The Delusionist

by Grant Buday

  THE DELUSIONIST

  OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

  The Venetian

  Under Glass

  Monday Night Man

  White Lung

  Golden Goa

  A Sack of Teeth

  Rootbound

  Stranger on a Strange Island

  Dragonflies

  ANVIL PRESS | VANCOUVER | 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Grant Buday

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages in reviews. Any request for photocopying or other reprographic copying of any part of this book must be directed in writing to access: The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, One Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.

  Anvil Press Publishers Inc.

  P.O. Box 3008, Main Post Office

  Vancouver, B.C. V6B 3X5 canada

  www.anvilpress.com

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Buday, Grant, 1956–, author

  The delusionist / Grant Buday.

  ISBN 978-1-77214-007-1 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8553.U444D44 2014 C813'.54 C2014-900724-8

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Cover design by Rayola Graphic Design

  Cover Illustration by Lauren Simkin Berke

  Interior by HeimatHouse

  Represented in Canada by the Publishers Group Canada

  Distributed by Raincoast Books

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  Vancouver, summer 1962. Cyril Andrachuk and Connie Chow are seventeen and in love.

  Cyril is the only Canadian-born member of the Andrachuk family, his parents and older brother having survived Stalin’s systematic starving of the Ukraine. His brother’s brittle bones are not the only legacy of Stalin. Cyril’s famine-free childhood has built up a distance between him and the rest of the household.

  His family’s past charges Cyril’s present with bitter overtones he barely understands and Cyril’s love of art is beyond his family’s comprehension; Cyril is destined to be a working man, not a working artist.

  In this house built on the edge of a cemetery, where his mother reviews the burials over her morning tea, creativity and joy are suspect. Mourning the early death of his father, Cyril finds solace in lovingly drawing his father’s metal-working tools and in his happiness with Connie. But his family’s resentment sows the seeds of betrayal, and Cyril must find a way to live with his family’s past in order to find his future.

  Art, love, and history furnish the setting in this tale. The Delusionist is a novel of longing, loss and rediscovered joy.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PART ONE — 1962

  In Which Cyril Meets His Match

  PART TWO — 1972

  In Which the Match Burns Twice

  PART THREE — 1982

  In Which Cyril Strikes a New Match

  PART FOUR — 1995

  In Which Cyril Discovers Fire

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  And the soul is up on the roof

  in her night dress, straddling the ridge,

  singing a song about the wildness of the sea

  until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.

  Then, they all will return to the sleeping body

  the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree.

  — BILLY COLLINS

  PART ONE — 1962

  In Which Cyril Meets His Match

  ONE

  OVER THE PAST MONTH Cyril and Connie had started to notice each other. It began in art class when everyone had to draw each other’s mouth. Cyril did Connie’s whole face. It was a good likeness, an uncanny likeness, right down to the sardonic narrowing of her already narrow eyes, the curl at the corner of her lips, and the nostrils alert to the scent of Cyril’s excitement. Cyril knew he’d hit that one, like a ball square off the bat; the lines were not sketchy but bold, and even had flair. Sometimes it was like that: you lucked out, as if your hand did the work and you were just along for the ride. Not that Cyril admitted that to Connie.

  “No putting pins in it,” she said.

  “Then you better be nice.”

  Her eyebrows rose in pleasant surprise as if discovering a worthy opponent while Cyril, breathless, went off to draw the next kid’s mouth, feeling the exhilarating heat of Connie Chow’s attention. Connie was strange. She once came to school with her teeth blacked out, another time wearing a boot and a runner, and once wearing a shiny red clown’s nose. She always used one of those painted Chinese umbrellas. Some said she was from The Twilight Zone. When she walked by they whispered just loud enough to be heard, “Picture if you will an alien who looks almost human  . . .” She was an object of fear and disdain—disdain because she was small and skinny, fear because she was confident and unpredictable. The very elusiveness of her approval made it all that much more desirable to Cyril, who wanted it, meaning he wanted her. Somehow she managed to be terrifying and reassuring at the same time, and while she might say no thanks if he asked her out he knew she wouldn’t sneer, so he decided to do it right after school.

  Art was the last class of the day. Cyril lingered on the steps trying to appear casual even as his mind was fizzing like a shaken Pepsi. He debated whether to sit or stand, and if he stood what sort of pose to take, hands in or out of his pockets, and if he did put his hands in his pockets should it be his front pockets or back pockets? But if he had them in the back it might look as if he was scratching his butt. And yet if they were in the front ones it might look even worse, as if he was playing pocket pool. Maybe if he hooked his thumbs over his belt? Yes, he could hook his thumbs over his belt, cool, like Gary Cooper. Except he wasn’t wearing a belt. He considered standing with his arms crossed but that would look like impatience. He groaned. All he wanted was to ask her to go see The Apartment with Jack Lemon. He rehearsed it in his mind. So. Connie. Too abrupt? Connie, hi, I was kind of wondering if maybe  . . . Too passive? Hey, Connie, I’m going to see The Apartment. Interested?

  In the midst of this rehearsal she appeared, book bag thumping like a dead dog at the end of a leash as she descended the steps.

  He turned toward her, nearly snagging his right toe on his left heel, his words stumbling out faster than intended. “Connie hey hi how you doing?”

  She halted on the step above him which put them eye to eye. She was tiny, about five-one, wore a tartan skirt and a jean jacket with the collar turned up. Her bangs touched her eyebrows making her hair resemble a helmet, and she was chewing a big wad of Black Cat bubble gum. “Okay.”

  He had hoped for something more substantial, a springboard for further conversation, a delightful discovery of shared interests. “Yeah?”

  She shrugged. She chewed with her mouth open then blew a bubble that popped over her lips and she chewed it back in as if gathering a black parachute into her mouth. “How about you, Cyril? You okay?”

  “Good. You know. Fine.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Her bemused tone reminded him that they’d seen each other only minutes ago. Kids streamed by whooping at their freedom, punching each other, or slouching off to hack a butt. Connie watched them pass with lidded eyes. Was she getting bored standing there with him? She blew another bubble, smaller this time, which popped with a snap. He could smell the faintly liquorice scent of the gum.

  “Wanna go see Psycho?” He nearly choked. What was he doing? What had possessed him? The Apartment was safe and funny; Psych
o was weird and horrific.

  She stopped chewing. “You do realize it’s restricted.”

  Of course he realized it was restricted. He was seventeen; you had to be twenty-one. But it was too late to turn back, so he shrugged offhandedly as if he went to restricted movies all the time. He saw her gauging that shrug, measuring it. As he awaited her answer, his pulse thumped a countdown in his skull: three  . . . two  . . . one  . . .

  “Sure.”

  “Great.”

  And with that she hoisted her book bag, black canvas with a red drawstring, onto her shoulder and proceeded on down the steps. At the street she turned and looked at him, head tilted appraisingly, and waved as though wiping mist from a window.

  All week Cyril was in a panic. He recalled paying a quarter to inhale a chest full of helium at the PNE, an experience simultaneously exhilarating and slightly sickening. Each time he and Connie met in the hallway or the cafeteria they nodded or, it seemed to him, purposely pretended not to see each other, as if they had an unspoken agreement. Was this a sign of an intuitive connection or a sign that they—she—was having second thoughts? He couldn’t imagine Connie Chow nervous. She’d been in the school performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Helena, and while the other kids over-acted or stood like mannequins, she made you believe. Cyril had watched understanding that she was exposing herself, taking the risk of humiliation with the entire school watching, and that therein lay her strength.

  Friday afternoon she appeared in the hallway, book bag slung over her shoulder as if she was a hobo hitting the road. “So, meet you out front of the theatre, okay.”

  Cyril nodded quickly, relieved at the casualness though at the same time a little disappointed. Shouldn’t they be going to the theatre together? Wasn’t he supposed to knock on her door? Or were they just buddies? He hadn’t been pals with a girl since he was five years old.

  Saturday his anxiety mounted. His mother saw something was up.

  “Vut?”

  “What, not vut.”

  She grew defiant. “Vut.”

  His mother’s accent was a blunt and plaintive lament, embedded with centuries of history: eras of glory and eras of defeat, cathedrals and palaces built, cathedrals and palaces burned. Cyril habitually measured his own speech against her accent, fearing that it would erupt through his own perfectly pitched English, the way his voice had occasionally betrayed him during puberty. “Nothing.”

  They were in the kitchen watching the funeral across the alley. She turned from the dark pageant and regarded her son. She was not a big woman yet bore an aura of weight, as though gravity reserved a special force for her alone. “You’re pacing.

  “I’m not pacing.”

  “Here—there. You’ll wear out the floor. You need to pee go pee.”

  His mother had dyed black hair wound in a braid around her head. When Cyril was small he liked to touch it because it felt like thick silk rope. Sometimes she had a bun on top, sometimes at the back, and sometimes one at either side, but it always involved some kind of braid. She had high, broad cheekbones, a thin nose, a small mouth, and favoured heavy red lipstick and skirts of bright yellow or robin’s egg blue.

  “If I needed to pee I’d pee.”

  She responded with an elaborate shrug. It was two in the afternoon and she was still in her housecoat, faded yellow flowers on a faded blue background, and wore feathered slippers which made it look as though she had hens on her feet. She was on her third pot of Darjeeling. On the table sat a loaf of rye bread, a plate of sliced ham, some garlic sausage, some dill pickles. She pointed to the funeral procession with her thumb—one hearse, half a dozen people, no flowers—and nodded with grim satisfaction. “Only a man could have such a small funeral. A bachelor. Or—” And here she became worldly in a way Cyril did not want to consider. “If it’s a woman she was a slut.” She pursed her lips up under her nose and sniffed dismissively as if she’d seen it before and knew of what she spoke. “You must be shit on a shoe for such a small funeral.”

  Cyril couldn’t bear another one of her “Lives of the Deceased,” based on the scale of the funeral, the quality of the coffin, and the number of bouquets, so escaped out the back door to the carport. The oil stain on the concrete used to be the shape of Ukraine; now it was nothing, smoke, a ghost, not of the land his parents and brother had escaped, but of the car they used to own, a Nash Rambler convertible with white-walled tires. Cyril’s dad had loved that car, loved its name and all that it implied, as if it was the very epitome of life in the new world, or, as his dad would have put it: noo vorld. When he died it sat dripping oil in the carport for a year and then, just when his mother decided to get her license, it was stolen.

  Cyril leaned against the wall and watched the hearse beyond the hedge. It was a sunny May morning, swallows skimming the grass, bees in his mother’s roses. She had a grudging admiration for roses: feed them shit and they bloomed bright and radiant and smelling of perfume. He slid down the wall and sat with his knees up, the voice of the priest reaching him from the grave, and wondered how it was possible to look forward to something and dread it at the same time.

  That evening he waited outside the theatre. Downtown Granville Street was all neon marquees: the Coronet, the Orpheum, the Plaza, the Caprice, the Lyric. The line-up for Psycho ran halfway down the block. Hands in his pockets he tried to appear casual, reminding himself that he wasn’t some schmuck alone on a Saturday night, he had a date. The evening was warm and the crowd eager. He’d shaved what little he had to shave, first with the grain and then against it, then looked at his clothes wondering what to wear. His church suit? He hadn’t been to church in two years, and discovered that the sleeves of the jacket ended mid-forearm and the pants mid-shin. He opted for clean jeans and a white T-shirt and his black Converse All Stars. Standing before the bathroom mirror he gauged his chances of passing for twenty-one. It didn’t look good. He toyed with the idea of sketching a moustache on his upper lip and a pair of sideburns. What if he was taller? He was five-foot-eight, so maybe another inch would do the trick. Taking a thick stack of pages from one of his sketch pads he traced his feet and cut them out making insoles which he fit into his runners. It felt different but he didn’t see much extra height, and by the time he’d walked all the way downtown to the theatre—too nervous to sit fidgeting on the bus—he’d packed the paper insoles flat.

  “Hey.”

  He stared.

  Connie had painted her eyelids gold, put on thick red lipstick, a black and red Suzie Wong dress with a high collar, and spike heels that made her the same height as Cyril. She’d also suddenly sprouted breasts—nice ones. She slid her arm inside Cyril’s and they strolled to the end of the line. He felt terror, pride, and a painfully rigid erection. The line began to move.

  “Someday I’m gonna be in movies,” she said as though stating her intention of going into dentistry.

  Cyril didn’t doubt it for a minute. She was focused and she had talent. What was he going to do? His dad had been a welder, his brother Paul was studying to be an accountant, and his own sole talent was drawing, which left courtroom sketches, police profiles, or sitting in Stanley Park on Sundays doing two-dollar portraits.

  At the ticket window Connie stepped ahead of him and in a tone of absolute confidence said, “One, please.”

  The ticket seller was a pale and balding man in a white shirt and black bow tie. A cigarette smouldered in the ashtray by his elbow and the fumes filled the booth and seeped like fog through the hole where you slid your money. He studied her, hesitated, then like some gate keeper in a fairy tale succumbing to a spell, he smiled and pushed a ticket through the smoke.

  “Thank you.”

  “Enjoy the show.”

  “If I don’t I will most certainly expect you to refund my money.”

  The ticket seller seemed to enjoy that. Connie was through, she’d made it. Cyril’s gut sickened. When he stepped up the clerk exhaled and smoke blasted like dragon fire through
the hole in the window. “Got ID?”

  Cyril put one hand on his hip and managed a sarcastic smirk, all the while horribly aware of everyone behind him. He tried sounding amused. “What?”

  The clerk tapped the black panther sticker on the window. “Gotta be twenty-one. You twenty-one?”

  Connie already had her ticket torn in two and was waiting, arms crossed, eyebrows elevated, as if growing impatient. Only bold action could save him. “Twenty-one? I’m twenty-two.”

  “Yeah?” The clerk considered that. “Wish I was still twenty-two. Can you prove it?”

  Cyril’s face burned and he desperately needed a toilet.

  The man was not unsympathetic. “Nice try, kid.” He motioned Cyril aside and the next person stepped up.

  “Swiss Family Robinson’s down the street,” called some wag, earning a big laugh.

  When Psycho let out the women in the crowd were clinging to the arms of their escorts. There was Connie. She rolled her shoulders provocatively causing her new breasts to rise and fall. Cyril tried not to stare, but one of those breasts was now riding distinctly lower than the other. She took his arm, leaned close and glanced fearfully around. “It was so freaky.” Cyril smelled the buttered popcorn on her breath and saw that her lips were shiny. “I think I clawed the padding off the arm of the seat.” Cyril’s own arm ached in envy of that seat. She must have seen the expression on his face. “You got to look the look, man. Play the part. Be the part. What did you get up to?”

  He considered saying he went for a beer except the bs wasn’t working too well for him this evening. “Walked.”

  “And what did you see as you walked?”

  He traced the horizon with an open palm. “The city.”