Architects Are Here (34 page)

TWO

T
HERE HAD BEEN
a previous incident, David said. He had just been talking to Randy Jacobs. His father, Randy said, had been driving on the arterial road when Gerard Hurley passed him. His father felt Gerard had come too close and when he passed, Gerard looked at him. It was the way he looked that upset Arthur Twombly. He wasnt about to live the rest of his life afraid of a look like that, Randy said. So he took Gerard Hurley to court. He told the judge all about his son, whom the Hurleys were raising. He said he felt there was extortion going on. He gave Loyola Hurley four hundred dollars a month. He thought that was a fine amount. He did not have to give the Hurleys anything. It was his own conscience that gave the money. But ever since day one the Hurleys have been trying to get more out of him. Actually Loyola Hurley wasnt the issue. It was Gerard Hurley. Gerard had it in for him ever since the Hurleys sold Arthur that land out in Rocky Harbour, land that wasnt theirs to sell, and eventually that debacle had gone to court and the Hurleys were told to pay Mr Twombly what they’d received. But by then they’d spent the money and a court order does nothing to make sure a verdict is followed through. So Arthur stopped sending Loyola the money. He stopped it for a year, he’d paid five thousand dollars for that land. A year went by and that’s what solidified the bad blood between the Hurleys and Arthur Twombly. They felt they were owed something. The government had expropriated land for a national park and the pulp mill had prevented them from using land they’d been using forever. My ex-wife, Arthur said, she represents the pulp mill. The Hurleys look at her and me as the very cause of their misery. Though I dont see really what misery they happen to be wallowing in. Theyre just a family that likes to hold grudges.

The judge listened to this, Randy said. He was interested. He enjoyed gossip, but the evidence was not there. You have not established, he said to Arthur Twombly, that Mr Hurley here failed to operate his vehicle without reasonable consideration for others. The word
reasonable
, the judge said, does not contemplate perfection. And the word
consideration
does not include looking at someone in a manner they do not like.

W
E WENT TO SEE
David’s mother. She’s probably out back, Dr Manamperi had told David. We drove to the house David grew up in. We parked in the driveway and opened the door. Helen Crofter had kept the house and she was sharing it now with Dr Manamperi. He had moved in with his furniture about ten years ago and built a pool out back. We passed furniture that my father and I had refinished when I was a teenager. Who knew Helen Crofter would ever be living with it. It was holding up. So was Helen Crofter, she was in the pool, floating on an air mattress, smoking a cigarette and eating a fried ham sandwich. She looked like a dazzling otter.

Once, when we were kids, we’d seen David’s mother in a parking lot looking for her car. We whistled for her. She ignored us. We whistled again. And then David called out to her, Mom. And she turned on us. Dont you ever whistle like that at a lady, she said.

It’s true that David had nothing of his mother’s frame. He was his father, thirty years younger. David possessed all of his mother’s inner traits. He had the brain of his mother, and the heart.

Shall we swim out to you?

Let’s have a congress alongside the swimming pool.

She paddled over a little, until she bumped into the tiles that read 1.15 M.

Gabriel, she said. How’s your writing.

I’m at a crest, I said.

I must apologize if I was snoring.

No Mother we caught you eating. And smoking.

So how does he look to you.

He said his dad looked old. To see him with coloured wires taped to his temples. The adhesive had a brand name across it and David had made a note to look the company up. The frailty of a man who should be wearing glasses, his exposed face asleep in a hospital bed. David had never seen his father like this. He was vexed about the moose bar. He’d had a rift with his father, but he did not want to see his father die.

I want to make peace somehow, he said.

The last thing your father said to me was, You know yourself. Youre who you are. Whereas I’m not.

David: Every relationship has a problem and it takes the entire life of the relationship to work it out.

He spoke of Sok Hoon being a drug user while in Asia. She fell in with men who had drugs. David discovered a folder with tissue wads in it—clots of her blood, which was news to me. Sok Hoon wanted to make an art project out of the blood. But we got over that, David said.

Speaking of Sok Hoon, she said. You got a postcard from your son. I didnt know you were calling him The Oven.

He wrote you a postcard and told you that.

He signed it, very deliberately, The Oven.

That was me, I said. That was my idea.

Thanks Gabe. Thanks for making me look like a goof. In front of my mother. Like I know how to raise a son.

Youre not raising him, she said.

Then Helen Crofter told us of Arthur’s will. There’s a provision for Anthony, she said. And an understanding between Loyola and Arthur over the raising of Anthony. That’s gone on, Helen said, for eighteen years.

She relayed this without any sign of pain.

David: Do the other Hurleys know about this.

They think, Helen said, Arthur abandoned him.

THREE

I
CALLED UP
Maggie Pettipaw. I thought, I’m the bridge between David and the Hurleys. And Maggie is the other side of the bridge. We had fooled around together as teenagers and we had both been very moved. We had broken out of our youthful irony to know that we were human and vulnerable and cared. And yet she was never, for more than twenty minutes, in love with me, or I her. And we both knew it. We should all have people on this earth like this, people we deeply love and yet have hardly anything to do with, ever.

She was getting off work at the hospital, and I went up to see her. I drove her down to the Keg and Kandle. She knew the reason why I wanted to see her. She knew her side of the bridge-building. For she had gone out with Gerard Hurley. They had almost been married.

I’ve been breaking up with Gerard Hurley, Maggie said, for ten years.

She finally left him about two years ago. He was in bed with another woman. She found his jeans on the floor and stripped out his belt and stared at the two of them in her bed. Then she whipped them both with Gerard’s belt. Then she left. Maggie Pettipaw has these flashes with her eyes. There’s a muscle in her lower eyelid that flexes, and a white patch around her eye, which makes her blue eyes appear to be lying in snow. As if snow has fallen in the hollows of her face. Gerard Hurley has bright blue eyes too, and I thought if they ever had a kid, what eyes he’d have.

Maybe youre not over him, I said.

That might be true, but what’s wrong with that? I still dont want to return to him.

Would he have you.

He refused my love with a various heart.

That sounds what. Like a psalm.

We didnt have chemistry.

Sounds like you did. At the start.

Maggie put her elbows on the table and sat her chin on one fist. That’s not what I mean, she said.

Maybe compatibility.

That’s it.

When Maggie started working at the hospital Gerard asked her to get cancer pills. At first it was just a bloated number purchased at wholesale, but then he got aggressive and she had to do some accounting. Gerard split the pills into their two active ingredients and sold them to nineteen-year-olds in the pool hall on West Street. I’d been in that pool hall once with Gerard. He was drinking white russians. He was small but he was a dirty fighter. He did dirty things like punch you in the armpit and shove his fingers in your eyes.

Gerard, she said, was driving that van.

We had a drink and then went outside. It had started to rain.

Maggie: Do you know what I like to do on a miserable day off?

She had scuba equipment. She had equipment for me if I wanted. All we had to do is rent air.

I’m supposed to meet David, I said.

David can spot, she said.

I took her home and we loaded up two buckets of gear and then drove over to David’s and picked him up. We took the shore road to Bottle Cove and parked on the beach and checked our regulators and spat in our masks. I’d known Maggie in high school. In junior high she was a tomboy. And then, after the Grade Ten summer, she turned beautiful. When she was thirty-five she’d been on a talk show. They flew her to New York to do this show. And it was a surprise show, with Gerard Hurley and his new girlfriend. Chairs were thrown.

There was pity and humour in Maggie. Women are playful, she said, and men are all work. Even play is work.

At the hospital she worked with a lot of men. To David: When your father came in, he was looking around. He explained the origins of the word
chauvinism
. He said, It’s the tendency to withhold things from the one you love, in case something better comes along. It’s not male or female.

David: So my father was conscious when he first arrived.

Oh he wouldnt stop talking.

Did he say if Gerard Hurley was driving the van?

He didnt know what hit him. Literally.

She was telling me one thing and David another. In our wetsuits we held hands and walked backwards into the surf. Bucephalus walked in with us. The dog stood there up to her knees in the sea, tasting it, while we walked with our heels. I felt the water at the small of my back, then I slumped into the water and adjusted my buoyancy and found my regulator. I released myself to the sea. I sucked in the air, made the A-OK, and sank into soundlessness. There was a wild world down here, a turbot raced out of the murk and Maggie caught him by the tail then let him go. Goofy seaweed. It all happened in slow motion and slow motion makes things appear significant. The bad weather gone. I yawned to equalize the pressure and let the weight of water sink me and I remembered my Wyoming over Nell in the desert. That scuba diver who repaired the Bellagio fountain. Maggie Pettipaw propelled herself into a deeper zone, past the anchor ropes of dories.

I followed her. The pantomime and the jungle. The water grew colder and darker, so I knew we were descending. I was trusting her. I yawned to equal the pressure in my ears. She turned to me and gave me a thumbs-up and I thumbed her back. I followed her legs and they kicked further down and now I was hers, she could kill me here if she wanted.

Something dark and large and dormant. A ship. An old ship. The stump of a mast in vaseline. There wasnt much time to see it as a whole thing. We were down near it, touching it, though we werent supposed to touch it. A lobster backed itself up in a doorway like a scorpion. He looked to be ten pounds, but as I put a finger near him he reduced in size. Refracted light.

Maggie Pettipaw slipped inside an open door. What the hell, I thought. And beat my way in.

A hallway and the small rooms of a galley. A table full of sea urchins. The deep release of air, bubbles now hitting the roof and trailing along it. We stood in what had been the cooking area, but no one had cooked here in two hundred years. Then Maggie came up to me, very close to me, the clank of her tank against a wall. She put her hands on me and the corners of her mouth around her regulator, she was enjoying herself. Then she became practical and checked her air. We wandered through a school of wheeling white jellyfish. The light shone through their bodies and they stroked me as they passed, indifferent and going somewhere. And then a final check of her air and Maggie giving me the sign to ascend.

D
AVID WAS TALKING
to someone, a woman. She had come down from a house in Bottle Cove. She’d recognized Maggie’s truck.

You guys just sort of disappeared on us, she said.

You remember Gwen, David said.

I knew Gwen. And slowly I saw that David knew who she was too.

Youre Gwen Hurley, I said. I hadnt seen either of them since that last New Year’s Eve, when we’d taken them up to Crow Hill in Zac’s car.

I was waiting for David to tip over the table from all this bullshit. But instead he said, lugubriously, I committed to loving Sok Hoon before the love was there.

They were resuming a conversation. While we were undersea they had been talking. There was allegiance to family and then there was allegiance to romantic love, and they were picking apart the latter. Maggie leaned against her open tailgate. Help me off with these, will you.

And I worked on Maggie Pettipaw. I tugged at her neoprene leggings. My hands around her thigh, peeling.

Gwen:That’s a powerful idea.

The love came after, Dave said.

But you’ll never know, Gwen said, if love would have come without the commitment.

Gwen Hurley married out of it. She married a Nova Scotian cook, Jason Linegar, who is on a trawler now working out of Corner Brook. Gwen had us up to the house for coffee. The hard edge in Gwen, the storyteller, it’s her voice, low and kind.

FOUR

I
DONT KNOW
what I am most of the time, David said. I came here to do damage to the Hurleys, and I end up flirting with one.

She’s the good in Hurleys, I said. She’s like Joe.

We were in my parents’ basement. I used to tie flies down here, and make snowshoes and clean fish in the double sink of the laundry room. David was waiting for me to remember the combination to the gun cabinet. We’d decided to sight the Lee Enfield in.

We bought a box of Remington cartridges at Canadian Tire, then David steered past the pulp mill to the shore road. Bucephalus with her face out the open window, her eyes pursed. Hardly the face of a dog that can savage another dog, I thought, and wondered if this dog had rabies.

Perhaps, I said, we’ve brought rabies back to the island.

Rabies is making a comeback, David said, like Latin.

The gravel pit was the old Lundrigan’s limestone quarry. It had closed down for the past three years. The old train was parked here and we both instinctively looked up to find that face in the rock that our fathers had both shown us when we were small. There he was, the Man in the Mountain in the hills over the Humber River, near Shelbert Island where I used to fish in the mornings with Loyola Hurley. We parked the car by the fence and Bucephalus leapt from the window. She ran furiously down the road and we saw it, a dog or a fox in the woods. Bucephalus grabbed the animal and tossed it in the air.