Order of Good Cheer

by Bill Gaston

  After two coffees he found himself in the Tim Hortons bathroom checking his red eyes, and then his sideburns, in the mirror. Tilting his face, trying to find five-foot-four Laura’s angle of sight, he had a startle: only now did he see what in his face had changed badly since she’d last seen it. Not his cheeks, exactly, but his jaw, or even his skull — in any case his face was way rounder than it used to be. Weren’t those ears almost hidden by added face? He’d seen drinkers grow round faces. He hoped she wouldn’t see two decades spent in the bar. He stepped back to eye himself again, trying to see a stranger. He wondered if it wasn’t the sideburns making his face look rounder. Does a line on a blank slate draw attention to, or away from, the slate?

  And then it was almost like he invited people to the party by accident.

  Yesterday during a dutiful Christmas call to Rachel Hedley he’d got May E’s phone number. Rachel had to hunt for it, and giving it to him she berated herself and Andy and Prince Rupert for letting May and Li languish unknown for weeks, apparently with no attempts on anyone’s part to befriend them. In any case, on his way back to his table, at the pay phone between the Tim Hortons double glass doors, Andy called the number.

  “Yes?” she answered, with so faint an accent that Andy wasn’t sure.

  “Is this May?”

  “Yes?” She sounded more suspicious than excited.

  “This is Andy. Andy Winslow? From that — that party?” He was thinking, The party where your friend was assaulted.

  “Yes?”

  He was stung that her greeting wasn’t warm. He thought they’d made a decent connection. He asked if things were going well and if there was anything he could do for her.

  “No, not really. Thank you.”

  “I mean, I heard your friend, Li, had some problems, and went home, to China. Isn’t that what happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I wanted to see if she was okay, and if you were okay, and if I could do anything.”

  “I am all right. Thank you. I don’t know if Li is all right. I don’t know exactly what happen. Happened. The police ask me questions already.”

  May’s pronunciation of “police” reverted into a Li-like R sound. She sounded tired and disturbed in general.

  “Is she coming back?”

  “No.”

  “Are you all right by yourself? I mean, are your studies okay? I mean, can they continue? Were you a team?”

  “I can continue. It will take longer now, I think.”

  “Well, good. Okay.” May was treating his questions like police questions. She either didn’t trust him, understandably perhaps, or maybe, like some people, a foreign speaker especially, she needed to read a face to conduct a conversation. Andy decided to take a little chance, and it was here he committed himself.

  In a comic voice, making the irony as loud as possible, he said, “Well, I’m phoning to invite you to another, really fun, party.”

  “Oh, great!” she said, and laughed.

  He told her it was a New Year’s Eve party. She said okay, and wrote down his address, and he thought a moment and told her it was a dinner party, starting early, six o’clock. And then he immediately called Drew, who put his hand over the receiver to ask Pauline if she wanted to go to Andy’s for New Year’s, and he said, “Yeah, we’re there,” as if they weren’t splitting up at all. Pauline came on to ask, “What can we bring?” Andy sadly noting how comfortably she said “we.” He told them they had to bring a weird appetizer. It had to be homemade, and they can’t have made it or even eaten it before. And, he added, coming to decisions on the spot, all ingredients had to be local. Pauline said she loved theme parties, and asked, “Appetizers for how many people?” Andy told her twenty, then he told her it was a little something to celebrate Laura, and she sighed an “isn’t that sweet” sigh.

  He slapped his pockets for quarters and almost ran to the counter to stand in line, tap his foot, and finally ask the girl for some change for his five-dollar bill.

  “We can’t make change,” the girl told him, already turning away. Andy stood a moment before understanding she meant “won’t.”

  “It’s for the pay phone,” he said to her back. She was wide, but not tall, and something in her tucked chin suggested she used whatever power she could get.

  “You have to buy something,” she said, so Andy swung round to indicate his table laden with coffee cups and muffin waste, but of course it had been cleared and wiped. There were likely ten easy words to make his case with, but they wouldn’t come.

  “A small coffee, double milk.” He waved his five at her, not rudely. Her name tag, reading Jaynie, was pinned on a bothersome angle. “And lots of quarters please.”

  Next he got on the phone to Leonard, hoping five days would be enough, and Leonard said he’d see what he could do. As with others, inviting them, he found himself blurting, “I think it’s a good idea.” And sometimes, “All this rain.” He talked fast, he felt manic. “We all need it,” he said. The Tim’s coffee was smooth to drink but jangle-making, unlike the darker Starbucks, which tasted like burnt toast but that, like espresso, he’d recently read, wasn’t as strong.

  A big party. At least they’d be entertained. Especially if Leonard came through. Andy looked down into his palm and needed to study things before determining he had a single quarter left. He thought a moment, suffered a wave of what at first felt Gandhi-like in its noble expansion, then mostly naive and corny, but he went ahead and looked up red-haired Dan Boyd’s phone number. He slid in his last quarter, punched the sourly musical buttons, got a message system, told Dan Boyd about his party, and said he could bring his kids.

  He found himself standing beside his Tim Hortons table, blowing into his coffee, which he soon understood was lukewarm. He sat back down.

  He’d been in Tim Hortons a long time: the ski jackets were the same but the faces were different. So he was committed to it, the party. The party was for Laura too. And for his Laura problem. Which was, the first time he asked her out, just the two of them, could he escape the perception that he had major presumptions? In a party he could retreat, he could re-emerge. Pay attention in artful amounts. It would be his house, and if she chose to see herself as the hostess, and see people off at the door, and linger after, and stay over, having wonderful presumptions of her own, well, that would be sort of perfect. He felt there was a chance of her doing that. But it was a real party, for New Year’s. It might help make amends to May E. It might even be a gesture for Pauline and Drew. And not only them — it wasn’t just Pauline and Drew separating, it was everyone, everywhere, for years sliding off into isolation.

  The food alone was reason enough. The Order of Good Cheer. North America’s first-ever club. Andy had liked reading that “cheer” referred to food and drink. Beautiful France, where over-proof stuff made from backyard pears was seen as restorative, was water of life. Where they brushed off dirt and straw and nibbled some outrageous cheese from some cellar in the barn. In Champlain’s day they gathered for some cheer.

  It would be excellent to eat and drink something new with Laura. A kind of exploring. Sink your front teeth in, wait for the taste, pull from the bone, such a thing, a feral thrill. Cast eyes at each other. So, what do you think?

  HE WASN’T TOO TROUBLED that his life had peaked at eighteen, that he’d already experienced the best he ever would. This was the conclusion he’d reached. The logic was easy: making love to Laura Schultz was the best thing in life. He could even remember the best of the best: a Friday night in June, around midnight, in the attic of his parents’ place, on a nest of throw rugs and winter coats, a party going on below them, one of the rare times Andy made use of his parents’ being away. They did it twice, with a leisurely half-hour in between. Because the music was loud they had to put their mouths to the other’s ear, and Andy could still remember the brush of her lips and her warm breath in his ear and the shivers down his spine from it. One of the rugs was the old blue and gold one from the tv room, whi
ch he knew as intimately as childhood pyjamas, and it felt like he and Laura were wrapped up in an old friend, or toy. The half-hour between sex was almost the best part. Neither wanted to be anywhere else. What was most delicious about this night, and their soft talk, lips to each other’s ear, was his dawning awareness that this achingly adorable creature was just as shy with him, just as stricken by what he might think of her! He felt so close to her, so eye to eye and soul to soul, that sex felt almost incestuous. In any case, he knew he was truly happy, for the first time, to be alive.

  And she could surprise him, her spice could trip him, as when, at the end of the interlude, he got up to pee out the top window and, more lunatic, searching for somewhere to pee, Laura went up on an elbow and spied an immense doll, stored after the visit of a cousin. She pulled its head off and squatted and held the head under her, Laura’s blank-faced stare full of mischief, and Andy could see the upside-down head and shiny blonde hair hanging down as Laura peed, filling the head completely. She balanced the vessel in a bunched-up sweater so it wouldn’t spill and took it downstairs later to clean, hiding it behind her back, whispering that she felt like Andy Warhol. He joked that he felt like Andy Winslow, but he felt included in her nasty art.

  In any case, at thirty-nine he was fine with the knowledge that he would never again enjoy a body like hers unless it was hers. It seemed only reasonable to be addicted to her still, so much so that sex with someone else served mostly to jostle the addiction and make her body stand out more clearly. Her thighs, her bum, all her limbs met at the apex of strength and beauty, making strength and beauty the same thing. Whenever he thought of sex with her, he could feel her strength, and he could smell her with his heart.

  It wasn’t because she was his first. Both had had fumbly first times with others, he with tall Sally Bevan, Laura with Doug Young, and also a drunken mistake with a twenty-five-year-old petty crook named Lawrence, who everyone called The Law. So it wasn’t that. Nor in the intervening years had he sat around doing without, dwelling on what they’d had. He and tall Sally Bevan had hooked up again and lasted six months. Simone, a hippyish tree planter from Quebec who had never, not even as a child, applied makeup (why were all Québécois who came here such obvious hippies?), liked him enough to make Prince Rupert her home for two off-seasons. Then there was Rachel Hedley, with whom he’d discussed endlessly the pros and cons of living together, until they realized that if they really wanted to they would have stopped talking and just gone and done it, like animals running off to a burrow.

  Animal was really the only way to make sense of something like Andy and Laura. Animal was the best explanation available to him. Her scent traps had seen him coming; her pheromones had his name on them.

  But, mercy. A pull that strong and beautiful and animal had the same gravity as a wolf ripping into a big-eyed rabbit.

  Andy had thought it all out, probably too much. And no matter what happened tomorrow night at the airport, none of it would be anybody’s fault. As Laura herself said in her latest letter:

  One more adventure, and I’ve had some big adventures, will be seeing you again Andy. Neither of us has a clue what it will be like. I’m actually a little afraid and I don’t get very afraid anymore, except about my daughter, but that’s instinct I’m guessing.

  The matter of you and me — that feels alive, doesn’t it? Something alive in a cave with no face. But about to come out. I know you’re excited too. And we know that excitement itself is iffy, we’re both smart that way, we know expectations ruin almost everything. Expectations make it likely that we’ll instantly disappoint each other. Maybe knowing that is the only antidote. Who knows? I don’t. Do you? Do you think you do know how we’ll be together? I bet your fantasies have gone everywhere and have already done everything! Maybe I’ll ruin everything by coming at all!

  I’m glad you’ll be at the airport. And, do you remember, it’s where we last saw each other. We’ll look different for about 10 seconds, and then we’ll look the same, because I think our brains revert. Lucky for us, eh? Though I don’t believe you for a second when you say you’re hugely fat, with a grey beard down to your chest.

  HE CAME TO ON the padded chrome bench in the art gallery, which was empty. His hands had trouble keeping still. It was overly bright in here and he felt too outside himself. His body felt impossible, like a cruise ship suspended by a thread.

  He had to kill the afternoon, just one more. He didn’t want to think of art this way but it was either here or home lying in bed. He was still in his work clothes. He could smell himself. He had invited everyone to a party.

  He would bring her here too, of course. It was his other place, this new gallery hanging off the Museum of the North. This bench was where he could sit and, similar to his window on the water, do nothing. Here too he was charged with the energy of other, in this case not moving water but fixed art, a stillness that lived. Surrounded by paintings, by such concentrated vitality that could cast itself from itself, he could feel buoyed. By dropping any effort, by simply giving in to the agonizing yellow there in Sunscape, 1958, he could feel brilliant. The more he let go, the more brilliant he could feel.

  He could relax socially too. No one from work was going to stomp through the art gallery. But no matter who came in, by definition they were now as uncool as he was. So it was a place he fitted, he could sit and say nothing, he could be himself, the blandest of the bland. His blandness was known. That tall Andy Winslow sure doesn’t say much. Fine. Ever since his twenties, even since Laura left, in fact, when he stopped wrestling what adolescence shoved in his face with its mirror, he’d been relaxing into his blandness. In fact, in public he was not even shy any more. Laura, the blandness has gained confidence. In fact, he was probably now eccentrically bland. Which was a fine thing, that blandness could go full circle, and oxymoronic. Maybe, just in time for her, he’d be charismatically bland.

  He was alone but smiling. Before chez Winslow and another try at sleep, he stood to scan the fifteen paintings more closely. As usual, even when other people were there, he deliberately moved counter-clockwise, against the flow, widdershins, the direction witches walk while casting spells. (Maybe he’d get magically bland.)

  He was killing an afternoon. How else do you kill one?

  He loved this: A Storm, 1971. Wildest, darkest wind and water blasted but couldn’t defeat something like rock, but softer, its pinks and yellows suggesting something humbly alive. The impression Andy got was chaos threatening a human heart. Or a person’s sanity. He always thought of a crucible, of the transforming fires of alchemy. He’d read that alchemy’s changing lead into gold had been a secret society’s metaphor — the kabbalists? the Gnostics? — for changing the self. For building a soul. Something like that. Inner change. This painting was alchemical. The small burst of excitement, before words come, surely it was minutely transforming. All these paintings. That woman’s eyes there, Her Birthday, 1989, were better than eyes really were.

  He stopped at the last painting by the door, Field, S. R. Lewis, 1953. That’s all it was, a field, but a purple one, its brush strokes suggesting endless grass diminishing in the distance. It was simple, it was bland, and only bland, and Andy could feel nothing dangerous or challenging or alchemical about it. He probably lacked the eyes.

  Laura. Tomorrow. There was alchemy in this, wasn’t there? There was the churning impatience, but let’s call it alchemy, in any love that hadn’t come to a natural end.

  LAURA. TODAY.

  Coming off graveyard, driving home, he went into a skid on the curve near Stutz Rapids and barely held it. He slowed down, shook his head. His Mustang had never scared him before.

  He wasn’t hungry but decided he would make a huge breakfast — pancakes, ham, maybe a cheese omelette too — because if he ate too much he might fall asleep from it. Laura flew in at seven tonight and he was a jangly mess.

  When he parked and opened his car door he heard the kitchen phone stop ringing. He knew it would be bad, not ju
st because someone was calling before eight in the morning but because it began to ring again when he was in the hall tugging off his boots — someone was calling and calling. His stomach flipped when he realized Drew was getting home around now too, and that the phone call might be about Chris.

  He was right that it was bad, but it wasn’t about Chris.

  The hospital was frightening, even if he wasn’t there about a loved one. After graveyard, fluorescent lights were always too bright, containing tiny but extra colours, like bad spells being cast, and he felt them harsh over his head as he tried to get directions from the nurse behind her desk. Andy didn’t know her, and her glasses were overtly fashionable, the arms weirdly bent, dipping down then back up, suggesting leverage, but it was all a ruse, simple arms were all that was needed, and Andy thought they looked ridiculous. She told him the east wing, fourth floor, pointing to the elevators that he could see.

  “Are you related?” the nurse remembered to ask.

  “Yes,” said Andy, feeling the thrill of this, because it wasn’t quite a lie.