This All Happened Part 15

Making a film, he says.

When he speaks he looks at his feet, but when he's listening he stares you in the eye. Kids throwing themselves in the tall gra.s.s. Lydia points out a rusty bedspring. I figure the kids know of it, but the eldest bangs his head on it. It's as if Lydia created the bedspring and then drew the boy to it. He rubs his head, says to his dad, I bashed me head in! but forgets it as he sees a white sail at the horizon. The man tells Lydia she can film anything she wants. His wife inside the house the whole time.

25 Life is the battle between attaining comfort and rebelling against it.

26 It's Friday and I am feeling a little sorry for myself. I wonder if everybody suffers this in their loneliness.

Lydia worked late and then we went to the s.h.i.+p. I had wanted to spend just ten minutes alone with her, but she wanted to go have a drink with the film crew. She said, Theyre all going down.

I didnt tell her I wanted the ten minutes.

When we got out of the car, she raised her face to mine to be kissed. And said: Youre a good boyfriend, you dont ignore me.

27 I overhear Maisie Pye and Daphne Yarn talk at the bar. Maisie says, Drinking does nothing for your relations.h.i.+p. It may be great for getting f.u.c.ked, but not to meet men.

Alex arrives and I ask how things are with Craig.

A disaster. I ended up in behind his house in the dark curled up in a ball, crying. My emotions are all over the place. I've got photographs. Of the canoe trip.

Oh, let's see.

There's one of Alex in her canoe navigating the rapids. Craig is lying down in the back with the paddle gently steering.

Alex: Now that tells you so much, doesnt it?

What.

Well, look at my arm, so stiff. Like I'm twelve and I'm trying to be cool.

I dont see it that way, Alex.

Wilf Jardine comes in and we watch him as he leans over to Lydia.

Excuse me, he says. While I kiss my wife.

Lydia, in bed. What did you think of Wilf saying Excuse me while I kiss my wife.

It was funny. But I wish he didnt feel like he was doing something wrong.

Good.

He didnt see me.

It's just for the past five days we've been married on-set. And he lives the part.

28 Lydia is at Craig Regular's now, playing crib. She has called. I say, You two alone?

Yes.

That's cozy.

She says she will be by soon. But she waits an hour. She waits on purpose until it's too late. I say this. She says, I dont want to be made uncomfortable on the phone. She doesnt have any friends. Any time she spends with friends I resent. And Craig's been a major help to her on-set. Any time we spend with other people she instigates. We fight for fifty minutes. And now she has gone home because she has a long day ahead.

I've got to lighten up. Cut her some slack, as she says. Saying cozy was out of line.

Iris in the house the entire time.

Lydia would prefer if I just asked if Craig was interested in her, was she interested in him, okay? Instead of this stuff. She said, If you were man enough.

She'd thought that Craig and I could be friends. She used to have a lot of male friends whom she didnt sleep with.

29 These days have been cold, the hills wearing hats of fog.

The whitecaps pus.h.i.+ng out the Narrows yesterday morning. The sea starts here. Unleas.h.i.+ng waves that will rush to Portugal.

The first strawberries ripened this morning. I gave one to Iris on a small white plate.

Feeling still so exhausted, beaten down. Max said, It's good to see you up in spirits. Last seven times I've seen you youve been in misery. I thought you'd forgotten how to be happy.

I feel worn out and unworthy. Not being strong enough. I had wanted so much to be big.

30 I ask Maisie if she sometimes found herself in an uncomfortable silence with Oliver. Often, she says, we'd be doing different things in the same room, but it was understood we were together.

But what if you were eating a meal together.

Maisie: I can remember that happening, but it's normal for a couple especially if they live together to run out of things to say. Eventually you know all about them. I asked Oliver once if he felt uncomfortable with anything, and he mentioned the mealtimes. At first he'd tried to fill in the lapses of conversation, but then he realized our main reason for eating was to have food. And then he was okay with it. The way I see it, a dinner party is when you converse, and dialogue is the prime reason for being together but regular meals are just to eat.

I tell her Oliver's having a hard time of it.

Maisie: I've heard.

I confess my despair. That my journal is full of it, and Maisie says, Well, Gabe. You have to write the low points as well.

31 It's the weekend of the food fishery, and Max invites me out.

Max: A pound a foot will hold a boat.

Meaning a forty-foot boat needs a forty-pound anchor.

He says that when he was young, he'd ask his father how he knew when to turn in to port in the fog. You couldnt see anything and they didnt have sonar. His father said, Well, son, I'm on my second chew now When that's gone, we turn in.

He was given his father's boat. Max has put in sonar. All the fis.h.i.+ng boats have a metal diamond on a mast that acts as a radar reflector.

We can see the cod sitting on the sonar screen, a white ma.s.s in the blue water above the orange seabed. The caplin are just below the surface. Out on the water, the puffins are feeding on the caplin.

We throw over our jiggers. We let the line down to the bottom, and then haul in about four feet. Then we jig.

I get one quick and haul it up. It's just a dead weight. It takes thirty seconds of hauling to bring it to the surface. I see the cod's white belly and the arc of its black, freckled side. I've hooked it through the gut and it flops over the boat rail. About four pounds. It wrenches its tail up in agony.

Max jigs a sculpin. It's yellow and green and spiny. He beats it against the side of the boat until it falls off the hook.

Those are the only fish we catch.

The cod are full of caplin, Max says. They are little purses full of silver coins.

August.

1 On our way to Gallow's Cove. Max and Lydia and me. We stop at a Mary Brown's to eat fajitas. We sit in the parking lot to eat them. We look over the lot and across the road and over another paved lot to a Sobeys. There are about three acres of bare property that caters to automobiles. Fajitas perched on our high, bent knees. Then we wipe our fingers in the new gra.s.s and drive on.

The Cove is slanted green into the sea. There are cows, a weathered fence to duck under. We scan the field for a bull. It's the most easterly farm in North America. We descend towards the ocean, you can hear a cl.u.s.ter of gannets in the cliffsh.o.r.e. We check the dung of cows. Under trees we find chanterelles, small but we pick them. We look for psilocybes. Max finds a lone one.

Another month, he says.

I say, I've never done mushrooms.

This begins something for Max and Lydia. They swap psychedelic experiences. It happened in the fall with Lydia and at NewYear's for Max. The full moon ascends and blurs behind a jacket of cloud. It smudges the moon into Saturn. The ocean is surging white against the blue, upraised slate. Max was with Maisie Pye then, and that's why Oliver has never liked him. This, under the influence of the mushroom. Lydia was with Earl.

Max has forearms from manual labour, from laying pipe in the Northwest Territories, from living a summer in a canvas tent while building a hunting lodge. Each time I'm with him he has a previous life to reveal. He can always ill.u.s.trate a point with a personal story. It's as if, left to think long enough, Max could summon an entire personal universe.

2 We're at the s.h.i.+p and Craig Regular buys me a beer. I hate how he pretends to like me. He says his house in the Battery has had plumbing for only twenty years. In the seventies there was a honey bucket.

Alex says she photographed a sentinel fishery crew throwing a thousand grapefruits into the sea. To mirror cod egg dispersion. They got back a hundred. She didnt think they'd get any back.

And then we see Oliver in the corner. He's watching Maisie laugh at the bar.

I go over to say h.e.l.lo. Oliver says, Dont you hate it, Gabe. When the one you love has a laugh with someone else, a laugh you never hear from something youve said?

On the way home Lydia says, I like Oliver. Even if he is an a.s.shole when drunk.

It's true that Lydia prefers the company of men. That Maisie has always aggravated her a little. Because I get along with her so well.

3 I pick up Lydia in Jethro and drive west to Brigus.We stop to investigate a bog for bakeapples. I have a bottle of red wine, a clear bag of green arugula.

We walk through Daphne's garden. Mini tree farms. Ginko. Across the water I can see Kent's cottage. Bartlett's house is hidden in hawthorn bushes. What I should do is come out here and write.

Daphne says this age will be lost because our records are so fragile they are p.r.o.ne to any catastrophe. She says our handling of the past concentrating it in libraries and museums makes our records vulnerable to disintegration. We may be the first generation to acc.u.mulate a vast knowledge of the past, but this knowledge will be lost for the first and only time, along with the evidence.

4 We walk the length of Water Street with Tinker b.u.mbo. To the War Memorial, where the kids smile, facing the water. They like Tinker. They line up to pet him. At Fred's we check out the folk concert lineup.

Lydia says, I'm gonna take you home now.

We look at the fabrics in that Nepalese clothier. And back to the car. I do not protest. We hold hands. I try to recall where the Napoli pizzeria used to be. I'm surprised at how old photographs show the same structure, merely a difference in detail.

At my driveway we kiss, the headlights on the red gate.

Lydia: Can I visit if I'm feeling tired tomorrow morning? Yes.

I won't be able to talk to you, just sleep. You won't be offended?

We kiss in three stints during this conversation. Three pauses in the goodbye. I'm gonna miss you, I say.

5 We stop into Max's on our way to the folk festival. The thing about Max's house is that it's so big and beautiful that he has to take every job that comes to him. He's a slave to the house.

They are eating blue burgers blue cheese in the ground moose meat.

Daphne tells us how important it is to stay open and be friends with new people. That it's true that when you get to be thirty this effort diminishes, but without the effort you may as well end it. You have ended it. Max, in his undervest and smallpox vaccine scar, confesses he prefers the company of women.

Lydia: Gabe does too.

Max: Or is it the feminine side of people?

Funny, I say. It's the male side of women I like.

6 In the novel I have the boy grow up and come to St John's. To this city. Composed of roofs and walls and chimneys, windows, stout maple and dogberry, and the bank of hills on the other side of the harbour are streaked with pipelines to a tank farm. This is all I see, but I have to imagine it as it must have been eighty years ago. Telegraph poles. A patch of harbour with not a wave on it. I hear the long rub of tires on pavement, the motors echoing off hills and buildings. Every morning I pick a plateful of raspberries and eat them with a cup of coffee. I can smell the raspberries on my fingertips. It is very early in the morning, the hills would not photograph well, washed out by the sun. The fog always sleeps in the harbour and then the sun, when it lifts off the water, chases the white fog into the hills. As if the hills soak up the fog. The sun a bright orange cod after caplin.

You can hear the rivet shot of a hydraulic punch as workers dismantle the last stretch of wooden wharves in St John's. These wharves were here in the twenties. Making room for Hibernia facilities and the light blue Maersk support vessels.

7 Regatta day on Quidi Vidi pond. One ticket holding up the wheel. Sometimes the water is too bright to look at.

A family of ducks in the shade under a wooden walkbridge.

I bet a quarter on the crown and anchor and win a dollar.

Four boats race at once. The c.o.xswain holds a cord to a buoy. She also controls the rudder, on cords. Lydia's film crew is next.

A girl in a booth displays a stuffed black fox. Samosas and puri and overboiled hot dogs in stale buns. There's a brisk westerly. Close to thirty degrees.

I see Una with her friends. The kids have twenty dollars each: ten for gambling with, ten for eating.

Max last night, mimicking his father. I'm all right, he says, except I got the hole droppin out of me.

Lydia's team is second in its heat.

8 I serve Lydia pasta outside at the picnic table, with home-brew. She's wearing three shades of brown. And pink eye in both eyes. We lie in the gra.s.s. I've picked raspberries and I feed them to her. Lydia pretends to be a baby. A baby, she says, would not like raspberries.

No. A baby'd push the raspberries out with his tongue.

No, he'd do this.

And Lydia pushes out with her lips and tongue.

And he'd straighten his legs.