Another of his fall-silent moments.
‘You want another rye?’ he asked me.
‘Sure,’ I said, holding out my glass. He splashed a few more fingers of whiskey in it. Then, with two distinct globules of sweat rolling down his face, he poured out another finger of rye into his own glass. As soon as he’d done that he stood up and disappeared into the kitchen with the bottle.
When he returned he said to me: ‘If you want another top-up it’s by the sink. If I start going for it, tell me not to, OK?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
There was a slight quiver to his lips as he raised the glass. Once he had downed the shot in one go, he shut his eyes tightly, an anxious glow of relief filling his face. He put the glass down.
‘In London I had a breakdown,’ he said. ‘It happened around a month after I got there. I’d been assigned by the Royal College to this big-cheese Viennese guy named Zimmermann. Tyrannical, exacting, never kind. I was his star pupil. He told me that two weeks into our “collaboration”, as he called it. He thought I was so good he insisted we “immediately try to scale Everest”. “So what if you fall, Canadian,” he said in this thick Viennese accent. “I will be the one with the rope to pull you back up again. So come now, we scale Everest.”’
‘What did he mean by that?’
‘The Hammerklavier Sonata by Beethoven. It’s number 29 – the last sonata and the most taxing. You can’t approach it lightly. It’s fiendish – and perhaps the greatest exploration of the infinite musicalness of the piano that has ever been composed. I went to the library. I got the score. We started to work on it during our three one-hour sessions each week. Zimmermann was – as always – scathing. But that was part of his strategy as a teacher, and I always responded to it. I aimed to please.’
‘And he was pleased?’
‘By the end of the second week, he told me: “You will be playing the Hammerklavier on the concert platform within eighteen months. You will scale Everest.”
‘The next day I was working alone on the scherzo in one of the soundproof rooms at the Royal College. Third movement, bars 3 to 8. Suddenly my fingers froze. They literally stopped dead over the keys. I couldn’t move them, I couldn’t move myself. I don’t know what happened. It was like someone flipped a switch in my brain and rendered me immobile. Another student found me there an hour later, catatonic, unresponsive to anything he said. They called an ambulance. I was admitted to a hospital. I stayed in that unresponsive state for about four weeks. Finally, my mom – who flew over to be with me – agreed to let them try electric-shock treatments to bring me back. The shocks worked. I came back.’
He fingered the whiskey glass again, so wanting another drink.
‘But I never played the piano again,’ he finally said. ‘No, that’s a lie. I played the piano all the time. Because once Mom got me repatriated to Canada and I started to function again, I did start teaching piano . . . in Hamilton, Ontario.’
‘Why Hamilton?’
‘I spent around six months in a psychiatric hospital there when I got back. There was a shrink in residence who specialized in my sort of manic depression, and my consultant in London had once worked with the guy, so it was decided to send me to him. That’s where I met my wife, Jessica. She was a nurse on my ward.’
I really didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. We fell silent for a few moments. Vern kept fingering his empty whiskey glass.
‘I’ve talked too much,’ he said.
‘Not at all.’
‘I don’t have much in the way of company, so . . .’
‘How did you and Jessica get together?’
‘Not tonight. I’ve already bored you with the half-story of my life.’
‘It’s hardly boring. Anyway, you shouldn’t be apologizing to me when I’m the one who caused the scene on the street, in the bar, in the cab . . .’
‘You had just cause to do that, given that it was a year ago today.’
Now it was my turn to stare down into my whiskey glass.
‘You’re well briefed,’ I said.
‘It’s a small place, the Central Public Library.’
‘You saved my ass tonight.’
‘There was no choice in the matter.’
‘Still . . . you did that. For me. And I’m very grateful.’
‘I just know what that first anniversary is like. When I had to commit my daughter Lois . . . it was April 18th 1989. And since then . . .’
Silence.
‘Her schizophrenia is of a type that never seems to be cured. Even if she wanted to be let out of the institution where she’s lived since then, the state wouldn’t let her. She’s considered a danger to society. And that’s that.’
Again his index finger began to rub incessantly against the whiskey glass.
‘What sort of meds do they have you on?’ he asked.
‘Ever heard of Mirtazapine?’
‘It’s been my constant companion for the past five years.’
‘That’s a long time on one drug.’
‘I sleep because of it. That’s something I didn’t do for years.’
‘Oh, it does make you sleep.’
‘How many milligrams are you on?’
‘Forty-five.’
‘I’ve got a spare room top of the stairs to the right. It’s even got its own en suite bathroom.’
‘I’d rather go home.’
‘And I’d rather you not hurt yourself tonight.’
‘I’m OK now.’
‘I jumped out of that moving car an hour after I assured a friend I was OK. You wait here until I get the pills, then you go upstairs and sleep. There’s a radio by the bed and some books. But the pills should do their stuff – and when you wake up tomorrow, that anniversary will be behind you.’
‘I’ll still feel terrible.’
‘That’s right, you will. But at least you won’t be obsessing about the day in question.’
He returned a few moments later with the pills, a glass of water and some towels. Part of me told myself: This is all too weird. Another part of me wanted to simply bolt out the door and into the night. But there was a small rational voice still operative inside my jangled brain which counseled: Take the drugs and go to sleep. You just don’t know what might happen if left to your own pitch-dark thoughts.
So I accepted all that he offered and went upstairs. The room had the same sepia floral wallpaper and a sleigh-style bed, decorated with dolls. There were several framed portraits of a young girl, taken when she was a baby, a young girl, a teenager. Was this Lois? Were these her dolls? Was I about to sleep in the room of his lost daughter, a room she herself had never slept in, as Vern had only moved here after she was committed . . . ?
Again I wanted to flee. Again I told myself: It’s just one night and – unless I’ve misjudged all this entirely – he’s not the type who’s going to strut in here naked at three a.m. I downed the pills, thinking: That’s decided the matter. I used the bathroom. I climbed into the elderly pink floral sheets. I switched off the light. My watch glowed in the dark. It was only eight p.m. The bedtime of a child. But tonight I was a child sent to bed early in the room of a child who never lay in this bed, and whose presence hovered above me as the pills did their magic and . . .
It was five-thirty a.m. That’s what my watch told me. Nine and a half hours of sleep. I couldn’t complain – even if it was disorienting to wake up in this strange bed in this strange house, wondering if the loud rasping sound I could discern nearby was Vern snoring.
I got up and used the bathroom, then dressed and remade the bed with great care. Once downstairs I found a phone in the kitchen and called a taxi company and asked them to send a cab to . . .
I actually remembered the address and told the dispatcher to inform the driver that he shouldn’t ring the doorbell when he pulled up. The kitchen, like the rest of the house, was from another era. The fridge must have been thirty years old. There was a linoleum table with photographic placemats
depicting ‘Great Canadian Scenes of Natural Beauty’. There was no dishwasher, no microwave, no fancy espresso machine, and the front-loading toaster was one of those lost-in-time jobs that was made from tin. Vern spent thousands on the most up-to-date stereophonic equipment, but ignored all mod cons elsewhere. We all have our priorities, I suppose.
I scribbled a note on a pad that he had picked up from a local realtor’s.
I slept so well I was up before the dawn. You were extraordinarily kind and decent to me at a moment in time when I didn’t merit such decency. I hope you will now consider me your friend – as I do you.
See you later today at the House of Mirth.
My best
I got into the cab. It headed up 29th Street, passing the Cancer Center of the Foothills Hospital. Was this where Vern was treated?
The driver must have been reading my thoughts. As we passed it, he said: ‘Every time I drive by that place and see the words “Cancer Center”, it gives me the willies. “There but for the grace” and all that stuff.’
‘Know what you mean.’
Back in my little apartment I took a hot shower and changed my clothes, then went to Caffé Beano for breakfast. When I reached the library at my usual start time of ten Ruth greeted me with a look of concern.
‘You had me worried yesterday. I was going to suggest taking you out last night, but you were gone by the time I came looking for you.’
‘I just went home.’
‘You shouldn’t have been alone last night.’
I said nothing.
Later that day, Babs came up to me in the staffroom and also asked how I was doing.
‘Just fine,’ I said quietly.
‘Well, if you ever feel in any way like you want a shoulder to cry on—’
‘Thanks,’ I said, then quickly changed the subject. People want to be kind. People don’t know what to say. In turn, you don’t know what to say to them. What can you say? What can be said? Just the usual bereavement banalities – and the acknowledgement that it’s all still so awful. After that . . .
There was no solution. There was just work – and I threw myself into it. I chased down a Bodley Head edition of the complete Graham Greene for a bargain $2,300. I asked Marlene – now functioning as Head of Children’s Books (and endlessly grumpy) – if she would like to spend $20,000 on updating her collection.
‘Will I have carte blanche to do what I want with it?’
‘Did you ever give anyone else carte blanche when you were in charge of acquisitions?’
‘You’re not answering my question.’
‘And you’re evading mine. But I’ll cut to the chase. Yes, you can have virtual carte blanche – insofar as you can draw up your dream list of how you plan to spend the twenty thousand. Unless I seriously object to anything on the list, you can go ahead and order all that’s there. Fair enough?’
‘What exactly would you “object” to?’
I sighed a long sigh – and stopped myself from saying something genuinely angry, like: Why do you have to be so goddamn contrary? Why is everything a problem in the making for you? And I could have added to this the thought: Why is every workplace a minefield of petty politics and smoldering resentments? It’s as if people need to turn their own insecurities and boredom into something malignant and displacing. Internal politics are all bound up in the ennui of the quotidian – and the terrible realization that there is only a finite amount of interest to be found in what you do from nine to five every day; that, like it or not, it’s meaningless. So why not turn the banal into the melodramatic by finding people to dislike, by sniping at your coworkers, or getting paranoid about what they might be saying about you . . .
Vern had the right idea. He came to work and rendered himself invisible. He did his job. He did it well. He remained cordial, but distant from his fellow workers. He went home – and immersed himself in the music writing that, I sensed, gave his life the passion it otherwise lacked . . . or that he no longer wanted.
Vern. After that night at his house, he simply greeted me with a courteous nod in the hallway or a fast ‘Hello, Jane’ the few times I saw him in the staffroom. He seemed to be avoiding me, as if he had said too much about himself that evening, revealing more than he wanted to. Though it struck me that all that stuff about his secret writing life should be known and celebrated, I also understood why he kept it to himself. In a small world like our little library, everything can be taken down and used against you – especially if you show initiative above and beyond our own prosaic horizons.
‘And he really thinks himself a music critic? . . . Who in their right mind would commission a textbook from him?’
No wonder Vern lived in a sort of internal exile. When life has so conspired against you – and you find a little something that re-establishes your sense of wonder – you have to guard it fiercely. Because malignancy is all around you, and kindness is not as commonplace as we so want to believe.
Vern. A week went by – and still nothing more than a monosyllabic greeting. Fair enough. A second week went by – and I had a request from him, via email, about purchasing the Complete Mozart, a one-hundred-and-fifty-disc set on Philips. He wrote:
If I had my way, I’d buy each work individually – but that would be bad waste of public funds. The set is on special offer for $400. It strikes me as great value – and an essential addition to our collection. They’re all very credible readings of the Mozart oeuvre.
I hope you will approve this.
Vernon.
I wrote back:
Approved. Aren’t there also complete Bach and Beethoven and Schubert sets? At the price you mentioned it strikes me as a steal. Please investigate and get back to me.
You well, by the way?
He wrote back:
The Bach and Beethoven and Schubert are also $400 each and, as such, excellent value. The Beethoven and Schubert piano sonatas, for example, are performed by Brendel, Kovacevich, Lupu and Uchida . . . the major league of contemporary pianists, so to speak. So yes, these would be ideal recordings for us.
Ps I have two seats for the Angela Hewitt concert next Thursday night. Might you be free?
My God, Vernon Byrne was inviting me out. I didn’t know how to take this, except to think that Angela Hewitt was the greatest Canadian pianist since Glenn Gould. And she was going to be here in Calgary and Vern had an extra seat, so . . . why the hell not?
I wrote back.
The Bach and Beethoven and Schubert Collected Works are approved for purchase. And yes, I’d be delighted to go to the Hewitt concert with you. But let me buy dinner.
He wrote back:
No, I’m buying dinner. I’ve reserved Teatro at six p.m. on the night. See you then.
I must have bumped into Vern half a dozen times between his invitation and the dinner itself. Every time I saw him he tensed and simply nodded hello. I felt like telling him: It’s just a dinner and a concert. Stop acting like we’re having an affair and I’m married to a trigger-happy, alcoholic, wildly jealous Marine . . .
‘You know, I believe that Vern is intimidated by you,’ Ruth said to me on the day before the concert.
‘What makes you think that?’ I asked.
‘The way he averts his eyes every time you come into his field of vision.’
‘Maybe he has better things to be looking at.’
‘Maybe he has a crush on you.’
‘Maybe you should stop acting like we’re all still in high school. He’s a shy man, end of story.’
He was a very nervous man, fingering an already-poured shot of whiskey as I entered Teatro. It was one of Calgary’s big-deal restaurants – located only a block from the library and opposite the Jack Singer Concert Hall where Ms Hewitt was to play tonight. I’d passed by it a few times and never looked inside or glanced at its menu – big-deal restaurants not being something that was ever part of my life, even in those brief Freedom Mutual days when I was making stupid money. But I had dressed nicely for the ev
ening out – a longish black skirt and a black turtleneck and black boots. The fact that I had come to work in these clothes made Babs and Ruth immediately quiz me if I had a ‘heavy date’ that night.
I just smiled and said nothing. But as the restaurant’s maître d’ escorted me down past the very swish Manhattan-style bar and into a dining room that looked like a design-magazine spread, all I could think was that my ‘date’ tonight would easily pass for my father. Vern was dressed in the same tweed jacket, tattersall shirt and knit tie he wore every day, and was nursing a small measure of whiskey.
‘I bet that’s Crown Royal,’ I said as he stood up to greet me. He shook my hand shyly, then held my chair for me as I sat down.
‘You want one yourself?’
‘I was thinking about a gin Martini.’
‘I used to specialize in gin Martinis. What kind of gin?’
‘I’m not that picky.’
‘Bombay’s the best.’
He lifted a finger and a waiter showed up.
‘Straight up, with olives?’ Vern asked me. I nodded. He ordered the Martini.
‘You’re not having another?’ I asked, knowing that I was venturing into tricky territory.
‘I can’t. Two drinks a night is my limit. Granted, sometimes I exceed that. But when I do . . .’
He opened his hands flatwards, like someone trying to ward off a deluge.
‘Were you in AA and all that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yes. Four years of AA. My sponsor still calls me regularly to see how I’m bearing up. He doesn’t like the idea that I drink at all. They’re all a bit doctrinaire and Jansenist, the AA. But as I had basically lost my career to the booze – and was also on the road to cirrhosis – I decided I could put up with all their Higher Power stuff. But Charlie – that’s my sponsor – worries I’m going to backslide if I keep having the two every night.’
‘Abstinence is an overrated virtue.’
‘My thinking exactly – but only if you don’t exceed the limits you’ve set for yourself. So . . . two drinks are better than no drinks. But three drinks . . .’
Leaving the World Page 41