I go to the washroom. I pee red. Oliver is at the next urinal.
I’m peeing red!
He says, Did you have any beets today?
9 This is my last barbecue of the year. I’ve decided to invite both Maisie and Oliver. Oliver has brought salmon. It slips off the spatula onto the dirt path. Oliver looks at it. Then grinds the fish into the dirt with his heel.
Wilf, drunk, leans forward and slips off his chair. His head above the table, making his point, then keels over sideways onto his back, stretching his neck up, still talking, and making perfect sense. He’s a man for whom liquor affects his body first.
10 I walk to Lydia’s in the rain. Leaves stain the sidewalks almost like a spore print from mushrooms. The trees tight with clusters of dogberries. It’s going to be a hard winter. The silver dollars have turned brown, and you can peel them now. Inside is rice paper. The furnace cut in this morning and I have hauled out my portable heater. I have lived ninety-five days on the heat of the sun alone.
I get a fire going using coal. A little drunk on Scotch as Lydia watches me. As if a foggy light, a heavy air, makes it hard to blink. I read aloud an interview with Gordon Lish. Lydia has made a steak in peppercorns, mustard, cream and white wine, garlic. Can you light some candles?
Me: Where will I find a match?
I dont know, you’ll have to imagine where they might be. Every interaction drains me of goodness.
11 Me: I was mailing something. And I got the paper. Lydia: What were you mailing?
It was an application.
A what?
There was a job.
Great.
It’s to write a book and you get to travel and interview seniors and I think you design the book too – I’d love to get it, and it pays twenty-five thousand.
Wow You’ll be, like, closing in on fifty thousand then.
Yeah. I’ll have to find a woman who wants seventy-five thousand.
Sure.
Does that piss you off?
I think it’s kind of mean.
I think it’s mean to keep mentioning fifty thousand.
It was a joke.
You keep mentioning it.
I never knew it bothered you.
I told you I didnt like it.
Well, I’ll never ever mention it again.
You know, you can be spiteful.
Say it.
That’s all I want to say. You should say it.
I’ve already said it.
You dont want to elaborate.
I think you get the picture.
Well, let’s forget it.
12 I am feeling rather spiritual. That I’d like to spend more time alone. Read books I hear are good. Study and write. There is no one else I want to be with. But I could grow into being a man who can’t live with a woman, no matter how accommodating the woman is. That is the worst, when you see lost men. Oliver is a little lost.
Boyd Coady tells me his parents live in Eastport. Theyre in their eighties with no electricity. They have an outhouse. His grandfather is still alive, at 109. He had twelve children, and only Boyd’s father is still around.