Part 3 (1/2)

I said I'm having great fun with my characters. Because it's all set in the past. I describe Josh and Toby and Heart's Desire. About the research I've done on the American painter and of Bob Bartlett's trips to the North Pole. I'm using Max and Lydia and others as these historical characters. Max is going to be my Rockwell Kent. My father might be Bob Bartlett. That way, I can be present in the past.

Maisie says, So who am I?

I havent used you. Yet.

And she's disappointed.

30 The harbour is caught over with a thin ice sheet. A transport vessel, the ASL Sanderling, slices through the ice on its way to Montreal. It leaves a cold blue strip of linoleum behind it. It'll be back in six days. The Astron left yesterday and the Cabot will arrive tomorrow Cold days, the heater on behind me. The light is marbled, you see the current of the harbour. Gulls standing on the ice as the raw sewage surfaces. Sewage melts the ice.

Through the Narrows a thin line of open Atlantic. The hills that pinch the horizon have been trying for ten thousand years to acc.u.mulate topsoil. I love how you can see an entire afternoon's walk. The sweep of one topographical map playing itself out. Enough variety to keep me busy with a pair of binoculars. When Grenfell, a hundred years ago, first entered this port the entire city was still smouldering, burnt to the ground, only chimneys left standing, the sides of churches. These same churches.

Iris is downstairs. She's making coffee for Helmut. Helmut has large hands and his longest finger is his ring finger. You notice the ring fingers when he's gesturing. It's an attractive gesture.

31 Lydia's off to Halifax for a week. So we spend the day together. We sharpen our skates and drive to the Punchbowl. Max and Oliver and some kids have cleared the ice. There's a hockey game and there's a loop ploughed off the ice. I watch Oliver lean into a turn and cross his skates. A fluid hockey player, a product of the minor leagues. I never played hockey, except in the backyard on a rink made out of water from a hose. I skate behind Lydia, tuck down and hold on to her hips, and she leans ahead and tows me.

Max has a fire going in the woods beside the pond. He's having a boil-up, hot dogs and coffee. He's brought birch junks from home. Life is good.

February.

1 Lydia left this morning for Halifax to work on a script. It's not her script, but the money is good and she feels better when she's working. I am at the s.h.i.+p, having a drink with Max and Maisie. Max is holding his shaved head. The stubble is coming through and right now there is the outline of a cat's ears at his temples, so it's like he's stroking a cat. It gives him a devilish look, as though faded horns are burning through his scalp and he is trying to tame them. Max is building cabinets or Oliver and Maisie. But he is articulating one of his dreams, his hands up, gesturing wildly. He wants to make moulds of men's a.s.ses and hang the moulds in a row in a gallery.

Max: Also, I want to bolt a giant erect fibregla.s.s c.o.c.k onto the Royal Trust building. The c.o.c.k would be a sundial.

Maisie: That's funny. I just wrote today that the protagonist acts as a gnomon for the action.

Me: All over town, little strips of snow are hiding in the shadows of chimney stacks. The white strip angled north away from the sun. The chimney is a gnomon.

Maisie: When the world is a sundial, everything looks like a gnomon.

Max: Can I take a mould of your a.s.s, Gabe?

You can have my a.s.s, Max. And that's my limit.

2 I should be writing the novel, but instead I concentrate on Lydia. Remembering how she smelled a pair of gloves and knew who owned them. How can I turn that into a historical moment? Moments never attenuate. Moments are compressed into the dissolve of real time. I will never forget how she looked when she smelled those gloves. They were Wilf's gloves. She could smell cigarettes, she said. Mixed in with an indefinable personal scent, unmistakably Wilf's. I will have Rockwell Kent's wife have this ability. But Kathleen Kent is nothing like Lydia. Lydia is firmly planted, no-nonsense, strong clavicles and shoulders. She is attractive because of her mixture of gumption and beauty. Whereas Kathleen has a silent, introspective quality. She is serene. Lydia would never have thought that identifying an owner of gloves by smelling them was a special gift, unless I told her so. Kathleen Kent would know it was a skill worth prizing.

3 From my bedroom window I can watch Maisie walk down Parade Street with groceries. She's wearing a yellow raincoat. Una skids down the ice ahead of her. On the southside, skiffs are bunched together, hiding from the weather behind a rusting trawler. Two coast guard vessels, the Henry Larson and the Sir Wilfred Grenfell, are nose to nose, having a conversation about the cold.

I wait until Maisie is in her porch. I can see her run for the phone.

You should close your front door, missus.

Who is this.

I've frightened her. It's Gabe, I say.

Jeez, boy.

I tell her I'm reading about the barber who noticed Midas had big ears. The barber has to tell someone, though he has sworn to Midas that he will keep the secret. He digs a hole and whispers the gossip into the hole and buries it. But when the wind rustles through the gra.s.s, it is saying Midas has big ears. This is the story of all good fiction. A good story whispers whenever there's a breeze. You can dig a hole and bury your story, but the words will emerge from the undergrowth. Let the story whisper down the reader's backbone.

Maisie says I'm getting a little too poetic for her taste.

4 I pick up Lydia at the airport. She is full of people she met in Halifax. She tells me details of people I do not know. She tells me who she's attracted to. She says, You should have taken a left there. I say to her, I like going this way. She says, That way is shorter. This makes me tight. Lydia believes there is a right way and I believe there are many ways. This is a truth about our personalities. I was thinking this while I watched her plane pivot over the airport. I saw it, bright on a wing over chopped acres of Newfoundland winter Lydia said it looked like a thousand white sandwiches at a funeral. I walk in to stand by the luggage carousel. There's a crowd. I hear an attendant say, St John's is unique. The number of locals that come to greet the landed. I see Lydia. Her funky gla.s.ses and the angle of her jawline. At a distance, she's always smaller. Perhaps I judge size only from a distance. We hug and we are strangers, smiling a little too energetically. She avoids kissing me on the lips. It depresses me. We climb into Jethro, a cold air between us. As I'm driving I watch her wrist twist the rear-view mirror and apply lipstick. This makes the sadness melt.

I say, Youre a fas.h.i.+on cougar. And she laughs.

She says, When you travel, time rushes at you and past you and then you come home and bang! time stands still and you have to walk through it again.

It's like that optical illusion you get in a car that's been speeding all day and you stop for gas and the earth slowly slinks away as if youre in reverse. That's how Lydia has felt over the last few days. As if St John's is slowly moving away from her, she can't really get into it again.

Me: Or want to get into it.

Maybe that's it. When I'm alone I think of men who live in other cities. Whereas you think of women you'll see today.

I nod agreement to this.

She says, Arent you going to ask if I had an affair?

I say, I know you.

Oh, she says, there's lots I get by you.

5 There's an old woman in lane one with a white bathing cap. She's doing little push-away strokes and a few slow crawl strokes, neck arched way back.

It has taken me thirty-six days of the new year to begin exercising. I will do forty laps. I'm not in bad shape.

When she gets out it's slow up the chrome steps. She barely hauls herself out. A large savannah mammal. She finds her walking cane by the steps. Her knock knees. Thin legs and wide back. I think, if Lydia is like this at seventy-four I can still love her. Then I see she's one of the two slender, well-dressed ladies who shop at Coleman's. So careful to get to her chair. Where there's a bag and towel. She drapes the white towel over her shoulder, like angel's wings. I finish my laps. Twelve then twenty then eight, but I'm not tired (except my neck) and it's more the monotony. I catch up to her as she's still carefully reaching the women's showers, but she doesnt recognize me. For I am disguised as well in bathing trunks.

6 Max Wareham says he fell for Daphne Yarn because her eyes watered whenever it was windy. He noticed an inner light in her eyes that mirrored her external being. I said, Are you saying she has a serene beauty? No, he says, she has a deep laugh that undercuts the composure. But I've found a connective force, some adhesion, and this force pushed me to commit.

Max says, I'm crazy enough for two people. I need someone anch.o.r.ed.

He says his mother married his father after he asked her to dance to Hank Williams. They waltzed and he told her of his dog opening doors with its teeth, and she laughed.

He says, Now you with Lydia. I've never seen a man so c.u.n.tstruck.

I thought about that word all day. c.u.n.tstruck. I had to go out for a walk with it. It was a little dog that I put on a leash and let wander ahead of me. It was one oclock, the night's first puny hour. I stepped outside, preparing for it to feel like the furthest thing from summer. But a wind from the Gulf of Mexico had drifted in off course. You could smell the heat. Redolent and c.u.n.tstruck. It's true. Tonight should have been the coldest night on earth, and yet the soft wind reminded me of summer. I thought of the wind in s.e.xual terms. That this wind was having an affair with my little dog.

7 I write three pages on an old man who lives in Frogmarsh, near Brigus. I'm calling him the remittance man and I'm basing him on Wilf. He's done a bad deed in England and fled to the colony. A novel needs evil men. While driving, the remittance man sees a car broken down, a couple, and stops. He gives the man a lift to the nearest gas station. The man's wife stays with the car. At the station, the man says he can find his way back. But the remittance man, instead of continuing on, doubles back. He picks up the wife. He says, Your husband asked me to bring you to the gas station. She gets in, but the remittance man drives past the station. He pulls in to a dirt road that leads to a salvage yard.

This is all plot and action. And invented. It doesnt interest me.

8 When I think of G.o.d I think of a voice in my chest I tell promises to. I will not lie. I will give away a hundred dollars this month. I will not read Lydia's journal. I will praise others and not myself. I will steal only from corporations. I will not fool myself about the truth of my actions.

This type of promise builds you. It is the moral foundation.

I do not want to write another word on couples. On the words they tell each other. On detail. I have no interest in this. I want insight. So often my interests are prurient and carnal. I want to leap, rather than be hemmed by the drudgery of copying down rote event. There is nothing wrong with deluding yourself. I must pinpoint motive and repercussion.