This All Happened(30)

            Maisie’s upset it didnt work out.

            She’s upset about the rumours.

            I can’t stop rumours.

            Me: Let’s call her now.

            You think so?

            Yes, let’s do it.

            Oliver calls and says hi, expectantly. I’m leaning against the wall, holding our pints. He says, Maisie, do you think we’ll get along okay? Youve forgiven me?

            He nods at me.

            How am I? Well, I’m just startled at the ferocity of your anger.

            No, no, no, I mouth, and spill the pints. But by now the phone is a foot away from Oliver’s ear and even then you can hear her.

            30 Oliver Squires, Lydia says, is a cynic. Yet he’s a purveyor of honesty. He has a way of using phrases that are not cliche but are found in phrase books, a conversational gambol using more intelligent cliches. He likes the word peccadillos. He uses words like malfeasance and anomie and confesses to lacking secular connections.

            Lydia: He has a wicked tongue. If you hurt him he will betray you.

            Me: I left him still pacing the snooker table. Bewildered that Maisie has left him. And then, almost in the same breath, he’s perplexed that the Canadiens can’t seem to score goals in March. There is no variation in the weight he puts on problems.

            Lydia: Men are like that.

            31 Sometimes, to be squeezed shoulder to shoulder in a kitchen party, the frenetic energy of bodies, the physical pull and tug and unanimous decision to be frenzied and fun and enjoy being incarnate. Earl Quigley is back from a conference in Santa Fe, and he is telling me about the true size of the universe. This is the man Lydia spent four years of her life with. I’ve had a few, so I can relax and almost pretend I am Lydia. There is something enjoyable in being Lydia in her past life, something revealing. Then Iris interrupts to say the caplin are so small these days and they used to come in June but now they roll in July. Maisie Pye, who has decided to appear and I’m glad of that, says Random House is interested and Wilf Jardine is being encouraged to play an original. Wilf is drinking tequila, lime soda, and ice. He says, you know how they say there’s a fork in the woods or you walk down the road less travelled or you can’t see the woods for the trees. Well I’m saying I just went bombing down the road and never saw any woods at all.

            By two the party dwindles to a fortress of stalwarts in my kitchen. I have begged Lydia not to go but she has a meeting in the morning, so I kiss her goodnight and she is sharing a cab with Maisie Pye and Craig Regular. I have watched her look at Craig Regular all night and, because he is so tall, her look can be mistaken for admiration. I return to Earl’s attention. Earl is on the phone to Casino taxi, ordering rye whisky.

            There are just the four of us left―Earl, Max, Iris, and me―with this twenty-six-ouncer of rye and excuse me I must piss in the garden oh what a night the double daylight breaking over Cabot Tower.

            While I’m pissing Iris sits on the steps. She says an old boyfriend of hers, a marine biologist, buried a dolphin under a rose bush. This boyfriend used to bring her flowers he’d stolen from cemeteries.

            I wake at noon on the living-room couch. Upstairs in my bedroom Earl and Max are snoring hard. Iris makes me a hot cup of tea with lots of canned milk and two slices of toast with butter.





April


            1 Lydia had spilled wax on the sleeve of her astrakhan. She lays the coat on the floor, takes a piece of butcher paper, and irons it to the sleeve. Kneeling over the coat, sun shining branches into solids and shadows over her head. The wax melts into the butcher paper, the grease of an animal.

            2 There has been an absence of wind for more than a day. How rested the trees look, the harbour. Like horses. Patient horses.