The Blue Guitar

by Ireland Ann

  His client smiles evenly. “Do I care?”

  Jasper presses on, used to such evasion. “Let’s just say that I do.”

  “Is this a trap?”

  “By no means.”

  “Because I’m not going back to that place. Wild horses can’t drag me.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jasper assures her. “You’ve graduated with flying colours.” This is true. Ivy was a woman fighting for her life and mind less than a month ago.

  “So ask me something interesting.” Ivy leans forward in her chair. “Given the fact that I’ve stared death in the face.” Her eyes are milky with medication. She left hospital fifteen days ago, her departure a media event, cameras recording each movement as she was helped from a wheelchair into a waiting car.

  “All right, where were you born?”

  She lets out a barking laugh, a sound that causes the intern, Rachel, to poke her head around the doorway.

  “I’ve been reborn,” Ivy proclaims. “From the chrysalis of pain to my present state.”

  “Why do you think you’re here?”

  For a moment Jasper fears she isn’t going to answer, but she releases a long breath and says, “Because I’ve forgotten nearly everything. I can hardly dress myself in the morning, and they won’t let me near the kitchen.”

  “I can help,” Jasper says, “if you’ll agree to work with me.”

  Ivy looks dismayed. “You have no idea, do you?”

  “We’ve found notable improvements in such cases.”

  “What I really long to remember,” Ivy says, “is being sick.” She hesitates, then offers with a burst of intensity, “Where was I then?”

  The panicked stare is chillingly familiar; Ashok, the Emergency Room physician, gazes at Jasper the same way. The illness takes them on an arduous journey to another country, and when they return, they’ve forgotten how things are done here. Mrs. Cronin, according to her file, ran a garden nursery before getting ambushed by the virus.

  “How can I possibly return,” she says, “if I don’t know where I’ve been?”

  When Jasper suggests they develop a recovery plan, she gives him a pained look.

  “We might start with a short routine you can easily follow,” he says.

  That look again. Some might call it blank, but Jasper knows better. Ashok says he lost his limbs and was just a floating head during his illness, surrounded by string instead of air. Another time he was an aquatic creature nosing at his own inert body. No one came to see him for months, years.

  “Is there something in particular you’d like to learn to do?” Jasper asks.

  Ivy brightens. “I’ve never been able to remember a joke and tell it right.”

  Toby practises his bows in front of the dormitory mirror, bobbing up and down like a manservant. Ten points will be awarded for presentation, and bowing is a minefield of potential indignity. You don’t want to look like a fool before you begin to play. He grabs the guitar by the scruff of the neck, then bends deeply beside it, demonstrating the dead-chicken bow. Next, as practised by the dazzling Romero brothers, he stuffs the instrument under one arm like a surfboard and strides across the floor, smiling and nodding at an imaginary audience.

  Bad idea. The mirror reflects a taut, crazed expression that would spook anyone. He circles the common room, edging past the weathered tables and scuffed chairs, then returns to the ad hoc stage, this time mimicking Scottish virtuoso David Russell. He holds the guitar horizontally in front of him like a magician about to perform a levitation caper, then rotates the instrument so the sound hole faces outward and — here’s the tricky bit — he bows behind it.

  Way too complex. You don’t want to use yourself up before the first note sounds.

  Armand stomps in, wet hair with towel flung around his neck. “That’s not how you do it, esteemed colleague. You’ll fall on your face. Permit me. I have perfected the ultimate stage bow.” He reaches for Toby’s guitar. When Toby doesn’t deliver it immediately, Armand’s smile grows rigid. “I may not be such a genius as you who have achieved the semifinals, but I do know how to bow.”

  Toby relents. “Show me.”

  Armand seizes the instrument, lifts the sound hole to his nose, and peers inside to examine the maker’s name. “Who is this guy?” he asks.

  “Luthier from Quebec,” Toby says.

  This was his standby instrument, until he lost his main performance guitar. Yes — lost.

  Armand clutches the guitar mid-neck to his side and bows evenly, the instrument following the tilt of his body, and hovers there for two beats before rising at the same leisurely pace.

  “You see?” he says. “No rush. This is a very elegant gesture.”

  “Work of art,” Toby agrees, taking the instrument back, then retreats to his room, feeling a tingle of irritation. It’s so easy to get lost in curtains of detail.

  Across the hall, Hiro stumbles over the tremolo passage in the compulsory piece and swears loudly in Japanese. If you can’t manage a whirlwind tremolo in the privacy of your room, what hope do you have when nerves bite down? The technique relies on a form of fraught relaxation, achieved after years of practising slowly, then working up to hummingbird speed.

  Toby shuts the door, then rolls a towel along the bottom to mute his playing noise and that of others. The single chair faces the porthole window overlooking the courtyard. He switches the chair around so it now faces the door, then kicks the footstool over to its new position: this rearrangement is a trick to keep him from getting comfortable in one spot. Toby has to be able to mount any stage and posses the new space within seconds.

  He practises until midnight, then falls into bed, lying there visualizing the way his left hand slides up the fretboard, fingers planting. Toby knows this passage as if it were imprinted on his eyelids, but something is wrong. He jackknifes up in the bed, body licked with heat: it’s the wrong damn piece! All he can see is the music he played in the first round, but that’s over, finished. He strains to pull his mind to the next morning’s program, mere hours away, reciting the name of each work in sequence, what key it’s in, and how the first bars sound. Yet the moment he sinks back into the pillow it’s the freaking Fandanguillo and Sarabande that appear in photographic detail.

  In that week of madness leading up to the Paris trip, he’d practised in his rented room ten hours without a break until day bled into night. Fingers grew numb, calluses shredded, and his wrists seized up, deep down the carpal tunnel. Red stop signs must have flashed, but he refused to see them. A spirit state is where it took him, lips cracked, dropping pounds by the day. He was pure mind and ringing tone, a lean mystic of the guitar, death a heartbeat away.

  Well, it always is, isn’t it?

  No time to shop for food and no desire to break the spell. That’s what no one understands: the so-called black hole was anything but. Nothing could interrupt him, no phone or doorbell, just brother Felix who found him lying on his cot with saliva caked to the corners of his mouth — dehydrated, for starters. It was Felix who lifted him onto the back of his Harley and roared downtown to Emergency. How long was he in the hospital? Four days? Discharge to the halfway house where a man called Jasper greeted him at the door. Lucky to get in such a place, everyone assured him. They’ll soon get you on your feet again.

  “What would you do if I hadn’t entered your life?” Jasper likes to ask.

  Toby answers the question with a mysterious smile, convinced that once Jasper is sure about him, sure that he’s healed, those sharp eyes will move on.

  The first time they became lovers he felt Jazz pucker like a snowflake under his touch, and for more than a year the guitar stayed locked in its case, a pet they weren’t sure about.

  It’s almost 3:00 a.m. and Toby’s mind is doing cartwheels. Frantic, he pops a sleeping pill, one of four he sneaked out of Jasper’s toilet bag before leaving home. Jasper will notice, of course. He will have counted the tablets.

  At last Toby feels his limbs grow heavy on the matt
ress as the little blue pill folds him into its tent.

  Poor Nina, the Mexican girl. Lucy finds her hiding in the dorm bathroom, one foot propped on the sink, painting her toenails. The cellphone lies next to her naked foot.

  “You headed home soon?” Lucy asks in a carefully neutral voice, waiting before darting into a cubicle. Everyone knows how Nina wept through her performance.

  The girl glances up, brown eyes pooling water. “I am so sad,” she says, sighing tragically. “My boyfriend is angry. He pays for my flight, for food, for everything.” She goes back to dabbing her nails with the tiny brush.

  Lucy places her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “I’m sure he’ll forgive you.” She hopes that’s true.

  The girl finishes off one nail and proceeds to the next. “His mother and father are professors, very intellectual family,” she says. “I thought if I do well here, maybe —” she turns to look Lucy in the eye “— they will respect me.”

  Lucy feels sorry for the girl, but this is quickly overtaken by a lick of euphoria, for what really stirs her is her own success. She enters the cubicle and dangles her purse from the hook, feeling her heart kick. It’s all she can manage to calm down enough to practise for the next round, fending off a crazy fantasy where she’s wearing a sparkly top and a long drapey skirt, peering out from behind the curtain as the concert hall fills with admirers. It’s the finals, and Goran has flown in to witness the historic occasion.

  “Do you believe you will win?” the girl calls from the other side of the door.

  “Of course not,” Lucy assures her.

  Later Lucy perches naked on the rim of a steaming pool while women of all shapes and sizes tiptoe across the tiled floor. The spa smells hygienically clean. Nearby an ancient Korean woman crouches on a low bench and, using a pail, sluices water over her mottled shoulders.

  Lucy starts to slip into the bath, but the old woman waves at her urgently.

  “You help me,” she orders, thrusting the empty pail toward Lucy. This is followed by a crusty loofah sponge.

  “What do I do?” Lucy asks, lifting her legs out of the skin-puckering water.

  The woman points at the empty pail and the sponge, then makes scrubbing motions. On the other side of the pillar another much younger woman is scrubbing a girl’s back with a rough sponge. A film of steam covers flesh and hair, blurring the edges. Mimicking what she sees, Lucy scoops up a load of water and coasts the wiry loofah across the old woman’s back in small, tentative strokes. The crepey skin seems translucent, as if it might easily shred.

  The woman cries, “No good! Harder!” and shakes her shoulders in obvious frustration. The loose flesh of her back sinks to broad hips and a soft flat bottom, pleating like drapery.

  Lucy obeys as soapy water flows down the gutter into the drain.

  A young woman wearing a sparkling white bra and underpants appears on the pool deck and calls Lucy’s name: it is time for her massage.

  This luxury was Mark’s idea. “Treat yourself,” he said, hearing the clang of nerves in her voice. He was racing off to work where he was in charge of security for the Treasures of the Silk Route exhibit.

  A naked Lucy follows the girl into a windowless room where she hoists herself onto the table, fitting her chin into the pocket. Scented oil squirts onto her back and is worked into her skin by small, firm hands.

  “Shoulders very tense,” the Korean girl informs her.

  “Yes,” Lucy murmurs, feeling a pair of sturdy thumbs burrow toward her brain stem.

  Uncle Philip trots down the noisy street toward a back road lined with shops offering sweets and knick-knacks. He leaps over a ditch, gracefully landing on the other side. He’s become a sort of dragonfly, and everyone smiles at him, this old white guy wearing neat shorts and a polo shirt. At the edge of this colony a pair of brothers lives, ages thirteen and fourteen, with excellent teeth. Uncle Philip understands this indicates superior heath. His step is light, his heart a reliable drum.

  Lucy moans.

  “Too hard?” the girl asks, but doesn’t let up the pressure.

  A silver disc rises inside her head.

  Uncle Philip hears the whistle and stops in front of a small wooden house. A girl is selling cigarettes in the doorway, and behind her a portly woman beckons him in. Suddenly, he’s swept past a beaded curtain and experiences a flash of panic: is this how it’s going to end? Fear jazzes him up, and he notices everything, the jars of unknown substances laid neatly on a shelf, pots and pans nailed to a slab of plywood, and a peeling poster of the Backstreet Boys.

  The woman speaks quickly, holding out her hand. Uncle Philip digs into the pocket of his shorts and finds his wallet. He can hardly breathe.

  Lucy touches her forearm with the tip of a finger and shivers with pleasure. Basted with fragrant oils, she could almost taste herself.

  Thirteen

  Nothing is green in the windowless green room. Instead,

  its walls are painted a soft rose. A bouquet of irises decorates the ledge — a gift to competitors from one of the small army of volunteers.

  The first round took place in closed studios, but the semifinals are real performances. Toby flexes his hands, then each finger in turn, special attention paid to the one damaged in his baseball-playing mishap. The hall’s plush seats and concrete-clad walls will create bright acoustics, and this early in the day the audience will be tiny. Breakfast was a banana and a glass of water: banana for its hit of soothing potassium and water to keep hydrated. He ducked into the shower long enough to wash the sleep out of his eyes but not so long that his skin dried out. Such calibrations come easily after all these years.

  He chips the tuning fork against his knee and sets its stem on the soundboard of his guitar to resonate: pointless to overtune, since stage lights will ramp up the pitch within seconds. Toby is old school about tuning, using his ears rather than electronics. He straightens, rolls his shoulders, and inhales deeply. Control the mind, banish distractions. He squeezes a millimetre of Vaseline onto his finger and dabs it in the crease of the instrument where neck meets body. During pauses in performance, he’ll smear his fingers to keep them moist. The thumbnail of his right hand is bevelled from practising so much, though not worn enough to justify gluing on a falsie. Too much flesh creates a soft, undifferentiated bass sound. He’ll make a slight adjustment with the angle of his wrist.

  Breathe. Focus. This is what he tells members of Guitar Choir when they titter nervously backstage, wiping slimy palms on their dress-up clothes.

  Five minutes until showtime.

  He grins, feeling the surge of elation that precedes performance, but it too must be tamed.

  Setting the guitar back in its case, he tugs off his shoes and, using the wall for leverage, teeters up into a headstand. Blood soars, filling his scalp and ears, flushing out the Eustachian tubes. Broadloom presses into the top of his head — eau de nylon and stale cigarettes. In the hallway he hears a door swing open and the barking voice of Manuel Juerta demanding sugar for his coffee.

  A volunteer taps tentatively on the door. “Toby Hausner?”

  “Yup,” Toby grunts, lowering himself vertebra by vertebra, feeling the rush of blood disappear from his head. Bits of carpet fluff cling to the knees of his dress pants, and he brushes them off before tucking in the tails of his shirt. He gives his shoes a once-over with his sleeve, not a recommended method, and glances at himself in the full-length mirror. Jasper’s right — he’s going squinty, a sort of Mongol thing happening with his eyes.

  “One minute,” the volunteer cries.

  Create your own courage, insist on it. Toby grabs his instrument and begins the march down the corridor. The volunteer leads the way as they sweep past framed photographs of little-known musicians.

  “My magic hands will leave them breathless,” Toby intones, a recitation geared to deflect any last-minute panic, the hound of doubt that may seek a final lunge.

  The girl pulls back the curtain.

  His buttoc
ks clench as he strides onto the stage.

  Trickle of applause from the sparse audience.

  Doused with light, he leaves the cool forest to emerge into a sun-drenched meadow. The wooden floor feels springy underfoot, and when he spots the padded bench waiting downstage, his heart jumps, a sci-fi horror that threatens to burst out of his chest.

  Jasper stands next to the window of client room B on the upper floor of the institute. A teenage girl called Moxie tips back and forth on her chair and refuses to talk. She’s been sent over from Eating Disorders for a life-skills orientation. Her hair is dyed albino — think of the ammonia leaking into her porous young scalp. Moxie’s days revolve around not eating, and one of Jasper’s tasks is to help structure her time so that a range of activities will offer the promise of a full and interesting life.

  Jasper gazes down at the city boulevard with its hot dog stands, groomed civic gardens, and a godawful sculpture of one of the province’s founding fathers perched on a concrete plinth. It is possible, Jasper knows, even inevitable, to be two places at once, his world and Toby’s, which is both blessing and curse. At this moment Jasper has no choice but to imagine his lover as he approaches the bench in Montreal, sweat soaking through his laundered shirt.

  “You okay?” Moxie finally asks.

  The comment startles Jasper. “I am quite all right.” She must have spotted the flush of excitement on his cheek. He wishes he could say that it isn’t every day you play your heart out for a team of international judges — you with your twig limbs and sunken chest can’t know about the ecstasy of the artist. But perhaps Jasper is mistaken. Moxie is a devoted and tireless sculptor of her own body, and there is elation as well as fear in those overly bright eyes. The artist is never understood by conventional citizens.

  Toby reaches the bench where, clutching the neck of the guitar, he bends deeply from the waist toward the unseen audience. At the back of the hall a door clicks open, letting in a sleeve of light — Lucy, with two other competitors have come to watch.