Happiness of Fish (33 page)

“All dressed up in your tuxedo, eh?”

“Come take our picture by the tree,” Vivian says to Melanie. It vaguely irks Gerry. He wishes perversely that their dressing up could pass un-remarked.

“Taxidermy is more enduring,” he says grumpily as Melanie herds them in front of the tree and the camera flashes.

Traffic feels light as Gerry drives them to the hotel, the
de facto
designated driver by virtue of being on the wagon. The cars they meet and pass have a ships-in-the-night feel, bound for their own mysterious islands of revelry or to the garage at home to let the cabbies have their big night. It's years now since Gerry and Vivian have had to wait in hotel lobbies or the downtown slush to get a New Year's cab home. He's always perfectly, predictably able to drive. There are times he thinks Vivian resents this.

“You're always ready to go home,” she'll say, half accusingly, at the end of a party.

“I spent a lot more time out than you did in your last life,” he'll say, as long as they're not arguing about it. “Home's got novelty value.”

They drive past a sign from Viv's company on the lawn of a house.

“You know we can get a hundred and sixty for our house right
now?” she says, the street lights flicking over her.

This is a topic that's been bubbling to the surface for a week now since it first came up Christmas night. In the past, Gerry has railed against selling the house. Now, for some reason, the proposal that Duane will buy it seems to put him at a disadvantage. Unreasonably, he feels he's being put in a position of denying Duane and his little tribe a roof over their heads. He doesn't want to have this discussion at the start of a party, particularly a party with Viv's office.

“That much, you think?” he temporizes. “But of course then we'd have to find something else.”

“There's lots out there,” Viv says. They pull up at a stoplight. He says nothing, waiting for the light to change. When it does, they drive on in silence.

Vivian isn't wearing boots and the hotel parking lot is full so he drops her at the main door and drives slowly out a back exit and parks in the lot of a dark office building across the street. A few other lone men in dark overcoats are doing the same thing, establishing parking outposts on the frontiers of festivity. They straggle back across the road to the hotel, looking like some off-duty platoon in their uniform trousers with the shiny stripes and the flashes of shirt front where their coats open.

The doorman salutes Gerry. He's been a fixture at the hotel forever and Gerry has been to hundreds of events here over the years. In the old days he's poured him into cabs. Latterly he's greeted Gerry when he has fits of fitness and signs up for a month or two at the hotel's health club and pool. The doorman is beaming. For once, the people he's ushering into the building are dressed up to the standard of his Cossack fur cap, buttons and braid. The lobby has a
Dr. Zhivago
look to it, men in black and white, women in Christmas tree colours and glitter. Gerry feels substantial and worldly walking in. He thinks of Rod Steiger in the Komarovsky role and is tempted to twirl his moustache. He's always felt Steiger's illusion-less villain stole the movie from Omar Sharif 's frostbitten, runny-nosed poet.

Patricia or Jane or Rachel or Fiona will walk in and shoot me during dinner, he thinks. Except they won't because why would they? What would matter enough?

“Hi Gerry,” calls Sally, a reporter he knows. She's seeing a Scottish engineer with one of the oil projects these days. He's got her interested in salmon fishing and gets along with her kid. Tonight he's at her elbow in kilt and hose. Sally is an explosion of dark curls over bare shoulders and a soft-line, 1930s-style dress that seems to drip off her.

“Hi Sally, good evening...” He fishes for the name for a moment. “Duncan.”

“You clean up nice,” Sally says, nodding at his evening clothes. “You'll ruin your reputation as a boat bum.”

“And you look like you're expecting a very discriminating ape to pick you off the Empire State Building. Keep an eye on this one, Duncan, she's trolling for Kong.”

“I know,” Duncan says. “I feel quite inadequate and all.”

Gerry feels a warmth for them. “Have a good time, guys. I've got to find Vivian. See you on the dance floor later.”

When he finds Viv, she's already found some of their dinner party. They're in the ante-room of the ballroom and Viv's boss, Chuck, has been to the bar to order. He's shuttling back and forth, passing drinks around. Gerry notices that Vivian has taken a rye and ginger instead of her usual wine.

“And that'll be what for you, Gerry?” Chuck says. “You want a Coke or something? The rest of us are on the hard stuff.”

Chuck is short and trimmed. He's a keen after-dinner speaker and reputed to be a dirty hockey player in his old-timers' league. When he smiles it's a brief Edsel-grill stretching of his lips, as though he's checking out some new dental work in the mirror.

Hands up, those who can remember the Edsel grill, Gerry thinks. A Mercury sucking a lemon.

He feels he's been discussed in advance and is reminded that he's always thought Chuck was a macho little shit.

“No, Chuck, I might as well go on the hard stuff too tonight. I'll take a Perrier with a twist and cut me off if I start to sing.” He gives Chuck a grin that he hopes looks insincere and gets a warning glance from Vivian.

Chuck's wife Natalie is taller than he is. A vee of golf- and tennis-weathered
skin points downward into the considerable cleavage of an aubergine-coloured dress. Gerry tries to imagine them in bed. Ancient jokes about horny mice and acquiescent elephants float through his mind.

“Vivian tells us you're thinking about moving into a new home,” Natalie says. It seems to Gerry that everybody involved with Viv's work is incapable of saying “house.” They speak only of “homes.”

“Yes, yes, I guess we are.” He decides since they have talked about it, what he says is true. “Although I'm hoping we can swap the house for a really nifty boat.”

This gets only a polite laugh. This crowd doesn't make jokes about homes.

Gerry floats with the stream as they go in to dinner. The hotel New Year's party always gets a lot of strays, odd office parties and odd couples, people who have no genuine plans or real places to be. At a distance, he spies Roger and Vanessa who visited him on the boat. They are with a group of similar old-young couples. Gerry thinks they look like an ad for one of those mail-order Russian bride services.

He watches Sally and kilted Duncan being led to a table for two that appears to have been added to the seating plan as an afterthought. They're too new a couple to fit somewhere else.

But we're an odd couple too, Gerry thinks. We're here because we don't fit anywhere else.

They've been together the best part of twenty years but that's not quite long enough to grow new traditions. They got together as they turned forty and had come from different places. They had a second-time-around newness that shut them off from old friends. Now, whatever else people their age do at New Year's, they've been doing it together for a decade or two longer than Gerry and Vivian. Only-child Gerry doesn't much mind drifting around the edges, but Vivian likes a crowd she knows. At a pinch the gang from the office will do, and sometimes Gerry finds himself turned off as she comes on too strong to blend in.

“...tigers,” Chuck is saying. It's also an evening for people like Chuck to rent an audience.

“That's right. We're tigers.” Vivian agrees.

“We'll have the tethered goat to start and a couple of coolies still alive,” Gerry says to the air in front of him. “We want to play with them a bit first.”

“Play with them a bit first,” Chuck picks up. “That's good.”

Gerry swivels his grin around the group like a nasty child with a magnifying glass, looking for new insects to fry. The group concedes him some brownie points for bloodthirstiness.

A man called Glenn is talking to him. “Vivian says you race your boat.” Glenn has a small round head on top of a stand-up dress collar. Gerry is reminded of the penguin waiters in
Mary Poppins
.

“Yeah, we actually managed to win a couple.”

“I hear you write,” says Glenn's wife, a health-clubby, short-haired woman in sea green. “I read.” She says it in a challenging way, as though there might be a causal connection, as though she might have caught something unpleasant from him.

Gerry wonders if Glenn and Glenn's wife do this good-cop, bad-cop routine often, engaging the same person in two simultaneous unrelated conversations. Then again, the way they ignore each other's conversation, maybe it's just some grudge match they've got going. Who can suck the victim dry first?

“My book group's reading
This Bucket Here
.” She says it as if she's telling him she eats bran for regularity. “I like Newfoundland writing.”

“My nephew's got a J-24,” Glenn says. “Man, can that thing go.”

“I never get on the boat,” Vivian confides from his side. “Gerry doesn't want me on it. I think I got out once last summer.”

“What are you writing, Gerry?” Mrs. Glenn demands.

“A novel.”

“Is it fiction?”

“Well it's a novel, isn't it?” Gerry says.
It is fiction, isn't it?

The waitresses bring the starter.

“What is it?” Glenn asks.

“Trout in drag,” Gerry says and concentrates on taking it apart in small forkfuls.

Gerry decides the meal is a cunning attempt to cater to the tastes and aspirations of the guests. Perhaps a survey was done or a focus group convened. The Pilates crowd feels virtuous over the trout fan-dancing in
phyllo and a soup that seems to be mostly hot orange juice with some shreds of carrot. The main course is a new-age-garnished, but identifiable hunk of beef for the marketplace carnivores. The dessert is a spun sugar concoction. It delights everybody because it looks as though it's made of plastic but turns out to be edible.

Gerry decides that conversation is dead. The talk is factual and faintly competitive.

“This is very good.”

“Yes. We had it this way in Cancun.”

“You bought it where?”

“We got in there on the ground floor and it's gone nowhere but up.”

Gerry wonders if there used to be more ideas at parties or if he's just being nostalgic. For one thing, thirty, or even twenty, years ago he was partying with younger people. They didn't have much to throw around except ideas or maybe slogans. This crowd has matured into social Sumo wrestling. Wrap your jewellery, politics and bank account up in a silly loincloth and let them lumber around the room bumping into things.

“I've always hated that house,” he hears Vivian say.

Has she? Our house? When did this happen and why and what business is it of Edsel-mouth Chuck and Natalie?

“Those old houses are more bother than they're worth,” Glenn's wife is saying. Gerry wonders how she knows what sort of house they have. He feels conspired against.

The evening lurches into the ten-thirty doldrums that strike parties of people with short attention spans. Dinner hasn't lasted long enough to take them to the silly hats and noise-makers. The talk is refrains and variations on earlier themes. Little knots of shop-talk develop, and spouses, miffed or relieved, fend for themselves in other little knots. The jazz combo that is half of the evening's music starts to play. The rock band will come on after midnight. The partiers are faced with the prospect of an hour and a half of self-directed fun until midnight. They scuttle for the lavatories and the bars.

Gerry finds himself alone, stretching his legs in the lobby. He feels mildly combative, marshalling his calm among the potted palms. If sides are being picked, it appears Vivian has picked the gang from the office and he's picked himself.

I could camp here, he thinks, looking around the indoor undergrowth of the lobby. Raid by night and harass them when they least expect it. A palm court commando: they seek him here, they seek him there.

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.