Alex wears dark clothes, even at badminton. She smokes. There is a sinister note within her goodness. How she bends over to a serve, and looks me in the eye.
25 We pick up Max and Daphne and drive up the shore to hunt down icebergs. It’s twenty-one degrees. I can feel the colour come to my face. The profiles of icebergs. A pair are linked in a green seawater gleam under the surface and I think of Lydia and me standing like that, at a distance but joined surreptitiously. One looks like a Spanish galleon, another the head of a rooster, complete with comb. A third is a lilting ocean liner. We turn shapes into objects. We do it to clouds, to rock formations.
We picnic on the grey sun-baked cliffs of Bay Bulls out on Bread and Cheese Point. Thick sandwiches and expensive leaf lettuce and a bottle of French red and crunchy pickles and ice creams and the orange guitar.
The hard wine bottle clunking against the rock.
26 There is a lawn on Waterford Bridge Road shot through with blue crocuses. I watch Lydia admire them. She has a soft spot for oddities in nature.
But then a hardness appears. We’re in her kitchen. I had finished washing the dishes and she turned on the faucet with a dishcloth, getting in my way, and the cloth wiped my sleeve leaving a grease mark and I backed away, got my stuff from upstairs the tap still on in the kitchen. I ask, Do you want the tap on? Lydia: No. In a tone that says,You left it on.
I ask if anything’s bothering her.
I wish you’d taken a loaf from the freezer when you finished the bread. Is that too much to ask?
I havent had any bread.
And she gives me a look that says I dont admit to anything.
27 I decide to walk down to Lydia’s without phoning first. The door is locked and I have to ring. She is there with Earl Quigley and Craig Regular, having a toke. Craig tried to get back into the States, but they found marijuana on him at the border. She’d made them supper.
Lydia: I was just about to call you.
This is her second most favourite phrase. Her first favourite is, So what’s your point?
I realize I am taking the annoying side of every issue.
I size up the waist size of both Earl and Craig. I notice the underwear is gone now from the detergent box.
I recall that Lydia admitted she felt a little alone. That Earl and Craig allow her to laugh, to be connected. And here I am standing in the kitchen looking at these two men eating supper with Lydia, sharing a spliff, and I must be talking but my concentration is on remembering Earl’s professional accents that Lydia falls into, of Lydia laughing when Craig holds her arms so she can’t answer the phone.
If I were holding Lydia, she would be pissed off.
All night I’m quiet until Lydia inquires. I say,You dont find what I have to say interesting. When I tell how my father couldve been an excellent burglar
Gabriel, youve said that a number of times.
Did I ever tell you? Because I’d felt like I’d told you, but you were silent.
Gabe, youve told me dozens of times that your father would say this is what a burglar would do. Do you want me to be entranced with everything you keep repeating?
Just tell me if I’m boring you. But saying nothing.
Lydia, on an elbow, says how unfair that is, thirty times I must have told her that, what do I expect from her. What I expect is for her to say,You’d be driving along like this? Would your brother be with you? Where would you be driving? Out of town? And he’d just scan the houses, or would he point one out in particular? Did your mother know he thought this way? Did you ever think he’d do it? Do you think it affected Junior? Etc. When Lydia talks about her family I’m interested, I ask these kinds of questions, I draw the stories out of her, I make her embellish. I ask for things. Whereas Lydia nods, or changes the subject, or says, So what’s your point? Lydia will never be on the phone long with me, and never laugh as hard as she does with Wilf or Craig or Oliver.