Nocturne

by Helen Humphreys

  Miss Empringham came to our house once a week. She was an avid garbage picker and often brought me something from someone’s trash. Sometimes the items still smelled like garbage. One week she brought me an angel formed out of coat hangers and a pair of nylons.

  I was, frankly, more interested in Miss Empringham than in the piano. She did look alarmingly like Beethoven, and stamped around, brusque, moody, and impatient. She was often irritated with me, which I rather liked.

  You wanted to have piano lessons, but Mum said you were too young, so you asked if you could stay in the living room during my lesson. I didn’t want you there as a distraction, or as a witness to my clumsy playing, but Mum said you could stay so long as you were quiet. I remember you sitting absolutely still during my lesson, your hands on your knees, while I squirmed on the piano bench and Miss Empringham snapped and chided, waving her conductor’s wand, or crashing her beefy hands down on the keys.

  I don’t remember how many lessons you sat through. It couldn’t have been very many—maybe two or three—but one day, after Miss Empringham had left the house, you got up from the couch and came over to the piano and played, perfectly, for Mum and I, the piece of music that I had been struggling with all week. After that, Miss Empringham came to the house to teach you, and I was allowed to stop having piano lessons, which was a huge relief.

  After you died, some of your friends asked me what you were like as a little boy, and I said serious and sensitive. At the age of five you would walk up the street to the neighbour’s house and have tea with her and discuss the Vietnam War. At the age of seven you kept a diary that recorded how many hours a day you were practising the piano, and what competitions you had entered and won, all in shaky childhood script. When we went fishing—which we did a lot as children, left to our own devices at the boat club in Port Perry while our parents worked on their cabin cruiser—you would catch fish, take them off the hook, and kiss them before you threw them back into the water. I think you said something to the fish after you kissed them. Good luck, or Thank you.

  You were deadly serious as a little boy, but as a teenager and man you liked puns and practical jokes. And you were funny. I still have some of the Christmas labels you used to attach to my presents, where you would take the first letters of my name and your name, and make synonymous words from to those letters. To Handel, Love Mozart. To Heavy, Love Massive. To Hope, Love Mercy. You did this with everyone in the family, never repeating words or themes from one year to the next.

  I never regretted giving up the piano. I much preferred words to music. I loved the world of books, a world I felt was much more exciting than the one I actually lived in. To have some of the thrill of story, I would try to put myself in the way of adventure in my real life. Usually this involved riding my bike around the neighbourhood, or squelching through the pond opposite our house, although neither activity ever yielded anything interesting. For a long stretch of days one summer, I stood at the window of my bedroom, notebook in hand, looking for suspicious people to document. I made you stand with me, as my assistant. Your job was to look up the street while I looked down.

  Around this time, I read Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. This whimsical story of the friendship between Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the spider moved me as nothing else had moved me before. When that spider died, I was inconsolable. Mum, nonplussed by my sobbing, tried to calm me by pointing out that because Charlotte had babies there were still lots of spiders at the end of the story. But of course these other spiders didn’t matter because I didn’t know them. I didn’t care about them.

  Since we lived in the suburbs, few people walked along our street, suspicious or otherwise. Everyone drove everywhere. You soon quit being my surveillance assistant, saying that it was boring. I realized then that it might be better to make up the adventures rather than wait for them to happen to me. And my devastating response to Charlotte’s Web made me think that if I controlled a story, I would never have to feel that sad again.

  I was wrong, but this was how I became a writer.

  You said, near the end of being you, that music is always good—meaning, to listen to it, to play it, is always an enriching experience. I can’t say the same about writing, and my lifetime of doing it has always held ambivalence and struggle. But it makes sense, if I think back to our beginnings. You responded to the music. You got up from the couch and walked over to the piano and simply entered what had moved you. I looked to writing to provide what life wasn’t providing, to be, in a way, a substitute for living. And this has remained. For to write well, to write fully, to really get inside a novel, I have to leave the world I actually live in. I can’t have distractions from the story, which means living alone, and creating an environment of calm and routine—wearing the same clothes day after day, eating the same food—so that nothing from the real world interferes with the creation of the fictional one.

  Over the years this has worn me down and created a kind of loneliness that is hard to live with, and surprisingly hard to leave.

  About ten years ago, when I was writing almost all the time, I remember you saying to me, You used to do other things besides work, and I thought that was strange coming from you, who was just as driven to create. But you were right. And now, perhaps, the desire to not write is really just a desire to not leave the real world, a world that has been made possible again, perversely, by your death.

  But the thing about writing is that I’ve done it for so long, I can no longer differentiate where it ends and I begin. My being is enmeshed with what I do. And this is why, in spite of my desire to give up writing, I am writing to you one last time. Writing is what I have, and it’s how I make sense of experience.

  I even wrote a line at your hospital bedside, as you lay dying, because two ideas occurred to me in that moment and I wanted to remember them. The first was just the very simple fact that, in the end, you can step out of a room or you can’t. That is what separates the living from the dying, that one small, enormous action. The second is the poignant truth of the flesh we live inside, that in the end the body leaks or it holds.

  Someone is letting off firecrackers tonight. The dog is apprehensive, but she’s not scared yet, because she’s still so young. We grow into our fears, animals and humans alike. We grow into our fears and our neuroses. So, for now, she sits beside me on the little deck behind my house, panting and nervous, but staying with me.

  You had an ulcer at the age of seven. Now the experts say that ulcers are caused by a bacterial infection, but the ulcer always seemed connected to your practising the piano or worrying about your practising. It just felt like further evidence, to me, of your seriousness as a child. And when I look back now, tonight, it seems that neither of us was ever really lighthearted or carefree. We may as well have been adults, not children. We were driven and responsible and pathologically independent.

  When we had our last conversation over the phone, as they were wheeling you down the hospital corridor to the operating room, I asked you what you wanted me to do for you, and you said, You decide what’s best. I’ll leave it to you. I give in. I give in to the disease. I’ll stop working. And I realized then how hard you’d been fighting, that you hadn’t really let anyone help you until that moment—and by then, of course, it was too late.

  5

  You will want to know what happened to your things because you (like me) were always very attached to your possessions. It gave you comfort to be surrounded by them.

  When I went out to Vancouver, when you were first in hospital there, I got your wallet and keys from the nurses and I went to your apartment. It was still a mess because you’d just moved in, just moved back out west two weeks before you went into hospital. There were piles of things all over the floor in the bedroom. The living room was more orderly. The books were on the shelves, the furniture in its place. The pictures weren’t yet on the walls, but they were neatly stacked against one wall.

  I slept in your sheets, in the bed you’d ordered t
hat had been delivered the day you went into hospital. You called the ambulance in the middle of the night, so you never got to sleep one full night in that bed.

  I slept in your bed. I used your towel when I showered. I hauled your laundry—load after load—down to the basement where the washers and dryers were behind a steel door that shushed closed behind me. I did all your laundry and I put your clothes away. I washed your dishes. At night I lay in your bed and stared at the ceiling. Sometimes I slid open the single pane of glass that was your bedroom window and I leaned out over the sill and stared down at the row of cedars that bordered the side of the apartment building and the wooden fence next door. It was late November and there had been a lot of rain. The cedars were wet and aromatic and when I breathed them in, I was reminded of the green and damp smell of England, and I could see how this place reminded you of that one—the England we had, at different times, both lived in—the country where I was born.

  I walked through the rooms of your apartment and looked at your belongings. Most of them were deeply familiar. You didn’t like to throw anything out, which was a burden when I came back in January to clean out your apartment and jammed garbage bag after garbage bag with outdated microwave instructions, old travel brochures, plastic packaging for various electronics.

  But what struck me about your apartment was how little changed your surroundings were from when you were twenty. You had not strayed from our original path, as I had. You still lived a life circumscribed by art. You played the piano, taught the piano, composed at the piano in the day. On the nights you weren’t working, you went out with your girlfriend or for a beer with your friends or to sit in a pub and watch the hockey game. Your life could have been the life of an artist a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago. It was only in the last couple of years that you’d owned anything, that you’d tried to be like everyone else—with a car and a house and a debt load—and you’d found it didn’t suit you at all. I’m the kind of person who likes living in an apartment, you’d said to me.

  A lot of your books were the same as mine. I might even have given them to you, but I couldn’t remember. I took English Journey from the top shelf in the living room and I read a small part of it every night before I went to sleep. If you don’t remember, it’s the story of a cranky British novelist travelling through the north of England in the footsteps of J.B. Priestley, only she’s dragging along a film crew. She spends a lot of the book desperate for a cigarette.

  It’s a true story. I like that term—true story. That’s what this is. Because I have ordered experience, that makes it a story. It’s as simple as that. While I stand in the chaos and swirl of my life, I am in the midst of truth. Once I decide what experience or sensation comes first, and then what comes second, I have begun to make a story. It doesn’t matter that the facts are facts—the ordering of experience is the relevant part.

  English Journey was soothing because I’d read it before, years ago, and I knew what to expect from it. Reading it helped me to sleep, helped to calm me down.

  At night, after I had spent the day at the hospital, sitting beside your bed, I tidied your apartment. I put anything personal away, kept what was private, private. I phoned your students and cancelled lessons with those who were due to come that week, cancelled the jobs you were set to go to. I downplayed the seriousness of your situation in case you did miraculously recover and would be embarrassed by the dire spin I had put on your prognosis.

  This was all before you died, but you wouldn’t know this part because you were unconscious.

  After you died the decisions were more pragmatic. I kept any piece of paper with your handwriting on it. I threw out everything else. We tried, and mostly succeeded, to sell or give away anything you loved to the people whom you loved. All of us took back from you the things we had given you.

  What I kept of yours, aside from what you left me in your will, were strange, small objects: a felt rock that I put in my car, over the cupholder with the loose change in it, which my dog tries to steal every once in a while because it looks like a stuffed toy; a small earthenware jug from your kitchen that sat, empty, on the back of your stove; the donkey finger-puppet from our childhood; your pencils for composing, each one sharpened to a useful, hopeful point; the postcards you bought but never sent, from our last trip together in New York; the books you were reading (one of which was mine; I mean, it was written by me); the CDs from your car; the notes you had made towards pieces of music that you never got to write; some T-shirts; and a cutting board, your champagne glasses, your carry-on bag, a photograph you had bought in New York of Central Park in winter, a Chopin prelude with your fingering pencilled in, the four bone-handled knives from your cutlery drawer, one with a chip out of the tip where you’d clearly used it to try to pry something open and hadn’t necessarily succeeded.

  All these objects were small enough to tuck into the corners of my life.

  No one wanted, or could take, your kitchen table, a wooden one that you’d bought used and painted with a pale green wash. It was made from tongue-and-groove panelling that had been nailed onto a frame with legs. I remember it from every place you’d ever lived. It was too expensive to ship back to Ontario, and your friends couldn’t find a place for it in their houses. We had to leave it with your landlady, who said she’d use it, but I’m not sure what happened to it in the end because she sold the building shortly after you died. I’m not sure where she went.

  But we did find out, before she sold the building, that a brother and sister had rented your apartment. One of them must be sleeping in your bedroom right now, in the middle of this night, and the other sleeping in the room at the front of the apartment that you were going to use as a music studio.

  Your car was sold to a man from Surrey, who came to look at it with his wife. They were an odd couple. He was large and loud, and had long, stringy hair and pants that he was constantly hauling up with one hand. She was small and quiet, neat in dress and manner. He had agreed to a price on the phone, but once he got to the apartment, he tried to bargain me down. I almost told him to leave because I knew he was getting a good deal on the car and it annoyed me that he would have the gall to try for an even better one. He had brought tools with him, screwdrivers and adjustable wrenches, and he crawled, with great difficulty, underneath the car to check various connections and to make sure it didn’t have a rusty underbelly. I stood to the side with his wife, neither of us saying anything, while he huffed and puffed, emerging from under the car with grease marks on his forehead.

  When we went for the test drive he finally found something he could use for bargaining. “Look,” he said, triumphantly tapping the steering wheel. “The rubber is separating from the metal where the wheel has been gripped too hard.” He demonstrated by applying a claw-like pressure to the steering wheel so I could see how the rubber had been pulled away from the metal frame of the wheel. You had bought the car used, so I don’t know if it was you or the previous owner who had driven with such a death grip on the steering wheel. I hope it wasn’t you.

  I gave the man, Clive, a hundred dollars off the price of the car.

  Later, we went together to the motor vehicle office to change the ownership. The Vancouver bureaucracy is not the same as the Ontario bureaucracy and required different pieces of paper, none of which we had. I don’t remember what we needed to do, only that we were in the office for hours, during which time I had to call Cathy at her job and she had to go to the lawyer’s office in Kingston to fax something out to me. (It created a lot of extra work, making us joint executors, because we always had to do bureaucratic tasks in tandem.)

  During the lengthy wait, Clive went to the bathroom numerous times, finally coming back to whisper, loudly, to me that he’d just had an operation and now it seemed his stitches had split. “I jammed a whole roll of toilet paper up there,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s going to hold.”

  I was too weary and dispirited to lose my temper with the motor vehicle employees
, but in the end, Clive did it for me. After the umpteenth delay he yelled at the clerk.

  “Why can’t you be more co-operative? Can’t you see, she’s been through enough already!”

  I was touched that he said this on my behalf, and when, finally, everything was settled in our favour and we parted company outside your—now Clive’s—car, I was actually sorry to see him go.

  You would have liked his character, not so much that he was trying for a better deal, but certainly his disdain for the vehicle authorities, so nobly displayed, and the crazy, chaotic state of his innards.

  There was no piano for us to sell, as you know, because you had decided to sell your piano before you left Toronto, to avoid the shipping expense. I know you were planning on getting another after you arrived in Vancouver. But when I called you, shortly before you went into hospital, and asked if you’d bought one yet, you said, I think it will be a while before I get another piano. It made me uneasy to hear that. For most of your life, from the age of four on, you had played the piano for hours every day. For you to say that meant you were reconciled to your death, already defeated by it. Your not playing the piano in those last two weeks before you went into hospital was more heartbreaking than anything else.

  6

  My ex-partner, Mary Louise, and I had shared our old dog, Hazel, and after Hazel died, we decided to get new puppies from the same litter. The idea was that we could look after each other’s dogs when one of us had to go away. Because Mary Louise was on sabbatical with her partner in Edinburgh until the summer, we decided that I would pick up the two Vizsla puppies from the breeder at the beginning of May and care for them both until she got back in July. Before that, Mary Louise sent me a plane ticket to come and visit her in Edinburgh for her fiftieth birthday in February. I went, but I had just finished clearing out your apartment in Vancouver and I was so tired and weighed down with grief that I could barely drag myself along behind her as she cheerfully marched up and down the hilly Edinburgh streets, trying to walk me back to life.