The Big Why (17 page)

But good work, he said, gets done six hours after waking up from a hangover.

Like me, Gerald liked to speak the truth as the truth appeared to him. He’d had such a good summer, he was tanned. When he smiled, a dimple on his cheek opened up and the skin was white.

He said, You know what Alma said? She said, What kind of life can I have with this Gerald Thayer. There’s only two people my husband will eat with. And Rockwell Kent is one of them.

Gerald was broke before they were married. Alma said to me, I’m gonna take care of Gerald.

Me: I dont think love has to be like that.

It gave Gerald an anxious feeling. They lived hand to mouth. Alma had fifty-four cents. No, she said, money is coming in tomorrow.

They didnt have enough money for a marriage licence.

Me: Strange that you didnt have enough money.

Gerald: No it’s not. We often dont have enough.

At the behest of his wife, Gerald had begun clipping his nostril hair. I knew him when his nostrils were abundant with hair. I liked him that way. This is what married life does to some men: it restrains them. Or they become conscious of scrutiny. Most women are aware of this without getting married. It ruins people, this reconciliation with majority perception. Later in life Gerald liked to carry a roll of dental floss.

We were so theoretical in those days. We thought we could control the heart.

As we ate it grew colder and we thought about going in. Gerald noticed a woman inside plunge her fork into a table full of yellow flowers — it was a pot of flowers outside the window that seemed to sit on her table. She was eating alone. Well, she was eating with a book.

Me: She knows how to dress for summer.

Gerald: She knows how to dress for all occasions.

We went inside for a drink. We stood at the bar. It had darkened, and Gerald Thayer watched the woman’s reflection in the window — outside the yellow flowers, their stems pushing through her head as if attempting to rub out her poise.

Someone at the bar said, Did you say read the box score?

Another: I said read the Bible.

Gerald: What’s your favourite bit of the Bible.

Me: When Jesus allows Mary to wash his feet. She dries them in her hair. And then she uses that expensive ointment.

How lavish, how decadent, yes.

I watched Gerald Thayer slam his hands against the bar and go over to her. She said to him, Good to meet you.

Gerald: We’ve met before.

I dont remember.

Gerald: You dont recognize me with all my clothes on.

Pause.

I’m joking. What are you reading.

The woman looked up and said, It’s not that important.

Gerald was ordering the drinks. He looked old. He was less than twenty-five.

You love architecture, he said, with animals. Or figures with a lifted leg.

It makes them look more relaxed, she said.

Like the caryatids, he said. How they carry weight on their heads and yet have one knee bent, to make the roof light.

With lions it’s a rampant gesture.

Her pale blue eye appeared between Gerald’s lips. That was the angle I saw them at. So as he spoke, bent over to her, it was as if his lips were massaging her eye.

The rest of the night was the drink and my saying goo night to Gerald Thayer as he took Jenny Starling back to her apartment. He wiggled his eyebrows at me as they left. A bicycle ran over an empty cigarette package. He woke up, he told me later, with scratches on his face from her earrings.

Gerald Thayer could not take her on, could not take care of Jenny Starling. He was married, so he sent me in. Jenny Starling, the divorcee musician with a house on the island of Monhegan as part of her settlement with Luis Starling. It was an excuse to go there. I ended up spending a year on Monhegan, built a house, learned to lobster fish, and Jenny and I were together for two hundred days, though I could not promise her anything. It was this trust thing. I could not allow her to be open. My refusal to let her be open caused her anguish, for it closed her down and she grew weary. She was so smart to grow weary.

Then I met Kathleen Whiting.

It was her youth and utter devotion. It was the way she closed her eyes before she nodded her head. The way she played with children. There was no risk, really, and at the time life was a struggle to achieve grace. I knew there would be no war out of Kathleen Whiting. I could dominate her. I’m not sure I knew this then, but I learned my lesson. About being loved. How the worth is in the giving. The permission to be oneself.

The truth: one is erratic when one is of high hopes. I would say that if you were involved with someone who is on the cusp of exuberance, who feels the wing of inspired thought, my advice is to beware. But more: there is no one else to be with. Be with them. You may as well get into it as live a life of hesitation.

Gerald visited us in Monhegan. How he murmured at Jenny’s description of an oar stirring a phosphorescent shoal. But it wasnt even an oar, it was a comparison to the oar. The thing was Gerald Thayer’s fingers stirring up a trail on the inside of Jenny Starling’s thigh. And Gerald murmured at that and I knew he would fall in love with her. He had slept with her, but I am talking about the heart. When a man lets out such a sound. It is a betrayal of the inner course, and that course will have its way even though he is unaware of it at that moment. I heard the sound of
mmm
come from his throat, hardly out of his mouth but through the skin of his throat, and I knew that body would be after her.

It felt like the final chapter in my life with Jenny Starling, now that our son was dead.

Kathleen: Tom Dobie looks like he’s working hard not to do anything.

Me: It takes a lot of effort on his part to stop from doing something.

No, this is it — he looks like he’s trying hard to stop himself from doing something bad.

I love you.

Kathleen: I love you too.

Would you say that out of a hundred times that I love you gets said, you say it first forty times, and then I reply, I love you too. And I say I love you first maybe thirty times, and you say back, I love you too. We each say I love you about thirty times without it being answered.

It’s just a lone I-love-you.

Me: So, on average, youre moved to say I love you slightly more than me.

Yes, that’s true.

It is?

Yes.

Youve noticed.

Well, you noticed too.

But I was assuming I was a little crazy.

No, I know what you mean.

The important thing is for change in belief to occur. If one is born an atheist, one should become spiritual. A person with no change is not searching. My wife was a Christian and she stayed a Christian. For the fifteen years she was with me she suppressed her feelings. But she had an underground river of Christianity that bubbled up in fissures through the years.

A death in the family can be an agent for change. I wondered what my son’s death would mean. Would it renew my faith. My father’s death had caused me to question my belief in God.

Kathleen peeled apples for a pie. You rotate the apple around the centre of the peeling. It is a motion I caught her doing, so as to keep the apple turning clockwise and the peeling to unravel counter-clockwise. There was something in this that explained how we peel away time and yet manage to return to it.

Kathleen was singing a song, over and over. Or maybe she was singing several songs. But it sounded the same. Until Rocky growled, How long is this song anyway.

Tom Dobie looked at Rocky’s face: The eyes of him. He’s just like a husky.

Me: He’s just like you.

Kathleen said a dog had followed her. A three-legged dog. She paints a white mark down her forehead and nose. A beautiful —

Cape Shore water dog, Tom said. And smiled. Yep, a registered breed. I once had a dog, he said, with only two legs. One in front and one behind. It’d be like a bicycle. Every time he stopped he’d have to lie down.

Tom Dobie and Stan Pomeroy at the head of the wharf, their legs splayed, sorting through their fish. How theyre elbow-deep into fish. They were tossing crab into the water.

Can I have some crab.

Stan: You gonna eat that stuff. We’ll set you aside a tub if you stop sketching off pictures.

Then he wanted to see what I had of him.

Tom: He lines that off pretty good, dont he.

Stan: He marked out a likeness of me there.

Then they turned to watch a small boat come in.

Tom: Look at that skiff.

Dory.

She’s a skiff.

She’s a dory, boy.

Go on, you useless article.

Look at the rake on her.

Look at the side, the ramp.

Okay, a flat.

She’s a dory, okay? A dory.

What about that
V
in the back there.

That’s a little skiffish. But she’s a dory.

What about —

Ah shut your face.

Go fuck yourself.

Kathleen boiled the crab. I laid newspapers over the kitchen table. The children could see I was excited. There was pepper and fresh bread and butter. I had them sit down to this. I gave them each a large napkin. Then we tore into the crab. We pulled the meat out of their shells. The children chewing on the pliable hoses of their legs. We boiled another batch. We had enough for three boils. I got the water galloping and we sat there and ran out of bread. We were delighted with the work. Then I realized it was no work at all. It was pleasure. So often I mix up work and pleasure. It’s true that I’ve hardly ever felt like I’ve worked. For me it’s all about eating as much crab as you can.

I decided to get to work on the tennis court. There were six boulders on the Hearn field. Five I dug out with a pick and rolled to the side, and one I left to bury. I dug a hole to the side of it and pushed it in. I felt like a gravedigger. Tom Dobie and Stan and Tony Loveys were trimming logs nearby: shores, beams, and longers for their flake.

They might lose some brinkles, Tom said, but that makes them better.

They worked at their work and I worked at play. I filled a barrel with stone and rigged a set of handles from a grass cutter and pulled the barrel over the field. This is grooming. This is flattening a fallow field. Jim Hearn came over.

What are you doing.

Waiting for a train.

He thought about that. Now that’s not very friendly.

I decided to stop. Youre right, Jim. You are correct. And I’m trying to change my behaviour. I’m trying to be gentle. In the way that gentle is meant. Truth is, I hate being asked obvious questions, Jim, but youre only trying to be neighbourly.

He said that there was an old seining net over at Chafe’s, and that Bud Chafe had tennis racquets and gear better than what they had in town even.

I rolled my field. While Hearn watched. My children watched. I let my anger melt away. I did this for three solid days. I made a parcel of flat earth.

Me: Do you think we’re good.

Kathleen: Yes, we’re good.

Me: We’re good and smart, arent we.

We’re not bad.

We’re smarter than most. We’re pretty important, arent we. I mean, our friends think — theyre impressed by us.

I dont think we should be saying this.

We’re just saying it to ourselves.

I’m not comfortable.

We’re not boasting.

But it could lead to something. It could affect us.

I just want it said. I want it acknowledged privately.

I dont think anything stays private. It leaks out.

Kathleen: Theyre not an attractive fish, the codfish.

Me: A third of them is face.

After dinner we put the children to bed and then stepped out. You abandoned children in those days. We walked into Brigus proper while the moon rose and ate the clouds. You could feel the heat of the land come up and warm you. There were voices ahead. We turned onto a small road. There was an argument. A young couple beside Hearn’s pharmacy. Their dark shapes slewing into each other. There were wrists being grabbed. We stopped. I held Kathleen’s hand.

It’s Tom Dobie, I said.

And Emily Edwards. But I did not say this. The door to Billy Cole’s shebeen was open, light pouring out. There were men’s voices. A man in the doorway spat on the ground. Emily was pushing Tom up against the boards of the pharmacy. Tom took it. Then the man stepped away from the light. The man laughed and I could see now that it was Stan Pomeroy. Tom said something. Stan Pomeroy bent down and took up a shovel. He tested the weight of it. He hoisted it back, very slowly, and swung the flat of it like a baseball bat. It swung through the air, and the face of the shovel flashed in the light, then it caught Tom full in the chest. It staggered him. He collapsed under a window. There was a scream, and it was Emily. She launched herself at Stan, pushing him off.