The whole night Max is revelling in his luck, his night out, my ass, his child-to-be.
14 I train my binoculars on the southside hills. On the shadows and snow-capped mansard roof windows. The detail. I tell this to Lydia, about using the binoculars as a device in painting.
I watch a crow on a pole. It looks around until its beak is hidden. Its furtive eye flashing grey, a pure grey I would never see with my naked eye. So binoculars make colour appear. A claw clamped on the edge of the pole’s top rim. As the crow lifts it plunges to the left, raising its breast slightly to the side to catch wind. It caws three times and lunges from the shoulders, swooping as it caws. I can hear the caw through the window.
I wouldnt have heard it if I wasnt seeing it. So binoculars create sound.
But looking at things up close — for instance, spruce inside a copse of hardwood — can inform you of the colours in a smear. Magnification breaks down smears to components (blue and grey and yellow and pink, instead of a smudgy green). Enlarging encourages colour to show itself. Lydia says Monet has become an adjective, describing something that, close up, breaks into fragments.
15 I see Max and Daphne peering through the rippled glass of my porch. Daphne with a bottle of raspberry wine and a silver pendant with agate that the light shines through. These are Daphne touches. A tardy birthday gift. She holds the pendant up to demonstrate. Why would a stone appreciate light? What would be the advantage?
We speak of mulberry trees and ginko leaves and selling oak and hawthorn to local nurseries and all sorts of farm things to do on crown land at a hundred dollars an acre.
Daphne wants, eventually, to give up nursing and farm full time. And Max looks like a man who has considered this avenue his entire life.
I’ve always thought berry liqueurs were a way to go. Daphne: If you make them I will cover them in chocolate.
And suddenly I’m hooked.
She has grafted apple plants and divided sucker seedlings and boiled down extracts, and has other assorted technical skills I would have to learn. If I’m serious.
If I plan on getting into the tree-farm business.
Do I plan on that?
I realize I have been convinced.
Who would love an Avalon farmer? Drop this literary crap.
We eat a crisp salad in the living room with sun drenching the rooftops and catching the avocado leaves and making the dressing of mustard garlic with cilantro―which Daphne says is coriander―glow.
I am so affected by the passions of others. There is nothing more I want right now than to be an Avalon farmer.
16 I bump into Oliver Squires at the Honda lot on Kenmount Road. I’m picking up a wiper motor. He is with his paralegal student. She is young and thin and silent. Oliver’s dressed like the lawyer he is, but it surprises me as I never see him when he’s practising. He wants my advice because my brother is a mechanic. He’s not uncomfortable at all.
But I’m not my brother, Oliver.
Oliver makes a hand motion that implies I’m splitting hairs. There are new models in the showroom.
I say, Cars inside buildings is a strange image.
Yes, he says. Those cars they raffle in the mall.
Mass-produced things are harder to replicate, in appearance, than natural things. It is easier to draw a tree than a telephone.
Oliver is buying a car. To replace Maisie, he says. And laughs. And his paralegal student smiles. How people laugh when they are in pain. Oliver is getting on with things. And really, all this chatter is about not losing me as a friend.