This All Happened

by Michael Winter

  16 We sleep in the tent in Daphne’s backyard at Brigus. I am making notes about how the rock is tilted into the sea, the grain of rock on an angle, like a giant’s handwriting. Daphne in her maternity dress frying blood pudding and pancakes with Max’s partridgeberries. Out the window I can see the gentle curve of Brigus. I can see where the sealing ships would lie at anchor to dry their sails. A second pot of coffee on. Sun and wind. The night wind was strong, slapping the tent fly like a sail. A few dangerous moments of wet windshield, headlights from other cars refracting on the wet, making it hard to see the road, the median. Reaching for my wipers.

  A note from Lydia. I read it as soon as I got the fire going. She had jogged through Brigus with my baby inside of her. She was definitely pregnant. Running and pregnant with my baby. And then she felt her period start.

  I feel my own blood sink, a depression that a ritual had begun. I realize that I had wanted her to be pregnant. There was only remorse, no relief, at the news.

  17 Lydia sad and sick from her period, doesnt want to play soccer. Oliver Squires, after a bad kick: It’s like a Heisenbergian particle, you concentrate on its placement and the velocity is shot to hell.

  Oliver challenges Max in the Tely Ten road race. Oliver ends up passing out from dehydration. Oliver back from a week in Mexico, his face seems to be slowly crumpling, his good looks turning sour. Abundant nostril hair, pushed in eyes.

  I watch Max lift to head a ball, but instead he sneaks his fist up to his neck and punches it upfield.

  18 I water Iris’s flower boxes using the shower nozzle through the bathroom window. I watch a plane descend and, for a blink, the sun goes out. Beyond the fence Boyd Coady is growing snow peas.

  Lydia calls and says, Thanks, Gabe.

  Youre welcome.

  It’s beautiful. It’s so cute and excellent quality.

  What are we talking about?

  Your little television.

  Lydia.

  I found it this afternoon.You know, I thought I didnt want to live with a TV, but

  Lydia. I didnt get you a TV.

  Lydia: There’s a television in the living room. Well, perhaps someone else left you the television. What?

  I drive down and there it is. A very good, portable TV.

  I think we should call the police, she says.

  Just think, first, I say.

  19 I am fishing with Max. At one point the outboard motor stalls. I try to remember my childhood knowledge of choke and gas and ignition. I get it going. Like remembering youve memorized a poem and can recite it years later.

  We fish for salmon on the last day of the season. Max lands a black fighter, about four pounds. We store him in the cooler and climb to Mount Misery. We scan over two hundred square

  miles of land. The distant ponds agreeing to the topographical map. I tell Max about Lydia almost pregnant, and he sees I’m sad. He says, But you were both happy about it. That’s a terrific sign. And perhaps that’s the lesson offered, not failure but a signal that youre ready.

  20 Lydia calls from Wilf Jardine’s at 1:15. She’s too stoned to walk so I suggest getting her.

  I stand in the porch but she doesnt see me. She has her hand on Wilf’s knee. She’s drawing his attention. Someone tells Lydia, Gabe’s here.

  Sitting on the bathroom sink at home brushing her teeth she says, I’m really attracted to Wilf. Can you see why?

  I describe his rough energy. But that’s not it, she says. It’s more his armpit.

  His armpit?

  Lydia: His spirit.

  In bed, we’re honest. She says I’ve only ever lied to you once. She says, I wanted you to come over to me and kiss my cheek and say, I’m here for my baby, in my ear.

  I thought if I’d done that you’d have been embarrassed at such a public display.

  But that’s discreet, she says. She says, Why did you walk away from me and Wilf?

  I didnt feel a part of it. I dont like seeing you stoned, you laughing at not-very-funny things.

  At 5:15 I’m still awake, walk around the house, I massage Lydia’s feet.

  21 In the morning she asks if we made love last night. This too angers me. She could have slept with someone and not known. I ask about the lie. Lydia said it was with a guy who had a girlfriend.

  It struck me that I knew who it was.

  She says, Youre not upset, are you? It was nearly two years ago, before we were going out.

  I say, You have to understand that I had decided on you. You might not have been going out with me, but I was going out with you.

  But you knew I wasnt going out with you.

  Lydia lingering on Wilf’s knee.

  She wants me to relax, be comfortable. Get to know her friends more.

  22 In the porch doorway we argue. It begins with me following Lydia down, wanting a kiss before she leaves. She says she can’t because of the towels: all the towels in her bathroom were gone. And I felt like I couldnt say anything to you because you’d take it the wrong way and write it down in that journal.

  You read it.

  Yes.

  Lydia.

  Everything you write about me is rotten.

  I write down things that vex me. I dont write down the good things.

  Well, why dont you?

  Happiness is too hard to write and boring to read.

  She won’t kiss me before her run. Only as a begrudging against-her-will kiss. I say, Not even a neutral kiss?

  You mean like kissing a statue?

  No, youre right. It’s all or nothing when it comes to a kiss.

  23 I roll my trunks inside a towel and drive down to Lydia’s. There’s a strong wind in the tops of trees. Leaves add so much sound. The tomato plants have sprouted.

  Lydia is sitting on a cooler, clipping her toenails.

  We drive out to Horse Cove. I spot Max’s truck stopped in at Jardine’s. They are buying fudgesicles. A man, bare-chested, is slicing bologna. He is singing.

  Max says, The Jardines are full of music.

  We take the route to St Thomas and then Laurie Road after the guardrail.

  The shale cliffs tossed vertical.

  I put together a salad at Horse Cove.

  We swim and play Scrabble. Daphne gets two seven-letter words in a row. Drinking rum and orange juice. The kids throwing rocks at the boulders, to have them bounce back.

  When did you first think of Max?

  Daphne: First time I clapped eyes on him. I said, That man I’m gonna marry.

  Are you getting married?

  Max: After the baby.

  24 In nature you see only half of a thing at a glance. But in writing you patch together bits and sides. More than is natural. It’s a full map of the world, but in two dimensions. A flat map is not the globe. Something is lost in seeing it whole. Or too much seen gives the wrong impression. Nothing is as grand or foul.

  Lydia and I make a list of all the things we’ve lost. The bread, the good cheese, the green bottle of wine, a Sydney Lumet book, a cutting board, a small rug from the bathroom.

  We hunt through her house and notice a plate missing above the pelmet. The curtains from a window in Lydia’s study. A pair of shoes.

  We add the two items found: underwear and the television. The police suggest installing a monitoring system, and Lydia has agreed.

  25 I help Max set a course of cinder blocks under a house. The basement excavated and the dirt thrown to the side for a vegetable garden. Max says, On the job, when the foreman yells for mortar, the labourer throws in a handful of stones. That slows up the bricklayer he has to pick out the stones. The stones are called the hearts of the labourer.

  He shows me the plumb. The line is the line, he says. You go just inside it with the bricks, you never touch the line. If you move the line, then you have no line. />
  Max knows a bricklayer who doesnt know eighths. If the measurement is seven-eighths, he will say a strong three-quarters. Five-eighths is a weak three-quarters.

  He says how many bricks it takes depends on the job. If youre paid by the brick, then if you have to break a brick in two for instance, around a window you throw away the other half of brick. If youre being paid a wage, then you save the half-brick and use it on the next course of bricks. Those half-bricks add up.

  26 We’re invited to a barbecue at Alex’s, but Lydia is shooting an underwater scene at the fluvarium. Craig has become a volunteer, helping the cameraman.

  At the barbecue, Wilf sings a song whose only line is: Please come back to me.

  There are murmurs of a swim. Alex wants me to stay behind, but it’s safer to swim. So she comes along. We follow Max to Long Pond, which is rimmed in distant orbs of street-lamps. A wharf that sinks a little when we step on it. There’s a wind here, cooler. Max strips off and is in first, his cry. As Alex undresses I see her small breasts. We all jump in. Except Oliver. We lose the moon and a short, swift rain falls. I can’t feel the rain, only see it puncturing the surface of the pond, and the punctures look like nipples, a pond of nipples. Then the moon returns. A quarter moon.

  Look at the moon.

  Look at the ass on that moon.

  Oliver: I can’t believe you havent thrown me in.

  He looks big, with a gut, and old.

  I tell all this to Lydia and she says, At about the time you were skinny-dipping I had parked the car with Craig by the fluvarium. We caught that rain. We were probably looking right over at you.

  27 Una skipping in the baseball diamond. We are following our noses. This is what skipping would be like, Una says, if it was an Olympic event. She whirls fast.

  I ask, Why isnt it?

  Because it’s a kid’s game.

  She says, In India they dont skip rope.

  Why not?

  Pause. Culture, she says.

  She knows this because in both movie versions of the Secret Garden they discuss India and skipping.

  Maisie and I have decided to enter the CBC short-story contest. I’m culling a story from the journals. I havent written a story in months.

  28 We take sea kayaks out into Bay Bulls. I watch Lydia lean back and paddle along the coast, across from Bread and Cheese Point. A cave with a baby gull bobbing in low tide. Lost and fluffy. Panels of rock slanting into the sea. A ledge to keep off or you’ll be capsized.

  Farther out puffins with caplin draped in their mouths. Puffins find kayakers unusual and dont move. Until youre right up on them and then they hop and flap, push off the water with their stubby wings, and plunge-dive.

  On the way back in the baby gull has reached a purchase. But he’s alone and bewildered.

  29 Oliver says, Everything of importance has resonance. It all has immediate links. Maisie, he says, goes for the throat in her fiction. And that’s what it should do. It matters how you leave someone. If you want to feel good, then choose to love and leave when you dont like her. Leave when youve done no wrong and leave when youre not feeling jealous. Have a good footing.

  I have seen Oliver too often at the Ship. And who has seen him with his prize, pregnant paralegal student? Only me.

  30 Craig Regular steps out of Lydia’s bathroom and we chat for fifteen minutes. About his six-week gig on a local software program. Oliver got him discharged from drug charges, so he can get back into the U.S. He’s leaving in ten days.

  All this time Lydia is drawn to him, and Craig speaks to her. Then he wants to make a coffee. Lydia shows him how her stove works. There’s something coquettish about how she leans on her hip as she twists the knobs. There is something brazen in how his head tilts over a collarbone to admire the propane flame.

  I call her when I get back home and she says, I’m going to call you back. And I can tell that Craig is by her ear.

  I am nervous. I dont want Craig so close to her ear.

  31 The police are rigging a video-camera system through Lydia’s house. They are very polite, ashamed if they have to do a little damage to the mouldings. The cameras are tiny, with high resolution. Apparently there are three, though as soon as they are installed I cannot see them.

  I wash a cast-iron pan in the sink. I have my weight on one leg. I often rest on one leg to give an ankle some relief. The body does things the mind is oblivious to. Lydia is firmly planted on two legs. She’s slightly back on her heels, feet apart, ready to go. I am more floaty, balanced, ready to bend with whatever comes. Lydia anchored, resists any oncoming.

  September

  1 My story is about the impossibility of holding onto water. Of the moments of love sifting through your hands. Trying to hold them and yet they push through and pass. Maisie’s story ends with a man’s fluorescent shirt, so blue it’s like someone poured a drink down his neck.

  I want to hold the majority of Lydia. I want this established. She offers me this much, a quarter. And when I ask for more she is defeated. She says, with resignation, that what she offers does not seem to satisfy me.

  And then I’m down to a tenth.

  This morning as I press her close to me and there is resistance. A moment at the top of the stairs when I lean in for a kiss and she steps away. All this makes me ache. I have holes of aching.

  2 I am taking a few days on my own. I have forgotten about the city. About the small images that fill in a day. There is a man in an apron smoking in a doorway beside Leo’s Fish and Chips. He is talking to Boyd Coady, who sits wedged around the radiator under the hood of his pickup.You could drop the hood on Boyd and click it shut, he’s that far in.

  3 I’m running around Quidi Vidi. As I run I’m talking out loud about Lydia. How she trivializes my love, implying that my love means an appreciation of her body and social graces, but not her talent. As if I could love someone whose talent I didnt respect. And yet I’m constantly in jeopardy, feeling that I’m not getting enough love, which must drive her nuts.

  I am grumbling out loud. I swear as well. It feels good to swear at her.

  Soccer-pitch lights shedding white on the path. I have to shut up as I pass people. I watch fifteen minutes of a soccer game, excellent players. High-school girls in the bleachers and I understand there are boys playing. The girls chatter about bad shots, hitting the scoreboard, that shot’s got steroids in it. A corner. Both posts are held by defence, standing almost inside the posts. I run on. Up King’s Bridge Road and then Gower, past Lydia’s car. On Long’s Hill I see Boyd Coady in the cab of his pickup. He is playing accordion. His truck windows screwed up.

  4 I turn on the radio and a listener asks, When’s it a good time to move a bleeding heart? The gardening expert calls her my dear and it’s patronizing.

  Lydia has on a small, checked jacket with big mother-of-pearl buttons. She speaks of the salty beets you get in Toronto. She misses the beets. I tell her how I instantly fell for her and havent changed over two years of loving. That it’s a rare beauty that Lydia doesnt seem aware of. She’s not clear about what I mean, this unconscious beauty. That’s just it, I say. Youre unaware. But still she has drifted from me.

  I walk to the store for a newspaper. Wilf is there and asks if I see Twix bars. He is bending and pointing into the glass cabinet. I have never noticed this cabinet for chocolate bars. Wilf has big hands and I see that he is very big. He’s wearing tinted blue glasses. He is holding, by the neck, a guitar in a peculiar black case, like half a guitar.

  That’s an odd case.

  You play, Gabe?

  I play a little.

  He’s unzipping the case because I have remarked on it. Play us a tune.

  I appreciate his novelty. I remember there is a music school two doors up. As Marion passes me the paper I catch her quiet face.

  Me: No, I dont play in public.

  Just
a little song.

  I couldnt,Wilf. It’s good you play.

  Marion says to Wilf, Do I know you? I feel like I know you. What’s your name?

  He tells her.

  Have I seen you on television?

  Wilf: I’ve been on television.

  That’s where it was then.

  As I leave Wilf encourages me to play in public.

  5 Lydia says her film is accepted in Vancouver. That’s great, I say. That is so great. And she gets a bottle of wine and we drive out to Flatrock to watch the water surge against the breakwater. She leaves in ten days. Gone for five. She says that after that we should take a trip to Corner Brook. To see my parents. To visit the cabin at Howley.

  Craig will be in Seattle. Just down the road.

  6 I’m sitting next to Boyd Coady in the bleachers. Boyd worked in a restaurant in Ontario, near Woodstock. Been working on rodeos since he was sixteen.

  Boyd: I saw Alice Cooper at the TSC. I used to hang around the university.

  Me: Oh, what did you study?

  Boyd: I never went there. I only hung around.

  His hair rich brown and parted in the centre. Well-takencare-of hair. His face scarred. Beady big brown eyes. A tattoo of a snake on his ring finger. He comes from a big family.

  There’s eighteen Coadys, he says. Same as the Roaches up on Freshwater.

  He points with his arm. I’ve got to make phone calls to Santo Domingo and Los Angeles tonight, he says. Family.

  The arc lamps glow on the backs of outfielders. I sit in the bleachers with the university team, which is arriving for the night game. It is September, they have begun a new term. Earl Quigley wants to take a group portrait. He has massive thighs.

  The home team behind ten to one.

  Boyd says, in an effort to lift them: It’s a tie game, let’s knock in a few runs.

  A woman sits on a legless folding chair. Down by the dugout Earl stares up at Boyd. There’s no need to be like that, Earl says to Boyd. And Boyd rises to meet him. There is history here.

  7 I am cleaning a pound of squid. Stripping the flesh of ink-freckled skin, cutting the abdomen rim to push out the cartilage spear. Removing this spear is like slipping a belt off your waist.