Like the forlorn hope of some archaic army, the dancers struggle to hold the middle of the floor in the cut and thrust of public fun, battling to survive to midnight. Gerry and Vivian are in the thick of things. She seems to be dancing too hard, a shade ahead of the music. Her face is flushed and self-contained, cut off.
“You didn’t have to look so surprised when Natalie asked about selling the house. We’ve talked about it.”
“Yes, I know, but I didn’t realize we had a cheering section. How many of us are going to live in the place?”
The music stops suddenly and they’re left in half-clenched positions, bar fighters trying to look innocent when the lights go up.
“Fifteen seconds,” yells the girl singer from the band. “Ten, nine, eight...”
“Never mind, kid, we’ll find something. I was just kidding.”
“...three, two, one, Happy New Year!”
The band breaks into “Auld Lang Syne” and a waiter tugs at a rope to free a reluctant net of balloons overhead. It sags at one end and releases a couple of balloons. The crowd guffaws. The waiter looks flustered and tugs harder. The net tears partially free of its moorings and dumps its balloons on the crowd. There is the sound of a small war as the dancers stamp them to rubber shreds.
Vivian stands stiffly, angry now. She suddenly seems close to tears. “You spoil everything.”
“I guess I do,” he says, somewhere between contrition and despair. “I’m sorry. We’ll look.”
The singing strands itself on the chorus. “For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld land syne...”
“We’ll look, okay?”
She lets herself be kissed.
“Happy New Year.”
They dance clumsily into the new year.
The party is breaking up in the lobby. Gerry has collected their coats from the cloakroom. He’s got his on and Viv’s over his arm. A few moments before, they’d agreed it was time to go. Other people had already started looking for coat-check tickets. It’s a point of honour with Vivian not to be the first to leave. It’s a point of honour with Gerry to humour her. Now, though, she’s got a second wind as the group lingers over its goodbyes.
“You’ll have to come to dinner,” Viv is telling Natalie.
“In your new house,” Chuck says, playing with his car keys.
“Yes, that’s right, Chuck, and maybe we’ll celebrate Gerry’s book. With what his mother left him, he shouldn’t have to work now. He can write all the time.”
Gerry cringes and shakes her coat like someone trying to attract a young animal’s attention to a feeding pail.
“Why did you have to say that, about the old lady’s money?” Gerry asks as they drive home. He decides he isn’t angry so much as tired. All at once he’s exhausted. He recalls himself to what he’s doing and swerves the Honda slightly to give a wider berth to a couple standing in the gutter. The girl has a lime-coloured formal under a short leather coat and she’s throwing up. Her escort leans towards her as though he’s giving coaching tips.
Happy 2005, Gerry thinks.
“Why not? It’s true, isn’t it?” Vivian asks. “You’ve got no excuse now.”
“I guess not.”
The car makes its slow pinball way through the streets that are corridors of black trees and Christmas lights.
I’ve got no excuse.
seventeen
JANUARY 2005
Gerry, Vivian, her sister Nellie and a real estate agent named Carole stand in their socks on a cold expanse of plastic-looking blonde hardwood. They’ve been looking at a new house.
“The floors are beautiful,” Nellie says. She’s come to visit and has become part of the new house project. She’s volunteering to stay and help clean up the old house for sale. In exchange, she gets to look at new places with them. “Beautiful floors.”
“Aren’t they?” Carole says. She’s trying to read the dynamics of the little group of sock-footed worshippers. She knows Vivian’s in the business. Gerry looks non-committal, so she correctly assumes that Nellie is moral support and cheering section.
“What do you think?” Vivian asks Gerry. She says it like an ambulance attendant, talking to make sure the patient is still conscious.
“It’s nice and bright,” Gerry says, thinking that if Gretchen and Duane are going into their house, they should arrange a floor swap. This house has the shiny gym floors of their place in Ontario.
“Viv, I don’t need to stay with you guys,” Carole is saying. “It’s one-ninety-five but I think they’ll move on that. Look around and just stick the key back in the lockbox when you’re done. Call me. You’ve got my cell.”
“One-ninety-five, eh?” Nellie says, looking shrewd, as though she’s being asked to come up with the price.
“Thanks Carole,” Gerry says. If he can add nothing else to the process, he can be polite.
Carole gets back into her snow boots, hopping one-footed, a hand braced against a door frame. Then she leaves them to it.
“It would look better furnished,” Vivian says tentatively, still watching Gerry for symptoms of dissent.
“We’ve got the stuff to fill it,” he says. She looks at him sharply for signs of sarcasm but he’s poker-faced. He’s thinking of empty places he’s moved into over the years. “In a way, I kind of like it empty. It’s got nothing but potential.”
“The things you do get on with,” Nellie says. “Like it empty.”
A few days later, Gerry is back hiding in the coffee bars again. For the first time, he has brought his geriatric laptop to a coffee shop. He still hasn’t fully made the transition from Chinese notebooks. One is open beside him as he translates the last few weeks into a George reflection.
Fragment: New Technology
George unplugs the charger for the electric screwdriver so he can plug in the one for the laptop. It’s not going to cost him a screwdriver. The electric screwdriver hasn’t worked for more than a few minutes in a couple of years now. He killed it with attention, popping it back on the charger as soon as he’d used it. It built up a memory and now can’t absorb more than a few minutes of charge.
Ellen and I have built up a memory, George thinks. Doing the right thing wrong makes me bloody useless, incapacitated by the knowledge of what used to work.
Gerry saves the half screen and flashes up another.
Fragment: Liking It Empty
Once, a very long time ago, George had a room with a table, a chair, a bedroll and a half-dozen books. His knapsack hung on the back of the door with a set of nesting mess tins and a single-burner butane stove in the side pocket. He lived in it when he met Paula. The chair and table belonged to the house. She admired his simplicity. When they split up they left trunks full of simplicity in other people’s houses.
Half as long ago he’d had an apartment where he’d owned nothing but some bedding, the kitchenware, the bathroom curtains, and a short shelf of books. He brought Ellen to it in their early days. She pitied his neediness. They are buying a new house to store its antidotes in.
Gerry patters to a stop on the little keyboard. The bits he’s written seem small and stunted. He feels nostalgic for the days when he could conjure up ten pages of an old love affair reworked. If he admitted it, the days of love affairs seem very remote. He gets up and takes his cup for a refill. The space deb behind the counter smiles at him. For years now, Gerry has flattered himself that he’s wearing pretty well, that pretty young women respond when he tries to be charming. He knows better than to come on too strong.
“My wife tells me I shouldn’t hit on women I have socks older than,” he’d kid them, “or should that be ‘than whom, I have older socks?’”
It was gently self-deprecating, spelling out the realities of wife and age but leaving the hint that Gerry knew a bit about hitting and being hit-on. Today, though, he sees the girl’s smile and remembers that no one frowned at the inmates in his mother’s old-age home.
I dribble this coffee down my front and I’ll still
get a smile as she mops up.
Gerry takes his coffee back to his table and closes the lid of the laptop. It seems awkward to have it in front of him in the coffee shop, vaguely prosthetic, a crutch or an artificial leg. He never misplaces his Chinese notebooks, but he feels he could accidentally close the laptop and walk away, forgetting it on the table.
Forget your crutch and fall on your face.
It’s a winter evening and Gerry has gone to earth. After supper he slithered away to the cramped, cluttered, incubator heat of the basement workshop. More and more, he finds the complete useless-ness of the room suited to what he is, or isn’t, doing. The furnace blower cuts out, leaving only the sustained sigh of the warm air in the duct-work guts that branch out over Gerry’s head. He feels that the warmth radiating outward is desiccating him, draining and mummifying him. He thinks of the grey fur husks of dehydrated mice you find on high, dry shelves in old houses.
They’ve made an offer on the new house and it’s been tentatively accepted. The deal has gone off to the lawyers. Gerry’s part in the process has been saying he doesn’t mind. They’re waiting to see what Duane and Gretchen can get for their place in Ontario.
When Duane and his tribe move in, I’ll be here like mouse jerky, he thinks. He’s not sure if he minds or not. He feels cramped and yet safe here. A part of him wants to become part of the fabric, like bones in a crypt. Another part wants to shed it all.
Tonight, in theory, he’s sorting out his novel-stuff, filling a carton with notes he wants and throwing out the rest. He’s got a plastic disk case beside him. From time to time he pops disks into the laptop to see what’s on them.
The house is fairly quiet. Darren is at work and Melanie is over at their house, getting things ready for a move back. The power has been restored and the insurance has given them a cheque. She put Diana to bed before she left. Tomorrow is a school day.
Semi-consciously he tracks the movements of Vivian and Nellie upstairs. They’d sat at the kitchen table long after supper had finished, talking about what the new house needed. Now the kitchen water pipes and sink drain have stopped talking to themselves overhead. The dishes are done. A strengthening telepathy of creaking floorboards takes the women down the hall and into the living room over Gerry’s head.
“You know, he’s like he’s dead, girl.” Nellie’s voice is strangely intimate in the workshop. The builders never bothered to run ducts to all the registers in the living room. One, over the work bench, is just a grating to let the warm air up. Nellie is apparently on the couch right above it. Her voice has the clarity of a theatre aside. “It’s like he had nothing to say about that lovely new house at all. It’s not natural. I don’t know how you put up with it.”
“Gerry just can’t handle change,” Vivian says. “He’ll be all right. He likes everything just the way it is, but I know we can do better.”
I’m not the only one who isn’t crazy about the idea, he thinks. Duane and Gretchen chose to see taking over the house as a cross they have to bear to come home and do God’s work.
“Well I suppose he could stay where he is and look for another job,” Gerry had said a week or so before. They’d just had a late-night discussion on the phone, with everyone on the downstairs and bedroom extensions. “I wouldn’t want to force him to live here just so I could have the fun of moving.”
“He wants to come home,” Vivian had said.
“Home is good,” Gerry observed bleakly, “I’m quite partial to mine.”
On the phone, though, he’d had to sound as though Duane was volunteering for a particularly worthy leper colony by condescending to take his house.
“You’d think he wasn’t glad that Duane’s coming home,” Nellie says overhead, recalling Gerry to the present. He realizes he’s putting notebooks and his box of disks into a large gym bag he uses for hauling boat stuff. “Sometimes it’s like he doesn’t want to be with you and the family at all.”
“Gerry’s all right,” Vivian says, but it seems to Gerry that she doesn’t put much fire into the argument.
He rummages through dairy cases of boat stuff and finds the little ceramic heater the kids gave him for the boat a couple of Christmases ago. He chucks it in the gym bag and pulls a rolled sleeping bag down from a high shelf.
Move over you mummified mice!
He feels an unreasoning rage at Nellie, meddling in this move as a little break from the monotony of outport living in Burleigh, a chance to nose around in new houses she can’t afford and snoop in this one. He goes upstairs feeling as if he’s been sanded until the nerves are on the surface.
“Good night,” he says, passing the living room and going down the hall to his and Vivian’s room where he flops on the bed and reads an old copy of Wooden Boat.
After an hour or so, he undresses, gets into bed and flicks off the light.
“What’s the matter with you?” Vivian says, flicking it on again when she comes to bed. Gerry has been lying clenched in the dark. “You never said a word, going to bed.”
“To be expected from somebody who might as well be dead,” he says tonelessly. “Besides, I’d hate to upset Nellie’s planning of where I’m going to live.”
“We agreed moving would be a good idea. The kids can use the house. We should be someplace better.”
“Yes, yes, I know, but shit, it gets on my bloody nerves.”
“Don’t start. This house gets on mine.”
They argue in forced undertones. Nellie may be Vivian’s ally but she doesn’t feel like giving her too much of a show. They fall silent, apprehensive of where the argument is going. The silence stretches.
“Look, kid, maybe I just need to get away for a little while, maybe do some writing.”
“Oh, that’s great, just when we’re getting ready to move. The house is going to close anytime, and besides you haven’t written anything in months. I bet you haven’t done a damn thing since we got back from Ottawa.”
“I have, but you’re right, not much. I need to go away for a bit and try. I feel like I’m swelling up, like I need to go lance it.”
“You don’t care about me. I’ve got the kids coming and Nellie here...”
“You asked Nellie in,” he says. “But no, I’m not running away. I just need to get out of the house for a bit. I’ll keep in touch. The minute I’m needed for the house I’ll be right back.”
“It looks great, us buying a house and you don’t even want to be here.”
“I’ll be here. I’ve said I’m up for moving, but I just need some time. I feel like I’m smothering.”
“I smother you, do I?”
“No, kid, I think I smother me.”
“You’re making a holy show of me in front of Nellie.”
“Shag Nellie! What do you care what Nellie thinks? She’s still looking down her nose at you because you don’t bake bread any more.”
“I made good bread.”
“But you don’t have to anymore,” Gerry says, urgently pushing the words into the room’s dark, trying to bridge the yawning foot between them in the bed. “I’ll be there when I’m needed.”
There’s a sniff from the other side of the bed. Vivian rolls face down. “Do I get on your nerves that much? Go on then.”
Gerry is compelled to reach out and touch her. Her shoulders are shaking. “No, kid, I told you. I get on my own.” He tugs her to get her to face him. “I just need some time alone to get human.”
She lets herself be half-turned towards him. There is enough light from the window to show her face, wet and crumpled.
“I do love you, you know. If you don’t want to move we don’t have to.” Her voice comes from against his chest. “You’re not a bad man, Gerry.”
So my wives keep saying, he thinks. Who are we trying to convince?
“If you have to, you go on. I’ll be okay with Nellie and the kids.”
“I’ll be back when it’s time to get serious about it.”
“You go on then. I’ll tell Nellie some
work came up for you.”
They curl into each other and for the first time in a while, go to sleep in each other’s arms.
Gerry gets up before daylight the next morning. He pitches some clothes and a washing kit into a gym bag. He moves quietly, trying not to wake Nellie in the spare room or Melanie, Darren and Diana in the basement. Sleep-junky Vivian gets up a little while later and joins in his morning game of stealth. They drink tea at the kitchen table under a wide-based cone of light from the hanging lamp and talk in voices that are just above whispers.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. I’m just going to drive around a bit until I feel my shoulders unclench. I’ll be in touch though. I’ll call, wherever I get to.”
“I suppose I should be glad. I know you’ll just drive around. I don’t need to worry about you going off with somebody else.”
“You make me sound like an altered tomcat. That’s not altogether flattering. Patricia would have worried.”
“You were different then.”
“I suppose.”
Gerry drags his gym bags of book-stuff and clothes to the door. He rejoins Viv at the table and is finishing his tea when they hear Nellie moving around. Eventually she comes down the hall to the kitchen. She’s wearing a home-knit sweater over flannelette pyjamas. Her feet are in shapeless knitted slippers.
“What are you fellahs doing up then?”
“Convention of the living dead,” Gerry says, but Viv gives him a dirty look.
“Gerry’s got to go on the road,” she says. “He got the call last night. Somebody got sick at the last minute. You’d better get going, hon.”
She kisses him matter-of-factly, as if he’s being sent off to school.
“Yeah, right, see you, love, see you, Nellie.”
“Say hello to George and Paula,” Vivian says. He’s surprised. He didn’t think she remembered the characters in the bits he’s read to her from time to time.
“Who are George and Paula?” Nellie asks.
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