This All Happened(13)

            3 From my bedroom window I can watch Maisie walk down Parade Street with groceries. She’s wearing a yellow raincoat. Una skids down the ice ahead of her. On the southside, skiffs are bunched together, hiding from the weather behind a rusting trawler. Two coast guard vessels, the Henry Larson and the Sir Wilfred Grenfell, are nose to nose, having a conversation about the cold.

            I wait until Maisie is in her porch. I can see her run for the phone.

            You should close your front door, missus.

            Who is this.

            I’ve frightened her. It’s Gabe, I say.

            Jeez, boy.

            I tell her I’m reading about the barber who noticed Midas had big ears. The barber has to tell someone, though he has sworn to Midas that he will keep the secret. He digs a hole and whispers the gossip into the hole and buries it. But when the wind rustles through the grass, it is saying Midas has big ears. This is the story of all good fiction. A good story whispers whenever there’s a breeze. You can dig a hole and bury your story, but the words will emerge from the undergrowth. Let the story whisper down the reader’s backbone.

            Maisie says I’m getting a little too poetic for her taste.

            4 I pick up Lydia at the airport. She is full of people she met in Halifax. She tells me details of people I do not know. She tells me who she’s attracted to. She says, You should have taken a left there. I say to her, I like going this way. She says, That way is shorter. This makes me tight. Lydia believes there is a right way and I believe there are many ways. This is a truth about our personalities. I was thinking this while I watched her plane pivot over the airport. I saw it, bright on a wing over chopped acres of Newfoundland winter Lydia said it looked like a thousand white sandwiches at a funeral. I walk in to stand by the luggage carousel. There’s a crowd. I hear an attendant say, St John’s is unique. The number of locals that come to greet the landed. I see Lydia. Her funky glasses and the angle of her jawline. At a distance, she’s always smaller. Perhaps I judge size only from a distance. We hug and we are strangers, smiling a little too energetically. She avoids kissing me on the lips. It depresses me. We climb into Jethro, a cold air between us. As I’m driving I watch her wrist twist the rear-view mirror and apply lipstick. This makes the sadness melt.

            I say, Youre a fashion cougar. And she laughs.

            She says, When you travel, time rushes at you and past you and then you come home and bang! time stands still and you have to walk through it again.

            It’s like that optical illusion you get in a car that’s been speeding all day and you stop for gas and the earth slowly slinks away as if youre in reverse. That’s how Lydia has felt over the last few days. As if St John’s is slowly moving away from her, she can’t really get into it again.

            Me: Or want to get into it.

            Maybe that’s it. When I’m alone I think of men who live in other cities. Whereas you think of women you’ll see today.

            I nod agreement to this.

            She says, Arent you going to ask if I had an affair?

            I say, I know you.

            Oh, she says, there’s lots I get by you.

            5 There’s an old woman in lane one with a white bathing cap. She’s doing little push-away strokes and a few slow crawl strokes, neck arched way back.

            It has taken me thirty-six days of the new year to begin exercising. I will do forty laps. I’m not in bad shape.

            When she gets out it’s slow up the chrome steps. She barely hauls herself out. A large savannah mammal. She finds her walking cane by the steps. Her knock knees. Thin legs and wide back. I think, if Lydia is like this at seventy-four I can still love her. Then I see she’s one of the two slender, well-dressed ladies who shop at Coleman’s. So careful to get to her chair. Where there’s a bag and towel. She drapes the white towel over her shoulder, like angel’s wings. I finish my laps. Twelve then twenty then eight, but I’m not tired (except my neck) and it’s more the monotony. I catch up to her as she’s still carefully reaching the women’s showers, but she doesnt recognize me. For I am disguised as well in bathing trunks.