April

1 Lydia had spilled wax on the sleeve of her astrakhan. She lays the coat on the floor, takes a piece of butcher paper, and irons it to the sleeve. Kneeling over the coat, sun shining branches into solids and shadows over her head. The wax melts into the butcher paper, the grease of an animal.

2        There has been an absence of wind for more than a day. How rested the trees look, the harbour. Like horses. Patient horses.

We meet Maisie down at Alex and Max’s opening. Maisie is staring into the pupil of Alex’s eye. The pupil dilates. Flaccid, Maisie says, should be pronounced flax-sed. And, turning to the wall of bums, says, The only two descriptions are for a penis or for prose.

She shows us a copy of the letter she sent to Michael Ondaatje. Do you think he gets many letters?

Lydia: A hundred a year.

That many?

They won’t be as good as this, Maisie, but he’s read all over the world.

Me: Yeah. He’s bound to get a lot of mail.

Maisie’s depressed by her first royalty cheque. She sold 214 books. In the letter she says to Ondaatje: My mother has a lot of friends.

She is trying to figure out how many strangers have bought her book.

We walk to the bums and try to pick out mine. There are twelve plaster moulds of bums hanging on the wall. Lydia points out mine. I see Wilf Jardine studying them, and then I know Wilf’s bum is up on the wall too. It is right beside my own.

Wilf stares at his own bum. It has a taut carriage. He is sucking on a hard candy. He holds his elbow and wrist in a gay posture. He is oblivious to this.

Some tight ass on you, Wilf.

Yours is pretty nice too, Gabe.

Which is it?

Isnt it this one?

And Wilf picks out his own bum. Or is it.

3        Supper at Max’s. He’s blanched and roasted an entire seal carcass that his father, Noel, has sent him from Arnold’s Cove. We all stare at the beast. Even Daphne.

The seal’s massive, coffee-brown, steaming torso dominates the table. It’s daunting to approach it with a knife.

I’ve never had anything but flipper pie, Lydia says.

The rib cage has thin strips of meat and the flippers are tender. It’s a boiled dinner: turnip, carrot, potato, cabbage, and pease pudding. Max is delighted. He grew up sealing, and he has a set of sealing tools: a sculping knife, which separates carcass from pelt, and a flensing knife, which is used on the pelt to carve blubber from fur.

4        I study the city with binoculars. The southside hills have gone grey overnight. Like a black dog will go white around the mouth as he gets older. The toes, the tip of tail. As if the cold exhalations of winter freeze the fur white. I think it’s a frost in the scalp of the hill and the sun is shining deep into it.

The wet trims on all the mansard roofs glint like shining gifts, like metal boxes that hold new hardware. Fresh hinges. Uncollected garbage. A mattress sags against a boarding house. Broken vinyl siding exposes styrofoam and the faded paint on rotting clapboard. Inside a window two men sunk in a floral couch roll cigarettes while an astonished parakeet swings in its cage. Children toss a bicycle tire over cold telephone wires. A man in a wool cap pedals up the street with a towering load of bent aluminum balanced over his front wheel, secured with rough yellow rope. He exhales over the aluminum and his breath looks like aluminum vapour.

The aluminum flashes in the sun, and the streets are bone dry. Thirsty streets, salt stinging the sidewalks. When dogs begin to hunker down and chew their paws.

I open the window and smell boiling fat. A slow, glacial grease slips down the sidewalk from the backs of fish-and-chips shops. Liquid copper slides out of the eavestroughs on Gower Street United. Staining the sidewalk green.

A light dry snow wafting. With the shadows sitting under their objects.

Mere description.

5        Max stalks around the snooker table, analyzing percentages. His forearms toned from constant heavy carpentry work. He has an exquisite long shot. The quiet green acre of snooker cloth. He is reverting to a former life. He has made money shooting pool. He wipes the palms of his hands on the stubble of his scalp. His jeans have a hole worn in the back pocket that reveals a corner of his black wallet.

His firm bridge on the nap. The puny pool tables have an eerie blue cloth in comparison, and it seems classy to pot balls that have no numbers.

6        Remembering how Max had said, The body is the only motor that doesnt make noise. And these furnaces of heat inside us (he points to his rib cage) if we didnt give off heat, it would seem magical for a body to be warm. All the senses are quite mysterious inventions. Max once lost his sense of smell for a few weeks after a roofing truss fell on his head.

Max: Name me the things you love about Lydia.

Her face. She has a face like a beautiful shoehorn.

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 ass.

We tackle Max in the street until he has to tell halted taxis that it’s okay, just horsing around. Wilf passes 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 coarse clapboard of a house (I scrape 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 asshole. What a shit 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 fucker 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 pussy willows and frozen ruffage.

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 eggshell 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 passengers.

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 glass 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 embarrassments 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 God and people seeking God and people who are convinced there is no God. 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.

She’s working late, I say.

I shift from first to second and accidentally touch her knee. Alex’s knee doesnt flinch.

21      I tell Lydia of Alex’s idea. Of taking pictures of men, concentrating, as they play pool. As part of the passion exhibit.

I’m speaking into the pillow. I’ve decided I have to tell her this.

You crop the photo so you dont know theyre shooting pool. Youre left with the concentration.

Lydia: Concentration brings a peculiar look to the face.

Me: A lot of my memories of my father are in acts of concentration.

It’s like lovemaking.

Well. That’s not what I think of when I think of my father. I think Alex telling you this is a bit like lovemaking.

It’s intimate. But it’s art.

22      I rent Raging Bull. I’m walking along Gower Street at 10 p.m. Three kids, fifteen years old, start yelling.

Beat the fucking shit out of ya!

A dirty snowball hits a light pole ahead of me. I cross the street, pass them. Another snowball whizzes by my head. I stop and stick the video in my jeans. Turn. I point to one of them.

He says, Are you giving me the finger?

They wonder if I speak English, because I havent spoken. One walks close, yelling like a mongrel, and I grab him at the collar, take him down and feel like smacking him. I have a knee to his chest. I’m surprised I’ve managed to catch him, like swatting a fly with one hand. The other two scream. Four more boys run up, bigger shapes. Some as tall as me. I back off and I see they have hockey sticks. But theyre in silhouette. I decide to boot it out of there. And they, of course, run after me. Running is a bad idea, I realize. Running obliges them to catch me. I turn to see about three eighteen-year-old boys with the younger pack behind them. They doggedly run after me along Gower. I run past Lydia’s (they’ll just beat out the windows) and jog up Garrison Hill. They are shouting for me to hold up. I continue west along Harvey Road. And make a stand under a streetlight by the Big R. If I’m going to be beaten up it will be in the light, the police station just across the road. They surround me, catching their breath, bent over, hands on knees.

We just want to know, the biggest boy says, what happened.

I tell them, my throat burning for air: Throwing snowballs, verbal threats, I live in the neighbourhood. I took one down. Big boy: That’s okay. We’ll take care of things.

I say, Youre a good feller.

They walk back. My throat raw from the run, exhausted. I can barely laugh at my own panic. The adrenaline still hot in my skin. I walk down Long’s Hill, past Gower Street United, and wait in the shadows. The boys are slow returning, as if changing their minds. They pick at potholes with the hockey sticks. I walk briskly to Lydia’s, but her door’s locked. I dont have a goddamn key. She’s on the phone. She stretches the phone cord into the porch to open the door, and I rush past her. I drink water in the bathroom and try to tell her what happened. She says, You should have pounded them.

But they were fifteen years old.

So what?

They’d have me up on charges.

What would a judge say if they did?

Lydia.

What?

23      When she says, Goodnight, Gabe, I say, Goodnight, babe. I say, You hardly ever call me Gabriel. She says you hardly ever call me Lydia.

That’s not true.

It is true.Youre always calling me babe.

On the phone I call you Lydia.

Once. I remember hearing it on the answering machine when I got home. My name and it struck me how you hardly ever say it.

I think about this argument. That I dont like to sway opinion. When something sounds untrue but Lydia believes it, I find it hard to convince her otherwise. I would be a bad lawyer. I regret that she feels it, and I will usually try only once to describe my side of things. If she still holds to her opinion, I’m loathe to object.

24      I nose the green lobster into the boiling water. His tail flexes, full of bewilderment. A claw taps the side of the pot. It takes about ninety seconds for him to resign himself, for his shell to turn orange.

A dip made of melted butter, lemon, garlic, and parsley. I spread the leaves of a newspaper over Lydia’s dinner table. Lydia wonders which of her boyfriends hammered the claws. Was it Earl? He’d go to the tool chest and get a hammer.

At this very table.

Corn, I say, is the lobster of the vegetable family.

Lydia: Now that sort of statement. That’s where you lose me.

I think about this. Why did I make that pronouncement, which feels true to me. Theyre both large, I say. A solid colour. You boil them alive and theyre seasonal. You eat only a select part of the whole body. And pepper’s important.

Lydia accepts this. She reads me a quote from Salinger, about images and how God will understand if there’s confusion or misuse of images. Youre better off not getting wrapped up in the small stuff of right and wrong.

25      In the morning I tell Lydia it’s time to get up. No, not yet, she says. Then the doorbell. She has forgotten that Maisie and Daphne are coming for yoga. Stay in bed, she says.

I wake again and there’s no sound. And I get up. Downstairs this note. Gabe, dont leave.

It’s nearly io a.m. when Lydia returns. And sits with me. Sometimes when she’s alone she thinks of her past lives and starts to feel sad. She tells me how Earl never cried. Nothing in life is tender, Earl would tell Lydia when she was crying. He didnt see the point in crying.

We lie down for a few minutes. She’s made me a little sad, but I’ve cheered her up by consoling her. Then the phone. And Lydia has to go. She’ll call me when she’s through. I’m glad you cry, she says.

As I walk home I spot a wry cat leaping to my fence. He’s after a grosbeak. He’s as orange as a kipper.

26      Max says he was driving in from Arnold’s Cove, where his father lives. Just past Whitbourne something hard landed on his truck hood. Then a leg smashed through his windshield.

You hit a moose?

Max: No. It fell out of the sky.

He found the head by the side of the road. There was a full quarter torn from the hip that landed in the back of the truck. He drove back to Monty’s Restaurant and called the cops. The cops told him what happened. A transport truck heading west hit the moose. The moose flew off its spoiler, twirled in the air, torn to bits, and landed on Max’s truck heading east.

Max is dressing the quarter of moose that landed in the truck bed. Nothing wrong with a bit of tenderized spring moose.

27      Upstairs reading a fashion magazine. Lydia licking her finger to turn the pages, commenting on the looks of the stars.

Me: You often pick out women who look like you and say theyre gorgeous.

Lydia is silent. She’s taken offence to that because it’s egotistical. She starts listing women in town whom she has said are beautiful but who look nothing like her. She wants me, I think, to retract. And all I want is to move on why can’t I have an unsupported opinion? Why can’t she just see it as funny? She thinks that I look upon it critically, that I won’t go out on a limb, ever, and won’t admit or see that I am acting critically.

She gets up for yoga and I rise when I hear her playing Mozart and Beethoven on the piano. I say, That’s beautiful. She says, That’s because my parents paid for music lessons.

28      Craig Regular, Lydia says, has spent three years in retreat. Now he’s in Seattle. He rents his house in the Battery. His tenant moved out, so he decided to come home for a visit.

Lydia says my handwriting reminds her of Earl’s. Earl Quigley and Craig Regular were best friends. Lydia is good at particular explanations. Reasoning why. She says that our vowels and consonants take up the same amount of space, that they remind her of rows of teeth. That it’s not confined, but a loose script.

29      Ten p.m. at Max’s, playing poker. Lydia and Wilf Jardine have left the table to sing and have a laugh and I feel tight. They are singing a song I thought was my song with Lydia, but now I see it’s a song she has with Wilf. I am unable to loosen up. It’s about Lydia’s passion. I can see a novel of a man whose movements are contemplative and their effect is not immediate.

The novel starts with them contemplating marriage. Gabriel’s tension and Lydia’s freedom with others. She longs, but she stops herself unconsciously and she loves Gabe’s quiet goodness and he loves that she loves this in him and he loves her bigness in the world. But still we wonder about him; we dont see Gabe’s worth (because it is an invisible thing), only Lydia’s (external, sensuous, obvious, full of acts of will), and Gabriel hampering her and holding her back. She’s not free. Then comes Alex Fleming, who sees Gabriel, understands his inner working, and suddenly the reader recognizes why he’s great and talented, because Alex brings his treasure to light. Alex complements his thought and his creativity is ignited. They connect and Lydia sees it, Lydia knows again why he’s great, the reason she’s in love with him. But Lydia understands she can’t bring it out in him. She needs Alex to encourage it and by this time he is engulfed by Alex.

All of this arises out of Lydia singing a song with Wilf. Meanwhile the cards are dealt and the best hand I have all night is two pair.

30      I can hear Maisie Pye, Daphne Yarn, and Lydia stretching downstairs on Lydia’s area rug. The sun is just up. They must be pressing their faces into a wool rug that smells of Tinker Bumbo. That must be a pleasant yogic experience.