He’s tempted to ask Darren to move so he can look at his e-mail and maybe do some writing, but he can’t bring himself to. He’s crushed under tons of toast smell and feels a million years old. He doesn’t need a computer. He should be out in the back yard, chipping mammoths onto stone with a piece of antler.
“I don’t know how you can write all that stuff you do,” Darren says. “Who’s going to read it all?”
“Archaeologists,” Gerry says. He puts his sandwich and coffee mug on the washer, leans around Darren to haul out a boxful of notes and files and goes to hide in the workshop part of the basement.
Gerry’s workshop is a workshop in name only. The furnace lives in it and, although it has a tool bench along one wall, it’s too small and too warm to do anything more than pile tools, boat equipment and junk in. Today he roots around behind a pile of boat cushions and digs out a laptop computer that Vivian got when she went with the real estate company she’s with now. The laptop has been redundant and replaced by a newer model for a couple of years. Gerry took it over with the idea of putting navigation software on it and taking it sailing. It turned out that the software had evolved too far for that to happen, but you could still write on the computer and save things to disk. Gerry unplugs the charger for his electric screwdriver and plugs in the laptop charger in its place. Perhaps he’ll get out of the house sometime and do a little coffee-shop writing. He sometimes envies the people who click away at keyboards at back tables. They seem quicker and more efficient than his Chinese notebooks. Feeling he’s done something, but not quite knowing what, he reclaims his sandwich and coffee. He sits on a tool box and finishes them, like a child eating a treat in a secret hiding place. The furnace cuts in with an asthmatic-lion purr and wraps him in white noise and warmth that is comfortingly isolating until it becomes too much and drives him back upstairs with his plate and cup.
“I’m going out,” he says, running his dishes under the tap at the kitchen sink. “I’ve got some last-minute shopping to do.”
Gerry’s shopping stalls in the space debs’ coffee shop. He’s sitting with his notebook, trying to do the physics that has made him too light to stay submerged in his house, even, he suspects, in his life. He hasn’t really much shopping to do.
“The statutory gifts are bought, the big items that people need,” he tells the space deb who gave him his coffee. Shopping is one of the topics the space debs are programmed for.
“Yeah, me too,” she says.
“I got Vivian a down coat she wants,” he says. He thinks he may have introduced Viv here at some point. “Boots for Melanie, that’s the daughter, and a sweater for her husband. I got the granddaughter a paintbox. She ought to get something she doesn’t have to follow the instructions for.”
“That’s nice.”
What he doesn’t say is that he’s stumped on the fun gifts. He’s walked the length of Water Street, looking at everything from designer jewellery to dollar-store kazoos and can’t feel a spark for any of it.
I have no feel for what anyone might want, he writes in his book. I only can get what they need. I’m like somebody handing out supplies to a lifeboat crew. It’s all so deadly serious.
He’s stopped in a couple of import stores where he can normally get stocking-stuffers and has picked up some cheap Indian bangles and strange little wood carvings and decorated boxes, but in their plastic bag, they feel like doomed trade goods for a tribe of clever cannibals. They’ll see through their chintzy good humour and put him in the pot.
A page or two back, his notebook prophesies his cannibal musings. Idly web-searching, he had tripped over a quote from a science fiction writer called Stanislaw Lem. Gerry has never read any of Lem’s work, but he wrote down the quote.
Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
The coffee shop is warm and steamy. He decides he’ll stay there a while.
Christmas day arrives mild and drizzly, less a dawn than a gradual paling of the dark. Gerry gets up in the half light and is making coffee in the kitchen when Diana comes upstairs from the basement.
“Merry Christmas, sweetie.”
“Merry Christmas.” Diana is a quiet kid, a watcher. Gerry feels a kinship. She’s carrying the gift she was allowed to open the night before, some kind of hand-size electronic game.
“Are your mom and dad awake?”
“No.”
“Well, your nan isn’t either. They’ll be up soon, I guess. We’ll get at the big stuff then, but why don’t you check out your stocking now?”
“All right.”
Gerry takes his mug of coffee and they go into the living room. He plugs in the tree and sits in what’s normally his reading chair in the corner of the room. Diana digs through her stocking.
“I got a tattoo set.” She holds up a packet of paper transfers. Gerry’s pleased. It’s one of his import shop specials.
“You’ll be like Lydia the Tattooed Lady.”
“Who’s that?”
“A lady in an old song. Lydia, oh Lydia, oh have you met Lydia? Lydia the Tattooed Lady...” Gerry waggles his fingers by his mouth, tapping an imaginary Groucho Marx cigar. She giggles.
They sit and exclaim over each new discovery in the stocking.
When it’s empty, Gerry fetches a damp dishcloth and they give themselves artificial henna tattoos on the backs of their hands. Then Diana settles in the corner of the couch with her video game, and Gerry returns to the kitchen to make the dressing and get the turkey in the oven. He’s just finished when Vivian comes down the hall for a coffee.
“Good morning, kid. Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas. What’s on your hand?”
“A tattoo. Diana and I were up early.”
“You’re as big a kid as she is.”
Diana bounces into the kitchen, waving her game. “Look at the score I got.”
“Oh my, that’s pretty good,” says Vivian.
There’s a mumble of voices underfoot in the basement.
“Go down and see if your mom and dad are awake,” Vivian tells Diana. “We’ll open our presents now.”
There is numbness in possession. Sitting in his favourite chair by the Christmas tree, Gerry feels anaesthetized by things. He’s passing out the presents and feels like a sociopathic traffic light, divorced from the flow he controls.
He’s wearing a breathable rain suit that Viv has given him for the boat. “You can’t go wrong with extra large,” he says. “I’ve got room to move. You need that on the boat.”
“I could have got yellow,” Vivian says, “but I thought the blue you could wear more. The jacket will make another windbreaker.”
Gerry thinks that if he ever falls overboard in the blue and grey suit, he’ll be invisible: lots of room, waterproof, but impossible to find.
Getting loose big-time in a bruise-coloured ocean.
Vivian is wearing the down coat he got her over her flannelette snowman pyjamas. “This’ll be great for showing houses in the winter. It’s warm but it’s light.”
“We’re insulated,” Gerry says. “Thoroughly insulated.”
He feels insulated, isolated actually. A bit of old Beatles floats into his head. He thinks of the nurse selling poppies in “Penny Lane.”
Although I feel as though I’m in a play, I am anyway, he thinks.
“There’s more there for the kids,” Viv prompts.
Although their big gift to the kids is the rug that lurks in the basement, Vivian has been shopping since the fall. She actually started when he left for Ottawa when his mother fell. She’s got clothes and cosmetics for Melanie and a white, fur-trimmed ski-jacket for Diana. She’s topped Darren up with socks and a sweater and what she still calls dress pants. Gerry is old enough and urban enough to have worn suits to work in the old days before working clothes for reporters took on the look of an upscale day-care. He still says “slacks” or even “flannels.” It seems to Gerry that every Christmas Darren is re-outfitted from scratch. He also seems to absorb the new clothes
like some sort of sartorial black hole. Gerry never seems to see him in anything but black jeans and white, short-sleeve cook shirts from the defunct pizza and donair. Gerry knows Darren was outfitted last Christmas. He wonders if Melanie gave the clothes away or if Darren abandoned them somewhere when he went to Alberta. Maybe Viv should just collect them on Boxing Day for re-distribution next year.
Gerry fishes a small, soft parcel from under the tree and passes it to Darren. “Socks, Darren. It definitely feels like socks,” he says. “You can never have too many socks.”
“That’s right,” Darren agrees. “Socks are great.”
They fall into a lull after the presents are open. With only the five of them and no guests, they can’t sustain the avalanche momentum that has accompanied other Christmas days. Melanie is peeling and cutting up vegetables. Darren is playing with Diana or, at least, with her new video game with her in the same room. Vivian is dressed now and is making neat piles of everybody’s gifts. She feeds wrapping paper that is badly torn into the fireplace and stuffs what’s re-usable into a plastic shopping bag.
“We’ll find that the day after Boxing Day three years from now,” Gerry says.
“You never know,” says Vivian and keeps piling and sorting. They are like a theatre company that has enough voices for the main parts, but no chorus. The theatricality of Christmas seems overwhelmed by the scenery of the house. Gerry remembers being told that theatre extras mumble “hubbub” and “marmalade” to make the noise of a crowd or mob.
“Hubbub and marmalade,” Gerry says and skulks off to hang his new rain suit with his boat stuff and hide in the basement for a while.
With Darren and Diana occupied upstairs, he has a chance to get at his computer for a bit. He has decided he wants to put together a disk of book-bits to feed to the laptop he’s incubating in the workshop. This morning there seem to be more pop-ups on the computer than he’s used to. He suspects Darren of cruising for porn but decides, with Christmas charity, not to check the search history and confirm his suspicions. Instead he cruises his own files, his personal underwear drawer of fragments. He makes up website names for fragments and chapters as he takes them off the main-frame and salts them away on the disk.
“X-rated ex-wives,” he mutters to the screen. “Red-Hot Old Friends and Geriatric Love Slaves Go West of the Overpass.”
Gerry’s pleased to find his bits and pieces take up more than one disk. He hadn’t thought there was that much stuff. He feels like the spy who has micro-filmed the plans. He’s got it all in pocket-size, ready to slip away.
Why am I making an escape kit?
Then he remembers that it was last Christmas that he told Vivian he was going back at his book.
Not my disk-and-a-half, he thinks. It’s a long time since the fuse was lit on this particular firework. Perhaps she’s tired of waiting for the explosion. Bombshells that don’t explode become paperweights.
Noises of Christmas dinner preparation continue overhead. Gerry puts his new disks in a side-pocket of the laptop bag and calls up his e-mail account. He hasn’t looked at it in a week or more. He doesn’t get a lot of e-mail because he doesn’t send much. Today, though, there’s a reply to one he sent to Philip wishing him a Merry Christmas.
I was at my Humanist Discussion Group Christmas party the other night, Philip wrote. There was a lot of argument about whether we should have one. We finally called it a solstice party and went ahead.
Gerry reads on.
I met this woman who is a sort of new-age Wiccan and after far too much humanist plonk, we wound up in her apartment. What rough beast whose hour has come...
“Slouches towards Bethlehem to be bored,” Gerry says sourly.
Before you say, ‘Why Wiccan? Why not RC or Seventh Day Adventist?’ I say it just feels right. It’s time for me to stop being alone.
Or start, thinks a cynical Gerry and then instantly feels guilty.
She works in an alternate used bookstore and she says I can get a job there too. They want somebody to sort out some of their classics and take a look at their computer accounting.
Gerry remembers The Vales of Har and The Books of Thel from his first life. His imagination smells the peculiarly alternate-bookshop mixture of mildew and cat.
Good luck to you both.
I’ve told Charmian about the dinners you used to invite me to. I said you were a pretty fair amateur shaman in the kitchen. If we can get some money together we might get down to see you next summer. Merry Christmas (or solstice) to you and Vivian.
Gerry wonders what it feels like to be at the start of something again, when reconciling Yeats and crystals and the Goddess seems possible. He tries to remember the miraculous foreign-ness of someone new, the magic unfamiliarity of everything from her body to the layout of her bathroom.
He is suddenly aware that he and Vivian have made love only twice since they got back from the funeral. Once was after they had a fight over where to put the furniture they’d shipped down. The second time was in the cold dawn after they’d ferried Melanie, Darren and Diana home after their fire.
It sometimes seems to Gerry that they need a row or a disaster as an aphrodisiac.
For-giveness or for-titude equal fore-play, Gerry thinks. Good luck, Philip and Charmian. Good luck to you both and the books and the cats and the mildew.
Christmas dinner is a reminder you’re old and jaded.
Gerry remembers being a kid and drooling at the prospect of Christmas dinner. He wonders if it was just that kids are naturally hungrier or if it was a sociological thing. Snacking hadn’t been much of an option for a kid in the 1950s. Fast food hadn’t fully arrived and kitchens were strictly controlled by Depression-trained mothers. If you got a snack at all, somebody made it for you and you were guaranteed it wouldn’t spoil your dinner or supper or whatever the next meal in line happened to be. Gerry remembers the prospect of bland mega-food at Christmas being something you could daydream about. Now it’s a lot of stodge that you’ll still eat too much of. His annual Waldorf salad is as close as the meal gets to what they usually eat. Tomorrow he’ll co-opt the leftovers into something less bland.
“Turkey curry tomorrow,” he says.
“That’s a waste of good turkey,” Vivian says. She believes, implicitly, that turkey is good.
“I’ll just do my share of the bits and pieces with a few veggies.”
“Yecch,” says Diana. “Yeah, yecch,” says Darren.
“Don’t come looking for any when I get it made then.”
Gerry and Vivian have yet to evolve a traditional Christmas dessert. Vivian gave up baking when Gerry took over most of the day-to-day cooking. One year he bought a steamer and attempted a proper Christmas pudding full of suet, peel, crumbs and rum. It was voted down as too heavy. This year he’s bought a little red-wrapped pudding from the grocery store. The pudding is about the size of a softball and comes in a plastic basin that can go in the microwave. There’s a tin of hard sauce.
“It’s like survival pudding,” Gerry says. “If you were going to put Christmas pudding in a life-raft, this is what you’d use.” As it is, he eats most of the survival pudding.
The short solstice afternoon draws in quickly and the drizzle turns to snow as darkness falls. Vivian and Melanie are putting dishes in the washer with a litre-and-a-half of white wine between them. Darren is stretched out on the couch and Diana is watching TV amid a tangle of gifts on the living room floor.
Gerry decides to go for a walk. He puts on his coat, an old tweed cap and a pair of waffle-soled hiking boots and sets out by the kitchen door. His footprints in the new snow of the driveway are the first to escape the house today. Like some hatching dinosaur, he leaves the turkey-scented, vinyl-sided egg and makes his transient mark in the outside world. He stops at the street and turns to look at the house. The lights of his giant wreath sparkle and the front door and picture window drip icicle lights. Looking at the kitchen window, he sees Viv and Melanie pass back and forth at the sink, o
nly the tops of their heads visible from street level. The house is like some illuminated novelty, a peepshow, observable but inaccessible. Gerry pulls his cap down to keep the fluffy snowflakes out of his eyes and sets off up the street.
It’s fully dark when Gerry returns to the house, stamping snow off his boots on the deck and letting himself back into the scented warmth of the kitchen. Vivian is sitting at the kitchen desk, a smudged wine glass beside her, talking on the phone. The glass is one of a set of big, balloon-shaped ones that somebody gave them. It’s one of only a few survivors of the set. The stems are too narrow for the big globes and they have broken with dignified restraint, one or two per holiday, for a couple of years.
“It’s Duane,” Vivian says. “They’re coming down. Here, talk to him.” She hands Gerry the phone but stays seated at the desk. He has to stretch the phone cord around her. He’s reminded of the cartoons where somebody detaches the steering wheel and hands it to a passenger as the car careers out of control.
“Merry Christmas, Duane.”
“Merry Christmas, Gerry.”
“Your mother says we’re going to be seeing you.”
“Yes, that’s right. I’ve got laid-off. Things are slow in the field just now. We just found out a week ago,” Duane says, not sounding regretful enough for Gerry. Gerry also notices Duane always says yes, not yeah or yep or any of the short-hand affirmatives. It’s as if he’s relaying something solemn, something just this side of “yea verily.”
“That’s too bad,” Gerry says.
“No, Gerry, I think it was a blessing.” Duane’s voice warms. “I’ve been talking to some of the people at Pastor Bob’s ministry. They think they can find something for me to do back home.”
“The move will upset the horse,” Gerry says surreally.
“We sold the horse. A friend of Gretchen’s from the church bought it.”
“Too bad, or no, I guess, great really.” Gerry is unreasonably nostalgic for a horse he’s met once. Irrationally, he wants loyalty to the family stable, the tribe’s trusty steed. “Put on Gretchen and the kids, I’ll say Merry Christmas.”
Happiness of Fish Page 24