This All Happened(97)

            How do you know so much about it?

            I keep an interest in what goes on, Gabe.

            We sit in the warm room at a table near the stage. There is to be a children’s play. The play has a scientist refusing to go to the Hanukkah party. When her friends leave, she is killed during a chemical discovery. Moral: beware the works of man.

            We are sitting with a doctor and his wife. They are both learning Hebrew There are no vowels. Alex asks if shellfish can be kosher. No, the doctor says, because they are scavengers on the bottom.

            He sticks out his hands and scrabbles his fingers over the tablecloth, the cloth gathers under his fingers until a glass topples. Scavengers, he says again.

            8 Una and I watch Max filing pyrophyllite. He sits cross-legged and wears a surgical mask. The soapstone is from Manuels. He pulls down the mask and smiles. Newfoundland, he says, has the best stone in the world. He’s doing this piece for Daphne, it’s slightly abstract. Near his knees are wedges of cast-off stone. That’s a tail of a humpback, Una says.

            Max says, You can have the humpback.

            When I say a new word, like pyrophyllite, I have a propensity to forget it.

            Una’s game when we’re walking home: Why does underwear start with an H?

            Why?

            Because they lie in a heap on the floor.

            9 Maisie’s favourite found poem is: thick fat back loose lean salt beef. We are walking up from the Ship. She opens a frail yellow umbrella. The poem was on a piece of shirt card in Vey’s corner store for ten years. Now Vey’s has been sold, renovated, and is for sale again as a house. There was a pot-bellied wood-stove between the aisles.

            Maisie says there’s wonder in this life. I say, And bewilderment. Thank you, Gabe. That’s the word.

            10 Alex says, There’s your Christmas present. I look behind me, Where. There, she says. In the near vision I see a tight filament of dental floss and a small box hanging from it. At eye level. You look in the box. The box has a glass front that’s been sandblasted except for an eye, which you can look through. At the back of the box is another eye. It is a photograph of my eye. Then she shows me bits of furniture she’s made: wooden arms for a chair. Human arms. She’s adding pearls and chunks of mirror. Alex has sculpted an ear that she carved by feeling her own ear. She carved from touch. Translating touch into vision.

            Alex wants to build a corner camera. You stand at an intersection and the two barrels of the camera take a picture of both streets converging. The photographic paper is at a right angle and you mount the photo in the corner of a room to get the correct perspective. Of two streets meeting. I say, Does such a camera exist? Alex: No. I’m going to invent one.

            She says she’s bored with flat art.

            We eat off plates made of fired clay.

            Everything in Alex’s house is art.

            We bake squash stuffed with lemon and dates and mushrooms and garlic.

            We drink the wine and I walk home in the clear, cold air.

            Sometimes you can see more in night air than you can in the day. Maybe it’s the city lights.

            11 Oliver talks of legal scandals. He’s not the only lawyer to have left his wife for a paralegal student. He puts on his overcoat, a new coat for him. I say, Nice coat. He says that Maisie never liked it on him. That it’s grubby. She’s got something against second-hand clothes. It’s okay if you have money. But for the poor, it marks you as poor.

            I tell this to Maisie later. And I say, The coat is a bit grubby. Yes, she says. Fact is, it doesnt look good on him.