by Tim Wynveen
Cyrus dawdled back to the house and didn’t crawl into bed until three. He woke a number of times that night, wondering where he was. Long before anyone else was up, he tiptoed out to the lounge and, with the first inkling of sunrise touching the sky, dialed the apartment in Toronto, hoping to talk to Eura. But the machine was on, and the tinny sound of his own recorded voice made him ache with loneliness and concern. It wasn’t like Eura to stay out so late, well past midnight, Toronto time.
A few hours later, he and Nigel had breakfast, then carried their coffee to the guitar room where they each took up an instrument, Cyrus the Les Paul and Nigel an old sunburst Telecaster.
“Let me show you the sort of thing I want you to work on,” Nigel said. Then he launched into the chord pattern of “The Bridge,” in particular the clipped arpeggios Cyrus had played beneath the synthesizer solo. “This is a nice little figure you’ve come up with, but listen how great it sounds on the Telly. Did you ever hear anything that sounded more like twanging metal? Now you try it on your Les Paul.”
Cyrus shook his head. “I don’t need to. You’re exactly right.”
They switched guitars. Cyrus tried the part just as Nigel had played it, and knew in his bones it was much better. More than that, the sound of the guitar suggested different ways of extending the line.
Nigel played a few licks over the arpeggios, then held the Les Paul out from him admiringly. “No question,” he said, “these are amazing axes. Always sound like dirt to me. Mud and muck and swamp ooze.”
For the next few hours they fooled around on a variety of guitars. After a quick lunch, they were right back at it. Nigel had a big workbook in his lap, and together they listened to the demo and picked it apart, phrase by phrase, instrument by instrument.
At five o’clock Nigel excused himself. He had to go to London for the evening and wouldn’t be back until the next day. “Sophie will make whatever you like for dinner,” he said. “Or I’ll tell you what: Patrick and Sophie can take you down the road to the Two Poofs. A few pints and a round of darts might do you a world.”
Cyrus tried phoning home, but again there was no answer. He was starting to worry. More than that, he needed to hear her voice and be reminded of the complicated melody of their life together.
When he stepped outside, Patrick was waiting behind the wheel of a vintage Jaguar. “Sophie will meet us there,” he said with his head out the window. “Went home to change.” Then they sped off in a cloud of dust, the car seeming to fill the narrow winding road. Two minutes later they arrived at a tidy little place with a thatched roof, leaded windowpanes and a bright-coloured sign out front that featured a pair of rotund friars.
Patrick took him by the arm and led him into the back room, where there was a jukebox and a couple of dartboards. Cyrus had never been in a proper pub before. He’d never played darts or had steak-and-kidney pie. Nor had he ever seen people having this sort of fun: these big beefy fellows drilling into the treble twenty while young folk nodded to the rock and roll or, like Sophie, danced non-stop beside the jukebox. Others laughed and talked and seemed like happy drunks, not at all like his father or any of the people he’d seen stumbling out of the Wilbury Hotel or the Laredo. Back home, the idea of going to a bar seemed so uncool. It had never occurred to him that a night of drinks could be uplifting, that a roomful of people bound by smoke and alcohol, music and games and simple chat could seem like one of the secrets of life.
After his third pint, he worked up the nerve to sway alongside Sophie, who danced with her eyes closed and was dazzling in her high-top runners, tweedy trousers and sleeveless undershirt. He couldn’t pretend they were dancing together, because he was sure she hadn’t noticed him. But then, without breaking her rhythm or looking at him, she pressed her body to his and draped her arms around his neck. “Don’t drink too much,” she whispered. “You’ll spoil it.”
He tried to look at her face, but her head was tucked under his chin. “Spoil what?” he asked innocently.
“It. The magic. It’s magic, innit?”
And it was. So was the walk home, the two of them swaying along a dark winding road so narrow in spots that, with arms outstretched, it seemed he could almost touch the hedges on both sides. She pulled him into her pasture. She spread a blanket on the ground, the mist swirling out of the north, and they leaned together, saying nothing, moving hardly at all. When the sun began to burn off the haze, she removed her clothes and doused herself with rainwater from a barrel before scooting into the trailer for her chef’s whites. She hunched before an open fire and made herbal tea to have with day-old scones. Then they were back through the hedge and along the road to Hidey-Hole, where he tumbled into bed and a deep dreamless sleep.
When he opened his eyes, Ronnie was sitting beside him. The violence of two worlds colliding made Cyrus wince in pain. “I called the apartment,” he muttered.
Ronnie touched the boy’s arm. “She’s gone, Cyrus. Vanished.”
Cyrus knew and didn’t know. He understood completely and didn’t have a clue. Covering his eyes with the palm of his hand, he said, “She wouldn’t go. She has no one but me. She has nowhere but there.”
Then Ronnie pulled a sheet of yellow lined paper from his pocket. “I found this on the kitchen table,” he said.
It was the kind of paper they kept beside the phone for messages. It held very few words, written in her perfect hand.
Dear Cyrus,
I am a thief to sneak away, but it is not possible otherwise because I am weak and need to be loved. Do not hate me.
Eura
Cyrus read the message three, four times, and never stopped shaking his head. Ronnie took the paper and placed it on the bedside table. He said, “I bumped up our schedule. The rest of the band arrives tomorrow.”
Cyrus sat upright and swung around so his feet were on the floor. “I have to go to Toronto,” he said mechanically. “I have to find her.”
“She’s gone,” Ronnie repeated. “You should let her go.”
SEVEN
Janice worked for years on her Carrara sculpture (a month here, a month there), watching with satisfaction as the likeness of a human figure gradually rose out of the stone, and not just any figure but, surprisingly, that of her father, bending backward with arms thrust toward the sky. Unfortunately, the more she worked on the statue, and the more time she spent thinking about her father’s joyful approach to life, his commitment to a better world, the more she began to notice, by contrast, the many shades of Jonathan that were not to her liking. Eventually another and darker truth rose before her, and on their return from yet another trip to Italy, she told him she no longer loved him. There was no one else, she said. She just felt their relationship wasn’t going anywhere.
“I wasn’t aware it had to go anywhere,” he said, his tone distant and superior. And she nodded her head as though that was exactly what she had expected him to say. They discussed the matter for a day or two but not with any heat. He didn’t argue or rage or make rash predictions. That final day, she watched him quietly pack his suitcase and walk out the door.
For the next while she concentrated solely on the Carrara. She slept at the studio, ate at the studio. When she had finished all the hard slogging—the screech of masonry blades and the painstaking effort with mallets an steel—she started on her favourite part, turning the general contour into a particular kind of beauty with the aid of claw and tooth chisels and a variety of rifflers. She had also settled on a final design. Instead of the one central cavity that characterized her Hollow Men series, she had drilled three or four smaller holes no larger than a silver dollar. Each hole would be fitted with a pair of magnifying lenses. Peer through one of the openings and you’d see a bigger and wider world. The surface of the marble would also have letters and symbols, even a few words etched into it—what she had come to think of as “lexical skin.”
The shape of her life was far less encouraging, but at least she was busy enough with work that she had few oppor
tunities to miss Jonathan. Then she suffered an even greater blow: a few weeks before Christmas, her father died suddenly of a heart attack. She returned to Wilbury for the funeral and stayed with her mother until the new year, sliding into a deeper sadness with each passing day until finally, her darkness threatening to overwhelm her, she flew out to the west coast and rented a house on Salt Spring Island. She spent the rest of the winter alone there, walking the tide line and searching the debris for some clue to the future. By April she still wasn’t ready to get back to a normal routine so she returned to Wilbury with the idea that she and her mother might become better friends. But her mother didn’t need Janice’s company or particularly welcome it. When Janice complained about the cool reception, her mother squared her shoulders and said, “I’m making a new life. I suggest you do the same. You only get one kick at the can.”
On Salt Spring, Janice had wondered whether to leave the Carrara unfinished, like her father’s life, and even contemplated having the thing destroyed. But as the sharp edges of her pain slowly softened, she realized that without her father on the planet, she needed the next best thing. So she arranged with Harold Winters, who owned a shipping company in town, to bring her sculpture to Wilbury for the summer. He rented her a bit of warehouse space out by the farmers’ co-operative, where she worked most nights. Most days she drifted about in a fog of remembrance.
She visited her father’s law office and chatted with his former partners, reminiscing about the summer she filed mortgage documents for them. Another day she sat on the steps outside the Three Links Hall and sang her way through the old set list, or what she could remember of it. She drove to the dock and the arena; she spent quiet afternoons at the library. But her favourite place of all was Lakeview Cemetery, where her father was buried. She’d sit on the small concrete bench near his grave and listen to the birds singing in the pines. She didn’t always think of him when she was there; sometimes it was the peace and quiet she was after.
Eventually, as her fog lifted and her pain began to fade, she realized that her work was the only happiness that remained in her life, the only strength. Because of that, and because it was in Wilbury that her interest in art first came to light, she decided to return the favour. She would offer classes in sculpture and line drawing, hoping to undo some of the damage Velma Fleck had wrought on the artistic temperament of the community and, in return, lead herself back into life. She met with Roger Larry, the director of the Wilbury Recreation Centre, and convinced him to set aside an area of the complex for classes.
It was mainly retirees who showed up the first night, people she remembered from her churchgoing years before and who already had a moderate amount of skill. For their first exercise Janice set up a still life of fruit and a wine bottle. “The bottle and fruit are your subject,” she said, “but you are not allowed to draw them. You can only draw the space around the flowers and fruit. You can draw the wall in the background, the table beneath them, the other objects in the room. You must render your subject by revelation.”
The exercise was odd enough that she assumed there’d be fewer people for the next class. In fact, the room was almost full. This time, she asked them to do paired sketches. “First draw a flower,” she said. “It must be realistic, with petals and leaves and stem. But the mood must reflect your mother, or some aspect of her—the way she used to stand, the way she looked when she scolded you. The other drawing will be the reverse. Sketch your mother in every detail but in such a way that it evokes a flower.”
At the end of the second class, after the last of the students had gone home, Ruby Mitchell showed up. Janice immediately ran to embrace her. “I’ve been meaning to drop by,” she said. “I’ve so wanted to see you. Are you interested in the course?”
“Well, no. Art isn’t really my cup of tea, dear. It’s more my nephew. Do you remember Hank? He had a spot of trouble a while ago, and according to the doctor hasn’t really healed the way he ought to. Tell you the truth, I think he’s feeling pretty down, and I was wondering if you thought this sort of thing might help him.”
“That’s hard to say, Ruby. Does he enjoy art?”
She shook her head dubiously. “I don’t imagine he enjoys much of anything anymore. It’s more I was wondering if maybe this would do him good—as therapy, I mean. Could I bring him to your next class?”
“Well, sure. You come, too. How’s Clarence holding up?”
Ruby looked away, her mouth a grim line. She started to say something and then stopped abruptly, her eyes closed, her index finger pressed to her nose the way people do when they’re about to sneeze. After a long moment, she swallowed several times and said, “He says he feels fine, but I think it’s back again. I can tell he’s in pain. He can hardly stand up straight. He’s going through Aspirin like they’re candy.”
Janice touched her arm. “Has he been to the doctor?”
“He talks about it but never makes an appointment. I don’t know if he’s just being stubborn or afraid of what they’ll find.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Ruby. Is there something I can do?”
“For Hank, maybe. Maybe you could do something for him.”
TWO NIGHTS LATER Ruby brought Hank to the class twenty minutes early. She made the most general introduction, then hurried to the car.
Hank had a few simple categories into which he slotted the women he met—sluts, bitches and goody two-shoes—and the woman in front of him, his brother’s friend, was clearly option number three. She was pretty, he thought, in an all-American way, wholesome and well fed. Her teeth were straight and white, her eyes clear, her skin and hair squeaky clean. And while she was a little too solid to ever be considered a Miss Universe, he had always preferred women whose flesh exceeded his grasp. What qualified her as a goody two-shoes was her happiness and confidence—a bad combination for a woman to have. The world was a cruel and dangerous place, and Hank didn’t think women had any call to be that confident or at ease.
She kept holding his hand and staring into his eyes like there was something there she wanted to understand. When he realized she was waiting for him to respond to her greeting, he said, “So you’re the artist.”
“And you’re Cy’s brother.”
He smiled appreciatively. “That’s—what’s the word—diplomatic. Some folks’d just out and out call me the murderer.”
“Is that what you’d prefer?” she asked, an eyebrow raised mischievously. “Or I suppose I could just call you Hank. That seems simple enough. You can call me Janice.”
He looked her up and down without pretending otherwise. Then he said, “I’ll tell you straight out, Janice, I know fuck all about art and pretty much couldn’t care less. But Ruby thinks it might be the cure for what ails me, and tell you the truth, I’ve always had a soft spot for the old girl. So between you and me, I’d be just as happy to sit off to the side somewheres while you and your friends do your thing.”
“Suit yourself,” she said. Then she walked over to the table where she continued to prepare blocks of clay for the class. Every time she looked up he was staring at her. That in itself was not so troubling. Back in her waitressing days, she got used to men watching her with mournful eyes. Even now, when she had a show, a few men would follow her every move, and she was neither flattered nor offended. She took it for what it was, an involuntary reaction from those who were not thinking clearly, if at all. What did trouble her, worming its way under her skin, was the feeling that Hank himself was a work of art, that his hard grey eyes and sensuous mouth, the scars on his face, his slouching posture and the mechanical efficiency of his chair were somehow iconic, as though the figure before her were merely a physical and symbolic manifestation of all the invisible elements of his life. In a way, we were all like that, she knew, wearing our broken hearts on our sleeves, our losses like so many pockmarks—but she had never seen it so clearly.
When the others arrived, she handed everyone a block of clay, even Hank, and gave one sentence of instructio
n: “Mould a figure that represents the most important thing your father said to you.” Then she left the room, returning every few minutes to see how they were progressing and to offer words of encouragement. When anyone asked a question about technique, she answered them; but for the most part, she let them find their own way. Near the end of the class, she noticed that Hank had left the room. At the table where he had sat, she found his piece of clay, which bore the perfect imprint of a man’s fist.
She scanned the class again, then stepped outside, where she found him in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette and staring at the moon and stars. “Your sculpture,” she said, “it’s very powerful.”
He flicked his cigarette butt into the air. Without looking at her, he said, “Maybe ’cause it’s not art, it’s true.”
Those words filled her with hope. She touched the cold metal of his chair. “Art has to be true, Hank. Always. Or else it’s not art.”
He turned to look at her. “Does your art tell the truth?”
“Well,” she said, “yes, I think so. At least I hope it does.”
“I’d like to see it, then. See what you think is true.”
ON THE NIGHT OF HANK’S first art lesson, Isabel went to dinner with Ross and had too much to drink. Afterwards, she stopped at her office to pick up a few papers that she needed for a meeting in Keppel the next day. While she was there, she took a moment to file away some of the documents that had been cluttering her desk for weeks.
Above the filing cabinet was a map of the deeded property of Wilbury. She’d coloured her own properties bright red, each little square another step away from the past and into her own brave future. Taken together, those red spaces should have been the very image of her independence, the very shape of her dreams. And yet as often as she had studied the map, it had never once given her the sense of satisfaction she craved. Aside from her home on Orange Street and this lovely office, the properties were hers in name only. True, they offered a kind of financial security not to be downplayed, but they didn’t speak to her in a single voice, didn’t whisper the words she needed to hear.