Good weather arrives the way parcels from faraway places did when Gerry was a child: slowly, unbelievably, tightly wrapped and hard to get into.
His wandering aunts once shipped a cuckoo clock from the Black Forest. There was no way they could carry the thing. They were coming back by ship, the Empress of Britain to Montreal. They sent the clock by what used to be called “surface mail.”
Does “surface mail” exist anymore? Gerry wonders.
Some German clockmaker shipped the clock in a huge, stiff box, wrapped with hairy cord. He had wrapped the clock in layers of what seemed to be lint sandwiched between paper. The lint was grey like the German uniforms in the movies. Perhaps it was those uniforms, shredded by the late ’50s. The pine cone weights of the clock were rolled in cocoons of the stuff. They felt like hand grenades dressed for winter. Every space in the box was stuffed with shavings.
“There can’t be much of the Black Forest left,” Gerry’s father said, surveying the mess of packing on the kitchen floor.
In the end, Gerry’s aunts had found the clock kept them awake. When his parents bought a cottage in the ’60s, the clock was banished. Its tick and cuckoo seemed less annoying when you were already listening to nighthawks, frogs and whip-poor-wills.
“Is there still surface mail?” Gerry asks Philip. Perhaps Philip knows. He’s still mailing books to Toronto so maybe he has inside information. They’re sitting at a table outside the coffee shop. So far this year, there have been very few days when you could do this.
“I suppose. I mean if you mailed an anvil overseas, I guess they’d put in on a ship.”
“You know you can’t get airmail forms anymore?” Gerry says. He found this out a couple of weeks ago when he got a sudden urge to write to a former flat-mate in the U.K. He felt saddened by the loss. When he’d gone abroad for a year in 1969, little blue airmail forms had seemed the perfect amount of news to send or receive.
“I think I knew that,” Philip says. “I think they’ve been gone for a couple of years.”
Philip will soon be gone. He’s bought a plane ticket for the end of June. He says the call centre is getting too crazy for him. A couple of weeks ago, one of his California crazies called about her website. Something was wrong with it. Philip connected to her site and found a gallery of nude photos.
“Do you think I ought to get my other nipple pierced?” the woman asked.
“This was not an unattractive woman,” Philip says. “She did not need to be doing this.”
“You both probably brightened your supervisor’s night. I assume you still have the random monitoring of calls.”
“Anyway, this is not what I came to Newfoundland to do. I thought I’d sit by the ocean and read.”
“You do read and the ocean is, verifiably, out there. Maybe you missed it. It’s the big wet thing I took you sailing on a couple of times. I’m pretty sure I pointed it out though.”
It occurs to Gerry that he, himself, is supposed to be living beside the ocean and writing. This morning’s notebook entry, written before Philip came along, started as a description of his ball cap with the sailing-club crest and goes downhill fast.
My sailing hat is looking a bit the worse for wear after launch a month ago: bottom scrapings and crud blended with a dust of blue anti-fouling. It has a sort of a Danish navy-blue cheese look.
Pretty much resolved to quit work although I wonder if that’s just sublimation of a desire to quit altogether. I think I may go fishing this week or just hang out on the boat and eat Chinese noodles and canned tuna. It’s been a year or more since I drove across the island. Then again, how long is long enough?
Gerry and Philip go inside to fetch refills. In the line, they’re behind a loud twit who seems convinced the world needs to know how he feels.
“...just totally blown away, you know?”
He has one of those stand-up haircuts which have come back into fashion from Gerry’s childhood. He’s professionally boyish like a ’50s peanut-butter ad. He wants elaborate sprinkles on some kind of boiled-milk coffee.
“Please, Mom, can I have some more?” Gerry says. “Can I lick the bowl? God, I’m getting sour and old.”
“Or you just want a second cup of coffee,” Philip says.
They return to their table on the street. Philip brings one of the coffee shop’s complimentary newspapers. It’s full of federal election.
“I’m going to have to vote in an advance poll here,” he says. “I won’t be able to vote when I get to Toronto.”
“The perfect moral situation,” Gerry says. “You can vote for whoever you like here and not have to live with the result. Then you get to complain about your member in Toronto because you had no say in picking the beast.”
“It all seems to be coming down to kiddie porn,” Philip says, shaking out the paper. Stephen Harper looks out of one picture like a politely interested android. Paul Martin appears to be experiencing convulsive cramps in a facing one. “Harper seems to think the Liberals are in favour of it.”
“I think Mr. Harper is on shaky ground there,” Gerry says, “Turn out the sock drawers of all your candidates and I suspect the neat and tidy Sunday school types will come off worst. Who’s the obnoxious ex-cop MP who went down for molesting Indian kids? People with a sense of sin are more likely to commit them.”
“You have no sense of sin then?”
“Being mean is the only sin. I commit that all the time. Manners are better than morals most of the time. The world’s full of Gladstones and Mackenzie Kings ready to give those naughty hookers a stern talking-to. There’s lots of creepy uncles and daddies out there.”
“Vote Adamson, for an end to meanness. I like it, but it doesn’t seem to have much of a platform to go with it.”
“When I was in university, somebody ran for student council on a platform of ‘A return to the golden age, an end to menstrual cramp and a tail for everyone.’”
“That’s the Conservatives this time, except I think they’re for menstrual cramp.”
“I’d like a tail. Tails are great. Wouldn’t you like a tail?”
It is the time of year for Gerry to be lining up his summer work. Summer is his busiest time as people take vacations and his apparent suitability for responsible work increases. He meets with producers and they find that perhaps a few weeks of him working on their show won’t quite end western civilization as we know it. This year, his talk with Bob, rhythm band sticks player and family lawyer, hangs over these chats. We’re getting through four thousand a month or so, out of a pot of three hundred.
“I mean the money’s got to run out in a few years,” Gerry says to Vivian after supper. “I don’t mind not inheriting anything. We did okay off the house and Aunt Louise, but what about looking after the old dear? She seems to be planning to outlive me.”
“I’ve always said she could live with us,” Vivian says.
She has too, usually when they are fighting. They sometimes propose escalating martyrdoms they say they’d endure for each other, one-upping each other into slammed doors or angry silences.
Gerry pictures the frozen-in-amber atmosphere of the nursing home moved to their house. How much longer would the drives and walks and sails have to get to avoid death by osmosis? What new things would it bring to have fights or silences about?
“It’s something to think about,” he says. That’s true anyway. He thinks about it, talking to a producer. Gerry is trying to be an adult and get a real job.
“There are a couple of jobs you’ll be filling when everybody gets back in the fall,” he suggests.
“Oh my God, I haven’t even been able to look at them yet,” she says.
“One of these days I might just apply for a real grown-up job.”
They’re drinking coffee in the break room. He tries to keep it light and bantering, fishing for any encouragement.
“Really? You’d be interested?” The producer’s tone implies that he’s suggested he’d like to take up brain surgery in middle-age: an interesting concept, but not very practical. “I mean, Gerry, would you really want the day-to-day? Weren’t you working on a book? You really should write a book.”
“Yeah. Really.”
That night, while Vivian is out showing a townhouse somewhere, he pushes the laundry off the desk in the basement and tries to kick George and Ellen into gear.
Fragment: Argument
“Why do you keep that damn office?” Ellen asks.
“To deny I’m dead,” George says bleakly. “To deny I’m dead, to deny that I don’t care anymore, to deny that I have nothing to say and that all I’ve learned is that you should shut up and worry about your house!”
“Why are you so angry?”
“To deny you’ve got no one to talk to but people who tell you to walk on your hardwood floors in your socks,” he says. “To deny that you have to be buried for years before you die.”
To deny the rage you inflicted on yourself in good faith, George thinks. The world isn’t unfair. The seating arrangements for viewing it are.
On a shelf over the desk is a handful of paperbacks Philip has given Gerry. Philip’s clearing out his duplicates, getting ready for his big Toronto move. Marcus Aurelius is on top of the pile. Gerry thumbs through the book. It’s thin, more scholarly notes than musing emperor.
“No one loses any other life than the one he is living nor does he have any other life than the one he loses.”
You should get out of the emperor racket, Marcus, Gerry thinks. You should write a book.
Summer finally seems to be taking hold. Vivian is busy because people use the long evenings to look at houses after work. On the other hand, she gets some that aren’t likely to buy and wastes a good deal of time.
“Not a pot to piss in,” she says, setting out to meet a young couple somewhere. They’d left a grunted message on the answering machine and wanted to see a house in a pricey new subdivision. “They can’t afford that neighbourhood. I feel like Miss Jane on The Beverly Hillbillies showing some of these goofs around.”
“Push ’em in the cee-ment pond,” Gerry says. “But be nice, maybe they won the lottery.”
The evening is warm and Gerry decides he’ll take in one of his rare AA meetings. He’s going for all the wrong reasons: nostalgia for another set of problems that have faded, schadenfreude, voyeurism or the fact it’s a nice night. He decides a walk would do him good and leaves the Honda home. The first lawn mowers of the season are out and doing. They make a bumblebee background to the shushing of the sprinklers as he walks to his meeting.
Gerry gets the reception he expects as someone who doesn’t attend very often. There are the caring people who ask how you’ve been, in case you’d had a slip and been drinking and need support to come back. Then there are the others, the competitive losers, who want to know that your roll ended, that you fell off the wagon. Then, however brief the sober time they’ve got in, they’ve got more than you have.
Gerry supposes he was a bit that way himself when he first came to AA fifteen years ago. There were a lot of people with more sobriety who pissed him off.
I wanted to get sober to have a life and they thought getting sober was life, Gerry thinks.
In those days, somebody talking about seven years of sobriety sounded like a description of a hundred-mile tightrope walk with an egg balanced on the end of your nose.
Yes, it was an achievement of sorts, but why a tightrope and why the egg? Couldn’t you just do what you did before, but sober?
It seemed to Gerry that if you decided it was a tightrope you had to keep concentrating on, you were setting yourself up for a long drop and a nose full of scrambled egg. There were times he secretly willed banana skins onto the tightrope.
Let the poor bastard have a life and not a substitute religion so I can learn to do the same, Gerry would think. In my worst moments I’ve tried to worship the drink and I’ve believed in vengeance and the whole nine yards. Now let’s see something sustainable.
At tonight’s meeting “Johnny” comes over to talk to Gerry while people are still milling around getting coffees and finding chairs with their buddies. He’s always “Johnny,” never John.
He’s one of us, Gerry thinks. One of the people with a built-in diminutive.
When Gerry first went to AA, Johnny had a year in. He got a medallion at the second or third meeting Gerry was at. Since then his luck hasn’t been good. He has a collection of three-month medallions and probably a dozen years of sobriety in total, but he can’t seem to string it together. It’s made him bitter, although he keeps coming around.
“I haven’t seen you around,” Johnny says,
“I’ve been busy. No rest for the wicked,” Gerry says. He’s aware of his equivocal reasons for being here tonight. He suspects that Johnny hopes he’s been out, that his world’s a mess. Then he could regain some of that magic time he had when he had a year’s sober ascendancy and Gerry thought a day without a drink was magic that only wizards could do.
“I’m suing those bastards where I used to work,” Johnny tells Gerry. Gerry recalls that he had some sort of tangled unfair dismissal case that had dragged on for several years. Building scrap had gone astray. No charges were brought but Johnny got fired. He claimed his union hadn’t taken his part. At one point, when Gerry was trying to be a keen reporter, they had talked about him doing something on the story. However, the union and Johnny’s sometime lawyer had both shied away. They stopped just short of saying that he’d got himself fired and that was all there was to it.
“It’s a big fucking swindle, you know. Honest-to-God, sometimes I think you’d be better just going out to Red Cliff and jumping over.”
Or wait until the blood donor people send you a letter with a surprise in it, Gerry thinks, remembering his own reminder of mortality. Be careful what you wish for.
Gerry has never been able to find pat answers for people who talk about killing themselves. It’s not something he considers for himself any more. He’s not sure that he ever did, but he used to threaten. Once, in an empty house, he had stretched a toe to the trigger of a shotgun, a morbid rehearsal. Despite the fact he knew the gun was empty, it took every muscle straining to make the trigger click. He’d decided that the drunk’s slower suicide was better suited to his more cowardly, lazier style.
Gerry knows he’s a disappointment to Johnny. He wants the church-conditioned response: “You can’t. You mustn’t.” Gerry is afraid he’s a bit more pragmatic than that. It’s more a question of how much pain, or prospect of pain, you can take. It’s like taking aspirin. Some people resist medication and do acetylsalicylic martyrdoms. Others pop a pill at the first twinge. Who’s right?
People who talk about suicide get on Gerry’s nerves a bit. They want him to be responsible for their life or death, to be their advocate in the capital case they’re trying in their heads. Gerry suspects they would not be happy to be told to look at how they fit into the world and then do what they think best.
The meeting finally gets started.
“God grant me the serenity...”
Gerry looks out the window at the thickening dusk. The meeting is in an upstairs room so he’s looking at a skyline. The trees are plump, frozen explosions of dark green against his horizon. He remembers summer dusks in early childhood, when the trees in the backyard seemed to draw closer to his bedroom windows as the sky purpled and the murmur of grown-up voices on the lawn swing replaced the last roulette-wheel whirr of the hand-pushed lawn mower.
A few late gulls flap purposefully across his patch of window. A droning small plane, its lights already gem-bright, bumbles across the sunset to get down before dark.
Gerry declines to speak tonight.
“No thanks. It’s great to be here, but I’m just going to listen tonight.”
The deepening evening quiets him.
On his walk home he picks up chocolate ice cream drumsticks. Vivian is home when he gets there. They sit on the steps of their backyard deck and eat the dripping waffle trumpets in what is still a warm darkness.
According to the sun, it is just past mid-summer when Gerry and Vivian have Philip around for his farewell dinner. Gerry has never found mid-summer works very well in large parts of Canada, in Newfoundland in particular. The days may be long but the water is still cold and the fog can lie in. It’s not as warm as it’s going to be yet.
“What is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days,” Gerry recites from a ’50s memory work assignment. “There ought to be a scale of correction for where you are. Add one month for mainland Canada. Add two for St. John’s.”
Despite Gerry’s grumbling, it is a pleasant summer evening. He has picked up Philip and his luggage and brought him home. He’s not working this week. Summer relief work will start in earnest in a week or so with the July 1st weekend. Vivian is working until almost six so Gerry has been cooking, pork tenderloin and roast potatoes. Vivian will buy a trifle for dessert on her way home. Philip sits at the kitchen table with a large glass of white wine. Gerry is fussing with salad makings.
“I’m going to miss dinners here,” Philip says. “I like your family.”
“That’s because you only come a couple of times a year. We’d wear a bit thin if you spent more time with us.”
Gerry is feeling petulant because Darren has been in touch from Alberta.
“He misses Melanie and Diana,” Vivian had told Gerry earlier that week. “He wants to come home.”
“Jesus, he’s like the cat, “Gerry said. “When he’s in, he wants out. When he’s out, he wants back in.”
“He called them the other night,” Vivian said. “He really misses them. He’s stopped playing the machines.”
“His sister’s smart enough not to let him near the till.”
“I told Melanie I’d pay for a ticket. I put it on Visa.”
“You were the woman who wanted the little weasel dismembered a couple of months ago.”
“He wants to come home. Diana’s all excited.”
“We could buy her a pony cheaper and she’d still be excited. We’d only have to feed that,” Gerry had said.
“I keep telling you your family is pretty normal,” Philip says now. “They get on top of you,” Gerry says. “The other day I was in the liquor store and they were giving out ugly cloth smiley faces or some damn thing for Father’s Day. The girl asked me if I was a dad. I said no without thinking. I think I meant it.”
Vivian rolls in with the trifle. Gerry pours her a wine and himself a soda water. They sit down to dinner.
“I hear your son-in-law is coming home,” Philip says.
“Yes, we’ll see how that goes.”
“He’s probably quite worried about coming back. I know I’m wondering if I’m doing the right thing going back to Ontario.”
“Well, I’m sure you miss the place,” Vivian says.
“No, actually I dread the thought of going back. Toronto has changed from the city I grew up in,” Philip says. “I like the size of things here but I’m afraid I’ll never move. It’s addictive.”
“What’s your point, caller?” Gerry asks. “I just dropped in for the weekend thirty years ago.”
After dinner Vivian clears away, putting plates in the dishwasher.
“You boys cooked,” she says. “I’ll clean up.”
“I’d hardly say I contributed anything,” Philip says. “I just sat around and watched your husband.”
“That’s what made it art,” Gerry says. “You were the audience.”
After dinner Gerry and Philip go for a walk. One of the things Gerry likes about their neighbourhood is that the country intrudes into the town and comes up against it. On a summer night, a wooded hillside looms over the end of their street and it’s possible to imagine you’re in a more rural and a smaller place. A conservation group has run a network of trails close to his and Vivian’s house. Gerry liked the hillside better when the trails were old ones and less frequented by joggers and up-market dogs, but there are still good walks to be had.
Gerry and Philip climb on a gravelled path through moss-hung fir.
“That’s it, is it?” Philip asks. “I’ve heard the term. Var just means fir, I guess.”
“It’s var and it’s snotty all right,” Gerry says.
The path switchbacks up through the trees, with pressure-treated wooden steps up the steep bits. The woods smell like a mouldy apothecary shop.
“Vivian runs up this,” Gerry says. “There are five hundred and some steps,”
“I’ll take her word for it.”
The evening is warm and they’re both short of breath and sweating when they come out into a clearing on top of the hill. The town is spread out below them. At their feet are a brook, some ponds, the parkway and Gerry’s subdivision. His Honda is visible, parked in the street, a sesame seed in the tree-and-pavement salad of the neighbourhood.
South and east, the older parts of town hold the ridges. The Basilica and the new art gallery stick up and bite into the belly of the sky. Beyond them, the Southside Hills and Signal Hill rear up, as high as where they’re standing now. Beyond that is the sea, like silver paper now in the flat light. Far off, the fog lurks, waiting to come to land with the evening’s cool.
“I’m going to miss this place,” Philip says.
“I know,” Gerry tells him. “I go to Ontario now and the ocean is missing. Even if I don’t go near it for days at a time, I want it around.”
They walk home down a road that still has an outpost of country in the city. A tiny pasture and a cow barn occupy a rural island in the subdivisions that climb the slopes of the hill.
“I do like the smell of cows,” Gerry says.
“It’s an acquired taste, I guess.”
“An affinity for bullshit is no bad thing for a journalist.”
When they get back to the house, Vivian has finished the dishes. She’s on the phone to some client or other. Gerry gets Philip a beer and makes himself a coffee and they sit on the back deck. When Viv finishes her call she brings a beer and joins them.
Gerry has given some thought to a going-away present for Philip.
He’s settled on a tiny collection of Whitman poems. They were part of an anniversary set that Penguin put out a dozen years or so ago.
“I have said that the soul is not more than the body,/And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,/And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,” Gerry reads. “And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud...”
“That’s beautiful,” Viv says.
“That’s some barbaric yawp,” Philip says. “Thank you, Gerry.”
Trees overhang, and alders enclose the darkening yard. Beyond their leaves, the traffic whooshes by, tires sibilant. They watch the night fall and then go to bed. Philip has booked a bargain flight that leaves before five in the morning. Gerry sets double alarm clocks, the way he does to go to an early shift at work.
Gerry phases his alarms. First there is a little battery-powered travelling clock that makes a monotonous bird-like piping, an idiot nestling calling insistently to be fed. The back-up is the clock radio set to “alarm” with its chainsaw buzz, but this morning the idiot chick is enough. Gerry reaches out and stifles it before Viv has a chance to do more than roll over and mutter in her sleep.
Philip, it appears, hasn’t slept. Gerry raps on his door as he goes down the hall to the kitchen to put on coffee. There’s already a line of light from under the door.
“I got interested in some of your books,” Philip explains as they drink the coffee at the kitchen table. “Then it got to two-thirty or so and there just didn’t seem to be much point to going to sleep. I’ll sleep on the plane.”
The fog that was offshore when they took their walk the evening before is on the land now as they load Philip’s stuff aboard Gerry’s wagon and set out for the airport. The headlights make long, narrow white cones in the mist. There is virtually no traffic. They’re more than halfway to the airport when a taxi passes them, heading the same way. A few others join the convoy as they make their way along the main road to the airport.
The car radio is politely murmuring the latest news from sub-Saharan Africa on one of the overseas broadcasts the CBC runs late at night. Two announcers, one with an Afrikaans voice, the other, Oxbridge-African, are talking about Zimbabwe. Gerry flashes to an early apartment with Patricia. It was the time of the Rhodesia war. They used to listen to Barbara Frum on the radio, talking on the phone to white Rhodesians in a bar. The Rhodesians would talk and Gerry and Patricia would cook and eat their supper. Gerry was a local current affairs producer then. They always listened to As It Happens and Sunday Morning. They hoped that national radio might be contagious.
The airport looks like the final scene of Casablanca. The lights are ringed in haze. Water jewels the chain-link fences. The planes poke into the terminal like shiny, dark piglets around an aluminium and glass sow. However, the mist is growing greyer. Somewhere the sun is trying to come up.
Gerry helps Philip carry his bags into the terminal. The TV screens say that his flight is scheduled to depart on time.
“They can take off into it,” Gerry observes. “It’s landing they’re not fussy about.”
“You don’t need to wait around,” Philip says. “I’ll check in and just wait for my flight.”
They shake hands. “Give my best to Ontario.”
“Don’t run into anything with the boat.” The sky is lighter still when Gerry goes outside to the parking lot. Philip will get away just fine. Driving away from the airport, he turns away from town and drives in a wide loop through some of the communities on the outskirts of St. John’s. Sometimes he drives on winding roads by the sea. Then he drives through wooded roads where suburbs are just starting to take hold. In one of the new suburbs he spots a tall figure farther down the road. It stands in the middle of the lane he’s in. It grows improbably tall as he nears it. It seems to want to block his passage. Gerry slows down. As he nears it, the gawky shape resolves itself into a moose. It looks at him as he stops in the road. The big ears semaphore. The new bungalows along the road look on with blind windows. Gerry taps the horn, a short Bronx cheer of a beep. The moose startles sideways slightly, offended more than frightened. It clacks up somebody’s newly paved driveway, walks through a breezeway and disappears across a newly sodded backyard. The big hooves cut up the new sod.
“Go moose,” Gerry says and continues his drive. The fog is burning off. The radio plays the national anthem and the “Ode to Newfoundland” and resumes local broadcasting. The weather report says it will be a sunny day.