January

1 Lydia leans back to laugh at something Wilf Jardine says. Her breasts are the closest thing to Wilf, and he is looking down her taut white throat. Lydia’s teeth and lips a crescent of broken apple. Offering up her breasts and throat to Wilf. She wants to go elsewhere after the midnight fireworks, and that ambition to persist, I have decided, is drawing me to her.

A toast! and Max Wareham hands me a brandy. Max is naked under a pale raglan. I steady myself against the back of a chair. I love Max. This year I must confess all to Max. And in the periphery Lydia is still entranced by Wilf. Can I love a woman who is so entranced? Wilf lurches to me, kisses me, and I want to smack Wilf for being powerful in Lydia’s eyes. I want to make sure my forearm catches his chin in the followthrough. Wilf Jardine’s short white hair and suit jacket are doused in peppermint schnapps. He’s apologizing for wolfing down Lydia. That’s what he is, a wolf. Wilf the white-haired, ravenous wolf. He clinks my glass when the clock hands meet at twelve, and Max cries out, To Old Year’s Night! I watch pearls of liquor spinning out before my brandy snifter smashes on the hardwood. Wet splinters across all the shoes. All Shoes Night. And Alex, our hostess, says, Nobody move.

Alex Fleming, in a black sleeveless number, brushes our feet with a straw broom. She pushes flakes of wet glass into a yellow pan. She sweeps the toes of my black shoes a little extra, first act of the new year. Swipes at my knees, brush handle between my legs, and Max my dear friend Max is dancing barefoot in a raincoat.

Alex, just minutes before, had fingered the dust on the windowsill and said, drunkenly, Gabriel, you shagger. She pressed a thigh against the outside of my knee and I could see down the entire front of her black number. Imagine, she’s all of twenty-six and pressing me. She said, If I could get my claws into you. She gave me her entire eye. What I mean is she threw herself at me with one eye. And while I did not lurch, I did not decline.

Maisie Pye grabs my elbow and steers me back to Lydia.

Lydia leans on my shoulder. Wilf, she says. Wilf said, Any chance of a Christmas fling?

Me: Wilf said that?

Make you jealous?

Wilf Wilf fuck you Wilf.

Lydia and I rock against the fridge, Max opening the door for the last few beers. There’s a garbage bucket full of ice cubes and broken beer bottles, and Max Wareham, when he spoke to me almost naked, spreading lapels to show his fat nipples, Max had a sliver of brown glass hanging from his lip the size of a number-fourteen wet fly. He says, I know youre the apple of someone’s eye, Gabe.

I love you, man.

Max: I love you too, man. He pauses, almost in deep sorrow. He says, Hard to say I love you without adding man.

Me: You love me?

Max considers this.

I’m talking to Lydia, Max.

I love you anyway, man. I love you unconditionally, and you can leave off the man. Pretend I never said it.

I’m thinking, Never ask the one you love: Do you love me? Lydia: I love you, darling.

The ghost of burnt fireworks hovers over the water.

Max, as we wait for a cab, makes angel’s wings in the garden. His shaved head in the snow. Lydia pulls up the collar of her astrakhan, holds me tight. I want her head to sink deep inside my chest.

2      Words Lydia has for life are want, crave, desire, yearn, and who wouldnt want these words, but they do frighten me. The appetites. They are good for an actor to possess. Lydia is a good actor and a filmmaker, though she is not meticulous in her technique. The frame is full of life and love. In life she cares for colour, quality of fabric, but if there’s a rent under the arm, she hardly notices. I have seen her orchestrate the actions of a hundred crew and cast. Giving direction is her normal bent. It’s what attracts and detracts.

I woke up in my own bed, alone. The cab dropped Lydia off and I went home alone and walked down the pathway to my little house on the cusp of downtown. I made new footprints in the snow, the first prints of the new year. Iris and Helmut were in the kitchen dancing to the radio. I didnt even brush my teeth. Stripped, that felt good, and being alone was good, too. I love a cold bedroom. And in the morning I turned on the space heater and boiled the kettle and ate buttered toast and tea. All New Year’s Day I sat in my room and stared at the frozen harbour. I thought about marrying Lydia Murphy. I have two New Year’s resolutions: to decide on Lydia and to finish a novel.

I love this room. I love the huge windows that meet at the corner of the house. I watched the snow patiently accumulate over surfaces. I called Lydia, but we took the day off from each other, exhausted.

I called Max. He’d gone to emerge with frostbite on his ears.

I wrote off the first of the new year. I heard Iris say to Helmut, I will meet you in Brazil. That phrase could have melted a snowman.

3      I call Lydia. She’d gone to Maisie and Oliver’s last night (I declined, so hung over). Wilf was there. Wilf played a game with them at supper. Of putting a word on the forehead of someone else. Lydia stuck CHARM on Wilf’s head. And he put TRUTH on hers.

Not jealous of her time with Wilf. Because of her tone of voice. The loving.

Maybe we should get married, I say.

Maybe.

Can I define Lydia’s hesitation? Perhaps it’s that I blurted out the marriage offer. Her tone was warm, trepidatious, scared of the prospect rather than of me. A good sign. Of course, I’ve been hinting at marriage for eighteen months. Am I that pathetic, that I wanted to marry her after our first date?

4      I walk down Long’s Hill to Lydia’s. Lydia’s house is of better material than mine, but she has no view and the house is attached. There is a wooden banister and hardwood floors and exposed beams and a funky bathroom sink and tub. My house is the windows, the eyes that study the downtown and the harbour, that witness the marine traffic and the weather accumulating over the Grand Banks.

Lydia says she has met this woman, Daphne Yarn, and thinks she’s perfect for Max. Daphne’s a nurse, she has land in Brigus where she grows herbs and goats. I say, What makes you think of her and Max? Lydia: Max is a man who can appreciate nature. And Daphne has a serene beauty.

I find the term serene beauty insulting. Words like grace, serenity, harmony, peace. They all connote some kind of composure. How some people adopt a tone. The cultured poise that unnerves me. A measured evenness.

Lydia: Sure, youre like that when you leave a message on the phone to anyone.

And she mimics me. She may be right.

I dont know, though, if I’d wish Max on any woman. He’s a hard case. I love him, but I’m not a woman.

How did she note this in Max―this need for a solid fixture at home? It’s true, and perhaps wildness desires a measure of calm. I know that I desire to spend some time outside of town. On my own. I tell Lydia I may ask Maisie and Oliver about their house in Heart’s Desire. To spend a week or two there. Lydia says, It might be good for your writing.

5      I sleep at Lydia’s and we cook poached eggs (I watch her add a drop of vinegar to the water) and we lie around the fire with Tinker Bumbo and then we walk over to Maisie and Oliver’s. Before we leave Lydia’s, she looks at the electric meter. It’s winging around too fast, so she steps back inside to flick something off.

We buy beer at Theatre Pharmacy. You can buy bandages, a lady’s purse, a car battery, and beer at this place. I get light beer to please Lydia. There’s a dogberry that still has fruit, snow capping the berries like patriotic Canadian desserts. Little Una in the porch hands us slippers and I say, That’s a very European thing to do, Una. Is she nine?

Maisie Pye folds her glasses by her plate. Ten years ago I went out with Maisie. Sometimes I think of this. I think, I could be married with a nine-year-old daughter. And so could Lydia. Lydia’s ex, Earl, has a son now. Earl lives two streets away. Once, when we were walking home from the Ship, Lydia told me to shush. We were talking about Earl, under his window.

There is salsa and blue corn chips. Russian cold bean salad. Scalloped potatoes. Ham and pineapple. What a feed.

I ask if I can borrow their house in Heart’s Desire. Oliver Squires dunks a cold shrimp into a hot sauce. That house is too cold for you.

Lydia: It’s too cold and too far to drive.

Oliver: Are you both going out?

Me: It’ll just be me.

Oliver: Put antifreeze in the toilet when you leave.

Maisie says she lived out in Heart’s for one winter with Una. While Oliver finished his law degree at Dal.

What she doesnt say is, When Oliver and I were going through a hard time.

6      Snowstorm, the city closed down on Old Christmas Day―but from my windows it’s nothing compared with childhood storms. Lydia has stayed over, though she doesnt like it here. There’s no privacy from Iris and Helmut. There’s a grain of aggravation in Lydia that I can’t make a go of it without a roommate. And then there’s the fact that I owe twenty thousand dollars in student loans. Lydia is solvent whereas I’m scraping by. The bedroom doors have an inch gap at the floor, so it’s hard to be intimate. At least I could replace the doors. We wax up (waxes have lovely names: orange klister) and ski downtown, dropping off Lydia’s last mortgage cheque. She owns her house. It’ll be nineteen years before I own a house. Driveway shovellers encourage us by wagging their aluminum shovels. There’s a new, wider shovel called a push.

Discarded Christmas trees are blown in wide arcs down the hill, clumps of silver tinsel attempting to make the trees respectful. Lydia slips by me on the road, crouched and silent, plunging into the downtown. Just a whirr from her skis. Her strength is sexy.

All day the snow piles on. Towers of snow teetering towards houses. We buy split peas at Hallidays to make soup, and ski past the video store that glows against the twilight, the snow on the sills is fluorescent, a cat asleep by the cash register. We ski along Gower Street, to Lydia’s little two-storey clapboard house. She’s left lights on and it’s like a pumpkin house. How soft the city is, silent, in the snow.

7      Snowbound in St John’s. I sit by the fire at Lydia’s with Tinker Bumbo. He is fifteen, arthritic, snores, and farts. His balls flop out of his hindquarters like a purse. Lydia’s doorbell rings. She’s in the shower, so Tinker and I get it. Tinker wags and moans, his balls swaying from knee to knee, a scrotum pendulum.

A short man pushes past me.

Hello, I say.

He sits on a chair and slips off his overshoes. He lifts an elbow to me. I take it. He wears a blue suit, is in his fifties. His eyes blink, then open wide. And I see now, he’s blind. Short silver hair. Portly, with sausage fingers. He takes a dog biscuit from his breast pocket and Tinker sits to receive it. He leads me to the piano by the Christmas tree.

Youre new, he says.

Yes, I say.

I’ve been tuning this piano for thirty years.

He is wrenching off the small nuts in the back of the standup. It’s a fair model, he says.

I ask if he’d like some coffee.

I rarely have anything between meals.

I bring coffee up to Lydia.

The piano tuner is here.

Mr O’Brien. Oh, good.

She is leaning over, rolling her wet hair in a towel.

He must have walked, blind, through the drifts to the front door.

8      I meet Alex Fleming for dim sum. I havent seen her since New Year’s. She wants help with an art project that deals with passion. She says, Did I reach between your legs with a broom? Did I?

She reaches into her purse. I dont picture you as a man who is quiet, she says. Who doesnt talk much.

Alex has thin skin on a strongly defined face, long bleached hair, twenty-six. She has big eyes. Her eyes, I imagine, will get bigger. The eyes are slightly crazy. Or, she has come through craziness.

We are paying the bill. I notice she has a passport in her purse. You were born in seventy-three, I say.

I am trying to be a customs agent, or prescient. I am formal but flirting. Alex Fleming pulls out the passport, numerous ports of entry. I see her photo and birthdate. Her full name:

Marie Alexandra Fleming.

I was born in October, Officer.

She says officer in a tone that is courageously sexual. This tone lingers for a moment. I am supposed to be a border guard considering her credentials. Then the word and its tone disappear. Flirting is such a delicious act. I show her a photo of Lydia when she was five.

Alex: Youre a sentimental guy.

Her knuckle touches my hand. She has sophisticated fingers, the slight cool of a silver ring. Alex is not asking about the photo if she asked I’d say it reminds me that Lydia is crazy, mad, sexy, brilliant, funny. And that being with her, I lack regret. But that would bore the hell out of flirtation.

Dim sum means small heart, Alex says, or appetizers.

She turns her cup over and twists it clockwise three times.

I lift her cup and read her fortune.

I see a beach, and bright skies. There is a window with louvres. A man is bringing you something.

Alex: Is the man good to me?

Me: He has tender hands.

You love the word louvres, dont you?

I confess I am a lover of louvres.

Alex: Did you know there are no muscles in the fingers?

We examine each other’s fingers. It’s an excuse to touch. Then she reads my cup. It involves two quiet sailboats. Meeting at a boom.

Alex: It is meeting someone else. Briefly.

Me: Do they have an affair?

An affair of the heart, she says. And there’s a successful career too, a well-earned one.

Pluck rather than luck, I say.

Alex: Although youre very lucky.

Outside a fat snow falling.

And this too seems shocking.

I can smell cologne.

Alex Fleming is a woman who wears cologne.

There is a figure riding a bicycle, leaning hard over the handlebars, and I recognize the bicycle. It’s Lydia.

Lydia: Oh hi!

Alex opens a lavender umbrella to the snow and three nude women pop out, dancing across its ribs. And I cannot see Lydia for the umbrella.

9      Me: She wants me to write some prose poems on passion.

Lydia: Youre sure she doesnt want more than poems.

It’s a collaboration. I’m going to do the seven deadly sins. I’ve remembered them with an acronym: scalp egg. Except there’s only one G.

What?

The first letters: sloth, covetousness, anger, lust, pride, envy, gluttony.

Babe, you won’t fall for Alex, will you?

It’s work is all.

I show her the key to Heart’s Desire. Imagine, Lydia says, writing a novel there. Who would believe it. Too corny for words.

But I want, this year, to write a historical novel, set in Brigus, where the painter Rockwell Kent and the northern explorer Bob Bartlett both lived. I want a boy who is fourteen to meet them. To have these men inform the boy of the outside world. The boy will be the last person born in the nineteenth century.

I shove a piece of cardboard between Jethro’s radiator and grill, to help keep his engine warm. I drive by to pick up Tinker Bumbo. I hold Lydia by the shoulders and we kiss and I love her shoulders. She almost decides to come.

Well, visit me.

I will, babe.

10     There is a moose on the highway. I wake up Tinker Bumbo, and a youthful transformation slips over his frame. He sniffs at the lip of the window. The cow stares at me in the snow, waiting, patient. And then a grown calf emerges from the woods. They trot off together, wedge open the spruce, and are gone.

Heart’s Desire. A Catholic town nestled between two Protestant ones (Heart’s Content and Heart’s Delight). The fishery closed. I pass a man pulling logs out with an all-terrain vehicle. He waves and I honk.

Maisie and Oliver’s little red house is beyond the bridge. The key will not work, so I have to force the side door. There are boys on cold bicycles hauling sleds, watching me. There’s no water.

I lug in wood from the shed and get the stove going. I open the vent and hear the fire roar. I turn on a radio. It’s less desolate with a radio. The same radio voices you’d hear in St John’s. There’s a distant rush of water, under the house. A frantic sound. I turn on a tap and get the hollow sound of air.

11     Heart’s Desire is not a pretty town. The modern bungalows clutch the road, the abandoned saltboxes are pilfered for lumber. The church was torn down and relocated in a complex that includes a bingo hall and the mayor’s office. There’s no vista here; a bare inlet, a spruce backyard, and flat land. I phone Maisie to ask about the water. She says, Look under the house. But a storm has begun, and I decide to ignore it. Gallons of water are escaping somewhere under the floorboards. The faucets are all dry. I sit in the living room, near the woodstove. The walls and windows buffer the wind, but you can still feel it. There’s a slight current of cold, wet air. The sky darkens and I peer outside. I have no flashlight. The storm is so thick I can’t see the lights across Trinity Bay. The wind whips the porch door from my hands, smacks it against the house so hard it is wrenched off its hinges. I step down off the porch and crouch into the crawl space. I feel around, I feel water charging through the kitchen drainpipe. A boy comes by on his bicycle and I tell him.

Light a kerosene lamp, he says.

I go inside and light one. But when I bring it to the door, it douses in the wind.

He says, Light it when we’re under.

The lamp coats a false, cheerily maniacal face to the vicious pipes, the fall of water ice forming savage stalactites around the main sewer line. I am in awe at nature’s lack of shock. That a process will not stop when a situation becomes horrendous. There is no fairness, no honour. I break off chunks of smooth ice from the mad clown. I find a tap and turn it until the water ceases.

I’m Josh.

I’m Gabe.

Josh: No one stays in this house over winter. Drafts and whatnot, the water freezing up on you. Though it’s never good, he says, to have a house empty.

12     I drive to a grocery store in Heart’s Content. Bright aisles and surprising sales. A fresh plump chicken, the whole plucked bird, for three dollars. I snatch it up. It’s true I dont feel right about owning a whole chicken. I have a problem with my own deserving. There’s fresh horseradish and ripe mangosteens. The cashier doesnt know what to charge me for the mangosteens. She looks at them as if I might have snuck them into the store under my coat.

I’ve never eaten a mangosteen. But I want to support the idea that a little place in Trinity Bay will import them. I want to encourage the mind that brought them here. Let the accounting show that three mangosteens were purchased on the road to Heart’s Desire.

13     Lydia phones. She is spending a lazy day, loving me. She went downstairs and saw my photograph on the fridge and knew.

She says, Sometimes I feel shy.

Come and visit me.

I’ll try.

Want to live together?

We’ll see.

What else can I say? I cut short the call and brood around the house. I want to live with Lydia. I’m tired of separate places, and as it stands I dont even have a key to Lydia’s. I want to rent her place and have her move in with me. Or the other way around, though I’d miss the view.

I thaw the freezer and get impatient. I lay a hammer to the ice and crack the freon tubing so I shut the door on it. I read one of Oliver’s crime novels. I e-mail Alex and Max and Maisie. Each, I realize, encourages a different e-mail voice. For instance, Alex told me of a naked eye she’s building. When you look at it, the pupil grows larger. She wrote: The pupil is not a thing but the absence of iris. It’s the iris shrinking that makes the pupil grow. That’s eros allowing in more light from the object in question.

When you abandon love, flirtation increases.

Max writes spoonerisms: All guns and fame until someone oozes a lie. And Maisie is literary. About the problems a novel presents over a short story. She wrote: A good story should be a door opening onto a scene already begun and closed before the last word said. A novel should be told by the voice of an authority, yet a voice that is still discovering the meaning of what the story is. There should be wonder. And all traces of the technical problem a novel delivers (that is, how do you keep the story afloat for three hundred pages?) should be erased or masked.

14          Two boys on their bikes knock at the door. It’s Josh and his buddy Toby. They have a good laugh at Tinker Bumbo. Toby:Tha’s a town dog.

How can you tell.

He got a collar and a dog tag.

I tell them it’s my girlfriend’s dog. And they are curious about Lydia. I remember Maisie had said that when she was out here, she’d never done any writing. She was a woman with a child and no occupation. You could drop in on her. When she said she needed time to write, they couldnt comprehend it. They invited themselves over. She gave into it.

Josh: So what’s your girlfriend do?

She’s an actor. And she makes films.

Josh: That’s healthy. And what about you?

I try to capture people by their actions. By quick glimpses of how they do or say things. Moments.

Josh says he does that all the time. Except he’d call it gossip. Me: Let’s do a project together. You tell me who lives in Heart’s Desire, and I’ll write it all down.

Josh and Toby look at each other and sit on the couch. All right then.

They stretch their necks to look out the window We’ll start across the road. Madge is in the green house; she’s a nun.

Josh: She’s not.

Toby: No, but close to it. Next to her is closed up, but Et Coombs, she used to live there.

Josh: Lives in the graveyard now.

Toby: The Rumboldts, they got a little tiny house and a little tiny car. Tom Rumboldt we calls him Tommy Ginger, cause he’s always crooked.

The boys rhyme off fifty-four families that live along the road. They are like old men in their depictions and knowledge. They are far more knowledgeable of the people they love than I am of my own.

15          I’ve asked Lydia Murphy to marry me. I’ve called her and asked her. On the phone her voice was little. Yes, she said, I think so.

When I responded that she sounded dubious, she said, nervous and excited, Okay, I’ll marry you. I said, Are you sure. I said it as a statement rather than as a question. She hesitated. She had to go. She’d call me back. I waited for two hours. Then the phone rang. Maybe we should talk about it tomorrow, she said.

I e-mailed Maisie to tell her about the burst water pipe. And then I got into the issue of marriage. I felt a woman would be closer to another woman’s ambivalence.

Maisie wrote back, You never meet hesitation with hesitation. That only fosters doubt. When Lydia says no, you say okay. When she says yes, I think so, you say okay. When she says no, you say okay. When she says yes, you say, again, okay. When she says no again, you say okay. And when she finally says yes, you say okay. And then you get married.

This, apparently, is how everyone gets married.

16          I watch Josh and Toby run from the school bus straight to my door. They want to pet down Tinker the town dog and tell me who lives on the Head. They are flaked out on the couch with Tinker between them as I type this. I close up my novel file and open the Heart’s Desire one. I am going to use these boys in the novel. What they tell me I’ll inject into the story.

I read what they told me yesterday and they crack up.

Jamie Groves just west of us, Josh says, he paints cars. And has a beautiful wife. Toby’s grandmother died of a fluke. Renee Critch has a butt so big she walks through a door sideways. Smooth Jude drives the bus and he’s so fat his car can barely carry him. There’s Uncle Mary, who looks and acts and talks just like a man. Joey Langer couldnt walk before, then he had a operation and he walks perfect now.

John St George was captain of the SS Eilleen, a boat they blew the motor in her and smoke went flying everywhere and gas. Then it’s Harld Powr.

Me: Why do you say it like that?

Josh: Cause he talks so fast and he walks so fast you can’t pass him on bike.

They both laugh and slap each other’s legs.

17     I’ve laid some snares and Tinker finds a dead grouse. It startles me (the snares are set for rabbits). Its long neck rubbed down to a red hose, brass wire wrapped several times around the branch. Feathers in the moss. A struggle, a large, long battle to get free. But now lifeless. His chest flattened a little to the moss. I set the snare again instinctively. I set the snare even as I feel shame.

I show the white grouse to Josh. He says it looks healthy. Let’s go clean him, he says.

I’ve never cleaned a bird before. Cutting off the head and feet and wings. Beautiful plumage. Prying the beak open to see its perfect mouth. The feathers peel off like a pelt. Coiled black entrails flop out and stink. The heart solid and big, the fresh liver. The chunky flesh of the breast.

Tomorrow I’m taking those snares up.

The ruffled whirr as the birds ascend and disperse. In Peterson’s guidebook: at a distance the grouse’s muffled thumping is so hollow that sometimes it hardly registers as an exterior sound, but seems rather to be a disturbing series of vibrations within the ear itself.

The strongest socket is in the wing. The legs are like the front legs of a rabbit, no ball joint. The eye sunken but brown.

Josh says, With the cold, the meat should be healthy. He says Franky Langer was once lost in the woods and had to eat his dog. He was gone four days, Josh says. I mean, four days. He couldnt last longer than that before eating his dog?

18     I miss Lydia. When youre used to holding someone, a physical habit, you miss it. Is it habit to miss a voice too, to miss a response to your thought? I do no writing. There is nothing in Heart’s Desire to fill the absence of Lydia. I stare at the road and wait for the school bus. Josh says, in an accusing tone, You wasnt up by lunchtime.

How do you know? You were in school.

My parents said at noontime there was no smoke coming out of your chimley.

Toby: What happened to Maisie’s fridge?

I broke it trying to thaw the freezer.

Josh: You laid a hammer to it.

Yes, I went at it with a hammer.

Trying to break out chunks of ice.

Yes.

They both shake their heads.

Josh: Dad got a old fridge in the basement.

Well, I’d love to have it.

Josh: I’ll see what I can do.

They take the axe and go out to the shed to cleave up some junks of wood.

19     Josh’s father, Cyril Harnum, stands up on the grey flatbed truck, the garbage truck. With two men helping. The flatbed has a fridge roped to it.

The young driver, with a screwdriver, pops out the hinge bolts on the side door.

I can smell coffee, the other man says. You want her plugged in or thaw her out?

I should have kept the plug out of her last night, Cyril Harnum says.

I have paid fifty dollars for this fridge. The fat, heavy enamelled door that opens onto a salmon pink interior with two chrome shelves that swivel out. There is a pair of lightbulbs sunk into the bottom so the shine strikes up on your food, floorlights on a stage. It makes the food seem solid, planted, stars of the grocery world. The corners of the milk carton lit in a gold aureole, the spout silhouetted. I e-mail Alex about it and she responds that it was built in a time when kitchen appliances were treated as art.

All night I leave my work to go open the fridge door and admire the rich pink interior.

Cyril Harnum: Come over to supper tomorrow.

20      I call Lydia and beg her to come out. She says, I thought you wanted time on your own? I have no response. I miss watching her do things. She doesnt do things the way I do them. She makes a lot of ice cubes. I’m a man who forgets to make ice cubes. She makes sure there’s air in her bag of lettuce. She sprinkles talcum powder in her hair if it’s greasy.

Josh comes by on his bike with no handlebars.You like fish? He is steering with a set of vice grips clamped to the front fork.

I eat nine pieces of fish with slices of hot homemade bread. The fish is served from the stove. On the table are jars of tomato and rippled pickle slices. I have a mug of boiled water in which I can put a tea bag or a spoonful of instant coffee. There’s a can of evaporated milk.

Josh’s mom, Doreen, is rolling cigarettes at the table. There’s patch in the varnish at the end of the table faded from cups of tea. I’ve told them my decision to lift my slips and Josh thinks it’s foolish but his dad can see how it’s cruel.

Cyril: There used to be no grouse out here. Now the woods is thick with em. Theyre easier to pick than turre. With turre you got to dip em in boiling water first.

There is a big hook in the ceiling that I ask about. Doreen laughs. Cyril has a sore back, she says, from working in the woods. It’s all right in the summer, it’s in the winter it acts up. So he put a screw in the ceiling beam with a rope through tied to his waist. He hoists himself off the floor with the rope. He won’t go see a doctor.

Doreen hands me a fresh loaf as I leave. The snow just wisping over the ground. The loaf is warm in my hand.

21      I tie on my snowshoes and venture into the woods. Tinker wades in a few feet, then sits down. I do love solitude. I am a simple man when it comes to being satisfied by the natural world. The sun poking through in patches, lighting up a knoll here, a dip there. Tinker begins to bawl when he’s had enough. I can still see the roof of the house.

A man at the store says, I’ll give you twenty dollars for that dog.

You want my dog?

Sure, he looks like he got one more winter in him. He’s full of bird dog.

Tinker wags and smells the man’s hand.

He’s not my dog, I say. I dont want to explain the absence of Lydia, so I leave it at that.

I’ve got the woodstove vent opened wide, but still I’m cold. Didnt write at all today. I forced myself to read fifty pages of Proust. Maisie and Oliver have great books. But there’s no hot water. My hair is greasy. I sweep the floor and visit the Heart’s Content grocery. Lydia comes tomorrow. I will hear her catalytic converter.

22      When I opened the door we were shy. We were relieved that Tinker Bumbo was a diversion, but we were awkward together. Twelve days apart and all that we’ve formed together has burned off, grease on a stove element. We are two individuals again. We do not act in concert. We are not convinced by the prospect of living as a couple. We were brought together by Maisie, and we still feel unnatural. It wasnt our idea to be together but someone else’s, and both of us resent that intrusion into domestic affairs. Lydia circles me like an animal, inspecting. And I feel judged.

But I’ve been told that I have a critical eye. Some people mistake my gaze for judgement. When all I’m doing is looking into your eye. I have an open eye, I admit. This can unnerve some people. Make them uneasy. But it’s their insecurity that is exposed. However, I admire the skill Max has for making a person feel comfortable. Max lives in his skin, completely, whereas I float within my body. Not quite filling my frame.

And right now, with Lydia in the kitchen, adding to the fridge with some city groceries, I’m dreading having to make conversation. We’ve been together eighteen months, and still I have this black, boggy fear creeping into my joints.

Nice fridge, she says.

She has a blemished finery about her. Her good looks only heightened by the small scars incurred from reckless behaviour, when she has hit the corner of a kitchen cabinet or smacked into a cement wall.

23      Josh and Toby are impressed with Lydia. That she’s been on television and she owns Tinker. She makes them cookies. I explain our system to Lydia. I unfold the laptop and they begin. There’s Rosy Langer with four youngsters and they havent got the same father, and Fail Burden they got a song made up about him about a cigarette or a power saw, and France Clarke lives in a small house, not bad but not very big. About the same size as this one.

They look around.

Same size. France he’s after losing a nice bit of weight. He has a car brought up solid on a rock and he got out and the car rised up about three foot. Next is Leonard, he wears pork chop grease to keep his hair down and puts his cap on squish. Then there’s Pat Whelan, who got a glass eye.

Lydia: How did he lose his eye?

Toby: I thought it was a hook at the wharf.

Josh: No, he was foolin around and got stuck in the eye with a prong.

Sure, that’s what I said.

John Harris is up to the store every day. He uses his trike for a car. Next is Killer Sean; he’s married. His wedding was only half an hour long cause they havent got any money.

And that’s it for half the harbour.

With the presence of Lydia they cut it short. Josh says, So are you two married or what?

Lydia: No, we’re not married.

Me: We’re entertaining the prospect.

You guys should get married and come out and live here. Lydia: We’ll think about it.

24      I’m telling Lydia about the novel, how Max Wareham will be the model for Rockwell Kent, how I’m stuffing the novel with facts from the present, stuffing garlic and sage into a leg of lamb, when her body suddenly tenses, her leg lifts off the couch. She wants to interrupt. But rests again. As if her entire body is full of the words she wants to say, have coursed through her and stalled before sputtering out.

Me: What is it.

Lydia: Nothing. It’s unrelated.

Me: You may as well say it.

She releases her censor. She says, Do you call Max a friend of yours?

Why.

He was talking about you. He had questions, but the questions were leading.

What did he ask?

He asked what I thought of you. If I thought you were aloof.

And you said.

That I loved you, and yes, you are aloof.

And he said.

That youre obviously attracted to me. He said that I’m too good for you.

He’s said that about all my girlfriends.

He wanted to take on Wilf in the basement. He wanted to wrestle. He wanted to wrestle naked.

Was serene Daphne Yarn there for that?

They left together.

You got them together?

I introduced them.

Max has been single a long time.

It was the kind of party where everyone was hitting off everyone else.

I won’t even ask.

Wouldnt it be fun to have a party like that? Everyone naked except for trenchcoats.

Me: I think it would be silly.

You think it would.

I think it’s funny to think about, but not to go ahead with. It’s fun to laugh, dont you think?

Yes, it’s fun to laugh.

25     We load up the cars. I pull the plug on the fridge, prop the freezer door open with a piece of cardboard. I fill the toilet with antifreeze. I stoke up the woodstove one last time, then lock the front door. The boys are in school. I look back to see a puff of pure blue smoke. I follow Lydia as we drive back to town. We pass a harbour seal lying in the snow by the side of the road. His skin is so full of meat, like a forced sausage. I can see the instinct behind clubbing and sculping.

Lydia says her father thinks we’re getting married. She had asked him what he thought of me. And then she had to tell him that we’re still thinking about it.

26      Back home on Long’s Hill. Helmut Rehm is studying the plans of the racer, Sailsoft. He says he will lose about fifteen pounds on the final leg of the race. They will begin in Boston in June and sail to a small port near Sao Paulo. The next leg has them cross to Namibia. This is the toughest section. Some racers like to veer to an extreme southern latitude, where higher winds exist and therefore greater sailing speed. But there’s the danger of shoals, hurricanes, ice, and brutally cold temperatures. They’ll lay up in Africa for a month and begin again around the cape to Bombay. Head southeast to Sydney and north again to Hawaii and over to San Francisco. Thread the needle at Panama and then boot it to Boston. A five-month race. Their boat is sponsored by a software company.

Helmut says he can sit in our living room all day and be entertained by the fronts combining to make weather. He has never seen weather like it.

27      Lydia’s cousin is getting married to a man who studies geology. He has shown me a series of maps that shave plates of rock off the island, as though it were an anatomy lesson, revealing pockets of magma and oil and natural gas, seams of coal. A network of veins stripped away to expose muscle groups, then these lifted to display skeletal structure. You understand, from the rock, that the island is chunks of three continents fused together.

In the church, an aunt two pews ahead turns around and mouths to me, Congratulations. I frown. She mouths it again, five distinct syllables.

Lydia: That we’re getting married.

Lydia leans over the pew to tell her the difference.

At the reception Lydia spills punch over her blue tulle dress. She says, I guess I’ll have to walk around all night like this: one hand on her belly, laughing. The stain between her hand and her laugh. She kisses the groom on the shoulders. She kisses her cousin on the eyelids. The aunt who whispered to me says to Lydia, I can see your bra strap.

Lydia lifts a shoulder, bends an elbow, and slips off her bra. She pulls the bra from her dress like a rabbit. She stuffs it in my jacket pocket.

On the way home with her parents, Lydia in back with her mother, her father dropping me off. We kiss across the seats as he pulls the handbrake against the steep hill. Her parents are disappointed. Mr Murphy had said to me, I hear there’s been a proposal. And I had to say to him, We’re still negotiating. I hand back her bra, cupped in my fist. The crisp rustle of that blue tulle dress.

I’ve known her now for eighteen months, but even this one night informs me. I can love her way. But I can’t love her if she doesnt love me.

28     Max introduces me to Daphne Yarn. I was expecting someone quiet, but she has a story. She’s taller than Max, but then Max is short. I remind Daphne of her brother. And when I talk she laughs, because we talk about the same things. She says the way I say things is occasionally impossible to follow. She has to wait for more information. And I understand that Lydia is right about me. That I sometimes make people uncomfortable because I’m not clear. I’m confident but obtuse. And they dont want to hurt my feelings. So they laugh good-naturedly. Usually it’s a joke that I make where the leap is too large.

Daphne’s hair is tied back in two pigtails, and this forces her face to be intense when she laughs. The laugh is something that is not serene beauty. There’s a gruff undertone that means she’s game for anything.

29     I meet Maisie Pye to discuss our novels. She’s making a novel about what’s happening now. It’s thinly veiled autobiography. Except she’s pushing it. The Oliver character has an affair, and her friends, when they read it, think Oliver’s cheating on her. He’s not, she says. People believe if you write from a tone of honesty, conviction, and sincerity, if you capture that correctly, then readers will be convinced it all happened that way.

I said I’m having great fun with my characters. Because it’s all set in the past. I describe Josh and Toby and Heart’s Desire. About the research I’ve done on the American painter and of Bob Bartlett’s trips to the North Pole. I’m using Max and Lydia and others as these historical characters. Max is going to be my Rockwell Kent. My father might be Bob Bartlett. That way, I can be present in the past.

Maisie says, So who am I?

I havent used you. Yet.

And she’s disappointed.

30     The harbour is caught over with a thin ice sheet. A transport vessel, the ASL Sanderling, slices through the ice on its way to Montreal. It leaves a cold blue strip of linoleum behind it. It’ll be back in six days. The Astron left yesterday and the Cabot will arrive tomorrow Cold days, the heater on behind me. The light is marbled, you see the current of the harbour. Gulls standing on the ice as the raw sewage surfaces. Sewage melts the ice.

Through the Narrows a thin line of open Atlantic. The hills that pinch the horizon have been trying for ten thousand years to accumulate topsoil. I love how you can see an entire afternoon’s walk. The sweep of one topographical map playing itself out. Enough variety to keep me busy with a pair of binoculars. When Grenfell, a hundred years ago, first entered this port the entire city was still smouldering, burnt to the ground, only chimneys left standing, the sides of churches. These same churches.

Iris is downstairs. She’s making coffee for Helmut. Helmut has large hands and his longest finger is his ring finger. You notice the ring fingers when he’s gesturing. It’s an attractive gesture.

31     Lydia’s off to Halifax for a week. So we spend the day together. We sharpen our skates and drive to the Punchbowl. Max and Oliver and some kids have cleared the ice. There’s a hockey game and there’s a loop ploughed off the ice. I watch Oliver lean into a turn and cross his skates. A fluid hockey player, a product of the minor leagues. I never played hockey, except in the backyard on a rink made out of water from a hose. I skate behind Lydia, tuck down and hold on to her hips, and she leans ahead and tows me.

Max has a fire going in the woods beside the pond. He’s having a boil-up, hot dogs and coffee. He’s brought birch junks from home. Life is good.