‘You said you were teaching music back East. When did that start?’
‘Around a year after I was finally allowed out of the hospital. But you don’t want to hear about my little life . . .’
‘Actually I do.’
‘Because it’s so messy?’
‘Whose life isn’t?’
‘True.’
‘I’m just interested . . .’
‘Let’s order first.’
He pointed to the menus that had been placed beside us. I opened mine and was shocked to discover that a main course cost anywhere between $28 and $42.
‘We have to split this,’ I said. ‘It’s far too expensive.’
‘I just got a check in from the Gramophone yesterday. It will cover the entire evening – especially as the pound is still two-to-one to the Canadian dollar.’
‘But I’m sure you could use that money for something more important than—’
‘Let me be the judge of that.’
My Martini arrived. We ordered. I took a sip and shivered pleasantly as the super-chilled gin numbed the back of my throat. Opposite me, Vern started fingering his whiskey glass, clearly debating whether to order another one now or wait until the food arrived.
‘Your wife . . . Jessica, wasn’t it?’ I asked.
‘You have a good memory. Yeah, she was the ward sister in the hospital where I was . . . placed.’
Over the next hour and a half, I heard the second part of the Vernon Byrne story. As he talked, the narrative details took shape. The breakdown in London brought about by manic depression – but which was diagnosed wrongly as ‘causal’ rather than chemical. The three years of incarceration in a series of bleak Canadian hospitals. The electric shocks and mind-numbing cocktails of Librium which neutralized him, but also killed any ambition to ever re-attempt a concert career. The bland music-teacher job in a bland second-tier city. The nurse who wanted to mother him – and became a shrewish wife. The daughter he adored – but who, from an early age, was also showing signs of instability. The drinking that he and his wife engaged in – and the ferocious drunken fights that became a staple of their marriage. His wife finally running off with a local cop and never seeing their daughter again. Vern being determined to steer Lois out of the schizophrenia that had begun to claim her when she was eleven years old. The way this ‘dementia praecox’ (he used the actual clinical name) led Lois into attacking a teacher with a pair of scissors and then cutting her wrists after breaking a windowpane in the police station where she was first brought after the attack (‘and she was only thirteen at the time’). Vern having no choice but to commit her. His escalating drinking. His leap from the car. The termination of his teaching job. Having to move back to Calgary. His mother taking him in – and in her own quiet, tough way, forcing him back into the land of the functioning. Him landing the job at the library. The gradual return to some sort of equilibrium – to the point where, when the doctors told him his daughter was never going to have a life again outside a supervised living facility, he managed to handle it. The way he made a point of flying East four times a year to spend four weekends with her. How, before she died, his mother made him promise that he would try to play the piano again. How . . .
When the bill arrived, Vern glanced at his watch and said that he felt shame for ‘having spoiled a lovely dinner with all this talk about me’.
‘I wanted to hear the story,’ I countered, ‘because you are an interesting man.’
He fingered the now-empty glass of Shiraz that he had ordered with his main course.
‘No one has called me interesting in . . . well, not since my professor at the Royal College.’
‘Well, you are interesting. Know that.’
The bill arrived and when I again offered to pay half of it, he said: ‘After all that you had to listen to?’
We then crossed the street and entered Calgary’s very spacious, very modern concert hall. It was obviously a big event as the lobby was buzzing and everyone seemed ever so slightly overdressed . . . the way people in cities with not much in the way of High Culture reach for the cocktail dress and the far-too-designer suit whenever they are about to attend something that has been tagged ‘serious’. Our seats were wonderful: sixth row, just off-center enough to give us a perfect view of the keyboard.
Then the house lights dimmed, the stage lights came up, and Angela Hewitt walked out on stage. She was a woman in her early fifties – not conventionally beautiful, but handsome in a sort of Simone de Beauvoir way, and dressed in a shiny royal-blue dress. But within moments of her settling herself behind the keyboard, waiting for the audience to fall completely silent, and raising her hands to play the first bars of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, I wasn’t thinking at all about her strange sartorial sense or the way she was probably the bookish, cerebral girl who never got a date in high school. Once Hewitt launched into the first meditative aria of Bach’s extraordinarily dense and profound keyboard universe, she held me rapt. For the next seventy-five minutes – as she essayed the manifold variations of this massive work – I began to hear it as an encapsulation of the human emotional palate: from severe introspection, to giddy optimism, to careful cogitation, to middle-of-the-night despair, to ebullient dazzle, to the sad pervasive knowledge that life is but a collection of fleeting ephemera . . .
I had never heard a performance quite like this one – and was astonished by Hewitt’s ability to shift emotional and dynamic gears so brilliantly, and weave Bach’s complex and detailed musical variants into such a cohesively argued whole. I didn’t move my eyes from her for the entire hour and fifteen minutes. When the final bars of the repeated aria drifted away into a resigned, plaintive silence there was a moment of complete, dense hush. Then the entire concert hall erupted. Everyone was immediately on their feet, cheering. When I looked over at Vern I could see that he was crying.
Once outside the hall I took Vern’s arm and said: ‘I cannot thank you enough for that.’
His response was a shy smile, a nod of the head, and a slight shift of his arm to free it from my grasp.
‘Can I offer you a lift home?’ he asked.
Vern’s car was a ten-year-old Toyota Corolla – its color best described as rusted cream, its passenger seat thick with compact discs that he hastily dispatched to the back. He asked for my address, told me he knew the building and said nothing more all the way back there. I could have tried to make conversation. But the two times I stole a glance at him I could see that something had happened to him during that concert; that the sadness still so present in his eyes spoke volumes about so much which simply could not be articulated. When we reached my front door I again thanked him for a wonderful evening – and made a point of leaning over and giving him a peck on the cheek. I could see his shoulders tense as the kiss landed. Then, with a quiet ‘See you in the morning’, he waited for me to get out and drove off into the night.
I went upstairs. I sat down in my armchair, still dressed in my overcoat. I reflected on what I had just heard – and how grateful I was to Vern for having given me the opportunity to experience something so rich and luminous and forceful that – and it only now hit me – allowed me, for its entire seventy-five-minute duration, to vanish from the grief that had so wracked my life.
Of course, the moment I reflected on this was the moment it came rushing back. But still, Bach’s long dark night of the pianistic soul had made me detach for a while. And I couldn’t help but wonder – given all the children of his own that he lost – whether Bach himself hadn’t found consolation in the contrapuntal immensity of this aria-and variations.
The next morning, however, Emily loomed large over everything. I tried to bargain with the grief – to tell myself that I simply had to live with it. The problem was, I couldn’t live with it. My daughter was forever gone. I couldn’t reconcile myself to such an appalling reality – and yet that was the finite, inflexible heart of the matter. There it is. What can you do about it? Nothing . . . except get through another day.
I snapped off the radio. I didn’t need – or want – to hear any more about this.
Later that morning, when I entered the staffroom during coffee break, Babs and Mrs Woods were having a most engaged conversation about the disappearance of Ivy MacIntyre.
‘I heard that the father is a notorious drunk and that he’d attacked Ivy and her mom on two occasions,’ Mrs Woods said.
‘And there’s an older son – Michael – who’s eighteen and working the oilfields up at Fort McMurray. According to him, his sister was always worried about being alone with her dad, because . . .’
The door swung shut behind me and – upon seeing who it was – they instantly changed the subject. Later that morning I happened to pass Vern on my way out for lunch.
‘Thank you again for such an amazing night,’ I said.
His response was a diffident nod and then he walked right
by me. The next few days the media was full of Ivy MacIntyre. Though everyone in the staffroom seemed to be preoccupied with the case – and all the newspapers regarded Ivy’s suspicious disappearance as a commercial godsend – I was determined to block it out as much as possible.
A week went by. Vern sent me an email, asking if he could purchase a new edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians – all twenty-nine volumes for an alarming $8,500. He wrote:
It is an essential reference tool, and one which no library should be without.
I wrote back:
It’s also a small fortune – and don’t we already have an entire Grove’s Dictionary on your floor?
He wrote back:
Yes, we do have a Grove’s but it’s twenty years out of date. Could I convince you over brunch on Sunday to approve the purchase of the new edition?
I didn’t answer immediately, my reluctance having to do with the question of whether I really wanted to go out on another date with Vern. Had it taken him almost two weeks to get the courage up to ask me out again? If so, why on earth would I want to give him any hope of a future beyond an occasional concert or movie or dinner? The notion of an ‘involvement’ with Vern Byrne . . . well, I simply couldn’t imagine it.
But this was the strident, defensive part of me talking. The other part – a little more rational and attune to the solitude in which I had decided to dwell – told me: What’s a brunch anyway, but a brunch? You have no contact with anyone outside of work. All right, that’s your choice – but surely you can’t live this way for ever, so why not accept the offer of company for a weekend afternoon?
So I wrote back:
Brunch would be fine this Sunday . . . but only if you let me pay.
He wrote back:
Agreed, with reluctance. But let me choose the place. I’ll pick you up at 12 noon.
That Sunday – like every Sunday – I got up early and dropped by the magazine shop around the corner from Caffé Beano that actually sold copies of the Sunday New York Times and now always had one put aside for me. I paid for the paper and brought it around to Beano where I drank a cappuccino and began to regret that I had agreed to this brunch, as the idea of having to make conversation with anyone outside of my workaday reality filled me with serious dread. Worse yet, having told me his story in full a few weeks ago, he might now be expecting to hear mine. But there was absolutely no way I’d ever share that with anyone. Anyway, what the hell was I doing going out to eat with this guy in the first place? It was a mistake, a stupid mistake. And if anyone at work learned about it . . .
I glanced at my watch. It was eleven-thirty a.m. With any luck I could catch him at home right before he left, and inform him that I just couldn’t make it today. Scooping up my paper, I left the café and was back in my apartment within three minutes. Walking in the front door a thought struck me: You don’t have his phone number. I grabbed my phone and dialed 411. ‘Do you have the number of a V. Byrne, 29th Street NW in Calgary? . . . Yes, it’s a residence . . . Yes, I would like to be connected, please . . .’
Then the number started to ring and ring and ring. No reply. No answerphone. I started pacing the floor of my apartment, nervous, frightened and simultaneously telling myself this was a wild overreaction. But this was how the grief often worked – the urge to sit down on a street, to blow up in a bar, to refuse to see anyone socially, to tell myself that seventy-five minutes of transcendent Bach would suddenly alleviate . . .
I got out of my sweat clothes and I dived into the shower. I dried off and threw on some clothes and ran a brush through my hair and put on my boots and my parka. The intercom rang. I grabbed my wallet and my keys and went downstairs.
Vern was standing by his elderly Corolla, trying to wear a grin on his face. He was dressed for the weekend: gray flannels, the usual tattersall shirt, a green crewneck jumper, one of those old-fashioned brown car coats, brown boots. He nodded shyly and held the car door open as I climbed inside.
The motor was running and the heater was on full blast, as it was minus fifteen today, even though it was still mid-March.
‘Does winter ever end here?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In June.’
We drove off.
‘Where are we eating?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘That sounds mysterious.’
‘It’s a bit of a drive, but . . . I think you’ll like it.’
We set off down 17th Avenue, turning right on 9, and then proceeded to the river, whereupon we crossed the Louise Bridge and connected to the highway system that led to the northern suburbs and beyond. During all this time we said nothing to each other – the dead space taken up by the Choral Concert program on CBC Radio 2. The presenter played excerpts from a new recording of Handel’s Esther – specifically, one of the big tunes from the oratorio: ‘My Heart is Inditing’.
‘I only found out recently that Handel got the idea for the oratorio after seeing a play by Racine,’ Vern said.
As attempts to make conversation go, it was . . .
‘I never knew that,’ I said.
Another dead zone of silence.
‘Where are we going exactly?’ I asked.
‘Let me surprise you.’
Silence. Then, around three minutes later . . .
‘Good weekend?’ he asked.
‘Low key. And you?’
‘Wrote an article for the Gramophone.’
‘On what?’
‘A new recording of Handel’s Esther.’
‘You mean this recording . . . the one we’re hearing now?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Ah.’
Another silence. We turned off on the ramp leading to 16th Avenue NW, marked ‘Banff’.
‘We’re not heading out of town, are we?’ I asked.
‘You’ll see,’ he said.
More silence. We continued along a gasoline alley, then past an artificial ski slope, marked ‘Canada Ski Park’.
‘That was the site of the ski jump when Calgary hosted the ’84 Olympics.’
‘I see.’
‘Now there’s skiing there around eight months a year . . . if you ski, that is.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Nor do I.’
We pressed on. Within moments the city literally fell away. We were in open prairie – vast, endless plains, stretching to the limits of the horizon.
I suddenly felt a chill hit me; a chill that was undercut by a growing panic. It was the same panic that seized me on the bus ride north out of Montana when I made the mistake of looking up at all that epic grandeur and felt as if I was about to come unstuck.
I turned my eyes away from all that oceanic space laid out before us. I kneaded my hands together with such force that I felt as if I was trying to strangle my fingers. I felt my breathing become irregular. Next to me Vern could tell that something was seriously wrong.
‘Jane, are you OK?’
‘Where the hell are we going, Vern?’
‘A nice place. A real nice place. But if, for some reason, all this is making you uncomfortable . . .’
I looked up in front of me and saw what we were heading for: the Rockies, now silhouetted on the horizon. Their fierce beauty – all jagged peaks, cliffed with snow that gleamed under harsh winter sunlight – was impossible to endure. I let out a stifled cry, put my head in my hands and started to weep. Immediately Vern pulled the car off the road. As soon as we reached a full stop, I threw open the door and began to bolt. I didn’t run far – the cold put a quick end to my crazed reverie of escape. But after maybe twenty yards I did buckle down on my knees into the thick snow and pressed my gloved hands into my eyes and willed the world to go away.
Then I felt a pair of hands on my shoulders. Vern kept them there for a few moments, steadying me. Without saying a word, he slid them down to the sides of my arms and lifted me to my feet – and then got me back into the car.
‘I’ll take you home,’ he said in a near-whisper.
‘I don’t want to go home. I want to . . .’
I fell silent. The motor hummed, the heater blasted warm air. I hung my head.
‘Talk,’ I said, finally completing the sentence. ‘I want to talk. About what happened. That day.’
Leaving the World Page 42