This All Happened(42)

            Me: I’m reminded of what you said, Maisie that teaching made you realize what you believe.

            Maisie: People used to give up. They would try to be a pianist or a painter, they would get to Paris and be told they werent good enough. They would become electricians. Not now

            Daphne: That’s what happened to Max. Except he told himself.

            13 We are driving home from Heart’s. A northerly has driven ice close to shore. It pushes Jethro towards the shoulder. Daphne says her grandfather was killed at the seal hunt and brought back in a pickle barrel. They laid him out on his mother’s kitchen table and the pickle came running out of him and ruined the cloth.

            Daphne can’t wait to get back to her greenhouse. She says Craig Regular wrote a letter to the paper. He was complaining that she uses waste of eviscerated animals from the university labs as fertilizer. It’s not enough for some, she says, that I’m selling organic produce.

            14 On Lydia’s desk there is a photo of Lydia dancing with Earl Quigley. They are in Lydia’s kitchen on Gower. The same table, same fridge, same brass chimes hanging in the doorway, same grey-and-red wool placemats, even the fridge magnets, the bulletin board behind the door all the same except Lydia is dancing with Earl Quigley, he’s bending her and they smile for a camera and this is five years ago when it would have been his underwear in the dryer and I’m certainly not anywhere near the dance.

            I have walked down to Lydia’s to make Boston bluefish chowder with clams and shrimp. I have to ring to have her open the door. I notice a block of cheese I bought is gone. Did Lydia eat a whole block of cheese?

            Youre the cheese pig, she says.

            The photo and the cheese, the underwear still hanging there, and the fact I have no key make me irritable. But I say nothing about it. I am a cheese pig.

            Lydia tests the chowder and wonders if something is off. It tastes zingy, she says. Like putting your tongue on a battery.

            I decide not to stay, and I can see she’s relieved. You can take the chowder, she says. And I walk back up the hill. I pour out the chowder under a tree, where a dog like Tinker Bumbo will find it.

            15 Lydia:You sure are spending a lot of time with Maisie. We’re writers. We’re conferring.

            I realize I havent been discussing the novel with Lydia. The reason is she’s so busy with scripts, with the play, with funding proposals for the film in the summer.

            Lydia thinks the novel could make a good film. Scenes of Bob Bartlett in the north, walking over polar ice that is floating south. Of the Karluk sinking, the phonograph playing. Of Rockwell Kent being accused of spying for the Germans. When I describe these images she gets excited, more excited than me. And I realize she’s good for egging me on. She’s much better at story than I am.

            16 Just showered after a run with Lydia. Shaved a minute off Quidi Vidi, and much easier even though I ran feeling a little sore in the shins. A calm night, the lights of Pleasantville in bright focus. The oil tanks hidden behind a point of land, only the glow of lights on the bank behind them. The whole hill a dull apple-cider glow to protect the tanks from vandals.

            Not a soul anywhere.

            We stop at Lydia’s. When she peels off her running shoes I see she has a pair of Chinese slippers inside. The shoes are too big, she says. I love how her elbows move close to her hips when she jogs. There’s something oriental in all that.

            We kiss and I continue on up Long’s Hill. The greys and blacks. No colour except in blurred pools around streetlights in the distance, showing shingles on the edges of houses.

            I run past Theatre Pharmacy, where we hugged that first Christmas and I had the rolling pin down my pants. Feel that, I’d said.

            Oh, my.