Happiness of Fish (4 page)

As the writing sessions went on, Gerry watched his group-mates.

There was the woman who always arrived at the last minute dressed in running gear. Her name was Pamela and she had a slightly explosive look. Gerry would wonder if she was going to read or break dishes or burst into tears. She had a full knuckle of wedding and engagement rings, but talked about having been dropped off by her boyfriend. She seemed to be doing the workshop either as therapy or as a form of martial arts training in preparation for some great retributive war.

“My ex would kill me if he knew I was going to write a book,” she said. Then she asked, “You can't get sued if you change the names, right?”

Pamela seemed to be deputizing the group to be on guard for prowling former husbands or their spies. She wrote and read angrily
and fast in the first person. She didn't seem to understand any discussion of synthesis in fiction and made no bones about being her own protagonist, in fact, her own heroine.

Walking home on nice nights, or driving on miserable ones, Gerry would wonder if he was his own hero in his writing. Mostly he felt he was only the stage things were acted out on. He felt littered by bits and pieces of other people, like the traffic jam of corpses at the end of
Hamlet
.

As an assignment Gerry tried to write about himself and Patricia in their early days. He called them George and Paula.

“Hey hey, Paula,” he hummed as he wrote.

Fragment: Streets

It seems to him that they spent a lot of time on the streets then. He supposes it was a function of not having a car. They walked a lot for cheap recreation and for the buses they needed to take them to their jobs and sometimes to the mall. The mall was still new then. When people heard you'd just arrived in town, they'd ask if you had been to the mall yet
.

George and Paula were new to St. John's and childishly delighted with what they found in its streets. They'd compare notes on the mute shoeshine boy who gargled a greeting at them as they walked to the bus stop or to the narrow liquor store opposite the war memorial for a bottle of cheap wine. The shoeshine boy had a gaudy painted box to rest your foot on. It was decorated with hand-painted American flags and Union Jacks, harking back to the war days when the shoeshine boy had started in his trade and had really been a boy and not a gnarled little man with a lot of grey showing under his cap. The shoeshine box also had religious medals tacked onto it
.

“They say he doesn't really give a very good shoeshine,” George reported to Paula. “He'll polish your socks if you're not careful.”

George got a job with a newspaper that let him hang out in bars a lot and get the lowdown on the street characters. Paula was working in a boutique. She didn't want to teach just yet and get into that whole middle-class thing. The boutique was called The Vales of Har. In the basement they had a second-hand bookstore called The Books of Thel. They got a fair number of customers who didn't get the Blake references and were looking for science fiction. They got enough that they finally had to stock some
.

Often, as George walked Paula to work, they'd meet the two little musical winos who used to dance the length of Duckworth Street. They were jockey-sized men who wore old suit jackets over layers of shirts. In cold weather they pulled the lapels shut across their chests with one hand. One played the harmonica, not-too-badly. The other did a shuffling step-dance to the music. They never stayed in one place but shuffled along like some archaic sky-driven street-cleaning device. At times the wind seemed to propel them around the corners
.

In the evenings, George and Paula built a papier maché wino. They made a frame of chicken wire that George bought at Neyle-Soper Hardware, crimping it together with pliers. Then they made flour and water paste and slathered strips of newspaper over it in layers. It dried poorly in the apartment and grew some spots of mould. They thought that was great
.

“Wino-rot, far out!”

“Intimations of mortality built right in...”

They dressed their wino in the same sort of thrift-store clothes they bought for themselves, including a salt-and-pepper cap like George's. They darkened the eye sockets and sketched features with magic marker, but in the end they decided against painting their creation. His complexion was a fog of smudged print and dried mould. They stabilized the surface with artist's spray shellac. The wino had a small loop of wire protruding above his collar at the back that let him be hung bashfully in a corner. A cigarette butt, smoked to a filter stub, was glued to his lips
.

When they didn't have a major project like the wino to work on and neither had to work in the evening, they'd sit in their crow's nest top-floor apartment that creaked like a ship when the wind funnelled through the narrow harbour entrance and swept up the street. Paula painted watercolours at the kitchen table. She painted pitcher plants and bunches of dogberries and sold them on consignment at The Vales of Har. They actually sold quite well. Paula painted in a mock-Victorian, ladylike, tidy style that middle-class housewives, slumming at The Vales, thought pretty
.

George read or settled at his Woolco Smith Corona portable at a shaky worktable in the corner of their living room. His two-finger typing made the table wobble as he wrote. They had a cork bulletin board on one living room wall, an organic collage of whatever they were doing. When George finished a poem he'd pin it to the board for contemplation next to the doodles and
evil little caricatures that Paula did. She drew the ladies in fur coats who bought Mexican and Indian jewellery for the nights they were being Bohemian or who played art patron by acquiring her watercolours
.

“Don't you have one with more green, dear?” she'd mimic. “I'm doing the kitchen avocado.”

They also clipped George's stories out of the newspapers and put them on the wall. They still weren't used to seeing him validated in print. It seemed incredibly grown-up to have words you'd written available on doorsteps and under newsboys' arms every morning
.

“Why should we care about these people making a chicken-wire wino?” asked Leona, the woman who ran the writing workshop. She had written a novel about the Labrador coast.

Because we did, Gerry thought. Because we thought the world was new and wonderful, warts and all. We wanted to build wart monuments.

He was tempted to add that no polar bears ate their children and, in fact, they didn't have children. He said something else though, something a bit disloyal to his Paula/Patricia and George/Gerry.

“It's setting a scene,” he said. “It's showing how naïve they are.”

He reflected that it wasn't the first time he'd betrayed Patricia, or himself. We were together then. We still came home.

“I had two kids just starting school then,” Vivian said, when he tried to tell her about how the group is going and how his Paula and George were received.

Another member of the writing group was a short, boiled-looking man who used to be a purser on a coastal boat until booze got the better of him. His name was Nish and Gerry had met him before at AA meetings. Nish wanted to write about some of the funny things he'd heard or seen on the boats. He wrote larger-than-life snappy endings that sometimes got away from him. One night he read a story that Gerry remembered having heard somewhere else from some of his coastal boat acquaintances.

“The mate was a hard-spoken man, common as pig shit,” Nish read. “And when the owner's wife and family were coming aboard, the captain told him to watch his language. He told him to refer to the toilet as ‘the facilities' and ask if the ladies would like to wash their hands.”

Nish gripped the school notebook he wrote in, readying himself for the climax of the story.

“The mate was nice as pie as they all came aboard,” he said, seeming to swell with anticipation. “Then he says, ‘Ladies, the facilities is right this way, and if you wants to wash your hands, you can piss in this bucket here.'”

One wet night, Gerry gave Nish a ride home. He was living in a bed-sitter in Rabbittown.

“The wife and me split up,” he told Gerry. “I'm going to write a book and show her I can do something.”

Gerry wondered if that was what he was trying to do himself, but he kept going to the workshop. It had an optimism he liked. One night a woman announced she had just sold a radio commentary. Her name was Jan and she normally did something clerical in a theatre company.

“It's a program for people who've never been on the radio before,” she said. “It's great. You just write it and read it and they give you money, it's neat.”

Gerry had heard of the program. He wondered if she'd sell another piece or learn to lurch from one short radio gig to the next the way he did. Then he realized he was a hooker listening to a bride. Jan didn't care. She had done something and got it out there in front of an audience. She was immortal. Gerry envied her the feeling. The millions of words he had spilled onto newsprint or into microphones over the years didn't delight him much. He wanted that first-time feeling compacted into an artefact. He wanted to jump out of the aimless archaeological dig of his life and wave it and yell, “Eureka.”

On another drizzly morning Gerry sits in the more austere and bohemian of his two coffee shops and lets the random thoughts come.

How many of us are writing in here today? he writes. At least three: the blonde girl in the T-shirt at the window, the guy with the chef's clogs and the laptop at the back table, and me
.

Gerry's little notebook fills pleasantly fast. There's something to be said for writing tiny thoughts on little pages in a small book. It seems to bridge a stylistic gap, poetry ripening into prose, he hopes.

The pages look pleasantly cluttered and busy, like bird tracks in snow under a bush that still has a few berries in early winter. He wonders how you translate bird tracks into characters.

“A circle is defined by its tangents,” Gerry says half aloud as he writes it. He wonders what a circle being defined by its tangents would look like modelled on a computer screen.

It starts as just the line circle, the circumference. Tangents dart out of nowhere at the edges of the screen and glance off it, spermatozoa with bad aim bouncing off an impermeable round egg in some existential sex-education class. As many points as exist in the circumference, there will be tangents to touch them. The space around the blank circle becomes a weave of crosshatched tangents getting infinitely darker and denser. In time there is only the blank circle on a black field.

How about the inside of the circle? What happens there? What's going on with all the chords and secants?

What the hell is a secant? Gerry asks himself. He sort of thinks he knows, but he'll have to check in the frayed high-school geometry book he lugged back from his mother's house in case it might help him learn navigation. He tries to relate what goes on inside and outside the circle. Imagine chords drawn in between all the points the tangents touch, then all the equal angles subtended by the chords. The inside of the circle blooms in a million equiangular petals, layer upon layer. It seems to Gerry that more is happening inside than outside the imaginary circle.

Geometry as a first cause, he writes. What do the math people say about that? What about inherent darkening of enclosed circles, insides innately more mysterious than outsides?

The coffee grinder roars beside him and there's a fine dark smell of coffee.

Dark sucks when surrounded by a circle, he writes, but can't resist adding, There's a fine piece of obscure wankery.

Gerry and Vivian are waiting at the airport for two-thirds of her kids to come home. By some miracle of on-line booking, Tanya, the youngest, and Duane, the eldest, and his family are both arriving on the same plane from Toronto. Tanya is coming in from Alberta, and Duane and his family can get to Newfoundland from where they live, near Ottawa, quicker by flying to Toronto and meeting her there. They're all travelling on one of the one or two-syllable airlines that seem to pop up like mushrooms on the arrival screens these days, Zip or Zap or Bingo. It amazes Gerry that, if he shops around, he can get to places on the mainland as cheaply, or even more cheaply, than he could thirty years ago. In some cases he thinks he's even flying on the same planes. Bingo, or whatever line it was he last used to get to Ottawa, flew the old familiar Boeing 737's like the ones Eastern Provincial flew in the old days. They had tall, pretty young flight attendants who sang summer-camp-style songs to their passengers. Unlike thirty years ago, though, they charged for everything. Cheezies cost a dollar. Dubious-looking sandwiches cost five bucks or more. Gerry wondered if they had antique value. Maybe they had been discovered, stashed in
the old planes. Bottled water had to be paid for and people did. Gerry remembers free double Scotches and being blissfully buzzed by Halifax.

Gerry and Vivian wait by the arrival gate. She's craning and stretching in her leather coat to look for Duane and Gretchen and their kids, Joshua and Natalie. Gerry looks at her beside him, hair short and recently gone redder, big hoop earrings and a good scarf tied around the strap of her bag. The snow is still holding off and she's wearing low, black walking shoes, jeans and a sweater.

“We look good for breathless grandparents,” he says. He's being conciliatory. They'd argued over when to leave for the airport. They often argue about when to leave for things. Gerry likes to go early and hang out. Vivian favours a last-minute dash. When they go somewhere together, they both manage to feel rushed and pressured.

“There they are,” Vivian says, neutrally. A truce has been arrived at. “Wave. You're taller. They'll see you.”

Gerry waves and watches the family come down the steps.