Happiness of Fish (21 page)

A few hundred yards down the block, Gerry tries to remember if he rattled the door to make sure it was locked. He does this more often than he'd care to admit. Most of the time it doesn't matter if Viv is home, but today she's not. He drives around the block and leaves the Honda running while he trots up to check the doors. He has, in fact, remembered to lock them.

Gerry always says his blood pressure drops below the scale when he reaches the community where he keeps the boat.

“You come over the hill by the Chinese restaurant and mellow right out,” he says.

Today, as usual, he's quietly delighted, slowing to drive through the easy curves of the road past the white-painted houses and down to the pin-cushion of masts in the marina. It's too early on a Friday afternoon for many people to be around. People with normal jobs will turn up in late afternoon. Gerry parks his Honda and carries his duffel bag and groceries down to the dock. He puts the boarding ladder across to the bow of the boat and swings his stuff onto the foredeck, one-handed. Then he pushes the ladder back past the point of balance onto the dock. He carries on moving his supplies along the boat to the cockpit and, after some fiddling with the lock, into the cabin.

Today is a day for sloth. Gerry has no make-work projects to do. He brings a cushion up from the cabin, positions it in a corner of the cockpit seat. Pulling his cap over his eyes, he stretches out and lets the sun and the light breeze play over him.

He's been dozing when voices on the dock bring him back across the border of consciousness. A man and a woman are walking along the dock, chattering about boats.
The Wind in the Willows
Water Rat in him warms to them. He lifts his cap off his eyes and cranes from his cushion, squinting into the sun to see them. The man is dapper, late fifties, about Gerry's age. The woman is much younger. He'd put her somewhere between Tanya and Melanie, thirty-ish tops.

“Nice afternoon,” he says. You should always be nice to sightseers. They get hooked and turn into new boaters and buy yours when you want to move up. “You looking at boats?”

“Looking at boats,” the man says. “Not looking for a boat. Just driving around and stopped for a look.”

He points vaguely to a hulking Mercedes four-by-four parked at the end of the dock.

Gerry realizes he knows the man. His name is Roger and years ago, he was in the advertising department when Gerry worked at a newspaper. When local ad agencies bloomed, he went to work for one of those until a particularly gruesome cabinet minister took him on as a handler. Gerry and other reporters had referred to him as “Roger Wilco,” making fun of his yes-man job. He had weathered that and run unsuccessfully as a candidate once. Then he floated around government and business until it seemed to be forgotten that he had started off as a writer of news releases. Now he sat on a couple of boards and was a
consultant
.

“How's it going, Roger?”

“Gerry, Gerry Adamson.” Roger got where he is, at least partially, by having a good memory for names. “I didn't know you had a boat.”

“Well. She's an elderly lady now but she's still afloat. Like most of us. Would you like to come aboard and have a drink?”

“Vanessa Honey, have we got time?”

“I suppose, Roger.”

Gerry goes to the bow and pulls his boarding ladder down to the deck. He makes helpful noises about staying in the middle and not looking down and grabbing the forestay. Roger is cautious, edging down the plank, lingering in the riskier middle, while he reaches for the stay. The girl comes aboard like a pirate, barely aware of where she puts her feet. Gerry ushers them back to the cockpit. He fetches them beers out of the starboard locker that is always colder than any portable fridge he's been able to find. He opens himself a Fresca and looks at his guests sitting in the stern sheets of the boat.

They are dressed for nothing that Gerry can see himself doing. Vanessa, abbreviated to Nessa, wears a striped pink-and-white tube top and a short white skirt like a tennis skirt. She has on a pair of the fashionable pastel rubber thongs that look like they come from the dollar store but are probably quite expensive. Gerry sometimes skims the style section of the weekend
Globe
. He thinks he recalls that these
thongs are imported from Brazil. Nessa has an even tan and a dusty vinyl smoothness. The few gold hairs on her arms seem to be applied like sparkles to compliment a gold chain. She has semi-big hair that falls around her shoulders. Her eyes, when she takes off her big sunglasses, are round. The whites seem to show all the way around the corneas, giving her a slightly surprised look. Her lips are full and pout a little. With the startled eyes, they suggest a child in the split second before deciding a tantrum may be called for. Still, she smiles at Gerry in an abstracted way and makes polite small talk.

“This is nice,” she says, stretching her legs along one cockpit bench.

Roger Wilco looks as if he's dressed for a sport that has yet to be invented, but will be exclusive when it is. His white shirt, with open collar and little pilot shoulder straps, vaguely suggests boats or planes. He wears high-end sneakers and white socks that don't droop. His white shorts are tennis-length over legs that are tanned and bulged with muscle at the calves, but hairless. Gerry wonders if this hairlessness is old age or the new androgyny. He can't tell if Roger has been shedding or waxed.

Roger's face and neck aren't as tight as the skin on his legs. He's got a tan and his hair is beach-boy bleached, but his skin looks finely creased, like paper that has been wet and dried. He seems to keep his lips pursed to hold his jaw up. Gerry recalls that Roger never had a great chin. He's got the beginnings of an iguana neck flap, just above a flat gold chain.

Gerry gives them the one-minute tour of his twenty-four-foot kingdom. Roger follows him around to look in lockers and bounce a bit on the cushions in their original '70s tweed.

“They must have looked everywhere for a fabric that could swallow mildew and puke and anything else and just blend it in,” Gerry says. Roger pays polite attention. He hasn't had much to do with Gerry for the last ten-or-more years. He remembers Gerry from his tab-running, drinking-reporter days. The Fresca-sipping boat owner is a new incarnation and Roger is taking it all in.

Vanessa doesn't leave the cockpit. She just leans into the cabin and makes approving noises about the little brass oil-lamp over the galley table. She's like a mother or older sister humouring a little boy who has
found something mildly slimy in a tide pool. Gerry wonders when Vanessa came on the scene. Twenty years ago, when Roger took his stab at elected politics, he remembers a wife and a couple of kids. They were in a picture in a pamphlet with a dog at their feet by a fireplace. They all wore matching hand-knit Newfoundland sweaters. Gerry used to say there was an agency that rented presentable kids and stuffed Labrador retrievers for politicians' PR photos and Christmas cards.

“For a little extra you can get the kids stuffed too,” Gerry would say. Until Patricia threw them out, he kept a collection of Christmas cards in which, he swore, the dog was the same and stuffed.

The boat is too small for confidential asides and he doesn't really know Roger well enough anyway to ask when he'd warped back a generation in the spouse department. Vanessa actually answers his question for him, making nautical chit-chat.

“We were on this neat catamaran in Tahiti five years ago. It was our third anniversary. We got soaked, didn't we, Roger?”

They sit and chat as the marina gets busier. People roll in from work and go aboard their boats. Engines are turned over and some head out of the little harbour and head down the bay. They yell destinations and meeting places over puttering engines.

“We'll be in Middle Arm.”

“We'll go to Brigus tonight. We'll be in Carbonear tomorrow.” Gerry waves to the departing boats and calls across the yacht basin to those who are flashing up their barbecues.

Roger and Vanessa tell him they have a four-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son. They imply the daughter was conceived on the Tahiti trip. The kids are at home with a nanny. Roger and Vanessa are expected at a barbecue nearby. They had the afternoon to themselves and they were just driving around, killing time.

“Of course, Roger's first family are all grown-up now,” Vanessa says. She's bloodthirsty with collective nouns.

“Yeah, young Roger's a doctor in Markham, and Tiffany is articling with Peters and Peet downtown,” says Roger.

Gerry figures Roger Wilco is at least his age or a year or two older. He remembers moving in with Vivian when Tanya was eight or nine and he was just turning forty. That had seemed a shock, but Roger is going
to be dealing with childhood and adolescence until he's seventy. If he's not careful he'll be dealing with the Darren's Pizza and Donair stage of his life when he's in a walker.

Maybe he can get his first lot of kids to raise his second lot.

Roger and Vanessa leave about six. Gerry is not going anywhere tonight. What wind there was dies completely in the slanting, late afternoon sun. Noises from across the harbour seem extremely distinct. Kids yelling and a trail-bike winding up through its gears aren't loud, but crystal clear. A screen door slams somewhere.

Roger goes over the boarding ladder more easily this time. A couple of beers must have relaxed him. Vanessa swings off as easily as she swung on. Gerry walks them up the dock and waves to them as they drive away in their tall, brooding German car with the smoked windows.

Gerry gathers the empty beer cans and puts them in the plastic garbage bag after holding them over the side upside-down to drain. He goes below and flashes up his alcohol stove for what he calls “fission” cooking.

“It's like fusion cooking only not so safe,” Gerry jokes. “You have to eat it off lead plates.”

“Only masochists, Brits and lunatics like alcohol stoves,” people kid Gerry. “Which are you?”

Gerry doesn't mind. He finds the two alcohol burners enough for any cooking he does. Tonight he boils some oriental noodles, fries some onions and a handful of bean sprouts and tosses in a can of tuna. Stirred together it hits the spot. He saves the noodle water and adds detergent to wash his few dishes.

After his humble meal, Gerry goes for a walk along the railway right-of-way that hugs the long gravel beach at the head of the bay. There is no wind now, but the remainder of the swell still makes a soft gravely hiss beside him as he walks. He thinks about Roger and Vanessa and himself and Vivian.

“If I died would you get married again?” Vivian asks him sometimes. Sometimes it's not a casual question. It can be a ranging shot in an incipient argument.

“I think I'd just have affairs,” Gerry says. “I've been domesticated twice. A third time would be too much.”

“You'd probably shack up with some young one,” Vivian says.

“Only if she had some sort of grandfather complex,” Gerry says. “Besides, I was never a cradle-robber. Some of my old girlfriends are collecting pensions by now.”

He's telling the truth. When he fooled around on Patricia it had been pretty much a perverse point of honour to find women older than she was. It was as if he didn't want it said he was looking for a younger or prettier woman. It also helped if they made it quite clear, early on, that they were just out for a fling themselves. Patricia had no such rules. Brian, when she found him, was six or seven years younger and obviously in it for the long haul. Gerry wonders if Brian was playing a modified version of
his
rules and got caught.

Only in his inter-regnum, between marriages, did Gerry date younger women. Fiona of his Weasel jottings was still in her twenties. Walking along the beach he does some mental math.

She was twenty-six and I was just about forty, so she was born about the time I was in the tenth grade. She heard “The Twist” in the womb. She listened to the Beatles in her playpen. The Beatles broke up when she was eight and I was in England after graduation.

Gerry imagines 1960s playpens, or tries to. He thinks they'd stopped being wooden by then, although the wooden ones were still around. He suspects that the folding, plastic-netting type had arrived.

In the mid-'80s they had been drinking in one of the bigger hotels. There was a piano player. Gerry had requested “As Time Goes By.” Fiona didn't realize that he only knew it from
Casablanca
on TV and from childhood, pre-TV radio. There was a program called
Make Believe Ballroom
. Fiona thought it was something he really knew. Dancing with her, he felt she was right.

“It's ‘Play it, Sam. You played it for her. You can play it for me,'” he told her. “It's not ‘Play it again, Sam.'”

Fiona, in bed, had made him aware of their different ages too. She hung out in the same bars he did and her body had an indoor pallor. Her body hair was unobtrusive and her nipples pale and pink. Naked, she looked wispy, immature, ready to be given a bath and tucked in. Patricia had read
The Female Eunuch
, and alternated between letting her bush grow and then clipping it with nail scissors when swimsuit
season rolled around. She suspected the clipping made it grow back with an increased vigour. Not long before they split up, she went for bikini-line electrolysis.

Gerry had enjoyed going to bed with Fiona but the cliché about age difference proved true. They had little to talk about when they finished. They were good-enough company out somewhere, where they could talk about their surroundings and other people, or flirt with each other. After that had played itself out, though, they tended to drop off to sleep silently. Although they had apartments near each other, neither suggested moving in together, and one or the other usually walked home in the early morning. Gerry remembers feeling slightly relieved by the solitude of those walks.

He wonders what Roger and Vanessa Wilco talk about in the early mornings while the two kids and the nanny are asleep.