This All Happened(51)
Max has a photo of a fly’s enlarged head glued to his tool chest. This photo tells him a lot about the twentieth century. The beauty of science and the power of life. His father once scraped the inside of his lip with a spoon. Not telling him why. Then showed him the cells under a microscope. That vitality taught him insignificance.
17 Iris lends me her flashing rear light and a small triangle of reflecting banner. I bicycle out to Cape Spear in the dark. The name Shea Heights painted on a water tower like some military post. Strickland’s Salvage hidden behind a tall wooden fence. As though if you saw the beautiful wrecks behind it, you’d feel compelled to steal them. The beautification committee has bulldozed and paved an area for an open market. You could land a small plane on it.
It takes an hour to ride to Cape Spear. I claim a spot on the grass above the World War II cannon in front of the bunker. The cannon faces a bonfire licking the cement wall below the stage. The singers look nervous about the cannon facing them. Or are they cold. I huddle into the grass as the wind picks up. An anonymous thermos of good Scotch is passed around. Then I see it’s Max’s. They wave and I join them.
Clear night, dark sky, streak of milky way, Daphne calls it a fried egg on its side. The city to the north is two pots of jewels separated by Signal Hill.
Max offers a ride home, throw the bike in the truck, but I want to whoosh back in the dark. There are no streetlights and I have no light. I pull up hills and then descend, plunge into the valleys of the road. I can make out the centre line and the side line and keep in the middle. But the condition of the road is a mystery. All I can sense is the whirring of my wheels and I can tell their distance from the sound they make. There is no motion except wind. It could be that I’m standing still. I look back and notice the frenetic blinking of Iris’s red light.
18 Woke at six-thirty, the mist anchored in the harbour. Propped on an elbow I can see this bed of sneaky fog. And then coffee with Iris and Helmut. Hot sun. Everything lit.
On the table is our box of co-op vegetables from Daphne’s organic farm: deep green bok choy, rhubarb, a green onion, parsley, tatsoi (a small bouquet of greens with a slender peach-coloured flower in the centre), spinach. Everything special and select.
I wait for Lydia to call, and she does. She invites me down and I go.
19 The rain wakes me at six, and I get up and make coffee. I wrap Lydia’s Bodum in a cup towel. I notice her faucet is fixed. I watch the rain, tons of it, slash down. Lydia smells the coffee and comes down for some.
Me: You fixed your faucet.
I didnt fix the faucet.
Well, someone fixed the faucet.
It wasnt me.
She’s got an admirer who fixes faucets. Craig Regular fixed that faucet.
20 At the Ship with Maisie and Lydia. Theyre having brandies and Earl Quigley says he’s alone at the bar could he sit with us and listen.
It’s rare to see Lydia and Earl together. I like to see it. To see the one youre with talking to her ex provides a window onto a previous life in action.
We had been to Alex Fleming’s photograph exhibit. And there was a picture of Maisie and Oliver wearing cowboy boots. It was seeing them again in their life together. Maisie said, Even though Oliver’s affair was the catalyst for my departure, I had already begun to drift from him. She hated how, when they married, his sink became their sink. His mess was their mess.
Maisie: I dont ever want to clean up our dishes. Una’s I dont mind. But not the man I’m sleeping with. There’s no fun in that.
Me: What about a guy who fixes your faucet? Just on the side?
Maisie: That’s what I want. I want a weekend man.