by Ireland Ann
Toby is genuinely shocked. Not enough glue, and the nail will go flying, like a hockey player losing a blade mid-stride.
Lucy is stricken. “Scratch that last comment,” she says, hurrying toward the elevator leading to the women’s wing.
The Krehm piece went off the rails with that weird slur he added out of nowhere; it threw off his fingering until the end of the phrase. Can’t let each tiny flaw chisel into his confidence, for something else, almost magnificent, stole in when he was onstage: he knew he belonged up there.
After lunch, after demolishing a platter of steak and fries, Toby bends over the nail repair job, manicure scissors in hand, Hiro’s elegant finger waiting to be saved. He remembers his mother clipping his nails when he was little, tenderly pushing each soft cuticle out of the way. When he was very small, she chewed off his nails with her teeth. Hiro sits quietly during the task, as if afraid he might distract Toby. It’s an intimate procedure, and Toby inhales the kid’s aftershave and minted breath as he slides the tiny slice of celluloid over the nail and presses it flat. The two men eye each other, and it’s Toby who breaks the silence, saying, “Don’t drink hot fluids or eat for an hour.”
Hiro looks anxious; he doesn’t get the joke.
“You’ll be fine, my man,” Toby reassures him. “This is your lucky nail.”
Luck is a word Hiro does understand, and he grins with relief.
Something’s taken hold of Lucy’s body and colonized her mind, an unstoppable force. She’s leaped from being ecstatic at not making a fool of herself in the opening round to actually thinking she might win.
When she first met Mark, he was a compact man wearing khakis and one of those Picasso striped shirts, and she decided they would create a bohemian life together. Each month they would host a salon where poets could read their latest masterpieces, musicians would play difficult experimental music, and Mark’s big, expressive paintings would hang from the walls to be viewed and discussed by all. Lucy would play a sonata or two, when she wasn’t refilling the cauldron of chili. Something like this event did happen once or twice. Then one day Mark came home announcing that he’d landed a job at the Art Gallery of Ontario as a security guard and was about to be fitted for his uniform. He took to the job and claimed he was in no way restless or unhappy, although weeks went by where he didn’t set foot in his studio. In the evenings he’d fool around with his collection of vintage lunch boxes and Big Little Books. She never dreamed she’d end up living with a man who enjoyed hobbies.
“Draft Agenda.” Jasper types these words under the subject heading, then taps send. Luke likes the word draft because it’s an invitation to muck about and change things. Jasper fully intends to edit the sequence himself before tomorrow’s meeting, and he’ll do this without alerting Luke. The fiendishly expensive dinner party Luke arranged for potential donors, without consulting the executive, will be brought up under “other business.” Jasper has arranged for Ruth Baxter, treasurer, to raise the issue: she’s livid. Luke took his cronies to Flood, the fancy oyster bar, and put it on the institute’s tab. They can ill afford such reckless extravagance. Luke will squirm in his seat and bluster on about how they were discussing “key elements of our fund-raising mission,” but no one will buy it. When the issue is raised, he’ll act startled, then say with a grandiose wave, “If I’ve lost the confidence of this board, then I offer my resignation …”
Not for the first time.
Except instead of the ritual chorus of objections, there will be a tense silence, then Ruth will ask for a show of hands.
Jasper lowers his wrists, flexing them according to the ergonomic exercises he’s followed religiously since that spot of trouble last year. He feels like a hunter closing in on his prey after a long and exhausting chase — don’t snap a branch now.
Fourteen
Toby slips into a seat at the back of the recital hall to catch the rest of the semifinalist performances. As each musician finishes his set, he disappears into the wings, then re-enters the auditorium through the rear door.
When a young Mexican plays with a strained expression on his face, Larry the Texan whispers, “Too much frijoles for breakfast. The kid’s holding back an epic fart.” Bumped from competition, Larry has been on a bender and reeks of the bourbon he carries in a Perrier bottle.
A Brazilian plays recklessly, and Armand leans over to titter, “He comes too fast, yes?” The German musician, who also struck out in round one, is making copious notes about each guitarist, convinced this will help him in future competitions.
When Salvatore, a diminutive Italian, performs an extravagant bow full of unnecessary flourishes, there is general merriment at the back of the hall. He plays with self-conscious beauty, lifting his hands to let the chords ring, extended rubatos that verge on corny, all of it a shameless romanticism that sets Toby’s teeth on edge. He even plays the modernist Krehm piece as if it were a late-nineteenth-century Fantasia.
Javier, the Argentine, slips in two seats down. He’s changed into a polo shirt and velvety chinos. Toby eyes him more than once and waits for a mirroring gaze. No dice — Javier is a straight arrow, despite the fussy cufflinks. “Italian guys play cantabile from cradle to grave,” he whispers during a pause between movements. This is true. Salvatore finishes each phrase with an arpeggiated chord, a mannerism that his fellow guitarists term “a Segovia” — a tip of the hat to the great pioneering guitarist who played in a different era. Such easy sentimentality won’t fool the judges.
Toby rests one sneakered foot up on the seat in front. Lucy waltzes onstage next, wearing a long black skirt and a gold blouse.
“The old babe,” Armand says, making no attempt to lower his voice.
Suddenly, Toby is rooting for her while Armand slumps in his seat, reminded that he has been humiliated by a woman. Lucy has piled her hair on top of her head in a weird way and fastened it with a clip. Toby watches as she aims her hundred-kilowatt smile at the judges, though there is no way she could see them in the blare of the spotlight, and her bow is a modified form of dead chicken with an odd jerk at the end, as if she’s lost her balance.
If Lucy heard Armand’s nasty comment, she isn’t letting on. She arranges the material of her skirt, then cranks up the piano stool and the footrest. Her guitar has a reddish soundboard, not the best instrument in the world but a decent copy of a fine luthier’s work. Lucy has promised that if she makes it to the finals, she’ll put a deposit on a Clifford Fairn concert model, though it takes seven years for delivery, given his backlog of orders. By then she’ll be — good Lord — fifty-three.
Her tune-up is discreet, apologetic pings that only the first rows can hear. She wipes her palms on her skirt, then steps into the opening bars of the Tárrega.
The piece unfolds in a version so opposite from the Italian’s overblown romance that at first Toby recoils. Decent tone, but it all sounds diligent to his ears, each phrase carefully articulated, each nodule of expression prearranged — nothing left to chance.
Toby glances at his colleagues down the row and notes the skeptical expressions, and let’s face it, obvious relief. Nothing here to fear. Yet by the time she’s halfway through, Toby is almost convinced. This Tárrega is brainy, perhaps brainier than the composer merits. He claps harder than he needs to when she’s done.
Next up is the Krehm marathon. Lucy skims her palms over her draped knees and gazes at some point at the back of the hall, then plunges in. Whispering ceases. Javier, about to beat an escape, stops in his tracks. The Tárrega has in no way set them up for the performance that is underway. She attacks the piece with her whole body, fingers snapping off the fretboard, head bobbing, shoulders pressed forward — the performance of a lifetime. Chords unroll with deadly accuracy, and she mutes vibrating strings with her wrist, her thumb, anything that moves. It could fall apart any second, but it doesn’t.
Toby slips his foot off the seat and leans forward, hardly daring to breathe.
The final notes die away and on
ly then does Lucy release her shoulders. How fragile she looks, as if the air has gone out of her.
“Jesus,” Larry breathes, “she plays the rest of the program like this then the rest of you crew might as well pack it in.”
Javier stiffens. He won’t give up so easily.
“Where did this hausfrau come from?” Armand wonders aloud. “I have entered twenty competitions, and this is the first time I’ve seen her.”
Falling back into the seat, Toby begins to share the tango of panic: Lucy doesn’t need to win the way he does. She waltzes in with her disguise of middle age, pretending she’s some housewife, someone’s mother.
Next up is the suite.
Lucy squints blindly into the auditorium. Something inside her chest is doing handstands. Beyond the lights they note her bleached hair, a body that has borne children, and they are inventing a hundred stories to explain her presence here.
Delete Mark’s recent phone call.
“Just spoke to the Canadian consulate in Bangkok,” he said in the flat voice he uses when agitated. “Uncle Philip’s been busted. Turns out he’s a sex tourist.”
If I can get through the gavotte, she decides, the largo will be clear sailing. She can play the gavotte perfectly ten times in a row, then have it splinter during the eleventh. A slight drop in concentration causes havoc. If she stops for a moment to think, then she’ll capsize. Uncle Philip stashed in some third world jail, an old man in a hot country, so fastidious, flossing his teeth three times a day, those manicured nails. They will have confiscated his camera: Exhibit A.
Nothing lasts, least of all this heated stage and her pulsing nerves, nor the anticipatory stirrings of the audience. This is what the young ones don’t know; they have no perspective.
The guitar settles in her lap, a familiar weight.
Uncle Philip, she decides, smiles at a woman with a red purse and tells her, “I’ll look after your boys.” The woman nods, and without glancing at him, holds out her palm. He counts out a wad of baht, the national currency, and watches as the bills disappear into her purse.
The man will be kind, the woman thinks. He’ll give the boys treats, more than she can ever offer. Tonight she’ll cook fish and see her sister-in-law, who is pregnant again.
Her modest house is the site of a pleasure Uncle Philip has been imagining for months, a bouquet of anticipated tastes and smells, his papery skin yearning to be touched, as he touches now, pulling the boys into his chest, burying his face in their sleek hair.
Lucy lifts her hands to play. The tug of string against flesh and nail is welcome relief.
When she finishes the piece, she cradles her guitar tenderly as if it were a child she’s rescued from great danger.
In the back of the hall, Hiro caresses his new fingernail, giving it suspicious glances in the dark. He needn’t worry, for Toby is an honourable man and used plenty of glue.
Like the others, Lucy has mailed a short list of repertoire to the judges and awaits their selection, not knowing what piece she’ll be asked to play next.
Nerve is nothing new to her. Try fishing a toddler out of a swollen river or marching into a hospital room to demand they not resuscitate your own father. Nerve is what you get by living a life.
An older judge rises to her feet and peers through spectacles at a sheet of paper. Visnya Brocovic achieved second place in this same competition during its inaugural year, and she returns every fall to help select the new generation. She examines the printout and says in a heavy Balkan accent, “We will hear the Briscoe, please.”
“The what?” Larry whispers from the back of the hall.
No one in the row of musician spectators has heard of a composer called Briscoe. Will Lucy get extra points for this departure from tradition?
Toby smiles tightly. He knows that Charles Briscoe taught Brocovic decades ago in Sarajevo and that Visnya, in turn, taught Goran, Lucy’s current teacher — a biblical order of transference. This is no coincidence. Lucy has done her research.
Turns out that Briscoe is hardly a crowd-pleaser. The first note rings as an harmonic and the sound decays into silence before the piece gets going, to be followed by a series of tone patterns overlaid with otherworldly key changes. Jasper would like this — dissonance excites him — but it’s a lousy choice for competition. Toby relaxes his fists until they fall open.
Jasper and the rest of the institute staff gather around the monitor. The city has flown in a noted epidemiologist from Calgary who stands outside Toronto General, surrounded by a squadron of reporters. Wind blows his hair across his face; he looks as if he packed quickly, wearing a scruffy shirt and windbreaker. It’s Bob Howell, the physician who firewalled Foothills Hospital with a series of screening procedures and protocols considered second to none.
Microphones bob while the doctor holds forth. “You know how this beast operates?”
A rhetorical question.
“A virus can’t do its business until it binds to a living cell,” he continues breezily. “The host cell is tricked, can’t sort out its own protein from the invader’s. The virus replicates thousands of times in less than an hour. While you ladies and gentlemen sip your morning coffee, a virus has already done a day’s work.”
Nervous laughter greets this observation.
Fifteen
“Manuel, dear friend and colleague, you have a soft heart,” Portia says, dropping an arm over the back of the leather couch.
Manuel Juerta stiffens, feeling himself shrink from the heavy limb behind his head. “I insist we consider promoting this woman to the finals.”
“We consider everyone.”
“It’s our job,” Jon Smyth adds.
Why does Manuel feel they’re ganging up on him? The judges have gathered in the faculty club lounge, a low-ceilinged room featuring leather furniture and walls of white pine. He feels as if he’s in a fishing lodge, not in the middle of a large urban university.
“Her performance was original and not ordinary,” Manuel says, hearing his voice rise.
“I agree,” Portia says, sliding a finger down to touch his shoulder.
“It was certainly both of those things,” Smyth concurs.
“Visnya, what do you think?” Manuel turns to the Croatian guitarist, her face, as always, set in a worried frown.
“An interesting case,” Visnya says, reaching for one of the digestive cookies on the tray. “In my opinion this performance had great vitality and originality, but it was the work of a gifted amateur.”
“A moderately gifted amateur,” Jon corrects, wielding one knobby knee over the other. He’s changed into a pair of cargo shorts and has been scarfing cookies since the group adjourned here half an hour ago. “What do we know about her?”
“She studies with Goran Petrovich, a student of mine in Yugoslavia before the war,” Visnya says.
“What does Goran say?”
“We haven’t spoken in years. He lives in Toronto. I live in Belgrade.”
Manuel interrupts this exchange. “What do we care about the viewpoint of her teacher? Are we not here to judge a particular performance?”
There is a short silence, then both Jon and Jean-Paul, who is head of the guitar department at this Montreal university, start to speak at once.
“We must determine who is most able to launch a solo career,” Jean-Paul insists. “I would have to agree with our British colleague that this woman is a moderately gifted amateur.”
Jon jumps to his feet, spilling crumbs onto the floor. “I can’t believe we’re even considering promoting this woman to the finals!”
“Settle down,” Portia warns. Then, in demonstration of her conciliatory powers, she turns to Manuel. “Tell us more what you are thinking.”
What is he thinking? Manuel hardly knows. Perhaps Mrs. Lucy Shaker is exactly what they say, no more, no less. He heard how she played, saw how she caressed the instrument in her arms, an intense, hunched figure whose hands shook, yet he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. After
so many years of judging countless musicians, how many times has he felt compelled to listen to every note?
“I suspect it’s the narrative possibilities that appeal to our friend,” Portia says. “What a marvellous gesture to lift this woman from her regular life. We all want to be given a second chance — God knows I wouldn’t mind a crack — but is it realistic?”
They turn to Manuel and wait for his reaction, for he is the most eminent musician in the room.
Of course, he feels compelled to defend his choice rationally. “Her rendition of the Krehm was the most coherent and passionate of any competitor.”
“I grant you that,” Jon says, “but we must speak of the rest of her program.”
Manuel starts to list sideways on the couch. He’s exhausted after another sleepless night, not helped by someone pulling the fire alarm at 3:00 a.m. The truth is that he can’t remember much of the rest of Mrs. Shaker’s performance. His own scribbled notes reveal unspectacular scores, a fact that he shields from the others, but knows he must eventually share.
“What Manuel means to say,” Jon ventures, “is that we must realize this musician has achieved a personal triumph.”
“Well put,” Portia says. “Alas, we have no form of adjudication to reward such an achievement. Of course, I intend to take her aside and congratulate her.”
A note of relief enters the room — sanity has returned to the judging process. Only Manuel remains silent. His coffee cup is empty, and when he peers in, he sees a tiny insect drowning in the dregs. Behind a pacing Jon Smyth, a pristine log lies on the hearth, waiting for the bitter Canadian winter to land.
Jon can’t let go of the topic. “Is it feasible to believe this woman is on the cusp of a major performing career?” he asks, though it isn’t a real question.
“Why not?” Manuel asks.