Street Symphony (20 page)

“I know. That’s part of the point.”

A week before the show, with Josh’s help, she delivered the box to the gallery. Elise took off the cover, walked round it, stood and eyed it from each angle. Andrea watched, breath held in so long she gasped. Finally Elise embraced her and said, “I think you’ve got it.”

“Really?”

“‘By George, I think you’ve got it,’” they sang, and danced round the tiled floor.

~ • ~

The gallery was decked out for the grand fall art show.
Flowers in tall vases stood beside the table. The doorway was draped with a chain of silver and gold leaves. Two waitresses walked elegantly around offering champagne. Food had not been allowed at these events since the shrimp and Rothko incident. Andrea pretended to look at the other artists’ work and watched the formal minuet: These men and women were well practiced in the steps. They stopped in front of a piece, gazed as if rapt, surveyed it from an angle, head to the left a little, then to the right, murmured to their companions,
noted the price, took a sip of wine and moved on. Elise, in her green-and-gold gown, surveyed the surveyors and smiled.

Andrea stopped in front of a painting of trees reflected in a lake; the shadow of a monster lurked in the water. The artist came to her and asked what she thought. Always a danger at these affairs. The fellow artist seeking confirmation.

“I really like it, Jules,” she said truthfully. “The colours, the dark shape and that feeling of menace. I try for that too.”

He turned away. What had she said? She put her glasses on to read the label beside the frame.
Mary Swimming.
Vague nothings were the best approach on these occasions.

~ • ~

The people were gone. The waitresses were gathering
up empty
flutes. The pianist tucked his music into his briefcase and left. Sit
ting by the door, shredding the gold and silver leaves, Andrea
was crying.

“Come on,” Elise said. “What’s wrong with you? See the red dot. People loved it.”

“That’s the point, “Andrea shouted. “Love! They saw it as something funny, neat, new, afuckingdorable. They were meant to worry. To be appalled. To shake. To be afraid. Any moment those people could have had the whole house come down on top of them. Death was with them in that so-called shelter! Like any shelter. There is no safe place. The people next door were killed.”

“But these people were safe. Safe is what they were. That’s what
the clients saw. You just go home and think about it, darling.
Consider the money. Make another one like it. Do a series. I could’ve sold it five times over.”

Out on the street, Andrea looked at the approaching bus, measured the distance and its speed, and tried to figure out at what point she might successfully hurl herself in front of it and die while causing the least disruption to others. People were hurrying along the sidewalk. One of them might try to save her and get killed too. She looked at the passing faces. Grim, some of them were. Hard-pressed, maybe. Others were relaxed, even jolly. She stood still and held her breath. The bus went by and she walked on. Her certainties had been shaken. Who was right? It was her work. Her purpose had been to shock, yet people were comforted and even amused. She’d left home fearful but excited. She returned defeated.

Josh emerged and called out, “How was it, Mom? A triumph?”

“People loved it,” she said. “They want more.”

“Great. I’m glad, Mom.” He returned to his own
shelter
.

“Oliver,” she said to the cat, “Fresh salmon for you tomorrow. There’ll be money. More work if I want it. But what’s the use if no one understands?”

The cat looked at her as if to remind her that Chekhov saw his plays as comedies. Did the poor man turn in his grave every time an audience stood up to applaud a dreary production of
Uncle Vanya
like the one she’d seen last week? Probably the great writer merely sighed and thought,
let people make of it what they will.
There’d always be one person who understood. And maybe one was enough. She began to draw the outline of the shattered house, Margery’s house, and to think of the child who was saved while her parents perished. It would be three-dimensional again but black and white, a scene of devastation. The piece would be called
Next Door
. People who got it would know exactly what it meant.

Caffè Italia

1. Early Morning

Fiona liked to get a “start of the world”
but it was rarely “majestic” at 6:30 a.m. A sliver of moon hung low over the rooftops and streetlamps cast cones of light on the damp paving stones. At least it wasn’t raining.

She should have put on something smarter for this encounter and looked like a woman of consequence, whatever that meant. She pulled her raincoat around her to hide her old shirt and patched jeans, and smoothed her hair. But this wasn’t to be a moment of seduction; it was
High Noon
with Monsieur Fromage cast as a guy in a black hat. Behind her, instead of a rickety saloon, were the windows of the fabric store and the deli. Beyond the florists, the dim light from the café kitchen showed up the half-finished Xmas design on the window; outsize Santa, dog-like reindeer. Next to the café was the health store with its display of herbs and pills and whose owner, Franco, would have advised against indulging in any of the café’s products or, indeed, much of what was sold in the small supermarket on the corner. This brief row was hardly a strip mall; it was merely a
strip,
stretching between Maple and Lark streets. One short block.

Three mornings last week, the man had parked his grey BMW over a white line, taking up two spaces and preventing Sara Habbard from leaving her car in the end spot as she’d done for the past six years. The café didn’t open till 7:00 but Sara usually arrived at 6:50 and the kindly barista, whichever one it was that day, would let her in and pour her a mug of coffee. She’d sit in her corner by the door reading the newspapers, little noticed by the other customers, and slip out again around 7:30 to her first appointment. She rarely spoke to anyone, but on Friday she’d told Fiona about the man’s bullying, dismissive, behaviour. Small, and not likely to invest in the costly brie and paté on offer in the man’s delicatessen, Sara, at first glance, perhaps appeared eccentric. A retired teacher, she was now a volunteer who drove the elderly and infirm to their medical appointments. Her crime, according to the man, was that she’d annoyed the woman who arrived early to take deliveries in his store.

The handicrafts store window, always lit, was still offering pumpkins, spiders, filmy cobwebs made of wool, masks for small monsters. Their Christmas goods were probably still being knitted, woven or tatted by the talented. A bus went by, its lights silhouetting profiles of early workers heading downtown. A blast of music screamed from the open window of a passing SUV, the driver perhaps deciding that since he was up, everyone else should be awake. A smartly dressed woman walked by holding the hand of a reluctant child to be dropped off at Granny’s or daycare. It was a safe area, this, and the chairs and tables outside the café remained on the sidewalk overnight under the canopy. They didn’t get wet, just cold. Fiona didn’t want to be caught sitting down when the enemy appeared. She wished she’d worn a hat. She hoped he’d arrive soon. It was chilly work being an avenger.

Two spandexed women ran past. She moved to let them go by.
Goodmorning. Chilly today. At least it’s not raining.
Fiona imagined them as statues, action figures, expressing what exactly? The desire for good health? The human dynamic? The moving thinker? The day, for now, belonged to the few. In another hour the buses would be full and traffic would add gasoline fumes to the unclean smell of dead leaves, stale breath, yesterday’s leftovers.

She heard the smooth sound of the expensive, late-model car as the wheels, carefully guided, straddled the white line once more. The driver turned off the engine. He opened the car door and stepped out. He reached into the trunk and took out an oblong box. He turned. Fiona looked at his rough morning face. She let him set foot on the sidewalk before she began.

“I want to talk to you.”

“Hm?”

“It’s about the woman who usually parks here.”

“So?”

“She doesn’t like to park on the street and she likes this end space because then she doesn’t get trapped between two cars.”

“That’s her problem.”

“She doesn’t cause any trouble.”

“She bothers my assistant.”

“How?”

“If she doesn’t like it, she can take the bus,” he said.

Fiona felt her nails dig into the palm of her right hand as her thumb closed down on the knuckle of her first finger. Unusual strength flowed into her arm as she drew it back. Sensing attack, the man stepped backwards and fell onto the chair behind him. The two of them stayed frozen in place for a moment and in that moment, Fiona knew that the aggression she felt, that power, that impulse to strike when up till now she had never hit anyone in her whole life, contained a multitude of targets. The blow, if it had come, would also have been aimed at Roger who had, for a time, destroyed her self-confidence; at Doctor Hanson who had misdi
agnosed her sister’s cancer; at the kid who’d left his cigarette burning on her couch; at certain members of the current government. And that only named a few.

If she’d followed through, if her fist had landed on that man’s face, she might have broken his jaw. And he might have hit her back even harder. South of the border, this could have been a moment when each of them pulled out a legal, concealed weapon, him from his belt, her from a pocket in a specially designed shoulder bag, and life would have depended on the speed and luck of the draw.
His body lying on the sidewalk. Your honour, he was a bully. Oh well then, he deserved it. Go free.

He stood up. Slowly, her fingers relaxed.

“I own these two stores.” He spoke the words as if they were standing on Madison Avenue or Robson Street, and not in an area where none of the houses was worth more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. There were no multi-millionaires here. He seemed to expect a measure of awe. She saw him then. Saw him for the man he was. A possessor. She didn’t know where he’d begun, how or why he’d bought his first wheel of cheese, his first bottle of cold-pressed virgin olive oil. She looked at his black coat, his smart pants, his shiny shoes. She took in his unhandsome face, sparse brown hair, and saw back in time a boy who didn’t share his toys, a boy who perhaps didn’t have many toys. And then she snapped out of it. This was her habit, her bad habit, feeling sympathy where none was deserved. He was a grown fifty-year-old treating a good woman badly and she was here, a cowboy in white hat and Levis, to speak up for that woman.

He opened the door to his store and was about to go inside. She followed him.

“We don’t open till ten,” he said.

“So what’s
your
problem?” She nodded at the parking area, empty except for his car.

Oh dear! He looked at her again and his eyes were those of a man for whom Christmas is a sad day when, through no fault of his own, he has to keep the doors of his stores closed. If she wasn’t careful, any moment now, she’d be asking him if his mother had liked his brother best. That was if he had any siblings. There was such a lack of humour in his eyes, such a lack of perspective, that she could only wonder about his family life. And what did he see when he looked at her?
Frustrated. Hasn’t been laid in how long? Middle-aged.
She wanted to shout back to his imagined thoughts.
I have a life. I’m not looking for sex right now.

“Why don’t you mind your own business,” he said.

He went inside his property.

Instead of going straight to the café Fiona leant on the trunk of the maple, most of its leaves gone in Friday’s gale, and took a deep breath. She who had never hit anyone in her entire life had come close to violence. Her hand was shaking. And at the same
time, she felt a small thrill in knowing that she might have punched that man. She watched the woman who lived on the opposite corner run across the road, wearing slippers and dressing gown, and
drop a full plastic bag into the garbage bin on the corner. Fishy re
mains perhaps.

There was no need to mention this encounter to Sara or to anyone. It had been a waste of time. She could, of course, come early every day and stand in the end parking spot to keep it free. Her few minutes of anger had been about a piece of ground six feet by twelve. Ridiculous really. And yet! And yet, a few weeks ago she’d yelled “No!” in response to the words on the placard that strange woman carried around town.
Are you content to be nothing?
Certainly not!

Dave, another early coffee drinker, arrived and attached his bike to the metal bar.

“Been up all night?”

“Feels like it,” she said.

And now, here was Sara walking towards the café. She’d parked her car on Maple Street round the corner and would worry because
she couldn’t keep an eye on it. Fiona sighed and left her opponent to his chores, whatever they were: Scraping the mould off the cheddar, moving the oldest bottles of olive oil to the front, stacking expensive bottles of cherries in liquor. She glanced back. He’d come outside and was staring after her. She moved a little closer to him, looked into his eyes and smiled. It was useless to talk to a block of a man who no doubt had all the weight of business in his head with little room for anything else. But Fiona realized that he, who likely never gave anything away for free, had given her a great gift. She turned away again, she raised two fingers to her mouth and blew smoke off her imaginary gun before she re-holstered it.