I say, Youre a fashion cougar. And she laughs.
She says, When you travel, time rushes at you and past you and then you come home and bang! time stands still and you have to walk through it again.
It’s like that optical illusion you get in a car that’s been speeding all day and you stop for gas and the earth slowly slinks away as if youre in reverse. That’s how Lydia has felt over the last few days. As if St John’s is slowly moving away from her, she can’t really get into it again.
Me: Or want to get into it.
Maybe that’s it. When I’m alone I think of men who live in other cities. Whereas you think of women you’ll see today.
I nod agreement to this.
She says, Arent you going to ask if I had an affair?
I say, I know you.
Oh, she says, there’s lots I get by you.
5 There’s an old woman in lane one with a white bathing cap. She’s doing little push-away strokes and a few slow crawl strokes, neck arched way back.
It has taken me thirty-six days of the new year to begin exercising. I will do forty laps. I’m not in bad shape.
When she gets out it’s slow up the chrome steps. She barely hauls herself out. A large savannah mammal. She finds her walking cane by the steps. Her knock knees. Thin legs and wide back. I think, if Lydia is like this at seventy-four I can still love her. Then I see she’s one of the two slender, well-dressed ladies who shop at Coleman’s. So careful to get to her chair. Where there’s a bag and towel. She drapes the white towel over her shoulder, like angel’s wings. I finish my laps. Twelve then twenty then eight, but I’m not tired (except my neck) and it’s more the monotony. I catch up to her as she’s still carefully reaching the women’s showers, but she doesnt recognize me. For I am disguised as well in bathing trunks.
6 Max Wareham says he fell for Daphne Yarn because her eyes watered whenever it was windy. He noticed an inner light in her eyes that mirrored her external being. I said, Are you saying she has a serene beauty? No, he says, she has a deep laugh that undercuts the composure. But I’ve found a connective force, some adhesion, and this force pushed me to commit.
Max says, I’m crazy enough for two people. I need someone anchored.
He says his mother married his father after he asked her to dance to Hank Williams. They waltzed and he told her of his dog opening doors with its teeth, and she laughed.
He says, Now you with Lydia. I’ve never seen a man so cuntstruck.
I thought about that word all day. Cuntstruck. I had to go out for a walk with it. It was a little dog that I put on a leash and let wander ahead of me. It was one oclock, the night’s first puny hour. I stepped outside, preparing for it to feel like the furthest thing from summer. But a wind from the Gulf of Mexico had drifted in off course. You could smell the heat. Redolent and cuntstruck. It’s true. Tonight should have been the coldest night on earth, and yet the soft wind reminded me of summer. I thought of the wind in sexual terms. That this wind was having an affair with my little dog.
7 I write three pages on an old man who lives in Frogmarsh, near Brigus. I’m calling him the remittance man and I’m basing him on Wilf. He’s done a bad deed in England and fled to the colony. A novel needs evil men. While driving, the remittance man sees a car broken down, a couple, and stops. He gives the man a lift to the nearest gas station. The man’s wife stays with the car. At the station, the man says he can find his way back. But the remittance man, instead of continuing on, doubles back. He picks up the wife. He says, Your husband asked me to bring you to the gas station. She gets in, but the remittance man drives past the station. He pulls in to a dirt road that leads to a salvage yard.
This is all plot and action. And invented. It doesnt interest me.
8 When I think of God I think of a voice in my chest I tell promises to. I will not lie. I will give away a hundred dollars this month. I will not read Lydia’s journal. I will praise others and not myself. I will steal only from corporations. I will not fool myself about the truth of my actions.
This type of promise builds you. It is the moral foundation.
I do not want to write another word on couples. On the words they tell each other. On detail. I have no interest in this. I want insight. So often my interests are prurient and carnal. I want to leap, rather than be hemmed by the drudgery of copying down rote event. There is nothing wrong with deluding yourself. I must pinpoint motive and repercussion.
9 Lydia calls and she’s full of love, but I’m irritated. She was inviting me to come down for supper, but I declined. I said I’d already eaten when I hadnt. I declined because she had thought of me at the last minute. But that’s her nature. Lydia lives with the evidence that surrounds her. She was oblivious to my existence right up until the moment she called me.
I walk to the pizza joint and order a slice. I have made a date with Max to play racquetball. I realize I’ve been volatile all week. I’ve been tight in the shoulders. I understand it has to do with the marriage proposal, how the proposal has been stored away in a cupboard behind Lydia’s ear while she prepares for roles and a film this summer. The word that best describes my plight is anguish. The word comes to me while I’m whacking a racquetball. Max is exasperated. Anguish, he says, is something most people cannot afford to have (he smacks a low shot into the back corner) . It is a self-made dilemma. Most people are dealing with forces beyond their control. Anguish implies a position of your own doing.
But what’s wrong with suffering from your own hand? Everyone, he says, gets into moods and it’s no big deal. But there is no room for me to have a bit of a mood. Lydia gets angry at me.
Just tell her youre in a bit of a mood.
I dont always know I’m in a mood. Small things build when they should stop. Mood should not feed on mood.
Max can offer me no solution to this one.
10 Helmut Rehm is on his way to Boston for ten days. The company boat, Sailsoft, needs a new boom. I ask Helmut if sailboats, when they cross the Atlantic, take the Gulf Stream.
No. It doesnt go north now.
He says the Gulf Stream is a river in the ocean. It’s about ten or fifteen miles wide and sailors use it all the way up the seaboard. It is a mechanical stair, he says. You just coast. But to cross the ocean you must wean yourself off it.
Everything in nature is a comparison to the human state. There is a stream in relationships, a highway of water you can take that is the easiest route to destinations. But you both must be in that route.
11 I meet Lydia at the Ship. The bar has a different light to it. Directly behind Lydia there are strings of white pins of light taped to the ceiling beams. White taffeta trailing from the posts in anticipation of Valentine’s. The white taffeta and white pins seem to bloom out of Lydia’s head. As though she is of pure thought.
Oliver Squires puts on his coat and waves goodbye to us. He is still dressed in his court clothes, so I know he’s been here since five. It’s evident there’s a large block of frost between him and Maisie.
I tell Maisie I dreamt she read a version of my novel and said,You can’t write it like that, it’s too much like my style. And I realized the style that I wanted was Maisie’s. I had no style of my own. That I’ve never had personal style, but instead adopted the styles that I admire. The fear of being derivative.
Maisie nods and Lydia says being derivative is a fear we all have. The white taffeta lends a weight of truth to her statement.
12 I drop off the first few pages of the novel to Maisie. I put them in her mailbox. As I turn I see Oliver Squires walking towards me. He’s just breaking for lunch at legal aid. He’s loosened his black tie. His neck is too big for his shirt. He says, Have you been eating and defecating in my house again?
He invites me in. Welcome to the hellhole.
He asks what my place is like; he has never been up there. We are at the window and look up the h
ill. You can see my bedroom window from there.
I’ve always admired that house, he says.
Oliver seems to be in a mood for confession. He appears exhausted. He fixes himself a sandwich and I decline. He keeps the fridge door open with one foot. He says, One thing I miss about being single is sleeping in my own bed. Maisie, she nudges me over to the edge of the bed. It’s like she’s pushing me out. Like I’m a piece of grit in her shell. There’s this acre of bed in front of her. We have this joke that she’s cultivating a national park. I ask if any animals were poached last night.
He is telling me this story because he knows I’m a writer. He is telling me this so I’ll write it down. It’s as though he knows Maisie is writing about him and he wants me to have a piece of the action.
Oliver: One time, I dreamt I was in that park. I was tiny, on the duvet, like one of those fairground moonwalks. Puffy. Maisie was a mountain range in the distance, and I had to make my way across this desert. But the animals, of course.
Me: You didnt make it.
Oliver: No.
So it’s good the way you are.
I suppose so.
Stick with what you got is what youre saying.
Is that what it all means?
Everything he says is tinged with the possibility he’s having an affair.
13 Wind shudders the telephone poles, the cold churches. I pick up Lydia and we walk over to Max and Daphne’s Valentine’s party. Oliver in his speckled bow tie, his ginger-grey curly hair, and Wilf Jardine in that wool jacket and jeans discussing Spinoza. We try putting Oliver in the fridge as he’s fetching a beer, but Maisie saves him. Or she’s saving the fridge from injury. Part of Oliver wants to go in the fridge. But then he decides on two Jockey Club in one hand and a bottle of red Chianti in the other. His breath hot with alcohol.
Oliver: Show us your tits, Alex.
Alex leans back and flashes her tits at us. Just long enough for her nipples to register on the retina.
Oliver: What a gorgeous girl you are.
Max walks in with two dozen fresh ones. The tips of his ears red. Generous Max.
Max says, Oliver tries to be sophisticated. But I once saw him make instant coffee with hot water from a tap.
Daphne stands behind Max. She will use Max as a shield to get through this night.
Oliver: Those were my years in the wilderness.
Max: Sure, youre only at an oasis. And youre some vain with your ginger hair.
Oliver: At least I have hair.
Max: You seem to have more hair now than you did then. Oliver: Back then. When I was with a Hobbesian woman: nasty, brutish, and short.
Alex, to me: How do you prepare oysters?
The oysters lie fiercely shut on a plate and I take them to the sink and ask Daphne for a strong, small knife.
Alex makes her way over. She is flagrant and I am drawn. She tells me of her short infatuation with Wilf Jardine. Wilf is showing Lydia the chords to his song. They talked on a bird count. Wilf wrote Alex a letter. She found herself watching him play guitar down at the Spur. He sang his one good song. Then, during a break, he sat in front of her and she studied the back of his neck, the grizzled white hair. She bought him a beer. He said, Alex. But in a frozen way. She knew then it was a mistake, but she slept with him. Sleeping with him got him out of her system.
Me: And he was your age when you were born.
Alex: He’s just a sexy guy. Or he had a moment of sexiness. I am prying at the crimped, ceramic mouth.
What was the moment when Wilf became human?
When he got irritated, she says. We were driving through town in his old Valiant and I suggested we take a route and he was irritated.
I sever the muscle, wring a lemon. The lemon spurts over my hand. I lick the crevices of my hand. I hand Alex the opened oyster. She lays its ceramic mouth on her bottom lip. She leans back. I watch her white throat swallow. Her nipples, in the periphery, just show through her top. Then she stares straight into my eye. She says, Theyre delicious.
14 We’re at an erotic reading in a room above the St John’s curling club. Both Maisie and I are reading. When you go to the bar you can watch the curlers sweep down the rink. Wilf Jardine, at one point, leans to me and says, I think she likes you. Meaning Alex Fleming. And then he says, I wouldnt mind finding a blonde here tonight one with a great set of assets.
Wilf leans back and straightens his grey wool jacket lapels. Sometimes his face relaxes and you see that he is fifty-two. He has large eyes and a broad face. One of those faces that has got thicker over the years. He stares at the helium balloons framing the room-wide window that looks down on six lanes of curlers casting rocks. The tray of desserts being wheeled out, like a sweet patient.
Wilf: I like this set-up because you know you won’t be talking to a load of drunks.
Lydia: Unlike last night.
It’s hard to feel anything erotic as the poets whisper up their attempts at arousal. When it’s my turn I realize the problem: eroticism rests on intimacy, and a roomful of people destroys this intimacy.
We eat dessert. We plough into the sweet patient.
The speaker system is accidentally attached to the downstairs intercom, so the curlers hear every word.
Wilf says, The problem with the word erotic is that it has the word rot in the middle of it.
15 There is no colour in the hills now. Whatever quality affords colour in colour film is no longer in those hills. Below the hills in dry dock is the trawler Wilfred Templeman. It looks like a part of the sentinel fishery. Hauled up alongside the Beothuk park, deep in the shipyard.
You must listen to your heart of hearts. You must know there is a cable of love that connects, that carries an undertow, that tugs and anchors you during the white storm. When I look into Lydia’s blue eye I want to see that cable. The storm can shave away all bindings, but the silver cable persists.
The roofs are white. But the roads have melted to black. All the windows are black or a very dark green. Windows allow light but offer darkness. If you are attracted to windows you probably like looking out through them. Otherwise, you like looking at yourself in them, as darkness allows a reflection.
Iris says there’s a new prison in the mountains of Germany. Helmut was telling her. And the only windows are slits, like a glowing envelope on edge. And Helmut wonders if you can see an entire mountain through a slit. This is the project we all undertake, she says. Isnt it. To accept everything if you love a piece of everything.
16 Lydia tries on clothes at the Value Village. A green wool suit made in Dublin. It fits her like stretched fabric over wood. Her thin chest and full thighs. She cocks her hips, pulls up a shoulder.
What do you think?
I think youve rescued it.
Then it’s a wine V-neck sweater that hugs her little tits. I am in the change booth with her. I run a hand over her pubic hair. I can’t help it. What about this, she says. A black number with white stitching. I am learning to choose clothing for her. At first it seemed anything would look good on her. I was astonished at how small a top could be. The size of children’s clothing.
She says, Youre some chummy with Alex.
Me: Youre one to talk.
17 Forty laps in a thirty-metre pool. I love swimming in winter. But I’m winded after ten laps. The water playing off plexiglass like starfish made from sunlight. Moving a plate of light around the room off your watch.
Lane one, a man, about forty-two, with a bald spot and a small pot and tufts of hair at his nipples and belly button. A young guy with him learning to shallow dive, tattoos on his shoulders, something meek. I practise the crawl, blowing under water, sucking under my arm. I take it easy. Lane three, a sleek woman ploughing through lengths like she’s churning cream.
Some people you care for, some you dont, just from their look.
That man and the younger man could be lovers, except I see that it’s my neighbour, Boyd Coady.
I drive home and there’s a message on the machine: Lydia’s out for a run and she’s going to come over. Then I see her walking down the path. She is carrying a bouquet of carnations.
How did you run with flowers?
I held them behind my back.
When I hug her, her body is hot and steamy.
18 Maisie Pye and I get drunk. We havent been drunk together in ages. It’s so good, she says, to get drunk with you.
She pulls on a lock of her brown hair and nibbles it.
She says she can be direct with me. She can utter anything and it won’t be misconstrued. She says, The fact that we’ve slept together avoids all that sexual tension bullshit.
That was ten years ago.
Doesnt matter. Does it matter to you? I mean, do you have any sexual feelings for me?
I guess not. But I didnt know it was because we’d slept together.
Well, thanks a lot.
That’s not what I meant.
Maisie: With most men I have to watch it. Or they watch it. But with you I’m perfectly comfortable.
So youre saying―
I’m saying you should watch out for Alex.
We’re only ever flirting.
I think she’s interested in you.
We leave it at that. She asks how things are with Lydia. Me: We were thinking about getting married.
Maisie nods at this. Maisie got us together in the first place, and now I can see she’s having doubts.
Maisie: My flaw is I’m convincing. I can convince people to do things, even if theyre the wrong things to do.
You dont think we should get married.
I’m not saying anything. I’m just worried that the right thing gets done.
Well, how do we look from the outside? From your angle?
You look infatuated. Which beauty can drug you on. You have to work through infatuation.
And how do you know if youre infatuated?
Your work suffers.
Maisie says you have to watch yourself in any relationship, or you’ll end up in torment.
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