“Scared the life out of me,” Nellie says. “Black as the ace of spades, with a three-piece suit on and his shoes off and a six-pack of beer. I don’t suppose he knew where he was, no more than a child.”
Nellie and her husband Plemon took the man home. He was a government agronomist from Nairobi. They took him berry-picking. They still exchange Christmas cards.
Outside of Nellie, Plemon and the agronomist, Gerry has little to add to the local 9/11 remembrances. He and Vivian were on a holiday cruise in mid-Atlantic when it happened. With little else to do, he decides to get back to his writing and convert the cruise into a George and Ellen story.
Fragment: For Those in Peril on the Sea
The napkin-folding class was cancelled when they learned the planes had hit the towers.
George had taken the galley tour that morning and had been waiting by the pool for napkin-folding to start as the cruise ship steamed west, a day out of the Azores. While he and Ellen were not exactly fighting, they had had a minor row over souvenir shopping in Punta del Gada the day before and were giving each other some space. George had gone napkin-folding because he thought it might be silly enough to write about some day. Ellen had gone to lunch with a school friend from Burleigh she’d only just encountered, between Lisbon and the Azores. George and Ellen had been walking off lunch when they overheard three women walking behind them.
“They’re Newfoundlanders,” Ellen said. She stopped, turned and smiled at the three. “Excuse me, aren’t you from Newfoundland?”
The reunion followed. Ellen and her classmate, a woman called Velma, recognized each other. Velma introduced the other two women with her. They were her sisters-in-law. They’d all had their bangs corn-row beaded at the ship’s beauty salon. No one in Burleigh had beaded corn-rows and they were on vacation.
“We married three brothers,” Velma said. “They’re here somewhere.”
Presently the brothers had appeared. They were short grizzled men who ran a carpentry business together. They kept to themselves and walked the deck in a way which suggested they were measuring it and might build a cruise liner from memory later on.
“They’re hobbits,” George said to Ellen. “They’ve got furry feet, I bet you.”
They had been on the cruise for ten days. It was what the agency called a repositioning cruise, one where the ship crossed the Atlantic to be back in its winter cruising grounds. They got a spectacularly good rate by booking a September cruise the preceding winter.
“We could die before then,” George told the girl in the travel agency. “We’re ancient, you know.”
However, they had paid for cancellation insurance, kept their fingers crossed, and now had cruised from Italy to the Azores with only Boston left on the itinerary. Now the announcements were saying that on this repositioning cruise, more than the ship was being repositioned.
The ship’s PA speakers extinguished the afternoon like a sprinkler system. Activities were cancelled. Horse racing was postponed. Passengers were asked to please be patient trying to call the States. An ecumenical prayer service would be held in the Aloha Room. The ship’s closed-circuit TV channel would give news as it became available.
The pool deck cleared like a rained-on garden party. George wandered down into the central atrium of the ship. He found Ellen and Velma coming out of the dining room.
“Should we try to call the kids?”
“Not much point. Besides, what do we tell them? There’s nothing wrong here. If they’re dropping planes on people, the middle of the ocean on a moving target’s a pretty good place to be.”
Gerry sits at his computer and looks at the notebook he used for a travel diary on the trip.
Early internet news is garbled and poor. CNN wire stuff is better after supper, but still no attempt at casualty figures. We played a guess-the-word game with a bunch of comedy fatalists, then attended a sock hop, complete with Twist and hula-hoop competitions.
Gerry remembers the hula-hoop competition. It was won by a sparrow-like British granny who managed to twirl eight hoops around her neck. She wore a floral-print summer dress and peeked out of the wreath of bright plastic hoops as if from a nest. Gerry guesses she’d have been a teenager in the Blitz. No sky-borne terrorist was going to stop her carousing with her grandkids.
The next morning he and Vivian had shared a table with a retired marine biologist and his wife. Gerry works them into his narrative.
Fragment: Armageddon Breakfast
They came from Mobile, Alabama, and their name was Hickson. Dr. Hickson had a sad-basset-hound air and a polite southern slowness of speech. He had done research on farmed shrimp. Work with tiny crustaceans had made him comfortable with big numbers. He had heard there might be forty-thousand dead in New York
Mrs. Hickson was at ease with big numbers because of her work with the Book of Revelation.
“It’s all prophesied,” she told George. “We are in the end times. We should all pray.”
In fact, Gerry’s travel diary shows they did not pray. In the final days of the cruise, he recorded menus, weather – as the ship skirted the edges of a hurricane – and the scarcity of world news. He chronicled fights with the tour company reps as rumours spread that the ship was going to be diverted to any number of places. Finally, he noted that the almost-famous doo-wop group that was the final night’s show was holding up pretty well, despite not having had a hit since 1966. The three grey-haired men and one bald man in Italian suits sang well. Like the hula-hooping granny, they were indomitable. Gerry’s last entry says he went to the show alone. The hurricane was nearby and Vivian was feeling seasick. She stayed in the cabin and started packing.
Gerry and Vivian had come most of the way back from their cruise on a bus to Halifax. The airline had arranged it. The planes were still not flying when their ship got to Boston. They called Tanya from a phone booth during a rest stop somewhere in Maine. She was house-sitting for them. She seemed to have trouble with them being on an un-planned activity.
“Where are you?” she demanded. “I was worried.”
“I don’t know,” Vivian told her. “We’re in some kind of public washroom. The sign says it’s maintained by the blind. If you smelled it, you’d wonder if they’re only just blind.”
The bus dropped them at Halifax Airport. After all night in the terminal, they got on a flight back to Newfoundland.
Having been insulated from the initial events, Gerry followed the run-up to the Afghanistan invasion closely. Work was slow. The budget for freelancers had been spent covering the stranded air passengers. Gerry was restless.
One day he called the local naval reserve unit. He talked to the commander, a woman he’d known for years.
“Just in case you needed an elderly sub-lieutenant to count the paper clips or answer the phone or something. Free up some of the younger ones. I did have a commission, years ago.”
“You’re over the age, Gerry,” she told him. “It’s all different now. They don’t let people hang around like they used to. You’re not the first I’ve had a call from. Thanks anyway.”
“Apparently my reserve status is somewhere just after nuns and just before Cubs and Beavers,” Gerry told Vivian. Still, he felt old that fall.
On a fine September day, Gerry meets his ex, Patricia, in the parking lot of the Family Life Centre of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese. He is there because of a phone call from a man he used to work with at the newspaper in the ’70s. The man’s name is Michael. Michael and his wife Maureen were friends of Patricia’s and Gerry’s. They used to go to clubs together and invite each other for meals. Then everybody had changed jobs and moved a few times and Patricia and Gerry split up. So had Michael and Maureen, but later on. Gerry recalls that he and Vivian had encountered them somewhere in the mid-’90s and they were still a couple, but barely. They’d had dinner together and promised to do it again and hadn’t. He heard they’d separated not long after that. Michael had moved to Vancouver. Now, it seems Michael wants to r
emarry. His new bride, like Maureen, is a Catholic.
“We’re going for an annulment,” Michael told Gerry on the phone. “They’ll want to talk to people who knew us when we were just married. You can give a deposition there. Somebody from the church will be in touch.”
To say what? Gerry wondered at the time. To prove what? However, here he is today in the family centre parking lot. He’s early because he left himself lots of time to find the place. It’s a beautiful day, with bright sun and big, towering clouds. Gerry lounges in the warm seat of his wagon. Every city sound seems muted and remote. He’s been sitting listening to Mozart on Radio Two when Patricia pulls in.
She drives a minivan these days. Gerry reflects that she must be emerging from the kids’-chauffeur period of the twins’ development. She pulls into a space a couple away from where he’s parked and gets out of her van. Gerry turns off the radio and gets out too.
“Hey, kid. How are you doing?”
“Gerry, I haven’t seen you for ages. How’s Vivian?”
They press cheeks, movie-star air-kissing, distant though touching and civil. Gerry wonders if she remembers she once slipped a pair of lurid knickers with cats on them into his suit pocket before a job interview.
“For inspiration,” she said afterwards.
Patricia has had her off-the-shoulder hair done a silver grey. It looks surprisingly good over a face that has stayed youngish looking. She is wearing a khaki-coloured skirt and a Madras blouse. She has a blue blazer on. Her shoes are brown suede.
“We’re fine,” Gerry says, circling the wagons in the plural.
“You’re here for this thing with Michael?”
“Yeah. I guess you got a call too.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to say. I mean they split up. It’s over right? What do these people want to hear?”
“I guess we’ll just have go in and see what they have to say.”
“God, I’m glad we didn’t have to do all this bullshit.”
They climb the steps and Gerry opens the door for her. “After you, madam.”
“I’ll see you out here after. We’ll compare notes.”
The Family Life Centre is like a ’50s Russian trade show. It is full of ugly chemical colours and lotion-bottle shapes. Perhaps it’s been furnished by donations from parish attics, but the stuff looks too new. They tell an elderly secretary why they’re there and she tells them that Sister Angela will be taking their depositions.
Sister Angela looks sixty-something, with steel-grey hair and the eyes of a jaded loans officer. She wears a navy suit and a white blouse. There’s a brassy brooch with a black cross at her throat.
“Mrs. Pearce, come in please. Mr. Adamson, you’re very punctual, early in fact.”
“I know,” Gerry says apologetically. “I left myself time to get lost and then didn’t. I’ll just wait right here.”
Sister Angela nods and takes Patricia into an inner office. Gerry picks up an old issue of Canadian Living and reads about all the great things you can do with pinto beans. The elderly secretary answers her phone once and goes to a sideboard where there’s an electric urn of hot water. She makes an instant coffee in a plastic cup in an orange holder and takes it in to where Patricia is doing her thing. The air has a waxy smell. Gerry is almost dozing when his turn comes.
Sister Angela and Patricia emerge from the office with a discreet clatter. They shake hands solemnly. Turning away, Patricia rolls her eyes and mouths “outside.” Her suede shoes click down the shiny tile of a corridor and Gerry is being ushered into the office. Sister Angela is hitting her stride. She asks straight off if he’d like the instant coffee.
They sit at a boardroom table with a tape recorder on it. Gerry notices it because it’s a good make and looks new. On the other hand, it’s a model that has been replaced by digital in Gerry’s work.
The volume of annulment depositions mustn’t be burning out the equipment, he thinks. Either that, or nuns take better care of their gear than reporters do.
The interview, from Gerry’s point of view anyway, has an Alice-in-Wonderland feel.
“What religion would you be, Mr. Adamson?”
“Nothing formal, sort of Taoist, I suppose.”
“That must be foreign.”
We smile like sick cats, Gerry thinks, mentally writing this. We talk about the people who made the vows so long ago, the matches that are broken or are being broken now.
“Did Michael and Maureen’s separation surprise you?”
“Probably no more than mine surprised me.”
“Was there a lot of drinking?”
As compared to what, he thinks.
“Not that I remember, but then again I was drinking heavily in those days.”
“Did you see anything that made you think there may have been abuse?”
“No. No, I don’t think so.”
The questions and answers succeed each other. Gerry continues to write a poem in his head.
I remember a day:
Two couples and Volkswagen,
With a 410 shotgun,
Looking for birds;
There’s a photo of us
In a weed-bright gravel pit,
Laughing in big sweaters,
On a day like this;
One of us, (we’re saying now) was crazy;
Another was a drunk,
But we didn’t care;
The two normal ones have got out, or want out,
But it was still a nice day
And nice days still come;
We shot no birds;
I don’t believe we saw one;
As I recall, we went home to cook
Pasta and red wine
In a mobile-hung walk-up,
With old-time ads stuck
On the kitchen wall;
I hope the question
Isn’t if that time was bad;
It wasn’t then
And it doesn’t seem so now.
“Thank you for your help, Mr. Adamson,” Sister Angela says, the end of the interview recalling him to reality.
“I don’t know that I’ve been very much help.”
“These things are difficult. I’m sure Michael and Maureen appreciate what you’re doing.”
Gerry isn’t sure that Patricia will have waited in the parking lot. His watch tells him the interview has taken less than twenty minutes but he’s lost track of time. She has waited though. She’s sitting in her van reading a paperback novel. It’s Catcher in the Rye.
“One of the kids left it in the car,” she says. “I haven’t read it for years. I think we had it when we lived on top of Frankie’s.”
They drive to a Tim Hortons, diplomatically about mid-way between their respective homes.
“That was pretty awful,” Patricia says when they’ve bought coffees and sat down at a table.
“I kept wondering if I was doing them any good,” Gerry says. “It’s like maybe we should have been saying they were unconscious drunk at the wedding and never consummated it and spent the rest of their time beating each other up and having perverted sex with wombats.”
“Wombats?”
“You never found out about the wombats in leather? God, there I was, thinking that’s what drove you into Brian’s arms.”
“Fool.” She smiles.
“And here it turns out you were just embittered by having to carry me over the threshold drunk.”
“You weren’t drunk then.”
“No, I guess I wasn’t. I was later on, though.”
“Do you ever wonder why?”
“Christ, you do harder ones than Sister Angela.”
“No really, I mean you’ve been sober for years now. You go to meetings and stuff. Did you ever figure out why?”
“Well,” Gerry says, “I always liked that old line that I drank to make other people more interesting.”
“You did always say that, usually to guests.”
“But I think maybe I was trying to make me m
ore interesting.”
“How do you mean?” Patricia asks. “I mean sober I was way too uncomplicated,” Gerry says, cradling his coffee mug in both hands. “Booze was my religion, something I could be the guru of. I wasn’t just drunk. I was declaring a new reality.”
“You were pretty real. I didn’t like phonies.”
“Worst sin you could commit back then, being phoney. Now how phoney would we look?”
“When I said I wanted to come down here on the bus to live, you just asked when we were leaving. That wasn’t phoney.”
Gerry looks at the face framed in the silver hair. He looks for and finds the eyes that floated in candlelight as they’d sat up, naked in two sleeping bags zipped together, talking about taking off to Newfoundland.
“I just wanted to be as cool as you. You were so damned grown-up. I figured I had to be some kind of Byronic wild-man or you’d throw me back in the pool.”
“I really believed in your writing, the poems, the novels. Do you still write?... Outside of work I mean.”
“Yeah, I do, but a lot more slowly. I know I’ve got to work for it now. The booze-muse doesn’t dictate whole chapters anymore. Do you still paint?”
“Touché,” Patricia says, “You know, Gerry, apart from the drinking you were never a bad guy. You were drunk when you fucked around.”
“You knew then.”
“Some of those perverted wombats were friends of mine.”
“I never wanted to hurt you, Pat.”
“I know that now. We didn’t hurt each other much. I mean, hey, we’re nice people.”
“Yeah, pretty civilized.”
The autumn afternoon is turning to orange and gold when they walk to their cars.
“See you, Gerry. Say hello to Vivian.” She gives him a hug. He returns it and finds there’s no muscle memory of her. They embrace like strangers, unsure of the fit, the pressure to exert. He remembers when they fitted each other’s fronts like hot poultices. Still, the unfamiliarity is comforting in a way. They’re immune now.
“See you around, Pat. Say hi to Brian and your mob too.” Civilized, Gerry thinks as he drives home. That’s what we are, civilized.
Happiness of Fish Page 17