Sometimes, I say, it feels like you dont understand me. You dont like how I behave. You wish I were another way.

Yes, she says. I agree with that. But I also resent that you compare me with others.

I say, I should be cherished every day.

Lydia suddenly laughs, agreeing. And there is a melt between us.

21 E-mail from Maisie: she woke up last night to singing. She went downstairs and found three sailors in her Lemarchant Road kitchen, with jugs of liquor and food. They cheered her. They were Portuguese. She had to yell at them and they were confused. She pointed to the door, but they would not go. So she called the police.

Today, in court, she found out that the house she has rented used to be a brothel. The Portuguese come every year. They didnt know. Their ship was leaving port today and Oliver, who represented them, asked her to drop the charges. She did, on one condition: they make a plaque that says, in three languages, This House Is Not a Brothel. The men agreed.

22 If I could hand deliver on this first day of spring. From my hand to Lydia's. Hold her shoulder as I give her a simple message. If I could roll it into a thread and slip it in her ear as she sleeps in her bed. My last line would be . . . No, I would have no last line. There would be an ellipsis. There are no last words. Only words that belong in no last line. There are end words such as possibility and promise.

23 Called Maisie to get a book. She says she admires Max because he persists in doing what he thinks is right (integrity) whereas Oliver does what people seem to expect.

Me: People expected he'd stay with you.

Maisie comes from a deep-seated philosophy, you can depend on her to say a point of view. And I realize I dont come from there, I'm too sceptical of a truth. I argue not from a position, but from an example.

A sheet of thick plastic is wrapped in the bare oak on Long's Hill. Max says the denser the wood, the harder it is for leaves to unfurl. Oak are the last to bloom. Beyond the oak the brick church steeple with green copper peak. I like looking at this spire while I write. I'm going to look up the kirk's style. Squinches in spires.

24 Maisie says she was washing dishes one day. And she slipped the ice cubes from a whisky gla.s.s into the dishwater. It was Oliver's gla.s.s, from when he was on the phone with his brilliant paralegal student. Maisie held those cubes of ice under the warm water, held them fiercely, and noticed her wedding ring on the windowsill. That's when she decided to leave Oliver.

25 Lydia offers me the dental floss. She brings me coffee and sliced oranges to bed. I love the way she pours coffee. She sits on my lap while on the phone to Daphne. Daphne says the rumour is Oliver got his student pregnant.

Where did you hear that?

Daphne: You hear everything in social services.

Lydia, to Daphne: Craig Regular is in town. I saw him last night. He's looking great.

When she hangs up the phone, I say, You never told me that Craig was in town, or that you saw him.

She says, All your best friends are women.

I say, All your best friends are men.

That's not true, she says.

Me: Well, maybe women are easier to be best friends with.

26 I'm crouched at Lydia's car door in the dark, having thanked Max and Daphne for the rhubarb pie and coffee. Lydia says I love you and I say, But I can't get your door shut. She drives home with my arm across her midriff holding the door handle and she asks if I'm loving her a little more today.

I say, Every day that happens.

Tell me something you love about me.

I love it when you wear your red kimono and sit on your kitchen counter to read a recipe book with your goggly gla.s.ses on.

At the lights a fire truck screams past us and we follow it to my place.

Daphne had confessed to eating things in grocery stores. She will not buy an orange before she pokes her finger through one to taste it. Lydia says she does the same with peaches.

Lydia had asked Max for a light. And for a second I am jealous. But also, in as brief a moment, I am a.s.sured she is committed. I realize jealousy knows no bound. That I could think of a moment when Lydia and Max were s.e.xual.

What I love of Lydia is that her head is full of new, unfinished thought. No complete ideas, always renovating opinion. She has conviction, yet she can be converted, if she believes your evidence.

Daphne tells us a story of a horse she had as a child that got into the grain grain that hadnt been watered.

Daphne: I had to pull that mare off the ground. And walk it around Brigus. The field arcing up and the sky bending down, tugging this horse around to save it.

I'm going to use this detail in the novel.

Talking about the past, Max says. It's like sewing a fabric and pushing the needle through two thicknesses, through both sides of the cloth. His father, Noel Wareham, is going blind. When Max visits, his dad asks him to thread all the needles.

27 Snow is melting under mounds like sudden child pee. Bold shadows thrown onto things, firm and sure of themselves.

The southside hills wear a mist that makes them look gigantic. Patches of snow in the dips. Fog and the sea beyond. I like watching weather work in the distance.

28 I lay a tray of frozen chicken in the fridge to thaw. I am a fervent believer in letting nature do work for you. And conserving energy. I've left a ca.s.serole dish to soak in the sink overnight, so it's easy to clean now. I am a patient man.

The harbour a cold deep marble blue, blue of blood in the veins, starved of oxygen, water so cold and dense the oxygen is squeezed out, the blue of hydrogen.

I walk to the library. I choose microfiche film of newspapers from March, 1914. Knowing what the news will be. That the preliminary reports are optimistic. There are hints to the disaster. A novelist uses foreshadow. Whereas a newspaper's reports are never infused with such prophecy. The sealers are missing. Now the sealers are dead. On a day like today.

29 Oliver Squires invites me to play snooker. I'm so surprised that I agree. He'll meet me there at nine.

It's hard to talk around a snooker table. It's five dollars an hour, so we spend about two dollars of time just talking. Oliver holding his pint carefully, the blue tip of his pool cue leaning on his shoulder. He says, I called Maisie but she's out. Hadnt heard from her. I see her walking to her car and she calls out, she's friendly, but I'm low-key. And she pounces on this. She's had a hard day, not a second to call me. About Una.

Oliver says, I know youre Maisie's friend, but I appreciate your listening.

Maisie, when she found Oliver low-key, started to yell. Why dont you go f.u.c.k yourself. That's what she yelled. I dont want to have to deal with that kind of att.i.tude.

Me: I'm thinking how lucky I am. This morning I was served a peeled banana and coffee in bed. A nice lingering kiss. And Lydia called me to say I never did tell you, but it's great that you paid off your student loan.

Oliver: I never did get that kind of appreciation.

She's upset at you.

Maisie's upset it didnt work out.

She's upset about the rumours.

I can't stop rumours.

Me: Let's call her now.

You think so?

Yes, let's do it.

Oliver calls and says hi, expectantly. I'm leaning against the wall, holding our pints. He says, Maisie, do you think we'll get along okay? Youve forgiven me?

He nods at me.

How am I? Well, I'm just startled at the ferocity of your anger.

No, no, no, I mouth, and spill the pints. But by now the phone is a foot away from Oliver's ear and even then you can hear her.

30 Oliver Squires, Lydia says, is a cynic. Yet he's a purveyor of honesty. He has a way of using phrases that are not cliche but are found in phrase books, a conversational gambol using more intelligent cliches. He likes the word peccadillos. He uses words like malfeasance and anomie and confesses to lacking secular connections.

Lydia: He has a wicked tongue. If you hurt him he will betray you.

Me: I left him still pacing the snooker table. Bewildered that Maisie has left him. And then, almost in the same breath, he's perplexed that the Canadiens can't seem to score goals in March. There is no variation in the weight he puts on problems.

Lydia: Men are like that.

31 Sometimes, to be squeezed shoulder to shoulder in a kitchen party, the frenetic energy of bodies, the physical pull and tug and unanimous decision to be frenzied and fun and enjoy being incarnate. Earl Quigley is back from a conference in Santa Fe, and he is telling me about the true size of the universe. This is the man Lydia spent four years of her life with. I've had a few, so I can relax and almost pretend I am Lydia. There is something enjoyable in being Lydia in her past life, something revealing. Then Iris interrupts to say the caplin are so small these days and they used to come in June but now they roll in July. Maisie Pye, who has decided to appear and I'm glad of that, says Random House is interested and Wilf Jardine is being encouraged to play an original. Wilf is drinking tequila, lime soda, and ice. He says, you know how they say there's a fork in the woods or you walk down the road less travelled or you can't see the woods for the trees. Well I'm saying I just went bombing down the road and never saw any woods at all.

By two the party dwindles to a fortress of stalwarts in my kitchen. I have begged Lydia not to go but she has a meeting in the morning, so I kiss her goodnight and she is sharing a cab with Maisie Pye and Craig Regular. I have watched her look at Craig Regular all night and, because he is so tall, her look can be mistaken for admiration. I return to Earl's attention. Earl is on the phone to Casino taxi, ordering rye whisky.

There are just the four of us leftEarl, Max, Iris, and mewith this twenty-six-ouncer of rye and excuse me I must p.i.s.s in the garden oh what a night the double daylight breaking over Cabot Tower.

While I'm p.i.s.sing Iris sits on the steps. She says an old boyfriend of hers, a marine biologist, buried a dolphin under a rose bush. This boyfriend used to bring her flowers he'd stolen from cemeteries.

I wake at noon on the living-room couch. Upstairs in my bedroom Earl and Max are snoring hard. Iris makes me a hot cup of tea with lots of canned milk and two slices of toast with b.u.t.ter.

April.

1 Lydia had spilled wax on the sleeve of her astrakhan. She lays the coat on the floor, takes a piece of butcher paper, and irons it to the sleeve. Kneeling over the coat, sun shining branches into solids and shadows over her head. The wax melts into the butcher paper, the grease of an animal.

2 There has been an absence of wind for more than a day. How rested the trees look, the harbour. Like horses. Patient horses.

We meet Maisie down at Alex and Max's opening. Maisie is staring into the pupil of Alex's eye. The pupil dilates. Flaccid, Maisie says, should be p.r.o.nounced flax-sed. And, turning to the wall of b.u.ms, says, The only two descriptions are for a p.e.n.i.s or for prose.

She shows us a copy of the letter she sent to Michael Ondaatje. Do you think he gets many letters?

Lydia: A hundred a year.

That many?

They won't be as good as this, Maisie, but he's read all over the world.

Me: Yeah. He's bound to get a lot of mail.

Maisie's depressed by her first royalty cheque. She sold 214 books. In the letter she says to Ondaatje: My mother has a lot of friends.

She is trying to figure out how many strangers have bought her book.

We walk to the b.u.ms and try to pick out mine. There are twelve plaster moulds of b.u.ms hanging on the wall. Lydia points out mine. I see Wilf Jardine studying them, and then I know Wilf's b.u.m is up on the wall too. It is right beside my own.

Wilf stares at his own b.u.m. It has a taut carriage. He is sucking on a hard candy. He holds his elbow and wrist in a gay posture. He is oblivious to this.

Some tight a.s.s on you, Wilf.

Yours is pretty nice too, Gabe.

Which is it?

Isnt it this one?

And Wilf picks out his own b.u.m. Or is it.

3 Supper at Max's. He's blanched and roasted an entire seal carca.s.s that his father, Noel, has sent him from Arnold's Cove. We all stare at the beast. Even Daphne.

The seal's ma.s.sive, coffee-brown, steaming torso dominates the table. It's daunting to approach it with a knife.

I've never had anything but flipper pie, Lydia says.

The rib cage has thin strips of meat and the flippers are tender. It's a boiled dinner: turnip, carrot, potato, cabbage, and pease pudding. Max is delighted. He grew up sealing, and he has a set of sealing tools: a sculping knife, which separates carca.s.s from pelt, and a flensing knife, which is used on the pelt to carve blubber from fur.

4 I study the city with binoculars. The southside hills have gone grey overnight. Like a black dog will go white around the mouth as he gets older. The toes, the tip of tail. As if the cold exhalations of winter freeze the fur white. I think it's a frost in the scalp of the hill and the sun is shining deep into it.

The wet trims on all the mansard roofs glint like shining gifts, like metal boxes that hold new hardware. Fresh hinges. Uncollected garbage. A mattress sags against a boarding house. Broken vinyl siding exposes styrofoam and the faded paint on rotting clapboard. Inside a window two men sunk in a floral couch roll cigarettes while an astonished parakeet swings in its cage. Children toss a bicycle tire over cold telephone wires. A man in a wool cap pedals up the street with a towering load of bent aluminum balanced over his front wheel, secured with rough yellow rope. He exhales over the aluminum and his breath looks like aluminum vapour.

The aluminum flashes in the sun, and the streets are bone dry. Thirsty streets, salt stinging the sidewalks. When dogs begin to hunker down and chew their paws.

I open the window and smell boiling fat. A slow, glacial grease slips down the sidewalk from the backs of fish-and-chips shops. Liquid copper slides out of the eavestroughs on Gower Street United. Staining the sidewalk green.

A light dry snow wafting. With the shadows sitting under their objects.

Mere description.

5 Max stalks around the snooker table, a.n.a.lyzing percentages. His forearms toned from constant heavy carpentry work. He has an exquisite long shot. The quiet green acre of snooker cloth. He is reverting to a former life. He has made money shooting pool. He wipes the palms of his hands on the stubble of his scalp. His jeans have a hole worn in the back pocket that reveals a corner of his black wallet.

His firm bridge on the nap. The puny pool tables have an eerie blue cloth in comparison, and it seems cla.s.sy to pot b.a.l.l.s that have no numbers.

6 Remembering how Max had said, The body is the only motor that doesnt make noise. And these furnaces of heat inside us (he points to his rib cage) if we didnt give off heat, it would seem magical for a body to be warm. All the senses are quite mysterious inventions. Max once lost his sense of smell for a few weeks after a roofing truss fell on his head.

Max: Name me the things you love about Lydia.

Her face. She has a face like a beautiful shoehorn.