Last Notes

by Tamas Dobozy

  Only now, I realize he had not been looking that way at the landscape at all. What he had been looking at, and what had met with his approval, and caused him to smile, was not the river and mountain and clouds and forest that defined the landscape but the nothing, the great nothing, forced down on their contours—the space that framed and thus determined their distinctiveness. The essence of landscape was a thing he finally achieved by not being able to paint it.

  And I would have an opportunity to see that smile again and again after my family and I returned to Canada and to Ákos, who had installed himself in the spare bedroom in our basement, the leaky urn and its non-contents sitting on the shelf over where, every night, he rested his head. I would see it every time my little brother pulled off the cap to look at “our father.” For it was this nothing, so similar from country to country, Hungary to Canada, that my father had spent his whole life painting toward, and which was realized every time we opened the urn and saw him pressing up at us with an emptiness that was definitive—a pressure we come up against, and which in turn pushes back at us, like some unsettled boundary, whenever we want a limit to who and what we are. Whenever we want a limit to the places we live.

  The Man Who Came Out of the Corner of My Eye

  FOR WEEKS I’d been seeing him criss-cross the hallways of my home. At first, I thought maybe it was Lucinda, come to claim another stick of furniture (which would have been difficult, given that she’d already taken everything), but when I turned to look there was never anyone there. And yet the figure seemed so definite, so clear, from the shine of his shoes to the cut of his suit to the flapping tail of his overcoat.

  My wife and I had had an argument. I was sitting in the breakfast nook the night we celebrated my fortieth birthday, toying with an antique metronome Lucinda had given me, when she stopped in the midst of clearing away the plates and champagne glasses to say, “You know, I find it a bit disturbing how you didn’t want me to invite anyone to this.”

  I slowed the metronome as far as it would go, and set it aside, ticking softly. “I guess I’m not keeping in touch with much of anyone these days,” I said, pretending to be thoughtful.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” she said. And by the sound of her voice I could tell she wasn’t just speaking of the friendships— some dating as far back as childhood—that, in the last few years, I’d been slowly breaking off, but about the way I’d taken to living in my own home with my own wife, walking the halls with such careful steps it was as though I was hoping to get by her unnoticed.

  But because this was a subject I hoped to avoid, I instead told Lucinda I didn’t like Katie McIntyre’s second husband—the Baptist—who said that he, like Christ, never judged anyone, and instead just felt a deep and abiding pity for the Roman Catholics, homosexuals, and communists who didn’t realize how hot it got in hell. I told her I couldn’t stand the way Evelyn Moberley would call me when she’d decided to sober up again (for the twelfth time in the last fifteen years), apologize for being out of touch, and then promise to treat me better. And, finally, I told her that Joe Bolez, no matter how old a friend, should have known that telling me my compositions were “mediocre”was just plain offensive—even if, as he claimed, art demanded that he tell “the truth.”

  I added that I had realized something else about myself: I was the pathetic sort of person who didn’t like being made fun of— even gently—but who took great delight in making fun of everyone else. Recently, I had come to recognize the hypocrisy of this position, and had decided to remedy it by avoiding the kind of intimacy that makes our friends so effective at annoying us, and us so effective at annoying them; and if the price I paid was no longer being intimate with anyone, then fine.

  Lucinda waited patiently for my tirade to end, and then, her hands wrist-deep in soapsuds, responded, “Katie McIntyre only makes you speak to her husband when you call because she wants everyone to get along so that Katie and you can get along’” Lucinda was looking down into the suds, and when she wiped her forehead left a trail of bubbles there. But she was too preoccupied to notice, as if she had something else on her mind than what she was presently speaking about. “As for Evelyn Moberly,” Lucinda continued, “she’s an addict. Not right in the head. And I think it’s disgraceful of you to abandon her to this sickness. And I don’t care how often she needs you to prop up her illusions, or forgive her for being out of touch, or pretend you ‘understand’ when she decides to stop using antidepressants, because they’re drugs too. She’s supposed to be your friend, for God’s sake!”

  She stopped what she was doing at the sink and reached for one of the dishtowels to wipe her hands, her eyes snagging on the remains of my birthday cake as though she was shocked to find it there. “As for Joe Bolez,” she whispered, saving her voice for something else, “he’s a composer, and I guess that makes him as weird as you. Maybe Joe is a bit blunt sometimes, but he’s also given you a lot of support over the years. Or have you already forgotten the referrals and introductions that helped you get some of your stuff put on? Maybe you’re just bitter because he always teases you at the wrong time, and because he’s so merciless about it. Or maybe you’re just mad at him because you never have any good comebacks.”

  “But never mind all that,” Lucinda said, her voice rising almost to a shout. “If we were perfect we wouldn’t need other people. What I want to know is this: if you’re planning on ditching all your old friends, then what about me?” Here, there was a terrible pause (which I blame on my rather sluggish emotional reflexes) before I said, “You’ll always be my friend.”

  And she replied, “The fact that you have to lie to me proves we are anything but.”

  I came to miss Lucinda not because she’d been my friend, but because she’d been such a great acquaintance. Marriage and friendship, to my mind, don’t go together very well. But marriage and acquaintanceship? Let me explain the difference: friendship is transparent, an intimacy so intense that the two friends seem to coexist, as if their selves have overlapping boundaries. Acquaintanceship, conversely, is founded on distances. It is ruled by politeness, by the respectful awareness that the other person is not an open door, that their agenda is not known to you; and this, as far as I am concerned, is marriage more or less: the co-habitation of two individual agendas.

  I’m not talking about big secrets—affairs, murders, former marriages kept under wraps—though these certainly can be part of it. What I’m talking about are the microscopic evasions: about how much of your day at the office was actually spent working (versus the amount spent having coffee or afternoon beers); about how much dope you’re smoking (“just an occasional toke, dear,” versus several joints per week); about what your train of thought really is (“no, dear, I never look at other women,” versus the lurid fantasies continually playing on the screen of your mind). Marriage is the accumulation of lies so inconsequential unto themselves—these things you hide from your wife to avoid friction—that only together can they possibly be dignified as falsehoods. But they do amount to a separate existence. And since the best marriage is one where you can live more or less as you prefer while still appearing to participate in harmonious compromise, the happiest couples are almost always acquaintances masquerading as friends.

  Lucinda wanted us to be real friends; I haven’t seen her in over two years.

  When she left—as I said—she took everything, without so much as a word of protest from me. Afterwards, I dragged in one of the old lawn chairs, mended it with twine, and set it next to the bookshelf and the small, portable stereo I’d bought after she took the European unit that made recordings of my music sound better than they really were. She also left me the piano, since I needed a means of livelihood in order to be able to make the alimony payments. Very soon, I would sell the house; but for now I was just basking in the emptiness, having realized that what I liked most about a home—any home—was walking in and imagining how it could be outfitted. It was this imagining that I liked; once the pla
ce actually was outfitted, I was invariably bored. So I spent a lot of time, in those two years, sitting around and exercising my imagination. I wrote a suite of songs called “Empty Chamber Music;” it received moderate reviews.

  This emptiness, however, didn’t only extend to my home. I seemed to be divesting myself of everything, not only friends and furniture, but also entertainment, conversation, even food. It was hard at first, giving up the gourmet meals Lucinda had prepared, downgrading to canned soup, sandwiches, green salads, or going down even farther, from three meals a day to two, cutting out snacks, but the truth was I simply had no desire to eat, and the feeling of emptiness, the lightness in my stomach, made me feel oddly powerful, as if I were floating free, no longer tied down, able to give up anything at a moment’s notice. Yet, it also made me tired and lightheaded, as though something were missing, a crucial blood flow.

  During the weekends—when I wasn’t at a recital or at my studio or at a practice—I would walk out into my backyard, into the scintillating motes of light, into a garden gone wild with flowers whose seeds had drifted in from the neighbourhood, and just sit there, enjoying the quiet. And it was here that I had contact with the only two people to keep me company, outside of work, during those first years on my own. One of these was Fred Macklesmith, my neighbour of ten years, whose hand would occasionally dart above the fence and flutter there, waving at me. And I would think, eureka!—the perfect friendship: a hand waving for a few seconds over the top of a very high fence and not expecting me to wave back. The other person, whose name I don’t know, and who only visited me once, was a local man I’d seen before: middle-aged but boyish, probably autistic, or born with significant parts of his brain missing. He used to speed-walk up and down the street, his hands raised to his ears to block out the laughter and jeers of the local kids—some as old as sixteen—who harassed him whenever he came through the neighbourhood—copying his awkward movements, trying to trip him up, calling him names. One day I simply opened up my gate to give him an escape, and he came into my garden, wandering through the tall grass and looking at the flowers, picking up fallen apples, as if he’d never seen a plant or fruit. I remember because it was the time of moths: that yearly infestation, near the end of summer, when the backyard, and everything in it—from the grass to the trees to the lawn chairs—is coated in tiny white insects, their wings folded up, all of them awaiting some directive to arrive from east or west, instructions on where to fly next. He spent a lot of time running his hands lightly over the tips of their wings, setting off flurries of moths that would resettle just a few feet over. That afternoon, in his presence, I felt as if I were witness to a sanctity that made for better company than any I’d experienced—even that of Fred Macklesmith.

  But after two years with Fred and the singular encounter with this nameless man, I began seeing things, or, rather, I began seeing a thing. I don’t remember exactly when it started, but I know that eventually, some time in autumn, it became routine for me to be doing something—slicing bread, say—and to suddenly see a figure in an overcoat calmly strolling down the hallway. But when I turned to look, there was never anyone there.

  After a while I began to see him not only in my house, but in other places as well. I’d see him sitting on swings in the park as I walked to my studio. I’d see him in the passenger seat of the car rented by the local symphony so that I could get to and from rehearsals more quickly. I’d see him leaning on the bar at O’Toole’s when I went down there for my weekly night of whisky obliteration.

  I hate to admit it, but I grew used to this hallucination, thinking it was probably how my conscience appeased itself over the way I’d ditched my wife and friends. And I was prepared to let my conscience take care of itself. I had better things to do with my time.

  But after a while I grew frightened, since—let’s face it—it wasn’t normal to be seeing people only at oblique angles; and this fear, as it always does, turned to fascination, especially once I noticed that this figure seemed to be beckoning toward me, trying to say something, though he’d always be cut off in mid-sentence, disappearing the second I turned to take in what he was saying.

  What happened was this: I trained myself not to look at him directly. It’s a very difficult thing to do, actually, to pay attention to something that’s in the corner of your eye, out of your focus.

  The first time I was really successful at doing this was in the spa of the Delta Hotel, which I went to every Sunday afternoon after a hard half-day of musical notation. He was sitting on a bench against the wall behind the Jacuzzi, and I trained my eyes very deliberately on the foam and bubbles around my chest and let him inhabit the corner of my left eye. After a while, he smiled at me, then reached into the pocket of his overcoat, pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead, which had grown sweaty in the heavy steam coming off the bubbling water. “Bit hot in here, no?” he said.

  “Depends on where you’re sitting,” I replied, concealing my astonishment under a forced, casual tone.

  “I’ll meet you outside when you’re done,” he said, and rose up and walked away. Naturally, when I turned to look for him he’d disappeared.

  By the time I got out he was waiting for me in the lobby, sitting on one of the complimentary chesterfields and sipping an espresso. I sat on the easy chair positioned at ninety degrees to the chesterfield.

  “How are you, Jeff?” he said.

  “Never mind that,” I replied. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I have a job proposition for you.”

  “I already have a job.”

  “Not like this one.”

  “Well, that’s obvious,” I trembled.

  “I think it would be a good idea if you took a break from music for a while. You’re not really getting anywhere with it anyhow.”

  “Thanks,” I said, rising. “Thanks a bunch.”

  “How do you expect to grow as an artist,” he replied, “if you run from the truth?”

  He sounded like Lucinda, who had always assumed I thought I really was talented, that the world was unfair not to give me the recognition I deserved. But by thirty-seven I’d already experienced enough years of rejection—starting with having to perform a second audition before making the high school band, and progressing through two decades of lost competitions, bad or mediocre reviews, rejected grant applications, and the stinging words of Bolez—to know that I was going to be a composer even if there wasn’t a grain of evidence to support my decision. It was my right to hope, goddamn it, even if 90 percent of the world thought I was a hack.

  And who was Bolez not to support me in this? Who was his loyalty bound to, some abstract notion of aesthetic value or his friend? After all, great art would still be produced—the Beethovens of the world would still exist—whether or not he humoured me and said my stuff was great as well. Why not let time be the one to sort good from bad? I’d be dead by then, and it wouldn’t matter a bit whether every single note I’d written had been flushed down the toilet.

  Me, I’d always told Bolez his stuff was good even when it was shit, told Katie and Evelyn they were leading meaningful lives even when they were not. This was why my friends loved me—why they’d sounded hurt and disappointed and surprised when they’d called to ask why I’d been out of touch. I’d always supported their illusions, and just couldn’t understand why they’d so poorly supported mine. Lucinda was right, Bolez had helped me in the way of introductions and favours; now, if he’d just refrained from teasing me about how “banal” my stuff was we’d have gotten along just fine.

  I was about to launch into this rant—surprised by how much I wanted to say all this miserable shit, as if it had been waiting to burst out since I’d cut everyone from my life—except that I realized it was my wife and friends who should have heard it, not this weirdo in an overcoat. So, instead, I said “Goodbye” and walked out of the hotel.

  Later that night, I was trying to figure out whether I was hungry when he walked in, looked around, and leaned
against the nearest wall.

  “You should get some more chairs,” he said.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “What about guests?”

  “There’s only me.” I took a gulp of air against the rumbling in my stomach, and decided it was enough.

  “So here’s the deal,” he said. “I’ve become involved in a little business enterprise, and I think you’re just the man.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked.

  “I’ve decided to start up a new business: breaking up friendships. And I think there’s a lot you could teach me. I mean,” he said, “the way you did that thing with Katie McIntyre was just amazing.” He whistled and shook his head in pure admiration. He was, of course, referring to my usual modus operandi, which I call the “gradual withdrawal method.” This involves a slow slackening of the ties of friendship, the sort of thing where you always let the answering machine get the phone, then don’t return the message for three or four days, then a week, then ten days, and before long a whole month—citing some vague “business” that kept you from responding; with letters or email I would let an even longer initial period go by, say six weeks, then eight, then twelve, and so on, and my responses would grow colder and colder, more stiff and formal, filled with astonishingly boring anecdotes about the weather; the state of my shoes; a minutely detailed account of how inflation has outstripped, cent for cent, the federal pension plan; and so on. Nonetheless, it still took me three years to get rid of Katie this way.

  Such is the strength of friendship.