This All Happened

by Michael Winter

  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 hig
her 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.

  February

  1 Lydia left this morning for Halifax to work on a script. It’s not her script, but the money is good and she feels better when she’s working. I am at the Ship, having a drink with Max and Maisie. Max is holding his shaved head. The stubble is coming through and right now there is the outline of a cat’s ears at his temples, so it’s like he’s stroking a cat. It gives him a devilish look, as though faded horns are burning through his scalp and he is trying to tame them. Max is building cabinets or Oliver and Maisie. But he is articulating one of his dreams, his hands up, gesturing wildly. He wants to make moulds of men’s asses and hang the moulds in a row in a gallery.

  Max: Also, I want to bolt a giant erect fibreglass cock onto the Royal Trust building. The cock would be a sundial.

  Maisie: That’s funny. I just wrote today that the protagonist acts as a gnomon for the action.

  Me: All over town, little strips of snow are hiding in the shadows of chimney stacks. The white strip angled north away from the sun. The chimney is a gnomon.

  Maisie: When the world is a sundial, everything looks like a gnomon.

  Max: Can I take a mould of your ass, Gabe?

  You can have my ass, Max. And that’s my limit.

  2 I should be writing the novel, but instead I concentrate on Lydia. Remembering how she smelled a pair of gloves and knew who owned them. How can I turn that into a historical moment? Moments never attenuate. Moments are compressed into the dissolve of real time. I will never forget how she looked when she smelled those gloves. They were Wilf’s gloves. She could smell cigarettes, she said. Mixed in with an indefinable personal scent, unmistakably Wilf’s. I will have Rockwell Kent’s wife have this ability. But Kathleen Kent is nothing like Lydia. Lydia is firmly planted, no-nonsense, strong clavicles and shoulders. She is attractive because of her mixture of gumption and beauty. Whereas Kathleen has a silent, introspective quality. She is serene. Lydia would never have thought that identifying an owner of gloves by smelling them was a special gift, unless I told her so. Kathleen Kent would know it was a skill worth prizing.

  3 From my bedroom window I can watch Maisie walk down Parade Street with groceries. She’s wearing a yellow raincoat. Una skids down the ice ahead of her. On the southside, skiffs are bunched together, hiding from the weather behind a rusting trawler. Two
coast guard vessels, the Henry Larson and the Sir Wilfred Grenfell, are nose to nose, having a conversation about the cold.

  I wait until Maisie is in her porch. I can see her run for the phone.

  You should close your front door, missus.

  Who is this.

  I’ve frightened her. It’s Gabe, I say.

  Jeez, boy.

  I tell her I’m reading about the barber who noticed Midas had big ears. The barber has to tell someone, though he has sworn to Midas that he will keep the secret. He digs a hole and whispers the gossip into the hole and buries it. But when the wind rustles through the grass, it is saying Midas has big ears. This is the story of all good fiction. A good story whispers whenever there’s a breeze. You can dig a hole and bury your story, but the words will emerge from the undergrowth. Let the story whisper down the reader’s backbone.

  Maisie says I’m getting a little too poetic for her taste.

  4 I pick up Lydia at the airport. She is full of people she met in Halifax. She tells me details of people I do not know. She tells me who she’s attracted to. She says, You should have taken a left there. I say to her, I like going this way. She says, That way is shorter. This makes me tight. Lydia believes there is a right way and I believe there are many ways. This is a truth about our personalities. I was thinking this while I watched her plane pivot over the airport. I saw it, bright on a wing over chopped acres of Newfoundland winter Lydia said it looked like a thousand white sandwiches at a funeral. I walk in to stand by the luggage carousel. There’s a crowd. I hear an attendant say, St John’s is unique. The number of locals that come to greet the landed. I see Lydia. Her funky glasses and the angle of her jawline. At a distance, she’s always smaller. Perhaps I judge size only from a distance. We hug and we are strangers, smiling a little too energetically. She avoids kissing me on the lips. It depresses me. We climb into Jethro, a cold air between us. As I’m driving I watch her wrist twist the rear-view mirror and apply lipstick. This makes the sadness melt.