by Dian Day
“No problem, sir,” said the ever-cheerful youth. “Anything else you need while I’m there?”
When it came to down it, we were all hungrier than we’d thought.
“Oh my God, these beans!” Ed said, at his first forkfull.
“Good, eh?” Galen agreed. And then there wasn’t any more desultory conversation, but sudden and surprising exclamations about the uplifting power of a good home-cooked breakfast.
“Even if we didn’t home-cook it,” said Jane.
“No, really, these beans,” said Ed. “Can you believe these beans? You tell the cook,” he called to our smiling waitress. “You tell the cook these are the best beans I’ve ever had.”
“You can tell him yourself,” she said, and at that the transient man from the other table stood up and walked good-naturedly towards us, revealing the reason for his continuous disappearances.
“You’re the cook?” said Ed. “These are the best baked beans I’ve ever eaten,” he repeated.
I looked at Ed, and I had the faintest premonition of a spark in his aging eyes, like when you hear a train whistle a long time before the train appears. A spark birthed, it seemed, by the previous night’s music and tears, the lack of sleep, the frozen lake and the melting ice; and midwived most inexplicably, by beans, bringing something as yet undefined on the newborn surface of his face. It was like seeing Hope personified, diminutive and clothed in green, after an endless winter. There was a shift in the weight of the air around us.
“Well now, I’m glad you like them,” said our cook—who was also, presumably, the restaurant’s owner. “I get a lot of compliments about them. I’ve spent a long time perfecting those beans.”
SOMETIMES I THINK WE ARE ALL LIVING out stories of mythic proportion; we are each the heroes, or perhaps anti-heroes, of our own lives. We are called, and we either agree to the trip or refuse to go. There is indeed a pattern to all things. Events are small in number but have large variations, and the patterns repeat themselves like a wheel rolling in the dirt, or a choir singing a simple round with the melody going on indefinitely: love, loss; security, fear; mastery, despair. In every one of our song-stories there are challenges, obstacles, hurdles. At every primordial turn, we ask ourselves moral questions, but the answers are given to us in symbol and archetype; and since we are merely human we cannot decipher what the gods mean to tell us.
On the drive home, Ed was pretty quiet, but it seemed a silence of acceptance rather than sorrow. I didn’t sing, either, my head too full of the memories of the previous twenty-four hours, thoughts tumbling in the wheel. When Ed pulled his car up in the dusk assembling in front of my house, I didn’t really know what to say to him.
“Come on over tomorrow night,” I tried. “It’ll be fine, even without the Red.” I opened the car door, but he put his hand on my arm and stopped me from getting out.
“I’m going to retire soon,” he said then. It was as if he’d just decided that very minute. “I don’t suppose you want the shop?” But he asked the question like he already knew the answer.
“Sylvia told me what you’re thinking, Ed,” I told him. “I don’t really think it’s feasible.”
“Sylvia told me you’d say that,” he said, ruefully.
“Do you want the details?” I asked.
“No, I guess I don’t need the details,” he said. “I can work them out for myself. You have a job already, and the shop doesn’t make enough to hire someone else to work there…”
“And the whole Guitar Hero thing,” I said.
“And the whole Karaoke thing,” he agreed. “Passing for music. Pffft.”
“And you’ve given me enough already,” I added. I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t grateful.
“Oh, don’t give me that crap,” said Ed forcefully, with sudden anger. “What I’ve given you seems to be taking you your whole bloody life to get over!” And he let go of my arm and waved me out of the car, and I got my bag from the back seat without thinking of any response.
After he pulled away, I stood on the sidewalk and watched his tail lights come on at every stop sign until he turned left on Montreal Street, a well-lit warning in the ancient language of the gods.
I DIDN’T ASK ED WHAT HE’D MEANT, though I tried to. In the days that followed, when his head was bent over the Gibson, all four fingers of his mottled hand sliding on the strings, tunelessly, I didn’t say “Ed, what did you mean by that?” I watched his hand, and I listened to the noise he was making with the guitar, like the distant whistle of a lost bird. When I watched him open the jar of peanut butter in the shop, and mix the jar’s contents labouriously, with a knife, plunging it up and down methodically, peanut oil invariably spilling over the sides of the jar and down his fingers, I didn’t say, “What am I not getting over?” I just got a dusting rag and wiped up the drips and wiped his shaking fingers, too, like I would a child’s—and he let me. When he left the shop in the afternoons, putting his cold hands out thinly and pulling the door closed behind him as one might pull a lover close, for comfort, I didn’t run after him and ask, “What am I not dealing with?” I watched him walk away through the wet snow for a few seconds, his shoulders hunched up against the wind, his frame so insubstantial that it seemed he might melt away with the snowflakes, before I picked up the phone to call Sylvia to let her know he was on his way home.
I practised asking him. In my mind, I asked him whenever we were together, the question voiced in my mind almost as regularly as the intake of breath in the dull air of the shop. I tried out different phrasing in front of the mirror in the bathroom, checking my eyes to ensure that they looked as casual as I intended as the quiet words emerged from my dusty throat. I looked around the store room on my way through as if I might find the question hidden there in pieces, waiting to be picked up and assembled in my mouth, a row of teeth ready to bite off anything. In my mind, I even asked him when I came in with the mail, handing over the question as I handed over the small packet of bills and letters. Nothing sounded. I pretended that I didn’t want to know; we both knew that I already did.
WE DIDN’T CALL IT BULLYING in those days. We didn’t call it anything. We didn’t ever once think that what we were saying out loud in the school yard and under our breaths in the cathedral vestry had the power to shift the entire swirling world under our still-growing feet.
The shift occurred three days before the Christmas Concert, near the end of the first semester of our final year.
Kevin put Alex’s homework in the office shredder while Mrs. McDermot was out of the room. He’d grabbed it out of Alex’s hands in the hallway and run, dodging between the streams of boys moving noisily from classrooms to chapel, and they had passed it back and forth among the senior class as if playing basketball, getting ready to shoot a hoop. Alex had run after them, laughing hollowly. Still trying pathetically to play the game.
It wasn’t any regular old homework. It was his only copy—in the days before computers in the schools—of a term paper due that day in music theory, a course whose successful completion was required for his Juilliard audition.
I know because I held my own paper loosely and confidently in my hands, knowing there was no threat to its security.
They got to the end of the hallway, and Mrs. McDermot came out of the office and crossed over to the staff washroom.
“Settle down, boys,” she called over her shoulder, but no one paid her any notice.
Somewhere in a twin world, far distant from this one, before any single one of those sheets of paper got anywhere near that terrible machine, a better Frederick lifted his chin like a hero and pointed his slender finger at his friends. He lifted his scarred hand, and shouted, “Enough!”
In that other universe, Kevin returned the paper into my outstretched hand, and I, in turn, handed it back to Alex Hughes, since what we did know, after all, despite our still-growing feet, was that some things
were just too big to tamper with.
But in this universe, this is what I said: “You faggot, Alex.”
And it felt good. I enjoyed saying it; the power was all mine. I knew—for the length of time those words echoed in my head—that I was omnipotent, and that I could lay waste to the entire world. One of the Madrigal boys, at last. I laughed, and I watched the gang of them in that fateful dance, Alex uselessly leaping to try to rescue his future, held above his head by boys whose voices never could compete with his own, but whose height was, in that moment, worth far more than music. Boys whose savage strength was enough to hold him back in the doorway, flailing his arms like a whirligig, no longer laughing, as his future was stripped of its thin and desperate possibility.
I could have made it be different, then; I know it.
DAYS WENT BY, PUNCTUATED BY unwelcome memory. I delivered the mail and taught voice lessons and after dreaded evenings fell into bed and prayed for dreamless sleep. I never felt rested when I awoke in the mornings. Night after night I lay awake and sometimes half-awake in the dark, surrounded by the scattered fragments of my life. When my alarm went off, my heart was invariably already racing, and I pulled on my Canada Post pants in a kind of torpor, the lethargy of my body in direct contrast to the hazardous speed of my careening mind.
Through those long nights, at first, I was back at St. Mary’s: still a boy, still in uniform, still in school. Still living with Annie and singing my heart out in public—at school, in church, at concerts and funerals, in the shower, and on the bus. Those images should have been nothing but comforting: me singing—unrestrained, unselfconscious, utterly free of guilt or remorse. I belted out all my favourite songs, and the world went about its merry business. I remembered how children feel when they first discover Christmas; the way a boy’s new love feels at thirteen, when he thinks this miracle is going to last forever; the way a hypothetical Adam must have felt, surrounded by an entire world that had been made for him and his other half by a generous God. Imagine that first spring and summer, when all kinds of curious creatures ran among the fresh green leaves, everything holding such promise that human hearts could admit not even the slightest possibility of future misfortune.
I wanted to linger joyously; it was like lucid dreaming. There can be such peace in dreams, however fleeting.
But suddenly, we open the door of the phone booth and look up to discover a violent storm already underway. It arrives like a lightning bolt. We never saw it coming.
Annie was pinning the holly onto my blazer. She was having a lot of trouble with the procedure. She tried numbers of times, holding the pins in her mouth, her cool hand inside my jacket, holding the lapel away from my skin. She was upset, and I made myself believe she was frustrated with herself for not being able to get it right. She began to cry, and I decided she’d pricked her own finger with the pin. The tears streamed down her face, and I ignored them, wishing they had nothing whatsoever to do with me. I was impatient to be gone. I had a concert to sing: my last St. Mary’s Christmas concert.
I had one more semester of high school to sing through. My invitation to audition for Juilliard was stuck to Annie’s fridge with a magnet shaped like a treble clef. Even without Juilliard, I had more post-secondary musical options than I could keep track of. Several university scholarships had already been offered. Concert tours were already in the wings. Recording studios were already lined up. I had a future to step into that stretched out before me like all of Eden. Everything I could see was mine.
One night, over and over, Annie was driving me to Massey Hall in her ancient Volvo. She always knew the best way to get somewhere, and we wove through the streets of Toronto relatively unencumbered by traffic. At every stoplight, I watched as the walk signal changed and people crossed in front of the car, or stood at the streetcar stops smoking furiously, as if to warm themselves by inhaling minute amounts of smoky heat, or sat on the curb wrapped in dirty sleeping bags, hoping for enough coins for a cup of coffee. I avoided looking across at Annie. We didn’t speak to each other. The holly was pinned to my blazer above my heart, and I had decided not to wear a coat. I held my hands between my knees; keeping warm or praying, I do not remember which.
She dropped me at the stage door, and went to park. I went inside with all the other boys flowing in through the open doors—some singing snippets of carols, warming up their concert voices, some laughing and punching and slapping each other’s shoulders, the way boys do—the heat rushing out to meet us and inviting us in. I could feel the heat, but it did not penetrate. I hid my hands under my armpits, as I always did when I was cold.
One night, at last, I was onstage, hearing the opening bars of “Silent Night.” A portent, had I but known it. Had I understood but one small thing about myself, or about being human, or about guilt, or about the inexorable end of childhood. How could I have seen it coming? That was the end of it, that moment when I moved forward on the stage to sing my last solo—the solo that should have been a duet—at the last Christmas Concert at St. Mary’s, during my last, my graduating year. That moment when I opened my mouth to sing, and the music did not come. The moment when I lost my voice, not to puberty, or shyness, but to despair.
The moment when I at last saw myself for what I was, and recoiled.
The moment when God Himself deserted me.
I STOOD IN THE SCHOOL CLOAKROOM and watched the door, as if Alex might come back in and laugh, as if we could still make it into some kind of joke. In my hands, I held a pair of worn gloves, and thought about going after him.
But I didn’t.
He’d go to Mary and pray, and then he would come back, I told myself. I waited a long time. He never came back. The side door to the school courtyard stayed closed. There was a clock somewhere; I heard it ticking. But the feeling of power had given way to self-loathing and a growing horror, so it might have been my heart.
I PUT ON MY JACKET, walked over to the shop, and sat around with Ed while he set about tuning every guitar on the racks. There were more E notes oscillating in the air than in an entire symphony. He’d hand-drawn a big sign that read “Closing Sale!” in twelve-inch letters, and there were a fair number of people coming in and out, a little alarmed that a place they’d never before thought to patronize might be going out of business after being an institution of the town for so long. I only went to talk to Ed to keep his spirits up. I also held the instrument he was currently tuning while he went and showed the nice woman the second-hand French horn, and the nice man the rainbow guitar straps, and the nice child the book called How to Play the Pennywhistle, all at fifty percent off. On my way home, I stopped in at the bookstore because I couldn’t bear to go back to the library, and I spent the evening lying on my bed with a book in my hands. But I found I was reading sentences over and over; after twenty times they still held no meaning.
ON SATURDAY, BOTH MY MUSIC STUDENTS CANCELLED, and I didn’t really know what to do with myself. The piano and sundry collections of stringed instruments held no draw; it didn’t really seem worthwhile to get dressed. I wandered around the house in my pyjamas and finally settled on the chair in my bedroom to watch the newly awakened Free-for-All and Fly-by-Night on the shelf outside my window, shelling my peanuts and stuffing them into their eager cheeks.
The sky was bright blue, and it seemed like the temperature was climbing, so mid-morning I put one of my kitchen chairs out on the front porch and went outside wrapped in blankets. Spring was no longer a suggestion in the air, but a tangible event. The roads and sidewalks and driveways were clear of snow, and I could see a few crocuses emerging in the bare patch of ground in front of the other side of the porch, the last things planted by Norman before he packed it in and sold his house to Maya.
I heard Luke coming long before I saw him. When he finally rounded the corner, all I could hope was that he’d gotten a good price for the WD-40.
He was so busy scanning the curb that he didn�
�t see me at first; when he did, he made a quick ninety-degree turn with his wheelbarrow and pushed it two steps up my walkway. When the wheel hit my bottom step, a case of empties slid off the top of his pile and landed at my feet.
“You sick?” he asked, perplexed, as if I were the strangest thing he had seen that day.
“Nope,” I said. I pushed the empties back. I felt a little self-conscious in my pyjamas, which was ridiculous. I was talking to someone who had been known to wear socks on his hands and underwear on his head.
“Hmmmm,” he said. He stood there for a while, thinking. “You got any empties?”
“No,” I said, “sorry.”
“You got any books you want me to take back to the library?”
“Oh,” I said. “No. No books, either.”
“Hmmmm,” he said.
It finally occurred to me that he might be hungry, and if I got him some crackers maybe he would go away.
“You hungry?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, and then he looked like he’d had an idea, like he surprised himself with his own idea. “Why don’t you come to lunch with me? I’ll take you out to eat for once.”
I protested. He argued. I said he really didn’t need to do that; he said it would be an honour. I said no really; he said it would make him feel less like a parasite. I said I wasn’t dressed; he said that didn’t matter. I said it did; he said he would wait, outside, while I put some clothes on. He was a pretty stubborn guy for someone whose life had been made infinitely easier because of a discarded wheelbarrow. I finally gave up when he asked me to listen to his stomach rumbling, and went inside to get dressed. By that time my stomach was rumbling too.
As promised, he waited outside, though I had, somewhat against my better judgement, invited him in. When I got back outside, Luke was sitting in my forgotten kitchen chair, reading the Sears flyer.
“Whites are on sale,” he grunted.