We meet Maisie down at Alex and Max’s opening. Maisie is staring into the pupil of Alex’s eye. The pupil dilates. Flaccid, Maisie says, should be pronounced flax-sed. And, turning to the wall of bums, says, The only two descriptions are for a penis or for prose.
She shows us a copy of the letter she sent to Michael Ondaatje. Do you think he gets many letters?
Lydia: A hundred a year.
That many?
They won’t be as good as this, Maisie, but he’s read all over the world.
Me: Yeah. He’s bound to get a lot of mail.
Maisie’s depressed by her first royalty cheque. She sold 214 books. In the letter she says to Ondaatje: My mother has a lot of friends.
She is trying to figure out how many strangers have bought her book.
We walk to the bums and try to pick out mine. There are twelve plaster moulds of bums hanging on the wall. Lydia points out mine. I see Wilf Jardine studying them, and then I know Wilf’s bum is up on the wall too. It is right beside my own.
Wilf stares at his own bum. It has a taut carriage. He is sucking on a hard candy. He holds his elbow and wrist in a gay posture. He is oblivious to this.
Some tight ass on you, Wilf.
Yours is pretty nice too, Gabe.
Which is it?
Isnt it this one?
And Wilf picks out his own bum. Or is it.
3 Supper at Max’s. He’s blanched and roasted an entire seal carcass that his father, Noel, has sent him from Arnold’s Cove. We all stare at the beast. Even Daphne.
The seal’s massive, coffee-brown, steaming torso dominates the table. It’s daunting to approach it with a knife.
I’ve never had anything but flipper pie, Lydia says.
The rib cage has thin strips of meat and the flippers are tender. It’s a boiled dinner: turnip, carrot, potato, cabbage, and pease pudding. Max is delighted. He grew up sealing, and he has a set of sealing tools: a sculping knife, which separates carcass from pelt, and a flensing knife, which is used on the pelt to carve blubber from fur.
4 I study the city with binoculars. The southside hills have gone grey overnight. Like a black dog will go white around the mouth as he gets older. The toes, the tip of tail. As if the cold exhalations of winter freeze the fur white. I think it’s a frost in the scalp of the hill and the sun is shining deep into it.
The wet trims on all the mansard roofs glint like shining gifts, like metal boxes that hold new hardware. Fresh hinges. Uncollected garbage. A mattress sags against a boarding house. Broken vinyl siding exposes styrofoam and the faded paint on rotting clapboard. Inside a window two men sunk in a floral couch roll cigarettes while an astonished parakeet swings in its cage. Children toss a bicycle tire over cold telephone wires. A man in a wool cap pedals up the street with a towering load of bent aluminum balanced over his front wheel, secured with rough yellow rope. He exhales over the aluminum and his breath looks like aluminum vapour.
The aluminum flashes in the sun, and the streets are bone dry. Thirsty streets, salt stinging the sidewalks. When dogs begin to hunker down and chew their paws.
I open the window and smell boiling fat. A slow, glacial grease slips down the sidewalk from the backs of fish-and-chips shops. Liquid copper slides out of the eavestroughs on Gower Street United. Staining the sidewalk green.
A light dry snow wafting. With the shadows sitting under their objects.
Mere description.
5 Max stalks around the snooker table, analyzing percentages. His forearms toned from constant heavy carpentry work. He has an exquisite long shot. The quiet green acre of snooker cloth. He is reverting to a former life. He has made money shooting pool. He wipes the palms of his hands on the stubble of his scalp. His jeans have a hole worn in the back pocket that reveals a corner of his black wallet.