In the morning I walk down and she lets me in, but she’s serious. I see she’s been cleaning the kitchen and living room. She has thrown my things (a pair of socks, sneakers, three books, a sweater) into a corner heap. It’s so offensive. She commences to talk on the phone. So I tell her I’m off to the library. It maddens me. It makes me want to never return to her place. I’m not welcome.
4 On the way down to the Ship, I spot a kingfisher on the phone line in the rain.
I confess to Max that I’m upset. And I’m not sure what it is. I resent the little fights Lydia and I have. She’s late or she gets angry if I peel potatoes in her sink or she says I dont instigate evenings out.
He says passive-aggressive behaviour is insidious. He says, You two look so good together.
He remembers seeing me after we’d come back from Toronto. Asked what I was doing. And I said, Falling in love. Max: It sounded beautiful.
He says, Hank put faith in Audrey.
But Hank left in the end.
Max: And then he died. On New Year’s Day.
I am drinking blackberry sodas. I am eschewing alcohol. Max asks if I’ve ever eaten the testes of urchins.
Max: Use scissors, cut them open, wash away the stuff, get to these orange sacs, about five to a teaspoon? Urchins are hermaphrodites. Eat the testes raw. Taste of the sea. You know that taste on the shore? Or when you have cod right off the water? Something that gets lost after a couple of hours. Whelks.
He pauses.
I’ve eaten whelks. I’ve eaten periwinkles steamed. I’ve been eating a lot of sea crap. Milt from herring.
Alex is looking great. I tell this to Max and he raises an eye.
The truth is, Lydia loves me. When we fight, she is upset that I’m hurting her. She’s angry because I’m an asshole. It’s true she feels she’s done nothing wrong, but her anger blooms out of love. Whereas I see I’ve upset her, and I’m afraid of Lydia’s anger, but I never blame her for the argument. I try to see where I went wrong. What I resent is that she never does this, sees where she’s wrong.
5 Vinyl siding is going up in strips. Why. Why not a vat of liquid plastic that you ooze over houses. I would like that. I’m not opposed to plastic. But if it stood for what it was and did not pretend to be wood. If you could be proud to call it genuine plastic. You start from the roof with a nozzle. You mask off the windows. Ooze the hot plastic over roof and sides. Nudge it into soffits. Encase the house in plastic. It would look like snow houses. The smooth rounded surface of Gaudi architecture. This would appeal.
6 Oliver says the fights he had with Maisie eroded the beachhead of love between them. They’d apologize, but he needed good times to restore the love. Whereas Maisie became immediately in love with him again. So she could afford to fight more often than him. She was hurt, too, when he told her about the beachhead eroding. The fights never diminished her love for him.
7 Lydia has painted her cupboards a light orange. She is mixing a bowl of vegetables. She is cutting carrots. Her rings scrape against the stainless-steel bowl. She says she’ll just be a minute. She has flour on her sleeves.
Lydia is chopping the carrot very slowly. The wind gently lifts the back end of her house, just a fraction of an inch, but it lifts and cracks. I have boots on and they stamp on the linoleum. The linoleum is too soft for my boots. The phone rings and Lydia is waiting for me to grab for it. But I dont. She is supposed to be finding the books I left here. She grabs the phone with its long cord, she needs to dip under the stretched-out cord to look on top of her fridge for the books. Her hair gets caught in the cord, and for a moment, she balances on bent knees, trying to untangle herself, and she blames me for the tangle. Oh hi, she says.Yes. Sweet on the phone.