This All Happened Part 8

Max: I wouldnt tell her that.

She laughs from her solar plexus.

Yes.

Lydia is always right and I am always wrong.

That's something to love.

It allows us to step away from argument.

What else.

She has tremendous legs, legs that will serve her well when she's ninety.

Gabe, I got to tell you.

No. I know You think I'm being unkind. Okay. I made cabbage rolls and soup and she picked out the cinnamon and the cardamom. She nailed seven distinct ingredients. And she makes these little movements of her hands to remind me to flick off all the lights.

Max: That's good. When mannerisms annoy, you know youre in trouble.

She's animated, Max. I've been seeing her for almost two years now.

Max: She says she's been seeing you just over a year.

Well, that's true. I was going out with Lydia for six months before she started going out with me.

Max: That's pretty funny. But aint it the way.

7 First iceberg of the year, drifting across the mouth of the harbour. Lydia had said, Let's play cards this Easter. Okay, I said. Nickel ante and five dollars to the table. Lydia: And the most you can raise is the Lord.

This morning I had Una up to blow eggs through pinholes. I blew my cheeks purple on the first one. Una, brandishing a brush, ready to dive on the egg, says, You sure it's empty?

Yes.

Maybe we should crack it open first and check.

8 Got home this morning and the sky was turning blue. Out with Max and Maisie. Where's Lydia, they say, and I explain she's rehearsing lines with Wilf. We end up at the after-hours boozecan, avoiding fights with a guy who wants to shove something up someone else's a.s.s.

We tackle Max in the street until he has to tell halted taxis that it's okay, just horsing around. Wilf pa.s.ses us and nods.

Fiction writers, he says. Theyre a tough crowd.

Where's Lydia?

Left her with Craig Regular, he says.

We pick up Alex at the foot of Solomon's Lane. She is fresh from the Ship, wearing a long yellow trenchcoat. She has a bunch of carnations and daisies she stole from a vase, and she's slipping them into my jacket pocket. It's a free-booze night, some ceremony, some stand on principle, and everyone who is anyone is out crawling the mild, wet streets, a bit like Dublin folded into a Paris. Europe of the twenties, when everyone is walking home with a person they shouldnt be walking with, people going home with the wrong people for one night only. Alex leans into me and we kiss against the coa.r.s.e clapboard of a house (I sc.r.a.pe my knuckles).

Max and Maisie say, Break it up. Maisie in particular is rough with me.

Goodbye, Alex.

She slips another flower in my pocket.

And Maisie and Max haul me away.

Max walks me home. He knows which route will save us valuable steps.

9 Lydia is flipping through her old journals. In a lemon cardigan, polka-dot blue shirt, and dark green tights. I'm drunk in love with her.

I ask Lydia if she's ever lied to me. Yes. But only small things.

I confess kissing Alex and Lydia admits she kissed Craig Regular at about the same time. It's as if our confessions balance; we're stunned at the reciprocity, and we both seem renewed. Or a blurring factor, like glaucoma, has been peeled away. We drive out to Goat Cove, where a crowd has convened. A boil-up in a sheltered, stony beach on the Atlantic. I find a purple starfish for Una. She puts him back in a rock pool. It's cold but sunny. We play frisbee and climb the waterfall and eat roasted bananas. Max boils the kettle. The adults loafing about the fire, keeping warm. Max hasnt said anything about our night. He has brought his rusty Christmas tree to burn in the fire. We listen to the pull and suck of the water's ebb, remembering our mother's bellies. The tree sizzles then ignites like a lantern mantle. We are all remembering gentler times as the tide claws at stones. We all want, for a moment, to return to some simpler existence, when we were all together. Or perhaps before we were together.

10 I'm at Lydia's sketching when Daphne drops in. Lydia's not home. Daphne asks if Lydia will ever have a baby. I say, If we get married, that'll be a sign. Daphne: I can't imagine being with a man and not having children with him.

I say, Congratulations.

I draw Daphne, but I've made her mouth haggard. She says, What if I put my hand over my mouth?

I draw the hand, but you still see the mouth, so I colour it like a red glove.

Looks like I'm just about to give head, Daphne says.

She says a client down at emergency declined her service. Said it'd be too hard to work around a woman who's pregnant.

Daphne: I've been pregnant all of one month and people know.

11 Lydia spent the afternoon with Craig Regular. He asked her if she's in love. Craig's been in Seattle designing software and attending Shambhala conferences. I knew she was with him because there are two Buddhist books on the table.

He asked: Are you more in love than youve ever been in your life?

I think: What an a.s.shole. What a s.h.i.t disturber.

Lydia: I thought I'd been in love with Earl, but Craig says no one can love Earl. He says he loves the guy, but Earl's not into growth. Earl has his ego and his research and that's it. Who can grow with him? He's not interested.

Lydia thought this very interesting. But Craig likes you, she says, the feel he gets off you.

I'm sure the f.u.c.ker does.

I ask what she thinks of Buddhism and what he's doing.

I wonder about the meditation, of avoiding thoughts that come to you. Perhaps, she says, it's important to look at those thoughts. Craig believes meditation allows him to understand his own processes, how he does things.

Me: I need less of that. I'm in the moment so often that I need to become more oblivious of the self. I dont need the meditative encouragement.

What I do meditate on is their kiss. When I think of their kiss, how it happened by the washrooms at the Grapevine, that Daphne probably saw it, it drives me away from Lydia. It makes me think of leaving this claustrophobic city.

12 A fresh dump of winter. Moose are caught in snow up to their necks in Bird Cove. Men on snow machines try beating a path out for them, but they have nowhere to go. The moose are bawling.

Iris and Helmut have gone to look at them. Helmut has never seen a moose. While they are gone Max calls to say there's a bull moose standing in Bannerman Park. I drive over. The moose is gobbling the p.u.s.s.y willows and frozen ruff.a.ge.

Helmut returns disappointed. Iris: The moose got free before we arrived.

I tell them about the moose they missed in the park.

Stories. As soon as I try to write one down, it floats away from me. Trying to get a bit of eggsh.e.l.l out of the mixing bowl. It scoots off and wants to be something else.

13 We wake up to the sound of rain driving back the snow.

For lunch I make cheese-and-asparagus sandwiches. Lydia has made a cake. I ask what kind of cake it is. She says, It was a cake I had on the plane from Halifax. I've had it in my mind now for a week.

Youre trying to make an airplane cake?

It was good.

14 I love my binoculars. Watching a rollerblader tack down Signal Hill Road. Then I see that it's Craig Regular. Cars brake, weave around him, using up a lot of gas on the brake and accelerate. Craig wears an orange traffic vest. He's zipping, dipsy-doodling, turning down Battery Road. He has no idea I am watching him. I am two miles from him. I would love to see a car smack into him. But he is too swift. He zooms by the last saltbox in St John's, down past the yellow guardrail, and straight to his door. I hadnt realized I can see his house.

I turn to a coast guard vessel, to read its name on the bow, but can't steady the binoculars my excited heartbeat is moving them a fraction.

15 I confess to Maisie that I have no imagination, that I have a methodical nature. It's easier to write down the present than to be present in the past.

She says, If Oliver had told me he'd slept with another woman, it might be different. But the fact is, he hid it.

Even if he'd slept with someone his own age, a peer, with the same interests, she could understand it.

Maisie: I mean, I'm not going to be the only person he could fall in love with.

Maisie says she and Oliver had friends who agreed to have affairs, as long as they didnt last and they didnt have to tell each other, but the husband got involved, long term, and eventually they divorced.

Maisie: It's the deceit that's killing me. What ever happens with Lydia, dont pull an Oliver Squires.

And what precisely is an Oliver Squires?

Lining up someone before you leave.

You might be better off telling that to Lydia.

16 Iris's cactus is blooming pink. Laundry today. Read the National Enquirer. The tabloids are good because often the actorsdont look their best; theyre caught in unflattering poses coming out of limos or washrooms where theyve sneezed or done a line. They look tired, startled, worn.

17 Lydia says Maisie is beautiful. She has light coming out of her face. She agrees with Maisie's stand.

Lydia: If you ever have an affair and dont tell me, then it's your burden. I dont want to hear about it two years later.

Maisie is considerate. We dropped in just after she'd eaten, and she wiped down the dinner table. She was alone, Una with Oliver. She offered us apple pie and took the smallest piece. Articulate and well-mannered, she points out your habits in a way that doesn't cause offence (she made fun of my hand gestures by mimicking them). She takes her cigarette outdoors, in her own rented house.

18 The sun is a barrel down the Crosstown Arterial, lighting the southside hills, Shea Heights, the tank farm, all the way to the mini-marina. And the top floor of the Royal Trust.

I pick up my cheque from the arts council, cash it at the Royal Bank, and buy a bottle of eleven-dollar wine at the liquor store next door. I walk into Blue Peter Steamships.

I am taken by the idea of leaving St John's by sea. I am taken by the idea of vanishing. A small vengeful part of me, or an intolerant part of me, wants to leave Lydia, and this means leaving St John's. And so I delight in the fantasy of preparing a departure.

Blue Peter has an open-air-concept office, a half-acre of carpet, and three oak desks. There's a woman, a sixty-year-old man, and a young man in a ninety-dollar shirt. I finger the young man's desk. I cradle the bottle of wine along my forearm.

I was just wondering if you still take pa.s.sengers.

Young man: You want to cross the Atlantic by boat?

A twenty-foot skylight beaming in a prism above. A bank of windows to my left. You can watch ships come and go through the Narrows.

The ninety-dollar shirt says, Those days are long gone.

I walk home with the eleven-dollar wine. I am the kind of man who finds it hard to spend more than that on a bottle of wine. Lydia will often pour a gla.s.s of seventeen-dollar wine.

19 The last minutes of last call in the Ship Inn, encore of the evening. Lydia swirls her brandy in victory. Max says, As soon as you write about a culture, then you know it's gone.

The lights come up and we stand surprised and accept the applause of our own drunkenness, the embarra.s.sments of the night, when our actions are hidden in smoke and darkness, the fictions we flirt with. Illicit lovers caught by the wrong husband.

It was opening night of the play at the LSPU Hall, and Lydia, in her small part, was terrific. She became someone else, something I can't do. I dont have the proper brain to pretend and be convincing.

We manage the stairs to Duckworth Street and speak quietly under the ear that hears all of downtown St John's. Quiet with the stories you tell, or the wrong person will hear you. Whispers from actors, from producers, from songwriters and one drummer. There are people who believe in G.o.d and people seeking G.o.d and people who are convinced there is no G.o.d. All walking up the stairs into cars on Duckworth Street.

We walk up past the LSPU Hall, the amethyst of St John's theatre. A green clapboard building that holds up a hill of attached eighty-year-old houses that cling together in the hope of money and love and insight. Not optimism, but hope. The pink, white, and green national flag of Newfoundland emblazoned on the Hall's forehead, a wild palomino, stalwart in a domesticated land, where Lydia delivered her stellar performance.

Lydia and I walk up Long's Hill and then up the stairs to my room and I sit here at the windows while she sleeps. I am so proud of her. I look at the harbour with my thoughts varnished by this supreme feeling. All spring, only the Astron has left port. It's a dead port. A purse seiner shelters behind a rusting trawler. Tourists will soon be pointing their video cameras at things that dont move: the basilica and Cabot Tower.

While beneath them the sewage outfall is gobbled up by seagulls. Boyd Coady says the water has changed in the thirty years since the Portuguese white fleet docked here. It was pollution from boats back then. Now it's the city's waste that colours the water as it blooms brown into the crystal green depths of the Atlantic.

I turn from this desolation to the fullness of my bed. I curl into the side of Lydia Murphy.

20 Alex tells me that most men are mediocre: I want a man I find interesting.

She was once almost married.

I ask for moments.

This very date seven years ago.

When you were nineteen, I say.

Yes, she says.

She met a man in a staircase. They went out for two years. He's a philosopher now. Earl Quigley knows him. He asked her to marry him. He had met her parents. But she said no.

Alex: I dont know why now, and I regret it. But at the same time I wonder.

I drive her back to her place on Duckworth. On the way I stop at Lydia's and point out her house. All the windows are dark. It's about midnight.