Happiness of Fish (2 page)

“Alchemist is an anagram for St. Michael,” Gerry informs the space deb in low-rise pants who's clearing tables. He moves his crossword to let her get on with it. Her skin has an unnatural bright-bronze look, like statuary in an MGM '50s bible epic.

“Have you been south?” Gerry asks. Asking about holidays is about the limit of any intimacy that has established itself between him and the polished alien waitresses. He thinks
between
and not among because he suspects they have one shared intelligence. What planets consenting adults vacation on is their own business. However, holidays are something the waitresses are programmed to discuss if they're in a forthcoming mood.

“No, I was in a bodybuilding contest on the weekend,” she says and strikes a flexed pose. Between the bottom of her short shirt and the top of her low pants, the bit of her stomach that shows becomes a narrow, vertical rectangle like the box an expensive bottle of liquor comes in. Its sharp edges are softened by being lightly upholstered in microscopic peach fuzz and artificially bronze goose flesh.

“How did that go?”

“I got third. A whole bunch of us got third. It was the first contest they'd had. I think they want a lot of us to keep working out.”

“Will you?”

“No. I don't know. Maybe...but hey, I mean, like I got a third, you know.”

Gerry thinks he knows all about coming third.

The coffee shop is decorated in elaborate garlands of evergreen and those new space lights of such an intense blue that they seem to radiate dark. It is supposed to be almost Christmas and has been, it seems, for months.

Gerry puts the crossword aside and scribbles in his notebook:
Whatever happened to November as a month?
He also jots down a note that St. Michael is an anagram for alchemist. The space waitress may not be around to remind him if he ever needs to know.

Gerry arrived in St. John's in November 1972 and he doesn't remember it feeling like Christmas then. Late one Sunday night, he and his ex, Patricia, rode into town at opposite ends of a CN bus. They weren't married yet. They had left Ottawa hand-in-hand. After four days on buses, broken by a rough night on the ferry, they had found separate seats where they could stretch out more.

“Don't touch me. I think I've got bugs,” Patricia announced tightly, after a taxi took them from the train station bus stop to a hotel they thought they could afford. She spent a long time in the shower.

He had paid for the room in advance while she was in the lobby washroom. It cost sixteen dollars. They were supposed to be on a strict budget.

“How much was the room?” Patricia asked as they went upstairs. It was close to midnight and they'd been off the boat since early morning, but she still had a seasick pallor. She looked like she needed to lie down.

“Ten bucks,” Gerry said. It was the first time he had lied to her.

The first but not the last, he thinks now.

When they felt better and started to explore the town, Gerry remembers it as being like the Novembers from early childhood, a separate, pre-Christmas winter season of its own. It was a gentler, English picture book winter, made of first snowmen and last robins, with inglenooks and cherry-bright fires in elaborate hearths. December was more intense because November was separate.

Gerry thinks the orphanage raffle was the first sign of approaching Christmas back then. He looks out into Water Street and remembers the kids with handbells clanging away for the Mount Cashel draw. They stood in front of a shop with a floor full of ticket stubs and slush and
cigarette butts. The air was full of smoke and the bells and the endless whir of the big, numbered wheel.

“Win a turkey, mister,” had a Dickens ring to it. “A turkey bigger than me.”

The bells don't ring now and Mount Cashel is a subdivision and Gerry covered the abuse hearings and a couple of the trials a dozen or more years ago.

There was always a lot of Dickens that he hated, Gerry thinks, but he sort of misses the handbells.

If tonight is any indication, it will be a green Christmas. There is a hard, slanting rain driving against the house, rattling the vinyl siding that Gerry still thinks of as new, although it's been on the house for about five years now. The siding has a louder, tinnier rattle than the old cedar it replaced. Gerry had fought with Vivian to keep the cedar.

“I painted it,” he said.

“It's falling apart,” said Vivian. “Everybody's got vinyl now. You don't have to look after it all the time.”

He still expects the vinyl to come off on wet windy nights like this.

The vinyl wars are behind them tonight. Gerry and Vivian are pottering in their kitchen. She is re-hanging a Christmas garland that has come partially unstuck over the kitchen door. Gerry is washing their few supper dishes. They've had a run of Christmas parties to go to and have been pigging out. Tonight they've been fighting a rearguard action, eating soup and a salad. They've been toying with the idea of a movie.

“It's a rotten night out there,” Vivian says, tottering on a kitchen chair in her stocking feet. The joints in her toes whiten under nylon as they flex to maintain her balance on the chair. Life is unconscious
acrobatics. “Do you really want to see a movie? We could stay in. I'm up to my arse with Christmas stuff and I've got a lot of paperwork to sort out.” Vivian sells real estate. She climbs off her chair and they move around each other, straightening the kitchen. Vivian is workout trim and still in black slacks and a good sweater. Her hairdresser has given her short hair a red streak. Gerry is taller, bulkier, bearded and dressed in old cords and a sweater. She moves around him like an escort around a battleship in the kitchen. The rain rattles the siding again.

“I'm happy this Christmas,” Vivian announces. She climbs down off her chair, crosses the kitchen and leans into him. “Are you happy?”

This is the sort of question that can explode. Gerry approaches it cautiously. He knows he's supposed to be happy.

“After all, I live in a vinyl house that I don't have to paint.”

Gerry sometimes thinks Vivian sees happiness the same way she sees cleanliness and takes it far too seriously. She pulls spot checks. If there is a suspicion that the standard is slipping, the housecleaning can be worse than a bit of squalor. Confessing to the most trivial angst can land you in a fit of emotional attic cleaning.

“Be happy, damn you!”

“Pretty content, I guess,” Gerry says. “Not actively suicidal over the outdoor lights or anything.”

Christmas traditions are another minefield. He knows he should shut up now, but the notion of not belonging anywhere has sneaked into the kitchen like a guilty wet dog. He can't stop himself adding, “I feel a bit itchy sometimes. You know, fidgety.”

“Not about us?” Vivian's touchy sea-urchin spines stir in the sluggish post-supper current of the kitchen.

“No. God no!” Gerry says, then adds, “I'm going back at the book, I think.”

He has surprised himself. Through nearly twenty years with Vivian he's threatened to write a novel. He has filled filing cabinets with notes and scribbles and the dead Chinese notebook journals. He's made starts that disappear like rivers in a desert after fifty pages, but it's been months since he sat down to write anything long.

“I'm a radio writer,” he jokes when pressed. “I get to three pages and expect somebody to give me money.”

Two tatty folders of typescript that once claimed to be finished products lurk in the bottom of a filing cabinet in the basement. Gerry's ex, Patricia, had found them in the bottom of a trunk and sent them back. He wondered at the time what her motive was: prosecution exhibits to justify her going perhaps. Judged by length, they could charitably be called novellas. They were written back in Gerry's drinking days when he thought every word was god-given. There are polite but firm rejection slips tucked into them too. Thanks, but no thanks. They made better recitations at the ends of house parties.

“Anyway,” Gerry says, “I'm thinking about getting at it again, trying to make sense of it all, and sort of trying to explain how I got here.”

“I'd love it if you'd do that,” Vivian says, putting the soup pot away under the counter. “But I don't want to push you though. I think you're afraid of failure sometimes.”

“I am not,” Gerry retorts, making a flurry with the dishcloth. “I revel in it. I have failed consistently and creatively for thirty years now. Anybody who hasn't failed has never tried to do anything hard.”

“You haven't failed,” says Vivian. Her office wall has a poster of a cat struggling to cling to a rope with “Hang in there, baby!” on it. “I mean, you're always working. You haven't failed.”

“Or tried,” mutters Gerry.

Some years ago, when Gerry thought the bottom was falling out of the freelance radio journalism market, he went out and rented himself an office to become a man of letters. He imagined Virginia Woolf and Alice Munro turning cheerleader cartwheels as he took the little room on the back of a strip mall. He furnished it with two Wal-Mart filing cabinets with a door blank across them for a desk. He took in a brand new swivel chair, a coffee maker and his computer. His office window looked out on a dumpster, a rear parking lot and a cemetery over a fence. The rent was satisfyingly low and idiosyncratic, seventy-three dollars a month. Vivian had gone to see the office the first spring he rented it. He was proud of its starkness, like the orderly room of a puritan battalion in a front-line attic in some urban guerrilla war. The computer had a tool-like, weapon-like practicality. It was like a lathe, drill press or machine gun under the pale fluorescent light of the little room. He felt he should be able to take it apart and put it
together blinfolded. In the office, he hoped to make tangible, workman-like words out of his drifting life. It was a place for invention, stripped to its industrial guts, with a cheque-cashing service and a mini-mart next door.

Unfortunately Gerry always preferred gathering the oddments of raw material to sitting down and putting them together.

“Why do you pay rent on that darn room?” Vivian asked after a year or two. She had a point. Gerry hadn't been near the place in a couple of months. Its equipment and purpose made it too accusatory a place to get away from home in. It was easier to sit in the coffee shops with a notebook, or just drive around.

“It's not costing you anything, is it?” he demanded. “You haven't been asked to contribute to the rent. Besides it's a tax write-off.”

The book and the office failed to thrive. After several years more, the office was abandoned. The filing cabinets, the door blank and the computer got moved to Gerry and Vivian's basement. So did the malaise they produced in Gerry. A laundry basket on top of a file cabinet could scare him back upstairs in an instant.

“It's too nice a day to lurk in the basement. Let's go for a walk,” he'd say. He found a walk in the park or through the nighttime neighbourhood took his mind off the accusing scraps of paper and stale notebooks. Vivian found it was just as well to go with him for the walks. He was less irritable around the house.

She took over the door-blank worktable to sew new living room drapes.

“How the hell am I supposed to write with all that crap there?” he demanded, waving at her table and lapful of pale heavy cloth. “What the hell's wrong with the drapes we've got?”

“They don't match the room, you poor fool,” Vivian shot back. “They haven't matched the room since we painted and it needs doing again. I hate that goddamn room.”

“A zoo,” he yelled. “I live in a fucking designer zoo.”

“Oh, go on with you, boy,” Vivian said. “By the time you get around to doing anything, I'll be out of here. I'll take the damn drapes and go on with them if you need to write something.”

The “new” drapes are three years old now.

People who don't go to church often, go at Christmas. Gerry doesn't go to Alcoholics Anonymous often anymore, but on an evening in mid-December he finds himself driving through the dark streets to a '60s-modern church not too far from home. He feels he needs a booster shot against the Christmas spirit. The parking lot is too full to be all AA people, and when he goes in, he can hear the organ from the sanctuary and the coughing that suggests a full house. He goes to the church library for his meeting.

There are AA meetings and AA meetings. Gerry has been to some that have the smell of puke, piss and desperation still strong in the room. Then again, once in Ottawa he went to one so calm and existential it was rather other-worldly.

“Hi, my name is Gerry and if I exist and alcoholism exists, I'm an alcoholic,” he described it to Vivian later.

The people Gerry listened to at that meeting, and talked to over gritty carrot cake and coffee afterwards, seemed to imply that they'd only become drunks to further the cause of addictions research.

This meeting isn't like that. It's got a good mix of people, long-timers and newcomers. Gerry sees people he used to carouse with when George Street was just starting to be a bar ghetto and before that, when the neighbourhoods of town seemed to be a network of booze capillaries and alcohol nodes he could navigate like a sodden corpuscle. There's some grey long hair at tonight's session and some fashionable clothes and the talk is generally pretty bright.

There's only one first-timer, a scared-looking woman accompanied by a pretty woman with white hair parted in the middle, but a surprisingly young face that looks like it came off a '60s album cover, peering over a dulcimer perhaps. Gerry remembers her when she hung around the bar where a lot of reporters and actors hung out in the '70s. He sort of remembers that she tried to cut her wrists with a broken bottle in the toilet one night, He looks at her wrists but she has long sleeves and bracelets.