This All Happened Part 3

I said I'm having great fun with my characters. Because it's all set in the past. I describe Josh and Toby and Heart's Desire. About the research I've done on the American painter and of Bob Bartlett's trips to the North Pole. I'm using Max and Lydia and others as these historical characters. Max is going to be my Rockwell Kent. My father might be Bob Bartlett. That way, I can be present in the past.

Maisie says, So who am I?

I havent used you. Yet.

And she's disappointed.

30 The harbour is caught over with a thin ice sheet. A transport vessel, the ASL Sanderling, slices through the ice on its way to Montreal. It leaves a cold blue strip of linoleum behind it. It'll be back in six days. The Astron left yesterday and the Cabot will arrive tomorrow Cold days, the heater on behind me. The light is marbled, you see the current of the harbour. Gulls standing on the ice as the raw sewage surfaces. Sewage melts the ice.

Through the Narrows a thin line of open Atlantic. The hills that pinch the horizon have been trying for ten thousand years to acc.u.mulate topsoil. I love how you can see an entire afternoon's walk. The sweep of one topographical map playing itself out. Enough variety to keep me busy with a pair of binoculars. When Grenfell, a hundred years ago, first entered this port the entire city was still smouldering, burnt to the ground, only chimneys left standing, the sides of churches. These same churches.

Iris is downstairs. She's making coffee for Helmut. Helmut has large hands and his longest finger is his ring finger. You notice the ring fingers when he's gesturing. It's an attractive gesture.

31 Lydia's off to Halifax for a week. So we spend the day together. We sharpen our skates and drive to the Punchbowl. Max and Oliver and some kids have cleared the ice. There's a hockey game and there's a loop ploughed off the ice. I watch Oliver lean into a turn and cross his skates. A fluid hockey player, a product of the minor leagues. I never played hockey, except in the backyard on a rink made out of water from a hose. I skate behind Lydia, tuck down and hold on to her hips, and she leans ahead and tows me.

Max has a fire going in the woods beside the pond. He's having a boil-up, hot dogs and coffee. He's brought birch junks from home. Life is good.

February.

1 Lydia left this morning for Halifax to work on a script. It's not her script, but the money is good and she feels better when she's working. I am at the s.h.i.+p, having a drink with Max and Maisie. Max is holding his shaved head. The stubble is coming through and right now there is the outline of a cat's ears at his temples, so it's like he's stroking a cat. It gives him a devilish look, as though faded horns are burning through his scalp and he is trying to tame them. Max is building cabinets or Oliver and Maisie. But he is articulating one of his dreams, his hands up, gesturing wildly. He wants to make moulds of men's a.s.ses and hang the moulds in a row in a gallery.

Max: Also, I want to bolt a giant erect fibregla.s.s c.o.c.k onto the Royal Trust building. The c.o.c.k would be a sundial.

Maisie: That's funny. I just wrote today that the protagonist acts as a gnomon for the action.

Me: All over town, little strips of snow are hiding in the shadows of chimney stacks. The white strip angled north away from the sun. The chimney is a gnomon.

Maisie: When the world is a sundial, everything looks like a gnomon.

Max: Can I take a mould of your a.s.s, Gabe?

You can have my a.s.s, Max. And that's my limit.

2 I should be writing the novel, but instead I concentrate on Lydia. Remembering how she smelled a pair of gloves and knew who owned them. How can I turn that into a historical moment? Moments never attenuate. Moments are compressed into the dissolve of real time. I will never forget how she looked when she smelled those gloves. They were Wilf's gloves. She could smell cigarettes, she said. Mixed in with an indefinable personal scent, unmistakably Wilf's. I will have Rockwell Kent's wife have this ability. But Kathleen Kent is nothing like Lydia. Lydia is firmly planted, no-nonsense, strong clavicles and shoulders. She is attractive because of her mixture of gumption and beauty. Whereas Kathleen has a silent, introspective quality. She is serene. Lydia would never have thought that identifying an owner of gloves by smelling them was a special gift, unless I told her so. Kathleen Kent would know it was a skill worth prizing.

3 From my bedroom window I can watch Maisie walk down Parade Street with groceries. She's wearing a yellow raincoat. Una skids down the ice ahead of her. On the southside, skiffs are bunched together, hiding from the weather behind a rusting trawler. Two coast guard vessels, the Henry Larson and the Sir Wilfred Grenfell, are nose to nose, having a conversation about the cold.

I wait until Maisie is in her porch. I can see her run for the phone.

You should close your front door, missus.

Who is this.

I've frightened her. It's Gabe, I say.

Jeez, boy.

I tell her I'm reading about the barber who noticed Midas had big ears. The barber has to tell someone, though he has sworn to Midas that he will keep the secret. He digs a hole and whispers the gossip into the hole and buries it. But when the wind rustles through the gra.s.s, it is saying Midas has big ears. This is the story of all good fiction. A good story whispers whenever there's a breeze. You can dig a hole and bury your story, but the words will emerge from the undergrowth. Let the story whisper down the reader's backbone.

Maisie says I'm getting a little too poetic for her taste.

4 I pick up Lydia at the airport. She is full of people she met in Halifax. She tells me details of people I do not know. She tells me who she's attracted to. She says, You should have taken a left there. I say to her, I like going this way. She says, That way is shorter. This makes me tight. Lydia believes there is a right way and I believe there are many ways. This is a truth about our personalities. I was thinking this while I watched her plane pivot over the airport. I saw it, bright on a wing over chopped acres of Newfoundland winter Lydia said it looked like a thousand white sandwiches at a funeral. I walk in to stand by the luggage carousel. There's a crowd. I hear an attendant say, St John's is unique. The number of locals that come to greet the landed. I see Lydia. Her funky gla.s.ses and the angle of her jawline. At a distance, she's always smaller. Perhaps I judge size only from a distance. We hug and we are strangers, smiling a little too energetically. She avoids kissing me on the lips. It depresses me. We climb into Jethro, a cold air between us. As I'm driving I watch her wrist twist the rear-view mirror and apply lipstick. This makes the sadness melt.

I say, Youre a fas.h.i.+on cougar. And she laughs.

She says, When you travel, time rushes at you and past you and then you come home and bang! time stands still and you have to walk through it again.

It's like that optical illusion you get in a car that's been speeding all day and you stop for gas and the earth slowly slinks away as if youre in reverse. That's how Lydia has felt over the last few days. As if St John's is slowly moving away from her, she can't really get into it again.

Me: Or want to get into it.

Maybe that's it. When I'm alone I think of men who live in other cities. Whereas you think of women you'll see today.

I nod agreement to this.

She says, Arent you going to ask if I had an affair?

I say, I know you.

Oh, she says, there's lots I get by you.

5 There's an old woman in lane one with a white bathing cap. She's doing little push-away strokes and a few slow crawl strokes, neck arched way back.

It has taken me thirty-six days of the new year to begin exercising. I will do forty laps. I'm not in bad shape.

When she gets out it's slow up the chrome steps. She barely hauls herself out. A large savannah mammal. She finds her walking cane by the steps. Her knock knees. Thin legs and wide back. I think, if Lydia is like this at seventy-four I can still love her. Then I see she's one of the two slender, well-dressed ladies who shop at Coleman's. So careful to get to her chair. Where there's a bag and towel. She drapes the white towel over her shoulder, like angel's wings. I finish my laps. Twelve then twenty then eight, but I'm not tired (except my neck) and it's more the monotony. I catch up to her as she's still carefully reaching the women's showers, but she doesnt recognize me. For I am disguised as well in bathing trunks.

6 Max Wareham says he fell for Daphne Yarn because her eyes watered whenever it was windy. He noticed an inner light in her eyes that mirrored her external being. I said, Are you saying she has a serene beauty? No, he says, she has a deep laugh that undercuts the composure. But I've found a connective force, some adhesion, and this force pushed me to commit.

Max says, I'm crazy enough for two people. I need someone anch.o.r.ed.

He says his mother married his father after he asked her to dance to Hank Williams. They waltzed and he told her of his dog opening doors with its teeth, and she laughed.

He says, Now you with Lydia. I've never seen a man so c.u.n.tstruck.

I thought about that word all day. c.u.n.tstruck. I had to go out for a walk with it. It was a little dog that I put on a leash and let wander ahead of me. It was one oclock, the night's first puny hour. I stepped outside, preparing for it to feel like the furthest thing from summer. But a wind from the Gulf of Mexico had drifted in off course. You could smell the heat. Redolent and c.u.n.tstruck. It's true. Tonight should have been the coldest night on earth, and yet the soft wind reminded me of summer. I thought of the wind in s.e.xual terms. That this wind was having an affair with my little dog.

7 I write three pages on an old man who lives in Frogmarsh, near Brigus. I'm calling him the remittance man and I'm basing him on Wilf. He's done a bad deed in England and fled to the colony. A novel needs evil men. While driving, the remittance man sees a car broken down, a couple, and stops. He gives the man a lift to the nearest gas station. The man's wife stays with the car. At the station, the man says he can find his way back. But the remittance man, instead of continuing on, doubles back. He picks up the wife. He says, Your husband asked me to bring you to the gas station. She gets in, but the remittance man drives past the station. He pulls in to a dirt road that leads to a salvage yard.

This is all plot and action. And invented. It doesnt interest me.

8 When I think of G.o.d I think of a voice in my chest I tell promises to. I will not lie. I will give away a hundred dollars this month. I will not read Lydia's journal. I will praise others and not myself. I will steal only from corporations. I will not fool myself about the truth of my actions.

This type of promise builds you. It is the moral foundation.

I do not want to write another word on couples. On the words they tell each other. On detail. I have no interest in this. I want insight. So often my interests are prurient and carnal. I want to leap, rather than be hemmed by the drudgery of copying down rote event. There is nothing wrong with deluding yourself. I must pinpoint motive and repercussion.

9 Lydia calls and she's full of love, but I'm irritated. She was inviting me to come down for supper, but I declined. I said I'd already eaten when I hadnt. I declined because she had thought of me at the last minute. But that's her nature. Lydia lives with the evidence that surrounds her. She was oblivious to my existence right up until the moment she called me.

I walk to the pizza joint and order a slice. I have made a date with Max to play racquetball. I realize I've been volatile all week. I've been tight in the shoulders. I understand it has to do with the marriage proposal, how the proposal has been stored away in a cupboard behind Lydia's ear while she prepares for roles and a film this summer. The word that best describes my plight is anguish. The word comes to me while I'm whacking a racquetball. Max is exasperated. Anguish, he says, is something most people cannot afford to have (he smacks a low shot into the back corner) . It is a self-made dilemma. Most people are dealing with forces beyond their control. Anguish implies a position of your own doing.

But what's wrong with suffering from your own hand? Everyone, he says, gets into moods and it's no big deal. But there is no room for me to have a bit of a mood. Lydia gets angry at me.

Just tell her youre in a bit of a mood.

I dont always know I'm in a mood. Small things build when they should stop. Mood should not feed on mood.

Max can offer me no solution to this one.

10 Helmut Rehm is on his way to Boston for ten days. The company boat, Sailsoft, needs a new boom. I ask Helmut if sailboats, when they cross the Atlantic, take the Gulf Stream.

No. It doesnt go north now.

He says the Gulf Stream is a river in the ocean. It's about ten or fifteen miles wide and sailors use it all the way up the seaboard. It is a mechanical stair, he says. You just coast. But to cross the ocean you must wean yourself off it.

Everything in nature is a comparison to the human state. There is a stream in relations.h.i.+ps, a highway of water you can take that is the easiest route to destinations. But you both must be in that route.

11 I meet Lydia at the s.h.i.+p. The bar has a different light to it. Directly behind Lydia there are strings of white pins of light taped to the ceiling beams. White taffeta trailing from the posts in antic.i.p.ation of Valentine's. The white taffeta and white pins seem to bloom out of Lydia's head. As though she is of pure thought.

Oliver Squires puts on his coat and waves goodbye to us. He is still dressed in his court clothes, so I know he's been here since five. It's evident there's a large block of frost between him and Maisie.

I tell Maisie I dreamt she read a version of my novel and said,You can't write it like that, it's too much like my style. And I realized the style that I wanted was Maisie's. I had no style of my own. That I've never had personal style, but instead adopted the styles that I admire. The fear of being derivative.

Maisie nods and Lydia says being derivative is a fear we all have. The white taffeta lends a weight of truth to her statement.

12 I drop off the first few pages of the novel to Maisie. I put them in her mailbox. As I turn I see Oliver Squires walking towards me. He's just breaking for lunch at legal aid. He's loosened his black tie. His neck is too big for his s.h.i.+rt. He says, Have you been eating and defecating in my house again?

He invites me in. Welcome to the h.e.l.lhole.

He asks what my place is like; he has never been up there. We are at the window and look up the hill. You can see my bedroom window from there.

I've always admired that house, he says.

Oliver seems to be in a mood for confession. He appears exhausted. He fixes himself a sandwich and I decline. He keeps the fridge door open with one foot. He says, One thing I miss about being single is sleeping in my own bed. Maisie, she nudges me over to the edge of the bed. It's like she's pus.h.i.+ng me out. Like I'm a piece of grit in her sh.e.l.l. There's this acre of bed in front of her. We have this joke that she's cultivating a national park. I ask if any animals were poached last night.

He is telling me this story because he knows I'm a writer. He is telling me this so I'll write it down. It's as though he knows Maisie is writing about him and he wants me to have a piece of the action.

Oliver: One time, I dreamt I was in that park. I was tiny, on the duvet, like one of those fairground moonwalks. Puffy. Maisie was a mountain range in the distance, and I had to make my way across this desert. But the animals, of course.

Me: You didnt make it.

Oliver: No.

So it's good the way you are.

I suppose so.

Stick with what you got is what youre saying.

Is that what it all means?

Everything he says is tinged with the possibility he's having an affair.

13 Wind shudders the telephone poles, the cold churches. I pick up Lydia and we walk over to Max and Daphne's Valentine's party. Oliver in his speckled bow tie, his ginger-grey curly hair, and Wilf Jardine in that wool jacket and jeans discussing Spinoza. We try putting Oliver in the fridge as he's fetching a beer, but Maisie saves him. Or she's saving the fridge from injury. Part of Oliver wants to go in the fridge. But then he decides on two Jockey Club in one hand and a bottle of red Chianti in the other. His breath hot with alcohol.

Oliver: Show us your t.i.ts, Alex.

Alex leans back and flashes her t.i.ts at us. Just long enough for her nipples to register on the retina.

Oliver: What a gorgeous girl you are.

Max walks in with two dozen fresh ones. The tips of his ears red. Generous Max.

Max says, Oliver tries to be sophisticated. But I once saw him make instant coffee with hot water from a tap.

Daphne stands behind Max. She will use Max as a s.h.i.+eld to get through this night.

Oliver: Those were my years in the wilderness.

Max: Sure, youre only at an oasis. And youre some vain with your ginger hair.

Oliver: At least I have hair.

Max: You seem to have more hair now than you did then. Oliver: Back then. When I was with a Hobbesian woman: nasty, brutish, and short.

Alex, to me: How do you prepare oysters?

The oysters lie fiercely shut on a plate and I take them to the sink and ask Daphne for a strong, small knife.

Alex makes her way over. She is flagrant and I am drawn. She tells me of her short infatuation with Wilf Jardine. Wilf is showing Lydia the chords to his song. They talked on a bird count. Wilf wrote Alex a letter. She found herself watching him play guitar down at the Spur. He sang his one good song. Then, during a break, he sat in front of her and she studied the back of his neck, the grizzled white hair. She bought him a beer. He said, Alex. But in a frozen way. She knew then it was a mistake, but she slept with him. Sleeping with him got him out of her system.

Me: And he was your age when you were born.

Alex: He's just a s.e.xy guy. Or he had a moment of s.e.xiness. I am prying at the crimped, ceramic mouth.

What was the moment when Wilf became human?

When he got irritated, she says. We were driving through town in his old Valiant and I suggested we take a route and he was irritated.

I sever the muscle, wring a lemon. The lemon spurts over my hand. I lick the crevices of my hand. I hand Alex the opened oyster. She lays its ceramic mouth on her bottom lip. She leans back. I watch her white throat swallow. Her nipples, in the periphery, just show through her top. Then she stares straight into my eye. She says, Theyre delicious.

14 We're at an erotic reading in a room above the St John's curling club. Both Maisie and I are reading. When you go to the bar you can watch the curlers sweep down the rink. Wilf Jardine, at one point, leans to me and says, I think she likes you. Meaning Alex Fleming. And then he says, I wouldnt mind finding a blonde here tonight one with a great set of a.s.sets.