The End of Music Page 8
Leah returned to Toronto for March break because he told her to. In June, he told her to start driving as soon as the last day of school ended, and keep driving all night until she got to the bungalow, and she did. The Irish boyfriend showed up a week later. Leah sat him down at the kitchen table while Carter hid in her bedroom. It didn’t take long, maybe ten minutes. He heard the door and the car leaving the driveway, and waited a little longer before emerging. Found her cooking oatmeal, still wearing his denim shirt and boxers. They each took a spoon and ate from the pot. Leah said the sensible thing to do, the right thing and decent thing, was to get married and keep her job. Instead, she was being crazy, making crazy decisions.
“I blame you for that,” she said, pointing the spoon at him. “I blame you.”
For nearly a week after that they hardly left the house. It was all they could do to keep pace with the music. Black cables snaked and coiled around the bungalow. The finicky Tascam tape machine blocked the basement door. Leah’s three keyboards took up half the living room. Tambourines, shakers, blocks of wood. Little black boxes with pedals, buttons, dials and glowing lights. The refrigerator smell. Tea cups and toast plates, an old sweater they shared, scratchy blankets, CDs and tapes spilling over each other, scribbled notes taped to walls. Cellophane stretched across the picture window. On the wall was a poster of Sam Cooke, wailing into the microphone. There was another poster, a woman in a pink bikini, spraying herself with a garden hose. The phone rang a couple of times every day. They never answered. The dog got off its leash and didn’t even make a run for it. Didn’t leave the yard. Just kept running mad, joyous circles in the pissing rain.
When Carter lifted the dead mailman’s Telecaster, the neck was greasy from previous hands. Tilted to the bedroom window, the sunburst finish showed fingerprints and smudges. He found a stained dishcloth in the case. Ran it up and down the neck and body. He would keep the cloth. The strings were slack and lifeless against his thumb. There was no guitar stand, no amplifier in sight. He opened a sliding door to an empty closet with a lived-in smell. The door jammed on its runner and wouldn’t close.
The enormous woman repeated her story to everyone who came through the house. It took several weeks for the mailman to die. She came to look after him, arranged for the oxygen and had a nurse visit. He recovered a bit of energy and started eating, but grew agitated. Said to leave him alone. So she went out every day, and one afternoon he died while she was out buying a chicken and vegetables. When she got home she called the nurse. Then she stuffed the chicken with garlic and lemon and put it in the oven. She looked Carter in the eye when she talked about cooking the chicken.
Carter wanted to tell her that his father had died in the palliative care unit, just a few weeks before. Watched around the clock, all vital signs tracked to the end. Would he rather have been left alone? He had died with his mouth wide open, and Joyce had tried to close the jaw. The flesh was warm and the unshaven face prickly, but the joint wouldn’t give an inch.
Carter had flown back for the funeral and spent a few days with his mother. When he got back he told Leah that there was a girl back home, and he had gone to the girl’s apartment and slept with her. The next day he had gone back and broken up with her. The day after that she called him and when he got there she went down on him. Of course, Leah hated the story and they had a fight.
The mailman’s sister brayed in a honey-rich accent Carter recognized from Bob Marley songs. He didn’t like her, but he didn’t want to be racist. He had seen loud, assertive Caribbean women in movies and on TV. They were hefty and big-bosomed and wore headscarves.
She made him wait while she argued with a white-haired woman about the dining-room table.
“Of course you have to refinish,” she said. “Price is set for the quality.” She rapped her knuckles on the table. The white-haired woman drifted away, and the mailman’s sister raised her voice to chase after her. “This is not for junk. There is quality here.” She rapped the table again and turned to Carter.
“This guitar, then. I will trust you to give me a fair price.” Her look suggested anything but trust.
Carter wasn’t sure what he had. But he apparently knew more than she did. He knew it was a Telecaster. It had three pickups, and knobs and toggle switches that mystified him. No one else had come about it. He offered more than he could afford, though much less than it was likely worth. All the cash in his pocket, which was everything he had. Most of it borrowed from Leah, because they had to put everything into music now.
“Sit while I count your money.”
The living room was filled with furniture, much of it covered in yellowing sheets. People walked through the open door, sniffing the air and lifting the sheets. When they let go the sheets billowed and sank, dust swirling in the sunlight that streamed through bare windows. Smaller items were laid out in the kitchen. A set of small wooden elephants. Old radios with broken dials or cracked casings. Assorted hats and a tweed overcoat.
She counted out loud, sounding angry. Carter feared she would take the guitar away.
Then he understood that the deal was done.
This was astonishing good fortune. But Carter was young enough to expect it.
They spent the next morning with another half-realized song. Carter toying with his new Telecaster and Leah cross-legged on a big red cushion that used to belong to her grandmother. The cushion gave her sinus trouble, and she wanted that congested, nasally quality because the song was about claustrophobia. They stopped to pee and eat corn flakes. Carter called in sick for his shift at the light-fixture shop. He would soon be fired.
“I used to think music was a dream state,” she said. “But with you it’s the opposite. A bigger reality, not an escape from it. It’s all the triggers firing at once.”
Why would he have expected anything less than good fortune?
//////
“Mr. Carter, it’s Melissa Ryan calling from Howley Enterprises. Director of Resident Relations here at Howley. I’ve just been down for a visit with your mother today, and she’s doing wonderfully.”
“Okay. She was trying to call me. The other day.”
“But Mr. Carter, we’ve already met. I was on your flight when you came to Gander a couple of weeks ago. We talked about your band.”
The bay girl.
“If I had only known that your mother was moving in,” she says. “I was tied up with the conference that week. But this is wonderful. I had a note to call a Mr. Carter, and I said to myself, I wonder is that him? And sure enough.”
“It’s funny how things work,” offers Carter.
“Now, I want to apologize for this week’s regrettable incident. The telephone call from your mother. I understand you weren’t expecting to hear from her?”
“It’s fine. No need to apologize.”
“I’ve asked the duty nurse for a full report. We do everything we can to prevent such episodes. We’ll be reviewing our staffing on that shift. And your mother’s medication, of course.”
“You just put her on some new pill. I just agreed to it a few days ago.”
Pages flipping. Melissa Ryan hums a soft nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh sound to fill the brief silence. “We’ll certainly be reviewing that. And of course the telephone left unattended. Clearly a lapse. If you wish to pursue this further I can give you the administrator’s direct line. You can speak to her directly. As I said, we keep the lines of communication open.”
Carter feels like a man joining a conversation in progress.
“I’d like to talk to her. My mother.”
“We can arrange something, of course. Right now…” Flip-flip-flip. “We’re already into the dinner hour and then the evening shift, which is of course a smaller complement.”
“So I can’t get her on the phone now?”
“You might want to consider the sundowning, Mr. Carter.”
“Sundownin
g?”
“Pattern of fatigue and disorientation at the end of the day. We see general confusion and decreased awareness as daylight fades. Aggravation and mood swings. A widely recorded phenomena among seniors.”
“Oh.”
“I’d venture that your mother is at her best in the morning.”
“Right. But in her message, she sounded upset, and the nurse said there was a complaint about her from someone?”
“A complaint?”
“It sounded like she was reading from a notebook, something like that.”
“She’s not supposed…I don’t suppose you caught her name? The nurse?”
“No. But this complaint—”
“Don’t you worry, Mr. Carter. I’m sure it’s nothing. People live together, they’re going to have their little squabbles. I’ll look into all this and get back to you straightaway on Monday. Do you know I was driving home the other day and I thought, if only I still had that CD to put on right now. Haven’t heard it in years.”
“It’s pretty hard to find these days. If I see one I’ll send it along.”
“Really? That would be wonderful. To hear it again, just me alone in the car. Sometimes you want to feel like you’re nineteen or twenty years old again, only for a few minutes, don’t you find?”
//////
Isabelle descends the stairs in her long black skirt. It’s a sensible skirt, but then it fans out with a playful swish, adding a dash of whimsy and flattering her rangy build. Carter knows this because Isabelle has told him.
“So it starts at noon?” Carter asks, though he knows the answer.
“Yes,” says Isabelle. “And we’ll want to be there in good time. Saturday at the mall. You know.” She stops in front of the hallway mirror and agitates the skirt, wiggling a little. “Shelley’s coming next month.”
“Shelley from fashion school?”
“Yes. Next month, around Valentine’s. On her way to Windsor for something the producer needs.”
The producer is Shelley’s occasional boyfriend, who makes television shows. Carter has seen one of them, a reality show about three hotshot business types sent to revive a meat packing plant in a moribund small town.
“I just heard from her this morning,” says Isabelle, smoothing her charcoal sweater. “It’s just for one night.”
The friendship ran its course long ago. But Shelley refuses to take her cue and fade away, so Isabelle grants her the irritable tolerance of family. Their safe topic of conversation is fashion school, with its shared memories of adolescent fervour. Shelley and Isabelle holed up in a dim little townhouse basement, with a mountain of by-the-pound clothes dragged home from Goodwill. The ancient sewing machine that jammed up if you didn’t have just the right touch on the pedal. The Portuguese family next door always screaming, and the old guy upstairs taping Playboy centrefolds in his little kitchen window. A new girl every month.
What they never talk about is the turn that spoiled everything: Shelley’s unwavering pursuit of Isabelle’s brother. As Carter understands it, the two were never a couple, at least not in any conventional way. This didn’t stop Shelley from claiming a stake in Ronnie’s death. She wore the tragedy like a tattoo. Carter found it implausible, this high-pitched drama of doomed love. He suspects Shelley of being more enamoured with the drama than she ever was with the man.
Sam explodes in a huge, liquid sneeze, and his cereal spoon clatters to the floor. “Can I get a tissue?” he calls. Snot bubbles from one nostril. Carter snatches tissues for him, and picks up the tablespoon. Sees his distended face in the back of the spoon, frog eyes bulging. The reflection darkens as Isabelle enters the kitchen behind him. Carter hears the soft brush of the skirt as it slides over her frame. She insists that clothes must be “honest,” but Carter sees trickery in the skirt, and loves it. The fine wool mesh is clingy, yet it hides the true expanse of her thighs and gives her slinky hips.
//////
Sam has been to the movies before, but not for a birthday party. Carter expects preschool chaos: tantrums, flying popcorn, vomit. But the children lie back in their seats, pinned down by the pulse and throb of coming attractions.
The feature begins, a cartoon set in a snowy kingdom where humans are dwarfed by gloomy palace rooms. Carter and Isabelle slip out of the theatre and walk the mall.
“How long since you saw Shelley?”
“She’s never met Sam. She never saw me pregnant. So four or five years, at least. Look at this shit.” She stops outside a shop and lifts the sleeve of a frayed, spangled jacket. “The girls who buy this garbage will end up with the worst boyfriends, and when they get treated like crap they’ll come back and buy more. Abuse and recovery. It’s a huge market.”
Completing the mall circuit, they slip in to check on the movie. The Nordic princesses are pale and pink, their saucer eyes ready to reflect everything a child might invest in them. The princes are handsome in the sinewy way of purebred hounds.
Valentine’s Day will be the anniversary of Ronnie’s death. But the day always goes unmarked by Carter and Isabelle. Forgetting the anniversary is a transparent fiction in their marriage. Can the customary silence be maintained with Shelley around?
Ronnie Mullins was a diabetic with alcoholic cirrhosis, Hepatitis D, and an appetite for “whatever you’ve got,” according to Isabelle. A disciplined addict, he was remarkably adept at hiding it from his parents, and even had the guys at the fire hall fooled for a few years. Until the diabetes caught up with him. The fire department put him on leave and he rarely left the apartment after that. Isabelle had a key, and one night she found him dizzy and cramping and shitting blood. The doctor said his colon looked like a war zone, his esophagus on the verge of rupture. He told Ronnie to stop drinking. Ronnie said he’d rather give up the crystal meth and stay on the booze. The doctor said the booze was killing him, but avoiding crystal meth was a good idea in any case.
Isabelle started overnighting at Ronnie’s when she could, because he would try to stay straight for her. When Carter met her, she mentioned that she occasionally stayed with her brother, doing the fifty-minute commute between her apartment in Kitchener and his Etobicoke duplex. Ronnie was back in the hospital a few weeks later, his digestion jammed up with what little food he ate. They purged him and kept him overnight.
On the night he went in for the purge, Isabelle slept at Ronnie’s side, in a chair. She called Carter before the sun came up and said it was like waiting for a strange old man to die. He’s like a stranger lying there.
A few weeks later she called Carter and said, “Can you come get me? It’s getting weird here.”
“Where’s your car?”
“One of his drug buddies took it.”
He found her at the street corner at the end of the block, hugging herself against the cold.
It was twilight when they arrived at Isabelle’s place. She wanted to go for a walk. Then she decided they would see the French movie.
The paramedics found the body that night, after the building super let them in. Too late, by about an hour. Carter looked up the movie online: 109 minutes.
Shelley came through Isabelle’s door the next day, flinging her overnight bag aside and bursting into tears before Carter had any idea who she was. She said Ronnie was “too beautiful” and “too pure,” and otherwise carried on like she was mourning in public, always mindful of the camera. She clutched Isabelle’s hand and demanded every detail of the story. Isabelle explained how bad it got, how scared she was, how she sat shaking in the car all the way back to Kitchener, how she couldn’t think straight and called 911 too late. There was no mention of the French film. The 109 minutes.
After the movie, the kids are penned in a room for pizza and cake. Most of the parents sat through the movie, and it wore them down. The small talk is desultory. Isabelle is on her phone.
“I Googled you guys,” she says.
“Who?”
“Your band. I’ve never done that before. Isn’t that funny? The pictures are sweet. You’re all so, so young. She’s very sexy.”
“She had a look.”
“So the top result for ‘infinite yes’ is an art exhibit in Texas. Did you know that? Then some spiritual thing, and a blurb for a self-help book. You guys aren’t even on the first page.”
“I know,” says Carter. Sam turns to them and makes a face, pointing to his plate. Carter leans over him to eat the unwanted melon and strawberries. “Did you like the movie?”
“Yes!” says Sam. “Can I have a sister?”
Isabelle flicks at the screen with her finger. “More spirituality, religious stuff, infinite yes to all life offers, poem, another poem. Ah, here we go. Ooh, you were an independent Canadian band widely celebrated for its hazy melodicism and nocturnal urban aura.”
“That’s the standard band bio. It’s replicated on a million sites.”
“Wait, here’s a message thread: ‘semi-obscure mid-90s Canadian rock bands.’”
“I’ve seen that thread.”
“You’re here! Infinite Yes. One guy says, ‘Ubiquitous background music of the time.’ I guess that’s a compliment.” She scrolls. “‘I had a friend who was obsessed with them.’ Oh, here’s a good one. ‘You could tell the I-Y types just by looking at them.’”
A girl with black curly hair cries out, snatches something from the hands of the kid next to her, and they both collapse in tears. It brings the room to life, as the children break into laughter and squabbling.
“Look at this.” Isabelle hands Carter her phone. “Have you read this?”
Album’s impossible to find. Not in new or used racks, no iTunes, no Amazon. I’ve looked at yard sales and junk sales. – White Boy Wonder
They always said another album was coming. But I guess they broke up and that was it. A lot of us felt kind of jerked around when that happened. Like, what the fuck? It was like we owned the band or something. Ha! – spitfire