Sweeter Life

by Tim Wynveen

  “You’ll do it then?” Ronnie said. “You’ll design our icons?”

  She shook her head. “I’m afraid not. I couldn’t. I don’t take specific commissions. I just do what I do. If any of my existing pieces are suitable, we might arrange something, but otherwise …”

  Ronnie became brisk and businesslike. “Thank you, no. Our requirements are very particular. Best of luck to you in your endeavours.” He took Cyrus by the arm and ushered him toward the door.

  Before they could escape, Janice said, “Thanks, Cyrus. For coming here, I mean. It was good to see you.”

  He pulled free of Ronnie’s grip and turned to face her. There was so much he wanted to say, but every time he found a few suitable words, his feelings rose up and washed them away. She was waiting, looking lovelier than he could ever remember, and he dragged his hand through his hair and said, “It’s good to see you, too, Janice. I’m real proud of you.” Then he turned and walked away.

  That night Ronnie drove back to New York, and Eura made dinner, a rich and fiery goulash, served with heavy rye bread and Pilsner Urquell. It was the first meal she had prepared in weeks, and Cyrus wondered what was wrong. He found out later when she brought him palacsinta and coffee. “I have decided,” she said, “that I must find my husband.”

  She had delivered this news, or news very much like it, several times before, and over the years he had learned not to take it too seriously. No one had seen or heard from her husband since 1968 and, like many young men of his education and political affiliation, he was probably dead. Cyrus knew better than to express his opinion on the matter, so he concentrated on his coffee and dessert. She would feel better in a day or two, he figured.

  After dinner, Eura kept to the bedroom, and Cyrus slouched on the sofa with his guitar cradled in his lap. He had hoped to work on one of his tunes but couldn’t stop thinking about Janice, how great she looked, how much she’d changed. He remembered the way they used to snuggle beneath an afghan and watch TV. She had an opinion on everything and could talk non-stop about any show that was on. She sometimes kept talking even when they made love, teasing, coaxing, instructing until the moment came (and he learned to wait for it) when she would say, “Oh,” her voice low and hushed as though she had stumbled on something profound, that single syllable followed by long moments of breathy silence that he always equated with joy.

  Work was out of the question now, so Cyrus laid aside his guitar and drank a beer, then another, listening to music by Howlin’ Wolf, Paul Butterfield and Taj Mahal. It was well after midnight when he tiptoed to the bedroom. Eura’s eyes were closed, but she was only pretending to sleep. He perched on the edge of the mattress and said, “I’m doing this for you, too, you know. I don’t understand why you’re acting this way, as if wanting to be successful makes me a bad person.”

  “I am not acting at all. This is the only way I know how to be.”

  “Well, this is the only way that I know how to be, too. At least I’m trying to be happy. I mean, let it go, Eura. Your husband is dead.”

  She opened her eyes to look at him and said, “Maybe so, but sometimes he is more alive to me than you are.”

  FIVE

  The band recorded a three-song demo in the first week of September, and Cyrus immediately sent a copy to Ronnie in New York. The minute it was in the mail, however, he began to have second thoughts. In the studio, the tunes had sounded good; but to hear the stark reality from a couple of stereo speakers in his living room made him cringe. Within two days he had found a thousand things he wanted to change. He was so upset that he phoned Ronnie in the middle of the night.

  Ronnie clucked his tongue and said, “It is a demo, Cyrus. A chance to step back and listen to what you have done. The gap between what you intended and what you achieved is the gap between a great artist and a nobody. Move forward, my friend. Move forward.”

  For the next month the band rehearsed eight hours a day, often stripping the tunes down to the simplest elements then putting them back together. They listened to a lot of music, too, critiquing their favourite recordings, finding out what made them tick. The first week of October, they went back into the studio and recorded the same three tracks, plus a new one Cyrus had written. This time everyone felt better about the result; this time Ronnie phoned to praise the work they had done. It still wasn’t perfect, he said, but it was something to be proud of.

  A few days after Ronnie’s call, Isabel rang up. They had spoken about once a month since the spring, always the same conversation: she was fine; Hank was on the mend and fine; Ruby and Clarence were fine; everything was fine. But the sound of her voice this time told him they wouldn’t be having one of those chats. From the initial sigh and the weariness in her tone, he knew there would be a higher truth quotient.

  “Hank’s birthday’s on Saturday,” she said. “Four-oh. I was hoping you could make it down. He could use a little cheering up.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Well, what do you think is wrong?”

  He was so surprised by her sarcasm that he stammered. “I thought, I mean, every time I called, you said he was fine.”

  “How fine could he be? I mean, okay, the tubes are out of his nose and he’s off the painkillers, but what’s he got? His little sister breathing down his neck, a nurse who treats him like a retard, and TV around the clock. Come and talk to him. He won’t listen to me anymore.”

  He tried to get Eura to go with him, but she’d already seen enough of Wilbury, she said. So he set off on his own and arrived the next day around lunchtime, a glorious afternoon with the trees in full colour and the temperature an unseasonable eighty degrees. He let himself into Izzy’s house, but there was no one inside. Out back, through the patio doors, he saw the nurse sitting in the middle of the lawn on a kitchen chair, dangling her bare feet in a child’s wading pool. Hank was slumped in his wheelchair on the edge of the driveway. He was listening to a Walkman, the sun beating down on him. He looked like he had a burn.

  “What’s going on?” Cyrus demanded as he approached the nurse. “I thought you were taking care of him.”

  “I am his nurse,” she said, waddling toward him in her bare feet. “Who are you?”

  “His brother. Which means you can buzz off. As a matter of fact, you can take the rest of the week off.”

  “I will have to talk to Ms. Owen—”

  “Get lost, lady, before I throw you headfirst into the pool.”

  She hastily gathered her belongings and, after a quick trip into the house, piled into a blue Pinto parked out front and drove away. Throughout the confrontation Hank hadn’t taken off his headphones or stopped bobbing his head. It wasn’t until the woman had gone that Cyrus took a good look at his brother, who had the air of someone in a hospital waiting room, taut and exhausted.

  “You look like shit,” Cyrus said.

  Hank pulled off the headset. “About how I feel, I guess.”

  When Cyrus tried to wheel his brother back into the house, he realized the chair was mechanical and that Hank could control it with small movements of a joystick. The woman hadn’t left Hank baking in the sun; he’d positioned himself there.

  The two brothers moved in single file up the ramp on the front porch. Once inside the house, they drifted into the den. When Cyrus asked if he needed anything, Hank looked out the window a moment, tapped his forehead and said, “How about a bullet? Right about here.” When Cyrus didn’t respond, Hank clucked his tongue and said, “You probably agree with my physiotherapist that this is some kind of opportunity, right?”

  Cyrus crossed the room and, on impulse, sat on Hank’s lap. He swung his legs over the arms of the wheelchair and hugged his brother’s neck. “It’s your birthday this weekend, Hank. I came to spend a few days.”

  “Oh, par-dee. What’d you have in mind, pin the tail on the donkey?”

  “I thought we could hang out, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, great, hanging out. That’ll be a change.”

&
nbsp; Cyrus fetched them each a Coke from the refrigerator. Then they settled down to some television. For the better part of two hours, Cyrus kept talking about the shows, the commercials, whatever came into his head. And he wondered if Janice had ever felt this way about him: like Florence Nightingale cheering up the wounded. Maybe chattiness was a normal reaction in the presence of pain.

  Isabel came home early, and it was clear that she felt Cyrus’s arrival was the equivalent of the cavalry riding to the rescue. “This is nice,” she said. “Real nice.” She ordered pizza and smiled through the whole meal. After a cursory cleanup, she excused herself and went off for a long hot bath.

  The moment she was gone, Hank hung his head and said, “You have no idea how much I hate this.”

  Cyrus figured he did have some idea. He would have hated it himself. “Seems to me Izzy’s doing everything she can,” he offered.

  “No kidding. Thanks for the info, Brainiac. What do you think I’m talking about? She’s got dough, looks, she could do anything she wants, and instead she comes home every night to babysit me. It sucks, man.”

  “So why don’t you make it easier for her, if you feel that way?”

  “The only way I feel is I wish Goldie’s pals had finished what they started. Fact is, kid, I can’t give Izzy what she wants. It’s not in me. And what is in me, I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”

  At nine Isabel made tea. She had a quick cup, declared it was her bedtime, then looked over to Hank, who could hardly keep his head up. “What about you?” she said. “You going to try to sleep?”

  “What? No. Not yet.” He gave his head a shake. “Not ready.”

  The two brothers sat up awhile longer. They watched the divisional playoffs between the Astros and the Dodgers. It was enough to make Cyrus wish he was watching the game with Clarence, someone who understood the slow majesty of baseball. Hank was always flipping channels, right in the middle of innings. He seemed to have no interest in the sport at all.

  Around eleven, Cyrus began to feel the effects of dinner, the long drive and the tension of his brother’s presence. He couldn’t stop yawning. Hank seemed to be in even worse shape. Every few minutes his head would nod lower and his chin would almost touch his breastbone; then he’d jerk himself up and take a deep breath, as though there might be a shortage of oxygen in the room.

  With a big stretch, Cyrus said, “I have to pack it in for the night. Looks like you could stand some sleep yourself.”

  Suddenly Hank got all speedy, blinking his eyes and nodding like a coke fiend. “I’m okay, kid. But you go ahead and crash.”

  Cyrus stumbled to his feet, grabbed the remote control from Hank and turned off the TV. “Thing is, bro, I’ll be flaking out on the couch here. You’re kinda in my room.”

  “Right. Sure.” He motored toward his bedroom. “Sleep tight, kiddo.”

  Cyrus had no trouble falling asleep; but he woke in the middle of the night with an aching bladder and didn’t know where he was at first. When he had it pieced together, he tiptoed down the hall to the bathroom. As he headed back to the sofa, he heard music and noticed Hank’s door was ajar. He opened it enough to poke his head inside the room, and what he saw made him flinch. Hank had headphones on and was staring out the window, bathed in the yellow light from the street. His stillness and the colour of his face were that of a dead man. He turned, with the slothlike motion of the massively drugged, and said, “Did I wake you?”

  “No, it’s fine. I took a leak and heard the music. You okay? You look like shit. Why don’t you go to bed?”

  Hank removed his headphones, then turned to face him more fully. “I’m cool, kiddo. Just not ready to sleep yet.”

  Centrefolds covered the wall beside the bed, a pair of binoculars sat on the windowsill, but it was the stereo that dominated the room—tuner, tape player and snazzy-looking turntable, speakers that were large enough to do some damage.

  Cyrus moved into the room and sat on the bed. “You in pain? Is that why you can’t sleep?”

  “I can sleep. I’m just not ready.”

  “You look like you haven’t closed your eyes in weeks. What’s up?”

  “Forget about it. It’s my routine. It works for me.”

  Cyrus nodded agreeably, then turned to the bedside table. According to the alarm clock, it was three-thirty. He turned back to his brother and said, “Hit the sack, Hank. Big day tomorrow.”

  “Hanging out, you mean.”

  “Our very own magical mystery tour. Tomorrow we hit the road.”

  Cyrus tiptoed back to the den and lay on the sofa, but it took him forever to fall asleep again. He kept thinking how bleak and miserable Hank looked, how his face just then had been the face of their father, or rather the face of their father at his lowest, a version of Riley that Cyrus had all but forgotten. Mostly when he remembered his dad, he thought about the physical exuberance of the man, how he would run full-speed into the lake and send up a fountain spray that would make them all squeal, how he was always the first one off the dock or the first to throw a snowball or climb a ridge, how he was a kid, full of pranks and moods and excess and, like a kid, quick to judge, quick to forgive.

  Cyrus knew the other side of the man, of course. He’d made his own trips to the chicken coop (though never as often as Hank), and had seen what his father’s silence could do to their mother’s beautiful face. But the sadness and doubt had always seemed an aberration, superficial flaws in an otherwise playful man. To see that flaw now mirrored in his brother’s face was doubly troubling. It not only reminded him of times he would rather forget but made him shiver with a gloomy thought of his own: that in the disposition of genetic material, Hank had gotten the dark, and Cyrus the light. And when sometime before dawn he heard his brother crying out in the garbled voice of dream-talk, he felt guilty for his many nights of easy sleep.

  IT WAS AFTER SEVEN when the sound of Isabel’s morning clatter brought Cyrus stumbling into the kitchen. His brother and sister had both eaten breakfast and were sipping coffee. Isabel was dressed for a workout. After one final gulp of coffee, she blew them a kiss. “Be good,” she called on her way to the door.

  Hank gave him the eyeball and said, “You gonna sit there all day? You got me all excited about our magical mystery tour.”

  “We’re going. Hold your horses.” He poured himself a coffee. “I figured we might drive around the marsh first.”

  “The marsh? I thought we were gonna have some fun. Let’s go to Hounslow, for Christ’s sake. We could go to the racetrack, have something to eat, see some strippers, maybe even find ourselves some tail. Gordie knows women there could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch.”

  Cyrus made a sour face. “Just you and me, Hank.”

  “Oh right, hanging out. I forgot.”

  They left the house at about eleven with a folding wheelchair in the trunk. At Spring Creek, Cyrus parked the car and rolled Hank’s chair over to the Bailey bridge. There was no way he could drag his brother down to the bank, so they just stood in the middle of the bridge and looked around. If he turned toward the lake, the view was pretty much the way he remembered it.

  Seagulls wheeled overhead. The air carried the sweet tang of tomatoes from the cannery in town. Cyrus leaned over the rail, pointed to the creek and said, “Remember the summer we spent down there? It was after you came back from Burwash. Just you and me.”

  “Sorry, kid. Those were pretty crazy times.”

  “But we had a ball. I thought you were so cool.”

  “I was cool. Must’ve been the summer I was banging Ruth Woltz and her old lady. No wonder I was with you every day. I was exhausted.”

  “But you don’t remember?”

  “I had other things on my mind, I guess.”

  Cyrus spit over the edge and watched it hit the sluggish flow of the creek. He’d been ready to tell Hank about the other significant moments at the bridge, and how it would be the title of his first album. Now it didn’t feel right to talk about it.


  They returned to the car and continued out to the old place. Although Isabel had told him what to expect, the change still caught him off guard. No sign of the Owens remained; everything had been knocked down and carted away. With the metal fence and orange flare and paved road, with the pumps and the containers and the signs warning everyone to keep out, it was hard to believe it had once been a farm.

  Hank enjoyed Cyrus’s discomfort, not because he wanted him to suffer, but because he believed the kid needed this kind of hard lesson. Cyrus, he figured, had a rosy view of the present and the future because he remembered the past as a sunny place—and that was dead wrong as far as Hank was concerned. He should know; he’d been there. The ugliness of their childhood had followed him right into the present, and it seemed pretty certain that it would lead him into the future. The sooner Cyrus clued in to the truth, the better off he’d be. Otherwise it would rise up one day and bite him on the ass.

  Hank said, “I wouldn’t get too worked up about this, kid. Wasn’t such a hot place to begin with.”

  Cyrus stared gloomily at the pumps as they drew oil from hundreds of feet inside the earth. And the longer he watched, the more he hated the sight of them, the mechanical stupidity of it all, ceaselessly pumping wealth and power. As he drove away, he said, “It’s like when you’re a kid, one of those stupid things you wish for. What if there was a tap in your house and when you turned it on pop came out. Or what if there was a secret passageway from your closet to an ice cream factory.”

  Hank laughed, a short, caustic sound. “Pop and ice cream, give me a break. I never wasted my time with piddly-assed wishes like that.”

  “You know what I mean, the stupid wishes you have when you’re, like, five. I used to have this dream when I was a kid, where Mom gave me one of her spoons and I went into her garden to dig around, and every spoonful had money in it, nickels and dimes and quarters. Like that, I mean. Not real wishes you have when you’re older.”