“Eggs?”
“Yes. We used that saucepan with the little cups for the eggs?”
“Yeah, I do remember,” says Carter. It was a variation on a double boiler. The cups were cradled in a frame that sat on top of the saucepan, with water simmering below. You could lift a cup out and turn a domed egg bottom-up on your plate.
“I said at breakfast the other day, they should get a couple of saucepans like that. Because it’s the best poached egg you ever had. And this old one at the next table, she wouldn’t hear of it. That’s the lazy way, she says. You don’t poach a proper egg like that. What was her name?”
“Mrs. Vincent,” says Shanna.
“And she from Lumsden. Sure what would they know about it down there?”
“Mrs. Vincent’s from Cape Island.”
“Which one is Lumsden?”
“Mrs. Gibbons.”
“Anyway, it’s all the same crowd. All married to each other.” Her mouth falls open and her eyes squeeze shut with an almost silent laugh, delighted with the confrontation. “Sure what would—” She makes two attempts at finishing the sentence before giving way to another phlegmy wheeze of mirth.
The moment of hilarity seems to disorient her. After recovering and wiping her eyes she turns her face from the computer. Carter talks to her. But she shakes her head, uncomprehending. “Turn it off, turn it off,” she says to Shanna. Though she still seems in good spirits. She pushes from her chair and shuffles offscreen.
“Okay, Joyce,” says Shanna. She leans in to work the mouse and asks Carter if they can Skype again soon. “Just the two of us, if that’s okay. Couple of things I want to update you on.”
“Okay,” says Carter.
“It’s nothing urgent, only—”
“Turn it off now please. Turn it off.” Joyce’s hand reaches in, slapping at the keyboard. They disappear.
//////
Joyce had looked curiously two-dimensional on the screen. The light in the room gave her no depth, or maybe it was the pixilation. Her voice had been unmistakable, nipping at the words and jumping smartly into any lull in conversation. Not once did he have to remind her that Isabelle had replaced Leah, or repeat Sam’s name. When she started in on music—how it brings meagre rewards, “and I don’t just mean the money”—he told her he had given up music for good, and she never mentioned it again.
Computers never scared Joyce. She’d worked for a phone company in the eighties, when they overhauled the long-distance system and computerized it. She even modelled the new rigging for the local paper, in a photo captioned CNT operator demonstrates new computerized 4000-line digital switiching exchange. Carter’s father had clipped it, circled the spelling error in red pen, and posted it on the fridge. Joyce looked good in the picture. Every inch the modern working woman, poised at a keyboard in her crisp blouse and smart shag cut, smiling at what might have been a very large microwave oven across her desk. She had little patience for those who flinched at the new technology. “Some of the girls are terrified,” she had said. “Sure it’s not going to bite you.”
A few years after she was widowed, Joyce purchased a computer of her own, and her first emails to Carter included links to websites poring over the details of the Arrow Air crash. The pages were text-heavy conspiracy arguments, including one that accused the American government of bombing its own soldiers. Carter was at the height of his powers then, the band working steadily and college kids swooning over his wife. His grand plan to leave Newfoundland had worked out even better than he could have hoped. The air he breathed seemed charged with music. He had little appreciation for his mother’s predicament: barely sixty years old, widowed and alone. He had scoffed at her computer noodlings and written a lengthy email advising her to find a more productive use for her time. It was not one of his better performances.
10
Eric heard that Pan-Am was looking for new station agents, and applied for the training program in New York. An operation that size would surely prosper for years to come, he reasoned, and getting in now opened the possibility of working anywhere in the world. He was turned down, much to Joyce’s relief. Eric didn’t possess the patience for the half-witted passengers and countless bumbling oversights she dealt with daily.
The rejection troubled him, but no more than a day or so. More and better opportunities were sure to come his way. Eric didn’t so much search for jobs as search the world for wonder and possibility, spending long evenings in his easy chair, the floor around him strewn with his magazines and newspapers. He was dogged in his concentration, reading softly to himself, often repeating a line or paragraph several times over until it made itself clear. He might call Joyce over to show her the latest developments in skyscraper design, or read to her about how potatoes were being bred for greater yield. One night he asked her opinion on a series of magazine illustrations proposing “a revolution in the household kitchen.” But she didn’t get to say much. “You see what happens with better design,” he explained, tracing his finger over the strips of chrome trim on the stove and refrigerator. “Just by making it more pleasing to the eye, it becomes an easier place to work. And nuclear ovens, for quick cooking.”
“Nuclear ovens!” Joyce couldn’t imagine it, not after seeing the newsreels of bomb tests in the American desert.
Eric’s kitchen wasn’t much. A filing cabinet for a pantry, a hot plate and coffee pot on an old office desk. But the tiny electric refrigerator was the first Joyce had ever seen in action. The rest of the apartment she liked. On Page Street, well away from the tarmac, with a second easy chair for her and a nice big picture window looking to the woods. The worst of it was the Murphy bed, which partly blocked the bathroom door.
His next job idea was to work the network of superhighways that would soon crisscross America. Hard labour, but with his years of experience he’d rise to foreman or beyond before too long. After that he had a notion to return to California, where the next generation of airliners would be conceived and built. Opening a magazine page that folded out to double size, he showed Joyce the sketches for an airship that would hold hundreds of passengers and crew, with dining rooms, libraries, tennis courts, private quarters, and a ballroom with full orchestra.
“But can they actually make it?” asked Joyce, perched on the arm of his chair.
“Sooner than you think,” he said. “Maybe we’ll be the house band. What do you say?”
He stored his records in a case that looked like a toolbox, each disc nestled in a velvet-lined slot. The case had a lid and a handle on one side, so it could be latched and carried like luggage. The record player was similarly built, resembling a briefcase made of blond wood. It might stay latched a week or more, and then he’d play every record, working through the case from front to back, late into a single evening. Or he might fixate on a song and hound Joyce with it. One night he insisted on playing “Mood Indigo” for her, to show her how it was done.
“Please don’t,” said Joyce. “Mood Indigo” was among the songs she had been trying to master. It was beyond her, the words felt false in her mouth.
“You’re being foolish,” said Eric, holding the disc by its edges so Joyce could read Duke Ellington & His Famous Orchestra stamped on the black RCA Victor label.
Whoever sang it for Ellington would surely fill the words with all the hope and sorrow and solitude that Joyce couldn’t muster. If she heard it done that way she would never sing it again, and she had to sing it because Gordon had worked out a solo for it—the muted trumpet groaning like a sheep being sheared—and was determined to play it.
“No,” she said. “I’ll walk out.”
“You’re the singer,” said Eric, but seemed to sulk a bit. Joyce thought him a bit foolish for making such a fuss over a song, but it wouldn’t matter much longer. Singing would be over for her once she was settled with children.
//////
Fran Delane
y was in an awful state. It had started in the winter, when she stopped going out. Not for groceries, said Mary. Not even for mass, said Gert. Sleeps all day. Won’t answer the door. Gordon’s looking after the youngsters, said Mike Devine. They say she hardly talks to them. Won’t let them near her. Her own children! said Mary, pity turning to disgust.
People asked Gordon, how are things? Good, he always said. Not bad. The band had a wedding in June, for the general manager at TWA. Joyce watched him closely that night, but it was the same Gordon. Counting in every number, and flexing his knees with the tempo. Tilting an ear and pursing his lips at the trumpet. On the slow songs especially, his instrument purred with a warm, drowsy tone. His face belied the effort, bursting red and wide-eyed. On long notes his chin inflated like a bullfrog’s.
Fran disappeared on a fine night in September, in slippers and housecoat. Constable Reid caught up to her easy enough. Found her in the middle of Radio Range Road, he said. The red velvet of the housecoat lit up like a Christmas tree in his headlights. She must have been through the woods, going by the tree needles she carried and the mud caking her slippers. At the hospital they kept her door locked, said Malcolm Follett, whose wife worked at the hospital reception. Afraid she’ll bolt in the middle of the night. Not even able to clean herself, said Gert. And she used to be the life of the party, said Malcolm. Loved a hand of cards. And those beautiful cakes, said Mary. First gone at any bake sale.
A week later the band did the MET office anniversary party. They opened with “Got a Feelin’ You’re Foolin’” as usual, and the tempo lagged right out of the gate. Gordon lifted his shoulders, urging them to pick it up. Ivany panicked on the drums and soon the band was chasing itself. The anxiety was contagious, sweeping across the hall like bad news. Everyone was thinking about Radio Range Road and the velvet nightgown and muddy slippers. They sat clutching coffee cups and dessert forks, Baked Alaska dying on their plates. Dance floor empty and every eye trained on Gordon.
Ivany settled down, and the moment passed. Dancers came out, and the rest of the evening was uneventful.
“If you can’t play your best show on your worst day, you might as well pack it in,” Gordon said.
Fran came home from hospital. But Mrs. Tucker next door started taking the kids every day. Then Mrs. Kendall for a while. Father Kiloran offered an intercession “for all those troubled by illness we cannot see, and for their loved ones.” People saw Gordon eating at the airport on his days off. So they started dropping by with tuna casserole and three-layer meatloaf and fresh buns. Gert did up her cheesy green beans and onions.
Joyce knew Gordon’s sweet tooth. So she and Gloria tried a recipe for no-bake chocolate butter balls. They ate two each and Joyce found them a bit mushy—a mistake to whip the butter, perhaps—but they loaded the cake tin and drove over. They found Gordon strolling his front lawn, trying to pick a spot for a maple tree. The maple sat behind him, leafless, with a brin bag tied around its roots.
“It’s not a good time to be planting,” said Gloria.
“I suppose not,” said Gordon. He wiped his hands on the thighs of his creased slacks, lifted the lid of the cake tin, popped a glossy brown ball in his mouth, and said, “Hoo, hoo, hoooo!” Tilting his head back as if doing a bird call. The house behind him looked dark and lifeless. But the front door was open. Gordon’s trumpet case sat just inside the door, as if he might dash off to a dance at a moment’s notice.
“My stepmother went mad in a similar way,” said Eric. “It seems almost a regular thing with girls. Ever see it in your family?”
“As a schoolgirl, I had a terrible crush on a boy I saw in films,” Joyce said. “I was lost in it altogether. Like I wasn’t even in the world anymore.”
“That’s not at all the same thing.”
He was right, of course. Still, she recalled it as a time that might have easily spilled over into a kind of madness. The boy and his sister appeared in a series of films brought round to the school by Father Coles. The films were meant to teach modern standards of health and hygiene. The importance of containing odours and fluids and appetites. The priest introduced the films by reminding the class that true Christians were clean and sturdy in body, mind, and soul.
The boy didn’t have a name, and Joyce didn’t give him one. She watched him complete his studies and paper route. In snug white T-shirt and dark trousers, he touched his toes and flattened his frame for perfect push-ups. He scoured his hands and arms with soapy water, laid out fresh clothes on his bed, conducted polite and cheerful conversations with schoolmates of either sex, and refused the company of boys in blue jeans or messy-haired girls with dark, budding lips.
By the end of grade eight, Joyce was the tallest girl in class, and woke at night with throbbing in her legs and hips. Father Coles always carried the smell of church, of candle wax and incense. Combined with the darkness of the room, the dust motes dancing in the projector’s beam, the scorched smell from the film, and the thick air of boots and wool socks drying near the woodstove, it made the film days sacred and profane. Cast back into Cape St. Rose when it was over, she would leave school and walk home in tears, or sometimes not go home at all until well after dark, when she would turn up cold and dirty, hardly aware of where her feet had taken her.
//////
“We might finally be getting somewhere,” Eric announced, the next time she stepped through his door.
“Who?”
“A company’s been formed to explore the potential up in Labrador.” He rapped a finger on the folded newspaper. “This is the real thing. The Americans are in on it. The Brits. Brazil.”
Joyce liked that nothing seemed to discourage him. She had begun to notice how the men around town made a show of thwarted ambition, wanting a witness to their torment. One night Joyce stood in the doorway of her room for a good ten minutes, listening to a strange man explain how he had been cheated out of a position with the RCMP. The man had come calling for Rachel, and didn’t seem to believe that Joyce had no idea where to find the girl. But I always treated her with respect, he said. I wouldn’t dream of disrespecting her. All the fellows who fell for Rachel were mad for respect. They would repeat and hang on the word as if they had just invented it. The RCMP reject lingered longer than most, as Joyce stood with one hand on the door and the other closing the collar of her housecoat at her throat. Finally, he asked if she would like to go for a drink, and when Joyce refused he went on his way.
Eric was certainly a cut above such men.
Joyce stood over the hot plate to make a melted-cheese sandwich, while Eric circled the apartment, slapping the newspaper in his palm. “Not just hydro, it says here. Minerals, smelting, uranium enrichment. It’s like nothing you can imagine.” He flipped down the Murphy bed and pulled Joyce to it. She had to delay him long enough to unplug the hotplate, and delay him again in the midst of his excitement to make sure he put on the safe. “Very good to take charge there, Joyce,” he said after. “Well done.”
It was too late for the cheese sandwich when he pushed the bed back up. Joyce had to get home and clean up in time for work. She dressed quickly while Eric lathered up to shave. She was straightening her skirt, reaching behind to free a bit of fabric snagged in the zipper, when she heard him suck a quick breath. Then she saw his fist, the white shirt cuff flapping back, and the bulging blue veins in his forearm.
Joyce saw it and heard it and buckled at the waist, as if all she had to do was make room for it. The fist swept in and stopped just short of her belly, brushing the front of her blouse. The rest of him carried forward so that his cheek touched hers. It left a dab of shaving soap on her, its sharp mint filling her nose.
Joyce rocked on her heels for a moment. Watched a drop of sweat roll down behind his ear. Her hands were still behind her, a thumb and finger tight on the zipper tab.
“I had you then, Joyce!” His voice thick and wet. “I had you going that time!” He ba
cked away and did it again, this time a roundhouse under the chin, so close that she felt the breeze.
“Christ, Eric.” The words died in her throat. She backed into a chair and sat, her chest was shuddering and her stomach still clenched. “Goddamn it, Eric. What was that?”
“Come on, love. Got to be on your toes.” He was grinning at her.
“I don’t…”She wiped a tear that clung to her eyelash. “Why did you scare me like that?”
“Ah, just a game, love. Bit of fun.” He had already turned back to the mirror, and she caught his glance in it, still grinning, then pursing his lips to scrape around them. “How about you and I go up to Labrador?” he said, tapping the razor in the bowl. “Live in a company house and build that big bloody dam. By God, we’ll have the run of it up there.”
11
“In the fucking clear,” says Jordan. “It’s all over the band agreement. Once she’s gone, you and Will are calling the fucking shots.”
The relevant wording arrives via email a few minutes later:
From Clause 12: In the event that a Band member dies, his or her estate and heirs will assume the rights of a terminated band member. From Clause 6: Terminated members shall have no rights related to the use of the Band’s music and artwork, including decisions related to performances and master recordings.
Carter allows himself a fist pump, and takes a moment to settle himself before calling Jordan back.
“Let’s not act like it’s a celebration. Someone’s dying here.”
“Sure,” says Jordan. “Hang on.” There is a thunderous crash like a room coming down on him.
“Where are you?”
“Banquet hall on Keele. Almost got taken out by a stack of chairs. Anyway, when she’s, you know, gone, it’ll drive media. Media’s definitely on board. Already getting feelers from Now, maybe the Star, maybe the Globe, definitely the CBC.”
The End of Music Page 16