The End of Music Page 2

  She’ll call, they all said. Perfectly normal, Mr. Carter. She’ll call and say, please come and take me home. It’s all part of the adjustment. They all do it, a kind of mourning for their former life. But she’ll be grand. Do you want her kept from the phone for a couple of days, till she settles in? That helps sometimes, they said.

  No, Carter said. Let her call.

  She’s left the microwave, so he goes to Shopper’s for a stack of frozen dinners, only to find that the microwave doesn’t work. Why didn’t the guys with the truck take it? He stops at the Co-op for bananas, milk, a rotisserie chicken and a twelve-pack of sausages. Sees people his age, knows none of them. The temperature tops twenty-five degrees, with a blurry, liquid sun. Carter eats the chicken from its tray and moves his couch cushions to the cool of the basement rec room, laying out garbage bags underneath to ward off carpenter beetles and earwigs. He wakes in the middle of the night with his T-shirt soaked in sweat and his butt slipping between the cushions, and hears music in the dark. In a high-school essay he dared not show anyone else, Carter wrote that he craved music for its beauty and strangeness and confused striving. He wrote it in this room, records blaring.

  The cleaners, Pamela and Jocelyn from Traytown, arrive at eight that morning and follow him from room to room, grinning at his instructions. Don’t worry, sir. We’ve scoured many an empty house. They’re amused by him, somehow. He leaves them to their work and explores the exterior, where vinyl siding is cracked and coming undone. Takes a broom to the spidery eaves.

  Joyce calls while Carter is dragging her mattress to the curb. “I’d like a drink at lunch, and before bed, and they should give it to me.”

  “But they can only let you have one drink, Mom. It’s all you’re allowed.”

  Howley Park agreed that there was no point in cutting her off altogether. “That won’t make anyone happy,” said the doctor. So it’s been written in her chart: An ounce-and-a-half of Scotch, with water, every day before dinner.

  “Have you got anything at all? A job or something?”

  “I’m still at the bakery, Mom. I’ve got a good arrangement there.”

  In fact, he left the bakery last year to focus on grad school. Joyce would be appalled if she knew the truth. Isabelle supporting the family while Carter still dabbles in archaeology. Still trying to get started, she would say. Sitting in a classroom with youngsters half your age.

  He pulls the mattress up the driveway, letting it buckle and flop to the ground when the phone rings again. Isabelle reports that Sam isn’t sleeping, and she might have a migraine coming, and Leah called again. “Left a message last night,” says Isabelle. “Said she had to talk about the band. She mentioned a guy named Will?”

  “He was our bass player.” Will was the sensible one. Band manager, booking agent, accountant, archivist, driver. The one who wheedled a better deal out of night-shift motel clerks and threatened to beat the shit out of scummy club owners. Later he went to northern Alberta for work and was nearly killed in some sort of industrial accident.

  “Maybe she wants to get your band back together.”

  “No, Iz. That’ll never happen.”

  “That new friend of yours, who you met on the plane. She’d buy a ticket.”

  Carter laughs nervously.

  He gets the mattress the rest of the way to the curb, fighting for a good grip. Then the microwave, frozen dinners stacked inside it. Gathers the couch cushions, bags the last bits of kitchenware and contents of the deep freeze, and retreats to the front step. The street is quiet. Mrs. Primm’s house dark. She must be out of town. He’d like to thank her for keeping an eye out all these years.

  Leah would never propose a reunion. Unless, if the cancer was back? Maybe one last go?

  He won’t play music again. It would be like relapsing into a nervous disorder.

  “I’m not a musician anymore,” he had told Isabelle when they met. It felt good to say it.

  The town truck pulls up, and Carter waves to the garbage men as they dispense with the last of Alcock Street. Then he sets out on the short walk to Sinbad’s Motel, pulling his suitcase.

  The route takes him through the town square and past Dee-Jays Music. It’s a bottle depot now. Carter cups his hands to peer through the plate-glass door. Empties are stacked against the back wall, where a bin was always reserved for vinyl, even as CDs slowly took over the rest. It’s still got the checkout counter, where Jane the Punk propped her big boots on either side of the cash register while she rolled a cigarette against her belly. Carter spent so many after-school hours here that Jane gave him free access to the 99-cent bargain bin. He could pick through it and take home as many records as he liked, as long they were back for end-of-month inventory.

  Carter loved those records, how every song purred with aspiration and nerve, like a fresh-faced schoolboy angling to get by on charm and good looks. It was exactly what Carter needed. Music became his consoling belief system.

  It was this belief that would carry him to Toronto a few years later, to the damp little music shop on Queen Street, where he found Leah and stood in front of her until she took him home. He was in her bed before he knew how to ride the TTC or where to order a pizza. He was still living out of a suitcase when they started making demos in her living room. She had a boyfriend and went to North Bay to be with him to teach high school. Came back at Christmas and said she was engaged. Came back in June and agreed to start a band, just for the summer. They called their band Infinite Yes. “We will make art as realists,” Carter told her, quoting from a book he found somewhere. “The true realist does not present the world as we see it. He reveals the world as it would appear if only we could see it fully.”

  Had there really been a time when he could talk such nonsense and be taken seriously?

  Weeks later, Carter had picked up a fungus that festered in the quicks of his fingernails, with tiny blisters popping into sores. Unable to put any pressure on his fingertips, reduced to playing gentle bar chords, he began messing with the effects units. Little black boxes with pedals and coloured buttons that he talked Leah into “borrowing” from the music shop. That’s how he discovered the droning, heavily processed sound that would come to characterize the band. When he finally went to a clinic to have the fungus looked at, the woman at the desk asked how long he had been in Ontario, and told him he should have applied for an OHIP card by now. But I’ve been making music, he wanted to say. I’m playing guitar and I’ve got a band and I’m fucking the lead singer. Can’t you tell? Don’t I look like the new guy who blew into town and formed a band? Don’t I walk like the guy who fucks the lead singer?

  //////

  Her cuffs are stained and crusty with food. Her hair hangs loose. There’s no excuse for that. The photos on the wall show her in a bun.

  “You must be doing alright,” says Carter, his voice bouncing off the lavender walls. “It’s nice here.”

  Joyce pushes herself up from the rocking chair with quivering arms. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  They start down the long hallway, the gleam from the linoleum rippling ahead of them like moonlight on water. Doors are open on a Saturday afternoon. Visitors perch nervously on beds while residents doze in rocking chairs or lean against stacked pillows, half-following the trail of small talk: the food, the aches and pains, the grandkids. And the weather, always the weather.

  “I’m leaving this afternoon, Mom.”

  “Okay then.”

  “I’ll try to get back soon for a visit.”

  “Okay.”

  A chalkboard at the end of the hall promises games of chance in the activity room at two and Coronation Street in the sitting room at three-thirty.

  “Games of chance this afternoon, Mom. Do you think you’ll go to that?”

  “Go to what?”

  “Games of chance. In the activity room, it says.”

  “Wi
ll they have a cup of tea? A bun or something?”

  “I don’t know. I would imagine.”

  “They were singing those bloody old songs this morning. Her eyes they shone like the diamonds, da, da, da. Beating the piano to pieces.” She lifts her arms and flaps them in front of her. “I said to the girl, get me out of this. Did you know Mr. Bussey’s wife got sent away?”

  “Who?”

  “Sent her down to that place by the lake. I’m not going there. I already told them. So if that’s what you’re here for you can forget about it.”

  “No, Mom. I’m just here to see you before I go.” He reaches as if to touch her elbow or take her hand, but shrinks back again.

  They complete the circuit. Joyce returns to her chair and Carter examines the room, finding a photo album on his mother’s bedside table. The usual scenes: birthday suppers, young women cradling babies, Christmas mornings, and what looks like a retirement or anniversary party. Back into the hallway, he catches up with the familiar-looking nurse. He doesn’t know her, but she strongly recalls the girls he knew in school. Thin and unadorned, with quick eyes behind small glasses. He finds her outside the kitchen, with dishwashers grinding.

  “I don’t know these people,” he tells her, showing the album. “This isn’t our family.”

  “Stuff gets mixed up all the time,” says the nurse. “They scatters it everywhere.”

  “What’s the place down by the lake?”

  “That’s New Horizons, our facility for the Level Three and Four residents.”

  “Marty! Marty!” Joyce is outside her door, her voice urgent.

  “She’s worried about being sent there.”

  “Right now Joyce is classified as Level Two,” says the nurse, trailing the nub of a pencil along the clipboard. “Feeds herself and manages alright in the bathroom.”

  “Marty!”

  He sprints back down the hall and touches her elbow.

  “It’s Herb. I’m Herb. Uncle Marty isn’t here.”

  “I’m through with the house.” She flicks a hand, like brushing crumbs from a table. “I can’t go back to it now.”

  “We’re selling the house, Mom. It’s on the market.”

  “Yes, but I don’t want to be in a racket over the money.”

  “There’ll be no racket. There’s an agent, he’ll get the best price.”

  “Yes but…People like that will tell you anything.”

  “I’ll watch him. Every move. You don’t have to worry.”

  The two of them stand silent, until Joyce seeks out the rocking chair, gripping it with shaky hands. Carter follows and reaches to help. “No,” she says. Sets her jaw and settles into the seat.

  On the high shelf of the open closet, the black gloss of the jewelry chest peeks through a woolly tangle of gloves and hats. The chest has a satisfying heft, but it feels small in his hands, no bigger than a meatloaf. As a boy, Carter called it the Night Box. When its hinged lid was open, it meant his parents were going out for the night. Carter liked to sit on his mother’s lap while she dug through her treasures, choosing pearl earrings or a chunky necklace. His father claimed the Night Box had been a gift from “a real Arab.” His version of the story cast Joyce as a headstrong young woman working a night shift at the airport. The Arab (“Rich as Croesus!”) touches down for a few hours en route to New York. He is smitten; falls at her feet. But Joyce turns him away.

  “Imagine that, Herbie!” says his father. “You might have been half-Bedouin! The next Prince of Persia!”

  “Go on with your old foolishness,” says Joyce.

  The lacquer finish is spoiled by what looks to be dried glue left by strips of tape. But the lid is as Carter remembers. Painted with a crosshatch of gold trim and the portrait of a brown princess in white turban and crimson robe. The toes of her slippers curl back to make full circles and her dark eyes are as big as the palm of her open hand. She’s a daring princess, with substantial cleavage on display. This was Carter’s first cleavage.

  The blue carpet inside darkens when his finger sweeps against the grain. But there is no jewelry, only a dog-eared postcard and a photo in a Ziploc bag. The postcard shows an egg-shaped map of the world. Newfoundland is at the centre, and has the map’s only identified location, a black star labelled Gander International Airport. From the star, red streaks shoot in all directions, curving across oceans and continents. Crossroads of the World is the inscription across the top. The reverse side is blank.

  By the time he was in high school, Carter chafed against this glorified history. What was the so-called “Crossroads of the World” except an accident of geography? A suitably flat stretch of land at the edge of the continent. A service station, where international flights could top up the tank while everyone had a pee and a sandwich. Even that trivial role was fleeting, over by the time Carter was born, as more powerful jets crossed the ocean straight to cities like Montreal and New York and Toronto. Places that mattered. He had made this argument excitedly, nurturing a fierce urge to take his father down a peg or two. But Arthur Carter only smiled and shook his head.

  The photo is a black-and-white of his mother, with her head tipped back and lips parted, blurry points of white where her gown shimmers. Three fingers hold the microphone stand. The other hand makes a fist at her side. She’s alone in the spotlight, darkness all around.

  “You’ll take the money, then. Is that it?”

  “From the house? No, no. You’ll get every penny, Mom. In your bank account.”

  Joyce is on her feet again. She makes for the window and yanks at the handle.

  “Here,” says Carter, rising from the bed and easing her fingers away, then turning the window open a crack. “Bit of fresh air.”

  She returns to the chair, lowers herself slowly, pulling the blanket around her knees.

  “Where’s Leah?”

  “Isabelle, Mom.”

  2

  Joyce saw it first. A dot against the pale blue, coming for them.

  “Look!” she said.

  One of the men shaded his eyes. “Now then.” He glanced at his watch. “Three-oh-six from Idlewild, late again.”

  Joyce watched its descent, which seemed too fast. It tilted and seemed to break apart, and her heart was in her throat. But it was just the wing flap opening. A moment later, three-oh-six was on the tarmac with a screech of rubber, slowing to a crawl against the wide horizon. The side lettering identified it as Air France.

  “Ha!” snorted a tall man, smoothing the hairs that blew across his head. “Late again. Skinner’ll be having fits.”

  “When will it get to France?” asked Joyce.

  “Depends on whether Skinner murders the crew.”

  They were walking on a road that skirted one of the runways, bending left. Looking across the runway Joyce saw what she took to be their destination. A few low buildings cut from the woods.

  She didn’t cover her ears for the next one. It passed over the road ahead, close enough that she could trace the rivets in its grey, burnished belly and see the landing wheels spin as they emerged. The women clapped their ears and the men shouted to continue whatever they were arguing about. It bounced lightly before settling on the runway like a giant toy. She didn’t recognize the foreign name, and the men took no notice of it. She liked the French one better. Long and lean, with a huge wing at the back.

  Darker clouds crowded the sky by the time they reached the Legion. Tall, billowing clouds like she never saw at home. Within an hour rain was beating hard on the low, wooden rooftop, throwing the dancers off their rhythm.

  “That system blew in quick,” said Frank, who worked at the weather office.

  “And how do you plan to get me home in this?” asked Gloria.

  Joyce sat with Frank and Gloria and three couples she had just met. The only one she could name was the fellow who made a lot of jokes, b
ecause the women would laugh and shriek, “Oh, Kenny!” in response to his frequent wisecracks. Joyce didn’t get Kenny’s jokes, but perhaps she would in time.

  She had arrived the day before, dragging her father’s old duffel off the train as the stinging dust blew down the platform. Her father had begged her not to leave, feigning illness. Her brother Marty had come at her with his fists. By the Jesus, your place is in this house and you’ll stay in this house. But they were seven hours away now by train. She had a bed and a roommate named Rachel. She had yet to work a shift, and had slept poorly, waking with a fright when the first of the early-morning arrivals passed over and the whole building trembled. In the morning she had walked through the wrong door returning from the bathroom, frightening a pair of girls in slips as they stood shoulder to shoulder at the mirror. Gasping and backing out, Joyce glimpsed the grey skirt and jacket of Trans Canada Airlines laid out on each bed. She would soon meet these two as co-workers, and hoped they wouldn’t remember her.

  Gloria was seven months pregnant, so Joyce and the other women took turns dancing with Frank.

  “I warned you,” said Gloria, as he pushed back his chair and extended a hand to Joyce again. “You can’t get him off the floor, the fool.”

  Joyce had seen bands in movies, and knew some of the songs from the radio. But the attack of the music jarred her. Drums pounded in the bridge of her nose. A recurring low note found her legs. In the lull of a slow dance, the horns blared so loud they gave her a terrible start. For a moment she thought it was an alarm to signal some sort of attack.

  “Lovely,” murmured Frank, guiding her between couples. “Where did you learn to dance like that?” Before Joyce could answer, the wind shifted and rain pelted the high windows behind the bandstand. A window flew open and sent a spray of water down on the musicians, staining their light blue tuxedos. The hush of the song was spoiled.

  A horn player stepped up to a microphone and bowed with mock formality. “Another lovely night on the Gander,” he said. The crowd responded with derisive laughter. “Hold on to your hat!” cried one man. “Now you’re in a pickle!” yelled another.