It’s a thin envelope.
I can’t believe it. Youre putting me on.
It’s true. I’m gonna open it. Hang on. This is it.
Oh, man, why didnt I get one?
Shit.
What is it?
It’s a rejection.
Gabe.
Yeah.
I didnt get anything, Gabe.
30 Eight city workers stand over the big pits carved by the back hoe on Tuesday. There’s a broken sewer pipe and theyve watched water and toilet tissue slip through it. The pipe belongs to Number 6 Young Street. So now theyre shovelling by hand to remove the length of pipe.
A wasp crawls over my bare foot as I’m on the phone. It’s a yellowjacket. They are licking up the aphids off my chilli-pepper plants. I watch one bite chunks out of the flesh on a cantaloupe rind in the compost heap. Black currants are still ripe on bushes.
I’m surprised when good weather lingers into fall and bad weather remains into spring. I’ve never gauged correctly the true nature of the seasons.
October
1 I drive out to Conception Bay. I’m on my way to teach creative writing to high-school students. Jethro’s studded tires rumble on the sunlit pavement. I feel tough. I let go of the wheel and the steering stays true for three hundred metres.
Two students have signed up, the librarian says. Youre in the basement.
Two?
I follow her downstairs. There are small plywood and metal tables. The shelves are full of Robert Ludlum.
Glenda is sixteen, wearing an off-white raglan with a poppy. Her bleached bangs cover her dark eyebrows. She speaks to me with confidence, with erect posture. When she gesticulates, she bends her arms at the elbows and sways her arms. Her elbows she plants on her hip bones.
Hedley arrives, with his mother. His mother is not much older than me. Hedley is fifteen, smaller than Glenda. They shake hands and introduce themselves in a social and comfortable way. His mother says, So it’s until four oclock? And that’s all she wants to know. She’s a pretty but harried woman.
I start by saying that this chair is a chair. And if you wrote your impressions of the chair, what you wrote would become the chair. The writing is not about the chair, it is the chair.
The way Hedley and Glenda exchange a look tells me we’re going to have a good time.
2 I am picking up Lydia from the LSPU Hall. Wilf is smoking in the bar, clutching a beer with thick fingers. He has a perfect physique yet he lives on chocolate bars and cigarettes. Ragged white hair. He’s been a songwriter and an actor for thirty years. He once moved to Toronto, to do merch, he says. Sell merchandise for a folk band.
Terrific show, Wilf.
Dostoevsky says the human being is an animal that can get used to anything. And that describes Wilf.
I’ve come to like Wilf. He would be surprised to hear me think that I suspected anything. He thinks highly of me. His love for Lydia he puts down as unrequited.
Lydia, he warns, is one fucking talented woman.
3 I run and circle back to Lydia’s. She wants me to go for a walk. I say I am beat. She steps back to admire the curtain rod she has for her kitchen and stands on my finger, then my bare foot she’s wearing big clogs. I yell in pain. She says, Well, you were in my way. And I say the obvious (It was you standing on my foot), to which she leaves the room. For a half-hour she’s on the phone and so I lace up my sneakers, wave goodbye, and run home. I call up Max and go to the Grapevine for a beer. From there I call Lydia no answer. I walk back up the hill at nine and she’s not there. At ten I call and she answers. She’s mad at me for leaving without telling her, after she’d invited me out for a walk. So we go through it, and she thinks I should apologize for yelling at her, and so I do. I ask if I can come down, and she says, I want to be alone tonight. She says she stood on my hand because I’d moved a chair to the wrong place, and so she had to stand on my hand. And I say, Why can’t you admit you stood on my hand because you werent looking?