together, tight all through the last year of school and that next summer.

“And I heard you're going out to get her at the airport?”

“That's right.”

“Well,
I
think it's sweet.”

Unlike your husband, Drew, who thinks it's pathetic. Who thinks it's naive. Who thinks it reveals a desperate friend he never knew.

“What do you think is sweet?”

“That you're this excited after twenty years.”

“Eighteen, actually.”

Pauline began her list and Andy half listened.

How could something
sweet
threaten everything? In thirty-nine years, he had built the cleanest, safest life of anyone he knew. He owned a house and land, albeit shrinking land. He had a job he didn't take home at night, paying him more than he could spend on gas, groceries,
CD
s, books, the weekly shiatsu, even outfits, and he would not be fired because he had been there forever. He had a great new car, he had a double kayak he never used. He had a mother who was healthy. He had no girlfriend, wife, or kids. The worries, knots, and complications that filled his friends' lives were precisely what he was free of. He did his shifts, read books, watched a popcorn movie with Drew every Tuesday. He walked a lot for exercise. He didn't have abs, but he could feel them under a forgivable and recently shrinking belly.

More and more he was thinking that, boring as it sounded, maybe consistency was the
definition
of comfort, or peace. Maybe stability was the hearth to warm one's feet at. Maybe sameness didn't mean one was stagnant. Maybe self-betterment was more subtle than people thought. Maybe it involved modesty and patience and had nothing to do with the extreme shift, the panicked search. Maybe breathing like a metronome was the most peace you could hope for.

Andy even knew when his life was going to end. His father had died of heart disease at sixty-three, and his grandfather at sixty-two of an identical condition, one with high genetic predictability
and a long name that Andy purposely did not commit to memory. Neither father nor grandfather was obese or smoked, so Andy was more or less a ticking clock, and the doctor he'd joked with about not making any plans after 2033 had only smiled and, apparently serious, said that twenty-five, twenty-six years was still a long time.