This All Happened Part 24

Taylor makes them.

Oh, it's Taylor.

The eighteen-wheelers wait in line, snorting exhaust, the Taylor operator does not hesitate. He spends less than five seconds at the side of the transport truck, his hydraulic front end (at least forty feet high) clamps onto the container is it magnetic? lifts, the rear wheels pivot, he swings towards the neat stack of blue containers awaiting an Oceanex vessel. He pivots the rear wheels, returns to the next truck. The previous truck now making a slow loop around the stacked containers.

5 I attend Boyd's trial. I sit with Lydia and we share a look. That beyond it all life is peculiar, we're healthy and blessed, and we are curious. We are not going to be mean to each other. Oliver Squires allows Boyd to confess to taking 114 items from eight houses in the neighbourhood. His neighbours are all present. Boyd says it wasnt personal. He just needed things now and again and he was tired of waiting in line to pay for things. He says he's sorry.

The judge sentences him to three years.

6 Alex says things tailored for me. The ideas seem to be performed or moulded to what she thinks I'd like to hear. It's flattering but annoying. Because I want her to be herself. Lydia never did that, unless she was talking to Craig Regular. Perhaps we do it to those we have crushes on. I hate seeing it in Lydia, because it implies the person she is talking to is out of her reach.

7 Alex says, Have you ever been to the synagogue? Come on, let's go.

It's Hanukkah. A wall of windows made from Stars of David.

Alex: You might be expected to wear a keepah there's a box of them at the door.

Is that the same as a yarmulke?

Yes.

Does this one fit?

It's fine, Gabe.

In a cold room plaques of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, proclamations during the Yom Kippur War. In 1931 Hymen Feder donated three dollars. A Chagall print of Moses with the Torah.

Alex says all synagogues smell the same. A mixture of must and stale seeds. She says only five people attend Friday meetings. It's outport Judaism, she says.

How do you know so much about it?

I keep an interest in what goes on, Gabe.

We sit in the warm room at a table near the stage. There is to be a children's play. The play has a scientist refusing to go to the Hanukkah party. When her friends leave, she is killed during a chemical discovery. Moral: beware the works of man.

We are sitting with a doctor and his wife. They are both learning Hebrew There are no vowels. Alex asks if sh.e.l.lfish can be kosher. No, the doctor says, because they are scavengers on the bottom.

He sticks out his hands and scrabbles his fingers over the tablecloth, the cloth gathers under his fingers until a gla.s.s topples. Scavengers, he says again.

8 Una and I watch Max filing pyrophyllite. He sits cross-legged and wears a surgical mask. The soapstone is from Manuels. He pulls down the mask and smiles. Newfoundland, he says, has the best stone in the world. He's doing this piece for Daphne, it's slightly abstract. Near his knees are wedges of cast-off stone. That's a tail of a humpback, Una says.

Max says, You can have the humpback.

When I say a new word, like pyrophyllite, I have a propensity to forget it.

Una's game when we're walking home: Why does underwear start with an H?

Why?

Because they lie in a heap on the floor.

9 Maisie's favourite found poem is: thick fat back loose lean salt beef. We are walking up from the Ship. She opens a frail yellow umbrella. The poem was on a piece of shirt card in Vey's corner store for ten years. Now Vey's has been sold, renovated, and is for sale again as a house. There was a pot-bellied wood-stove between the aisles.

Maisie says there's wonder in this life. I say, And bewilderment. Thank you, Gabe. That's the word.

10 Alex says, There's your Christmas present. I look behind me, Where. There, she says. In the near vision I see a tight filament of dental floss and a small box hanging from it. At eye level. You look in the box. The box has a gla.s.s front that's been sandblasted except for an eye, which you can look through. At the back of the box is another eye. It is a photograph of my eye. Then she shows me bits of furniture she's made: wooden arms for a chair. Human arms. She's adding pearls and chunks of mirror. Alex has sculpted an ear that she carved by feeling her own ear. She carved from touch. Translating touch into vision.

Alex wants to build a corner camera. You stand at an intersection and the two barrels of the camera take a picture of both streets converging. The photographic paper is at a right angle and you mount the photo in the corner of a room to get the correct perspective. Of two streets meeting. I say, Does such a camera exist? Alex: No. I'm going to invent one.

She says she's bored with flat art.

We eat off plates made of fired clay.

Everything in Alex's house is art.

We bake squash stuffed with lemon and dates and mushrooms and garlic.

We drink the wine and I walk home in the clear, cold air.

Sometimes you can see more in night air than you can in the day. Maybe it's the city lights.

11 Oliver talks of legal scandals. He's not the only lawyer to have left his wife for a paralegal student. He puts on his overcoat, a new coat for him. I say, Nice coat. He says that Maisie never liked it on him. That it's grubby. She's got something against second-hand clothes. It's okay if you have money. But for the poor, it marks you as poor.

I tell this to Maisie later. And I say, The coat is a bit grubby. Yes, she says. Fact is, it doesnt look good on him.

12 Max: When they were building the office tower, I didnt think it would ruin the view. At first, the scaffolding around the infrastructure blocked only a little bit of the Narrows. It wasnt offensive. I thought I could live with that. Seemed a narrow building. Then I found out that was only the elevator shaft. So we grew trees in the backyard and now there's nothing.

13 I watch Craig Regular walking out of a restaurant carrying an Obusforme for his back. Tinker b.u.mbo at his side.

Craig holds the door. He is holding the door open for Lydia.

I follow them. I havent allowed myself to think that they really are an item.

They enter the Mighty White laundromat.

I stroke Tinker, who wags, blind, but his nose knows me. I think of the dog that saved Ernest Chafe. Chafe, lost in a storm, tied his sled dog to his wrist. The dog sniffed his way back to camp.

Craig is pushing detergent along the lid of a public washing machine, coaxing it down the crack in the lid. Wiping his hand over the lid to get all the blue detergent down. His money's worth.

Now, he's trying on a new shirt. I can tell that Lydia has bought the shirt. She tells him to try it on. Does she want to see if it will fit?

They get in Lydia's car. I follow in mine. They drive into the Battery. To Craig's house beyond the yellow rail.

I sit in the car and watch them through Craig's kitchen window. It is a beautiful window that looks back over St John's. His view is the reverse of my view.

There are two frozen salmon steaks hauled out to thaw. Their pink skin crystallizing to a hot white. Craig turns on a light and closes the curtains.

14 There is a warm wind blowing, a soft b.u.t.tery moon. Max baked a brie with glazed crushed walnuts, a date on top. There is fresh-baked sourdough bread. We dip chunks into the melted brie and drink wine.

I ask Daphne what they did today.

Daphne: Max cooked a pheasant.

A pheasant?

Max: Daphne told me you can find pheasant in Sobeys and I imagined them hiding in behind the boxes of Cheerios, wild pheasant nesting in the rafters.

Pheasant is a good dish, Daphne says.

Max: I stuffed it with plums and quince and sewed it up. He p.r.o.nounces sewed like lewd.

Daphne: Then we sat down and ate it.

I walk home from Max's, a wind bouncing off the southside hills. It's on nights like this that things happen. It was a sinister wind. And the moon with fast wisps of cloud over it. Max raised a gla.s.s to Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon. On this very night.

15 Maisie launches her novel at the Ship Inn. She has a beautiful line where a character fires up her zipper. That's what I like about Maisie: she chooses the right word. There's more going on in the story, but it's that word I remember.

Maisie's nervous at the Ship. She has no need to be nervous. The work is good.

16 I walk past Lydia's house. I look in through the front window. I see Craig pa.s.sing two pills to Lydia's cupped hand. Then a gla.s.s of water. Tinker b.u.mbo stretched out on the couch. Craig holds the water in his right hand and Lydia takes the pills into her left hand. So there is a moment when their arms are crossed, in reception.

I remember Lydia asking, But what do you love about me? When I paused she said, Youre obsessed with my body. Yes, I said.

Youre obsessed with being in love, she said.

I am obsessed with being in love. I admit to this.

Lydia: You are weak alone.

I've never liked being alone, it's true.

17 When you describe an experience, what you are recounting is your memory of the act, not the act itself. Experiencing a moment is an inarticulate act. There are no words. It is in the sensory world. To recall it and to put words to it is to ill.u.s.trate how one remembers the past, rather than actually experiencing the past. Keep this in mind as you read the words of others as they remember an incident.

18 Catholics rehea.r.s.e their stories. They tell stories over and over. The same story, torquing it a little, realizing a certain detail is not working, adding stuff. I've heard the same two dozen stories out of Lydia about thirty times. And then there are the daily stories. Events that happen that she recounts. She'll tell me, and then she'll call Daphne, and then her brother phones and she tells her brother. The thing I find interesting about this story-telling is that if you heard only one of these stories, you'd think she was telling it for the first time. The enthusiasm behind it. That's definitely a Catholic thing. Protestants tell a story once and it's over with. They feel self-conscious to tell the story again. They are aware of who has already heard the story. Protestants tell a story best the first time; Catholics, the last time.

This follows through into making up after arguments. Lydia wanted to list every point in the argument, make sure it was fleshed out, whereas I was happy enough to say, Okay, let's apologize and get on with it. It's as if there is some pleasure in recounting each moment of the fight, who said what when, and admitting to each wrong turn taken. Usually, of course, I had taken the wrong turns. I'm not sure if this is Catholic or not, but Lydia was convinced she knew my true motives, and I would be a bigger man if I could only admit to them. But by that time the entire fight would have evaporated into a mist with no detail or shape to me any more, and to admit to wrong-doing would be a lie. I admitted to nothing. I can be stubborn in this.

19 I watch ships coasting into harbour with bulk. Or are they empty. So slow. Ships seem arduous. Yet if you take your eye off one, it has instantly docked or left harbour again.

I bought a crate of tangerines. This is the only export I have seen from Morocco.

Helmut has come for Christmas. He says, We should put candles on the tree.

Five months of sailing has made him thinner and ropey. He is like a coil of rope. He has tremendous strength in his grip.

He makes candle holders out of copper wire. He places twenty-six candles on the tree. We turn off the lamps as he touches the candles with a match. The candles offer light from below The tinsel lifts in the updraft. It's a soft, uplifting light.

I watch Helmut in the kitchen, sharpening a knife on the back of a plate.

He gives me a stainless-steel spatula made in Sweden. It's wrapped and looks exactly like a spatula.

20 Wilf says his father used to sniff out fat fires. There was a man at bingo when his house burned down. They couldnt find any evidence of arson. It was a new house, properly inspected. So they gave him the insurance.

A couple of months later the police got a letter from the man with a cheque for the full amount, plus interest, and a confession to arson. The man had just found out he had terminal cancer.

People were visiting him and saying what an honest man he'd been all his life. He couldnt live with the guilt. Or better, die with it. Even his wife didnt know.

This is what he did: He crumpled newspapers and shoved them under the couch cushions and chairs. He doused a couch with a forty-ouncer of gin. He lit the paper and went to bingo. If you want to commit arson, use alcohol. It leaves no residue.

The man had burned down his house so he could build a new one down by his daughter's place. He wanted to be close to his daughter and he knew he wouldnt be able to sell his house for what it was worth.

Because of the cancer, they didnt charge him.

One final note, Wilf says. If it was a fat fire, Dad had no compa.s.sion. He'd let photographers take pictures of the bodies.

21 I am drunk and sentimental. Can't believe what I've said to Lydia. I called and said let's get married for a year. It would help me, I could let you go more, knowing you were mine for a full year, and then we could renegotiate the terms.

And Lydia thought about it, then spoke about Oliver's voucher. You dont like it when I talk about the voucher, do you? I think it would be disastrous, I say.

One baccha.n.a.lian night a year. You go home with someone and there are no questions or repercussions. It was meant as a fleeting proposition, but Lydia has latched onto it. There is a corner of her, a small pocket with a line of lint in it, and the lint agrees with this voucher idea.

But really the voucher is a ruse. She's attaching herself to Craig Regular. She has been hurt by me and is drifting to that smooth smart goofy guy. Who wouldnt.

22 I tell Max, There's nothing better than holding tight to the one person whose smell, whose taste, youve craved all day long.

Love is a savage thing, he says. Love is all to do with head, heart, and animal.

Daphne: You do the silliest things to make that one person laugh.

Max and Daphne are over for lunch. Max: I've been busier than a mink on a rabbit trail.

I ask Daphne what she did today and she says, and she's got this raspy voice, these sharp features, and a deep larynx like she's been shouting all night she says she got up at noon and read Maisie's new book and then took Eli out Christmas shopping.

Max: I'm tired of buying things.

Me: So what do you think of the book?

Daphne: It's not my kind of thing.

Me: I dont persist in things that dont grab.

She laughs: I like that bit of you.

On several occasions she says, Oh no, Max, Gabriel wouldnt do that, because he no longer bothers with things he's not interested in.

23 I hear Max say: So are you and Craig seeing each other?

Lydia says nothing. Then she says, So how are things with Daphne? Is s.e.x good?