Happiness of Fish (17 page)

“After the fire, when they were rebuilding, they'd let anyone in, even me.”

But the fire was twenty-five years ago, Gerry thinks. Bob was a member here when the old man died. Bob has been a grown-up for a very long time.

The lunch tastes homemade, almost school-lunchy: soup and sandwiches to order.

“So you fat cats gather up here and eat '50s comfort food,” Gerry kids Bob. “What's for dessert, animal crackers?”

“I always try to go a little light at lunch,” Bob says.

They talk about their fathers over lunch. Each was at the funeral of the other's father.

Bob's father died when he was still in university. Gerry's lived on until the year he was breaking up with Patricia.

“I remember we went over to your place the week I was home from school for the funeral,” Bob says. “Your dad gave me a huge Manhattan.”

“That's because it was still April,” Gerry says. “If it had been after the twenty-fourth of May you'd have got a gin and tonic. You could set your clock by him.”

The summer Gerry's father died, he went out to Bob and Mavis's for dinner. They had bought trendy, authentic Chinese take-out. Their eldest son was about four at the time. Bob had showed Gerry the kids' programs you could get for the new computer. Bob was the first person he knew to have a computer at home. After Mavis went to bed they drank a bottle of Glen Livet, or at least Gerry did. His father was eighty-seven, ten years older than his mother at the time. Now he'd be well over a hundred.

“You've got great genes, you know,” Bob says. “You'll go on forever.”

Gerry and his great genes drive straight to the nursing home after lunch. He tells his mother about his meeting with Bob.

“You're in good shape,” he says. “Anything you need, just call Bob or call me and I'll call him.”

They spend the rest of the afternoon with the photo album. They put names to various cats that have been photographed, squirming in people's arms or in other uncooperative poses.

“That's Misty.”

“He got run over.”

He looks at a picture of himself on a rocking horse in a front room with a Christmas tree. There are doilies on the backs of chairs. The right word,
antimacassars
, floats into his head. The room comes from a 1920s movie although the picture is from about 1950. The Depression and war rationing froze time, so Gerry could be born into an earlier decade.

He leaves as the time for her supper approaches.

“I'll walk you down,” he says. “I'll take you down to supper and then go on to the airport.”

She's confused.

“But I'm not packed.”

“You don't need to be packed, dear. You're staying here.”

“I'm staying here?” She digests this, unsure.

“Yes, love, you're staying here.”

Gerry drives to the airport through the late rush-hour traffic and returns his rented car. Once again he feels himself getting lighter, freer. It's the same sense of freedom he felt leaving St. John's to come here a week ago. He's glad to be heading home, but he's not sure that's what's elating him. Perhaps it's the untouchable limbo of the flight itself. The time when the wheel is spinning, no new bets can be made and nothing changes. He wonders if “Limbo” had occurred to the airlines as a name when they were looking for short snappy names for their cut-rate subsidiaries.

When the plane takes off he watches the motorway tracery of Ottawa and then Montreal slide below him. He dozes off with his head tipped to the window.

Gerry and Philip are sitting in the over-stuffed chairs of The Coffee Shop of the Space Debutantes. It's a Saturday morning and Gerry is explaining that spring is an alien concept to St. John's.

“You disappear into the fog in March and have a few blizzards to keep you edgy until about the twenty-fourth of May and then, if you're lucky, you pop out into summer in July.” Gerry feels fussy and old as he says it. When did he start caring about the weather?

“At least the sidewalks are clear again,” Philip says. “Snow clearing here doesn't make any allowance for people who don't drive.”

“It's Dickens season,” Gerry says. “The best of times and the worst of times.”

That's the way he has felt since he came back from visiting his mother. He feels weighed down by the smallness of his problems. He remembers what he thinks was an old
Reader's Digest
joke about the priest who said that hearing nuns' confessions was like being stoned to death with popcorn. Orville Redenbacher winds up for the pitch.

The writing group has come to an end and Gerry has been busy filling-in at the radio station again. Somebody slipped a disc shovelling
and he's found himself with a month or more of steady work. It's evening work. He goes to work at four in the afternoon and works until midnight, so he tends to goof off in the mornings. His characters, George, Paula and Ellen, seem too heavy to push around. It's easier to write about scenery in his Chinese notebook.

“Maybe I'm a landscape writer,” Gerry says to Philip. “Maybe I shouldn't do portraits.”

Philip fetches a bagel with vegetarian cream cheese and shovels three spoons of sugar into his coffee.

“Maybe you should write non-fiction. Most Canadian novels I read are just people whining.”

“He whined,” Gerry says.

“Point taken,” Philip says. “But remember, I like Marcus Aurelius. You don't see him trying to write novels.”

“No. Just ‘Poor old me. I'm emperor of Rome and I have to meet a lot of people with bad breath. Roll on death.'”

Later in the day, Gerry sits at his computer and transcribes notebook pages. He's reverted to putting down random jottings in the hope that they'll gel into something significant. His muse skids wildly. The phrase “like a pig on ice” floats into his head. To pretend that he's not just rambling, he dusts off “George” and writes in the third person, but he can't fool himself into getting George to take off on his own.

Fragment: Only George

George has a short attention span, or maybe an only-kid self-satisfaction with one's own doings. When he was a child, people used to ask him if he didn't wish he had a brother or sister. It was an alien concept. They might as well have asked if he wished he had a truss or a cream separator. He needed neither, although both had a certain robotic allure as pictures in the Eaton's catalogue
.

Paul Simon may have got it right in “Kodachrome.” People often don't match one's sweet imagination
.

Easter is coming, fertility feast of horny rabbits and over-stuffed eggs; call it Spring, if you'd rather. The idea of a religion from Wind in the Willows occurs to George as it has before. He thinks about Rat and
Mole meeting their god when they go looking for Otter's lost son. Worship Pan in the island glades without knowing about it afterwards. George thinks Kenneth Grahame knew a thing or two. He came up with a religion with no hangover. Spend the rest of your time feasting in badger banqueting halls
.

Gerry can't bring it off the page. He thinks about a party they were at a week or so before. Vivian had complained that he faded into the wallpaper.

“You were like somebody dead. You might as well have stayed home.”

“I wasn't rude to anybody,” Gerry said. Vivian sniffed.

He's been thinking about manners as a substitute for morals lately. In some ways they seem to work better. He thinks eastern religion has a grasp on this. The mannered universe is easier to take. However, he knows he doesn't work like that. He dives into despondency and dithers and snarls at the drop of a hat.

Perhaps the ability to dither inwardly is enough, he thinks. Absence of visible dither is enlightenment.

Partway through the party, as the talk swept by him, Gerry had envisaged himself alone in his boat with a middling sea running. The boat was sailing as it does sometimes when he's alone, like a giant perfect sailboard, with a fulcrum right under his feet when he stands at the forward end of the cockpit. The vision of the boat was devoid of any practicalities about how he'd stop or survive, how he'd eat, keep warm or leave the helm to go for a shit. Instead it is just a screen-saver vision of the sea rising to the boat and the boat splitting it and raising itself on the swell. This was the Rat and Mole after-life perhaps, an open, endless sea and no bodily functions. Maybe Mole would like something a bit more confined though, an infinite summer hedgerow with a companionable pub around the corner.

Gerry had talked about
Wind in the Willows
at the party. He talked about the interaction between the animal characters and the humans. Animals slide like shadows through winter villages or give them a wide berth. On the other hand, they sue, go to court, land in jail and carry out the social duties of the landed gentry.

“Is the lesson to remember that you're an animal, as you do the social thing?” Gerry asked somebody who'd backed him against a mantelpiece.

The man had just done a hiring board for a promotion. They'd asked him what kind of an animal he'd like to be.

“That's the worst kind of anthropomorphism,” Gerry said. “Eagles and lions aren't proud. They're just unaware of any values but their own. Hyenas and sculpins and crab lice are probably just as proud.”

The man said he'd told the board he'd like to be an otter because they played creatively. He got the job.

Gerry is still thinking about it. He decides foxes aren't sly. They're just good at being foxes. They just fit perfectly into the blind spots of their enemies or their prey. The mouse that gets eaten probably isn't much concerned with slyness. The person hit by an asteroid or a falling piano isn't thinking about astronomy or music, except by chance. Foxes look smart because they work along an adjacent set of premises that are magic to us.

Gerry rehearses things he could say to a suit on a hiring board who asked him what kind of animal he'd like to be.

Why would I want to be another animal?

Would it not be better to just be good at being the animal I am?

Why do you distinguish between us and the other animals?

Gerry's hypothetical questioner suggests that it's an exercise in “imagination.”

Have you ever tried using your imagination to get the best out of the species you can claim membership in?

In Gerry's imagination, the board members flee like startled weasels and he's guest of honour at a bash at Toad Hall for that one.

On another spring Saturday morning, Mr. Dickens gets it right. It is the best of times. Gerry wakes up early to a completely silent house. When they went to bed, it had been raining and they had been arguing about the need to paint the kitchen. They went to bed a half hour apart and silently, and the mouse-foot skittering of the rain on the vinyl siding had put them to sleep. At least, it also seems to have eroded their fight.

As first light creeps into their bedroom it has a watercolour pallor. Gerry gets up and pads down the hall to the bathroom in his ancient terry-cloth robe. Then he goes to the kitchen and puts on a pot of coffee, looking out at the morning. The rain has cut the snow. Almost the whole lawn is visible, with only a spine of thawed and refrozen slush down the middle. Around the foot of a tree, their half-dozen crocuses aren't in bloom but are visible, pushing up like lurid, cheap ballpoint pens through the winter-kill beige of dead grass. Gerry goes back down the hall to the bedroom. Vivian has the covers pulled way up. Only the tousled top of her head shows.

“Boat day, I think, kid,” Gerry says, tentatively, checking that peace has really broken out. “Have you got any open houses?”

The blankets stir. “No. The one I've got is tomorrow.”

“No viewings?” Gerry thinks the jargon of her business sounds like undertakers' euphemisms, but sometimes he finds himself using them.

“No. Nothing today.”

“Are you up for the first injection of boat for the year? It looks like it's going to be a nice day.” Gerry is feeling benign. Sometimes he just sneaks away to do boat stuff. Vivian doesn't particularly mind. The preparation part of boating doesn't interest her much, but this morning she senses that some sort of private Easter is on offer. The winter's dead are being offered a day out of the tomb to go and play.

“I'm not going to do much work,” Gerry says. “Just uncover and air her out. We can take a picnic.”

“I guess so, but later. I want to sleep.”

“Don't sleep too long. It'll probably blow up a blizzard by lunchtime.”

Gerry gets dressed and goes back to the kitchen. He finishes his coffee. Then he goes to the basement and drags up a tool box, an electric drill and a couple of coils of orange extension cord. There is still no noise from the bedroom. The sun outside becomes more assertive, angling into the kitchen. Gerry feels he has to be moving. He shifts into picnic-planning mode and heads out into the day.

He stops at a Tim Hortons to plan his picnic and make lists. Chinese notebooks are excellent for making lists in. Sometimes it worries him that the stir-fry ingredients and to-do lists are threatening to swamp the journal entries. Today it doesn't bother him. He's feeling efficient.

Polish sausage
, he writes.
Cheese, French bread, margarine from home, olives, Pinesol, WD-40, J-cloths, garbage bags
. Gerry can never recall, from fall lift-out to spring, what he left on the boat. Vivian says it's going to sink under the weight of carefully hoarded, virginal, economy-size packages of garbage bags.

Gerry eats a cinnamon-raisin bagel and works on his list at one of several tables where a group of regulars gathers on Saturday mornings. They're a collection of first names and single identifying facts. There's Wayne who paints houses, Clyde who works at the mental hospital, and Harry who is retired and keeps beagles. Vern sells cars and Wally repossesses them. Gerry imagines he's “Gerry who's got the sailboat.”