Happiness of Fish Read Online Free Page A

before he knew he was a CFA. His 1960s and early ’70s lurk between the blue marble-pattern covers.
    Cupid is a fascist

With shiny black jackboots

Smeared with small pieces

Of hearts he’s machine-gunned;

A thousand valentines

Flap wildly in his camp
,
    Battle flags abounding
.
    â€œChrist, this kid!” Gerry says softly to himself. The oil furnace cuts in with a breathy, but probably sympathetic sigh. He wonders if he goes upstairs and finds the Leonard Cohen anthology Vivian gave him a few anniversaries back, will he be able to track what he was reading when he wrote some of this. Then again, maybe it wasn’t that profound.
    I was walking my serpent in the garden

And I let him off the leash

To frolic among the flowers and lovers
,
When up came a silver-wingèd cop

Who said all serpents must
,
    Must be kept on the leash, not

Let frolic et cetera et cetera;

So I sadly took my serpent and went home

To eat apples in my room
.
    â€œRecord jackets,” Gerry says aloud, “I must have been reading frigging record jackets.”
    In another pile of paper, Gerry finds himself in St. John’s for the first time. At some point over the years he has transcribed some of the stuff he wrote when he and Patricia, his first wife, lived in the east-end.
    Why is the night?

Because of the dog, child
,
Obscene fat doggy
,
Soul beneath his waggle:

He licks the sun

From the pavement

Like ice cream;

Dirty, mouldy dog
,
Like a hairy Dutch cheese
,
Dreams all gurgly

And burps another morning;

Nice fat doggy
.
    Gerry had written that the first autumn he and Patricia had come to St. John’s. It occurs to him that you no longer see the packs of almost mythologically ugly crackies that used to drift up and down the hilly streets in the older parts of town. Dogs are tied on now and belong to recognizable breeds and, for all Gerry knows, health clubs and spas and new-age churches. Their owners walk them with pockets full of shopping bags to pick up the dog shit. Gerry sometimes argues that picking up dog shit is making humanity stupider. A basic lesson in watching where you’re going has been removed. Shuffle along any old way. Never mind the dog poop. There’s no need to be watchful or learn the steps in the dance of life.
    â€œDon’t be silly,” Vivian tells him. “It’s not sanitary.”
    At any rate, the weird dog creatures are no longer around, but they were when he and Patricia were setting up housekeeping in 1972or so. Maybe they huddled together for safety from the mythological crackies. They’d only just learned the word and could conjure with it. Maybe when the crackie packs disappeared they had no further need of each other and fell apart.
    The house is ghostly quiet and Gerry goes upstairs to make a cup of tea. He feels like a museum visitor, sidling past the baroque splendours of Vivian’s Christmas decorations. The few cars that pass in the street make soft noises like rotten old flags tearing. He makes the tea in the pot rather than in the cup and takes it back to the basement with him. Somewhere over the years he had come by a mini electric pad, a tiny hot plate for keeping a mug warm. He plugs it in, balances the teapot on it and returns to thirty years ago. Pawing through the snippets and false starts in his middle-class basement, he compares then and now.
    It seems to Gerry that he and Vivian dress quite a lot alike now. They both wear khaki pants in summer and blazers when they dress up. They buy sweaters and suburban sweatshirts at Work Warehouse. He and Patricia may have shopped in the same stores but their look was different.
    Patricia wore a lot of Danskin leotard tops and he remembers a short suede skirt. They’d joke and call it a wide belt. On other days she went to the opposite extreme and wore a maxi-length jumper that he called her one-legged overalls. In the winter she piled an antique raccoon coat over it all.
    Gerry wore high-top