It is not quite eight in the morning, two days after the funeral, and Gerry is juggling two big paper cups of coffee outside the door of the motel room. He sets them on the frosty bonnet of his rented car and digs in his pockets for the key. A clipped-looking older man with two small dogs on leashes comes out of the next room.
“How do you like the small Pontiac?”
Gerry hadn’t really been aware he had a Pontiac. “Fine, I guess. I’ve only had it a week. It’s a rental.”
The clipped man looks at Gerry as if there’s something immoral about rented cars. Perhaps Vivian isn’t his real wife either. He loads the dogs into the back seat of a very clean car with a Canadian Legion decal on the back. The dogs have a folded blanket to sit on.
“White schnauzers,” he says. “They’re rare.”
“Nice dogs,” Gerry says non-commitally. The white schnauzers watch him out the back window. They seem pre-occupied with schnauzer thoughts and a sense of their own rareness and superiority. They remind him of two elderly, diminutive, twin bachelor brothers who were both elders at the church Gerry and his parents went to when he was about ten. They monopolized a vestry committee meeting over a suggestion to omit the confession of sin from some services. They were against the idea.
“Opinionated little runts,” said Gerry’s father.
“They’re old and they’re lonely,” his mother had said.
Gerry finds his key and takes Vivian her coffee.
They spend their final morning doing last-minute errands. Gerry drops Viv at the retirement home to pack anything she doesn’t want shipped by the movers. He drives downtown to drop off undertaker paperwork and spends an hour signing papers for Bob.
When they are done, Bob picks up Vivian’s theme from the night of the funeral.” I hope you’ll get back sometime, guy. It’s always great to see you and Vivian.”
“Yeah, I’m sure we’ll keep in touch. I don’t say we’ll be up as often, but it wouldn’t kill some of you guys to take a trip east sometime.” Gerry wonders what he means when he says this. He’s asked his friends many times over the years. Doc drove down in 1974, for his and Patricia’s wedding. Mort had spent a night with them once, during the Joe Clark election in ’79. Mostly though, the distance seems too much. He wonders how much he’ll miss coming here. He and Bob shake hands.
“Take care, guy,”
“You too, buddy.”
When Gerry gets to the retirement home, Vivian is waiting for him. She’s got a suitcase of his mother’s packed. It’s a small suitcase that reminds Gerry of old newsreels of British kids being evacuated from London.
“You need a gas-mask bag and a name-tag,” he says.
Vivian is looking at the photo album that he and his mother passed the time with on his last visit.
“I’m taking this,” she says. “I’ll put it in the desk and the movers can ship it. I called the kids and said goodbye and I called the phone company. They’ll cut the phone this afternoon, tomorrow morning at the latest.”
They take the room keys to the desk then and say their thank-you’s to the staff. Vivian leaves contact names and numbers with the movers. Gerry punches the code on the elevator buttons that prevents residents on this floor from wandering off. It’s the street number of the home reversed. The elevator is crowded with old people with walkers. It’s after eleven-thirty and the slow-motion rush to early lunch has begun.
A few minutes later, they have driven down the street to their motel and tossed their bags aboard the rental car. Gerry takes the key to the office while Vivian waits in the car. He’s been coming to this motel for ten years, since his mother moved into the home. He feels he knows the weedy-looking clerk, who, he gathers, is a ne’er-do-well member of the family that owns the place. Still, he supposes that in ten years he hasn’t spent more than twenty minutes in this lobby.
It took that little to make it familiar, Gerry thinks. Now it’s going to become unfamiliar even quicker.
A computer printer stutters out his bill, completing the process. Already he feels the motel fading around him.
Gerry and Vivian find themselves in early afternoon limbo. They have done everything they had to and their plane doesn’t leave until nearly six. Between motel check-out and airport check-in, Gerry feels they’re in a backwater of time, circling just out of the current.
They conceive a sudden nostalgic fondness for the Italian restaurant they went to a couple of nights before and go there for a leisurely lunch. In the shrunken universe they inhabit this afternoon, it’s become one of their places. They eat for amusement, making an idiosyncratic meal of several kinds of antipasti and salads. Vivian has a couple of glasses of the house white while Gerry drinks San Pellegrino. He talks her into a crème brulée for dessert, and after a couple of cups of coffee they feel they need a walk.
Gerry chooses an Aunt Louise place for their walk, the arboretum of the experimental farm. They park the car at a look-out that gives them a view of ornamental streams wandering from the canal under bridges and through willow trees reduced to pale pencil sketches by their fall nakedness.
“We used to hike around here on Sunday mornings,” Gerry says. “She’d take the other aunts to church and then pop up here for a little pagan fresh air.”
“Let’s walk,” Viv says. “I ate too much.”
They have the big park pretty much to themselves on a cool, sunny Friday afternoon. A few joggers and dog walkers pass them by, but for most of their ramble, they’re by themselves. There’s frost in the ground and the puddles are still skinned with ice although it’s late afternoon. They walk along the canal for a way. It’s been drained to a narrow stream at the bottom of its bed, just enough water for its winter tourist role as “the world’s longest rink.” They come to a set of locks. Across the canal is the university Gerry went to.
“God, it seems huge,” Gerry says. “None of those office towers were built when I was here. It was just the quad there and a couple of buildings on the back and the residences along the driveway.”
“Let’s go across and look,” Viv says. “I need to pee. I shouldn’t have drunk all that coffee.”
One set of lock gates is kept permanently shut to make a footbridge across the canal. The gate top is wider than the others and has double handrails. Gerry and Vivian hustle across like exploring children. They scamper across the driveway, hand-in-hand, and go in a side door to the basement of the student union building.
“Relief is on the way,” Gerry says, pointing to a set of male and female signs with arrows. “The sign of the canny middle-aged traveller, the ability to find the loo anywhere.”
“I’ll see you in a minute,” Vivian says.
“Me too,” says Gerry.
They re-unite outside the washrooms and do a prowl around the older parts of the campus. Gerry discovers the geography of the university he knew thirty years ago, like a vestigial organ in the body of the present-day version. Mostly new has been piled on top of old, so by following the tunnel system, he can recreate his world of the late ’60s.
“This was Juvenile Junction, sort of a speakers’ corner and general hang-out. The Tunnel Rat’s snack bar was down there.”
“I was married when you were here,” Vivian says, “married and expecting Duane. Jack was supposed to be working in Labrador City and quit because he said he had an ulcer.”
“The year I got here, everybody was getting right into Tolkien,” Gerry says. “Personally I always sort of cheered for the Orcs. I got tired of all the amazing escapes and wanted somebody to eat the damned hobbits. Anyway, there used to be some really good runes in Elvish painted on the tunnel walls over the stairs down here.”
“When I think of all the stuff I missed,” Vivian says, “I get so damned poisoned. Get a job or get married. That’s what we were told. We didn’t know any better. I should have been here too.”
“And you’d be somebody else I’ve forgotten about or only run into now and then,” Gerry says. He takes her hand. “I guess we had to go our own ways to run into each other.”
They leave the university the way they came in, by a door close to the canal. A couple of girls waiting for rides by the door nudge each other at the middle-aged couple holding hands.
“They probably think we’re profs, married to other people, having a little on-the-job affair,” Gerry says.
They’re still holding hands when they’ve walked back across the locks and the arboretum footbridges and climbed the hill to the look-out and their car. The afternoon shadows are getting longer and the sky turns shades of denim. A striped hot-air balloon floats over the Friday traffic as they drive to the airport to catch their flight to St. John’s.
Gerry and Vivian check in at the Ottawa airport.
“Adamson, Vivian and Gerald,” Gerry says, presenting the tickets and his wallet, open to his driver’s licence. “Going to St. John’s... Three bags to check and we’ll carry the little ones.”
Vivian leans around him to show her driver’s licence too. They have travelled a lot together. They perform the check-in rituals unhurriedly, but deftly, dancing around each other, playing to each other, but contained, like old vaudevillians reprising the routine that made them famous. Gerry swings the heavy bags onto the scale. Vivian gathers the shoulder bags for quick redistribution. Gerry wonders how the counter girl likes their performance. He thinks they’ll remind her of somebody in an English movie she saw on a late show. They still dress up a bit to travel.
“Gate twenty-eight. You can go right through.”
Gerry is glad to be rid of the big bags. They were heavy. They both had suits for the funeral and Vivian had his mother’s suitcase with stuff she was afraid to leave for the movers.
“Feels good to get rid of that load,” Gerry says. Their talk is the smallest kind of small talk. It hits Gerry that it has been for days, a Popeye and Olive nattering that gets them around the big stuff. “Thank God you couldn’t get anything else in the damn bag.”
“It’s just jewellery and little stuff,” Vivian says. “Things that would get broken or lost.”
“I never realized the Adamson family jewels were so heavy,” Gerry says.
They find their gate and sit on slinky aluminium and leatherette benches waiting to board. The walls of the waiting area are floor-to-ceiling glass. They can see right across the airport in the late afternoon sun. Far off, towards a backwater corner of the airport, the hot-air balloon they’d seen as they drove to the terminal is slowly descending. It seems to have followed them in its aimlessly majestic way. The gas bag is striped and imprinted with the sign of a big real estate chain.
“Look, there’s the balloon again,” Vivian says. “It looks like a big Christmas tree ornament.”
“Check the tickets,” Gerry says. “With the bargain bookings and all the last-minute running around, that could be our flight.”
They lose sight of the balloon as it drifts downward behind a row of hangars. Their flight is called a few minutes later.
They have changed planes in Halifax. They are somewhere off the south coast of Newfoundland. The plane has the snugness of nighttime as it tunnels through the dark sky. The interior seems cozy, almost fire-lit, with only a few reading lamps turned on. Gerry’s is off. Vivian’s is on. She’s reading the in-flight magazine. Vivian tells people that she is not a nervous flier, but she doesn’t sleep on planes. The magazine isn’t holding her. It’s full of articles about Japanese gadgets for the business traveller. She’s a person who needs things to do. Gerry suspects he’s a person who just needs things to happen.
“Are you tired?” she asks, looking at him in his nest of shadow next to her cone of lamplight.
Gerry doesn’t answer right away.
“No,” he says finally. He’s a bit surprised, but he’s not tired. He’s been sitting thinking about the last seven days. Their events seem to be receding the farther east they go.
“Are you okay?” Vivian asks.
“Yeah, I am,” Gerry says. “We did okay there. I think we did about as well as could be expected. For a fifty-something orphan, I think I’m holding up pretty well.”
“You always do the right thing.” Vivian pats his hand. “You’re good that way. You just seem to know what to do.”
Gerry looks for an implication that there are ways in which he’s less good, that knowing what to do is not a trump card under Vivian’s rules. He’s looking for a fraying of the accord they’ve lived under for the past week.
“Eventually,” Gerry says ruefully. “Give me long enough and I’ll figure it out eventually.”
He wonders how long is long enough. He fiddles with the lever on the armrest and leans his seat back.
How long did I have to rehearse this? When did I start doing the right things? What has it got me?
Suddenly he feels tremendously tired and tries to relax. It seems to have taken a very long time to get here, to this time, to this seat. A life recedes in the plane’s invisible wake.
“You’ve been uptight, I know,” Vivian diagnoses.
“Yeah, I guess I have. It’s like for the last, I don’t know, the last year or so, I’ve been frozen, waiting for something to happen. I feel lighter.”
Gerry leans back and thinks about waiting and doing the right things.
The plane bumps heavily, seems to skitter sideways slightly and bumps again.
“I hate this,” Vivian says to Gerry.
“I know, kid. It’s just a little rough.” Water streaks the window beside him and beyond that the green of the wingtip light is only a stain in the speeding murk. The plane’s white strobe pulses off the walls of the cloud tunnel they seem to be caroming down. “It’s not a very nice night out there.”
The plane’s hydraulics squeal and the cabin tilts, levels and tilts again. Gerry supposes the computer is flying the plane. Somebody told him computers do the final approaches now.
If we crash and burn, was it worth it trying to get here? a morbid bit of him asks. Is this the place you could die trying to get to? Could you have stayed where you were?
The plane rips its way out of the belly of the cloud like a movie alien. The lights of a subdivision scroll by under them, like the too-fast credits of a TV show. The airport fence rushes under them and they hit with a solid thump. They’re forced forward in their seats as the brakes grab with a rumbling shudder. They effortlessly make the transition from plummeting sky beast to big, tame, three-legged bus with fins.
Once upon a time, in the old EPA days, that landing would have got a cheer, Gerry thinks. We must be getting jaded.
He looks at Vivian, unclenching beside him. She smiles a small guilty smile. She knows you’re supposed to trust the technology. Studies have been done. It’s safer than walking, breathing even.
“We’re home,” she says. “Home again.”
“Back where we belong,” Gerry says.