“Your Uncle Cyril was a damn fool,” he would say. “But when he was sober, there wasn’t a better man to walk in the woods with.”
Gerry thinks the Old Man would have liked the boat.
Gerry would be the first to admit he’s not the world’s keenest sailor. Often in the summer, he just potters. He’ll spend an afternoon doing small things, like re-sewing the sun-rotted stitching of the zipper on the sail cover. He’ll fuss with wear on the plastic covering of the lifelines. In places, it’s wrapped with white tape like a cartoon character’s sore foot or a vinyl mummy.
Gerry has spent afternoons hemming the Power Squadron pennant or the club burgee that beat themselves to nylon fluff against the shrouds. On a rainy day he knelt in front of the plywood cover that folds down over the marine toilet and makes a chart table of sorts. There he plotted positions in handy places around the bay and punched them into the hand-held GPS. He punched in the middle of approaches and safe-distance-off spots and various obstructions. The rain drummed on the fibreglass over his head as Gerry constructed the boundaries of his little marine universe.
Sometimes he just goes aboard and takes naps.
Lately, Viv humours him with the boat although she used to complain that they never went anywhere. Now they agree that she’s not happy to be left at the helm to spell him off, so short cruises are their best bet.
Gerry has tried to teach the rest of the family to sail. Early on, when she was still in high school, Tanya had brought out several boyfriends and had looked on as Gerry tried to be polite to them and let them steer. Melanie had sailed with other people before she married Darren and had been useful as crew. Darren was only moveable ballast.
The last couple of seasons, they have cut their losses.
Vivian spends a weekend or two on short, overnight trips to nearby places. She’s come to terms with the heel of the boat and is sufficiently at ease to take a nap or read below if she gets tired of just watching the water roll by. On weekend trips they have made love in the V-berth, which is arguably the roomiest part of the boat.
“If the boat is rocking, don’t come knocking,” people joke over drinks at the club or at weekend anchorages. Mostly though, Gerry day-sails single-handed or rounds up a few buddies to race on the weekends.
Gerry hasn’t planned a very busy day at the boat. As they drive to the sailing club, a patch of overcast sidles across the sky and seems to threaten rain, but it blows by when they get to the boatyard. A pale sun skims across the yard like spotlights at a skating show as the wind parts the clouds. Then it clears again.
The boat is on its cradle and they have to un-padlock the chained-on ladder and scramble up into the cockpit. Gerry guides Vivian up first and then passes up the tool box and the lunch and the various bags and bundles he’s brought along. They find a piece of frozen snow in a corner of the cockpit and throw it over the side to smash on the boatyard gravel. They fiddle companionably with little things. He takes off the winter covering he screws over the hatch every fall. Vivian passes him tools as he wrestles the screws out of the damp plywood. The sun heats the wood and it gives off a faint forest smell. When they get the plywood off, they unlock and open the hatch. Vivian sniffs the crypt-cold air of the cabin.
“It’s not too musty.”
“It shouldn’t be. I put pie plates of Kitty Litter around to absorb some of the damp,” Gerry says. “All the cushions and cloth stuff went home so there’s not much to mould.”
“It’s probably bad in the cupboard under the sink.”
“Locker,” he corrects her. “Besides, I’ve got to have a major clean-up in there anyway. I’ll hit it with the Pinesol and the Murphy Oil when she’s in the water.”
Opening lockers is like unpacking Christmas decorations. You forget what you have and familiar things become surprises. Salt-crusted sunglasses at the back of shelves and plastic bottles with dregs of sunscreen are artefacts.
The cabin is bare without its cushions, but the boom and a lot of the fenders are stored inside. They move stuff out to the cockpit lockers to make room in the cabin.
“Last year Darren helped you get ready,” Vivian says.
“For what it was worth, “Gerry says. “I mean he poodled away with a scraper for a bit, but he got tiresome to listen to.”
“He respected you,” Vivian says.
“I doubt it,” Gerry replies. “Are you ready for lunch?”
Vivian has always been impressed with Gerry’s ability to make picnics. They were not a feature of her previous existence. Gerry has his picnic-prone aunts in his genes and he and Patricia had spent a good deal of time out of doors. He sometimes feels he has scored some easy points with picnics.
They use the boat’s emergency knife to cut up chunks of cheese and spicy sausage and slices of crusty bread. He opens the wine with the corkscrew on his Swiss Army jackknife. He’s brought a big thermos of coffee for himself.
The wind is cool, but the sun comes more than it goes and the day is almost warm if you stay out of the breeze. Gerry sits on a cockpit seat and leans on the cabin. Vivian leans back against him. The boatyard is spread out below their ladder.
“We’re like kids in a tree-house,” she says.
More people arrive as the afternoon ripens. Orange and yellow extension cords snake around the yard. The whir of sanders and drills emerges from under boats, and here and there, there’s the iron flatulence of a winterized diesel being turned over for the first time.
Vivian’s hair is against Gerry’s chin. It smells lightly of herbal shampoo but seems to have additional scents of warming wood and clean new rope.
“How are you doing there, sport?”
“Great. How about you?”
This is how things might endure, Gerry thinks, scented moments of nothing. Think too hard and you’ll destroy them.
eleven
JUNE 2004
Good weather arrives the way parcels from faraway places did when Gerry was a child: slowly, unbelievably, tightly wrapped and hard to get into.
His wandering aunts once shipped a cuckoo clock from the Black Forest. There was no way they could carry the thing. They were coming back by ship, the Empress of Britain to Montreal. They sent the clock by what used to be called “surface mail.”
Does “surface mail” exist anymore? Gerry wonders.
Some German clockmaker shipped the clock in a huge, stiff box, wrapped with hairy cord. He had wrapped the clock in layers of what seemed to be lint sandwiched between paper. The lint was grey like the German uniforms in the movies. Perhaps it was those uniforms, shredded by the late ’50s. The pine cone weights of the clock were rolled in cocoons of the stuff. They felt like hand grenades dressed for winter. Every space in the box was stuffed with shavings.
“There can’t be much of the Black Forest left,” Gerry’s father said, surveying the mess of packing on the kitchen floor.
In the end, Gerry’s aunts had found the clock kept them awake. When his parents bought a cottage in the ’60s, the clock was banished. Its tick and cuckoo seemed less annoying when you were already listening to nighthawks, frogs and whip-poor-wills.
“Is there still surface mail?” Gerry asks Philip. Perhaps Philip knows. He’s still mailing books to Toronto so maybe he has inside information. They’re sitting at a table outside the coffee shop. So far this year, there have been very few days when you could do this.
“I suppose. I mean if you mailed an anvil overseas, I guess they’d put in on a ship.”
“You know you can’t get airmail forms anymore?” Gerry says. He found this out a couple of weeks ago when he got a sudden urge to write to a former flat-mate in the U.K. He felt saddened by the loss. When he’d gone abroad for a year in 1969, little blue airmail forms had seemed the perfect amount of news to send or receive.
“I think I knew that,” Philip says. “I think they’ve been gone for a couple of years.”
Philip will soon be gone. He’s bought a plane ticket for the end of June. He says the
call centre is getting too crazy for him. A couple of weeks ago, one of his California crazies called about her website. Something was wrong with it. Philip connected to her site and found a gallery of nude photos.
“Do you think I ought to get my other nipple pierced?” the woman asked.
“This was not an unattractive woman,” Philip says. “She did not need to be doing this.”
“You both probably brightened your supervisor’s night. I assume you still have the random monitoring of calls.”
“Anyway, this is not what I came to Newfoundland to do. I thought I’d sit by the ocean and read.”
“You do read and the ocean is, verifiably, out there. Maybe you missed it. It’s the big wet thing I took you sailing on a couple of times. I’m pretty sure I pointed it out though.”
It occurs to Gerry that he, himself, is supposed to be living beside the ocean and writing. This morning’s notebook entry, written before Philip came along, started as a description of his ball cap with the sailing-club crest and goes downhill fast.
My sailing hat is looking a bit the worse for wear after launch a month ago: bottom scrapings and crud blended with a dust of blue anti-fouling. It has a sort of a Danish navy-blue cheese look.
Pretty much resolved to quit work although I wonder if that’s just sublimation of a desire to quit altogether. I think I may go fishing this week or just hang out on the boat and eat Chinese noodles and canned tuna. It’s been a year or more since I drove across the island. Then again, how long is long enough?
Gerry and Philip go inside to fetch refills. In the line, they’re behind a loud twit who seems convinced the world needs to know how he feels.
“...just totally blown away, you know?”
He has one of those stand-up haircuts which have come back into fashion from Gerry’s childhood. He’s professionally boyish like a ’50s peanut-butter ad. He wants elaborate sprinkles on some kind of boiled-milk coffee.
“Please, Mom, can I have some more?” Gerry says. “Can I lick the bowl? God, I’m getting sour and old.”
“Or you just want a second cup of coffee,” Philip says.
They return to their table on the street. Philip brings one of the coffee shop’s complimentary newspapers. It’s full of federal election.
“I’m going to have to vote in an advance poll here,” he says. “I won’t be able to vote when I get to Toronto.”
“The perfect moral situation,” Gerry says. “You can vote for whoever you like here and not have to live with the result. Then you get to complain about your member in Toronto because you had no say in picking the beast.”
“It all seems to be coming down to kiddie porn,” Philip says, shaking out the paper. Stephen Harper looks out of one picture like a politely interested android. Paul Martin appears to be experiencing convulsive cramps in a facing one. “Harper seems to think the Liberals are in favour of it.”
“I think Mr. Harper is on shaky ground there,” Gerry says, “Turn out the sock drawers of all your candidates and I suspect the neat and tidy Sunday school types will come off worst. Who’s the obnoxious ex-cop MP who went down for molesting Indian kids? People with a sense of sin are more likely to commit them.”
“You have no sense of sin then?”
“Being mean is the only sin. I commit that all the time. Manners are better than morals most of the time. The world’s full of Gladstones and Mackenzie Kings ready to give those naughty hookers a stern talking-to. There’s lots of creepy uncles and daddies out there.”
“Vote Adamson, for an end to meanness. I like it, but it doesn’t seem to have much of a platform to go with it.”
“When I was in university, somebody ran for student council on a platform of ‘A return to the golden age, an end to menstrual cramp and a tail for everyone.’”
“That’s the Conservatives this time, except I think they’re for menstrual cramp.”
“I’d like a tail. Tails are great. Wouldn’t you like a tail?”
It is the time of year for Gerry to be lining up his summer work. Summer is his busiest time as people take vacations and his apparent suitability for responsible work increases. He meets with producers and they find that perhaps a few weeks of him working on their show won’t quite end western civilization as we know it. This year, his talk with Bob, rhythm band sticks player and family lawyer, hangs over these chats. We’re getting through four thousand a month or so, out of a pot of three hundred.
“I mean the money’s got to run out in a few years,” Gerry says to Vivian after supper. “I don’t mind not inheriting anything. We did okay off the house and Aunt Louise, but what about looking after the old dear? She seems to be planning to outlive me.”
“I’ve always said she could live with us,” Vivian says.
She has too, usually when they are fighting. They sometimes propose escalating martyrdoms they say they’d endure for each other, one-upping each other into slammed doors or angry silences.
Gerry pictures the frozen-in-amber atmosphere of the nursing home moved to their house. How much longer would the drives and walks and sails have to get to avoid death by osmosis? What new things would it bring to have fights or silences about?
“It’s something to think about,” he says. That’s true anyway. He thinks about it, talking to a producer. Gerry is trying to be an adult and get a real job.
“There are a couple of jobs you’ll be filling when everybody gets back in the fall,” he suggests.
“Oh my God, I haven’t even been able to look at them yet,” she says.
“One of these days I might just apply for a real grown-up job.”
They’re drinking coffee in the break room. He tries to keep it light and bantering, fishing for any encouragement.
“Really? You’d be interested?” The producer’s tone implies that he’s suggested he’d like to take up brain surgery in middle-age: an interesting concept, but not very practical. “I mean, Gerry, would you really want the day-to-day? Weren’t you working on a book? You really should write a book.”
“Yeah. Really.”
That night, while Vivian is out showing a townhouse somewhere, he pushes the laundry off the desk in the basement and tries to kick George and Ellen into gear.
Fragment: Argument
“Why do you keep that damn office?” Ellen asks.
“To deny I’m dead,” George says bleakly. “To deny I’m dead, to deny that I don’t care anymore, to deny that I have nothing to say and that all I’ve learned is that you should shut up and worry about your house!”
“Why are you so angry?”
“To deny you’ve got no one to talk to but people who tell you to walk on your hardwood floors in your socks,” he says. “To deny that you have to be buried for years before you die.”
To deny the rage you inflicted on yourself in good faith, George thinks. The world isn’t unfair. The seating arrangements for viewing it are.
On a shelf over the desk is a handful of paperbacks Philip has given Gerry. Philip’s clearing out his duplicates, getting ready for his big Toronto move. Marcus Aurelius is on top of the pile. Gerry thumbs through the book. It’s thin, more scholarly notes than musing emperor.
“No one loses any other life than the one he is living nor does he have any other life than the one he loses.”
You should get out of the emperor racket, Marcus, Gerry thinks. You should write a book.
Summer finally seems to be taking hold. Vivian is busy because people use the long evenings to look at houses after work. On the other hand, she gets some that aren’t likely to buy and wastes a good deal of time.
“Not a pot to piss in,” she says, setting out to meet a young couple somewhere. They’d left a grunted message on the answering machine and wanted to see a house in a pricey new subdivision. “They can’t afford that neighbourhood. I feel like Miss Jane on The Beverly Hillbillies showing some of these goofs around.”
“Push ’em in the cee-ment pond,” Gerry says. “But be nice
, maybe they won the lottery.”
The evening is warm and Gerry decides he’ll take in one of his rare AA meetings. He’s going for all the wrong reasons: nostalgia for another set of problems that have faded, schadenfreude, voyeurism or the fact it’s a nice night. He decides a walk would do him good and leaves the Honda home. The first lawn mowers of the season are out and doing. They make a bumblebee background to the shushing of the sprinklers as he walks to his meeting.
Gerry gets the reception he expects as someone who doesn’t attend very often. There are the caring people who ask how you’ve been, in case you’d had a slip and been drinking and need support to come back. Then there are the others, the competitive losers, who want to know that your roll ended, that you fell off the wagon. Then, however brief the sober time they’ve got in, they’ve got more than you have.
Gerry supposes he was a bit that way himself when he first came to AA fifteen years ago. There were a lot of people with more sobriety who pissed him off.
I wanted to get sober to have a life and they thought getting sober was life, Gerry thinks.
In those days, somebody talking about seven years of sobriety sounded like a description of a hundred-mile tightrope walk with an egg balanced on the end of your nose.
Yes, it was an achievement of sorts, but why a tightrope and why the egg? Couldn’t you just do what you did before, but sober?
It seemed to Gerry that if you decided it was a tightrope you had to keep concentrating on, you were setting yourself up for a long drop and a nose full of scrambled egg. There were times he secretly willed banana skins onto the tightrope.
Let the poor bastard have a life and not a substitute religion so I can learn to do the same, Gerry would think. In my worst moments I’ve tried to worship the drink and I’ve believed in vengeance and the whole nine yards. Now let’s see something sustainable.
At tonight’s meeting “Johnny” comes over to talk to Gerry while people are still milling around getting coffees and finding chairs with their buddies. He’s always “Johnny,” never John.
Happiness of Fish Page 14