This All Happened(23)
6 I look up from writing to watch the dying sun turn the snow on Signal Hill pink. The bottoms of clouds another pink. I can distinguish between pinks. There’s a pigeon cooing, and it sounds like a rope pulled taut.
I walk down to Lydia’s. Tinker Bumbo, asleep, is a balloon losing air. The flame in Lydia’s fireplace sounds like a finger rubbing grit off a record needle.
We eat supper and walk down to the Ship. Lydia pulls down her tights to imitate Oliver. She is so quick and apt with imitation. Maisie, disgusted, throws away the chalk after scratching on the break. How funny is that. Can you weigh funniness. How long does an image stay with you. I think now that it was so funny. Yet I didnt laugh when Maisie threw the chalk. It’s a funniness that lingers. Maisie threw the chalk out of not blind disgust but a self-conscious look-at-howshitty-that-shot-was disgust.
The cue ball hops over the cushion. It hits a beer bottle. I dont mind, for this moment, if Lydia sleeps with Wilf. She wants to go to the Spur, where he probably is. How I love Lydia gossiping with Maisie about men.
Somehow the world is more intimate and loving and I am generous with what I love. All love is displayed on an embroidered white cloth on long grass beneath a sycamore and generosity is running towards it from a ball field, both teams at once, running, throwing their gloves in the air.
7 Heartache is something you can have without ever having your heart broken.
Sometimes. In Lydia’s kitchen. When she’s mixing ingredients for a cake in front of a sunny window. Sometimes, like in photographs of swimmers in the distance, standing on sailboats, the sun cuts through the bodies so the knees and ankles and elbows have light coming through them. Bodies are cut into segments. Sometimes I see that happening to Lydia, so thin. When she’s sideways. At the mixer churning a cold block of butter. And slowly the silver egg beaters mangle.
In the closet: the sleeves of my coat tucked into Lydia’s coat pockets. The toes of her boots nudging into mine.
8 Max picks me up in his truck and we head down to Maisie’s. She has put yellow sticky notes on the bits of furniture she’s taking. There are garbage bags with bedding. A cardboard box stuffed with cutlery. She has dresses and shirts still on their hangers draped over a full-length mirror. She says, I just want to take one truckload and no more.
Her house on Lemarchant is little but solid. She has spent the weekend scouring it. I realize I havent been helping her.
But when we get the furniture in, and we’ve had a beer (the only thing in her fridge is a box of beer), she says, Thanks, boys. Now I want to be on my own.
Max says, Can we do your ass now?
I am leaning against the bathroom sink, my pants down. I’ve washed myself and spread vaseline from my hips to my thighs. Lucky youre not very hairy, Max says. Some people I ask to shave.
He is slapping patches of cold plaster over my ass. It’s nice to have a set of confident hands moulding my ass.
He fires up a blow dryer.
He begins by prying from my left hip. It reminds me of peeling dead skin off my brother’s sunburned back. Wet blisters of skin. Except this is an entire dry shell. And I see the form of my ass, I’m surprised how curved it is. It’s a pretty ass. Max offers no criticism of it. He makes off with the mould in the fashion of a thief.
9 Lots of fat snow. We drive to Churchill Square for a bouquet of irises and carnations and a bottle of port. For Maisie. This encouragement of spring. I am in love with fresh flowers. They are a lavish and outrageous fact of living here. If nothing else, you can get fresh flowers at the start of March in Newfoundland. Lydia picks up some fat-free cookies and ultraviolet lotion.
On the way to Maisie’s Lydia says, There arent enough storytelling songs.
I say, It’s time Wilf Jardine wrote some love songs.