This All Happened(6)

            I’m Gabe.

            Josh: No one stays in this house over winter. Drafts and whatnot, the water freezing up on you. Though it’s never good, he says, to have a house empty.

            12 I drive to a grocery store in Heart’s Content. Bright aisles and surprising sales. A fresh plump chicken, the whole plucked bird, for three dollars. I snatch it up. It’s true I dont feel right about owning a whole chicken. I have a problem with my own deserving. There’s fresh horseradish and ripe mangosteens. The cashier doesnt know what to charge me for the mangosteens. She looks at them as if I might have snuck them into the store under my coat.

            I’ve never eaten a mangosteen. But I want to support the idea that a little place in Trinity Bay will import them. I want to encourage the mind that brought them here. Let the accounting show that three mangosteens were purchased on the road to Heart’s Desire.

            13 Lydia phones. She is spending a lazy day, loving me. She went downstairs and saw my photograph on the fridge and knew.

            She says, Sometimes I feel shy.

            Come and visit me.

            I’ll try.

            Want to live together?

            We’ll see.

            What else can I say? I cut short the call and brood around the house. I want to live with Lydia. I’m tired of separate places, and as it stands I dont even have a key to Lydia’s. I want to rent her place and have her move in with me. Or the other way around, though I’d miss the view.

            I thaw the freezer and get impatient. I lay a hammer to the ice and crack the freon tubing so I shut the door on it. I read one of Oliver’s crime novels. I e-mail Alex and Max and Maisie. Each, I realize, encourages a different e-mail voice. For instance, Alex told me of a naked eye she’s building. When you look at it, the pupil grows larger. She wrote: The pupil is not a thing but the absence of iris. It’s the iris shrinking that makes the pupil grow. That’s eros allowing in more light from the object in question.

            When you abandon love, flirtation increases.

            Max writes spoonerisms: All guns and fame until someone oozes a lie. And Maisie is literary. About the problems a novel presents over a short story. She wrote: A good story should be a door opening onto a scene already begun and closed before the last word said. A novel should be told by the voice of an authority, yet a voice that is still discovering the meaning of what the story is. There should be wonder. And all traces of the technical problem a novel delivers (that is, how do you keep the story afloat for three hundred pages?) should be erased or masked.

            14 Two boys on their bikes knock at the door. It’s Josh and his buddy Toby. They have a good laugh at Tinker Bumbo. Toby:Tha’s a town dog.

            How can you tell.

            He got a collar and a dog tag.

            I tell them it’s my girlfriend’s dog. And they are curious about Lydia. I remember Maisie had said that when she was out here, she’d never done any writing. She was a woman with a child and no occupation. You could drop in on her. When she said she needed time to write, they couldnt comprehend it. They invited themselves over. She gave into it.

            Josh: So what’s your girlfriend do?

            She’s an actor. And she makes films.

            Josh: That’s healthy. And what about you?

            I try to capture people by their actions. By quick glimpses of how they do or say things. Moments.

            Josh says he does that all the time. Except he’d call it gossip. Me: Let’s do a project together. You tell me who lives in Heart’s Desire, and I’ll write it all down.

            Josh and Toby look at each other and sit on the couch. All right then.