Happiness of Fish (27 page)

He wonders as he says it if he's assuring her or himself. When he's away from Vivian, he finds he wants to call, but he's also guiltily glad to hang up.

When Gerry gets off the phone, he pours himself a mineral water and joins Doc and Mort.

“Is anybody hungry?” Doc asks.

Gerry realizes that he is...ravenously hungry. The hospital soup and salad didn't last. It seems days since he ate. He wonders if this is why some people binge-eat in times of stress.

Bullshit. I'm just hungry. Stop looking for symptoms.

They drive downtown to a pizza joint, legendary for the cheesiness of its pizzas. They wind up ordering a medium to back up their original large pizza. Doc complains about the general sleaziness of garage-door opener fittings. Mort provides amusing backroom political gossip. Gerry feeds his face and feels strangely light.

It's a crisp Monday morning and Gerry is busy on the phone again. He starts off with Bob. Bob is earning his money as family lawyer. He says he has the file on his desk when Gerry calls.

“It's just the way I remember it,” Bob says. “Nothing complicated. You're the sole heir, so do what you like with the stuff in her room. Make any arrangements you want and send the bills to me.”

“You guys have the deed for the cemetery plot?”

“Do I ever. It's a little leather-covered book that would cost you a small car to produce now. A family plot for eight in Cedar Glen Cemetery, sold to Samuel Donald Adamson in June 1935. That's your grandfather, right?”

“That's him. I never met him. He was the first tenant in '38.”

“I bet those Cedar Glen guys thought they were smart, selling off un-farmable land as burial plots,” Bob says. “God, if they'd held onto that land until the suburbs caught up in the '50s, they'd have made a killing. Can you imagine what that great big island of trees and dead people is worth now?”

“Anyway, we've got a spot on that island?”

“Damn right. I'll call and tell the funeral home to call Cedar Glen and they open the grave. We do it all the time. No sweat.”

Gerry makes an appointment with the funeral home for that afternoon. He calls the nursing home and tells them his mother is dead. They say they'll lock the room until he and Vivian can come and sort things out.

“There's no rush. The rent is paid for a month.”

Then he calls his usual time-warp motel to get a room for Vivian and him. He tells the clerk he'll check in around noon. He spends the rest of the morning doing his little bit of packing, drinking coffee and playing Space Rocks on Doc's computer. He finally manages a score that's recordable in the top ten. He checks into the motel at a quarter to twelve, dumps his luggage in the room and goes to a mall for lunch. The food court at this mall offers Greek. He dines on a kebab platter and watches people. He has his notebook out, partially to check his to-do list and partially to try to write something.

Everyone looks familiar
, he writes.
But nobody is
.

Underhill Funeral Directors have been around as long as Gerry can remember.

Underhill, under valley, underground, let us bury you. Gerry remembers the jokes from public school. We're the last people to let you down. What we undertake we carry out. There was even a joke song: Under hill, under dale, we are happy when you're pale and the hearses go rolling along...

The funeral home looks much churchier than most churches do these days. It's grey stone with wrought-iron lanterns outside and high, arched windows with leaded glass. The chapel is 1920s Gothic. Only a discreet sign and the row of soberly painted garage doors for hearses and limousines betray that this is a business.

Gerry is met by an actual Underhill. He's the latest generation in the business, a man in his early thirties, with buzz-cut hair slightly at odds with the dark jacket, waistcoat and striped trousers. Underhill's is defiantly old-fashioned. His first name is Frank.

They sit in an office like a high-tech monk's cell while they work out the announcement. When it comes to the “leaving to mourn” part, Gerry realizes he's either going to have to do all sorts of homework or get his ducks in a row. They settle on him and Vivian “and family in St. John's,” his Aunt Carmen “and husband Charles, Ottawa, and a large circle of relatives and friends.” The hospital staff is remembered by ward number and there's a thank-you to the people at the nursing home.

Frank is good at what he does. He tells Gerry that Bob has been on the phone and the family plot is being opened. He calls the minister at the church that Gerry's mother hasn't attended in nearly two decades, sets a funeral date for the day after tomorrow and arranges a meeting for Gerry and the clergyman. They agree that Vivian will pick out clothes for his mother tomorrow and Gerry will drop them off. Then it's time to select a casket.

The display coffins are kept behind a locked door.

Do people steal them? Gerry wonders. Hey buddy, want a real deal on a hot box?

Frank stops him for a moment at the door.

“Some people find this upsetting.”

“I'm fine,” Gerry says. “It's really sort of looking at furniture, isn't it?”

Looking at furniture is exactly what it is and Gerry has never been very good at it. The selection ranges from a white pine box that reminds him of a magazine rack he made in seventh grade to shiny metal, mobster specials. Underhill's starchy
haute wasp-ness
slips in the casket department.

Gerry rules out the magazine rack and the godfather's mummy case.

“Something in dark wood, I think,” he says.

Frank shows him a casket with interchangeable corners. They can be cherubs, flowers, or a variety of sporting images: curling brooms and fishing gear, ducks and pheasants.

“This is quite popular.”

“She'd come up and choke me, Frank. Not her style, I'm afraid.” The boxes seem expensive but Gerry has a mildly drunken-sailor feeling that permits pissing money up the wall at a time like this;
within reason
. He finally settles on something that looks like it might have contained very large duelling pistols in some more fastidious age of giants. Frank makes approving noises.

“That's the ‘Unknown Soldier,'” he says. Incredibly, in an alcove, there is a poster-size picture of a box like the one Gerry has picked, carried by French soldiers in kepis at some sort of re-interment.

Gerry doesn't know how the “Unknown Mother” might go over with his mother, but he thinks he remembers the coffin she picked for his father being like this one. He was drinking then, of course. He doesn't feel he can ask Frank if Underhill's has any record of what they buried the old man in.

Gerry is at the airport early for Vivian's flight. He has a need for neutral, anonymous space and the arrival hall provides it. He buys the day's newspapers and an over-priced sandwich-in-a-croissant and a coffee. He and Vivian will have something to eat later. The snack-bar is on the second floor of the terminal. He sits at a table looking down into the arrival hall, reads the papers and fiddles with the crossword puzzles. There seem to be surprisingly few arrivals. Either it's a slow time of evening for flights or the new air terminal is big enough to disperse a planeload of people and make
them look sparse and insignificant. He watches Vivian's flight number slowly flicker its way to the top of the screen.

Vivian's flight via Toronto and one from somewhere in the Arctic arrive at the same time. She comes through the arrivals gate with a mixed bag of travellers. Some are in business suits, some in down parkas and improbable cowboy hats. Vivian wears her leather coat and has a self-sufficient air. Gerry feels he's seeing her for the first time. It hits him that he wants her, physically. Three days of dying and death have made him feel vibrantly alive.

This is why people are horny in wartime, he thinks. Ha ha, you missed me! The bells of hell go dingaling-aling, for you, but not for me...

He waves to Vivian and weaves through the small crowd to hug her.

It is the wrong side of midnight and Gerry and Vivian are sprawled naked in the teenager's-bedroom tangle of their motel room. The newness of place and oddness of circumstances seem to have worked for them. The room is lit only with the flicker of the TV with the sound turned to nothing. The baseboard heating hums and ticks and the room is warm. It smells funky with the scents of the love-making that ambushed them almost as soon as they walked in the door. It smells of Vivian's perfume and a medium vegetarian Greek pizza. The pizza box sits on a chair by the bed.

Vivian sits up and pours herself a glass of wine from the bottle on the night table. Gerry had picked it up that afternoon to welcome her. Her outline is indistinct in the TV lighting as she rolls on her side, glass in one hand, the other touching gingerly between her legs.

“Jesus, honey, I guess we needed that.”

Gerry is drinking diet pop, delivered with the pizza. “I know I bloody did.”

“Like a couple of kids,” Viv says. “You don't suppose we're getting too old for this stuff?”

Gerry's hand covers her exploring one. “Doesn't feel like it at the moment, does it?”

“Get me some Kleenex. Is there any more pizza left? Now I'm starved.”

“There's two chunks, a slice each, unless you want to save it for breakfast.”

Later still, they lie with the light out, separate but holding hands. They're flat on their backs talking to the invisible ceiling.

“I brought your blue suit and a couple of white shirts. I put in your new black shoes,” Vivian says. There's a silence. “How are you doing?”

“Not bad, really. It's funny. You build it up in your mind and then it's just over.”

“It wasn't like that with Dad,” Viv says. “He dropped down dead in the kitchen. That was a shock.”

The room is very dark. It has heavy drapes to keep the parking lot lights out. Gerry rolls closer to Viv.

“You aren't still horny?”

“What can I say? Coffins and naked women rubbing themselves with pizza turn me on. Nothing odd about Adamson.”

“Come here then,” Vivian says with vast patience.

She rises sleepily and invisibly around him like a tide of warm darkness, and after they've gasped and shuddered, they roll to the side and fall asleep apart.

The next morning, Gerry and Vivian are at the retirement home bright and early. Pale sun streams through bare November tree-branches outside the window as they rummage through drawers. In the home's garden below the window, black squirrels are busy. They importune residents seeking the last fall rays for food and they scrabble in flowerbeds for bulbs.

Vivian watches them from the window. Newfoundlander that she is, squirrels still have novelty value for her. For Gerry they're more nostalgia from childhood. He also knows that squirrels can be obnoxious as well as cute.

“Remember Tanya feeding the squirrels the first summer we came up here?” Vivian asks. Then she goes back to finding the right clothes for the funeral home. She purses her lips, discovering screw-ups in laundry that have been made over the years. She holds up a cotton nightgown with a teddy bear on it. “Where do you suppose that came from? It's nothing your mother ever wore.”

“You never know,” Gerry says. “Maybe she was a closet Care Bears fanatic.”

Vivian finds the dress she says Gerry's mother told her she wanted to be buried in. Gerry drives downtown with it, to drop it off at Underhill's. He asks after a florist his parents and aunts had done business with. Frank Underhill looks blank.

“They've been closed for years,” an assistant, a woman about Gerry's age, says.

Gerry thanks her. Then he gets the name of a reliable florist and orders flowers, and drives to his appointment with the minister.

The minister's name is Dr. Wallace and his office is in the basement of a church hall that Gerry still thinks of as new. It was opened the year he left the Cub Scouts. The corridor walls are covered with artwork from the daycare that inhabits a corner of the basement and rainbow emblems from the gay reading group that meets Tuesday nights. The smell, however, is familiar: a mixture of floor polish, children and dusty hymn books.

Dr. Wallace is a small, white-haired man with a ruddy face. Gerry thinks he would look at home coxing a rowing crew. His office is hung with pictures of grandchildren. There is a lumpy hand-thrown jug full of pens on the desk. It's painted in green and yellow stripes and inscribed
Grampy
. Dr. Wallace's tear-drop bicycle helmet hangs on the back of the door, and a corner of the bookshelf has back issues of
Mountain Bike
and some frayed Agatha Christies.

The minister shakes Gerry's hand and gets him a cup of very indifferent coffee. Then they sit, neither rushing to fill the silence. Gerry decides to speak first. “It must be difficult, being asked to sort of jump in here when we haven't been in touch with the church much.”

“Not as much as you'd think,” Wallace says. “My secretary, Mrs. Whillans, knew your mother quite well in the UCW years ago, and I've been to see Kit a couple of times.”

“I'm glad you've got the name right,” Gerry says, impressed. “I don't think one of your predecessors had ever met Dad when he buried him. His name was the same as mine, Gerald Edward, but everyone called him Ed, never Gerald. The poor minister never asked and we didn't think to tell him. He kept referring to him as Gerald.”

“It happens,” Dr. Wallace says.

In the course of half an hour, they decide that short, simple and traditional is what's called for.

“Would you like a hymn?” the minister asks as though he's offering after-dinner liqueurs. “Underhill's has quite a good little organ.”

“Can we sort of pencil it in?” Gerry asks. “Mom was awfully old and the notice is only in the paper today. We may only get a handful of family. If it's you and me in duet, we might scrub around it.”