Debussy’s Suite bergamasque was written from the poems of Paul Verlaine. The famous third movement of the piece, called “Clair de Lune” (Moonlight) was taken from the following poem, written in 1869, which I know you have read:
Your soul is a select landscape
Where charming masqueraders and bergamaskers go
Playing the lute and dancing and almost
Sad beneath their fantastic disguises.
All sing in a minor key
Of victorious love and the opportune life,
They do not seem to believe in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight,
With the still moonlight, sad and beautiful,
That sets the birds dreaming in the trees
And the fountains sobbing in ecstasy,
The tall slender fountains among marble statues.
Debussy wanted his music to be an emotional experience, to be about the emotions, and this is what you wanted too. You said to me, more than once, that you were tired of people going about their day trying not to feel, being afraid of emotion, and that what you wanted your music to do was simply make people feel something.
Fauré’s Theme and Variations is sombre, and even though the piece leaves that shadowy place and escapes into one variation after another, it always returns to that darkness. It is not hard to see why you chose to play it, why you chose to let it speak for you.
These were the pieces that kept you company that last fall, that you gave your failing strength to, and that you tried to perfect. This is where you put the knowledge of your impending death. This is what you gave yourself over to, and what held you up during those final few months.
It wasn’t bad company to keep.
At the end, in the hospital, we borrowed a CD player from the nurses’ station so that we could have music playing for you while you lay sedated and hooked up to the ventilator. Your friends brought in CDs that they thought you’d like, and every morning Cathy and I took a couple of CDs from the collection in your apartment. We rotated through them. The music played day and night in your room, most of it piano music. All three of the pieces that you had been learning to play that fall were there, performed by different pianists, none of them, frankly, sounding as good as you.
We thought the music would be a comfort to you, but I wonder now if it wasn’t a torture instead. The sound would have let you know that people were in the room with you. Sometimes we’d put on a particular CD and you’d thrash your head around as though you were trying to communicate something, although it was impossible to know what that might be. Either one of two things, I guess—that you liked the music, or that you wanted us to turn it off.
21
Your two CDs were reissued after you died. Now Mum and Dad are at work putting out your live recordings. There will be three discs, released in chronological order. The first one will be ready in a week or two. This would please you, I think. The first disc is solo piano and has you playing Chopin, Ravel, and your own composition, “Winterscapes.”
When you were first diagnosed and I went to your house in Toronto to see you, we went for a walk around the block. We laughed about your prognosis because it seemed so unbelievable. I don’t want to die, you said. “But you’re not dead yet,” I said. Nobody knew then how shockingly fast it would all go. Now I drive by your old neighbourhood often, right past those streets where we walked. If I look quickly, out of the corner of my eye, I can almost see us there. You, stopping to light a cigarette. Me, bending down to pat a dog.
On that visit, you gave me two file boxes to take away with me to our parents’ house, which, in your panicked state, you suddenly thought would be a safer place to keep them than at your own house. One box contained your compositions, and the other was filled with recordings of your live performances. Guard them with your life, you said—because they were your life, all the meat of your years in those two boxes that I could lift together and place in the trunk of my car.
You were always trying to compose, but there was never enough time. Your ideas and the notes for your ideas carried over from year to year, with little or no advancement. “Winterscapes,” which will be on that first live CD, was written more than ten years ago, when, miraculously, you had a few days in Montreal and could sit and watch the snow fall outside your window and were moved to write a piece about that. But you still had plans to rewrite it. This was on your list of Things To Do Before I Die.
“Winterscapes” was about the loneliness of winter. In your introduction to the piece when you performed it, you said it was about somebody sitting by a window and looking outside, and becoming quite entranced by what they see, which causes them to look inward.
You made your living teaching and accompanying and examining, all work that was done piecemeal, so that you were constantly stringing together your part-time jobs, and eventually this meant that you worked all the time. There was no day off in a week. There was no time to reflect, gather your thoughts, write down a phrase, and then another. There was no time to compose, which was what I’m sure you would say you really wanted to do.
But you were a good teacher, a natural one. After you died, cards came in from so many of your current and former students, all of them saying how encouraging and supportive you were, how patient and kind, what generosity of spirit you had.
One former student wrote, “I credit Martin for my success in piano, but more importantly, my enjoyment in playing the piano. During the many years of piano lessons, Martin was not simply my piano teacher, but he was also my friend.”
Your own notes on music were both direct and comprehensive. You advised that Thinking of where you want to clear the pedal (instead of put the pedal down) often works well. And you offered the simple thought, If you’re having trouble with the fingering, think of the music. You dismissed various “methods” for playing the piano—high wrists, low wrists, curved fingers, flat fingers—saying that music is far too varied to have one solution. Of Rachmaninoff’s Variations you wrote, This builds, but also changes gradually (is it necessary to produce the sense of building, or is it better to play each variation to the utmost of its character?). For the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata you decided that the entire movement keeps shifting back to minor chords, therefore do not make the major chords too bright.
A lot of the composers you admired, and the writers I admired, had functioned, in their time, without much money. They lived in drafty apartments, nursed one coffee all afternoon while writing in a café because it was warmer than where they lived. They were inspired to create, but underneath that was always the struggle to earn enough money to pay the rent, to get by. You and I were no different in that respect. It’s always been hard to earn a living, and sometimes it’s been brutal. It surprised me, when I became a writer, to discover that many writers these days come from money, have an independent income, or are supported by someone else.
But that was never the case for you or me. And for you perhaps it was harder because the nature of your work meant that you were required to work day and night. I remember trying to make a date to meet you for a beer when you were back in Toronto, and the only time you had free to meet, when you would have a couple of hours to spare, was Sunday night at 10 p.m.
In the list of what you wanted to work on, written down in a red hardcover notebook that you kept with you all through that last fall, you had this: Cello Sonata, Musical, Dance for Two, Pieces in Montreal—for starters, then a lot more things.
The “Cello Sonata” is little more than a few bars, written in your trademark light pencil markings, in your composition notebook. “Dance for Two” is really the only completed piece of music, and I know you would have kept tinkering with it, but we have had to count it as finished. Your friend Bernie, and Mum, worked from the almost impossible-to-read manuscript and transcribed a final version. We had the first two bars carved onto your tombstone.
“Dance for Two” was the only finished piece for your m
usical. You said to me, more than once, that you thought the musical was the most perfect art form. You were excited to be writing one. Initially, you had asked me to collaborate with you. We had always talked of working together one day, but we also thought there would be more time, that we could just keep putting off that day because it would still be there when we wanted it to be.
When you went into the hospital in Toronto for a couple of days at the end of September, that first time, for a bowel blockage that needed hydration and morphine to fix it, you asked me to work on the musical with you. The morphine, and the relief from the pain, had put you in a good mood. You were happy, full of creative spirit. You had been writing poems about the dawn each day at the hospital, and making notes about your musical. “Okay,” I said. I already knew the story of the musical because you’d told it to me numerous times. “I’ll write the words for you.”
Oh, but I want to do the words, you said. And we laughed, because although it seemed like a good idea to work together, in reality you didn’t want to give up any control over your project.
I thought later about what you said, Martin, about the musical being a perfect art form. I can see what you mean, although I would choose a sonnet over a musical as the perfect form. A musical is all plot points, each song detailing a specific decisive moment in the narrative, or relaying key information. There is no nuance, no description, all the atmosphere is done with props. It’s character and feeling, how we tell stories to one another—“this happened, and then this happened next.”
Your musical was going to have two acts. The main story was of a developer and a politician who were in league to exploit a town and its citizens. The developer owned a factory where the male lead (Jack) worked. There were safety issues at the factory and at the end of the first act Jack loses his life on the job, and returns in the second act as a ghost. He is in love with a young woman (whose name keeps changing in the notes you made). Jack comes back to her as a ghost, but she can’t see him. She lobbies against the politician and developer because of Jack’s death, and she is able to stop their corrupt plans for the town.
You had names for almost everyone, and ideas for their songs. Adam is the developer. Trixie is his girlfriend. She is a hairdresser. You were going to have a scene in the hair salon with a chorus of women sitting in chairs, singing, Trixie, Trixie, will you cut my hair …
The politician is named Tim, and he is backed by a chorus of men, thugs, known as the Morrissey Boys. There’s a doctor, simply called “Doc.” She’s there to preside over Jack’s death, but you had no songs sketched out for her yet. When she first appears on stage, she asks the audience how they are feeling.
You had most of Adam’s solo worked out by the time I came to see you in hospital that first time. You sang me the tune, with the lyrics, snapping your fingers to the beat. I am Adam. / Get down on your knees. / I am Adam. / I do what I please.
“Dance for Two” is a song without words. It opens the second act, or closes the first one. I can’t remember now what you wanted. But I do know that the dance is performed by Jack’s lover outside, at night. You imagined that the dance would take place on a bluff overlooking the moonlit water below. But that would have been hard to stage, and I think that was just a slippage from childhood. We grew up near the bluffs in Scarborough. We often rode our bikes to the bluffs when we were children, or sat on the edge of them as teenagers, smoking and drinking. You walked back to them a few times when you were ill and staying at our parents’ house. They were always compelling: that strict three-hundred-foot drop to the lake, the crumbling sandstone cliffs. Once, as children, we dared our wildest friend to ride his bike off the bluffs. He began pedalling in the middle of the park towards the drop, and I remember his hurtling flight across the grass, how his bike soared, spectacularly, right out past the edge, hung in the air for a moment and then dropped straight down. He snagged on some tree roots about sixty feet below and had to be rescued by the fire department. His bike was a tangled twist of metal at the bottom of the cliffs.
I think that you were Jack. When you told me that your main character was going to die after the first act, I said, “Well, then, how can you have a second act without him?”
I know, you said. It’s a problem. But he has to die.
It’s what you hoped, I suppose, what we all hoped—that somehow you would come back as a ghost, that you would find your way home.
You wrote a song for your female lead to sing after her lover died. In all your other notes for the musical, you interspersed words and music, notes dashed down and words scrawled on top of them. But in this song there are only words, and they are written out neatly, in stanzas, like a poem.
Jack, where are you—where have you—where have you gone?
I’m inside of you, and you’re inside of me.
But where have we—where have we gone?
Where are we now?
22
I remember you being born. It was the end of May and there was a heat wave. I was wearing shorts because my legs were sticking to the orange plastic chair in the hospital waiting room. Also, my legs didn’t touch the floor, because I remember the feel of swinging them back and forth as Dad and I waited for Mum to come downstairs with the new baby.
I had wished and wished for a baby brother, and so it felt as though the fact of it coming true had something to do with that wish. I could hardly wait to see you for the first time. You were wrapped tightly in a blue blanket (everything was strictly gender colour-coded in those days). You didn’t cry. I was allowed to hold you all the way home in the taxi, and I was careful not to move in case I made you upset.
I adored you as my little brother, and later Cathy adored you as her big brother. Our parents cherished you as their only son, and later they worshipped you for your musical gifts. From winning piano competitions when you were a child, to finishing your ARCT when you were thirteen, to debuting at the Royal Festival Hall in England at twenty, you were always revered for your musical ability.
You were born into this atmosphere of utter adoration, which at first you took for granted, and later craved but did not trust.
There was a period when you rebelled against the piano because you felt that everyone only liked you for your talent, not for your real self. You struggled with these feelings for years. I asked you in the fall that you were dying if you still felt conflicted. I’ve made peace with it, you said. I love the piano.
I think that you, like me, had done the same thing so intensely, and for so long, that it was impossible to know where it ended and you began. The piano, once “other,” was now you, and it could be relied upon to express your feelings rather than to simply absorb them.
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I loved that you chose as your bank code the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—5552.
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You can fall into music, and maybe music is better company than writing because it makes a sound, takes up human space, a dimension in the world. It releases emotion, whereas writing pins emotion down. And all writing is necessarily elegiac because it happens after the moment it seeks to capture.
25
There’s a frost out this morning. The first frost this fall, and the crisp of the ground and the cold of the air makes me think of you, of your dying season, and how we’ve entered it once again.
The dog’s breath came in clouds as she tore through the fields this morning. The heat of her, in the cold mouth of the day.
What I was thinking today was how when we were children there was that big climbing frame in the backyard. We spent a lot of time on it, scaling the ladders up the sides, hanging upside down from the bars at the top. It was elaborate and complicated and had taken our parents a full weekend to assemble. Each of the bars was a different colour—blue, red, yellow, silver—although the silver ones eventually rusted out and our clothes were always smudged with that orange dust.
We were the only ones on the street who had a climbing frame and so our yard was often f
illed with other children. One day, we were all on the frame, about seven of us, and you fell off. Remember, Martin? Your teeth went straight through your tongue and there was a great gush of blood. Your tongue was partially severed and it took numerous stitches to close the wound, all without anesthetic. But before that—before the drive to the emergency department, before I even screamed for Mum—when you were crouched on the grass, bleeding, I chased everyone else out of the yard. I was convinced that someone had pushed you, and since I didn’t know who it was, I just got rid of them all.
What I was thinking this morning was how this wasn’t much different from the way I behaved at the hospital in Burnaby at the end of your life. I made rules of conduct for your bedside. No one was allowed to cry, or talk over your prone body as though you weren’t there. No one was allowed to tell you that you were dying, or make references to your death. All the talk had to be positive, because all you knew was that you had come to the hospital for an emergency operation, and that you had survived the operation. You didn’t know anything beyond that. I’m still convinced this was true. You didn’t know you were dying, and when you were dead, you didn’t know that you were dead.
But I think you know now.
I wanted to protect you, as always. I wanted you to be able to have your own feelings, whatever they were, and not be burdened with the sorrows and tears of everyone else—because you were a natural empathizer and would have found it easier to take on other people’s feelings than to acknowledge or struggle with your own.
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