This All Happened(35)

            I pick up my cheque from the arts council, cash it at the Royal Bank, and buy a bottle of eleven-dollar wine at the liquor store next door. I walk into Blue Peter Steamships.

            I am taken by the idea of leaving St John’s by sea. I am taken by the idea of vanishing. A small vengeful part of me, or an intolerant part of me, wants to leave Lydia, and this means leaving St John’s. And so I delight in the fantasy of preparing a departure.

            Blue Peter has an open-air-concept office, a half-acre of carpet, and three oak desks. There’s a woman, a sixty-year-old man, and a young man in a ninety-dollar shirt. I finger the young man’s desk. I cradle the bottle of wine along my forearm.

            I was just wondering if you still take passengers.

            Young man: You want to cross the Atlantic by boat?

            A twenty-foot skylight beaming in a prism above. A bank of windows to my left. You can watch ships come and go through the Narrows.

            The ninety-dollar shirt says, Those days are long gone.

            I walk home with the eleven-dollar wine. I am the kind of man who finds it hard to spend more than that on a bottle of wine. Lydia will often pour a glass of seventeen-dollar wine.

            19 The last minutes of last call in the Ship Inn, encore of the evening. Lydia swirls her brandy in victory. Max says, As soon as you write about a culture, then you know it’s gone.

            The lights come up and we stand surprised and accept the applause of our own drunkenness, the embarrassments of the night, when our actions are hidden in smoke and darkness, the fictions we flirt with. Illicit lovers caught by the wrong husband.

            It was opening night of the play at the LSPU Hall, and Lydia, in her small part, was terrific. She became someone else, something I can’t do. I dont have the proper brain to pretend and be convincing.

            We manage the stairs to Duckworth Street and speak quietly under the ear that hears all of downtown St John’s. Quiet with the stories you tell, or the wrong person will hear you. Whispers from actors, from producers, from songwriters and one drummer. There are people who believe in God and people seeking God and people who are convinced there is no God. All walking up the stairs into cars on Duckworth Street.

            We walk up past the LSPU Hall, the amethyst of St John’s theatre. A green clapboard building that holds up a hill of attached eighty-year-old houses that cling together in the hope of money and love and insight. Not optimism, but hope. The pink, white, and green national flag of Newfoundland emblazoned on the Hall’s forehead, a wild palomino, stalwart in a domesticated land, where Lydia delivered her stellar performance.

            Lydia and I walk up Long’s Hill and then up the stairs to my room and I sit here at the windows while she sleeps. I am so proud of her. I look at the harbour with my thoughts varnished by this supreme feeling. All spring, only the Astron has left port. It’s a dead port. A purse seiner shelters behind a rusting trawler. Tourists will soon be pointing their video cameras at things that dont move: the basilica and Cabot Tower.

            While beneath them the sewage outfall is gobbled up by seagulls. Boyd Coady says the water has changed in the thirty years since the Portuguese white fleet docked here. It was pollution from boats back then. Now it’s the city’s waste that colours the water as it blooms brown into the crystal green depths of the Atlantic.

            I turn from this desolation to the fullness of my bed. I curl into the side of Lydia Murphy.

            20 Alex tells me that most men are mediocre: I want a man I find interesting.

            She was once almost married.

            I ask for moments.

            This very date seven years ago.

            When you were nineteen, I say.

            Yes, she says.