The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  “Guess we’ll be seeing you tonight,” Neil said when I handed him the envelopes, tapping his finger on the reservation book, and I thought my knees would buckle for sure.

  Outside, I could smell snow, and I figured perhaps there was a storm coming. The air was damp, and blew in from the lake in a spectacular hurry, like late-breaking news.

  After work, I had three voice students, and in every case I found something to criticize with last week’s repertoires, so we wouldn’t have to go over anything new. When I finished the last one—Becky from the Youth Choir, as it happened—I called Sylvia and sent Ed home early, and then, despite what I’d told him to get him to leave, I locked everything up, turned over the sign on the door, and headed home myself.

  I just had to propel myself through a little bit more of the day, I thought. I just had to get through it, and then, miraculously, it would be over. God knows I’ve been through worse.

  I was fresh out of the shower and staring hopelessly into my closet, pants on but belt unbuckled, searching for the right shirt, when the phone rang. There were three rings, and then the machine picked up, but there was no message. I didn’t bother to go look at the display, but it rang again almost right away, so I crossed the bedroom with one arm into a grey flannel shirt, had a quick glance, and picked it up.

  “Frederick?” It was Kathleen. She said my name after a moment of hesitation, like she couldn’t decide whether to talk or hang up.

  “Yes,” I said. I looked at my watch. The chosen shirt hung from my arm, and I switched hands on the receiver so I could get my other sleeve on as I talked. I don’t know why, but I didn’t know what was coming. I pretty much never do know, but still, it always surprises me that I don’t. Things seem so obvious in retrospect. You’d think even an idiot could figure them out.

  “Yeah, well, so,” said Kathleen. “I was just going to let you sit at the restaurant for a while, waiting for me. I thought you might even go ahead and order the wine before you figured out I wasn’t coming.”

  “You’re not coming?” I asked her. I don’t know what I was feeling. It wasn’t exactly relief.

  “No, Frederick,” she said. “I’m not coming.”

  “Oh.” My body hadn’t caught up with my brain and I was still frantically trying to do my shirt buttons up, one-handed, thinking I was late. I thought of the day I had just spent, every excruciating minute focused on something that wasn’t going to happen—or at least not yet.

  “Did something come up?” I asked. “Do you want to reschedule?”

  “Why would I let you order the wine if I was going to reschedule?”

  “True,” I said. “Right.” There was a pause. I didn’t know how to hang up. “So what happens now?” I finally asked. I laid my forehead against the cold glass of the window.

  “What happens now is you cancel the reservation, have a drink in my honour, and reflect on the nature of justice or fairness or equality, or whatever you want to call it.”

  “How about ‘an eye for an eye?’” I suggested. Through the foggy glass I could see Maya’s truck pull into her driveway and stop abruptly, too close to the fence.

  “Sure,” Kathleen said, congenially. “You could call it that.”

  “So,” I said, “Toronto…?”

  “No, really Frederick. We can’t pull that off at this point, can we?”

  “Okay,” I said. I couldn’t think about anything except getting off the phone, but as soon as I saw Maya get out of her truck and start rearranging those damn pipes, a bizarre impulse started to form in my head.

  “When you get back from the wedding,” Kathleen’s voice said in my ear, “you can call me if you want. Now that we’re even.”

  “Right,” I said. I pressed “end” and got the dial tone at the same moment that I finished doing up my last button, just a fraction of a moment before my legs started to move out into the hall and down the stairs. I opened my front door, at the precisely the same moment that Maya’s left foot was on her top step, her copper supply clattering under her arm. It was a perfectly timed, totally dumb, completely self-redemptive and face-saving dance. Maya looked over at me and smiled.

  “Do you have any plans for dinner?” I asked her.

  “SO WAIT A MINUTE,” SAID MAYA. “You’re telling me this Kathleen woman asked you for a date and you didn’t go, and, on the other hand, you’ve been pining over this other woman, this unattainable woman, this married woman at the library—for several years now?”

  It wasn’t like I had expected a response that would demonstrate her compassion and understanding.

  “Freak, Frederick,” she continued, “don’t you see the pattern here?” She looked at me with triumph. I struggled to focus my brain on this nefarious pattern.

  We were drunk on a bottle of Maya’s gallo nero Chianti and a newly replenished supply of Rickard’s Red—I knew Ed wasn’t going to be drinking it anymore, but I couldn’t stand to see the fridge so bare without it. I’d bought a case of twelve as a kind of place-holder for a vanishing life.

  Maya was sitting on the floor between the harp and the piano, her back against the wall and her arms resting on her bent knees. I was leaning on the opposite wall, my legs stretched out along the floor, looking up into the belly of Jiro’s second cello, left in my living room much of the time so he didn’t have to drive it over every week.

  We were surrounded by empty bottles, scattered like ninepins. The case was in the middle of the room, flaps open, almost empty.

  Maya burped loudly.

  “S’cuse.” she said.

  “I don’t get patterns when it comes to women,” I explained. “I’m pattern-impaired.”

  “I’ll explain patterns to you.”

  “No,” I said, “don’t.”

  I tipped the last dregs of a beer into my mouth. I put the empty bottle down carefully beside me and lined my feet up as precisely as possible along the grain of the wood. When I heard Maya start to speak again I closed my eyes.

  And then I fell asleep.

  WHEN I WOKE UP, I was perpendicular to the grain of the wood. Maya was slumped over, still against the wall, only lying lower down. The sun was well up and streamed into the room, casting weird shadows across our faces from the collected instruments. The phone was face-up on the floor between us, like road kill.

  Except it was beeping.

  Maya opened her eyes. She looked around the room without moving her head. The beeping stopped.

  “Oh,” I said, once she stopped looking at the phone and was focused on me, “Did we sleep together?”

  “Ha,” she said. “Ha. And ha.”

  “I thought it was pretty funny.”

  “No doubt it is your finking sense of humour that endears you so much to women.”

  “Touché,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s talk about funny.”

  “No, let’s not,” I said. “My head hurts.” I finally looked at my watch. Shit,” I said. I reached for the phone. After a dozen years with a perfect attendance record, I was late for work. Really late.

  DESPITE WHAT I’D SAID TO MAYA, my brain, contrary to my wishes, ruminated on patterns and women. There was a week or two when I was completely irrationally sure a message from Kathleen would be waiting for me when I returned home, when I went out sometimes solely in order to be able to come back and look again for that blinking light. No matter where I’d been, or for how long, I thought about patterns as I was turning the key in my stubborn front door lock, as I was pushing the door with my shoulder while pulling the handle towards me, as the bolt clicked open and the door swung inward, as the heat ran out to greet me, licking my face like a dog that’s been left alone all day. I checked for messages as soon as I got in, before even taking off my coat or hanging my hat on the hook in the hallway. It almost felt like I made friends with the phone again, or, at least, unde
rstood that the phone could bring welcome messages as well as unwelcome ones. Whenever it rang when I was home, I looked at the display with a feeling of vague hopefulness, an elusive longing, an unvoiced wish that I could, for once, be given a second chance and do the right thing. That I could, somehow, make up for having done it wrong the first time. One night, at three in the morning, I got up bleary-eyed from my gnarly bed and made a list of questions on the back of an old Sea Biscuit take-out menu:

  How long have you worked at the Grand?

  Do you like it?

  Do you like music?

  What kind of music do you listen to?

  Do you have a family?

  Tell me about them.

  Tell me about them, I thought. I felt a little sick as I looked at what I’d written. Tell me about it. It was as simple as that.

  THREE WEEKS BEFORE THE WEDDING, Ed and I went for a haphazard getaway in the country, at Sylvia’s urging. We go every year in May, and this year she thought if we went early it might shake Ed out of his fugue. I suspected it was more a case of her needing to be rid of him for a few days, so she could think about herself for a change. But the weather was good enough, and the roads were clear, although the snow lay in deep patches among the stark trees in the woods. And maybe I was a little in need of getting away myself.

  Our yearly trips are like that male-bonding thing about fishing or hunting, except it’s long past hunting season for some things, and long before hunting season for others—and we generally just drive around and sing instead of sit in a camp and drink. Well, in previous years he’d be drinking if I let him, but it’s a car, and it’s moving, and I’m in it. I think he has a responsibility to drive it safely.

  In previous years, we’d be singing together, too, but this year he seemed inclined to let me take care of that part by myself.

  We drove north into deer country—to places so overpopulated with cervidae that humans there have gardens like the U.S. military has Fort Knox. I have heard that hungry whitetail deer can jump eight or ten feet straight up into the air, and in consequence we saw chicken-wire-roofed garden enclosures still tangled with the remains of last year’s harvest—the tips of brown corn stalks poking through the snow. We saw plenty of deer, too, standing in handfuls in the bottomlands of white fields, heads down with the confidence that they had made it through hunting season, and deep winter, and were rounding the corner on almost-spring.

  I’m not all that sure what has kept me and Ed amused with each other for so long, stuck in a moving car, though I think that when there’s driving going on, it’s no longer considered rude not to look at someone when they’re talking. I’ve noticed that you can say a lot more about difficult subjects if everyone’s eyes are looking at the road.

  Back in the shop there always seems to be business to deal with, the selling of music and our attempts to ward off bankruptcy. In my living room we just made music, loud and half drunk—his half—and there’s not much stopping for breath to let any words get in the way of our single-minded purpose. But when we’re driving, on that weekend once a year, is when I learn, without him taking his eyes from the pavement, how Ed’s marriage is sliding around like a bottleneck on a resonator guitar, and how both of them are sick at heart for the children they never had, and it’s when he admits that he was drinking too much Red for his own good. It’s when he tells me that running an independent music shop is a losing proposition these days, what with YouTube and iPods and all manner of other things he feels too old to keep up with, and that he’s thinking about retiring anyway.

  “But I’m worried about the Red,” he says. “What will I do with myself except just drink even more?”

  “You haven’t had a beer in ages,” I tell him, trying to be reassuring.

  “It’s only a matter of time,” he says, mournfully. “I can feel a tickle in my throat.”

  And then I sing another couple of songs, and then he asks me, as he always does, how old I am now, and when I remind him, he tells me: “You go get yourself a woman and make some babies together, Frederick, before it’s too late.”

  And for my part that leads into me telling him all the dates I blew in the past year. I still skirt around the whole issue of making babies, since the notion of fatherhood is about as foreign as a Polynesian nose flute. So this year, in between “The Union Maid” and “I Don’t Want Your Millions,” I told him about Kathleen and the planked salmon. I told him too about the librarian, though I told the story lightly, as if it hadn’t mattered. He shook his head a little at the salmon dinner gone to the dog, but he had a good laugh about my library fines being even worse than they used to be. And it was true that telling him about things made the humiliation tip towards humour.

  “But what about that other one?” he said. “Your neighbour? The plumber? Be pretty convenient when you need to go home and find clean clothes in the morning before going to work. Just have to hop over the porch railing.”

  “I don’t think she plays for the same team, Ed,” I said.

  “I know I’m getting old,” he admitted, “but what the hell does that mean?”

  “Forget it,” I told him. “You don’t have to keep up with the times on this one.”

  And then I continued my string of working songs with Merle Travis’s “Dark as a Dungeon” as we turned off the suddenly ugly TransCanada into the charming town of heritage Perth, and I directed him through the limestone-lined streets to Abraham and Alistair’s houses, duplexed side by side, the pointing faultless and the masonry renovated to perfection. When I got to the end of the song we sat in the car across their street and looked for a while before driving on, as if all we were doing there was admiring the brickwork.

  ED AND I STAYED OVERNIGHT WITH FRIENDS of his in Lanark where there was a fine enough Breitmann piano in the living room, and a host of other instruments scattered about the lifelike legs of their Queen Anne furniture like chew toys left for oversized pedigreed dogs. The tastes of his friends, Galen and Jane, ran from Renaissance to Baroque, and in particular to the transition period between the two, so we spent the evening in instrumental rather than vocal mode.

  Ed warmed up slowly. At first, I didn’t think he would play at all. Then for a while he would take his hands from the piano keys in the middle of a piece, with no warning, as if his fingertips had been scalded by major and minor chords, and the three of us would hold our collective breath, pausa, before he found the notes again. Or, perhaps more accurately, they found him.

  But gradually, his rusted fingers were oiled by music’s memory. All the melodies we shared that night were interpreted and defined by Ed’s sorrow, worn on his sleeves and edging down to his deftly moving fingers. When good music gets made, we can recognize its emotional elements because the notes live in us, like the words of stories. We heard the story of Ed’s life that night. At last, bittersweet between despair and hopefulness alive within the same bars and phrases, Ed began to cry—the first time I had ever seen him cry—and as he cried harder, he played harder, stroking the keys one minute as if he were making love, and the next, appassionato, as if he were at war and the piano was his enemy. At the fermatas, he wiped his nose on his sleeve, but the tears still ran off his cheeks and anointed the ivories.

  When Ed cried, Jane cried, feeling sorrow on his behalf. And looking at Jane, Galen’s eyes welled with tears. I remained dry-eyed that evening, but after we stopped at three in the morning, I fell onto their pull-out couch with a sense that something piercing, like a hawthorn branch, or perhaps the thin bones of a sixth finger, had worked itself out of me.

  IN THE MORNING’S BITING RAIN, Jane and Galen and Ed and I drove down to the restaurant below McDonald’s Corners for breakfast—middle of finkin’ nowhere, as Maya would say. All four of us seemed to be moving in some kind of dream state, slow with echoes of music, and fuzzy around the edges with lack of sleep. Our server was a young woman with an old-fashioned attitude t
owards customer service. She took our coats from us at the door and hung them up on a wrought iron hook, and then held her hands out for a second time for our scarves and Jane’s umbrella and Ed’s multi-coloured felt hat.

  “Wet day,” she said as she showed us to a table overlooking the lake. “But it’s amazing: the lake is already opening up.” I followed her overly hopeful gaze outside, where thin sheets of water covered the frozen lake.

  “An ice sandwich,” Jane observed.

  “The lake: my heart,” said Ed. Everyone could tell he was drawing an analogy.

  When we’d looked at our breakfast choices for a while without any noticeable effect, Ed waved the young waitress over again and told her we’d all like to have whatever the cook recommended, and we gave the menus back with relief, as if a crisis of some kind had been averted.

  “I might be too tired to be hungry,” said Galen, and it was easy to believe that this might be true, the way gravity was pulling at the skin under his eyes. He hadn’t shaved—none of us guys had—and he ran the palm of his hand repeatedly across his emerging whiskers.

  “We’re getting too old to stay up that late,” said Jane, shaking her head. Though we knew the drain of the previous evening hadn’t been just about late. We all stared bleakly out the window for a while—two cars drove by, and a bundled woman walked by with a dog on a rope, both soaked to the skin—and the three guys a few tables over, the only other folks in the restaurant, talked about taping hockey sticks in energetic voices. A fourth kept getting up from the table and disappearing from view for a while, and when he rejoined them they’d summarize their discussion from the past ten minutes for his benefit.

  “It’s a happening place,” observed Ed.

  Our breakfast arrived: four mountainous plates of pancakes, sausages, and beans. Real butter in a flowered dish. Real maple syrup, served in a jar with a ladle. Four steaming coffees—and naturally Ed sent his back to get tea.