Order of Good Cheer

by Bill Gaston

  To this understatement Andy said, “I guess.” He was grateful Drew had said anything at all. It was the closest his friend would come to saying, I’m on your side, Be careful, or What the hell are you thinking?

  Yes, it would be weird with Laura back. How weird, he had no clue. He did know that, in the largest sense, it was really up to him. How seriously he took it. How worked up he got. Not that he’d be able to find the handle for either of those.

  As per Tuesday’s post-movie routine, Drew turned into the Legion and Andy followed. Two pints, tops. They both started morning shift tomorrow, rise and shine by five. Though with Drew these days, you never knew. Drew was capable of closing down a bar even when faced with a morning shift. Andy didn’t want to think his friend had a problem, despite what Pauline had to say, despite her ever more frequent jabs in public. But Drew didn’t usually miss work because of it. He generally got himself to the parking lot and in the door and punched in, sleep or no sleep. Though once he did leave his Jeep running, all day. Eight hours later there it was still purring, waiting faithfully, overheating only a little. A year’s worth of jokes came from that one, as in, Drew was secretly married to a Qatar oil sheik. As in, Drew was Prince Rupert’s gift to global warming, and they’d have him to thank when they were suntanning in March.

  Drew aimed himself at a table full of regulars, which was loud already. That was fine, Andy wouldn’t have to talk. The pub air felt no drier than the drizzly November night outside, the yeasty pong of spilled beer as familiar as his own armpit. He sat, edged the chair out from the circle a bit, not liking this corner of the bar, where you got the waft of urinal discs each time the door flew open. They’d changed those old-school camphor ones to something smelling like a really strong vanilla, which, now that he thought of it, and as long as you could ignore its raison d’être, wasn’t half bad.

  HER LETTER HAD been a thing of beauty, five pages long. He read it over and over and then put it away for a few days hoping he would forget it enough to enjoy anew. Because here, after so many years, was her voice again, her letter voice, a voice in which they’d found an intimacy unlike any other, even face to face. This intimacy had surprised them both. Until she left for Toronto they’d never written letters to each other before, there being no need. Then one letter led to another and it became their way of speaking for an entire year.

  Andy remembered discovering his own letter-writing voice and what it could do, and they had discussed it, in letters, and agreed that it was good. There was something about being able to edit to clarify, and clarify again, and so speak the deepest truths and find the fiercest intimacy one was capable of, something the speed and lurch of face-to-face encounters often ironically prevented. It let them both talk about love. And her absence. And what it would be like when he finally joined her there in Toronto. It let her describe Toronto after a life in Prince Rupert. It let them both be funny. Then, when the time came, it let her articulate the reasons why Andy should not come after all, should no longer join her in Toronto. In this she took great care and many, many pages, as if by spreading pain’s endless angles and edges over so much paper this could help ease it. And in fact it probably did.

  In any case her recent letter, the first in a decade and a half, brought the intimacy back. It took only a few sentences:

  This feels crazy, this letter, but when I learned you don’t have email, and then picked up the phone to call you, I somehow couldn’t. It felt too abrupt, or rude, or invasive, and anyway I was nervous, not that I’m not nervous writing this, but it feels really familiar, doesn’t it? to be talking to you in a letter?

  It was her nervousness that excited him. Made him a kid, made everything uncertain and possible, and it made him horny, right off the top. It was mostly her voice, her letter voice, the magic little leap of doesn’t it, the assumption, the knowledge that he felt what she felt, that not only made him love her again, not only made him love him-and-her again, it made him understand he had never stopped.

  This understanding was a ready one. If his love was a monster he’d thought dead and buried, it had been buried alive. Launched by the giant spring under its back, Laura’s letter, it popped easily out of its shallow grave, and now the monster was in the room. There it was, in the mirror, tall, pale, pretending not to breathe. (Andy could joke about all this, and not. Because why did it feel like gallows humour?)

  It wasn’t simple, this matter of undying love. Eighteen years? Andy wasn’t stupid about it. Nor was he going to be stupid when she came. Nothing was simple here, nor was it the slightest bit predictable. If love was complicated when you were with each other, it was even more complicated when you weren’t. He’d done some thinking on this.

  A month after Laura had gone to Toronto, if he were asked if absence made the heart grow fonder, he would have said yes. God, yes. If asked the same question a year later, he’d have given the same painful answer, but with pause. If asked after ten years, Andy would have had to look inside and then say no. After that much time, fondness has absorbed much desperation and has stiffened up. If it can throb at all it throbs a little insanely. In the long run, fondness mutates. And forgetfulness gets into the mix: memories are smoothed over and fattened up. The quick bed of pleasure grows brass ornaments and rose silk sheets; her eyelashes lengthen absurdly when she shyly blinks; her breath after orgasm is the fig-and-pepper breeze drifting in off the desert. There were no fights; she had no freckles on her shoulders. After ten years, and now after eighteen, who knows what it had been like? Who knows what even happened?

  And of course her cancer added an unknowable mutation, an oddest spice. In remission, a breast removed, Laura had seemed cheerful enough in the letter.

  THEY LEFT THE LEGION after Drew pounded back maybe five pints, and Andy his two. They had a half-mile to walk together before Drew turned uphill and Andy down. It was one of the saddest stretches of town, with a third of the buildings empty. Most didn’t even have For Lease signs up, no point to it. A few still had Going Out of Business banners hanging diagonal inside a window, faded and yellowed. Some of the businesses still open on this stretch (Ling The Tailor, Spirit Tattoo’s, and The Northern: The Best Hamburger, The Freshest Fish) were damned by their shoddy charm, the very thing tourists stared at but passed by.

  What will Laura think. To the best of his knowledge, because her mother loved travelling south to visit her, in eighteen years Laura had been up only twice. Once with her hubby and three-year-old daughter, when PR was still doing okay. Then once alone, a few years later, when PR was coming apart. (Again he’d steered clear, learning after that she’d left word with no fewer than four friends to say hi to him.)

  The raindrops got bigger, could penetrate hair to the scalp, so Andy took his ball cap from his pocket and Drew pulled up his hood. He looked funny in that hood. It made his long face longer, made him a horse-faced monk, lending an earnestness to an ironic man. Drew, sincere in nothing but his brooding. He’d been like that even as a kid. They didn’t speak for a block, Andy guessing Drew also felt pulverized by the tavern’s endless theories and bullshit about the ten miles of dead fish. Despite all the conjecture, nothing concrete had emerged. All that had been added to the radio tape-loop was that, “no matter the cause of this environmental catastrophe, Prince Rupert’s commercial fishing, sports fishing, and budding tourism industries could suffer untold damage, and the only thing certain here is that this economically depressed little city on the north coast didn’t need this kind of punishment.”

  In the bar Andy had put feelers out but nobody knew how much it would cost to shore up his property against further erosion, or what might be the best way. A young carpenter, Larry, had no facts to back him up when he said matter-of-factly, “You can go rock barged in, or you can go cement wall, but either way it’s a hundred grand.”

  The rain eased, and now it was only the sounds of their feet. Drew seemed in no hurry, a dullness of stride suggesting boredom behind him and boredom to come. Perhaps out of this sam
e boredom Drew asked a question he knew he’d always get an answer to.

  “What you reading these days?”

  “Bunch of stuff. Early seventeenth-century Canada.” And the Nijinsky biography. And a thing on S.A.D., something he should pass on to Drew, who maybe could use it.

  “History?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Coureurs de bois in canoes?”

  “Not for another hundred years or so. It’s still the coast, the first settlement. It’s Nova —”

  “Well let’s go in here then.”

  The non sequitur took Drew through a restaurant door, the Hickory Pit, and so launched one of his impromptu little adventures, the kind that made Andy shrink inside and want to keep walking. More and more Andy figured Drew did it mostly to bug him. In any event it was the kind of thing Drew did when bored and not sober.

  Drew was at the waitress station asking to see the manager. Andy said, “C’mon, I’m not hungry,” but Drew ignored him. The manager, Ken Worthington, strode from out of the restaurant’s dark recesses, the question on his face turning doubtful when he saw them. He knew them about as well as they knew him, which is to say, their names and thumbnail lives. He was about five years younger and had lived in town maybe a decade. White SUV, small kids. Black hair and moustache and physically capable air. He looked like a fireman, but pudgy.

  “What can I do for you gentlemen?” he asked, choosing safety in the businesslike.

  “I have a convention coming in,” Drew announced, not slurring at all, “and I’m planning the itinerary, including dining, and a majority is calling for ribs.”

  “Well — we have fantastic ribs. As I hope you already know.” A manager’s smile.

  “The thing is, I don’t. Your little neon sign, the cursive one —” He hooked his thumb back.

  “‘Chicken, Ribs, Steaks.’ It’s what we do.”

  “And I’ve never had the ribs myself. If you bring me a sample to try, if I like ’em, there’ll be twenty-five, thirty men in here a month from now, eating and drinking up a storm.”

  Worthington was caught motionless. He stared at Drew, an oddly distant look, wherein one could see cautionary words replaying between his ears.

  “Okay now — so it’s Drew, right?”

  “Right. This is Andy.”

  Andy waved. “I’m fine. Not hungry myself.”

  Drew pivoted to face Andy and instruct him. “I’m not ‘hungry.’ I’m scouting locales.”

  “Well then, Drew — why not come in some time and order the ribs? They really are good.” The manager’s smile again but just the mouth this time, no eyes to it at all.

  “I figured you’d want me to sample some if it meant lots of business.”

  “Well, it’s one-time business.”

  “Full house, thirty-five hungry guys, thirty-five international grain workers, ordering appies, beers all night? That’s not worth a sample?”

  Worthington stared at Drew some more. He eventually nodded, told them to take a table, and turned for the kitchen. Andy thought he betrayed the look of someone who knew bullshit when he heard it and had decided to let himself be duped as a manager, though not as a man.

  They sat at the nearest table. The only other patrons were a young couple off in the corner sitting too silent over a coffee. The lone waitress delivered two waters, and since they likely had to wait for Drew’s sample, Andy ordered a small poutine. Though even a minor waistline bulge looked exaggerated on a tall, thin man, lately he’d been careful and was pretty happy with the growing paunchlessness.

  “Why didn’t you get a big one?” asked Drew, which was odd, since he hated poutine. He called it “triple-fat fries.” Slouching across from him, Drew seemed as comfortable and distracted as possible for a man-on-a-prank. Glancing about, weighing decor choices, people, the waitress’s gait, his penetrating glare focused on anything but himself. It was always a wary look. Because Drew was obviously perceptive, but very capable of misreading what was going on inside, Andy and Pauline had long ago agreed that he was outelligent as opposed to intelligent.

  “I don’t know. Not that hungry. Sort of watching the weight.”

  To this Drew said, “You know, she’s had a kid and everything.”

  “Well, sure. I know.”

  “A kid. She’s a different person now.”

  “Yeah, she probably is.” Andy suspected the conversation might stay here, on kids changing your life, which would be fine. Chris leaving, a half-year ago, barely sixteen, had profoundly shaken Drew, and he didn’t unburden himself nearly enough. Once at work he’d told Andy that he thought about little else these days and added, looking amazed with himself, that he’d woken up in the middle of the night and cried, and that he was pretty sure he hadn’t cried since he was eight or nine years old. Trying to be scientific about it, he also told Andy that when your son, who’s your best buddy, shifts from begging to shoot hoops with you to hating your guts, almost overnight and for no apparent reason, “It’s a biological imperative, sure, but it’s impossible to understand. Exactly like death.”

  But thoughts of his son didn’t kidnap Drew tonight. Looking drunker than he had coming in, he counted on his fingers. “She has a grown-up kid. She had this whole career. She’s had cancer. She’s had this whole life. It’s totally different now.”

  “Well exactly. And I’m no Johnny Depp, so I’ve got to be buff at least.”

  Drew looked away shaking his head, but on the verge of smiling.

  Andy tapped an incisor. “I’m thinking the gold teeth too. Kohling my eyes.”

  Here Drew shifted, accepted the inevitable, decided to help. “Okay, seriously? Lose the hair, okay?” He scuffed his knuckles over his cheek.

  “My beard? Really?”

  “It’s not a ‘beard.’ Remember Yasser Arafat? Remember those individual hairs he had coming out of his face? She won’t be impressed.”

  Laura arrived in exactly a month, after first spending Christmas with her daughter, who was a freshman at university. Amelia, seventeen.

  Andy decided to give the beard a few more weeks, see if it filled out any.

  Worthington delivered the ribs himself. The waitress — it was one of Helen and Steve Peters’ kids — followed behind him bearing Andy’s poutine. Worthington set down a plate holding what appeared to be a full rack of spareribs. To one side, a dome of potato salad balanced a sprig of parsley. To another, a finger bowl of hot water floated a lemon wedge.

  Drew snorted and held his hands out over the platter, a gesture of helpless complaint.

  “I wanted a rib. A taste. A sample.”

  “Our compliments, sir.” Worthington brought his heels together and did a slight bow. “We hope you’ll choose the Hickory Pit.” It was hard to tell if the manager wasn’t now duping back.

  In any case the ribs were awful. Upon realizing this Drew peered up from the soggy pile, lips smeared with sweet grease. He looked embarrassed and sad for the place, and for his prank, when he mouthed, “These really suck.” Andy ate his poutine and tried to help with the ribs, which swam in far too much sauce and were chewy to boot, and maybe even a bit off, though steeped in so much vinegar it was hard to tell. They each ordered a pint to wash things down, and also to drop some money in this teetering place, which was empty when they’d arrived and still empty when they left, and the feeling upon leaving after eating free food was that they’d lifted change out of a beggar’s hat.

  NEXT DAY, ANDY got home from work at three and deliberately showered without his clothes on, though they were caked and beige with grain dust. It was odd at first how much the spray stung. He felt like he was an apple with no peel. Also he hadn’t slept well again.

  There was enough time before ordering his Wednesday pizza to settle in his easy chair beside the living-room window and finish the Nijinsky biography. It was more of a skim really. Laura’s career had led him to this subject and he wanted to bone up, as it were. He’d chosen this chair half hoping he’d drift into a nap,
but though the writing was bad the subject was so quirky he found himself flipping pages hunting the nuggets. What a story, what a life. Nijinsky, irrefutable creative genius, the social graces of a turnip farmer. Confused sexuality, an impresario sugar daddy, the fall of Czarist Russia, and, finally, insane asylums. Nijinsky’s thighs were so thick and he could leap so high that he was thought superhuman. Audiences swore that he actually transformed into his various characters. He took to leaving the stage with a leap, disappearing into the wings at the height of his jump so that no one saw him come down, leaving the impression that he didn’t. Barely able to make himself understood with words, he found sanctuary in a haughty muteness. His nickname was God of the Dance. Within a year of the height of his fame he’d be catatonic, masturbating in public and shouting in German, a language he didn’t know. Andy recalled, in Lolita, Nabokov referring to Nijinsky as having giant thighs and too many feathers.

  Andy closed his book and swivelled his chair to note the sunset breaking through and a wind coming up. In the outer harbour a scatter of fish boats punched home through some chop. (Were they out fishing already? Or hunting the tide line for more damage?) Over on Ridley Island, from the clutch of houses in Dodge Cove the wood-fire smoke rose to clear the wall of trees, then blew horizontal. But there on the horizon was some orange, some rare sunset.

  It was Wednesday, tonight his weekly visit at his mother’s, so he put on his one pair of dress pants, black. He had two white dress shirts, but with those pants he’d look like a waiter. The red golf shirt made him look like a waiter from some place like last night’s Hickory Pit, while the dark blue golf shirt made him look like a bruise. He hated his closet. It felt not just sparse but seedy. Again there was the “what would Laura think” question, but his closet’s crummy contents also asked why his social life had become so meagre. He had lots of work clothes — jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts — and these had also become his everyday clothes. The “dress” clothes were basically old concoctions geared to satisfy his mother and the three ladies she lived with. But wardrobe demands were suddenly pressing. Not just Laura. First was next week’s banquet with the Chinese Wheat People, which is what people had taken to calling them.