Part 24 (1/2)

Taylor makes them.

Oh, it's Taylor.

The eighteen-wheelers wait in line, snorting exhaust, the Taylor operator does not hesitate. He spends less than five seconds at the side of the transport truck, his hydraulic front end (at least forty feet high) clamps onto the container is it magnetic? lifts, the rear wheels pivot, he swings towards the neat stack of blue containers awaiting an Oceanex vessel. He pivots the rear wheels, returns to the next truck. The previous truck now making a slow loop around the stacked containers.

5 I attend Boyd's trial. I sit with Lydia and we share a look. That beyond it all life is peculiar, we're healthy and blessed, and we are curious. We are not going to be mean to each other. Oliver Squires allows Boyd to confess to taking 114 items from eight houses in the neighbourhood. His neighbours are all present. Boyd says it wasnt personal. He just needed things now and again and he was tired of waiting in line to pay for things. He says he's sorry.

The judge sentences him to three years.

6 Alex says things tailored for me. The ideas seem to be performed or moulded to what she thinks I'd like to hear. It's flattering but annoying. Because I want her to be herself. Lydia never did that, unless she was talking to Craig Regular. Perhaps we do it to those we have crushes on. I hate seeing it in Lydia, because it implies the person she is talking to is out of her reach.

7 Alex says, Have you ever been to the synagogue? Come on, let's go.

It's Hanukkah. A wall of windows made from Stars of David.

Alex: You might be expected to wear a keepah there's a box of them at the door.

Is that the same as a yarmulke?

Yes.

Does this one fit?

It's fine, Gabe.

In a cold room plaques of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, proclamations during the Yom Kippur War. In 1931 Hymen Feder donated three dollars. A Chagall print of Moses with the Torah.

Alex says all synagogues smell the same. A mixture of must and stale seeds. She says only five people attend Friday meetings. It's outport Judaism, she says.

How do you know so much about it?

I keep an interest in what goes on, Gabe.

We sit in the warm room at a table near the stage. There is to be a children's play. The play has a scientist refusing to go to the Hanukkah party. When her friends leave, she is killed during a chemical discovery. Moral: beware the works of man.

We are sitting with a doctor and his wife. They are both learning Hebrew There are no vowels. Alex asks if sh.e.l.lfish can be kosher. No, the doctor says, because they are scavengers on the bottom.

He sticks out his hands and scrabbles his fingers over the tablecloth, the cloth gathers under his fingers until a gla.s.s topples. Scavengers, he says again.

8 Una and I watch Max filing pyrophyllite. He sits cross-legged and wears a surgical mask. The soapstone is from Manuels. He pulls down the mask and smiles. Newfoundland, he says, has the best stone in the world. He's doing this piece for Daphne, it's slightly abstract. Near his knees are wedges of cast-off stone. That's a tail of a humpback, Una says.

Max says, You can have the humpback.

When I say a new word, like pyrophyllite, I have a propensity to forget it.

Una's game when we're walking home: Why does underwear start with an H?

Why?

Because they lie in a heap on the floor.

9 Maisie's favourite found poem is: thick fat back loose lean salt beef. We are walking up from the s.h.i.+p. She opens a frail yellow umbrella. The poem was on a piece of s.h.i.+rt card in Vey's corner store for ten years. Now Vey's has been sold, renovated, and is for sale again as a house. There was a pot-bellied wood-stove between the aisles.

Maisie says there's wonder in this life. I say, And bewilderment. Thank you, Gabe. That's the word.

10 Alex says, There's your Christmas present. I look behind me, Where. There, she says. In the near vision I see a tight filament of dental floss and a small box hanging from it. At eye level. You look in the box. The box has a gla.s.s front that's been sandblasted except for an eye, which you can look through. At the back of the box is another eye. It is a photograph of my eye. Then she shows me bits of furniture she's made: wooden arms for a chair. Human arms. She's adding pearls and chunks of mirror. Alex has sculpted an ear that she carved by feeling her own ear. She carved from touch. Translating touch into vision.

Alex wants to build a corner camera. You stand at an intersection and the two barrels of the camera take a picture of both streets converging. The photographic paper is at a right angle and you mount the photo in the corner of a room to get the correct perspective. Of two streets meeting. I say, Does such a camera exist? Alex: No. I'm going to invent one.

She says she's bored with flat art.

We eat off plates made of fired clay.

Everything in Alex's house is art.

We bake squash stuffed with lemon and dates and mushrooms and garlic.

We drink the wine and I walk home in the clear, cold air.

Sometimes you can see more in night air than you can in the day. Maybe it's the city lights.

11 Oliver talks of legal scandals. He's not the only lawyer to have left his wife for a paralegal student. He puts on his overcoat, a new coat for him. I say, Nice coat. He says that Maisie never liked it on him. That it's grubby. She's got something against second-hand clothes. It's okay if you have money. But for the poor, it marks you as poor.

I tell this to Maisie later. And I say, The coat is a bit grubby. Yes, she says. Fact is, it doesnt look good on him.

12 Max: When they were building the office tower, I didnt think it would ruin the view. At first, the scaffolding around the infrastructure blocked only a little bit of the Narrows. It wasnt offensive. I thought I could live with that. Seemed a narrow building. Then I found out that was only the elevator shaft. So we grew trees in the backyard and now there's nothing.

13 I watch Craig Regular walking out of a restaurant carrying an Obusforme for his back. Tinker b.u.mbo at his side.

Craig holds the door. He is holding the door open for Lydia.

I follow them. I havent allowed myself to think that they really are an item.

They enter the Mighty White laundromat.

I stroke Tinker, who wags, blind, but his nose knows me. I think of the dog that saved Ernest Chafe. Chafe, lost in a storm, tied his sled dog to his wrist. The dog sniffed his way back to camp.

Craig is pus.h.i.+ng detergent along the lid of a public was.h.i.+ng machine, coaxing it down the crack in the lid. Wiping his hand over the lid to get all the blue detergent down. His money's worth.

Now, he's trying on a new s.h.i.+rt. I can tell that Lydia has bought the s.h.i.+rt. She tells him to try it on. Does she want to see if it will fit?

They get in Lydia's car. I follow in mine. They drive into the Battery. To Craig's house beyond the yellow rail.

I sit in the car and watch them through Craig's kitchen window. It is a beautiful window that looks back over St John's. His view is the reverse of my view.

There are two frozen salmon steaks hauled out to thaw. Their pink skin crystallizing to a hot white. Craig turns on a light and closes the curtains.

14 There is a warm wind blowing, a soft b.u.t.tery moon. Max baked a brie with glazed crushed walnuts, a date on top. There is fresh-baked sourdough bread. We dip chunks into the melted brie and drink wine.

I ask Daphne what they did today.