This All Happened (8 page)

17      Lydia says Maisie is beautiful. She has light coming out of her face. She agrees with Maisie's stand.

Lydia: If you ever have an affair and dont tell me, then it's your burden. I dont want to hear about it two years later.

Maisie is considerate. We dropped in just after she'd eaten, and she wiped down the dinner table. She was alone, Una with Oliver. She offered us apple pie and took the smallest piece. Articulate and well-mannered, she points out your habits in a way that doesn't cause offence (she made fun of my hand gestures by mimicking them). She takes her cigarette outdoors, in her own rented house.

18      The sun is a barrel down the Crosstown Arterial, lighting the southside hills, Shea Heights, the tank farm, all the way to the mini-marina. And the top floor of the Royal Trust.

I pick up my cheque from the arts council, cash it at the Royal Bank, and buy a bottle of eleven-dollar wine at the liquor store next door. I walk into Blue Peter Steamships.

I am taken by the idea of leaving St John's by sea. I am taken by the idea of vanishing. A small vengeful part of me, or an intolerant part of me, wants to leave Lydia, and this means leaving St John's. And so I delight in the fantasy of preparing a departure.

Blue Peter has an open-air-concept office, a half-acre of carpet, and three oak desks. There's a woman, a sixty-year-old man, and a young man in a ninety-dollar shirt. I finger the young man's desk. I cradle the bottle of wine along my forearm.

I was just wondering if you still take passengers.

Young man: You want to cross the Atlantic by boat?

A twenty-foot skylight beaming in a prism above. A bank of windows to my left. You can watch ships come and go through the Narrows.

The ninety-dollar shirt says, Those days are long gone.

I walk home with the eleven-dollar wine. I am the kind of man who finds it hard to spend more than that on a bottle of wine. Lydia will often pour a glass of seventeen-dollar wine.

19      The last minutes of last call in the Ship Inn, encore of the evening. Lydia swirls her brandy in victory. Max says, As soon as you write about a culture, then you know it's gone.

The lights come up and we stand surprised and accept the applause of our own drunkenness, the embarrassments of the night, when our actions are hidden in smoke and darkness, the fictions we flirt with. Illicit lovers caught by the wrong husband.

It was opening night of the play at the LSPU Hall, and Lydia, in her small part, was terrific. She became someone else, something I can't do. I dont have the proper brain to pretend and be convincing.

We manage the stairs to Duckworth Street and speak quietly under the ear that hears all of downtown St John's. Quiet with the stories you tell, or the wrong person will hear you. Whispers from actors, from producers, from songwriters and one drummer. There are people who believe in God and people seeking God and people who are convinced there is no God. All walking up the stairs into cars on Duckworth Street.

We walk up past the LSPU Hall, the amethyst of St John's theatre. A green clapboard building that holds up a hill of attached eighty-year-old houses that cling together in the hope of money and love and insight. Not optimism, but hope. The pink, white, and green national flag of Newfoundland emblazoned on the Hall's forehead, a wild palomino, stalwart in a domesticated land, where Lydia delivered her stellar performance.

Lydia and I walk up Long's Hill and then up the stairs to my room and I sit here at the windows while she sleeps. I am so proud of her. I look at the harbour with my thoughts varnished by this supreme feeling. All spring, only the
Astron
has left port. It's a dead port. A purse seiner shelters behind a rusting trawler. Tourists will soon be pointing their video cameras at things that dont move: the basilica and Cabot Tower.

While beneath them the sewage outfall is gobbled up by seagulls. Boyd Coady says the water has changed in the thirty years since the Portuguese white fleet docked here. It was pollution from boats back then. Now it's the city's waste that colours the water as it blooms brown into the crystal green depths of the Atlantic.

I turn from this desolation to the fullness of my bed. I curl into the side of Lydia Murphy.

20      Alex tells me that most men are mediocre: I want a man I find interesting.

She was once almost married.

I ask for moments.

This very date seven years ago.

When you were nineteen, I say.

Yes, she says.

She met a man in a staircase. They went out for two years. He's a philosopher now. Earl Quigley knows him. He asked her to marry him. He had met her parents. But she said no.

Alex: I dont know why now, and I regret it. But at the same time I wonder.

I drive her back to her place on Duckworth. On the way I stop at Lydia's and point out her house. All the windows are dark. It's about midnight.

She's working late, I say.

I shift from first to second and accidentally touch her knee. Alex's knee doesnt flinch.

21      I tell Lydia of Alex's idea. Of taking pictures of men, concentrating, as they play pool. As part of the passion exhibit.

I'm speaking into the pillow. I've decided I have to tell her this.

You crop the photo so you dont know theyre shooting pool. Youre left with the concentration.

Lydia: Concentration brings a peculiar look to the face.

Me: A lot of my memories of my father are in acts of concentration.

It's like lovemaking.

Well. That's not what I think of when I think of my father. I think Alex telling you this is a bit like lovemaking.

It's intimate. But it's art.

22      I rent
Raging Bull.
I'm walking along Gower Street at 10 p.m. Three kids, fifteen years old, start yelling.

Beat the fucking shit out of ya!

A dirty snowball hits a light pole ahead of me. I cross the street, pass them. Another snowball whizzes by my head. I stop and stick the video in my jeans. Turn. I point to one of them.

He says, Are you giving me the finger?

They wonder if I speak English, because I havent spoken. One walks close, yelling like a mongrel, and I grab him at the collar, take him down and feel like smacking him. I have a knee to his chest. I'm surprised I've managed to catch him, like swatting a fly with one hand. The other two scream. Four more boys run up, bigger shapes. Some as tall as me. I back off and I see they have hockey sticks. But theyre in silhouette. I decide to boot it out of there. And they, of course, run after me. Running is a bad idea, I realize. Running obliges them to catch me. I turn to see about three eighteen-year-old boys with the younger pack behind them. They doggedly run after me along Gower. I run past Lydia's (they'll just beat out the windows) and jog up Garrison Hill. They are shouting for me to hold up. I continue west along Harvey Road. And make a stand under a streetlight by the Big R. If I'm going to be beaten up it will be in the light, the police station just across the road. They surround me, catching their breath, bent over, hands on knees.

We just want to know, the biggest boy says, what happened.

I tell them, my throat burning for air: Throwing snowballs, verbal threats, I live in the neighbourhood. I took one down. Big boy: That's okay. We'll take care of things.

I say, Youre a good feller.

They walk back. My throat raw from the run, exhausted. I can barely laugh at my own panic. The adrenaline still hot in my skin. I walk down Long's Hill, past Gower Street United, and wait in the shadows. The boys are slow returning, as if changing their minds. They pick at potholes with the hockey sticks. I walk briskly to Lydia's, but her door's locked. I dont have a goddamn key. She's on the phone. She stretches the phone cord into the porch to open the door, and I rush past her. I drink water in the bathroom and try to tell her what happened. She says, You should have pounded them.

But they were fifteen years old.

So what?

They'd have me up on charges.

What would a judge say if they did?

Lydia.

What?

23      When she says, Goodnight, Gabe, I say, Goodnight, babe. I say, You hardly ever call me Gabriel. She says you hardly ever call me Lydia.

That's not true.

It is true.Youre always calling me babe.

On the phone I call you Lydia.

Once. I remember hearing it on the answering machine when I got home. My name and it struck me how you hardly ever say it.

I think about this argument. That I dont like to sway opinion. When something sounds untrue but Lydia believes it, I find it hard to convince her otherwise. I would be a bad lawyer. I regret that she feels it, and I will usually try only once to describe my side of things. If she still holds to her opinion, I'm loathe to object.

24      I nose the green lobster into the boiling water. His tail flexes, full of bewilderment. A claw taps the side of the pot. It takes about ninety seconds for him to resign himself, for his shell to turn orange.

A dip made of melted butter, lemon, garlic, and parsley. I spread the leaves of a newspaper over Lydia's dinner table. Lydia wonders which of her boyfriends hammered the claws. Was it Earl? He'd go to the tool chest and get a hammer.

At this very table.

Corn, I say, is the lobster of the vegetable family.

Lydia: Now that sort of statement. That's where you lose me.

I think about this. Why did I make that pronouncement, which feels true to me. Theyre both large, I say. A solid colour. You boil them alive and theyre seasonal. You eat only a select part of the whole body. And pepper's important.

Lydia accepts this. She reads me a quote from Salinger, about images and how God will understand if there's confusion or misuse of images. Youre better off not getting wrapped up in the small stuff of right and wrong.

25      In the morning I tell Lydia it's time to get up. No, not yet, she says. Then the doorbell. She has forgotten that Maisie and Daphne are coming for yoga. Stay in bed, she says.

I wake again and there's no sound. And I get up. Downstairs this note. Gabe, dont leave.

It's nearly io a.m. when Lydia returns. And sits with me. Sometimes when she's alone she thinks of her past lives and starts to feel sad. She tells me how Earl never cried. Nothing in life is tender, Earl would tell Lydia when she was crying. He didnt see the point in crying.

We lie down for a few minutes. She's made me a little sad, but I've cheered her up by consoling her. Then the phone. And Lydia has to go. She'll call me when she's through. I'm glad you cry, she says.

As I walk home I spot a wry cat leaping to my fence. He's after a grosbeak. He's as orange as a kipper.

26      Max says he was driving in from Arnold's Cove, where his father lives. Just past Whitbourne something hard landed on his truck hood. Then a leg smashed through his windshield.

You hit a moose?

Max: No. It fell out of the sky.

He found the head by the side of the road. There was a full quarter torn from the hip that landed in the back of the truck. He drove back to Monty's Restaurant and called the cops. The cops told him what happened. A transport truck heading west hit the moose. The moose flew off its spoiler, twirled in the air, torn to bits, and landed on Max's truck heading east.

Max is dressing the quarter of moose that landed in the truck bed. Nothing wrong with a bit of tenderized spring moose.

27      Upstairs reading a fashion magazine. Lydia licking her finger to turn the pages, commenting on the looks of the stars.

Me: You often pick out women who look like you and say theyre gorgeous.

Lydia is silent. She's taken offence to that because it's egotistical. She starts listing women in town whom she has said are beautiful but who look nothing like her. She wants me, I think, to retract. And all I want is to move on why can't I have an unsupported opinion? Why can't she just see it as funny? She thinks that I look upon it critically, that I won't go out on a limb, ever, and won't admit or see that I am acting critically.

She gets up for yoga and I rise when I hear her playing Mozart and Beethoven on the piano. I say, That's beautiful. She says, That's because my parents paid for music lessons.

28      Craig Regular, Lydia says, has spent three years in retreat. Now he's in Seattle. He rents his house in the Battery. His tenant moved out, so he decided to come home for a visit.

Lydia says my handwriting reminds her of Earl's. Earl Quigley and Craig Regular were best friends. Lydia is good at particular explanations. Reasoning why. She says that our vowels and consonants take up the same amount of space, that they remind her of rows of teeth. That it's not confined, but a loose script.

29      Ten p.m. at Max's, playing poker. Lydia and Wilf Jardine have left the table to sing and have a laugh and I feel tight. They are singing a song I thought was my song with Lydia, but now I see it's a song she has with Wilf. I am unable to loosen up. It's about Lydia's passion. I can see a novel of a man whose movements are contemplative and their effect is not immediate.

The novel starts with them contemplating marriage. Gabriel's tension and Lydia's freedom with others. She longs, but she stops herself unconsciously and she loves Gabe's quiet goodness and he loves that she loves this in him and he loves her bigness in the world. But still we wonder about him; we dont see Gabe's worth (because it is an invisible thing), only Lydia's (external, sensuous, obvious, full of acts of will), and Gabriel hampering her and holding her back. She's not free. Then comes Alex Fleming, who sees Gabriel, understands his inner working, and suddenly the reader recognizes why he's great and talented, because Alex brings his treasure to light. Alex complements his thought and his creativity is ignited. They connect and Lydia sees it, Lydia knows again why he's great, the reason she's in love with him. But Lydia understands she can't bring it out in him. She needs Alex to encourage it and by this time he is engulfed by Alex.