This All Happened Part 1

This All Happened.

Michael Winter.

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Introduction by Lisa Moore.

Gabriel English, the narrator of Michael Winter's This All Happened, has a lot in common with the writer Michael Winter. For instance, Gabriel is writing a novel based on the American artist Rockwell Kent. Michael Winter wrote the novel The Big Why, based on Rockwell Kent, soon after the publication of This All Happened.

Gabriel lives with roommates in a creaky downtown St. John's house with raspberries growing in the garden. Michael Winter, for a time, lived with roommates in a house downtown very like Gabriel's. When a visitor ate raspberries out of Michael's garden, she could smell them, later, on her fingers, just as Gabriel does.

And Gabriel has fallen dangerously in love with a gorgeous, much-sought- after filmmaker girlfriend who is full of errant desire and equivocation, ambivalence, ambition, joyousness, and insight. A girlfriend who, when she throws back her head in laughter, at the New Year's party that opens Winter's startlingly beautiful and spare novel, has a taut white throat, and lips in a crescent of broken apple.

But who knows for sure if it can be said that the same thing happened to Michael Winter? We are given a caveat: "This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people living or dead is intentional and encouraged."

Much of This All Happened is an interrogation of what is true, or how the stories we tell help the truth to shape-shift and transform. The chasm between truth and how we try to capture it with words (that ever-warping medium) has always been a preoccupation for Michael Winter, one that makes us aware of our subjectivity, causes us to question our beliefs, and jostles our understanding of what, exactly, happened.

Winter invents; no two of his novels are alike. Here the form is a record of a full year, unfolding day by day in an urgent, charging present tense. This All Happened is a log, noting the course of a turbulent love affair, each entry in chronological order, marked by the date.

Some entries are as brief as a koan: "There are white flowers on the raspberry bushes."

Some are aphoristic: "Life is a battle between attaining comfort and rebelling against it."

There is unabashed poetry: "The cod are full of capelin, Max says. They are little purses full of silver coins."

Some entries contain maxims about writing: "One of my key tenets: if you know what the next scene is you've already written it."

And there are elongated entries about moments: "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 s.e.xy 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 h.o.r.n.y and I like trying to put words to these moments give particulars and hand them delicately to people..."

On January 2, Gabriel tells us his girlfriend, Lydia, has these words for life: want, crave, desire, yearn.

He says: "And who wouldn't want these words, but they do frighten me."

In this way, Winter differs entirely from Gabriel English, because in this novel the author's very pulse and breath is full of want, craving, and desire-and though there's the boiling-over engine of jealousy, this prose is fearless.

Here is what I crave in any novel: surety.

An authority of voice that allows the reader that singular and intense pleasure: the suspension of disbelief.

This All Happened is bursting with that kind of authority. Also, there is humour, l.u.s.t, jealousy, landscape so accurately rendered the reader looks up and sees the boulders and scrubby spruce and churning ocean as though she had never seen them before.

There is talk of writing, of style and form, infidelity, drunkenness, community, friendship, canoeing, and anguish-inspiring, crazy-making, meaning-of-life-provoking love.

Love that burns so very hot and bright, it is destined not to last.

But one thing of which we may be certain: the record of the moment will endure.

Gabriel writes in his last entry: "A moment winks like a black locomotive, harnessed fire, sitting impatiently on its haunches, forever primed to lurch and devour."

What this means is that if this has not really all happened, it will, and will again and again, for every reader.

to, for, and because of MARY.

Gabriel English was the protagonist in a book of stories I wrote ent.i.tled One Last Good Look. Let me tell you about Gabriel English. He is a writer. He's supposed to be writing a novel. Instead, he writes a collection of daily vignettes over a full calendar year. These small windows onto moments follow the evolving pa.s.sion and anguish Gabriel feels for Lydia Murphy. The vignettes also doc.u.ment the desperate relationships that blossom and fail around him. Gabriel discusses his friends, confesses his failings, copies overheard drunken conversations, declares his dreams, reports gossip, and charts the ebb and flow of his love affair with the people and geography of Newfoundland in particular, the port city of St John's. The result of this daily examination is the book you're holding. This All Happened is a literary tableau of Newfoundland life, for better or for worse, seen from within.

Caveat: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people living or dead is intentional and encouraged. Fictional characters and experience come to life when we compare them with the people and places we know. New experience is always a comparison to the known.

- M. W.

January.

1 Lydia leans back to laugh at something Wilf Jardine says. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s are the closest thing to Wilf, and he is looking down her taut white throat. Lydia's teeth and lips a crescent of broken apple. Offering up her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and throat to Wilf. She wants to go elsewhere after the midnight fireworks, and that ambition to persist, I have decided, is drawing me to her.

A toast! and Max Wareham hands me a brandy. Max is naked under a pale raglan. I steady myself against the back of a chair. I love Max. This year I must confess all to Max. And in the periphery Lydia is still entranced by Wilf. Can I love a woman who is so entranced? Wilf lurches to me, kisses me, and I want to smack Wilf for being powerful in Lydia's eyes. I want to make sure my forearm catches his chin in the followthrough. Wilf Jardine's short white hair and suit jacket are doused in peppermint schnapps. He's apologizing for wolfing down Lydia. That's what he is, a wolf. Wilf the white-haired, ravenous wolf. He clinks my gla.s.s when the clock hands meet at twelve, and Max cries out, To Old Year's Night! I watch pearls of liquor spinning out before my brandy snifter smashes on the hardwood. Wet splinters across all the shoes. All Shoes Night. And Alex, our hostess, says, n.o.body move.

Alex Fleming, in a black sleeveless number, brushes our feet with a straw broom. She pushes flakes of wet gla.s.s into a yellow pan. She sweeps the toes of my black shoes a little extra, first act of the new year. Swipes at my knees, brush handle between my legs, and Max my dear friend Max is dancing barefoot in a raincoat.

Alex, just minutes before, had fingered the dust on the windowsill and said, drunkenly, Gabriel, you s.h.a.gger. She pressed a thigh against the outside of my knee and I could see down the entire front of her black number. Imagine, she's all of twenty-six and pressing me. She said, If I could get my claws into you. She gave me her entire eye. What I mean is she threw herself at me with one eye. And while I did not lurch, I did not decline.

Maisie Pye grabs my elbow and steers me back to Lydia.

Lydia leans on my shoulder. Wilf, she says. Wilf said, Any chance of a Christmas fling?

Me: Wilf said that?

Make you jealous?

Wilf Wilf f.u.c.k you Wilf.

Lydia and I rock against the fridge, Max opening the door for the last few beers. There's a garbage bucket full of ice cubes and broken beer bottles, and Max Wareham, when he spoke to me almost naked, spreading lapels to show his fat nipples, Max had a sliver of brown gla.s.s hanging from his lip the size of a number-fourteen wet fly. He says, I know youre the apple of someone's eye, Gabe.

I love you, man.

Max: I love you too, man. He pauses, almost in deep sorrow. He says, Hard to say I love you without adding man.

Me: You love me?

Max considers this.

I'm talking to Lydia, Max.

I love you anyway, man. I love you unconditionally, and you can leave off the man. Pretend I never said it.

I'm thinking, Never ask the one you love: Do you love me? Lydia: I love you, darling.

The ghost of burnt fireworks hovers over the water.

Max, as we wait for a cab, makes angel's wings in the garden. His shaved head in the snow. Lydia pulls up the collar of her astrakhan, holds me tight. I want her head to sink deep inside my chest.

2 Words Lydia has for life are want, crave, desire, yearn, and who wouldnt want these words, but they do frighten me. The appet.i.tes. They are good for an actor to possess. Lydia is a good actor and a filmmaker, though she is not meticulous in her technique. The frame is full of life and love. In life she cares for colour, quality of fabric, but if there's a rent under the arm, she hardly notices. I have seen her orchestrate the actions of a hundred crew and cast. Giving direction is her normal bent. It's what attracts and detracts.

I woke up in my own bed, alone. The cab dropped Lydia off and I went home alone and walked down the pathway to my little house on the cusp of downtown. I made new footprints in the snow, the first prints of the new year. Iris and Helmut were in the kitchen dancing to the radio. I didnt even brush my teeth. Stripped, that felt good, and being alone was good, too. I love a cold bedroom. And in the morning I turned on the s.p.a.ce heater and boiled the kettle and ate b.u.t.tered toast and tea. All New Year's Day I sat in my room and stared at the frozen harbour. I thought about marrying Lydia Murphy. I have two New Year's resolutions: to decide on Lydia and to finish a novel.

I love this room. I love the huge windows that meet at the corner of the house. I watched the snow patiently acc.u.mulate over surfaces. I called Lydia, but we took the day off from each other, exhausted.

I called Max. He'd gone to emerge with frostbite on his ears.

I wrote off the first of the new year. I heard Iris say to Helmut, I will meet you in Brazil. That phrase could have melted a snowman.

3 I call Lydia. She'd gone to Maisie and Oliver's last night (I declined, so hung over). Wilf was there. Wilf played a game with them at supper. Of putting a word on the forehead of someone else. Lydia stuck CHARM on Wilf's head. And he put TRUTH on hers.

Not jealous of her time with Wilf. Because of her tone of voice. The loving.

Maybe we should get married, I say.

Maybe.

Can I define Lydia's hesitation? Perhaps it's that I blurted out the marriage offer. Her tone was warm, trepidatious, scared of the prospect rather than of me. A good sign. Of course, I've been hinting at marriage for eighteen months. Am I that pathetic, that I wanted to marry her after our first date?

4 I walk down Long's Hill to Lydia's. Lydia's house is of better material than mine, but she has no view and the house is attached. There is a wooden banister and hardwood floors and exposed beams and a funky bathroom sink and tub. My house is the windows, the eyes that study the downtown and the harbour, that witness the marine traffic and the weather acc.u.mulating over the Grand Banks.

Lydia says she has met this woman, Daphne Yarn, and thinks she's perfect for Max. Daphne's a nurse, she has land in Brigus where she grows herbs and goats. I say, What makes you think of her and Max? Lydia: Max is a man who can appreciate nature. And Daphne has a serene beauty.

I find the term serene beauty insulting. Words like grace, serenity, harmony, peace. They all connote some kind of composure. How some people adopt a tone. The cultured poise that unnerves me. A measured evenness.

Lydia: Sure, youre like that when you leave a message on the phone to anyone.

And she mimics me. She may be right.

I dont know, though, if I'd wish Max on any woman. He's a hard case. I love him, but I'm not a woman.

How did she note this in Maxthis need for a solid fixture at home? It's true, and perhaps wildness desires a measure of calm. I know that I desire to spend some time outside of town. On my own. I tell Lydia I may ask Maisie and Oliver about their house in Heart's Desire. To spend a week or two there. Lydia says, It might be good for your writing.

5 I sleep at Lydia's and we cook poached eggs (I watch her add a drop of vinegar to the water) and we lie around the fire with Tinker b.u.mbo and then we walk over to Maisie and Oliver's. Before we leave Lydia's, she looks at the electric meter. It's winging around too fast, so she steps back inside to flick something off.

We buy beer at Theatre Pharmacy. You can buy bandages, a lady's purse, a car battery, and beer at this place. I get light beer to please Lydia. There's a dogberry that still has fruit, snow capping the berries like patriotic Canadian desserts. Little Una in the porch hands us slippers and I say, That's a very European thing to do, Una. Is she nine?

Maisie Pye folds her gla.s.ses by her plate. Ten years ago I went out with Maisie. Sometimes I think of this. I think, I could be married with a nine-year-old daughter. And so could Lydia. Lydia's ex, Earl, has a son now. Earl lives two streets away. Once, when we were walking home from the Ship, Lydia told me to shush. We were talking about Earl, under his window.

There is salsa and blue corn chips. Russian cold bean salad. Scalloped potatoes. Ham and pineapple. What a feed.

I ask if I can borrow their house in Heart's Desire. Oliver Squires dunks a cold shrimp into a hot sauce. That house is too cold for you.

Lydia: It's too cold and too far to drive.

Oliver: Are you both going out?

Me: It'll just be me.

Oliver: Put antifreeze in the toilet when you leave.

Maisie says she lived out in Heart's for one winter with Una. While Oliver finished his law degree at Dal.

What she doesnt say is, When Oliver and I were going through a hard time.

6 Snowstorm, the city closed down on Old Christmas Daybut from my windows it's nothing compared with childhood storms. Lydia has stayed over, though she doesnt like it here. There's no privacy from Iris and Helmut. There's a grain of aggravation in Lydia that I can't make a go of it without a roommate. And then there's the fact that I owe twenty thousand dollars in student loans. Lydia is solvent whereas I'm sc.r.a.ping by. The bedroom doors have an inch gap at the floor, so it's hard to be intimate. At least I could replace the doors. We wax up (waxes have lovely names: orange klister) and ski downtown, dropping off Lydia's last mortgage cheque. She owns her house. It'll be nineteen years before I own a house. Driveway shovellers encourage us by wagging their aluminum shovels. There's a new, wider shovel called a push.

Discarded Christmas trees are blown in wide arcs down the hill, clumps of silver tinsel attempting to make the trees respectful. Lydia slips by me on the road, crouched and silent, plunging into the downtown. Just a whirr from her skis. Her strength is s.e.xy.

All day the snow piles on. Towers of snow teetering towards houses. We buy split peas at Hallidays to make soup, and ski past the video store that glows against the twilight, the snow on the sills is fluorescent, a cat asleep by the cash register. We ski along Gower Street, to Lydia's little two-storey clapboard house. She's left lights on and it's like a pumpkin house. How soft the city is, silent, in the snow.

7 s...o...b..und in St John's. I sit by the fire at Lydia's with Tinker b.u.mbo. He is fifteen, arthritic, snores, and farts. His b.a.l.l.s flop out of his hindquarters like a purse. Lydia's doorbell rings. She's in the shower, so Tinker and I get it. Tinker wags and moans, his b.a.l.l.s swaying from knee to knee, a s.c.r.o.t.u.m pendulum.

A short man pushes past me.

h.e.l.lo, I say.

He sits on a chair and slips off his overshoes. He lifts an elbow to me. I take it. He wears a blue suit, is in his fifties. His eyes blink, then open wide. And I see now, he's blind. Short silver hair. Portly, with sausage fingers. He takes a dog biscuit from his breast pocket and Tinker sits to receive it. He leads me to the piano by the Christmas tree.

Youre new, he says.

Yes, I say.

I've been tuning this piano for thirty years.

He is wrenching off the small nuts in the back of the standup. It's a fair model, he says.

I ask if he'd like some coffee.

I rarely have anything between meals.

I bring coffee up to Lydia.

The piano tuner is here.