Street Symphony

by Rachel Wyatt

  She heard sniggering.

  “What I’m talking about this morning is positivity in these difficult financial times. People look to us for reassurance as if we are responsible for their well-being and in a sense perhaps…”

  Here, when Muriel tuned out, there was no football field to gaze at beyond the window, no horizon, as there had been at Newbold High. Instead her thoughts bounced back off the brick wall of the building opposite. She returned to the meeting and sat up positively as she heard the words, “Even, or perhaps especially, our physical appearance, our stance, can re-inforce…”

  Jack was looking straight at her. Did he mean that she or something about her clothes, her makeup, was giving off negativity? Was her new hairdo a cause of market decline? He wasn’t married, Hodgson, and Muriel reckoned he spent his weekend reading literary books to prepare for his Monday morning homilies. She hoped he’d forgotten Friday evening. Had she really put her hand on his thigh when they were sitting in the bar? She had!

  “Remember that the market will improve,” he said. “Say this to yourself: Money is like water, it finds its level.”

  “If it doesn’t drain away or dry totally up,” Wayne said softly.

  “There are doomsayers,” Hodgson went on. “But we don’t have to listen. Nor do we have to add our voice to theirs. Nothing causes a Depression like depression.”

  Back in her own office, Muriel sat down to read the business sections of four newspapers online. At 8:45, her phone rang. She listened to the sad voice at the other end and then said, “I’ll just bring it up on the screen here, Mr. Alvarson. I transferred the funds on Wednesday and they should be in your account now. I can’t understand why they’re not. Hold on for one moment, please.”

  The payment from the construction company had made him rich but no amount of money could compensate Edvard Alverson for the loss of his son. He moved sums around, bought and sold stocks, gave to charity. It passed the time, he’d told her. She mourned for the man and considered the shock of losing a child. Best perhaps not to have a child at all. She couldn’t let her thoughts go down that road. Time to check the figures from yesterday, respond to clients worried about the market’s continuing downturn and decipher the usual analysts’ reports.

  At ten o’clock, she poured coffee from the Thermos into her china mug, a delicate hand-painted leaving gift from her colleagues at Imperion. She’d given up going to the little kitchen or galley as the CEO had christened it. (He owned a yacht.) It wasn’t simply because when, in a gesture of friendliness, she’d brought muffins to share and had heard, or thought she’d heard, Wayne call them mooffins that she ‘d made the change. She needed this time to think about her life. For weeks she’d felt that something was askew. At nights, listening to recorded sounds of the seashore before she fell asleep, she counted reasons for changing her way of life.

  The muffin from the café had fallen apart. Usually she bought blueberry-bran but today she’d pointed to the cranberry, wanting a bitter flavour on her tongue. She threw the crumbly thing into the wastebasket and for several moments sat quite still, allowing her thoughts to wander as they would. The faces of the people she saw every morning in the café haunted her. They were like characters out of a morality play: The old man, the sick woman, the artist, the hockey guy, the quiet old lady in the corner reading the paper with a magnifying glass. How many years did she have before the best part of her day was an early morning trip to the Caffè Italia with its local art and stressed furniture? And then. And then! Truth, or something she feared was truth, seeped into her mind like gas from a leaky pipe, and it was frightening.

  She could blame her boring life on her dear mother for calling her Muriel. It was a name for aunts, staid and solid. Muriels didn’t go out on the lam, whatever that meant. They worked in banks, read good books and took up with steady men who had regular jobs. But that was where her inner Tiffany had won out. Lance was an artist who was going to buy her all the diamonds in Africa, or at least in Birks’ store window, when he sold a major painting. He was also going to pay her back for the last three months’ rent of his apartment. He made love to her infrequently, saving his strength for his art. He called her his muse, his inspiration, his divine spring. Her mother knew nothing of his low financial worth, seeing only someone who carried out the garbage and had a way with squeaky doors and tight windows. He was only a more useful man than her previous two boyfriends: clever, decent men with weak eyes and a tendency to speak mainly in numbers whether the subject was finance or baseball.

  If my life is in a rut, it’s not a bad rut. Many would envy it. It’s a dutiful rut, narrow and high-sided. That was yesterday’s thinking. That was the blond speaking. Muriel allowed her inner devil’s advocate to continue: You have a great deal of good in your life, a well-paid job, a man and a family in the shape of a mother as well as aunts, uncles and cousins in Alberta. You got over your father’s defection in grade twelve when you saw it was a common event. You are attached to life in many ways. Your volunteer work at the drop-in centre gives you brownie points for the next world too if you decide to believe in an afterlife. So what else do you want, Muriel? I want respect! That’s what! And I am going to get it! Today! She held on to her desk as she allowed the props of her old life to fall around her in splinters.

  The phone rang again. “Good morning,” she said, and listened.

  “Let me take a look at your account, Mrs. Javez.” The figures danced on the screen. What a lot of lovely money this old woman possessed, in her eighties and here she was demanding to know why the interest rate on her savings account was only one point five percent.

  Muriel could have yelled, “Because it is. Because the economy’s a mess. Think about the tragedy in Pakistan. Think about death.” Instead she said, “Give me a day, Mrs. Javez, and I’ll see if we can get you something better. Have you thought about another annuity?”

  When Hodgson had put his head round the door on Friday and asked if he could come in, Muriel would have liked to know whether he too thought of her as bovine. But he was always dignified, always polite. The rumour last spring that he was buying sexy underwear for the new girl at reception had been an unfounded story put about by Wayne, whose own frequent trips to Victoria’s Secret were no secret. She’d said, “Of course,” wondering why he bothered to ask, and offered him coffee. He’d declined and then asked if she would care to come for a drink with him at the Four Seasons after work.

  Slowly, as if she had to consider numerous possible engagements, she’d replied, “Thank you. Yes. I’d like that.”

  Jack had walked out before she could ask him about new investments and the TFSA rules. And suddenly she didn’t care. Suddenly she cared about why, in that shy way, her boss had invited her out for a drink as if, like some genie, he had read her thoughts and was about to offer her a solution to the problems of her life.

  In that moment, Muriel had begun to see that her life was not good. She did indeed have problems. Lance would never buy her diamonds or even a glass ring. Thea in her sly way had hinted as much, almost saying he was a con man. Muriel had put that down to jealousy. Thea’s husband was a virtuous, steady accountant. She knew too, in her heart – and for how long had she suppressed this knowledge? – that her mother blackmailed her into doing errands and chores that she could afford to pay someone else to do. And, most important, here, at her workplace, she was not esteemed. Truth is hard to bear. Suppressed truth is torture. Years of it. Years and years. She put her head down on the desk and cried. She cried for the schoolgirl who had always pretended to be good. She cried for the rare and not wonderful sex with Lance. She cried and mourned for the blond she had been. Tears marred the printout of Today’s Best Buys.

  She heard someone step into her office and step out again. No doubt more fodder for office gossip: She’s in there crying. The boss talked to her. She must’ve been fired. And would they think, John, Amy, Mahood, Wayne, Bren, as they gathered to discuss it by the water cooler, that they should be kinder
to her, treat her with some deference? Not damn likely! She decided to gain their respect in her own way. She wiped her face and combed her hair and walked out into the open area of the office. As she passed Amy’s desk, she managed to catch her foot in the cable of the woman’s computer and disconnect it. It was a small gesture but it was a start.

  On Friday evening, Hodgson had explained why he’d invited her to a bar when in fact he didn’t drink alcohol. He liked to watch people having a good time, he said, and besides, she’d looked lately as though she needed pepping up. An odd expression! He bought her a manhattan and she wondered ungratefully whether the bank was paying for it. He was sipping a diet Coke through a bendy straw. They were sitting side by side on a low couch opposite a couple who were blithely fondling one another regardless of the audience. The place was full and the noise, the end-of-the-week sound of the free, was near intolerable. The woman playing the baby grand in the corner by the door fought to be heard.

  Jack spoke into her right ear, “You’ve been with us now for nearly four years, Muriel.”

  Promotion? The sack? She shuddered and gulped at her drink before she whispered, “Three and a half.”

  “Another?”

  “Yes, please. It was very good. And I don’t have to work tomorrow.”

  “You’re an attractive woman, Muriel. Your hair is like a bird’s nest. I imagine a wren. But in the office –”

  Muriel couldn’t remember on Saturday morning when she was sitting in the chair at Hair Apparent what had prompted her to put a hand on Hodgson’s thigh, but she did recall seeing it lying there like a detached hand in a horror story. She didn’t quite remember how she’d got home. She’d had to get up early and take a cab to get her car from the hotel car park. Asking her mother to drive her would have meant explanations. It was bad enough that she’d giggled all the way through Survivor. Driving with an aching head through the empty streets at 7:00 a.m., she’d repeated to herself: Explanation, Recrimination. She sang those two words aloud and added four more: Information. Reformation. Dispensation. Revelation.

  She remembered Gilles, with his hand in her hair, also telling her that she needed pepping up. “Erplift you need,” he said. “We strip your ’air down and cut away ’ere. You will be new.”

  “Do what you like,” she’d replied as if she were lying down naked in front of him.

  The rest of the weekend was like a bad piece of theatre seen through smoked glass. Lance made his joke about diamonds and kept staring at her as if without her blond hair she’d become a stranger. Her mother apologized for the hard Brussels sprouts and overcooked beef and grumbled at length about the amateur opera company’s upcoming season before going to her room to listen to Gigli singing “Vesti La Giubba” at top pitch. Lance poured the last of the wine into his glass and talked about the need of more funding for the arts as if she and the bank were responsible for a national cultural decline and his in particular. In the kitchen, Muriel, confronted by a pile of dirty dishes and a note on the dishwasher saying, Broken, do not use, knew that her mother wasn’t going to be easily defeated. She called Lance to come and help but the response had been a soft, “See you,” and the sound of the front door closing.

  But that was Sunday, her past life. She was about to move on. She went to the galley to rinse out her mug. Wayne and Bren, sitting at the table drinking their own strange brew, turned and said, “Hi, Muriel.” She smiled at them in response. Wayne offered to pour her a coffee. She thanked him but said she’d brought her own and then suggested that he bring her the figures he was supposed to have finished on Friday.

  She sent Lance a text. Working late tonight. Inventory. Inventory! As if they were going to count the money! How easy it was to lie. How liberating. She had, at two in the morning, lain back on the pillow not caring that she was still awake, and thought about poetry. Short and long lines. Breaks. Rhythm. It was time perhaps to buy an anthology and find the poems she’d liked at school. This evening, she was going to check out a condo downtown. Next weekend she would tell Lance that she could no longer pay his rent. Maybe she could persuade him and his oil can to move in with her mother. She went into Jack’s office and sat down in the postulant’s chair.

  “Thank you for the other evening,” she said.

  “Well,” he said. “Yes. We could, you know –”

  “I’d like to take my vacation at the end of the month, Jack.”

  “Both weeks?”

  Both weeks! How utterly mean that sounded. Out of the entire three hundred and sixty-five days, she was allowed only fourteen or, given the weekends, ten!

  “I might stretch it to three,” she replied. “I’ve worked some extra Saturdays.”

  “There is the annual report coming up, Muriel.”

  “I intend to leave everything ready and I’ll be back before then. There’s a jazz festival in Monterey. I’m going to drive down. I’ll be back on the ninth.” Oh yes, she would come back. She would come back with determination. Hodgson’s job was not beyond her, and there were places higher up the ladder within her reach. And if, and if, he went to the super-boss and complained? Then she might be fired and a whole new world, an uncertain world, would open up before her. It might be a chasm but at least it wouldn’t be a rut.

  She stopped by Mahood’s desk to tell him to take over the Javez account and then she said, “That’s a nice tie.” The man’s look of confusion assured her that she was on the right track. Back in her own office, Muriel closed the door and took a long strand of blond hair from her purse. But for the smoke alarm, she’d have set fire to it. Instead, as she dropped it into the wastebasket, a few hairs at a time, she murmured, “Thank you,” to the denizens of the Caffè Italia. They had made her realize that she had only this one life, that she was thirty-seven and that in another three decades, she might well be sitting there too looking forward to an endless day. Tomorrow, she would listen to the old guy who murmured “cherries” as she walked by, talk to the sick woman in the corner, respond to the hockey fan, tell the sculptor she knew her work. And maybe one morning in late December, she would march into the café and, with apologies to Dickens, say, “The coffee’s on me.”

  5. The Price of Coffee

  Monday was over. Another day. Day of his life. The last lingerer was closing his laptop. Jurgen couldn’t believe the price of beans was up again, the second time this year. As he dusted the crumbs off the tables onto the floor, he pictured a bistro where smart people made reservations and ordered fine wine and talked about vacations in Peru. Terry had left the brush outside again and it was damp. What could you expect from a seventeen-year-old kid on minimum wage and tips? He wrote a note for Elise: Pls swp flr b4 opn. He could’ve bottled this five o’clock smell: stale coffee, sweat from spandexed cyclists, baby powder from the afternoon mothers’ group, worry, disappointment, friendship and occasional flights of glee.

  Good coffee. Good baked goods. Decent location. Eleven years. Should be rich by now. Ha ha! He laughed. The word for his once-upon-a-time dream café was shabby. He spelt it aloud. S.H.A.B.B.Y. A song in there somewhere. He blamed the customers. Some of them bought one coffee and then spent hours reading the free newspapers, doing their school work or just hanging around. Sometimes, towards the end of the day, he wanted to shout, “Have you no homes to go to?” but didn’t in case they hadn’t. His competitor on Lake Street hung a sign in his café window: One coffee – One hour. That seemed harsh, but apparently no one complained.

  Shabby, and getting shabbier. It was time to buy paint and spend a weekend sprucing up the place. There were marks on the wall where pictures had been hung and then taken down. Scenes of city life and floral pastiches remained for sale. The books on the shelves near the door had a tired, unwanted look. He added chopped nuts to the muffin mix that Elise would put into pans and bake in time for the seven o’clock crowd. Arthur, Kate, Blondie, John, Fiona, Kumar, Sara: All of them perhaps desperate. Or looking for comfort. So was he a comforter? Yes! He was a provider of service a
nd shelter to a small segment of humanity.

  Whatever, there’d be no medals coming his way and the profits shrank as the price of coffee rose. There was a limit to what people would pay for the precious brown liquid. I buy so-called organic fair trade beans, I grind them for you, I turn them into lattes, cappuccinos, americanos, double doubles. For a little extra, add any of these taste-defying syrups to your drink, ladies and gentlemen, and ruin a fine cup of java. Thanks. You’re welcome. Smile. Need to get teeth fixed. Fortunately, due to his staff, he only had to come in early twice a week. But in the last part of each day, excepting Sunday, he was here, counting the take, adding up the slow figures, checking how many muffins were leftover to be sold cheap next morning and which sandwiches had to be thrown out because of their lapsed sell-by date.

  His mother, who didn’t always know who he was any more, had said to him last Tuesday, “Still at the café?” as if she were reproaching him once again for his unfinished degree, his wasted talents, his life as a server of food and drink. But she hadn’t been impressed either when, tempted by promises of quick money and fast advancement, he’d gone to work for the Trident Investment Trust. Perhaps she’d even been glad when the company disappeared in the slump like a car down a sinkhole, and hoped he’d finally become a doctor or a professor, a son she could boast about to the neighbours.

  When he woke up at night to go and look at Joey in his crib, he imagined the boy asking, “What do you do, Daddy?” There was no chance of becoming an astronaut before the boy learned to speak; he was precocious and even at thirteen months words made sense to him. But he could be a cop, a firefighter, a man in an admirable uniform. A fake uniform kept here at the café and worn home every evening?

  Zoe, loving, undemanding, offered to clean the café on Saturday, and had smiled a lie as she went off to the hospital that morning. All will be fine very soon. Keep making the muffins and they will come. She’d given up asking, as had his friend Al, as had brother Hank, When are you going to finish your novel? And that was good because he had no answer except that Philip K. Dick, Terry Pratchett and many another had mined his chosen seam. Current prize-winning authors left few themes untouched. He had to go further. He needed time to think, to choose, to find a relevant and original idea, an idea that didn’t smell of caffeine.