For a few minutes there’s a confusion of people put on the phone, not knowing who they’re talking to. Gerry finally makes his way through Duane’s little family and hands them back to Vivian and Melanie.
Through much of Christmas evening, Gerry is by himself. Vivian and the kids disappear to the basement to play Christmas CD’s and call extended family. He sits in the living room, scented with the Christmas tree, and toys with the idea of joining them or even of calling some of his own family that he rediscovered when his mother died. He discards the idea. They’re fading back into the haze of the past thirty or so years. Besides, he doesn’t really want family just now, extended or otherwise. He’s got a basement full of it.
“I’ll be home with bells on...,” the CD player rumbles underfoot in the basement. Vivian is singing along.
Gerry picks up a coffee table book on sailing from his pile of presents and looks at pictures of expensive boats that all appear to be crewed by male acrobats and the space debutantes from the coffee shop.
“Boat porn,” says Gerry to the Christmas tree. “It’ll never take off in Newfoundland until somebody invents the thermal thong.”
On TV, the Alastair Simm version of A Christmas Carol unwinds. Gerry has tried to correct himself of being a Scrooge-snob. He tries not to pronounce on its superiority at parties. If asked which version he prefers, he’ll plump for the Disney cartoon or the Muppets. Now, however, watching Scrooge pine for Fezziwig’s party, he unaccountably finds his throat choked and his eyes full of tears.
Gerry is asleep when Vivian comes upstairs to go to bed. She wakes him when she staggers slightly and bumps into the bedroom door. He hears her grunt as she pulls her sweater over her head and he feels the mattress cant sharply as she flops into bed.
“Are you awake?” She’s switched from wine to beer in the course of the evening. He can smell it. He thinks beer is one of those smells like tobacco, smells that were warm and welcoming twenty years ago and are mildly sickening now.
“Now I am.” He hopes he’s not being too obviously sarcastic. “I was just dozing,” he lies, to soften the tone.
“I don’t think I’m going to take the tree down this year.”
Gerry has visions of a sort of Miss Haversham’s Christmas tree, bald and shedding garlands in the height of summer. He lets her declaration lie there, hoping she’ll fall asleep or change gears.
“Leave it up, boy... Love Christmas.”
“Yeah,” says Gerry, waiting. The gear change comes without warning.
“We should sell this place to Duane and get something smaller. He’d do all right on the difference between what he’ll sell for up in Ottawa and what this place is worth.”
Gerry feels the universe wobble. In the past week or two he’s felt smothered in the house. Now the suggestion of getting rid of it makes him feel exposed.
“You’ve been talking about this with him?”
“I’m going to leave the tree up,” Vivian says again. He waits for an answer to his question but none comes. He doesn’t push. This isn’t the time. A snore comes from Vivian’s side of the bed, then another. He nudges her slightly. She stirs, settles again and the snore stops.
“We’ll talk about it,” Gerry says. “Goodnight. Merry Christmas.”
It takes him a long time to go back to sleep. When he does, he dreams he’s standing outside the house again, as he did when he went for his afternoon walk. There are no curtains on any of the windows. He can see Duane and Gretchen inside, and a crowd of strangers singing. When he goes to the door, it’s locked. They don’t hear him when he knocks.
In front of the dresser mirror, Gerry performs the half-remembered magic of tying a black bow tie. He is sweating slightly, holding his head up and trying to make his fingers perform the magic middle part of the process where the knot starts to bite in the centre and the ends take on definition. It’s his third try and the two previous attempts have come out lop-sided or too loose. This time he judges the tensions right and gets a hard, tight knot between two reasonably equal wings of black, just enough crookedness to boast that this bow is tied by hand and not clipped or strapped-on. He sighs and shrugs the tension out of his shoulders, feeling the unfamiliar braces on them. He shrugs again, takes his dinner jacket off the back of the bedroom chair and puts it on. His image in the mirror is black and white. It seems to him that his face and hair are the monotone grey of old theatre marquee photos to match the puritan formality of his evening clothes, a middle-aged face, to be charitable about it.
“Behold the penguin in all his sober glory,” he calls down the hall to where Vivian is putting on her face in the bathroom. They’re getting ready for a New Year’s ball at a hotel downtown. Her office has booked tables. It’s been a good year in the real estate business.
He walks down the hall and looks in at the open bathroom door. Vivian stops putting on eye shadow for a moment and looks sideways at him.
“You’re all ready. You look nice.” Vivian likes Gerry to wear the dinner suit he’s had since they started taking occasional cruises some years ago. She was surprised when he bought one.
“You could rent a tux on the boat. It says so in the brochure.”
“A tux is a rented dinner jacket,” he quoted from somewhere. “I don’t want to look like the senior prom.”
Surveying his shirt front above his cummerbund in the hall mirror, Gerry is reminded of the Shepard illustration of Toad in Wind in the Willows. He doesn’t mind. He feels pleasantly anachronistic.
Vivian emerges from the bathroom. She’s wearing black with a sparkle of encrusting-jet. A short jacket of the same material covers her shoulders. She looks encased, like something Egyptian or perhaps some rather splendid insect.
“I’m too old for off-the-shoulder,” she says. “God, I haven’t had this girdle on in a while. I hope I can sit down.”
Melanie and Diana look around the corner from the kitchen.
“Wow,” Melanie says. “Wow,” Diana echoes obediently. Darren comes up from the basement in his pizza baker’s whites. He’s getting ready to go to work.
“All dressed up in your tuxedo, eh?”
“Come take our picture by the tree,” Vivian says to Melanie. It vaguely irks Gerry. He wishes perversely that their dressing up could pass un-remarked.
“Taxidermy is more enduring,” he says grumpily as Melanie herds them in front of the tree and the camera flashes.
Traffic feels light as Gerry drives them to the hotel, the de facto designated driver by virtue of being on the wagon. The cars they meet and pass have a ships-in-the-night feel, bound for their own mysterious islands of revelry or to the garage at home to let the cabbies have their big night. It’s years now since Gerry and Vivian have had to wait in hotel lobbies or the downtown slush to get a New Year’s cab home. He’s always perfectly, predictably able to drive. There are times he thinks Vivian resents this.
“You’re always ready to go home,” she’ll say, half accusingly, at the end of a party.
“I spent a lot more time out than you did in your last life,” he’ll say, as long as they’re not arguing about it. “Home’s got novelty value.”
They drive past a sign from Viv’s company on the lawn of a house.
“You know we can get a hundred and sixty for our house right now?” she says, the street lights flicking over her.
This is a topic that’s been bubbling to the surface for a week now since it first came up Christmas night. In the past, Gerry has railed against selling the house. Now, for some reason, the proposal that Duane will buy it seems to put him at a disadvantage. Unreasonably, he feels he’s being put in a position of denying Duane and his little tribe a roof over their heads. He doesn’t want to have this discussion at the start of a party, particularly a party with Viv’s office.
“That much, you think?” he temporizes. “But of course then we’d have to find something else.”
“There’s lots out there,” Viv says. They pull up at a stoplight. He says
nothing, waiting for the light to change. When it does, they drive on in silence.
Vivian isn’t wearing boots and the hotel parking lot is full so he drops her at the main door and drives slowly out a back exit and parks in the lot of a dark office building across the street. A few other lone men in dark overcoats are doing the same thing, establishing parking outposts on the frontiers of festivity. They straggle back across the road to the hotel, looking like some off-duty platoon in their uniform trousers with the shiny stripes and the flashes of shirt front where their coats open.
The doorman salutes Gerry. He’s been a fixture at the hotel forever and Gerry has been to hundreds of events here over the years. In the old days he’s poured him into cabs. Latterly he’s greeted Gerry when he has fits of fitness and signs up for a month or two at the hotel’s health club and pool. The doorman is beaming. For once, the people he’s ushering into the building are dressed up to the standard of his Cossack fur cap, buttons and braid. The lobby has a Dr. Zhivago look to it, men in black and white, women in Christmas tree colours and glitter. Gerry feels substantial and worldly walking in. He thinks of Rod Steiger in the Komarovsky role and is tempted to twirl his moustache. He’s always felt Steiger’s illusion-less villain stole the movie from Omar Sharif ’s frostbitten, runny-nosed poet.
Patricia or Jane or Rachel or Fiona will walk in and shoot me during dinner, he thinks. Except they won’t because why would they? What would matter enough?
“Hi Gerry,” calls Sally, a reporter he knows. She’s seeing a Scottish engineer with one of the oil projects these days. He’s got her interested in salmon fishing and gets along with her kid. Tonight he’s at her elbow in kilt and hose. Sally is an explosion of dark curls over bare shoulders and a soft-line, 1930s-style dress that seems to drip off her.
“Hi Sally, good evening...” He fishes for the name for a moment. “Duncan.”
“You clean up nice,” Sally says, nodding at his evening clothes. “You’ll ruin your reputation as a boat bum.”
“And you look like you’re expecting a very discriminating ape to pick you off the Empire State Building. Keep an eye on this one, Duncan, she’s trolling for Kong.”
“I know,” Duncan says. “I feel quite inadequate and all.”
Gerry feels a warmth for them. “Have a good time, guys. I’ve got to find Vivian. See you on the dance floor later.”
When he finds Viv, she’s already found some of their dinner party. They’re in the ante-room of the ballroom and Viv’s boss, Chuck, has been to the bar to order. He’s shuttling back and forth, passing drinks around. Gerry notices that Vivian has taken a rye and ginger instead of her usual wine.
“And that’ll be what for you, Gerry?” Chuck says. “You want a Coke or something? The rest of us are on the hard stuff.”
Chuck is short and trimmed. He’s a keen after-dinner speaker and reputed to be a dirty hockey player in his old-timers’ league. When he smiles it’s a brief Edsel-grill stretching of his lips, as though he’s checking out some new dental work in the mirror.
Hands up, those who can remember the Edsel grill, Gerry thinks. A Mercury sucking a lemon.
He feels he’s been discussed in advance and is reminded that he’s always thought Chuck was a macho little shit.
“No, Chuck, I might as well go on the hard stuff too tonight. I’ll take a Perrier with a twist and cut me off if I start to sing.” He gives Chuck a grin that he hopes looks insincere and gets a warning glance from Vivian.
Chuck’s wife Natalie is taller than he is. A vee of golf- and tennis-weathered skin points downward into the considerable cleavage of an aubergine-coloured dress. Gerry tries to imagine them in bed. Ancient jokes about horny mice and acquiescent elephants float through his mind.
“Vivian tells us you’re thinking about moving into a new home,” Natalie says. It seems to Gerry that everybody involved with Viv’s work is incapable of saying “house.” They speak only of “homes.”
“Yes, yes, I guess we are.” He decides since they have talked about it, what he says is true. “Although I’m hoping we can swap the house for a really nifty boat.”
This gets only a polite laugh. This crowd doesn’t make jokes about homes.
Gerry floats with the stream as they go in to dinner. The hotel New Year’s party always gets a lot of strays, odd office parties and odd couples, people who have no genuine plans or real places to be. At a distance, he spies Roger and Vanessa who visited him on the boat. They are with a group of similar old-young couples. Gerry thinks they look like an ad for one of those mail-order Russian bride services.
He watches Sally and kilted Duncan being led to a table for two that appears to have been added to the seating plan as an afterthought. They’re too new a couple to fit somewhere else.
But we’re an odd couple too, Gerry thinks. We’re here because we don’t fit anywhere else.
They’ve been together the best part of twenty years but that’s not quite long enough to grow new traditions. They got together as they turned forty and had come from different places. They had a second-time-around newness that shut them off from old friends. Now, whatever else people their age do at New Year’s, they’ve been doing it together for a decade or two longer than Gerry and Vivian. Only-child Gerry doesn’t much mind drifting around the edges, but Vivian likes a crowd she knows. At a pinch the gang from the office will do, and sometimes Gerry finds himself turned off as she comes on too strong to blend in.
“...tigers,” Chuck is saying. It’s also an evening for people like Chuck to rent an audience.
“That’s right. We’re tigers.” Vivian agrees.
“We’ll have the tethered goat to start and a couple of coolies still alive,” Gerry says to the air in front of him. “We want to play with them a bit first.”
“Play with them a bit first,” Chuck picks up. “That’s good.”
Gerry swivels his grin around the group like a nasty child with a magnifying glass, looking for new insects to fry. The group concedes him some brownie points for bloodthirstiness.
A man called Glenn is talking to him. “Vivian says you race your boat.” Glenn has a small round head on top of a stand-up dress collar. Gerry is reminded of the penguin waiters in Mary Poppins.
“Yeah, we actually managed to win a couple.”
“I hear you write,” says Glenn’s wife, a health-clubby, short-haired woman in sea green. “I read.” She says it in a challenging way, as though there might be a causal connection, as though she might have caught something unpleasant from him.
Gerry wonders if Glenn and Glenn’s wife do this good-cop, bad-cop routine often, engaging the same person in two simultaneous unrelated conversations. Then again, the way they ignore each other’s conversation, maybe it’s just some grudge match they’ve got going. Who can suck the victim dry first?
“My book group’s reading This Bucket Here.” She says it as if she’s telling him she eats bran for regularity. “I like Newfoundland writing.”
“My nephew’s got a J-24,” Glenn says. “Man, can that thing go.”
“I never get on the boat,” Vivian confides from his side. “Gerry doesn’t want me on it. I think I got out once last summer.”
“What are you writing, Gerry?” Mrs. Glenn demands.
“A novel.”
“Is it fiction?”
“Well it’s a novel, isn’t it?” Gerry says. It is fiction, isn’t it?
The waitresses bring the starter.
“What is it?” Glenn asks.
“Trout in drag,” Gerry says and concentrates on taking it apart in small forkfuls.
Gerry decides the meal is a cunning attempt to cater to the tastes and aspirations of the guests. Perhaps a survey was done or a focus group convened. The Pilates crowd feels virtuous over the trout fan-dancing in phyllo and a soup that seems to be mostly hot orange juice with some shreds of carrot. The main course is a new-age-garnished, but identifiable hunk of beef for the marketplace carnivores. The dessert is a
spun sugar concoction. It delights everybody because it looks as though it’s made of plastic but turns out to be edible.
Gerry decides that conversation is dead. The talk is factual and faintly competitive.
“This is very good.”
“Yes. We had it this way in Cancun.”
“You bought it where?”
“We got in there on the ground floor and it’s gone nowhere but up.”
Gerry wonders if there used to be more ideas at parties or if he’s just being nostalgic. For one thing, thirty, or even twenty, years ago he was partying with younger people. They didn’t have much to throw around except ideas or maybe slogans. This crowd has matured into social Sumo wrestling. Wrap your jewellery, politics and bank account up in a silly loincloth and let them lumber around the room bumping into things.
“I’ve always hated that house,” he hears Vivian say.
Has she? Our house? When did this happen and why and what business is it of Edsel-mouth Chuck and Natalie?
“Those old houses are more bother than they’re worth,” Glenn’s wife is saying. Gerry wonders how she knows what sort of house they have. He feels conspired against.
The evening lurches into the ten-thirty doldrums that strike parties of people with short attention spans. Dinner hasn’t lasted long enough to take them to the silly hats and noise-makers. The talk is refrains and variations on earlier themes. Little knots of shop-talk develop, and spouses, miffed or relieved, fend for themselves in other little knots. The jazz combo that is half of the evening’s music starts to play. The rock band will come on after midnight. The partiers are faced with the prospect of an hour and a half of self-directed fun until midnight. They scuttle for the lavatories and the bars.
Gerry finds himself alone, stretching his legs in the lobby. He feels mildly combative, marshalling his calm among the potted palms. If sides are being picked, it appears Vivian has picked the gang from the office and he’s picked himself.
I could camp here, he thinks, looking around the indoor undergrowth of the lobby. Raid by night and harass them when they least expect it. A palm court commando: they seek him here, they seek him there.
Happiness of Fish Page 25