The End of Music Read online

  He hugged a fat leather satchel to his chest with both arms, holding it just like Marty had held the pig that got into the potatoes. The pig screaming and spitting and shitting on him, and Marty saying he’d kill it, and Mother saying, “No, dear God, Marty, that’s Mrs. Kennedy’s pig, we’ll never hear the end of it.”

  “Miss?”

  “Yes, sorry. I’ll check. Just a…one moment.”

  Mary had disappeared. Joyce couldn’t remember a word of her morning tutorial. She turned and lifted her chin. Crack-crack went her shoes, around the door and into the sweaty room. There was a man at a desk that had previously been empty, a head of perfectly parted black hair bent over a lengthy sheet of paper.

  “Excuse me.”

  The head looked up, mouth open and fishy eyes squinting, his face yellow-green in the lamplight.

  “A gentleman, a passenger wants to know…” Joyce raised a hand in the direction of the counter.

  “Yes?”

  “How long it will be. His stopover.” That was the word: stopover.

  “What flight?”

  “Oh!” said Joyce. “I’ll just go—”

  “Never mind. Tell him 45 minutes. He’s not military, is he?”

  “No. Englishman. Well dressed.”

  “Tell him 45 minutes.”

  “Yes, Mr. Shea,” said Joyce, catching a look at the nametag.

  She resumed her post and delivered the news.

  “Well,” said the Englishman, releasing one arm from the satchel to remove his hat and scratch his bald head. “That’s not the arrangement as I understood it. Not the thing at all.”

  Joyce remembered to smile. “They’ll stand you a coffee at the sandwich bar,” she said, having picked up the strange expression while dancing with Frank. I’ll stand you a drink, he had said as they finished a box step.

  The Englishman brightened. “That’s alright, eh?” Joyce knew it was the smile that shifted his tone rather than the prospect of free coffee. “Is there a telegram kiosk, then?”

  “Certainly, sir.” She straightened her shoulders and leaned across the counter, her starched white sleeves crackling. He leaned as well, and touched her forearm, as if she was confiding in him. “Ah-ha,” he said, as Joyce pointed to Posts and Telegraphs. The satchel had fallen to his side.

  Joyce was smoking when Mr. Shea came in from the tarmac. The engine noise rattled teacups on desks. Men in overalls followed him, smelling of exhaust.

  “Your first day, then?”

  “Yes. Joyce Pelley.” She stood and smoothed her skirt.

  “And where do your people hail from?”

  “Cape St. Rose.”

  “Eh?”

  “It’s down around—”

  “How’d they vote down your way?”

  “What? Oh! Mostly confederation, I think?” Her father had not revealed his vote to anyone. “I mean, I wasn’t old enough, so—”

  Mr. Shea waved a hand. “Never mind, girl. Just having you on. You’ll want your summer kit on a day like this. Gert!” He was shouting all of a sudden, head turned over his shoulder. “Gert! Do we have summer kit for the new girl?”

  “What?” The voice booming from around a corner.

  “The new girl.” He looked at Joyce. “Sorry?”

  “Joyce Pel—”

  “Joyce!” He was shouting again. “She’ll want a summer kit.”

  “I’m waiting on Supply. They’re hopeless.”

  “What about the dress? The frock? You’ve a closet full of them.”

  “She’s too busty, Den.”

  Joyce felt herself blush. But the men weren’t watching. Everyone was busy, the day’s pace picking up.

  Mr. Shea leaned back in his wooden chair, which creaked on its pedestal. His waist was tiny as a schoolgirl’s. Maybe he had been a sickly boy. Probably from some big-house merchant family that voted responsible government.

  “We’ve got you on the counter, then?”

  “Yes,” said Joyce. Her thighs itched fiercely.

  “Good. Look, when someone gets all in a huff about being delayed, tell them forty-five minutes. You’ll be right as often as not and most of them just want to know if they’ve time for a drink. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Call me Den. Where’s your nametag?”

  “I was told to leave it on my jacket.”

  “You’ve only got the one? Gert will have to see to it.”

  Joyce feared he would start bellowing again. But instead he stood, took his clipboard and disappeared down the hall, skinny hips rolling in an exaggerated manner that might have been a limp.

  3

  Carter stands in the doorway, watching Sam run to the car, trying to guess whether he might pee at the mall. He’s getting bolder with outside bathrooms, even peed at the airport with hardly any help.

  Sam shouts, “Bye, Daddy!” and disappears behind Isabelle, who leans over him, hips shuddering as she yanks at the straps of his car seat. Confined by belts and pads, he looks strangely fragile. In a few weeks they have another checkup at SickKids, where the doctor will listen again to the slosh and flow in his chest. Sam has a heart gallop, which is probably nothing. He might have a murmur, which is likely innocuous. It could indicate a tiny hole in the upper heart wall, though such defects are often harmless. Probably, likely, often.

  Isabelle’s skirt balloons up around a tanned thigh as she stands straight, and dry leaves race at her feet. The trees in this young neighbourhood are thin and reedy, easy pickings for the autumn breeze.

  “I’ll text you if I get the early bus,” calls Carter from the doorway.

  “We’ll come get you regardless. Right, Sam?”

  “Right!” cries Sam, who loves the bus station.

  “Don’t be afraid of the magic toilets,” calls Carter, as the car door closes on Sam.

  The washrooms at the mall will surely be a fright, full of women, stall doors banging and industrial pipes roaring with water. But nothing scares Sam like the automatic flush toilets, the sudden and seemingly random flooding and sucking of the bowl. They’ve shown him the blinking red sensor, and waved hands in front of it to set it off. But he can’t bear it, clapping hands over his ears and whining a painful, “Noooooo!”

  //////

  Grossman’s is unchanging, with its green floor tile and church-basement furniture. Its daylight pong of dishwater and disinfectant and fermentation is the smell of afternoon sound checks. Thirty people would make a decent crowd. But stepping through the door reminds Carter that there were good nights as well, when so many people came to see Infinite Yes that squeezing up to the bar was impossible and the cops should have shut the place down.

  The club is empty at one-thirty on a Sunday afternoon, save for Leah behind the bar, her mop of faded red hair hanging over the dishwasher. She greets him without looking up. Asks after his mother. The two women have never met.

  Carter takes Suzy Q’s old stool at the corner of the bar. Suzy was a hobbled woman who drank brandy and scratched her arms raw. Supposedly one of the boat people from the Vietnam War, with bulging blue ankles and a red vinyl raincoat full of cracks. Red flakes fell around her, and sometimes she fell too.

  Leah approaches and lays a slim black box on the bar between them. A hard drive, much like the one Isabelle uses to back up their computer at home. “The new cancer is a lump in the corner of the lung.”

  “I’m sorry, Lee.”

  “Everyone’s sorry. You wouldn’t believe how sorry the doctors are. You should have seen them delivering the news last week. Like they just found out there’s no Santa Claus.” Her hands, long troubled by arthritis, rest on the table like rubber Halloween props. She’s forty-nine, two years older than Carter. The hollows of her eyes have deepened, much like his. The crooked red lines spreading from each side of her nose are ne
w. Is she a drinker now?

  Leah’s first cancer diagnosis had brought her back into his orbit, four years after their divorce. Carter had just met Isabelle. Euphoric in the early days of new romance, he’d responded generously when Leah called. He visited her several times following her lumpectomy, pleased that she had found no replacement for him.

  She lifts the hard drive from the bar and turns it in her hand. “Will brought this along when he came to see me. He’s got everything on drives like this. All of it.”

  “Right.”

  “But there’s some kind of glitch. A software problem.”

  “A glitch?”

  “I’m not sure about the details. He sat here, where you are, and he’s showing me this thing and rambling on.” Leah shakes her head. “Have you talked to him at all?”

  “No.” Carter had sent a card after Will’s accident, but never followed up on a promise to call or visit.

  “It did something to him, whatever happened in Alberta. He’s really hard to talk to.”

  Carter takes the black box and turns it in his hand. It’s heavier than the one on Isabelle’s computer. The shell tapers to a row of silver teeth at one end, where it plugs in to some larger machine.

  “Anyway, it’s crapped out, one way or the other,” says Leah.

  “But he’s still got the three-inch reels.” Will had kept and catalogued the tapes from every studio session. Infinite Yes completed just one fifty-minute album in ten years. But they were constantly recording and rejecting material. Nearly a hundred hours of music, by Will’s reckoning.

  Leah reaches below the bar, this time producing a cardboard case. “Part two of our show-and-tell,” she says.

  The lid hinges open, and Carter breathes the magnetic residue of a long forgotten studio. He wraps both hands around the fat reel and lifts it. The lead end of the tape begins to fall away, and he shifts a hand to stop it unravelling further.

  “Look,” says Leah. She nods at the open box. There’s a fine layer of dust at the bottom. “They’re flaking away.”

  “That’s from the tape?”

  “Whatever we played that day.” She dips a finger in and draws a line through the dust. “It’s just about gone. Apparently they’re all like this. Unplayable.”

  Carter tilts his head to read the faded pencil notes on the spine of the box. IY 10/5/98 best takes: 5 mid/end 6 mid 12. He returns the tape to the box, and his fingers come away black. “We have to save those hard drives, then.”

  “He says he can transfer it to a new format, whatever everyone’s using these days. But it’ll cost around five thousand dollars. And there’s no guarantees the software will hold up.”

  “He fucked up here.” Carter’s anger rises. “He’s got to pay for it.”

  “Will doesn’t even have a job.”

  “This is…” Carter grasps for a dramatic statement about legacy. “My boy’s nearly four years old, just like that. I mean, when you’re young it feels infinite. You don’t understand the way things…” He swoops a flat hand through the air. “You don’t understand the velocity…”

  “I’ve got maybe two years, if that.” Leah pushes the tape box aside and reaches to lay a dry hand over his. “I have to settle things. And with this, I think we just let it go.”

  “Did he say how long we have to do this? Before the software stops working, and it’s all gone?”

  “You’re not listening, Carter. Look at me.” Her voice falters and a dim memory stirs. His head resting between her small breasts, rising and falling as she breathed. “We don’t do anything. The tape falls apart and the digital stuff fails. The band dies a natural death.”

  “What?”

  “Remember how it used to drive you crazy?” she says. “All that old music on the radio? You’d be screaming at it. You said the past was weak and lazy.”

  “I said all kinds of stuff back then.” Carter must have been an exhausting partner in those days, going on with his grand, overheated ideas.

  “And at the end, when we broke up, you said we should erase it all.”

  “I didn’t say erase.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “But letting it go on purpose, Lee? It’s a crime. Against our legacy.”

  “Or a crime against our vanity. Let’s not confuse the two.”

  “How about we don’t get personal.”

  “How do we not get personal? I put ten years into this, Carter.” She lifts the drive and slaps it on the bar. “I left everything else because you told me to.”

  “Could I get a glass of water?”

  Having her serve him, briefly forcing her into the barmaid’s routine, might restore the balance between them. He feels ambushed, and shamefully suspects that she’s coordinated all this, her own demise and that of the music, for full effect. It’s true that he marched into one of the final band meetings and said they should destroy the archive. But that was just a stunt, a way to show Leah he could dismiss everything they had together.

  She comes around the bar with his water, and sits next to him. He drinks, and she reaches for the glass to take a sip. “We made a mistake,” she says quietly. “Lots of people pick the wrong career, the wrong partner. They figure it out and move on.”

  “You’re talking about us,” says Carter. “Maybe that was the mistake. But these recordings…”

  “It’s all the same.” Their marriage failed, and that failure is written into the music.

  Isabelle knows it was all just blind, headstrong youth. Carter has told her how he and Leah set themselves to music with the tenacity of a child sitting a difficult exam, head bowed to the task, vexed and jittery, the answers coming in spurts. How they lived as distracted ascetics. Minimal eaters. Occasional teetotallers. Night owls. Income-tax truants. They were kids, so devoted to the vitality of experience that they overdressed for shows, so they might more readily drip with sweat.

  The marriage was fatally humourless and often sexless, even in the early days. It was only in the final months that he and Leah started screwing all the time. They did it quickly, with a kind of grim vigour that felt adulterous. He suspects now that Leah was not a fully willing partner in this final flurry. He recalls her body twisting and shifting as if trying to evade his. She worked hard to overcome this resistance, as if determined to swallow a pill that caught in her throat. Taking extra water to force it down.

  Carter prepares for every meeting with Leah by girding himself against regret. But regret always finds him.

  Straightening and leaning back in her seat, she pulls up her pant leg to scratch a reddened shin. The pants are blue and limp and shapeless, probably with an elastic waist. She’s dressing like a hospital patient, concerned only with comfort and easy access to a leaking body. “What did we move on the album? Was it a thousand?”

  “Closer to two,” says Carter. “Eighteen hundred, at least.” For years Carter kept his share of unwanted CDs, several hundred of them, shrink-wrapped and boxed. They went into a dumpster when he and Isabelle bought the house.

  “So there you go. Anyone who really wants the music has it anyway.” She sneezes, and Carter imagines a cloud of poisoned air shooting from her lungs. “Can we at least think about an agreement that we won’t release it, or let anyone sell it?”

  Carter excuses himself to the bathroom, hunching low to get down the cramped stairwell. Like the rest of Grossman’s, it’s plastered with yellowing photos and flyers for bands like Danny and the Devils and the Swamp Juice All Stars. A club dedicated to middle-aged white-guy blues was a poor fit for Infinite Yes, and the regulars despised the band.

  The Mens is freshly disinfected, and his eyes water with the sting. He leaves the door propped open, and is standing at the urinal as Leah descends the steps and turns for the Ladies.

  “Jesus Christ, the roll’s empty in here,” she calls. “Can you grab me one?”<
br />
  “Hang on.” Carter zips and takes a roll of paper from a cardboard crate in the middle of the floor. One step out the door and another to his left brings him to the Ladies.

  “Whoever closed last night…” says Leah, from her stall. “Un-fucking-believable.”

  Carter takes a step into the washroom, side on to the stall, and offers the roll. When she stands to take it, he catches a glimpse of thin calves and the panties stretched at her ankles. Still she can’t reach, so Carter leans, and sees the pouch of flesh hanging over a thin and ragged patch where he once knew a red expanse of pubic hair.

  In the sanctuary of his fifty-minute bus ride home, Carter will come to hate this moment. Leah orchestrated it, obliging him to look. She knows that he can’t separate their music and their bodies, and wants to remind him that one is in the other. By the time Isabelle and Sam collect him—“I peed, Daddy! I stayed and it went all the way down and I wasn’t afraid!”—he will decide that the body Leah showed him can’t last much longer.

  In the moment, he can only apologize. “Sorry,” he says, and averts his eyes. He’s truly sorry about the marriage and the band and the music, about the part of him that’s been waiting for her cancer to return. Every day he’s waited, and every day he’s been sorry.

  //////

  First he hears a low, droning noise. Then whispered sounds like half-formed words. She’s closing in on the bit where her legs flex and her breath shoots little hisses through gritted teeth. Carter lifts his eyes to look at her face. She doesn’t like him to, but he knows her eyes are closed.

  His neck is tired, so he climbs down to the floor and shifts her to the edge of the bed. Careful with the ankles. They’ve been achy of late, and swollen. His phone starts up like a bee in a jar on the bedside table. Probably Howley Park again. He already signed off on his mother’s new prescription. Another brain pill. Ratcheting up the medication.

  Isabelle’s fingers knead his head, easing him back a bit. She arches and gasps. There’s a gurgling sound—the kind of throaty noise Carter recognizes from movies, when someone is eviscerated—then the hissing breaths.