Happiness of Fish (12 page)

Afterwards they took a tepid bath together and sat wrapped in towels, eating their curry and drinking gin
.

“Stupid hard-to-get goats,” she said, leaning against him
.

They repeated their love-making a couple of times over the next six months. As she had predicted, they didn't do it often, although she broke up with the architect and took a new apartment for her and her daughter
.

Once, George went to her after some sort of spat with Paula. Her daughter was away with her father. They drank a lot and made cozy, sloppy love until long after the buses had stopped running. George had wanted to stay
.

“No. Go home, you're married,” Jane said. “We're pals. Remember?”

She had had too much to drink to risk driving. Neither of them had enough money for him to take a cab. He walked home and, on the way, broke the heel off one of the cowboy boots he was wearing. He cursed her as he hobbled home to make his peace with Paula, but he thanked her later
.

The last time he met Jane was sometime in the early '80s. He was visiting her city for some sort of workshop. They got together for lunch and she told him she was getting married to somebody who ran a travel agency. She'd met him on a cruise. They argued like old friends over the bill and when they said goodbye, George repeated the old navy toast that he'd quoted to her once and made her laugh
.

“Wives and sweethearts, may they never meet.”

She laughed and the last time he saw her, she was striding past the ice cream sellers of a green city square to go back to work
.

Gerry scrolls through the four or five pages that are Jane on the computer screen. Vivian is out and the house is quiet. When the furnace cuts in with its soft, sibilant roar it seems intimate and close, a breath in the ear.

I'm having an affair with the damn furnace, Gerry thinks. Wait until Viv gets out the door and push up the thermostat. I'll be naked with the vacuum cleaner next.

Gerry sometimes wonders why he's been faithful to Vivian for nearly twenty years while he found Patricia fairly easy to cheat on. He wonders if it has anything to do with having split up once and knowing that it's possible. He and Patricia had seemed so very permanent when they were married. Other people felt trapped and destroyed by the minutiae of houses and kids and lack of time for each other. They were trapped by their freedom from all of that. When they'd been married for ten years or so, people pointed them out as indestructible, a perfect couple. It took half as long again before they could bring themselves to admit out loud that, with everything in their favour, they had failed. On both sides of the family, their in-laws loved the people they had married.

“Who gets custody of the parents?” they had asked each other ruefully on the phone. Each was in somebody else's apartment. They were choreographing their last steps by long distance from cities miles apart. “Maybe we can just swap them.”

Sometimes he feels he had almost been set up to fall away from Patricia, or maybe that's just what he wants to believe to make himself look better. He recalls the time a university friend of hers visited them. He converts her into a George and Paula episode.

Fragment: Poor Old George

She came to stay with them for two weeks at the end of August while she looked for a new apartment. She had broken up with her husband the previous spring and was going to be a language specialist at Paula's school. Her name was Rachel
.

It was a warm August that year, a sweet, lingering end of summer. Paula and Rachel had nothing much to do before school started. They apartment-hunted. They bummed around the apartment or lounged in the tiny backyard in swimsuit bottoms and T-shirts. When they came to the supper table, they brought the smell of warm skin and suntan oil. There seemed to be a lot of bare legs in the apartment. Rachel kidded George about his household of partially clad women
.

“Poor old George,” she would say when she and Paula giggled and mimicked the cheerleaders at their university, bouncing around the kitchen. “You've got a disorderly house full of lewd women.”

“It's a burden,” George would say with a sigh and they'd all laugh
.

It was almost Labour Day when Paula had a car accident. She was driving their ancient Volkswagen from the supermarket when a kid in his dad's big Buick ran a stop sign. The Volks was whipped sideways. The other car cut its front half-off, just in front of Paula's legs. She was taken to hospital on a stretcher, in a plastic collar. George and Rachel raced to the hospital by cab and spent the late afternoon in waiting rooms and corridors. By nightfall, the X-rays showed that, amazingly, Paula had nothing broken, but she had two black eyes and was painfully bruised and stiff. A sleepy resident told them they'd keep her overnight. He gave her something for the pain and she fell asleep with George and Rachel at her bedside
.

They walked up the hill from the hospital to the apartment through the pools of streetlights' glow. They felt strangely companionable as they talked about Paula's close call. Back at the apartment they drank a bottle of white wine that was supposed to have gone with the supper Paula was bringing
.

“Jeez, I guess the fish is still in the car, wherever they took it.”

“Poor old George,” Rachel said
.

Later he was lying in bed when she came into the room. She was wearing a long man's T-shirt, one of her ex's
.

“My loot,” she said, tugging at the tail and sitting on the bed. “How are you doing in here, poor old George?”

She pulled the sheet aside. The curtains blew briefly into the room as a breeze moved outside. Rachel administered herself like first aid. Her hands, her hair and her mouth washed down the front of him. Finally she settled herself, astride, on top of him with a pre-occupied little grunt, like someone finding that they've remembered the sequence of CPR properly and the patient is responding. George looked up at her and realized he'd been willing this to happen
.

Rachel went back to her own room at dawn. Later that day they went and got Paula in a taxi, fussing over her and making a special
supper. On the Labour Day weekend, against all expectations, Rachel found the perfect apartment
.

For some months after, George visited her occasionally. Paula had signed up for a dress-making class at the Y. Rachel always seemed abstractly glad to see him, but along about Christmas, she gently told him she was busy when he called from a bar to see if he could come over
.

“I'm seeing this wildlife biologist. We met when I was escorting a field trip,” she said. “I think maybe it's serious, like you and Paula.”

Which is why I'm calling you, George thought wryly. That's like Paula and me
.

Not long after that, she moved in with the biologist whose name was Mark. Later they got married
.

Paula was Rachel's matron of honour. George got drunk with the groom and said he was a nice guy. They went to Labrador afterwards and sent a letter to say they had been living in a tent on the barrens all summer. They tried to conceive when Mark wasn't busy putting radio-collars on caribou
.

Gerry and Patricia were godparents for the real Rachel's son. It was one of the things they did in what he thinks of as their polite period when they were both working in Labrador and got back together with the couple he now calls Mark and Rachel.

They had stopped fighting about things by then. Patricia had become a specialist in art and language curriculum and did more work in school board offices than in the classroom. She moved around more.

“I'm going to St. John's for six weeks. It's an exchange.”

“That's nice, I'll see if I can't get down a couple of weekends.”

He was working in local television then. The shifts were arranged so that you worked for ten days and got four off. A northern town in winter is ideal if you want to be idle. Seasonal workers lie-up for the winter. When Patricia was away, Gerry spent whole days in a bar just down the road from the radio and TV station.

They were aware that their special-ness was dead and they were nice to each other in their bereavement. Eventually, though, it was spring and time to get on with their lives.

Gerry remembers an unseasonably warm May night with the smell of burning. They were at a barbecue on the lawn of an air force mess and there was a forest fire burning on the crowns of the hills across the valley. As the dusk came on, it made an orange-red necklace on the green-black skyline and threw a red glow on the bottom of the smoke clouds. The smoke of meat and the smoke of burning forest mixed. It made the barbecue feel momentous and yet heedless, like Drake's game of bowls, or Wellington's ball before Waterloo.

“Drink, love?”

“Those pitchers of Sangria look good.”

“I've got our names on a couple of steaks.”

Now he remembers that they seemed to circulate through the party with different clumps of people, getting together only for polite practicalities. Occasionally they'd lob badminton serves of banter to each other from the safety of their separation. They waved across the grill like a couple who had consented to crew in different sailboats in some trivial regatta, smiling, but whizzing past each other, driven by different strategies and winds. They wound up at two different parties that night after the barbecue broke up.

They came home at daylight with the smell of the fire drifting through the open windows of their rented house. They slept the morning away. About lunchtime on Saturday, they found themselves taking a shower together. They touched each other tentatively, like antiques under the spray and eventually found themselves back in bed. They made practised, but slightly distant love, each sensing comparisons being made. They finished together, sweating, but strangely unmoved.

Gerry thinks of the argument he had with Vivian after the awful Valentine's party, how she had said that he and Patricia should still be together. He writes a more up-to-date scene about George and Paula and adds a Vivian character he calls Ellen.

Fragment: Explaining “Over”

They came together, but then again, they almost always did. They lay with the shades down against the afternoon glare and spoke only of things that had nothing to do with them
.

“That wind's warm.”

“It'll be hot work for the crews on the fire.”

The distant growl of water bombers, shuttling to the fire, underlined their silences
.

It is the enduring finality of that slightly mournful calm that George has never been able to convey to his wife Ellen. She seems to resent Patricia's and his unanimity in deciding they were through
.

When he went to bed he found half of Ellen's drink, unfinished on the bedside table. She was asleep on her back, still wearing her sweater and underwear. She snored slightly and he could smell the rye. He lay carefully on his own side of the bed to make sure he didn't wake her and wondered about the calmness he felt
.

Darren's Donair and Pizza is closed indefinitely and Darren has skipped town. He got up early one morning and got on a plane to Alberta to go to work for his older sister who runs a pizza joint in Fort McMurray. Gerry and Vivian and Melanie have pieced together these facts at councils of war at the kitchen table.

The business had wallowed to a halt in the post-Christmas restaurant doldrums. Darren nibbled away at the float in the cash drawer to go and play the gambling machines in the bar next door.

“He just stopped paying the bills,” Melanie says. “He just took what was in the till on Friday and went on.”

It turns out that Darren ran his disappearance with a lot more planning than he ever ran the business. He had managed to keep one credit card, paid-up and functioning. That bought his ticket, a new wardrobe and a suitcase at Wal-Mart. The kitchen-table war-room knows that because the bill has come in.

“He sold his car to his buddy Ryan,” Melanie says. “Ryan drove him to the airport and then kept the car. He came up home to see if the summer tires were in the shed.”

“I'd tell him what he can do with his summer tires,” Vivian says.

“They're no good to me if I don't have a car,” Melanie says philosophically.

Meanwhile, Gerry is in the process of discovering that, insofar as Darren's D&P can be said to exist as a corporate entity, Gerry is it. He signed for a loan to get the business up and running.

“I should have made him go to the mob or the triads or somebody,” he says. “Somebody who'd like a set of kneecaps as a desk ornament.”

It turns out that the collapse of Darren's business empire is not exactly Enron or Nortel. The suppliers had doubts about Darren for some time before he flew the coop. He hadn't been able to run up very much debt. Gerry learned that there was a local black market for cheese and that, in the age of billing-on-line, it was defiantly cash-based.

“There's just a couple of things that came in after,” says the loans officer at Gerry's bank. “I don't know what the equipment is worth, you're better to sell that yourselves.”

In the end, Gerry and Vivian sell a savings bond to pay off about eight thousand dollars to the bank. Vivian is incensed that one of the items on the business loan is gifts for Darren's sister's kids. He charged them to the shop just before he left. Melanie knows someone who wants the oven and the power mixers. Gerry has quixotic notions about making sure the staff gets paid. However, it turns out that the girl on the cash got paid from the till on the last night of business. The drivers only worked for beer and dope money. After they'd peered into the dark store around the “closed” sign and shaken the door a couple of times, they ran out of ideas.