by Dian Day
But those evenings were my favourite at Annie’s house, too. After Ed had had another beer—in those days he drank Canadian—and Annie had poured the smallest glasses of Harvey’s Bristol Cream for herself and Sylvia, and a tumbler of soda water for me, the adults would toss their napkins onto their scraped-clean plates and push their chairs away from the table in anticipation. It was the moment we all waited for, even though the food was always good.
Ed went and sat at the piano. He rotated his shoulders and snaked his spine. He inhaled deeply. He closed his eyes and tilted his chin up and down a few times, and with one final deep breath raised his hands above the keys.
And wham—he was off, his hands jumping into the music as if their fire could save the world, as if everything burned as the music came out of him, as if the phoenix was merely biding its time in the ash.
Annie and Sylvia sat in the wingback chairs and sipped their sherry and tapped their toes and swung their legs and even, when the sherry bottle had been tipped a few more times, added their fine alto voices to the song.
Once, after another couple of beers, Ed looked up at me in between tunes, when it hadn’t yet come to him what he would play next. It seemed like something pierced him, and he put his fingertips on his Adam’s apple for a minute, as if there was something stuck there. There was an odd silence.
“I wish your mother would come,” he said to me finally. “I wish she could see you now.”
And then his hands were on the keys again, and he was belting out Johnny Cash as if music was the Last Supper and he was singing to prisoners on death row.
Sylvia and Annie were looking at me carefully to gage my reaction. I smoothed out my forehead and joined Ed singing.
WE WERE AT THE SHOP, and it was another slow day. Ed was doing an inventory of the sheet music, but we hadn’t ordered anything since he last tallied everything up, so I knew he was just trying to pretend that there’d been enough turnover in the past few months to actually make a difference. I was doing my usual, checking out NPR music, reading ChoralNet, surfing YouTube, going from one song to another as if I was being led down a path by breadcrumbs. I kept the volume at a kind of middle range, and I kept my eye on the door, waiting for Anita, my next student, who was late again. Depending on my mood, I’ll either dig up old favourites that I haven’t heard in years, or I’ll try to find something I’ve never heard before.
Ed has a pretty low tolerance for bad recordings, so if the first couple of notes indicate that someone was holding a cell phone over their head at a concert, I quickly move on. The result is that we hear a bar or two of an awful lot of tunes, and only occasionally a whole piece of music. On that day, he’d heard a half dozen short clips in other languages, and finally a decent recording of a pink-shirted choir singing in Hungarian on the top of a building.
“Eh? What’s that?” he grunted at me. When I didn’t answer, he got up from his pile of faded show tunes and came over to stand behind me at the computer.
“There’s the translation,” I said to him, pointing to the bottom of the screen: Why don’t they wash MY son’s stuff in washing powder ads? it read.
Who knew, but all over the world, impromptu community choirs were popping up—made up of regular folks, some of whom had never sung in public before—creating songs about whatever it was that bugged them about early twenty-first-century life.
I wax every month but no one ever notices.
These Complaints Choirs perform on street corners and outside subway stations, as well as in concert halls.
Why does CapsLock get stuck at the worst possible moment?
We listened to the rest of Budapest’s complaints, and moved on to St. Petersburg, Tokyo, Jerusalem, and Copenhagen—these last dressed in black and red, singing in a public parking garage, the ones in the back row standing on upturned milk crates.
Since the world is going down from global warming, hate, and mistrust, we would like to complain that the weather doesn’t get better right away.
When that one ended, we both stood there for a while, speechless as the credits rolled up, and then just staring at the black screen with yet another handful of Complaints Choir videos listed. Behind me, Ed had his eyebrows ruckled up and was tipping his head from side to side like a bird. I just waited, almost holding my breath.
“People who smoke don’t realize how much they sti—ink,” sang Ed, finally, and then he nodded at me like he was passing along the baton.
“I can’t get shirts to fit because my arms are too long,” I sang back.
“People come in here with sticky fingers and they touch everything.”
“Right,” I agreed. “It doesn’t matter what they’re eating, animal, vegetable, or mineral, it’s always sticky. How about: Why don’t people print neatly when they address envelopes? Don’t they know someone has to read them, even if it’s only a machi—ine?”
“It doesn’t matter if they print neatly or no–ot; I can’t read it anyway.”
“My neighbour’s tree had about a billion leaves on it and they all fell in my gar—den.”
Ed snorted. He was on a roll. “My wife wants me to retire but I don’t know what I’d do with myse—elf. I’m too old to keep up with how fast things are chan—ging,” he sang. “And I’m too old for se—ex.”
“I’m too young to not to be having se—ex, but I haven’t slept with anyone in almost three—ee—ee years.”
And then the bell on the door sounded, and we looked around to see Anita already standing inside the shop, her umbrella dripping rain on the tile, her mouth a round O of surprise.
IT ISN’T THAT I NEVER THINK about my father; I do. Not very often, but once in a while, when I’m kind of brought to it by force. Not on Father’s Day or predictable times like that. More like this: somebody will make some casual remark or ask some innocent question, and I’m suddenly brought up against it: I know nothing at all about him. It’s the only thing I think about, that there’s nothing to think about him at all.
I was at a party—one of Ed and Sylvia’s parties, actually, so there was a lot of home-made music happening. A different room, a different jam session, practically. I just wander around at these things, room to room, mostly just listening, but I do sing along quietly sometimes too, if there are enough voices going and I can keep my distance. I enjoy the small-scale notes: nobody’s performing, there’s no separation between the audience and the music, everyone pretty much just joins in and plays or sings or both. Music is and does, the way it used to. The way it should.
Sylvia’s one of those perfect hosts: greets everyone at the door, makes a million little one-bite hors d’oeuvres, all from scratch. Always damn good food. She greets me at the door, and when she’s kissing me, left cheek, right cheek, she whispers the names of all the available women in my ear.
“Jacklynn, the redhead, tall, Vogue glasses, plays the piano very well; Maura, frizzy dark hair, bit of a lost look but nothing to be concerned about; Kathleen, now she’s pretty interesting, artistic director at the Grand, quirky, but not really a flake at all, despite the look of that skirt.”
I guess I am supposed to spend my evening checking these women out, courtesy of Sylvia’s undercover dating service. And sometimes I do, but generally from the other side of the room. I’d do much better if Sylvia left me to my ignorance; I’m pretty good at pretending that all the beautiful women are married when I don’t know otherwise. I don’t seem to make such an ass of myself if I believe my co-conversationalist to be already taken.
I went from the living room to the kitchen, got myself a beer, and started wandering. There’s a huge sunroom in the back of the house, with a woodstove in it for the three seasons we don’t get enough hot sun in this country. It was a cold night—a November rain in October—so lots of people were in there. All the cold-blooded ones, anyway.
Ed had rolled in the upright Steinway; they always do for p
arties, and then call the piano tuner to come in after it’s been moved. I went and leaned in the doorway. There was a redhead on the bench playing Schoenberg—Jacklynn, no great mystery. Sylvia was right, she did play very well, though I didn’t think the selection was really party material. Not an Ed and Sylvia party, at any rate.
As soon as I had that thought, she must have realized it herself, and did a neat slide into James Taylor’s “Shower the People You Love with Love.” It worked, because by the second bar she had half the room accompanying her fine alto voice, me included, and a guitar and a banjo appeared for a quick tuning.
And then there were two quiet words that materialized in the breath between lines.
“Nice voice.”
There was a beautiful woman at my elbow. The skirt was one of those wacky brightly-coloured affairs, in sections like the petals of a flower, light like feathers. Quirky Kathleen, artistic director of the Grand. She was talking, it seemed, to me.
“She does, doesn’t she,” I agreed.
“I meant yours.”
I had heard a thousand appreciative comments about my voice when I was a schoolboy, but it had been a long time since then. Kathleen’s remark came accompanied by intense looks from her reportedly single women’s eyes, clearly an opening to an episode of flirting. I cleared my throat. Sylvia had probably whispered in Kathleen’s ear about me, I realized. We were both standing in the doorway, and everyone going in and out of the room pushed us up against each other. I think Sylvia made four or five trips in and out with plates of food during the course of that one song. I had my beer bottle up above my head.
“You don’t have a drink,” I said, finally noticing. “Can I get you something?”
“Red wine,” she said. “On the rocks.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“I know, I know,” she apologized. “It’s weird. I get it from my father; you can blame him. He taught me how to like my red wine cold. He also taught me to keep the salt and pepper in the fridge. And to eat the peel of oranges.” Her hair was full of static, and a dark tendril floated in the space between us and attached itself to my shoulder.
“The zest?”
“Yeah, the zest,” she agreed, and made a face.
I went and got a wine glass and some ice cubes and poured the Moroccan wine. When I got back to the doorway and handed it to her, she said it.
“Don’t you have weird things you learned from your father? You know, you read the newspaper backwards, or you flush the toilet before you finish peeing, or you open your mail with the latch of your belt buckle? Because, you know, that’s the way he did it?”
So there it was again, staring me in the face. I could easily imagine that my father did not regularly read the newspaper any which way or remember to flush the toilet at any time or get any mail besides eviction notices. But I didn’t actually know for sure. And I didn’t actually care. But I sure didn’t want to get into that with Kathleen.
“Can’t you learn to enjoy your red wine at room temperature despite your quirky father?” I asked, jokingly, evading her question. But as soon as I said “quirky” I blushed, as if she could somehow hear Sylvia’s roster.
“It’s much more comforting to be able to blame someone for my idiosyncrasies—and my faults,” she explained, smiling up at me. I couldn’t really tell if she was joking.
I felt the need to change the subject.
“So do you eat the zest with the orange, or afterwards?”
“With,” she said. “Just like I’m eating an apple.”
“Don’t they put some kind of wax on those things?”
“I wash it first. In hot water.”
“I’d never have children,” I said. But I was thinking of my father, not hers.
KATHLEEN CALLED ME THE WEEK AFTER the party. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” I said. I had no idea who was calling. Mostly when women call me they want music lessons, not dates.
“It’s Kathleen,” she said. “We met at Sylvia and Ed’s—”
“Oh, right, Kathleen.” But I guess I still sounded vague, because she said: “I told you you had a nice voice and you told me I drank too much.”
“Oh, no … I didn’t say that … I didn’t say that…?” My hand was suddenly sticking to the receiver.
“Okay, you didn’t say that. But you did raise your eyebrows at me.”
“I did?”
“When I got that fifth glass of wine.”
“I think my forehead was just itchy,” I said. “Just some kind of dry skin, forehead thing.” I was scratching my head with the palm of my left hand as I said it, pressing hard, noticing how the skin wrinkled up on the down stroke. I was beginning to get it that she was teasing me, and if she was teasing me she was maybe going to ask me for a date. I fell back on small talk, since I didn’t know whether or not that would be a good thing. “Good party, wasn’t it?”
“From what I remember,” she said, “it was great. You do have a lovely voice.”
“Do you drink too much?” I asked. It would be good to know what I was getting into, just in case we were going to get to the date part. Be in the moment, I was telling myself. I’m just not very good at staying calm when facing the future, especially when it comes to relationships. I always want to know what I’m getting into before anything happens; I want to know the worst of the worst. And then usually, in short order, I go down on one knee and then the other, tie my running shoes, and run.
“Sometimes,” she admitted. There was a small silence, as if she were considering her next move. She made it: “That’s pretty personal.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked that. I should have said—”
“So now I get to ask you something personal: Do you like fish?”
“Fish?” I said. “Like fish in an aquarium or fish to eat or “Save the Whales” or what?”
“I was thinking planked salmon,” she said. “On an open fire. Beside the lake. On Saturday night.”
“Uh…” I said, “Saturday night coming? This is the Thanksgiving weekend…?” I hadn’t expected that level of date, like going right to the coda to start playing the notes. The “be in the moment” theme was shot to hell already.
“You can bring the wine,” she said. “I prefer red.”
“Yeah, with ice. I noticed that,” I said. I think she was pleased I remembered something about our interaction.
“Come in the afternoon; we can walk on the beach,” she said, and she gave me directions to her cottage, which, as near as I could figure, was a good two hours’ drive away. I don’t know what it is about people giving me directions, but as soon as I have to start with the rights and lefts and stop signs and gas stations at the fork, I completely lose sight of saying no.
I HAD PICKED UP THE PHONE about ten times before the weekend to tell Kathleen that I didn’t own a car and that, anyway, I really had to go and visit my mother for the nursing home’s Thanksgiving luncheon—even though it wasn’t always clear whether or not she even knew who I was. I wouldn’t have said that last part, of course. In the end, after a lot of procrastination and random plunking of harp strings, I called Enterprise and booked a subcompact for twenty-four hours, noon Saturday to noon Sunday, telling myself I could take my mother out for a drive on Sunday morning before I brought it back. Make it worth it, I thought.
“Only reason I have any cars left is because someone just cancelled,” said the rep. He wasn’t anyone I knew, even though I deliver mail to the showroom. “You’re a lucky guy. This is one of our busiest weekends of the year, you know.”
I had one hour and twenty-seven minutes to mull over the question of luck as I was driving along the shoreline of Lake Ontario. Was it luck to find another whole continent when all you were looking for was saffron and pepper? You can easily see how those early explorers thought they had found the ocean, in
perpetual high tide mode. Little waves lapped the shore in an imitation of salt water, and the sun lifted their edges into thin golden horseshoes. At least it’s a fine day for a drive, I thought to myself. I was pretending that the drive was what it was all about, not thinking about arriving at my destination, and especially not thinking about planked salmon. Across the vast expanse of water, nothing was visible except sky. There’s something unnerving about that far horizon and the way it continually beckons. Most of us can’t live like that. We need trees or hills or skyscrapers to keep us from the longing. We need to be boxed in. Limits save us.
I got as far as the ferry at the end of Bath Road, and I waited for a while in a small line-up of cars, looking out across the narrow strait to the cliff on the far shore. There was a giant chocolate lab in the station wagon in front of me that was steadily obscuring the vehicle’s rear window with drool.
I ejected the CD from the player. I’d been listening to the Deller Consort sing the madrigals of Clément Janequin. I wanted to see if I could hear the dog panting, but of course I couldn’t. The windows were closed, and the wind whipped any sounds right out across the Bay of Quinte and tumbled them among the rocks on the far shore. I put the music back on, and watched as the dog’s sides heaved in and out in 2/4 time. I could see the ferry across the bay, starting its return journey.
And then I re-started the engine, backed up as far as I could without ramming the car behind me, and did a five-point U-turn on the narrow dead-end road. Driving back along Bath Road, with the lake on my right this time, Alfred Deller and I sang a duettino at the top of our lungs.
I POPPED THE CD OUT AGAIN to listen to DNTO on the CBC, and I caught the news. I was only half listening, but I turned it up for the weather report. There were thundershowers expected for Sunday. I looked out across the water at the two-toned blue, the blazing sun, and the stark trunks of trees, with their almost-bare branches etched haphazardly into the sky.