This All Happened (5 page)

A fraction is the minimum amount of paint that can drip from the beaker. It's enough paint to cover your fingernail. Enough to change considerably the hue of a gallon of avocado. The power of pigment.

With all the pictures off the walls her study looks relaxed. We've stacked Lydia's paintings and lamps in between the legs of upended chairs in the hall. I expect a caravan to be hauled up outside, a thin horse, ruts in the road from wagon wheels. There is a primitive, European feeling of exodus, of imminent rush and migrant behaviour, hanging around Lydia's stairwell.

25      Stories are all about meeting someone, Maisie says. You have the narrator. Then you are introduced to a character. And how does that person shape the protagonist? That's all a story ever is. Your protagonist meeting someone. That's how my novel begins, I say. Little Leo Percy (Josh) meeting Rockwell Kent (Max) at the train station.

I want to write a kid's book for Una. Have a whale meet a shark and discuss his time on land. How his tail is flat now and he has to return, always, to the surface to breathe. A story about returning home, but how the experience away changes you permanently.

26      I wake up on the couch cushions on the living-room floor. The rain sounds like plastic bubbling off the walls. Mom is directly above in my bed. I picked her up last night at the bus station. I watched her guide her feet down the steep hammered-metal steps.

She had her bags on the chair by the phone. She said, Is that okay?

Yes, I said. We can bring them up to your room later. Oh, there's a limit, she said.

What?

They only go that far for now it's a joke.

She asks about commitment, and I explain that Lydia and I are considering the question. She says, You should give yourself a deadline.

I say, I've never been in love before.

She says, Well, it's good to have your heart broken.

27      I introduce Mom to Iris and Helmut, and they look at her with little grins on, as though she explains certain aspects of who I am. Mom tells them I was a quiet child and I went through a time when I said even less. I would stay in my room. But she wouldnt investigate. I was conscientious and reliable. My brother, Junior, would come home from school and sprawl in the porch. I've just got to rest, he'd say. My mother told him people were waiting for their newspapers. When I took over the route, I was an obedient paperboy.

She mixes brewer's yeast in orange juice for her breakfast. She says she can run on that all morning.

She notices I have a hole in my shoe. She says, You take after your grandad. He wore starched shirts and wingtip shoes, very grand. But the shirt cuffs were frayed and the soles of the shoes had holes.

28      Lydia wants to take us out for lunch. She chooses a table against the wall. There are fresh flowers and Mom admires them.

We order the specials.

Mom says money is just after sex for problems in a marriage. Then she clarifies: Money never came between us in an irreconcilable way. We had differences but worked through it. And as for the first thing, the same can be said.

When the waitress arrives my mother asks: Are you having a wedding, or do you always have flowers?

Waitress: We always have them.

Mom: It's like having fruit when youre not sick.

Simple pleasures, and Lydia's happy to have her out. Mom thoroughly enjoys a meal cooked by someone else.

March

1
I convinced Mom to fly back to Corner Brook. And she called to say it was terrific, so fast, and Dad sort of enjoyed picking her up at the airport. The only drawback was that she missed having a bowl of soup in Gander.

No snow Cold, though. Strange but acceptable to have the city so bare. I hate frozen slush. When I was seven I thought Newfoundland was attached to Britain. And with Confederation they floated the island over.

So often I wake up and the fog, the blizzards, living here is like being on a barge, adrift in the Atlantic. There is no buffer to weather. We're forced to take the brunt of it. I love it.

Admission: I love choosing hard times. The not being able to choose is what frightens me. And that's what scares me most about having kids. It's true I dont care for surroundings. As long as the roof is solid, the fridge stocked, and you dont see your breath. But wallpaper and matching dinner plates and a brand-new car make my neck tight.

I have a gut feeling that Newfoundland can float. It's not inconceivable to haul up anchor and drift into the Gulf Stream. Any thought is possible.

2        I've found only two dots of snow in the crags of southside hills. Old man's beard, they call it.

I am incorporating a proposal of marriage into the novel. One of my key tenets: if you know what the next scene is, youve already written it. The novel is full of contemporary events. Lydia says, Be present in the past. But what I'm doing is being present, then infusing this into the past.

At the Ship the pussy willows, cut three weeks ago for Valentine's, have begun to bloom in their demi-litre jars. Fresh green shoots, seal fur, in the dark bar. The pussy willows know nothing of winter.

3        I was about to call Lydia when I pictured her phone and I thought about what she had to say about being present in the past and how impossible it is but instead I'm writing honest moments and people who are themselves and people who make fun of themselves and are silly and childish and unsophisticated and warm and generous and loving and full of toughness too and original and sexy and rough and animalish and playful and have guts and a red red tender heart bursting crying at small wonderful irrational things at moments at hot moments that steam and penetrate our brains and sizzle like a branding iron into the marrow and make us horny and I like trying to put words to these moments give particulars and hand them delicately to people like Lydia and I want them from her too that is my only demand on anyone because that is life that is all life is is moments doesnt she think and I think she does and she does among other things when the moment's right.

4        It's after badminton, on the only day of the year that is a command, march forth. Let's have a small drinky-poo, Lydia says. Maisie Pye and Max Wareham and Lydia Murphy.

At the Ship there's a little whiff of grass.

Maisie says they are moving to a house on Lemarchant Road.

Max: When?

I've got the keys now. It's a little three-bedroom. Yes, I have to move.

I'm thinking they can't pay the mortgage. Or maybe they were renting. Maybe Oliver has lost his job. But then we realize it's only Maisie and Una. No one can speak.

I say, So what's going on?

I'm leaving Oliver. I have to leave.

Maisie says it with finality. Her hands on the table edge pushing her shoulders back, her eyes closed.

Me: Do you want to say anything else about it?

Just that it's something I have to do.

Well. It's good that youve managed to reach a decision. She puts an arm, briefly, to my shoulder.

Lydia says, I'm so sad.

Maisie: It has been two hurdles. To decide, and then to actually do it. To find a place. To think about getting beds.

And how is Oliver?

He doesnt want me to go. Shouldnt he be the one leaving?

He says he can't leave.

Is he having an affair?

I found condoms.We dont use condoms.

Oh, Maisie.

Then he told me about this paralegal woman.

Are you capable of calling someone if you do need help?

Yes, Gabriel. Thanks.

In bed. Me: It made me afraid to be with you.

What do you mean?

If it can't work out between them.

Baby, does it make you not want to be with me?

Oliver's a legal-aid lawyer and Maisie's a writer and I thought, That's a good balance.

Lydia: And Maisie said it so simply, yet their life is so substantial. I wanted to say to her, Have you given this a lot of thought?

Me: She has given it a lot of thought. Both families, Oliver, everyone is probably saying to her, I hope youve given this a lot of thought. Do you think I was a little too direct?

I think she appreciated it. I didnt know what to say. I thought you were good.

I felt strange.

You like her.

Yes. But I wish they were together. I like it better that way. Does it make you nervous?

I guess I was uncomfortable.

I think she likes you too.

But we've gone out. And she's that way with everyone. That's true.

But we do seem to understand each other well.

I think she likes you. Dont you?

I guess so.

5        I'm sitting with Helmut, reading, when the room is suddenly painted with revolving blue, hungry light. There is the beep of something big going in reverse. Out on the end of Young Street, a cul de sac, a rogue city tractor piles snow against our fence. The attached houses are cast in fluorescence as the cab light spins. The snow is eight feet high stacked against the fence. I open the screen door. Youre nudging the fence, I say. The driver leaning out his door: If I knock it down, call city hall.

He reverses. Chains on the fat industrial tires smack against the pavement, sending up sparks. Kids are huddled behind a car, watching. They have made igloos out of the snow. I notice other neighbours are at their screen doors, calling in their children. The driver revs and shifts into first. The nose of the tractor rears. Headlights jerkily bear down on the mound. He races into the snow, stretches the tractor's hydraulic neck up, and the fence buckles. Six steel posts bend. The pickets lean and splinter, buttons on a fat man's gut. Three pickets burst and shoot off into the trees. The dark fence cracks and a raw new light is exposed from deep in the wood. The driver lifts the shovel and retreats, halts. Then roars towards the pile again. The steel posts groan, nails pulled from a board. The palings snap. A mound of heavy, dirty snow tumbles across the path. He retreats, studies the cul de sac. This time he pivots and heads back to the depot.

6        I look up from writing to watch the dying sun turn the snow on Signal Hill pink. The bottoms of clouds another pink. I can distinguish between pinks. There's a pigeon cooing, and it sounds like a rope pulled taut.

I walk down to Lydia's. Tinker Bumbo, asleep, is a balloon losing air. The flame in Lydia's fireplace sounds like a finger rubbing grit off a record needle.

We eat supper and walk down to the Ship. Lydia pulls down her tights to imitate Oliver. She is so quick and apt with imitation. Maisie, disgusted, throws away the chalk after scratching on the break. How funny is that. Can you weigh funniness. How long does an image stay with you. I think now that it was so funny. Yet I didnt laugh when Maisie threw the chalk. It's a funniness that lingers. Maisie threw the chalk out of not blind disgust but a self-conscious look-at-howshitty-that-shot-was disgust.

The cue ball hops over the cushion. It hits a beer bottle. I dont mind, for this moment, if Lydia sleeps with Wilf. She wants to go to the Spur, where he probably is. How I love Lydia gossiping with Maisie about men.

Somehow the world is more intimate and loving and I am generous with what I love. All love is displayed on an embroidered white cloth on long grass beneath a sycamore and generosity is running towards it from a ball field, both teams at once, running, throwing their gloves in the air.

7        Heartache is something you can have without ever having your heart broken.

Sometimes. In Lydia's kitchen. When she's mixing ingredients for a cake in front of a sunny window. Sometimes, like in photographs of swimmers in the distance, standing on sailboats, the sun cuts through the bodies so the knees and ankles and elbows have light coming through them. Bodies are cut into segments. Sometimes I see that happening to Lydia, so thin. When she's sideways. At the mixer churning a cold block of butter. And slowly the silver egg beaters mangle.

In the closet: the sleeves of my coat tucked into Lydia's coat pockets. The toes of her boots nudging into mine.

8        Max picks me up in his truck and we head down to Maisie's. She has put yellow sticky notes on the bits of furniture she's taking. There are garbage bags with bedding. A cardboard box stuffed with cutlery. She has dresses and shirts still on their hangers draped over a full-length mirror. She says, I just want to take one truckload and no more.

Her house on Lemarchant is little but solid. She has spent the weekend scouring it. I realize I havent been helping her.

But when we get the furniture in, and we've had a beer (the only thing in her fridge is a box of beer), she says, Thanks, boys. Now I want to be on my own.

Max says, Can we do your ass now?

I am leaning against the bathroom sink, my pants down. I've washed myself and spread vaseline from my hips to my thighs. Lucky youre not very hairy, Max says. Some people I ask to shave.

He is slapping patches of cold plaster over my ass. It's nice to have a set of confident hands moulding my ass.

He fires up a blow dryer.

He begins by prying from my left hip. It reminds me of peeling dead skin off my brother's sunburned back. Wet blisters of skin. Except this is an entire dry shell. And I see the form of my ass, I'm surprised how curved it is. It's a pretty ass. Max offers no criticism of it. He makes off with the mould in the fashion of a thief.

9        Lots of fat snow. We drive to Churchill Square for a bouquet of irises and carnations and a bottle of port. For Maisie. This encouragement of spring. I am in love with fresh flowers. They are a lavish and outrageous fact of living here. If nothing else, you can get fresh flowers at the start of March in Newfoundland. Lydia picks up some fat-free cookies and ultraviolet lotion.

On the way to Maisie's Lydia says, There arent enough storytelling songs.

I say, It's time Wilf Jardine wrote some love songs.

But he hasnt experienced that. He's experienced yearning. And break-up.

That's what love songs are all about, I say. The before and after.

But we are both absorbed in the here and now.

10      A trait in Lydia: to begin feeling guilty, then guilt transforms into resentment and anger. In the morning, when I'm leaving Lydia's and she doesnt want me to go.

I say, You want me to go, though. Youve said enough times you want more time alone.

Yes, Lydia says. I should work.

But she holds me, doesnt want me to go. I carry her to the couch. Then she's rigid. I've got so much to do, she says.

Okay.

I clap my hands and say, All right, let's get to it. Lydia pauses, then jumps up stiffly.

Okay, she says.

Me: What just happened?

Nothing.

Why are you being stiff?

Oh, it just sounds like youre talking to Tinker Bumbo. Come on and get up, clap your hands.

I'm not talking to you like youre Tinker Bumbo. I dont even talk to him like that.

Well, it felt like it.

I'm just trying to get us both started. If you want to work―if youre resenting not having worked yesterday then let's get at it.

She says, Are you upset that we're not hanging out? I say, Not upset, just disappointed.

It's a little fuse of anger that Lydia focuses on time spent with me as the thing to cut back on in order to get her work done and I'm trying to cut through the lingering and so she resents it.

Okay then, I'll see you.

And I leave, both of us angry.

Lydia will often say, What's wrong, baby? and when I tell her what's wrong, involving her in blame a little, she'll accept it for a minute, be sorry, then retaliate. She'll become defensive. If she could absorb it and leave it, without feeling that she has to defend. That she's in the right. It's as if she holds a club behind her back, asks what's the matter, and when I tell her, agrees, then gives me a quick dash on the head.

11      It's a sunny day and I'm thirty-four. When youre sad, events take on symbolic importance. Sadness connotes lacking, a want for something. Lydia brings over a Gabriel doll she's made for my birthday and I cry laughing. The black leather coat and stuffed body, stitched face. A rose corsage blooming, not that I wear a rose, but it's indicative of my joy at least what used to be my happiness. And it strikes me that this image is no longer who I am. Somehow, other emotions not my own have crept in. I'm no longer a romantic figure. I have grown wise. The clothesline is frozen in a shaded bank of snow. I have decided to settle my student loan. I phone the loans officer, Fabian Durdle. It's my birthday. He says, Do you think that'll impress Ottawa?

I get a bank draft for nine thousand dollars, and fifteen hundred in cash. I grab an elevator and knock on Fabian Durdle's office door.

That's half what you owe.

The rest, I say, is outrageous interest.

He calls Ottawa. Fabian is nodding in a bored way into the phone and then pauses.

Yes, he says. Gabriel English is here in front of me. With ten-five on the table. He says take it or he'll go bankrupt. Fabian puts the phone down.

Sign here.

Theyre taking it?

He nods.

I say, I'd like a witness, as it's a lot of cash.

Fabian: Gabriel, youve got to trust people more often.

But he's been dealing with me for ten years, and knows my idiosyncrasies. In fact, I know he respects them. No, I dont know that. But he is the perfect man for this job. Fabian Durdle holds no grudges. He calls in a secretary. As we're waiting Fabian studies the bank draft. He's not familiar with bank drafts.