The End of Music

by Jamie Fitzpatrick

  The women push away empty plates and continue gnawing on chunks of baguette.

  Shelley says the lemon-drop A-line jacket was the best thing Isabelle ever made, and she never, never ever should have shown it to Callahan.

  “I remember how she held it,” says Isabelle. “Like I just handed her a lump of dog shit.”

  “Like it was a personal insult or something.”

  “I can’t believe my tuition helped pay the salary of that…that cunt.”

  “That cunt,” says Shelley, and they let the label fill the air between them. Carter sits back, giving them room to relish it. He’s never liked this dining room. It’s more of a dining nook, too small for he and Isabelle. They loom over each other’s food and get entangled trying to help Sam. With Shelley taking Sam’s chair, it feels like the three of them are huddled in a secret bunker, knees touching.

  They talk about boys.

  “It was all out of anger,” says Isabelle. “Like, not hate, exactly.”

  “No.”

  “If you thought about it, you’d never, you know?”

  Carter knows he has gained access to a raw, rich female moment. But what he wants is to see the video on a bigger screen. The laptop sits on the cabinet behind him.

  Shelley spies a bottle of grappa at the back of the bar shelf. It’s been there forever. She opens it and pours shots for the three of them.

  “Mmmmm!” says Isabelle, and Shelley pours another round. They talk about TV. Shelley’s guy is making a documentary about women who visit men in prison, men they’ve never met, and fall in love with them. Isabelle says she saw a documentary about Kurt Cobain, and it was so full of shit. The poor, tortured artist, too sensitive for the world. She takes her wine to the couch. Why can’t an artist be like anyone else? Why can’t he go home after a good day’s work, put dinner on the table and put the kids to bed? She settles into the couch, tucking her legs. Makes a pistol with her fingers, puts it in her mouth, and throws her head back. “If that’s your idea of a hero,” she says. She leaves her head back, resting on the cushions, and closes her eyes.

  Carter excuses himself and heads upstairs, sitting on the bed, squirming with anticipation. Watches three times, turning his phone sideways and back, concentrating on the moment before the picture freezes. His hand touches her shoulder and slides down to the breast. The girl flinches and starts to turn her back. Carter takes her bicep and says, “Over here.” Or that’s probably what he’s saying, just as he’s cut off.

  Will is dangerous. He has to warn Jordan that Will is dangerous. He hasn’t heard from Jordan for a few weeks. Smart just to lay low, he wrote in January. Keep it quiet until, you know.

  Will is dangerous, he writes, and sends it.

  //////

  Morning is unseasonably warm, stirring odours of sticky alcohol and acidic tomato, with an underlying gym-locker rot. Carter sweats, his head in a vice. The young laughing man in the motel room is stronger than him. Stronger and younger, with a head full of ideas and a guitar. The lead singer is waiting back in his room and the girl in front of the camera is topless.

  Shelley has receded since last night. Her face is small, and sharpened by its frame of greying hair. The hair tapers to fine points that curl around each ear. Her skin, which radiated liquid orange in the candlelight, looks dry.

  “Are you going to give me your music?” she asks, breaking the silence over coffee. “Maybe we’ll use it? We’re always looking for music for our films.”

  “Talk to Jordan Toytman,” says Carter. “I’ll get you his email.”

  “They’re in a bit of a holding pattern,” says Isabelle. He can see her wavering over whether to mention Leah and her resistance, her decline. “Legal things to work out.”

  He’s been waiting for the right time to mention that he’s mentally set aside late summer and fall to devote himself to the reissue. Possibly to rehearsal and shows, assuming Leah is gone by then. Jordan sent him several names of potential singers. Carter Googles them. Young women on the indie scene, daring and feminist and “sex positive.” One of them is a thin, painted blonde who used to be a stripper.

  “Anyway, Carter’s an archaeologist now? He’s going to travel this summer, go digging in the dirt.”

  “Anywhere sexy?” asks Shelley.

  “I’m going to Gander in June.”

  “Where?”

  “In Newfoundland,” Isabelle explains. “Carter grew up there. It has a big airport and it’s full of plane wrecks.”

  “Not full of them,” says Carter.

  “This is Herb’s new life. He and his new professor friend, they’re going to go dig up old plane wrecks.”

  “But that’s awful,” says Shelley. “A plane crash is horrible. It ought to be left in peace.”

  “They go back to the war, most of them. It’s long ago now.”

  “But I don’t know about digging things up,” says Shelley. She peels chunks of wax from the base of a collapsed candle. “Supposing you find bodies, or bones of people?”

  “There’s no bones,” says Carter. He has no idea if this is true.

  “It’s history now,” says Isabelle.

  “My mom lost her father in the war. She never got over it. She wouldn’t want anyone digging him up.”

  “We’re not digging up graves.”

  “It’s the local people who are in charge, right?” says Isabelle.

  “Yes. Memorial University. Terry and his students. I’m just lending a hand.”

  Shelley asks about Gander, and Carter tells her about the mural they made in high school. A big blue sky filled with airplanes of every vintage. An outsized Gander Airport below, its runways spanning the breadth of the wall, and Crossroads of the World scripted in gold across the top. The only one in the class who could really paint, he tells them, was Barb Felthem, a sulky, green-eyed girl who had famously touched Wally Forbes’s crotch in exchange for two cigarettes, leaving her hand there while a hooting crowd counted three steamboats.

  They erupt in hysterical, hungover laughter, with Isabelle wiping her eyes.

  The woozy surge of energy burns out as Carter drives Shelley to the bus station.

  “Are you and Bella okay?” she says, as he pulls into the curb.

  There are little bursts in Carter’s head, like small balloons going pop. “Absolutely,” he says.

  “It was just something you said. Kind of strange.”

  “Last night?”

  “We were talking about music and film, and you said there was a French movie you saw once with everyone in it singing. Around when Ronnie died. You said you and Bella can’t get away from that movie. Do you remember?”

  “No,” says Carter. He gets out of the car and retrieves her bag from the back. “It must have been drunk babbling. We’re fine.”

  “I mentioned it to Bella this morning. I mean, not what you said. Just the movie, and she had no memory of it at all. She said she never heard of it.”

  14

  The teddy bears tumbled from the box in sickly shades of yellow and pink, with muddy red eyes that looked like scabs. Over three hundred teddy bears donated by the St. John’s Boys Club—the hard-won result of who knows how many bottles collected and cold-plate dinners sold—and all so tragically ugly.

  “A merchant clearing out poor stock,” said Ingrid, the Red Cross interpreter from Toronto. “Something doesn’t sell. So when a charity comes he offers a discount, or a two-for-one.” Using one edge of the scissors, she cut the seal on a second box. More of the same. “For the children, it doesn’t matter.”

  “No.” Joyce squeezed a pink bear, its fur greasy on her fingers. “It’s a sin all the same.” She dropped the bear and wiped her hand on her slacks. Reached into the fusty, tangled innards of the latest clothing donations to separate the most essential items—winter coats, boots, hats, scarves, long johns, and
sweaters.

  She had given up trying to distance herself from the refugees. Over three thousand Hungarians had passed through the airport since last week, en route to New York or Montreal or Toronto. Plenty more to come, what with the Russians killing everyone and setting fire to everything. Joyce had watched several newspapermen talk to a barber from Budapest, with Ingrid at his side to translate. I got out with the clothes on my back and a razor to defend myself, the barber said. I saw their bayonets cut down women and children. Bodies trampled under their boots. If they found out you fought against them, they killed your family and friends and neighbours. Ingrid struggled with the translation, and said later that it was impossible to get people’s stories straight. The barber had been small and handsome, with a luxurious white moustache like the man in the Monopoly game. He had borrowed a clean jacket before meeting the newspapermen. Combed the moustache before they took his picture.

  Joyce had stopped reading the papers after the barber’s story, had stopped eavesdropping as well. Instead she took to watching the Hungarians as they entered the makeshift relief centre, a curtained-off section of the terminal. They fumbled with glasses, formed orderly and near silent lines for soup and fresh clothes and washrooms, and repeatedly checked their pockets for important papers or money or small items to be held and worried like rosary beads. They rarely embraced or even touched each other. Joyce liked the children best of all. How they shook off the shyness and disorientation, blinking back to life, desperate for release after countless hours trapped on a slow air force freighter. Before long they would be laughing and carrying on, riling their parents.

  The latest group had just been packed off to Montreal, bellies full, teeth cleaned, bowels voided, faces and armpits scrubbed, pads changed, cheeks shaved, and hair combed. Less than ninety minutes earlier they had stumbled into the airport, lifeless and slack-jawed.

  “No shortage of help today,” said Ingrid, arranging the ugly bears on one of the plywood tables that lined the back of the room. With another flight due in a couple of hours, the volunteers had mostly stayed on, clearing dishes and wiping down tables. Card games were starting up. Beth Ann McCurdy was winning. Her husband Dave had been with the band for ages, his big bass so reliable that no one gave it a thought.

  “Sure that’s not even cards!” Beth Ann cried, slapping Dawson on the shoulder of his Star Taxi windbreaker. “You’ll go on anything! That’s not even cards!” Dawson hunched in his jacket and grinned.

  “Here comes your friend,” said Ingrid, touching Joyce’s hand.

  Andor strolled into the relief centre at a leisurely pace, toes out and legs wide, greeting the volunteers like a plant owner touring the shop floor. He leaned into the soup tureen, sniffed, frowned, nodded. Took his time selecting a new toothbrush from the toiletry table. Shorter than Joyce and impossibly thin, with long ears down the sides of his long head, he looked like a dissolute magician in the clothes he had chosen: grey flannel schoolboy pants cinched under a billowing bright red shirt. The shirt was surely a woman’s blouse.

  Andor was one of the sixty-five men who had been stranded in Gander for the past three days, waiting for their freighter to be repaired or for a replacement plane to show up and complete the journey to Toronto. People said they were resistance fighters who had spent weeks hiding in the woods before finding their way to Vienna. They were sleeping on cots at the old Eastbound Inn, irritable with the delay. They slouched about during the day, smoking, dozing, eating little, complaining of headaches.

  Andor was different. He never stopped moving and made faces like a comic actor. The first time Joyce saw him he was digging through the donated clothes, trying on colourful outfits and striking ridiculous poses for anyone who wanted to watch. She had laughed and offered him a cigarette. He lit it, puffed thoughtfully, wrinkled his lumpy red nose, and muttered something that Ingrid had refused to translate until Joyce badgered her. “He says, I hope you American girls are sweeter than your tobacco.”

  She didn’t need his foolishness today. Joyce was desperately tired, and due back at work at four. She turned her back and went to work with a box of used toys. They smelled of metallic paint and mould and cardboard, and a salty tang that could only be children’s saliva. In her exhaustion she couldn’t suppress a wave of emotion at the touch of each object, an awareness of the human presence in every toy. The nicks and scratches on a battered wooden boat. A baby’s teeth marks in the lid of a jigsaw puzzle.

  “Question, Miss Joyce.”

  “Yes?” Joyce turned and pushed back her hair, a strange plastic object in one hand.

  Andor perched on the table and searched for the English words.

  “Why does your Eisenhower, does not, send armies to save Hungary?”

  “Ha-ha,” said Joyce, with a roll of her eyes. Andor laughed, showed his yellow teeth. He raised this question every day. The first time he asked, Joyce had told him this wasn’t America. The second time, she had snapped, “He’s not my bloody Eisenhower,” which was apparently the funniest thing Andor had ever heard. Now it was their running joke.

  Joyce reached for her cigarettes and laid two on the table. Andor tucked one behind an ear, and took matches from his pocket to light the other. Like all of them, he had grey circles around his Chinese eyes, and always seemed slightly out of breath.

  He beckoned Ingrid, speaking Hungarian to her in a low, gravelly whisper.

  “He wants to know, is your heart pure and strong and worthy of the love of a Hungarian man?” said Ingrid.

  “My heart is tough as an old boot,” said Joyce, examining a fine black velveteen skirt with a rope-tie belt. “You wouldn’t get a steak knife through it.”

  Andor turned an ear to Ingrid, then whooped with laughter and raised his puffy sleeves to clap twice. Joyce reached under the table, where she had stored a thick canvas shirt, nearly new. She tossed it to him. “Tell him that blouse smells.”

  Andor caught the shirt and made a great show of surprise and delight, long ears lifting and flexing as his face split with a smile. Clutching the shirt to his chest, he bowed deeply and blew Joyce a kiss, skipping away to the dining area, where Gordon was wiping down tables. Snatching the towel that hung over Gordon’s shoulder, Andor propped a shoe on a chair and began buffing it.

  “Get out of it with your foolishness,” said Gordon, and snatched the towel back. Like a mime, Andor twisted his face in mock bewilderment and shrugged his shoulders.

  “He’ll be back here before long,” said Ingrid. “Where his hijinks are more appreciated.”

  //////

  The goal was to have each planeload back in the air in two hours. But everyone talked as if the Hungarians might settle in Gander and never leave. Gloria said they should be put to work straight away building houses and roads. They’d be happy for the work and do it for any wage. Den Shea said there was sure to be Communists among them, and soft-hearted kindness was exactly what they were counting on. Mike Devine said the first thing that happens when a crowd like that settle somewhere is the foreign men go after the women and the local men are shut out altogether. Alice Henley had heard that Hungarians ate soup made from cherries, and they wouldn’t be very happy with the pitiful cherries around these parts. “They want to go to Nova Scotia,” she said. “Up to Digby, where my father’s from. Gorgeous cherries.” Rachel said there ought to be more military around to keep them quarantined, as they might carry diseases.

  Rachel feared everything since her marriage to the fellow who ran the fire department. They had a house on the new town site and Rachel worked hard to leave behind her old airport days, with all the parties and boyfriends. She called Joyce occasionally. But they never crossed paths anymore.

  Joyce didn’t say much, but she understood that the Hungarians had come from violence. Some of them must have killed and lied and stolen to save themselves. What if they still carried this violence with them? The fear never surfaced when she t
ook a shift at the relief centre. But later, when she recalled their faces and their restless, twitchy bodies, the way they huddled and shivered as if unable to get warm, she thought that some of them would surely kill and lie and steal again if they had to. She knew that a jolly, outgoing man often held awful things inside.

  The Hungarian crisis had brought all manner of stranger to the airport—Red Cross staff, military men, nurses from St. John’s, customs officers, out-of-town volunteers. The place felt lighter with so many strange faces. None of them knew Joyce’s history. They didn’t feel bad for her or treat her like her best days were behind her. In the two years since Eric died, Joyce had been circled by a few men and been set upon by a couple of widowers encouraged by Gloria or Mary. She had allowed none of them more than an after-work cup of coffee. She was social, playing bridge and stepping out weekly with the TCA bowling team. Last year they had recorded the highest team score of the season, duly reported in the Beacon sports section the following Wednesday. But the streets around the airport were quieter now, with so many moved into town. Hardly any children around, unless their parents drove them up for the hospital or the rink.

  Chaulker’s Store was the last one Joyce could walk to, with the rest moved to the new town square. Joyce had her name in for one of the apartments going up on Elizabeth Drive, though everyone said it was more expensive to live in town. Gloria said the town taxes were robbery.

  She returned to the relief centre the following afternoon, and walked in as Maeve Vardy grew very curt with a teenaged girl who refused to exchange her filthy dress for decent clothes. “Look at this,” said Maeve. “Nice sweater set, and slacks to match. Just your size.” The young woman backed away. Her black hair was short and bristly, with patches of exposed scalp showing red welts. Ingrid stepped between them, speaking gentle Hungarian to the woman, who replied in a shaky voice, near tears. “She thinks you want her to undress here, out in the open,” Ingrid explained to Maeve.