This All Happened(70)

            24 In nature you see only half of a thing at a glance. But in writing you patch together bits and sides. More than is natural. It’s a full map of the world, but in two dimensions. A flat map is not the globe. Something is lost in seeing it whole. Or too much seen gives the wrong impression. Nothing is as grand or foul.

            Lydia and I make a list of all the things we’ve lost. The bread, the good cheese, the green bottle of wine, a Sydney Lumet book, a cutting board, a small rug from the bathroom.

            We hunt through her house and notice a plate missing above the pelmet. The curtains from a window in Lydia’s study. A pair of shoes.

            We add the two items found: underwear and the television. The police suggest installing a monitoring system, and Lydia has agreed.

            25 I help Max set a course of cinder blocks under a house. The basement excavated and the dirt thrown to the side for a vegetable garden. Max says, On the job, when the foreman yells for mortar, the labourer throws in a handful of stones. That slows up the bricklayer he has to pick out the stones. The stones are called the hearts of the labourer.

            He shows me the plumb. The line is the line, he says. You go just inside it with the bricks, you never touch the line. If you move the line, then you have no line.

            Max knows a bricklayer who doesnt know eighths. If the measurement is seven-eighths, he will say a strong three-quarters. Five-eighths is a weak three-quarters.

            He says how many bricks it takes depends on the job. If youre paid by the brick, then if you have to break a brick in two for instance, around a window you throw away the other half of brick. If youre being paid a wage, then you save the half-brick and use it on the next course of bricks. Those half-bricks add up.

            26 We’re invited to a barbecue at Alex’s, but Lydia is shooting an underwater scene at the fluvarium. Craig has become a volunteer, helping the cameraman.

            At the barbecue, Wilf sings a song whose only line is: Please come back to me.

            There are murmurs of a swim. Alex wants me to stay behind, but it’s safer to swim. So she comes along. We follow Max to Long Pond, which is rimmed in distant orbs of street-lamps. A wharf that sinks a little when we step on it. There’s a wind here, cooler. Max strips off and is in first, his cry. As Alex undresses I see her small breasts. We all jump in. Except Oliver. We lose the moon and a short, swift rain falls. I can’t feel the rain, only see it puncturing the surface of the pond, and the punctures look like nipples, a pond of nipples. Then the moon returns. A quarter moon.

            Look at the moon.

            Look at the ass on that moon.

            Oliver: I can’t believe you havent thrown me in.

            He looks big, with a gut, and old.

            I tell all this to Lydia and she says, At about the time you were skinny-dipping I had parked the car with Craig by the fluvarium. We caught that rain. We were probably looking right over at you.

            27 Una skipping in the baseball diamond. We are following our noses. This is what skipping would be like, Una says, if it was an Olympic event. She whirls fast.

            I ask, Why isnt it?

            Because it’s a kid’s game.

            She says, In India they dont skip rope.

            Why not?

            Pause. Culture, she says.

            She knows this because in both movie versions of the Secret Garden they discuss India and skipping.

            Maisie and I have decided to enter the CBC short-story contest. I’m culling a story from the journals. I havent written a story in months.

            28 We take sea kayaks out into Bay Bulls. I watch Lydia lean back and paddle along the coast, across from Bread and Cheese Point. A cave with a baby gull bobbing in low tide. Lost and fluffy. Panels of rock slanting into the sea. A ledge to keep off or you’ll be capsized.