Street Symphony

by Rachel Wyatt

  In the small room, he sat in front of a computer screen hiding from the people who ran the casino, two men he was sure he’d seen in the Goodfellas movie. Had he been a woman, he might have fallen for their strong, silent approach. As it was, he’d become their accountant. So far they were pleased with him. He dreaded the day when they were not. And dread had sucked out his enjoyment of life. Baseball had lost its glow. All food tasted like dry toast. Delight in Maura, in love, in Skyler, his remote-control plane, had declined to near zero. And they’d talked of starting a family next year. Family! Famiglia! He shuddered. Those skimpily dressed kids Rolf employed in the “shop” had to be somebody’s daughters. Did their parents know where they were?

  He’d have to tell Maura soon. He was tired of leaving the house an hour earlier than necessary as if he were still working at his old job. One of these days she might bump into one of his ex-colleagues in the street or worse, with her scattershot approach to job seeking, be invited to an interview at SafetyNest: Branches everywhere. Feel safe with us. You can be sure when we insure. Her reaction to his present occupation would be shriek, howl, get out of there.

  And yesterday the body of a girl had fallen from the building across the road. A freezing hand had clamped onto his spine when Maura told him about it. He’d poured each of them a glass of the whisky they kept for his dad’s visits, and tried to comfort her. “Don’t get involved,” he’d said. “Please.”

  ~ • ~

  The interview left Maura feeling hopeless. “What,” the superior woman behind her large desk had asked after twenty minutes of serious questions to which Maura knew she’d responded well, “do you think of country and western music?” Since the job on offer was to do with the evaluation and assessment of educational statistics, Maura was thrown off track and became wary. “Not a great deal,” she’d answered, not meaning disrespect but that she hardly ever thought about it at all.

  The response from Ms Kazlak was a significant “Ah!” It was over.

  She left the building considering better replies. Love it. Hate it. Mention a name. Merle Haggard. Only one she knew. Could have sung, “I turned twenty-one in prison.” She stood still and wanted to go back. Clearly it was a trick. She should have said, Why do you ask? Shown some initiative. Maybe she should have said right away, Look, I saw a woman die yesterday. I’ve maybe talked to a murderer and I’m afraid, and given herself an excuse for any missteps. And then she saw Harold. He was coming out of an alley beside the casino. He looked furtive. She dodged into the Wholesome Bakery and watched as he went to the bar next door. Another man who looked very like the man from the beige building, possibly the killer, also emerged from the alley and also went into the bar.

  She had instant choices. The accidental meeting: What a surprise! The confrontation: What are you doing here? Or thirdly, home. She chose home. It would give her time to sort out her thoughts. As she hurried along to catch the number seven by McDonald’s, Maura was disturbed. The universe had tilted. Two days, two shocks. The bus seemed to take forever and by the time it reached her stop, she’d convinced herself that Harold was plotting with that man, perhaps to lure her up to the roof of the beige building. For the past few weeks there’d been little response from Harold about anything at all. Even sex, his favourite leisure pursuit after the remote plane club, failed to interest him. And the other man? What if he was the culprit and knew she was Harold’s wife? Or had Harold joined a group whose members routinely pushed people off tall buildings? Maybe he’d taken up gambling to make up for her loss of income and had remortgaged the house or even lost it.

  Again she had options but decided to watch and wait. And not, on any account, to be lured onto a roof. Nonsense, her common sense told her. Coincidence. Go slow. All will become clear: her mother’s mantra. Mother, now in the Bahamas, would have been no help here. Sorting out these two mysteries required more than a clean cloth and a bottle of Windex.

  “I’m sorry it’s only salad again,” she said to Harold at dinner as she sliced the remains of the pork roast.

  “I like salad,” he replied. “How was the interview?”

  “I thought it best not to mention the other person on the roof. I only told her about seeing the woman fall. She was really interested in that and kept asking more questions. It upset me all over again so when I got to the office I was kind of shaky.”

  “Just a minute. I’m lost here.”

  “A reporter from the Herald turned up. In fact she drove me out to Everstone.” Maura wondered for a moment whether the woman in the navy blue outfit really was a reporter. “But the job thing. I don’t know.”

  “You have to keep trying.”

  She was surprised at the forceful way he spoke.

  “I do keep trying.”

  “Something will come along.”

  “A man from the building opposite came over this morning to ask what I saw yesterday. Why I said I’d seen someone else on the roof. It gave me a creepy feeling. I shut the door on him. Do you think he was the pusher? ”

  “Drugs. Are you talking about drugs?”

  “I mean, was he the person who pushed the woman over the edge, the killer?”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, do you have to make everything into a drama? Suppose it was the woman’s husband, grieving. You should have been kind to him.”

  “It said in the paper she was from Serbia, Maja Markovic, a music student sharing the apartment with three other girls. Only nineteen. Came to Canada a year ago, her friend said. Maybe she couldn’t speak the language and gave the wrong answer to someone. Or she was working undercover in some kind of spy ring. I mean, I don’t ever recall her and a group of teenagers going in and out of there. I told the radio woman that. And besides, those apartments aren’t cheap.”

  “Leave it, Maura. She probably got depressed. Students do. Look. I might have to go back to the office for a couple of hours this evening. The books, I mean, it’s a busy time of year.”

  That was too much. Maura lost her resolve and brought out the Windex. “I saw you,” she said. “You’re gambling.”

  “Oh.”

  He took a good look at his wife. What kind of truth would be acceptable here? And now? There she was. Vivid. Bright. Greatly alive. Lovely hair. Brown eyes. He looked at her soft hand holding the carving knife. Every step on his tightrope had been another step away from her. Rolf had bought him a drink in the bar that afternoon, pressed an envelope into his hand and said, “You’re doing a great job. By the way, there’s something you can do for me.” And the rope beneath Harold’s feet had twanged.

  “I saw you and that man come out of the casino.”

  “Ah!”

  “Oh! Ah! Is that it?”

  Harold stood up as if he were a prisoner in court. Your honour, the money we have been living on these last few weeks has come from the pockets of people who cannot afford it. He turned his back to the window because he thought he saw Rolf’s face there, looking in. I’ve lost my mother, your honour, and I’m only thirty-seven. I had a discouraging start to life and now I need praise. I need admiration. I’m too young for failure.

  “I’ve been walking a tightrope,” he said to Maura.

  “Your feet are too big for a tightrope.”

  “Don’t discourage me,” he said.

  “All right, honey.”

  “I’ll cook at the weekend,” he said. “I’ll get the groceries. We’ll have fish.”

  The silence was full of flying thoughts, his and hers. They met across the table and crashed. Finally he told her the truth. She shrieked. She howled. She said, “You have to get out of there.”

  “The boss gave me this.”

  He put the envelope on the table and both of them stared at it. White, letter-size, a little crumpled, unimpressive.

  “It’s not very thick,” Maura said. So the man called Rolf, the person on the roof, knew she was Harold’s wife. Was this an order to get rid of her? “Have you looked inside?”

  “Not yet.”
r />   “Are you going to?”

  Harold tapped the floor with his left foot. It was firm. “Did we ever have a honeymoon?” he asked.

  “Not so’s you’d notice,” she said. “If you recall, your sister and her husband turned up two days after we got to the cottage. It was six years ago. Why now?”

  “Let’s go away for the weekend.”

  Sure! To some lonely spot where it was easy to dispose of a body.

  “You need to get away from here, sweetheart. You’ll keep staring out the window, seeing what you saw. Let’s go to Vancouver. Inferno’s playing at the Orpheum. I just have a couple of calls to make.”

  They got ready at different speeds. Him slow. Her fast. But he was first to the car. Maura avoided standing beside the trunk and stretched her arm out to hand him her grey weekend bag.

  “There’s something I have to do,” she said. “Won’t take a moment.”

  She left a quick voice mail for Kylie: Away till Sunday night. If Harold returns alone, enquire.

  “You want to drive?” He always asked. It was a kind of courtesy. But she rarely did.

  “Music?”

  “I’d like to know what this is all about really.”

  On the ferry, while he slept, she looked at his face for signs of degeneracy and found none. His brown hair, greying now, was still thick and fell forward over his brow. His mouth, slightly open, was an innocent mouth. When his eyes weren’t shut, they were truly blue.

  The hotel receptionist welcomed them as if forewarned. “We’ve upgraded your room,” she said. “You’ll have a lovely view of the city.”

  Harold called for champagne.

  Maura looked out the window to the parking area twenty-four floors below. She was drunk. She fell. I was asleep.

  After the champagne bottle was empty, Maura watched Harold slit open the envelope with the blade of his Swiss Army knife. In it were a dry-cleaning slip, thirty-five dollars and a note. The note read, Pick up my suit and drop it by my place tomorrow morning. Rolf

  Harold looked at it.

  Maura looked at it. Maura looked at the address.

  It was in the Blue Forest area among the two-million-dollar houses, not 2013 Lachlan Street.

  “Are you someone who does errands like that?”

  “I’ve booked the room for two nights.”

  ~ • ~

  Maura was sitting in the wrong chair again on Monday morning when the phone rang. Devina Kazlak asked her to come and meet the Everstone Board on Tuesday at ten.

  “Should I carry a guitar?”

  “We never hire anyone who’s a fan of C and W. We ourselves aren’t prejudiced, but our first CEO, Colonel Everstone, laid it down as an absolute rule.”

  Maura wondered what sad song had driven away the man’s wife and his dog. They’d checked her credentials and understood the six-month gap in her résumé. She could work for the most part at home and go to the office on Mondays and Thursdays. The pay was good.

  Harold was at his desk on Monday when Rolf came in at lunchtime and said, “You didn’t bring my suit?”

  “Suit?”

  “The dry-cleaning slip was in the envelope. And the cash.”

  “Oh that. It’s over there on the shelf.”

  “I needed that suit on Saturday.”

  “I’ve written myself a cheque for two months’ wages. I think that’s fair. The books are in good order.”

  “Hang on!”

  “Is that what you always say?” Harold replied as the wire snapped beneath his feet and he floated to earth in a leisurely way, light as a leaf. He took his coat and walked out, walked to the car park without turning round and drove home.

  That evening, Maura was wearing a silky black pantsuit and nursing a large bunch of pink and white lilies. “Someone must mourn,” she said. “She was young and Serbia is so far away. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Standing by the window, Harold saw her look to either side, then cross the road and crouch down to set the bouquet on the grass beyond the yellow tape. She seemed to be praying or was, at any rate, reverential. He glanced at the entrance to the beige building: To one side, half-hidden, a man who looked very like Rolf appeared to be watching Maura too.

  The Healing Touch

  What had he said to Alma only yesterday? You are trying to resist. Let it happen. And she had let it happen, and thanked him later with tears in her eyes.

  So now, sitting beside Rebecca, who had never yet come to him for help, he wanted to make her understand his value and believe in his gift. If she kept turning her head away as she was doing, others in the hall would notice. He didn’t want to get up and go to the foyer and mingle in case she moved away altogether. Three of her friends adored him; he was a necessary part of their lives. Her answers to his remarks were short and unamplified. She gave him no more words than politeness required. He felt mentally shunned.

  Yet he was Leo by name and by zodiac, admired, sought after, and yes, truly, loved. It wasn’t just that he cared for their bodies, but the people who came to him knew he would keep the secrets of their souls. He handed out solutions and, occasionally, absolutions. His fee was not excessive, and now and then he waived it. He could have covered the wall of his sanctuary with the notes, he might even say encomia, he’d received, but instead he kept them in a file with names, dates and addresses in case of later need. Occasionally, when the past wandered into his mind, he took them out and read them.

  He said to Rebecca now because he knew she had a degree in French Literature, “Do you think George Sand wrote while Chopin played, or did she just listen and admire him, watch his hands perhaps?”

  She nodded and smiled slightly but didn’t respond. He sighed. Being repelled was new to him, and it was a dark, shady place. Twelve years he’d lived and worked in this city by the sea and life had been good, was good. Before that, in the place he called Elsewhere, there had been monsters and false accusations. When he’d figured that he could achieve more by doing less, he’d picked this city on the edge of the country, acquiring the mantle of ‘good son’ by saying he wanted to be near his aging parents. Besides, Margo told him there was no reason he couldn’t make an easy million or two. There were a lot of middle-aged and older ladies who would learn to need him, even some men. Beautiful but mercenary, Margo couldn’t see the abstract value of his work. In fact she refused to refer to it as work, even when he came out of his sanctuary exhausted. “I give to them of my essence,” he kept telling her, but she only imagined him patting naked parts of the clients’ bodies and telling them to get up and walk. And walk they did. And walked back to see him again and again. Like an addiction.

  Margo, in the first couple of years after they moved to the city, complained that it was provincial, narrow. She complained too about the amount of time he spent with his “patients”. But as he now recalled while sitting beside this cold woman, empty chair on his other side so no one else to talk to, Margo hadn’t complained for some time. What was she thinking? More important, what was she doing? He looked around to see if she’d come to the concert too.

  ~ • ~

  Every few weeks, Rebecca came across this man at a gathering in town. Usually, she acknowledged him and moved on. Several of her friends doted on him. I went in there in pain and when I came out I was a new woman. He’s just amazing. There was worship in their tone, as if he were the expected prophet returned to earth. She couldn’t help her irrational Doctor Fell dislike. Instinct? She’d dismissed jealousy. Her friends loved her no less for seeing him. But there was something amiss. Clearly he didn’t like being ignored but she felt it was important to be the standout, to teach this man that he wasn’t a god. And now, by chance, they were sitting side by side because Carrie had given her this ticket. You don’t get out enough. Go. You like Pärt. Was it a ploy?

  He tried again. “You like modern music?”

  “Some.”

  “It’s a matter of taste, yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “How is
your son?”

  “Fine! Thank you.”

  This was how he did it, of course, by finding weak spots. Someone had told him about Owen! It was too much. There was no way she was going to discuss her family with him. She got up and walked to the back of the hall. Her friends, his acolytes, no doubt fed him stories in a kindly way. Thank heavens he didn’t, as far as she knew, go in for blackmail. He had no right to creep into her life. When the players returned to the stage, she found an empty seat in the back row and let the music take over her mind.

  ~ • ~

  Leo couldn’t pay attention to the music. In fact he thought any classical music later than the early 1900s was crap. And this gloomy Finn or Estonian or whatever wanted to impress on his audience that life was a dreary downhill slope. He’d only agreed to come this evening because of Carrie Delborn. She’d already introduced him to several people who were important in the cultural life of the town, and this evening it was to have been the very wealthy Jermains who’d sponsored the concert. For them he’d put on his best grey suit, silk shirt and dark blue tie. And this woman, this Rebecca, had walked away from him when he’d been about to offer help to her son.

  He tapped his feet on the ground. The person behind tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and glared. Had someone from Elsewhere talked? If they had, the unproven and totally false stories would spread, clients would stop coming to him and once again he’d have to move on. Or was it Margo? How was she spending her days? He was so successful now that he often worked fourteen hours straight with only a quick lunch of fruit and cheese to keep up his strength. After their treatment, the clients always wanted to chat awhile. In their forties and fifties, many of them were beginning to fear that loss of youth, of vigour, of certainty that comes with middle age. He was a comfort to them all. And Mary Richards had called him more than once in the middle of the night for help with her back pain, knowing that he wouldn’t take advantage of her. In any case, she was nearly ninety, twice his age. As he drove away from her home at two or three in the morning, going slowly through the quiet streets to avoid deer, he allowed her faith and her gratitude to seep into his soul. He wanted to dance and shout, I am Leo and I am good. When he got home he’d have a shot of whisky and arouse Margo to have raucous sex.